The Robert Watson Literary Prize Story MANTIS

Shaken as an infant, abandoned by my father, and squeezed through time and circumstance, I find myself some thirty-odd years later, here, retching onto a frosty hedgerow outside the town house I rent with my mother. I pull myself into focus, and my stomach feels stretched and snapped like a surgeon’s glove. This is coastal Florida. Our row of homes sits along the Gulf shore, but it’s freezing, so I pretend there’s snow and tilt my head to catch an imaginary flake on the tongue, a miracle. An egret on the sidewalk pecks at a worm and fails to kill it. I stamp it out of its misery and grind with the heel. Then, finally, after I stare down the sun, it begins to set for the last time before The Great New Millennium, century twenty-one. 

Inside, my mother’s on the couch with her boyfriend. The King of Sanitation, they call him. (“You’re not customers. You’re family.”) They link hands and watch Jeopardy!, both wearing their New Year’s hats. There’s glitter on their brows and on the carpet, too. 

“You out there for some air, bud?” says The King. “Cold weather to end the year on, but that can be good for you.” I don’t bother telling him that, no, dumbass, my pharynx is contracting from the fluid produced by an acute anxiety spell. The television goes static, and he gets up to fidget with the antenna, as he is wont to do these nights he visits. 

Mom looks good, rosy and done up for the first time in a while, and that admittedly makes me happy. Her hair bobs above her shoulders. Her lashes are curled long, and she wears a slender-fitting dress that covers one shoulder and exposes the other. For all of last week Mom wore the same sweatpants, and when she burned her wrist on the oven rack, she spent the rest of the night crying about death and the pearly gates, the inevitability of her struggling ventricles, her failing heart. To help I recited that joke about the Chihuahua and the top hat because she likes that one, but it only worked insofar as she could take a few breaths of calmness. 

“We’ve got those dinner reservations later,” she says with tenderness. “We’d both like you to come, get out into the world. Could be back to watch the fireworks over the water after.”

I swallow the acid in my throat. “Told you no, but thanks. I have to grade papers.”

“School’s out for break, my man,” The King says. Just like that, he catches the fib and has to remind me of my embarrassing things, throw them in my face: That this PhD is worth a square of toilet paper. That I’m only a history adjunct at the state college, and I am stuck in-progress on my book of the Roman emperors. That I don’t get offered many classes, and when I do, a lot of them don’t even make enough enrollment, so I can’t afford a place all my own. 

I say I’m headed to my room and touch my mom on the shoulder to signal I love her but I just can’t leave the house with this disposition, and certainly not with him, The King. She nods because she always tries to understand. We ride the same wavelength. Her style is compassion.  

I boot up the computer, and the internet begins to gargle, to dial up. I wait. There’s the pornography folder, but my heart’s not into it. I’m distracted by what happened earlier, this guy who came by in a backpack selling doomsday gear, like radiation goggles and non-perishables. I asked him his deal, and he said that come the year 2000 all the aircraft fall from the sky, the grid fails, the microwaves explode, the chips burn out. He scratched his shin. “Okay,” I said. “But then what does this mean for my mother’s pacemaker?” He said, “Don’t know, broseph. Sorry to say, but she might be a goner,” and turned to haul away his batteries and peanuts. 

I’m aware of all the apocalyptic speculations—who isn’t by now?—and I think of them as absurd and pathetic but my worry does stay with my mother and that precautionary yet essential electronic machine designed to zap her heart, her fundamental organ. 

This sort of panic I now type to Mantis in our private chat, so I can get these worries out into the open. I don’t have to wait long; she’s always online when I need her. I’ve never seen Mantis in person, but I choose to imagine her as such: a tidy woman my age, her plush visage illuminated by a computer screen in the wet, stone basement of a convent in Rome, perhaps, or at least in some adjacent township. Because of this glowing, one must be able to see the moisture on her upper lip and the tiniest amount of peach fuzz, almost translucent. She will occasionally press her palm down the front of her habit to smooth any wrinkled fabric. Undoubtedly, it’s past sleeping hours, and if caught, the reprimand she would receive from her superior would be severe. But I am worth that risk to her. 

And for that I am in love, whoever she might actually be. 

If all collapses, Mantis says, her text appearing in our chat thread. You know. How will we communicate without the web? Give me your address now, sweetheart???

I’m not ready for that, not quite, not yet at the phase of my life for a romance to become tangible. I steer the conversation back to my mother.

But the end of the world, it’s not factual or actual, right? I type. And my mother’s pacemaker isn’t necessarily needed anyway, right? It’s like break-in-case-of-emergency, right?

I pick at my thumbnail and examine my space, the dinginess in here, the dusty vent, the one bulb. And then there’s what’s taped to the modem: a scrawl written by Mom’s fingers on the back of a heart-healthy pamphlet, a poem from her most recent hospital stay. I don’t like crying, so I never read any lines except the last one. In heaven or blazing hell, we’ll love each other just as well. That’s true.

If real, Mantis says, one startle, and if that heart stops without the machine? She dies??

Possibly. Yes. 

My poor baby, Mantis says, because kindness is among her highest virtues. Then a couple beats. So address yet??? she asks. 

The King knocks, opens the door like he’s a chum or some kind of dad. “Bud, I want to beg you,” he says. “I’ll even bribe you if I have to.” He tosses his gaudy silver watch onto my bed as an olive branch. “It’ll mean the world to your mother if you tag along.” I close my eyes but glare at him through my lids, which can be a more potent strategy. “I know it’s because of me,” The King says. “But it’s not like I can back out, can I? Me, you, we’re both trying to help her enjoy the simple things while we still have time to.” He extends his hairy hand for a shake.

I summon courage. People know of my width but forget my length, so I stand to exist above him. I’m quiet. I spin the ceiling fan blade. 

“Okay, I get it,” The King says and turns to leave because I have used intimidation. “Keep the watch.” I secure The King’s timepiece around my wrist and it suits me well—me in my finery. 

I lock the door and feel almost brave enough to give Mantis my address. I type in the coordinates and hover my index above the ENTER key, only to delete without sending. Again, there’s the porn folder, and this time I’m feeling it. 

Just moments after my culmination there are gunshots—no, firecrackers—outside my window. A group of starlit teens launch the explosives overhead, and I twitch when they ignite above the ocean tide. A wiry kid in a jacket and shorts tosses one of the bombs to his friend, who runs before the bang, before there is damage to any extremities. Their bare feet leave spastic imprints in the sand. The impact zone of their debris inches closer to the marsh-end of the beach and toward what they probably can’t see in the darkness: my pal Rex’s RV, stationed among the sea brush.  

I open the window. “Stop it,” I whisper, even though I too would like such fun. I’ve never been a good disciplinarian. Cases in point? My students. Occasionally they break my chalk before I arrive to the classroom, as if I were a dunce. They sometimes snicker, heckle my belly. There has been snorting, frightening faces during lectures. I speak toward the floor to prevent any conflict because they are unkind company.  

 My wall rumbles with the sounds of pipes and faucets, which means Mom or The King or both are showering for dinner. Out of fear of being within earshot of possible intercourse, I step through the window threshold and slide myself out and onto the sand. It triggers the floodlight. I tremble even though I’ve secured my peacoat, and when I raise my arm to wave at the children, they scatter as if I’m the village ogre. 

Rex must’ve noticed me from his RV. He hobbles out the door and flashes a peace sign to beckon. My left ear rings vaguely, a result of my anticipation flaring up, and my tinnitus. My boots conceal my feet and ankles, so as I walk toward Rex’s place and turn back, my prints appear blocked and mechanical in contrast to the feral steps of the teens.  

He pours me something warm and gritty from a blender, and I drink before saying hello because this is our ritual. Rex handles the maintenance in our complex and is the only man who’s slept with my mother I appreciate. I just about love him, my only true offline friend. He is nearing seventy. So perhaps due to his tenure, he’s accumulated his fair amount of the world’s paraphernalia. He’s got it all: bean bags, katanas, ashtrays from every state. Books climb from floor to ceiling, wall to wall. He says he’s written more than twenty. I can’t even complete one. 

I give him the brass tacks regarding my mother’s artery channels, her shock-rhythms, her emergency defibrillator.

“Can’t help with your mom, dude,” Rex says and pulls me to the space next to him on the sofa. “Been there. Tried that.” A calico claws itself onto Rex’s lap, then paws at the hair hanging from his chin. “I might be good with appliances but nothing like that, nothing on the inside, all that squishy stuff. Gal’s been on her way out for a while, besides.”

He pushes away the cat, crosses his legs, and fills a balloon with nitrous. Inhales. I do the same—my self-granted indulgence and as far into the underworld as I’m willing to venture. The gas unscrambles my innards, and for those thirty seconds all thoughts are fireflies, all worries miasma, far above the ozone. 

Rex asks if he can snap a couple photos of me with my arms behind my head, says I’m cute that way. And even though it’s odd, I can’t help but turn flushed and flattered. He takes a few, and I sit again while he winds the camera film. 

“I’m no mystic,” Rex says. “But this end-of-the-world bullshit might actually hold some merit. Just think of the rhymes: JFK. Y2K. And what’s the common denominator?” He uses the inside of his shirt collar to blow his nose. “That’s right, my dude: the fucking CIA.” 

“Hmm.” I can’t blame Rex. Like with the constellations, when there are so many billions of burning suns, how can you not be tempted to connect them all, to sketch the handsomest images to mend the loneliness? “And then there’s MLK,” I gift him. “But why would the CIA want to kill my mom?”

He palms my knee, massages the top and then tries to pry at the cap with his index finger. “Why wouldn’t they?” he says. 

Rex has the shakes of a motor, so he asks if there’s any booze at my place and if anyone’s home. And yes I do have a few bottles in the high drawers, even though The King has recently convinced my mother to stay on the wagon. Rex takes the lead and we exit toward the sand, but out of impulse or kleptomania, I snag the disposable camera he’s left on a stack of old newspapers and put it in my coat pocket. 

I show Rex in the front, since The King’s car is gone for dinner. The heater is buzzing, so I toss my coat on the kitchen counter. I pour him two fingers of some kind of scotch and he drinks it like he’s sucking on honey. He insists I match him, but it’s difficult, I say. It tastes like towering Vesuvius, the metro killer. Rex has no idea what I’m saying—which is nothing, really—but he laughs and lifts himself to kiss my earlobe, nonetheless. This is nothing to make a fuss about and far from the first time. He nods toward my room, and as we pass the television, Dick Clark winks at the camera, snow on his shoulders. 

My bed is dusty, but we are warm under the quilt. Rex holds my fetal body from behind and reaches for my member. This is as far as it ever goes, and he understands. I am not of that persuasion, I don’t think, so I lie un-erected. 

After a bit, before I’m asleep, Rex releases his grip and glides his hand over my chest. I am glad for this, Rex’s presence, his encompassing, sweaty comfort. I wonder if The King provides this security for my mother. I’m tempted to hope so. Eventually Rex grabs and yanks the hair on the top of my scalp, the wiry bunch barely clinging to the follicles, then exits out the open window, leaving nothing but drool on the pillow. 

I load up the instant messenger to check on Mantis’s New Year’s situation, to see if there’s devastation to her time zone, but no response even after seven-plus minutes. 

Systems down? I ask. Send SOS? To what latitude/longitude???

I shut my eyes and visualize: Much ruin. Her town aflame. Mantis clutches her rosary beads, dodging sparks from outlets and fixtures. The other sisters cower in desperate prayer. She holds a candle stick both for illumination and defense, and when she makes her way out and into the mist, she slips and cuts her cheek on the sharp stem of a poison hemlock. The wind snuffs her flame, and after she spies her way up the brick path to the medical clinic, half of the structure has crumbled to rubble. A howling queue of civilians waits outside. Mantis falls forward onto her elbows, and the gravel makes its way into her like splinters of shaved metal. Despite the circumstance, she is affronted by the power of her own slender beauty. She curses the Lord for this matter—that she cannot match the ugliness of the scene around her, that she stands out. She is an outlier, living as contrast. Her eyebrows furl and she screams my name for help. I cannot reach her without the web, and in this instant, I fear our tether has been clipped, umbilically.

I type my address into the message box, delete, type again, then finally press SEND.

Mantis does not reply, so I do the same again, hoping for any sign of life and to give her a place to run toward. But no. There is an error message, and our chat window closes. When I attempt to reboot the program, it fails. Her username no longer exists, it tells me. Gone. Evaporated. 

I pop an antacid. It lodges sideways in my throat, and I choke until my cough ejects the tablet and my spittle seeps into the carpet fibers.  

In the kitchen I gargle water from the tap, then dampen a slice of white bread with milk to soothe my esophagus and to provide myself a meager amount of sustenance. A cockroach claws its way out of the electrical socket by the telephone, and I think of what people say about their ability to survive nuclear fallout, but I don’t want to muse on that. I slam it, smear it across the marble surface with the edge of my fist and rinse it down the garbage disposal. 

Headlights cut through the window blinds, the deadbolt releases, and in struts Mom with a plastic bag. She’s all giggles, happy and filled with three courses. She comes in for the hug, and I press my chin to her forehead. 

“Where is he?” I say. “The King.”

“In his car listening to his cassettes.” She extends the bag for me to reach inside, and I remove a box of sparklers. “He wants to give us space.” She sees the trail of insect. I wipe it away, and she smiles like it never happened.

Mom insists on lighting the sticks on the beach, so she wrenches her feet out of her heels, and I notice they’ve ballooned again, swollen from ankle to toe. She stops me when I bring up her circulation. Mom breathes heavily, and I wonder if it’s tipsiness from the night out, but there is no whiff of wine. I ask if she hurts. She doesn’t answer, just tugs my wrist to follow. I grab my coat. 

The sand takes her up to the ankle, but me, I feel buoyant. I am lighter alongside my mother. I could float across the Gulf of Mexico if I chose to, big belly up, drawn by the Gulf Stream into the Atlantic beast and back. Mom stifles a wheeze into her elbow and tries to play it off as a laugh. Her breath has gone short. She points eastward down the shoreline, and in the middle distance, a lonely hot air balloon glides gently home to Earth. Probably lovebirds, high on kissing and helium inhalation. Its small flame dims. They land safely from such height. 

“I didn’t know anyone was allowed to fly those at night,” I say. 

Mom looks at me with a shine in her eyes—the sort I know from her old yearbook photos, gleaming with youth and a long, fortunate future. “How about,” she says, “we let everyone off the hook tonight?”

I shuffle into the ocean only because she asks me to. It’s coldest around my toenails. The hem of her dress is now soaked, and I can’t help but look to where her lungs are hidden, then to where her heart lives, imagining the struggling artery that connects the two. 

“Your pacemaker,” I say aloud, and my mouth dries from the rough texture of the word. “Does it really work?”

“It works exceptionally,” she says and walks backward, barely missing a pile of tangled weeds. “Unfortunately, exceptionally is all it can do.”

Finally we strike up our sparklers and do a little marveling at the size of the moon. I accidentally allow the stick to burn my thumb. It hurts like grieving, so I let it fall and hold the finger out to show my mother.

“What is life to you?” she says. “To you specifically.”

The world has me cornered, so I say, “I don’t know. An accumulation of seemingly minor moments, that, when compressed into segments, create escalating consequences which eventually influence our collective experiential decisions on the planet, thereby causing a perpetual series of syllogistic patterns until we inevitably extinguish.” 

A big fish, now, swimming unusually close. 

“Why don’t you love yourself as much as you love me?” she says. 

I try to conjure a response, but this only makes my memories activate, those of a single mother and her only son, infant images: bubbles in the bathtub, the surprising palms of peekaboo, birthday candles and tree ornaments, car seat buckles, the tickling of my soles. “Are you afraid you don’t deserve it?” she says.

I try to breathe more deeply, from my diaphragm. There are tears, obviously, but the ocean mist conceals them against my cheeks. Mom reaches to hold me, and I bend to press my temple to her shoulder. In a tenor, she sings the hymn I used to love from Sunday mass, “On Eagles’ Wings,” that windy song. I step back, eased. 

She lights one last sparkler, and The King’s watch shows a quarter to midnight. I remove Rex’s camera from my coat pocket in order to capture a spirit all but vanished. My mother twirls. Her hair is newly short and dyed red. Before, she’d always found that color too daring. She is gaunt in face and stature, but in her current movement it is no longer jarring—an unwinding figurine in a jewelry box. I snap away. I capture grace. She poses, then steps over a blue crab and kicks the surf in my direction. Sure as hell she would swim if she could, but her heartbeat won’t allow it. My mother asks me to guess the letters and words she writes in the air, her flaming, winding strokes, and I use the last click of the camera to preserve the instance. The ball will soon drop, but here, over the Gulf of Mexico, the stars remain random. They cross each other’s brilliance and dance over and behind us to the mainland side—the vibrance of ’99 waning. 

 

A week before the spring equinox, year 2000, my mother died of cardiac arrest, and I try not to dwell on it too much or too little. 

It occurred the night we went to the bowling alley. We both made fun of my foot size as I struggled to knot the laces of the rented shoes, and I joked that she was one to talk. My mother could barely lift the lightest ball, so I would hold her arm and help guide it backward, then forward, to push and urge toward the pins. She winked with both eyes when a few would fall. The two of us, slipping on the hard wood, clumsy as clowns in baggy clothes.

Now it is just The King and me. The King has moved into the house, into Mom’s room, because he misses her. He still spends his nights in despair—crying in the living room, in the bathroom, sometimes even on the floor of my room when I am compelled to join. We are closer now, after many months of this year. At the end of each, he writes me a check for half the rent. I brew the coffee in the morning. In the evening he prepares supper. 

Rex, the over-lover of life, stopped by to deliver his sympathies and salutations, but he wrote no card. He was cruising west to find California, he said, to pursue late-life political ambitions, or maybe even a little commercial acting. I wished him well with a handshake and nothing more. 

I’ve taken to pedaling my Schwinn to campus, but this morning I hitch a ride on the back of The King’s garbage truck because he gets a kick out of it. I white-knuckle the rail and nod to all who will never experience this privilege and power. Today though, The King doesn’t drop me at the pedestrian trail. Instead, with no decal, he parks in the student lot—who is going to tow a vehicle like this?—and asks if he can sit in on my classes. He’s a fish out of water in his company polo. I wear my wool suit jacket even though it’s ninety degrees. 

8:50 is Roman Mythology. The King takes a spot in the back corner, and I tell the kids he’s here to evaluate the learning experience. Confused, they engage their best behavior. The King asks the student next to him for a sheet of looseleaf and a pen. He writes when I speak. 

I’ve grown more confident manipulating the accoutrements of the classroom, so I use the projector to bring to life a rendering of the Roman deity Cerberus, a three-headed canine, the guard and minder of the underworld. A springy boy in glasses asks if this animal is indigenous only to the Mediterranean, or has it ever come to the contiguous U.S. Before I can respond, The King pipes up. “Listen, bud,” he says. “It ain’t real. None of this shit is actual or factual.”

So as not to pierce anyone’s bubble, I tell them mythology is as real as we perceive it to be. The Romans saw in these gods beauty and hope and justice and fear. In my opinion, a figure of the past is only fictional if you let those truths fade or be forgotten.

In my office The King wants to know what the fuck that even means, and I shrug and say that in this line of work you have to think on your toes, that it’s part and parcel of the gig, and sometimes words might simply spew as such. I ask if I can see what he wrote down, and he supposes so as he tosses the folded paper across my desk. The sentimental element in me expects a romantic moment in which the sunlight splits the cloudy shawl over my window to illuminate a vulnerable poem, The King having connected the metaphorical implications of today’s lesson with the sweetness of Mom’s legacy. But it’s not much, a crude sketch of Cerberus the dog smoking a cigar and a scribble to further look up the subject at the library. 

There is an hour before my next class, but The King doesn’t take the opportunity to leave. He sticks around, folds his arms over his stomach, and falls asleep with his mouth open. Rex’s camera sits on my bookshelf, and no doubt its contents have overwhelmed The King, to whom I’ve told what’s on the film: my mother lives there, undeveloped.

A trait I’ve absorbed from The King’s demeanor is the desire to console. So I stand to reach and hold his shoulder. I even wet my lips to whisper like my mother would, but the door opens with no warning. 

For a moment I expect Mantis, as I do lately, often, paranoid and fearful. Now thrown into the bin along with my computer, she remains a specter, no longer needed, and I am unsure if I would even be welcoming of her arrival. Mantis was born of my past self, not of my present maturation. If I were to meet her, or whoever controlled her messaging account, I would like to say: Thank you for the help and benevolence, but your manifestation is a stark reminder of my tendency for agoraphobia, the diabolical characteristic I am in the process of expunging. Or something to that effect.

However this, here and now, is only a frantic student, a boy with hair to his narrow shoulders. I struggle to recall his name, and he pays no mind to the sleeping man in the chair. He’s been absent this week, he says, because his dorm has flooded, he says, because his car is getting repaired, he says, and his parrot is sick. He has documentation. The boy asks for an extension. I grant it.

When my classes finish, The King is off to complete his rounds, so I get home by way of city bus. Inside the portico of our town house, against the door and nestled beside a clay pot of grayed soil, rests a delicately wrapped bouquet of calla lilies, tulips, peonies, and one rose—beautiful and tenderhearted—a gift which arrives every twelve or so days since my mother’s passing, that one might reasonably conclude is, in fact, from Mantis herself. But the card is nameless. 

Inside, the refrigerator drones, and a wren sings along from outside the kitchen window. The word is harmony. I clip the stems, remove any browning leaves, and I lay the flowers on the dinner table for The King to arrange later. 

 

MEN WITH GUNS

I entered the phase of my life when I began to date men with guns. The move to Montana helped accelerate the onset of this stage. This felt new and exciting, like it had things to teach me. These men—mostly hunters, but also the occasional personal security guard or a private contractor for the army—seemed sturdy, masculine, steeped in knowledge that to me was occult. Aren’t sex and death intimately connected? Wasn’t a tender primal truth present here? If only I could grasp the link. I was curious. I imagined their muscular fingers would tear ribcages apart, imagined them sink into the still-warm flesh of elk, red and wet with blood. Images that were distinctly erotic. Just think what those fingers could do to a woman. But could they?

This phase of my life could alternatively be titled: my mid-twenties. I was searching for something for which I had no name. Exile played a big part in this. What part exactly was difficult to say. I wasn’t from here. I wasn’t from anywhere near Montana. Most days I felt tugged right and left in bouts of improvised performances upon a blacked-out stage before no audience. My parents had just died. I think I was trying very hard to become something new, or possibly get back to what I once had been. These men felt like archways to step through.

The first man took me to a speakeasy-style bar inside a building’s basement: floorboards creaked overhead, a musician strummed a guitar flat on his lap. The place seemed sincere and strange. It was exactly the kind of exotic experience I moved here half-hoping to find. The man in question was tall, sveltely muscular, with a blondish-reddish beard. He stood up when he saw me. A hunter, if I ever saw one, and I never had.

He’d only ever been to one country in Europe—not mine—and the fact that most of the population did not possess guns unnerved him. He said it made him feel unsafe. I said I felt that way about here. He offered to take me shooting one day. I said: okay. I had no idea what “shooting” entailed. Would a carcass be involved, a bulletproof vest, face paint? I moved to Montana for grad school. I was a painter. I could have gone to Yale or NYU or Bard but I came here. Why here? I had no answer for him. Jasper, his name was. He worked for the government as a road engineer. Hunting came purely from the heart—everything he knew he taught himself. I understood passion, I understood self-taught. His articulated fingers carved quick gestures as he explained the rivers in which salmon ran and the migratory patterns of pronghorn elk.

Jasper asked to hear my mother tongue, then smiled as if seeing me for the first time. I asked him to tell me something I did not know.

“Do you know the difference between how a mountain lion and a grizzly take apart its prey?”

I shook my head.

“The mountain lion will pluck out the fur, bit by bit; the bear will use its claw to slowly peel the skin.” Jasper glowed with a fleeting copper haze of passion.

I felt at ease. None of this talk seemed eerie or out of place. His eyes, god, his eyes did not leave mine. They shimmered in that low light, colorless.

All night I heard my body decide: yes.

The next time I saw Jasper, he picked me up in his blue truck. When he got out my stomach did a complicated tug, a simultaneous backward and sideways spin, like a planet revolving in space. Damn, he was beautiful. The intervening week had dulled this effect and now here it was, in full force. I did not let this on. We drove east of town, following the hum of rivers, between steep red canyon cliffs and faraway trees turning copper. Birch trees, I wanted to say, but that would be wrong. It was early October, the air was cool and full of woodsmoke. He pointed to the river and said, “Later in the fall I trap beaver here.” I waited for the follow-up of laughter, but it was not a joke.

People back home gave me deep, grave looks when I said I was moving to Montana. Almost always they cited cowboys, guns, rodeos, cartoonish images of saloons, canyons, desolate stretches of mountain, and, quite wrongly, mesas—before abruptly running out of associations. Since moving here I’d only seen one man in cowboy boots, and it was at Walmart. I did not tell them this, not wanting to spur them on. Why, they wanted to know, as though my choice were an affront to the old world they believed we were bound to. What will you do out there? They wondered, or alternatively wished me well, with the sincerity and seriousness appropriate to one they might never see again. I listened to these anxieties with forced patience. I listened as an anthropologist might listen to the valley tribe’s stories of the mountain tribe, knowing the valley tribe has never been up the mountain. But then I landed at the local airport and saw the walls of mounted carcasses and creatively posed taxidermy, men with chest-long beards, women in camo socks, and thought to myself: you idiot.

For what felt like a long time, Jasper drove us down a dirt road. He kept glancing at his phone, an app that marked public and private land. The lines kept shifting between roam free and trespass.

“That’s another thing about America,” I said to him, “you can’t go where you want to go.”

He looked at me, then frowned like someone receiving bad news. At last we pulled over. Behind us a steep reddish cliff, in front of us a long field, somewhere water flowed. A few camper vans went by, prayer flags in the windows.

“Dirtbags,” Jasper said.

He opened the trunk and pulled out a colorful bull’s-eye, a case of empty beer bottles, and three serious-looking black suitcases I realized were guns.

“Shotgun, air rifle, hand pistol,” Jasper said, setting them carefully one by one on the ground.

