I knew that downloading music was illegal, but my dad was the one who showed me how to do it, so I didn’t worry too much. I still prayed at night for God to forgive me, just in case.
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The Australian's username was koala_rocks47 and he was thirty-two, though I didn't know that yet.I was eleven and three-quarters. I'd found the John Mayer fan forum through a Google search after Drew read the lyrics to "Why Georgia" in Literature class, during our poetry unit."am I living it right?" over and over again, while his hands shook.I wasn't living at all, not really. Not until I heard that song.
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koala_rocks47: hey Why_GeorgiaGurl! saw ur post about wanting the Melbourne bootleg. I've got the whole show, soundboard quality. want me to upload it for you?Why_GeorgiaGurl: omg yes please!!! I only have the first 4 songs from limewire and they keep cutting outkoala_rocks47: no worries, mate. us hardcore fans gotta stick together. btw love your username - georgia's my favorite track too. how old are you?Why_GeorgiaGurl: 16
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On Wednesday mornings, Pastor Jim drove the Presbyterian middle schoolers to Bojangles on Cleveland Highway. We called it Prayer Breakfast. At Bojangles I would order a cinnamon biscuit, a buttered biscuit, and a Mr. Pibb. I’d watch Drew across the restaurant while Jim asked us about our “faith journeys.”“Anyone want to share what God's been doing in their lives this week?”I could’ve shared that I'd stayed up until 3 AM downloading bootlegs with someone named koala_rocks47, who thinks I am in high school. Instead, I said nothing and watched Drew's headphones settle around his neck, wondering what holy music played through them.Last week on the bus, his batteries died and he asked to share mine. We listened to a live John Mayer show from Melbourne together. During “Comfortable” our arms touched and stayed touching for three whole songs.“Where do you find all these?” he asked.“The internet,” I said.
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The next Wednesday his batteries worked but he asked to share headphones anyway. This time he played me Damien Rice and said "this will make you cry" and I pretended it did even though I was mostly thinking about how to make our arms touch again.
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On the forum, I tell people I've been to twelve John Mayer concerts. I say my favorite was Atlanta because that's the closest city people would recognize. I talk about the acoustics at the Fox Theatre even though I've only seen pictures online.koala_rocks47: which was your favorite show of all the ones you've been to?Why_GeorgiaGurl: probably the one at eddie's attic. he played this unreleased song called “in your atmosphere” and everyone was dead silentI downloaded another bootleg. Hartford, 2002. The crowd noise sounded like prayers or waves or static between radio stations.
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I burned Drew a mix CD and almost called it “Songs for Bojangles” but at the last second I wrote “Songs for Wednesday Mornings”. I included the Melbourne "Why Georgia," some Damien Rice, and other songs I thought sounded appropriately deep and romantic. Songs about longing and roads and being older than we were.
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koala_rocks47: what's winter like there?In Georgia, winter meant maybe putting on a fleece. Maybe frost on car windows that melted by 9 AM. In Brisbane it was summer. Upside-down seasons.Why_GeorgiaGurl: cold sometimesI opened a new browser and googled the distance between Brisbane and Atlanta which was 9,272 miles.
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Drew's mix CD got scratched. The Damien Rice track skipped on “still a little bit” over and over.“Still a little bit still a little bit still a little…”
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That night I prayed. “Dear God, forgive me for lying about my age. And for downloading. And for the way I feel when Drew's arm touches mine during 'Comfortable.’”
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Some girls hang out in Pastor Jim's office after school, taking photos on flip phones and listening to emo music that almost sounds like worship songs. I don't go because I don't get asked but also because when I mentioned it to my mom she furrowed her brow and said "I don't know about that."I rolled my eyes and told her it was perfectly fine and she said that it didn’t matter. That it was a bad look. I mentioned this to Drew, like can you believe this, and he kind of shrugged. He said, “I mean yeah, he never has the guys in his office.”
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I asked koala_rox47 if he believed in God and he typed for a really long time before just saying “no”.
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At Prayer Breakfast, Pastor Jim always sat next to whoever was newest. This week it was Anna from sixth grade. He asked her about her "walk with Christ" while his hand rested on her back.My Mr. Pibb tasted flat. I couldn’t finish my second biscuit. When Drew played me an unreleased Damien Rice song on the bus, I could barely pay attention to the words. I stared out the window watching the cars fly past us on Cleveland Highway and letting my mind go blank.
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My mom asked me again about Pastor Jim and I said I hadn’t noticed anything. She stared at me for a long time. I added this to my list of lies needing forgiveness.
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koala_rocks47 messaged me less and less. Or was it me who was messaging him less and less?
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I started praying with just the beginnings. Dear God, Dear God, Dear God, Dear God, Dear God, Dear God, Dear God, Dear God.
