That doesn’t mean it was a bad book or movie. When I read a bad book I know pretty early on, “Oh, this is bad! I’ll adjust my expectations accordingly and will either DNF or continue reading in order to learn what not to do in my own writings.”

No, the books/movies I get mad at are the ones that really tricked me into believing they were amounting to something superlative—rereadable, rewatchable, recommendable to my friendables, only to throw it all away in the climax and resolution. These stories betray the audience by violating spoken or unspoken rules of the story or genre.

Allow me to illustrate.

The “I can learn what not to do from this” kind of bad

I read the Maze Runner books in high school. I enjoyed book 1 well enough—the premise of a bunch of kids trapped in an ever-changing maze with monsters and traps and no recollection of how they got there enticed me even as I realized “this is a bad book.” Not the cheating kind of bad, but the “I can learn what not to do from this” kind of bad. The nice thing about the latter kind of bad is you can still enjoy the story, provided you realize it’s bad before you cross the 50% mark. It’s all about expectations, see. Like, you go to Culver’s expecting just a decent kinda crappy burger, and are perfectly satisfied. You wouldn’t be satisfied with a Butter Burger^TM prepared by Gordon Ramsey.

What was bad about Maze Runner was how all the kids—excuse me, Gladers—had all this made-up vocabulary reminiscent of the nadsat in A Clockwork Orange, except the words don’t actually correspond to real words and all just function as swears. Another bad thing is all the verbs are—and an English teacher is welcome to tell me what these are actually called—state-of-being types. “We were running,” “I was fighting,” instead of “we ran,” “we fought.” Also the characters are all super-annoying and one-dimensional. But it was exciting, scary, and gory! So I kept plugging away.

Also in high school I read a series of Christian fantasy books called Dragons in Our Midst. Dragons present at the fall of Adam. Dragons and Nephilim battle as the great flood carries off Noah’s Ark. King Arthur’s Knights flying into battle on dragons. Dragons adopt human guise in order to fit in as yuppies, have families and human kids who have bat wings or breathe fire. The bad guy is this immortal dragon hunter guy from King Arthur’s time who gets killed at the end of every book and comes back at the beginning of the next one, every. single. time.

The no-duh thing I learned from these books was not to bring anyone back from the dead. Not four times, maybe not even once. Tolkien got away with it, so did Lewis. It’s time to be done with that one now. Maybe I’ll allow one fakeout death per 1000 pages.

I also learned a lot from reading Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes. Until last year I thought the best way to write was as much like Cormac McCarthy as possible. Pack every sentence with unique and beautiful prosody. Then I picked up this little horror novella and promptly perished the thought. You see, every sentence in Something Wicked makes you go “wow, that is some writing.” Trouble is it sounds like writing. I realized by contrast that not all of McCarthy’s sentences are trying to be eloquent or profound, but that’s what Bradbury was going for. He wanted every sentence to be one you could spot on a fridge magnet and go “oh hell yeah, that sounds like Buddy Boy Bradbury!” I wanted to dig him up from his grave and say “hey, remember The Illustrated Man? Why didn’t you just write like that? Like, let the story write itself?”

Anyway, the type of books in this category, where you can enjoy yourself and learn what not to do, obviously aren’t completely terrible; otherwise they’d never have crossed their editors’ desks. Usually they pass muster in those core elements like character, plot, structure, and coherence, but are weak in or missing some of the load-bearers, like word choice, pacing, or believability. Each missing nugget a whetstone vouchsafing the aspiring craftsman’s blade to cut deep to the heart of—

WRITE NORMAL DAMMIT

Ahem.

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The “this book just cheated me” kind of bad

spoilers in this section. nothing to spoil, carry on.

Returning to Maze Runner. Book 1 ends with the kids escaping the Maze, discovering it’s the end of the world outside, a virus has wiped out most of humanity, they were placed in the maze and deprived of memory by grownups doing experiments to see if they could train into them or uncover a gene that would help preserve humanity. Ok, rad, I’ll read the next two.

I read the next two. Even more bizarre, disgusting trials awaited our heroes, many of them devised by the aforesaid grownup scientists. One of the worst twists was the main guy’s girlfriend telling him “hey, they’re gonna make me betray you, but it’s just a trick, okay? Like, don’t believe me. I actually love you.” And then she goes and betrays him, and he’s like, this a trick, right? And she’s all, “ha, what I said about it being a trick was the trick, you fool! I don’t love you!” But then our hero escapes and later rendezvous with the girl and accuses her of betraying him and she says “I had to say that saying it was a trick was a trick to trick you because they made me! It was all a test! I actually love you!” This goes on for some time. Unfortunately, we never find out exactly why the grownups were doing any of these twisted tests on the kids—like, no explanation whatsoever of how trapping kids in a maze with flesh-eating cyborgs was supposed to guarantee humanity’s survival, nor of how the girlfriend juking and double-juking our hero was supposed to turn him into some kind of hero.

This series falls into the latter category of stories that cheat their audience, because they have promised something and then failed to deliver on it. Now, that’s not to say all mediocre/bad stories are of this type—sometimes the execution just doesn’t hit, third acts are hard to pull off, etc. No, I’m not talking about excusable reasons for books and movies to miss the mark; not that you tried and failed. I’m talking betrayal. You promised something and didn’t deliver. Now it’s time to pay the piper and get the flip outta town with the other rats.

You know what I’m talking about if you are or know anyone who is a Star Wars fanboy/girl. Think how you or those people felt watching Riann Johnson’s The Last Jedi. I personally thought it was the best of the three sequels, but I can admit it didn’t deliver on the promise of Luke Skywalker or a final duel between Luke and Kylo. Audiences were deliberately prepared for one thing and then stabbed in the face with a middle finger, arguably the worst finger to be stabbed with because it’s the longest.

Speaking of Star Wars—and go ahead and take a deep breath, because this is going to the article’s hottest take—let’s talk about Darth Vader’s redemption in Return of the Jedi. Let’s take the most iconic villain in cinema history, a man responsible for the deaths of countless men, women, and children; the emperor’s head honcho. Yeah, believe it or not, he doesn’t like the emperor killing his son! And just because he saves his own son’s life by killing the emperor, we’re supposed to equate this with repentance?

No. No, you are not allowed to redeem your villain when you’ve absolutely not foreshadowed it up until now, and especially you cannot ascribe redemption through an act even bad guys would do. Doesn’t the Bible say something about even Sith Lords loving their own children?

I know I started by talking about books and now I’m transgressing into movies, but let me do just one more while I’m at it. Richard Linklater, a man with some great movies that excel on all fronts, severely let me down with 2023’s Hit Man. And not just because he tried to sell us that Glen Powell could pass for a dweeb! A nerdy cop goes undercover as a hitman to catch this lady who wants to put a hit on her ex, but he obviously falls for her and things get complicated with a kinda skeevy badguy cop getting wise to their affair. This movie had me until the last 15 minutes. Man, what a ride! Unfortunately, two things happen. First, the woman actually kills her husband—personally, no middle-manning. And then she and Glen Powell kill the skeevy badguy cop just as he gets wise to them.

Oh! I didn’t know we were allowed to kill our way out of our troubles, babe! Why didn’t we just do that in the first place? Oh right, because then the movie would’ve been just 20 minutes long.

In case you missed where my problem is, in a cop movie, where the main guy is a cop, and a good cop as in, he pretty much acts on the up-and-up—falling for femme fatales notwithstanding, since they’re understood to be along his beat—the cop is supposed to not be a bad guy. That means not doing murder, even and maybe even especially when murder would solve all his problems. The best ending for this movie would have Glen Powell realizing he can’t be with this dame—she bad news, boss. Maybe he turns her in, maybe he doesn’t and then turns in his badge and goes away somewhere he can wear his jorts in peace. Idk. I’m not a movie director. Not my job to write your ending Linklater, stop calling me to fix your flipping movie.

And now for the big kahuna of all kids’ books: Harry Potter. All along we’re told the good guys don’t use the dark arts: cruciatus (torture), imperius (mind control), and avada kedavra (straight up kills you) curses are strictly forbidden. We’re told time and again only death eaters use these. In book 5, in a fit of rage and grief, Harry throws an ineffective crucio at Belatrix. Other than that, it’s clear where the dividing line falls…until book 7.

In The Deathly Hallows, Harry, Ron, and Hermione throw around the imperius curse like it’s BOGO at the dark arts store. Then, returning to overthrow the death eater occupation of Hogwarts, they reconvene with McGonagall, who uses the crucio curse on two baddies without a second thought! Okay, Christian homeschoolers, I see your outrage re: magic use and defying adults. BUT WHAT ABOUT THE MORAL RELATIVISM????

If you establish a rule in your story you need to keep it intact or demonstrate the consequences of breaking it. There are no consequences for Harry and co. because they’re the good guys and it’s okay for them because the ends justify the means. In a book where morality and doing the right thing (“We must choose between what is easy and what is right”, anyone?) are essential to our understanding of the central struggle and characters, Rowling betrays her readers in the bottom of the 9th by acting as if these distinctions no longer matter.

The unspoken contract

If you’ve studied stories at any point in your life, I probably don’t have to tell you that a story is a contract between the teller and the listener.

Consider what you expect from the author or director or teller before you engage with his or her story. You probably don’t expect perfection or even to agree with every artistic or narrative choice the storyteller makes. We expect that stories make sense. We expect fairy stories to have happy endings. We expect We expect if a gun is on the table in the first act that it’ll go off in the third. And we expect first and foremost to be entertained, but also not to be deceived. Truth and entertainment value are positively correlated.

Now, I’m not talking Shutter Island or Memento-deceived. Plot twists are one thing; those are sleight of hand. We understand plot twists as a fair story element. I also don’t mean a story set in an unrealistic or fantasy world, because these stories, when done right, let us know early on to expect surrealism or dragons.

By deceit I mean the storyteller lies about the world, relationships, and good and evil. They break the trust between teller and listener, cause and effect, the way the story has been set up and the way the story resolves; the way things are and the way they should be. The hero or antihero of the story must reap what he sows. Of course, stories shouldn’t promote the notion that every evil deed gets punished. How many billionaires would the world have if life was really like that? But our stories must hold heroes to higher standards. There can be no easy way out for him, no cutting of corners or deus ex machinae. Our hero, our focal point and conduit, the person we inhabit through his fictional world, must suffer when he chooses the wrong way; this suffering of consequence is integral to the Hero’s Journey.

In 2026 we’re beset by AI slop, political sloganeering, propaganda, and targeted ads showing us a world veneered and misrepresented. Fiction is the truer-than-life antidote. The future and our very souls are in the hands of storytellers, but when haven’t they been? Stories show beauty, ugliness, heroism, cruelty, love, hate, peace, war, life.

We expect and deserve the truth.

Looking for more writing about writing? For your perusal:

But everyone who’s tried to adapt the character of Odysseus—from Madeline Miller to Mary Pope Osborne to Wishbone—has failed to show us the man as he really was in Homer’s epic.23

Books 1-4 set the scene. Telemachus laments for his father, Odysseus, absent these last seventeen years on the shores of Troy, but believes he is alive out there, somewhere, trying to make his way home. Suitors for his mother’s hand have crashed at his crib and are eating up all the best vittles in a most unseemly fashion, so the youth sets out to find out what he can of his father, aided by the goddess Athena. He visits Nestor and Menelaus, old friends of his father we recognize from The Iliad, who give him reason to hope Odysseus has not descended to Hades, but is still striving homeward.

In book 5 we finally pick up with the man we’ve been dying to meet.

“The man of many ways”, “that man skilled in all ways of contending”, “the man of twists and turns”, and “a complicated man” are renderings of Odysseus’s character in the poem’s initial lines. The translation from Richmond Lattimore (erroneously marked Richard in the graphic above) also revolves through such epithets as “godlike Odysseus,” “resourceful Odysseus,” “enduring Odysseus,” and “long-suffering Odysseus” which, even before we meet the man himself in book 5, prepare us to meet a remarkable hero. But after 6 arguments you’ll understand why I propose a different epithet:

Exhibit A: Canoodling with Calypso

By now we’re wondering oh boy, what’s this guy gonna be like? The goddess of wisdom just adores him! Heroes of the Trojan War can’t speak highly enough of the man of many ways! Oh geez, after losing his ship and crew he’s marooned for seven years on the island of the nymph Calypso?!? What next? He’s really been through the ringer, hope he’s gonna be oka—

These two, withdrawn in the inner recess of the hollowed cavern, enjoyed themselves in love and stayed all night by each other […].4

Uh…um…

…Well, the guy hasn’t gotten his rocks off in over ten years at this point, assuming he didn’t consort with any camp followers while across the Aegean (Homer doesn’t mention it in The Iliad). So, you know, he’s only human after all! Besides, he probably figures he’s never gonna see his wife again! For all he knows, maybe she’s remarried!

Well, actually, this occurs after Athena petitions Zeus and Zeus sends Hermes down to the island to tell Calypso to let Odysseus go.

Oh. So…you’re telling me he kept boinking the nymph even after he knew he wasn’t stuck with her and could go back to his wife?

Yeah. That’s what I’m telling you.

Sorry Odysseus, but you don’t get my sympathy with your “sitting out on the beach, crying […], breaking [your] heart in tears, lamentation, and sorrow”5 when you also “by nights […] lie beside her, of necessity […], against [your] will, by one who was willing.”6

Also, it’s not like this is some barren isle—the poet mentions “fragrant cypresses,” a variety of birds, grape vines, and meadows. It’s no wonder Athena flat out lies to Telemachus: “For no death on the land has befallen the great Odysseus, but somewhere, alive on the wide sea, he is held captive, on a sea-washed island, and savage men have him in their keeping, rough men, who somehow keep him back, though he is unwilling” (my italics).7

After Hermes commands Calypso to let Odysseus go, she offers him the choice of remaining with her or making his way homeward with her blessing. “Glorious Odysseus” chooses the latter (wow, much honor, very hero), taking on his raft with him clothing, wine and water, provisions, and a favorable wind. Oh, is that all? Wanna slap a Suzuki outboard motor on that bad boy while you’re at it?

Poseidon, nursing a grudge—we don’t know why yet, but don’t worry, we’ll get there—wrecks our hero’s raft, and our hero, quickly establishing himself as the whiniest little bitch of the B.C.s, complains:

My sheer destruction is certain. Three times and four times happy those Danaans were who died then in wide Troy land, bringing favor to the sons of Atreus, as I wish I too had died at that time and met my destiny on the day when the greatest number of Trojans threw their bronze-headed weapons upon me, over the body of perished Achilleus […]. Now it is by a dismal death that I must be taken.8

…Like, no dude, you DON’T wish you died back at Troy by biting down on a bronze spear, letting it shoot your teeth out the back of your neck!9

Anyway, with the further help of a minor sea goddess (whose help he spurns out of mistrust but who hauls his soggy ass shoreward anyway!), Odysseus lands on the beach of Phaeacia and passes out (beta behavior).

Exhibit B: Acting a fool with the Phaecians

Lucky for Odysseus—all things considered he’s luckier than most people who fought in the Trojan War because he, y’know, actually MAKES IT HOME—he washes up on a beach where the princess Nausicaa and her maids are chillin’. They take him home, slather him all up in olive oil like you do, and King Alkinoos treats him like royalty: feasts, songs, sports for his amusement, etc. But then Odysseus has to go bad-mouth the athletes and show off, and they’re all like okay dude, you can throw a metal disc farther than we can, cool! And THEN, I shit you not, even though every time up til now when someone asks him about himself, he’s all “eh, it’s too sad a story,” NOW, at the royal court of King Alkinoos, he’s like, “Come to another part of the story, sing us the wooden horse […], the stratagem great Odysseus filled once with men and brought it to the upper city”!10 And as soon as poor blind Demodokos starts playing it, guess who’s bawling his eyes out???

Never mind that any time literally anyone asks Odysseus about himself, he’s all “it is a hard thing […] to tell you without intermission, all my troubles, since the gods of the sky have given me many.”11 Now he’ll gladly tell the tale, now everyone’s gathered to listen to the Biggest Crybaby of the Danaans tell us his story of woe.

His account flashes back to him being

Exhibit C: Certainly stupid with the Cyclopes

The first thing Odysseus and his men do is massacre a city to supply their ship for the journey home. Okay, great! They certainly don’t have anything to complain or cry about because, you know, they’re not who the story’s about.

Then they land on the island of the Lotus Eaters, where Odysseus makes sure to let us know that he certainly didn’t let any of those tasty flowers pass his lips, and that he himself “took [the men who tasted lotus] back weeping, by force, to where the ships were, and put them aboard […].”12 Oh good for you, dude! You’d seem super butch compared to those weepers if you weren’t crying about everything else going on!

Then they land on the island of the cyclopes to see if they’re also “eaters of bread” (spoiler alert: they’re not). This part of the poem is gnarly and horrifying because the cyclops Polyphemos isn’t a good host, which would have offended ancient Greek sensibilities! He doesn’t even offer them any sheep’s milk cheese!!

Finally Odysseus shows us why everyone calls him clever and wily: he gets the cyclops drunk, tells him his name is “Nobody” so that after he sticks a battering ram in the monster’s eye and he screams bloody murder that “Nobody is killing me” his fellow cyclopes don’t think a thing of it, and then sneaks his guys out of the cave by having them cling to the undersides of the cyclops’ sheep. Wow, genuinely job well done, Odysseus! You saved most of your men, escaped certain death and made it to the ship, now all you need to do is set sail without opening your big mou—

Oh. Oh, you’re gonna…taunt the giant? You’re gonna yell “in the end it was no weak man’s companions you were to eat by violence […], and your evil deeds were to catch up with you […] who dared to eat your own guests […] so Zeus and the rest of the gods have punished you”13 so that the cyclops knows where to aim the boulders? Oh, oh that was good thinking, very “clever Odysseus” of you. Okay, the boulders made waves that washed your ship almost back to where he could each you before you paddled away…that was a close one, hopefully now you’ve learned your less—

“Cyclops, if any mortal man ever asks you who it was that inflicted upon your eye this shameful blinding, tell him that you were blinded by Odysseus, sacker of cities. Laertes is his father, and he makes his home in Ithaka.”14

………..

Flip you, Odysseus.

After this, Polyphemos calls upon his father, who happens to be a guy called Poseidon, god of the sea, to curse Odysseus with everything bad that subsequently happens to him: lose his ship and men and come home to find his house in a sorry state of affairs. And he’s only able to apply this curse to full effect because Odysseus gave the cyclops his real name.

So. Any time from here on out, if you hear this guy weeping “as a woman weeps, lying over the body of her dear husband,”15 simply do not take this guy at his word that he is much-maligned. He’s earned every iota of his misfortune.

Exhibit D: Severe suckage

After incurring Polyphemos’ curse, the onslaught of horrors is unceasing.

Things seem like they’ll go well when they get Item: Bag of Winds from Aeolus. You know, to blow them homeward. And they’re pretty much in sight of their home when Odysseus decides it’s a good time to take a nap, and his men are like, you know what we should do? Instead of make land asap, we should check this mysterious bag he for some reason didn’t tell us anything about! And all the winds, now released, blow them way, way back to the Aeolus, who this time will have nothing to do with them because it’s obvious to him at this point that the Greeks are royally flipped.

The next episode sees Odysseus and his fellows on the island of the Laistrygonians, giants who pelt their ship with boulders and kill a bunch of them.

After that, they land on the island of Circe, a witch who turns half of the Achaeans into swine after they eat her food. I’m beginning to realize the reason we tolerate Odysseus is because his men are utterly worthless. Luckily Hermes beams down from on high and bestows on him a potion to render him immune to Circe’s enchantments. Unfortunately, our poor, poor, hero needs to sleep with her in order to bind her in oath to restore his men! Alack, alas, oh well!

Now, with Circe’s perils nullified, do the men press on toward home? NO! “There for all our days until a year was completed we sat there feasting on unlimited meat and sweet wine.”16 Only after his men remind Odysseus, hey, should we get back to our families? does he go to Circe and say welp, better be heading off…after one more day of unlimited feasting! And then when Circe says actually, you have to head to the underworld to talk to Teiresias the prophet first, Odysseus cries until he has “glutted [himself] with rolling about and weeping.”17 Maybe we’d accept this behavior if he hadn’t just been feasting on unlimited meat and sweet wine!

So they head to the Stygian Realm and talk to a bunch of dead dudes and dudettes. Teiresias prophecies how Odysseus should NOT let his men eat Helios’s sacred cows (you already know those m’fers will), how Odysseus will come home, deal with the suitors, make an offering to appease Poseidon and any other gods that might begrudge him, and then live to “a sleek old age.”18 Good to know! I’m sure he’ll never despair again!

Then Odysseus talks to the shade of his mom and then several other past queens, before encountering some past comrades. The gang’s all here—Agamemnon telling how he got butchered in the bath by his boo (more on this in a minute), Achilles relating how being the greatest warrior who ever lived doesn’t mean jack when you’re dead, Ajax being all pissy he’s dead too…none of these guys got their homecoming. So. Yeah, good thing Odysseus has all this perspective now. So we know he’s not gonna, like, go moan to anyone about how he’s had it so much worse than everyone else. Oh, wait. He will say all that to the Phaikians before he tells them this story.

After this delightful sojourn Odysseus returns to Circe, who equips them with foreknowledge of the sirens, the monsters Scylla and Charabdis, and the sun god’s favorite bovines. Given the head’s up, it shouldn’t shock us they get through okay—and by okay I mean losing no more than a handful of men to the deadly duo of S. & C. But where things don’t go great is when his men get a whiff of those divine beeves. Since he’s actually learned his lesson about keying his comrades in on potential disasters (remember the bag o’ winds mishap?), Odysseus commands his men not to BBQ the cattle during his siesta. The men promise. And then the men break that promise. And then they set sail and all the men except Odysseus drown, and after ten days drifting down monster lane in the Aegean Sea our boy gets washed ashore on Ogygia and….hellooooooo Calypso.

Exhibit E: Being a putz compared to Penelope

Meanwhile, back in Ithaca, you’ve got Penelope.

Before we embark on this point we must understand the significance of homecoming to the ancient Greeks. A man’s city is his entire world, his be-all and end-all. Recall how Socrates opted to drink the Grimace Shake rather than be kicked out of Athens. Yup, to be banished from one’s polis was a fate worse than death.

Penelope is Odysseus’ very heart. Without Queen Penelope, there is no home for him to return to. Coming home to his city to find his wife married to another man would render the fruits of his journey rotten.

Penelope has two main foils that emphasize the rareness of not just the hero’s homecoming from war, but of so faithful and valiant a wife. The first foil is Helen of Troy, husband to Menelaus, the king of Sparta. Helen and her boy-toy Paris caused the whole bloody Trojan War. Okay, blame Aphrodite and Eros if you want, but still, the damnation for these two oughta rival the eternal punishments of Tantalus and Sisyphus. Helen is self-absorbed and unfaithful. Even though Menelaus is one of the few Achaeans who gets his homecoming, he’s still been cuckolded. There’s no undoing that; his homecoming rings hollow.

Penelope’s other foil is Agamemnon’s wife and Helen’s SIL, Clytemnestra, queen of the Argives. Neither son of Atreus did too hot in the wife department, although Agamemnon does invite his fate by, y’know, offering their daughter as a burnt offering for success in the war, which Clytemnestra for some reason doesn’t take too well. Anyway, she and her lover murder Agamemnon as he’s taking his first bath in ten years.19 Our hearts don’t exactly bleed for the guy, but one can perhaps agree it would suck to get merked the second you dip your toes in the jacuzzi.

Back to Penelope. While Odysseus is out toasting delicious hot schmoes with the bros and scaring all the demigodly hoes, his queen endures the transformation of her palace into the set of the Bachelor, with every strapping young man in the vicinity squatting at her place for chips and dips and a chance at her hand. Rather than give in and select a suitor, which nobody (heh, get it?) could fault her for, she stalls them year after year, watching her riches be eaten and drunk away. The whole time she is faithful to her husband and goes above and beyond in exemplifying the Greek virtue of hospitality by not throwing these good-for-nothings out on their ears. Also, Odysseus isn’t the only twisty-turny one in the family; Penelope promises she’ll pick a husband as soon as she finishes weaving a tapestry, but then every night she undoes the work of the previous day.

In short, Penelope is the whole package. Virtuous, brainy, loyal, hot. But even with this, she isn’t the main woman who saves Odysseus’ hairy Greek buttocks; that honor belongs to

Exhibit F: Athena

The Odyssey’s gods differ greatly from their role in The Iliad. In The Iliad, a quarrel between the gods blows up what should have been a petty squabble between a few mortals into the most famous war literature will ever immortalize. The gods continually interfere and work to make things worse; they’re more human than human, so to speak. In The Odyssey, however, the gods mostly sit back and let things be, trying to rebrand after the whole Apple of Discord thing. “Oh for shame, how the mortals put the blame on us gods, for they say evils come from us, but it is they, rather, who by their own recklessness win sorrow beyond what is given.”20 Sure enough, the only two deities who thwart Odysseus and his men in the whole poem are Helios and Poseidon, who operate as consequences for their rashness. By contrast, we have the goddess Athena, (brain)child of Zeus. She’s really the master here, but not a puppet-master. She lets her pet suffer but not die, working not from Olympus but with her feet on the soil. And she gets very little thanks for it. Her operations here are perhaps the closest any Greek god’s will get to prefiguring the Judeo-Christian One.

From the first verse, Athena connives to keep her favorite Argive alive. She petitions daddy Zeus to set him free from Calypso, and he sends Hermes to see it done. (While Hermes also helps Odysseus out with Circe, this chapter is told from Odysseus’s point of view, so he wouldn’t see behind the curtain that Athena is the one who asked Hermes to go). She adopts the visage of various mortals and helps Telemachus figure out what happened to his father. She puts the famous contest of the bow and twelve axes into Penelope’s mind. And during the final battle she urges Odysseus to the attack and ensures that even when six guys throw their spears at once, none of them go anywhere near him!

If we can find fault with the devoted goddess in any way, it’s that she fully encourages Odysseus to be a lapdog. She keeps calling him “most wretched of all men,”21 the most propagandistic statement you or I have ever heard, when the shores of Ilium lie bestrewn with countless corpses of other mighty heroes. If only any of them had such a protector as Pallas Athena, favorite (brain)child of Zeus! How can you be such a pathetic milksop when the gods go to bat for you?

Conclusion: Odysseus the man

There you have him, ladies and gentlemen: Odysseus the Little Bitch, a Hyper Inflator of Travails, Forgetter of His Divine Patroness, an Unseemly Braggart of Disastrous Hubris, a Despairer Despite Auspicious Prophecies…aside from all the other things other and better scholars have dubbed him. A destroyer of cities, a deceiver, a man who punishes harshly and mercilessly those who’ve let his household go to rot.

And yet, he is a remarkably twistable-turnable man.22

After sealing the fate of his own men by an easily preventable curse, banging every minor goddess he chances upon, and being this guy *gestures at meme*

…he decides you know what? No, I don’t think I’ll stay on with unlimited nachos at Circe’s. No, I don’t think I’ll stay with bodacious, evergreen Calypso. No, I don’t think I’ll stay on Phaecia, a veritable utopia, with these guys who know so much about rowing boats. I think I’ll head home to an utter clusterflip in Ithaka, to my wife who’s getting old and wrinkly. Like I am.

And bless the little guy’s heart, he actually learns from some of his mistakes! Upon reaching his domicile, he disguises himself rather than chance a fate like Agamemnon’s; despite Teiresias’ promise he’ll emerge unscathed to live to a ripe old age, he’s perhaps learned you don’t get cocksure when there are enemies left alive.

Do his determination, eventual and flawed marital fidelity, and survival exonerate Odysseus? Far from it. He whines, mopes, lollygags, suffers well-merited punishments, and forgets he’s only here by the grace of the goddess. But she’s there for him anyway.

The Odyssey is a marvelous poem, and because of its hero I think I may have to disagree with Lattimore and rank it above its predecessor. As great as The Iliad is, I’ll never find in it a hero I relate to more than Odysseus.

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22

Whenever I visit home my mom always leaves one of those thicc binders laying out on the sofa for my perusal, and I always look through it because I’m some sort of sucker for cringing out of my body. Hmm, why yes, I think maybe I’ll pick up The Return of Sauron and see if I can detect any early glimmers of genius OH GOSH I killed Gimli in chapter FOUR?!?!

Anyway, if you don’t wanna be regaled with several pages of said burgeonings, simply close this tab and pick something else to read. I’d do the same thing if you sent me your 8-year-old ramblings. I’m sorry for wasting your time.

But if for some reason you want to read a short standalone (15 of my handwritten pages equates to about 1 typed), which has actually a kinda decent voice and would be rated R if you adapted it even as a cartoon, then strap in for

All errors have been retained for honesty’s sake.

Misty Swamp

I figure I was 9 when I wrote that, because I first watched Fellowship when I was 9 and would’ve taken inspiration for an orc licking his knife from that movie. 1

Given my day job entails working on writing with , kids with special needs who are either performing way below or way above grade level, it’s hard to say how Misty Swamp stands compared to the writings of average 9-year-olds—if you, patient, forgiving reader have some of your own to share, at this point I believe I owe it to you to give them my perusal—but I think it’s good! It’s got funny bits, even if most of them are unwitting…and some shocking violence! And I can’t believe I had the chutzpah to write a kissing scene in a book where either of my younger brothers or parents could’ve stumbled across it!!! Ach, just imagine…!

However, it sounds exactly like you’d expect a 9-year-old’s impression of Tolkien to sound. “Save for a bow and a few arrows.” “Picked him up and bore him away.” “Soon had them on the run.” “Home for Christmas.” All ripping off Middle-Earth! Not a lot of originality. Granted, my longer opus The Return of Sauron had some truly original bits, like the part where they all get in flying hot tubs, or when Tom Bombadil sees Gandalf’s smoke signals and comes to rescue him in a biplane, but those episodes are few and far between. Most of it might sound impressive for a 9-year-old, but not terribly unique for a 9-year-old who’s made LotR his be-all and end-all.