I nodded like I knew exactly what that meant. We carried everything into the field. I watched him set up targets, walk there and back while he counted steps—measuring what, don’t ask me. Jasper asked for the three rules I was supposed to memorize: treat all guns as if they’re loaded, always point the muzzle to the ground, and keep your finger off the trigger until you’re ready to shoot.

“Good, good,” he nodded, and handed me a bullet that weighed nothing.

“You have any questions?” he asked, the look in his eyes boyish and bright.

“Yes,” I said. “What’s a muzzle?”

He smiled, shook his head, and laughed.

“That’s the muzzle.” Jasper pointed to the end of the gun, then placed giant headphones over my head.

It did cross my mind, at least once, that shooting guns with a man I just met might not be my finest choice. Although, it did seem exactly the kind of behavior Montana required. I had a good feeling, is all I can say. Jasper seemed straightforward and simple, a lake so clear you can see each detail of its depth. When I gave my roommate all the pertinent information she raised an eyebrow at me and said, “Be safe.” I thought that was reasonable advice and left.

As I watched this handsome man lie on his stomach in the tumbleweed grass, and lift a rifle to his left eye and shoot a clean bull’s-eye, I couldn’t help but smile. This was as Montana as it could get. This was the West. I imagined my thumb between Jasper’s teeth, his forearm round my waist in the back of the truck, guns scattered across the backseat as a distant prop, a counterweight. What was the source of this attraction? I didn’t care for excessive killing. I used to be vegetarian. I couldn’t understand, which did nothing to lessen its hold. There was something about men with guns.

But when it was my turn to shoot, Jasper’s arms did not wrap around mine, his hands remained at his sides, trusting I’d be competent enough to follow his example, and I was. I was surprised to feel the gut drop of genuine disappointment at his lack of guidance. I shot. I hit the blue ring on the bull’s-eye, then the red. I shot three glass bottles that exploded gleefully into the air. It was so easy. Bullets were light as air. It was not terrifying, as I expected. It was not terrifying at all, I would report to my friends back home, it was fun.

That’s the problem, I thought. Luckily, it wasn’t my problem.

After we finished shooting, Jasper asked me to help collect the broken glass and I thought: environmentally conscious. Not that it mattered to me, not at all. Darkness started to dim the sky. By the time we drove up the dirt road, his two headlights were the only discs of light. Jasper asked if I would want to go shooting again, maybe do a hike. I asked what a typical hunt looked like. He said it involved focus, a lot of patience, then told me about a hunting trip he did in northern Minnesota. The way he talked made me calm. He reminded me of autumns at home, chestnuts, and red leaves of oak. He reminded me of who I once was, of The Tallest Man on Earth songs, of longing for things I had no knowledge of—remote cabins, artistic renown, multiple lovers.

In the passenger seat, I felt full of chill and outdoors, as though I’d accumulated the day’s luster and could glow. Jasper asked what my parents are like. We were back on the highway. Names of places rose and flattened on the road signs, sounding tense and vaguely folkloric: Kalispell, Great Falls, Polson. I misread the last one as Poison. I didn’t know what to tell him.

“They’re fine,” I said, and for a while we did not speak.

Then, driving over the river that ran through town, Jasper said, “I think I’d like to have a daughter one day and name her June.”

I said nothing.

So, there are people like that, I contemplated afterward, people whose desires followed a straightforward track, as an arrow being shot, uncomplicated and aimed at a single place to land. Desires with no commas, no question marks. Jasper did not have to tell me he was looking for a wife. He did not have to tell me his parents were happily married. His worst pain, he did tell me, arrived after losing Winnie, his childhood black lab. I wondered if the two of us could be happy together. I wondered if it was possible for someone who has not yet suffered to understand one who has. Jasper was content in this small Montana town. Jasper did not long for elsewhere, or perhaps that was to be my role: supply his life with an uncanny flicker, be somewhere he could never truly know.

When he suggested a hike for our third date, I said yes.

At the trailhead, Jasper pulled out a heavy-looking backpack and explained he needed to train for hunting season.

“After field dressing a deer I hike it out in my backpack,” Jasper said, “an average carcass weighs about a hundred pounds.”

That number meant nothing to me.

I glanced at the fine blond hairs on his knuckles. I imagined them pulling out plush sacs of guts, breaking ribs apart, proficient, and matter-of-fact. I felt the base of my stomach snap to attention. Red-tailed hawks circled overhead.

“Man, I love that sound,” he said.

“I can hear trains whistle from the lecture rooms,” I told him.

“Oh,” Jasper laughed, “is that your emblem of the West?”

I was surprised at his use of ‘emblem.’

He told me he read The Gulag Archipelago twice, which surprised me even more.

“Why?” I asked.

“It’s important to know what happened over there, what humans are capable of,” he said. Then after a while, “Well, you’d know.”

“I’m not Russian,” I replied and he laughed like it was such a funny joke.

I was not Russian. Where I was from was irrelevant. I was not from here, that is all.

Midway up the mountain Jasper and I sat on the base of a giant white letter. Giant white letter? Correct. A Montanan custom, or perhaps a local fetish, who knows, to decorate mountainsides with the first letter of the town below. It was the kind of thing my friends back home found amusing or registered with some degree of pity, like, “Oh, that’s what Americans are up to.”

In those conversations with Europe I found myself torn between laughing along and defending a place I was—at least spatially, at least geographically—now a part of. I had a predilection for its dirt-road charms. I knew dirt roads. I knew countryside. I knew riding boots and broken bones.

The shape of the letter was L. We sat at the base of it. Jasper offered me a neon-blue sports drink, the sugar made me wince. There was a lick of light in his eyes. He wanted to kiss me, I could tell, but there was not enough cue to go on. I wanted to watch him flail, see what he would do. Here’s the thing, he did not flail. He did not force a sexual undertone as men are so often apt to lead with or panic their way into. We continued going uphill. At one point he said I walked like a fat person. I spun around and half-laughed, half-yelled something at him. Jasper gently placed both of his hands on my shoulders and smiled.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “but it’s true. Your feet, you stick them out sideways.”

The warmth of his hands on me, the tightrope way he teased me, it all charmed me very much.

I was adamant about not falling in love. That’s not what this was about. Love has nothing to do with exile.

Actually, love has everything to do with exile.

When I left home everything was devastatingly beautiful and I was devastated. The blueberries were going from violet to blue, apples were almost ripe, sun touched the ears of wheat and of deer equally. There was not a corner of the house that did not slant with familiar patterns of shadow and light. I knew every dirt road by heart. I knew the intervals at which the church bells tolled and by the ways the mournful men marched down the hill, whether it was a wedding or a funeral. I knew the gap between the birches where the moon rose. The river ran low, there hadn’t been rain in months. In the fields, poppies scattered their reds into crumbling tractor marks. Black beetles crawled over forest paths. In the ditch: blue chicory flowers, rosy bindweeds, yellow buttercups. It was too much to leave, and I left.

Without love there would be no exile. We would not long for what we lost.

At his apartment, Jasper gave me a tour, pointing out the beaver skulls, stuffed pheasants, the antlers, fossils, and the rocks. He lived alone. An American flag hung in the kitchen, below it were jars of pear preserves he had made himself. On his bookshelves I found Doctor Zhivago and, indeed, The Gulag Archipelago. I thought Jasper was a man who never told a single lie in his life. When I asked what his favorite part of hunting was he said, “It changes you forever.” On the couch his lips were delicate, fingertips slow and tremulous. Not what I expected from a hunter, yet the contradiction pleased me. Such dissonances were full of possibility.

I took Jasper’s bearded jaw between my forefinger and thumb. His hands moved down my sides, traced my stomach, to where the hip bones arced.

“Your breathing changed,” Jasper said.

“My what?”

“Your breath.”

“How can you tell?”

A grin devoured his face. “I can tell.”

I felt full of happiness and hope. If he could read my breath imagine what else this man could do. I stood up, pulled off my sweaty shirt, and led Jasper through what I correctly guessed was the bedroom door.

“God,” he said several minutes later, “I’m sorry, this doesn’t—”

We were both looking down.

“—usually happen.”

He pressed the base of his palm into his eye socket, half-suspended over me.

I said it was okay, not because it was okay, but because that’s what is expected of a woman in situations like this. I’m not a particularly nice woman, but sometimes I like to pretend to be.

We were silent for a while.

“You’re just so—ah.” He pressed a closed fist to his forehead, then moved it over his lips. “You’re just so.”

I rolled my eyes, pulled his face between my legs, and thought—this won’t work.

      

One day I drove through the vast fields at the edge of town, past trespassing after trespassing sign. I could get shot, I thought, and kept driving. I played a song. What song is difficult to say—some song. Some song that made me very, very happy. It’s possible it was not a song, but a classical composition. It’s possible it was Chopin. Only Chopin could make me burst into long, ugly tears. I drove. My wet eyes blurred roads to rivers. A deer jumped in front of the car and I did not stop. Did I mean to hit it? I wasn’t sure, but somehow, in the correct symmetry of crisscrossing speed, the car and the deer managed to miss each other. I stopped then. I stopped and got out of the car and knelt in the rising dust. I pressed my forehead into the loose gravel, and cried. I cried until I remembered my name, then I stood and drove to the house, where my roommate glanced at me and said, “Some guy called.”

I hadn’t realized I left my phone.

In my land, back home, I never liked the Virgin Mary shrines. Webbed with ribbons in the usual alternating pattern of red, blue, green, yellow, white, they stood on nearly every other corner. I didn’t like Mary’s blue dress or the infant she was always holding, all those contradictory statements on reproduction and sexuality so quietly therein contained. I never liked seeing them at the edges of villages or the older women, kneeling with scarves folded into triangles on the backs of their heads, lips moving in the rhythmic motions of prayer, but now, driving back and forth across this town, beside the McDonald’s, the Starbucks, the Wendy’s, the sight of a single shrine would have changed everything.

      

The second man I met was in one of my mandatory elective classes, in English Lit. He was studying sustainable construction but in fact wanted to be a writer, and behind that, what he truly and secretly wanted was to be a leader against climate change. I laughed when he told me.

“You want to be Greta Thunberg?”

He shook his head, smiling, like: shut the fuck up. Then he looked at me hopelessly. The whole thing seemed a little hazy. He was a few years younger than me, too young, maybe, to predict the mute remorse of lost years. But I also knew occasionally it was necessary to move in the opposite direction of what you desire in order to get to it. It did not fail to occur to me that might be what I was doing.

His name was Charlie. He was from a small Colorado town, had brackish water eyes and long hair he sometimes braided. And he owned a gun. That was essential. When I asked why, he looked at me like the question was beside the point.

“I used to hunt with my dad,” Charlie eventually replied, “and it’s good to have.”

I nodded.

“I also have one gun in storage that’s not mine.”

“Oh,” I said. “Whose is it?”

“My roommate’s.”

I gave a soft hum, as if that made sense of everything.

In Charlie, I found a more equal match. For hours we moved through one another. I wanted him down the length of me. When I saw him naked for the first time I almost sighed. I’d never seen a more beautiful outline drape midair. Charlie seemed indifferent to his own body, which only made my passions for it more heated. I could claim it as my own without having an owner to negotiate, and I did, or at least I did my best. Occasionally in bed one of us would pause, smile, and shake our heads, because it really felt too good for this Earth. “You’re this perfect sex creature,” I once told him. He laughed and replied, “Look who’s talking.”

Charlie wanted to see my paintings, not the pictures I had on my phone, but stop by the studio and see the big canvases in person. He stared at them for a long time, then said he wasn’t sure what they were about but one, that one, moved him very much. It was a painting of two thick white lines intersecting across a chaos of grayish black: everything textured, everything pained.

“They’re not supposed to be understood,” I told him, as though the mere suggestion of understanding abstraction was childish and passé, but of course, they were. Meant to be understood. Or rather, I understood them. I was saying something specific through them. Of course, I did not expect my audience to be receptive to undertones of exilic emotion, but nonetheless, I hoped Charlie would understand.

For the following week he texted me interpretations of the painting. Nazism and Europe, he wrote and I laughed. The principle of seriousness and jest. Past and present. All of them wrong, except the final one, meant as a joke: you and me. That could be correct, I typed, then deleted everything and replied with a laughing emoji instead. In the face of being found out I have learned to be trite.

All was going well. Charlie sustained the correct ratio of sex to guns. I didn’t know how many guns were part of the equation, but I knew the equation was right. His dramatic jaw bone fit perfectly inside the palm of my hand. His hazel eyes were unlike the eyes of anyone back home, and that, in itself, was another triumph. I left long scratch marks down his back that he adored. We didn’t do much besides have sex and go to questionably lit bars at late hours of the night. In his truck, giant and gray, he once asked what I listened to. I plugged in my phone and played Biggie Smalls to make him laugh. Charlie widened his eyes. “Seriously?” I laughed and said, “Yeah, sometimes.” I saw it lock in slow-motion behind his gaze: the fact that he didn’t know me as well as he thought he did.

There were nights, lots of them, when his erection flickered on and off. It might seem like this was a sudden development, but it existed from the start, this interruption in momentum. What is it with American men, I asked myself. Is this a national problem? Does everyone know? During one of these forced intermissions, I ordered Charlie to describe field dressing for me.

“In detail,” I said.

He looked at me like it was an insane request, given the context.

“Ah, I don’t know. It takes a lot of time—” he paused. “You’re mainly just quartering out the animal. It’s a lot of rough cuts around joints. You’re also skinning the animal, so you want to cut in the direction of the hair. Before any of this you should gut the animal so none of the intestines spoil the meat. It’s an involved process to cut the pelvic bone—”

I shuddered, noticing he was describing the process backwards.

“—avoid breaching the bladder and spilling urine on the meat. You also want to avoid touching the metatarsal glands with the knife, that can give a bitter taste to the meat. Once the animal is gutted, best practice in grizzly country is to drag them one hundred yards downwind.”

A man, I comforted myself, unafraid to get his hands dirty.

“Satisfied?” He pinned my arms into the mattress.

I smiled. “No,” I said.

Charlie ran his lips over my left nipple.

Weeks passed. It became winter and the deer carcasses started showing up.

They always revealed themselves in a double take, half-shrouded by tarps, riding in the backs of trucks or casually parked in front of a grocery store, the edge of an antler sticking out.

I could be indifferent to it. No, I could not.

I thought of Jasper’s body pressed into the snow, serious-eyed, forefinger flipping the safety guard. I thought of the ruffled soil of fresh graves, the way rain slides down a double headstone. The relief of such silence. I saw myself as a young girl. A small mysterious figure, opaque, compact, with blond looping curls. I thought of the woman who sold balloons in front of the park. I saw the balloons. Chestnuts in tall blossom. Clouds sailing over faraway church spires like battleships. When the woman lifted a hand to bring down a blue balloon, I flinched. Who could have hurt you? I wished I could ask her; though, of course, I knew.

Only once did I summon the courage to walk up to such a carcass, strapped to the back of a parked truck, and peer underneath the covering tarp. I saw a mess of reddened fur, a tongue sticking out, the head twisted in a pose suggestive of agony.

Was this the initiation I had hoped for? Evidently not.

Charlie and I continued. In class our gazes brushed with pleasurable and pretend indifference. I loved knowing how every square inch of him looked naked. Seeing his lean torso slouch in the classroom chair made me want to walk over there and slide onto his hips. An incremental increase of pleasure until the final bright exclaim: one hundred eyes opening at once. It became necessary to restrain my carnal impulses.

Gaps began to show themselves within our more intense moments.

Charlie was desperate to cook for me. It was obvious this held some heightened significance for him; perhaps it was a hallmark of ritual courtship, the kind of thing good men were supposed to do. The offer, evidently meant to please me, evoked instinctive resistance, hostility even. I postponed it for as long as I decently could, thinking up the strangest excuses, including, “I need my paints to dry.” God knows what that meant. Charlie knew nothing about painting, and, it was becoming gradually and painfully clear, he knew very little about me.

I could have told him anything—where I was from we have no internet, we communicate through fax, we ride reindeer to work. He might have believed it.

I explained the lack of interest as a result of impoverished knowledge, lack of imagination—one of the two, or possibly both. Probably both. Charlie wouldn’t know how to begin, what to ask about. He couldn’t approach me through the most distant metaphor. And is that not what I wanted?

Only very rarely did a wind pick up the familiar scent of forest—pine, moss, dew—and almost bring me to my knees. The pain was too visceral, a hard kick under the skin.

Nothing else in Montana reminded me of home. Not the gentle slouch of hills that people called mountains, not the pawn gun shops, not the police tape cordoning off entire blocks when another kid brought a gun to school. Not the drive-through ATMs or the low steep of smog. Not the bison, not the railway yard or the absence of blue eyes.

Eventually I agreed to dinner. When I arrived, after a late evening lecture, darkness seeming eternal, Charlie greeted me with two glasses of wine. “Here,” he said, then announced, rather gleefully, we’d be having elk lasagna.

“Did you hunt the elk yourself?”

He nodded. “Last season, so it’s frozen.”

Charlie asked me to set out plates, slice carrots, grate the cheese. I felt unexpectedly summoned from the audience to fill a part onstage. I felt ill-prepared, required to perform—I wasn’t sure what.

Charlie hummed jovially as he spiced elk meat. I’d never heard him hum before. He turned around to glance at me, and I quickly pulled on a smile. None of this was very like me. We made garlic bread, which seemed a strange addition to the meal. We ate. The food tasted like salty nothing, but otherwise everything was fine. I shouldn’t have made a big deal of this dinner. This is what women want, I told myself—want this.

Charlie stood and scooped what was left on his plate into the trash. I’d never seen anyone throw out that much food. He told me that cooking was something he was trying to get better at, that he used to do it quite frequently, but then just kind of stopped. A silent beat followed. “Cooking together is a great way to find out someone’s character,” Charlie added.

That last statement, apart from being ridiculously and obviously incorrect, confirmed a latent suspicion. This had all been a test.

There’s a perfect word in my mother tongue for what I felt in that moment, but no translation exists and I don’t think I could explain.

I tried to steady myself, but the damage had been done.

Another night I asked him, “Do you ever think about the fact that I’m not from here?”

We were sitting in his gray truck, waiting for a break in the rain to run inside a bar. Charlie thought about it with a serious look on his face that made him all the more beautiful, then said, “Beyond your accent, no. Not really.”

We were silent for a while.

“You?” he eventually asked. “Do you think about me being American?”

I must have smiled, raised my eyebrows.

“I don’t have to think about it. It’s just always there.”

He gave that some thought.

“Well, I don’t consider myself to be, you know, a typical American.”

I laughed. He was serious.

A variation of this story has already been told. It’s been told as a painting and therefore, is not this story at all. The image is by René Magritte, it’s called The Lovers. Two faces, a woman and a man, as indicated by the clothing, are kissing. Both faces are wrapped with white cloth. All the obvious themes of longing, isolation, suffocation, and blindness apply. We’re strangers to each other, et cetera, et cetera. Desire and death, one could make those words rhyme.

I won’t.

Winter wore on. The number of dead bodies increased, then abruptly ceased. It occurred to me that for every deer carcass in town there was a man with a gun. A man with a pulse, with crisscrossed veins on his wrists, a particular cadence of voice, and a particular pattern of hair down the abdomen.

“Can I do anything I want to you?” I asked Charlie.

He nodded.

“Anything?” I asked.

“Anything you want,” he confirmed.

A few weeks before Christmas, Jasper texted me. He said he didn’t know if I was going home for the holidays. If not, I was invited to celebrate with him and his family. I interpreted that to mean he wanted a second chance. Around that time, Charlie asked me to be his girlfriend.

“I’m not the girlfriend type,” I told him gently.

Charlie appeared irritated. And I couldn’t believe he so misunderstood the nature of what I was.

“I don’t know what you want from me,” he snapped.

“What I want?” I asked, genuinely surprised. “I don’t want anything from you.”

He flew to Colorado for a few days to visit family. I stayed in Montana.

It approached, the dreaded time of Christmas. Occasionally I saw the L on the mountainside and smiled; otherwise I was miserable. Only those born into happy families enjoy Christmas. My roommate flew home. Then it was just me.

In the house, silence sharpened its even teeth.

I drove over to Jasper’s place one night, knocked on the door, expecting him to be out. I shuffled from foot to foot, the snow was half a meter tall. I had started to turn around when I heard the door unlock.

“Hey?”

The question was inflected with such joy I knew at once what I would do.

“Hey,” I said and walked inside. I did not take off my jacket or my boots. I put one hand against his chest and pushed him back across the kitchen, across the living room, then with a flick of a wrist backwards onto the bed. Of course, he let me do all this.

“Well fuck,” Jasper said. “Okay.”

His beard a rasp against my chin. His hands pulled off my jacket, my sweater, my jeans. I felt like sparks were catching off me, a circuit full of faults.

Jasper ran his tongue flat up my thigh. I flipped us around and pinned his face to the bed with my hips. There is no way to explain the look in his eyes, the delighted slow upward roll to meet mine. “Now fuck me,” I said, and he did.

Everything went as I originally hoped it would.

Afterward, panting, Jasper looked at me with a face of optimism and hope, like a man about to hear the verdict knowing he’ll be proclaimed not guilty. I thought: oh no.

“Look,” I started to say, searching for the correct name to give things.

“Listen, you don’t have to,” Jasper cut me off. “I know it’s Christmas.”

I paused because it was such a strange and accurate thing to say.

Then he stood up and kissed my temple, a gesture that pierced me with its sudden sincerity. I got dressed. Jasper handed me my two limp white socks and walked me to the entrance. The door hadn’t fully shut earlier and a few snowflakes had drifted in. He stood there naked, and said, “The Christmas Eve invitation stands.”

I thought: stop being nice to me.

I drove back. One after another, the streetlights turned green. I sped past the Starbucks, the McDonald’s, the Wendy’s. I was almost at the house, taking the second to last turn when I saw a misshapen pale heap, slumped and disfigured. A shape of death. A carcass? A corpse? My heart flattened. My ribs wrapped around a gasp.

I slammed the brakes.

I couldn’t tell whether it was a deer or a human. Warm skin tones glared against the snow. I was preparing myself to see something hideous, jaw clenched, when the image shifted into focus: it was a chair. Tilted against it were a few planks of wood. On top of the chair stood a cardboard box with one flap lifted so it did not seem like a cardboard box. Hanging off the back was a billowy white mass, a fitted sheet. Underneath a small sign read: FREE STUFF.

Dizzy, I slouched in the car seat. I took a few breaths, turned on the engine, and turned the car around. I couldn’t go home. Grief pressed down, a long dark tide poured itself through me. I became a sieve incapable of separating all its black grains. No, no. Please, let this stop.

I drove back across town, texting: Where are you?

Home. Got in this morning.

Haphazard in my desire, I knocked on his door.

“Let’s do it differently this time,” I said when Charlie appeared in the doorframe.

His body was receptive to this change of direction. I moved us through new coordinates, layering sensation over sensation, closing my eyes and forgetting my name, letting everything blur. If only I could live there, never exit the antidote. The pitch of him in me expanded, a stone tossed into a body of water, concentric circles, until the entire surface rippled and I let out a hard scream. Then his penis went limp.

It was only briefly, face between my thighs, that I worried he might taste another man on me. I had no idea what I’d say if confronted. But Charlie only gave his usual preliminary exhale and said, “I missed you so much.” I grabbed a fistful of his hair. He seemed perfectly unaware.

This felt like a dangerous absolution. Not for me, dangerous for men. A woman can do anything.

I had forgotten all about the strange skin-colored shape, all about the billowing sheet, and more importantly, I had forgotten what these shapes evoked: shrouds, loss, a thousand dark grains demanding to be felt and sorted. I had hoped moving half an earth away, killing all associations, would exempt me of all this. If not for the chair maybe it would have.

I took Charlie’s Adam’s apple into my lips and we lay there, skin indistinguishable from skin, heat from heat. He moaned.

I remembered something I wanted to ask him. “Why do you have your roommate’s gun?”

“Oh.” Charlie propped himself up on an elbow and looked at me. “He, ah, he told me to take it because he wanted to kill himself.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah, he asked me to lock it away from him.”

His roommate worked night shifts at a shabby casino near the airport. I never met him.

Guns. We do not choose our symbols; we inherit them.

“Shower with me?” Charlie asked.

I could have gone anywhere but I came here, to Montana. All my life I believed I’d be happy once my parents died. They’ve been dead for a few months. A car crash, five hundred meters away from our house. A gun was found in the glovebox after. What was the gun for? Good question.

In the bathroom I watched Charlie step into the shower. I watched the beautiful dimples on his ass, the hazel path of hair between the two indents of his lower hips, and had to ask myself: is this what happiness is?

The Greensboro Review Literary Award Story JENNY LYNN & BUDDY

When Buddy meets Jenny Lynn, she has a hole in the side of her ankle about as big around as a nickel, a shallow well of gore at the end of the knobby bone. She doesn’t seem to mind it too much; she is laughing a lot and when Buddy thinks of her now, he thinks of her laughing. She tells him that her leg got stuck under a car, just now. Buddy asks to see it and she lifts her pant leg and pulls down her bloody sock to show him. The bleeding has stopped and the sock is starting to get stiff. It peels away from the skin, letting the fresh wound finally breathe. 

“Holy shit,” he says. 

She laughs. “It’s not as bad as it looks.” 

The ankle is starting to swell, there’s purple from the bruising and black from the asphalt, or maybe it’s from the tire. He can’t tell, but now he’s picturing her flesh and bone being ground into the road and this makes him feel sort of sick inside. It looks pretty bad. 

“What the fuck,” he says. “How is it not broken?”

She laughs. “She ran me over.” She points behind her, into the house. “I don’t know.”

“Jesus.” Now Buddy is laughing too. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” Jenny Lynn says. “You wanna get stoned?”

They are sitting on the front porch, on a ratty couch that no one admits to bringing here. It’s May and there’s a June bug banging against one of the screen windows and there’s a broken pint glass on the windowsill and cigarette butts on the wooden floor. There are piles of incense ash where the floor meets the wall and stacks of little yellow sticks on the sill, left from when the Nag Champa burned away. Buddy takes a new stick and lights it with a paper match and blows out the match and drops it. Watching it fall through the slats of the floor, he wonders if there’s anything flammable beneath them. 