Room Temperature is the latest film collaboration byDennis Cooper and Zac Farley. It focuses on a family-run, amateur haunted house and was shot on location in Southern California. The film recently screened at San Francisco’s Frameline film festival, and before that at Los Angeles Festival of Movies. It will soon show in Europe. Although the concept of co-directing a film is unusual, the rapport between Cooper and Farley is natural… as evidenced by how they often finish each other’s thoughts in this QA with Jack Skelley. And this reflects in the quietly supernatural vibe of Room Temperature, which is spare and cool, but with deep emotional undercurrents. Jack:Can you describe the division of labor between the two of you? Dennis, one would assume that you’re responsible for the script and Zac is more responsible for directing camera angles, blocking, and those kinds of things. Is that true?Dennis: I’m not completely responsible for the text. I do the vast majority of that work, but everything is in consultation with Zac. He has lots of ideas that I can’t implement textually because I’m not as visually inclined as he is. But we talk about everything. And we’re so in sync about what we want that I trust him. Occasionally, I do question some visual decisions, but on the set, Zac is directing and I’m mostly there working with the actors and conferring with Zac. But as it’s being written, I’m basically the guy at the computer.Zac: The films are complete collaborations. We decide what we want to do and how to do it together. Neither Dennis nor I are classically trained filmmakers, so I guess neither one of us really knows how other directors make their films, but our collaborations feel both more complex and fluid than one does words and the other makes images. But yes, Dennis is a writer, a really great one, so I know better than to mess with his intuitions on that front. But we make all the decisions together. We do the casting together, for example.Dennis: And decisions about choosing locations are all completely mutual. But he is stronger in that area. So it divides up a little bit, but it’s always a back-and-forth.Jack: How often do these decisions happen on the set, in real time?Dennis: Oh, quite a lot.Zac: The goal on set is to be really attuned and responsive to what’s going on. We plan meticulously ahead of time so that we can feel free to react to a change in circumstances outside our control and to embrace happy accidents. There’s nothing more thrilling than something unexpected happening on set that supersedes our expectations, and to a certain extent we bet on and hope for happy accidents as part of the process. Both Dennis and I are particularly excited with working with the performers. Because we’re working mostly with non-professional actors, we cast people for what they can bring to the projects and welcome their own senses of intuition and insights into their characters. The film is really the result of a collaboration with the cast and crew that participated in bringing it to life. Dennis: When we’re shooting, it’s very common that a line we thought would work isn’t working. So we’ll cut the line or change the words. The same is true with the visuals: Yes, the films are storyboarded. But on set, we’ll realize a scene will be better if we change the POV.Jack: It was very interesting to compare the screenplay with the final product. A lot of dialog was cut. Now, having two directors is fairly unusual, right? Are there any models for this sort of dual relationship?Dennis: Well, there are the Coen brothers, Straub-Huillet, the Wachowskis … It’s not completely unprecedented. There’s never any confusion about that: We know what the other is capable of, and often one of us will back off and let the other person do what they need to do.Jack: Both of you are based in Paris, while Room Temperature was filmed in Southern California. It seems like a lot of effort to pick-up and relocate from your home base to California to do this.Dennis: We just set up camp at my Los Angeles apartment. We have the advantage of knowing a lot of people in Los Angeles. All kinds of friends to lean on. Our casting director Erin Cassidy and our main on-the-ground producer Luka Fisher for example, were based there. Zac: We made our two previous films in France, which was wonderful in that we could finance them in part with public grants. But to be eligible the films have to be shot in majority in the French language. Early on, we tried making Room Temperature in France, but it quickly became clear that this had to be shot in the United States and in English. Home-haunts unfortunately don’t yet exist in France, and while we had always envisioned Permanent Green Light (our previous film) as a French film, we wrote this one in a way where translating it into French would have done real damage. It was a challenge to shoot the film in the United States, but it was absolutely the right thing to do and we got to collaborate with some incredibly talented people. Jack: The collaboration between you is unusual and often feels seamless: The dialog is lean and punctuated by pregnant pauses. So is the visual framing with its own kinds of pauses. There are long, wide shots and slow pans. In this way, the film says more by saying less. Thoughts?Dennis: We have a really strong sense of the rhythm we want the film to have and how that will work. The dialogue is spare, but it has a lot of weight on its shoulders and the visuals are as important as the dialogue. Some of our favorite filmmakers such as James Benning make films with almost no dialogue to provide breathing room. Our films are poetic and formally surprising, but they provide time for the audience to settle-in to the pacing and commune with the characters.Zac: In a way, the rhythm and the pacing act as the glue that allows us to have sometimes wildly divergent tones coexist in the film. In a weird way while the film can feel somewhat slow at times, it’s actually incredibly dense.Dennis: This approach worked well with our Southern California desert location. It’s shot in the middle of nowhere with a family who is very isolated. They don’t have cameras or cell phones or computers, as far as we know. Not even a car. They live in a very closed-off world. So having all that space and silence reinforces the emptiness of the world they live in.Jack: Let’s talk about the differences between writing on the page and screenwriting: Writing on the page depends on the reader to provide some interpretation of the text’s dialog and imagery, while film, being more concrete and visual, presents the image more straightforwardly and the viewer is a less “active” participant in the experience as a work of art. Do you agree with how I pose this?Dennis: Yes, that’s obviously the way I think about writing. The novels don’t create such a solid world that the readers feel like they’re just an observer, right? They participate. And what’s interesting about film is it’s the exact opposite. Because the film is very solid, it does take all the responsibility. We try to open that up, so that the film is obviously a carefully made object, but at the same time it feels very translucent. It’s not so locked down that the audience is casually observing. They have to pay a lot of attention.We just saw the new Wes Anderson film. I love his films, but they are the most extremely fascistically visualized films. There’s no way our films are so completely locked up. But I feel a certain kinship with what he does. We do angle for images and shots that are very highly composed. So it’s weird.Jack: What is the origin of Room Temperature’s setting of a family-made haunted