Although I pay no attention to apples in the real world and even actively avoid them, they often surface in my conscience in slices of fantasy, mixing with vague mythical connotations in scenes of pleasure and destruction. Last year, I went deep into a internet dumpster diving session researching apple breeding, while trying to write a short story about vaguely incestuous twin sisters who grow up on an apple orchard and kill each other. The iconography of the blood red apple holds its strength in the obvious power it has across storytelling traditions, it is lust, it is desire, it is sin and passion and the forbidden. It’s immortality and destruction, when an apple enters a story there is no going back to the way things were before. An apple is fate you can hold in your hand.

When I was a child, I read and re-read a Beverly Cleary book about some old-timey girl in some old timey town, the title of which escapes me. There is a scene where the main character accidentally forgets to bolt the gate of the pig pen, and during the night the pigs escape and gorge themselves on rotting apples. The next day, she is horrified to see that they are slobbering drunk, inebriated off of the sweet ferments of an orchard passing into the next season. As a child, that scene was hilarious to me, the image of a pile of drunk, farting pigs being fretted over by a horrified Caucasian girl. Even funnier and stranger to me was the idea of being drunk, much less on apples, which to my knowledge at the time were omnipresent, waxy globes of mediocrity in school lunches, to take two bites from and throw away. And to have the power to make a thing drunk! There was something delightfully evil about that, that association between the innocent apple and drunkenness, which was a concept I only understood through overheard conversations between my parents about so and so uncle who had drank too much at some family function, always mentioned with a sigh, laugh and shake of the head. I wanted to know what it felt like to be drunk and arouse the loving ire of my boring mom and dad. I would play at being drunk, staggering around the house and flinging myself on the bed in various dramatic positions.

In my unfinished short story, I described the apple as the jewel of fruits, pretty and tasty. A ruby red gem begging to be consumed, always with a price, as brilliant as a blade shining with fresh blood. A bite from an apple could damn humanity to sinful impulse, could start a war between jealous gods. The smell of fallen apples, cidery and rotten, softening in the fallow dirt of an orchard conjures romance and danger. I remember the rough, knobbed branches of the apple trees that grew behind my local library, which produced small, hard fruits that were always disappointingly fibrous and tart, tasting more like an apple-flavored radish than the way an apple should. The pleasure of eating them was more for the satisfaction of picking them off the tree and scrubbing them clean with my sleeve, rather than the taste. I think of slow days of being dropped off at the library on the weekends, when I would read romance manga instead of real books, browse the DVD section and wander around the apple trees outside among the crows when I got bored. I also remember the view of green, rumpled leaves casting a shadow over the windshield of my car, as I discovered masturbation with all of the cautious sexual frustration of a proto-adult, parked in the far corner of the library parking lot, half-terrified of being caught. Thoughts sliding to the older brother of my friend, who was literally my next door neighbor, how predictable. Being sixteen and driving back home with a handful of small apples, left on my kitchen counter as a small offering of penance for my secret misbehavior.

A small town library, surrounded by apple trees and crows, how erudite and romantic. Was my life much more beautiful and interesting than it appeared to me back then? Writing this now I’m tempted to roll my eyes, what good is mining your past for romance when you can’t feel it in the moment of life itself? Sometimes I think writers are the most severed people walking through life, always preoccupied by watching ourselves to find things to write about, exploiting life to make something out of the infinite disappointment of things never being as beautiful or painful as we wish they could be. The deeply important truth of the matter is. If only we could find it, buried deep inside. Right now I am looking for something, some sentence that makes some tastefully rebellious linkage between apples and sexuality, when I literally haven’t been touched in more than a year. I think I should be outside making stupid decisions and baring my soul to people instead of sitting crunched up on my couch dreaming a life that lays somewhere beyond my scummy windows and the fuzzy grey skies. I should be the fucking apple. I should be fucking apples. The apples should be inside of me, I should be fucking them until they become apple puree. Nothing should be something that I do and anything should be everything that I am. Those foolish little library apples, revealing themselves now from the damp fantasy warren of my childhood, would probably be small enough to go up inside me. I’d eat the apple after i’ve fucked it, or maybe i’d keep it inside until the juice dripped down my legs. Someone could lick it up. Worth the yeast infection? They should make a tasteful apple perfume, something sweet and vegetal and dirty, I would wear the shit out of that.

The body as a receptacle for apples. The body as a receptacle to receive another person. Apples as a substitution for another person. Delicious midday demons fighting for my attention as hot wind blows through my windows and my bare skin is licked by the oscillating fan. If I keep writing forever will I reach the end of my thoughts? I want to go pre-cognition, before the first apple was eaten. When Eve eats from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, God condemns them to die. But they were always going to die, they just didn’t know to fear it. Death is a misunderstanding of time. First a juicy sweet apple, then the slow apocalypse of thought. An apple demon rides at the front of a congregation which snakes around the fourth dimension. No I will not be explaining further.

Upon doing a quick internet search apparently the concept of Eve eating an apple is a misconception, actually the specific type of fruit was never specified in the Bible. Now my previous revelations are void and null. According to Google AI, some of the top alternative candidates for the forbidden fruit include figs, pomegranates, grapes, citrons, quinces, or even apricots. Apples, apparently, are not the only fruit.

The bath smells of eucalyptus and a faint whisper of bleach. I soak my old bones, candlelight smoothing over the mounds of my body into a more pleasing shape. Weird, weird, weird feelings, a spikiness that the heat can’t quite strip away. Hungry and empty. What do I want? How should I treat myself? I need to piss. I let the bathwater drain away and lay there, silent and vacant, like a beached whale. I let my own gravity press down against the porcelain like I’m under a huge warm foot. I piss while laying still, the relief is beautiful. Sebum vaporizes from my skin, my organs would perform incredibly around a meat thermometer, my piss comes out steamy and kind. I feel my piss pool under the arch of my back and coat my ass on its slow journey down the drain. I have free will, I could lie here in my own piss until the next day if I wanted to. It’s the little joys, I’ll take it.

From where my bed is positioned, the two arched windows on either side of my wall directly align towards the windows of the people who live in the building next door. Little perforations into the private lives of strangers. Through my right window, across the gelid space sliding over the neglected backyards of the floor-level tenants, I can see the dark green leaves of a fiddle leaf fig through a slit of glass interrupting a brick wall. This neighbor sleeps late, the lights are often on past one, two am. I imagine that through that window is a kitchen, and that a couple cooks meals there, although I don’t know why I think this. Through my left window, through the ramble of a tree overgrown with dark ivy, another slit of glass interrupts another brick wall, although this wall is a pale gray color compared to the rust red of the other. The light that comes through this window is sometimes an eerie marine blue. Perhaps this neighbor is trying to achieve some kind of “mood” lighting, although what mood they are trying to accomplish, if not a sickly underwater headache, is beyond me. Maybe a boy with a confused sense of aesthetics lives here. Staticky splashes of color from a television spill out from this window on most nights. The overt symmetry of this spatial arrangement is pleasing to me, I like to be in my own little box and have the sense that things are happening in little boxes separate from my own, that the world is made of people and people are, in fact, the world.

People are the world. I am part of world, but I’m having a hard time understanding my place in it. There exists two lattices, a lattice of events caused by people, their choices, their carelessness, their conclusions, that weave together in a matrix of cause and effect. The second lattice is the one within each one of us, personal threads of events that make the story of our lives. Where these threads intersect become nodes of significance that dictate who we are, how we live. We live inside nets, and both are bisected by holes, the holes are part of their design. People fall through, quite literally to their deaths, or tumble into misery or towards plastic heavens. The weave is precarious but it holds, like it has always held, it’s important to me that the string does not break, but yet I want it to break, what makes sense, what doesn’t, what it all means to me, I look into the holes, the micro ones and the macro, but here I am, still, luxuriating in the confusion of it all, which means that I don’t really have skin in the game, not really. The string holds, and I continue to think about it.

Two weeks ago, I thought I had definitely killed my friend’s dog. This poor sweet creature was doomed to fall through the lattice of events, caused by my negligent decisions. The ten or so raisins baked into the half-eaten pastry I had brought into Jacob’s home would overwhelm his system and kill him. Despite the horrifying predictions of fatal acute kidney failure that the internet was shouting at me, he was fine, his parents unconcerned, the emulsified evil raisins passing through his healthy dog body with little issue. Jacob himself had no idea of the danger he was in, and it was only me, it seemed, who was waiting for death to strike. I think of him fondly, this funny, strangely fickle animal with worried eyes and soft fragrant ears. When I approach him with my neediness, wanting his love, he always sits there agreeably and accepts it. It is a given, more or less. When his tongue dependably reaches towards my face, I take it as a sign of affection, a loose approximation of something I am missing from my life. You give a dog food and a warm place to sleep and stroke its back and it will reliably love you. A dog’s love is creature love. It is baby love. A dog promises family without the psychic burden of one, we manipulate their purity to control them, to make their existence agreeable within the structure of our human lives. Dogs are beautiful, and they are animals. Brute creations, close to the source, even with instincts dimmed.

Humans are animals too, of course, but without the sincerity. The pigeon outside of my window lives in complete earnestness, it is completely transparent. A stray cat lives a free life of it own accord, but she has no choice in the matter. I imagine that animals live in a state of pure feeling, where lust, fear, pleasure and hunger can only be averted or completed. Animals don’t experience choice, because choices can only be made on the level of the mind. However, all of the choices I’ve made in my life and will make in my future are ultimately engineered by external forces outside of my control, I don’t choose my decisions insomuch as my decisions choose me. I don’t believe that external freedom has ever existed and I have never known anyone to achieve true internal liberation. Animals are innately free, or at least I like to imagine, because they exist outside the mental confines of having to choose. Humans cannot seek this kind of freedom because in our seeking, we tumble forward into the void. We can only live comfortably if we fail to understand certain truths, and maybe this paradox is the price we have to pay for our ability to make things and to love.

The universe is a rabble of constantly self-destructing concentric spheres. Dogs are a part of this universe and there is a universe in every single dog. The things that moved me have always been the same, and I don’t quite know what they are but sometimes I can touch it and that’s enough.

The dredges of summer still clung to air, but it was more a feeling than anything, and a tart chill settled in with the darkening skies, a reminder that time spun on regardless of anyone’s protests. It would soon be fall. She flicked her cigarette towards the air, ashes disappearing into the wide, hectoring sky and sweep of bluish greenery that fizzled beneath the deepening evening. The air was clean and light. She hungrily breathed it all in and relished the taste of the sweet, sooty tobacco mixing with the Italian troposhere.

Soft footfalls approached her from behind. She made a point not to turn around, but her skin prickled greedily.

“Hello.” A hand reached the small of her back. The man who arrived next to her was slight and appeared taller than he was, with long, graceful hands and feet. “I was wondering where you went.”

She glanced at the tops of his bare feet peaking out from dark green corduroys. They were pale and startlingly erotic against the cold stone floor.

“Shouldn’t you be back inside celebrating, Mr. Director, sir?” She said this coquettishly. “I’m sure everyone is keen to get you as fucked up as humanly possible.”

He laughed. “I needed a breather. It’s getting rowdy in there. Everyone’s drinking like monsters, and I’m just thinking about how Freddie and I have still got to cut and edit the damn thing.”

Camille smiled around her cigarette. “Oh, chill out Mick. Let some of us celebrate before you inevitably cut out our best scenes. You know how we actors get.” She made a face and flicked her hands around in faux distress. “Egos need to be stroked.”

“Is this a warning? Should I expect some unhinged behavior in the future?”

She looked at him, the tufts of gray speckling his hairline, the slope of his rich mouth, and the way his eyes flickered greenish towards her against the blue evening. It was too much, resisting the gravity of his face.

“Yes, definitely. I might even start today.”

“Really? What would you do?”

Camille had the urge to grab his face and kiss him wildly, right on the spot—instead she just focused on maintaining eye contact and trading oxygen for carbon dioxide.

He gazed back at her. There was a challenge in his eyes, in contrast to the nervous, soft way he rolled and pressed his lips together. She was sure now, that something was happening between the two of them, something dangerous and inevitable. Like sliding into the blue, smooth skin of the lake that beckoned at them through the windows.

“Oh,” she exhaled, flinging her glance back out over the balcony after what seemed like a small eternity between them. “I don’t know. Maybe I’ll take some ecstasy and make out with your husband.”

“Now that would be something.” They were quiet for a moment, watching a few of the crew tumble out onto the lawn, their voices bright and loud in the quiet, forested space.

“May I take a drag?” He wiggled his long, neat fingers towards the smoldering stub of her cigarette. She nodded and offered it to him, but instead of taking it from her, he dipped down his neck and took a long, indulgent toke from her hand, lips almost grazing the tips of her fingers.

“Thank you,” he said, contorting his mouth to blow the smoke away from her.

She said nothing, just ground the butt into the wrought iron railing, but blood pressed hot towards the surfaces of her skin. The wind picked up greedily, taking a litter of dead leaves with it over the lip of the roof.

“Let’s go back inside. It’s getting chilly.” Mick held on to his arms for warmth, which were bare to air. She was struck by how raw he looked in the moment, and strangely fragile, in contrast to the charged confidence he exuded moments before.

A boldness took over her. She unwound her scarf and stepped in close to wrap it around his neck. Two loops, and a strong tug at end, like she was tightening a loving noose. The sight of his moving Adam’s apple was slyly beautiful, but she covered it quickly and surveyed the way the red slunk down over his yellow shirt. “There,” she said, patting her work twice. “Suits you. The red looks good with the yellow.”

“You dressed me like a stop light,” he said, attempting a joke, and it was true, with the red and yellow over the green pants. Funnily enough though, he couldn’t quite manage a laugh, his voice instead creaking with a soft quality that stroked the insides of her ears.

Lingering slowly against the railing, Camille realized she was still fiddling with the fringe of the scarf. She let it fall away from her fingers, and the both of them spun away from each other, turning their backs against the deepening twilight. She was breathless, like she had inhaled a bouquet of birthday balloons. Following him back inside, the sight of her red scarf around his neck charged her with an impish joy, like she had secretly laid a claim. It floated slightly behind him as they wound their way through the corridors and back down the stairs, music jangled with laughter and voices becoming louder and louder as they descended.

____

Camille opened the door. Mick was standing there, hands shoved into his pockets, dirty strings of hair falling into his eyes.

“Hey.”

“Hey.”

Without fail, her heart started pounding at the sight of him, like at the flick of a switch. She nervously shifted her weight from foot to foot, halfway out of her apartment door.

“I’m sorry. I—is this a good time?”

“Not really, Mick.”

“I’m sorry. I just really needed to talk to you. I’m so sorry about the phone calls, really. I just really needed to speak with you, and you weren’t answering, so…” His words rushed into each other and tumbled out quickly, as if he was afraid of what was on the other end of them.

He looked fucked up. He was sucking persistently on the inside of his mouth, the way he did when he was distressed, and his eyes were rimmed in red. He probably hadn’t been sleeping.

“It’s ok.” She felt as though she might tumble apart like Jenga blocks, completely lose structure, but she steadied herself with a measured breath. “What did you want to talk about?” Before the question had fully left her lips, she already regretted asking it.

“Can I come inside?”

He peered up at her, tight-lipped and hopeful. The streets were quiet and dark. She looked his face and wanted to fall to the ground and cry. When it came to him she couldn’t think, couldn’t take a full breath, and all that existed were blistered, twisted feelings that she didn’t have the language for.

“I don’t really think that’s a good idea,” she heard herself saying. She so badly wanted to let him in, but her body did not move, pressing rigidly against the door frame.

“Oh. That’s alright.” He opened his mouth and then shut it again. “I just need to know.” He paused, searching for words in the uncomfortable silence. “That after all of this is over, you’ll be with me again.”

Her brain fuzzed over. She peered at his face, his beautiful, stupid face, watched his eyes flit erratically, locked onto hers, in anxious anticipation of her words. The full weight of their absurdly romantic, stupidly disastrous affair hit her like a tree tumbling down a hillside. She might as well log roll herself down into oblivion with it.

“You left me, Mick.” Her voice was shaking. “You were the one who said that we would be together and chickened out. Do you have any idea what you put me through?”

“I do—”

“No you fucking don’t! Because if you did, you wouldn’t have the fucking audacity to come here and do this to me!”

The words came out louder than expected, and a chirrup of crickets burst back in response, harsh and strong.

“Joseph and I are ending it for good. It’s over.”

She laughed at this. A harsh bark of a sound. Mick flinched.

“Joseph left you. Don’t make it sound like it was in any way your decision.”

He inhaled purposefully, as if he was summoning something up from inside himself. “Camille,” he said, trying to step closer to her, “I know I made a mistake but I see clearly now, I just needed some time to figure it out—”

“You’re kidding me right? You can’t just have me however you like and come crying back when Joseph gets sick of your bullshit.” Her words trembled with the strain of keeping her voice down. She felt sick. Mick’s face quivered between the orange glare of the street lights, and everything felt unstable and on the verge of lurching into something else, like a violent dream. “You don’t get to decide that you want me now.”

“It’s not that, it’s more than that,” he grabbed at her hands, rubbing his thumbs desperately over her fingers. “Please, Camille, you’re the love of my life.”

She shook her head in disbelief. The bland, plaintive quality of his voice, the petulant tilt of his jaw—it was all too much. She pulled her hands back. She scoffed, softly, pinched the bridge of her nose hard, like that might erase what was happening to her. “Right.”

“What—what’d you mean, ‘Right’.” An edge of defensiveness seeped into his voice.

“Like you haven’t used that one before. I’m sure that you said the exact same thing to Joseph so he would let you move back in with him. Hell! Maybe we should be going to joint therapy after all the torture you put us through.” She cackled, nastily, couldn’t help it.

“Oh I see, now you’re glomming yourself together with my husband—”

“Ex. Husband.”

“—against me, the evil adulterer. Don’t act like I was the only selfish one.”

A neighbor cleared his throat noisily from the adjoining unit.

They both sagged. Camille felt a profound frustration wash over her, and the urgent need to be rid of him, this horrible moment. She loved him too. Still, inexplicably. Hated him intensely in equal measure.

She mashed her voice down to a hiss. “I sacrificed so much for you, my career, my fucking reputation—”

“Reputation? What did you think this was going to be, like we were going to become fucking Gena Rowlands and Cassavetes or something?”

“Cassavetes? Ha! You fucking wish. I was never that naive.” His face twinged, feeding her malicious glee. “The fact of the matter is, Mick, is that you used me, you used me when it was convenient for you and you were so okay with stringing me along every time you went back to Joseph. The gaslighting wow…you should play yourself in your next stupid film about self-obsessed men. I know how much you love them.”

“Oh, don’t pretend that you weren’t using me too. You were playing your cards just right, weren’t you.”

“Oh, fuck you.”

“You seduced me Camille! You came onto me!” His hand jabbed towards her chest. “You knew I was married and still fucking threw yourself at me!”

“Yeah. Well. You were practically begging me to fuck you.” The words came out ugly, cold. “Don’t play the victim. You’re a grown man and you knew what you were doing.”

He spun back on the steps and exhaled raggedly towards the dark street before turning to face her again.

“Well what about you?” he pleaded, voice hoarse. “You said you loved me. Do you remember? You wanted me to break up my marriage so we could be together.”

Camille was silent a moment. It was useless statement, he knew it was. For a second she thought she might laugh out loud, but it was washed away with a sickly sweet sadness. The moon was high and bright and beautiful, shining like a big fuck you.

“What were you even thinking about Mick? When we were together?”

“I don’t know, I don’t—”

“What, nothing?”

“You! I don’t know—”

“Me?”

“Yes! How much I loved being with you!”

She smiled at him then, her eyes pained and shining with tears. “You never stopped to think how you wanted this to end?”

“I—” He stopped. “I wanted you,” he said in a too-loud voice that teetered on the edge of a sob. He looked at her pleadingly. “I still do.” His words lingered, and fell, useless, into the night. In his eyes she saw the meager remnants of promises they used to hold. Here, they used to say, here is simple and happy. Here you can have a home.

Camille felt as if all of the love she had ever felt, ever could feel, was mixing with acid in her chest. “I think you should leave,” she said quietly. “Don’t come back here.”

Mick opened his mouth as if to say something but nothing came out. He dropped his head, mute, looking like a kicked dog. Camille gazed down upon him, watched his brow furrow with a faint awareness of numbness creeping in around her pain. When he looked up, he only nodded at her slowly, and his eyes were already clouded over in regret.

Moving automatically, she slipped back into her apartment and closed the door. It shut with a metallic click as she sagged against it. She could hear the soft slap of his shoes on the steps, walking away from her. A sliver of moonlight pierced through the window from a gap in the curtain, landing on one side of her body. She felt bifurcated, split into two. In that moment, she could see Mick as he was, how he once looked to her, his bare feet gleaming on cold stone, leaning into her through the cooling twilight. She also remembered the desperate rasp of his voice from minutes ago, saying “I love you.” She cried then, and thought she might never stop.

____

The party thundered on in full force. Half empty plastic cups of alcohol strewn everywhere, a cloud of spliff smoke hanging over everything. A disco ball spun languidly on top an armoire, throwing rays of colored light that glided over the walls and furniture and people like water. Mick accepted a mystery cup from Marcus, the first AD, and raised it from across the room towards Camille, who was slicing limes with Joanna, a talky production designer with a charming lisp. She smiled serenely towards him, licking salt off her hand after a tequila shot.

“Hey!” Francis, the lead actor, barged into them, hungry for a shot. “Where’d you go?”

“Out for a smoke.” She wasn’t really listening to him, but was watching Mick sidle up to Joseph with an easy familiarity and cup the back of his neck. The music was perfectly loud, frenetic, the luscious (and surely expensive) sound system sending the bass vibrating into the bones of the house, as soothing to Camille as a cat’s purr.

“Let’s dance,” she decided, pulling Francis and Joanna out from the kitchen alcove. They obliged, laughing, and abandoned their concoctions on the kitchen counter which was littered with half empty bottles of liquor. All three of them glided into the living room, which was high and wide and throbbing with bodies. People yelped and slapped their shoulders as they entered, welcoming them back into the fray.

“Guys.” Joanna stopped. “Let’s take them now?” She took out a crumpled baggie of small capsules from inside her pocket, looking around furtively.

Selene looked at the points of molly in their clear cases, and felt a giddy chaos rise up inside. “Oh. I dunno.” She sucked her teeth. She glanced towards Francis, who was already reaching for them greedily.

“Fucckkkk. I’m down.” His deep voice dipped haphazardly into a Birmingham accent.

Joanna gave one to him.

“Give me two? I’m bigger than the both of you combined.”

She huffed and handed him another one.

“Camille? You want one?”

She checked her phone. It was only 8:15.

“Come onnnn Camille. You just starred in your first film, take the damn molly. Marcus said they were cleaner than a nun’s vagina.”

She giggled at that. “Yeah ok. Gimme.”

Francis and Joanna let out a yelp of delight. All three of them tapped their pills together in a tiny cheers, then washed them down with swigs from a glass of beer that someone had forgotten. She felt the capsule tumble past her throat and her heart picked up a notch, the allure of bizarre possibilities blooming in her stomach. They weaved through the bunches of people, dancing and talking, until Mick appeared in front of them. He was nursing his plastic cup and talking intently to Joseph, who nodded and laughed with his hand on his shoulder.

“Hi! We took molly!” announced Francis, smiling widely.

Joseph laughed, an easy sound. “Beautiful spring chickens. I love that for you all.”

Mick looked at Camille and raised an eyebrow, mouth quirking up in a smug smile that was only meant for her. She shrugged back. She felt her breath hitch up into her throat and tried to relax into her body. Waiting for drugs to kick in always made her feel raw and slightly anxious, like she was full of helium.

Joanna was wagging her eyebrows at Mick and Joseph, offering molly to them as well, but they just laughed and said they were too old and already risking a brutal hangover, and that tacking on a comedown would be suicide for the drive back tomorrow. Oh, come on, they all protested. You aren’t that old. But the both of them just laughed and shook their heads, lamenting about the unexpected bodily woes of being forty.

Someone had taken over the DJ table behind them and the music flowed into something else, becoming harder, more energetic. Camille dissolved into it. She needed to move, to be free, a liquid fuzziness was setting in and her brain was starting to glide, smoothed over by tendrils of druggy bliss. The molly was kicking in. She looked around her and saw Francis and Joanna fluttering their eyes closed, it was hitting them too. The house and lights around her looked soft and beautiful, the music stratospheric, she looked into peoples’ faces and saw a radiance that she hadn’t noticed before. Her own moving body felt soft and strong and sensual all at once. She danced like the animal she was, an animal in a girl’s—no a woman’s—body, she played a woman on screen and now she was a woman in real life, a woman owning the pleasure of having a body that she was not afraid to use and would not apologize for.

She smiled at everyone and everyone smiled back. They were all touching each other now, wrapping their arms around shoulders and waists and collapsing into some internal rhythm that was infinitely forgiving. It was so good, it felt evil. Mick was at the crux of it all, swaying and bouncing to the music with a boyish grace. The way the disco lights descended across his body was ethereally beautiful. Her mouth went dry, cracked open with desire.

“Here!” Joseph handed her a plastic bottle, eerily on cure. “Drink some water.”

His eyes blazed with kindness. She liked him, she really did. The gesture felt genuinely heartwarming, and she received the bottle, slightly contrite. The rush of cold water down her throat was life-affirming.

“Thank you so much,” she breathed. She felt as if she might burst of gratitude.

In thrall, she moved her arms and legs with no thought. Sweat dripped down her neck. Everything was in sync, moving through her, bathed in swathes of music and heavenly light. Someone offered her a puff from a spliff and she wordlessly obliged. Arms and veined hands carved through space, piercing the smoky air like beautiful spears. She grabbed someone’s hands and lifted them high. Mick’s hands. They smiled at each other and she thought her heart might explode. A rush of ecstasy overcame her and she dropped her head into the crook of his neck as synthetic bliss melted her limbs into a puddle.

Just before she came to, she felt his hand drop to clutch her waist. Then, a flurry of movement, as someone declared they should all get some air and cool off, Francis complaining of being hot and dizzy. She caught the tail end of Joseph’s bemused glance towards her, as they all tumbled out onto the front porch. There was something puzzled in his gaze that lingered over her for a beat too long, and she turned away, dismissing the thought. The cold draft on her skin was inviting, and lifted the hairs on her arms in a delightful manner. Someone pressed a glass of cold water into her hand, and then everyone was sitting, sharing a smoke. After a couple of long drags, she sat in comfortable blankness, the nicotine entering her bloodstream smoothing over firing neurons like a deluge of warm water.

Joanna was placing a strand of tinsel on Mick’s head. It looked wonderful on him. Throwing his head back to laugh, he looked like some kind of beautiful, tragic king from a Shakespeare play. Mick’s waiting hand offered up a flickering lighter to Joseph, who dipped his head towards him while talking around another fresh cigarette. As she watched them regard each other within the chattering din, brightening embers swam in front of her eyes, and the soft warmth of the lights mixing with the cold night air made everything look still and painterly, yet achingly alive, like a Rembrandt come to life.

Mick sauntered back around towards her, passing her the glass of water, and she pressed it to her face. The cold hardness was biblical. She took a greedy swallow, then left it with Francis, who was having his shoulders massaged by Joanna and lolling his head around like it was far too heavy for his neck. They both chuckled gently at his loud groans.

“How are you doing?”

A smoldering sensation began in her chest and spread into an rabid longing. She felt a lust for the moment seize her. She struggled to form words—she felt the shape of them, but they wouldn’t reveal themselves.

“Good,” she managed.

“You’re a great dancer.”

It’s the molly, she was about to say, but stopped herself. “Thank you. You as well.”

Moths fluttered against the glass lamps that rimmed the patio. Turned against their hazy glow, Mick looked as if he was cut from mulberry silk, the soft edges of his silhouette petering out into inky firmament. She felt that if she reached out, she could pass her hand through him to dip her fingers into that darkness. She wondered how it might feel, and thought of satin and crushed velvet, of things that felt nice.

“You’ve forgotten my scarf somewhere, have you?”

“Actually, I was thinking of packing it away with my things. I quite like it. Thought I might keep it.”

“Oh, really?”

“Yes. Your wrap gift to me.”

Their voices were getting quieter and quieter.

“It’s quite a nice scarf, pretty expensive. I don’t know if I want to give it to you.”

“Please do.”

“Why should I?”

“Because I like things that feel nice.”

The inevitability of the evening was coming to a head. She was sure of it. The darkened sky seeped into Camille’s bones, and with it, a rupture, an imprint of confidence in each other’s mutual desire for the forbidden. She shivered, a manic gust of wind snatching the breath from her lungs, the clean wind of God.

She leaned towards him. “Come find me later,” she calmly instructed, before disappearing inside.

____

He had found her later, down in the barely lit kitchen. The house had fallen into quietude, majority of the cast and crew winding down in drunken sleep. But she was wide awake around her tiredness, the last remnants of molly drawing out feeling like the reverberations of a plucked string.

“Joseph?” she asked.

“Asleep,” he whispered.

She could barely see him, just a darkened form punctuated by a splash of light from the moon. She heard him draw a breath. Then she took three quick steps towards him, and grabbed his neck with a fury, mashing her mouth into his. The heat of his mouth cut. He responded, hungrily, grasping her body towards his with all the fury and strength of pent-up desire.