“You wanna get stoned?” she asks again. 

He looks to her on the other side of the couch and raises his eyebrows, forehead crinkling, lids heavy and red in the whites of his eyes like webs of paprika. He blinks.  

She pulls out a clean little glass pipe and sets it on the sill next to the broken pint and she takes out a handblown jar with a cork lid and a bunch of stinky buds inside and tosses it onto Buddy’s lap. It lands just barely on one of his testicles and he flinches, wincing in pain as Jenny Lynn watches this happen in slow motion, her face distorting in horror. 

“Oh Lord!” She says this and reaches over to him and puts her hand on his shoulder. 

He makes a face and he laughs and brushes it off, says it’s fine—neither one of them wanting the other to feel bad or wrong or embarrassed. 

She takes the jar back and packs a bowl and gives it to him to light. While he smokes, she takes out a prescription bottle and shakes it, the green-coated pills rattling against the orange plastic, a sweeter sound he never heard. She sets the bottle, so gently, she balances it on his leg, just above where the blue jean is worn white at his knee. 

“Let’s get fucked up,” she says. 

      

They become fast friends and stay that way for a year, though Buddy knows by now that she wants more. This scares the shit out of him because he is twenty years old and still a virgin, and it’s all very confusing. The way he sees it fluctuates. Sometimes it’s because he’s shy. Sometimes it’s because women are terrifying to him, sex is terrifying to him. He still thinks of the girl in grade school, who ruffled his hair with her hand, the plastic bracelets dangling off her wrist. Riding his bike home afterward, feeling weird. Sitting next to a girl at the movies in middle school, feeling weird. On the couch with a girl in high school, feeling weird. 

Other times it’s some misplaced romantic pride, like he’s waiting for “The One.” 

What does that even mean? he wonders. Fairy tales from his youth. 

Horrified by the whole deal, he just wants to get it over with. So they finally have sex.

It’s late July and it’s hot and it’s sticky and Buddy will close all the windows in his room so the neighbors can’t hear and they will sweat together with David Bowie playing in the background. He’s high on OxyContin, and he won’t remember how it went.

They’ll keep having sex, and it will mostly be fine. Neither one of them will ever call the other their boyfriend, or their girlfriend. They are just “Buddy.” They are just “Jenny Lynn.” 

      

Some weeks later, Buddy loses a condom inside of her. He’s high and gone soft and he can’t feel anything and he doesn’t realize it’s missing until he gets up to go to the bathroom. Standing weak-kneed over the toilet he goes to take the thing off and it’s already off. He looks around. He goes back into the living room and looks around. He’s on his hands and knees crawling around the floor while Jenny Lynn smokes a cigarette, one hand holding it toward the open window, the other running lightly through her pubic hair. 

Buddy starts feeling under the couch cushions. 

She asks him what he’s doing.

Buddy looks at her. He can’t think of how to say it. 

She asks him if he lost a pill.

He looks at her, panic rising within him. 

“Do you feel weird?”

She smiles, sweetly. “What do you mean?”

“Like, inside?”

“Do I feel weird inside?”

“Like in your guts.”

“You’re crazy,” she says, and stubs out her cigarette. 

He puts his hands on her shoulders, looks into her eyes. “I think I lost it inside you.”

“You came inside me?”

“No, baby, the condom came off, it must be inside of you.”

He can tell that he’s scaring her and this opens something new in him, something unexpected. What would be his own fear melts at her feet and he feels only calm, and strength, and the need to protect her and reassure her and in this moment, he knows that he loves her. 

“What do I do?!” She meets his eyes. “Get it out, baby!”

“Okay,” he says.

He puts his hand behind her neck and feels fine hairs against his palm. He kisses her forehead and then he puts two fingers inside of her and tries to find the condom but he can’t. The fear is back in him now and never in his life did he see himself in a situation like this. Never did he see himself in love. He leans over and kisses her on the mouth and kisses her on the cheekbone and kisses her on the eyebrow. He reaches deep inside of her, his lips resting now against the folds of her ear and he says, “There it is baby, I got it.”

Within the year, they get pregnant. Jenny Lynn finds out at the doctor’s office, when she’s there for undiagnosed pain issues. She’s just hoping they’ll give her some pills, but the doctor makes her take a urine analysis. “You’re five weeks pregnant,” the doctor says. 

“Damn that’s crazy,” Jenny Lynn says. “Can you give me anything for the pain?” 

She’s nervous about a baby, she never thought of the realities of pregnancy. She’s excited though, she’s thinking they can do it, she’s excited to tell Buddy about it. She can clean up, she thinks. She waits for him in the kitchen of their now-shared apartment. 

He wants an abortion. “I grew up on government cheese and crappy white bread,” he says. “I’m not raising a kid like that.” He’s angry about it, and remembering things from his childhood. Getting teased for hand-me-down sneakers. Stomach grumbling in classes and everyone looking at him. Dollar bills stuffed in his locker vents with lewd notes on them. 

Jenny Lynn just stares at him. 

“We’re bums,” he tells her. “We’re poor people.” He’s getting worked up now and Jenny Lynn steps back. She’s not crying. She’s mad too. She sees her father in Buddy for the first time, and it breaks her heart. “We don’t know how to do anything, Jenny. We can’t care for anyone.”

Two weeks later she has a miscarriage. 

It’s just before Halloween and a thin layer of snow covers the ground.

It will melt away by morning. 

Four years later she has gone to school and finished a nursing degree. She gets a job as an RN in a senior living facility. Buddy is working as a bartender in a hotel until one night he falls down a cement stairwell and breaks his leg. He’d been stealing bottles of liquor from the supply closet and hiding them in a room of the hotel that was under repair, sneaking around and drinking them between room service calls. One of the hotel guests finds him at the bottom of the stairwell, sucking on lemon slices he carries in his pocket and writhing in pain. 

They’ve been living apart for the last year, but after this, Jenny Lynn moves in with him again. To help him recover. Together they blow through his prescription Dilaudid in a week and she starts stealing pills from the old folks’ home. 

She’s caught and fired; she loses her nursing license. 

She takes the city bus to Applebee’s and meets a guy in the parking lot and buys some heroin. She gets out of his car and finds a big pine tree and crawls underneath its wide skirt of branches. She puts her hands against the tree trunk, sap sticks to her palms. She lowers herself to the bed of brown pine needles and turns and leans against the trunk. She fixes up a shot. Two hours later someone calls the cops about a dead body outside Applebee’s. When they get there they find Jenny Lynn, her feet sticking out from beneath the edges of the tree. 

She wakes up and tries to hide the syringe that’s still clutched in her hand, the shoelace she was using to tie off, the little aluminum cooker. The cops are pissed because she doesn’t have any heroin left, no actual drugs. But there’s enough paraphernalia to arrest her on possession charges. Later they claim there was still junk in the syringe and give her first-time felony possession. She spends a week in jail. She is released after pleading guilty and agreeing to residential AODA treatment and probation.

The night before she goes to rehab, they listen to Mariah Carey’s “Daydream” on Buddy’s little cassette player and when the B side ends they flip it over and listen to it again and when it ends they flip it and when it ends they flip it and when it ends they flip it again. Both of them have core memories of this album from their childhood. Both of them know that they’re making a new memory, now, in real time. They know that they’re trying to hold on to something. 

She calls him from the treatment center and tells him that everything’s going well and that she loves him. She writes him letters; she keeps them light. She doesn’t ask how he is doing, instead she says, “I hope you are doing well.” She never says she misses him. She feels a weight lifted from her shoulders. But she doesn’t know how to talk about it, what it means, what it says about the two of them. She goes to meetings and she feels something positive in her life, not for the first time, but it’s been a while. It’s right on time. She has faith again. She connects with women in the house and she gets their phone numbers when they leave. She makes friends. She’s not sure if being totally sober is possible, but it sounds nice. Buddy calls and she can hear the dope in his voice. She can see him, through the phone; his eyes half closed, the spit on his lips. She can hear him suck his cheeks. Click his tongue. It’s disgusting. He doesn’t even realize it. 

She’s embarrassed for him. Most days he’s sad—dark and morbid and she wonders if they shouldn’t talk anymore. Her counselor agrees. His name is Ted and he’s balding, usually red in the face, with a kind smile. Jenny Lynn thinks he’s stoned all the time. But she also thinks that it’s none of her business, and never asks about his own sobriety. Ted tells her that it’s too hard, when one person gets clean and the other doesn’t. He tells her that relationships are the leading cause of relapse. He tells her that you can’t have any reservations. Ted’s office is filled with pictures of single lions, looking off into sunsets, looking content, at last, maybe, finally. 

One day Buddy calls and he asks her if she remembers the baby. “What if we coulda done it, Jenny? What if we coulda made it work? It’s my fault you lost it.” He’s drunk. 

She cries, sitting in the creaky wooden chair outside the women’s rooms, in front of the old wooden desk where the phone waits. Names and numbers and dates scrawled into the desk, some scratched raw into the wood. 

Her roommate takes the phone from her, the long, curled cord reaching over Jenny Lynn’s shoulder as she sets her face on the desk.

“She can’t talk to you right now,” the roommate says. 

When she gets out of rehab, Jenny Lynn moves in with her grandmother. The same grandmother that she lived with after losing her mom to cancer. After her dad traded his tools for an old shell camper and left Wisconsin, to live in Montana, without her. At four years old, this might be her first memory: she stands in front of her father’s legs, smelling the engine oil in his jeans, smelling the engine oil under his fingernails and the tobacco-stained yellow fingers that lay on her shoulders as together they wait for Grandma Maggie to accept her. Her father is crying, and squeezing her shoulders. “Take her, Maggie,” he says. “Take her from me. I can’t keep up.” Jenny Lynn is shivering, though bundled in a snow suit. She stands on her grandmother’s porch like a little stuffed toy. 

“Goddamn it, Joe,” her grandmother says. The same grandmother that took her to see Disney’s Pocahontas in the movie theater when she was six years old. The same grandmother that took her to McDonald’s whenever she got A marks on her report cards. That gave her an old thin wedding ring, the diamond chip almost invisible, and told her someday she’d know. That told her—when Jenny Lynn was awake all night, another sleepless night, another anxiety attack—to breathe. To think of the good things. To believe in the Lord and to believe in herself and that if she really waited, and had faith, she’d find the things she was looking for. She stares up at the glow stars on her ceiling, she looks over at her grandmother. “But I don’t even know what I’m looking for,” she says. 

      

She stalls for a couple of days after getting out, before seeing Buddy again. She picks him up and within five minutes, he asks her to split some dope with him. “I don’t want to,” she says. 

He doesn’t understand what she means. 

“I’m sick of this bullshit.” 

Buddy picks at his fingernails. “Are you mad at me?”

“Drugs, Buddy, I’m sick of doing drugs.”

He looks out the passenger seat window, where he sits in his first girlfriend’s grandmother’s minivan. She’s driving it without a license. They’re parked in front of his own grandfather’s house. He doesn’t understand what she means. Why doesn’t she want to get high?

A few months later, Buddy checks himself into rehab. The same one she went to. She’s not clean anymore, but she won’t admit it to him. He would never say he’s doing it for her, he’s not. But seeing her when she got out was the closest thing to hope he’d had in years. Something changed. Something was possible. After a week he’s allowed to use the phone and he calls Jenny Lynn to tell her how well it’s going. He tells her that he’s ready and that he wants to get married and buy a house and get a dog and make a bunch of babies. He tells her that he’ll do anything. 

She is eleven weeks pregnant. She says nothing. 

When Buddy gets out, the baby is gone. She says nothing. She can’t.   

He stays clean, he gets a job, he gets a mountain bike that’s too small and rides it around town making amends. He stays clean; Jenny Lynn does not. 

She violates the terms of her parole; she ends up back in jail.

She ends up back in rehab. 

She meets a guy in treatment who’s tall and skinny and wears expensive shoes. He’s got tattoos all over his arms that look like they’ve been there since high school. Buddy is embarrassed by this guy and he knows something’s going on but he just sits there quietly when he goes to visit Jenny Lynn in rehab and she introduces them. She tells him that the guy wrote a novel. She tells him that he lost his father. She tells him that they’re just friends. She kisses Buddy on the cheek and thanks him for coming to visit. 

“I’ve got to go to group now, Buddy,” she says. 

He says that’s good and he says that he’ll see her at the same time next week and before he leaves, he tries to talk to this new guy. Buddy asks him if he wants to stay clean.

“Yeah,” the guy says. “I guess.” 

Jenny Lynn leaves rehab early. She and the guy she met get a little apartment together, the bottom floor of a house down east of the train tracks, about three blocks from the park. Buddy goes to see her and she shows him around, shows him the kitchen with the little window over the sink, shows him the little salt and pepper shakers. A chicken and an egg. He fixates on the coffee pot. He imagines them getting up in the morning, waking up together, talking about what they need from the grocery store or when they have to go to work or . . . he imagines them getting drunk together, getting high. He pictures them honking blow off the little yellow plates that she’s showing him now. They have fuzzy ducklings printed on them, all in a row, following their mother to a pond. She shows him the living room and the couch and they have sex on it and then they lie there together. Buddy looks over and out the window and sees the guy standing on the front porch. He can see the guy’s jean jacket through the window, just his torso, just standing there. Then the guy is gone. Buddy gets dressed quickly and when he leaves, the guy is getting out of his car in the street, walking toward the house, acting like he just got there. 

Later that night Buddy starts getting text messages from a number he doesn’t know. They say that he has a small penis. They say that he’s a junkie and a loser. They say that Jenny Lynn claims Buddy raped her. He gets scared and blocks the number. He blocks Jenny Lynn’s number too. He will occasionally hear from friends that the couple moved down to Whitewater. He hears that they’re fucked up all the time. 

He hears that Jenny Lynn has overdosed in the back of someone’s car. 

He hears that she jumped out of a window. 

He hears all sorts of things. 

A year later his phone rings and Jenny Lynn’s number pops up. He stares at the phone as it rings and then he picks it up, unsure of how she got through. They talk for a minute and it’s fine and then another minute and it’s fine and then Buddy starts yelling. He freaks out, screaming into the phone. When he hangs up, he hates himself, and has no idea what he was yelling about. 

He decides to go to college. He’ll get a bachelor’s degree, even though everyone has one these days and he’s not really sure what it will do for him, but he’s sure it will do something. He thinks about going for psychology, or anything that might help him to be a counselor. He thinks maybe he’d make a good counselor. For other drug addicts, an AODA counselor. But he doesn’t want to work for the state; he doesn’t want to talk to cops all the time, be nice to them. He’s not sure how any of this works but a friend tells him that that’s not a problem. That you just start somewhere. That you figure it out as you go and all of a sudden, it’s over, and you’ve found your place in the world.

Fake it till you make it, like they say in the Program. 

He thinks of how much his own counselors helped him. Ted, and Ken, and Steve from the outpatient program. He thinks of where he would be without them. 

He runs into Jenny Lynn’s best friend at the grocery store, the one that ran over her ankle with a car. He sees her pushing her cart toward him and he sees two little kids in the cart and his heart falls to the floor of the store and rests there on the waxed linoleum and he runs it over with his shopping cart. A wheel on the cart starts squeaking. They stop and talk, and she tells Buddy that Jenny Lynn is doing great, that she really is doing great. She’s trying to get her nursing license back and she’s sober or supposedly. Yes, she’s still with the guy but she’s sick of him and he’s drunk all the time and he pisses the bed, or so the friend says. 

When Buddy drives home he thinks he should be more pleased about all that than he is. 

He gets a voice message one day and it’s from Jenny Lynn from a different number. She just wants to say hello. A couple weeks later she texts back and asks him if he would consider getting a cup of coffee with her. He says he doesn’t think it’s a good idea. She says that she understands. But her heart breaks again, maybe for the last time. She knows by now that he is the love of her life, and that she’s lost him. She’s heard nothing for two years but good news about him, how great he’s doing, how happy he is. How he’s a totally different person. But she knows better, he’s not different, he’s who he always was, who she saw so clearly, all that time ago, when they met on the front porch. She wants him to be happy, like he was back then. 

Some time goes by and Buddy thinks about it. He thinks that maybe he’s just being stubborn, and that there’s no good reason not to see an old friend. He starts texting with Jenny Lynn and they try to decide where to meet. They pick a neutral city that has no connection for either one of them. A sort of no-man’s-land. Buddy tells her that he’s got a bum leg again, and they joke about all that time ago, when he was a no-good drunk and she was a junkie and they did their best to take care of each other. It comes back to him, truly and sincerely, how much they cared for one another. How sweet they could be to one another. How they helped each other. He remembers all the times that he couldn’t score and how sick he was and she would always show up with a little something, she would always help him get well. She always came through for him. On the phone, she asks him how he hurt his leg and he tells her about the shitty apartment he lives in now and how everything is always broken and how hard it is to get a maintenance guy over. He tells her the place is pretty crummy but he likes it all right. He tells her that things are pretty good these days, alone. He tells her about the landlord’s buddy who looks like Hoggle from Labyrinth and that he’s the closest thing to a repair man the landlord will send but that he’s a nice guy too. Buddy likes the guy. But he came over to replace a faucet, finally, and didn’t tighten the fixtures enough, and water sprayed everywhere. Buddy ran about, grabbing towels and moving artwork and yelling into the basement to turn the goddamn water back off. He slipped on the linoleum kitchen floor and all 200 pounds of him went down at once with his leg beneath him and he swears he heard something snap. 

She laughs with him, as he tells her this.

When Jenny Lynn and Buddy finally meet again, he is thirty-three years old and she is thirty-one. He’s been clean and sober for three years, five months, and seventeen days—if you want to get specific. She says that she’s been sober for seven months and he doesn’t ask any more questions about that. He didn’t ask in the first place. He tells himself it’s none of his business really. He has ruined her life enough; he’s realized that through the years. She’d have been better without him, less of a mess. The whole problem in the past was worrying about what she was doing, trying to control her—disguised as protecting her, worrying about her. He wonders about the guy that supposedly wrote a novel. Buddy wonders if she ever saw it. He doesn’t ask about that either. About him. 

He just wants to be here with her now. It’s mid-October and it’s crisp outside and the air is full of memories. He’s thinking about their first baby again, the things he said. The snow on the ground and how it melted so fast. On her drive there, Jenny Lynn thinks about this too and she thinks about their second, and how she’ll never tell him. She can’t.

Buddy’s been walking without crutches for a few days now and he knows that he’s pushing it. Everything seems to be fine until he parks his little red truck in Fox Lake, across the street from the coffee shop, and he gets out and he starts walking across the road without thinking about how fast the traffic is moving. He doesn’t realize until he’s in the middle of it all that he’s going to have to run to make it across. He hasn’t tried to run since tearing the ligament in his leg, and when he does, something pops again. Like shooting a rubber band from your thumb, he feels it let go. He hops and hobbles across the road, wincing in pain, swearing. 

Inside the coffee shop, Buddy finds a booth facing the door. He waits for Jenny Lynn patiently, worrying about his leg only. When she comes in, he sees her but doesn’t get up until she is standing at the end of the table and when he does, she can tell that he’s in pain. He hugs her and he’s surprised that it feels normal. He’s been worried about the hug. About whether their bellies would press together. How long they would hold it. What if he got a hard-on, or what if it just felt wrong? What if her hair brushes his face? Would she still smell faintly of patchouli? Lavender? He’s grateful right then, for the pain in his leg, distracting him from this. But it all happens fast and normal. She is very nervous. He wants to comfort her. He says he is fine.  

Buddy’s birthday was last week and Jenny Lynn has brought with her a homemade card and a BIC pen from the nursing home she is working at again, with probational restrictions. She almost has her license back. She wants to be a traveling nurse, if she ever really gets it back. 

“I remember your birthday every year, Buddy,” she says. He nods before she can finish her sentence. “Every year,” he says back to her. “I remember yours too.” He doesn’t think she’ll believe him, that that’s true, but it is and always has been.

They stay there together for an hour before he has to get up to use the bathroom. She asks if he wants help and he says no, but as he walks down the hall, putting his hand against the wall every other step, it’s clear that he’s seriously injured again. That the leg is not healed. That he has made it worse. He takes a piss, leaning lopsided against the wall of the stall. He doesn’t know what to do. He’s scared. He comes back and she is at the table, smiling at him, quite still. She’s calm now. She’s so happy, just to see him. She smiles at him as he limps back to the table. 

“Buddy,” she says. “I’ve got to tell you something. I fucked up back there Buddy . . .”

“Not so, Jenny Lynn.”

“Yes Buddy, I made a mistake. I wasn’t honest. I was scared. I didn’t know what to do.”

“No,” he says. “No, it wasn’t like that. I’m sorry too, Jenny.” 

      

They get up to leave, and Jenny Lynn heads to the bathroom. Buddy walks to the front door, weaving between tables, putting his hands on them for support. Outside he stands in the sharp wind, early hints of snow blowing through the road, dancing like dandruff against his hands and his face. He knows he can’t make it across the street, back to his truck, not alone, not in traffic. He doesn’t want her to help him. He doesn’t want to need her for anything. But she comes outside now and she stands there squinting into the street. She clears her throat. He looks at her and says “okay” and she smiles and puts her arm around him. He leans into her and she feels strong, she smells good, like she always has—warm.

MINE EYES HAVE SEEN THE GLORY

We call her the wild girl because she is naked and unafraid when she first appears in the Meiers’ cornfield near the collapsing barn. Mr. Meier brings her a can of tuna and sets it down in the field along with his eldest daughter’s old dress and a saucepan of water. Mr. Meier remembers the winter he found a dead fox under the graveyard road’s slope, two fox cubs curled up under her. He took half a can of wet dog food and the same pewter saucepan to the Calvary crosses every other day. He kept his vigil over the foxes until spring but never saw them again. Mr. Meier is a faithful man.

Like the foxes, the girl hides herself. She takes the food but not the dress. The dress is a formality she does not understand. When Mr. Meier takes it back into the house it is damp and sweet-smelling but his daughter refuses to wear it. Sometimes Mr. Meier can catch the wild girl’s silhouette if he stops halfway to the house and turns back. She is slender, her hair like a blond flame. The wild girl continues to take the food, the water. One day she stops.

So everybody is surprised when she walks into town a month later. She is swaying on her feet and clutching a horse blanket. She is waltzing into town like a drunk homecoming queen after a night of too much and her hair is shorter, chopped ragged. It does not take long for Mr. Edzel Winters to claim her as his long-lost daughter. Look at the scar on her arm, he says. Nina had a scar just like it from when she caught her arm in the baler. He points to what looks like a deep rope burn on her forearm. It’s plain as daybreak, he says. Mr. Winters reminds us that his wife and daughter disappeared on the same day in June, ten years ago. The two of them had hiked up into the Big Meadow to fetch the horse and neither came back. Nina would have been six then, and stubborn enough to follow her mother. Nobody looked until dark, assuming they had stopped to pick sour early apples. The Jollytown Volunteer Fire Department arranged to have bloodhounds trucked down from Pittsburgh, but the search ended after a few weeks.

The wild girl lives with Mr. Winters and his six sons. The brothers coddle her and dress her. Some say they see the family resemblance, especially in the childish chin and the sharp, thin nose. Some say there is no family resemblance. Even the skeptical Mr. Meier says nothing because the glow of mystery is too warm to sidle away from.

It is devilment to cut her hair. Mr. Winters’s sons trick her with candy but the first snip of scissors against her neck makes her bolt. They dress her in their mother’s pink silk nightgown but she screams when they put shoes on her feet. The social workers descend with tote bags and paperwork. Reporters follow the social workers. Some of them pay to sleep in extra beds, but most take rooms at the motel off the highway in Waynesburg, half an hour away. The Colonial Inn is the closest bar, ten miles south on Rural Route 18, and as such becomes a de facto press club.

Mr. Edzel Winters agrees to a blood test but later changes his mind. He receives the reporters always with dignity, offers them coffee and pie. The wild girl knows only three words: mother, father, bellyache. She can use a spoon without instruction. She responds to games but treats her family with indifference. So say the newspapers that run developments on her story every day. She seems content enough but her brothers keep watch. She seems willing to disappear.

Of course there are theories. A newspaper man from Pittsburgh has examined the marks on her ankles and wrists, concluding that she must have been confined at some point. Her hair, cut short around her face when she walked into town, must have been cut by someone, he says. The police bring dogs and trackers but no trace shows.

Mr. Winters is a recognized evangelical. He is the first one to remind you, casually, that your presence was dearly missed at the most recent tent revival, that without your cabbage noodles the potluck could not be counted a success. Mr. Winters loves his new daughter like he loves tent revivals: in public. Some see him buying dresses for her at the department store an hour away. Everybody begins to wonder when the wild girl will show up at a revival, when he will use her keening and moaning to dial up his direct line to God.

With such rich material people can’t help themselves from telling stories. Francine Wyman says she saw the wild girl walk into the post office to play with the pens chained to the counter, later to mash her face into a wrapped loaf of Wonder Bread at the store. Some people say Mr. Winters shouldn’t let her roam around like that. Evelyn Rospun says the wild girl approached her in the Rospuns’ hayfield carrying a purple corn snake in both hands, holding it out as if to bestow a gift. But Evelyn has a history of hysteria and it is difficult to take her seriously.

Mr. Meier’s daughters refuse to walk to the spring up the hollow, even in daylight, unless they carry corn knives. At night they put the dog in the root cellar for safety. Myra, the eldest, claims to see a white-suited man with a slingshot and musket running along the deer paths on the hill behind the house. He wants her back, Myra explains to her mother. He wants her back and if he can’t find her he’ll take me instead.

Before her sisters were born, Myra’s parents told her she had a twin who lived in the attic. When she sassed back or pouted, they claimed she could easily end up there, too. Mr. Meier regretted the joke when he found Myra on a stepladder with a box of crackers and a jar of peanut butter, looking for her imaginary twin. Now he regrets bringing her dress to the wild girl because Myra won’t touch it. It hangs in the middle of her closet, a foot of space on either side.

Mr. Meier is not given to worrying superstition, but he has noticed dark, leaping things at the edges of his vision. Lately he has found snuffed fires on his walks to mend fences or sluice the spillway at the pond. A hammer has gone missing from the work shed. Whenever he finds a wrinkle like that, he smoothes it. He doesn’t want his girls to go spooky.