house? Dennis, knowing your obsession with neighborhood haunted houses, it must come from you. You even make Halloween pilgrimages to Southern California to visit many haunted houses.Dennis: Both of us are massive fans of them, and we think of it as an art form. On the surface level it’s just a family having fun and trying to do something cool and make their haunted house better than the neighbors’. But they put so much effort into something that is always a failure on some level… because they don’t have enough funds or because it’s just them and their kids playing with the concept of a haunted house. I love the amateurism of that. All of our films so far have been about people who can’t achieve what they want to achieve. We tried to capture that in this case using the setting of a haunted house whose aspirations are higher than the family’s imaginations and budget can realize.Zac: Yeah. It’s a shared fantasy that the characters have. But it’s also the individual fantasy of each family member. One kid will be really into the acting and theatrical part of it, while another member of the family will be into the architecture and fog machines. In terms of narrative structure, home-haunts are daring and experimental by default. You enter the first room and there’s a pretty classic introduction video explaining the premise of the haunt, but then you go walk into the second room and somebody was obviously just really obsessed with the animatronic ghoul they saw at the Halloween store, so they bought five and decided to operate them out of synch, and it doesn’t really fit with the surface logic of the haunted house, but the conflagration of the two is really generative. The visitor going through this haunted house can project narrative meaning onto something that wasn’t necessarily built to accommodate it, at least not in any literal way, and that creates the kind of openness that we’re seeking to have in our films. Haunted houses are like films in that they use acting, writing, music, architecture... In Room Temperature the house is a setting and a character, but it’s also a kind of analog for the film. Jack: In fact, there’s much discussion among the characters about whether the haunted house is succeeding. One of the first lines in the film is an outside character asking, “What’s wrong with your house!”Dennis: Then he says, “I’m not against it.”Jack This seems like a statement on not just the artistic abilities of the families. It’s an observation that can extend to the father character, who is like the creative director. And there’s definitely something very “wrong” with him. Now, in addition to haunted houses, you two share an obsession with theme parks. Symbolically, thematically, what connects these two art forms?Dennis: In a dark ride, the experience is out of your control. The car is devising your pace and each passenger sees exactly the same thing. Whereas in a haunted house you can hang around or go look at details that intrigue you. It’s not like everybody’s constantly being propelled forward, but there is a unifying quality that makes it a haunted house. You know, the Indiana Jones ride at Disneyland in California is not completely dissimilar. In an earlier version of our script there was a point where people got in a little car and experienced a section of the house that way. It was impractical and overly expensive to realize, but we were very excited by that concept.Zac: There used to be a haunted house called Mystic Motel that had a ride-through component. It was created by a 14- or 15-year-old kid who was obviously very ambitious and excited about the mechanics of dark rides. He used one of those electrified shopping carts designed for disabled people to navigate giant grocery stores. He had it follow a track in his basement and built a remote-control system so he could decide when it would stop and go, controlling your rhythm. Dennis: Some of the big cities in Europe, such as London or Amsterdam, have the London Dungeon or the Amsterdam Dungeon. That’s kind of a combo because you walk through it, and it’s obviously much more professional than a family haunted house. For instance, in the Amsterdam Dungeon, at the end you get on a roller coaster that takes you through the final section of experience.Jack: Dennis, you are familiar with Sabrina Tarasoff’s concept for her “Beyond Baroque” walk-through haunted house – in the “Made in L.A. 2020” biennial at the Huntington Museum in Los Angeles. It focused on your writing and mine and others from 1980s Los Angeles. And originally it was to be a dark ride. Sabrina wanted something close to what you were saying, Zac, where you get in a little car that follows a track. And later, she and I wrote a piece for your blog, Dennis, about theme parks where we discuss Disney’s invention of the Omnimover: a shell-like, encased ride vehicle that directs your experience. This is unlike, say, dark rides such as Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride where you can look all around. The Omnimover points and targets your vision and experience.Dennis: The Haunted Mansion uses those, right?Jack: Yes. They are named Doom Buggies. Now Disney and other theme parks have more sophisticated versions of this. I don’t know where I’m going with this question: I just want to use the word “Omnimover!”Zac: It’s a really good word.Jack: So, what are your feelings in retrospect about making Room Temperature?Dennis: It was an absolute and utter joy to make. Yes, it was exhausting. Sometimes on the set you were going until 5 o’clock in the morning. And it was often freezing cold. But we’re both very happy with the film. It’s not unlike what we hoped it would be when we wrote it. And the editing was a joy.Zac: Every time Dennis and I start a project, we set the level of ambition to a high point which we may or may not be able to achieve. This was much more ambitious than our previous films. And it was harder to produce for those reasons. But I think we managed to do what we set out to do.Jack: Another exciting yet subdued component of Room Temperature is the music. It is even more spare than the dialog. It appears only in very rare scenes. Who is the composer?Dennis: The music is by Puce Mary. In fact, the only pieces of music in Room Temperature are the sounds of the haunted house, created by Puce Mary, plus one song the character Andre (played by Charlie Nelson Jacobs) sings as part of the action. There is no music in the film other than that one song, the haunted house soundscapes by Puce Mary, and the end credits music.Zac: Dennis and I have been huge fans and admirers of Puce Mary forever. We have seen her perform live several times. She was our first collaborator on this film. She started drafting pieces of music – including the ghost sounds – maybe six years before we shot a single image. The song performed by Andre in the middle of the film is written and composed by Chris Olsen, who plays Paul the janitor. And the end credits music is a piece titled “Angel Shaving (L.A.S.E.R.)”by 7038634357, a really brilliant musician. Dennis: It’s important to our films that we don’t use music unless the characters hear the music as part of the action. That’s why there’s not a lot of music in them. It’s not because we don’t like music. We just believe scores are often manipulative. We are not going to dress-up the experience to make it more dramatic or sad or weird than it actually is for the characters.Jack: This certainly fits the vibe of the film. What’s next? Is there another collaboration in the works?Dennis: We are writing our next film right now. We have a meeting about it tomorrow. Jack: Yeah?Dennis: Yeah, and it’s good!