Now, if I might try your indulgence a little longer…compare the above to this book my son dictated to my wife to give me for my birthday:

Compare the two pieces of writing, mine and my son’s, and tell me which sounds better. My piece has a little more sophisticated language than my son’s, but in my son’s you can hear influences from other works he admires, like Winnie the Pooh, Wind in the Willows, Stuart Little, Charlotte’s Web, and the Frog and Toad books, all of which he has listened to time after time on his Yoto player. Still not sure which of us wins out? Does it help matters if I tell you he’s 4.5 years old?

I guess if I wanted to somehow tie this self-indulgent foray back into a meaningful lesson for my long-suffering readers, I’d say this illustrates the importance of reading widely. Take from everything you’ve ever read when you write. Too many fantasy writers are just trying to be the 21st century’s Tolkien, instead of stirring in other ingredients. Too many romance writers only read and emulate romances, too many horror writers only read and pull from horror, etc. Make your books good.

I promise my next post will be 100% my own work and won’t farm karma from my children’s cuteness.

If you read this far, I challenge you to share / post 1 piece of writing from your childhood. Something to show off what a precocious little scamp you were.

And lo! Alicia volunteered us to have everyone over. “We have the biggest kitchen, we’ve got wide walkways for a wheelchair,” etc. Little did I realize when we took out a second mortgage for renovations to space everything out that it would pave the way for the Uncle Dons and Aunt Sharons of the world.

So on the 18th, with Alicia at the hospital with her mom, I started the day single-dadding at home: breakfasting the boys, getting them out the door without their lunches, running the lunches to school, racing home to prep the guest room for Jill after her discharge so she could descend like Lucifer on our holiday, almost killing myself on the slick driveway getting into my car. That made me slow down. “Hold on, Geoff. Better late than getting in an accident.” So to prove I was okay and in control--and I wasn’t sure the plows had salted yet--I took it slow out of the neighborhood and got rewarded with an extra long red light on Hampton for my pains.

Work was rough because after it there’d be no end in sight but Jill. At quarter to four, everyone else was wrapping scarves around their necks—not tight enough, I gloomed, as they joked around, asked about my Christmas plans, gave me commiserating slaps on the back, instantly forgot my troubles and vamoosed because Craig had shouted from his office at 3:30, “I’m not watching the door from here on out!”

When Craig mozied out with his briefcase and coat and saw me at my desk, he jumped. “Geez, Geoff, whatcha still doing here?” His eye alighted on my blank computer monitor and the empty desk under my elbows. “Oh…right. Alicia’s mom.”

“Yeah.”

He set down his stuff just to slap me on the shoulder. “Hey, this too shall...you know.”

“So they tell me.”

Craig picked up his stuff. “Well, if she’s like your wife, she’s a fighter, right?”

That’s the whole problem.

On my way down to the parking lot I realized my phone was dead, so I started the car to charge it and defrost while I brushed snow off the windshield. I hadn’t slept much the night before and before I finally conked out I guess I forgot to plug my phone in. I’d been avoiding looking at it all afternoon, grateful not to feel it vibrate. I paused when I got back around to my door. Brushed off the hood and went around to do the roof and back bumper. Then I got in and turned on my phone.

The screen lit up. Among the regular email and news notifications there were three missed calls from Alicia and five texts:

Why aren’t you picking up?

Call me back ASAP.

G, what’s going on? Can you see if Craig will let you leave early? As much as you can.

Bloos clot and mom had a stroke. Stable but they dont know whats gonna happen.

I need you.

The last one came 45 minutes ago.

Staccato sentences? Periods at the end of texts? Typos? I threw down my phone and whipped the car around.

The snow resumed as soon as I reached the main roads, and with the clouds it was already dark as it would get. Red lights and brake lights blazed and coalesced in droplets on the windshield. In early winter before commuters are acclimated to accumulation, everyone forgets how to drive. We had to slow down and bottleneck three times for ambulances.

Bing Crosby warbled White Christmas on the radio but I didn’t listen. My phone vibrated in the passenger seat, but I didn’t look at it. In room 216 Jill lay naked in a thin green gown with my wife clutching her hand, but I didn’t think about that then. All my concentration poised like a sugarplum fairy in my right foot between gas and brake as I sidled between vehicles wherever ten spare feet emerged, taking advantage of lollygaggers skittish of slush. I knew the plows had salted by now and all the new stuff falling would melt on contact. In all likelihood the accidents I’d passed were due to overcautious drivers getting rear-ended.

I squeezed through a yellow light, gathered speed on the on-ramp, whizzed onto the interstate. Traffic heading the other direction inched along, but I slunk to the west-bound fast lane and put on speed while rehearsing what I’d say. My phone was dead and I forgot my charger at home. I don’t know anyone else at work who has this kind, you know how Apple is. I came as fast as I—what happened? No, I didn’t know! I’m so sorry to hear that. Is she gonna be okay? Do you think after all this she’ll still want to stay with us? Maybe for everyone’s peace of mind—

Before you think me heartless, please know Jill acts like I’m the least competent husband/father you’ll ever meet—this from the lady who married an alcoholic. Everything I do, it’s: oh look, Geoff’s pulling out his phone to check the game. Oh, Geoff took the Lord’s name in vain when he stubbed his toe. Oh, I think Geoff was eyeing up that bimbo on the sidewalk. How I make up her guest bedroom, phrase the Thanksgiving Day blessing, carve the turkey—nothing measures up. And I was sure when she regained consciousness she’d wear her famous look of knowing when she heard I wasn’t there. Typical Geoff.

Of course, Alicia and the kids just love her. She takes us out for ice cream, treats us to theme parks, gives the best gifts—with just a touch of self-aggrandizement. She says at least once each holiday gathering, “I just love bringing life and joy to a party. That’s all I care about. The life and joy.”

Cutting across two lanes to exit, my spirits lifted: maybe the stroke would mellow her out. Make her take a more humane view of her son-in-law. It wouldn’t kill her, of course—Craig was right about that—but maybe it would give Jill some kind of realization that she didn’t need to be on my ass all the time.

The light was red but I was turning right. My left clear, I nosed out and pushed the gas. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the homeless guy turn and spin away as my right front fender connected with him, and I felt the thump through the whole vehicle and in my chest and eye sockets. I just sat there for a minute with blood rushing in my ears and the rest of it going to my feet and hands, lightheaded with ricocheting eyespots. Then I put the car in park, unbuckled, and slung myself out.

He lay between the car and curb, on his back with his elbows and knees bent like a turtle flipped belly-up. Because of his coat and muffler I could only see his nose to his forehead. He smelled like a cross between McDonald’s and Jiffy Lube.

“Sir? Sir? Are you alright?” He eked his head side to side and wiggling his gloved hands like flippers. He mumbled something behind his muffler and I bent closer with a hand to my ear. “Sir? Are you alright?”

“Help me.”

I took his hand and put my other around him into his armpit to scoot him back to the curb. I know you’re not supposed to move injured people, but what was I gonna do? Leave him soaking in the slush? He didn’t look hurt, but as I pulled he groaned tremendously. “Call 9-1-1,” he said when I set him down as gently as I could.

“I—sir—can you tell how bad you’re hurt? I’m sorry, I’m having a hard time hearing you.” I pointed at my mouth, hoping he’d take the hint and move his scarf.

He wasn’t looking at me, though; just kind of rocking and hugging his knees, then flopped over on his side with another moan. Metallic numbness on my tongue, I registered cars slowing or stopping, faces pressed to windows. I’d left my phone in the passenger seat, so I pulled a glove on my hand and held the fingers in a clutching gesture to my ear and kept them there.

“You’re gonna be alright,” I said to both of us, “This too shall pass.” I was looking around like someone had said “I Spy the solution to hitting a homeless man.” I squatted by him with my non-fake-phone hand propping him back up. He growled and sank against my chest.

“9-1-1,” he said again.

“Look, I—sorry, but—” The idea honestly seemed harmless, at least excusable in the split second between its generation in my head and its slipping out, “—can I take you someplace warm? There’s a good restaurant I can take you to. We can get something to eat and take a look at how bad you’re banged up, and then, if you need it, we’ll—call an ambulance. Yeah. Can you walk? Can you get to my car?”

He went “Uh uh, uh uh,” as I picked him up, but no more moans. He hopped along beside me, my cheeks burning at the gaze of a million commuters. I got him to the car, took my fake phone down from my ear and opened the passenger door to put him inside. I went around to the other side and noticed the left headlight was burst and the fender had a big dent. Of course.

When I got in, the bundle of rags and smells packed into the seat against the fogged window said “It hurts.” I cracked the backseat windows, blasted the defrost and pulled forward. Someone honked. I trembled and breathed, signalled and merged. I don’t remember breaking, hitting lights, seeing anything out of the cloudy windshield, just him breathing and humming and shuddering with every pothole in his gray coat with white stuffing pluming from holes patched with duct tape.

I found myself getting out of the car and looking around in a daze to see where I’d brought us—didn’t it make sense for me to call us an ambulance? It would take us both where we needed to go…—and found I’d brought us all the way to the top of a parking garage. The only car on a white plain, perfect except for our tire tracks. I got back in and drove us back into the gray building and fluorescent-green lights and oil and skid marks, ba-bumping over speed bumps, stop and look at yield signs, around and around arrows and down again with yellow-black striped signs to the bottom level where I eased us into a compact spot for no good reason, reversed into an empty spot across the way. This too shall pass. It was passing alright, and I couldn’t seem to make it stop.

I opened the passenger door and he fell out into my arms. “Hey, you alright?” I pulled him up by the armpits. “We’re here. Can you smell that? Vietnamese. It’s good.”

“Doctor,” he said.

“Look, would you rather have a doctor or a good, hot meal? Which would you rather have, honestly? I’ll take you to whichever. You decide.”

He straightened up in my arms and looked at me sidelong. He had icy blue eyes like a husky and a square red nose poking over his moustache and scarf. “It hurts,” he said.

“Yeah? How bad?”

“Just go.” He nodded his head.

“To the restaurant?”

“Can’t feel my leg.”

“From the cold? Or—”

“Just go.”

We three-legged raced past the gate out into the winter wind that made me hesitate but he pulled me on like he knew where he was going.

“Can you walk?” I asked, suddenly aware of a couple coming toward us who would reach the door at the same time.

He grunted but didn’t make a move either way, so I extricated my arm and stepped away. He was still limping but kept on. Maybe he’d already been limping, before. We got to the door a little behind the couple and they held it. I thanked them and took the door myself, and then all four of us got tangled in the entryway when my companion reached the inner door first but wouldn’t open it or move aside when the couple said “Excuse us,” so I had to say “Excuse me,” slide past them, shunt my companion aside so I could get to the door, but then he sagged against the plate glass with a ringing thud that drew a lot of eyes from inside and a gasp from the young woman. “It’s alright,” I huffed, grabbing his arm and pulling him toward the door the young man was holding for us.

My companion chose that moment before stepping through the portal to point his nose at me and go, “You hit me.”

I laughed but it was coming from someone else, the door-holder watched us doggedly, the homeless man wavered between me and the door and from the looks of things he wasn’t budging.

“Go on,” I said, taking his arm, guiding him over the threshold.

“You hit me.” As though he had just remembered.

“Oh you’re something else.” Some ventriloquist was using me like his dummy. The waitress looked at me and held up two quizzical fingers; I nodded and followed her to the only available seating: a high table on the bar side by the big glass windows, so that not only could every person in the restaurant see us but everyone on the street, too.

The usuals peopled the place: college students after classes, couples, some families, a promising number of Asians. A muted TV above the bar played a football game. Three yuppies below it raised their glasses and laughed. I looked around wondering if I’d ever be able to take Alicia and the boys here again.

I took off my coat and hung it over my chair. My charge was having a hard time climbing up into his, like a plastic action figure you can’t quite position correctly. I started to move around to him and he pulled his arm away, knocking a waiter’s pitcher and sloshing ice and water on the floor.

By the time we were both seated I was sweating and shivering. Patrons standing in line to pay for their takeout orders pressed into my back and talked with strangers in loud holiday-infused tones. The stranger across from me leaned his elbows on the table and put his still-scarved chin on them, condensation gathering on his moustache above his scarf, feet resting on the top rung of his chair and knees bumping the table. His hands wore fingerless gloves and were red and white from cold but clean.

I opened my menu to seek solace in the familiar panels. “So, uh, what do you think you’ll have? The pho is delicious. Vietnamese soup where they steep the beef broth for days. My wife’s favorite is the bun noodle bowl with egg roll and pork. The service is warm and knowledgeable; say the number of a menu item and they’ll quote you all the ingredients and possible substitutes. Trust me, my mother-in-law—”

“Thai coffee, iced,” the homeless man said to a waiter passing with someone else’s order. The young man blinked, nodded at my companion, and hurried on with his tray.

“Um, yeah, good choice,” I said. He wasn’t looking at me or my menu and his own lay closed on the table under his elbows.

The waiter brought him the glass of syrup and sweetened-condensed milk on ice and a little glass pitcher of coffee, which the homeless man picked up with his fist and dumped over the contents of his glass. He brought it to his lips and drank about a quarter of it, leaving his moustache gray and dripping on his scarf.

“Have—have you been here before?” I asked.

“Two banh xeo,” he said to an Asian waitress passing by, who nodded curtly and without semblance of surprise that would have grounded me in a spiraling world. I hurriedly flipped through my menu and then back to the top and stopped in the appetizers when I spotted it—banh xeo, a Vietnamese pancake. No sooner had I located it than two battery plate-sized crisps appeared on the table in front of him.

“And for you, sir?” the waitress asked me.

“Um, give me a couple, um…” I watched my tablemate slide chopsticks out of their sheath, shimmy them together to shed the splinters, and spear them into one of the battery crisps. He pulled up a wad of fried dough, cilantro and bean sprouts, pulled down his scarf and deposited the load in his mouth.

It may have been a while before he finished that pancake, or it may only have been a minute later that he took the other and stacked its plate on the empty one and this time poured fish sauce on top of it and stabbed into it with the gusto of a conquistador planting his flag, but this was evidently no new world to him. Until the waiter returned I didn’t realize I hadn’t ordered for myself yet, but before I could ask for a diet coke, my companion uttered, “Szechuan duck.”

“What’s your name?” I asked when the waiter had left. I hoped the question would have a humanizing effect, remind him to take pity on me. Truth be told, I was thinking about my cracked bumper and busted headlight and that cars of its age have been totaled for less.

His blue eyes flitted their light lashes. “Leroy.”

“Leroy. Hi. I’m Geoff.” A beat passed. “So how’d you, uh, come to be…”

He didn’t look up this time. He was holding his breath and then releasing it. “I don’t talk about it.”

“That’s okay. I understand.”

“You think a meal will cut it?”

I bit my lips. “Well, if you’re not that badly hurt, then…You know, there’s a Goodwill not far from here. If you need a new coat or boots, socks, gloves…”

“I had things I wanted to do,” he said ominously, and I shut up.

We went on as before, the passing of the duck signalling the passage of time that had otherwise stood still once his second plate was empty. I marshalled my efforts to order a bowl of pho. I needed something warm. My fellow man slurped his second drumstick clean, eyeing the open menu. Miraculously he hadn’t spattered even a drop on it and he patted his fingers on his napkin in his lap. Maybe it was the cold from sitting by the door that made my face numb and in need of a pinch, but I hoped I was dreaming. Jill and Alicia at the hospital seemed no more real than a dream, either. I mechanically began to eat the pho as soon as it arrived, not bothering with the basil, lime, or cilantro garnish on the separate plate the waiter deposited in the table’s dwindling open space.

When he finished his duck he sat back in his chair; his face around his eyes spasmed. He looked like he had lost his balance or maybe his bearings. He kept looking around the place, looking at me, then looking around again, then at me, as though trying to figure out how I fit into the equation.

“How are you feeling?” I asked.

“I need a doctor.”

“What—what makes you say that?”

“I hurt. Inside.” He had said it matter-of-factly, without placing any weight in the words, which made them heavier.

“Maybe we should look at you in the bathroom. Where’s it hurt?”

“Inside.”

“Should we go look?”

“No.”

That was a guilty relief. “Well, how are we going to know if you need help or not?”

“I already told you I do.” His voice was clear and quiet, not accented or gravelly like I’m used to hearing from panhandlers. That, and his eyes, made me squirm. I thought of my phone alive and waiting in my pocket. I wondered when the waiter would be back and if it would be too soon, too obvious to ask for the check when I hadn’t even finished eating, while he—

“Mango sticky rice,” he said into the blue, and I didn’t bother turning to see if anyone had heard him or not.

“Well, do you think you’ll be alright? I can drive you back to where—where I found you, if you want. Or take you someplace else…a shelter, or—”

His eyes were drifting shut like my kids’ start to do late at night when they should be heading to bed but don’t want to yet. I leaned toward him, gulping. “Hey. What do you think?”

His lashes opened and he stared at me, blue eyes red around the irises, lips puckering over his scarf, clasped hands under his chin. “I see you,” he said. “I see the way you roll your eyes and hear how you huff under your breath as you walk out of the room. The way you go load the dishwasher, all long-suffering. I see how you won’t make eye contact, and it’s not just me.”

I sensed noodles slipping off my spoon onto the table far below. I shook my head and lost my balance in my tall chair; my heels slipped off their rung and I oozed to the floor. Other diners tilted their heads away and went about their meals. I pushed up and found myself wheezing in my chair again with a waiter holding my elbow and asking if I was alright.

“Fine.” The homeless man was looking down at the creamy dish of rice with the slice of mango on top of it. His hands were in his lap. I heard his chopsticks titter on the floor under the table. He leaned forward and laid his head on the table on his menu in the space the waiter had just cleared. He closed his eyes.

Without him eating and ordering and eating some more there was nothing to pull me into time again until our waiter materialized at my elbow. “Is he alright?”

“Tired,” I said. “Can I get the check, please?”

“Yes, sir. How would you like them split?”

“All together.”

“Yes, sir. That’s very good of you, sir.”

“Huh? Oh.” I fixed on her smile as she cleared our plates.

“Would he like a box?”

“Uh, no thanks.”

She returned with the check on a plastic dish with two fortune cookies. “Take your time.”

I winced at the bill, added 20%, and laid my card on it. Just like at the corner where I’d hit him I could feel bystanders—bydrivers then, byeaters now—watching us, everyone aware something was wrong but no one wanting to be a part of it. I hated and envied them. I cracked my fortune cookie and read, Something big is coming your way.

I could leap up and say, “My wife is calling from the hospital! Here’s three missed calls and five texts to prove it!” But then everyone would remember my face. As it was, the waiters at the very least would be able to identify me—and the transaction! I snatched my card off the bill and stuffed it back in my wallet just as the waiter came around. I smiled apologetically and made a show of rummaging in my wallet for cash that wasn’t there until she passed.

I looked at Leroy across from me, shaking my head at myself. I felt my phone buzzing and squeezed the power button through my jacket pocket to silence it like a soldier with his legs blown off sticking himself with morphine. Some of the tables were emptying and staying that way, but the place was still crowded. I sipped and clutched my coke as though I couldn’t be bothered with bills before I’d finished it. But too soon I reached the bottom of the glass. I had to use the bathroom, but what if someone came to the table while I was gone? For that matter, what if someone came to the table while I was still here?

I almost fell getting down from my seat and I found myself in a bathroom stall trying not to throw up. I waited until the feet at the urinal outside walked away, washed their hands, and closed the door, then emerged and looked at myself in the mirror. I didn’t look good. I washed my hands and put them on the back of my neck, then I hurried out without drying them because I had fourth-guessed myself on the prudence of leaving Leroy alone. A couple wait staff stood behind the bar looking at him and conferring in low voices. When I returned to my seat one broke off and positioned himself at a respectful distance until I acknowledged him.

“Sir, please do not feel you must wait. He may stay as long as he needs.”

I looked up at his blur. “I—I’ll just be a minute.”

If anyone asked me what happened I could deny everything. I’d say he looked hungry so I decided to buy him dinner. I didn’t know he had internal bleeding. In fact, I really didn’t. He might have been going to die anyway. Maybe he burst something after eating too much, or he was sick already.

Before I could think any longer I made myself drop my wallet and keys under the table, and I got down and hit my head doing it. I noticed waiters’ feet standing close by to be of assistance if needed, then walk away when I didn’t acknowledge them. I reached into the homeless man’s long jacket and found the pockets empty. I came out on his side, feeling dizzy, leaned an elbow on the table and felt his pants pocket. Nothing there. I switched hands and went to his other side. Me picking his pockets must have looked incredibly like I was picking his pockets, but I assumed an air of business, the same I had adopted sitting at my desk from 12:30-4:30 all afternoon, and cast my line again.

This time I landed on his wallet. His thigh was warm and his whole body rocked as I worked my fingers in around the leather casing. I jiggled it out and found two hundred crumpled dollars in twenties, tens, and fives. I threw a hundred fifty on the table, crossed out my tip with shaking hands, and stuck the wallet back in his pocket. I returned to my seat and fanned my face with the plastic tray with the bill on it.

Then I felt a hand on my shoulder. I recognized the difference between those friendly “I feel bad for ya, pal” pats I’d received earlier at work, and the heftiness of this one.

“Sorry to interrupt, sir, but I have to ask you a couple questions,” the officer said.

I thought I actually would faint. I thought, this is the point where this dream strays so far into implausibility, even my subconscious recognizes the hooeyness and throws the brakes. I was aware that my head was nodding, that my hand was pulling apart a napkin.

“How do you know this man?”

“I—ran into him on the street.” When I realized what I’d said I started coughing, then took a drink of Leroy’s water.

“Mmhmm.” My remark went from his pen into his notebook, then he glanced absently over my shoulder at a waiter laden with a tureen we could both smell. His wandering eye sparked in me a revelation. He didn’t want to catch me. He was here to eat. He just saw a funny situation and thought he’d better take a look because that’s what he knew he had to do. It made my heart bulge with compassion for another human being just trying to get through the day. Maybe that compassion would prove contagious, who knows?

“So how’d you end up here together?”

“He looked hungry. I took him here, he ate a bunch, and then—” I gestured at him.

“And you footed the bill?”

I shrugged modestly.

“Why?”

“Spirit of the…you know.”

He pointed with his chin at Leroy. “How long’s he been like that?”

“Oh, five, ten minutes. I figured it’s the first his belly’s been full in a while and maybe it made him sleepy.” How easily the words came! Not too fast, not too slow, with ordinary cadence and inflection. How was I doing it?

“Have you checked him?”

I hesitated, then shook my head. And then the police officer did what I’d feared, and all my blood rushed to my feet and I put a hand on the back of my chair to steady myself as he went around the table and looked down at Leroy’s face, pried open his eye, put a hand to his neck and frowned up at the ceiling.

“Uh huh.” He removed his hand and shook his head with an unsurprised grimace.

A second before he looked at me I prepared a shocked face and liquified in my chair. Seemingly convinced, the officer stepped out of the restaurant and spoke into his two-way, then came back. In that interval I reviewed all my options and found I had none. My only excuse to slip away would raise more suspicion—with family waiting at the hospital, not even the good Samaritan would’ve turned aside to buy a homeless man so much as an egg roll. I braced myself.

“Not how you want to be repaid for a good deed,” the officer—Reynolds, from his name patch—said. It took me a minute to realize he was offering commiseration.

“No.” Feeling this inadequate, that I should be saying more, I added, “Do you think—drugs?” I felt nasty, especially knowing it was false, but Reynolds nodded vigorously, as though the stereotype was connective tissue between reality and expectation, in finding a dead man when you were just looking for a bowl of hot soup.

“What do you need from me?” I asked, the only thing I could.

“EMT will be here in five, CSI in ten. Sit tight. I’m gonna have you move over there by the bar.”

In ten minutes the officer and wait staff had cleared the restaurant. I didn’t register when they arrived until a team had put up caution tape outside and opaque tarps over the windows. Gloved, goggled people in lab coats and EMTs swarmed all over; it was just like you see on shows. A professional young woman with a sharp chin and doe eyes flashed her badge and pulled me outside with Reynolds and a clerical-looking young man. “Detective Mavis. I’ll need you to tell me what happened, in order, exactly as it went down.”

I didn’t plan what I’d say ahead of time—I let myself hem and haw a bit because I know that liars are more fluent, articulate, and attentive to detail than the ordinary person. I said I was on my way to grab takeout when I saw this guy panhandling outside—“Right there,” I said, pointing at the curb. It was an impulse. I didn’t think I had much time, but my phone was dead and I’d needed to wait for it to charge so I could see what my family at the hospital wanted to order. While I was waiting, Leroy kept ordering and ordering, and I hated to cut him off. When he passed out I chalked it up to a warm room and a full belly.

“But now I’ve got to go. I saw these half an hour ago.” I held up my phone to show the missed calls, so shaky I almost dropped my phone, and I saw the clerk frown sympathetically.

“Got it,” Detective Mavis said. “Go ahead and message your wife. We’re probably going to hold onto you at least another half hour. Forensics will need to determine cause of death before we let you go.”

Forensics. Prints. Of course. They’d be all over his wallet. Best case scenario, they book me for picking his pocket, assuming they buy my excuse about thinking he was just sleeping. I felt my meal climbing in my throat.

“What do they think happened?” I heard myself shrill.

“Anyone’s—hmm.”

I turned to follow her gaze and saw the restaurant door burst open. About a dozen people flooded out, white coats, gray coats, blue coats snapping through the caution tape carrying a body on a stretcher, so many people I couldn’t get a good look or even realize what I was seeing until after the ambulance peeled away with sirens blazing, leaving the detective whistling in its wake and the people in lab coats coming out shucking their gloves and masks and shaking their heads. “What—what just happened?” I said.

“He started breathing!” some officer was shouting to anyone who’d listen as though it were a Christmas miracle. “He woke up!”

“But he was dead!” I argued. They were playing a trick; their smiles warned they were trying to trap me into giving something away.

“So get this,” a lab coat crows to us as though we’re all friends at the bar after hours. “They defibrillate like nine times, check vitals, everything. All bruised up under there when they tore off his clothes to zap him, like he’d been trampled by an elephant. The gal timing the defib says to call it. They start to pack up. Forensics are moving in, and then, out of nowhere, boom! He curls over and pukes up a buffet’s worth of Vietnamese food.”

The cop and aide both started to laugh, but the detective gave me a “back to business” look, pointedly shutting the forensics guy out of our circle. “Mr Abner, were you aware the victim had been hit by a car? Did he show any signs of physical or mental trauma?”

“N-no.”

“He never said anything that made you suspect—?”

I shook my head vehemently. Then realized maybe I shouldn’t. “Well, we didn’t talk much. He seemed off, but—I thought maybe he wasn’t sober, and-and that was why.”

“Hmm.” She turned back to lab coat, who had started to walk away. “Any signs of head trauma? Bleeding from nose or ears, discombobulation, dilated pupils?”

Lab coat shrugged. “He was awake like two seconds before they whisked him off. But no blood anywhere. Maybe hemorrhaging. Guess we’ll find out.”

They had a few more exchanges, during which I strove to tread these new waters and see if I could spot shore in any direction, but all I saw were maybes. Maybe they wouldn’t look for prints after all. But then, maybe they’d ask to see my car. Maybe they’d ask the wait staff if the guy really had been panhandling outside their restaurant. Maybe the guy was already giving the EMTs an earful.

“So…can I go?” I mumbled at a lull.

Gabe the aide gaped at me. The cop and lab coat raised their eyebrows. Detective Mavis flapped her long open coat and fixed me in her hazels. “You don’t want to see if he’s alright?”

“No, I mean, I do, but my wife’s in the hospital—I mean, my wife’s mother is—did I tell you this already?—and I was gonna give you my number so you can text me if or w-when he wakes up—do you guys text?—because I definitely want to make sure he’s okay.”

“Hmm. When he wakes up you’ll need to verify what he says so we can assess cognition. Do you have a car? Gabe will ride with you.”

The clerical kid rapped his pen on his notepad.

At this point I almost gave in. Maybe the reason crooks want to be caught is because crime is too much work. I was halfway through a confession in my head when the cop, Reynolds, turned to the detective. “Hey, maybe it’s better if he rides with us. He looks pretty shook up.”

Detective Mavis nodded. “Who could blame him?”

I rode to the hospital with the person I least suspected of suspecting me. Unfortunately, Officer Reynolds kept asking me questions: how was I spending the holidays? Who did I think would make the Superbowl? Why did I think the homeless man didn’t let on he was hit by a car? I watched droplets bead along my window and answered evasively.

I pulled out my phone, announced, “Just checking how my wife’s doing,” and opened a search. What happens if I hit someone with my car? The results said call it in right away, even if the pedestrian doesn’t appear hurt. I would be liable for any medical treatment needed, face civil lawsuits, may even be charged with vehicular manslaughter.

I mopped my forehead and edited my search. What happens if I hit someone and don’t report it? The words “hit and run” glared up at me. My mouth fell open. I forgot there was an easy name for what I’d done.

“How’s it going over there?”

I jumped, swiping away the tab. Why was he allowed to look away from the road without hitting anyone? Why couldn’t a homeless man jump in front of us now? “Great, they’re all great. I mean, as good as you’d expect. Hanging in there.”

“I meant with you. Must make you wonder.”

“Wonder—?”

“Why someone would do that. Hit someone with their car and just take off.”

I shook my head to hide that the rest of my body was also shaking.

He slapped his hand on the steering wheel. “Just try to relax. You’ve had a day, alright. We’ll handle it from here. Worst you’ll have to deal with is a few more questions, that’s it. Hey, you’re a good guy. You saw someone who needed help and you asked him to dinner. Prodigal Son-type. No one’s forgetting.”

I sat on my hands and swallowed hard. “Really?”

“Abso-flipping-lutely. Relax. Here we are.”

He ran around to get my door for me, allowing not even a second to gather my wits, and then the detective and her assistant were pulling up behind us. From her face I doubted she shared the officer’s view.