The social workers drive into the hills and washed-out towns to ask questions. They check their registers of previous abuse and family trouble for the wild girl’s source. What they find only makes more work. So much family trouble has gone unregistered. In Deep Valley, they find a mother dosing her children continuously with bourbon to make them sleep. Naked, they sprawl on a mattress like mice. None of them know the word birthday.

By the high point of summer one story takes root. It is Mr. Meier, the faithful man, who first tells his neighbors that he has heard the wild girl sing. Mr. Meier has a calm way of doing things, a kind of natural reticence about wild stories. But he walks into town one day to get some bread and a can of chaw, and he has a healthy audience of midday loafers at Sissy Pecjak’s gas station. Mr. Meier tells the boys around the sandwich counter that he hasn’t gotten any good sleep lately because of the singing.

The singing? They look him over for exhaustion.

Mr. Meier says he hears things at dusk coming from his property line, about a quarter mile away from the house. It sounds like somebody singing the national anthem.

Almost nobody believes this at first. The boys go out in their pickup trucks at night to the Meier property line. They are fragrant with cheap beer and hay musk. Some of them are so ready to hear singing that they hear it before it begins. But they get their shock when the wild girl actually starts singing. This time it isn’t the anthem, but “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

She must be close by to the place where they pull their trucks into the field to sit on hoods and tailgates. From there you can see the Winters house, yellow and crooked on the ridge like a rotten tooth. When the wind catches it the song rushes down to them from somewhere. Though they are natural wisecrackers, they shut their mouths. Every night, it is always one patriotic song, over and over, for sometimes as long as an hour. They lose sleep dreaming of her. Accidents chase their waking hours.

Peachee Mitchum gets the worst of it when, fraught with exhaustion, he missteps in the hayloft and falls to the barn floor. His arm is broken and his ribs bruised. It is the kind of bone break that will trouble him for the rest of his life, according to the doctor. He can’t work for a month. He listens to the radio deep in a fat, listless annoyance. Sometimes, from within himself, he hears the bones click in disagreement.

The rest of the boys go on in his absence, listening to her sing every night. Their livid girlfriends try all kinds of bribes. Some claim they will start putting out. Some beg to ride along; others try to sneak up on their own. But it is understood, somehow, that it would be wrong to let them listen. The boys chase their girlfriends away with threats. One pulls a rifle, unloaded, just for show, to demonstrate his seriousness.

Peachee goes back the first night he is well enough to join them again. And for the first time, he finds the pure reverence on their faces repulsive. In his absence, the rest of the boys had started jacking off whenever she sang. They find their own quiet places in the dark, spread out in Mr. Meier’s field, to moan or clutch their breath. Peachee sits up on the hood of his truck and tries to look away from their shows of ecstasy. It is hard to focus on the singing like this, without their collected attention to magnify it. He finds his floodlight in the cab, the one he uses to spot deer in the fall.

With the light in his hands, Peachee aims for the source of the singing. When he feels he has a bead on it, he flips the switch. The beam hits high on the hill behind the Winters house and catches the wild girl in its circle. She scrabbles up the hill and he chases her with the light but loses her in a stand of trees.

The rest of the boys push him to the ground. One holds the floodlight on him while the others take turns roughing him up. They stomp on his cast until it cracks. They return the next night already knowing the singing is over, but it is important to verify. They can sit still only five minutes before their hearts feel raw and they leave.

By the end of summer, when ironweed starts flushing through the fields, Mr. Winters leaves a stack of revival brochures at the counter of Sissy Pecjak’s gas station. This time he springs for full color with his newly adopted daughter as the centerfold. Come Hear the Angel Girl of Western Pennsylvania Translate the Gospel Back into Tongues, it reads.

A lot more people show for this revival than the last one. It is difficult to compare, but the atmosphere has a ring of carnival in it. The women wear brighter dresses. The men wear their good boots. The Volunteer Fire Department will hold a chicken fry after the proceedings. The wild girl sits up front near the stage and Mr. Winters fans her with a program.

Mr. Meier stands near the back. His Quaker distrust of spectacle will not let him enter for fear of the urges to sweat and dance. Peachee Mitchum stands even further off, enough distance to become a spectator rather than a participant. Myra waits with binoculars in her father’s truck. She is keen for a look at the white-suited man, and truly expects him to show up.

Mr. Edzel Winters begins at noon prompt. The faces before him shine with sweat. Do you know your father God, he begins, do you know Him by His face? Do you know Him by His voice, do you know Him by His hand? Nobody listens. The story about Peachee has spread as wide as a net, and everybody who was not interested in the wild girl’s singing is a damn sight more attentive now. Mr. Winters testifies that the great hand of God brought back his lost daughter. Proof, proof, proof, he shouts.

Come home, come home, come home, ye weary. The choir invites sinners to get saved. Mrs. Martha Bedillion walks to the stage to have hands laid upon her. She does this at every revival, even though she has not built up enough sin in the interim to warrant it. When she faints, a girl with a basket of scarves leaps up to cover Mrs. Bedillion’s legs. Nobody else is weary enough to come on home.

Any good revivalist possesses an ear for the pall of silence. Silence means that belief is not running high enough in the crowd. Believers mutter to themselves and respond in kind to testimony—Mr. Winters is certain he can hear their blood heat up. With so many staunch minds to convert, he decides to turn up the dazzle full-blaze immediately and reaches for the wild girl’s hand.

Signaled, the wild girl hikes herself onto the stage. Someone has tried to teach her a pretty smile but it comes out wrong. It’s more wolf leer than feminine wile, although it looks right on her face. She balls up the front of her yellow gingham dress with her fists. It is a feverish silence, at the edges of which Mr. Winters is smiling and nodding his head. Go on honey, he says.

She starts with “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” All of the boys who had listened in the dark that summer cannot stop from shivering a little. It is stunning, to hear her this close by, and to watch the breath she takes heap in and out of her chest. Some of the old boys who ribbed Mr. Meier at the sandwich counter blush impressively. Everybody seems to remember an incident they had defeated with shame. The girls in the choir look on, desperately jealous of that voice.

Because he senses the rising reverence in the tent, Mr. Winters reaches for the spotlights. Nobody had told him about the wild girl’s fanatic audience over the summer or what ended her nightly performances. He hits the switch, snaring her in a golden circle. Her face crowds in on itself. We see it for only a moment because she bolts. It takes all six of her brothers to catch her. They smooth her hair and coo to her but she scratches one’s face hard enough to draw a little blood. When he slaps her stiff on the jaw, she hardly reacts at all.

The show must go on. Mr. Winters believes in this principle. When he tries to cue the choir girls they look blankly back. Only true believers remain. Mr. Winters considers the revival a failure, but he shouldn’t. Everybody, even the ones who leave or refuse to enter the tent in the first place, leave believing indelibly in some thorny, private vision.

School starts and part of the dream is over. The social workers make recommendations regarding the wild girl’s education and return to normal life. After the revival, it is unlikely she will ever fully rejoin society, but almost everybody imagines her in the hallways at school carrying a satchel and binder. She would answer all of Mr. Tanner’s questions about the New Deal by saying either mother, father, or bellyache. She would join choir. A few VFW boosters suggest she sing the national anthem at the first football game. Peachee Mitchum imagines her as a homecoming queen. Of course it’s impossible.

The wild girl attempts escape more often after the revival. She is not allowed to wander without at least two of her brothers present, always. Calvin, the strongest, still recovers from a concussion she gave him when he tried to stop her once at the door. She will only sing if she thinks she is alone.

Peachee Mitchum ends up married to Myra Meier. In spite of her father’s intentions, she has gone spooky herself. Nobody could convince her that the white-suited man with the slingshot and musket was not real, and she only disdained them for trying. Peachee built her a house deep in Mr. Meier’s back forty and then built her a road. In the mornings she takes her coffee outside and walks the perimeter, pretending to pull weeds or look for snail shells. Sometimes Peachee worries when contracting jobs require him to stay in Wheeling for a few weeks, not out of fear that someone will take her, but because he can imagine her taking off. He suggests moving to a city but she likes her job. Myra is a social worker, driving into the hills to check on the family trouble.

She visits the wild girl often. They sit at Mr. Winters’s Formica kitchen table eating apples. One of the brothers sits, always, on the other side of the door. They can talk as long as they only use words from the national anthem or “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” which the wild girl learned eventually to say. Even so, she has to sing them a little. Myra tried to teach her other words, then other songs, but found that some, like “America the Beautiful,” frightened her just to hear them. Still, jokes are possible: Whose broad stripes and bright stars? Mine eyes.

SKEPTICAL ANIMAL

The second time the rat returned, it hadn’t even been gone five hours. I was working on my machine, tying a rope around a bowling pin’s neck. I planned to adjust the hoisting cord until the pin swung at the correct velocity and height to hit a matchbox car waiting on a wooden slope without bashing anything else. The process was repetitive—tie, drop, pick up pieces, reset—but how else could I get it perfect?

Also, I was sexting Boy #53. My phone buzzed with a photo of his upper thigh. When I first met him on the subway, he’d joked that I only wanted him for his body.

“Guilty,” I’d said. “You have such sensual ankles.”

So, it wasn’t sexting yet, but based on the rate at which the photos moved up his leg plus process of elimination, it would be in three to seven minutes. From the kitchen, I heard a faint but grating gnawing sound.

Mainly I was distressed because it was my fault the rat came back. A website I found, Rats Are Clever Creatures, had highlighter-yellow Comic Sans informing me, “Freaky Fact: Rats can find their way back to the nest from several miles away!” This tidbit was positioned above a Looney Tunes-style banner saying, Rat’s all, folks!

I should’ve taken the rat farther away the first time I disposed of it, but I didn’t want to leave my apartment twice. It was the kind of Hallmark-gorgeous fall day that nature shoves in your face sometimes. The crunchy sidewalk leaves were a jillion unbearable shades of red and orange, more colors than the Paint by Number kits I did as a kid. I spent so many weeks on them that my parents started calling me “little hunchback” and asking if it ever got lonely in the bell tower.

The rat’s return complicated things re: the boys I brought over. They’d all ask me the same questions: What is it? How long have you been building it? Why are you building it? How will it end? I’d give my autopilot answers: A Rube Goldberg machine, about ten months, I don’t know, I don’t know. At that point, I usually hustled whichever boy was over straight into the bedroom without turning on the lights, but now, even that didn’t work. My apartment was shadowy and cluttered; occasionally, pools of blue light from the streetlights outside seeped in through the barred windows, glinting off the milky-white marbles set atop their slopes, shining on the ribs of the little metal pails poised to slide down their miniature wires. Only, since the rat was around, I had to keep the lights on because I was petrified it’d skitter over my bare feet.

With the lights on, the boys thought they had license to linger. They’d inspect the pulleys with the worn interest of a retiree docent. They’d crouch by the PVC portion, say, “What’s a, uh—”

“Rube Goldberg machine. Chain reaction.” I’d point to sections of my project. “A ball rolls through the pipe into a cup, which weighs down the cup, which lands on a seesaw, which flips to release a string, which is attached to a pulley . . . it just keeps going.”

By then, I’d be fading fast, so hyper-focused on spotting a flicker of tail or a ripple of grimy fur that when I saw a flutter over by the windows or heard a faint clicking, I’d nearly lose it, but it’d turn out to be the curtains moving in the wind or something. Meanwhile, the boy of the night would mime stumbling into the machine or tunneling his stubby beef-jerky finger through the air teasing, “I’m gonna knock it over!” I’d be exhausted at the mere prospect of having to pretend these men were remotely original in reminding me they had the power to destroy everything I’d built.

I’d say my usual, which was “No touching!” Except, I said it sexy, like a porno prison guard slapping handcuffs shut. Or, what I imagined such a woman would sound like. The porn I watched didn’t do plots, and the women definitely didn’t speak.

Then, I’d look at the boy hard, trying to recall what about him I could have found attractive in the first place. Without fail, nothing leapt out at me, and I’d know that if I didn’t act fast, I’d lose even more interest, and then I’d lose my nerve. I’d grab his belt and tow him toward the bedroom like a sled, but it was inevitable: at some point, we’d both hear it. The rat. Bustling in paper bags or flicking its wormy tail around the baseboards. I’d re-clench my fists, suck in a deep breath, and drag the boy into the bedroom, blinding him with scattershot kisses so he couldn’t see the rat and leave before I’d gotten what I’d invited him here for.

 

I decided to send Boy #53 back a pic of my tits for efficiency’s sake. I rearranged my lamps to create three-point lighting and flattering shadows, arguably the most practical use of my art degree yet. Usually, I avoid any evidence I have a body, slug-pink and raw like a fresh scar, but I feel weirdly peaceful after sending nudes. I’m suddenly French-braided, holding a hot chocolate mug with both hands. It’s like those olden times people who shut themselves in crates and mailed themselves somewhere far, only I’m doing it piecemeal. Actually, it’s more like the ones who climbed into barrels to careen over the edge of Niagara Falls.

I mentioned that to a friend once, when I still had them.

She said, “Didn’t they die though?”

I mean, yes, they died. Of course they nearly all died. But I can imagine a moment after waving goodbye, clambering inside, inhaling fresh wood, hugging shivering knees, and closing the lid on the world. That moment was maybe kind of nice.

I was unbuttoning my shirt when the rat shot past me like a screeching hockey puck. Truth be told, I was kinda impressed. I’d taken it six subway stops away. I held it inside a trapper cage, which I’d stuffed inside a big, yellow-striped gift box I’d been saving for a special occasion that didn’t seem forthcoming. I was so honed in that the rat’s every move inside its glittery container was amplified. I felt its scuttling. Every whisker twitch reverberated in my lap.

I only intended to take the rat a stop or two away, but this guy wouldn’t stop staring. I’d stared first because he had long, dangling earlobes like he’d taken out gauges, and it inspired me to consider incorporating embroidery hoops into my machine. But he must’ve thought I was ogling. He, future Boy #53, made a whole show of giving me elevator eyes, all the way up, all the way down. We had the not unfunny exchange re: ankle objectification, and he suggested I join him on a coffee date at the stop after next. God knows why I almost agreed—I don’t do coffee, and I certainly don’t do dates—but the rat shifted a millimeter and startled me out of my seat. I said I couldn’t, that I had an important errand, but I gave him my number.

And now the rat was back. How many miles had its spindly feet traveled to find me? Haunt me? It reminds me of that kids’ movie. Since I can’t sleep, I’ve re-watched them all: Matilda, The Parent Trap, the one where talking pets embark on a cross- country adventure to reunite with their owner. Homeward Bound, it’s called. In my favorite scene, these menacing wild dogs try to flirt with Sassy, a Himalayan housecat who takes no shit, and she’s like, “Oh, great, catcalls.”

That line. It makes me so happy. Not because it’s funny, but because I imagine the screenwriters banging this script out at 3:00 a.m., absolutely dying laughing at each other’s stupid jokes. I bet they collapsed into each other giggling hard enough they struggled to breathe.

Moments like that, and all the movies, actually, make my chest tighten. They never did when I was little; I’m not sure what’s changed. All I know is that when the owner, Peter, hugs his dog before leaving him behind and says, “I’m gonna miss you so much,” and his golden retriever, Shadow, says, “I know. I know you’re sad. I just wish I knew why,” I have to pull my comforter over my head, mash my face into the pillows, and slow-breathe until my own stale exhales swaddle me into a half-asleep state.

These quicksand moods overwhelmed me more frequently those days. I thought maybe it was because I kept accidentally walking past the good deli. I didn’t mean to, but I looked up while passing it and saw the familiar candy advertisements, sun-faded into newspaper comic tricolor, and the smiley sign saying, We appreciate your patronage, and the jangly door I used to walk through. I felt a twinge beneath my breastbone, and I sped on by.

Boy #53 texted again, because I had ignored his text asking to grab dinner.

“IDK,” I texted back. “Are you a murderer?”

“Care to find out?” he wrote, which indicated either homicidality or plain horniness. I didn’t have enough context yet to know which.

I put my phone down. Picked it up. “Not really a dinner kinda girl . . .”

I tightened the noose around the bowling pin. Swing, miss, reset, repeat. I tried to stop imagining the rat’s toenails scrabbling over delicate sections of my machine, scaring off the boys I did manage to bring back here. My phone pinged, “Pinebox tm? 8:00? [not dinner].”

I knew that bar. Their gimmick was that they were a former casket factory. All the cave-like booths were made of casket wood.

“Casket, coffin, what’s the difference?” I asked the bartender once, while out trolling for a Boy #21. I pretended to stir my drink even though he knew perfectly well it was straight gin because he’d poured it.

“Not a lot,” he said. “A coffin has a flair outwards at the top, like old vampire movies. A casket doesn’t. It’s just a rectangle.”

I said unless you were Superman-level jacked up top, a coffin was just excess real estate. I told him I enjoy coziness and don’t have much muscle mass, so a casket would be perfect for me. He said I was weird as hell, but he was into it, so I should call him when his shift ended. I killed time with a truly underwhelming Boy #21 I met in the bathroom line, then stumbled out of his place at 2:15 a.m. to make the bartender Boy #22. I thought two in one night would feel special in some way, but it was just more of the same.

 

I sidled around my apartment searching for a clearing with no machine in the background—my tits couldn’t take the upstaging— but there wasn’t one. I hadn’t realized how much of my apartment it had swallowed. The water wheel section commandeered the entirety of the kitchen counter space and was encroaching on the stovetop. Black suspension cords from the unfinished pulley systems hung down, tentacle-like, from the ceiling. I had a mini portrait studio in the corner with a stool and soft, cloud-printed background fabric, but I dismantled it to make space for the particle board that held up the dominoes, tin can pyramids, and glittering paper pinwheels, the most precarious parts.

Maybe it would be good to get out.

“You’re a funny one,” Boy #53 said, and based on his accompanying hairy knee picture, he was too. Maybe I’d visit Pinebox, for a little while.

I’d gotten the pin to hit its target seventy-five percent of the time, but chance wasn’t the same as inevitability. It had to be right every single time. I let the pin go again and it slammed the car’s slope so hard the pieces scattered, sliding beneath the couch, where I suspected the rat lived.

I got down on my knees to peer underneath, ready to leap away at any sudden movement. I snaked my hand through the dust, but instead of pulling out a scaffolding chunk, I extracted a glossy pink postcard featuring a beet-faced baby with a pair of silhouetted heads, my college best friend and her husband, bent to kiss its pudgy cheeks. The card had come six months before. I kept meaning to respond, say congratulations, but then too much time had passed and reaching out would’ve been weird. Except, then I couldn’t call to talk in general, because she’d remember I’d never acknowledged her baby’s existence, so I ignored her texts altogether. Now we don’t speak.

On the card, a stork clutched a banner: Welcome To The World, Baby!

I’ll never understand how people feel like they belong enough to this earth to be its ambassador. I’ve been here twenty-eight years and I barely feel welcome myself.

I sat back on my heels, inspected my machine. I couldn’t go to Pinebox. There was still so much to do, everything so far from perfect. What if the rat terrorized it while I was gone? I dug my fingertips into my thighs until they whitened.

I texted Boy #53 my address, along with a question: “1:00 a.m.?” I added a purple devil emoji.

 

When the rat returned a third time, I lured it into the cage with a peanut butter smear, shoved it into the gift box, and took it to Times Square. The place was intolerable—all that jostling and obnoxious wonder. I knelt on the gum-spackled sidewalk. I figured if I let the rat go underneath a hotdog cart, it’d either be so bewildered by the bright lights and big city that it couldn’t find its way back, or it’d gorge itself on wiener crumbs until its arteries exploded. I was no killer, but I was okay with being an accessory.

Unfortunately, it reappeared while I was in bed with Boy #56, a cinematographer from work who sulked when I joked that his whole job was pointing a lens in the right direction. He seemed hurt, kept muttering, but then I took my top off and he got over it. We were mid-kiss when I sensed the rat’s return. He couldn’t hear it, but I knew. The rat and I were basically one. I could feel it rustling even from afar.

After Boy #56 finished and I shooed him away, I crept barefoot into the living room. The calm I felt after sex with strangers lasted for less and less time with each visit. By then, it wore off completely before the door closed behind them.

I focused on the machine’s problem section. The ball should’ve rolled down the ramp and bumped the lip of a suspended pitcher so that it poured into a waiting cup, but I couldn’t get the pitcher to pour everything out. I tried fifteen times before I got frustrated and slammed my tools around. I texted the subway guy, Boy #53.

No Repeats was one of my rules—too much possibility they’d get attached—but Boy #53 worked coat check at a gentlemen’s club, and who else would be awake at this hour? I granted myself special dispensation.

I described my problem: “Bouncy ball not heavy enough. Tried 15x. V frustrated.”

He responded immediately, “Aw, don’t despair champ, you’ll bounce back.”

I snorted and sunk to the floor to draft a response. “For real tho, you a murderer? Kinda want u to be so u can mercy kill me cuz ur pun = v bad.”

 

The rat was back from Times Square in under twelve hours. I barely rolled over upon hearing it root through my trash, just grabbed my phone. My first search yielded an exterminator’s site explaining, “Rats are skeptical animals!” I pictured my rat as a tweed-coat-sporting professor complete with tiny pipe, but it just meant rats are good at skirting obstacles. Nothing breaks their patterns from x (food) to y (foraging area) to z (nest).

I had to respect the rat. I went from x (less-good deli, for dinner) to y (machine work) to z (sex with laundromat guy/laundromat guy’s roommate/the super of their building). When I ran into the super after leaving the first two guys’ apartment, I thought it’d be satisfying, like a game—sex Pokémon, gotta catch ’em all!—but it didn’t feel like the conquest I’d hoped for. The high wore off before I hit the subway platform, and by then it was late and the LED screen’s estimated minutes remaining kept scrolling backward in time and I could only wait and stare at the empty tracks.

When I finally got home, I was tired but not sleepy. I got so wrapped up in taping the hammer to the seesaw that when I glanced up and spotted the rat blinking back at me from the countertop, I jolted backward and hit my head on the couch. I didn’t scream, people only scream when we believe someone might hear, but I was shaken up. Being scared without a witness felt strange, like the gesture you would’ve made with your hands—The rat was thiiis big!—got lodged in your body somewhere. I texted Boy #53, “mr. rat is getting v cocky.”

Boy #53 suggested I’d failed to put myself in the mind of mr. rat. He proposed I show it the world—had I considered Paris? I said I could never do that to the city of love, and he said he was appalled, clearly I hadn’t seen Ratatouille, surely the rat possessed innate talents I wasn’t recognizing. Boy #53 was funny enough to merit a half-smile, which calmed me enough to set up the peanut butter trap and catch the rat again.

Instead of Paris, I opted for the Botanical Garden. Maybe I just hadn’t given the rat a good enough alternative to life with me. When I got there it was early and the gardens were empty. I shot a wedding in the Azalea Garden this summer. The bride was very woo-woo, kept insisting the flowers were “evocative of softness and femininity,” which made me gag, but it really was gorgeous, painfully so.

The ground was dewy enough to soak my jeans when I crouched to open the cage. The rat wandered out slowly, like he was equally happy inside the box and outside it. I hovered there until he scurried away into the trees.

 

The rat took longer to return from the gardens, nearly forty-eight hours, like it appreciated the effort. While it was gone, I got out of hand. Those days are pretty jumbled. There was Boy #56 with the enormous “Be vulnerable” tattoo. I recognized the quote from clips old friends had shared, and told him nothing turned me on like a good, informative TED Talk. He got huffy. He said there was nothing wrong with being earnest and he wouldn’t let me make him feel bad.

There was another—Boy #59?—who asked to sleep over, so I yelled, “Keep the change, ya filthy animal!” I was quoting Home Alone to soften the blow of kicking him out, but I guess he didn’t recognize it.

Then, Boy #60 who yammered about his American citizenship journey and didn’t take my hints. He said his visa labeled him as “an alien of extraordinary ability,” so I tried to pivot with “Show me your extraordinary abilities, alien.”

My jokes were rusty. I was tired. I couldn’t stop envisioning the rat toppling my machine. In the end, Boy #60 stood, kissed me lightly on the forehead, and didn’t come home with me.

On non-work mornings, I couldn’t distinguish the days. It may have been longer than forty-eight hours. It was either two days, or it was nine. I fixated on the pitcher problem. My brain was on laser mode and I was so sleepless and shaky that when the rat returned, I was almost relieved. We had our routine now.

I took him to Asbury Park Beach, reasoning that New Jersey was surely far enough away. I hoped the freezing water might shock me into getting back on track and waking up refreshed for my machine.

But immediately after releasing the rat on the sand, he scampered off in the direction we came from, like he was gonna catch the next train back. I waded in the water but it didn’t work. I was inordinately deflated. I couldn’t do a single thing right. I considered hiring an exterminator, but I read a Freaky Fact explaining that exterminators don’t physically remove rats. They gas your whole place and leave you to clean up the carcasses. The rats rot in the walls around you, turning into shriveled bone sacks, little tumors behind your mirrors. But isn’t that the whole point of having someone else there? The prospect that they’ll take away the bad and leave you with an empty home in which to start over?

 

On my return from the beach, I entered the good deli instead of walking past like I should’ve. I was hungry, but also, I maybe wanted to punish myself. For what, I was not sure. I spent a while running my hands over the crinkly snack packets. Eventually, I grabbed the closest item, took it to the counter, and there he was: the nice deli man.

“She’s back!” He calculated my total. “We thought you were dead.”

I hadn’t seen him since summer, before I stopped coming. I’d been obsessed with this machine step where a knife would jut forward to pop a balloon. It was impossible to get the knife to jab the balloon with the correct force. I spent weeks, months, went through endless balloons. I kept returning because the good deli sold fifty packs and the nice deli man was always there. He started recognizing me, which made me shifty, even though he was only ever kind. It’s just so hard to let people know you, like floating atop a sea of stinging jellyfish.

One day, he pointed to the balloons and said, “Gotta beat the heat!”