They separated an inch, and looked at each other. His eyes were wide and unguarded, and she saw in them a simplicity that dismantled her. He was near and he was hers. Beautiful and close and a little dangerous, just like her.

She collided back into his warmth with more urgency, shivered when his stubbled mouth scraped her throat. I want you, I want you I want you, she whispered possessively as they rushed up the stairs, clumsily, frantically, delayed by their refusal to break apart for more than a millisecond at a time, and crashed into her room, tangling onto the bed. She leapt up for a split second, remembering to ease the door shut, and turned the lock.

He was waiting for her on the foot of the bed, shirt already discarded, the shallow rise and fall of his waifish chest lurid and vulnerable. He looked up at her with wet eyes. She pushed him down onto his elbows and then knelt to the floor, running her tongue around his belt buckle, lapping at the grooves of worn metal the way a mother cat would wash a newborn. It tasted of blood and the stones beneath the earth. Mixing together with the smell of old leather, there was something mineral, amniotic about it. She reached her hand inside his pants. Mick’s breath was loud and chaotic, and hitched nicely to the movement of her fingers. He grabbed her hands and put them to his face, bathing each of her fingers one by one in his hot saliva, sucking and licking them clean. The wet inside of his mouth was a revelation, the tongue as dexterous as a mindless red animal. She closed her eyes and imagined tumbling down the darkness of his throat. When their mouths met again, the taste of metal passed to him too—she felt like meteors were colliding in her brain, she thought she heard the sound of bells tolling, old ones cast in bronze.

Affection and pleasure poured out from her. Every touch was conductive, electric, light but also with depth, turned up to almost too much. She took and took and took from him in a way she never had before in her life. They must’ve said some words to each other but she couldn’t remember anything—it was hardly sex, it was knotting, it was as if they had entered a new galaxy of biological stasis, she didn’t feel human, the intimacy of their bodies seeming to defy civilized conventions. She was dimly aware of the drugs still in her system, but didn’t care. She wanted to mix their atoms together, to bathe in his skin. She wanted to crawl inside of him. Curl up in his ribcage with one foot dangling out.

When it was over, they huddled together in a pool of innocent, tired comfort, like two children. A heavy warmth hung limp over the bed, pinning them together in their complicity. There was nothing left to do but laugh with disbelief.

“Thanks for being in my movie,” he said with false mawkishness, while gathering his clothes. It was very like him, attempting to make a joke in a moment like this.

She laughed softly. “Fucking psycho. Don’t start now.”

He kissed her on the hand before quietly slipping out, like he had to. She lay on the cooling sheets, moonlight lapping through the curtains. The darkness of the room shrunk around her, eager and aware. Inside of herself, Camille swayed and spun lazily, as if she were on a raft. Looking up at nothing in particular, she searched for guilt or some feeling of wrongness, but couldn’t find it. Instead she felt intensely alive, as if she stood at the precipice of a mysterious world. The night was sincere. It shone with the threat of great promise, like something puzzling and glorious was going to happen, or was already happening, she was sure of it. She closed her eyes, and had the sensation of being bisected by clouds, and that one half of her was forming into an entirely new, godlike being. Her breaths lengthened as sleep pulled her down towards the incoming day, as the sound of rushing winds collided overhead.

Which leads me here. Writing this substack. I told myself I would write today because unfortunately I identify as a writer and I have not been writing. I have been too lazy to work on my fiction, which requires research, yuck. I also have not been reading much, which dampens my sensitivity to the world and the impetus to write. I need to read something good soon. I do not trust people who don’t read (and self help doesn’t count). Literature, I think, beyond any other artistic medium, is a direct contact with someone else’s thoughts, initiating a strange inverse process of holding a foreign presence inside of yourself that somehow also overlays your entire life. Something about the banality of words on a page, bonding together with the basest level of communication, can feel like an infinite shrinking into one’s inner depths while living in someone else’s mind. How to explain this feeling to someone who hates to read?

A good sentence can flatten reality to a single dimension. A fuck you, I suppose, against the distressing tangle of everyday life. Maybe all art made in earnestness is an act of revenge against reality?

Yesterday, at an ambient show in Gowanus, I split a bar of mushrooms amongst a few friends and waited for my revenge. The set started off thin and crystalline, while gradually becoming heavier and heavier, more and more notes crashing into each other and endlessly resonating until the sound collapsed on top of me like an anvil, powerful, dark, intensely decadent. Music is an astonishing mystery, like a moving secret. I put my head down between my legs and listened to the sounds of a friend breathing next to me. I felt I was being crushed under a hydraulic press, my entire being condensed into a single particle. I was overheated, my whole body tense, the sound wringing my mind into a perfect thing. Next to me, my friend’s dark curls fell over his knees. We were were both curled up like turtles. What in the world? Who allowed such beauty? I’m really not trying to sound dramatic, but in my altered state, watching an old man design a miracle in front of me with one guitar and a few tiles of metal, seeing my intoxicated friends’ heads tip and back and forth with enraptured despair, I really felt that music could save the world from its wretchedness.

When the lights turned on, everyone staggered up as if emerging from a dream. We clutched each other and made sounds and said some words, trying to process, but within three seconds of the ambient set ending another DJ started playing from the other end of the room and I stumbled out to empty my bladder. My time to continue processing is now, as I write this. In this moment, it’s a bit funny to recognize the power of the initial experience passing and remember me tabling my thinking because of inconvenience, to now resume my thinking fourteen hours later. That’s the power of the human mind I guess, our cognitive ability to compartmentalize doing the heavy lifting to keep us level and functional, but also acting as an uneasy permissive for the facism and evil that creeps in our society. At one point during the concert I envisioned a dog passing through and wondered what it would think of all these people cloistered around a wizard making a room fill with loud sounds. It must be nice to be a dog! To have soft lovely eyes that look out at people and the world and to be content and forgetful amongst endless confusion.

Something I’m always seeking is the feeling of being stretched into a new configuration by two opposing forces. If two contradictory things exist at two opposite ends of a scale, reaching both ends at the same moment means that everything in between is also being witnessed all together at the same time. This is what I mean by flattening reality into a single dimension, a moment where all is accounted for and understood with equal pleasure. The spectacle of high places and the reassurance of the earth. Light and darkness, silence and speaking, life and death. To be alone with myself, in my strange soft breathing body, while holding on to someone else. Seeing my own soul walking around in another. In these moments it’s almost like God, or the universe, or whatever higher power reaches down from the vast and degenerate cosmos to poke your shoulder.

Sometimes I find this in music, sometimes in a book, sometimes in sex, sometimes at the tail end of a panic attack. Being terrifyingly alive, everything wordlessly stretched taut right at the cusp of ugly and beautiful.

I’m not sure how to end this piece so maybe I’ll share something random I wrote in 2023:

The first time I walked into the old house, I remember what my son used to talk about, each time he came home with his face flushed rosy from running about in the wildness that surrounded that place. It was falling apart, still, like he had told me when he and Billy used to visit there, and I could almost see his red bike and Billy’s yellow one strewn on the patchy knots of grass that overlooked the tangled scenery. Through the rotting door, he told me, animals used to lie and pant in silence. But when I entered for the first time, it was empty and quiet in the way long abandoned places are. The sunlight seemed farther away. Sounds were dampened and hushed into woody silence and the only thing I could make sense of was the quickened beating of my own heart and my own breath, which sounded loud and desperate to my ears. He told me there were creatures here that lurked in corners and didn’t make a sound, wolves and sea birds and huddles of foxes that swished around the corners, and they seemed to be lying in wait, in stasis, puzzling and waiting for something to happen or for something to find them. My son told me they would go up and touch them, gently dip their fingers into soft fur and murmur towards them, but they paid them no attention. There were no such animals here now. When he told me those things, I did not believe him, but brushed them off as fanciful stories that only a child could come up with. But Billy had said the exact same things to his mother, and said them with a fervency that made me wonder. Where is this house? I asked him, would you show it to me? But my son only answered that he could not for reasons he refused to reveal, with a wry twist to his smile. It disappointed me, that he might keep secrets from me at that age. Now, with my footfalls leaving marks in the clotted dust in the place he once revered, I felt the urge to fall to my knees and disappear. The roof above me was riddled with holes, and the light that fell through pierced my world like spears of desire. I missed my son. And I knew that this place missed him as well, in a mysterious way I could never understand.

I looked for signs of animals. I looked for dried up droppings, for tracks on the winding peeling staircase, for fur and feathers caught in splintering wood or for dead nails that skittered in the curls of wind. There was nothing. No trace of any living thing, but somehow I could still feel their presence, the whole house creaked and moaned like a sleeping beast. My son’s voice whispered in my ear of fawns that lay on ruined cushions, their long legs bent delicately under them and feathery eyelashes fluttering in sleep.

Somehow, while thinking about the ambient set while writing this piece, I was reminded of this broken mansion I wrote about two years ago. Which somehow feels like a memory, although it’s fiction and I never lived through it. A vague cobbled feeling of a grieving mother, of two lost boys that maybe I mixed with my friends’ faces. Strangely, in the moments the music became transparent and softer in its strangulation, I dreamed of floating down cloudy American roads.

I had a fucking day yesterday. It crept up on me, as the day wormed forward, I became more horny and depressed. I slept like shit the night before, despite taking a Klonopin in the middle of the night. Woah, woah, woah, I thought, did I take my anti-depressants that morning? Yes I had. On the toilet a long thread of gooey clear discharge dispensed from my vagina, dangling from the used toilet paper at a length that I found to be very impressive. So I was ovulating. My body was ripe for impregnation. Sorry womb! Instead of sperm, I decided to symbolically impregnate myself with porn and the harrowing knowledge that people are suffering and dying and starving all around us and stoke the furnace of my rage that has nowhere to go. I donated some money, 25 dollars here and there, cried a little (I would have liked to cry more), and achieved three unsatisfactory orgasms that were forced out of me from the jackhammering head of my vibrator, each one inferior to the pervious. I hate when masturbation feels clinical. I cooked lentil soup and felt very lonely, looked at weighted blankets on Amazon and realized that they are very expensive. Who are you, annoying books and people always seem to ask, when you are alone? What a stupid platitude—I am nothing, I am a long sigh, I am the one who is writing this substack. I don’t care to “find myself” anymore, I only want to enter other people more deeply, more fully, to achieve pleasure in breaking myself apart against the shards of others.

Why do I write? Because I want to show some secret part of myself to other people. I want to leave something of myself, smear myself against the passage of time, to infect others with a glimpse of something inside of me that makes no conceivable sense but feels correct. I don’t really care to seek out my own personal truth through writing, I have long understood that my mind goes in circles and up and down and sideways in a way that is very stupid and very intense. I don’t care about making sense. Words are there to give order to thoughts, but making sense, that’s a whole other thing. Feeling is a beautiful, fecund scrawl and words are the things that take form and can be excavated from feeling as stand alone objects. As I am writing this I am also writing myself and as I am writing myself I am also getting closer to myself while getting farther away. A sentence can be a place of respite, but it’s never somewhere to fully rest. The gaps between the words, the indefinite spaces that language circumambulates around but cannot confine is where I sink, spellbound and outraged, grottos hiding dark space, black holes tunneling through the heart of matter.

On a day like today, I feel like a motherfucking genius, drunk off of my own jaundiced privileges, recycled thoughts hammering through the keyboard disguised as something wonderful. I like my outfit today. A red sweater, light-wash denim jeans, white socks and vintage penny loafers that give off a chic grandma vibe. I feel very writerly. Sunglasses and sightly oily hair, Dior lip stain. Against the backdrop of airless corporate tech and swarms of men wearing Allbirds, I feel cool, special, as if my slightly prettier clothing and slightly more esoteric interests make me better than the other people in this giant, carefully designed and partitioned machine. In all honesty, it's such a slog. It’s pathetic that a part of my personal joy is derived from something so stupid. I don’t know anybody and nobody knows me, I might as well not exist in this place, no one is thinking of me. I’m sure everyone else is walking around with their own ideas of what makes them a wonderful person.

Thesaurus.com is my holy codex. It’s incredible how much style can be achieved from switching a word to a slightly different one. It can be the difference between a meek sputter or a small decadent explosion. When I am moving through the world when working on a piece, words skitter around between my ears, little red cockroaches gnawing at my brain. Sentences coagulate quickly and dissolve away just as fast. I need to remember, I need to gauge their value, to see how they slot into my beautifully tragic inner drama. The reality I am moving through recedes, I itch to catch the words and bind them together, to complete the spell—this is when I feel most like a writer. The day I happen to be living in becomes inconsequential, as it is most likely boring. It serves as a bracket, a depository to hold this thing that I am trying to push out of me. It is a reference for the genre called “life.”

I leave the office in a minor rage because I realize the cafeteria doesn’t serve dinner on Fridays, and that I waited around for nothing. But really, I am more mad at myself that I did not fulfill my in-office quota earlier in the week and had to go to Midtown on a Friday, banjaxing my poorly planned commutes. I stalk down the streets of Manhattan in headphones, just for the look, no music playing, swerving around people with a pained expression as if I have been greatly inconvenienced by them trying to go about their lives. It can be quite healing to be a brat. Starving, I reluctantly enter a Thai restaurant and immediately regret it, it’s packed, the tables quite literally six inches away from the next. My ass brushes dangerously close to someone’s chicken satay as I am lead to my seat. I end up sandwiched between a table of three aggressively beefy masc-presenting guys speaking Hebrew and a couple seemingly on a first date, posters shouting about the deliciousness of Thai noodles beaming down on me from all sides. The day’s minor inconveniences have wrecked havoc on me, I am saturnine, the human species is an eyesore. Like some kind of pretentious asshole, I take out my laptop and attempt to write this. I can’t. A homeless woman shambles up to two girls seated outside, they both avoid eye contact and shift their drinks closer to their chests. To my right, the couple on the date pick at their papaya salad, the man repeatedly saying “No it’s good! Just spicy,” before spearing a single shred of papaya on his fork and rolling it around in his mouth. The plate of food sits between them like a stalemate, the conversation exceedingly dry, edging on desperate. The date is not going well.

The three men on my left want to pay with three cards. The waitress tells them they can only accept two. “Why?” one man asks, but she doesn’t answer his question, only repeats the statement. There is some muttering in Hebrew as another man digs around in his bag for cash. I feel a sudden animosity towards the men, my irritation flaring at this perceived notion of asshole-lery. A small drama breaks out on how to split the bill between two cards and a certain amount of cash, the waitress standing silently to the side with the card reader. I eat my noodles and watch her. Some ghostly sensation percolates in my mind, loosing a vague memory of looking at my hand as a detached object, a thing that is a part of me but also its own. They leave a big tip and I am relieved. “Thank you very much,” one man says, enunciating through a strong accent, which mirrors some degree of conviction. I am a little bit touched. I should check myself, I think, people are not what you think they are.

I have a very specific fear of myself. This fear is that my mind is too powerful and has the power to unleash chaos. Not as in I am super smart or something, more like my thoughts can open a cavern within which I can plummet and disappear. I mistrust myself, I have created a “me” bounded by very firm outlines that I do not dare surpass. Within these boundaries, I can be free, but beyond, it’s a toss-up. Inside is “true” and outside is “false.” I am cognizant that there are depths to me that offer a greater freedom but I don’t think that is compatible with daily living. Writing is a safe way for me to explore disintegration. It is a little bit like an aphrodisiac that fishes towards some dark and secret pleasure. Words as a substitute for the not words, but they are not quite a substitute—more like words as seduction, words as a maze, leading towards the thing that cannot be summarized by language. Being? Existence? Because writing is a process of relegating experience to the past, it is a weapon of codification. The meaning of words cannot bypass the intent to use them.

I sometimes wish that writing wasn’t my choice medium, because it always feels like taking an incomplete shit. It’s really not pleasant to have a colon that is perpetually full. Writing this piece right now is reminding me of why I wanted to take a break from writing in the first place…if only my whole being could transform into a sentence, no, a single word, if my hands and limbs and eyes and torso would rearrange into letters, I could stand with one foot in the physical and one foot in the metaphysical. I would fly out the window and stamp myself on the world, naming it as its colors graze my edges. To name a thing is to inherently alter it, but it is also to stop it from changing. I don’t want to be the namer, I want to be the word. If I were a word, I would be as fast and as impartial as sunlight casting itself over all things living and dead.

am i my head?

am i my heart?

i am lying in the grass with my ear pressed against the earth. i see a hydrangea bush, the tines of a rusted rake, a convulsing swarm of gnats thrashing against the sky. blades of overgrown grass tickle the inside of my ear canal. without a heartbeat the inside of my head sounds like a seashell.

but in reality it is 4:30am and it’s too dark to see much. but in nonreality a tiny sliver of the moon hangs suspended inside each of the million dewdrops that decorate the sleeping world.

sometimes i think i can stay very still for a very, very, very long time.

a cat pads over and turns me over with its soft paw, and i can no longer see anything.

beyond the physics of the whole situation (but what do i know about science) maybe i’m just tired of anticipating time. there is nothing like having a body that makes time all too real. having a body makes time, I take away my body so i can exist out of time. it’s a strange thing, trying to journey away from yourself in the middle of night, attempting to split the oppressive straight arrow of time into diluted threads that are weak enough to snap. if i split up my body, each district of flesh separate and observing its own information, maybe it will be enough for the everything to turn into nothing. and then i can sleep, and time will end.

how much time has passed in the world of dreaming? in dreams in dreams in dreams that i don’t remember, maybe i completely physically disappear from the world where laws and rules and history exist. who’s to say. how does anyone know that this infinite tired universe didn’t just appear in the space between the two previous ticks of the clock hand. i think, why not just meet with a friend at a bar and drink copious amounts of alcohol and do many lines of something or the other and let a stranger touch me. this way, inside my head i can enter a pleasing spiral that subsists outside of time, something like re-entering the stained glass color that draws out my forgotten dream into the morning.

the cafe i am writing this substack at has a long wood bar with water stains that look like an alien baby with huge head and crazed, buggy eyes. something about this waterlogged baby reminds me that there will probably never be a time when i feel safe enough to keep a child of my own safe. babies represent a warm fantasy, some kind of attempt at redemption over the failings of my own upbringing. and mold. there was a time not too long ago when i literally thought that mold was ruining my life. honestly, i am not certain i will live long, which maybe is why i cannot imagine a real future where i am a mother, it’s not like a suicidal thing, i’m just not sure that the world will not end within my lifetime and i don’t have enough faith in the durability of my body to rule out the possibility that a terminal illness won’t strike me down before i reach old age. is that morbid or does that make me depressed? actually i generally feel pretty happy these days.

there are also evenings where i read two words next to each other and it’s like a wellspring erupts in my head. or like a hot pin slots into a keyhole in my spine, and i am suddenly overwhelmed by the beautiful fragility of everything. I go to bed breathless from weeping and prepared to die.

then, the next morning, i wake up to a text from a friend asking to go to breakfast. i’m tired from a long night of failed decapitation so i contemplate saying no. but it’s nice, positioning friends to stand in the way of sadness. we eat bacon egg and cheese sandwiches in the belly of empire and look at dogs. later in the day, i graze my cursor over expensive things on the internet that i consider buying, capitalism offering me objects disguised as freedom. like my friend standing in the way of sadness, capitalism stands in the way of empathy. a deep howling rage with no beginning and no end is the world’s living engine. the world is fucked, i am fucked. need to be.

maybe living is riding on one long question, floating through time. except i don’t know what the question is. and the question is not really question but a piece of music.

i realize that life is spending a lot of time and effort on a thing with no point. it’s the endurance aspect that makes it impressive, probably. i am also attracted to people who spend a lot of time and effort on things with no point. is there anything more fruitless than the quest for knowledge? mathematicians and scientists must get off on their work constantly, with all that intellectual edging. i know nothing about cause, only effect, so people who devote their will to research the cause exude a deep eroticism for me. knowledge is created by humans, but all the knowledge in the world already exists. what feels tragic and sexy is the compulsion to throw yourself against the void. human offerings in exchange for pieces of truth.

as i writer i do not deal in truth, but lies. fixating experience to language is already a form of lying.

sometimes i wonder how many different faces i have inside me, and how many more i can hold until i burst. at a company orientation in menlo park, i put on a slutty bikini, arrange the small red triangles strategically over my nipples so the perfect tasteful amount of underboob spills out, while the rest of my cohort participates in a company social. i hold a dogeared book of poetry between my fingers next to the empty pool. it’s actually colder than i expected, and i feel goose flesh crawl over my skin. who am i performing for? at this empty hotel full of rich white people who don’t care if i live or die. i watch a maintenance man wearing a low slung tool belt trim the hedges and suddenly feel unbearably young and evil. i want to take off the three red triangles covering my private parts and run through the hotel and scream like a banshee. maybe this is a way of me dealing with the truth i’ve been avoiding which is that i am also an evil minion, not better than the rest of them.

maybe i’ll just stay face down in the garden.

We surveyed our good work and were giddy with joy. The mound of Ma’s things was enormous and nearly swallowed up the entire carpet, we looked at it with hunger and awe and looked at each other with sweat glistening over our lips and our mouths wet with excitement, it was humongous and the most beautiful thing we had ever seen. We fell into it together, ravenous with bliss. The soft smell of her things smothered us. It was the best day of our lives. We wriggled around in it, the darkness, swathed ourselves around each other and felt all her things touching us all at once and breathed greedily, we shouted and laughed, we needed more, more softness, more noise, more mess, more feeling. We yelled and threw things into the air, watched the clothes and scarves flutter down and caught them with our faces. Ma’s underwear went round our heads, our silly hats. We laughed and laughed, we shrieked and said naughty words and tied everything together in knots.

We waited for her to come back home, and when she walked through the door, we jumped out from where we were waiting crouched in her clothes and yelled SURPRISE!!!! The prospect of it was the funniest thing we could ever imagine and we collapsed in giggles seeing her shocked face, mouth hung open in such a perfect “O” that we thought something might fly in. We clutched each other and beamed at her, her perfect bored children. Look what we’ve done! Isn’t it wonderful???? we shouted at her, but her face did not move, and the grand praise we so wanted seemed stuck inside of her, so by the time her mouth had closed we shook off our confusion by flinging ourselves back inside and were little animals frolicking in our mess again.

She said nothing, just walked the three steps towards the big pile of all her things and collapsed face first into the wadded abyss. She fit right in, disappeared even, and the soft folds made a satisfying poof with the magnitude that we wanted to achieve but were too small to. Our lingering trepidation vanished, we laughed louder and pounded her back with our fists, as she said, Oh you little dummies, my little dummies. What have you done? We looked at each other with our hearts swelled in our chests. We’re dummies!!! we screamed. We’re yours!!!

That was a day unlike this one, a morning pale and treacly green with particular light that I imagine only existed surrounding the days in this part of the world. A light, that once descended, made everything feel like it had just congealed into existence. Suspended in the half-light, I feel like I could be anywhere, or nowhere, all at the same time, like the veil between myself and my tiny experiences and the meaning somewhere between flaps gently in the wind blowing from beyond a door. The trailer is muted and ashy, not quite corporeal, and I am waiting in the silence for a moment of reality, hoping, maybe, that it won’t quite come. The world is still blurred at the edges, like a photograph patiently revealing itself under the sheen of chemicals.

Puppy is still asleep. The quiet sound of his breath struggling through the saliva in his throat is a familiar comfort, holding me within the dreggy lure of sleep on the cusp of consciousness.

The woman in the picture on the fridge is full-cheeked and beautiful, barely an adult. Her pale arms are stretching across the space, forearms plump and shining, cradled around the pink and febrile thing that looks up at her with a kind of blank, suspicious awe. The thing that might be me, or Puppy. There’s no way to be sure.

In crystal mornings like this one, I liked to pretend that she was sleeping soundly in the room next to ours and the booze would be put away, that she would wake up and move about the kitchen in her messy, limber way while cooking breakfast and talk to us, the way she used to sometimes. That the mound of clothes on the carpeted floor was still there now, slowly flattening and strewn out and disappearing back on Ma’s body and into her drawers over the course of what seemed like an eternity. In my memory, we had never cleaned it up. Things like that, like mess, like childishness, had never bothered her. She simply dressed in the living room, methodically picking up her things from the floor as if picking through the aftermath of an explosion, cycling her clothes back on her body until everything had found its way back in its place. It thrilled us. We giggled and squirmed in the doorway as she stood in her underwear, surveying our mess with her hands on her hips and shaking out her shirts one by one. In my memory, she gifts us a knowing smile, as if there was a secret between us, and even then we held it close to our chests like a jeweled treasure. Even then, young as we were, we knew there was something special about Ma, she existed in some place on the cusp of ugly and beautiful, the way she wasn’t afraid to show us her brokenness, get close to our joy.

Now she was just gone, in every sense of the word. She rarely looked at us, and when she did, there was either a blankness or an intensity that terrified us. When she came home, she would be needy and then cruel, flipping between faces so unexpectedly, a twitch the only separation between her love and her anger. And then she would sleep for days. Sometimes we would crack open the door and watch her just to make sure she was still alive, witness the rise and fall of the blankets as she breathed, the curtains that stayed closed beating back the cycling sun, her dark tangled hair that pressed into the pillows, listen to the thickness that settled around her and pinned her in place. And then we would shut the door. We’re not children anymore. We leave her alone because we don’t know what to do except throw ourselves against the world, we need coldness and open space and water and sky to get rid of that suffocating feeling that follows her everywhere.

The entire weight of the sky seems to press down around me, hermetically sealing me off from the rest of humanity. My only company is the man next to me, who, although he doesn’t dare say it, is oppressed by my misery. The ripples of fog wrap around us, stifling us into silence. Which is fine by me, because I don’t want to talk anyways. I press my head against the damp window and pretend to sleep.

We arrive at the hotel close to 8pm. It’s rustic and nice, in an overly designed kind of way. The woman working behind the counter is the same woman who checked us in three years ago, it’s like time has stopped and hasn’t moved forward since. I imagine that when her shift is over, she retreats towards the backdrop and falls still, like one of the furnishings. I can tell that Leo is tired from the drive, although he doesn’t say anything. Behind his glasses, his eyes are rimmed in red. I give his shoulders a rub. His smile is small and thin, contrite with concealed pity—I wish he would stop looking at me like that. It makes me feel old and used up.

We shower together, eager to wash the long drive out of our bones. The shower is gigantic. We sit on the wet tiles and face each other, his knees bent around mine, my head on his shoulder as he massages shampoo into my hair. The hot water pounds my thoughts flat. It isn’t remotely sexual, although I suspect he wishes it would go in that direction. He comes out of the bathroom after me, a gust of steam chasing after him. He’s popped a pimple, and it leaves a little trail of blood and pus on his temple, like a teenage boy. Something about it makes me want to curl up in a dark closet. I think of little boys running around on wet grass, of big eyes behind a pair of glasses. My throat tightens. We get ready for bed, and in the dark, I’m surprised to feel hot tears on my face. I’m too tired to decipher exactly where they are coming from. Tears like condensation, as ordinary as rain.

In the morning, the fog has sunk downward, settling closer to the earth. The dining hall of the hotel has huge, continuous windows, overlooking a cut of forest facing the back of the building. I sip an espresso while observing the moss leaden trees, which twist around each other like petrified wisps of smoke. Overgrown ferns shiver next to a fat, glossy patch of mushrooms. Leo gazes outside as well, the window’s reflection casting an odd green glow over his glasses.

How’d you sleep? he asks, between bites of omelet. I can’t tell if he is looking at me, the glimmer over his eyes hiding his expression.

Not bad. The coffee’s helping, I say.

It looks exactly the same as it was the first time we were here. Prehistoric. Like dinosaurs can walk out at any moment, he murmurs.

I nod in agreement, stand up to get a plate of fruit. I pick up a few pieces of honeydew, grapefruit and pineapple with silver tongs. I don’t think I ever eat pineapple aside from in hotels. As I’m waiting for a man to refill the orange juice, I feel something touch my hand. Startled, my first reaction is to shake it off, but when I look down I realize that it’s a little girl that has grabbed my hand. Her fingers are sticky and her hair is tied into two low pigtails. As she looks up at me, her mouth immediately crumples into a confused “O.”

Maggie! a voice calls from the other end of the table. The girl flees to her mother, who beckons her over with an outstretched arm. So sorry about that, she says towards me.

It’s no problem at all, I say.

I sit back down and place the plate of fruit between me and Leo. Maggie’s family has positioned themselves at the table in front of ours, and she is pressing her little body against the huge windows, making little splotches of condensation with her breath. I feel a strange spiraling begin in my stomach, behind the belly button.

Leo goes straight for the pineapple. I think, with dim awareness, that subconsciously he also recognizes the elusiveness of the fruit. It’s always apples, oranges, bananas. Who buys pineapple? My thoughts are everywhere, fraying into cross-wired filaments with no end. And Maggie, her body so small against the giant windows like aquarium walls, nearly swallowed by green. A weakness takes root somewhere under my ribs, a dark stain traveling down to my legs. I need to keep away from myself.

Marie, is everything ok? Leo’s voice is careful, gentle. He keeps away too. Maggie is back at the table with her parents, putting a spoonful of scrambled eggs into her mouth. I reassure him, and wonder why I am the one soothing his fear, when it is I who has been fully emptied.