Some room in that oblong building contained Alicia and Jill. I let myself be guided like a child to the front desk, then to an elevator, up to the fourth floor to Trauma Intensive Care. A nurse seated the four of us—Officer Reynolds, Detective Mavis, Gabe, me—in the waiting area where a soap opera played and a weeping woman leaned her head on an older man. Officer Reynolds picked up a sports magazine and Gabe went for coffee. Detective Mavis sat across from us without a pastime in hand and just looked at me.

I took out my phone and switched off location sharing with my family, turned it off but kept looking at it. I kept waiting for one of them, Reynolds, probably, to say, “What’s the poor guy need to wait around for?” But he was buried in his reading. I cleared my throat. “Look, is it alright if I check on my wife upstairs? She’s gotta be worried sick.”

Detective Mavis pursed her lips. She slapped her hands on the sides of her chair. “I’ll walk you up.”

“Oh, no, I don’t think—I don’t want to worry her with—any of this. She’ll be fragile enough already.”

“You haven’t told her?”

“No.”

The cop pulled his nose out of his mag and looked up at her. “We’ve held onto him long enough, haven’t we, Mave? We know where to find him. Besides, this’ll take awhile.”

“I’ll walk you up.” There was no denying her. I huffed and turned around but couldn’t remember which door we came through to reach this wing, and I had to follow her out to the reception area, and then she led me in the direction the nurse pointed. I trailed her up to the Thrombosis unit.

When we reached the door the detective went a few yards down the hallway and looked at some bulletins on the wall, and I knocked. Alicia answered. Her eyes were baggy and her hair falling out of its braid. Her makeup had streaked and streaked again. She threw her arms around my neck and hung on me and bawled. As I patted her back I eyed my shadow down the hall but she kept her back to us. Alicia shuddered, then pulled back as quickly as she’d begun.

“Where were you?” Her tone said she was reserving judgment. I suppressed a shudder of my own.

“Car accident. I’m sorry, Aly. I should’ve called, but my phone was dead, and then—I just—I couldn’t handle it. I know I haven’t been here for you. You needed me, and I failed you. And—I let Jill down, too. I was scared. I am scared. If we lose her…what that’ll do to you, to our family.” Tears vouched for me and Alicia melted again, and I felt her heart pounding against mine, her cheeks wetting my shirtfront, her lips warming my neck, each point of touch making a hole where I felt the truth trying to burn a hole to come out.

“It’ll be okay. It’s gonna be okay. I worried you were hurt somewhere and I’d have to come to you and leave mom. But she’s stable. The doctors are hopeful.” She stepped back and held me at arm’s length. “Are you alright? Was the car—?”

“Cab.” Even the little fib grated on my teeth. Feeling Detective Mavis right-angle toward us in the hall, I pulled Alicia into the room. A hundred monitors beeped and whirred and showed green and red graphs. And then Jill, small and still in her bed. I couldn’t look at her either. I couldn’t look anywhere.

“How’re the boys?” I asked.

“Mrs Thompson offered to help when I told her the news yesterday, so I asked her to drive them up here, in case it was the last chance for them to see her. They’re in the cafeteria now. They needed a break.” Alicia stood at her mother’s side, bottom lip coming up and her eyes filling. “Would you hold her hand, Geoff?”

I didn’t have a leg to say no on. “Why?”

“You know how unconscious people can still show lots of brain activity, even move body parts or talk? Well, when they were running her up here after surgery she said your name, clear as day. The doctors and nurses all agreed having you here was a good idea.”

I pulled a stool to Jill’s bedside. She had a thin face, sharp nose and wide mouth that on my wife looked very pretty, but on her mother they seemed the exact combination you’d pick to express judgment, intolerance, assumptions of bad faith. I eased my hand over her papery one on the coverlet.

“Talk to her,” Alicia said. “She might hear you.”

“Hey Jill. It’s Geoff. I’m here.” Alicia held her mother’s other hand and watched me across the bed, and I could sense the detective’s presence passing beyond the glazed glass in the door. “I, uh, I’m sorry I’m late.”

“Maybe talk about your day at work. You know, normal stuff. How you’d normally talk to her.”

“‘Normally’?” I gave a helpless shrug.

“Geoff, come on.” Alicia came around and hugged me from behind, sandwiching me crouched against the bed. “I know how you feel toward mom, and you think it’s mutual. Just remember everything she does is out of love.”

“Oh, right, Aly. The thing with the Thanksgiving turkey was out of love. The photo op at the Lincoln Memorial was out of love. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t be sarcastic right now, you’ve had a hard day, but what can I honestly say to her?”

“Geoff, she can hear you!”

“Well, you brought it up. It’s just…out of love?”

All this time she hadn’t taken her arms from around my neck. She’s always been that way, trying to get closer when I need space. I could see her mother in that, too, and it was all I could do not to pull away from both.

“Geoffrey, she loves you, too.”

I snorted.

“She’s trying to love you like my dad would have.”

“I already have a dad.”

“This is different. She can’t just be the one to welcome you, she has to be the watchdog, too.”

“I’ve never had the sense she wanted me in the family.”

“Of course she does! That’s why she’s so tough on you, because she wants you to…”

“What?” I turned and faced her. “What does she want from me?”

Alicia looked at me and I felt myself melting the way I always do, dangerously near to giving away everything that had happened to me to pull her over to my side, but the thought of what Jill would say if she could somehow hear me—

A soft knock, and a nurse stuck her masked face in the room. “Mr Abner? There’s someone here to meet with you.”

Alicia wiped her eyes and let go of me. “Who?” she said more to me than the nurse.

I squeezed her hand to reassure us both. “Probably the police with some questions about the accident.”

She remarked this must have been a worse accident than I had let on, but I managed to turn the thought around by pointing out how generous and Christmas spirit-y the cops were to let me come to the hospital before they investigated, and that made Alicia’s eyes overflow with gratitude. The door closed behind me; I let out the sigh that had been building since I entered the room, and found Detective Mavis with steel-dry eyes that held in what they knew until I had followed her down to the waiting area, watched her plug quarters into the coffee machine and fill her styrofoam cup. But my thoughts weren’t on the news she was holding over me, but at Jill’s bedside, wishing I was man enough to tell her to her conscious face what I thought of her.

“Your M.I.L. gonna be alright?” the detective asked, eyeing the TV in the breakroom over her cup. The same college game played over the bar at the restaurant, now in the bottom quarter.

“Uh, yeah. So, any news from—Leroy? Is he okay?”

“He’s lucid.”

“Oh.” I sounded gutpunched.

“They confirmed he was hit by a car. Fractured his ribs. Ruptured spleen. A lot of internal bleeding. But yes, he’s awake.”

“That’s, wow…great.”

“They say he opened his eyes as they were doing the exam just after they declared he wasn’t going to wake up. He had this intense look like he had to say something.” She slowly stirred her coffee and narrowed her eyes. “He said your name. Geoffrey Abner.”

I caught the doorframe. “That’s all? He—wait, he said my full name?”

“Uh huh.”

“I didn’t—” It took a long time to pull my thoughts together. He had said nothing against me! Maybe he didn’t remember! “So, is there anything else you need from me?”

“That’s it?” She slurped her drink while I waited. “You don’t know if the guy will pull through yet, but you’re ready to waltz outta here?”

“I mean, my wife—my mother-in-law—”

“Of course. Then there’s only one last thing, for now. What kind of car do you drive?”

“What kind of—why?”

“Just checking all the boxes.”

“Uh, mazda. Mazda 3.”

“And you left it back at the restaurant, yes?”

I felt my ribs fracturing, my own insides bursting. “Yeah.”

“And you have your keys? I’d be happy to send Reynolds and Gabe for your car. As a favor.”

“I’m good.”

“No trouble at all. We’re all just waiting around here until Mr Leroy wakes up.”

“Well, that’s okay. It’s parked close by my house, anyway. Alicia can drop me on the way home.”

“Ah. Where do you live?”

“I mean, it isn’t so much on my way home. It’s on my way to work. Or it’s—it’s just in a—”

She sipped her coffee. “You know, you don’t need to tell me all this stuff right now. You don’t. It’s odd, though.”

For the first time that day I was glad to feel my phone vibrate. I yanked it out and thrust it at her face. “Look, see? I need to go. My wife.”

“Very well, Mr Abner. We’ll reach out if need be. We have your number.”

I backed out the door, found myself pressing the elevator button again and again.

I saw the two-word text before I got to Jill’s room and saw doctors and nurses packing the hallway. I ducked through the bottleneck, spotted Alicia on the couch against the wall with her head in her hands. A lady with a blue badge had a hand on her shoulder while a white coat buzzed explanations, excuses. There were so many people around Jill’s bed I couldn’t see her. I didn’t feel anything at the time; not anything I noticed.

So many people talked to us in the next hour I almost forgot about Leroy and Detective Mavis. Alicia had to sign a hundred forms—death certificate, autopsy, record release, release of body, insurance, financials. People kept telling her things she’d have to make arrangements for between asking how she was doing. After the social worker finished a depression screener with her—crazy they put you through all that while you’re still in shock—she asked if I wanted her to assess me. I guess I didn’t look great.

The boys fought over my phone in the waiting room. The tragedy hadn’t seemed to sink in for them yet, and it must have been the same for Alicia. Aside from the brief moments she’d had alone with her mother between the machines emitting terrible noises and a hundred doctors and nurses piling into the room, she’d had no time to grapple with anything. I wished I could shoulder any of it for her. I wished I was equipped to wave away the nurses and get us a minute to ourselves, but, of course, when things began to quiet down it wasn’t so nice to be alone with my thoughts.

I eventually told Alicia I needed some air, went down and bought a pack of gum, walked back and forth between the cafeteria and hospital chapel chewing three pieces at once. I spat them out in five minutes when my jaw hurt, then popped two more and rode the elevator back up. Whenever the loudspeaker clicked on to announce code blue or code white to summon staff to save someone’s life I expected instead to hear the voice of Detective Mavis or God. So it surprised me when it wasn’t the police that came, but a perky nurse who informed me that a Mr Higgins was out of surgery and had been moved into recovery, and he wished to see me.

I followed her into the elevator without saying goodbye to Alicia or the boys. At least they could look back and cling to some semblance of my manhood. My guide stood aside with a pleasant gesture toward the door of reckoning, oblivious to my turmoil.

At first I thought we had the wrong room, because I didn’t recognize its occupant. I had thought him a lot larger, supporting him to my car; maybe his coat and scarf had made him appear bigger. Officer Reynolds, Detective Mavis and her aide stood around not looking at one another like they’d just clammed up. I shuffled to the bedside of the thin, bandage-chested, wrapped-headed man and felt an inclination to take his hand like I had Jill’s. What the hey, I thought, it can’t hurt, so I did, and got frozen by Leroy’s icicle eyes. Otherwise, his face gave no hints.

“I’m so glad you’re okay. I was worried.” My voice sounded like reading a script aloud for the first time. He didn’t respond, and I gargled a few other openings that came out stillborn, then stopped. “Has he said anything?” I asked the room without looking away from him.

“Only that he was waiting for you,” said the detective.

“Well, I’m here,” I said. “Do you—remember anything?”

The blue eyes didn’t waver. He took his hand out of mine as he shifted in bed and got his elbows behind him and propped himself up somewhat. “Thank you for dinner.”

I flinched because the reflex was already primed. “Y-you’re welcome.”

He turned his head to the police. “You all can go.”

Detective Mavis winced too. “Ah. You want to speak alone with Mr Abner?” Leroy didn’t answer. “Very well.” She made a shooing motion at her associates. They shuffled out, as reluctant to go as I had been to come.

“Can I—help with anything?” I asked.

Leroy sighed and let himself back down in bed, tugging at the thin coverlet. I looked around for a chair but there was none. “Do you remember what happened?”

“Yes.”

“Have you told them?” From his slow blink I gathered no, he had not. “Are you—going to?” More silence. He just looked at me until I recognized the answer. “Why?”

Leroy frowned, pushed backward with his elbows, and his breath gathered momentum. I’ve had a few moments in my life when I knew I was about to catch it from someone—my boss when I misplaced an invoice at my high school job, my father when I cheated on a test, Jill once or twice. This was one of those times. I readied myself.

“It wasn’t my choice,” he said. “I was going to say something. I was ready to. I got up to tell someone, but then…I got called. It was time for me to go. So I got up and left myself on the bed.”

“You…what?”

“I went out in the hall but no one looked at me. The detective, the nurses, no one noticed.” Leroy swallowed, his chest rising and falling quick and shallow. “That’s where I met your mother-in-law. I’d met her before, earlier today—somehow she’d seen me at the restaurant, or I’d seen her. Yes, she’d been sitting and eating with you, and your wife and kids. She somehow seemed to know me, too. I asked if she was coming my way, but she wasn’t. She was waiting to be called back in. So I told her what happened.”

“You—you saw—”

“Jill.”

“And told her everything?”

“Yes.”

“What’d she say?”

“She told me who she was and that you just left her. She said to hold on. She looked back in the room she stood outside of. They’re calling me, she said. Then she looked at me. She said, if you went back, if I could pull a string for you, would you do it? I said yes, there were things I’d meant to do but hadn’t. She asked if I’d tell anyone what you did to me. I said of course I would. She said I could go back either way, but it would mean a lot to her if I said nothing. Then she told me about you.”

When he stopped I gasped for air. “What did she say?”

Leroy only looked at me, and it was a look I recognized. Not like the commiserating smiles of my coworkers or the false comfort of this too shall pass, the steely retributive promise of Detective Mavis, the adoring gazes of my boys or the willful loving waiting ignorance of Alicia, but like Jill. Jill looked at me.

The room wobbled. I put one haunch on the bed by this man, this calm ghost reincarnate. I believed every word he said. I believed. Suddenly I was bawling, hiccuping, gagging on snot and tears and belief.

“Go to your family,” said Leroy.

I staggered out of there through the blur of halls and nurses. I don’t know if I found my own way back or if someone guided me, sleepwalking away from the part of me that had always not just asked for but expected mercy and had now been tried at Leroy’s bedside and found warranting the sword. But then Alicia was holding me and our sons Eddie and Maurie to a Christmas song feebly chiming over the speakers, and I knew that justice was dead, too. And wonders of his love, and wonders of his love, and wonders, wonders of his love.

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First I’ll look at why the books are good. Then I’ll explain why, as an ~as of now~ unpublished author, this series instills me with HOPE.

What follows will be light on spoilers, because, as you’ll soon see, these (books 1 & 2 anyway) aren’t really the kind of book you can spoil.

Why they’re good:

Emma M. Lion’s early diary entries leave realistically scant breadcrumbs to piece together into the tasty little cucumber sandwich that is the first book of eight (and counting). At first, all we know is she’s a young Victorian-era Englishwoman and an orphan. By the end of the trim first volume we’re just getting to know Emma and her quirky old house in the fictional London burb of St Crispian’s, and understand the circumstances by which she finds herself somehow deprived of her inheritance and lovely old house by her scheming wet-blanket of a cousin, Archibald.

The first volume ends with Emma taking the reins a bit, but she doesn’t really do anything with them yet. The inciting incident really occurs at the end—while Emma now understands the odds and stakes, she hasn’t grown as a character or begun to exert much influence on her story quite yet. Book 2, although longer, follows the same pattern. At the end Emma takes on a heist of sorts, but it serves as resolution to only one minor plot thread. Resolution certainly is nowhere to be found, as Brower has just finished setting the stage at this point.

However, the reader forgives the lack of structure because Brower has, from the first page, convincingly established that these books are journals. Emma’s diary immediately won me over by avoiding one of the common pitfalls of diaristic framings: the info-dump exposition about the main character’s whole life story to date, which you wouldn’t actually expect to find in a real person’s journal entry for just any ol’ March 1st. The story’s pace is similarly lifelike, with events and relationships unfolding across days and weeks instead of within major individual scenes. Therefore, we also don’t expect Emma to undergo an inciting incident, character growth, crisis, and resolution every two months (the span of each book in the series). After all, the books aren’t standalones—we’ll get to rising and falling action through the course of the series, not all contained within a single volume. I anticipate this will relieve Brower of the pressure to commit the character growth sitcom pitfall I hate so much. In sitcoms, writers tend to adhere to the tenet that characters must exhibit development, change, or growth by the end of each episode. Well, by the end of season 2, characters have run out of lessons to learn, so they’re stuck in a loop relearning “gosh, maybe I need to work more on communicating my feelings!” Many prolific authors of long serieses also get bogged down with this. Comparatively, Emma M. Lion is a breath of fresh air.

While I initially planned to tackle just the first two books in this series to see what my wife was on about, the characters quickly had me resolved to keep reading the rest.

Emma is an assured, sensitive, loyal, book-loving, cousin-confronting, formidable-aunt-deceiving, man-attracting heroine. Her distinctive, wry voice keeps the book moving quickly even when not much seems to be going on, and when she refers to tragic tidbits from her past her spunky tone reminds us she’s going to be okay; she seldom ends an entry on a dour note, but is always thinking toward the next step of how to better her situation. She effortlessly engages with consequential figures when she’s way out of her depth. And yet, Brower lets her experience frustration and grief at the same time. She’s not immune. She’s allowed to be flawed and human.

I like her, I want her to succeed, I want her to be happy which, is rare for me with a protagonist of this temperament. This sort always seems to get what they want, steamrolling other characters around them, not sharing the pages with them. And while Emma commands the stage, she certainly has difficulty persuading the world to give her a chance at certain junctures. Her determination against struggles with grief and money in the first two books recruit us to Team Emma.

The supporting cast is strong and varied and deserves more space than I’ll allow here, except for a few remarks on Hawkes, Pierce, and Islington, who by the end of book 2 all seem more or less equally likely to become romantically entangled with Emma in the future. Hawkes is St Crispian’s impassioned but thoughtful vicar who always knows the right thing to say to cheer our heroine up. In book 2, Pierce, who has been involved in some capacity in an unnamed war, becomes Emma’s lodger. He is always described in terms of storms and weather, but has a marked tenderness for Emma. Islington is a duke who, despite the fact she accidentally commits a breach of trust against him and they spar verbally at every meeting, finds himself taken with her wit.

However, the absence of romantic entanglements in the first two books is just as remarkable as their lack of inciting incident or climax. For books marketed to young women, we expect a lot more than repartee, but that’s all Brower gives us. Instead, Brower lets the respective friendships between Emma, Hawkes, Pierce, and Islington unfold, letting us first get to know the characters in their own right, and develop curiosity about for whom Emma will develop feelings second.

BTW, these are MANLY men. Convicted, serious, witty, self-assured. Listen up, gents—the girls are dying over these (potential, mark you! still just potential) love interests. If you want the girls—you know, that demographic that does most of the reading nowadays—to devour your book, you gotta have a guy or two like Hawkes, Pierce, or Islington.

Some miscellaneous aspects I love about Emma M. Lion:

Literary allusions abound—Shakespeare, Jane Eyre, Paradise Lost, and, according to my wife, many more throughout the following installments! In Emma we find a kindred book-loving spirit. The events of Emma’s life, according to many of her fans who have read farther than I have, also parallel certain facets of the books she loves, and my wife has informed me there’s a thriving community on reddit dissecting in what ways each volume alludes to different books on Emma’s shelf. And one can’t help but compare Brower’s books to the works of Austen and Wodehouse.

Easter eggs—again, going off of what my wife’s more advanced research and progress in the series (she’s read all 8 released-as-of-now volumes), but Brower assigns each character a primary and secondary color, by which she determines the color of each book cover. Since Emma has the limelight in the first two volumes, they tend toward her aqua hue. However, later installments may focus more on other characters, resulting in a different color or blend between colors! Read more here:

Rabbit Hole Soul Sisters

Colors and Symbolism

Color is clearly important in the world of Emma M. Lion and to Beth Brower. Her writing and art posts are rich in color and these colors usually carry hidden meaning. To understand the color symbolism and really get out the rich layers of meaning in her writing, it is imperative to recognize and understand the color symbolism and schematic. All the main…

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7 months ago · 33 likes · 8 comments · Rabbit Hole Soul Sisters

Fantastical elements—I couldn’t truly spoil these even if I wanted to, because the first two books just kiss the top of the iceberg, but so far we know there’s a) a ghost who appears around St Crispian’s, and b) a tendency of one’s personal items to go missing and turn up in random people’s houses. That’s all I’ll say for now! I don’t at this point know if these are just set dressing or if they’ll come into play as significant plot points down the road, though Brower’s little books are so tightly planned I have my suspicions!

Cast list—gotta love a book that starts with a cast list.

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Why these books give me hope:

Authors aspiring to publication take note.

As of writing this article (16 June 2026 1:42pm CTE) Brower is #1 rising in fiction on Substack. She doesn’t utilize the notes function. Just posts.

Beth Brower self-published all 8 of these bad girls.

And the women-folk are all writing, talking, posting, videoblogging, eating, breathing, and injecting them.

It’s time we men-folk, and anyone looking to publish fiction, did the same.

Brower has recently been signed by Bloomsbury to publish her books in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, and other countries. Before securing traditional representation, she built ~this~ all on her own.

Whenever someone says “X title could’ve never been published today,” simply punch them in the face, because with self-pub you can get a book that wouldn’t pass trad-pub muster because it lacks basic tried and true structural and genre elements out to gajillions of rabid fans. You can publish anything today.

Now, of course, you also need to be as good as Beth Brower, which is the hard part.

Most of us—I mean, most of you—don’t have what it takes. But those of us who are good enough don’t have to depend on trad pub to build an empiric franchise the fangirls are hotly debating across the seven seas like nerds used to spontaneously combust over minute background details in the after-credits scenes in Marvel movies in the 2010s. The only author doing something comparable and inciting such fervor is Brandon Sanderson.

I guess my takeaway is we all need to move to Utah and write serieses 10+ books long.

Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this review, send it to a man in your life to remind him it’s okay to read girl books sometimes. To find reviews of other light-hearted reading materials, check out

In college I was in the Honor’s Program, which is not a brag because during our week-long retreat prior to the start of classes I was constantly impressed with “wow, these people are all a lot smarter than I am.” 18-year-olds making connections between works of philosophy, fiction, poetry, history, and theology; books I’d heard of but never read. In our seminars I was out of my depth but treading water; I had read almost all of the assigned anthology over the summer—to foreshadow a theme, not everyone had!—so I at least got what my classmates and professors were talking about. But that first week of college I remember looking around and wondering if I’d find my people here, kinship maybe not quite comparable to what I had with high school and childhood friends but, you know, something.

Turns out not only would I find some of my best college friends in this cohort, but many of my best life friends as well—not to mention my wife.

What does any of this have to do with Aleksandr Solzenhitzyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, you ask?

Everything.

You see, part of the graduation requirement for the honor’s program was a capstone class. This senior class was meant to be a culmination of the program and a return to the discussion-based seminar format of our freshman retreat week. I took the capstone with 3 other students, which made for more intimate, if less diverse, discourse.

Our syllabus focused on the role of the Christian citizen in society and the extent to which Christ’s call to be “in the world, not of the world” entails involvement in the democratic process. Our discussion centered around Rod Dreher’s controversial book The Benedict Option, although we also read several other books, like Democracy in America, Hannah Coulter, and Hillbilly Elegy.

Wait, not The Gulag Archipelago? Which book are you reviewing again?

Most of my honors peers took capstone the following semester. While I don’t recall the theme of their class, the main book they read was The Gulag Archipelago. Everyone complained about this book. Not only was it hundreds and hundreds of pages long—this is the abridged edition, mind you—but, according to them, incredibly depressing. “We already know communism is bad,” everyone said. “The book is just making that same point over and over and over.” My wife’s roommate, who I think read more of the book than anyone else, still didn’t finish it.

I snickered at their complaints, thanking my lucky stars for my capstone’s comparatively tame assignments, de Tocqueville notwithstanding. I did not anticipate ever tackling Solzenhitsyn myself…until three summers ago.

II: The Purpose of Reading

Reading for some people is about entertainment. For some it’s enrichment, education. For others, personal improvement. However, none of these really get to the heart of the matter. Reading is, of course, as any honors student ought to know, about being better than everyone else.

That’s why I decided to read Moby Dick four years ago. Not only did I read Moby Dick, but I read it when I was up in the middle of the night with my infant son, in order that I might be better than anyone who has read Melville’s masterpiece under less duress.

My commitment to being the best enables me to one-up my family, friends, and co-workers when they mention promotions, vacations, honors, and marathons; with “but have you read Anna Karenina? What about Middlemarch? Don Quixote? No? Huh.”

So anyway, I may not have understood all the references my honorable peers were making, nor possess their mental agility to interweave cross-disciplinary ideas. I may not have been the most effective writer of the bunch, or the best public speaker (hell, my honors professors and classmates would tell you my capstone presentation was the worst of the bunch, and they’re right).

But what I could do was read the full, unabridged, 3-volume The Gulag Archipelago, a feat to which none of my brainier contemporaries had come close.

So, three summers ago, I checked out vol 1 on Hoopla, popped in them earbuds, and let the stolypin whisk me off to Siberia.1

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III: The Gulag

Solzenhitsyn was a low-ranking Russian officer during WWII before he fell afoul of “the organs,” as he terms the oppressive soviet bureaucracy, legal system and penal code of the era. The 7 sections of his trilogy cover the prison industrial complex, the prison-transfer system, life in the gulag, the psychological effects of life in the concentration camp, resistance and escape attempts, conditions of those living in exile rather than in the gulag, and finally a synthesis and reflection on the system as a whole. I expected to learn a lot about Communism, the USSR, and the role of both in the 20th century. Instead, I learned about human nature.

In part 1 we learn not just of the brutality of jail under Stalin compared to under the Czar before 1917 (apparently you could hunger strike back in the 19th century and your jailers would cede to your demands?), but the simultaneously lengthy and obscure list of “crimes” under Article 58 that’ll get you put behind bars, notably “wrecking,” which can be construed to mean pretty much anything the Party doesn’t like. Not showing up at work, stealing a sack of potatoes, or even expressing dissenting opinions (overheard and reported by your neighbor) are “counter-revolutionary activities.”

Part 2 treats us to the “stolypin”: boxcars or coaches the soldiers would wedge twenty, thirty, or forty prisoners into for days on end until they disembark for their camps. You’d be fed the very apropos meal of sardines—but no water to quench your thirst. Forget about using the toilet, just go in your trousers, or in your boots (it’ll warm you up)! And the thieves, whom Solzenitsyn terms “bitches,” perch up on the bunks and club people on the head to rob them while their jailers and fellows look the other way.

The interminable part 3 deals with camp life: the organization of labor ordained by the pitiless Naftaly Frenkel—how’s digging a canal in clay with your bare hands sound?—the abysmal fate of women (it’s about as bad as you’d expect), the making of feral children, the youngest of which Solzenhitsyn describes being sentenced is six years old, and, perhaps most gallingly, the rise of the so-called “socially friendly elements” to the top of the pecking order. These are thieves imprisoned alongside the political prisoners—nicknamed 58’s after the aforementioned Article—who make up the gulag’s majority. The wardens turn a blind eye when the “bitches” steal from, rape, and murder their counter-revolutionary campmates.

Long before Solzenhitsyn touches on the futility of escape attempts in part 6, we’ve seen the writing on the wall. Both on and off the “islands,” you cannot trust the state, the law, your neighbor, or even your family. Beset by 14-hour workdays, “muzzles” blocking light from coming in your windows, meagre rations, bunkmates swiping your boots in the night if you take them off, “stoolies” listening in on all sides, and the threat of being executed at the whim of your jailers, the soul allows itself to be ground into dog food. Solzenhitsyn regales the reader with instances where a piffling squad of soldiers brutalize or butcher their wards, remarking how if the unarmed men had rushed their jailers en masse, or refused to turn out to work, or refused to restrict their words and behavior, or refused to or refused to or refused to…there would have been no gulag. But the camp regime pitted prisoners against one another by recruiting “stoolies” from the rank and file and appointing “trusties”—those entrusted to cooking or secretarial jobs considered cushy respective to general work. Yes, it turns out that the promise of an extra ounce of bread at mess or reprieve from lumberjacking is all it takes to turn a few men against their fellows, to poison the whole pot with mistrust. After 1500 pages of The Gulag Archipelago, I discovered the ease with which a soul abandons all but the most basic self-interest myself.

This is the darkest book I’ve ever read. No silver lining goes untarnished. A hard-working farmer earns an award of recognition for over-production, half-jokingly asks for extra rations for his family instead of the award, and gets slapped with a “tenner”—ten-year sentence—for his request. The committed escaper Georgi Tenno devises elaborate plans to break out, and is thwarted each time by jailers, random alterations in camp routine, mistrustful locals, and the harsh wintry taiga itself. Even those few camp denizens who manage to avoid getting slapped with another sentence before release enter into the outside fearful, alone, learning that freedom is not what they have been released into. Reading about the worst atrocities you can fathom in Solzenhitsyn’s sardonic tone is like being flayed, stretched, and tanned over a slow fire. And the hundreds of Russian names and places and non-chronological dates are like having your hide pelted by rocks while you’re drying.

I felt nauseated, numb, hopeless, beaten down…but I kept going…

Little about reading this book gave me comfort. The e-book’s decreasing page-count was one thing. Knowing I am better than everyone else was another. And then there are accounts in part 5 chapter 5—Poetry Under a Tombstone—of men who memorize thousands of poetic verses, of men placed in solitary confinement in cells little bigger than caskets who yet withdraw peacefully into their souls and pray. Nothing can touch the spiritually rich man. And many, once free of the camps, find solace even in exile compared to what they have undergone already. Exiled in Kazakhstan after his release, Solzenhitsyn is content earning a wage teaching mathematics, living in a tiny hut, and writing all night. Even the party’s deductions from his salary and his inability to fully trust his neighbors cannot dampen the spirits of a man who has known the penal colony.

But most are not so resilient. Solzenhitsyn reflects on one of his friends who, before his imprisonment, abandoned an entire regiment rather than relaying the order to retreat, and thus alone escaped with his life. But our narrator cannot find any hatred for him now, now that they both have been through the camp and exile; “One man can be bent into so many shapes in a lifetime! How different he may become, for himself as well as for others.” The stoolie, the bitch, the zek, the warden, the crooked judge are in all of us. Yes, it’s easy to understand the disappointing ease with which a human person breaks into either the brow-beaten or the tyrannical.