I wasn’t sure what he meant. He gestured out the window at a pair of kids who’d busted off a fire hydrant cap to play in the water. They were six-ish and running, arms pumping, not afraid to want something and show it. The deli man, I realized, thought I was making them into water balloons. I let my gaze linger on the children. The little boy hug-tackled the girl in her frilly one-piece, pulling her down into the water while she screeched and laughed and clawed at him. What would the deli man think if he knew why I really wanted the balloons? That I was doing the same pointless thing over and over, alone? I snatched them from the counter and speed-walked past the hydrant, careful not to get a drop on me, though August was sweltering. And I didn’t go back to the good deli. The gap between the life the deli man imagined for me and the one I lived was unbearable.

 

Leaving the good deli after Asbury Park, I took stock. I was still carrying the cage, I was scatterbrained, and my apartment would be empty when I got home. I squared my shoulders; I’d invite Boy #53 over. Sure, I never saw the Boys more than once, but I figured the rat would come scare him away eventually anyway. Boy #53 negotiated. He agreed to come over only if I’d let him take me to breakfast at the nearby diner. I accepted his terms. Once he got a dose of me, it wouldn’t be hard to convince him he didn’t want more time in my presence.

When he arrived, I tried waltzing him into the bedroom, but he dawdled in the living room. His eyes tracked the machine’s planned path from its start.

He turned toward me. “How does it end?” I was too aware of whatever my face was doing. Was I acting strange? Mean? Needy?

“I don’t know,” I said.

He nodded at the machine’s sprawl. “At this rate, it’ll eat you alive.”

I frowned, but he was entranced by the machine. “This must’ve taken you a ton of work.”

Making my machine didn’t feel like work to me. It was just something I had to do, had to get right.

Moving to show him the pitcher problem, I tripped over the rat cage next to the particle board with unsteady pieces, and though I caught myself quickly, I felt idiotic. I set the bouncy ball atop the incline and we watched it roll down to knock the pitcher. As usual, it poured less than I wanted.

“It’s still half-empty,” I said, pointing to the partially-tilted pitcher.

“Maybe it’s half-full,” he said.

“What? No.” I looked back and forth, touched the hook the pitcher turned on. “The problem isn’t the glass, it’s the pitcher, I—” The corners of his lips turned up just a little. “Oh.” I raised my hands to my cheeks and they were warm.

Boy #53 squatted by the couch to open his backpack. I warned him, “Oh, I wouldn’t. That’s the rat’s territory.”

He shrugged, continued rummaging. “Rats are a part of life. You just gotta get him to pay rent.” He found whatever he was searching for and cupped it. “Come here. I have a gift.”

I walked over to join him. “Close your eyes and hold out your hands,” he said.

I shook my head. “I’m the eyes-open type.”

He placed a smooth sphere in my outstretched hands. It was heavy, cool to the touch. I traced my fingertips over its orange surface, turned it slowly. A billiards ball. I sensed his eyes on me, gauging my reaction. He pointed to the thirteen on it. “I brought you bad luck.” I opened and closed my mouth like a stupid guppy. He continued, “Maybe it’ll be heavy enough for the pitcher.”

He half-stepped toward my machine. “Can we try?”

I was unused to people requesting permission. It was easier when they didn’t. “It’s not that simple, fixing things.”

“I’m a patient guy,” he said, moving another step nearer to the machine. I took one too. I could swear a few dominoes wobbled.

“It might be unfixable.” We moved closer in tandem, marionette limbs tied to the same string. “I know it won’t work.”

“How do you know if you won’t let me try?” Another step. Our footfalls were sure to make the particle board buckle. Collapse.

“You don’t think I’ve tried?” The church nearby began its chiming. The grates over my windows let in slices of sunrise. “It won’t work,” I said loudly. I only meant to speak over the bells, but it came out several registers too high. It was jarring. He stepped back, I stepped forward. If we were anywhere else, we would’ve been dancing, hips mere centimeters from the particle board. If he wasn’t careful, the board would cave in. The whole machine would come crashing down. I couldn’t take that. I just couldn’t. I wanted him out of the way. Where was the rat when you needed him most? I quieted my voice and reached for the ball. “It won’t work.” He stepped back, I stepped—

I couldn’t say which happened first. They felt simultaneous. He reached over the cage on top of which I stored the parts I hadn’t yet integrated, and at the same time, I pushed him. Hard. He was taller than me and didn’t fall, but he stumbled back, his head slamming into the wall. After his shoes squeaked against the hardwood, there was a long, long silence. He didn’t break eye contact. He refused to look away as he completed the motion he started, showing me I misjudged the arc of his arm. He set the ball down gently on the cage. It made no sound.

I was suddenly desperate, reaching out for his forearm, “I didn’t mean—” and clutching his sleeve, “I thought you were going to—”

He’d meant to leave the ball for me to solve the pitcher problem on my own.

I tried to catch his hand, stop him from leaving, but he moved aside. He spoke to me how you’d speak to a little kid, low, too- calm. He said he was gonna go.

And then he walked out.

 

That fucking rat. I’d never been angrier at anything in my entire life. I was on my knees behind the couch searching out its nest before the door slammed behind Boy #53. When I found it, I’d destroy it. Dump bleach on the shredded bags and hair strands it curled into at night. Smash it. Leave no home to return to. It was the rat’s fault I came back from the beach on edge and visited the good deli. I ran my fingers along the floor trim feeling for holes. It was the rat’s fault I had to store the cage there so close, hence the confusion of Boy #53 not threatening the machine like I’d thought. My fingertips’ frantic journey around the floor seam returned only dust and splinters.

Standing offered a better vantage point. Seeing the machine in its entirety, I understood how fragile it really was. The slightest wind would decimate the dominoes and a minuscule nudge would spill the water and the tiniest floor tremor would scatter the marbles and the balloon knife could easily slip and any teeth could rip the cardboard tubes to slivers and any bump would warp the strings the buckets rested on and the tracks I laid were unstable toys and the miniature cars were constantly liable to roll away and everything I built could be destroyed so quickly and I knew one thing for certain: I needed to kill that rat.

I called the exterminator. I called nine exterminators. I left messages that made no sense.

“I need somebody who’s okay with killing.”

“I can’t get it far enough away.”

“I’m a special case. Don’t want somebody ordinary.”

“My place has a precious thing; you need to be careful.”

“It’s urgent.”

“Are your guys careful?”

“I need it gone.”

“Send me someone careful.”

“Somebody help me?”

“Call me back. Call me back. Call me back. Call me back. Call me back. Call me back as soon as you get this message.”

I threw my phone down. I had to be practical. My first concern was guaranteeing the machine’s safety. Who knew if they’d send somebody careful. I needed to defend it myself. I hustled to the dollar store and bought nineteen plastic laundry baskets. I grunted and sweated hoisting the stack of them upstairs. None of the exterminators had called back. They would soon. I grabbed scissors to cut two sides off each basket to make a protective tunnel covering the machine. My scissors weren’t strong enough to saw through plastic. I walked to the hardware store. I came back with scissors strong enough to saw through plastic. I set to work.

I stared at the neon baskets so long my vision warped. The room was uber-bright. Sickly bright. My apartment was covered in the rainbow blind spots you get from staring at a light too long. I slashed the laundry baskets with increasing speed. The washing machine in the basement churned and the old building creaked as it settled and the sirens wailed toward the hospital twenty blocks away: I could hear everything. I felt powerful, like those women who get super-strength when their kids are in danger, who flip trucks barehanded and pry their babies free. My hands pulsed and itched. It was energizing to have a singular purpose. I finished cutting baskets and got to my feet. Now no one could knock over my machine, not the exterminators if they ever called back, not the boys who came over, and certainly not the rat.

I had to hurry. The exterminators would call back soon and my machine had to be safe. I raised a basket a few feet above a domino section and carefully, so carefully, lowered it, creating shelter, then another basket for another area, this time higher, lowering it slower over the pulley part, then another over the seesaw section, the safe structure covering most by now, another basket shielding the machine, though I had to speed up before the exterminators arrived, so I put down another basket, was almost done, placed another basket, covered another section, one more basket, another, I grabbed the second-to-last basket and held it tight in my hands ready to cover the pitcher problem which, yes, the pool ball seemed like it’d solve when I had the time for testing and I lowered it bit by bit over the machine and then—

And then, such a little thing, the basket’s jagged edge brushed a marble on the way down. And the machine started to fall. The dominoes chased each other. The levers flipped. The hatches swung closed. The seesaws clattered. The machine had been hit in the center, so it fell in two directions, from the inside out, like two velvet curtains. The pitcher poured and halfway filled the cup. The bouncy balls hurtled down their slopes and pinged off the walls. The miniature cars rolled away. The knife lunged blindly. The pulleys released. It was all over in a minute.

 

I sat surrounded by my shattered machine and waited for the rat. It took hours to come back. The sky darkened outside, then got light again. My sit bones went numb. I tried counting how many days it’d been since I’d slept. I wanted the rat to come back so I could kill it for good. Also, I thought I might be lonely.

When the rat returned, it slipped under the door like its bones were liquified and, once inside, cocked its head at me. It walked right into the cage. I hadn’t even set the peanut butter trap. I stuffed the cage in the gift box and took the subway to Pier 11 on Wall Street. There was a ferry that looped between the docks and IKEA, and it was free on weekends. I stood waiting to board the ferry, clasping the box to my chest. Inside, the rat was still. I shuffled forward with the line.

My plan was to leave the rat in IKEA. It needed a real home, and maybe somewhere in that legion of cushions and curtains and lights it could find one. But edging closer to the ferry’s entrance, trying not to bump into anybody, I realized the stupidity of my idea. It was futile. The rat would just keep coming back. If I wanted it gone, I’d have to kill it myself.

We boarded the ferry and I headed for the outside deck portion even though it was freezing and the water smelled putrid and the wind whipped my hair in my eyes and it stung. I perched the box on the railing for inspection. All the glitter had rubbed off in the course of my many trips. The once-crisp edges had worn down, exposing the pulpy cardboard underneath. It was covered in dings and scratches.

A loudspeaker announcement crackled. I turned to face the direction the voice came from, though the speaker was clearly inside. I could see him through the tinted window. A skinny guy with pockmarked skin and an utter lack of interest in his own spiel.

“Floatation devices are stored and available for your safety,” he said, pointing lazily at the windows where it was clear the floatation devices were not stored. I stared at his curly hair, the way he shifted from foot to foot. If I wanted to, I could’ve taken him home with me. It wouldn’t have taken much. I could’ve made a joke about life jackets and needing somebody to save me. Mouth-to-mouth. Etc. I watched the idle flex of his jaw as he ran through safety policies. I could’ve fucked him. It would’ve been easy. I turned my back on the cabin and looked out over the water.

The metal railing had triangle patterns. I hooked my pinky around a vertex. It reminded me of something someone, Boy #14 or #32, maybe, once said. I was describing a house of cards I saw in a store window, how it stressed me out. If I were going to make one, I said, I’d tape the apexes together for a stable hinge.

Whoever it was, he laughed so hard that little spittle projectiles flew from his mouth. He kept choking with each inhale until he finally got out the words: “That doesn’t count.”

I wanted to know why. He was laughing, but I was dead serious.

By then he was pounding his fist on the bar like a cartoon character. “Because the whole point is that it might fall.”

I looked around the ferry. Inside its cage, the rat wriggled a little, causing the box to bump gently against my arm. The only others outside in the weather with me were a little boy and his shih tzu. He had a package of green votive candles, probably something his parents hoped to return, and he was rolling them across the deck for the dog to chase. The boy pitched candles left, right. The dog pounced again and again, wild, thrilled. I felt the rat nuzzling the box’s inside corners. The candles the dog had already caught and abandoned littered the deck like lily pads.

The ferry trundled toward the docks where customers stood laden with hefty blue bags and creased mouths. The bored guy got back on the speakers to drone instructions for safe disembarkation. The water below was choppy and gray and seemed so far away. The other passengers shouldered their bags and trudged toward the ferry doors. The deck where I stood was nearly deserted now and the cabin was rapidly emptying. The metal railing was cold against my forearms. I had never been good at getting rid of things.

I felt something wet and looked down to see the dog nosing my ankles. It looked up at me and its smushed face was ugly-charming, like a snooty little Persian cat.

The cat in Stuart Little has a similar face. I just re-watched it. The Persian initially hates that Stuart is his master, but near the movie’s end he comes around. He even saves Stuart when he’s threatened by some cats perched in a tree overhanging a lake. He breaks off the branch holding the rival cats and they plummet, yelping, into the water.

“Just doggy-paddle!” an enemy cat calls to one of his comrades.

“Doggy-paddle?” the other cat cries. “I’d rather drown!”

What a stupid line. I love it so much. I bet the screenwriters who thought it up pissed themselves laughing, that they play-punched each other over such a complete eye-roller. Maybe one held the script in the air and yelled, “I went to film school for this?” and everybody fell out of their chairs laughing. Imagining it made my eyes well up, it made it hard to swallow, it made me start to cry.

 

The Robert Watson Literary Prize Story THE MYSTIC MARRIAGE OF SAINT CATHERINE OF SIENA

It’s a shock when David Sampson says that Salome is the most beautiful girl in our class. Of course she is, by far, with long, thick hair the color of honey wheat, a tiny face with vulpine features, slim, wide-set eyes, and enchanted skin. But it seemed as though no one else—none of the boys, that is—had noticed. She’s so quiet it’s easy to miss her. But we see her. We know.

Sampson is the class stoner and should be the class clown, but he’s usually too stoned to finish his sentences. He was, until senior year, a large, soft boy, almost cuddly, if he hadn’t reeked of weed and stale cigarettes. He wore the same oversized navy hoodie every day, covering his close-shaved head like a robe, and he spoke in a drone so soft he might have been praying. But if you listened, he usually wasn’t saying anything good. He liked dirty jokes, dead baby jokes. He told sexist jokes, too, but since we shot him dirty looks, we mostly assumed he was telling them just to get a rise out of us. Besides, the ones he told were the kind with no teeth. His favorite was a silly inversion of a clichéd directive: Get in the sandwich and make me a kitchen. We have to admit, the first time we heard it, we laughed.

His mom is a feminist historian who came to our social studies class to give a talk one day. We’d never seen Sampson slump so low in his chair or pull his hoodie so far down over his face so that only his angular chin showed. His mom gave him a hard time that day, asking him questions that, shockingly, he knew the answers to. “‘I will everywhere make humanity more than sex.’ Words spoken by . . . David, can you tell us?” His mother extended a long, manicured finger in her son’s direction. A long pause, and then from beneath the hoodie came a mumble. “That’s right: Lucy Blackwell. Now, in the 1850s . . .” We all felt kind of bad for Sampson that day. He made more sense to us after that. He became softer in our eyes. He didn’t seem to mind.

 

In the fall of our senior year, we come back to find Sampson transformed. He’s dropped probably forty pounds. He wears the same oversized sweatshirt that truly is a robe now, draping off his frame, and his face is gaunt. He has let his hair grow, and the curls on his head are a shock of gold. He looks older and harder, but delicate, almost beautiful.

Then we learn (we don’t remember who told us first) he’s been sleeping with Salome all summer. At first none of us really believes it. The pairing seems inconceivable. Besides, so few of the rest of us have had sex—we who are more solid and vibrant and interesting than Salome; we who, even if we aren’t exactly gorgeous or cool or beloved, at least have a presence, a reputation, skills that we put on display in English and choir and theater, teachers who like us more than the others, we who go to nerdy summer programs in college dorms that make us seem sophisticated each time we come back in the fall.

Salome is one of the quiet girls, would be indistinguishable from the rest if it weren’t for her beauty. We see her set her notebook and pencil case (she still carries a pencil case) neatly on her desk in French class; we see her put her hand up in Trig. We watch her chew salad with her mouth closed at lunchtime and staple her English papers parallel to the top edge. We are aware of her the way you’re aware of the mechanics behind every clock and inside every wristwatch: astonishing when you look at it, but you don’t often look. But it’s nice to know she’s there.

Anyway, it’s just not fair. Not that we want to have sex with Sampson. That would be absurd. But we want, at least, to be desired, to be found beautiful—to be discovered. We want someone unusual to push past all the powdered and curled and well-dressed girls in our grade, drawn by our own unusual magnetism, and find us.

But we’re also afraid of exactly this. For as unusual as we secretly hope we are, we’re also terrified that someone will discover we are not. Better to remain a compelling mystery than become a corporeal disappointment.

 

In a move that none of us expect, Sampson turns up to audition for the high school play. The play is a big deal for those of us who have elected to take theater every semester and showed up religiously for every single rehearsal for every single production. Sampson walks in like it only occurred to him to come five minutes before auditions began.

And we are even more surprised to find that he is, somehow, good. At first, we can’t tell if maybe we’re just thrown by the body he inhabits that we barely recognize. Its movements are quicker, its gestures finer, its angles sharper. It becomes apparent that in this new body he is inventing movement, is creating its own idiosyncratic language before our very eyes. He is a new animal, a species we can’t identify.

When the casting sheet is posted on the bulletin board outside the auditorium, we are not surprised to learn that he has landed the lead. With Sampson at the helm, the usual dynamic shifts; the game has changed. An outsider has joined us, and we get to show him our world.

 

In French class, Salome has taken to sitting in the back corner. We don’t notice until Madame calls her out. “Tu es moins sérieuse cette année, Salomé?” she says, too confident in the response she’ll receive. To everyone’s surprise, though Salome squeezes out a small smile for Madame, the instant after she turns back to the whiteboard Salome rolls her eyes. We are stunned and impressed. We are just a little bit jealous. Before, when she made herself small and quiet, Salome’s power lay dormant. Now she holds it in her hands, admiring its every facet, and it glows.

 

In rehearsals, Sampson is his usual goofy self, but when he gets to work he is utterly sober. This is the first time we’ve seen him go quiet immediately when a teacher speaks to him. It’s partly the hypnotic power of our director, whose elvish qualities and spritely energy are impossible not to fall in love with. We watch her give him direction and see him really listen, spinning her instructions in his head, making something private that we can’t see. It’s the first time it really occurs to us that Sampson has a secret self, just like the rest of us—one where he gets to be the person we have not yet let him be. But something is reeling him out, little by little. Or maybe we are actually, finally seeing him for the first time.

 

Salome’s friends were two mousy girls with interchangeably forgettable names. One of them liked to tell anyone who’d listen about her aspirations to become a dermatologist, because of how much she loved securing a pimple between her two fingernails and slowly applying pressure until the pus burst. The other seemed to become nervous beyond reason whenever we spoke to her, so we generally didn’t.

But we don’t see Salome with these girls anymore. We see them sitting together at lunch, business as usual, but Salome isn’t there. We don’t know where she goes. We don’t see Sampson, either, but we’ve never known where he goes when he’s not around. We’ve never particularly cared, until now. Now we find ourselves not only aware of his movements, of his orbit around school, but curious about them.

One day, leaving school, we see him and Salome across the street at the gas station. He’s leaning against a car—her family’s—and her reedy body leans against his, standing between his legs. It strikes us how beautiful they both are. It’s almost striking enough to keep us from feeling the jolt of something like betrayal. But that’s silly. We are only borrowing him. Someone else got to him first.

 

Sampson still makes jokes that make us cringe. But at Saturday rehearsals, he makes sure there is enough pizza for everyone when we break for lunch. He lets us know when there are crumbs in our hair. He teases us, but he never pushes too hard. He recognizes that some of us are more delicate than we used to be. He is more delicate than he used to be.

When we ride the late bus home from play practice, Sampson is one of us, joking and laughing about all the same things. But in the morning, on the regular bus to school, Sampson either talks to his non-play friends or is quiet. He doesn’t talk to us.

 

Late one night at a long rehearsal, we sit with Sampson at the side of the stage during a break. He has taken to wandering over to us between scenes, striking up mundane conversations that we wouldn’t have the energy for if it were anyone else. The mundanity of conversations with him is imbued with something that makes us smile and smirk and fidget. We want to hear every dull syllable that comes from his lips.

“We should get food,” he says.

We laugh. We tell him we’re surprised: it doesn’t look like he eats much these days. We’re trying to tease him, or maybe compliment him, but our concern slides out headfirst.

“I was too fat,” he says. “Now I’m too skinny. That’s why we should get food. I’m going to waste away.”

Then he looks at me and says, “You’ve gotten skinny, too.” He takes my hand, its back facing up, and tells me to lift my fingers up by the knuckles. “See?” He taps each one of the long, delicate bones that protrude in response. “You don’t have any meat on you.”

“Neither do you,” I say.

We look at each other. Our director calls us to attention. But I can hear his mind still purring next to mine, like he and I are by ourselves in an adjoining room.

At the end of rehearsal, Sampson asks me where I live. “I ride your bus,” I say. “Every day.”

“No way,” he says. “How didn’t I know this? Why didn’t you tell me?” He faces me. “We should go get food. Let’s get food sometime.”

“Okay,” I say. “Let’s.” And I know that we won’t, but I’m praying we do.

 

We talk about it, how Sampson wants to get food with me. One of us says, “He has such a huge crush on you, Catherine. He gets so flustered when he’s around you.”

“I don’t think so,” I say, with a laugh. “He has Salome.”

“I mean, yeah, they’re fucking, but he likes you.”

“It’s like, he wants her, but he adores you.”

I don’t understand the difference, but we laugh it off. It’s sweet that he likes me, that he’s trying so hard. It’s funny, to think about getting food with Sampson. We can hardly imagine it!

But Sampson doesn’t mention getting food again for a long time. We assume that he was joking, or was stoned and forgot about it, or maybe he changed his mind. Maybe he was just hungry.

 

In French class, we match verbs with appropriate objects. The verbs are acheter, aimer, oublier, adorer, saluer—to buy, to love, to forget, to adore, to greet. The objects are abricots, devoirs, amis, cahiers, Dieu—apricots, homework, friends, notebooks, God.

We go around the room. “J’achète les amis,” says a boy in the back, snickering before he’s even finished his sentence. We would be amused, but it’s like this every day, and we are tired. He looks to Salome for approval, who does not look at him. She seems tired, too.

When it’s my turn, I say, “J’adore les abricots.”

“Non, non,” says our French teacher. “On aime les abricots. On adore Dieu.”

 

We’re in class when we hear commotion in the hallway. The door to our classroom is open. One of the English teachers is walking briskly down the hall, trailed by a lanky, smirking Salome. Our teacher pauses slightly to watch, but the trouble falls from his face just as quickly as it landed, and we resume.

When class lets out, we walk to the cafeteria for lunch and hear whispers that Salome, noticeably addled in class, was suspended for being stoned at school. As we’re digesting this, we see Sampson cut through the crowd in the hall, his bag dangling from one shoulder. The head of upper school is close behind. “Mr. Sampson,” he calls, “please don’t let this turn out poorly for you, too.” But he’s already gone, the door swinging apologetically behind him.

We’re stunned. Some of us are impressed. Some of us feel like Salome has gone too far. We frame it in worry—we’re concerned for what’s happening to her; we wonder if everything is okay— but we’re not worried. Secretly, we’re a little relieved. The awe we’ve felt for her has been tempered by consequence. No one’s burden is that light.

 

Performances begin. We’re nervous and excited and our energy spills off the stage, literally: in the first performance, someone accidentally knocks a plate into the orchestra pit, where it shatters to the sound of laughter and applause. Fortunately there was no orchestra in the pit, or things might have ended differently.

As the shows go on, we watch each other, really watch each other. We’ve all grown so much since we each slipped timidly into our roles like a chrysalis at the start of rehearsals. Now we are magnificent. We speak our lines like they’re our own words, as easy as thinking, as easy as hope. We will miss the intimacy our characters share when this ends. We will miss the close physical space the play has forced our bodies to inhabit together.

We’re thinking about this onstage and off, in the wings while we’re waiting for our cue. We’re thinking about it just before our final entrance, while we stand alone in the wings. Then there is another presence, a breath, beside me like a ghost, but this is a ghost I know. Two slender hands alight on my waist, and when I don’t move away, they encircle me, and the body that belongs to them nests itself behind me. I have never been touched this way. I can feel every curve of his body even though he barely hovers behind me, his touch so light. I feel so light. I thread my fingers through his and I feel, for the first time in a year, more than the thrill of the stage or the draw of Salome’s beauty or the divinity of an empty stomach. This is adoration.

He and I stand there in the dark, our sad, hard edges locked together to make something larger than ourselves, until we hear our cue. And so he and I break apart, and he and I drift onstage, and we resume our roles.

The play ends. Things go back to normal. We go back to riding the four o’clock bus home. We’re relieved, but a little sad. It feels like a larger kind of ending.

The season changes, and so does the light. It streams long and late through our classroom windows onto our desks. It shoots and bends through the bus like a prism. We are illuminated. We feel, however fleetingly, like we’re coming alive.

Here at the end of the year, all of us about to go our separate ways, everyone changes. It’s sort of sudden, but when it happens it’s like we knew it would happen all along. It’s like the curtain has fallen at the end of the play that has been our time at this school, and we’re leaving the theater, freed from the characters we have played for so long. We are finally ourselves.

People talk to us who have never really talked to us before. People do things they’ve never done before. Some of us get wasted at the graduation party and find ourselves embracing people we thought we hated. Some of us are a little drunk, leaning against a wall at the graduation party, watching our friends, when Salome appears.

“Come to the balcony,” she says. Then she takes my hand, and we thread through the throng of all kinds of people I suddenly don’t care about as she leads me there.

Waiting on the balcony is Sampson. He smiles, then exchanges a look with Salome.

“So,” Salome says, “we heard you wanted to try this.”

I stare. Then Sampson produces what looks like a skinny, hand- rolled cigarette.

“Oh,” I say, “it’s really okay.” But Salome has already taken it and lit it, and she puts it to her perfect lips, inhales deeply. Then she passes it to Sampson, who takes a drag, and then offers it to me. Hesitantly I take it, lift it to my lips as they watch.

“I don’t know how to do this,” I admit.

“Just breathe,” says Salome. I expect her to be impatient with me, but she’s smiling, eager, like we’re all in on something together.

I inhale and then cough. Sampson pats me on the back, and when I can finally take a breath, I see they’re looking at me expectantly. I’m about to give them a smile, to signal I’m okay, when it comes over me: the lightness I’ve been chasing all year, that I’ve only found onstage or in an empty stomach, or just one other time, when Sampson held me in the dark.

We pass the joint around as the sun sets behind the city skyline, until I can’t take anymore. Salome and Sampson talk a little, but I’m content to just listen to the sound: the music of two voices that know each other so well they’ve become seamless.