I’m sitting at the pool with the boys, listening to the gardener trim the hedges. The world right now is loud and whirring. When the gauze comes off, everything will be graceful and good. My surgeon’s a short man with steroid face–large, skeletal nostrils–but he has great taste in women’s faces. My face feels taut and ready for anything. Underneath the bandages, I swear that I’m smiling down at the boys. I lower my feet into the lukewarm water. The sun is injecting undulating crystals of white that look like ominous little spirits. Or Xanaxs. I wonder what my husband’s doing at work, likely sitting somewhere too: at a desk, a toilet. The boys are yelling, splashing each other, crying out. I get up and towel off my feet, before alerting the nanny to go make them a snack. Heading upstairs to reapply SPF to my limbs, I swallow myself up in the blunt white surfaces of my house. Avoiding the sun makes me feel a little purer, like I’m a kidnapped woman. Peace, quiet, and skincare.The gardener moves right under my window, whirring underneath me. I hear him stumble. The trimmer turns off, and he’s singing to himself. I think to myself that he must be drunk. Last month, there was an incident at the country club. I overheard ladies talking about it at the smoothie bar–a worker killed himself, accidentally, in some sort of construction accident, some sort of falling or impaling or crushing. One of the ladies said that she thought he was probably drunk, and that alcoholism is a disease and it is more omnipresent than we think. Her friends were not necessarily having it, so I went over and agreed with her. It’s actually an area of vulnerability for me. The hedge trimmer turns back on as I lay myself down onto my bed, bunions hurting. Against my will, I think of my parents' liquor cabinet, the largest one you’d ever seen, with the wood sanded down where it rubbed together on opening or slamming shut. I close my eyes and laugh to myself, pop an Ativan for the pain. I look inward. I let myself recount the story of my life through identities: plain schoolgirl, shy debutante, wife, Hollywood actress, wife again, mother. And then I think about my little sports-stars, little Nikes on, splashing away in the pool, and I think about the scalpel that nicked their heads during my C-section. The nanny raises her voice out the window–and I’m reminded of last week, when I got a call from the boys’ teacher, Miss Pappajohn. She had a lot to say. They don’t listen, they don’t relax. They’re doing things. To other kids, to small animals. They’re headstrong, they’re troubled, they’re suspended. When I look at the boys, all I see is a curious innocence. I have the wisdom to know that everything that they do wrong comes from the innocence of not knowing between right and wrong. But of course Miss Pappajohn can’t see that. She’s the one who creeps me out. She’s about my age and I haven’t heard her ever mention a family, or friends. She’s rude, always emailing at odd hours. I can tell her hair has never touched a lick of conditioner. Sometimes, Miss Pappajohn’s face pops up when I see chicken skin at the grocery store. I feel bad for the boys. They have to sit and watch her all day. I bet she keeps whiskey and limes in her dusty little desk drawer. She’s not a good girl. My boys are the innocent ones. Which is funny because of my thought, just now, that I was never really innocent–certainly not as an actress, no matter how approachable and commercial I was always told I looked. You know, that girl-next-door face can be stifling, especially when you’re sitting at home in your own living room and an agent comes by and tells you that you are actually next-door. But that’s what they want. And that’s why I got popular. They don’t want character actresses. They want you to be relatable. But now I’m not. I’m not that innocent girl. Yesterday, I went into my husband’s home office and shredded the letter I got from my mother. The stationary had these cartoon drawings of plump strawberries and yellow happy faces. She was asking for money, I think. She was not innocent either. At the present moment, I have a hard time seeing my parents’ faces; their disapproving features are dwarfed by our distance in space, in time. The mom was short and the dad was tall. Not rich, not poor. They hated me for leaving. I can only imagine them in motion, in fuzzy nonexistent home videos. They’re eating large ears of corn in these home videos. The corn gets in the way of precise detail. I saw on Instagram that hurt people hurt people. I thought it was stupid at first. But lying here alone, I don’t feel like I’m the real cause of anything bad. I guess maybe I can be innocent if I think hard enough. Everyone can be. All the men, too, even. Silent rooms filled with them, black bow ties and woody cologne. That’s not even what they wore or smelled like, but it’s how I picture them.#MeToo has supposedly changed the industry. Now, it’s young men who have to watch out for the gay power-players. I was glad to take this work hiatus to gather my bearings, get in touch with myself, with truth, and now even with my own innocence. Maybe I’m a good girl with good bones when it comes down to it. I notice a pinstripe of sunlight feeling up the walls, then, I watch it disappear as I close the gap in the curtains. The gardener looks up mysteriously at me as I do it. I know I need to deal with him. Suddenly, footsteps. I turn around. “Mommy?” the boys ask. They’ve padded behind me to my room, dripping all over the floors like twin slugs. “Hello,” I reply, slipping the little orange bottle from my palm to my bathrobe pocket.“He’s mad at you.” One points to the other. “Mad?” “He doesn’t want your face to change. He wants you to stay the same and never die.”“Oh, sweetie,” I look at the boys, who are both averting eye contact. “Me too. This is all to make sure that I look the same forever.” The boys liven up, imagining this world I’ve created where mothers don’t age. Smiling, they say that they’ll stop eating so they can never age too. I smile back. Their minds are cute little uncooked hamburgers that only I know how to handle correctly. They’ve known me to get Botox before, and they always hate it because I look different. I’ve misled them in my way, but that’s what mothers are there to do: keep up the illusion of Santa, of no ‘bad guys’ who come out in the night, of a world that’s going to keep running smoothly for the next 100 years, just for them. What they don’t know is that I have to do it. What they don’t know is that looking different can sometimes be the only way to stay the same. If I posture just right, I can make it seem like I always looked like this. Because my new face isn’t stalling for anyone, not even the boys. My new face will not be plain, because plainness invites people to think that you are just like them, when you are not. My new face will not be aged, because looking in the mirror at a wrinkly face fishes out the bloated, drowned corpse of the past and turns it over into the future, which you also do not want. It’ll be that unique kind of beauty that you can’t forget. Which is to say that I will look fake.I’m finally ready to admit that I’ve always been fake. That’s what people don’t get–I’ve always been fake. Things roll off of me. I’ve schemed my way through life. And I’ve proudly worn blinders, because seeing everything in great detail makes everything strange and sad. I don’t want to be sad. But it's all okay now. This new face will let me rest my heavy little mind. It'll get me in touch with innocence. I’ll be on the outside what I’ve always felt like on the inside and it will be my repentance. Lately, I’ve been even considering trying my hand at acting again. This time, I could really disappear—line by line, frame by frame, into a good role. Be ruined and dramatic for a bit. Cry and beg for my babies back. Give a real smile when they do come back. No more Hallmark. I take the boys back downstairs. The gardener is packing up–and a strange feeling that I could have been unaware of something makes me nervous, realizing that something curious about this image does not come together correctly. I’m shocked to feel as though I’m sinking and the world around me is enlarging like a bright ballooning tumour. I gather myself. I approach the gardener, ask if he needs anything–water, a snack. While he answers, I inspect his face for puffiness, yellowing, and I inspect his eyes, too, for wandering. He looks back at me, blankly, as I take my time. He looks fine. I’m glad to see it. Now, I don’t have to do anything anymore. I don’t want to. So, I’m sitting at the pool with the boys, watching the gardener exit stage left. The sun is shining. The boys are screaming, with joy, and the adhesive under my bandages has never felt so tight and secure. Emboldened, I raise my face to the sun in satisfaction. My life is intact and good.