Outside, the air is so thick with moisture, it’s like walking through milk.

I don’t remember it being so swampy, I say.

We came at a different time of the year, he responds.

Leo checks the GPS obsessively, following the route on Google Maps like a baby duck that has mistakenly imprinted on the blue cursor. The fog creates a sense of narrowing and vastness all at the same time. Mirages shimmer at the edges of the swirling eddies of vapor, hidden between the crests of far off mountains that lay shadowed beyond the slick layers of trees.

A sudden dark blur, a dash of fur runs between the tires.

Shit! Leo exclaims. The car lurches to the side. The grind of the tires on pavement, a sudden jolt as the car hits a bank of earth.

What was that? I ask. I can’t see anything. In the rearview, there is nothing but the road stretching back towards the vague past.

The hazard lights throw out gentle blemishes of red. I gingerly walk behind the car, the anxious spiral in my stomach gathering strength. A sudden wind blows, briefly decimating the mist. A fox stands at the center of the center of the road, body contracted inward towards the ground. Its mouth hangs open, long pink tongue lolling out, a wet, red hole of shining teeth and spit. It pants in pain and looks at me. Two black vortexes for eyes, swallowing the light. Was that blood on its muzzle, or a dark spot of fur? The fox’s pupils seem to expand even larger, summoning back the amnesiac fog. Its gaze is a black snake that knows my darkest corners. Then, it vanishes like a spring, loping away into the underbrush. The sudden violence of the movement leaves me stunned.

Leo exhales raggedly beside me. He is saying something about the visibility, not seeing the fox rush out, but I am hardly able to pay attention. Inside, I feel like I am plummeting towards something with a speed that exceeds my body. I am here to have a nice time, I tell myself. I am here with my husband, I say inside my head. He loves me.

We reach our destination. Olympic National Park Hoh Rainforest, the sign reads. Leo leans over the trunk and surveys the items in his backpack, before earnestly buckling the strap over his chest. He smiles, a little nervously. I perceive a stunning absence between us, a negative space by which all other things are now defined.

Arriving at the place where I first allowed myself to be overtaken by my love for this man, I feel an opening probe its way from between my ribs. A wind blows close to the ground, gathering strength and memory. The smell of earthy decay fills my nose, and a splash of pain coats my uterus. A spate of blood between my legs as an announcement: even if I am not ready, cells replace old flesh and the body continues.

I clean myself up in a porta potty, and shove a few wads of toilet paper into my leggings. That should do it. When I walk out, Leo is waiting by the trailhead, the treeline splaying out behind him in a mass of darkness and green. He draws his hand across a mossy tree and beckons me to come join him. When I place my hand on its trunk, it sinks in like the moss is sucking me inside. Dew coats the palm of my hand. We walk into the forest and woody silence descends over our heads, like a blanket of fresh snow. The moisture in the air floats carelessly, as if asleep. Our footsteps fall wetly on the porous tongue of the earth. I don’t recognize this place, it feels completely different from three years ago. I feel like I am missing a layer of skin, that my blood is pumping at the very surface of me, begging to be released. Leo walks ahead of me, hands grazing the ferns that dip their necks towards his body. The words fall into me, like shards descending from the sky: I am lost. I am lost.

Moss blankets every perceivable surface, draping over the hemlocks in thick, green vestments that make it seem like the whole forest is melting, slowly dissolving into primordial soup.

This is crazy, Leo whispers. It’s so quiet. I feel like I can hear for miles. He stops and turns back towards me, eyes shining with amazement. Let’s stop for a second.

I don’t want to stop. I am holding onto the sound of my breath, the rhythmic scraping of clothing around my limbs, the muffled plodding of boots against the spongy dirt as an anchor for my understanding. But Leo halts, heaving a big sigh, and I am forced to as well.

Baby, he says. Listen.

I stand still. The woods are so thick, so choked with moss. I can hardly see fifty yards in any direction. A sudden vacancy appears from the stillness of our bodies, and hearing moves concurrently to meet it. The reaction is an expansion, a growth of information that extends and extends far past where my other senses care to go. Silence is not nothing, it’s a sprawling, never-ending sound. I can hear the warbling calls of hundreds, if not thousands, of birds. I can hear the air and the mist grazing the leaves that spin like mirrors against the sky. I can hear the slow creaking of wood, the rivets of condensation finding their way into the earth, the crashing of the furred bodies of bees meeting each other mid-flight. I can hear the wet squelch of Leo’s slow blinking eyes. I can hear my own blood. It sounds sluggish, like it has been mixed with silt. I feel as though my wits might disintegrate at the drop of a pin.

Out of anxiety I reach for Leo’s hand—I feel the discomforting sense of my thoughts going rampant, grating up against each other and spilling out like loose dirt. His hand is warm and dry, despite the cold damp all around us. He tries to hide his surprise, but when his fingers close around mine to form a fist, it is solid, sure. He leans into me and we walk on. He smells of coffee and laundry. A human smell, comforting in the echoing sprawl of this alien world. I press back into him, and I am surprised to know that I want him. The ache in my belly reaches down, sliding against my cervix, skirting pain. I am suddenly beaten down by a wave of disgust.

I don’t understand what I’m supposed to feel. There is a guilt that follows. This trip was planned as a kind of hail mary to shake our relationship out of its depressive stupor, or so I suspected, orchestrated by Leo to encourage a coming together of our separate worlds, I imagine. He wants togetherness. I’m not sure that’s what I need. He thinks that the death of our baby will make us stronger. Love, I have come to realize, is not only something that holds things together but also has the opposite power to tear things apart. I am oppressed between the two opposing sides of my instincts, and lonely between them. I want to sit in silence. I want to be touched. But the decision is too big, too definitive, so I am left adrift. Between one breath and the next, hovering like the mist between the trees.

We follow the direction of the meandering trail, guided by the languid sound of fresh water descending over rocks, subtly different from the sound of water spilling over the knotted roots that lattice over the surface of the earth. I keep my eyes trained on the ground, concerned about tripping hazards, while Leo eagerly looks forward, our fingers joined by the barest linkage of his thumb and my index finger. The incline climbs steeper. The sound of both of our panting spills into the milky air, our hot gusts of breath parting the hovering mist like hair. A slight phlegmy whine exits from Leo’s open mouth, the remnants from a bout of bronchitis that hasn’t fully cleared. Two banana slugs fornicate slowly amongst the exposed, spongy flesh of a felled tree, yellow appendages exploring oozing skin.

The wheezy sound of air struggling past Leo’s throat, the dripping wetness of the encroaching trees, the pain in my uterus climbing up my spine, all seem to infect my brain until I am sure we are trodding in circles inside of a dank, panting mouth. A mouth circulating with easy, rhythmic breath, as if laying in sleep, or wait. My skin warms against the cold, cavernous throat of the valley, our labored breaths syncing together, two points of struggle slicing through the deadened air. Our progression swivels uphill and downhill, following the divots of a sleeping spine, a supine body overgrown by green. Our boots leave no marks on the earth, but they somehow seem to be collecting on my own body. Like I was stepping over myself, that I had become the land, or it me.

The trail unspools until we are standing at a crux between an overgrown stream and a giant boulder. Chemical green mosses the stone’s surface, water dripping down in glassy cascades that merge into shallow rills. The water rejoins its body, dissolving easily into the bubbling veins of the valley. I bisect its trajectory with my hand. It’s stunningly cold, shocking me out of my circular reverie.

Leo crouches at the edge of the stream, cupping a mouthful of water in his hand.

Do you think this is safe to drink?

The scent of water overtakes me, bluish and seductive, the smell of life.

I wouldn’t, I say. What if you get parasites?

Fuck it, Leo decides. Just a taste.

Half of it spills over his chin, the other half enters his body. I stand over him, looking at the pale triangle of his neck peeking through the collar of his jacket, the brown spiral of his cowlick. Without thinking, I run my wet, cold fingers through the disarray of hair. I move with no recollection of what such a movement means. When he looks up at me, I don’t blink, when he reaches for my hand, I let myself be dragged down as he rises up. His cold, wet mouth meets mine in the space between our two bodies. We intersect in the middle like a car crash in slow motion. He tastes of eagerness, mineral confusion.

We kiss clumsily at first, then with more intensity. Leo’s icy hand grips the back of my neck with more force, the air leaving his nose in hot bursts. A strange feeling, as if I had misplaced my own life, and it now lain forgotten by the outlet of the trailhead. I gaze vaguely past his ear into the stillness, watch the mist shiver slightly between the trees.

We struggle down to the dirt. Our water-resistant windbreakers make squeaky protests as we sink to our knees. It’s funny, so we laugh, a two nervous chortles that mix together in the air and immediately dissipate. Inside, my disconnected brain turns over, once, twice, before incoherently submitting to the present event’s unfolding. Leo’s hands grip around my hips, pulling me close. His lips search my throat—suddenly, the smell of him, the warm oil saturating the roots of his hair, mixed with sweat and the scent of his aftershave—fills my nose. Something surges to life, and a soft moan slides out of me.

Are you sure this is okay? Leo asks for a second time. Down on the ground, the dirt is clammy and fragrant. I nod, again. He slides his hand into my pants, face scrunching in confusion as he pulls out a wad of bloodied toilet paper.

I just got it today, I whisper.

His face is a movie still, a blithely perfect depiction of love and sadness and pity. I love you, I love you, he whispers into my left ear, fingers gently plunging into my bleeding vagina from which a dead fetus came out of ten weeks ago. A jangly shiver starts up my spine. I feel like I am bifurcating, that a part of me is ascending to the gaps perforating the forest canopy via a force opposite than gravity, that another part of me is unspeakably heavy. A body should not feel so unstable.

The hot scent of pennies floats into the cold air, the familiarity searing my nose. The feeling is not so much pain, as it is a proto-pain, with the cervix at the center of this sensation that I am not sure exists beyond my brain. Leo’s tongue searches my neck, his right hand pinches my nipple, hard cock pressing against my thigh. It smells of blood and sex and spit and decay. I hear the sound of water and of someone weeping. Was it me? There is another noise in air, one that could be a kettle going off, or children shrieking. The tip of a tongue enters my ear, and a shiver runs around my brain. A tumble of rocks next to my head grows bigger, and the trees smaller, cramping around our bodies like they were crouching down to catch a secret.

Through the sliver of my half-closed eyes, I see something. The crumpled body of an animal, half-disappeared among the rocky bank. I lift my head an inch off the ground, chin running into Leo’s forehead.

What’s wrong? Are you feeling ok?

Stop for a second, I say. I push myself up on to my elbows, drawing my clothes closer, and crouch towards the mound of matted fur.

Marie, where are you going? Did I hurt you?

Leo.

It’s the fox. The one we ran over earlier. I recognize its dusky gray fur, the splotch of black over its muzzle. It lays limp, body falling within the gap between two wet rocks. My heart steps through my chest, the spiral in my stomach reemerges as a black hole that threatens to obliterate. The fox’s head is halfway submerged by water, one foreleg crushed beneath its chest at an unnatural angle.

Oh, no, I hear Leo whisper behind me.

Its mouth is still open. A red tongue moves gently beneath the surface of the stream, rising and falling slightly to the rhythm of the lapping water. I remember reading somewhere that wounded animals seek water to die. The jaunty crinkle of a plastic bag tickles my left ear—a sound felt rather than heard. I go rigid. Fear, thick, dark, turns my blood to acid. Something lodged deep inside my spine comes out that should never leave.

We should move it so it doesn’t contaminate the water for the rest of the animals, says Leo. He moves forward, hands covered with a plastic grocery bag we brought to store apple cores.

What are you—no, no—

I blink, once, twice.

Do you want to see the fetus?

I am covered in blood and liquids and traces of vomit. The nurse holds my hand. The doctor cradles something low in his gloved fingers that I can’t see beyond the mound of my own body and doesn’t meet my eyes. I shook my head no. I was too overwhelmed.

I hear the sound of a small body of flesh meeting folds of plastic. The material is thick, I can tell that much from the texture of the crinkling sound. For about five minutes, I could feel my baby between my legs. I can still feel it.

Why did I not want to see my baby? Why did I say no?

I imagine that steam must have coated the inside of the plastic, the body being still warm.

If they had let my sister stay in the room, maybe I would have been strong enough.

Don’t! I yell. Don’t! Don’t! The words fly from my mouth, speeding out as a trail of stinging wasps. I am shaking. The sound lands like an atom bomb in this quiet place, and I slap my hand over my face to keep the wasps inside.

Leo halts. A cascade of water rises from the force of his footfall and lifts the fox’s head, as if it too, had been startled.

You drank that water, I whisper.

He contemplates this. I think I’ll be fine. He starts back towards me, hand outstretched. Hey, hey... His other hand dangles at his side, the yellow plastic bag wrapped around it, held away from me like I am an animal ready to bolt.

In the treacly light, his body is bathed in a sickly greenish hue. It coats his skin, like sap. His glasses fall off and clatter on the rocks. His concerned mouth stretches into a monstrous grin, canines lengthening, lips glistening with spit. Two hungry pupils overtake the sclera, widening into glassy black voids. Tawny gray fur erupts from the gaps in his face, elongating into a narrow snout. I face my husband and find I am unable to make a single sound.

Leo’s gaze is soulless, reflecting nothing, flashing with the blank sheen of an animal caught in headlights. His mouth hangs open, red tongue hanging limp as a ribbon, face becoming nothing more than a beast’s appetite. Saliva drips down and splatters onto the rocks. He becomes more and more deformed, body distending with urgency, until there is a subtle switch that begins to retract the chaotic progress, furred limbs snaking in, bones rearranging, compacting into a form that makes more visual sense. He shrinks, smaller, smaller, design becoming lupine, more in accordance with the natural laws.

A fox, the same fox, steps out from the mound of Leo’s crumpled clothes.

The fox looks at me. It opens its mouth. What happened then I can’t describe, can’t even begin to explain. There was something like words, like a question, an interior image, but it had nothing to do with language or sound.

But there was something in its eyes. I didn’t know my answer until I saw it. An expression, open like a child’s face.

During the day, she goes to the cafe. Orders an orange juice and tries to write. What comes out of her disgusts her. Words are like sludge, boring, ugly sludge. What was once within destroying her from the inside is now mocking her from the outside. So instead, she shops. She shops for sunglasses and designer purses. In this way, she can become involved in something, becoming a node in the global chain of commerce. She touches other people through the exchange of goods and services, caressing them through the invisible hand of her mouse cursor. She goes full days without speaking, connecting with the world only through the touching and moving of objects. She thinks she is ok, but one day while getting her nails done, she has to keep herself from crying when the woman is massaging her hands. She misses her mother, even though she has never liked her. She wishes to be a child again.

Back in her apartment, she lays down on her bed. The sheets stink of sweat. The sun is a dull yellow and struggles through the dusty sheen of her windows. This sets her off. She vacuums the entire apartment, throws out the festering tupperware in her fridge, scrubs the bathtub, takes out all the trash. When she lays back down on her stripped bed, she is exhausted, but feels a bit better. The man who lives next door is stuttering and screaming at his wife while his baby wails. It’s very loud, but she dares not knock for fear of disturbing the feeling of blankness that has flattened her against the bed. She lays there like a dead bug, eyes trained straight up. Blankness purges between the apartment walls and falls from her eyes until even sound loses meaning.

___

I invite you to look at Julie. She sits on a bench in the park as rain falls, lightly. The sky is a marbled gray, tinged with pink and an indescribable hue. She has walked for ten minutes, crossing six intersections and across a field to get here. Her face is impassive between slow, hard blinks. It’s impossible to tell what she is thinking.

But I’ll tell you what she’s thinking. She is so tired, she feels ill. Inside her mind, a long dark tunnel. The deeper she goes, the narrower the tunnel becomes, until the whole world falls inwards into the darkness and condenses into a small, hard dot. A pill. She swallows the pill, and with it herself.

The drugs don’t seem to be working. She looks out across the park and sees a woman wearing a headscarf watching as her little girl frolics around her legs. She is struck by how tiny the girl is. She thinks that if she wanted to, she could kill her instantly with one kick. Her neck is so thin, it reminds her of the curled necks of the plucked chickens hanging in the windows of the roast meat shop. The wind picks up, and a half deflated birthday balloon skitters across the path in front of her, as if possessed. Julie is suddenly seized by a creepy feeling. A black form arises in the corner of her vision and her throat seizes. But she doesn’t look. Because she is likely going insane, and if she looked, it would confirm that she was, indeed, insane.

Julie gets up. She crosses the field and six intersections to reach her apartment. She cooks a steak like she planned to, but the meat feels wrong sliding down her throat. As she is washing the dishes, thoughts of knives come to her. Her legs and shoulders ache terribly. For a second, she thinks that she might collapse, but then a wave of adrenaline hits her and she begins to burn up from the inside. A thought arises, sharpening from nothing like the blurry letters in an eye exam: that she can kill herself.

__

Me: I read the news to cry.

Therapist: Can you elaborate?

Me: I mean, I purposely read about all the terrible things going on so I can feel sad, and cry.

Therapist: Are you not able to cry without doing that?

Me: I guess not. Only sometimes though. It’s like when I’m walking around with all of these awful feelings, but they’re all stopped up inside of me, but I can’t really pinpoint what’s wrong with me. So I just scroll on my phone and watch all of these kids dying and people suffering, and I’m able to place my feelings onto something, and then I can cry.

Therapist: Do you think you are using the news as a distraction from investigating what is really causing you these feelings of distress?

Me: I don’t know. Maybe it’s more like a laziness? Like I know there’s something wrong with me, but I don’t want to put in the intention to figure it all out. Or maybe it’s fear? Like, I’m afraid to really think deeply about why I’m so anxious or sad. I prefer to think of it as just a feeling in my body. But then, it just builds and builds, and I feel like insane, like I want to explode myself.

Therapist: I see. And when you are able to cry after reading the news, do you feel a sense of relief? Or do you still feel a desire to process your feelings further, in a more meaningful way?

Me: I don’t know. I think so? I feel a little bit better, but sometimes I feel more stressed because I think about how privileged I am and how I’m not doing anything to help anyone.

Therapist: Do you think it’s your responsibility to keep track of everything that’s going on? The craziness in the world is lot to bear, on top of the other things you are going through.

Me: No, I don’t think it’s my responsibility. But I feel like if I don’t look at what’s going on, it’s like I’m saying that I don’t care and that it doesn’t matter what’s happening to those people. But it’s not like I actually do anything. I’m not like an activist or anything. I’m too anxious to be out protesting or whatever. Or maybe that’s just an excuse, and I’m just lazy. Or worse, I actually just don’t care.

Therapist: Do you think that being anxious is the same as being lazy?

Me: No?

Therapist: Perhaps you need to take a break from the news and find a healthier way to process your feelings. Find a way that you can gently engage with yourself without putting pressure on yourself to “figure it all out.”

Me: Like how?

Therapist: Sometimes, it’s enough to just acknowledge that you are having painful feelings without associating them with a narrative. Look at the world at face value and the experiences you are having in this moment. Simply, acknowledge, feel and let them pass through. Not everything needs to have a meaning.

Me: Yes, but I—

Therapist: Let’s just try it. The next time you feel it arise, instead of reading the news, I want you to just approach your feelings with a neutral curiosity.

Me: But then how will I keep informed?

Therapist: I think that if you stop reading the news, you’ll find that nothing in your life changes.

Me: I don’t know. I feel like most people can read the news without it affecting them, but then again, I don’t even know if it actually affects me, or if I’m just using it as a tool to feel morally superior. Like, I feel like most people think that they shouldn’t let it affect them, but I think that’s bullshit. It’s kind of like the world is burning around us, but everything is too far gone so we just turn a blind eye since it’s too late anyways. And everyone’s collective cognitive dissonance is making it harder to empathize with people in general, and our humanity can’t deepen. Because it’s being strangled by capitalism.

Therapist: I see what you are saying, but I think that you should limit your intake of the news. It’s clearly stressing you out.

Me: But it’s normal to be stressed about the news.

Therapist: Yes, it’s considered normal in society today, but I wouldn’t use that to disregard the stress it causes you. Here’s what I want you to do, I want you to limit your news intake to fifteen minutes in the morning, and only read the headlines.

After the session, I sat in the parking lot, and looked at the stunted trees growing from the strip of dirt between the rows of cars. I was struck with a shameful sense of artificiality. I felt no sense of clarity or relief, just a strong sensation of annoyance. Why did I even offer myself up to be deciphered? What was I expecting to gain from the process? Words were not strong enough of a tool to hold my meaning. It was like every time I tried to offer up a secret about myself, the secret gets replaced by a degraded, fictionalized version of itself. This was the only thing I could offer to the world. We play out our lives in a theater of assigned roles. Me, the patient, you the doctor. Me, the sick, you the healthy. The healthy heals the sick. The sick vomits out their secrets and gets filled with wisdom.

By speaking it out loud, even the sickness becomes artificial. When I talk, I split into two parts, one part that is falling forward into the choreography of my emotions, and another part that falls backwards to observe this choreography and floats deeper inside myself. It’s almost a relief to slot into this familiar rhythm, a series of data points yielding to your medical interest.

At this point in my life, I accept my role, and play it well.

__

She begins to feel like something was really wrong when, while driving to meet a friend at an udon restaurant, she imagines herself jumping off of every single building next to the freeway. The first building she passes is a modern glass and metal structure with an extended balcony ledge jutting out from the midway point. She envisions her body plummeting feet first off of the roof, then hitting the balcony ledge, bouncing off, then thudding gruesomely onto the pavement and into oncoming traffic. The second building is an old gutted industrial building, all brick and corrugated metal. She jumps off and meets no resistance until her body flattens against the hot concrete. The ugly buildings loom over her, and dozens of Julies fall to the ground, dead. The bright afternoon takes on a threatening air, and she is certain that she is losing her mind.

The day passes fine enough, but the feeling that she is losing her mind stays with her. It get stronger every time she stops talking. Her friend talks of a short film he is planning to make, and they go and browse a record shop. She picks out a record, a jazz album with a blue background and an illustration of an alligator playing a saxophone. She buys it for no other reason than it is just something to do. She doesn’t even own a record player. As her friend approaches the shop assistant about which record to pick, she realizes that she must busy herself to evade death.

But she doesn’t understand herself. It’s not that she wants to die, but everywhere she looks, she sees her death. In fact, she desperately wants to live. If only she could kill her fears instead.

At night, she smokes a cigarette on her balcony and watches the dark street below. It’s empty and quiet, aside from a man slowly walking his fat dog. She thinks of falling. She thinks of her last boyfriend, who she broke up with four years ago. It’s hard to remember even what his voice sounded like. How quickly people love and unlove, not that she could even imagine being with someone in her current state. She wishes to be embraced, but the thought is also met with a wave of disgust. To be touched by someone else is to open a door to the place she cannot go.

Hell is her dark apartment. She has the urge to stick her hand into the drawer full of knives. Her body is a knife, slicing down from the balcony, piercing the fat dog at the end of its trajectory. All day long she thinks of falling, but she does not fall.

__

A fall evening, suspiciously warm. I walk along a dirt path with long grasses on my left, and birch trees on my right. The wind is gentle, the sky still bright with a big, round moon. I reach a bend in the path, and enter a clearing where a single birch has crept away from its siblings to be exposed under the full moon. It has four distinct trunks growing from the same base, all peeling papery white bark. The trunks grow tall and straight, scattering into plumes of golden yellow leaves. Leaves litter the ground, and pile up in between the tree’s four prongs. I recognize the tree from my childhood. My parents and I used to play this game: I would stand between them, link arms, and close my eyes. They would lead me all around the neighborhood as I squeezed my eyes shut. I loved it so much. I savored placing all of my awareness in my feet, pressing the entirety of my soul into one step, then another, then another.

We stopped and I opened my eyes, the four-pronged birch was in front of us. It was shadowed, the orangey light from the street lamp just grazing its edges. I lifted my foot, and from under my shoe, dozens of brown seed bugs scuttled away from the birch catkin that I had crushed. I froze in horror. When I opened my eyes, I had expected to find happiness, but instead I was confronted with a different kind of darkness than the warm one behind my eyelids. The night had deepened, and my parents’ faces were cast in shadow.

“Okay, now we’re going to close our eyes and you lead us home.”

My parents smiled at me. In the dim light, their mouths stretched wide into two monstrous grins, teeth glistening with spit. My father’s eyes flashed with suppressed evil. I didn’t know how to get home. Their smiles stretched on forever, until their faces were all mouth, shining teeth, wet spit.

Everything wrong with me, I think, can be traced back to this moment.

—

All she wants is to write a normal story. Why can’t she just write a normal story, she thinks. Every time she opens up her laptop to write, the words that fall out of her become increasing ragged and strange. She wants to write something like the stories she loved to read as a child, about girls in strange worlds, girls overcoming their fears, girls befriending monsters who really turn out to be beautiful angels.

It’s so hard to complete a thing, to tie something together into a whole. When she goes to try to write, a hard little nut of despair cements in her throat. Can she not write a normal story because she is not normal? She is unable to escape her own life for long enough to create the life of someone separate from herself. Her imagination, the one thing that has saved her for her entire life, has been hijacked by anxiety. It’s a loss as cutting as a death.

Because she cannot write about another person, she can only write about herself, although she does not want to. She keeps trying to create stories out of her ragged thoughts, and at no point do the sentences ease together, her eyes become gritty, her mental faculties sore and slow from trying to create a passage, a form for a vision that never reveals itself. If she does not write, she will be succumbing to the threat of disintegration. If she does write, she finds herself more and more deformed. Yet she keeps demanding herself to write, as if the story was a force that wanted to exist outside of her.

Who is Julie? Who is the complete Julie? How to see the different parts of herself, separate, yet connected, to place them side by side, all in the same place. If she could write a full story relating all the sum of her parts into a whole, what would that look like? Would she change? She aims to find out, this is her mission.

—

Dear Julie,

Today I glimpsed the end, and I felt relief. I gave into my fear, I packed up all of the knives in the apartment, taped the box shut, and put the box on top of the kitchen cupboards, where it’s hard to reach. I kissed every single knife before I packed them away and was nearly shaking. I guess I am limited in what I can do now in the kitchen but that’s a compromise I’m willing to endure.

The knives radiate power that is hard to ignore. As long as I keep them in my mind, I have the strength to survive the day. You could say that they are like a fail-safe, in case of my existence going wrong. A fail safe that goes both ways—the knives are still there, of course, to use in case I need them, but the act of retrieving them is annoying enough for me to change my mind during the process. Quite clever, don’t you think?

It’s been raining every day here since I’ve gotten back. It feels fitting, given the state of things. Maintenance cut down the wisteria tree in the yard because it was diseased. When I went out after they had cleared the debris, I found a abandoned bird’s nest on the ground with a single speckled egg. I have no idea if the fetus inside is still alive, but I followed a Youtube tutorial to make a makeshift incubator with a cooler, a lightbulb and a sponge. The egg is so tiny, it’s about the circumference of my thumb. I hope it hatches, it will be interesting to see what kind of bird it is and to have a little chick to play with. Maybe I will have a little friend to show you the next time you come.

How are we to love each other, Julie? I feel very young, very new at life. I don’t think I dream of being a human anymore. I want to feel everything, but pure, like an animal. I am deep in thought about what I have become. Why would I dream of being a human if I’ve been a human for my whole life? I want to become a god instead.

All my love,

The wild smell of ozone fills the air. Warmth from the candle licks both of our faces.

We look up and see that it has begun to rain. Raindrops like fingers, reaching towards us, splattering against the striped awning.

I love it when it rains, you say, I wish it would never end.

Great gusts of warm wind careen over the ground and split against our bodies, and a crazed strand of rain splashes into your glass of wine. The entire glass slides easily down your throat.

A caterwauling garbage can dashes across the street after its sanity.

A woman ducks under a doorway, her shrieks muffled by high up rumbling.

Your eyes are bright pistons. You look up at the tossed sky, breath quick from wonder. A great, heaving laugh erupts from your open mouth, red, slick with wine and cracked gold teeth.

I swallow quickly. I want to put my fingers inside there.

Mindless red animals in my brain. And underneath, a pure, bold longing.

Why are you looking at me like that? you ask, but you are smiling with half your face.

I lean against the wind and let it polish me clean. I dreamt of you last night, I answer instead.

Did you?

Yes. You were standing at a street corner up a few steps. Well, in the dream you were an old Spanish woman but I still knew that it was you. Something about the eyes.

You wag your eyebrows up and down wildly, a pair of electric eels.

Yep, those old things. Somehow I knew that we hadn’t see each other in a long time. I was really happy, but also a little sad. But instead of hugging, we just held hands, like this

I take both your hands and hold onto them on top of the table. They are soft and a little damp from the glass of chilled wine.

and you did that thing you always do, Your thumbs starting to make slow circles on top my knuckles Yes, just like that Little sweeping motions sending gentle ripples across my nerves like a fine tooth comb.

And I knew that it was you. We had been apart. I don’t really remember your face, but your hands

Great sluices of rain shot down around you, flinging sunlight aside into dark building corners. The street under us has become a stream. Your whole body arches into alertness, waiting for me.

were wrinkled and soft. Your skin was paper thin and veined, almost translucent with flecks of age spots. Long fingered, warm and dry. I still have this image of them, this memory of what they felt like. When you touched me, I cried.