“I’m going to miss you guys,” says Salome. For an instant in her voice I hear the old Salome, the shy, quiet one—the one I thought everyone had missed but me. Then I think: Maybe there is no old Salome. Maybe she never really changed. Maybe it’s us who started seeing her differently. Then I remember we’re all high.

“You won’t miss me that much,” I say with a laugh. “We didn’t really hang out.”

“I always thought we might,” she says. “Anyway, it’s been nice to know you’re there.”

We’re quiet again. “You feel okay?” Sampson says to me.

I nod, but in the dark he can’t see the motion. The lightness rolls in waves. I take a breath and reach my hand out, and as I do I feel his reaching out toward mine.

 

 

I’M YOUR VENUS

In the bad winter of 1994, Minerva awoke at three in the morning during the fourth blizzard and pulled her suitcase out from under my bed. Your bed is what she called it even though we’d been sharing it for six months—longer than Minerva had been with anyone else exclusively. She slept around. Not in a sexual way, but in a let-me-hold-you-while-you-cry sort of way. She was the village witch that tended to the village idiots. Her business card said Minerva Lamplighter: Professional Spooner. Soothsayer. Doomslayer. She’d been in the bed of most every local man between the ages of twenty-five and seventy-five, curled up behind them, saying: “Now, now. There, there. Mommy’s here. Tell your troubles to Mama.” She didn’t like her job. She wanted to be a carpenter. But the Universe had other plans for her. 

“Jesus didn’t want to be a carpenter, and I didn’t want to be Jesus. But here we are. We do what we’re called to do.” 

I admired her for that. Envied her, actually. I was a fifty-two-year-old math teacher at the community college. I drank enough SKYY vodka every night to kill a better man. I ate cold pizza for breakfast, right out of my hands, looking out of my glass front door at the crows. I had gingivitis, gastritis, empty eyes the color of pencil lead. I had a dead wife named Maeve who I’d never even loved, and I was obligated to spend one afternoon a week with her son from a previous marriage doing the sorts of things I assumed stepdads did. Making tough steaks on a grill I had trouble operating. Throwing a football heartlessly back and forth. The kid’s name was Justice and he had dreadlocks. My name was Dave and I had a receding hairline. I’m pretty sure I was the worst thing to ever happen to him. I know I’m the worst thing to ever happen to me.

But anyway, Minerva pulled out the suitcase while the snow was blowing insane outside, like sifted flour through a fan. She found her bikini in a drawer and put it in the suitcase, which was really not a suitcase, but rather a little fireproof safe that most people use to store deeds and wills. 

“A bikini?” I said. “That’s it? That’s all?” 

Minerva twisted the combination on the safe, opened it up and put the bikini inside. The bikini was a flimsy thing, a wad of yellow strings. A plate of spaghetti I’d like to see spilled on her. “Where I’m going, even this’ll be too much,” she said. 

“Where on earth are you going?” I said. “A nudist colony? Ecuador?” 

Minerva shut the safe and tucked it under her arm. “I’m going nowhere on earth,” she said. “I’m going to Venus. The planet.” She kissed me on the forehead like the mother she was. “It’s hot as balls there if you didn’t know. And now I’ve told you, so now you do.”

With Minerva gone, I resorted to my worst and earlier ways. To my original sins. To what I did between Maeve’s funeral and me finding Minerva’s business card under my windshield wiper. I went down to Don’s, the bar, and took the stool at the west end. Don, the eponymous owner, didn’t flinch when I sat down, though it had been 179 days since I was last there. He didn’t even take my order. He just filled up a shot glass with hot SKYY and filled up a beer glass with warm Guinness and slid them both in front of me like Thanksgiving dinner.

“Dave,” he said. 

“Don,” I said. 

When I’d had four of each, I stumbled over to Frenzy’s, the pizza place, where the manager, Nate, was fielding calls from  college kids and townies. He still had his broom-colored ponytail low and loose at the base of his skull, his stained apron, his furrowed brow, the cordless phone tucked under his chin. His hands, veined and coarse from manual labor, from the demands of dough, were the hands of an old man. His hands looked eighty, even though Nate was only twenty-four. I sat at his counter like I’d sat at Don’s, and Nate served me without taking my order as Don had. He slid two slices of Hawaiian under my nose, followed by a plastic container of ranch.

“Dave,” he said.

“Nate,” I said.

Nate, like Minerva, had also answered a vocational call with a fury I could not conjure, could not fathom. While I chewed and swallowed, I watched him work. In life, it seemed, there were dough and doers, there were the needy and the kneady. I fell into the first of both categories. I was soft and helpless. The more I watched Nate work, the more I loved him. The more I watched Nate work, the more I hated myself. I saw me spooning Nate and Minerva spooning me. I saw myself weak and crying between them. The purposeless between the purposeful. Old meat between holy bread.

“My whole life is about circles,” Nate had once said. “Pizzas, pepperonis, onion slices, tomato slices, pepper slices, eggplant slices. Pineapple rings. See this slicer?” He’d pointed to the big stainless-steel machine behind him. “The circle of life. The circler of my life. When it goes, I go.”

I remembered this as Nate got a call for six Italian grinders. I watched him slice circles of salami, circles of pale watery ham, circles of provolone, circles of ruffled iceberg. My heart kept breaking and breaking. I could feel it in Nate’s hands, my sliced heart, with every back-and-forth of the machine. It was all I could do not to sob. What good was a man like me? I asked Nate to wrap the rest of my pizza. I stood and thanked him. He was on the phone. He was hard at work. I tipped him a twenty. He didn’t even notice. That night, I slept fitfully. I dreamed I looked through a telescope and saw a bikini dangling from a crescent moon. I dreamed Nate made Minerva a wooden pizza that she cut with a saw. I dreamed I was sick, over a toilet, and all that came up were circles: red, yellow, green, purple. 

In the morning, I ate the remaining circles off an old leftover grinder in the fridge while I stood and watched the winter crows out my glass front door. They arrived in the white yard like men in black business suits, commuters between trains. They strutted about in the snow like they weren’t expecting anything. Like they could give or take all or nothing. Minerva had once told me that birds liked shiny things. Winter crows especially. That they collected coins and tinsel and foil wrappers and decorated their nests with them. That there was nothing they loved more. I went and found my pants on the bedroom floor. I took some nickels from the pocket. I went outside in my slippers and robe and the crows leapt away—disgusted, not scared—and I scattered the coins on top of the hard snow. Back inside, I waited at the door for the crows to return, but the crows had moved on to whiter pastures. I ate the last three circles from the old grinder. In the bright morning sun, the nickels looked happy. I pretended I had done one good thing with my time.

Minerva was gone for a week. When she returned, she was tan, the color of maple syrup, and she carried a tote bag that said What Happens on Venus, Stays on Venus. 

“I brought you something,” she said. She dug around in the tote bag and pulled out a snow globe. Inside of it were a bunch of tiny women, the color of maple syrup and dressed in yellow bikinis, holding hands in a circle around a volcano. Instead of snow, orange glitter rained down on them. “Venus,” Minerva shook her head in awe. “What a ride, what a ride.”

“What else is in the bag?” I asked.

Minerva held the bag close to her body. “It’s all volcanic, all women. Gals and gas. Sulfur. Well, there’s one guy there, Maxwell Montes. I know. Only one guy? You’re thinking: he must be the king of Venus! But, no. You’re wrong. He’s our toy.”

“A sex slave?” I said. “What’s in the bag?”

“Your word choice is off,” Minerva said. “The cure.” She touched the bag. “That’s what’s in the bag.”

“The cure for what?” I asked.

“For what ails you.”

Minerva was only home for five days. In that time, she held me ten times and I cried eight of them. She praised me for my progress. She shook out the bed linens. She burned sage. She made her mushroom teas. She lined up her seven rainbow glasses on the windowsill and let the sunlight make chakra water. She made me gargle the water. The indigo nearly killed me. Minerva made me hold quartz crystals and talk about Maeve and math, two things I felt nothing for. At meals, she stirred my soup counterclockwise and her soup clockwise. She put her hands above my head and clapped. I just watched her, admired her, hated her. Her glossy coal mane, her decisive face, the ease she oozed. 

“It’s the midlife,” she said. “It’s got you bad.”

“How do I get rid of it?” I asked. I was desperate.

“Try or die,” Minerva said. “Try or die,” she repeated.

I hated her because she was right. I hated her because she knew she was right. I hated her because I hated myself. I hated myself because I hated her. How did she even get to Venus? Amtrak? LSD? Teleportation? I wanted to know, but I couldn’t muster the energy to ask. It’s not like I was allowed there anyway.

      

When the snow returned, the safe came back out from under the bed, my bed, and the bikini went inside of it and Minerva went off a second time. I looked everywhere for the tote bag while she was gone. I hadn’t seen her leave with it, but I couldn’t find it. Maybe she’d put it in the safe. Maybe I’d imagined it. I missed her terribly. I didn’t know what to do with myself when she was gone. I didn’t know what to do with myself when she was here, either, but when she was here, she was at least trying to fix me.

Every afternoon of Minerva’s absence, I went down to Don’s, and every night, I closed out the day at Frenzy’s. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays I taught Finite Math at the community college. The kids watched me teach with the enthusiasm of the dead. I taught them nothing they’d ever use. They knew it and I knew it. It was like singing a lullaby to rocks. On Tuesdays, Justice came by for his overcooked steak and baked potato. It had grown too cold for football, so after dinner, I’d make him listen to Exile on Main Street. One night, before he left, I rummaged through a dresser drawer and pulled out an old Penthouse and handed it to him. He held up his hands and took two steps backward, refusing to touch it, but I went on and opened up the magazine and let the centerfold unfold. I figured a stepdad had to do what a stepdad had to do, but Justice closed his eyes and shook his head and left. On that particular night, I went down to Don’s and had five vodkas and five beers, and on that particular night, instead of eating anything at Frenzy’s, I sat in the parking lot, in an empty, unlocked car that I was pretty sure was Nate’s, and I waited for him to finish his work. I went in and out of consciousness, in and out of sleep. At some point, Nate got into the car and I scared him. Not on purpose, just my presence.

“Man,” Nate said. “You scared me.”

“Show me where you live,” I said. “Show me how you live.”

“What?” Nate asked. “Show you how to live?”

“That too,” I said. “Where you live and how you live and how to live.”

Nate said okay. I could tell: he was a worker in every way. Not just at Frenzy’s. He was assignment-oriented. A tasker. He did what was asked of him. He didn’t strike me as particularly smart, just industrious. I could tell he would have liked Finite Math. He would have made me feel like I was contributing something to society. I saw his face in my classroom. I saw his face in the glow of the moon. He started the car.

“You could have frozen to death out here,” he said.

“Have you ever been to Venus?” I asked.

“What’s Venus?” he said. “A restaurant?”

“It’s a planet,” I said.

“Oh,” he said. “Then no.”

Nate’s car wasn’t much. It was some old two-door that rattled and whistled in the cold night.

“There’s a hole in my floorboard,” he said. “Down by your feet.”

I looked down, but I couldn’t see anything. I couldn’t feel anything. I couldn’t speak.

“Sorry,” Nate said.

His house was a little red rental. It had a purple porch light. Nate helped me out of the car. He showed me his kitchenette, his leather couch, his glass bong, his girlfriend. Her name was Nicole, and she had on a tank top. She had large breasts with wings tattooed on them. There was some makeup smudged under her eyes. Her face was scared.

“He doesn’t look good,” she said to Nate. “You need to call an ambulance.”

Nate shook his head. “We can do it,” he said to her. “You and me.”

They put a comforter on the leather couch. They put me on the comforter on my side. They put a blanket on me and then Nate climbed behind me and spooned me. Nicole laid on top of both of us.

“This’ll thaw him,” Nate said.

I felt myself thaw. I felt Nicole’s breasts and Nate’s breath. “What good is a man like me?” I whispered. “What good am I in the world?”

“He needs something to eat,” Nicole said to Nate.

“Where am I on the circle?” I said. “The circle of life. Where on it am I?”

“I’ll heat up some slices,” Nate said to Nicole.

I didn’t want him to leave me.

“I’ll do it,” Nicole said.

I didn’t want her to leave either.

“Tell me I’m either at the very beginning of the circle,” I said, “or the very end.” Nate and Nicole both sat up. They tucked the blanket around me. “I either need more time or no more time.”

Then I was quiet. They were quiet. They left me. I heard them in the kitchen. I heard a timer ding, and I smelled pizza getting warm. I was getting warm. I fell asleep. I opened my eyes at one point and saw Nicole take off her tank top. Her nipples were as brown as maple syrup. She walked out of the room. At another point, I heard the sounds of sex, but I couldn’t open my eyes no matter how hard I tried. In the morning, I heard another timer ding. I saw Nate walk by the couch. He was naked. His uncircumcised penis flopped as he walked, like a wet sock between his legs. He made life look easy. He moved about with more than confidence, he moved about with relevance. When I woke up a final time, Nate and Nicole were gone. I folded the comforter and the blanket and sat for a while with my face in my hands. When I quit doing that, I found a note and a set of keys on the dining table. Nate had left his car for me to drive to my house, but I was too embarrassed to see him again for a while. I’d have to get drunk all over again to face him when he picked his car up. So, I went outside and walked around the little red rental to think. In the snow under Nate’s bedroom window were four used condoms. Red, yellow, green, purple. Circles unfolding. I wondered if they were all from one night. When was the last time it snowed? I was equally amazed and depressed.

I decided to hitchhike without using my thumb. I walked along the main road until a man in a truck slowed down and gave me a ride. He didn’t talk and I didn’t talk, and it was starting to feel like one kind thing after another. When I got home, I shook the snow globe until all the women detached from the bottom and floated to the top. I was trying to get Minerva back home.

Minerva eventually came home on her own time. This time, she was as tan as French roast and smelled of sulfur. Like old eggs with fresh insides.

“I’m hot enough to melt lead,” she said. Out of her tote bag, she brought out a souvenir spoon, an iron-on Aphrodite patch, and a T-shirt that said My Girlfriend Went to Venus and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt. 

“What about the cure?” I said. “For what ails me?”

Minerva held her tote close to her body. “There’s only so much to go around,” she said. “There are men much worse off than you, David.”

I was incredulous. “You can’t be serious,” I said. “Don’t you know me? Can’t you see how bad off I am?”

Minerva was unmoved. “What I see,” she said, “is how unbecoming all of this is.”

I didn’t know what to say. I looked at the souvenirs on the kitchen counter. I tried to find the words, but only a single word came to mind: frenzy.

Minerva sighed a loud sigh. Her breath filled the kitchen with a tangerine haze. “I’m retiring,” she said. “I’m done doing what I was asked to do. I’m moving to Venus for good. I’m going to be a carpenter there. Build some decks, some boardwalks by the volcanic fields. Like in Yellowstone. You should go to Yellowstone. Walk on the boardwalks. Get close to the earth’s crust. Try or die, Dave. I just came back to get my things.”

I hung my head. “It’s that Maxwell guy, isn’t it?” I asked.

Minerva went over to her little safe on the counter and turned the combination dial. “Of course, you think it’s a man. Because you’re a man. A man can’t possibly imagine what a woman would do without one.” Minerva opened the safe and took out her bikini and tossed it to the floor. Then she brought out a little vial and unscrewed its top and picked up the souvenir spoon and filled it with a circle of green liquid. “Open wide,” she said to me. “Down the hatch.”

I did as directed. It tasted like eggs. Bad ones. I winced, resisted the urge to gag.

“When you get the call,” Minerva said. “Pick up.” She put the bikini and the vial back into the safe. She started going around the kitchen, collecting her things. It was ending. It was over. I never see anything coming until it’s already been gone a while. “When you’re called, you’re called. You can pretend you don’t hear it, but that’s what makes you miserable. The denial. The feigned deafness.”

Minerva packed her rainbow glasses and her dried mushrooms. She went through my drawers and gathered her scarves and finger cymbals and soap flakes. I couldn’t bear to watch her leave, so I left first. I went down to Don’s and sat on my stool, and he served me without me having to tell him how to serve me. I sat there with my warm drinks and waited. I waited for the cure to cure me. I waited to feel better. But instead, the snow picked up outside and it went past the window like Minerva’s soap flakes. A television played a silent hockey game. It was all so sad. I was almost too sad to drink. And then there was Don, in front of me, with the bar telephone, holding out the old dough-colored receiver like a hand extended to a drowning man.

“It’s for you,” he said, and I put my ear to the phone, but he didn’t even have to ask. I knew it was Nate and I knew he needed me to return the favor, all the favors. I knew he was calling for me and only me, and I just said, “Wait. Wait right there. I’m on my way.”

I got up from the stool and ran down to Frenzy’s, and the run and the snow felt good, exhilarating. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d run. When I got to Frenzy’s, there was Nate, standing on the deck of the pizza place, holding the big stainless-steel slicer like he was holding a wounded woman. For a flash, I saw Nicole, draped in his arms like she needed a ride to the hospital, but then I blinked and it was the slicer. Nate’s other love. His maker of circles.

“It’s in pieces,” he said in a voice I’d never heard him use. Was he about to cry? “You have to hold it together while I drive. Hold it together, man. Hold it together.”

I reached out for the slicer, and he transferred it to me, and I nearly fell from its weight. Nate went to his car and opened the passenger door and slid the passenger seat all the way back, and I staggered over with the slicer and got in and Nate shut the door. Then we were off, speeding down I-90 in the black night with the snowflakes whizzing by like stars, and I was in space—we were in outer space.

Nate said nothing, but I could tell he was grateful. He drove faster and faster. Past Ilion and Utica, past Rome and Verona. I was ancient. I was relevant. We went speeding down the highway with the silver slicer, with the wind blowing up through the floorboard, and joy washed over me like lava. When the slicer was fixed, I’d let the joy melt me down. I’d let the circular blade of the slicer slice me up, into molten circles, into shiny coins. Nate would drive, and I’d spill out into the night, or the morning, whenever it was, from the floor of the car and out onto the white snow. The birds would have me. They wouldn’t be able to resist. They’d pick me up, all my pieces, and take me back to their nests. I would be lain on forever. Cherished.

YOU ARE NOT MY MOTHER, MISSY GALLAGHER

“Baby in a glue trap,” says Sam, the oldest, as he steps out the kitchen door, down the back steps and onto the driveway.

He doesn’t close the door behind him so the autumn evening chill blows in. It’s soccer season, fifth among Sarah’s most despised seasons. (The first, hands down, is Halloween. Ice Hockey is number two. There are others.)

Sarah looks up from the sink filled with sippy cups and suds and, out the kitchen window, watches Sam step into the waiting minivan of Amelia, pretty Amelia. Sarah likes her smile and the way she rocks back on the sidelines, steaming chai tea in her travel mug, as the soccer players soccer around the field. Sarah feels good around Amelia. Around Amelia, she does not feel judged or lesser than.

Sarah turns off the faucet and watches Amelia’s minivan disappear down the street with Sam in it. She does feel it all disappearing some days. She was an English major at Vassar, and she still gets the poetry feeling, that tickling, airy sensation in the pit of her stomach and on the tender spots of her skin.

Stepping toward the open door, she finally registers what Sam has just said.

Baby in a glue trap.

Recently there has been an invasion of chipmunks. Sometimes they are outside. Sometimes they are inside. Derek is generally the one who takes care of such things, but Sarah is not squeamish. She will shoo them out with a broom. She will dispose of the terrified critter frozen in place, paws gnawed but unbreakably locked on the pad of glue. 

The babies. There are two. Twins, eight months old. Jack and Ben after their great-grandfathers. (With five children, Sarah and Derek have run out of the obvious namesakes.) Rebecca, the twelve-year-old, is on baby duty as part of her allowance. She treats her work as seriously as a lifeguard, meaning seriously, but also not seriously enough.

“Rebecca!” Walking out of the kitchen, Sarah grabs a dingy dishrag from the counter and dries her hands. She doesn’t panic. There’s nothing to panic about. Five kids, a house like a collection of aged wood and kindling, a financial landscape bleak as a Cleveland February—these things have taught her the limited utility of panic. She will later tell Derek that she knew immediately what she’d find under the family room’s side table, which on its surface is true, but how could she really understand what was coming?

The family room has been converted into a toppled warehouse of choking hazards, the hard angles of toys and game pieces covering the ground like the opposite of twigs and leaves. Sarah steps in and scans. “Jesus, Rebecca! You can’t leave all of these toys out! The boys will chew on these things. You know that! Where are you?”

Rebecca appears at the top of the steps, wearing her pajamas. Of all of life’s pleasures, Rebecca likes sleep the most and so changes into her sleeping clothes as soon as she gets home from school. “Calm down, Mom. I was in the bathroom.”

“The babies. Where are the babies?”

“I left for, like, four seconds. They were playing.”

Stevie, the third of the five, wanders in from the kitchen. He’s been outside, collecting rocks it appears. He is eight, and he cradles a pile of what appears to be dead chipmunks before Sarah realizes it’s actually a collection of muddy stones. She also sees that, like his older brother, he has not closed the door behind him. October cold mixes with the room’s stale air. 

“Jesus, Stevie. You know you can’t bring the outside in. Outside things stay—” Her breath catches because she sees a flash of flesh on the floor. Two flashes really. She bends down and peers under the side table where she finds the kicking feet of an otherwise still and content baby.

       

At Vassar, Sarah once gave thought to sleeping with her Art History professor, a rugged man named Arthur Simmons who was covered in fur rather than hair, fur that his rolled-up sleeves and V-neck undershirts exposed casually and exotically. She felt herself soften whenever he was near and would lose herself during his lectures on the Renaissance as she pictured their affair and then their marriage and then their life on the bluffs of Tuscany, a braless, workless life filled with grapes and sun and oil paint and wild fights and then the fucking on countertops and beneath marble statues, beautiful marble people frozen in time, their hands cupping crowns and oranges.

She never did much more than imagine this life, though. She did well in the course, earning an A- on the final exam.

       

Sarah pulls on the baby’s foot and slides him from under the side table. He wears a white onesie with the ghost stain of pureed peas. He also wears a moderately full diaper. It is Ben, the more adventurous of the twins. He is generally a happy baby with a rolling laugh. At this moment, though, his face is serious and perplexed because one of his wrists is stuck to a tray of glue. It is a rectangle roughly the size of an ice cube tray. It covers Ben’s arm from the bend of his wrist to the bend of his elbow.

“For fuck’s sake.” Sarah exhales, sliding her hands into Ben’s armpits. “How did you even get to this thing? We hide them so you can’t reach them!” The baby doesn’t respond. “You guys, find Jack now!” She is not panicking. She bites the inside of her cheek to push it all back, and suddenly she feels calm. A baby in a glue trap. Who hasn’t had one of those?

It is Stevie who finds the other baby underneath the curtains and on his back, gnawing on a wooden block. 

“Got him!” Stevie shouts. He deposits his armload of wet rocks on the couch before picking up his brother. She does not react. What is there to react to?

“To the bathroom!” she commands. “Now! Everyone! Don’t stop.”

Rebecca steps toward her. “Is he okay? It wasn’t my fault.” For an instant, Sarah sees a woman in her daughter’s face, the lines on her forehead, the defensive flare of her nostrils. Some days, Sarah wants that, wants them all to be older so that she can breathe again, but she stops herself. She’s heard too many women at grocery stores and in line at the pharmacy gush over her five kids. She hears in these women’s voices the bare landscape of childlessness, and, though the political implication slays her in some ways, in other ways she understands their mourning. She understands it intimately. 

Still, now, with a baby in a glue trap, and three others trailing her up the stairs, she wonders what it will feel like when they are all gone, gone, gone. What kind of couch will she own? What kind of silence will greet her in the evenings as she waits for Derek to return home?

       

The adhesive in the most popular and affordable glue traps is derived from mineral oils, resins, and synthetic rubber. The major pest control conglomerates then lace this substance with rodent-attracting flavors to lure rats, mice, and chipmunks. In college Sarah would have found these traps cruel and indiscriminate and, likely, would have seen them as an elaborate metaphor about men or capitalism or her relationship with her own mother or even God —but now, there is no metaphor here, only the industry’s most effective viscous adherent, the color of semen, the consistency of deeply chewed gum. 

“Goddamn it,” she mutters. She holds Ben by his armpits with both her arms fully extended like she would hold a cat she’d found on her front porch. She hates cats. She hates how her culture has told her that she must find them adorable companions. “Fuck that,” she told her college roommate Missy. “I fucking hate cats.”

Sarah does not hate Ben, of course, but she does hate Missy, or at least her voice. Sometimes she mistakes it for her own—or maybe vice versa. She cannot tell.

She also hates being the one who must clean everything up. Derek is gone but not absent, which, she’s come to think, makes it even harder because she has no foil, no enemy. He loves her and the kids. He sacrifices for them all. Without a hint of complaint or exhaustion, he cleans the house every Saturday. He is a generous lover, sometimes going down on her in the morning before she’s showered and not even expecting anything in return. “I got the feeling you needed that,” he says to her as he slides back up, her fingers still clutching his scalp. Sarah does not hate Derek or the children. But she hates this. She has begun to worry that she hates herself too.

She’s made it up the stairs and stands in front of the open bathroom door. She gazes upon the foul and filthy closet-sized room where her children purportedly clean themselves. “Everybody in,” she commands. “Rebecca, go get my cell phone first. It’s in the bedroom.”

Rebecca does as she’s told. Sarah can see that Rebecca has absorbed the significance of this moment perhaps more than she herself has. She feels it rising now and so sucks in a quick breath and steps into the bathroom with Stevie following, the other baby, Jack, sideways in his arms like a load of firewood. 

       

According to the poison control hotline, there are no specific treatments for a baby in a glue trap. The man who picks up is remarkably nonplussed. “No problem, Ma’am,” he says. “Let me look up what we know. You just stay calm. We’ll get through this together.”

Sarah nods. Ben is in her lap. The plastic tray pokes her stomach, which is not a firm stomach, but it’s not a bag of uncooked dough either. Around her are the other kids. Rebecca has Jack now. Stevie sits Indian style—Criss-Cross-Apple-Sauce, she corrects herself—in the corner, tracing his finger in the grout surrounding the floor’s square tiles. He is lost in his imagination, and the others are calm, which makes Sarah release a sound she hasn’t heard herself make before. Maybe it’s okay, she thinks. Why am I okay?