Doc Raeford lifted the tail and stepped back to avoid the torrent of steaming bull shit. After the last wink of the bull’s anus, he leaned forward and pushed the electroejaculator probe into the rectum, completing the docking maneuver.“Bull’s eye.” Mike would never have imagined that he’d enjoy helping a veterinarian anally penetrate a two-thousand-pound Angus bull, but he did.Raeford shrugged. “It’s a gift.”The bull resisted the intrusion, lunging forward, shoving his chest against the gate of the squeeze chute with a jolt. His nostrils flared, flecks of foamy mucus blowing out on the exhale. The Texas sun heated the black hide, releasing its animal scent.“How’s your wife?” Mike asked.“Good. She’s meeting her sister for a spa day. They’re doing goat yoga, then getting massaged with hot rocks.”“I’ve heard of the down dog, but not—”“This isn’t a position. It’s baby goats standing on your back. Supposed to be relaxing.”Raeford flicked the switch and the bull froze, legs locked straight, the only movement a twitch of skin over his shoulders.“Have you hired a new assistant for the clinic yet?” Sweat dripped from Mike’s chin onto the front of his khaki twill prison-issue shirt. He watched Raeford out of the corner of his eye.The bull sucked breath into his massive lungs and held it for almost five seconds, before releasing it in a snort as his abdominal muscles spasmed, and he ejaculated. Mike was right there with the collection tube.“Yep. He’s starting next week.” “Oh.” Mike tasted something metallic, bitter as an unripened persimmon. “Good deal.” It had been stupid to hope for anything different.Raeford pulled the ejaculator probe out of the bull. Mike removed the loving cup from the end of the collection tube and placed it carefully on the workbench.After pipetting a drop of semen onto a glass slide and studying it under the microscope for a couple of minutes, Doc Raeford said, “Morphology eighty percent, motility seventy percent.”Mike wrote the figures on the bull’s breeding soundness evaluation form. “He’s a keeper.”“Yep. Lots of swimmers.”“So, Doc, I’m getting out in three weeks. I’m going to miss working with you.”“I can speak with the parole board. They may argue for you to stay if I tell them what a big help you are.”“Oh, hell no. No, way.”“I’m messing with you, son.”Mike received the maximum sentence for being in possession of a smidge over two ounces of marijuana, likely because he’d refused to say who’d sold it to him. He smiled wistfully.Raeford palpated the bull’s scrotum and measured its circumference. He wrote the measurement down and gave a thumbs up to Mike, who pulled the lever releasing the head gate. The bull trotted out and was herded from the area by two trustees on horseback.The next bull had a higher body condition score but his sperm were sluggish, resulting in a motility score of only twenty percent. Despite being a handsome animal, he would not be kept for breeding. After the last of the bulls had been examined, Mike tidied the work area. He wiped off the electroejaculator and packed it, and the microscope, in their cases.Raeford sorted the evaluation forms by the bulls’ ear tag numbers. “That was a good day’s work. What do we have for next week?”“We’ll have several new litters of piglets needing iron shots, ear notching, and tail docking. And a batch of male piglets ready for castration.“The whole enchilada. That’ll keep us busy. Thanks for giving me a hand today.”“Yes, sir. Always happy to help.”
***
The following Wednesday, Mike had two tables set up in the farrowing barn, each with a large dog crate on top. One crate held a litter of piglets, the other was empty.Raeford pulled lidocaine, syringes, needles, a V-ear notcher, castration knife, brown glass bottles of iron dextran, and a jug of disinfectant from a black bag.Mike brought out the first piglet, cradling it gently in his calloused hands.“I’m back to square one with the search for an assistant.”Mike blinked and something fluttered in his stomach. “Why?”“The guy never showed up, and he’s not answering his phone. Maybe he got another job and isn’t courteous enough to tell me.” Mike stood mute as Raeford injected iron, punched divots out of the ear margins for identification, and nipped off the end of the piglet’s tail. He hugged the baby piglet to his chest and whispered in its ear before placing it into the empty crate. As he picked up another little one, his mind chewed over this new development. He took a deep breath and spoke fast, before he could change his mind. “Doc, would you consider letting me interview for the job?”Raeford frowned. “I thought you were going back to UPS?”“I’d rather work with animals.”“It probably doesn’t pay as much as UPS, but the job is yours if you want it.”It didn’t feel real. Mike didn’t want to ask but had to. “It’s not a problem, me being an ex-con?”Doc Raeford put down the tail nippers. “You’ve been my assistant for a year and you’re damn good at it. You treat the animals with compassion. I don’t give a good crap about anything else. You hear me?”“Yes, sir. Thank you.”“Now, let’s get going. It’s date night for me and the wife—she’s taking me to goat yoga.”