Why did we stand for it? Solzenhitsyn questions rhetorically, recurringly; and the only answer that’ll plug the gap tight is that, given the right (or wrong) conditions, any of us could find him or herself on the right or wrong end of the tommy gun. While the author attests that determined, general resistance could have thwarted the gulag system—for instance, the 1954 revolt in Kengir (part 5, chapter 12)—his book also indicates how fragile are life and conscience even under the auspices of western democracy; how easily a small number of self-styled authorities could cow the multitude. The concentration camp does not belong to Soviet Russia, nor to Nazi Germany. We must imagine it behind a dark door available to any people.

IV: Conclusions

Having finished gulag-slogging this 3-volume shelf-bender, I must now answer…did I actually enjoy this book?

Let me put it this way. The Gulag Archipelago is imperative historical and psychological reading. Stalin’s conquest began and ended with the atomization of a people into sheep afraid to stick out their necks for one another. As horrifying as Solzenhitsyn’s account of the fragmentation and mastication of 20 million souls is, it did not fill me with fear. Instead, I felt each atrocity steeling me, hammering into my worst-case-scenario-for-humanity-centric brain the necessity for retaining—a bunker of canned goods? No!—conscience and humanity no matter how bad things get. That’s what the prisoners of the camps, penal colonies, exile, and even living out in “freedom” lacked—the warning that fracturing a people each onto his or her own island is the way by which courage and conscience and thereby the ability to band together and resist wither and die.

So here’s why I liked the book, even if I didn’t strictly enjoy it: I do not believe that anyone who has read it could suffer the same fate as those who lived through the October Revolution and its long, bloody aftermath.

Say our country descends into the civil war half of both sides have been promising us, and that one side wins and puts the other into camps. Not that I think I’d be impervious to everyone else’s fate, but I do think I’d be more inclined to help up a fellow prisoner if he fell down on the way out to general work, or refuse to rat out my comrades, or, you know, maybe ignore the impulse to steal his boots when he’s asleep! Does this make me a hero? one iota better than the zeks?? or one smidge superior to my less well-read honors program peers??? better than you, dear reader????

You tell me.

A couple days later, the next time she came to my social group, I did a double take. She was acting her normal self, talking pleasantly while tugging at strands of hair, but one side of her head looked like she’d taken an electric razor to it.

That same day her 5th grade teacher texted me:

I called Kenzie back to my room to ask how she was doing, what’s going on at home, how are her friendships at school?

Her answers: “Good. Not much. Good.”

These are normal answers for Kenzie. She’s poised, confident, direct, hyper, and on the autism spectrum. She didn’t seem any different today.

“Are you aware that you’re losing your hair?”

“Yes.”

“And how do you feel about that?”

Shrug. “I don’t really care.”

“Oh. Do you know why it’s happening?”

“Because I’m playing with it and pulling it all the time.”

“Okay. Are you fidgeting with it because you’re nervous or anxious about anything, or…?”

“No, not really.”

“Do your parents know you’re losing your hair?”

“Yeah, they know.”

“How do they feel about it?”

Shrug. “They don’t really care.”

“No? Have they talked to you about it?”

“I mean, they’ve talked to me about it, but…”

“Are you trying to stop?”

“No, not really.”

“Do you want to stop it?”

“Not really.”

“How do you think your friends feel about it?”

Shrug.

“Do you think they think it’s weird? Do they think that’s normal or not normal for a person to pull out their hair?”

“I don’t really care what they think about it.”

As I gently probed closer and closer to my point, and the point at the center of many of the lessons I teach my students of all ages—that there are social expectations, and that others feel comfortable when we follow them and uncomfortable if we don’t—Kenzie withdrew more and more from that point. Not in an anxious, nervous, or resentful way. Just in a shrug “I don’t really care” kind of way.

We reached out to Kenzie’s parents and summarized our concerns and conversations with her. They responded yes they were aware, no they didn’t know how to get her to stop, and could we please downplay the ention-may of-yay er-hay eers’-pay erceptions-pay? We don’t want her getting self-conscious or thinking that looks matter all that much!

Oops.

Kenzie then wore a ski cap in school (the administration gave her special permission) for the next few weeks.

The issue appeared to go away all on its own. Her hair started coming back. There were no other true red flags on Kenzie’s side of things for some time. And then, in March, she started pulling it out again.

We had the same conversation: “Do you know you’re losing your hair, are you anxious about anything, do you care what the kids think?” I told her, directly this time, she had to find a replacement behavior, some other fidget or toy she could use when she needed to move her hands. I’d tried giving her putty before but it had no apparent effect. Kenzie showed me this row of 3D-printed critters she’d bought off her classmates and insisted these would do the trick.

It did not do the trick.

Her parents expressed again they were at a loss and would speak to her pediatrician about her meds, I asked her to stop when I saw her fiddling with her hair, but then…we all just sort of let it go.

There’s no stopping her. Our gently worried conversations went nowhere. For Kenzie, nothing quite replicates the feeling of pulling out her own hair. She now has less than ever before.

But I’ve noticed other changes during her social skills group, too. She doesn’t snap at others like she used to. She misses the occasional social cue but apologizes quickly when someone points out her mistake. When she sees someone bummed out she replies empathetically. Otherwise she sits and placidly pulls her hair. The other kids bicker around her. They yell at me for pulling them from class when their peers were doing something fun. They crawl under the table as I try to speed through the mini lesson so we can get to the game I planned and will have to postpone until next session because we all of us have used up the time misbehaving and managing misbehavior, all of us except Kenzie, who sits and placidly pulls her hair.

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If you liked this one, you might also enjoy this piece on a student very dear to me.

My brother1 was reading A Song of Ice and Fire but hadn’t yet finished book 3, which is where the infamous red and purple wedding scenes occur, when my dad, who hadn’t read the books but was probably sick of us and the wider culture talking his ears off about them, sat down at the computer one morning and saw some Game of Thrones headline, and announced, apropo of nothing, “huh, Joffrey died.”

And my brother—, correct me if I’m wrong here—literally shat a brick.

For the uninitiated, Joffrey was the main villain of books 1-3 (seasons 1-4 of the show). A capricious, entitled, bloodthirsty brat. His death, so relatively early in the series, was a satisfying bombshell.

My dad’s response to my brother’s outrage was “oops, sorry.” The smirking kind of sorry, because he doesn’t make a big fuss about avoiding exposure to spoilers himself. If the tables were reversed, I doubt he’d have batted an eye.

Worse, he has this debauched notion you should watch the movie/show adaptation before you read the book, whereas the rest of the world knows you’re supposed to do the opposite because the book is always (or almost always) better than the movie.

My dad actually agrees with this, which is why he holds this controversial opinion—if you watch the movie after you read the book, you’ll be disappointed, whereas if you watch the movie first you’ll enjoy it, then you’ll read the book and enjoy it even more. His hedonistic enjoymentmaxxxing approach has revolted me for years.

Until a month ago, when I started reading Dickens.

As a youth I watched David Lean’s movie adaptation of Great Expectations and at least a couple versions of Oliver Twist. Let’s not forget the George C. Scott-headed A Christmas Carol (1984), which is not only the best Christmas movie ever made, but which has {[(maybe)]} made me believe in ghosts since the age of 7! And then there are the BBC miniserieses of Bleakhouse, Little Dorrit, David Copperfield, and Martin Chuzzlewit. Even without reading Charles Dickens’ books I could acknowledge him as a masterful character creator and interweaver of plot threads.

But up until last year I hated him.

Yes, I liked A Christmas Carol when my dad read it aloud to the family when I was a kid. But reading Oliver Twist as a teenager, the aptly-titled Hard Times in college, and A Tale of Two Cities a few years later, left me, respectively, bored, irritated, and underwhelmed. The phrase “paid by the word” lived at the forefront of my soapbox-beleaguered mind. I was convinced for a while that Dickens wasn’t worth the effort, and the adaptations of his work were rare cases of the films being better than their source material.

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A few years ago I read Great Expectations (after trying 2 times earlier in life), and I thought it was good. But then last year I read Demon Copperhead, which is so inextricably akin to David Copperfield that I couldn’t help but recall the miniseries I watched as a kid. It made me think “huh, maybe I’ll give Dickens another go.” I checked out the audiobook2 … and loved it. Everything clicked; the $5 words and meandering storylines didn’t wear on me for a single second. The book was such a delight that I decided, somehow, for once in my life, that I was wrong, and everyone else was right: Dickens is the shit.

In January I listened to The Pickwick Papers, loved it, and this month I started Bleak House.3 Having watched the miniseries within the last few years, I remember all the major plot points fairly well, but what do you know, I’m enjoying it immensely. Knowing everything that’s going to happen hasn’t spoiled the book! Knowing we’re about to get to a good part helps me soldier through the slower bits.

Would I enjoy it more if I was more in the dark? … I tried reading Our Mutual Friend two or three years ago and couldn’t get farther than a few chapters. Maybe, having a much better attitude toward Dickens nowadays, I could fight my way through the names, places, and dense paragraphs. I could, but would I enjoy it? Being familiar with events and characters in David Copperfield and Bleak House gave me stepping stones to wade into more challenging books I wouldn’t have touched otherwise.

Now the question is, does knowing a major event ahead of time really spoil the story?

Bear with me for another analogy—we don’t cover ourselves in a blanket because we’re gonna warm ourselves off of a single stitch. It’s the entire network fibers that warm us. When we read a story, it’s not the individual elements that make the story, but how they all fit mesh together; the how and why matter much more than the who and what. When my dad gave away Joffrey’s death, my brother still didn’t know when, where, or how it was going to happen. We already knew a bastard like Joffrey wouldn’t survive the series.

We rewatch movies and reread books because the experience is about more than charting new territory. We relearn, we wonder in scenery, we laugh and cry with the characters, we revel in the author sweeping us away on an adventure—even if we’ve been on that adventure before. “You never read the same book twice.” My experience of Bleak House hasn’t surprised me, but I’ve had plentiful joys of other kinds.

Movies can afford to hinge much more on individual plot twists than books, because they only need to hold the viewer’s attention for a couple hours. He was dead all along! He actually fabricated his memories! He’s actually the bad guy! But Sixth Sense, Memento, and Shutter Island are all rewatchable—and watchable even if you had their ubiquitous twists “spoiled”—because it’s fun to see how the filmmakers set up the dominos toward the payoff you know is coming.4

Movies rely much more on intense catalysts, buildups, and climaxes—the sheer spectacle of the story—than books, which, while exciting in their own right, have to deal in slower, defter methodologies. Compare The Lord of the Rings the book to the movie, and you’ll see how Peter Jackson upped the ante in pretty much every area possible.5 But books have to rely a lot more on the intricate weaving of tapestry than on cheap gaudy textiles.

Toward the end of Bleak House the show, we discover that Lady Deadlock is Esther’s mother. That’s a big payoff right there. But in the book, Dickens hints at this somewhere around the 30-40% mark—very early on for his biggest twist! Why wouldn’t he wait til the end to deliver the payload?

First, and probably the most simple reason is, it hooks us into continuing to read (the next installment in the newspaper coming out next week! IYKYK)

Second, related to the first, the twist isn’t the real payoff. The payoff isn’t when we find out about Esther’s parentage, but when she and Lady Deadlock finally make the connection.

Similarly, Joffrey’s death isn’t the twist. The real twist is the rest of the book; the sharp left turn and cascade of events where the rest of the cast deals with this abrupt change in circumstances. So, as much as I enjoy movies like Sixth Sense, Memento, and Shutter Island, I would grade their twists just so-so. After the big ah-ha moment, the movie ends; because the twist was the whole purpose of the book, the twist itself is the resolution, and, while the twist sheds new light on the earlier events of the movie, it doesn’t change the story.6

But if you were reading a book where the twist is the entire payoff, well… you might enjoy the book, but you’ll rarely return to it. A book with a focus on surprising you, where all character development and every event are in service to this end—think mysteries and thrillers—is going to have less-satisfying characters than a book that doesn’t lean all its weight on twists. It’s also harder to write a satisfying book where all your eggs are in the twist basket. The most common critique I see of Christopher Nolan’s movies is that characters are cardboard cutouts swept away by the twisty plot. I don’t have a problem with Nolan over this, because his twisty plots are great. But books need more than mere twists, which means spoiling a single twist doesn’t spoil a book.

This epiphany helped me as a writer and informed the current draft of my fantasy novel. I was going to reveal something significant about the parentage of two peasant boys late in the book. But I realized two things: moving the twist to the middle of the book gives the characters an opportunity to react, adapt, and grow; and the book was never about this twist, anyway. The point isn’t that their parentage is important, the point is that their choices are.

I would have been afraid of spoiling my book for you there, but I don’t think I “spoiled” anything.

My brother posted a rebuttal!

Harmony of the Heavens - Theology Revealed Through Art

In Which I Rebuke My Own Brother for His Foolish Opinions about Spoilers

I never thought my first Substack feud would be with my own sibling. Alas, measures must be taken when one both misremembers certain events and uses them to express such dangerously illiterate opinions! I’ll make some rebuttals, point by point, to show both the wrongness of your recollection, which accompanies your grosser errors in the conclusions you …

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5 months ago · 3 likes · 5 comments · Ray Imgrund

4

Fun fact, my wife reacted poorly to the endings of both Shutter Island and Memento. My hunch is she doesn’t like to find out she was duped into rooting for the bad guy all along. But I just say to her,

“That’s far enough, Kellen,” I call, hoarsely as if my own vocal cords have determined without me to follow the course. He doesn’t reply and I don’t repeat myself. The water glares sick, sleepy, coaxing light, inviting me to shield my eyes from what must commence. I do, briefly, and see before them my brother and myself going down the plank steps.

Five and ten, landmarks where parents believe you’ll find safety and responsibility, respectively, but I carry those accumulated fifteen all on my own now and see off the end of every wharf the same face, in every first split-second when Kellen turns his head to my call I see my brother for the last time, I recur around the side of the vortex to my parents’ footbeats down past me and their splashes off the end of the dock, I enter the silence where he should have been or at least words about him should have breathed rebuke or grief but instead inhabit only his lack, and I spin through kind faces saying it wasn’t my fault, my mother and father bowing their heads and taking the burden on themselves, myself seeing their tight lips and eyes and hearts keeping it in to themselves and knowing I should be the one, but I looked away from them just as I looked away from my brother and how I’m tempted to look away from Kellen because this is what I do: I look away.

Watching Kellen now I know this is right, that it’s time to pay my debt, wait, let what is bound to happen happen. I have pushed against this trip, any such kind of chance where I might at a distance find my eyes averted as though drawn by—worse than vortex or fate—choice, and go to my parents, enter their living room, and look at them as I’ve never done as long as I can remember, and let them see what has happened has happened again, that I’m all paid out to them and won’t need to worry anymore but can honestly spend the rest of my life in a sort of monastic threnody gurgling at the bottom.

Then from behind the screen door my wife calls out, “Not so far, Kelly,” and I remember then the whirlpool is a wormhole to another place and time and I am here now, not there, and my eyes fill at this constant necessary reminder, and I sit at the end of the dock and take myself by the arm and don’t tell him it will be alright, but I tell him he won’t be alone.

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A boy tied the board to one end of a rope. He had no handhold or ladder, so he tossed it in the air. His throws got nearer and nearer an angle between branches and at last he managed to land the board on top of them. He tugged on the rope, attached his swing, sat in it, and gave a tentative push. The board held on top of the branches.

The board said, hello.

The tree said nothing back.

The boy left the swing and came back later that evening, then not the next day but the day after, and on again off again for the rest of the summer. Fall saw him less often. The board couldn’t care less, as his comings and goings were things to watch and remark on with no more moment than the passing of clouds or sprinkling of dew or chastisement of frost. All winter the swing dangled from the board lifelessly like a shriveled umbilical, and then, in the spring, when the boy sat on it, the knot cleared its throat and snapped.

“Cheap swing.” The boy waddled off, rubbing his behind.

Hmm, said the board. The board hadn’t spoken much beyond common pleasantries to the tree since that summer on the day the boy hung him there—nice watering we are about to get. Lovely colors you are sporting. Nothing personal like asking where she was deepest. But now he sensed a certain something in the boughs and leaves around him, a livening that was not the same as the budding and blooming she was already doing.

I wonder if he will get me down and move me, the board added, a trifle apologetically.

The tree said, it will leave you like it leaves my sticks once it is done whacking things. Her tone said, and that is that.

That spring there was a gale like the board hadn’t seen since before he was a board, and it made him recall memories he hadn’t in a long time, for a lot of those memories had been in the bark and twigs, not trunk. But he had received rustlings about phantom limb syndrome, where a tree that’s lost a limb might believe it’s still there. He felt the limbs under him shiver in the wind and himself slipping, and he realized he was afraid. He liked it up here, for he was getting tree memories he hadn’t in all the time he lay in the sawmill and lumberyard and in the back of the boy’s father’s garage, and the rest of him, elsewhere, saw and felt very little.

I might fall now, the board sighed.

Is that what you want? the tree asked.

If I fall, I will be put in the garage. Or be thrown away or burned, since I am growing lichen.

If you are thrown away or burned you will return to the earth and make more trees.

The reminder of meaning can kindle or freeze. The board spoke no more until the storm abated and he became certain he would not fall, although he had budged. Noticing he had left an abrasion on the righter, higher bough, he knew he ought to apologize or at least remark on it, but being still hurt himself, he did not.

The board didn’t speak to the tree and the tree didn’t speak to the board for two years. The family who lived in the house moved away and a man came who sometimes went in his backyard to pull the weeds between the patio stones. He pulled them all out and threw them in the pit and would wait until the weeds dried and then burned them. He would watch until the embers had died and then go back in his house until the weeds slunk out again.

The board watched. If he fell the man would put him in the fire. It had been five years since the tree reminded him, but the board thought daily of it. Some days he saw parts of him that had been made into a shelf and moved into another state, parts of him that were a sawhorse in another garage across town, parts that fenced boundaries between yards, small parts used to stop open or shim doors, smaller parts that carpeted the floors of animal stalls and were later shoveled out, and still smaller parts that humans found no use for and left behind in the woods to decay and that no longer could be said to belong to him. And he did not feel lonesome for the other parts or miss them, not as he once had, but he was sorry because he felt the yearning going out from them to him, to him and through him and out from him.

He asked the tree one day, do you wish I was not here because I am a conifer?

The tree said, no. No one could tell your grain from ash now.

The board felt the double entendre, but weathered it. Then what is the matter?

The matter is, you should not be here.

The tree went on a few weeks later as a robin began to deposit daubs, grasses, sticks and threads in the crook between board and branch: it is a marvel that you can even speak to me.

I did not know I could, the board said, until the boy put me here. The last time anyone spoke to me—he halted, for the memory was hard and he didn’t know how the tree would react. He had heard only whispers that were more like thoughts than speech of the other trees remarking on his going as the chains pulled him past their bark and over their roots. Poor fellow, they all said, not communicating the thought to one another or even to him but to themselves, separately same, only minutes or seconds before they themselves faced the same fate. And in the lumberyard, stacked among himself and other red pines, he was so scattered and sullen that speaking even to his own parts did not occur to him.

On another day, the board asked, do you ever talk to anyone else?

When the wind blows his leaves over the fence an older maple flirts with me. There is a family of oaks on the other side whose roots reach mine.

With these words she was the closest the board had heard her to pulp. Oh the things that made him remember. As if sensing his warmth he felt her begin to stiffen. She said, you cannot hear them?

No.

He hoped she would go on but she didn’t. As if sensing his hope he felt her begin to stiffen, as though he were burning her with his hope. She said, then perhaps you are not supposed to hear them. It is not your summer.

Stung, the board lashed out. Why do you hate me?

Hate you? the tree spluttered as though affronted. There was stillness as she weighed her thoughts, as though she had not considered them truly until now, and then the board felt that he had not hit the mark exactly, and he realized that he had been in the yards and houses of men too long, that hate was not a tree word. Before he could apologize she had already recoiled, and for a while, for the rest of that spring, he believed he had irreparably offended her.

Spring went and summer came. Summer had come to be the board’s favorite season since coming to rest in the tree, although he realized now he’d never had favorite seasons before. Trees do not have favorite seasons. He didn’t know why—perhaps it was his earlier argument, if it can be called an argument, with his host, or perhaps it was this season of being open and outward and aware—but he recalled for the first time in this state that this preference for the summer was not in fact something in-born, but, perhaps, another sprout of having been in proximity to men for so long.

Could the tree sense his favoritism? Did she find it repugnant? Was this why, even in this season of openness, she remained distant? But no, she had always been distant.

When the crew of workmen in hard hats came to the house and talked to the man who lived there in the backyard, walked around the tree and looked up, pointing and then pointing over the fence in the back, then handed him a check and went back out, the board felt the tree shudder as he never had, not even in storms that took down big branches.

The next day the men returned with chainsaws and ladders. The man came out and stood on the patio with a beer and watched them cut down limb after limb. The sun hit the board directly for the first time in his stay, and he watched them come nearer and nearer to his branch, against which the man with the saw had braced his ladder. They buzzed length upon length of her trunk away in spurts of dust and noise. They cut the board’s branch last, and he fell. He looked up at the lobotomized bare pillar that was once a tree.

The workmen were going to take away the felled wood, but the man who lived in the house told them he would like to keep it for his firepit. He spent the next hour after the men left carrying and dragging the pieces to his stack in the back of the yard. He didn’t move the board, either because he didn’t see the board against the tall dark grass or because the board was now too rotten to burn. Different workmen came and ran power lines over the yard. The man cut up the tree’s timber and stacked it in the corner of his yard, and over the course of the year, burned it all.

For a year the board lay there. The man’s lawnmower passed clear over him. Woodpeckers picked at him and left. The snow covered him. Spring came again and so did toadstools and ripening lichen. Under the board little white grubs and worms found moist haven. And finally summer came, and the board managed to say what had been coming to him that year round, even though he knew she would not hear him, for, being only a board, the only way he could speak to her was to have his skin against hers.

He said to the silent remnant of the tree, thank you for keeping me. I know you could have dropped me any time. It helped me come to grips with things. It gave me time to see you were right. This is where I should be.

The year passed quickly, the man moved away and a pair of human newlyweds moved in, and by spring there was not much left of the board. He could see and feel very little. But then he felt something coming toward him under the soil. It came up and stopped, touching him underneath. A familiar voice he had not expected to hear again said, I do not have as much view as I used to, but I can still tell you what I see as you go.

The board could not speak anymore, but he could listen.

Slowly, he decayed.

2000 years later it’s easy to forget how god coming thus must have shocked the pagan world. gods were strong. they controlled the seas, skies, and earth. they blessed with invincibility or cursed with crushing punishments. even the hebrew god smote mighty rulers, mowed down egyptian children, obliterated assyrian besiegers, tipped over the cities and nations.

but his tiny child’s footprint was there from the beginning, for his chosen people were a small nation drawn from the loins of a man who feared to claim his own wife and so let the pharaoh of egypt take her, spurred and developed out of a man who stole his own legitimacy from his elder brother, guided out of exile by a man who doubted his god and was cursed never to set foot in the land of promise, later to be freed by doubters and adulterers and murderers. they say god loves an underdog; what they don’t say is that the underdog deserves as bad as he gets and worse. yet god’s heart is somehow soft for such.

the hebrews in the time of christ hoped for the sort of savior who brought their people out of exile. plague their enemies with flies and locusts, smite their firstborn in their beds, write their doom on the wall with a giant hand. and their god came, but his signs and wonders would be of a different kind. the most wonderful and horrible of which must have been his bared, beaten, bloodied frailty.

there was nothing in him to make us look at him, spake the prophet Isaiah.

is a weak god any less shocking, even scandalous, to us today? even christians, born and bred on the beatitudes, find them no easier to live out than christ’s first followers. to nonbelievers and believers alike the cross is the hardest paradox to reconcile—is that really who you want batting for you? he won’t come down and end hunger, injustice, sickness, suffering. some omnipotent god.

deceptively simple word, omnipotent. all-powerful. not most powerful, but all-powerful. a whole spectrum of power, from least to most. god the father exercises the most power in his creative acts. god the son exercises the least in his surrender, mercy, and death. both simultaneous, each essential to his nature. god empties himself so that we have a mission to carry out, a say and role in our own redemption.

jon fosse, through his nobel-winning novel septology, muses on this paradox. a catholic himself, fosse questions the nature of god and faith, wondering at many junctions through asle, his narrator, do i really believe this? how can I? it seems impossible, and yet, i do believe. one of asle’s recurring cogitations is god’s power:

[…] It goes against all wisdom and understanding, because either God is all-powerful and then there’s no free will, or God isn’t all-powerful and there is free will, within limits, but in that case God is not all-powerful, so ever since God gave humanity free will he gave up his omnipotence, something like that must be true, because without a will that’s free there can’t be love, and God is love, that’s the only thing that is said of God in the New Testament, and that’s why God lacks divine omnipotence, he has God’s weakness, impotence even, but there’s a lot of strength in weakness, yes, maybe the weakness is itself a strength?1

fosse frames his writing almost syllogistically: god’s weakness is necessary for freedom. freedom is necessary for love. therefore, god must be weak in order for love to exist.

can we love that which is perfectly strong? think of the strongest person you know, personally or out of a movie, show, politics, or your own imagination. as short of absolutely perfect strength as that person falls, is it possible to love that person? or is it merely an image with no soul?

rather, it is weakness that worms into the heart. in the heart of the matter, graham greene puts scobie, a married man whose defining trait is his sense of duty, in the impossible situation of caring for both his wife and a much younger woman for whom he comes to feel a fatherly responsibility because of her hospitalization.

scobie, who practices the catholic faith apparently only at his wife’s behest and then stops going to mass when she leaves the west-african settlement to return to england, at first doesn’t consider the moral gravity of adultery. he only knows that now this fragile newly-widowed young woman needs him. when his wife unexpectedly returns to port, he goes on living a dual life, torn between wife and mistress, believing he can work things out so that both are happy, little thinking of his own happiness.

but what he does consider is his soul, not just in the mortal sin of adultery but in that of receiving the eucharist, god in transubstantiated bread and wine. yes, he fears damnation, but more so the pain he causes his lord, just as he fears the pain he could cause his wife or his lover by ending either relationship. bitterly he watches others go to receive communion:

It seemed to him for a moment cruelly unfair of God to have exposed himself in this way, a man, a wafer of bread, first in the Palestinian villages and now here in the hot port, there, everywhere, allowing man to have his will of Him. Christ had told the rich young man to sell all and follow Him, but that was an easy rational step compared with this that God had taken, to put Himself at the mercy of men who hardly knew the meaning of the word. How desperately God must love, he thought with shame.2

when he goes to take the sacrament, scobie reasons that he must put the two women’s needs first, even if it means living in sin and hurting god. “You can look after yourself. You survive the cross every day. You can only suffer. You can never be lost. Admit that you must come second to these others.”3 at the same time, he begs god to save himself from scobie, while knowing “God would never work a miracle to save Himself.” and still later he pleads with god to take his life so that he will not go on hurting him; god is better off without him.

in the depths of scobie’s reverie, god responds:

You say you love me, and yet you’ll do this to me—rob me of you for ever. I made you with love. I’ve wept your tears. I’ve saved you from more than you will ever know; I planted in you this longing for peace only so that one day I could satisfy your longing and watch your happiness. And now you push me away, you put me out of your reach.4

god speaks to scobie as his wife or lover or even himself; god again debases himself, imploring, begging pitifully, “don’t I need you too?” scobie reflects he has underestimated god’s weakness; it is an arrow straight to his core where he has always felt such responsibility and care for frail, broken things.

is it fair of god to play the heart strings thus? to have changed the very nature of the godhood by the incarnation into a helpless child and a suffering servant, so that we not only love him as a child loves a parent but also as a parent loves a child? he has rigged the game by making himself so easy, so essential, to love.

it’s easy to look at the events of our world with horror and despair, how the mighty cut and paste scripture to prescribe their own ends with the conviction of the devout and the skill of the devil. so the question is,

while striving with all our might to realize a just and merciful world, we must recall that embracing weakness, as did our lord, is just as essential to salvation as cultivating strength. framed thus, we find an explanation for god’s permission of suffering. suffering balances, binds us together, softens our strength into empathy, compassion, the need to love and console our neighbor. without suffering, without weakness, there can be no love.

1 Corinthians 1:25: For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.

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That’s what the first 13 pages of Jon Fosse’s Septology did to me. They rejected me from this book for a year until I tested ready. How? The first page’s long unbroken block of text invites, teases you into leafing through to find the first paragraph break. And leafing. And leafing… okay, they’re all one paragraph. You won’t even find a period. If you’re going to sit down with this bad boy until you reach the first indentation, you need 13 pages-worth of attention span. Who has that?

I’ll admit I’m only capable of fits and spurts of focus between checking my phone or doing something else, so before embarking on the next section of a book, I check ahead to the next section or chapter break. Septology has only six intermissions in its 800+ pages, but it soon broke me of the checking ahead habit. I grew accustomed to and comfortable pausing between two breakless pages, or even to reading on and on for tens of pages without pause. I wasn’t expecting the book to be so readable. The language’s everyday quality makes up for its stream of consciousness narration, and commas signal transitions as effectively as indentations. It’s actually one of the easier books I read in 2025, but its simplicity is deceptive.

At first I thought, as I often do upon experiencing modern art, “I could’ve made this myself.” Granted, I know very little about the practice of painting or making music, but since language is my medium, I believe when I apply this statement to a work that it actually holds weight. Maybe 300-400 pages later, I realized the effortlessness of Fosse’s art isn’t something just anybody could do with a stream of consciousness narrative lacking paragraphs and punctuation signposts. Interjectory phrases like “I think” replace commas and paragraph breaks, seamlessly transferring us from one rumination to the next. His deft craft really does read like human thought; it wanders around circuitously, repetitively, curiously, ponderously, endlessly around a topic, then another, weaves back to a memory of childhood, slides a familiar phrase he’s already used before to signal we’ve briefly skirted back to the present day for a moment, then eases us into another related memory. It yields the remarkable effect of the reader experiencing both Asle’s present and his past simultaneously, sometimes unawares. Both the effortlessness and pattern of Fosse’s prose remind me of a professional skater performing figure-8s, with each iteration of a thought returned to a little more fleshed out than on the last spin.