The fluty music on the other end of the phone stops. “Well, Ma’am, it looks like these guys keep their trade secrets to themselves. That’s okay, though. We looked up what we know, and we’re going to treat this like we’d treat any other adhesive situation.” He pauses. “How’s the kid doing?”

Sarah realizes that she needs to call Derek. First, though, this man needs to finish. “He’s fine,” Sarah says. “Now what do I do?”

“Run a warm bath with gentle soap, perhaps a dish soap without perfumes and whatnot. Let it soak. And then it looks like you can use some vegetable oil, like a canola oil or perhaps a corn oil, and slather the kid up. Go slowly, Ma’am. Don’t start pulling too hard. Eventually, it should release.”

“Release?”

“You’ll have to pull a bit of course. But slowly, Ma’am. You can always take the child to the emergency room as well.”

Her body emits a groan. She knows this is true, but she can’t envision it. Not yet. A baby in a glue trap. It just confirms too much.

“Thank you,” she says and hangs up. She realizes that the bathroom is silent, which she appreciates. She really does have wonderful children. She holds her breath for a moment, just a moment, then leans back and reaches for the faucet on the bathtub. The lunge makes her lose her balance slightly. Beneath her, Ben instinctively clutches her as the room fills with the sound of flowing water.

       

When they were babies and before the twins arrived, Sarah used to place the three oldest kids in the tub at the same time: Sam, Rebecca, and Stevie. Downstairs in the basement are photo albums with picture after picture of kids in the bath, three kids with gleaming, goofy smiles and bodies covered with suds. Once they were scrubbed and shampooed, Sarah would sit with her back against the wall and let them play, a mug of Chardonnay at her side. Almost always, she would imagine them older, but sometimes she would also imagine all of it catching up to her, and so they were sick or hurt, arms in a sling, heads shaved, IV drips worming into the veins on the top of their hands. More than once Derek walked into the bathroom, arms filled with towels to help with the drying, only to find Sarah seated on the floor, red-nosed and quietly crying with her three giggling children in front of her.

Now, there is only one kid in the tub, Ben, and he bangs the water with his arm’s new appendage. He is not panicking. He seems curious about his arm, though. He stares at it intensely while he splashes. 

“Can I go to my room?” 

Sarah swivels toward Stevie. “No,” she says. “No one leaves the bathroom until this is over.”

“How long will that be?” His voice pinches, and his eyes narrow.

“I don’t know. This is all new to me.”

“But I’m bored.”

“Listen,” Sarah snaps. “Your brother is having a much worse day than you, and he’s making it work.”

“He’s a baby. He doesn’t know anything.”

The first thought that comes to her is Well, who does? But she bites down on it. She doesn’t like to use sarcasm with her kids. “Well, he knows he shouldn’t have a third arm.”

“When do we do the oil?” Rebecca asks. She’s the one who had zipped downstairs and found the dish soap from the kitchen counter and pulled the family-sized jug of vegetable oil from the bottom of the pantry. Sarah sometimes jokes to her friends that her daughter has the middle-child compliance that will make her a valued sorority sister and a thirty-five-year-old divorcée. Now, though, Rebecca’s constitution is perfect. It’s ideal. It’s exactly what is needed.

“Oh no!” That’s Stevie who no longer sounds bored. He’s pointing at the bathtub. “He pooped!”

“For fuck’s sake!” 

In one practiced swoop, Sarah plucks Ben out of the tub and holds him in front of her like a child sacrifice. “Towel!” she shouts, and Rebecca stands up immediately and pulls a damp towel from the hook on the back of the door. Before she swaddles her son, she checks to make sure he is done relieving himself, which he isn’t. Sarah feels a surge of adrenaline and exhaustion, and the smell begins to bloom just as Ben, shivering and naked, begins to wail. 

       

Sarah took Biology in high school, so she knows that the skin is the human body’s largest organ. She remembers Mr. Hoffman making the class stand in a circle to demonstrate how much space the epidermis would fill: twenty square feet. Sarah thought it was nonsensical and misleading on Mr. Hoffman’s part to stand in a circle rather than a square, which is why more than two decades later, she can remember this detail and relay it to Stevie, who is now riveted by the action in the bathroom. 

Ben’s cries fill the air, but Stevie doesn’t seem to notice. He is instead fascinated with how the tray of the glue trap pulls on Ben’s skin as Sarah tests whether it seems looser after the bath. It does, in fact, seem like it’s getting looser, but not much.

Sarah shouts the facts about the human skin just so Stevie can hear over the baby’s cries. The shouting also distracts him from looking back at the floater in the tub. She knows he wants to get on his knees and stare at it, and that repulses her, not because she’s squeamish—she has five children—but because it suddenly seems to mean something, to say something about her as a mother, which is absurd, she tells herself in the moment, but still.

“So your skin is like a heart?” Stevie asks, his eyes wide. The whole world is like this for Stevie. 

Rebecca cups Sarah’s elbow. “Mom, what are we going to do?” 

“Let’s try the oil.” Sarah’s mouth is dry. She’s beginning to panic.

“Should we call Daddy?”

Sarah shakes her head more vigorously than what’s called for, but the reaction is instinctive and total. She’s realized that she does not want to call her husband after all. Not yet. Rebecca does not protest. Instead she sets Jack on the ground and grabs the jug of oil. She twists the lid off and looks up at Sarah with doubtful eyes.

       

Sarah buys staples like vegetable oil at Costco, but she doesn’t talk about it like some of the other middle-aged people she knows. She doesn’t share information about the size and quality of their salmon fillets or reveal the secret that March is the best time to buy their home electronics or go on and on about the speed of their oil changes and tire rotations. All of that talk turns her stomach. It makes her feel lost. It makes her feel dead.

That said, she does appreciate the liberation of buying in bulk because, within an hour or two, she’s able to complete the transactions that seem to occupy other people’s whole lives. 

Sarah can’t remember when she bought the two-and-a-half gallon jug of vegetable oil or how much she spent on it, but in this moment it settles her because the plastic bottle is so large that it doesn’t seem possible for it to ever run empty. Ben squirms in her lap and continues to wail. His face is swollen now with tears and snot. She tries to soothe him while Rebecca does the same for baby Jack, who has begun to whimper too. “It’s okay, bunny gooses,” Rebecca says. “It’s okay.”

Sarah also can’t remember when she invented the phrase “bunny goose” to express affection for her children, but it’s stuck.

The vegetable oil comes out faster than Sarah expects and spills down Ben’s arm and onto her jeans and then the tile floor. Ben begins to shake his arm wildly, spraying oil across Sarah’s face. “Jesus,” she blurts and then grabs the baby’s arm to stop him. She squeezes. From the look on his face, she may be squeezing too hard.

It takes a few seconds of soothing, but eventually Ben calms down enough to let Sarah test the trap again. She pulls lightly, lifting the skin of his forearm with it, like lifting a shoe that’s just stepped in a wad of gum. But then she senses just the slightest release. Ben yelps then cries. 

“You’re hurting him!” shouts Rebecca. 

“It’s okay,” she says and stops with the pulling. She lifts the oil jug again. “Scissors. I need scissors.”

“For what?” Rebecca sounds alarmed and full of judgment.

“Just get me the goddamned scissors, okay?”

Sarah is crushed when she sees what her voice has done to her daughter. She feels the urge to apologize, but before she can, Rebecca has done what she’s been told. She is up and out the door, and all Sarah can think about is what Daisy Buchanan said about her daughter in The Great Gatsby. She can’t remember the precise words but it was something about hoping her baby girl grows up to be a fool just like her.

       

At Vassar, Missy Gallagher was Sarah’s freshman year roommate. She was from Dallas and had the flaxen hair of a miniature horse that, as a child, Sarah once rode and fell in love with at a pumpkin-picking farm. Missy Gallagher said things like: “Oh, Sar! I love that blouse! Can I help you iron it?” and “Your mother is just adorable. I just can’t see why you’re so angry with her.” She was a round, often unpretty cloud of doubt and judgment that followed Sarah around her freshman year and then disappeared as if she were a cloud made not of water and air but of birds, a flock of starlings darting through the sky in one dark mass and then, suddenly, breaking apart in a million black dots.

Missy Gallagher disappeared from Sarah’s life just like that in May of 1990, but her voice had somehow remained. For the last twenty-five years, Missy Gallagher has whispered into Sarah’s ear more than even Sarah allows herself to consider. 

Here in the bathroom, Missy Gallagher says, “Sarah, you’re being stubborn! There’s no shame in admitting you’re a fraud and a bitch.” Sarah shakes her head and then lifts the trap so that Ben’s screams fill the room and the strands of glue pull off his skin enough that Sarah can begin to snip the thin strings with the scissors.

“It’s okay,” Sarah soothes fruitlessly. “It’s okay.” Jack is on fire now too, his face narrowed into a soggy fist, and Sarah knows without looking up that Rebecca is watery and anxious as well. They’re in a moment now that they will all remember, she knows. It makes her nauseated, but she has no choice. She lifts harder, exposing a jungle of glue vines. She snips and then snips again.

       

Missy Gallagher has an opinion about Sarah’s choices, but thankfully Sarah can’t really hear it because the room is a jet engine of noise and echoes. Even Stevie has joined in. “Momma, you’re hurting him!” 

It’s almost done when the lights flick off and on, off and on, and Sarah turns to see Derek and Sam, standing sweaty in the doorway, their faces shocked and curious.

“Someone shit in the bathtub!” Sam says. He’s recently started swearing. He’s fourteen. Other things will soon change too, Sarah knows.

“Jesus, Sarah, what happened?” Derek’s face slides into disbelief. “Why are you covered with oil?” 

She is crying herself now, and she closes her eyes for a long time. The room quiets. When she opens them again, Derek is ushering the parade of her family out of the bathroom until all the noise in the room belongs to the boy in her arms and her own pounding heart.

She looks back down, and Ben’s arm is almost entirely exposed now, a red, pulsing landscape of hurt. She lifts the tray and cuts the final strings.

The Robert Watson Literary Prize Story WHAT CONSUMES YOU

Mornings, Saba prepares two eggs. She fries them in olive oil that heats her stale apartment with a mineral scent. When the yolks have just set, she slides the eggs from the pan to a plate and with a knife wielded like an X-Acto blade, separates the crispy-edged whites from the mounded yolks. Those she spreads on toast like butter and eats first. The whites, thin and fringed as doilies, she picks up with her fingers and deposits into her mouth whole.

In the afternoons, she eats nothing but drinks nearly one hundred ounces of water, glass after glass after glass.

In the evenings, she feasts.

 

She made her first video without watching any others. Hers are different in their selection of food. Whereas other popular accounts layer food types—chips, gooey carbonara, fried pickles, cheeseburgers, buns and all—Saba’s focus on individual dishes. In her first video, “PIZZA,” she methodically consumes seven boxes of cheese pizza, the stack of unopened boxes on her right dwindling, then regenerating as a pile of empty, conquered boxes on her left. She eats one slice at a time, sips water between bites, and never slurps, smacks, or speaks. Nearly a million viewers have devoured it.

She has, to date, posted “PIZZA,” “VALENCIA ORANGES,” “DIM SUM,” “OYSTERS,” and “BUTTERED POPCORN.” The latest, “CACIO E PEPE,” is her most popular, and the one that results in the phone call from the museum director.

 

The following Monday, Saba takes the train from her apartment to the Guggenheim. She sees the great spiraling edifice rising against the sky like a wedding cake and makes a note for a new video idea. Inside the museum, she wants to climb to the top of the corkscrew but the director’s office is on the first floor, left of the ticketing desk. The leather chairs facing the gleaming oak desk are plush, but the office is small, with a window facing a too-close brick wall, and Saba feels as if she’s inside a dollhouse.

“I understand that in South Korea, millions watch these videos live,” the director says. He looks to Saba, who only blinks; she doesn’t watch the other videos or read about their cult followings. This man certainly knows more than she does.

The director continues: “There’s a sense of community inherent in the videos, in these channels, that we want to capture at the Guggenheim. To my knowledge, no one has performed a, it’s called a mukbang, correct? Yes, a mukbang, no one’s performed one live. We’d like you to be the first, here at the museum.”

“What might that look like?” Saba imagines the faces staring up at her, her roiling, rumbling stomach, easily edited out at home, betraying her in public. She imagines her garlicky sweat, the audience’s own smells distorting her own sense of the food in front of her.

“We would leave that up to you. You would work closely with our performance curator, Helen, but we’d be taking direction from you.”

“How soon?”

He smiles as he understands he’s passed some test. “One month, if that’s enough time.”

The man is glowing, his cheeks dewy and plump above his beard like two ripened plums, so Saba agrees, then excuses herself to prepare.

 

Saba’s mother fed her children the same thing every day: steel-cut oats with thinly sliced bananas for breakfast, three slices of turkey breast on an open-faced cut of sourdough bread spread with spicy brown mustard for lunch, and butter chicken over jasmine rice with a side of steamed vegetable, whatever was on sale, for dinner. After a while, everything tasted the same to Saba. Her younger sister, Adiva, cried for chicken fingers and macaroni and cheese, the food of their friends, but Saba accepted the lack of flavor and excitement. If her mother said life was so, it was so.

It wasn’t until Saba moved to Manhattan for college that she discovered the way a grapefruit explodes on the tongue, or the layers of flavor inside an empanada. Walking through the farmers’ market in Union Square, the smells alone overwhelmed her. Other students picked at their cafeteria food, complaining of gluey lasagna and chewy chicken piccata, but Saba couldn’t understand. Food tasted of something here! Even the melted square of cheese atop her lasagna melded mozzarella with pecorino and parmesan. It was unbelievable to her that people ate like this enough to find the flavors blasé. She ate and ate and ate, and when she returned home for winter break, her mother pinched her sides and scolded Saba for her lack of control. She realized, then, that her mother knew of this other world and kept it from her children on purpose. Bitterness grew in Saba’s gut like a seed, then a stone.

When the stone became a statue, tall and pointed as the obelisk in Central Park, Saba stopped returning home on holidays.

 

There are anywhere from zero to nine seeds per Valencia orange, which Saba spits into a small blue bowl set out for this exact purpose. She picks at the peel with her fingernail, a collection of zest building beneath the unmanicured margin. Most of the oranges she undresses in a single move, the skin curling onto the table like a ribbon. She lines up the segments in front of her, removing the thick, stringy pith and depositing it among the discarded rinds. Once the entire fruit has been dismantled, she eats the segments one at a time. There’s no music, no background ambient noise; it’s so quiet that when she bites into an especially juicy piece, you can hear the skin pop. The video is thirty-seven minutes long, and she eats twenty-one oranges. When she’s finished, Saba smiles at the camera, stripped rinds piled before her, and her teeth seem to vibrate with sugar.

 

Her channel’s subscribers double in number the following week when the Guggenheim announces the performance. Saba is alone in her apartment and she silences, then turns off her phone to avoid the constant calls and notifications. When she turns it back on that night, she has over 8,000 social media notifications and forty-four missed calls. One of them, she sees, was her sister. This call she returns.

“Saba, this is insane.” She can hear the excitement in her sister’s whisper, voice kept low so as not to wake her husband and two-year-old boy, Jazzy. “People have been calling the house, asking about you. Reporters!”

“Mmm.” Saba examines her toenails, points her feet. Something in her arch twinges and she rubs it.

“What’s wrong? Aren’t you excited?”

“Yes, yes, of course.”

“Mama knows,” Adiva says.

“So?”

“Oh, Saba.” In the background, she hears her nephew stir, mewling softly as Adiva soothes him. Saba closes her eyes and lifts the covers of her bed to slip beneath.

“It doesn’t matter,” she says.

“She’s worried. I showed her your videos. She can’t believe this is healthy.”

“Adiva, it’s late. You should get back to your family.” When she doesn’t say anything, Saba adds, “Thank you, for trying. So I don’t have to.”

“We love you, you know. We both do.”

“Sure. Yes. I know.”

Her sister sighs and Saba can picture her sitting up in bed, phone tucked between her ear and shoulder, one hand rubbing her son’s back, the other worrying her own earlobe, a nervous tic she never outgrew.

It’s not until they hang up that Saba realizes she’s been clenching her jaw the whole time, creating an ache that climbs up her temple that she can’t rub away.

 

Two eggs, toast, and today, a tea, milky in its mug. One month to prepare. Saba feels the days tighten across her temples like a vise. With the advance from the Guggenheim, she quit her job at the remote answering service, so there’s no longer the demands of answering calls in her apartment, pretending to be at the defense lawyer’s office in Kansas City, or sitting beside a fish tank like a giant jewelry box at the national dental chain’s Tampa location. There is only the food left to consider. Helen, the museum’s performance curator, has given her carte blanche in that regard. The museum has certain requests about lighting, necessities for videotaping, certain patterns and colors Saba mustn’t wear. But as for the food, that is entirely up to her.

She spends the day walking the city for inspiration, letting smells guide her down this street or that. In Chinatown she stops at her favorite dumpling spot, but she’s done something similar with the dim sum video. There’s the rice pudding place on Spring Street, where she samples Oreogasm, I Gotta the Panna Cotta, and Sex, Drugs, and Rocky Road. Too thick, she decides; the sticky rice coats her throat. Fresh buffalo mozzarella, eaten standing in front of the cheese counter after waiting in an hour-long line, seems like a real possibility for a time, but as she outlines the performance in her notebook on the train back from Brooklyn, it’s too boring, too white, like the museum building itself. For a similar reason she dismisses her original wedding cake idea, inspired by the Guggenheim’s famous architecture—too on-the-nose.

Tired, feet and stomach aching after a whole day exploring, she returns home idealess.

 

It took Saba three weeks to amass enough steamer baskets for the dim sum; the restaurant preparing the food stipulated that she supply her own for such a large order. She wanted something authentic; an Amazon order wouldn’t do. She considered ordering the tea from the restaurant as well, but decided to make it on her own. It’s the only video featuring something other than the starring item, but tea is technically food, she reasoned. She practiced with her chopsticks, to make sure she was fluent before the big meal. It’s not easy with the broth-filled ones.

In the video, each steamer basket contains a different dish—a mix of dumplings and buns. There’s har gua, cha siu bao, xiao long bao, wu gok. Her favorite part is cutting each open, so soft they split beneath the gentle pressure of a spoon. She loves the steam, its heat on her cheeks as she bends over to breathe everything in. She loves the smells, earthy and tangy, though she knows each bite will contain a heart of sweetness.

Commenters note that if you look closely, pausing the video at 26:34, you might catch the small, closed-lipped smile Saba allows herself when she’s halfway through the meal. She doesn’t look up at the video, only smiles into the full steamer basket before her. In all her previous videos, there are no facial expressions. Fans speculate as to what it might mean, what she’s thinking, who she’s thinking of.

They can’t know, though, the memory unfurling in her mind; the hole in the wall, its warmth pushing out of the plastic-tarp false front protecting the front door from the harsh winter. Tables so close together her coat brushed the other patrons as she made her way to the table in the middle of the restaurant. The menu wedged under her left leg, the red tablecloths, the water beading off the sides of her glass. Her face, sweating. Her sister’s, swollen with the final days of pregnancy. The food, the most delicious and spiciest she’d eaten yet. The harried waiter, bringing more, more, more, as she and Adiva ate and ate, and baby Jazzy, five days overdue, kicked and kicked, but did not budge.

The walk home, first snow falling, feeling like relief against her hot, flushed face, and the call six hours later as her brother-in-law tried to hail a cab in the middle of the night in the midst of the unexpected snowstorm, her sister’s voice in the background, laughter in between moans.

 

Saba will name the performance after the food, like all the others, but the Guggenheim’s official marketing campaign for the show is What Consumes You. She begins to see it everywhere. A promotional poster tacked onto the back of a bus stop bench. A billboard rising over Houston Street. A flash as a cab whizzes by. Soon, she can’t look up and down an avenue without seeing the thick white san serif font, the swirling red and black background.

Her sister calls again.

“You were on TV!” Same whisper-yell. This isn’t news to Saba; knowing the interview would air that night, she not only turned off her phone ahead of time but also placed it under her sink and left the apartment, went for a walk. Only now has she turned it back on, and only because she knew her sister would call.

“Mmm,” she says. Elbow deep in dough, she listens to Adiva’s voice fill her kitchen, listens to the way it fills the mixing bowls spread out on her countertop, how it circles back up and over the lips, overflowing the space. It reminds her of when they were kids, the way they were taught to make musical instruments of their water glasses. She can’t remember who taught them that. Maybe it was something they did in school. Certainly it was not their mother.

“We bought our tickets,” Adiva says, and this brings Saba out of her reverie.

“I could’ve gotten those for you,” she says.

“Oh.” Adiva is quiet. “Well, that’s all right.”

“I didn’t know you wanted to come.” As soon as she says it, Saba remembers the last conversation they had, her sister’s unwavering support.

“Mama had me buy one for her.”

The dough Saba works in her hands—moments ago soft and pliable, stretchy and new, the pillowy possibility of sourdough—hardens, feels like setting concrete. She pries her hands from the sticky mass and begins to scratch at the small bits sticking to her.

“I think she’s excited,” Adiva says. “Well, as excited as Mama gets. She bought a new dress, which is something, don’t you think?”

Saba scrapes the dough into the trash can, sets the bowl in the sink, fills it with soap and lets the tap run, bubbles frothing.

“Say something,” Adiva says.

“Why does everyone love sourdough? It’s not really a very good bread. So bland, too crusty. What’s the use?”

“Oh, Saba.”

“I have to go, I’ll call you later.”

Because her hands are filthy she cannot end the call, so she listens to her sister’s breath for several moments before, finally, Adiva sighs and hangs up for them both.

 

A rare Thanksgiving home, only a year after college, Saba volunteered to cook for everyone. Her family had never celebrated with a traditional turkey dinner, and she wanted to see her mother nibble some crisped skin, spoon thick slices of cranberry sauce into her mouth. For weeks Saba dreamed of falling through clouds made of mashed potatoes. She woke up hungry, smelling phantom butter and thyme.

This was when they were still being kind to one another, walking on eggshells. Saba was a wild woodland creature, something easily scared away. Okay, her mother said when she proposed her idea. I suppose that would be all right.

She went to the store and spent hundreds of dollars, her own money, money she didn’t have but dreamed into existence with the help of her credit card. There were only three of them but she bought enough to feed ten.

At home, turkey basted and roasting in the oven, she shook out the oysters from their plastic-lined paper sack. She’d found a recipe for oyster stuffing, her mouth watering as she read through the ingredients list. Her mother had never tasted an oyster, of that she was certain.

As she shucked, she tasted. How could she resist the shivering soft disk of meat, its salty brine and grit of sand still stuck to the shell? Soon she was gobbling the mollusks, slurping rapturously as she threw them down her throat. It felt like eating the sea.

“Saba! What are you doing?” Her mother stood framed in the doorway, and she saw herself as her mother must—clear juices dribbling down her chin, mound of shells emptied on the counter behind her.

“Mama, try one,” she said. Extending an experience was the only peace offering she knew. She held out the oyster she’d planned to eat next. For a moment she stood suspended from her own body as her mother reached out, hand hovering over the oyster, before she reached back and threw her hand forward, slapping Saba’s wet face. The sound was thick, slippery. She pried open Saba’s hand and let the opened oyster thwack onto the linoleum floor, the shell halves skittering beneath the kitchen table.

What pained her most was not the slap, but the small hope she allowed herself just before it.

In the “OYSTERS” video she shucks each oyster individually, and though it is her longest video ever posted, it is also one of the most popular. She sits among discarded shells like Ursula, a sea queen eating her way through the ocean. She lost count of the oysters while filming, only knew that the amount was enough to swipe clean her bank account. It was many months before she was able to make another video.

Most nights after shoots she spends in the bathroom, alternating between shitting and vomiting up the food havocking across her body. The oysters, though, remained. She swayed in her bed, wishing them up or out, but nothing. The hard rock of seafood anchored her to wakefulness, to the too-hot air in her room. This must be what it feels like to die, she thought. Then: no, to drown. Then: to be a whale that has eaten a giant squid, and feels the beast laying claim to some space inside it, a mistake she must carry now.

 

After the televised interview with the museum director, Saba turns down interview requests for the New York Post and the Daily Mail, concedes an hour-long sit-down with New York Magazine, and grants The New Yorker backstage access before the show. Or, rather, Helen does all this; Saba merely agrees. There are many questions but Saba has few answers for them. What more can be said, that cannot be seen in the videos? She can tell the reporter from The New Yorker is disappointed by her vague, single-word answers. Helen tries to make amends as he stands to go, angrily shrugging his jacket over his shoulders, arms shoved back into the too-tight sleeves like stuffed grape leaves.

After these brief media ventures, the Guggenheim releases a statement, expressing gratitude for the mounting interest but asking for privacy as Saba prepares for the show. It’s only a week away. Within a day of tickets going on sale, it sells out. She and Helen meet once more, agree to a completely darkened stage, like a black box theatre, Saba centered at a long chrome table. Matte, Saba says, and Helen agrees. During the show there’s to be no photography, no music, no speaking. All light will be directed upon Saba, and only turned on once she has sat at the table and is ready to begin, which she’ll indicate to the crew with a small button placed in her palm for exactly that reason. The food should be on the table, prepared, before she approaches.

“We have a kitchen here, nothing of chef quality, but certainly we can work with neighboring restaurants or catering companies for the event. Is there someone in particular you prefer to work with?” Helen asks.

Saba shakes her head, dissipates the questions in the air in front of her with a wave of her hand. “I’ll handle all that.” In truth, she has no idea what she’ll be consuming. She hasn’t cooked or baked in days, can barely taste the food she orders. Everything tastes bland, like her childhood: oatmeal, turkey, chicken, rice. Her apartment is littered with scraps of paper, ideas once considered, now thrown out. Mangoes. Banana pudding. Taquitos from the bodega beneath her walk-up. Duck a l’orange. Nothing feels right.

Helen is hesitant. “Really, we insist. It’s our job, there’s nothing we want more than to assist you in this event going smoothly. We only need to know what you’ll need, what food items to prep, and then you can—”

“I’ve got to go, there’s much to rehearse.” Saba stands, so Helen stands, clenched in the small opening between her desk and chair. Her office is not as grand as the director’s. It’s an unfair advantage, Saba’s freedom on the other side of the desk, but she takes it and doesn’t look back as the heavy door closes behind her.