Amelia-Rose followed first. She even had the audacity to message Francis afterwards, as if following real life acquaintances on Tumblr was normal. Hi Francis! It’s nice to see someone else who is as online as me lol. xoxo—AR Francis freaked, of course. She couldn’t picture Amelia-Rose as a fellow Columbiner, not even as one of the fangirls exclusively in it for horny reasons: the ones who posted crime scene photos of Eric’s body captioned idk hes kinda cute without his face, who posted drawings of a shirtless Dylan Klebold, passably rendered in ballpoint pen—not that Francis thought there was any respectability there, with those types of girls. Amelia-Rose’s blog was Lolita models and gifsets of the Sanrio characters and hard-jawed men who were stranded in a meadow of kawaii. Arrayed in tweed, they pinned squirming schoolgirls beneath them, besmirching their mahogany desks with statutory rape. Those posts were hashtagged with TCC.A multipurpose acronym, two types of girl. Read Francis’ way: True Crime Community. Turned on its head: Teacher Crush Community. Francis ignored Amelia-Rose’s message, but clicked the Follow Back! button. And so they were mutuals. A disclosure of degeneracy: I know you, yes, but you know me too.
***
In the hallways they passed each other like strangers. Francis saw Amelia-Rose exclusively through her peripheral vision. Amelia-Rose took on a diffused quality—pinks and yellows, like the kind of sunset Francis saw in the Sunoco parking-lot where she sometimes sat, cross-legged in a fug of cigarette smoke, on the automatic tire pump.What if I talked to her? Francis thought, but she couldn’t withstand the visual: Amelia-Rose, almost six feet tall with her childishly large hairbows; Francis, in a men’s leather trench coat that dragged across the linoleum floors.Despite this, Amelia-Rose liked her reblog of the boys mugging for the camera, liked her selfie in which she wore Eric’s mirror-lensed sunglasses, liked her 1000 word essay, a painfully comprehensive breakdown of a single line from Eric’s journal. What do you think about when you look at the sky at night, when there's no clouds out and you can see all the stars? Francis reblogged a text post: According to autopsy records, Eric’s heart weighed ten grams less than Dylan’s. Alone in her room, she cried. It was Eric she loved best, after all—his verbosity, his skinny limbs in a constant tap dance of agitation. The visibility of his desperation to be loved, like cracks of light shining through the roof of a condemned building. She shut her eyes and held her hands out, trying to feel the weight of a dead boy’s heart. Above her reblog, she added: when i read this, i cried for real.A message appeared in her inbox. Here if you ever want to talk about anything.She imagined telling her, all the trite things Amelia-Rose would say to try to convince her not to. And what advice could that girl offer? A teenage girl in love with her drama teacher. A girl who had answered, unabashed, the anonymous ask Francis had sent her—answered that her wildest fantasy was to be walking home from school in the pouring rain and see the familiar car on the street. To watch as it slowed, as the passenger window rolled down. To see deliberation play across his face, to watch the break in resolve in real time. To be offered a ride.
***
Do I dare disturb the universe? asked a poem Francis studied in AP English. Do I dare? Do I dare? came into her mind often. That intruding, shameful question. Time to turn back and descend the stair.
***
At night she would play through Eric’s Doom WADs. Bricks. KILLER. Hockey.wad. She liked to clear the level of all the demon hordes and then linger there, floating through that labyrinth he had created over twenty years ago. When she tried to sleep she would see the Doom HUD on the back of her eyelids. 50 ammo, 100% health, 0% armor. She dreamt a military-base maze, an endless turning of corners. Eyes shut, the eyeball flicking back and forth underneath the thin skin of her eyelid, searching for someone that was not there.
***
She did theater tech for the spring musical, Little Shop of Horrors. Amelia-Rose was Audrey. Francis watched from high above in the control booth as she sang her solo, a falsetto belt. I’m his December Bride. He’s Father, he knows best. It was a pity, Francis thought, that Amelia-Rose was so talented and still deemed unworthy of love. Francis trained the spotlight down on her, aim steady as Amelia-Rose danced across the stage. Afterwards when she went to smoke she found Amelia-Rose crouched behind the theater, her mascara in wet trails down her cheeks. Francis didn’t know what to say. As she lit up she watched Amelia-Rose out of the corner of her eye. Francis finished her cigarette in silence, crushing the butt under her combat boot.“Do you want to go to the mall?” Amelia-Rose asked suddenly.Francis had never been to the mall. She didn’t have a car and she wouldn’t have wanted to go even if she could get there. Still, she found herself nodding. Found herself saying, “Yeah, okay.”