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So far I’ve devoted a lot of space to the craft and style of the book without commenting on its plot. Usually I’d begin the review focused on the latter, but saying anything about Septology’s plot endangers the organic experience of the reader. There are so many fun recurrences and parallels that conjure plot out of the dense miasmatic incongruencies of thought! Suffice to say, our protagonist is Asle, a Norwegian painter and widower who muses on his wife, faith, art, and this…other Asle. The other Asle is also a painter. He looks exactly like our Asle. Herein lies a mystery of Septology, but it’s not the only one. God, the nature of being, the nature of art—perhaps all three wrapped into one—are mysteries Asle questions and questions.

I could detail other subtle uses of the minimal tools Fosse allows himself and their interplay with his methodical unveiling of Asle’s past and present choices, but to do so would be a disservice to you. I recommend this book wholeheartedly. It challenged and changed me as a reader, and hopefully it will you, too.

TL;DR, the culprits were screen time and…yeah, that’s pretty much it. I enumerated other (retrospectively minor) factors:

1. challenging myself too steeply or not enough

2. refusing to DNF a book and letting it bog me down instead of moving onto something better and faster

3. discounting reading books for entertainment and feeling I should mostly read classics.

The vantage of another year and a much taller stack of books reveals screen time as the only hurdle needs leaping.

This year I replaced the former tendencies with better habits—instead of scrolling Substack notes or playing games on my phone while laying next to the 4-year-old as he falls asleep, I instead (sometimes) opened Hoopla and read an ebook. I managed 13 books in this way! I also put on audiobooks while folding laundry or doing dishes instead of putting on something to watch instead. I consumed 7 audiobooks.

I’ll admit part of why I was able to exceed last year’s reading is due to my two-month paternity leave at the beginning of the year. Little girl E. took up one hand and a book took the other. I’d highly recommend having kids if you want to get more reading done…except that around the 6-month mark your reading time starts to decline…

The Books I Read This Year

The Golden Key - George MacDonald

On the Road - Jack Kerouac

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and other stories - Robert Louis Stevenson

The Queen of Air and Darkness (The Once and Future King #2) - T.H. White

Death Comes for the Archbishop - Willa Cather

The Buried Giant - Kazuo Ishiguro

The Ill-Made Knight - (The Once and Future King #3) - T.H. White

Demon Copperhead - Barbara Kingsolver

The Song of Achilles - Madeline Miller

Persuasion - Jane Austen

She - H. Rider Haggard

Notes From Underground - Fyodor Dostoevsky

Why Teach? - Peter Shull

The Haunting of Hill House - Shirley Jackson

Piranesi - Susanna Clarke

The Rhythm of War (The Stormlight Archive #4) - Brandon Sanderson

Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes

Their Eyes Were Watching God - Zora Neale Hurston

Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky

David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

Gulliver’s Travels - Jonathan Swift

Metamorphosis - Franz Kafka

Black Mischief - Evelyn Waugh

A Candle in the Wind (The Once and Future King #4) - T.H. White

The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera

The Empusium - Olga Tokarczuk

The Exorcist - William Peter Blatty

Rebecca - Daphne du Maurier

A Wizard of Earthsea (Earthsea #1) - Ursula K. Le Guin

The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway - Ernest Hemingway

The Holy Bible - Various

A Wrinkle in Time (Time Quintet #1) - Margaret L’Engle

The Trumpet of the Swan - E.B. White

And Then There Were None - Agatha Christie

The Heart of the Matter - Graham Greene

The Red Pony - John Steinbeck

Mars in Retrograde - James Worth

Northanger Abbey - Jane Austen

Something Wicked This Way Comes - Ray Bradbury

The Healing Power of Stories - Daniel Taylor

This Side of Paradise - F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

The Other Name (Septology I-II) - Jon Fosse

Mansfield Park - Jane Austen

The Hobbit — J.R.R. Tolkien

Solovyov and Larianov — Eugene Vodolazkin

Grand Total: 461

Top books & other stats

I’m not gonna be the guy who puts the Bible at the top (even though if I was being literal it would be). I also won’t include The Once and Future King because I’ve read it previously.

5. Notes From Underground

Do you ever just get a taste of an author and decide immediately you’re going to read everything they ever wrote? NFU reads like Dostoevsky read my mind on the worst day of the year and put it all to paper. I read this over two days while holding the napping infant.

4. Death Comes for the Archbishop

My favorite Cather. The landscape of the harsh, ofttimes otherworldly New Mexican landscape itself is a character. The friendship between the two principal clergymen reminded me of Lewis’ Four Loves; the shape of Philia—friendship dynamic between persons—creates, functionally, a third “character” that is only present when these two are together. The reader truly aches when they are separated, which is a rare enough feat in fiction on its own and even more so when it comes to platonic relationships!

3. The Unbearable Lightness of Being

I haven’t read anything else quite like this book’s blend of fiction and philosophy. The rare human insight and compassion make the 3rd-person omniscient narrator a character all himself, as though he’s the loving but unbiased parent of Tomas and Teresa, who are lovable, noble, pitiable, and contemptable in their own turns and sometimes all at once. It’s a quiet story elevated by its narration. If I was the kind of guy who underlines books—and had also read a physical copy instead of an ebook—every page would be inked with “gadzooks!” and “boy howdy!” and “…..interesting….” in the margins.2

2. Crime and Punishment

I’ve owned this book since high school but assumed it was gonna be a book about the penal justice system in Russia. Luckily I was wrong. This was an easy book to read because you can understand and see yourself in all the characters. That’s really all it takes! This is a top 20 book of all time. Do you ever feel that certain art had to be; that it wasn’t so much written or painted but discovered, whole and entire exactly as it was, by its transcriber or performer? As though straight from God’s mind?

1. The Heart of the Matter

The telling of this book is perfect. Greene’s prose is effortless and balanced. I don’t know how you pull this off. In nearly every book you hear the author’s voice; in many of my favorites I read this year, that’s a feature, not a bug—Dickens, Austen, Kundera, Hemingway, T.H. White are lovely minds to spend time in. But Graham Greene does the impossible—he fades into the background. His characters, even in third person, tell the story. Usually you’d think that’d make for pretty bare prose, but the turns of phrase—most of which peek at what I call Big Truth—hit every other page without slowing the action. Love me some Hemingway, but you almost never get that poetic punch. Love me some Faulkner, but you almost can’t breathe for the amount of poeticness; it washes over you but leaves you dry instead of sticking to you. Greene sticks.

Most books or songs wherein we hear God’s voice are snooze-fests or eye-rollers, but The Heart of the Matter is neither. We’ve got, effectively, a love triangle between Scobie, his wife, and his mistress; but by the end it’s developed into a love quadrangle because God takes the limelight in Scobie’s thoughts in a way you’ve never experienced in literature. In its most intense scene, Scobie tries to decide whether to receive Communion or not. The internal struggle, penned by a master, is 10x more violent than a fantasy’s final battle or a western’s shootout. I couldn’t and still can’t even with this book. Masterpiece.

more stats…

Hardest read—This Side of Paradise. Fitzgerald experimented a lot with his debut; I can see why it made a splash. It’s a charming book even if its ambitions were a little too lofty.

Easiest—The Trumpet of the Swan. Read this with my son over several months as his interest waxed and waned. He’ll still bring up stuff we read months ago that we haven’t discussed since, so I know he was paying attention most of the time.

Fastest—The Red Pony. Man, this was good. Really left me wanting more Steinbeck. I hadn’t read any of his short stories before, but he achieves so much in such limited space. Compared to epic works like Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men, or East of Eden, but it feels major in its own way. You see four isolated episodes of a boy’s childhood that you can tell Steinbeck is relating because they’re going to determine his manhood. A taste: the dad, who’s unsympathetic throughout the whole book, walks away on his own because he feels awkward and embarrassed seeing his own son happy. Whoof.

Longest—The Bible. Granted, I read most of it last year, so I’ll list second prize—The Count of Monte Cristo.

Worst—the only two books I was tempted to DNF were Olga Tokarczuk’s The Empusium, which reads like a redpiller built a strawman of feminist literature, except this Pulitzer-winning author somehow thought she was saying something by having a) only male characters and b) having them be misogynistic caricatures; and Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, which—and not to say this book is in any way erotic—is what happens when an author touches himself as he writes.

Most-read genre—fantasy (12 books).

New Year’s Reading Resolutions

1. Less screen time.

   This is a given. I deleted Instagram a while ago to make space on my phone for The Count of Monte Cristo audiobook, and that helped. Gotta do less aimless Substack scrolling too, unfortunately…

2. More nonfiction.

   This’ll slow my reading, but I wanna get more into ancient Greek/Roman history (Thucydides?), European history (like Renaissance onward), a little Russian history, some saint biographies, writings of Church Fathers…

3. More Russians.

   Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Vodolazkin, Master and Margarita.

4. Books I want to read:

   In no particular order: Master and Margarita, The Aviator, War and Peace, Demons, The Idiot, The Quiet American, Never Let Me Go, Go Down Moses, Cannery Row, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Sword and Honor Trilogy, Wind and Truth, Kristin Lavransdatter, and….nonfiction

1. What did you read this year?

2. Did you set reading goals this year? Did you meet them? What’s your goal for next year, if any?

3. Do you have any book recs for me? Especially in the non-fiction vein per item #2, because I have no idea what’s good.

Please find attached The Rising of the Last Moon Queen’s Shadow, a 225,000-word upmarket cozy dark academic romantasy about Lupra, a narcissussexual Latinx werewolf whose human self is in a non-reciprocated love triangle with her lupine half and the moon.

The hyper-sexual tone, pseudo-magical academic setting, and lowkey hangout vibes are, respectively, a blend of Sarah J. Maas’ A Court of Wings and Ruin, R.F. Kuang’s Babel, and the NBC sitcom Friends.

At the age of 16, while on a ski trip in the Adirondacks with her girlfriend’s family, Lupra is bitten by a wolf. She begins to experience strange occurrences—a craving for raw meat, sleepwalking, and infatuation with the moon. On the night of the full moon, Lupra transforms into a werewolf and has a moment of lucidity wherein she realizes they are vacationing on stolen land. In grief she tears her girlfriend and girlfriend’s family limb from limb, then flees the site.

Returning to school, apparently unaware of what has transpired, over the next several weeks Lupra intentionally doesn’t pluck her upper lip hairs and eyebrows and misses classes while staring at herself in her locker mirror. The principal meets with Lupra after school to discuss her odd behavior, but Lupra, sighting the waning Gibbous moon out the window, has another moment of clarity where she realizes the “odd” behaviors her administrator accuses her of are really arbitrary social mores of the town’s ruling class, and she roundly chastises him. Mollified, the principal agrees to crown Lupra homecoming princess, but Lupra rightly refuses this patriarchal attempt to control her image.

The story continues in this vein for the next 700 pages, which culminate in Lupra flying to the moon to copulate with it and herself on the winter solstice. Or perhaps it’s only a dream…?

Themes in The Rising of the Last Moon Queen’s Shadow include friendship, finding true love, and always being true to oneself. I believe it’s a message our world desperately needs in these unprecedented times.

Full disclosure and content warning: I am a cishet white male, but I have a lot in common with the protagonist of TRotLMQS because becoming a published novelist with [name of publisher] has been my lifelong UNREQUITED LOVE, you might say. I can be reached at dude.bloke.man@aol.com.

Sincerely,

Paul Imgrund

At midday he woke. Whether from the saltwater or hunger or both, Edgar’s stomach begged for help. He hefted his staff and lurched to Gisbourne’s camp, pushed aside the debris from the hut and fire. He knew there were no papayas before he began. He went to comb the brushline of the woods, still knowing he’d find no fruit, looking before he knew what for.

And there, covered in ash and dirt, lay the naked, shrivelled, sunken, graying remains of Edgar’s seatmate. Gone were the sleeping eyes, gone the cheek that had rested on his shoulder, gone any semblance of a human being. Crops.

“I’m sorry I was irritable. I was so tired. The meeting didn’t go as I hoped. I wanted to get away. They told me it wouldn’t work. It wasn’t going to. None of it. And I was going to Miami, supposed to celebrate with Shelly and Jack. And break the news there. That man wasn’t me. I would’ve laughed it off any other time. Just a bad moment…I didn’t think it was me.”

If you survived instead of Gisbourne, would things have been different?

In the damp sand on the shore he raked his nails, watching for bubbles from burrowing coquinas. Shelly, who’d grown up visiting warmer climes, showed him how to look for the miniscule clams pulling themselves back down in the sand. He found one, about half the size of a dime, and ate it. It crunched and tasted like salty grit. He rinsed the next one but by now the salt was unbearable. When he had a handful he rinsed them in one of the filled papaya husks. Prying with his fingers or a sharp stick at their shells availed nothing, so he ate them whole. Crunchy but tolerable with water.

He went back down to the shore with a husk and collected twice as many of the coquina as he ate to save for later, piled them on a leaf next to his two remaining skins of water. Sick but lively from his meal, he must use his energy while it lasted. He took a husk to each of the large leaves he’d placed on the beach. Most hadn’t retained any water, and of those that had he spilled more than he caught. After half an hour’s work he had one small swallow of water to add to his reserve.

When this was done he went looking for papayas. Beneath palm trees he found three coconuts, but no papayas in sight of their camp. His camp. Leaving its sight pulsed anxiety through his veins. He wouldn’t venture into the forest, not yet. His enemy, even injured, might catch him behind any tree. Coconuts and coquinas would last him until—what? Rescue? Each day dwindled the likelihood of a plane or boat, but certainty of rescue or at least contact with someone from off-island, even a war party bent on avenging their clubbed man, planted itself deep, imparting a sense of invincibility. He didn’t scrutinize this hope for fear it would wither like a plant too long under the sun’s eye, but he no longer nervously watched the trees or looked over his shoulder toward his camp.

The hot uneven sand and the light refracted off the sea seared away cognizance until his camp surprised him again. He’d circumnavigated his island without sighting another, without any landmark until his own camp again. Around the world in eighty minutes. Small as a casket.

There was nothing to do but keep alive. Keep alive until, until, until.

He spent the daylight and his remaining energy dragging branches, leaves, whatever storm debris into letters on the beach forming SOS. An idea he’d seen on—Gilligan’s Island? Some cartoon Jack watched as a kid? He set to work, gave up twice; twice forced himself to return to it. No more absurd than collecting rain droplets on leaves or falling 20,000 feet out of the air and surviving in a rubber raft or being harvested by a philosophical cannibal. He laughed until he dropped in his tracks, a period behind his three thirty-foot letters. He looked back at this handiwork and laughed some more. What in hell or heaven keeps hounding me?

In three days he drained his papaya husks and recycled his burnt-ochre urine past potability. The papayas were gone and his stomach rebelled at the thought of more raw coquina. He slept whenever he could manage it and talked to Shelly and Jack, his parents, his brother and sister, classmates and professors, old bosses and associates. He found old passages of philosophy coming back to beat Gisbourne over the head with. He finally broke it off with Liza. He told Shelly everything and told her how much he liked her manuscript. He talked and talked the whole three days whenever he was not asleep.

The fourth morning of solitude he bent over the ruins of Gisbourne’s shelter, digging through the dike he’d made, scooping up and dusting off the buried seared hunks of his seatmate’s flesh before lucidity even landed on him like a tongue of fire. He straightened, cradled the pieces in his shirtfront like picked berries as a kid, blinked and shook off doubts, went down to the water, cleaned them without looking, squatted in the shallows, tore his weak teeth at the tasteless brown meat that filled his whole mouth so that the talking finally stopped and he found the cockpit empty.

With effort in each chew, he knew there must be something that moved him. If it was all just biology and economy, he would have fed himself to the strong in the herd or chewed off his own leg to escape or given his own meat to the sharks while there was still some meat on him. The economy would have found a way to make use of his hide. No, from the beginning, from the first morning the hazy shape dragged the meat onto the beach, Edgar had known he would eat it; he would even fight the other, overthrow the strong or die trying, to get at it. Just as Gisbourne had known before the fates even smote the plane out of the sky how he would carve the island? No, no, it was something beyond, above, below or sideways of the impulse to propagate, dominate, survive…

“There’s something more,” he snarled, lumbering vertical and clenching the fist of his ragged meal at the sky, “Something deeper than you saw, because you didn’t reach the bottom, but I did.” It was all suffering; an impersonal force that scorched, sand-blasted, and slashed. Just a happening. The economy rose around it, in spite of it, in awe and trepidation of its interweaving systems and circles pure and raw and ancient, being’s guide and framework of every process from the revolutionary’s protest to cellular respiration:

The Suffering that went on and on, the Prime Mover, the one every man served and staved off with every fiber and breath, the dark heathen monster all cultures and religions paid homage to in their most primitive inklings, a question unanswered and the answer to every question man could dream; the reason for his huts and garbs and weapons, his buildings and civilizations and manners.

“I’ve got a handle on you,” he sang. “All of you. I figured it out. You’re predictable. You’re—.” The saltwater licked his legs, his wounds. He lay back in it, feeling the tide come in around him over hours passing like minutes and sometimes like days. It had driven him in circles until he arrived back at the center, the spiteful necessity of survival.

Who are you to make things like that?

Like the waves around him he lilted and babbled, “I won, I won, I won,” until they outspoke him.

He dreamed an angel climbed down a ladder, but it was facing away from the ladder with only its heels touching the rungs. With two wings it covered its eyes, two its feet, and with two it held itself aloft. And the light around the angel, as it descended, began to wane as it dropped into darkness like a great sinkhole or cavern, and still it descended. And when he looked again he recoiled, for it had changed. The wings peeled away like skins and showed the face was hideous now, marred beyond recognition from its former grandeur, and the bare feet that touched the ladder were curved and scaled like claws. As it descended it withered and shrank until it could not possibly go any farther because it could not get any more wretched, and still it went down, down, down.

Then, before he could hide his eyes from the vision, its feet stepped off the last rung. Dry dirt was all he could see, for the angel’s light was very dim by now, yet Edgar knew the desolate dirt must extend for miles and millenia. When its feet touched they began to wither and burn and the talons and scales curled and peeled away while the angel writhed in pain, but the dirt began to turn a deeper brown, produce sproutlets, shoot up stalks of grass that shone with chlorophyllic luminosity. Before he saw if the angel remained on the ground or returned to the ladder, his dream ended.

“Hey. Hello there. Hey, friend.”

Water kissed his mouth. He spat reflexively. He gulped eagerly, coughed, sat bolt upright, clutching at the bottle, gulping it all down and reaching for the next, but they made him wait and swallow carefully. The two figures were hazy in the bright light, cargo pants and safari shirts, one with the kind of hat Edgar wore camping, the other with aviator glasses. He wondered what kind of dream this was now.

“Well, well, he’s alive. Dash of heatstroke, probably.”

“Watch that leg, Steve.”

“Doesn’t look too serious.”

The two men talked at him but only bits pierced the blaring thought—I’m being rescued. I’m being rescued. These are not mirages. They aren’t even survivors. I’m being rescued.

“...Awful long time…”

“...Miracle anyone’s still alive…”

“...No one found at the site…”

“...Mountain of paperwork…”

“...You manage to swim all that way…”

“...Ocean current…”

“...North equatorial…”

“...Miles from the wreck…”

They gave him some more water, helped him stand between them, guided him to their raft on the beach. A seaplane stood out from shore a hundred yards away, shining, yellow and mammoth. He couldn’t bring himself to believe it or to care about the care these men gave him. He sat in the soft raft and saw himself out there again, kicking his way toward the gray formless sinking plane in the distance that might be an island…The sooner he woke the sooner the torture would be over.

“Big S.O.S. and everything.”

“And a fire…Not bad. Made it three weeks here. Not bad at all.”

“You’ve sure been through hell. But you’re in good hands now. We’ll have you home in no time. You got family waiting for you? We’ll get word sent to ‘em soon as we get back in the plane. And we’ll get you a steak dinner or whatever you’re hankerin’ for.”

The one with the hat plodded up the beach toward his shelter and the fire, looking at each hole in the sand, each husk, each leaf and branch. The one with the glasses pulled Edgar’s eyelids down and up, shining a light at him, asking him to open his mouth and say “aah.” Edgar noted the hairy arms, the clean fingernails, the sheen of sunscreen on the bridge of his nose. He couldn’t help seeing, without even residual revulsion, the arms peeled of skin and the face carved up for bits to eat, teeth showing through his rescuer’s dissected cheeks and sinews purpling against white mandibles; mirrored out of the bleached glistening buccals he recognized Shelly and Jack, Liza, Gisbourne, everyone. Who are you to make things like that?

The man with the hat had made his way beyond the camp and froze at the edge of the foliage. “Steve.”

“Yeah.”

“Holy smokes. Steve, take a look at this.”

Edgar’s examiner turned. “We gotta get him out of the sun.”

“I said. Look.”

Steve went. The two rescuers crouched in the shade with fronds bent over them, muttering things Edgar couldn’t overhear. They came back.

“Hey. Is that—is that in the woods—”

“Is that what it looks like?”

Edgar nodded.

The men looked at each other. “Was he—already dead?” Jim asked.

Edgar nodded. The men breathed out. “Then we’ll leave it at that,” said Steve. “Come on. Let’s get you to a doc.”

“Anything else you need here?”

He shook his head.

“Alright. Jim, you get him to the plane. I’ll take a look ‘round, see if anyone else made it.”

“Why not ask him?”

“True. Hey. Hey, what’s your name, friend?”

Edgar cleared his throat. “Eh. Edgar.”

“Edgar. Did anyone else make it?”

They must have thought strange how he sat without seeming to hear them or seeming to think very hard on a simple yes or no.

“No,” he said. “No one else.”

“Maybe we’d better comb the island, Jim.”

With grating effort: “I’ve been around the whole island. If there’s someone else, I’d know.”

The men nodded at each other. It was what they expected to hear.

They motored the raft out to the plane, saying things Edgar only half heard from his seat in the back of the raft facing back toward the island. He pulled his eyelids shut. He couldn’t picture anything else—Shelly or Jack, Liza, his business, his life, any part of a day that did not revolve around hunger or thirst or pain or ripped raw nakedness on a desert in the sea. Gisbourne, or Gisbourne’s body, not receding in view as the island from his view in the boat but larger and larger as though he kicked the sinking plastic raft toward it in the last throes of life...

He didn’t hear the propellers, pilot’s welcoming voice as his helpers boosted him into the aircraft, snick of his buckle. Each noise foreign language he’d never thought to hear again. Instead of the radio’s tinny voices…waves crashing…instead of the smiling faces of the three rescuers…the face of his enemy grinning out of the forest shadows. He rubbed his eyes and eased back in the seat. Suffering, a driving force, inescapable. A pattern, predictable rhythm. A plane blasted from the sky by lightning.

“Hey, buddy, have some water.”

This seaplane going down, buffeted by some tropical hurricane, act of vengeance for Edgar’s vengeance. Who may deal suffering? Who wields the instrument, exercises right of ownership? Who dares swing the double-edged knife?A man eaten on the beach by a man. Man left to bleed out in the woods by man. Cycle of violence, merited, unmerited. Driving, driving, driving. A renegade god. Taking so some may give…

“Alright, and here we go.”

They were moving, no faster than the motorized raft at first, then increasing speed with each bump over the choppy waters. Cold sweat ran from his clenched fingers to his armrest, slithered in the burnt rolls of his neck. It deserved to crash, sure, why wouldn’t it? But now they were taking off, floats leaving the water. But Gisbourne was on the plane, he was riding in the seat beside him with another lecture primed, grinning knowingly…no, his head sagging limp and sleepy on Edgar’s shoulder…

“Wait,” he growled. “Wait.”

“What is it, friend?”

“Got to go back. There’s someone else down there.”

“We know, Edgar. You told us. There’s nothing else you could have done.”

“Exactly. I don’t think anyone would judge you after what you’ve been through,” said Steve from the cockpit.

The plane was above the level of the trees now—the island was out Edgar’s window now.

“No, there’s someone else. Another man. Another man. You have to go back down. Go back down and get him!”

They all stared at him, the two pilots in the front and the man next to him, hewn mouths hanging open from slashed tendons, eyeless faces demanding to know whether this was some fevered fantasy or a sick joke. Edgar thrashed in his harness. “You have to go back down! There’s a man wounded down there. Gisbourne, his name’s Gisbourne.”

“Seriously?”

“Yes! He’s down there. Put the plane down!” His voice sounded harsh and unpracticed, like a savage’s, every syllable draining energy and patience.

“Shit fuck,” said Jim.

“We’ve got just enough fuel,” the pilot muttered. “Down we go.”

Edgar stared out the window until the island swung out of view, then looked down at his hands, feeling hostile eyes awaiting explanation. Tilting, swaying, spiralling. Slashing through the waves. He didn’t speak until the engine shut off. “I’ll go too,” he said as Jim and Steve began unpacking the raft.

“You’ll stay here.”

“No, I’m going. I’m going.”

“Fine. But you’ll stay in the boat.”

They didn’t speak as they propelled toward the island, only shot him looks of disgust every now and again.

“Wait here,” Jim said again when they beached the raft.

Edgar nodded, depleted of strength, and laid his head on the rubber. When the two men were at the edge of earshot he called, “Be careful.”

“I knew what you were going to do.”

The words surfaced him from the deep, and although they startled Edgar he gave no sign of it. He lifted his head and stared up at Gisbourne, a pole with bloodshot painted eyes and ribs chiseled into his naked chest bandaged with his shirt. He still wore his slacks and his suspenders hung from his waist to his calves, and the look of all-knowing superiority Edgar had first encountered on the plane long ago and every day since without which he might not have recognized the pale wasted form. A face neither surprised to be rescued nor even particularly gratified.

Edgar breathed again when he saw the two rescuers trailing a stone’s throw behind, but they still shot daggers at him when they noticed him looking.

“I know what you were about,” Gisbourne repeated. He was covered in blood but his cringes were subtle as he eased himself down in the raft.

“What?” Edgar snapped, moving away.

“With your sharpened seashell. You would’ve killed me. Or tried to. You may even have succeeded. It takes more gumption than you’d think to do it. It takes time to work oneself up to it. I spent a long time preparing myself to kill you, in fact. I hoped by warning you ahead of time that I’d warn myself.”

“And the native?”

“By then I was ready. It mattered not who.” Gisbourne nodded at the rescuers as they approached and continued as though they were not there. “An interesting situation we would have had on our hands had he not come along just then. No doubt we would have found out how ready we both were.”

“Is it such a good thing to be ready to kill?” Edgar muttered.

“A good thing? You speak in qualitative terms still, even after all this? For you it would have been an honest recognition, an acceptance of reality. I suppose I acknowledge what you call ‘goodness’ in that. A man must be prepared to do anything to survive.”

“You,” Steve jerked a thumb at Edgar, “Out of the boat.”

Edgar stood up, and the two men shoved the raft into the shallows easily with only Gisbourne’s weight in it. Then they took Edgar by the arms and heaved him aboard and pushed off.

“Ah, civilization,” Gisbourne drawled, motioning at the seaplane. “I suppose you think we had a narrow escape there, eh, Edgar? It will be ‘nice’ to return to ‘real’ life, a ‘simple’ life?” He flexed his fingers like quotation marks for each venomous word. “Although I would hope you’ve abandoned naivete and that you’ve learned something to take with you. Something to shock you out of your doldrums and infuse your family ‘business’ with a little more, shall we say, acumen.”

Edgar barely heeded the jibes. Pieces of himself were coming back and he didn’t know what to make of them yet beyond the fact that they did in fact belong to him and that he would have to sort them all out and fit them back together somehow, but if they had ever fit together before he could not remember the order, and if they had once been ordered he doubted he had done it right.

“You see, it matters very little that we have been rescued. Someone else will eat us both later. It is the nature of the world. Now, are you ready to do what must be done?” He looked in Edgar’s eyes. “Yes, I think you are. Indeed, I believe you were. You would have given it your best effort, at least.”

The men both scoffed and shook their heads at Edgar. Gisbourne settled back in the boat, his arms up on the sides. “You have no rejoinder?”

“You probably struck a nerve on him,” Steve grunted. “I’d say he feels pretty low right now.”

Gisbourne smirked. “How do you mean?”

“This friend of yours would’ve left you on the island. Now, I don’t know about this debate you’re having, but it seems a pretty low thing to do to a man you’re marooned with. Yes, he would’ve done it. We were in the air and everything. Didn’t give any thought to you, no hint to your existence, til we were up in the air, and then he starts raving that we’ve got to go back. I don’t know what kind of person does that, to a hurt man, no less. I guess you can lose all your decency out here.”

The smile dropped from Gisbourne’s face, the look of all-knowing, the confidence that would never be surprised or caught off-guard shattered into a fragmented dumbfounded expression that, for a moment gave him the aspect of an entirely different man.

At the same moment they turned to watch the island recede behind them.

The End.

In the night something was at his good leg. He woke kicking whatever animal, and when he realized what had hold of him he screamed “help, help!” It stabbed the sole of his foot right under the ball, but the hold was so strong he couldn’t reflex away as the prong of his belt buckle tore down toward his heel. It was over in seconds and the presence left him thrashing and screaming on the sand.

In the morning he ate a whole papaya while staring out to sea without thinking what lay beyond it. The sea was the sea. Afterward his stomach lurched him on his side, gasping like a fish as diarrhea spewed out. He let it pass as a matter of course, then crawled down toward the shallows, his foot smoldering every quivering inch. At last he reached the water, worked his pants and underwear down his buttocks and coaxed them down his thighs calves and ankles one wince at a time, laved handfuls of seawater over his lap, legs and feet, unable to relegate the burning sting to its proper compartment while he went to another part of himself, for he was the proper compartment: transfixed by the sheer boredom of pain. He wrung out his clothes, crawled back up the beach to his shelter and slung them up on the walls to dry. He lay his top half in the shade and naked nethers in the hot sun and sand.