I made you cry? Your voice rushes over me like a warm bath.

Yeah. I still felt it now, a pressure in the lungs that squeezed my throat tight. And then you stepped to the side and there was this big steel drum, and it was very dark inside. So dark that it was almost like a solid mass. You started to put your hands inside, and they fully disappeared. I started to get scared, but you told me not to worry. You reached inside all the way to your elbows, and started pulling out this heavy red curtain.

The dream exits from the moon-splashed annals of my mind, and I feel your breath pause. We enter a tunnel, just the two of us.

You tell me to help you, and I start dragging this curtain out behind you, this long thing, it’s so long it’s almost like a big ribbon. Then this big gust of wind rushes over everything and the curtain starts to float up into the sky. It goes up so far that I can’t see where it ends anymore, and there are these big, golden clouds that cover everything.

Beside us, traffic crashes by, sending people splashing towards cover.

I’m awestruck, looking up. But then you say “look!” and point down to the drum. And then all of these little mice start running up the ribbon, and as they get higher up they turn into rabbits, and then dogs, and then finally birds, these big yellow parrots with green-tipped wings, until finally they peel off and fly away. Their wings make this flapping sound that fills our ears, and the wind picks up and rushes through the trees, and I just remember all of these birds flying past you and then they’re gone.

Oh, very strange.

No, it was really beautiful! I understood that you were showing me something very very rare. I pause, a kernel of annoyance rubbing against me like silt. The feeling of the dream was inaccessible by words, but nobody can really document a dream fully, I suppose.

It had something of my heart,

So strange and broken, as we all are.

You give my hand a squeeze, a sweep to the cheek. I am as weak as a fly.

Words pile up between us, with nowhere to go but in. The sullen clouds spat out their last comments, rivulets of air shaking the trees one by one. We breathe. Sit quiet and watch the sun come washing up again.

People begin to venture back out from under shop doors and awnings. I am filled with tenderness to see several people wringing the rain from their clothes and hair—the shine on their skin as they shake their umbrellas and start walking again.

Look, you say, pointing outwards.

The street shines golden, steam rising from hot pavement. It coats the air in a soft scent, blurring the sharp corners of buildings and suspending time in a fine mist.

Sky a pale blue, melting into musky pinkish gold. Curiously quiet. You smile in disbelief.

Is this heaven cracked open?

Pedestrians pause, looking up towards the sky. All around us, necks bent back like daisies in the wind. No one in a hurry, everyone moving softly.

You leap over the railing, as nimble as a deer. Escape out onto the street. Your body cuts through the swathes of shining mist.

Alex! Waving your arms at me like a lunatic. The sun to your back, glory in your face. Time cranks forward and stops.

An image as strong as a smell. I am too stunned to even laugh.

We are beautiful beings, I think. Light purges from the inside of my soul and I try to hold it back, but I can’t stop it that way.

“Uhh…”

“See? You feel it? There’s a lump.”

“I’m not sure…” Clara’s face was squinted in concentration. Her fingers nibbled around next to my nipple. “Oh, oh!”

“You found it?”

“Yeah I think so. Does it hurt?”

“Not really.”

“It feels pretty hard. Kind of like cartilage.”

“That’s what Greg said too, that it felt like cartilage.” Greg was my boyfriend. He had poked and prodded at my boob upon request last Wednesday night, repeatedly asking “Where? Here? Here?” after I had first felt the lump while soaping my chest in the shower. Then he pinched my nipple and put his mouth on it, and we ended up having sex, which was not helpful.

“Are you going to get it checked out?” Clara had taken her hand off my breast and now clasped it on top of mine, her brows pinched together in pity, all histrionics. I felt pleased looking at her, was even more pleased when at the gynecologist’s office the lump was confirmed threefold.

“Yes, I feel it,” Dr. Lily Wong said, while kneading my breasts. I could feel my swollen tampon pressing against the interior of my vagina.

The examination room was aggressively bright under the homicidal lights. I could see every blackhead on Dr. Wong’s nose. I felt like a spachcocked chicken being rubbed with seasoning. Behind the doctor’s head was a framed poster of a flower that resembled a vagina made of chewed up deli meat. I clutched the paper robe together over my torso as she told me she was referring me for a mammogram.

“Do you have any other questions for me?”

“No,” I replied, “Thank you so much.”

I left the office with a new awareness of the lump, like it had suddenly grown a bundle of nerves. It was right there, lodged against my right nipple like a curled up, mealy larvae of some sort. I felt shiny and new, pumped full of energy that wasn’t mine. On the subway, under my winter coat, I cupped my breast in my hand and stroked the lump all the way home.

___

The emergence of the lump made me happier than I had been in a long time. I was at peace, finally. It confirmed what I have always known to be true: that my life was difficult and full of challenges. Childhood trauma. An abusive ex. Zoloft for anxiety and a smoking problem. Artist woes. And now the cherry on top, a quivering lump that exuded the whiff of death. It made everything clear—a bullet hole leaking blood, a big iron stud nailing me to my very own cross. I was truly a martyr to the cruelties of the world, doomed to suffer beautifully and die by age twenty-seven.

I could not stop touching my right breast to confirm the lump’s presence. It was like a tick, a compulsion, affirming the renewed meaning my life had taken on. Walking down the streets with my iced oat latte in one hand and my boob in another, I felt wobbly and young. Everything around me exuded a sugary patina, glossed over with the dizziness of childhood.

“Babe, stop doing that,” Greg said as he brought my hand down from where it was, in the middle of caressing my boob. We were standing against the counter at a sticky bar waiting for our spaghetts before one of his gigs, where he was playing supporting guitar for a band called Airport Goddess, the first of two openers. I suppressed the urge, but my hand flew right back as he disappeared to take a nervous shit before he got on stage.

“You got this king,” I texted, mostly out of obligation. I loved him, but after years of following him to tiny shows all over Brooklyn, I really didn’t need to go to another one ever again.

The show floated by in a dreamy hurtle of lights of sounds. The AC vent continuously blasted cold air on the top of my head, bestowing me with a headache, and the entire time I watched and listened with my hood up and ear plugs in, only half registering what was happening on stage. I felt strange, like I was on the very edge of the slipstream of life, fully aware of the weight of my whole body as images flickered past me and I dipped in and out.

We shared an UberXL back home with three other friends that had met us at the venue, and everyone stank of cigarettes and sweat. They had been moshing. The driver was a taciturn Indian man who probably hated us. I was crumpled in the very back seat of the van, knees practically up to my nose, and watched the neon agitation of the dark streets whirl past, suddenly finding the concept of people sitting still in a moving vehicle quite absurd.

Back home, as Greg laid his head in my lap in front of the TV, I pressed on the lump continuously, feeling a sensation close to arousal as it slid under my skin. The feeling of the sloping hardness beneath my fingers emitted a hypnotic, morbid comfort that soothed me. I glanced down at Greg. He was gazing blankly at the program, in the vague way an animal might look at a book, already half asleep. I had read somewhere that people felt sleepy around their partners because the body produces oxytocin, a hormone which promotes feelings of relaxation and safety. Perhaps it was too much of a good thing. It was like we had chemically reached a place that preceded sex, or intellect, we had essentially become warm rocks to each other.

Without realizing it, I had begun to think of myself as a new organism. “We,” I thought during inner monologues, instead of “I.” Me and the lump were involved in symbiosis, forming a new, conjoined entity of mutual benefit. I was a goby fish, the lump a pistol shrimp. A wooly bat roosting in a pitcher plant. Something like that.

___

Greg started “making an EP” with a mysterious girl named Helen he said met at a party who had no social media, and I was sure that he was cheating on me. I would imagine him lighting her cigarette, talking at her about the Ottoman War on the dirty sidewalk, trying to impress her in his misguided way—the typical Bushwick crap that girls fell for, shamefully, myself included.

“She’s a whore,” Clara said at dinner, “And he’s a dick. A tiny, smelly dick. A micropenis.”

“I’m sure they’re fucking right now. Do you think she was one of those bitches who showed up at karaoke?” My anger was all dramatics. Truthfully, I could barely sleep last night and was feeling quite sad, but my friendship with Clara was built solely on loud whining, crude jokes, and alcohol.

She started to shriek Sia’s “Chandelier,” her voice taking on a disturbing, nasally pitch. I cackled. She gulped down her second gimlet with both hands around the glass like she was afraid someone was going to take it away. “You should steal his phone, get receipts. Then break up with him.”

“Meh. That means I have to move out. I can’t afford that.” That and I still loved him, admittedly.

“Ugh same. Rent is soooo high right now, it’s crazy.”

Another topic we liked to moan about was being poor and mediocre. Well, only I was poor and mediocre—I fancied myself an actor and playwright (currently confined to off-off-off-Broadway) but worked as a clerk at an orthodontist’s office to make rent. Clara was secretly only mediocre—her plastic surgeon father was still bankrolling her as she galivanted as a poet and editor at a shitty lit magazine.

Clara was my best friend, theoretically. But now, seven years after we first met, we realized that we had fundamentally nothing in common, and at this point we didn’t know what to do about it. In classic late-twenties desperation, we had glommed onto each other as the last two people who somehow still remained in the city out of our college friend group, both stricken by a social illness that rendered us unable to form adult friendships—me out of indifference, her because she was overly eager and people could smell it on her like a dead rat. We were like two bedraggled sailors shipwrecked on a deserted island with nowhere else to go. Every time we met up for drinks and she approached me for a hug, I could see a thinly veiled desperation in her eyes, which both irritated and soothed me. She was needy and grating as a friend, but absurdly loyal, and somehow the most enduring constant in my life.

To be honest though, although I thought myself as better than Clara in many ways (fashion, personality, general taste), she was a talented artist, which is something I wish I could whole-heartedly claim for myself. I loved Clara’s poetry. She had one titled, “eyes/mice/holes/beyond” that I had a particular affinity for. Her voice could become hypnotic, powerful, when she willed it to—once, at one of her readings, I felt Greg swallow beside me before leaning over and whispering, “Wait, Clara’s hot” between verses.

“Poetry is dead,” she would say, afterwards.

“I just can’t engage with men anymore,” I was saying.

“I know. Literally going to kill myself. Ohmygod, wait, how was your scan?” She had put her fork down, a burnt cauliflower speared on the end.

I told her. There were multiple spine-tingling, medical terms spoken like calcifications, hypoechoic mass, biopsy, BI RADS etc. All I heard was death, death, death, oblivion. The radiologist, a kindly grandmother type, had told me not to panic before a biopsy and asked me if I was planning on getting pregnant, as sometimes the hormones from pregnancy could make lumps disappear. No, I answered. L was turning out to be fairly serious. I could feel him, snuggled within my body, seducing me to let him stay.

“L?” Clara asked. She pronounced it like two syllables, el-uh. “You gave it a name?”

“Sure,” I said, brushing it off.

“Aren’t you worried? About you know…cancer? Do you have family history?”

“I wouldn’t know, remember? I’m adopted.”

Clara’s face deflated around her drink. “Wait, what?”

“I’m joking.”

“Oh.”

I started to feel the fizzling sensation of mania. “You wanna know something interesting?”

“OMG spill.” She leaned forward with her mouth open, like she was getting ready to eat the words that were about to come out of my mouth.

“You know cancer cells are pretty incredible? They’re basically immortal. There’s this thing called the telomerase right? The telomeres of normal cells shorten, which cause them to die but in cancer cells, the telomerase extends the telomeres so they live forever! That’s why they keep growing and replicating into tumors!”

The bitchy twist to Clara’s mouth unraveled. She stared at me with a confused expression, stirring her drink. I continued.

“Oh and, this is really interesting—there’s like a thing, a molecule on the surface of tumors that can convert the cancer cells back into stem cells. That’s how they develop drug resistance. They literally become impervious. It’s crazy! Like the treatment itself triggers a special molecular pathway that transforms tumors back into stem cells. Like biologically, that’s amazing. Don’t you think so?”

“And cancer cells can hijack the tissue around it by releasing these signals, which causes the tumor microenvironment to develop more blood vessels so it can spread and get more nutrients, and cause the immune system to become unresponsive. They’re like smart. Tactical. Experts at escaping detection.”

I realized I was tipped forward onto my elbows, shooting beatific passion towards Clara, whose eyes had clouded over with poorly hidden apprehension. Her body language was sloshy and uncomfortable. But she was drunk. Her face twitched rapidly between expressions, then she laughed, a “BA-HA-HA-HA!” that blasted my face with her alcoholic breath.

“God, Jessa! You are so fucking funny.” Then she got up. “I’m gonna use the bathroom.”

___

I printed out a copy of my mammogram for two dollars at UPS and put it up on our fridge. Among the mound of gelatinous darkness was a skein of beauty, bright white and powerful. A homing signal, shining inside me, attracting my body’s energies.

“You are young,” Dr. Wong said, an attempt to soothe me, her face pixelated on the telehealth portal. Another variation of deli meat-flower-vagina erupted on the wall behind her like an infection. “But the mammogram was abnormal but inconclusive. So I’m referring you for a biopsy.”

On the word “biopsy,” a bolt of pain lanced through my right boob, into my ribcage. This was L’s way of communicating discontent to me at certain moments.

“Ok, I’ll make an appointment.” Aftershocks of objections pulsed rhythmically, as steady as a drumbeat.

“There’s no need to panic, we’re just making sure.” Her smile was wan. “It’s a minor procedure, no need to prep. Call me if you have any questions.”

“Thank you,” I said. “Thank you so much.”

I didn’t make the appointment and ghosted Dr. Wong after that. Greg got very angry at me. Which I found to be pretty fascinating, given that for the past several weeks he had pretty much treated me like an annoying salesperson who was trying to sell him an ugly sweater, the ugly sweater being my life and my thoughts. Nonetheless, I enjoyed the way he became exasperated with me every time I evaded the subject, flinging anguished gazes and shaking his head like I was a particularly disobedient toddler. I arranged these moments strategically, into a case of his concern for me. Surely, he wasn’t in love with this Helen.

Dating Greg lately was like orbiting around a distracted teenager. He had nothing to offer beyond taking up space and constantly asking me questions about myself I had already answered. He schlepped around the apartment like a bear readying for hibernation, leaving take-out containers everywhere and sprawling his flaccid body over the couch. Five nights out of the week he was busy, and when he wasn’t busy, he was sleeping. Every sentence he directed towards me was bisected by a yawn, as if my very presence was putting him to sleep. The only time he emitted an emotion that wasn’t malaise was when he was berating me for “being unreasonable.”

On one of the rare evenings when he was home, I came back into our room from the bathroom after brushing my teeth and saw that he had already fallen asleep. It was 10pm. His mouth fell slightly open and there was a bead of drool slowly collecting in the left corner of his mouth.

I shook him. “Let’s go out,” I announced loudly. He grumbled and turned over.

“Not tonight babe,” he muttered, stifling an offensively exaggerated yawn. Then he turned on his side and went back to sleep.

I stood there looking at him for a while. Then I lifted his arm up from where it was flopped next to him and raised it up above his head. His skin was hot and fleshy. He was dead asleep. I contemplated letting gravity smash his arm into his own face, but instead placed it back against the sheets. L began to twinge coyly to the right of my nipple, almost like a purr, or a coo. I crawled into bed next to Greg and began to search myself with my fingers, while pressing on L at the same time. I changed rhythm, changed hands, the topography of my body aligning deliciously with the forces plunging inside me. I edged myself until I saw explosions behind my eyes, and then slid into a soft twilight zone.

___

To ease my confusion around Greg, I found myself spending more time with Clara to complain about him. She was delighted at this turn of events, thinking it was bringing us closer, and took the opportunity to invite herself over at a high frequency. But there was never enough to talk to about, so we found ourselves watching 90 Day Fiancee and smoking and drinking and eating exorbitant amounts of snacks under the guise of “hanging out.” When she talked, I would play a game—instead of looking at her eyes, I would look at a mole above one of her eyebrows, my thoughts sliding towards other things. I would viciously compliment her on clothing items I found ugly. Despite being a self-proclaimed shopping addict, Clara had no fashion sense.

When she was over one afternoon, she stood in front of my mammogram and slowly rotated it ninety degrees, so that the nipple was pointing upward towards a bottle of sriracha mayo. “It looks like a mountain,” she said, squashing a finger on my nipple. “Boob Mountain.” It was a little funny, I’ll admit.

“Did you ever end up getting that biopsy?” she asked. I told her a lie, some obscure health insurance situation. She was wearing a faux leather trench coat the color of mildew with brass buttons, and I gave her the most genuine false compliment I could muster to change the subject.

People, I had begun to realize, had limits when it came to their knowability. Despite the familiarity that could be enjoyed between two people, at a certain point, there was an impasse that emerged, and beyond that point things died. What remained was the craggy debris of our differences scraping up against each other, the confines of human intimacy painfully apparent. My relationships were constructed out of proximity and memorized nostalgia, there was nothing required of “me,” really.

I found my thoughts drifting to that same horrible trenchcoat when I was on the way back from my orthodontist gig, the wailing keen of the Q train sluicing over the gray drudgery of the city. Yesterday, she had paired it with a houndstooth beret. Oh, Clara. I almost smiled. There was something charmingly vulnerable, even loveable, about the way she tried so hard to look good. Every mismatched outfit accidentally revealed how much she cared.

Suddenly, the train started to sway and shake. I first thought the wind had given it a hard shove. But then air began to emit a low rumble, and the tin walls of the train car started clattering.

“What the hell?” some guy across from me ventured. People dropped their phones down from their faces and stood up in confusion. Through the shaking grease-streaked windows, the East River glimmered below. A burst of frightened pigeons took flight from the peak of the Williamsburg Bridge.

“Oh my God, oh my God, it’s an earthquake,” a woman gasped, clenching her grocery cart with gloved hands.

“I don’t want to die!” someone else yelped.

I continued to sit. Unintelligible sounds garbled through the train intercom as people stiffened in their seats and swiveled their heads around wildly as if they would find answers in their peripheral vision. Two children in matching outfits clutched onto each other and began to wail. An uncanny mayhem seized me. I imagined the skyscrapers on either side of me trembling, toppling over like cinder blocks. I saw radioactive mushroom clouds engulfing Manhattan, the bridge twisting free of its bearings and crashing into the East River, cars dropping off like ants. In that moment, I prayed for us all to be swallowed. Sunlight angled down into the train car, everything crystallizing into washed out brilliance. I smiled inwardly, deeply. We were becoming beautiful.

Then, the earthquake shuddered to a stop, just as the sun was sucked back behind the clouds. People twitched and sat back down, slowly, turning their faces away from each other, as if they weren’t just about to grab onto one another and start praying to Jesus. The fleshy man next to me coughed hurriedly, fat drops of sweat rolling down his oily bald head. Everyone was ashamed, embarrassed to have revealed their fear and vulnerability, been forced to look around and relate to each other.

Slowly but surely, I felt something fracture and shift and inside of me. Relating to others became a chore that I was no longer obligated to endure. As I laid awake at night with Greg sprawled out beside me, my brain floated. I visualized my body turning inside out, peeling away and inverting into my skull until I compacted into a dried out walnut. I stroked L underneath my shirt, imagining two interloping strands of DNA caressing each other in darkness. I just waited, not to fall asleep, but for something to either kill me save me, I don’t know.

___

The earthquake seized New York’s collective consciousness for about three days, then was quickly forgotten. Its only remembrance was a lingering vibration—it had coincided perfectly with the seasons, shaking the city from its early summer stupor, imbuing the startled masses with libidinous energy. But for me, something about it had scorched itself into my neural pathways, exciting L. He was coming alive, becoming greedy. I, on the other hand, was quietly disconnecting from people, and everything meaningful I preferred to keep insulated, in secret. I walked about in a fugue, connecting minimally to the outside world through only touching and moving objects. So when Greg asked me to be his plus one to a party hosted by his new rich friend in the country, I was surprised, and mostly agreed out of guilt.

“You can’t keep putting this off. You need to go.” We were in a rented car. He removed his hand from where it was resting on my thigh and relocated it pointedly to the steering wheel.

“Why?”

“Are you listening to yourself, what do you mean why?”

“I mean I just don’t see the point.” I was talking to the window, being infantile, I know. The windows were greasy with condensation and refracted the glow of the streetlights lining the road into iridescent halos that all bled together like wet newspapers.

“Don’t see the point? Jesus, Jessa, it could be cancer!” He said “cancer” with the proper pathos, his voice rising to a righteous pitch. I suddenly had the urge to jump out of the car.

“I know,” I said instead, after a sigh I hoped conveyed the proper amount of unease. “It’s just…I’d rather not know, you know?”

He turned towards me. “Oh, babe.”

“I’m just a little afraid.”

I wasn’t. In fact, I felt free of fear for the first time in my life. But I needed to distract him with my weakness, to see if he could still conjure that warm curl up my spine that I craved.

He placed his hand back on my thigh. The car made a quick right, and my hair pressed up against the damp window. We were approaching a large house, multiple cars lined up on the driveway, windows tossing out warm light.

“I’m not pressuring you,” Greg said, as the headlights died. “I’m just worried.”

I looked at him, his soft hair and square chin, and suddenly remembered the sensation of desiring him, of attraction. The slow gravity of falling into his face, of speech retracting. But the feeling remained behind glass, as a memory, and suddenly I was lumpy and filled with knots, overcome with a feeling of weird guilt. I clasped his hand in confusion, kissed him so I wouldn’t have to talk. A spasm of pain lit my breast on fire, and we walked into the party.

It turned out the friend, Adrien, was the son of some important music executive, and that there was a rare Stratocaster something or the other that was owned by Frank Zappa. Greg got swallowed up by a group of long-haired white boys who moved like a flock of hypnotized pigeons in the direction of the guitar. Adrien’s girlfriend, Grace, offered to give me a tour. We wandered all around the house, from the glassy, high-ceilinged living room to the kitchen, all steel appliances and dark granite, and then downstairs to the second kitchen, where the walls were hung with brass pots and pans that had clearly never been used. She guided me to the bathroom, where a huge spotless bathtub glistened seductively in its own elevated alcove. Her long, dark fingernails trailed along the walls and countertops. A man passing us on the staircase asked us to pause for a picture, his film camera strapped obnoxiously across his chest. We leaned into each other primly and smiled. I felt idiotic. I didn’t know this woman, didn’t know anyone here.

Downstairs, I stood near Greg for a while sipping a glass of wine, but he seemed restless, trying to divide his attention between me and the older, pretentious music guys he was clearly trying to impress, so out of consideration, I cut myself loose. I loitered around the table of snacks and drinks, ate an arancini topped with a daub of red. It was cheesy and wet. I fiddled at my boob through my dress, trying to be discreet, but L was aching continuously, seething with low-grade displeasure. I dipped a skewer of steak into an herby oil and stepped back as people reached past me for napkins.

A girl touched my arm, and complimented me on my dress. I complimented her back. She was tall and pretty, with bleached eyebrows and short curly hair that accentuated her long neck. She asked me about my job, who I knew. A playwright I said, sometimes an actor. Greg is my boyfriend. She said she had just graduated from Parsons. Her earrings were tiny pink vibrators. She unhooked one from her ear and pressed it against the tip of my finger. It buzzed, on its sad search for a tiny clitoris. We laughed, she retreated back to her friend, and I realized I had forgotten to ask her name.

People were reaching over me for drinks. I scooted around to the corner with a martini, repeated myself to other strangers with my back to the wall.

I’m a playwright, I sometimes act—

Well, I was in this one act festival recently. At the Chain Theater?

I’m here with Greg, he’s my boyfriend.

My satin dress was staticky and clung between my legs. The olives at the bottom of my martini rolled lazily, two jelly balls for eyes. I drained the glass and horked them down, briny skin squelching between my molars. The guy, photographer guy, stood in front of me with one hand cradled around his camera, talking. I had a wine headache. I longed to be in a dark room, away from this dull insanity.

“How long have you guys been dating?”

“Almost three years,” I replied. The ill-timed martini released a new wave of drunkenness, and I felt something inside me droop. My tongue felt too large for my mouth. Stop talking to me, I wanted to say. There’s this lump. It’s very complicated. I may die!

“That’s cool, Greg’s great, we met at this show opening a while ago. I shoot a lot of bands back in the city. Do you know Nadine? She was also in the same group show.” Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted Greg, leaning towards another woman. It was the tall pretty girl, the one with the vibrator earrings, and she was touching his arm while his hand was on the small of her back. The photographer’s face in front of me dropped away in a violent tumble, his voice disintegrated into a meaningless garble of sounds. Love, I realized in that moment, was a sensation saved deep inside your spine.

“Excuse me,” I said, and wrenched myself away from the conversation, nearly stumbling over my dress. “Helen?” The girl touching Greg turned around, a puzzled look on her face. Greg looked over as well, his mouth half open, in the middle of a sentence. I dashed to the bathroom.

Behind the closed door it was pitch dark. I didn’t want to turn on the lights. I just stood there, breathing, heart pounding, frozen in the pool of my own gravity. My brain was attempting to rearrange itself. A spear of pain grazed my ribcage, then began to pulse, stronger and faster, intensely angry and alive. I was filled with a roiling, diseased kind of purpose. My heart began to flutter manically, in sync with L’s exclamations of revolt. There was a noise in the air that could have been whirring helicopter blades, or the sound of children shrieking.

The dark bathroom became a wobbling tunnel. I turned the light on. My face in the mirror was bloodless, surrounded by the cold, spotless gleam of stone. My own face shocked me, who was this strange, febrile woman panting in the mirror with dizzy black eyes? I bent closer. There, besieged in the round gleam of my iris, was a tiny me looking back. I understood a shred of something then, no matter how close or how far, between here or there, big or small, there was no difference. There was no understanding, no order to be achieved. To be right up close or far removed, was to be blind. Always.

Then, like a switch, my heart reversed to a steady, calm rhythm, heavy and hard. I felt a sensation of complete understanding, as if I had just downloaded a message from God. “I understand,” I said into my reflection. I was suddenly transfixed by joy. I stared intensely at my chest like Jesus was just to the right of my nipple. I caressed L underneath my dress, and swore that I could feel a tiny vibration emanating from his smooth body, an ambient purr. Leave all of them, he was saying, be with me and no one else.

All my thoughts converged at the single point in my head. I smoothed my dress, and walked out, slamming the bathroom door with a celebratory bang.

I decided to get wretchedly drunk. I didn’t look for Greg, although I knew he was looking for me. My phone tucked into the waistband of my bike shorts vibrated feverishly under my dress. I downed a flute of champagne, then a shot of something dark. I went outside. The night was cool, but carried a swampish muck that clung to the skin. A slimy film of sweat cooled rapidly on my neck and between my breasts. I turned around, the house behind me vomiting light out from behind gauzy curtains. It looked fake, like a dollhouse. I wanted to light it on fire. The world began to sway, like I was alone on a raft in the middle of the ocean.

“Jessa! Are you okay?”

I leaned over and vomited. Hot, ropey strings of half-digested steak and deviled eggs emptied onto the manicured lawn. Greg was behind me now, rubbing my back. I vomited until I heaved, my sour, empty stomach spasming until nothing was left.

“Let me get you some water.”

I stood up sloshily. The moon was smothered behind a smudge of cloud. “Don’t bother.”

Greg stopped walking. “Look, Jessa, it’s not what you think it is.”

“You look, Greg,” I said. “You look.” I started to laugh. It gurgled up endlessly, exploding between gasps of my hot, acrid breath.

“You’re drunk. We should go home.” He grabbed my hand and started back towards the house.

I sat down next to my vomit. “No. I’m not going anywhere with you. You can back inside and fuck that twenty-one year old. I’m staying here.”

“Let’s go home, please.” His voice mashed down to a desperate hiss. “Then we can talk about this.”

Despite it all, my heart sank. My face heated to the temperature of a hot plate. “I’m staying here.” I could feel my voice taking on a shrill edge, my heartbeat doubling in speed.

“You’re acting crazy.”

I stood up. The blood pounded in my ears with a terrific woosh. My whole being was seized by an ecstatic vibration, I felt as if I was lifting out of my shoes.

“Maybe I am crazy. So what.” I took a step towards him. “It’s my prerogative to act crazy. I can do whatever the fuck I want. You know what’s actually crazy though? It’s you ‘making an EP’ with that Helen or whatever and thinking I’m too stupid to know that you’re cheating on me. You don’t even have to try to deny it, I can see it all over your face.” Out of the corner of my eye, I could sense that the other partygoers had trickled out to watch me have a meltdown. I didn’t care. I had the overwhelming desire to projectile vomit over the faux-concerned faces with eyebrow piercings and trendy silver jewelry, to explode my social life, to drag Greg to hell. “You are so fucking fake. It makes me sick. Pretending to care about me. The way you act around these people swinging your dick around like you have something important to say—sorry Greg, but you are aggressively untalented. You’re not fooling anyone.” I was pitched forward, the volume of my voice propelling out of my gut with unstoppable force. I had never shouted like this in my entire life.

“You don’t mean that. You can’t treat me like this.” He looked like he was about to cry.

“I do so mean it. Even though you may think I have an obligation to you, I assure you, I have none. What is this?” I flailed my open palm towards the open space between us. “What’s even going on here? This is just some arbitrary situation thrown together, some circuitous, awful thing. What’s going on here?” I repeated, louder, turning around to the frozen crowd, with their drinks hovering below their lips. “What the fuck are we all doing here?”