***
At Southpoint Mall they threaded in and out of stores, compelled to buy nothing, touch nothing, barely speaking. They ended up on a bench behind the mall beside an abandoned fountain.“I guess we should go home,” Amelia-Rose said eventually.Francis nodded. She stared at the fountain. Inside were statues of children, cast in brass. They were disquieting, malformed, their mouths stretched into grimaces meant to be smiles, their teeth individually rendered. They were placed on raised platforms, and underneath them jets of water were supposed to spout up to give the illusion that they were being blasted into the sky, except someone had turned the jets off a long time ago. The fountain was infested with geese; they splashed in the water and leaked white shit through the children’s hair. What if I walked in? Francis thought. What if I did anything at all? The sun came down a parking-lot orange. A tree branch balanced in the open hands of one of the children. It was brittle and five feet tall. The end branched like a forked tongue thrust into the sky. “Do you ever feel scared to do literally anything?” Francis asked Amelia-Rose.“Sometimes it’s good to be scared,” Amelia-Rose said. After a pause, she continued, “It’s like—I made a move on him today. He was helping me do my makeup, blacking out my eye, and his hands were on my face—I grabbed them and held them against my lips. For a second he stayed there, and I thought maybe…” She looked down, fiddling with her bracelets. “He was nice about it—he said he would ignore it this one time.”Francis walked over to the fountain. When she grabbed the stick, it was almost too much sensation: dirt worming beneath her fingernails; the geese’s honks; the slippage of leaves underfoot; the smell of still water. She turned back to Amelia-Rose. She levelled the stick and looked down its barrel, composing the image just so. A face in the crosshairs. “I could kill him for you,” Francis said.Amelia-Rose laughed as if it were a joke. “You wouldn’t dare.”Francis thought: Watch me. Amelia-Rose grabbed the forked end and pulled. The stick cracked like a wishbone between them, the sound dry and startling. Around them the geese screamed, rose into the air, and fled.
When she found the babe under her woodpile, it was October and already cold on the mountain. Poor thing shivering under the logs with skin blue and veiny. Eyes bulging and pupilless. She scooped it up and swaddled it in a quilt, one long ago rendered by her own knotted hands, and took care to tuck its thin limbs into the folds of the fabric. Thin limbs that twisted like corkscrew worms. She brought the thing into her cottage to warm by the fire and watched as the heat revived it, brought presence to its eyes, a look of health returning to its cheeks. But its skin remained blue. Its skin would remain blue always.She took right away to calling it—him—Little Arlo. Though there were no discernable parts, none that she could find anyway, she felt that the babe was male. She knew men well. And boys. Had been surrounded by them in a past life, a husband and sons. Isn’t that the nature of the world? To be surrounded by a husband, and sons? Men who were always lingering in her effortful recollections, always too high. The tease of a box on a shelf edge. A husband who melted away in startlingly few years, a hoary, coughing soup. And boys. Boys who were also blue, wore blue, wooly blue that became mud caked, and blood soaked. Artillery. Amputation. Consumption. Dry eyes that stared into the sky and would ask for nothing, plucked out by crows, turned to birthing pits for insects. Push that away because here is a child, lovely and innocent. Here is a child, new and yours. Child, who are you? What do you see?Little Arlo had no interest in bread or vegetables, nor what little salted meat there was, but when she opened a jar of rhubarb jam he began to squirm. She scooped it into his triangular mouth, and he sucked the syrup down and cooed. Black tongue wagged, and she obliged, nearly half the jar, and then the boy slipped into a deep sleep. So wonderful to listen to him breathe those long breaths like that. Her own sleep did not come so easily and had not for years. Intervals of unsatisfying beinglessness punctuated by terror, faceless men in the shadows, drumbeat haunts emanating from within the dry air of her cabin. And then, the ringing of church bells, always church bells. Gentle, impossible, far.In the morning, Old Lady Murray sat on the porch and smoked and oscillated on her rocker, swaddled infant in her arms, and watched across the treeless ridge as Mr. Dalton, the postman, trotted in from the direction of Nimbus, giving a loud “Ahoy,” and a “How do you do, Mrs. Murray? I’ve brought you some preserves,” and “What is that you’ve got in your arms there?”“My new babe, Little Arlo.”“Oh? A new babe, then. Little Arlo, then. That’s—how nice I suppose.”“What did you bring me?”“Oh, just some pear and apple preserves, and some bread and—oh, but perhaps I should have a look at Little Arlo? Just to—and where did you say he came from?”“Better to not. Better to just leave the things on the stoop there. And, well I found him outside under the woodpile. He had such a chill, oh, but he’s nearly convalesced now. A terrific appetite for rhubarb jam, and I’m sure he’ll like pear. My boys, you know my boys, how they loved—my boys, oh, oh, and Mr. Dalton, just leave the things on the stoop there, thank you so dearly!”Mr. Dalton obliged, accustomed to the widow’s occasional episodes, and rested the sack of groceries on the rough boards of her porch. Then, giving a little bow, he spun around and trotted back down the mountain path, tut-tutting and shaking his head, and such a shame, really. The woman having completely lost her senses. Changed from the pragmatic schoolteacher of his youth, that formidable manner, and always that soft generosity beneath. And, of course, remembering that day after the meeting in Appomattox, the boys marching back into town and her sons’ not among that procession of shineless eyes. And the supposed babe, just a bundle of straw? Or a bag of flour? Or maybe something, an animal, an injured opossum. I think I saw the swaddle move.