Gisbourne loomed with a papaya husk over with one or two inches of urine in it. Edgar pushed his hand away. “I’ll drink my own.”

“Can’t make your own unless you take some first.”

“Not this…side of hell.”

Gisbourne’s face twisted in a smile. “You already have. Twice.”

Edgar’s eyes jerked up at him. He took the husk and tipped it to his mouth. Hot and foul. Gisbourne returned with another husk with darker liquid in it. Edgar stared, not comprehending.

“From a bird. You need iron.”

Aside from the metallic taste and floating specks he found it not as bad as expected. You can make yourself do anything.

Gisbourne took the empty skin back and sniffed at the sky. “It’ll rain soon.”

The morsels his provider gave him tasted like nothing and were worse than the blood. His teeth felt they’d shatter. We could survive a long time here, Edgar despaired. He couldn’t count on disease, starvation, his leg or even Gisbourne. The thought of survival! With the enemy weakening him, restoring order, every time he threatened to get better?

Laying around was worse than anything. His foot stung but not nearly as much as his leg had; he remembered as a boy being swatted and summoning fake tears to appease his father; he let the foot drag useless and propelled himself with the other. He rummaged among the coals until he found a stout piece of wood the length of his forearm. The entire effort took twenty or thirty minutes punctuated by intervals of breathing and groaning rest, but at least it was thoughtless rest.

When he returned to his shade he passed out.

For the next few hours he used fibers from the palms to lash the shorter piece crosswise along the unburnt end of his walking stick. Several times he gave up in frustration, pulled apart palms for tougher fibers and began again. He dedicated every itch and twinge during his work to his companion, thinking how to perform the ruse of his injuries and fever, lower his enemy’s guard, then drive the blackened end of his crutch into the eye of this cyclops. He was utterly absorbed, a personless will of hatred and pain.

“Edgar.”

He turned toward the sound of his name. Gisbourne stood there, a hazy dark swatch.

“You may think me needlessly cruel for last night, but I assure you it was not the case.” The economist waited as though he expected a response, then, “The food’s beginning to spoil, and I got lucky with those birds. They know to be wary of me now. I’m afraid it’ll be your turn soon.”

“My turn,” Edgar repeated, dumbfounded. “You can last on fruit…or fishing. I’ve heard you can use a sharpened stick. Tear some cloth to make a line and use—the body as bait.”

“It’s more than that.” Gisbourne chewed on a stalk of some kind as he stared out to sea. “There are myriad reasons to kill you, and only one to keep you alive.”

“What’s that?”

“We don’t have a refrigerator.”

“What fucked you up as a kid?”

“Ah, simpleton. One trauma or another as the root of anything. Not knowing trauma withers and kills a root. They’d rather give supremacy to past misfortunes than stare it in the teeth and carve out their own being.”

“So you’re sick just for the fun of it, eh?”

“Sick, am I? I care not what you think, but I’m the rule, the measuring stick, Edgar. I make the world turn. I shovel the coal that powers it.”

“Bet you think of Hitler or Mao when you touch yourself.”

“Impassioned but misguided leaders. An ecosystem abhors a tyrant. No man should strive to bend the wave, only to ride it.”

That night Edgar made three piles of sand, one for each option.

The first, being killed by Gisbourne, was the easiest option; it required no action. However, whispering it aloud to himself—“He will kill me. I won’t exist anymore. I’ll be gone. And he’ll eat me.”—he found, somewhat to his surprise, as he pushed a mound of sand up to represent this choice, that he did not want to die.

And that, he said to himself decisively as he made another mound, ruled out option two as well, which was to kill himself. It wasn’t so much admitting defeat or abandoning God as forking his body over for the enemy’s spoils that ruled out suicide.

Which brought him to killing Gisbourne. Mother Teresa, Gandhi, MLK: the coal of the world. Peaceful, equitable living was not possible. He had nothing else. It is not for the poor man to show generosity, nor for the weak to give mercy. The deprivation of any chance for goodness, to prove himself a decent man, left him only a breath of wind wavering him back over toward tortured survival.

This acknowledgement brought to surface dozens of instances where Edgar had pushed certain, as Gisbourne would say, “Machiavellian” practices to secure holdings for his family’s firm, to beat out competition, to lead clients to a certain view of him and his business that wasn’t entirely true. He stared at the mound of sand which stood for living, saw how true that really was as he thought of the Bible story about the man who built his life on it.

He pushed the three piles together and lay down in his shelter, full of hunger and regret. What purpose was there to life other than showing this monster that he would not be destroyed or do anything that would suggest admission to Gisbourne of any of his tenets and principles?

Killing him will only prove him right, too…He’ll be wrong about me being coal, though!

Kill or be killed: there’s no more basic economic principle. He could hear the words in his enemy’s taunting voice. The fucking prick. He’ll win either way—his last words would be I told you so. That smugness would never be wiped away. Nothing new under the sun. That’s been said before.

Self-pity and rage burned in his throat and eyes. He’d never thought himself a saint, but…decent, at least. He looked out for his own and tried to do right by people; surely he had resolve, integrity…stumbling back and forth over the lines of his own principles like a drunkard, a toad one moment and a viper the next. Where was the fourth choice? Where was the chance-choice to prove himself a good man, or at least more than an animal in an ecosystem, a commodity in an economy? The weak can prove nothing.

I will at least kill him. The victory of muscle against muscle, strength against strength, will against will. Or, at the very least, surprise against strength. The image of Gisbourne’s face as Edgar drove a sharpened stake into him brought grim cheer. Yes, you told me so, he’d say twisting the spear. I hope that eases your last breath.

He imagined the ways he could kill him, the different weapons he could construe from the scraps laying about. He needed range, accuracy, speed. He’d have to kill or at least cripple him with one blow. Yet not so quick that Gisbourne couldn’t look up at him with recognition, with fear, with submission before the end. In those last moments he would do far worse to him than he had done to Edgar...

“No,” he growled. “No. What the hell is…? No.” He let his leg-pain draw him back out of the dark pictures. “Kill fast. There’s no reason to make him suffer. There’s no reason to make him suffer.” He repeated this several times to himself because he couldn’t have disagreed with it more.

While Gisbourne scavenged, Edgar practiced walking up and down the beach on his staff, which he had whittled to a point. He paced as quietly as possible, moving slowly, sweating from concentration and anticipation, alternating with bursts of speed where he’d lunge forward, forcing himself to overrule the screaming fire in his leg as he rammed the point downward into the leaf or papaya skin he’d set as a target. He’d go until he could strike the center of whatever every time, but his efforts skewed more and more as weariness came on until he collapsed under his sheaves and sticks and succumbed to sleep.

In the evening Gisbourne forced more liquid down his throat—blood, he guessed, but it was too dark to see and his tongue too swollenly parched to taste—and a few small fruits he didn’t recognize. He shook his head until Gisbourne ate several himself, then he ate them, again without tasting. Afterward he lay awake, listening to his enemy eat many more of the little fruits and snapping the bones of the bird he’d slain earlier and sucking out the marrow.

Keeping himself strong and giving Edgar just enough to get by.

The next day Edgar went about his drills again, pleased to see his accuracy and stealth improving, but they weren’t sure enough to make up for his lack of speed. He watched constantly for Gisbourne emerging from the trees; the enemy would know what he was doing and would kill him before entertaining any danger from Edgar’s quarter.

“This damn leg, this motherfucking leg,” he complained, limping up and down the sand with the crutch on the side of his wounded leg and placing the weight of his good leg on the toes to avoid the gash on his sole. The injustice of it all, having to be a cripple and having his fate decided for him by some accident in the fall from the plane while his enemy should go unscathed, was worse than the notion of being far more seriously maimed. It was just enough to make a difference. Just enough hope for despair.

Around noon he realized he’d worn two deep grooves in the sand. He hurriedly brushed them over with his hurt foot, then laid down and rolled back and forth along his tracks because his efforts at brushing looked less natural than his tracks had. He picked himself up, brushed himself off, commanded his heart to slow down. His head felt light and the sun burned his eyes. Where was his crutch? Terror clutched him as he staggered like a drunken man with one arm outstretched and one over his face.

Then he saw Gisbourne, a blurry figure a stone’s throw away, facing him. He froze and dropped his arms, gaping. “Well, Friday, what about it?” the enemy drawled. “Lost your cane?”

“I—I fell down and lost it.”

“Well, pick it up.”

There it lay on the ground a few feet in front of him. Gisbourne roared with laughter as he fell over it, clasped it to himself. The point. Hopefully he hadn’t noticed the sharpened point. But Gisbourne only made his way back to the fire and sat, still chuckling, with the handful of whatever he had gathered and began to eat.

Edgar tossed and turned in the sand. I can’t stand his chuckling any more. He needs to die. I don’t care what happens. I’ll kill him. One of us needs to die. I can’t live with him in my head. The next time he lies down...

But Gisbourne did not lie down. As though hearkening to some instinct, some scent of Edgar’s intention, he occupied himself by refastening brush to his own shelter with strands from palms, threw more fuel on the fire, gathered more fruits from the forest. When he’d done all this Edgar expected he would rest, but he did not. Instead he began digging a hole in his lean-to, piling the sand outside in a dike that acted as a buffer against the wind. Edgar watched with concern as the enemy dusted his hands and laid down in the hole with his feet toward the entrance.

Edgar used his spear to lurch down to the water, where he stirred it with his good foot until he deemed sufficient time had passed for Gisbourne to fall asleep. Then he turned and crutched his way back, taking a different tack that would give him a view of the sleeper’s face. The eyes were closed, the chest rising, falling: steady, shallow. It would be difficult to find a stance and angle from which to deliver a single, fatal thrust.

Holding his breath he retreated, threw his stick down and dropped to his knees, biting his fist until he tasted blood. There lay the thing he had to do, and he could see no way from which to approach the thing beyond the one vision he had drawn upon while stabbing leaves and husks during his practice. The absurd endless expanse of his limitation knowing only one myopic way to go about the thing that he could not even bring himself to attempt, even envision another way drove the bestial sound from him. He didn’t even care if Gisbourne heard. The impotent rage wouldn’t concern, let alone surprise him.

He had worn the narrow blinders all his life, had worn them in choosing the school both his father and grandfather attended before him, following the same career as both his progenitors, marrying the girl his friends had introduced to him in high school, letting himself be taken with Eliza and being unable, no, unwilling to see a way out of her. What Gisbourne had said of free will on the plane gnawed and he pushed back with fury he knew was pointless before he even began to resist, holding back from itching his leg just to see if he could do it even though he knew he could not, keeping himself from looking back at the man in the shelter behind him a second longer than he told himself he would have otherwise, yet he couldn’t get up and do what needed to be done.

And so he sat staring out to sea long after the stars began their clockwork.

The next day Edgar was able to provide his own urine for the first time in he couldn’t recall how long. It burned coming out and going back down, and he chased it with a meager ration of berries and papaya. After the other had returned to the woods to forage, Edgar got up and paced rapidly across the beach so that he could stab kelp bladders that had washed up before he remembered that it was all futile. He jabbed spitefully, popping the sacs and then dragging the mass of them down to the water to rinse, then back to his lean-to.

He selected the brightest green. It was saltier than the blood Gisbourne had fed him and took a long time to swallow. He wondered if it had occurred to the other to cook any. He looked up toward the foliage, then crawled over to Gisbourne’s fire. He threw two more logs onto it and shoved more sand onto the dike of sand and sticks Gisbourne had raised between it and the wind, then wrapped the seaweed around a branch and held it into the flames. It sizzled and blackened in seconds, and even with his mouth burning from the salt taste of the raw stuff his stomach gurgled at the smell. He took it out of the fire and unstrung it from his stick, burning his fingers and mouth but wolfing it all down. Cooking had muted the seawater taste, and his spirits rose with new purpose. It was a needed victory.

As he ate he thought of what Peter and Shelly would do. At each wavering between survival and succumbing, life and death, morality and pragmatism he had convinced himself of their sympathies and support—“Yes, dear, keep yourself alive, whatever you do”; “Of course we understand, going on like this must be unbearable!”—when in truth he could so little envision them comprehending his current state that he could not believe they’d fathom a course of action on which to advise him. He could only see them looking at him, wondering just as he was wondering what he was going to do next.

“I didn’t deserve either of you,” he whispered. He had said it any time they landed a client, completed an audit, put another April 15th behind them, but this time he meant it. He’d always seen himself the spearhead of their little firm, priding his higher education and CPA certificate above their efforts to chase after him in their research, workshops, tutelage, sticktoitiveness. But in the course of his life, who had really been the follower, the dependent?

Too late he noticed Gisbourne’s shadow eclipsing him. He spun around in time for the span of wood to catch him on the jaw. Edgar collapsed with his mouth in the sand.

“You eat when I say.” Gisbourne’s fingers reached down for his stick, unwrapped the remnants of charred kelp, and stuffed them in his mouth.

Edgar sat up, opening and closing his mouth and pressing a hand to his mandible. “There’s enough for us both.”

Gisbourne crouched in front of him, still chewing. “It doesn’t matter how much there is. Your business classes—hell, your entire life up to now—taught you fuck-all, didn’t they?”

Edgar crawled away, hand in front of hand in front of hand until he came to himself in his pathetic little shelter. His head still rang and he thought he might vomit, the pain crawled like ants on his head and teeth. I’ll kill him. I will try.

That night he tried to pass water but could not. He was fed a handful of berries. That was it. Gisbourne had caught two crabs on the other side of the island and Edgar watched him spit them both on the skewer he’d used to roast seaweed, crack open their shells and devour them leg by leg. Then he moved the leaves off the body, dragged it to the edge of the firepit and spat its dessicating hand on a skewer to hold the entire arm over the flames. Edgar felt the berries rise in the back of his throat at the smell and curled up in his shelter with his nose pressed to his arm.

In the morning the other gave him nothing. It was the hungriest Edgar had ever been. Gisbourne didn’t hunt on the other side of the island today. Instead, he told Edgar to go in the shallows and fetch as much seaweed as he could find. He spent the morning wading out into neck deep sun-blinding water and pulling up handfuls. He rinsed off the grit and dropped it in a papaya skin and went back out. Gisbourne roasted it in batches and was always watching him when Edgar turned around.

The last time he went back up the beach he froze and stared as the other threw his crutch on the fire. “You’ve done enough for today,” Gisbourne drawled. “Eat what you want, then get some rest.”

Edgar took the skin and its portion of still-raw kelp to his abode and chewed it. He watched through the slats as Gisbourne laid down in his own shelter. He counted ten minutes in his head without looking away from the bare feet sticking out in the sun, then reached in his back pocket and removed the jagged clamshell he’d cut his foot on in the water.

Each inch of skin tingling and itching with sweat, Edgar crept closer, stooping, holding the tiny shiv under the lee of its bower toward the resting body. A thrust up through the chin? In the belly? A quick kill, a quick kill. Come on. It’ll be quick and then done with. He shuffled up the beach around to the back of the shelter. Now he could look down at the top of the enemy’s head through gaps between fronds and sticks. At his full arm’s length and with enough force he could reach through and cut the throat. Edgar doubtfully brought the sharp end up, fingered it. I’ll have to be ready to cut twice. If his hand went awry he might merely strike Gisbourne in the cheek or shoulder. He’d have to reach far in through the slats, but then he’d lose all his momentum. No, he’d have to crash through the shelter, throw himself on top of the other and knock the wind out of him, use those seconds of surprise to hack and stab. It would be far more physical than he’d envisioned, fully as much skin touching as lovemaking. He thought of sitting on the thin chest and stabbing, stabbing, stabbing, the gout of throat-blood gushing over his loins. It wouldn’t be quick and it wouldn’t be clean, but it would be a kill. Come on. Do it.

He realized he’d been standing above Gisbourne for five or ten minutes as though waiting for the sleeper to make the first move, impel him to action, permit his blow. What am I waiting for? If he moves, I won’t be able to kill him. This is it. I won’t get another chance. Go. Go on.

Still he couldn’t. He watched the chest rise hypnotically up, sink down, rise up, sink down, like a child in bed.

He looked up, exasperated, out to sea, and his shell, stuck between the slats of the shelter, knocked against the palms. Gisbourne started. Like a cat he twisted over and was on all fours within the time it took for Edgar to withdraw his arm; he leapt backward out of his hole and into a crouch before Edgar’s weapon had fallen from his hand to the ground. Then his eyes caught the direction of Edgar’s, staring over his head.

Riveted, they watched the spot on the ocean getting nearer and nearer, turning from a black dot obscured by every-other-moment-cresting waves into a lucid swarthy figure paddling toward their island with no indication of hurry, as though he had spotted them from afar and had already eliminated any sign of surprise, had been expecting them from the outset of his voyage from its unknown harbor, or effused a sort of natural stoicism born of wide experience or very little experience at all.

Edgar staggered down to the water, waving his arms and screaming “Hey! Hey!”, oblivious to his injuries and everything else. He clasped his hands and shook them, bowed again and again, hoping that one gesture of the many would find foothold.

“Is it just him? Is there no one else?” Gisbourne grated behind him.

“You don’t see anyone else, do you?”

The islander stopped paddling fifty or a hundred yards away, his craft rocking sideways up and down. His hair was pulled back from his hard brown face with coal eyes that surveyed them not with mistrust or curiosity but a guarded withholding of judgment or action. His paddle remained in the water with one hand on its shaft and the other on its grip.

“Please, please.” Edgar dropped to his knees.

With no decisive change other than a graceful forward motion of his arms, the native dug his paddle into the surf and plied forward. Edgar’s mouth blubbered thanks, songs, love and hope.

The man leapt out of his canoe where the water was thigh-deep, placed his paddle in it, and rose step by step out of the waves without reluctance. On his knees, Edgar raised his hands like a blind man to his messiah.

That messiah never spoke. Through the blur Edgar saw Gisbourne’s club crash down once, twice, three times on the native’s head, shoulder, and back, driving him first back a step, then to a knee, then to his belly. Edgar cried out. Gisbourne’s club lifted a fourth time. Edgar rose and threw up his hands and dove in the way, grappling with his adversary, clutching at his arms as they stopped poised above his head for another blow.

Naked chest to naked chest they heaved against each other with barely a sound; swaying like trees or the world swaying around them. Then Edgar’s legs began to tremble and then to buckle, lowering him back. With a snarl Gisbourne shook free, stomped on his leg where he half knelt in the surf. The club came up once more. Abruptly Gisbourne faltered, his mouth writhing like a stricken snake. Red ribbons spurted from his side as the stone knife yanked out. His club splashed in the shallows at the same time the savage’s bare feet slapped the sides of his craft.

Edgar’s would-be rescuer was already out of earshot of the pleas he expelled echolessly to the waves by the time he had gathered his senses. He spun around in time to see Gisbourne lurching into the thicket, blood drops sprinkling the sand behind him.

He took up a stick from the fire and hobbled up the beach as fast as he could, stopping where the foliage began. He hadn’t seen the severity of Gisbourne’s wound. It might kill him or only enrage him. He might lurk behind any tree to fell Edgar as he passed by. But he might make a bandage and save himself if Edgar left him alone…

“Hold on, hold on.” He tramped back to his camp to think, adrenaline wouldn’t let him sit still, anger and glee, fear and triumph sped through, vying for dominance as he tracked furrows up and down in the sand, he could take on two or three of Gisbourne, wounded or not, his leg barely hurt now, he needed to make a plan, to act on the plan while he still had the strength of rage and ecstasy.

“Think! Think, damn you!”

Gisbourne had left his club. He could find another—unless he was too badly wounded, in which case he’d bleed out. Couldn’t assume. Was it better to give chase? There’d never be a better chance—unless I let him grow weaker and weaker. Let him die himself. Good enough. It should be good enough. You’ll just have to keep watch, that’s all. Watch. The next few hours will tell if he’s strong enough to come back and kill me, or if he’s too weak. If he doesn’t appear in the next four hours—no, eight—better make it twelve...”

He hobbled to Gisbourne’s shelter and pushed it all over into the fire, bent down to blow sparks onto the materials until they blazed to match his mood. “They oughta see it from space,” he crowed.

Over the next hour he replayed the ten seconds of violence over and over and watched the fire consume its fuel and dwindle to ash, leaving him exhausted and chilled. His leg and head throbbed, shudders racked his body; he crawled from the fire back to his shelter, the most difficult distance of the day, and collapsed.

The clouds excluded any chance of telling how long he slept, but what did that matter?

The future expanded like the sea. He’d latched onto the killing, a reaction, but now there was no operator, imparter of force, nothing to react to. He sat under his eaves paralyzed on the edge of something but knew not what, a great emptiness like a blank canvas or a void he could call into forever without echo. “That’s my soul up there,” he sang under his breath, self-consciously, just as he sang in church.

That night Edgar hid in the foliage while it rained. It blew and pelted his house apart, obliterated the fire, beat trees and plants to bits. The waves would have engulfed him head to toe had he been standing on the beach. As it was, the salt water whipped his cowering form with stinging pellets indistinguishable from the rain. Lightning strobed the sky, illuminating the island in Halloween-like pallor.

Water! He sprinted across the beach, scanning for hollowed papaya husks and turning them bowl-side up. They skittered away across the beach. Hooting, he rushed after them. He scooped holes in the sand, far up the beach to avoid them filling with seawater, placed the skins and packed the grit snug around them. He spread out the great torso-sized leaves of the trees, weighting them with handfuls of sand and half-burnt sticks, laughing only harder when the wind ripped them up in the air and gusted them a mile out to sea.

He ran back and forth screaming until his voice came at a croak and his wound dropped him in his tracks, then dragged himself into the plants to cover his head.

The storm blasted the island all night, and after it had rolled away east the sky remained an angry inflamed purple. Edgar crept from the fronds weak with cold, hunger, and weariness. He had not slept since the first drops pricked his skin. He found his husks filled with water, the sand sunk to the bottom, and sucked it up with chapped lips. It was gritty and salty despite his efforts, but he drank up three skins. His stomach ached for a long time afterward and his mouth tasted foul, but he did not throw up. When he felt up to moving again he took some of the larger leaves that scattered the beach, not caring that he wasted precious droplets they had collected, dragged them over to his battered shelter. He propped up the branches as best he could and arranged the leaves and tendrils, but he knew the next hard wind would topple everything. He collapsed inside with one last branch to use as a staff and passed out.

Part Four→

The daylight was waning when Gisbourne returned with an armful of green gourds.

“You mean you started—before you even looked for plants to eat?” Edgar stammered.

“Man does not live by fruit alone.” With one blow Gisbourne cracked one of the papayas open on his knee. Edgar greedily took his half, raised it to his face and bit into the musky-sweet orange flesh. He’d never tasted anything so good. Like cantaloupe, but sweeter. His stomach ached at this sudden task but he didn’t stop until he had hollowed the rind. He tried one of the black seeds, but it was bitter and spicy. He hesitated, but Gisbourne passed him the other half, so Edgar took it and scooped the seeds out while eyeing his companion sideways. The tall man was holding another of the fruits under his arm like a football. Noting his glance, Gisbourne nodded toward the forest. “I’ve heard the juice makes a good meat tenderizer. Besides, I’m not all that hungry.”

Edgar set the fruit aside. Eating was treading water. Instead he chewed over Shelly and Jack. She’d be at her desk, either balancing ledgers or working on her second draft like she did when she thought he wasn’t watching. How he ached to have her manuscript, to be able to read something, to read her thoughts in the words of her characters. Jack would be meeting with Wakefield and Howard. No, no that was yesterday. When he was on the plane. The news would’ve reached them early, waking them, or maybe reaching them as they packed swim suits and sunblock. Now…now where would they be?

As the hours and then days stretched on he could only see them frozen in the poses, actions and attitudes of work. Not picking up the phone. Not waiting by it for the next news. Carefree and distracted. They were pictures on a wall for him to admire in yesterday’s museum.

Beside them hung many regrets, yet most of these were regrets not of things he had done, but things he had not. All his plans, all his future dreams became their shadow-selves, their dark opposites, omissions, voids where virtues and accomplishments should have been. Liza was only one of the vanguard.

Meanwhile, Gisbourne stuck stalks deep in the sand and wove them together with tall, thin-bladed grasses into a skeleton structure. As his long, deft fingers knotted them the other man muttered to himself about knives, fires, snatches of past lectures. At first Edgar couldn’t bear to watch him, then for sheer boredom he couldn’t bear not to. He counted the man’s trips to and from the forest. Usually he was gone for minutes. Sometimes hours. He looked at the sun, crawling lower and lower in the sky, and only that descent reminded him he was hungry again, but bringing it up to the other seemed absurd.

Gisbourne laid armload after armload of stalks, stems and grasses beside Edgar. He retrieved Edgar’s shirt which he’d washed and hung in the forest, wrapped it around his leg, inserting a broad leaf between the skin and shirt to keep it from adhering, tying the shirtsleeves to secure it. “You don’t need your belt anymore. You’ve stopped bleeding, and you need circulation. I need it now.”

“What for?”

“The buckle is what I need, mainly.” Gisbourne gestured to a pile of scavengings—logs, reeds, both of Gisbourne’s shoes. “It’s the closest thing we have to a knife.”

“Use your own.”

“Alas, I wear suspenders. I need the prong on the buckle.” Edgar thought about shoving away the long, cold hands reaching for his thigh but by the time he’d worked up the courage his companion was walking away with his belt.

Again Edgar watched, Gisbourne scratched with it at a log, twisting the prong back and forth, back and forth, boring a crater in the wood and blowing away the chips. He passed in and out of consciousness with no evident progress in Gisbourne’s work to tell him how long each lapse lasted. The light began to fade, and the wind bent on him with fierce chill. It was pulling him, the cold under his armpits. “Get off me,” he muttered. And then the wind was off of him.

“I’ve built you something,” it breathed in his ear.

Edgar opened his eyes when the presence was gone. Bent reeds through which he could see dark sky shot up around him. He was warmer now, and in the absence of shivers the pain in his leg and then his consciousness subsided, but his sleep was muddled with pains and guilty fever dreams.

His leg throbbed him awake before dawn but after Gisbourne. His companion was on his belly blowing the embers to life, then feeding more fronds to the fire.

“How’d you do it?” Edgar asked.

“Scout’s trick. I’ll teach you.” The other looked at Edgar as if waiting for him to express interest. “Usefulness is an advantage. What I need you to do right now, however, is gather more fuel. If it’s dry, put it on right now. If not, put it close enough for the fire to dry it. I’m going to cook what we have so it’ll keep longer.”

Misery settled in his gut as he watched the man’s slow, carefree gait toward the treeline. Surely I’ve imagined it. He’ll come back dragging an animal or more fruit. But then he saw it coming, like a sledge behind a packhorse. Flies clouded about the head, so Edgar almost didn’t recognize the body of his seatmate. When Gisbourne shooed the swarm away, he saw that Gisbourne had eaten the cheeks first.

Edgar gagged and shut his eyes. Gisbourne dropped his burden by the fire. “I thought it might help if it didn’t look like a human animal.”

“Shut up. Just shut up.”

“Count yourself lucky. The men of the Essex didn’t have fire in their boats. You’ll eat, Edgar. Papayas were yesterday, but you’ll waste away on those; a man of your constitution. No, you’re going to keep up your strength. Edgar? Are you listening?”

Edgar rose to his feet, stepping away jerkily like a marionette. “I’d rather die.”

“Ten dollars says your mouth waters by the time I finish roasting the offal.”

He lay in his shelter, listening to the waves kssh kssh to slow his breathing. With the walls covering all but the view of the water he couldn’t see or hear anything else. Even after laying there all day he could drift off. Funny how ever since his college days he’d be thinking too much of papers, reports, audits, returns due to relax properly on vacation.

Gisbourne loomed in the only view out, something steaming and stinking on the end of a skewer. “Eat.”

Edgar kicked at it, and as Gisbourne bent to pull it from the sand, Edgar’s heel rammed him in the nose. Cartilage crunched, but then a vice took his ankle and dragged him yelling onto the beach. A blow landed on the side of his head. He was thrown down to the surf, panting up his body toward his mouth pushed sideways in the sand; another blow mashed his teeth and tongue full of it. He coughed and spat, and the enemy’s foot drove down on his gash. It was fire. It was darkness. It was drunkenness. It was delirium.

“You know what I can do to make it hurt day and night? You’ll wish the sharks had got you. Stop blubbering. You’re not going to die, not yet. Got that? Say it!”

“I won’t, I won’t, I won’t, I won’t.”

Gisbourne removed his foot, straddling him, unzipping his pants and pulling them down to his knees over Edgar, leering with blood running down his lips and teeth. “You’re not a human anymore, Edgar. Neither am I. Got it?”

Edgar looked up. “Fuck you.”

Gisbourne brought his foot down on his wound again.

Edgar screamed. The foot stepped back.

“Do it, Edgar. Do it.”

“Fuck you.”

Again the leg came down, and then, a minute later, wetness splattered his cheeks and hair. And what Edgar had to do became a very simple thing that he was able to abstract himself from as easily as Gisbourne had abstracted answers from the biological economy: he would have to die.

He woke, clothes still damp, near the fire with Gisbourne crouched by him gnawing something red. Edgar dragged himself away directionlessly, willing his eyes not to see, his nose not to smell, his heart not to beat, away from the voice, into the undergrowth, reeds and leaves cutting his face and bare arms and useless, pain-anchored body.

He let himself lie when his strength gave out. His gasping form lay in and out of shadow. He forgot his leg, forgot his dead-dry mouth and burning stomach, forgot everything as the tide took him out to sea on a flat life raft. Each time it sank, the water filling his nose and mouth til he could hold it no more and let in the salty flow, he found himself again just barely afloat, and at the same time he was aware of the trees over his head waving their fronds, the tickle of grasses and itch of sweat on his bare flanks, the taste of salt on his upper lip, thirst thick on his tongue.

Then again the sensation of being dragged, at first no different than his nightmare dragging him under the water. His unmalleable lips tried to form curses.

“You’re dehydrated. Heat stroke too if I’m not mistaken.”