Someone came up behind me and attempted to steer me away by my shoulders. “Hey look, maybe you oughtta—”

“Get off of me.” I wrenched myself away and wheeled back towards Greg. “I don’t love you anymore. In fact, I fucking hate you. It’s over.” He looked stunned. I felt a terrible glee rise up inside of me. “Sorry,” I added as an afterthought. And then I charged past him into the house.

The crowded parted before me like the Red Sea splitting for Moses. My vision was wobbling from adrenaline. I stalked past Helen on the patio, assailing her with my best glare, which she didn’t meet. She just stood there, hands at her sides like a stalk of bamboo. She made no movement towards Greg, who had shrunk into a dark smear on the grass. I felt a twinge of pity, but it was immediately smothered by a smooth, alien-level of calm. I was finally alone. Ready to contend with something inside of me.

I didn’t retain much from the rest of that night. The last thing I remembered was me huddled in the backseat of a taxi that barreled down the road through darkness. The windows were cracked open, dark trees and sky whipping past. Limpid, stewing in the muddle of my own semiconsciousness. I was an egg and God had just cracked me into a pan. My head felt pinky red. My heart thudded languorously with a fetal glow. L’s glandular body unfolded within me like a blooming rose, leafing outwards through my arteries, braiding his tender fingers over my neural pathways. Pain, hot and limber, stepped through my chest, lanced down my spine. I sensed that my body had doubled in size, leaving a dual impression on the cracked leather seat.

I was finally, blissfully, alone. Sleep, sleep, sleep. Down, down, down, L implores. He proliferates. I slept.

Driving to Waterford college, her old Volvo stubbornly remained icy cold. She shivered, the coldness from the cracked leather seats seeping through her pants. Tomorrow, she promised to herself, I will start the car when I’m eating breakfast to give it some time to warm up. The road had a particular white sheen, the look of frosted over concrete. The trees outside were bare and stood skeletal in the windless afternoon. The houses and cars that sparsely dotted the road were sparkling and still, frozen and cheerily ghost-like. Joanna blinked heavily to clear her eyes. Her eyesight maintained an annoying blurriness from sleep, and the brightness was uncomfortable.

On the campus lawn, she stoppered her ears with earplugs and aimed her leaf blower at the last of the dead leaves littering the pathways. Two girls huddled in big jackets approached her on the path, and she stepped aside to let them pass. As they got closer, Joanna met eyes briefly with one of them. There was a glimmer of a question in her gaze, and she instantly knew what it meant. If she was out of her groundskeeper uniform, she wouldn’t have looked much different from any of the female students milling around at this private, liberal arts college. She was young and rosy-cheeked in the cold, looked vaguely mixed-race to passing glances. But instead of carrying a backpack and rushing to classes, she was weeding plant beds and smacking ice off frozen water sprinklers. The girl dropped her gaze, and Joanna watched the leaves travel in spurts towards the gutter.

Back in her shoe box apartment, she stabbed a couple of holes into a frozen meal with her fork and put it in the microwave. She watched it spin, her eyes throbbing. Standing at the counter, she shoveled the watery meal into her mouth, not even bothering to register the taste.

The drive to the gas station was monotonous and barely experienced, the empty, dark interstate roving outside and Joanna’s hands automatically turning the steering wheel, in step-time to the rotary of routine familiarity. Her old car squeaked to a stop behind the rest stop, and she stepped out into the harsh light of a single streetlight that flickered ominously.

“They really oughta fix that.” A man exited the building, rubbing his arms as he jogged back to his car.

Seated on the stool behind the counter, Joanna leaned back against the shelves displaying condoms and cigarettes and closed her eyes. She took out her notebook and a pen and thought of journaling, but the blank pages just seemed to mirror the blankness inside of her and conjured no itch to reflect. She sipped a soapy tasting coffee, counted change for a woman who wanted to use pump four, and gave her the bathroom key. She restocked the drinks and premade pastries, slipping a few expired ones into her tote bag. She kept her eye on a couple of drunk-ish looking men who stumbled inside looking to buy cigarettes. Business slowed, and she sat, rubbing her shoulders. It was 12:16am.

A woman, short-haired and petite in a green duffel coat, walked in and made a beeline for the coffee machine. Joanna watched her rub her nose as the dispenser shot out the steaming, black liquid with a frothy hiss. She had a beautiful profile, a perfect straight nose and small chin.

“Just this,” the woman said, placing the coffee on the counter.

Up close, the woman had eyes of an indiscriminate color, a golden brown rimmed in grayish green. When she talked, her lips tilted up towards the right, lopsided in a charming way.

“That’ll be three dollars,” Joanna said.

The woman handed her three one dollar bills from her wallet. “Thank you.”

“There’s creamer and sugar over there, if you want it.”

The woman shook her head. She looked tired. “Is there anywhere to eat around here? Somewhere still open?”

“There’s a twenty-four hour diner like five minutes away. You make a right and keep driving down. There’s a big sign, you can’t miss it.”

“Ohhh my god, thank god, that’s perfect. I’m starving. I haven’t eaten.” She looked at Joanna with her mouth quirked up into a slightly apologetic expression, like there was some secret between the two of them that she wasn’t aware of.

When she realized that the woman expected her to respond, she smiled back a little hesitantly. She had never understood people who decided to start up conversations with strangers.

“That sounds rough.”

The woman sighed. “Yeah, it is what it is. I took a job teaching ESL night classes in Scarborough but the commute is brutal. Barely have time to eat before I leave.”

Joanna nodded, trying to fix her expression into something sympathetic. But mostly, she was just looking at her, noticing the creamy bags under her eyes, absorbing the scratchy tiredness of the woman’s voice.

“Actually, can I also get a pack of cigarettes? The Camel Blues.” She slid her driver’s license across the counter. Olivia Mathers-Wong, the card read. DOB April 22^nd, 1996.

“Here you go,” said Joanna, handing back her change.

“Well, I’m going to head to this diner. Thanks for this.” She waggled the coffee cup in her fingers.

“You’re welcome.”

The woman left, disappearing into her car which then disappeared around the corner. The caffeine was activating in her system, and she felt slightly breathless. Something inside of her thrummed, matching the streetlight shining unsteadily outside the window. She realized she probably would never see this woman again.

Opening her notebook to an empty page, she wrote: Olivia. She ground her pen down into the period, as it seemed essential.

__

The following weekend was far too long. She worked Saturday at the college, stringing up Christmas lights over the library in the main quad, and Sunday at the gas station night shift, mopping the floors and cleaning the soft drink and coffee machines. She was restless, and couldn’t even decide on a channel to watch on the TV. Lying on the couch, she found herself thinking of Olivia, with her crooked mouth and tired voice, but felt silly and strange when she did.

Unable to sit with the skittish sensation in her chest, she got up and started driving. She drove in circles around the neighborhood, with the car radio tuned to a channel playing Christmas songs whose lyrics rattled uselessly in the back of her head. She knew this feeling, it was something that happened to her when she was alone for too long. She had first felt it after she left home for the first time, armed with her GED, crossing the state border to work at an Amazon shipment center on winter contract. Her brother had left her to join the navy, and she felt a strong wave of panic to leave as well. She went over a few times after work to drink beers and play Indian poker with a couple of the other women, but she was always the youngest and least enthusiastic about the game. She ended up spending most of her time alone in her tiny rented room, watching porn on her phone and trying to keep warm.

The weeks dragged on, and she got a feeling like she was becoming afraid of herself. Like if she were to stay in the same place and keep seeing the same things, something threatening might bust out of her. The feeling confused her because it wasn’t so much that she wanted people---she never had much faith in them anyways---but it was more like she needed to transplant herself into something entirely foreign. So she did the next best thing she could. She bought a junk car, and drove.

The next Wednesday at the gas station, she was wondering where she should go next, when Olivia walked in again.

“Hi,” she said, placing a coffee cup on the counter.

A strange sensation twinged in Joanna’s chest, a little painful.

“Hey. Will that be all?”

“Yeah.” She had already started on the coffee and was shaking out money from her wallet, and then seemed to second guess herself. “Three dollars right?”

“Yes, that’s correct.”

She handed Joanna three folded bills.

“Honestly, this is not on you, but the coffee’s not very good. Kind of tastes like hot soap.”

“I know. You’re probably better off buying the canned Starbucks.” Joanna found herself talking, to her own surprise.

“Yeah, probably. But I feel like this has the most caffeine? I’m at risk of falling off the road here, so I kind of need something black and disgusting to keep me awake.”

“Bad commute right?”

She looked startled for half a second, then relaxed. “Oh, yeah, you remembered.” She glanced down at her watch, a band of silver around a thin wrist. “Jesus, it’s already past twelve. I still have two more hours until I get home.”

“Where’s home?”

“Waterford. I’m coming from Scarborough.” Her face was resigned, tired. She really was quite small, almost half a head shorter than her, and Joanna was only five foot five.

Waterford? As in Waterford College?  “Like the college?”

“Yep. I’m a grad student.”

Joanna thought about how to respond, unsure if she should tell her that she worked there. “That’s a pretty bad drive,” is all she said. She herself had to drive more than two hours to get back to Farleigh, the town she lived in past Waterford. From Scarborough it would be close to three and a half.

“Alright, I better go. Classes tomorrow.”

“Good luck.”

“Thanks.” She groaned and rubbed her face. “I’ll be back to do it all again on Friday. Save some coffee for me.” She smiled again, but it was closer to a grimace.

She would be back Friday. As would Joanna.

“Okay.”

Halfway out the door, she turned back. “Wait, what’s even your name?”

“Joanna.”

“I’m Via. Have a good night.”

Her voice trailed out the door, and Joanna watched her cross the jittery streetlight to her blue Prius and get in the driver’s seat. Via. For Olivia. She kicked the stool out of her way. She felt like running out into the cold. But then a couple came in, carelessly wandering the aisles and grabbing bags of snacks. She preemptively put her hand on the barcode scanner, already prepared for them to finish.

__

The rest of her shift passed strangely, in a glittery haze. The fluorescent solitude of the gas station carried its iridescent shine into the trembling, low clouds outside the windows. She felt a quickness in her chest, but it wasn’t the same skittishness as before. She felt like a weird little bug in a glass cage. Joanna watched the sun emerge, its orange rays smothered by the drapes of clouds, as the sky changed from bruise-colored to a soft blue. There was a whiteness in the air. It started to snow on her drive home.

At the college, her boots were caked in salt and snow. The snow had gathered an impressive amount in seven hours, and she, with all of the other groundskeepers, were tasked with shoveling it away. The whole time, she couldn’t help but think about Via. What if I run into her? Would she even recognize me? Would she be pleased to see me? She scraped at the pavement with such an absent-minded ferocity that her co-workers chuckled and stepped out of her way. But in every variation of her imagination where they ran into each other, she felt a twirl of dread. She shook her head, bent her neck down and continued to shovel snow.

On her way back home, she eased her old car into the snowed over, petite downtown. There were only a smattering of people on the streets, a few families with small kids, who were bundled up to their noses and stomping gleefully through the snowy drifts, while the parents looked on with expressions of gentle concern. Joanna walked into a trendy-looking coffee shop with rivets of condensation running off the windows. She looked at the shelves of packaged coffee, chose the most expensive one, and promptly paid and drove home. It was still Wednesday, but already close to approaching Thursday, so it wasn’t very far from Friday at all. But looking at the bag of coffee grounds lying on the passenger seat, she felt mildly woozy and like time couldn’t move any slower if it tried.

On Friday evening, she stood barefooted in her tiny kitchenette and brewed the coffee in her Mr. Coffee coffee pot. The rich smell filled her apartment as she gazed at the label, which described “hints of pomegranate, cranberry, blackberry, and lemongrass.” She took a sip. She didn’t know anything about coffee, but it was quite good, she thought. She poured the full pot into her thermos, quickly agonized over which baseball cap to wear, and got in her car.

On the drive, she rolled down the windows a bit despite the cold. She felt weirdly overheated, and the gusts of winter air felt good on her face. She wondered how she could impress this girl, woman really, this impressive person who was older, a grad student, someone she would have never crossed paths with outside a chance encounter at a gas station.

She started sweeping the floor at twelve am sharp, hoping for an opportunity to stand next to Via when she came in, instead of being trapped behind the counter. Then, like clockwork, her blue Prius pulled into the station eight minutes later, but a slow-moving man was just bringing a can of iced tea to the counter. She had to hurry. She quickly swiped his card, and leapt towards the broom, pretending not to notice Via as she walked in.

“Hey again.” She was on her way to the coffee dispenser.

“Hi. Wait.” Joanna tried to casually block her path with the broom. “Don’t drink that. I made you some coffee.”

“Oh!” She looked surprised, eyebrows flying up.

Joanna didn’t waste time thinking on if this was a good or bad sign. She procured a paper cup, and poured Via a cup of hot coffee from her thermos and handed it to her, along with a lid. She was prepared.

“Thank you. Um, that’s really nice of you.”

Joanna leaned against the counter, trying her best to be nonchalant. She felt exposed, without the separation of the slab of plastic between them. They stood several respectful feet apart, blinking at each other like animals placidly acknowledging the other. Today, she was wearing a white turtleneck sweater over a pair of a pair of light denim, and the same dark green duffel coat. Her short hair was pinned back out of her face with several bobby pins, but a few errant strands fell over her forehead. She wanted to reach out and tuck them behind her ears, but she kept her distance, and watched her take a sip.

“It’s good! Much better than the hot soap.”

“I remembered last time you said that, so I thought I’d just bring some from home.”

“Aw. Dang, I can’t believe you remembered that.” She had put the lid on her coffee. “Aren’t you going to have some yourself? How long are you here for anyways?”

Joanna shook her head. Her mouth went a bit dry around her, but she didn’t want to tell her that. The coffee definitely would not help.

“I work till seven am.”

“Seven am? Wow. That must be rough.”

Joanna nodded placidly. “It’s alright. It’s pretty dead. Mostly just folks on overnight drives and some spill from the local bar, dudes looking for smokes.”

“Still, seven am? I could never do that.” She shook her head in disbelief. “I get home by like two, and the next day when I open my eyes I’m already tired.”

“How’s the class?”

She pressed the back of her hand against one eye. “It’s alright. I mean, it’s okay. I’m teaching ESL English and the students are mainly older immigrant types. Lessons are pretty simple, so prep is easy, and they’re great, everyone’s very sweet. But it’s just this drive, man. I took this job because I got talked into it by my friend who told me that it’ll help for when I apply to Fullbright next year but gosh, I dunno. It’s just a lot. I don’t know what I was thinking when I took it. I must’ve been stupid. Like, it’s basically a three, fourish hour commute each way for a two hour class, so that’s like ten hours of my life gone. And I have my grad courses and my research and the time it takes to plan each class…oh, and the other day on the drive back I fucking skidded on black ice outside of Norwich. I could’ve died.”

“Yeah, that’s a lot to deal with.” Joanna looked at Via’s large, tired eyes, below two of the most artful looking eyebrows she had ever seen. She wondered what she thought of her, if she thought she was some just some kid who decided she wanted to work at a gas station.

Via sighed. She took a Nature Valley granola bar out of her pocket. She tore it open and began chewing on one dejectedly, crumbs falling onto her jacket.

“You want one?” She offered Joanna the other half.

She shook her head.

She folded the wrapper and put the other half back into her pocket. “Sorry,” she said, glancing down at the crumbs on the floor. “I just realized that you’re probably going to have to clean that up now.”

“It’s alright. I don’t mind.”

“You probably think I’m some nutjob who won’t leave you alone.” She chuckled dryly, rubbing her forehead. Joanna chuckled a little too, and their laughs bounced off each other and hit the rows of inflated chip bags before the convenience store drone took over again.

“No, I don’t at all. It’s nice to chat with you.” She was so petite. She wanted to touch her, somehow, hold her hand or brush her cheek with the back of her hand.

Via quickly glanced at her watch. “Alright, well. I better go. Don’t wanna get home too late.”

“See you next Wednesday?”

“Oh, yes. Next Wednesday,” she groaned. “See you then.”

“Bye.”

She waved, then turned and left, the glass door shuttering behind her with a tinny ring. Joanna watched her cross between the gas pumps to her car, the wind fluttering her dark hair.

She had forgotten her coffee. “Wait!” She ran out after her. She had just reached her car door, one hand on the handle.

“Oh shoot. Thanks so much. Aggghhh I’m so out of it.” In the darkness, her breath gusted out of her mouth as she spoke, and Joanna’s skin prickled with cold. She didn’t immediately reach for the coffee cup, and for a second, Joanna watched their breaths mix together and rise up into the air. Her mouth hung halfway open, lips glistening in the glare of the street light. It was steady and orange, pressing up against the dark. Someone had fixed it.

Joanna tilted her head and crouched towards her lips. But at the same time, a notification popped up on Via’s phone, and she angled her head away to look down at it. Joanna jerked back.

“Thanks again,” she said, taking the cup from her hand.

“Of course. Be careful about the ice.”

She got in her car and drove away. She wanted to scream, to flail her entire body into a mound of snow. She should have kissed her earlier. She was picking up on something that wasn’t there. If only her phone hadn’t pinged. If only she was better at making conversation. She walked back inside and sat behind the counter, her mind turning and turning over the night’s events until the sun came up, and even then, she continued squirming with excited despair.

__

That weekend was the longest Via had ever known, even longer than the last. She didn’t want to leave bed, but also she couldn’t sit still. Cold gusts from the north showered the town in flurries of snow, but by Sunday, the sun was out again, and everything was rounded out, glistening and white under the smirchless blue sky. After work, she paced around in her apartment, and when she got bored of that, she paced outside. Her boots sunk beautifully into the thick sheets of snow, but when she looked back at her footsteps, she felt a little sad. When it got too cold, she got in her car and drove south, then east, then north again. The roads were bright and flat, glittering and pristine. The steady whine of the tires against cold pavement smoothed her out a bit, and she wondered about her brother, floating out somewhere in the middle of the ocean. She drove past her hometown. Her parents were somewhere off to the left, amidst the darkening clusters of lights.

By the time she woke up the next day, her mind was set right. A long drive always helped with that. By Wednesday, she was a woman on a mission. She would demonstrate her seriousness to Via, show her that she wanted to get to know her. What would a boy do? she thought. Am I in love?

She tied her hair back and brushed her teeth while the coffee was brewing. At the gas station, she chewed a few sticks of mint gum just in case, the thermos sitting heavy on the counter. She waited. Twelve am arrived, then passed by. Then twelve ten, then twelve twenty. Joanna squirmed in her seat. The initial nervousness had sank down, and now she was just confused. By one am, Via still hadn’t shown up. She wondered if she should be worried. Had the black ice gotten her? Or did she scare her away from the last time with the coffee and the almost kiss? She was pretty sure she didn’t notice when she had flubbed the kiss. Or was she just bored of her? Or was she just too tired and in a hurry to stop by?

It was useless. No matter how much she ruminated, it wouldn’t settle her heart. At the college the next afternoon, she chained up outdoor furniture outside the dining hall and struggled to cover them with a tarp. It was hard for her to fall asleep that morning, but she felt like she had an excess of energy, twitching through her muscles with nowhere to go. Although it was only four pm, she hung up her groundskeeper coat in the middle of her shift and smoothed her hair down in the bathroom. She changed her work boots into a pair of trainers, and then she stepped back out onto campus, seized with a determination she had never felt before.

Myrtle Hall. That was where the English department was. Even though she had worked at Waterford for the past year, she had never bothered to find out what the students were actually up to in all those buildings with the old-fashioned names, until now. She wasn’t a part of them, and she never saw her future in a place like this. She had always loved being outdoors, working with her hands, or with animals. When she was little, she wanted to be a cowboy. When she entered Mrytle Hall, and looked up at the curving wooden stairs and students walking about with their books and papers, she was surprised that it was so easy to blend in.

On the third floor, which was listed as “Student Services and Administrative Offices,” she asked the secretary about where she could find Olivia Mathers-Wong, the (possible) English grad student.

“Why do you ask?” The lady peered at her, not unfriendly.

“She’s my cousin. I need to let her know some information in person. Um, it’s kind of private.” And then as an afterthought she added, “I lost my phone.”

She looked at the lady gazing at her, and tried to look distressed. It wasn’t very hard. She saw her expression soften, inferring something vaguely urgent about the situation that presented itself.

“Let’s see…” she said after tapping away at her computer, “Ah, yes Ms. Mathers-Wong, English lit master’s…well she’s a TA for English 321 and that’s at Taft but her discussion section isn’t today…or her courses are between this building and Taft as well so I guess your best bet is here or Taft Hall.” More clicking and scrolling. “Or her advisor is at Blainey maybe there as well. Sorry. Not much more I can do for you.”

She thanked her, then went on her way. She visited every floor of all three buildings, lingering around the entrances, in the hallways until she started feeling uncomfortable. She criss-crossed around the campus and went back inside, walking through all the floors again, nervously peering into any open doors. She couldn’t find her.

“What am I doing,” she sighed to herself. Her feet were starting to ache. It was starting to get a little bit darker outside, and she was feeling the fatigue creep up on her from yesterday’s shitty sleep. She excited Blainey Hall. The street lights dotting the college had just flickered on as she  walked outside, useless still against the lingering brightness of day. She anxiously checked her phone for angry texts from her supervisor but there were none. Then she looked up, and Via stepped out from around the corner. She was quickly approaching, but didn’t seem to see her, and walked past.

Joanna’s heart lurched. She stood still, insides buzzing, and then turned around and strode towards the other woman.

“Via?”

She turned around. She was in the middle of rummaging in her backpack, but she let it sag from her shoulder once she saw her.

“Joanna? Wow, what are you doing here?”

“Um. I came to see you.”

Via stood there, seeming to be a little flabbergasted, so she continued. “You didn’t come on Wednesday so I just thought…well, I just didn’t know if I would---”

“Oh, yeah, the commute was just really bad so they found someone to replace me.”

“No totally, I get it. It’s a long drive.”

“Sorry, I didn’t really have a way to tell you.”

Via blinked quickly and glanced behind her shoulder, tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. This wasn’t going the way she had hoped. They were still standing apart from each other, and Joanna felt a curling sensation of panic. She shoved her hands into her pockets.

“I---” Via started.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to, like, ambush you. I actually work here. I just really looked forward to seeing you.”

Via’s face was a locus of obscurity. She twisted her lips in a pained manner. “I see.”

“I just thought I would look for you because I didn’t want to not see you again. That’s all.”

She opened her mouth, then closed it again. Joanna thought she might say something else, but she didn’t. She understood.

“Okay. Well, I gotta go now.” She tried to offer a benign smile, but she felt like crying.

“Okay.”

She lingered for a little bit, just in case. She wanted to watch her for a little bit, to see if she might change her mind, might want to stay and talk. If she reached her arm out, she would be able to touch her. But she stayed silent, holding onto the straps of her bag, waiting for her to go.

Via walked away. She wanted to look back but didn’t. She heard her footsteps start up, and carry her away in the opposite direction. She thought about turning around. She was going to say something before. I---something? What did she possibly expect her to say? I wanted to see you too?

She got in her car and turned on the engine. She couldn’t get comfortable, and gripped the steering wheel until her knuckles turned white. But she was tired. She wanted to drive until there was no more road, and then go to sleep. The thought of going back to her job the next day, walking past the same place where she last saw Via, made her shudder with self-contempt. It had hurt, the way she looked at her with a mix of indifference and pity. She liked her! So what? Was that so bad?

She passed her apartment building, drove through the downtown. She should have planned out what to say. She should have asked for her phone number instead. She breathed out heavily in the car. The Christmas lights were up on all the storefronts, the gas lamps sporting big red bows.  She shouldn’t have talked over her. She eeked to a stop at a red light. Poinsettias peeped out from the other side of the fogged up glass windows. She kept driving, and the town fell past her.

She hadn’t been treated badly so there was nothing to be angry about. She just wished that she could have gotten close to her, that’s all. Her chest ached, like it was bruised. She was driving past big, nice, New England houses, all done up for Christmas. The windows spilled warm light, and she could see some people inside, eating dinner or at their desks or in front of their tvs. But in her car, she felt like the only person in the world. She had always felt safe here, suspended in motion between one place and another. Waiting to arrive. There was nothing to control, just the strange slow moving ooze of the world, speeding past but never touching her where she sat, still. But tonight, it was falling inward towards her, through the glass and metal. She felt sore and small, and very very alone.

Maybe her earnestness could’ve made Via think again. But it was the way she had looked at her, waiting for her to leave. The finality of it. She knew that even though she was still stupidly hopeful, Via wouldn’t look for her. Her life was grad school, teaching, big plans. She had her car, towns where she knew no one, and little jobs waiting to be filled. Even though she could, Joanna knew would never look for Via again either. That’s what made her hurt the most. 

She found herself at the gas station, again. It looked different to her tonight, weirdly tragic, majestic, shining with an obnoxious brightness in the middle of nowhere. Like it was plopped there out of a dream. She realized that she had never been here in the daytime. She walked inside. There was a man she didn’t know behind the counter. She bought a cup of coffee and walked back out. The moon was quite beautiful. She took a sip and made a face, it was acrid and thin. Leaning against her car, she downed the rest of the coffee in one go, and crumpled the paper cup and threw it away.

There was a place I was obsessed with as a child. A ravine in between a narrow alley of houses, that trickled or rushed with water depending on the season. Beyond the cheery blonde fence around my house, there was another taller, rusted chainlink fence, through which the greenery cascaded down into this shadowed rift slicing through the neat grids of our neighborhood. Right in the middle of the ravine was a large dead tree. It was pale and twisted, scarred with thousands of holes from woodpeckers hammering their little black beaks looking for grubs to eat. I could just see the tops of its white branches from my bedroom window, and the tap tap tap of those red crested birds gouging into that tree reverberated through my childhood. I often thought the bleached bark against the sky looked like an electrocution that had conquered gravity. I would zone out while doing my homework and stare at those spidery branches grabbing the air, and drift inside a damp nothingness. It often rained where I was from. The ravine was always wet and green. Sometimes I would get the sensation that my hands were expanding, growing long and thin and dry like tree branches. The first couple of times it happened, I was alarmed and would be afraid to look at my hands, so I sat on them. But I soon grew to enjoy the sensation. I put out my soft child’s hands in front of the window and watched them grow and twist away from me, further and further to reach the ends of that tree in the ravine.

__

Jacob and I got married young. We married so he could stay in the country. Nevertheless, I was in love with him. But often I still got mixed up and referred to him as my boyfriend. It was cute for a little while, but then it started to upset him.

“Do you not think of me as your husband?”

We were twenty-four years old. The word “husband” conjured a scummy, icky feeling that came from some indiscriminate place, made me think of the fifties black and white shows I used to watch with my grandmother, where white women with perfectly coiffed hair and embroidered aprons opened doors for tall men in fedoras, saying “Welcome home husband,” while taking off their coats.

“I do, of course. I’m just not used to the word.”

But I loved Jacob deeply. He was handsome and reliable, and just the right amount of jealous. I liked his weight on me. I quite liked the idea of being crushed by someone I loved. In the mornings, or after sex, I would tell him to lie flat on top of me and not move.

“Can you breathe?” he would ask, concerned.

—

My mother forbade me from going down to the ravine. She was a nervous woman, but masked her high-strung qualities with a practiced elegance in front of my father. It only came out around me, her only daughter.

There could be drug needles down there! she said.

Yes mom, I said.

But she went to work every day and I was often home alone. So every day, I would crawl through a bent gap in the chain link fence and go down there. Sometimes I would take a snack.

I wasn’t quite sure why I liked going down the ravine so much. I supposed I liked the feeling of being surrounded by earth, at the lowest point of things. I liked that there was never anyone else besides me. I liked that when I looked up at the branches of that dead tree, and past it towards the sky, it felt like the rest of the world was very far away. Each time I went down there and spent time with that tree, I was turning a little bit more into a tree myself.

My hands were soon covered in soft bark and sprouting fresh pine needles. They tore at the window screens in our house. At dinnertime, I looked at my thickened, cracked nails and smiled.

—

I told a stranger about turning into a tree once. She was a skinny German girl I had met at a party. It was a summer of bodies and sweat. I had just turned seventeen and was working at a ski resort for the summer, managing ziplines and renting bikes and such. I was trying on a new personality every day. I lost weight, I dyed my hair different colors, I talked differently, even tried to eat differently, hold my fork differently. I wanted to completely eradicate myself and become someone new, after doing the proper research.

This girl was smoking a cigarette outside. I had followed her, even though I made it seem like a coincidence. She worked as a handler at the stables, saddled the horses and led tourists around the flat, grassy trails. It seemed like a shit job, but I assumed she liked horses so it must’ve been more enjoyable to her. Her economical German accent I found charming, she wore gold-rimmed, wired glasses which gave her a bookish air. That, and her being European. Honestly I knew close to nothing about her. When she looked at you with her pale, gray blue eyes, she looked kind of dead inside. I liked that, found it attractive, in a disquieting kind of way.

She trained her dead eyes at me, unblinking as I put on my new personality and overshared.

“Interesting.”

“It’s just something I imagined as a kid.” I hadn’t gone to the ravine or thought about that dead tree in a long, long time.

“You think weird things as a child. When I was like age three to seven, I wanted to be a dog. I would pretend to be a dog and eat ham from a bowl on the floor under the table.”