Too much time inside ivory museum spirals makes Saba’s head ache. She needs darkness, a setting akin to the conditions of her show. She walks down 5th then slips into the 86th Street station and onto a 4 train heading downtown.

 

To contrast the nearly neon butter yellow of the popcorn, Saba wears all black. On either side of her rests a clear trash bag filled with the snack—a gift snuck to her from her friend in concessions at her favorite theater. Before her is a simple white bowl filled with popcorn, which she empties in its entirety before dipping it back into one of the bags to refill.

The salt is what gets to her. Her lips feel like the desert; for weeks she will embalm them with Vaseline, day and night, only to feel the cracks splitting open hours later. She bleeds like this for what seems like a very long time. In the video she allows herself a glass of water, but sips from it only occasionally. It seems greedy, or wrong, to gulp at it as she fills her body with salt.

The day after filming the video, she was so bloated a woman stopped her on the street and placed a hand on her belly. “Bambino,” she said, eyes soft and happy. “Congratulazioni!” Saba placed her hand next to the woman’s, felt her own body. She had been up all night, alternating between drinking water, peeing, and Vaselining her lips. Her body felt hard and foreign beneath her hand.

“Grazie,” she said.

 

Film Forum is the first theater Saba visited after moving to New York. She watched A Streetcar Named Desire there for a film studies course, and among classmates loudly falling in love with Marlon Brando, found herself trying to taste the chicory in Blanche and Stella’s coffee. Movies were another thing she hadn’t much experienced. She spent many afternoons there.

The cool, dark theater is like the relief of a damp washcloth on the back of her neck. Saba settles into her seat, one of only a handful of patrons. The movie’s already begun so she tries to sort out what’s happening, watching as Paul Newman washes his hands and kneels before a mound of hard-boiled eggs. She leans forward and relief floods her body, then adrenaline as she leaps up and exits the theater as quickly as she’d entered it. It’s perfect, simple yet visually striking. Exiting, she leaves a wad of bills in the donations bin.

There are only six days to prepare so she must begin instantly. Though the food appears simple, she must practice boiling the eggs so they come out just right, the yolks yellow, no green-gray tinge, with shells that peel off smoothly in one fractured ribbon. She buys dozens and dozens of eggs, her cart at the store filled with nothing else. People stare.

With three days left, she wakes up with a surprise ending. A roast chicken. It will come as she is finishing the last of the hard-boiled eggs: crisp, golden-brown, glistening, smelling of rosemary and thyme, garlic and butter. She imagines that though the audience will have been instructed to remain silent throughout the performance, here they will gasp. She has never ventured outside of one food in a video. The chicken will be big enough to feed an entire family. The audience’s mouths will water.

Now Saba goes to the butcher and fills her cart with chickens, stopping at the farmer’s market for fresh herbs, the bodega for packs of butter. Her apartment windows appear permanently fogged. She smells like butter all the time, catches people on the street leaning closer to her to sniff her hair. Her days take on a new routine: boil, cool, rest; baste, dress, roast; smash, roll, peel; eat, eat, eat. The chicken she only cooks, and does not practice eating. Everything about this performance will be unorthodox. She hasn’t felt so alive, the world so cracked open and unknown, since she first left home and moved to the city so many years ago.

Two nights before the show, she works through the night and does not sleep.

On the morning of the performance, she is ready. Excited, nervous, committed.

Outside her apartment is the town car the museum has sent over, ready to take her uptown.

 

There’s something aesthetically pleasing about bowl after bowl after bowl of pasta, dressed in nothing but a melted sauce of butter, pecorino romano and grana padano cheeses, and freshly cracked pepper. Saba knows this “CACIO E PEPE” video will be a challenge, that by the final bowls, the sauce will congeal into a gluey paste she has to force down. That’s part of the excitement—she isn’t sure she can do it. Starch plus cheese plus changing viscosity of the dish combine to create an uncertain outcome. All the videos have been challenging, have exerted themselves on her body, but she has never assumed she won’t finish one. That she might fail excites her, sends trills down her arms, into her empty stomach, along the braid laced too tightly across her scalp. She breathes deeply before the first bowl. This is her favorite part of making the videos: the moments right before beginning, when she is hungry and calm, poised before the food and the camera. Saba is a professional, dedicated to the art form. She makes no effort to connect with the people who send her messages about their binge eating, their body dysmorphia, the pyramid scheme they’d love her to join. How many—and who—watches her videos has never concerned her, and never occurred to her, until the museum reached out. She cares only about the food.

By the end of the video, she is sweating. Her braid has come unlooped and sticks to her forehead; her blouse is sheer in the places it’s become damp. After she finishes chewing the last forkful of pasta, she looks up at the camera, face smeared with cream, and swallows. Smiles. Big, all teeth. The video cuts to black.

 

From behind the black curtain the museum has erected for privacy, Saba hears the room fill. It’s like being inside a beehive. She’s not alone, as stagehands move quickly all around her, but they’ve been instructed not to disturb her so she remains a silent oasis in the midst of their bustling.

It’s strange, not to be in her apartment. She misses fiddling with her camera, checking the lighting, making sure the tripod is level. A few minutes before the show is due to begin, Helen and the museum director approach her from the side. The museum director smiles and touches her elbow. Helen checks her mic, the button in her palm, the zipper on the back of her dress.

“Ready?” the museum director asks, and Saba nods. A stagehand appears and walks her to the edge of the curtain, then walks her onstage, to the table. She can barely see it except for a slight gleam, the glint of red reflecting off the stagehand’s walkie-talkie onto the edge of the table and back at them. He helps her sit then disappears. Everything is silent and though Saba knows the audience cannot tell she’s there, something in the room feels changed for her, like everyone has sat up straighter in the chairs, if only by a few molecules. The air in the room feels raised. She wants to breathe deeply but won’t allow herself the sound. Instead she steadies her hand on the chrome table; it’s cold to her touch, so different from her own kitchen’s linoleum counter. In her other hand, she finds the button and presses it.

The lights come up but Saba’s view doesn’t change; all she can see is black. Adiva and her mother will be in front, she thinks, and she wills her energy to that part of the audience, but she cannot feel their presence for sure. For all she knows, it’s only Adiva sitting there. For all she knows, no one sits in the five-hundred-odd seats, laid out in careful rows earlier this morning.

In front of her is a mound of hard-boiled eggs, the same fifty as the film. They’re piled into a lopsided pyramid, as requested, which she knows will tumble and dismantle as she begins. That’s okay; she’s planned for such disruptions, means it to be part of the show, an injected sense of chaos only the audience will feel. Saba knows which eggs she will eat when, in order to avoid one rolling off the table, bouncing away into the darkness. She will, as always, go slowly.

She picks up her first egg and smashes, then rolls it to loosen the shell. With the tip of her fingernail she picks at a crack to unfurl the whole thing. It comes off singularly, just as she’s practiced. She drops the shell, clinging to itself along the membrane. With a knife placed at her left, she slices the egg in half, the yolk perfectly yellow, bright as a surprise. She tilts the halves toward the audience, then looks up at them, takes the deep breath she wouldn’t allow herself earlier.

She begins to eat.

The yolks are chalky, the whites like rubber; none of this is new and yet it is, somehow, in this space where she is alone but not alone, in which she can hear nothing but can also hear the medium-rare ribeye beaten into pulp by the acids in the stomach of the man sitting in the fourth seat in the sixth row; can hear the roiling sea of the fast food hamburgers in the videographer’s stomach, beef patties several days past their prime, gluey cheese product resisting disintegration; just as she knows the exact feeling right this very moment inside her mother’s stomach, the reliable weight and sensation of the broken-down butter chicken and rice, the precise moment later tonight, before bed, when her mother will put down the length of floss and go to the toilet for one final shit.

She is seventeen eggs in and cannot disappear inside the food. The seams between her and the world, and the food and the world, and her and the food, are ridged and impossible to rend. Saba stands, suddenly, the loud scrape of the chair against the floor so jarring she jumps before realizing she’s the one who’s made it.

“The chicken,” she says. “Bring the chicken.”

There’s a hum now, coming from the audience. When no one emerges from backstage, Saba says again, louder this time, “Bring me the chicken!”

It appears as she’s been imagining it would, floating through the black box on a gleaming silver platter, but all she can see are the slabs of turkey her mother carved from the bird she over-roasted each week, slicing breast meat onto the same cheery blue Fiestaware platter. Saba’s mouth is dry and she can’t smell the chicken though she can see it dripping in its own juices.

“I can’t taste anything,” she says, in a whisper though her voice crescendos as she repeats herself. “I can’t taste. I can’t taste anything.” Now the audience lets out a full gasp as she opens her mouth and scrapes at her tongue, flecks of yolk and egg white spraying the black tablecloth. Is this part of the show? The chicken, still steaming, sits like a wedding cake in front of the remaining tower of eggs and without warning Saba stops clawing at herself and reels around to face the table once more.

“Oh, my,” says a small voice in the crowd, as it becomes clear her mouth is bleeding.

Saba never ate a single bite of the many perfect chickens cooked and discarded over the last three days. Such a waste, she thinks. And for what? Her hands curl back against the heat as she plunges them into this bird but she pushes further, feeling the tiny weakened ribcage crush under the weight of her palms. The audience screams. She tears off a hunk of breast meat and stuffs it in her mouth, lets the fatty skin slick her face with butter. It’s food, she yells, or would, if her mouth were not full. This is what we’re meant to do with it!

“No.” It is impossible to say for sure, but Saba knows the tone of her mother’s disappointment. She feels it as she hears it, like a wet thwack across her face.

The primal, depthless scream that comes out of Saba is unholy yet fundamental, wild yet manifest to everyone in the audience. With a seemingly inhuman strength, Saba grasps the chrome table by its edge and wrenches it from its home on the stage, sending it and the mangled chicken and the pile of still-shelled, uneaten eggs clattering, splattering, tumbling into the dark abyss of audience before her. There is the acciaccato noise of the performance’s destruction, then silence.

Then, a child’s voice. Her nephew, Jazzy? But her sister wouldn’t have brought a two-year-old to such a performance, would she?

“Mama,” the voice says. Saba imagines Jazzy, little fingers opening and closing as rubbery eggs roll off the stage, stumbling out of his mother’s grasp and moving toward the mess as everyone else falls back.

 

THE SPANISH CRISIS

The night Dominick and his friends got on the One Line and Dominick wouldn’t shut up about the girl from the party with bunny-soft lips, the metro car was empty except for an older woman reading a book near the front. The boys took seats in the middle section. It was odd to find an empty car on a Friday night in Madrid, almost impossibly odd, and one of them likely said as much, probably Jorge, who, of the three of them, was the most likely to comment on the obvious. Nathan Matías was the most likely to agree with what anyone said about the obvious or about the girl with bunny-soft lips. And Dominick, sitting across from them, was the most likely to talk stories. He was the loudest among them, which some girls liked but a lot of them didn’t. They told him he sounded too Spanish.

They were all in eleventh grade at the American School in Madrid. Jorge was a Spaniard, but he’d lived in the States and spoke perfect English. His parents were diplomats. Dominick was born in Missouri. His parents decided when he was six that the United States was fucked—their words, not his—and they’d uprooted the family and moved to Madrid. His dad did website design and his mom taught English and debate at the American School, which is how he got a spot there in the first place. She had been the Missouri State debate champion back when she was his age.

Nathan Matías was an American, too, but he’d just moved to Madrid in ninth grade. He was rich and tall and good-looking, with a Justin Bieber shag and sleepy eyes that the girls liked, but his Spanish was still pretty rough. At the botellón earlier that night, Dominick had mocked him every time he slipped up. “It’s echar un polvo, man, not hecho polvo,” he’d shouted when Nathan Matías had basically said that he liked being tired when what he’d meant was that he’d like to get laid.

“I’m telling you,” Dominick was saying now, leaning across the aisle to stare at Jorge and Nathan Matías. “Her lips were extra soft, like she’d rubbed them in baby bunnies. Or like they were baby bunnies and kissing them was really just my whole body curling into a nest of bunnies deep in a forest somewhere.”

“Fuck,” said Nathan Matías.

“Hombre,” said Jorge. “That’s kinda gross.”

“Not gross, man, fabulous,” Dominick said. “It was like Disney mixed with porn.”

The woman at the front of the metro car was facing in Dominick’s direction, but she never looked up, not when the boys got on and not when Dominick started talking too loud about the girl with bunny-soft lips, first in Spanish and then, when he noticed her sitting there, in English.

She was at least sixty and had the look of someone who’d worked in an office her whole life. Her short hair was thinning, and, beneath it, you could make out the slightest glint of white scalp. She looked small and was wearing gray slacks and a partially unbuttoned red peacoat. Her handbag was big enough to hold a human head. Dominick would’ve bet ten Euros that she was reading The Alchemist.

“But the best part is what she was doing with her hands,” he continued, looking over at the woman again. She didn’t look up from her book—even when it was clear he was staring. There was only a set of sliding doors between her and Dominick and his friends. She suddenly seemed so close.

Of the three of them, Dominick was the only one who lived near old ladies like her. His parents had bought an apartment in Alcorcón just outside Madrid because it was one of the few places they could afford and still have money to fly back to Missouri each summer to visit family in the Ozarks. Alcorcón was a midsized city, but it often felt like a village. There was a pedestrian walkway running through the commercial district, and it was there that parents and kids and tired, sad-looking old women went for a walk before dinner every evening. As a kid, Dominick used to like to watch those old ladies, walking alone, and try to imagine what their lives were like.

“Where are their families?” he’d asked his mom once when he was probably seven or eight. He’d never really known an old person. His dad didn’t talk to his parents anymore—they were hypocrites, he’d said—and his mom’s dad had died of a heart attack before he was born. His grandmother he could remember, but just barely. She’d died in a car wreck the year before his parents moved the family to Spain.

“Why don’t you go ask?” had been his mom’s response. He knew she was joking, but then one day he did. The woman he approached wasn’t all that old, probably fifty or sixty, but she had the same bowed look of most of the older women he saw walking in their town.
He was alone that day. His mom had sent him down for bread. The woman was just coming out of a café, probably heading home. She had short hair—like the woman on the metro car—and eyelids that were beginning to droop over her eyes, which he realized were green when she turned at the sound of his voice.

“Do you have a family?” he’d asked in Spanish.

Her eyes got smaller and she grabbed the strap of her purse in her fist, pulling it to her chest.

“Don’t be a dumbass,” she had said, and before he could answer, she’d walked away.

He never spoke to anyone on the streets after that. And in the years that followed he stopped wondering about the secret lives of older women. He entered middle school, made more friends, met girls. He still looked at photos of his grandmother every once in a while, but older women started to seem less like a mystery and more like a nagging reminder of something that once was.

On the metro car, the woman flipped a page, then held the book in one hand as she scratched at the hairline along the back of her neck. There was something familiar in the way she held her back so straight and the book so squarely before her. It was as if she were trying out for the role of old woman and had just now perfected the posture. Dominick suddenly wished she wasn’t there.
“So what’d she do, bro?” Nathan Matías said when it was clear Dominick wasn’t going to finish his story. “Give you a dick massage?”

Dominick ignored him and continued to stare at the old lady. “I bet you ten Euros she gets off at the Cuatro Vientos stop,” he said.

The other two looked over and for a moment the woman glanced up at them. Dominick still had his cup from the party and tilted it back and forth so that the ice clunked against the plastic. In a bag at his feet were two Coca-Cola bottles and one nearly empty bottle of vodka. Nathan Matías had a cup, too, and every once in a while he passed it to Jorge. Dominick did the same from across the aisle. The woman returned to her book.

“She’ll go home to a dirty apartment and masturbate watching Saber y Ganar,” Dominick continued, looking just past the woman at an advertisement for some restaurant or hotel that read ¡pare aquí!

Nathan Matías laughed hard, spitting part of what he had been drinking back into the cup.

“What the fuck, man,” he said. “She might understand you.”

“No way,” Dominick said. “I know that type. She’s Franco-era. The only English she knows is ‘Santa Claus’ and ‘Tank you.’”

Both boys laughed that time, but neither of them looked over at the woman again.

“I bet she hasn’t had sex in thirty years.” Dominick raised his voice slightly, unable to stop.

“Hombre!” Jorge warned. He reached across the aisle and grabbed the cup from Dominick and downed the rest. “She’s an old lady.”

“And she really might understand you,” Nathan Matías added.

“You’re a bunch of pussies,” Dominick said. He turned to face the woman and yelled: “You’ve got awesome tits!”

The woman looked up at the sound of his voice. He waved at her. She stared hard before looking back down at her book, shaking her head.

“See.” Dominick turned to his friends. “Don’t you think if she understood English, she would’ve beat me flat with that rock of a bag?”

His friends laughed, Nathan Matías the loudest. “Sick, man,” he said.

It got quiet again, but Nathan Matías interrupted the silence.

“So what about the girl?” he asked. “What was she doing with her hands?”

Dominick looked back at him, suddenly annoyed that Nathan Matías was there, too. Even the name Nathan Matías pissed him off if he thought about it too much. It was like trying to make a sandwich out of American and Spanish names and then coming up with something that made no sense in either place. He’d heard it was some sort of compromise between Nathan Matías’ parents, one a Spaniard and the other a conservative Republican from Texas.

“What’s wrong?” he asked. “You come up dry again?”

“No way, man,” Nathan Matías said. “The Spanish girls love me.”

“Whatever,” Dominick said.

The announcer made the call for the next stop, Colonia Jardín, and repeated that this would be the last train for the night. The boys were quiet as the doors opened and closed, but no one else got on their car. They could hear high-pitched chatter coming from somewhere else as the metro pulled away from that stop and toward the next.

Their car was warm. The woman laid her book facedown on the seat beside her while she undid the last buttons of her peacoat and took it off, folding it gently in half and placing it on her lap. Once all was back in order, she picked the book up again and continued to read.

“Including Bunny Lips, I made out with three girls tonight,” Dominick said after the screeching had stopped and they were again surrounded by tunnel. He was still looking at the woman but talking to his friends. “They were all good, but Bunny Lips was the best. She got my dick so hard.”

Jorge laughed. Nathan Matías finished his drink.

“Bullshit,” he said finally. “I’d believe two, but not three.”

“Fuck you,” Dominick said. “What do you know about Spanish girls anyway?”

“I know enough to know they don’t like you,” Nathan Matías said. And for a moment it seemed like either he or Dominick was going to stand up, but Jorge stepped in. He always did.

“Don’t be a punk,” he said to Nathan Matías. “And Dominick, finish your fucking story.”

But the doors opened again, and this time someone did get on: a couple, probably about five years older than Dominick and his friends. The girl was good-looking, though her eyes were a little big. The guy had thick eyebrows, a closely shaved head, and the body of a rock climber. They found seats at the back of the car. Once the metro had lurched to a start, the girl got up and sat on the guy’s lap.

Dominick looked over at them and then back down at his own feet. The truth was he’d never really done much with girls. He’d kissed a few in Spain and once he’d made out with his cousin’s best friend back in the Ozarks. He’d even convinced her to take off all her clothes, except her panties. But when he’d tried to touch her, she’d pushed him away and said she was saving herself. He’d gotten pissed and never spoke to her again. Not that he spoke all that much in general on that trip back to Missouri.

When he was a kid, he loved the Ozarks. Every time they visited, he felt like someone’s exotic pet. His cousins asked him to teach them swear words in Spanish and his aunts and uncles cooed over his good manners and tidy style. His parents always complained about the trip in the weeks before they left, but once they were there, they disappeared into the landscape. His mom drank Coors Light on the dock and his dad talked about baitfish and the Tigers’ new quarterback. They let all the cousins call him Nick. They rarely fought.

But at some point, things changed. His cousins said he’d turned into a snob, and once, when he said it was disgusting to eat a hot dog on the street, his Aunt June had slapped him hard across the face.

“Get off your high horse,” she’d said, and his parents hadn’t done a thing.

The past two summers it was he who resisted the trip to Missouri and his parents who talked more about missing home. Spain was in full-on crisis by then, and even the American School was talking about layoffs. Whole families showed up outside grocery stores begging for food. In Madrid, a woman walked into a bank and set herself on fire. Another woman was stabbed to death by her husband. He said he’d been fired from his job and when he came home and she refused to have sex with him, he just lost it.

And then there’d been the affair. It was over now, but his mom sometimes tried to blame Spain for what she’d done. His dad told her to stop using debate tricks to avoid responsibility, and she’d yelled back that it was his idea to up and move the family to this fucking country in the first place. Mostly Dominick stayed in his room and looked at pictures of naked girls online. Nothing really dirty, but at least it made him feel good.

Dominick hadn’t realized he’d been staring at the couple making out at the other end of the car until the guy looked up and stared back at him.

“You want my girlfriend?” he asked Dominick in Spanish.

Dominick looked back down at his feet and shook his head.

“I think you do,” the boyfriend said, pushing his girlfriend onto another seat and standing up. The girlfriend tried to pull him back down.

Dominick kept his eyes on the ground, shaking his head. His friends looked anywhere but at the guy walking toward them.

“Or maybe you wanna kiss me?” the guy was saying, now standing in front of Dominick. He smelled like hashish. To avoid his eyes, Dominick looked toward the front of the car and saw the old woman staring at him.

“He didn’t mean it,” Jorge said finally.

The guy moved closer. His crotch was now in Dominick’s face.

“Say something.”

“Man,” Dominick said. “Man, I was just thinking. I wasn’t even looking.”

“Where you from, fag?” the man said.

“He grew up here,” Jorge said. “Let him be.”

The old woman continued to stare, but like Nathan Matías she was quiet. She looked at Dominick with the same expression she’d had when he’d told her he liked her tits. Like she could see through him.

When Dominick turned his head, the guy was unzipping his fly. He tried to stand up, but the guy pushed him back into his seat. He heard the girlfriend yelling something, “stop” maybe, but a second later, the guy’s dick was in his face and then Dominick felt his shirt and pants grow hot and wet. Drops of piss misted his chin. He could feel the old woman staring. He could hear the girlfriend scream and then, he was pretty sure, laugh softly. The tunnel was dark around them, but the bright lights of the car illuminated everything.

Dominick closed his eyes just as the announcer made the call for the next stop. For a moment he could see the Lake of the Ozarks. They say it has the body of a snake, but you’d never know that looking out at it from ground level. From that perspective, the lake is only flat blue-gray water and the distant roar of outboard motors. His grandmother used to call it “the little man’s paradise,” and when he was young he thought that, by little man, she meant him. Only later did he realize she was talking about poor people.

The guy was laughing hard as he zipped up his pants, and in the next second he was in his seat at the other end of the car again. He and his girlfriend got off at the next stop, still laughing.

For a long while no one talked. There was just the whirl of the metro and the sound of pages turning. Dominick could taste salt, smell sourness. The wet heat of the piss had begun to cool and his shirt clung to his chest. He remembered how he’d pissed his pants once walking home from school. He was seven years old. It was soon after they’d arrived in Spain and the sense of cultural disorientation had only made the accident worse. Everyone seemed to be staring at him. By the time he got home, he was crying hard. It was the last time he remembered really bawling like that, like it might be possible to get every feeling out and be done with them for good.

When Dominick finally spoke, it wasn’t to his friends.

“I bet you’ve got a bunny in that bag.” He opened his eyes and turned to face the woman at the other end of the car. “That’s your girlfriend, that bunny. And you take her home and sleep with her.”

His friends stared and then, as if the world had suddenly grown hilariously tiny, they both began to laugh. The woman continued reading her book, its back turned toward him now. Dominick could see it wasn’t The Alchemist after all, but something by Ernesto Sabato. He recognized the cover from his Latin American literature class the year before. It looked like she was close to the end.

“I bet you’re so lonely, you sit by yourself every night in the bathtub eating chocolate and crying about how long it’s been since you got laid,” Dominick continued, still in his seat, empowered by the sound of his own voice.

“Gross, man,” Nathan Matías interrupted. “I don’t want to think about her naked.”

“Shut up,” Dominick said, and stood up. He realized he was drunk.

“You’re so lonely you wake up in the morning to an empty bed and then you just go back to sleep.” He walked closer to her. “You’re invisible. We’ve forgotten you exist.”

He knew the woman could hear him, but she kept her eyes on her book. He thought he might take it out of her hands. Actually, he wanted to do more than that, he realized, and the realization made him sweat. He wanted to push her off her seat and knock her to the ground. He wanted to kick her in the stomach, between the legs. He wanted to hear her scream and beg him to stop. He wanted to take his dick out and piss all over her, all over that bag and her neatly folded peacoat. He wanted the roaring in his ears to stop.

The announcer called out the next stop and repeated that this would be the last train for the night. Dominick sat down in a seat by himself and wiped the piss splatter from his cheeks. Neither of his friends were laughing anymore. What that girl with bunny-soft lips had been doing with her hands, really, was pushing him away. She’d said she had to go. She’d told him to leave her alone.

As the metro slowed, the woman closed her book and clutched it with her free hand. She unfolded her peacoat and put it back on. Jorge and Nathan Matías looked down at their feet, but Dominick stared. It was the Cuatro Vientos stop.

The woman stood as the metro came to a stop. She put her bag over her shoulder, the book clutched to her chest, and passed between the rows of seats where the boys sat. She didn’t need to go that way. She could have left through the door closest to her. But she chose to pass between them.

Then, for a moment, almost as if it were an afterthought, she paused before Dominick. His pressed jeans were soaked at the crotch. He smelled like one of those defeated old men, drunk or passed out, who were now so common in the city.

It would be best if she let him be. If she just walked on and forgot about the boys on the Metro that night. That is what it means to survive as a woman. To not be anyone. But she reached down anyway, and she touched his shoulder. She held it there for only a second.

“Stop,” she said in English.

When the doors closed behind her, the silence of the metro car was replaced with the dim hum of the station. The woman turned to find the boy staring at her, his face growing smaller in the window as the metro pulled away. She stared back at him as if from across a stretch of time instead of space, until eventually the metro picked up speed and the boy and his friends disappeared into the darkness of another tunnel.