His head hit something hard, rattling Gisbourne into focus as he held something to Edgar’s lips, a shell or cup. He swallowed mechanically, some of the liquid spilling down his chin onto his chest. It tasted salty. Is he trying to poison me with seawater? No, must be tasting my sweat. He gulped until Gisbourne pulled away.

“Rest. Don’t go out in the sun.”

The shadow left him and gradually Edgar’s eyes cleared on the pure, glinting ocean before him. He glared at it, resenting his past life for having once enjoyed it, for enjoying anything.

Later Gisbourne returned and put something wet and smooth and sickly sweet to his mouth. Papaya. He turned his head away, slapped at the insistent spidery hands.

“You’re not strong enough for a hunger strike, Edgar. But have it your way. You’ll learn plenty on this island.”

Gisbourne returned once more before nightfall. He came quickly, bare torso red in the fire behind him. He straddled his captive’s chest, facing his legs, threw his wet shirt over Edgar’s wound, swabbed it as the other screamed and flailed. “Lay still,” Gisbourne growled. “You got sand in the wound.” It was over as quickly as it began, and the pain Edgar had slowly forgotten returned for his last hours of consciousness. He kept watch against it as he glared at the sea in the dark where the fire didn’t shine. He listened to his body gurgle and twitch like an animal hit by a car, demanding some recompense for living, for pain. He’s right. You’ll never be able to do it. And so the second day ended with a voluntary papaya.

The next bout of light was not morning or day--there was no work, no itinerary, no three meals like a stool’s legs. He hated the sun and the waves and his heartbeat.

Thirst was all he felt. It was worse than the pain. The papayas’ sweet bitterness only worsened it. He sucked a palm with an attempt to keep the sour dryness out and gave up when he still couldn’t produce saliva, then resorted to watching Gisbourne crouched by the fire with his back to him, sleeves rolled up past his elbows angled out like chicken wings, gnawing something with noises that would have sickened Edgar yesterday. For Gisbourne he felt the pure hatred undiluted by imaginings of revenge. He knew his enemy was too strong, too savvy; he’d looked at Edgar the moment he was awake. How? Did my breathing change? Whatever. Above all he hated his casual regard of the island as though whatever fortune or misfortune, pleasure or cruelty it dealt would never surprise, let alone bother him.

“You should drink.”

“Drink what?”

“When was the last time you made water?”

“When I--?”

“If you can manage it and it isn’t too dark, you can recycle it.”

Edgar felt his lower lip split as he drew a grimace. “Fuck. Off.”

Gisbourne turned, his mouth rimmed with brownish fluid. “Make use of it while you still can.”

“I won’t look, if that’s your trouble.”

“Go away.”

“You must.”

“I said fuck off.” Edgar’s voice was much rawer than the other’s. He closed his eyes and tried to forget his two enemies: his throat and Gisbourne. When he closed them at least one was gone.

He drifted from his body on needle-flash waves of heat and chill.

“Hey,” said Shelly, sticking her head into his hutch. “What’s your favorite part so far?”

“Favorite part…?”

She frowned. “The Wayfarer’s Wife.”

“Honey…told you I’ve…been busy.”

“I know. We’re praying for you every second of the day. The Hetlers brought us meatloaf last night. I couldn’t stop thinking how you’d have liked it.” She blew her nose on a palm leaf. “The bed’s so big without you.”

“Shelly,” he began, but before he could say what he wanted to Liza was there instead.

“Why haven’t you texted me back?”

“I’ve…wanted to tell you. It’s over...can’t see you anymore.”

“That’s what you always say. You’ll want me. You’ll eat me all up. Just eat me. I want it to be good for you.”

Edgar shook his head, pushing her away, but then strong hands took and lowered his. Jack was crouched in the lee of the shelter.

“Hey pops! I wanted to let you know the meeting with Wakefield and Howard went great. They said they couldn’t wait to meet you and mom in person. They think it’s great what we’re doing!”

“Great, Jackie,” Edgar murmured. “‘Preciate you meeting with them.”

“Anything else I can do for you, pop?”

“No, son, you’ve...just look after your mom, will you? Needs you more’n ever. I’m sorry, Jack.”

“Hey,” he said with that nonchalantly humorous roll of his shoulders, “You don’t need to apologize! Just drink some, will you? You need it!”

“Alright, Jack. Alright.”

A cup pressed against his lips and tilted liquid onto them. Its warmth and filthy taste filled his mouth and chafed his throat. He coughed it out, but the persistent cup returned. This time he swallowed.

That evening he ate papaya from his enemy’s fingers. He could taste Gisbourne’s skin but not the fruit; choked when he tried to swallow too soon, as though he’d forgotten how to chew.

“How’s your leg?” Gisbourne asked when Edgar was done.

He pulled it toward him, felt only warm soreness from the sand-crusted gash. “Fine.”

“Looks swollen. Shouldn’t have let it sit so long. Been two days since I had a real look at it.” He sounded apologetic, which so surprised Edgar that the surprise of the two days struck him moments later.

“You refused food and most drink, so I left you until your body refused to starve anymore.” He was tracing a finger along the edge of the wound, sending prickles up and down Edgar’s leg.

“Leave it,” he growled, angry at his vulnerability, his helplessness, and especially his debt.

“It’s beginning to infect. I’ve got to clean it with saltwater, and then—.”

Edgar did not help, but nor did he resist, as Gisbourne guided him down to the waterline and sat him in the shallows, splashing the warm water over his leg. Edgar bit his lips and glared against the tears that filled his eyes, keeping them away from Gisbourne while the other tsked quietly. He took Edgar’s arm and put it over his shoulder to hoist him up and escort him back up the beach to the fire. He picked up a large branch, perhaps even the trunk of a palm tree, wrapped his long hands around it. Edgar looked up vacantly at the moment Gisbourne swung the branch at him. It struck him in the temple, and he did not move again for some time.

The sky darkened overhead, and he was aware of Gisbourne straddling his leg and pressing the lips of the gash together, but it was like seeing and feeling through a telescope. Afterward he reckoned Gisbourne must have alternately wiped his leg with palm leaves and poured water over him from hollowed papaya skins. After several waves of increasing pain Edgar became fully conscious, yet he didn’t stir for fear Gisbourne would hit him again.

His caregiver wrapped his hand in his shirt and used the makeshift glove to take up Edgar’s belt that had been in the fire, placed a knee on Edgar’s thigh and a hand on his ankle, and put the buckle to the shin. “Hush.” He placed the buckle again, tracing the mouth of the wound with the fiery wand. Occasionally he turned and flogged Edgar with the strap when he jerked too much or returned to the fire to heat the brand. In these interludes Edgar drifted away, trying to find the out-of-bodiness he had experienced earlier—yesterday? the day before?—but he was drawn back into himself each time Gisbourne positioned the brand.

After what seemed hours and hours Gisbourne got up, cast the belt and shirt aside and stepped away, placed his hands on his hips and stretched his back. “You take pain well,” he confided, not looking at Edgar but up at the night sky. The stars swam overhead, and Edgar praised them, thanked God for the pain being over, for he could hardly feel the fire on his leg now. He was shocked it hadn’t killed him, that it was over. For a while they stared at the same stars together, as if they were the only two in the world looking at them.

Eventually Gisbourne broke the silence as he bent to examine his handiwork. “I feel it only fair to warn you…I’ll need to keep you weak. Perhaps you don’t believe me, but I’m no sadist. I’ll be creative in inflicting as little pain as necessary. Do you understand?”

Edgar stared past the looming darkness that was Gisbourne’s head over him. “You’re sweating,” the shape said. “That’s a good sign.”

It must have been the fifth day when he felt strength returning. It first came upon him as an itch to move, a familiar urge that used to set upon him the second or third day of a vacation. On the sixth day, when God created Man, he crawled out of his enclosure and squinted for a sign of Gisbourne. The sky and sun seemed brighter than they’d ever been, and other details he hadn’t noticed before, ground shells and pieces of fishbones mingled in the sand, minuscule bird shapes soaring high above the island, the stench of the half-eaten body partially concealed by palm fronds from the sun and birds, stood out now. His leg also ached more. It was red and white and bare and the skin itself was numb but at least closed.

He had already drunk his own urine twice. The second time had refreshed him little. Sour and warm. He wondered how well the papayas would keep him hydrated. There were two still on the beach by the fire, their plump greenness provoking a growl in his stomach. He staggered toward them, both hands visoring against the light, fell beside them and fumbled to split one open on his knee.

The wind shifted, and across the fire a long palm blew off of Gisbourne’s larder. The face, or what was left of it, had turned black and purple, the eye already beginning to sink in, the arm bared from the shoulder to elbow and again from elbow to wrist, with only some gristle and purple threads decorating bleaching bone. Holes gaped in the flank and belly where Gisbourne had removed the kidneys and liver. Edgar was revolted only distantly, intellectually, as he had been during his conversation with Gisbourne on the plane. His stomach gurgled and he quickly turned away.

He ate the first papaya, forcing himself to eat slowly so he wouldn’t throw it up, setting it aside sometimes when he felt he’d be sick, picking it back up when the nausea passed. When he finished he picked himself up and limped about to clear his head and remind his leg how to work. After one halting circuit of the firepit his stomach wrenched him to his knees and emptied itself all over his trembling hands.

He crawled down to the water, splashed his hands and face, spat it out. His throat burned fiercely. When his hands stopped quaking he made his way back to the fire, took the other papaya, and took shelter once more to eat it. This time he took two or three-bite intervals between rests or crawls. By the time he finished he realized his will to survive had cropped up again, like a weed in pavement. His stomach still queased but he mastered it prone in the shade, massaging his temples with his fingertips.

He settled back to think for what he realized was his first real thinking since landing. His first thought: Oh, the irony of for the first time hoping for survival only now that it’s too late for hope of rescue. Search planes would have been all over the sky during his fever and delirium, but even half-alive he might have dragged some branches together to make a sign on the beach to spell S.O.S. Even flat on his back he could have reflected sunlight with his belt buckle. The thought that now he had some responsibility for his predicament now nearly throttled his hope. He began to reason with himself lest he lose his new drive. You hear of people surviving these things. Even two or three hundred years ago. People are eventually found. Maybe more will wash up from the plane that we can use.

He’d been lost in thought for some time when Gisbourne returned, naked, with a half-plucked gull dangling from his right hand. He tossed the bird at Edgar’s feet. “Finish plucking it.”

Edgar could barely stand to touch it. Its eyes were bugging out and its skin was dotted with blood and broken quills. When Edgar had done his best he crawled down to wash his hands, and when he crawled back up the other knelt beside him and slit open its back end with his sharpened belt buckle. He reached in, yanked out a fistfull of entrails, tossed them aside, twisted the bird’s head off, held it draining over his mouth, licked his fingers again, and met Edgar’s eyes as he rammed a branch up the slit in the bird’s rectum that emerged from the neck. He licked his fingers with popping sounds, eyeing Edgar all the while.

Edgar watched him languidly turn the spit on the forked branches bookending the fire. The other turned and met his gaze and neither dropped their eyes. “Why don’t you build your own shelter now that you’re well enough?”

“Oh. I thought—”

“Really? You don’t appear capable of thought.”

“Fine. I’ll go…other end of the island.”

“You’ll build it right beside mine. You won’t go where I can’t see you. Remember, your strength is a privilege.”

Edgar eyed his enemy’s crouch that both made for easy reach to the naked bird and would let him lunge forward at a second’s thought. He forced a shrug and got up and felt Gisbourne’s gaze following him to the edge of the woods. Gathering several loose fronds in his arms and then rising shakily, he scanned the beach for branches sturdy enough for a frame. “I’ll need to look in the forest for branches,” he called.

“No. Use what you have.”

Edgar threw them down. “You bald, pasty fucker.”

To his surprise Gisbourne chuckled, and since his back was to Edgar again, he went to the hut and poached several tall, stiff palms he thought Gisbourne wouldn’t miss, watching his long bony spine all the while. He counted twenty paces down the beach and began leaning his materials in teepee fashion. When he leaned others to the apex the original supports collapsed sideways. Cursing, he tried the project again, twisting off leaves to tie posts together. When he had three bound at the top, he returned to Gisbourne’s lean-to for two more. He began to construct palms together around four of the structure’s five sides, trying to interweave horizontal fronds with vertical ones. Whenever a wall collapsed under his aching hands he would spin away, kick the sand and swearing, but Gisbourne didn’t look or acknowledge the theft of branches.

Once he was satisfied the walls would stand the wind, he stopped to watch the sun sink and stars peek out one by one. He remembered that explorers had navigated by them and that he might even be able to tell where they were. They twinkled into the purple heavens faster than he could count them and more than he’d ever seen, constellations taking their stances like dancers on a stage. He knew few such formations beyond the astrological signs, and those not even in order. Neither did he know where to look for them, nor what they should signify. He only guessed that he wouldn’t be able to spot the Ursas or Orion, and, as pins of light slowly pierced the sky’s mantle, he forgot for a minute how alone they were.

Edgar lay on his back with warmth in the back of his throat and in his nose as though he had been crying, wishing he knew what he was supposed to do and begging up there for help, but he had no idea either what help could possibly come. It wasn’t only the thought that at this point the planes had already been out and back. The stories in Sunday school he’d turned half an ear to when he couldn’t help it had remained like some vestigial wrinkle of his cortex, the Jonahs and Samsons eaten or blinded for running or lowering their guard. If God smote for such understandable transgressions, what hope did an adulterer merit? The chance, best case scenario, of pity? A quick death? Maybe death on a forlorn island in the Bermuda Triangle was the one way God could keep Edgar from fucking up. Maybe that was all the mercy he deserved. Maybe he’d forgive his trespasses in the end, if Edgar ever managed to feel bad enough about Liza that he’d reject her in every hypothetical iteration of the future that existed only in the mind of God. Forget about daily bread. What was left of the old prayer to him now but the last requests? Deliver us from evil.

Part Three→

“Huh? Oh, thank you.” Like a dying man accepting a new treatment, Edgar accepted the cushion. It curled about his neck like a python.

The stewardess moved on down the aisle. A few lights shone over night owls reading books or watching movies, but he envied the rest. Did one get used to this? How many flights would it take? His seatmate’s gray head dipped close to his shoulder. It had already rested against him twice. How many flights had he been on?

Edgar had promised Shelly he’d finish her manuscript by the time he got back. Then again, he had the quarterly report due at the end of the month. He eyed his briefcase under the seat in front of him like a beast in its lair that also never slept and shoved it deeper with his foot.

He pulled a magazine from the pocket in front of him. Someone had already done the crossword and sudoku. Oprah’s top ten self-care books…he slid it back in the netting with the flight safety manual.

“Can’t sleep?”

Edgar turned his head toward the man across the aisle. He was older but fitter than Edgar, wore a gray sportcoat but no tie and his top two buttons were open. He had a neck pillow on his lap and a cup steaming in hand. His forehead was very large and his smile also a little too large for the time of night.

“Nope.”

“Nor can I. I stopped trying a long time ago.” (Edgar didn’t dare ask whether he meant many hours or many flights ago.) “But there’s something about being awake when no one else is. Especially twenty thousand feet in the air.” He smiled even wider. “Your name?”

“Edgar.”

“Gisbourne,” the other replied, trading his beverage to his left so he could reach his warm right across the aisle. “I hope I didn’t disturb you. I thought talking might lubricate the passing of time.”

“Not at all.”

“Where are you bound?”

“Miami.”

“Aren’t we all?”

“Well, yes. I’m meeting my family there.”

“And before this? The reason for your trip?”

“Business.”

“Not pleasure? Or does your business allow for both?”

“Just a meeting with some brokers.”

“Where?”

“Belgium.” Then, reluctantly… “You?”

“I am on a lecture circuit. Edinburgh to Zurich to Copenhagen, to end in Miami of all places—speaking to a big firm during their destination onboarding seminars—before I voyage home. Arizona: a change of climates from what I am accustomed, both meteorologically and socially. So polite, Europeans. Eager to learn, or at least to listen.” He spoke with the sort of precise diction of one who’s studied English a long time to the point of eliminating accent. Edgar found he hadn’t placed the man’s origin by the end of a long monologue he had mostly missed, and that the other was watching him patiently and a little condescendingly.

“So…you teach history?”

“Economics. I am writing a book, which I am promoting. The God of Civilization is its working title, although that’s a tad pompous. My publisher is eager to, as he says, ‘sex up’ my work. Ha. They can listen or they will not. I only care that the truth is published.”

“Well, you sound like a philosopher.”

“Ha. I hope that is a compliment.”

“I liked philosophy. It prepared me better for my field than my business courses.”

“You should have studied economics. Economics or biology, the scion of economics. The rest are pseudoscience—psychology, philosophy, chemistry—ha, mere children. No, all is in economics. Which a truly wise man need not even study. It can all be reasoned to. A child could.”

“Well, nothing less common than common sense.” Edgar detested his own tendency to resort to platitudes to back out of conversations. He shifted the bean pillow up behind his head and twisted away as much as the seat rests would allow.

“Philosophy misses the point. It seeks to answer why by soaring over the mountain rather than to its peak. Why read Sartre or Descartes when you can read Marshall or Darwin? Well, I suppose there’s Machiavelli. He was an economist. Smith, another. Or, if you prefer fiction, try Rand.”

“Maybe that’d help me sleep.”

“Any truly successful man must know economics. And you? Are you successful?”

“Trying,” he said with eyes closed.

“How?”

“Accounting. Our biggest client has some dealings in Brussels.”

“‘We?”’

“My wife, son, and I.”

“A family business! That’ll illustrate my point better than any other scenario. In your case, being a successful businessman, family man, and economist are all one.”

Edgar shifted positions and put on his sleep eye-mask.

“To be successful in the family, you need economics. Managing finances, the supply and demand of loyalty, trust. What we call love. Politics is a child, not the parent.” He could feel Gisbourne leaning across the aisle. “Understanding the needs of your family. We must eat today to invest for tomorrow. Economics and biology run back to the dawn of man and still further. Ask any squirrel. Now, how do you meet their needs? Through your business. And how do you meet the needs of your business? Through your family. Two levels of econo-bio-politics. If one falters the other falls to pieces and vice versa. Are you willing to do anything for your family?”

“Of course.”

“Then must you not be willing to do anything for your business?”

“I guess.”

“There.” Gisbourne sat back as though he had made his point.

“As you said?” Edgar demanded, taking off his mask.

“I’ve illustrated the difficulty, nay, the absurdity of your position. You can’t do both. You simply can’t.”

“What? Run my business and my family?”

“A conflict of interest. There will come a juncture when you must choose one over the other. Sacrifice one on the altar of the other. What if your son errs balancing the books? Your wife relates poorly to customers? Then? Do you keep them in an effort to preserve domestic tranquility? If you do, phthb to your business. If you sack them then you have saved your business at the cost of domestic politic.”

“We don’t have those issues. We do just fine.”

“But you’re trying to facilitate big clients with accounts overseas, Edgar. Overseas! You’re a mom-and-pop operation. You don’t have the expertise. Maybe junior and the missus were the best for their jobs before, but now you’re growing an empire. You need more than they can offer. Marc Antony put aside his wife for Cleopatara, and it wasn’t for her beauty, you know.”

“Shelly and Jack are the best there is. We do fine without outsourcing, thanks very much.”

“No need to keep up appearances with me, Edgar. If you cared about appearances you’d have brought them along. But what do you care what I think? I’m nobody to you. You’d eat me if you got the chance. Yes, eat me. It’s what you’ll have to do one day—sooner than later at the rate you’re going. Even keeping the one afloat without the liabilities of the other, you’ll have to do your share of killing.”

“Whatever.”

“And if you’re going to run a mediocre family and a mediocre business, you’ll have to do even more. To weed out weakness on one end, competition on the other. To deceive your customers that you’re fighting the good fight for them when you’re losing on the home front. There you are.” Again Gisbourne reclined as though accepting ovation.

“There I am what? What are you trying to prove?”

“Merely pointing out your position. But no worry. What you must do is no more than every other creature has done since we slithered out of the soup in our monocellular blueprints. You’ll just need to be more ruthless than the rest.”

“I don’t know about that. Cracking heads isn’t in our business model.”

“Ha! It’s not just in every business model, it’s in your DNA. There are no businesses when you come down to it. That’s why your degree was a waste. There are only human beings and economics. The founding principle? One must do anything in order to preserve itself. That’s how we evolved. That’s how every species evolves. Economics precedes biology. Every man, ape, fish, eukaryote for itself.”

“What about herd mentality?” said Edgar, annoyed at himself for participating. “The species that let themselves be killed for others in the herd to survive? Put themselves in danger to keep others safe? Cows, I think. Monkeys. They don’t just flee and let the lions take the little ones.”

“Do you think the apes do so out of anything less than self-interest? They keep their herd mates alive so they may continue to feed on them. I can’t eat a lion, but I can eat you. Say we’re mated, you and I. I hunt, you gather. You would sacrifice some of your energies to ensure I survive so I will keep hunting for food for you, yes? But if it came down to it, my life or yours, you would choose yours over mine any day.”

“Yes, yes,” Edgar began before Gisbourne had finished speaking, excited with his own coming argument, his ace in the hole, “But humans aren’t like that. We’re the top of the food chain, the peak of creation.”

“Ha,” interjected Gisbourne.

“Which means we’re the perfect animal, or perfect as animals get. And we will lay down our lives for each other. I’d give my life for my family, or even for most of my friends, for that matter. I’d do it in a second. Because I love them. There,” as an afterthought in Gisbourne’s own style.

The other was shaking his head. “Do you not see what your argument makes you? A necessary ingredient for natural selection—the casualty. The weak one who dies. Your genes will be exterminated. The compassion gene will weaken the pack for only a few more generations before it’s eliminated by those who take advantage of you and your offspring. Do you see? If every monkey laid down its life for every other monkey, the lion would catch them all. Why do you think we are what we are? It’s not hard to see where we’re headed to know our ancestors were the selfish ones.”

“Compassion isn’t weakness! It’s strength to put someone else’s needs ahead of your own. To see beyond what’s good just for me. Isn’t that how civilizations were built and inventions—invented? Other people are worth looking out for. That’s the core that built society.”

“It all amounts to the same thing, my friend. When the sun is up and the crops are good, we work together and look out for each other, because I need your crops to survive. But when the famine comes, I will eat you. Or you will eat me. Whoever is stronger.”

“So you’re saying everyone should be as ruthless as possible? Is that it?”

“Live how you please. But nothing interferes with nature’s course. Free will on a macroscale doesn’t exist. Our DNA is programmed unavoidably toward survival. Nothing you or I do will change it. So why flounder against the current? You’ll succumb faster.”

“We’re made for more than survival,” Edgar growled. “Man is different from your monkeys or—or—little cells. We do things animals can’t. We’re good at higher things.”

“You are too pure for this world, my friend. You are holding out for something, maybe? Ha. But this is the only world. The only place you are going is death. Sooner than later for you compassionates.”

The head of Edgar’s companion sagged against his arm once more, and he gave it a shove back with his shoulder. The older man gave a jolt, sat up straight, then lowered his head the other way. Edgar sighed, anger and weariness feeding on each other. Thankfully Gisbourne did not speak again. Without realizing it Edgar began to drift toward sleep, but before he could reach that dark shore the speakers chimed overhead. The captain’s voice came on, asking everyone to fasten seat belts for turbulence. The passengers stirred. Edgar looked out the dark window. Absolute nothingness below. No lights or anything.

“Didn’t bother you, did I?” the man sitting beside him asked. “Dreamed my head was on your arm.”

“No, not at all,” said Edgar.

He was adrift in his mind, sitting in either a hammock or a rowboat beside Liza in a two-piece and gardening gloves, who handed him a tequila sunrise and kissed him on the lips. “You shouldn’t kiss me like that,” he told her because he knew he had to. “Shelly will—”

“Will never know,” said Liza, reaching down his pants with her gloved hand.

“Oh, oh,” said Edgar. But she kept reaching down, down his leg, toward his calf, which he realized was on fire. And then he knew this must be the limbo between life and his brain’s synapses firing their last. Why was it her? Why the thing he felt worst about?

He slowly came awake, around him the gray ocean with dawn filtering through a foul gray haze over smoldering wreckage. There was a suitcase with the handle all the way extended bobbing up and down just out of reach, there a cleated shoe with a black crater in the heel, there an uninflated life jacket. In one direction he could see one of the wings still afloat.

The liferaft squeaked under Edgar as he raised his head and shifted positions to look for the rest of the plane, and rusty water coursed toward his weight. As he moved his right leg he felt fire burst again and he cried out. His pants leg was torn and so was what lay under it; he couldn’t look at it now. Instead a different horror, as though they were waiting for him to think of them before they showed themselves; he spotted bodies. They floated six inches or a foot below the surface, faces invariably pointed down toward the depths and sinking farther each moment he watched until they were gone.

I must be in shock for that not to shock me. His few snatches of memory made him worry about the state of his head. It felt okay, but was that a symptom? He remembered the lights flickering and his seatmate asking what was going on. And then a stewardess said something urgent, and the masks dropped from the ceiling…That was it. That was all he had.

There was the rest of the plane, a gray lump half a mile or a mile away; without landmarks between it was hard to tell. Suddenly it seemed everything to reach the plane before it submerged. He stuck a hand in the cold water. With several strokes he turned his raft to face the wreck. He scanned for anything he could use as a paddle but nothing he saw would suit or that he could bear to touch.

Sprawled across the width of the boat he put his hands in the water on either side. His progress was so slow it seemed he wasn’t moving at all, and he growled and swore and panicked and slapped at the water. He thought of putting his legs off the back to kick but shifting his leg at all daggered pain through his body. He splashed water on his face to ward off nausea. His nose burned from the salt, which brought a lucid memory of the raft inflating and hitting him in the face as the wing of the plane tore off like aluminum foil.

Every stroke was a prayer he’d reach the plane before it went under, every breath a muttered, wheezing plea. God, I’ll never see Liza again. Just get me to that plane. Why pray to get to the plane, idiot? What then? Better pray for a quick death. Better pray you have some brain hemorrhage that’ll do you in sooner than that leg. No, pray for another plane. A helicopter, a ship. The coast guard will know about the crash by now. They’ll come looking for survivors. They’ll find me. If you don’t bleed out by then. God, let me die quickly. God, let me live, as long as it doesn’t hurt too much. Why would God listen to you?

So preoccupied, he closed half the original distance between him and the plane before he realized it wasn’t the plane at all. He sat up, mouth hanging open, to stare at it, to convince himself of what he was seeing. He blinked, rubbed and stung his eyes with saltwater. No mirage. He lay low in the raft again and paddled desperately as though the island had just as much danger of sinking.

He reached the shore, toppled from the boat into the shallows, dragged himself ashore on his elbows. His leg flamed, the rims of his vision filled with spots. He got up to where the milky sand was dry and pried the cuff of his ruined pants up to his knee. The laceration on the outside of his leg nearly spanned his shin. An inch deep. Muscle fibers and maybe bone glazed with sand. Edgar looked at it calmly, detachedly, the way he’d looked at any number of corpses at funerals that no longer resembled anyone. He abstractly took off his belt and cinched it around his leg just above the knee, crawled back into the water to wash the sand away. The belt’s pressure somewhat dulled the burning. When he had done as much as he could stand he crawled back up on dry land, unbuttoned his shirt and wrapped it around the wound. It filled with blood immediately. Edgar shrugged. He laid down on his left side, propped the raft against his back between himself and the wind, instincts he didn’t know he had, and went to sleep.

When he woke the sun was out and the haze of the burning plane and kerosenic smell of jet fuel were subsiding west. He brushed away sand crusted to his face and squinted around at the ocean. On the shore several things had washed up. An oxygen mask like a shriveled eel. A shirt, a few plastic bottles, a shoe that reminded him his own were lost. He sat up and thought about these things for a while. The bottles might have some water in them. He could use the shirt as a replacement bandage. Somehow he couldn’t bring himself to care about any of it.

With forced effort he tipped the raft over, tossed sand in it until the wind stopped moving it, and crawled down to the waterline. Two bottles were empty, one was capless and full of seawater, but the fourth was closed and half full of sparkling water. He tossed it up the beach and groaned his way toward the shirt. He dragged it and himself back up the sand, sat with both legs in front of him, wrung the drips from his new bandage and slung it over his back. He shivered as he reached for his leg and gingerly tugged at the shirt wrapped around it. About three inches in the middle of the shirt remained glued to the wound, which bared a gruesome lipsticked mouth through the mask. Edgar bit his lips as he pressed his calf with one hand and pulled with the other, pulled until he saw black spots and fell over retching and cursing.

He propped himself up and saw a figure making its way down the beach. He squinted. Fleeting hope—he watched it for a long time before he could tell whether it was moving closer or farther from him, and as it neared him he held his breath, waiting for it to disappear.

Now it was close enough to see its face. Edgar rocked back and groaned.

“Hello Edgar. How fortunate you survived.” As if they had just crossed paths on the street. Edgar did not look up but he saw Gisbourne’s shadow fall across him.

He seemed uninjured and dry; barefoot, trousers rolled up to his knees, jacket folded and two-fingered over his shoulder. He knew without looking what he’d see in the knowing eyes, so he asked without meeting them, “How long do you think before they send someone?”

“Could be hours. Could be days.”

“We’ll have to keep an eye out. Do you think we could build a fire?”

Gisbourne made a slow show of searching his pockets, even those in his folded jacket, for matches, shaking his head with a pronounced grimace.

“Is there anything else we can use to signal?” Edgar hurried. “The raft’s bright yellow. It’ll show up to a pilot.”

“Edgar,” said Gisbourne.

“Or a mirror. Have you got a mirror?”

“Edgar.”

“...What?”

“I want to ensure we understand each other. That you have a grasp of the situation and try to disconnect passion from it as much as you are able.”

Edgar finally looked up at him and saw what he’d been fearing.

“Just as in economics, nothing is personal.”

“Bullshit. That’s bullshit.”

“Easier said than done, I know. Given our conversation up there, I think you already know that I detach emotion from will and action.”

“If you hurt me, that’s fucking personal.”

“A frog eats a grasshopper. Does the frog will the grasshopper harm? A phagocyte engulfs a bacterium. Is that personal?”