“Not a horse?”

“No. That came later.”

What came later? I didn’t know what she meant. But I was transfixed by a mole on her upper lip.

“Can I kiss you?”

“Ja, okay.” She said this slightly sarcastically, like I was suggesting we eat twenty bananas in a row. Or maybe it was just her German accent.

Her lips tasted like cigarettes. She smelled slightly horsey, but I didn’t mind. We kissed for a little bit, then stopped.

“I don’t think I’m a lesbian, after all,” I said.

“Ja, me neither. It’s like kissing myself.”

I laughed, a little nervously, and she joined in. I am young and desperate and enjoying myself.

—

When Jacob and I first met, I was desperately horny. The need to be touched was like an emergency. People could smell it on me, it was like a sign followed me around wherever I went: DESPERATE VIRGIN. My skin was thin and translucent, you could see my heart pumping around hot blood, raw with wanting, through my body. Being twenty years old and a virgin was the most shameful thing I could imagine in my stupid young mind.

We went on five dates and never touched. Between our first and last dates, I turned twenty-one. He was interesting and attractive but something about him was elusive, but also very linear. It made me confused. I was sure it would end after every date, but he kept asking me out, again and again. Each time, I would go back to my apartment and masturbate furiously.

On our fifth date, I told him the story about when I kissed that German girl. When we fucked for the first time, I made the first move. We had finally made it to my bedroom, and I was not about to let it go to waste.

“Do you want to fuck me?” I asked.

“Ja, okay!” he said in a thick German accent.

I nearly choked from laughing, and he fell on top of me laughing as well.

—

The ravine flooded when I just started high school. By that time, I was wrapped up in the corny dramas and anxieties of teenhood, and had lost interest in going down there. My hands stopped growing into branches, although I still had fantasies about turning into trees. I remember gazing into the distance at the tortured bark, slicked with rain, as my dad explained they were going to fill the ravine in to prevent more floods. My hands started tingling a bit, but then stopped.

I loved my dad, but he confounded me. He was easy to love because he always kept me at a distance. He never lost his temper, was always patient towards me. He was a bit of a black hole, with intense interests that he never shared with my mom or I. He owned hundreds and hundreds of books, on philosophy, on history, on science, and was always in his office with the door closed, reading. I would go in there when he was at work and look through his drawers and touch the books and flip through their pages. I read through his notebooks, making sure to put them back exactly as they were. They were dense and academic, I didn’t understand them. Sometimes I would press myself into the corner of the room and close my eyes and pretend to be a book, to imagine what it would feel like to hold his interest.

When I was twelve, he walked in on me while I was getting out of the shower. I had never seen such a look of shame and disgust when he accidentally glimpsed me naked. He couldn’t look me in the eye for days.

I spent years like this, wandering through my own house. Pressing myself into my parent’s things to get a grasp on them. My mother loved to dress well. She owned many beautiful things, had wonderful taste. We weren’t rich, but the house was decorated immaculately. But for what? No one ever came inside but us. I would rage down the hallways and shake the walls with my boredom, wanting to tear the place apart. I would plant my feet on the floor and spread my arms, and the tree I became would pierce the walls and wrench the house to bits.

My mother I regarded as a sort of restless, fantasy creature. She sometimes walked around with a glazed look on her lovely face, like she couldn’t remember how she had gotten here. Her love for me consisted of her fretting over my diet, my safety and the types of clothes I wore, and educating me about the motherly love she possessed for me that she said I wouldn’t understand until I became a mother myself.

“You will only know this when you become a mommy, but the only person on this earth who truly loves you is me, your mommy. Everything that hurts you hurts me too. One day you will understand.”

Did that mean if I got hit by a car, another car would come out of nowhere and hit her too? What she said deeply confused me as a child. I stayed away from cars so my mother wouldn’t have to gruesomely kill herself if I got run over.

—

I started to write a book about a girl who slowly turns into a tree, but gave up. I somehow got goaded into telling my parents this during our first dinner with Jacob. They dryly tell me that they would love to read it after I finish.

Afterwards, on the Uber ride home, Jacob caresses my hand.

“Your parents are like…the epitome of mother and father.”

I laughed.

“Especially your dad, he’s like some kind of cartoon character. Actually your mom too.”

“I know.”

“Wait, are you sure they’re not spies? Like those KGB agents during the Cold War or something?”

—

We ended up changing the destination of our Uber and go to a show instead. Music was everything to us back then. A song was a secret with wings. It was some sacred mix of weeping and laughing. We had the feeling that it changed us on some deep earthy level, editing our very genetics. I liked books, and called myself a writer, but secretly I wanted to be a musician. I just didn’t have the talent for it.

I held Jacob’s glasses as he bounced towards the mosh pit. I watched his body fly from one end to the other. The song ended, and he gave me a wave from the middle of the crowd. That was my husband! I closed my eyes and dissolved into the sound of wailing guitars.

On Broadway Avenue, we run into our friend Maisie at the 2 Bros Pizza. She tells us about her ten day silent retreat upstate and we listen intensely.

“For the first few days I was boiling with rage. It was insane. I had no idea I would feel that way. Everyone around me is sitting there meditating with their eyes closed, and I legit am just like…”

She imitates breathing heavily in anger, hot air gushing from her nose.

“You think you had suppressed it or something?” asked Jacob.

“Honestly I had no idea. I just felt this deep anger at myself and everything but also nothing in particular. I wanted to scream and kick everyone’s face in.”

“By day three I couldn’t take it anymore. But I talked to the instructor, and he convinced me to stay. And then something weird happened during one meditation. I just like…sank into myself. I had no idea I could go that deep. It was like my body just gave up trying to fight it and my mind followed. And then after that, time, just like, felt different.”

“What do you mean?” I was still drunk, and to be honest, not too interested.

“Like…before it felt like A, B, C, D. Like spikes and lulls, things being too fast or too slow. But there it just felt like I was moving through an open space. Like I was dreaming. There was no speed. No speed at all.”

—

Maisie’s words haunt me a little. I dream of being down in the ravine. I am a woman in a child’s body. In the dream, I realize that back then, time moved differently down there too. Time takes the form of water, spreading outward from my calcifying body, covered in bark and moss and new leaves. The ravine fills and I float up. In my dream, the tree comes back to life. The branches lengthen and sprout spicy smelling leaves. The holes from the woodpeckers soften and close up. My feet grow roots that reach all the way down into the earth. By the end, my head has turned into a hole in the trunk of the tree that just clears the water. The now alive dead tree is covered in beautiful white flowers. I cry because I want to have flowers too.

—

We moved from Bedstuy to a bigger, less crummy two bedroom in Ditmas Park. Jacob buys a car. I start getting bad hangovers and swear off alcohol and drugs. We talk about splitting our time between upstate and the city. My parents move to a smaller house. Jacob’s grandmother dies and he cries into my arms about not being able to say goodbye.

One morning I rush from our bed to the toilet and throw up. I take three pregnancy tests. Each one turns out positive, two cheerful pink lines appearing every time like magic. PREGNANT! PREGNANT! PREGNANT! I am thirty-one years old, and with child.

This has happened to us before, of course. But we were twenty-two, then twenty-seven, and it was an easy decision to make. Kill the damn thing that would get in the way of our dreams, our long nights! This time, it feels different. We are still young, but also not so young anymore that it’s completely out of the question. We’ve weathered through fights, and have dependably moved on from them. Once we had a fight where Jacob smashed a head of cauliflower on the wall. I still giggle to think about it. Jacob hugs me and tells me how happy he is, and that of course it’s my final decision to make. I study his face closely. There is no hesitation, no flicker of fear or resentment. Just love and support. Suddenly, I can’t be in the presence of such a good man. I push him out of the room, tell him I need to be alone.

I don’t know if I’ll make a good mother. I think about the tiny globule of dividing cells in my uterus. It seems unlikely that they will arrange into a walking, talking child. Is it a pile of shit? Is it an entity of some sort in the process of receiving a soul? My mind doesn’t know where to settle. My nails are blackening, crusting over and curling up towards the ceiling. Would I be able to hold a child like this?

In bed at night, we face each other and whisper. There are still miles inside me that need to be traversed. But I fall asleep thinking of Jacob holding hands with a little boy or girl. Both their faces are turned away from me, and they are getting farther and farther away. I can’t move. I realize I have no mouth to call out to them, because I am a tree.

—

The tree sutured onto the ravine becomes a vortex. A black void. A deep ardent mystery. Is it God? Is it death? We decide to have the child. I do want one. I guess I’m as ready as I’ll ever be. I was happy, Jacob was happy. But my desire to explode was just as real as the happiness. Little crumbles of dirt leak out of my taut bellybutton. The apartment is filled with branches so thick, I can barely see the light. My limbs creak and splinter. Vomit splatters in the toilet bowl.

—

I am twenty years old. I still haven’t fucked. I start to write a story about an older, closeted gay man, who falls in love with a mysterious gardener. They have their first kiss under a dead tree. But I gave up because I realized I knew nothing about love. And even if I felt it for the first time, I still wouldn’t know because I had nothing to compare it to. I couldn’t pick it out of a line up, wouldn’t recognize it even if it walked up to me and slapped me in the face.

—

Time is spread thin and wide. Could be forever, or no time at all. I dream, and wake up again, dream and wake up again. I have lost my own shape. I look down at my bare arms and they are covered in feathers, or leaves, or all the fingers are fused together into a spade-like hoof. Hooks lace across my skin and string me to the ceiling, and I gaze down towards the flooded ravine. Then slowly, one eye opens, and another.

I’m in a hospital bed. A nurse rushes in and fusses over me.

I cry for Jacob. I miss my best friend. She assures me that he will be here soon.

And the baby? She shakes her head.

“You’ve had a miscarriage,” she says.

—

Jacob cries as he explains to me that I had a psychotic break and jumped out of our apartment window. I don’t know what to say, and I am too weak to cry, so I just hug him and try to apologize. He cries harder and tells me to shut up talking, that he’s sorry, he’s the one that’s so sorry. Now I’m crying too. We don’t bring up the baby.

“I was turning into a tree,” I explained. “And no one noticed.”

“Okay,” he whispers.

“I feel like I’m disappearing a little bit every day and I don’t know why. I love you. I didn’t want to put you through all that.”

“Shhhh it’s okay. I’ll catch all the pieces and keep you together.”

We hold each other and cry for all the things unsaid. Our bodies enter twilight and death turns the room into a shrine. But how can we miss someone we have never known?

—

The slow slip of piecing things back together. My mother’s eyes, wet with tears. My father’s stumbling tongue. The breeze, trickling in, slowly promising to change the present. Colored pills rearranging like wobbling Jenga blocks. I was transfixed by self-contempt, but driven by an earnestness only achieved by profound guilt towards the ones who loved me. Hilarity mixed with despair! And the tree remained. It doesn’t occupy our apartment anymore, but I let my hands grow and leave it alone. I think back to when I was a child, when the tree hanging over the ravine was my strange friend.

—

Are ya leavin’ for the country…You say the city brings you down, my friend warbles, hugging me from the side. She has a lovely voice. We are walking up a country road.

Jacob trails behind, running back to grab a jacket. It’s chillier up here than in the city, and the air is tart and crisp, coating the inside of my nostrils. The real estate agent comes out to greet us. She looks and sounds exactly like the comedian Tig Notaro.

At the first chance she gets, my friend turns to me and says, “Tig Notaro?”

My husband taps me on the shoulder and whispers, “There’s no way that’s not Tig Notaro.”

I shush them and collapse my expression as the agent turns back around.

The house is nice, but outdated, a fixer upper. My friend knocks on the fireplace and grunts her approval.

“Nice stone.”

We look around for a while, at the high wooden beams, the wood paneled walls and carpeted stairs. Tig Notaro and our friend watch us as we pace around, imagining what our life would look like here.

We walk out onto the back patio, and I discover a strange thing. A beautiful, old tree with its roots growing over a small boulder, as if protecting an egg. A wooden rope swing sways gently from the lowest branch. I suddenly experience an ache in the chest, like I was meeting eyes with someone I loved from across the room.

On the car ride back, our friend was falling asleep in the back seat.

“When you saw that tree with the swing,” I ask Jacob, “did you feel it too?”

“Yes, and it made me wonder…”

He broke off and I saw that he was crying. So much to understand, days spent searching and failing. I realize I am smiling big. The pines outside stood still and watching like whispering giants, dooming us tenderly to love.

There was a bus stop not far from the prison, but I wanted to walk, so I walked four miles along the bare road before stopping at a gas station corner store to buy a Coke, a lighter and a pack of cigarettes. The man behind the counter had kind eyes and gave me a nod as I stepped out. “Best to you, son,” he said. His words, the first words I had heard from an ordinary stranger in twenty-four months, seemed to hit the blank wall inside of me that had replaced any reserve of feeling I once possessed. The kindness rolled right off me, like water.

I sat on the curb at the empty bus stop and drank my coke. It was good. I was thirstier than I had realized, and before long it was gone. Bertrand had been obsessed with Coke, and had one with almost every meal. His teeth were a disaster because of it, between the endless bottles of Coke and the cigarettes, his front teeth were stained a muddy brown color, like two ancient tombstones. It had only made him more beautiful, I thought. The ugliness of his smile contrasted with the rest of his face, and something about the slash of imperfection highlighted the loveliness in the rest of him. Made his liquid brown eyes warmer, the curl of his nose and mouth richer.

I smoked two cigarettes in a row while thinking about Bertrand. I tossed the butts on the asphalt and they immediately skittered away in a curl of wind. As I watched them disappear into the grass, a dry, mirthless chuckle eeked its way from my throat. I was not well liked in prison, for the obvious reason of being a gay man, and mostly had to scrounge for the discarded butts of other prisoner’s cigarettes. On break in the yard, most men would even refuse to light my pathetic stubs. It was to be expected. I was lucky I hadn’t come away with worse.

I paid the seventy cents for the bus fare and sat down in the back corner, two seats away from a woman who had a bruise on her neck. We met eyes for a moment and I lowered mine first. Her lips were slightly parted, as if on the verge of some lament, but I felt I had no right to speak with her. Woman were strangely tormented, majestic creatures, I had always thought so. I had been wrenched through the boring cruelties of a world of only men, watched them flex their warskins and threaten their own shadows. The world of women in contrast, seemed shifting and slippery in its feminine depth, but I understood that beyond my vague love of women, their realities were as inaccessible to me as the rigid ones of men. I was nothing to no one, a shadow. A nancy boy to have a giggle with. Nothing more. A ghost to be masturbated in the dark and discarded. This world had ruined me beyond return, and had spared zero effort in doing so. It was the same, existing in opposition to me. Always would be.

I had no watch, but didn’t care to ask for the time. The landscape that rushed by on the other side of the grease-streaked windows was ocher and ripe with color under the glaring autumn sun, but to me it felt fake, like a backdrop I could push over with my finger. I removed Bertrand’s letter from its casing and held it in my hands. It was yellowed and translucent, almost falling apart from the hundreds of times I had creased and uncreased it. A thin receptacle housing the last breath of my love. It rested lightly on my lap, like a decapitated wing. I thought of reading it again, but thought the better of it. I had read it so many times that phrases from it had become permanently cratered under my thoughts. They would surface randomly and his voice would whisper in my head, the same lines sometimes redolent with happiness, other times wane and tight with fear.

I am coming to be with you. I look at you and want to see all of you, and I want to be seen by you. My life stops here, I can see no further.

I closed my eyes. My lips could remember the feeling of a smile, could almost abide it. There existed the muscle memory of the corners of my mouth tugging up with no effort at all. It lingered ghost-like on my lips, the casualness of it, the easy falsity that I once affected with no thought. But now, it remains a memory, buried by your absence. There was no depth of feeling I could conjure to warrant such a thing.

The scenery outside had changed as we entered the city. It had the overexposed, ragged look of a place recovering from a time of conflict. The men and women walking the streets moved with a mechanical rigor, and regarded things with the hollowed, slightly shell-shocked look of people doing things quickly to remove themselves from the memories that still lived in their bodies. Even the children played listlessly, with little joy, it seemed. Or maybe it was just me who saw in them the things I felt in myself.

I got off at the central bus terminal and loitered aimlessly for a while. A group of grimy looking teenagers stumbled around to my right, obviously intoxicated, half-heartedly harassing a man inside a graffiti covered phone booth. I walked outside, where a woman with smudged makeup was fixing her lipstick on the street corner. She caught me looking at her and came over.

“You searching for a nice time, good lookin’?”

I could almost laugh, if I had any laugh left in me. She really was not selling it. I shook my head no, and for a second we both looked into each other’s eyes and perceived the cosmic emptiness that had swallowed time into a meaningless flat line. We nodded, two ghosts acknowledging each other. Then she drifted away, and I was hit with an unnamable gout of despair that felt as though it would squeeze my heart into failure.

That day by the lake, I wanted more than to kiss you wildly, I wanted to prostrate myself in front of you. I could live my entire life with you within that one summer day, and it would be enough.

It was an exquisite pain, a judicious pain, one I did not mind carrying for the rest of my life. The world spun on, but I would not. I would remember you, love you, and despair.

I had a scrap of paper with the address of a halfway house given to me by my parole officer, but otherwise I had nowhere to go, no one to get back to. The first thing on my mind was that I needed to find Bertrand’s grave. But I was hungry, and dimly aware of the meager change left in my wallet, so I decided to make my way to the halfway house first, in hopes of getting a hot coffee and a buttered roll.

After receiving a map and mumbled directions from a station attendant, I started walking again. Being back in a city disoriented me more than I expected. It was less the press of people and life around me, as nothing registered significantly, I felt like a busted window where all things passed right through, like wind. It was the memory of this place, what it used to mean to me. I had been waiting for Bertrand here, in this city, as the military occupation encroached from the East and I tried to obtain passage for the both of us over the channel to safety. I spent my time here with my heart in my throat, waiting in long, anxious lines at the consulate to get our paperwork in order and simultaneously seeking out backchannel means to secure two seats on the overstuffed ocean liners. We were trapped, all of us, shuddering against the world, waiting for the tipping point into madness. This city, like our hometown, had reeked of desperation and fear, trembled with the threat of violence on the horizon. Even so, as I waited alone knowing no one, that didn’t stop me from imagining us sitting at a table halfway out onto the cobblestones every time I passed by that dingy Italian restaurant by the consulate. We might’ve shared a bad pizza and drank glasses of cheap wine with our cigarettes and your Coke and maybe laugh a little about everything that was going wrong. I could look into your eyes and we would then look over towards the glittering water past the port, and hold between us the wild hope that we would get out and be free.

__

It was evening when I reached the halfway house, a gray brick building behind a low, rusted fence that gave the air of institutional regret. The man behind the counter was squirrely and thin, with dirty greasy strings of hair falling over his forehead. He eyed me with a bored curiosity. We exchanged the cursory words as he located the paper with my information on his cluttered desk.

“Alexander Fehling,” he read from the sheet. “They told me you were coming but didn’t seem sure you’d make it here.”

I shrugged. “I’m here now, aren’t I.”

“There’s an empty bed in room four. Bathrooms are down the hall to the right.”

I nodded.

“Food is done for the day, but there are some rolls and things left in the break room, if you want them. Coffee and tea’s there, help yourself.” He nodded towards the corner of the room.

“Alright.”

“No fighting, no loud music, no weapons, no substances of any kind. Payphones limited to ten minutes…” he broke off from his bored spiel and regarded me carelessly. “You got a jacket, son?”

“No.”

“There’s a bin with some clothes in the hallway. Take a look.”

When it was clear I wasn’t going to answer, he sighed and pushed himself upright into a stretch.

“Breakfast’s from five thirty to eight thirty. I’m assuming you don’t have savings or anything, family to tide you over?”

I shook my head.

“See to it that you meet a counselor tomorrow then, to figure out about getting work.”

I nodded. When he didn’t respond, I started inching my way towards the pitcher of coffee.

“Oh and son.” His voice mashed down into something darker, edged. “No funny business in here.”

“What?”

He tapped the paper in front of him, his finger landing crisply on a cluster of lines listing out penal codes. I knew exactly which one he was referring to without even looking at it, but the phrase “sexually deviant behavior” jumped out at me anyways, black and ugly in its wording.

“Yeah,” I muttered, walking past him to the table with the drinks. He didn’t strike me as hostile, but I could feel his judgment on me as I poured myself a cup of lukewarm coffee and a hot water, and took them down the hallway to room four.

___

Sleep took me quickly that night, a specific gravity pulling me into the world of troubled dreams. I awoke, suddenly, from some dark, feverish illusion, the feel of Bertrand’s fine hair under my hands quickly disappearing into the ether. I didn’t recognize where I was. Breath hitched painfully in my chest, I struggled upright, and then became dimly aware of another man sitting on the opposite bunk, watching me.

“You were twitching and mumbling in your sleep. Creeping me out.”

My memory returned. I was in the halfway house. This man, I realized, was hardly a man, a teenager was more accurate. Acne still dotted his cheeks and temples. He sat crouched on the edge of the mattress, eyeing me suspiciously but not unfriendly, like some jungle monkey.

“Sorry about that.”

“Doesn’t matter, really. I sleep through anything.”

He paused. “Who’s Bertrand?”

“No one. A friend.” I was annoyed, bleary-eyed. I didn’t feel rested at all.

“You kept saying his name in your sleep.”

I didn’t know what to say to that, and the conversation fell silent. It was still very early, I could tell by the treacly light and warbles of birds outside the window. I eased myself back onto the musty jacket I was using as a pillow, contemplated going back to sleep. I held onto the dredges of my dream, thought about how soft Bertrand’s oiled hair felt under my fingers, the look of the top of his head between my knees, how real it seemed. The boy next to me had begun tinkering with a small radio, smacking it against his knee.

“Give it here,” I said.

He held it out to me across the empty space between us and I reached it easily. I opened it up, looked at the guts for a blown fuse, checked the battery contacts for dirt and grime.

“The batteries are new,” he said. I ignored him.

The terminals were caked in dust, blackened with corrosion. I wet the corner of my sleeve with my tongue and wiped them out carefully, realigned the batteries and closed it up again. I flicked the switch on, and this time, the crackle of static lurched out into the small room.

“Damn. Thanks,” he said, as I handed it back to him. “How’d you know to do that?”

“My father was an electrician. Old pieces of junk like that are easy to fix if you know what to look for.”

“Useful.” He fiddled with the knob. Dreary newscasts, snatches of tinny music, chattering ads all blended together as he turned through the stations. “I’m Kurt, by the way.”

“Alex. Good to meet you.”

I closed my eyes again, but by now I was fully awake. Kurt had decided on a station that was playing some bluesy rock tune, and the quiet drone of the radio skittered under my formless thoughts. I wondered what I was to do today. The day stretched out long and tedious in front of me, and I felt no joy or freedom in my newfound liberation. Life was so painfully long. I would fill my stomach, go to the counselor to see about getting work like I was meant to, and then figure out where they put Bertrand. If they buried him I would convene with his grave, if they burned him I would retrieve the ashes and honor his silt, and if he was lost….well. I would find him some other way.

The music cut to a news segment, the broadcaster’s voice shot through with spikes of static. Industrial production, restored agriculture, socialist reform protests disrupting major thoroughfares...I listened half-heartedly, beginning to peel myself away from the bed and gather my few belongings.

“…code banning sexual acts between men, has continued to prompt strong public outcry from opposing factio---"

It cut off, the radio lurching into a saccharine children’s program.

“Wait.” I turned to Kurt. “Go back.”

“Huh?”

“Just go back to the last station.”

He shrugged and fiddled the knob until the radio landed back on the newsman’s voice.

“..since paragraph---warbled---been abolished, decriminalizing homosexual acts between adult men, demonstrations have continued in the city for---warbled---they see as continued legal inequity. The sexual deviance criminal code has been hotly---"

“Turn it off.”

“What?”

“Turn it off. Just change it.”

He twisted the knob again and the newscast stopped, bisected by a showtune.

“You must hate those fags, huh? Ever give one of em’ a good knock around in the boot?” He clucked through his teeth.  

I gathered my things and left the room. Stepped outside into the bare, scraggly courtyard. The inside of my head felt like an empty steel drum, in which useless concepts and unnamed feelings bounced around in a racket. Homosexuality was no longer a criminal offense. I just couldn’t believe it. War was over. I didn’t know what to do with either piece of information. I stood there blinking under the dull, mirthless sun. It was all too late. And where was Bertrand? Where was he? Lost to the war that had ended, lost in a life tormented by fear and love in equal measure, bound to a now dead law. And where did that leave me?

I am coming to join you as fast as I can, Alex. I am sorting things out as gracefully as I can. Just think, in a week’s time, we will be in each other’s arms and leave all behind, together.

It dawned on me that maybe I was standing in a new world, the one we had hoped for. And yet, it made no difference because you were not in it, and I was barred from everything forever.

“Hello.” The man who arrived next to her was slight and appeared taller than he was, with long, graceful hands and feet. “I was wondering where you went.”

As his hand rushed down and away from her back, she glanced at the tops of his bare feet peaking out from brown corduroys. They were pale and strangely erotic, against the cold stone floor.

“Shouldn’t you be back inside celebrating, Mr. Director, sir? I’m sure everyone is keen to get you as fucked up as humanly possible.”

He laughed. The sound was gentle, musical. “I needed a breather. It’s getting rowdy in there. Everyone’s drinking like monsters, and I’m just thinking about how me and Freddie have still got to cut and edit the damn thing.”

Selene smiled around her cigarette. “Oh, chill out Mick. Let some of us celebrate before you inevitably cut out our best scenes. You know how we actors get.” She made a face and flicked her hands around in faux distress. “Egos need to be stroked.”

“Is this a warning? Should I expect some unhinged behavior in the future?”

She looked at him, the tufts of gray speckling his hairline, the curl of his rich mouth, and the way his eyes flickered greenish towards her against the blue evening. Gods, she liked him. She swallowed.

“Yes, definitely. I might even start today.”

“Really? What would you do?”

Selene had the urge to grab his face and kiss him wildly, right on the spot. She couldn’t quite look at him, but tried, and despite her best efforts she felt a flush rise on her cheeks.

He gazed back at her. There was a challenge in his eyes, in contrast to the nervous, soft way he rolled and pressed his lips together. She was sure now, that something was happening between the two of them, something dangerous and inevitable, like sliding into the blue, smooth skin of the lake behind the summer house that beckoned at them through the windows.

“Oh!” she exclaimed, flinging her glance back out over the balcony after what seemed like a small eternity between them. “I don’t know. Maybe I’ll take some ecstasy and make out with your husband.”

“Now that would be something.” They were quiet for a moment, watching a few of the crew tumble out onto the lawn, their voices bright and loud in the quiet, forested space.

“May I take a drag?” He wiggled his long, neat fingers towards the smoldering stub of her cigarette. She nodded and offered it to him, but instead of taking it from her, he dipped down his neck and took a long, indulgent toke from her hand, lips almost grazing the tips of her fingers.

“Thank you,” he said, contorting his mouth to blow the smoke away from her.

She said nothing, just ground the butt into the wrought iron railing, but her heart was bouncing terribly in her chest with a hungry kind of glee. The wind picked up and caught her hair, brown tips scrambling over her eyes so the world was a blur.

Mick held on to his arms for warmth, which were bare to air. “Let’s go back inside. It’s getting chilly.” His buzzed head carved a handsome outline against the cold. She was struck by how raw he looked in the moment, and strangely fragile, in contrast to the charged confidence he exuded moments before.

A boldness bubbled up inside of her. She stepped in close and unwound the scarf from around her head to wrap around his neck. The sight of his moving Adam’s apple was slyly beautiful, but she covered it quickly and surveyed the way the red dripped down over his yellow shirt. “There,” she said, patting her work twice. “Suits you. The red looks good with your shirt.”

 “You saved my life. Thanks.”

An attempt at a joke, she presumed, but his voice creaked with a soft quality that stroked her desire. She dared to look at him again, and for a steady moment, the eyes that flashed back burned with a question that flattened her thoughts with want.

They lingered slowly against the parapet, and Selene realized she was still fiddling with the end of the scarf. She let it fall away from her fingers, and the both of them wrung away from each other, turning their backs against the deepening twilight. She felt slightly breathless. Following him back inside, the sight of her red scarf around his neck made her feel impish and charged, like she had secretly laid a claim. It swished behind him as they wound their way through the corridors and back down the stairs, music jangled with laughter and voices becoming louder and louder as they descended.

____

Selene opened the door. Mick was standing there, hands shoved into his pockets, dirty strings of hair falling into his eyes.

“Hey.”

“Hey.”

Without fail, her heart started pounding at the sight of him, like at the flick of a switch. She nervously shifted her weight from foot to foot, halfway out of her apartment door.

“I’m sorry. I---is this a good time?”

“Not really, Mick.”

“I’m sorry. I just really needed to talk to you. I’m sorry about the phone calls, really.” His words rushed into each other and tumbled out quickly, as if he was afraid of what was on the other end of them.

Gods, she thought, he looks fucked up. He was sucking on the inside of his mouth, the way he did when he was distressed, and his eyes were rimmed in red. He hadn’t been sleeping.

“It’s ok.” She steadied herself with a measured breath. “What did you want to talk about?” Before the question had fully left her lips, she already regretted saying them.