“We’re not frogs.”

Gisbourne interlaced his fingers as though to say, same ecosystem. “You may take it personally, but I don’t mean it that way.”

“Whatever. Just leave me alone.”

“We have plans to discuss.”

“What plans? Seems like you’ve already figured it out.”

“I will give your civilization a go, since you are injured. And while there are crops.”

“Crops?”

Gisbourne motioned with his chin.

Edgar watched the tall man stalk back into the sand. He wondered after he had been gone a long time if he had dreamt the whole thing. He wanted to go back to sleep, but his leg gnawed itself after his attempt to remove the bandage. He lay waiting, knowing he would not die, not for some time, and that made waiting for whatever he was waiting for worse.

After a long time he noticed Gisbourne, still a long way down the beach, bent forward and advancing very slowly. Edgar stared mesmerized as much at the thought of what these crops could be—concessions from the stewardesses’ cart? a tote of a hungry passenger?—as at the angular steps this figment of the desert took.

Twenty yards away it occurred to him what the thing may be, at ten yards the slow realization dawned to horror.

“While there are crops,” Gisbourne said, letting go of his burden.

Edgar glanced up at the other survivor only for a second before he had to look away. The agony of his leg, the throbbing of his nose, the salt brine on his lips, the heat and coarse sand were each a pinch against the notion he was dreaming, but the calm reasonableness with which Gisbourne looked and spoke belied their reality, finding the figment’s effortless assimilation of their plight into existing schemata more horrible and less believable than the grisly thing at his feet.

“You can’t be serious.”

“Look, Edgar, the way I see it—the way you ought to look at it is—it’s him or you. This—this dead animal or you.”

“I’d rather die.”

Gisbourne shrugged. “I suppose, in a way, you buy time by fasting. As long as I can eat....”

“You’re sick,” Edgar growled, still staring out to sea, wondering if he would have stood a better chance out there, adrift, swimming, drowning.

“Suit yourself. But I suggest we think about how we can advantage each other, for now, while there are crops. I can scavenge for resources, water, castoffs and other leftovers, while you build shelter and prepare food. I can range abroad, while you take care of home. I hunt, you gather. Understood?”

“Prepare food? Not unless you find some.”

“Like it or not, if you won’t pull your weight, I’m afraid you’d be no use to me. In fact, you’d be a liability. I’d have no reason not to harvest you. But if you play your part, I’ll take care of you. I’ll find the materials and keep you fed. I’ll dress your leg.” His shadow, the only part of him Edgar could see, dropped to one knee. “What about it?”

“You feed yourself. I’ll feed myself. I’ll take care of my own leg.”

“Edgar, don’t be silly. A child could see you’ve no medicinal talents. You’ve slowed the bleeding, but without circulation you’ll lose the leg long before infection sets in. Let me help you.”

“Don’t touch me!”

The shadow stood up. “I’ll eat. Then I’ll look at your wound.”

“I said I’ll help myself,” Edgar growled at his back. He could not resist turning over to watch him recede, dragging the body behind him. Hot tightness burned his throat, the feeling of crying that he would not let out, and at the same moment his stomach growled obscenely. He watched Gisbourne pass into the foliage and disappear.

He pushed away the cajoling hands of tiredness and pushed himself to his hands and knees, got to his feet and tottered down to the waterline. Flotsam bobbed among the waves too far out for him to go and too far out to see clearly. Nothing aside from scraps of ash and clothing had reached the shore. He hobbled back up the sand toward the wood and tore at the thick shrubs. Everything he could reach was fibrous, not wooden. The trees were not trees, but tall fronds. Cursing, he stumbled in deeper, battling with the stems and leaves that choked eyesight.

He touched and looked for anything he could construe as a weapon, a fire-starter, a shelter. A hiding place. Nothing. Just plants that gave him little room to breathe, let alone see more than a yard in front of him. Claustrophobia and fear of not finding—what? the same godforsaken strip of beach? No. No, my only hope.—drove him back the way he had come.

He emerged and collapsed to the sand, resolving on what he feared he would soon convince himself was out of the question. He picked himself up, crawled toward the inflatable boat and turned it over to shake the sand out. He gathered the extra shirt and bottle and dragged the raft toward the water, glancing back at the forest every other step. He knelt on his injured leg in the boat and pushed off with the other, and immediately the sand fell away beneath the water. Wind beat him. The boat was filling. One instant it was there, then the rubbery yellow ruin had shriveled beneath him and sunk into the depths, and Edgar found himself floundering, his leg burning and freezing. It was in his eyes, his mouth. He heaved himself toward shore, choking, gagging. His body felt heavy and his kicks useless except to bob him one breath before he went under where there was no bottom; when was the last time he swam? The water entered his lungs as easily as it had entered the ruptured raft.

Suddenly something grabbed him and pulled him by the neck. He choked as his face came above water. As he went under his heel gouged sand and sharp shells. And then he was ashore, racked by shivers and dry heaves. Gisbourne brushed water from his slim, naked torso. Edgar retched and coughed. “You did this.”

“Civilization prohibits suicide. It allows only deaths that serve a purpose. Like you said.” Suddenly Gisbourne knelt and tore off Edgar’s bandage. Edgar flopped on his back whimpering, allowing the long fingers to probe his gash. “The salt helped dissolve the scabbing. I guess that’s one benefit to your rashness. Give it some air, then wrap it up again.” Gisbourne calmly pulled his own shirt back on. “You ought to eat. You’ll need more iron to keep up your strength. And your blood count.”

“I’ll eat…a plant.”

“Then there’s water. Whether or not there’s water to be found, we’ll need a receptacle to recycle our own. Keep an eye peeled for that bottle you found. See if it drifts back to shore.”

Edgar watched his enemy move toward the shrubs like he had all the time in the world.

Part Two→

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Private Ahmed raises his hand, speaks when Sergeant calls on him. “Sir. In the quietest way possible, from as far away as possible, with as much damage to the head as possible.”

Sarge nods. “And how do you know when to fly rather than fight? Anyone? Private Bradley, how ‘bout you?”

The man raises his head from the seat in front of him. “Huh? Whatsat?”

The Sergeant repeats the question.

“I don’t know. When you’re surrounded?”

“If you’re surrounded, how are you s’posed to run? Do you know what ‘surrounded’ means?”

Some laugh but most remain silent, hoping Sergeant’s spite won’t turn on them.

“Does anyone with more than half a brain know when to run? Anyone even care to guess? Please? When your gut tells you to run, you run. When you feel panic eating your guts, then flee before the maneaters can get at ‘em. But if you can shoot from a safe distance, you’re breathing air free of the germ, then blaze away. Do the world a favor and weed some deadheads.” Sergeant’s eyes rove over his crew. The bus hits a bump, and everyone bounces or grunts at the shock. Everyone except Sergeant. He maintains his stance in the center of the floor, leering at his nine recruits.

“Say your girlfriend’s got a weird bite on her shoulder. But she’s coming at you naked with that look on her face?”

A few men exchange looks and roll their eyes. Private Ty speaks up. “I’d blow my ex’s head off either way, sir.” Everyone laughs, even Sergeant.

“Very funny, very funny. But all assholery aside, if we get home after this mission and your family comes out to meet you, but they’re all scratched up and acting weird? What do you do? Do you go up and ask what happened?”

The men shake their heads.

“Your mom is there. She’s crying and holding your little sister in her arms. The kid’s throat is shredded. Mommy’s sobbin’ her heart out and calling you to come help. What do you do?”

The men are more reluctant this time. Most avoid Sergeant’s eyes. Private Perry murmurs, “I would approach carefully, shotgun cocked—.”

“Wrong,” Sergeant barks. “Anyone tell me where Private Perry went wrong? He said he’d approach. The girl has clearly been killed by an infected. She’s about to reanimate and start biting. Mommy has the kid in her arms. Blood’s all over her, probably in her pores already, not to mention the fumes she’s breathed. In a few minutes she’ll be one of ‘em too. So you don’t even come near them. You shoot ‘em both.”

“But—”

“No buts, Private.” Sergeant stomps down the aisle toward the man. “You shoot, you blow their heads off. Ain’t nothing can be done for ‘em.”

“But they’re not turned yet. They’re still your family.”

“Your family is about to jump up and rip your face off,” Sergeant roars. “Better to shoot too soon than too late!”

Perry stares his officer in the face for a few moments, then turns away, cheeks flushed and eyes hard.

Striding back to the center of the bus, Sergeant asks, “After your family is dead, what do you do?”

“Shoot ‘em again,” Private John drawls, smoke climbing from the cigarette in his hand to the roof. “And then again just to be sure.”

“Right on the mark. And after their heads are blown to bits, then what?”

“Leave the bodies sit for ‘bout an hour. Let the germ die before you let the fumes in the air. Then burn ‘em.”

“You’re a survivor, my friend,” Sergeant says. “And we don’t just burn infected corpses, we burn—?”

“All our dead,” Private John finishes for him. “Not lettin’ the germ git in with the bodies.” He sticks his cigarette back between his lips and puffs.

“Sir,” the driver, Private Eric, calls. “We’re here.”

The men turn their faces to the warehouse out the windows on the left. The bus squeals to a halt before the gate in the chain link. A few of them grip their handguns in their holsters, plug shells into shotguns, jam magazines into AKs.

Sergeant’s voice draws their attention back to him. “You haven’t been issued hand weapons for a reason: If you got a machete in your hand, you numbskulls might stand your ground when a meateater gets close. Your pistol is as close quarters as you get. Some idiots argue blades and crowbars are quiet and never run outta ammo, but bash one of those things and its blood’ll be all over you.” As the doors fold he smiles at his crew. “Be safe and stay together. You do just like I told you, and you’ll be fine. Now get off my bus.”

All the recruits but the driver, Private Eric, pile out but stick close to the vehicle. Private D’Var sets to work with wire cutters on the chain link fence. Ninety seconds later, Sarge ushers all his men through the hole into the lumberyard, fingers lingering just outside their trigger guards.

“Spread and clear,” Sergeant instructs, and his men pair off.

Privates Bradley, Ty, and John soon find a hole in the tin sheeting. “We got ourselves a security breach, folks,” says John. “Do we board her up, or—”

“Go exploring?” Ty interrupts. “I sure as hell ain’t staying here to schlepp two-by-fours.” He steps through the hole.

Bradley hesitates. “Should we tell Sarge? He’d wanna know.”

John shoots him a withering look. “What you wanna do that for?”

“We don’t know what’s out there.”

John cocks his head and listens. “Hear any infected growls, boy? No? Then I guess it’s safe.” He crouches through. Bradley follows a few steps behind.

The forest seems to creep up to the structure. Overgrown by ivy, a bench stands beneath a giant oak with tentacular roots threatening to overtake it. The sidewalk that skirts it cracks and buckles. John and Bradley can see Ty’s head poking above the bushes maybe fifty yards into the woods. Branches snap under their feet, and they tread more softly. Finding Ty humming and singing to himself, they shush him.

“What a park,” Ty says over his shoulder. “Look what I found!” He holds up a handful of red berries. “The woods are full of ‘em. Juicy and ripe, just like your sister, John.”

John flicks his cigarette butt at him. “I’d beat your ass, but my sister could do it for me.” He slings his shotgun over his shoulder, pushes aside foliage to reach for berries, careful to avoid their thorns. “We oughta bring some back for the rest of the guys.”

“If we take ‘em past Sarge, he’ll know we came out here. You got a container or something?”

“Nuts to that. Let’s just scarf ‘em.”

Privates Roy and Donald load a wheelbarrow with bales of fertilizer. Roy pauses to wipe his eyes with a handkerchief while Donald wheels the load to the bus.

“Crying?” Sergeant sneers.

“No, sir. Just allergies, sir.”

“Allergies.” Sergeant squats beside him. “Make you sneeze a lot? Get you coughing?”

“Sometimes, sir.” Private Roy smiles sheepishly. “This one time in spring, I—”

“Dangerous thing, allergies. Very noisy.” Sergeant leans in. “I don’t recall hearing about those…afflictions before you got on my bus.”

“No sir. I—I didn’t think it’d be a problem, sir. Please don’t make me stay back. I wanna be out here. It’s where my brothers and dad would be if—”

“I’m letting you be out here ‘cause we need recovery men, not because I’d drop a single deuce for your family. On your feet ‘fore I change my mind.”

Private Roy springs up as Donald returns with the wagon; “Yessir,” and reaches for another bale of fertilizer.

Privates Ahmed, Perry, and D’Var slide long planks out of their dark dimension-sectioned holes and onto trolleys. The materials will be used to repair shelters and build fortifications. More families arrive every day, but the governor fears some may carry the germ and orders all chinks in the village’s armor to be boarded up so that these wanderers can only enter at the gate. Not until they last a week in quarantine outside are they eligible to enter. Some turn out to be germed and turn before the eyes of the watchmen on the palisade. Some pick up the germ from the shanties full of refuse and offal outside. The watchmen have strict orders where these are concerned.

“This is wrong,” Perry mutters as he chucks a board onto the pile.

“They keep our families safe,” D’Var reminds him. “One of ‘em gets through with the germ, we all die.”

“I don’t buy it. Our watchmen take down the infected like we’re taking down these boards. Even if one got in, it wouldn’t get close to the houses.”

Private Ahmed looks at him. “Perry boy, have you ever taken one down? Ever seen one taken down?”

Perry blushes and shrugs. “I’ve seen them, but—”

“You’ve never had ‘em come at you, so you’ve never seen how fast they are. Almost none of this bunch has. Some of this crew ain’t never seen a deadhead. Hell, my first time I shot the thing til its guts dragged on the ground and its arms were hangin’ by threads. But it kept coming til I blew that sucker’s head clean off.” Ahmed spits on the ground before loading another board. “Take no chances, suffer no losses.”

Private John looks back at Private Bradley who stoops with one hand braced against a tree and the other on his stomach. “‘Sup, Brad?” he calls, lighting another cigarette.

“I think--I ate too many,” says Bradley.

Private Ty laughs. “You an’ your delicate tummy. Hey, Sarge might have some pepto you can have. Bubblegum flavor. Should I go ask him?”

Bradley uncurls his middle finger from his stomach.

“Brad, why don’t you go an’ shit behind that tree,” John suggests. “Should help you feel better.”

Private Bradley’s belt clanks as he loosens it and squats behind the tree. His friends seem miles away. They may as well be if a maneater lurches out of the brush. Now Bradley has one hand on the ground to steady himself and the other on his holster. His ears pick up all sorts of snappings and scurrying in the wood…could be a horde of those things with gaping mouths and skin like melting candles…

“Get it together, Brad,” he snarls, pushing extra hard.

Private Roy hefts the last roll of insulation from the pallet into the emergency door at the rear of the bus, and Donald drags it forward, snug with the others when he stands up and dusts off his hands. “Bless you,” he says.

Roy sniffs. “Thanks.”

Sergeant rounds the corner of the warehouse and strides toward them, white-knuckled fists pumping at his sides. He slides through the fence, swearing as a jagged end of wire catches his arm. He claps a hand over the red streak. “Wheel that dolly back here, boys. We got lumber coming in.”

They take it back through the breach, bumping over divets in the concrete. Privates Ahmed, D’Var, and Perry pass them going the other way with the wheelbarrow balanced with six-by-eights. “Thanks for the help, jackoffs,” D’Var says in passing. “Where was that dolly ten minutes ago?”

“Up your ass,” says Private Roy, sleeving his nose.

Sergeant has his walkie to his mouth as they unload the lumber. He lowers it long enough to shout at the driver, “Private Eric! Get off your sphincter and help these boys get a move-on. Takin’ all damn day.” They don’t hear what he’s saying in the walkie because Sergeant keeps his voice low, but it’s taut as the muscles in his neck like steel cables as he stares down the road into the woods the way they came. Only a few words sift back out of the walkie, but one of them is “deadhead,” and they hear it several times.

Private Roy slides onto the dolly as many sheets of drywall as will fit, then looks around for Private Donald, who went to find some bags of concrete. The shadows are lengthening from the tin-roof awnings into the courtyard. “Don?” he calls hoarsely.

From his waist, Sergeant’s voice says, “Who’s carrying the other walkie? Private Perry’s got one. Roy, do you got it? Private Roy, come in please.” He’s getting madder by the second as Roy fumbles to unclip it from his belt.

“I’m here. What do you need?”

“Find where Privates Ty, John, and Bradley went. Jackoffs ain’t nowhere to be seen.”

Roy clears his throat and swallows hard. “Roger that, sir.” As he slides the walkie back into his pocket Private Donald slaps him hard on the back from behind, guffawing as Roy gasps and twists away with both hands going for the machine gun at his side. “Asshole,” he snaps. “You hear Sarge? We gotta get going.”

“Speak of the devil,” Donald remarks as the walkie crackles with their C.O.’s voice.

“Boys, it’s getting dark and the guard back at the gully spotted a herd. We don’t get our asses back through there soon, the sound of our bus’ll draw ‘em like flies to shit. Private Roy, go out in the woods an’ see if you can round up those good for nothin’ sons of bitches. Rest of you boys c’mon back.”

Private Donald spits as Roy grimaces at the directive. “That’s what happens when you carry a walkie. Extra duty.”

Roy stalks away and quickly finds a triangular slit in the tin sheeting, man-size, with boot prints in the gravel outside leading into the woods. “Shit.” He squeezes through, his AK-47 clanking against the torn metal. Another sneeze blasts out of him.

Stones crunch under Sarge’s boots as he paces, cursing his men, their haul, and the scratch on his arm. His men watch nervously out of the corners of their eyes. “How big a herd was it, Sarge?” Private D’Var asks.

“Big enough.”

“Can we go another way home?”

“County double H is blocked, retard. That’s why it took so long getting here. There’s no other way.”

Private Eric hoists the last board into the back of the bus and slams the door. “We oughta shoot our way through. We got the rounds. We could drop a hundred deadheads easy.”

Sergeant looks at him in disgust. “You don’t shoot your way through a herd, dipshit. You are a stupid bastard, aren’t you?” He looks around at the others, Private Ahmed smoking and leaning against his 20 gauge, Private D’Var sitting on the bus bumper, Private Eric standing with his arms folded. “You think these things are slow like the creeps in the movies? They come at you inhumanly fast. They fly when their blood’s up. I’ve seen squadrons go down. They won’t stop for tear gas or a busted bean like some fag picketer. They shred the shit outta soldiers with multiple tours. They’ll guzzle you sacks of meat in a second.” He raises the walkie again, switching channels with a beep, asking, “Sarge to lookout. Any word on that herd?”

A staticky voice replies, “Looks like they’re heading south away from the road, but it’s too soon to tell. Be careful out there, Sarge.”

Private Roy stops, listens. He can’t hear anything in the thicket, trees crowding in and branches threatening his face and tangling his weapon and arms. He can’t see much either. His damn throat and sinuses are killing him. He plugs one nostril and launches a wad from the other, then switches sides. The pressure between his eyes makes spots swim in front of him. He takes another step forward, not seeing much of anything at all, and a branch catches him in the throat. Private Roy doubles over, retching and hacking.

“Hello?” a voice calls, very near. “Who’s there? Roy? Is that you? Say something if it’s you.” The voice is building speed and timbre. He can picture the other man frozen wide-eyed in the woods. No more than four, five yards away. “Roy, where are you? Who’s there!?”

Private Perry sees a shape rise up between the trees, growling and spitting. “Holy shit,” he cries. Dropping the walkie, he grasps for the Glock at his belt. He’s proud how quickly he brings it up, clicking the safety off the split second before opening fire, hearing the shape say “It’s me”... the sound of a large heavy weight crashing down among leaves and bracken out in the dark.

He flinches as birds take flight, a bluster of wings somewhere overhead in the canopy. The rest of the woods is very still, except for the heart of Private Perry. He tastes bile.

Then Sergeant’s voice, quiet from the walkie on a bed of brown leaves. “Whose shot was that? Roy? Perry? One of you sons of bitches better pick up right this fucking minute.”

Gun wrapped in one hand, Perry lifts the walkie with his trembling other. Sergeant is still talking but the words are rushing by. Now it’s Perry who struggles to clear his throat.

“I shot something,” Perry’s voice finally labors through the walkie. “I–I think it was a deadhead.”

Privates Eric, Ahmed, Donald and D’Var watch Sergeant pace and scratch his arm. “Well Perry, you better get your ass back here in two seconds before this woods is crawling with those buggers,” Sergeant grates. “Roy, are you there? Roy, pick up.”

Blind with tears, Perry crawls through the woods hearing the walkie on his waist echoed by its fallen mate calling out behind him on the forest floor.

“Son of a bitch,” Sergeant raves. “Private Ahmed, you’re on lookout for John and those other fags I don’t remember the names of. Those bastards better get back here or I’m leavin’ their sorry asses.”

Ahmed shoulders his shotgun. Eric edges his way toward the bus door. Donald feels his fingers trembling as they clutch his sawed-off. D’Var has his AK-47 leveled at the woods crowding the lot, the trees more menacing than a horde of the living dead.

“Think they got all of ‘em?” Ahmed asks no one in particular. “Ty, Brad, John?”

“We heard only one shot,” Sergeant shouts.

Eric is in the driver’s seat cowering out the window, the other three form a line with their rifles raised and aimed at the woods, Sergeant with his handgun and hand up calling hold, not yet, wait until we see something. There is only quiet.

“This is it, boys. Shoot for the heads.” Sweat pours from his brow. “Blow their heads off.”

The trees crackle a ways down the road, figures lurching through and out of the brush, arms raised in front of them. Guns cock and safeties click off. “Wait!” Sergeant rasps.

It’s Ty, John, and Bradley; weapons in their hands, trotting, looking back over their shoulders, Bradley pale and staggering, bent nearly double, the other two straight and tall but alarmed, apparent even at the distance of fifty yards.

“Stop,” Sergeant yells. And then drops like a bale of fertilizer. His men shuffle sideways in shock, swiveling their guns. The others at a distance see this and begin to run, then skid to a halt, John first and then the other two, who stop and look at the dawning in his eyes, the grim twist of his mouth.

“Sarge? Sarge?” D’Var stoops at their C.O.’s side and reaches out to shake him. Donald snatches him by the sleeve and jerks him back against the side of the bus.

“Where the fuck were you?” Private Ahmed shouts at the newcomers. “Dead heads?”

“Uh, yeah!” says Ty, too slow for Ahmed’s liking. “Just checking some stuff out. Turned out there weren’t any.”

“Yeah,” John affirms, not liking how Ahmed’s rifle is pointed at him. A football field away, but it may as well be right against his chest. “Where’re Roy and Perry?”

Ignoring the question, Ahmed locks the butt of his AK to his shoulder. “What’s that on your face, Brad? You got bit?”

“Nevermind that,” D’Var mutters, tugging his sleeve. “Look!”

The slit on Sergeant’s arm is puckered and oozing blood and white clumps of pus while the rest of his arm flames in patches from wrist to shoulder.

“Did you touch him?” Ty shouts, pointing his shotgun at D’Var. “Did you?”

“What about Brad?” Ahmed retaliates just as Private Bradley retches up red globs. “You better get back from that dude before—”

That’s when Sergeant sits up, eyes crossed, spittle stringing from his half-open mouth. The others scramble away. Eric in the driver’s seat turns the key in the ignition and the bus rumbles to life. “What the hell,” Ty yells, moving to block the center of the road. Brad on his hands and knees behind him pukes.

“John, you got red on you too,” Ahmed shouts. “That your blood?”

John pauses and looks at his right hand. “It’s not blood. It’s--”

No one hears what he says because then Sergeant falls over on his side, his arm outstretched groping above his head as he makes odd snuffling sounds in the dirt. Then he lies still.

“John and Ty, put your guns down,” Ahmed shouts.

“Why the hell should I?” John sneers. “You been breathin’ Sarge’s air this whole time. You put down yours.”

“You got deadhead blood on you, and what’s with Brad? Is he bit? Where’s Perry and Roy? What’d you assholes see in the woods?” Ahmed shakes his rifle at them. “Well?”

Brad kneels, wiping his chin. “I’m fine, really. I just ate—” His face transforms into a look of horror and he hefts his rifle, aiming it at the group by the bus, none of whom have been watching behind them. “Look out!” He squeezes off four rounds at Sarge, misses, fountaining up tufts of dirt yards behind them, before Donald returns fire. The cloud of buckshot casts Private Bradley onto his back under a crimson geyser. Ty and John dive to the side. Ahmed strides forward, aiming from the hip, demanding to know if either of them got Brad’s blood on them.

Then Sarge is scrabbling, humming, grunting at his feet. Ahmed staggers away, swearing, while Donald recoils against the bus, eyes locked on the worming form of their CO while feeling blindly for the door.

In these few seconds Ty hisses to John, the two of them plastered to the gravel with firearms aimed at their fellows across the way. “John, they’re infected. Sarge told us to shoot.”

John rolls to plank position, steadying his barrel. “Ahmed and Don—”

“Are breathing that shit in. We gotta shoot.”

John takes in Ahmed, still fighting to kick Sarge’s hand loose from his pants cuff, and Donald several paces back. “Don, get down!” he shouts before squeezing off desperate rounds with an abstract hope that he’ll miss the others and only hit what was once their Sergeant, that if one of the others is truly infected it’s probably Ahmed and if he’s going to warn one of them it ought to be Don... Ty shoots too, so it’s unclear whose bullets ricochet off the bus’ dented mustard hood, which plod into Sarge’s legs and hindquarters and which explode Ahmed’s left kneecap.

Ahmed collapses screaming in the dirt, Donald stands like a statue, Eric likewise frozen at the wheel, the engine idling, while only Sarge in the moment of ceasefire seems unaffected, groping his way toward Ahmed with a ravenous growl. Suddenly the back of his head explodes in the return fire of the grounded Private Ahmed, who strafes the width of the road. Ty topples over with a scream and John dives for cover.

As the dust begins to settle Donald steps forward to survey the carnage, the muzzle of his shotgun lowered at Ahmed. “Are you bit?”

The other scoots back with a prolonged cry of pain, his leg a mess, blood pooling beneath him and soaking his jeans. “No, he never got to me.”

Donald looks back at Eric, whose drained face stares, and Ahmed amid the remains of Sarge. “His guts are all over you, man.”

Ahmed rests when he’s back a fully bodyspan from the corpse. “No shit. Get me hosed off, retard.”

Donald looks back at Eric, at John who raises his head gingerly from the road. He raises his shotgun at him. “Stay down. I don’t know about you yet either.”

“Don,” Ahmed pleads, staccato breathing as he reaches for him. “The bleach is—is in the back. Please…”

Donald looks at Eric a third time. “We have to go.”

John stands up. “Look guys, you murdered Brad and he wasn’t touched. He got sick on some wild berries in the woods. That’s it. You’re the ones who…”

Hand on the railing of the bus steps, Donald pauses. Ahmed pleads, “The biters’ll be here any minute. Don’t leave me.”

Donald looks back at him and grimaces. “You’re already dead, mate.” His face twitches when D’Var, who climbed into the emergency exit door at the rear of the bus during the standoff, shoots him in the back. Blood sprays the windshield, the console, and Eric, who screams. “What the hell, man?”

“He touched Sarge!” D’Var yells. Pauses. “Didn’t he?”

“So did you!”

“Guys,” Ahmed wheezes, dragging himself toward the bus, attempting to hoist himself onto the steps, avoiding the body of Private Donald lying with head and arm in the dust with feet sticking up in the air in the bus, “Guys, please.”

“Drive,” D’Var says, AK leveled at the man in the dirt but eyes on Private John out on the road, clouded by droplets of blood on the windshield. “Eric. Drive.”

Eyes straight ahead, jaw clenching, Eric presses the “close door” button and it slams to, folding Don’s legs up over him and dropping him to the ground. Ahmed rolls away cursing and sobbing in the bloodclotted dust. The bus lurches forward.

John rolls aside as it crushes Ty’s body under its front, then its back left tire. The engine kicks into higher gear as the vehicle distances itself from the bodies and few survivors. Then there’s a muffled thump as the bus jerks abruptly to a halt and the doors hiss open just in time to emit the crumpled form of one of its two remaining passengers. The bus hums like a huge beast and rumbles forward again after emptying its gorge. John watches its tail lights pass under the trees and vanish in dust and shadow.

Somewhere in the woods he hears other things crackling through brush and bramble as a backdrop to Ahmed’s whimpers. Son of a bitch, he thinks, sticking a cigarette between his lips and clicking his lighter with one hand and cupping the other around it against the wind and puffs twice. One minute and everyone’s dead. He approaches the fallen private amid the remains and slings his gun along with his own behind his back. “Well, if you can walk, let’s see if we can get out of here.” Private Ahmed’s hand is slick with blood that John wipes on his pants, and pivots in time to see a snarling shape lurch from the treeline. He raises his rifle at the bloody form. It raises its hands and chokes, “Don’t shoot!”

Taking in the gaping hole in the newcomer’s right shoulder, John lowers the weapon.

Roy hawks in the back of his throat again and shakes his head, surveying the bodies on the road, looks a long time at Ahmed with his blown out kneecap and then all the bodies. “What the hell happened here? Zombies?”

Private John flicks his cigarette and toes the ash into the gravel. “Yup.”

We ordered our chai latte and macchiato, found a seat at a varnished table in a back room, set up our laptops, scanned the plant-ridden walls for the network and password. An end table in the corner posed a pitcher plant next to a half-empty cup of water resting on a napkin with a plastic straw.

I stood up. Why don’t we take a look at the greenhouse?

I’ve got a lot of work to do.

Me too.

We walked up and down the aisle among flowers and ferns, sprawling mosses and stolid succulents. She shivered. Can you imagine having these in your house?

Might be refreshing.

It gives me the creeps. They’re too wild.

Too wild? These nasturtiums are more manicured than your nails.

They’d get in the way and take up space where you put art, furniture…

This cactus wouldn’t take up too much.

That? It doesn’t need water or even look real. It doesn’t look natural. Ugh. Let’s go back.

We returned to our seats and sat down. She put in earbuds. I looked around a little longer at the potted pricetagged plants on windowsills and stands and wondered when I would end our relationship.