“Can I come inside?”

He peered up at her, tight-lipped and hopeful. The streets were quiet and dark. She looked his face and wanted to fall to the ground and cry. When it came to him she couldn’t think, couldn’t take a full breath, and all that existed were blistered, twisted feelings that she didn’t have the language for.  

“I don’t really think that’s a good idea.”

“Oh. That’s alright.” He opened his mouth and then shut it again. “I just need to know.” A long, uncomfortable silence. “That after all of this is over, you’ll be with me again.”

Her brain fuzzed over. She peered at his face, his beautiful, stupid face, watched his eyes flit erratically, locked onto hers, in anxious anticipation of her words. A formless, senseless anger began to congeal.

“You left me, Mick.” Her voice was shaking. “You were the one who said that we would be together and chickened out. Do you have any idea what you put me through?”

“I do---”

“No you fucking don’t! Because if you did, you wouldn’t have the fucking gall to come here and do this to me!”

The words came out louder than expected, and a chirrup of crickets burst back in response, harsh and strong.

“Joseph and I are ending it for good. It’s over.”

She laughed at this. A harsh bark of a sound. Mick flinched.

“Joseph left you. Don’t make it sound like it was in any way your decision.”

He inhaled raggedly, as if he was summoning something up from inside himself. “Selene,” he said, trying to step closer to her, “I know I made a mistake but I see clearly now, I just needed some time to figure it out---”

“You’re kidding me right? You---you can’t just have us however you like and come crying back when Joseph gets sick of your bullshit.” Her words trembled with the strain of keeping her voice down. She felt sick. Mick’s face quivered between the orange glare of the street lights, and everything felt unstable and on the verge of lurching into something else, like a violent dream. “You don’t get to decide that you want me now.”

“It’s not that, it’s more than that,” he grabbed at her hands, rubbing his thumbs over her fingers, desperate and careful. “Please, Selene, I love you.”

She shook her head in disbelief. The bland, plaintive quality of his voice, the petulant tilt of his jaw---it was all too much. She pulled her hands back. She scoffed, softly, pinched the bridge of her nose hard, like that might erase what was happening to her. “Right.”

“What---what’d you mean, ‘Right’.” An edge of defensiveness seeped into his voice.

“Like I haven’t heard that one before.”

A neighbor cleared his throat noisily from the adjoining unit.

They both sagged. Selene felt a profound frustration wash over her, and the urgent need to be rid of him, this horrible moment. She loved him too. Still, inexplicably. Hated him intensely in equal measure.

She mashed her voice down to a hiss. “You used me Mick, you used me when it was convenient for you and were so okay with just stringing me along every time you went back to Joseph.”

“You seduced me Selene! You came onto me!” His hand jabbed towards her chest. “You knew I was married and still fucking threw yourself at me!”

“Yeah. Well. You were practically begging me to fuck you.” The words came out ugly sounding, cold. But she sputtered on, not knowing how to stop. “Don’t play the victim. You’re a grown man and you knew what you were doing.”

He spun back on the steps and observed the dark street for a beat before turning to face her again.

“Well what about you?” he pleaded, voice hoarse with suppressed emotion. “You said you loved me. Do you remember? You wanted me to break up my marriage so we could be together.”

Selene was silent a moment. It was useless statement, he knew it was. For a second she thought she might laugh out loud, but it was washed away with a sickly sweet sadness. The moon was high and bright and beautiful, shining like a big fuck you.

“What were you even thinking about Mick? When we were together?”

“I don’t know, I don’t---”

“What, nothing?”

“You! I don’t know---”

“Me?”

“Yes! How much I loved being with you!”

She smiled at him then, her eyes pained and shining with tears. “You never stopped to think how you wanted this to end?”

“I---” He stopped. “I wanted you,” he said in a too-loud voice that teetered on the edge of a sob. He cut his eyes towards her. “I still do.” His words lingered, and fell, useless, into the night. They were like shards of glass cutting into her heart.

Selene felt as if all of the love she had ever felt, ever could feel, was mixing with acid in her chest. “I think you should leave,” she whispered. “Don’t come back here.”

He gazed at her with an open pain. He looked like a kicked dog.

Mick opened his mouth as if to say something but nothing came out. He dropped his head, mute. Selene gazed down upon him, watched his brow furrow with a faint awareness of numbness creeping in around her pain. When he looked up, he only nodded at her slowly, and his eyes were already clouded over in regret.

Moving automatically, she slipped back into her apartment and closed the door. It shut with a metallic click as she sagged against it. She could hear the soft slap of his shoes on the steps, walking away from her. A sliver of moonlight pierced through the window from a gap in the curtain, landing on one side of her body. She felt bifurcated, split into two. In that moment, she could see Mick as he was, how he once looked to her, his bare feet gleaming on cold stone, leaning into her through the cooling twilight. She also remembered the desperate rasp of his voice from minutes ago, saying “I love you.” She cried then, and thought she might never stop.

____

The party thundered on in full force. Half empty cups of alcohol strewn everywhere, a cloud of spliff smoke hanging over everything. A disco ball spun languidly on top an armoire, throwing rays of colorful light that glided over the walls and furniture and people like water. Mick accepted a mystery cup from the first AD, and raised it from across the room towards Selene, who was slicing limes with Joanna, a talky production designer with a charming lisp. She smiled serenely towards him, licking salt off her hand after a tequila shot.

“Hey!” Francis, the other lead actor, barged into them, hungry for a shot. “Where’d you go?”

“Out for a smoke.” She wasn’t really listening to him, but was watching Mick sidle up to Joseph with an easy familiarity and cup the back of his neck. The music was perfectly loud, frenetic, luscious beats pounding her thoughts flat.

“Let’s dance,” she decided, pulling Francis and Joanna out from the kitchen alcove. They obliged, laughing, and abandoned their concoctions on the kitchen counter. All three of them glided into the living room, which was high and wide and throbbing with bodies. People hooted and slapped their shoulders as they entered, welcoming them back into the fray.

“Guys.” Joanna stopped. “Let’s take them now?” She took out a crumpled baggie of small capsules from inside her pocket, looking around furtively.

Selene looked at the points of molly in their clear cases, and felt a giddy chaos rise up inside. “Oh. I dunno.” She sucked her teeth. She glanced towards Francis, who was already reaching for them greedily.

“Fucckkkk. I’m down.”

Joanna gave one to him.

“Give me two? I’m bigger than both of you combined.”

She huffed and handed him another one.

“Selene? You want one?”

She checked her phone. It was 8:15.

“Come onnnn Selene. You just starred in your first film, take the damn molly. Marcus said they were cleaner than a nun’s vagina.”

She giggled at that. “Yeah ok. Gimme.”

Francis and Joanna let out a yelp of delight. All three of them tapped their pills together in a tiny cheers, then washed them down with swigs from a glass of beer that someone had forgotten. Jesus, she thought, I’m truly being irresponsible. She felt the capsule tumble past her throat and her heart picked up a notch, the allure of bizarre possibilities blooming in her stomach. They weaved through the bunches of people, dancing and talking, until Mick appeared in front of them. He was nursing his plastic cup and talking intently to Joseph, who nodded and laughed with his hand on his shoulder.

“Hi! We took molly!” announced Francis, smiling widely.

Joseph laughed, an easy sound. “Beautiful spring chickens. I love that for you all.”

Mick looked at Selene and raised an eyebrow, mouth quirking up in a smug smile that was only meant for her. She flicked her eyes back at him and tried to relax into her body. Waiting for drugs to kick in always made her feel raw and slightly anxious, like she was full of helium.

Joanna was wagging her eyebrows at Mick and Joseph, offering to them as well, but they just laughed and said they were too old and already risking a brutal hangover, and that tacking on a comedown would be suicide for the drive back tomorrow. Oh, come on, they all protested. You aren’t that old. But the both of them just laughed and shook their heads, lamenting about the unexpected bodily woes of almost turning forty.

Someone had taken over the DJ table behind them and the music flowed into something else, becoming harder, more energetic. Selene dissolved into it. She needed to move, to be free, a liquid fuzziness was setting in and her brain was starting to glide, smoothed over by tendrils of druggy bliss. The molly was kicking in. She looked around her and saw Francis and Joanna fluttering their eyes closed, it was hitting them too. The house and lights around her looked soft and beautiful, the music stratospheric, she looked into peoples’ faces and saw a radiance that she hadn’t noticed before. Her own moving body felt soft and strong and sensual all at once. She danced.

She smiled at everyone and everyone smiled back. They were all touching each other now, wrapping their arms around shoulders and waists and collapsing into some internal rhythm that was infinitely forgiving. God, she felt good. Mick was at the crux of it all, swaying and bouncing to the music with a boyish grace. The way the disco lights descended across his body was ethereally beautiful. Her mouth went dry, dizzy with desire.

“Here!” Joseph handed her a plastic bottle, eerily on cure. “Drink some water.”

His eyes blazed with kindness. She liked him, she really did. The gesture felt genuinely heartwarming, and she received the bottle, slightly contrite. The rush of cold water down her throat was life-affirming.

“Thank you so much,” she breathed. She felt as if she might burst of gratitude.

In thrall, she moved her arms and legs with no thought. Sweat dripped down her neck. Everything was in sync, moving through her, bathed in swathes of music and heavenly light. A girl offered her a puff from a spliff and she wordlessly obliged. Arms and veined hands carved through space, piercing the smoky air like beautiful spears. She grabbed someone’s hands and lifted them high. Mick’s hands. They smiled at each other and she thought her heart might explode. A rush of feeling overcame her and she dropped her head into the crook of his neck as synthetic bliss melted her limbs into a puddle.

Just before she came to, she felt his hand drop to graze her waist. Then, a flurry of movement, as someone declared they should all get some air and cool off, Francis complaining of being hot and dizzy. She caught the tail end of Joseph’s bemused glance towards her, as they all tumbled out onto the front porch. There was something puzzled in his gaze that lingered over her for a beat too long, and she turned away, dismissing the thought. The cold draft on her skin was inviting, and lifted the hairs on her arms in a delightful manner. Someone pressed a glass of cold water into her hand, and then everyone was sitting, sharing a smoke. After a couple of long drags, she sat in comfortable blankness, the nicotine entering her bloodstream smoothing over firing neurons like a blanket of snow.

Joanna was placing a strand of tinsel on Mick’s head. It looked wonderful on him. Throwing his head back to laugh, he looked like some kind of beautiful, tragic king from a Shakespeare play. Mick’s waiting hand offered up a flickering lighter to Joseph, who dipped his head towards him while talking around another fresh cigarette. As she watched them regard each other within the chattering din, brightening embers swam in front of her eyes, and the soft warmth of the lights mixing with the cold night air made everything look still and painterly, yet achingly alive, like a Rembrandt come to life. A strange, smoldering sensation grew in her chest.

Mick sauntered back around towards her, passing her the glass of water, and she pressed it to her face. The cold hardness was divine, the sweet melancholy broken. She took a greedy swallow, then left it with Francis, who was having his shoulders massaged by Joanna and lolling his head like a dog’s. They both chuckled gently at his loud groans.

“How are you doing?”

An exquisite longing, a ravenous lust for the moment, seized her. She struggled to form words---she felt the shape of them, but they wouldn’t reveal themselves.

“Good.”

“You’re a great dancer.”

It’s the molly, she was about to say, but stopped herself. “Thank you. You as well.”

Moths fluttered against the glass lamps that rimmed the patio. Turned against their hazy glow, Mick looked as if he was cut from mulberry silk, the soft edges of his silhouette petering out into inky firmament. She felt that if she reached out, she could pass her hand through him to dip her fingers into that darkness. She wondered how it might feel, and thought of satin and crushed velvet, of things that felt nice.

“You’ve forgotten my scarf somewhere, have you?”

“I was thinking of packing it away with my things, actually. Thought I might keep it.”

“Oh, really?”

“Yes. Your wrap gift to me.”

Their voices were getting quieter and quieter.

“It’s quite a nice scarf. Quite expensive. I don’t know if I want to give it to you.”

“Please do.”

“Why should I?”

“Because I like things that feel nice.”

The inevitability of the evening was coming to a head. She was sure of it. The darkened sky seeped into Selene’s bones, and with it, a rupture, an imprint of confidence in each other’s mutual desire for the forbidden. She shivered, a delicious gust of wind snatching the breath from her lungs.

She leaned towards him. “Come find me later,” she whispered, before disappearing inside.

____

He had found her later, down in the barely lit kitchen. The house had fallen into quietude, majority of the cast and crew winding down in drunken sleep. But she was wide awake around her tiredness, the last remnants of molly drawing out feeling like the reverberations of a plucked string.

“Joseph?” she asked.

“Asleep,” he whispered.

She could barely see him, just a darkened form punctuated by a splash of light from the moon. She heard him draw a breath. Then she took three quick steps towards him, and grabbed his neck with a fury, mashing her mouth into his. The heat of his mouth cut like a vice. He responded, hungrily, grasping her body towards his with all the fury and strength of pent-up desire.

They separated an inch, and looked at each other. His eyes were wide and unguarded, and she saw in them a simplicity that dismantled her. He was near and he was hers. Beautiful and close and a little dangerous, just like her.

She collided back into his warmth with more urgency, shivered when his stubbled mouth scraped her throat. I want you, I want you I want you I want you, she thought, feverish with greed. They climbed the stairs, clumsily, frantically, delayed by their refusal to break apart for more than a second at a time, and crashed into her room, tangling onto the bed. She leapt up for a split second, remembering to ease the door shut, and turned the lock.

He was waiting for her on the edge of the bed, shirt already discarded, the shallow rise and fall of his waifish chest lurid and vulnerable. The intensity in his eyes seared her in the moment he raised his lips to meet her again, wherein a pact seemed to be sealed between the two of them, complicity in possession, in selfish need and secret joy.

They grasped at and took from each other, moments of gentle reverence, moments of terrible, hungering mess. Affection and pleasure poured out from her. Every touch was conductive, electric, smooth and lucid, turned up to almost too much. She was dimly aware of the molly still in her system, but didn’t care. She wanted to mix their atoms together, to bathe in his skin. She wanted to crawl inside of him. Curl up in his ribcage with one foot dangling out.

When it was over, they didn’t speak. He kissed her on the hand before quietly slipping out, like he had to. She lay on the cooling sheets, moonlight lapping through the curtains. The darkness of the room shrunk around her, eager and aware. Something inside of her swayed and spun lazily, as if she were a man on a raft. She had built a bridge and crossed it. She had become a walking cliché, of course she was aware of that. Looking up at nothing in particular, she searched for guilt or some feeling of wrongness, but couldn’t find it. Instead she felt intensely alive, as if she stood at the precipice of a mysterious world.

She was in control. She was resolute in her desire, she had wanted this and him and did not have fear of anything else that came with it. The night felt sincere and truthful and shining with the threat of great promise, the promise of experience and some form of love. Something puzzling and glorious was going to happen, or was already happening, she was sure of it. She liked that she didn’t know what it was, really. She felt brave and vicious. She felt like a woman. She closed her eyes, and had a sensation as if she was being bisected by clouds and one half of her was forming into an entirely new being. Her breaths lengthened as sleep pulled her down towards the incoming day with a sound like meteors crashing.

His friends were coming over tonight and there were big plans for a early Christmas dinner party so they could celebrate together before everyone jetted off to be with their respective families. Jia had been spending time with her dad and sisters in Flushing for the past few days, but was coming back later in the evening to be with him and the rest of their little group. The idea was a Christmas potluck, but knowing Mannie’s strange affection for bland, sad food (“Food is fuel,” he once said while shoveling a spoonful of raw oats into his mouth) and Renata’s general state of confusion and dismay in the kitchen, Theo was happy to do most of the cooking. Jia announced she would bring dessert back from her favorite bakery in Flushing, so he would trust that to her, but he had an elaborate menu planned and a cooking schedule scrawled out to make sure everything would be warm and fresh when everyone arrived:

            Menu:

            Goat cheese/sardine and heirloom tomato crostinis

            Tahini endive Caesar salad

            Oven roasted smashed baby potatoes

            Ribeye with ramp chimichurri

            Maple syrup mulled wine

            3:30pm – wash produce, blanch potatoes

            4pm – chop salad, slice tomatoes and put in fridge

            4:30pm – smash potatoes, blend chimichurri and salad dressing

            5:30pm – simmer mulled wine, put steaks in oven on low for 25-30mins

            6pm – put potatoes/toast baguettes in oven, sear steaks

            6:30pm - dress salad, assemble crostinis, slice and dress steaks

            7pm – set the table, clean up around kitchen

It was half-past three when he started cooking, a bit of a gamble on timing, as he assumed that Renata and Mannie would arrive around 7:30 because the invitation was for 7pm. The radiator was rattling and pumping out hot steam, and the kitchen, a greasy dim box with no air circulation, was unbearably warm, a decidedly New York problem in the winter. He had cranked open the windows in the living space and placed a fan that blew air directly into the kitchen for the time being, yet he was still sweating. With both the stove and oven running full blast and the steaks emitting greasy smoke from the cast iron, the fire alarm had already gone off four times in the last thirty minutes, until he angrily decapitated it from the ceiling.

Theo was good at cooking, and derived a singular joy from browsing the farmers markets and coming up with new dishes for him and his friends to try. Ingredients were the one thing he did not scrimp on, in contrast to other categories like clothes and vices, which he regarded as dangerous extravagances and felt an uncomfortable aversion to spending money on. But food was different, it was luxurious and necessary at the same time, and the fact that he could spend less than five dollars and a negligible amount of effort to throw together a herbaceous and savory meal from a can of butter beans, one shallot, a few cloves of garlic, and a handful of dill, delighted him. Walking down the aisles of his neighborhood grocery store, he marveled at the sheer variety of foods that spilled out in front of him in neat, glistening rows, and whereas before the choices confused him and made him feel stupid and small, he now loved the routine of scanning the shelves, noting the produce that was in season and envisioning the meals he could fashion out of them, and the simple joy of finding the good Italian brand of tinned fish that was always selling out.

That was something Jia and him had in common as well, their love of feeding their friends. She was always cooking something when she had the chance, steaming a batch of fluffy, green onion hua juan late at night, which would be waiting for him the next morning, or buying the both of them goodies from her favorite places she frequented in Chinatown. Their most recent obsession had been a tiny Chinese Buddhist spot on Mott Street, which made all sorts of soy products, his current favorite being their spiced, braised tofu and hers a cold dish of tofu skin ties and seaweed, always washed down by a freshly made batch of perfectly sweet, nutty soy milk. On the off nights the both of them weren’t working late, he would walk the couple blocks up Fifth Avenue from the Met to the Guggenheim to meet her, leafy branches spilling out from Central Park flanking his left, and then walk together towards the 86^th Street Station, where they would talk about what they felt like making that evening while waiting for the train to pull in. The weekday nights spent cooking, eating, chatting and cleaning together were dear to him, the both of them always interjecting their stories to make little utterances of deliciousness between bites.

Just as he anticipated, the buzzer rang exactly at 7:30. Mannie and Renata arrived together, spilling into his doorway shouting “Merry Christmas!” followed with a flurry of apologies for being late, which was quickly redirected into exclamations regarding the decorations (Ooh so festive! I love the tiny Christmas Tree) and spread of food that greeted them at the door (Oh my God Theo, it smells so good. You cooked all this?). Renata, unwinding her red scarf, pressed into Theo for a quick hug and Mannie followed by wrapping his long arms around them both. The two of them spun around the room while he followed sheepishly, watching them admire the garlands of cheap tinsel from the dollar store he and Jia had put up, the tiny plastic Christmas tree (also from the dollar store), and the red felt stockings they had pinned up on the bricked up fireplace (from the Mexican hardware store around the block). But somehow, despite the cheap decor and memory of the broiling kitchen from a few hours earlier, the apartment looked rich and warm in the orange, sputtering light of dripping red candles and inhabited by his friends, who smiled and laughed towards him with their own, inherent effervescence.

The evening spun on like something out of a cherished dream. Mannie, a math major who had continued on in Columbia to pursue his Master’s in physics, was attempting to explain his current research role regarding the “dancing” movement of DNA strands in the nucleus of the cell, while Renata and him listened intently without understanding a word. The steak was perfectly juicy, the potatoes were buttery and crisp—the food was undeniably delicious, which they re-emphasized to him again and again. Mannie had brought copious amounts of drink, and bottles and bottles of beer and seltzer and endless glasses of mulled wine had flowed like water between the two of them while Theo sipped on his ginger beer, a participant and an observer at the same time, enveloped in a golden haze of contentment.

“—and that’s why I need to quit as fast as possible,” Renata was saying, a salad leaf hanging out of her mouth. “Or honestly I would love to get laid off, so I could just collect unemployment and focus just on photography for a bit.” Renata’s growing artistic wheelhouse was moody, abstract portraiture, and Theo, although not very knowledgable in photography, thought she possessed a deeply introspective eye that very few people their age did. She was quite famous in the fine arts circles at Columbia for her thesis show in college, titled “The Flight of the Crows,” which was widely lauded and garnered well-deserved attention from local contemporary galleries and the indie art scene press, depicting a series of black and white film images capturing the shadows of birds across various surfaces in different scenarios, overlaid and edited in a surreal, dissonant fashion over candid, intimate shots of people she had encountered.

At the opening reception for the show, he was shocked to see himself in one of the images, a shot of him looking through his old dorm window, the light only illuminating his head and torso in patches, eyes barely visible through the cast of shadow and his right hand lingering over his eyebrow, shielding half his face. The concrete-textured, blurred shadows of birds erupting into flight crept up towards him from the bottom of the frame, making it look like his arm and the rest of his body was slowing disintegrating into a web of ghostly wings.

When he first turned the corner and was confronted with the image, all he could focus on was his hand, an ugly thing, dark and covered with the shiny, papery skin of scar tissue all the way up past his wrist. He had never been confronted by his insecurities like this, presented under a spotlight within the gilded frame of something to be examined and digested, and had felt a prickle of heat rise up, the unexpected rasp of shame. Everyone around him, Jia, Mannie, and the rest of the friends and acquaintances that flowed around had ooh’ed and ah’ed and exclaimed at how beautiful the image was, how lost and otherworldly he seemed, but he could only nod and smile and praise Renata’s skill with a panicky stiffness and will them to chance the subject. It wasn’t until she approached him, shyly, and he saw her regard the image with an intense and faraway cast in her eyes, that he could look at it properly and eventually see it for its artistic beauty: its composition, its powerful stillness, the complicated play of light and shadow, the lingering gesture of his hand and the way the sliver of his eye openly reflected the dying light, the suggestion of infinite stories, a question, a life and a universe unknown to anyone but ourselves. It was a strange, humbling experience, seeing other people observe him freely, with soft openness in their faces, allowing a small liberation from his own image. The person in the photo is not me, he remembered thinking to himself. She gifted the piece to him shortly after the show, with a folded note scrawled in squashed, expressive handwriting:

Dear Theo,

I absolutely adore this piece, I feel like it might be one of the best I’ve ever taken. You have such a careful, sensitive face and I remember thinking even then, when I took it, of where you might have been in the moment. I cherish it, and you. Please, don’t be upset at me for indulging in the possibilities of you in that space—it came out beautifully, don’t you think? I want you to have it.

All my love, Renata.

He had tucked the note into the frame backing and they had hung it up in the corner of the living room above the broken piano (a compromise with Jia who wanted it facing the front door). The candles that were steadily melting into pools on top the piano were flickering, reflected in its dark glass.

“You should stab the next oversharing customer at the bar with an ice pick—that’ll get you fired for sure.” Mannie was saying, a laugh erupting from his gut with a pitch and volume unbecoming of a man of his size and stature.

Theo smiled. He loved the sound of Mannie’s laugh, it was starkly in contrast to his deep, slightly monotone voice and made his strong face look like a little boy’s. “Or spill gazpacho on the next French tourist who under-tips,” he added.

Mannie continued, “Or just tell Fernando he’ll never get a Michelin star, that’ll definitely piss him off.” All three of them guffawed at this, Fernando was the Michelin-obsessed, excruciatingly pretentious owner/chef of Faun, where Renata worked, which was backed by his rich restauranteur parents.

“Guys I need to get laid off to get unemployment, not fired and blacklisted from every restaurant in Manhattan!” Renata screeched, cookie crumbs falling off her fingers. “What if in a few years I succumb to becoming one of those career waiters when my artist dreams die?”

Mannie and Theo both huffed at this impossibility. Renata was a photographer in her blood, the way she aimed her camera and calibrated her shots were like an extension of her own body and basic human faculties.

“That will never happen, but if it somehow does, Jia will become the director at the Guggenheim anyways and give you a whole floor to yourself. We make nepotism work for us.” Slightly flushed from the alcohol, Mannie’s face looked valiant over the mess of burned gingerbread they were picking at, which was Renata’s earnest contribution.

Sighing dramatically, she tossed the charred head of a gingerbread man-blob aside, and turned her eyes to him. “You don’t understand what it’s like to be squashed under the foot of capitalism. You’re going to be in school for the next, I don’t know, infinity.” This was directed towards Mannie, who was steadily on track to accumulating one postgraduate degree after another. “I’m stuck applying to one awful grant after another, and fucking Theo here is still collecting coupons!” Her voice raised into a self-satisfied shriek.

“Hey, hey, don’t rag on my coupons.”

“Oh, fuck off. I’m not sneaking you into the dining hall the next time you come on campus.”

The two of them were often like this, their friendship characterized by an acerbic, yet affectionate antagonism that alarmed acquaintances who weren’t too familiar with their dynamic. In actuality, they had the most in common between the four of them when it came to upbringings: upper middle-class families, supportive, well-meaning parents, one older sibling (Renata had a sister and Mannie a brother), and they were both Latin-American, Mannie’s family was Puerto-Rican from Florida, and Renata was Argentinian. Jia and him had often joked separately that they acted exactly like pre-teens who had a crush on each other. From the way they stubbornly picked on every second sentence that came out of the other’s mouth, they couldn’t help but wonder openly if they actually might just like each other. But nothing had ever transpired between them that they knew of, so they let the question fade into the background.

He let them indulge in their familiar exchange for a beat, happy to watch the two of them look towards him and invoke his name in their arguments, and then applying the right word at the right moments to elicit a laugh. They were his friends. They were his, as he was theirs. As Mannie launched into a ridiculous story about the cold war going on between him, his roommate, and the engineering society who lived in the next building, which involved bags of dog turds being flung into conjoining yards, Jia arrived home, bursting into the apartment to great fanfare, and then all four of them were sitting together around the remains of a good meal, various guttering, cheap candles melting into puddles on the IKEA table, spooning into a plastic tub of mango sago pudding that she had carried back from Flushing.

“Merry almost Christmas you guys,” Jia said, slowly patting her bloated stomach, smile kingly in the warm light. “Love you all.”

A chorus of echoed sentiments floated around the table, and Theo felt like a smooth, hollowed out shell, iridescent and shining with a contentment so pure that it defied his life’s geometry. He wished he could bottle up this moment, this dinner, the ringing punch of Mannie’s laugh, Renata’s constant swipes of red lipstick between sentences, the musical lilt of Jia’s voice in the middle of a story, the way they all looked at each other with an affection so easy and confident that it was as if they were casting a unified spell, a spell that instructed safety, warmth and devotion to one another to the end of days. The conversation trundled on with music tinkling in the background, landing on a particularly hilarious take from a movie they had all inexplicably arrived at separately, and everyone laughed and laughed, raucously, unabashedly loud, shrieking with pleasure, and the apartment seemed to shake with everyone’s collective delight. Theo looked at the faces of his friends, the way that they flung their lovely glances towards him, and felt himself become, if only for a moment, shiny and new, scrubbed clean of his struggling, buoyed up by the disbelief that this was his life now, that these were his friends, that they had chosen him and continued to do so, day after day.

It was in moments like these, at the peak of his happiness, the delusion would fade, and he was often confronted with the fragility of the situation and a crashing doubt that this trajectory could ever be maintained. But this time, it was just a fleeting curl, an inkling of separation, and the detachment never quite hit because the unfolding night containing these people was just too special and perfect that he willed the spell to sustain. His eyes pricked with moisture, grateful and unworthy, and he closes them and tilts down towards his bowl of tapioca feeling strange but also happy.

Mannie, drunk and droopy on the couch next to him, grunted something incomprehensible towards Jia and leaned his head on the crook of his shoulder. This time, he didn’t tense or flinch, but just allowed it as if Mannie were a sleepy dog with thick curls that pressed into his cheek.

“Right Theo? What was that you said about Alana last time?” Jia was saying something about the head curator of her department, a dizzyingly chic woman who was always saying pretentious, yet oddly hilarious remarks about any and all subjects.

“That she probably gets off in the Vorticism exhibit when the museum closes, because that woman definitely only feels something for radical abstraction.”

Renata cackled. “I wanna meet her. She sounds fun.”

“What the fuck are you guys even talking about,” muttered Mannie on his shoulder.

And so it goes on. His eyes are open now, open wide, and everything is crystal clear and regains its effervescence. And again, he tentatively feels light and free. A good day, he decides, repeating it to himself inside like a benediction, pleased and slightly weary. Another day of trying to be what he wants to be for himself and for his friends, of calibrating his shape as the puzzle piece connecting with the other’s grooves and ridges, and he thinks that maybe one day instead of being he could just be. For now, he feels wonderfully happy, pleased that he can make his friends laugh and enjoy himself with only a wisp of spoilage.

At the end of the path lay a small stone shrine, cupped by a pool of still water that shimmered and seethed below the dappled sunlight, surface interrupted with the ripples of water skeeters and dragonflies resting on its surface for a drink. Within the moss-grown, small stone pagoda stood a headless effigy of the Benevolent Mother, delicate, green-mottled hands clasped together in venerated prayer. Although the woods teemed with sound here, the water between the rocks, the screaming cicadas, the wind rustling the needles of the pine branches and the trills of birdsong, it was always still and silent here, and the sunlight felt farther away, as if the water was absorbing disturbance and hushing the shrine into woody silence.

Kairi and Sora lived here. They stayed in a ragged hut in a small clearing some ways above the shrine that used to be the home of a holy man, who fasted and prayed to the Benevolent Mother and died there in his sleep. The villagers considered the shrine a virtuous place out of respect of his memory and left dried tea cakes and food at the stone crop before the water, although most had long forgotten the duties of the Benevolent Mother and her domain. However, they continued to pray to her before every season’s harvest or whenever a child fell ill, and all newborns were blessed with her name hushed on the mothers’ lips, screaming and slicked with blood and birth.

Sora huddled at the edge of the water. He looked towards the rain worn figure of the Benevolent Mother, its broken neck softened by time and green moss, and dipped his head in silent thanks. The sunlight fell heavy on his long black hair, bleaching it a lustrous copper, as he bent over to gather the dried fruits and tea. He and Kairi took care of the shrine, sweeping the stones, performing cleansing rights, and offering daily prayers in exchange for the tolerance of the villagers. 

Although they had lived here for almost a year, they were still perpetual outsiders, two ragged young travelers from beyond the valley, who had earned the village’s goodwill and acceptance through small favors and their peaceful strangeness which bled into half-baked reverence, as long as they kept a quiet, respectful distance. That was quite alright with Sora, as he had no desire to be indoctrinated into village life or interest in the ongoings of the smallfolk. All he cared about was Kairi, and getting her well again.

Across the clearing and a few steps out from the thatched hut, a slight figure wavered slightly in the midday sun, like a bamboo reed swaying in the wind. Even now, thick brown hair unkempt and wild, body thin and frail from her wasting, she was nothing less than lovely in Sora’s eyes.

“For you, Kairi.” he said, handing her a red spider lily. 

She took it from his hands and smiled, twirling the stem between her fingers with a glassy look that seemed to focus somewhere past his face. In the sun, her pale wrists looked painfully thin, purple veins stark against her skin. Like a little bird, thought Sora. The reedy curve of her fingers and neck reminded him of the sun-bleached bird bones that were threaded in the trees around the shrine to ward off evil spirits. He could almost hear the hollow clattering now, amongst the sound of the leaves rustling in the wind.

Kairi was not well. Last summer, scarlet fever had burned through the townships and villages like fire to kindling. It came with a fury, leaving stacked bodies wrapped in straw mats like bricks along the dirt roads and rows of fresh graves dug in the dried summer grass. Fields were overgrown and underworked as the hollow-eyed survivors burned incense and prayed fervently to the Benevolent Mother, touching thumb to finger and knuckle in quick succession as a gesture to ward off whatever evil spirit inflicted such death and suffering with its wrath.

When the sickness first came over her, it did so gradually. Kairi was small but wiry, and rarely caught ill despite frequently sleeping out in the cold and going without meals. At first they thought she was just tired, she had just caught a chill, that they had done too many days of hard travel and she just needed to rest. “I’m completely fine,” she had laughed, a boasting smile on her face. But the next day, her face was flushed and she stayed lying down in the straw when Sora had gone out to the stream to spear fish. She wasn’t afraid at all. But Sora had watched her warily, and mopped her forehead with a damp sleeve when she began one evening to shiver and sweat. Still, she reassured him, and her eyes sparkled as she spoke of planting seed rice on their own plot of land and raising horses, of taking in the war-ravaged orphaned children that had nowhere to go. She was so beautiful, and so full of strength, and Sora felt his worries spool away as she kissed his eyelids and told him she would be fine by morning. “Rest your baby eyes,” she murmured. “I’ll be alright.” That night, he had curled up around her and fallen asleep with his mind at ease, as clear as spring water. 

That night, Kairi’s stories and brightness had soothed away the dreams of blistering flame that erupted in him when he closed his eyes, and he fell into the rare blissful oblivion of sleep with his arms around her. That was the last night she was fully herself. As the next day bled to night, she lost the strength to speak and a mottled red rash spread on her body, the death mark that all people, rich and poor, feared. Sora was so afraid. Kairi had always been loud and brash and fearless, and now she could barely lift her head to the ladle of water he held to her lips. He himself could not eat nor sleep, and a sinking feeling in his guts hardened into a dark pit of despair. 

On one particularly awful day, when she lacked the strength to cough and her breath gurgled in her chest, Sora carried her on his back to the nearest village to beg for a doctor, but the smattering of gaunt smallfolk on the streets had seen her red neck and shook their heads at him, and told him that the doctor had burned with rest of the dead with their sleeves over their mouths. No one would help him. Kairi’s skin burned against his back, and after a day of sweating and pleading, he could only bring her back to the abandoned barn and lay her back down in the straw. 

Then there had been that terrible night, exactly a year ago to this day. All he could do was hold Kairi as she convulsed and trembled, like a trapped moth in the cage of his arms. Her eyes fluttered and rolled back in her head. Sora drove his fists into his own eyes and heaved out his tears. He prayed for the first time in his eighteen years, prayed with all the might of his aching bones---prayed and pleaded to the gods, to the demons, to his dead mother and brother, desperately flinging all manner of bargains and promises into the ether.

“Demons, take back my body,” he whispered. “Eat my flesh and leave Kairi. I can live in the darkness again, it was not so bad. Just…please, please spare my Kairi.” 

His voice broke and was eaten up by the musty darkness. But he was far from the Hall of Hell, and his offer was not heard. He could not obliterate the distance and broach the war-torn domain he had abandoned, when life had led him here to this moment, in a barn that was falling apart, with Kairi dying in his arms. 

Sora clutched the ivory effigy of the Benevolent Mother and drove it into the soft dirt. It glowed orange, lit by the feeble flame of their last candle. He stared into the spot of dark above its broken neck and clasped her tightly, squeezed his eyes shut.

Please, save us. If I am your favored child, hear me now. Let her live. 

Twilight seeped through the broken door, pale light just reaching Kairi’s foot where it lay in the straw. A small, keening sound escaped her lips, chest deflating. Her breath, the last scrap of thread unspooling into the new day. She went very still. Sora huddled over her, unmoving. The awful smallness of the rank barn encroached around him, spreading over them in a smothering blackness. His body didn’t feel right, he needed to leave, to escape; staggering out into the pale blue, he dragged his body with hers into the dawn. 

Birdcall warbled back and forth around them. Kairi lay limp in the knotted grass and Sora knelt next to her, his heart beating very fast. And by some miracle, her eyes muttered open. Slowly, Kairi sat up and looked at him, gaze dark and incomprehensible. Sora understood that the universe was generous and cruel from everything he had endured. He did not question, nor did he feel grateful. He could just breathe again. Hot tears spilt down the hollow of her cold, damp neck as he leaned in to embrace her. 

Class ends. It all means nothing to me. I can study if I want, calculate the effort I need to put in to maintain straight C’s so I can just pass and graduate and get a job somewhere else so I can get out of shitty Dogville where no one knows me and meet friends and start a completely new life. But then there’s Puppy, my brother, my heart, and it’s hard to think about the future sometimes because I want a clean break with everything left behind in the dust but then Puppy’s face emerges from the dark and I’m not so sure anymore because I can’t leave him but sometimes I brush the edge of a realization that maybe I should.

It's weird as hell being sixteen with no fucking friends. School is over, everyone squirreling off into their own little groups talking about who’s fucked who, Nirvana groupies squaring off against the Pearl Jam fans in their half-assed, preening animosity, the older girls who look at me like I’m old gum at the bottom of their shoes, the stench of teenage self-importance that makes me want to blow the whole place up. And maybe I will. If I told this to Puppy he’d really go on and try to do it, smile his private wicked smile and Kaboom! everything up in fire and smoke. That’s why I keep my mouth shut.

Hey Shy.

Hey Puppy.

You’re off Baron’s right? I’ll grab the groceries then.

I nod. I scrounge my backpack for the coupons I’ve collected over the past two weeks, Wheaties, two-for-one crunchy peanut butter, SPAM, Bush’s baked beans blah blah. He adds it to his, 50 percent off off-brand cola, canned soup on clearance, the square chalky chocolate crackers mom likes. It all ends up scrunched in his hands like a tangle of sad confetti.

Ok, I say, I’ll see you later.

Ok, Shy. I’ll go swimming. But I’ll walk with you to Baron’s first.

Puppy and me, him on the right and me on the left, like it always is, his teenage boy body a long streak of thing striding over the pale cement. Our shadows mix together between our swinging arms and legs, two stretched out stick bugs stabbing into the curving-away world. We loathe everyone, talk shit, bump our shoulders into each other in a ragged rhythm while talking more shit about the same fuckers and bitches we grew up with and don’t care if they live or die. Six hundred eighty-four steps from the bottom step of the school to the front door of Baron’s Drug Store, I counted once when I was bored.

Sitting at the counter at Baron’s I watch him continue walking through the window, patting his cut offs to keep the ribbons of coupons from flying away in the breeze. I adjust my name tag, which says “Shannon,” over my white work coat. It’s funny, every time I put it on, I feel slightly ashamed like I’m announcing myself as someone else to the people who come in, and that people sneer at me for trying to escape our notoriety even though the stupid name tag is not my idea, it's Gary’s. He barely acknowledges me from the shelves of pills behind the pharmacy counter, that grumpy old man, and from the way he squints and mutters at the prescriptions through his comically thick glasses it’s a miracle that he can see what he’s doing at all. One of these days, one of the old fuckers are going to drop dead from Gary accidentally putting Hydrocodone instead of Lipitor into someone’s prescription. Sometimes I steal a few pills from the forgotten bottles at the bottom of the filing cabinets and take them at work, and the hours spin by slow and fast at the same time, syrupy ooze, pleasant fuzz, lost but not concerned, the buzzing fluorescent lights soft and shining with a warm iridescent sheen. But that’s a habit that’s hard to sustain, the best pills don’t rattle around frequently, and it’s a small town and most people pick up their medications on the dot. Our favorite rarity is Valium, me and Puppy took ‘em once at the swimming hole, and it was wonderful, the water inky-smooth, every movement a gentle caress, bodies floating on the outside and sinking on the inside, slow motion falling in pleasant vertigo, and our brains were gliding, we would look at each other and send ripples from our fingers and everything was perfect between the two of us, smooth-brained ecstasy.

I restock the talcum powder, sort the prescriptions alphabetically, count the inventory and make a list of things that are running out. Gauze, benzonite clay, large size bandages, arnica gel, wait no scratch that there’s more in the back room. They’re expired but no one will notice. Marlowe Wright comes in to buy nail clippers and get the prescription for his old lady’s stomach ulcer, and after that no one comes in for hours. The ceiling fan spins lazily, I thumb through my book but I have a migraine and it’s hard to concentrate. I take my favorite blue pen from my bag and start scrawling on my hands, loopy curlicues, slashes tapering into soft fuzzy lines, random words that emerge from the din of boredom: Shy, monkey, Puppy, lambo, and in big blocky letters MODUS OPERANDI which I heard once in a cop show that was playing on the TV at the diner. Eyes are dry so I rub at them, scratch the mosquito bite that is annoyingly rubbing against the edge of my bra. Thoughts and memories are oozing along in weird and stumbling patterns: tinny high-pitched pop tunes, breath in breath out, heartbeat one two, clods of dirt falling off Puppy’s clothes, phantom green spots wavering in the sun, tape skittering out of a cassette, droning din of a plane engine beneath the migraine.

Time must be passing. It must. I open my book again, flip to the dog ear fold and read

his head toward the door, tried to smile, and without knowing it repeated an old phrase of Úrsula’s. “What did you expect?” he murmured. “Time passes.” “That’s how it goes,” Úrsula said, “but not so much.” When she said it she realized that she was giving the same reply that Colonel Aureliano Buendía had given in his death cell, and once again she shuddered with the evidence that time was not passing, as she had just admitted, but that it was turning in a circle.

I close the book. It suddenly hits me, me and this and Puppy and mom and the entirety of Dogville exists seated on the tongue of a huge, hungry mouth. My skin crawls. I press half moons into the backs of my hands and quickly go to check the door of old Gary’s office. The sound of shuffling and sighing reaches my ears, and relief douses through me, the fact that there is someone else alive and breathing in this godforsaken place with me. Where is Puppy? I want to be where he is, I want him alive and with me. Probably wading somewhere past the reeds, sucking on a crushed cigarette. I rub my temples and check the clock. 4:46. Everything by the clock. Shift is almost over.

I am ready to leave early but the shop door tinkles and an unfamiliar man shambles in, every advancing footfall carrying an unknown weight. A stranger in Dogville. Brown leather hat over greasy overgrown hair, bumpy tanned skin verging on the edge of being sunburned.

We’re closing soon. What are you looking for?

I was hopin’ to get a roll of duct tape. And a needle and some thread.

This is a drug store. We don’t have those things here. You can get those things at the hardware store around the block, but they’re probably closing up now. I have my suspicions, this guy looks like a certified bum and I am eager to leave but it’s not often I see someone we don’t already know, so I can’t stop myself.

Where are you from? His dirty veined hands brush the wood of the shelves and as he walks closer I see that he is quite young, probably only a couple years older than me.

Jus’ traveling through. With a few friends. He is right in front of me now, leaning on the counter.

Aren’t you gonna go to the hardware store to buy that stuff you need?

I’m not in a hurry. He nods towards my nametag. What are you reading, Shannon?

I’m looking at him looking at me and I feel like it’s someone else he’s talking to, through a me made of brittle glass to a me that I don’t even know.

It’s Shy.

Shy?

Yeah. That’s what people call me.

Shy. Right on, I like that.

I say nothing. Softness in a grimy tanned face, tobacco stained teeth, squinty brown eyes. He’s thumbing through my book with his brown fingers, thrrrppp thrrrrppp.

You like readin’?

Yeah I guess. I look for the one’s I like from the library. Or I steal them from school.

What’s this one about? Little puffs of air shoot out from the flipping pages, thrrrrp thrrrrp thrrrp.

It’s uhhhh..about a family and a town called Macondo.

The way he’s looking at me is giving me slight shivers in my stomach. It’s like he knows about the hungry, kicked-in hole through Dogville, that he’s picked me out as something misplaced that he’s decided he likes, or wants.

Sounds interesting, he decides. Hey, you like music? He takes a gum packet from the counter and spins it in his fingers.

Yeah as much as anyone I guess. My brother likes it more though.

You should come hang out with us after school, we play guitar and got two dogs you can play with. One’s a puppy. It’s all real nice. Bring him too. We’re staying by the campsite next to the place selling crystals and shit, can’t miss us.

I say nothing.

Say, can I buy this? He shoves a crumpled dollar at me in exchange for the packet of gum.

Sure. Shoves one into his mouth immediately, and lifts a piece into the air for me, pointing it towards my face. I take it.

My names Derek, by the way.

Derek. How old are you, Derek?

I’m nineteen. A pause. I swear—I’m not a pervert or nothing, not trying to make you do nothing. Just think we could be friends, that’s all. How old are you?

I’m seventeen. I don’t know why I lie.

His jaw works at the piece of gum, and I can just make out what the letters tattooed across his knuckles say R, A, I, L, F, A, R, E, RAIL FARE.

Well. He dips his head towards me, eyes sinking under the brim of his hat. It was good to meet you Shy. Thanks for the gum.

Good to meet you too.

Maybe I’ll see you around.

Maybe.

He leaves, the door shuttering behind him with a tinny ring. Maybe I’ll see you around. They float in the air like a soap bubble, and the sound of his voice lingers around the receding shadows pooling around the leafy fringe outside the window. The store feels distressingly fake, like a backdrop I can push over with my finger.  My insides are buzzing, I’m winded up, I feel a weird vertigo like I’ve been tumbling around in a laundry machine and only just got a breath of fresh air.

I put the piece of gum on my tongue. It’s stale and tastes like minty soap.

I dutifully work the wad of gum all the way home, like a cow mindlessly chewing cud. Two downward clenches of the jaw per one stride. One, two (one), one, two (two). Frothy, mint-basted saliva collects in my mouth and I swallow, feeling more and more dehydrated as I walk. Dark elm branches, waving strands of grass, swirls of mosquitos, rutted dirt beneath my shoes. The post, the grocery, the tackle shop, the smashed cigarette butts in a ring around the liquor store loosening from the asphalt with a curl of wind. Sunlight sputtering between the clouds. People. The one bar called Bar. Dogville curving towards me and away from me under my plodding feet. Feeling fades. Again, the day stretches ahead almost mathematically, the seconds, minutes marching in steptime to the rotary of scenery and routine, again and again. The inane endlessness of it all. But then, the felted brim of a leather hat, squint of ocher brown eyes. RAIL FARE, faded ink from under sprouting knuckle hairs, shitty tattoos crawling out, disappearing under the buttoned sleeves of a baby-soft plaid shirt. A newness and a lifting. The red rusted rail tracks snaking over the earth like the sad, militant skeleton of a creature long dead.

I get home, drink thirstily from the tap. The wad of gum stiffens from the flash of cold, and I stash it in my cheek for a bit while I go to check the fridge. A rope of sausages tumbles out, but it’s full, everything crammed haphazardly, milk turned on its side, waxed apples wobbling on the dirty streaked shelves, three things threatening to tumble out after one wrong move. Puppy must’ve stashed the groceries and then gone to swim at the reedy spot across the creek. He should be back soon. I toss my backpack on my bed and walk the four steps over to his, and I am so so tired, suddenly, the trailer is empty, the room is dim with the blinds down, the caw caw of crows linger in the bird-haunted evening. Every passing minute is an eternity, but time was passing, must be passing, is it not?

I lay face down on Puppy’s bed and I imagine burrowing into the mattress and disappearing forever, like a coin happily tumbling into the puckering crack between the couch cushions, full speed into the abyss, never to be seen again. The sheets are cool and soft, and smell kind of scummy, like pond water mixed with the warm tang of sweat. It smells like him. I wish he would come home soon. As I turn my head in the soft darkness, the clump of gum loosens from the hollow of my cheek and falls back onto my tongue. I chew again, but it’s hard and tasteless. I swath Puppy’s sheets around me and breathe his smell, I am exhausted, slightly feverish like a child at the end of a party. It feels alright to be alone with myself, this strange soft breathing body. I am falling asleep. I swallow the gum. By the time it squeezes past my throat and drops into my stomach, I am no longer conscious.

He arrived at the third floor of the apartment building, above a roast meat shop and a dim space filled with electric bike parts. The doorbell went off with a springy ring. A wiry, balding man wearing a red apron opened the door, Jia’s father, and gestured for him to come in while calling for her in Cantonese.

It was the first time that he had visited Jia’s home. He took off his shoes and stood near the doorway a bit awkwardly, not wanting to encroach on anyone’s space, but Jia’s father beckoned the both of them over to the small kitchen alcove for breakfast.

“I already ate. But Dad saved some breakfast for you. I told him you like Chinese food.”  

“Oh, no it’s really ok, I’m really not—”

“Theo. Don’t be dumb. Just eat.”

He obeyed and sat down on the wooden chair and curiously eyed the spread in front of him. Congee with what looked like pumpkin chunks, a plate of fried eggs, some kind of pickled vegetable and a plastic tupperware of reddish brown fluff were laid out on the linoleum covered table, steaming and glistening. It smelled divine. He was in fact, hungry, the only thing he had that morning was a cup of scalding hot coffee from the bodega, which was weirdly soapy tasting.

Jia’s father shuffled up next to him. “Not fancy,” he said in quiet, accented English. “But please, eat.”

He pointed at the tupperware of fluff. “This pork.” He spooned some into his bowl of congee. “This—” he turned towards Jia. “How you say, salty vegetable—”

“It’s pickled mustard greens.” She stated this matter-of-factly.

He grunted his approval. “Yes. Is very good.” He spooned some into the bowl as well. 

“Thank you very much, sir. It looks delicious.”

“Me, sir?” Jia’s father chortled for a second, and Theo, looking at father and daughter side by side, could see the resemblance between them in an instant. “No sir. You call me uncle.” His lip quipped up in an almost roguish smile, eyes folding into two good-natured half moons, looking very much like Jia. “Thank you for help my daughter.” For a beat, they met eyes, and Theo was surprised to see a glimmer of emotion in the man’s lined face, but he was the first to look away.

“No problem at all, sir—uncle.” Jia let out a throaty chuckle.

He patted him on the shoulder quickly three times before saying, “Well. Hm. Enjoy.”

He didn’t let Theo respond, instead walking away to rearrange the rack of spices and condiments for a half second before leaving him and Jia in the kitchen. Theo spooned up some congee with the now gooey pork floss and a daub of mustard greens. It was homey and warm.

“It’s delicious.” He declared this while reaching for a sloppy fried egg. He truly meant it.

“I’m happy you like it.” She was looking at him watchfully. “Come help me with some stuff in my room after you’re done eating. It’s the first door after the bathroom.”

As Theo ate, he observed the apartment. The kitchen was small and warm from the radiator, even with the window open to the November morning, with the front door leading directly into a small closet and then into the kitchen from an entrance to his left. The stove was lined with foil and well cleaned, a carton of sauces and condiments sitting quietly on the yellow linoleum counter. Four mismatched chairs huddled around the table, with one set aside in the corner next to the trashcan, a picture of a smiling woman and a jade plant adorning its wooden seat. Jia’s mother. She had died around six months ago in May, of complications due to diabetes after a stroke. From what she had told of her to him, she was a firm, yet loving woman, the parent who was more prone to losing her temper and fretting over money, her daughters, the business; but never nasty or cruel. She, along with the rest of her family, had loved her—love her—very much. Jia’s grief ripened past the inconsolable phase, but he understood that it had the weight of a stone, coloring her every new day with the ache of her absence.

His own mother was dead as well, but he had only heard that through his social worker and was conflicted on whether or not he even cared to know the details. All he was told was that she died of illness and relatively quickly. At this point in his life, she had become a specter that hovered at the corners of his vision, something he could actively turn away from if the day was good and he kept busy enough.

“Oh my God, Theo,” Jia murmured when that fact had finally been ferreted out of him by a circle of inquisitive dorm mates. As everyone else had made the appropriate sympathetic noises, an intense disgust rose up inside him towards himself, feeling like he had floundered into a situation where he was cherry picking the facts of his life to elicit sympathy from others, something he promised he would never do.

The conversation spun on, after sputtering a bit awkwardly due to his terse (and false) explanation (she died when he was very young from an accident, he didn’t remember much about her, a deflection he had since perfected), to the rest of the group gratuitously revealing the ails of their childhoods and psychoanalyzing each other and themselves, something Theo soon realized was a favorite pastime of newly minted adults.

This was before Jia’s mother had passed, and nevertheless, he would never deign to use the Dead Mother fact on a grieving Jia to purposefully draw a false string of understanding between them. Because the fact was, he spent a lot of energy erasing his mother’s taint from his life and was happy she was dead. And Jia, obviously, wasn’t. He gazed at the framed photo of the smiling woman he had never known and felt his heart turn over a bit from its complicated meaning.

He quietly finished the last of his breakfast and covered the rest of the eggs and condiments before going over to the sink to rinse his bowl and spoon. Growing up, he consisted off a diet of empty carbs, canned meat and beans, and often times went to sleep still hungry. The free square of greasy pizza he received at school was the best part of the day on many days. It was a marvel to him, still, that he had the money and means to eat warms meals every day, all kinds of delicious foods and flavors he never could have dreamed up when he was a dirty child living by a ranch not so long ago.

Jia was bent over, folding up a box when he stepped into her room. It was cozy, with a big white dresser wedged between a bunk bed and a single, with a cluttered desk under a window overlooking the back of the building and walls adorned with posters that varied wildly by each bed.

“Oh, hey. Can you help me take those out to the living room?” She gestured towards the two sealed boxes next to the closet, which was exploding with clothes. “I’m just going to finish this one up and I’ll be right out to load everything.”

He inhaled the slightly stale air of the room, took in the dust motes playing in the sunlight above her head. It was slightly unnerving, stepping into someone’s childhood room, much less one shared with two other absent girls. It seemed a private, almost sacred, space, and he a dishonest outsider. When he was younger, he had often fantasized living in a room not unlike this one, one he could adorn with his interests and childish obsessions, a place of his own where he was protected.

This was undoubtedly a room of girls. He could imagine Jia as a teenager, texting and eating chocolates in bed as her sisters flowed in and out around her. He felt as if he was stepping into a movie montage of someone’s coming of age, starring Jia as the troubled, yet earnest main character. Having grown up partly in a group home for boys, where girls where hardly seen and subsequently mythicized, he used to think of girls in their rooms like foxes in their dens: soft, secretive and hard to understand. Although slightly dazed, he was also strangely soothed by the thought, and peered around the room with an archeologist’s intensity.

“Is that one yours?” He pointed at the bottom bunk, the one with a print of Damien Hirst’s Love Is All You Need pinned above the pillow.

She peered at him over her shoulder. “Yeah. I liked how it made it look like there were butterflies flying out from my head when I was sleeping.” She went back to her packing. “You want it? Your room is so bare, it looks like a serial killer’s.”

“No keep it. It’s yours.”

“All I’m saying is you’re an art history major. In Post-Renaissance. It’s fucking weird that you don’t have at least one poster of The Gleaners or something.”

Theo grinned to himself. Millet was in fact one of his favorite artists, but his favorite painting by him was The Shepardess with her Flock.

“You with your basic taste.”

She huffed at him, folding the cardboard flaps into each other in a satisfying cross.

“Okay let’s go. But please don’t move anything an inch. My sister is going through puberty and she’ll freak out.”

Jia’s father sent them off, giving him and Jia a bag of banhmis to eat after they moved in. Jia was out last, tucking two bottles of mysterious dark sauces into a tote bag before climbing into the driver’s seat and flinging a wave out the window to her father, who looked out at them leaving with the building door halfway open.

“Thanks for driving back,” he said, shuffling things off the passenger’s seat. “I was fucking stressed out on the way here.” He had just gotten his license last year and still wasn’t used to the crowded frenzy of the city streets.

Jia gestured towards him limply, distracted. “Of course.” She pumped her horn at a produce truck that blocked the street and squeezed past it to the intersection. “He was nervous, you know.”

He chuffed in confusion. “Nervous? Your dad? Why?”

“To meet you. Because I told him how good of a friend you are.”

Theo blinked, abashed. “Are you sure it’s not because he finds it weird to have a white person in his home?” He pushed out a laugh, trying to lighten the compliment.

Jia was staring straight ahead at the road, her eyes hidden by a sweep of thick, dark hair. “No. Because you took care of me. When my mom died. Even now.”

The boxes shuddered behind them as the van hit a rough patch in the road, the plastic-wrapped mattress giving a cheerful bounce. He swallowed and said nothing, letting the scrape of the tires and chatter of the radio fill the silence. Of course he took care of her, checked in on her, gathered notes for her and reminded her to eat when she sat, hollow-eyed in the room from crying, day by day until she emerged back into the sun. Because she was his friend. Because he loved her for inviting him into her world. But the fact was when she said that to him, he felt ashamed. He felt ashamed because behind his soothing words and little favors, he was deeply afraid of doing the wrong thing, should he end up losing her. It was the fear that drove him, not his genuine concern for her. He was afraid that he would lose her and the space that they were creating between themselves, her friendship that, for him, was a scary, alien and precious thing.

He was scared that she would realize that behind his façade of normality, she would come to see that he was a filthy, shameful thing, a person not worth knowing. That, through her grief, would come a revelation that the bond between them was hollow and meaningless, paling against the effortless references, easy vulnerabilities and depth of affection she had for her family, her friends from Queens, her dead mother. She would see through to his desperation and tire of his presence. Decide that he was not worth the energy she offered him. He, who was still learning, and trying, to see if there was something light, yet strong enough within himself that could bear his own damned weight.

The van speed ahead, syncing with the press of Jia’s scuffed oxfords, and they were finally free of the traffic crowding the entrance to the highway. The scraggly trees began to whip past them, faster and faster, against a pasted blue sky. He felt empty, and guilty, but before he could say anything in response she interjected, “Don’t worry. You don’t have to say anything. This is me just saying I appreciate you being in my life is all.”

“I appreciate you being in my life as well.” More than you would ever know, he thought. “It’s nothing. I did what anyone would do.” His voice sounded small, even to him.

“No, they wouldn’t. But you did. So just say ‘thank you’ Theo, because I’m being sincere.” Her voice took on a slightly exasperated quality, but she glanced over at him and her eyes were kind.

His mouth contorted into various shapes, but no sound came out. She laughed.

“Thank you. Repeat after me. Thank you.” Her mouth formed over the last words in an exaggerated mime.

“Thank you.”

“Ok, moving on.”

He laughed.