***
Sad intrigue can spread with epidemic ferocity through small mountain hamlets, especially when carried by the lips of an unabashed gossip. Consider the bed bug, whose colonies can multiply by orders of magnitude on a monthly basis. It was in this way that, over the course of remarkably few days, Mr. Dalton had cultivated a general awareness of Little Arlos’ presence within the town of Nimbus.Gossip. Mr. Dalton felt all right about gossip. He felt that it was his employ and currency, his special talent. Gossip was a little distasteful, yes, but only a little. After all, it was gossip that enabled his charitable visits to the old woman. It was through gossip that, besides a certain prideful, self-serving generosity, shopkeeps justified the handouts they provided on her behalf. Without the extraction, and exchange of gossip, what mail, what food, what human interaction would Mrs. Murray receive? Without gossip, there might be three generations of Little Arlos living in that cabin by now. And frankly, most days there was nothing for Mr. Dalton to report. A remarkably boring person, really, just smoking and rocking in toiled remembrance. A hollowed-out woman in a hollowed-out town, drained of its youth by the undertows of war and industry. Nimbus, the unadaptive. Nimbus, monument to obsolescence. Boom and bust. Vestigial limb of a world whose new language was coal— bituminous and anthracite—was rail, land-rights, incorporation. No space for your people and their bald mountain, their total depletion of hemlock, beech, maple, chestnut, now just black shale and grey sandstone, dramatic, exposed bedrock geometries, brittle cliffs that crumbled away into angular shards, pencil lead thin.The morning was just ending as Mr. Dalton returned to Old Lady Murray’s cottage. He stood for a long time and watched as she teetered forward and back and said nothing. Just a mutual watching. He was struck by the way she held the swaddled object to her chest, her ironic resemblance to the Virgin Mary. “Well, Mrs. Murray, did Little Arlo enjoy his preserves?”“Oh yes! You should have seen him suck it all down. So quick, rabbit quick!”“I’m sure. Say, why don’t you let me hold the wee babe?”“Better to not, Mr. Dalton. He’s asleep in my arms here. Better to let a growing boy sleep, don’t you think?”Mr. Dalton climbed the first steps to the porch, leaning in close. “How about you just pull the swaddle back a bit? I’d be so pleased to have a look at him.”“Don’t come close. You’ll wake the poor thing.”There was a suggestion of embarrassment, a subtle loss of confidence appearing in the wrinkles of his forehead. “Of course, pardon me,” he said, blinking hard. “Goodbye, Mrs. Murray, and take care now. I’ll be seeing you.” Following the mountain path back towards Nimbus, Mr. Dalton crooked his neck around for one last look at the woman. He watched her release a plume of white smoke, which formed a rolling puddle of milk caught in the gentle slope of her awning. Strange mother. Blessed Mother. Recall your own mother, the lines in her face, the way her body had once seemed a landscape. Knees like mountaintops, amazed by the whiteness of the scalp where her black hair parted. Her expansive kindness, without horizon. Her resilience in the face of embarrassing, petulant torments, masculinized rage, the way she protected you with that selfsame body. A body that eroded and became wan, and then just pebbles. Just pebbles and silt. Recall how you found the stony thing that had been your mother at the kitchen table. Recall how you felt relieved.
***
After Sunday worship, during the sharing of joys and concerns, Mr. Dalton stood and reported on certain alarming developments as they pertained to the Little Arlo situation. Most congregants, those vectors of gossip, were already familiar with the story of the so-called new babe, but hearing now how the old woman still clung to the delusion, how she still cared for the mysterious swaddle of indeterminate provenance, this was certainly distressing news. Mr. Dalton listed a number of considerations, chiefly, the health threat—should the swaddle contain an animal, even the carcass of one, the widow could be at risk of injury or infection. Otherwise, say a bag of flour or object of similar inertness, she may incur emotional or spiritual harm, poor woman on the brink as it was.“What if we threw a party?” Suggested Edith Wainbridge, as she often did. If you asked Edith, a party might solve any of life’s problems. “But here, let’s throw a party to celebrate the young babe. All that drink and merrymaking, the dancing, Mrs. Murray would show us. She’d simply have to show us.”It seemed to be a good idea, a way to get many eyes on the swaddle at once. With so many well-meaning supplicants, she’d have to pass the babe around. Right away they began adorning the walls of the adjoining social hall with blue paper streamers, made last minute preparations for cold supper foods and desserts, and diluted the dregs in their liquor bottles. As for the old woman who had not stepped foot in a church since the end of the war, Mr. Dalton tasked himself with relaying the invitation. Once again, climbing the disused summit path, he found her rocking with that swaddled infant in her arms. Sun beams filtered through the trees, then the slats of the awning, then fell upon her face, where a circle of pipe smoke portrayed an almost druidic look.“Oh Arlo, won’t that be fabulous?” She said after Mr. Dalton had disappeared back over the ridgeline. “An entire party in your honor. How befitting, how deserved! My beautiful infant, my wonderful savior.” And there he was, staring at nothing in particular, sphincteric mouth clamping hard around the wooden spoon, the heap of golden apple mush.
***
It had passed well into the evening and very perceptibly the time of night when partygoers begin thinking about their own beds. Jaunty music still filled the social hall, plucked out by the fat-fingered hands of John Miller and John MacLeod, but only Edith Wainbridge, by herself, still flatfooting and stomping on the wriggling boards. The few remaining slices of cake were collapsing on the tray, and the watery liquor was very nearly finished. But still, no one had glimpsed the child, Arlo, who was completely swaddled, not a patch exposed. Nothing could breathe in a swaddle like that. There was no stink either, no reek, but a strange odor if you got close. Something botanical, almost bitter. Not entirely unpleasant.Old Lady Murray remained at the center of it all, holding court from her folding wooden chair, humored through the night by the masses. She sat and told meandering, nothing stories that rushed apart and broke, tumbled over cliffs, formed logic eddies, loops of adoration for sons whom she described with increasingly blurry distinction. And still, the kernel of her former self was present tonight, present for the first time in years. That self-sacrificing woman, teacher of a one-room schoolhouse, mother for many. Mrs. Murray, who nourished her students with stories of a world which would never be theirs. One of great kings and prophets, mathematicians, inventors. Students, who would know only the lives of soldiers, the labor of serfs. Where there were gaps in her droning recollection, partygoers took turns descending upon the old woman, asking to hold the babe, to at least have a glimpse beneath the swaddle. “Better to not.” This was her refrain, without variation. Better for his face to be hers alone. His strange features, his blue flesh. To hold his writhing body, to caress his jawless chin, the undulations of the muscles beneath. Gravel through a hopper, a meager but steady stream of attendees bade farewell and departed, hiding their frustration. Mr. Dalton paced. He noticed the spiral of the party, the unspoken, shared desire to end the night. He held onto one final gambit. It had occurred to him days ago, a means to retrieve Little Arlo, to detain and inspect the swaddled object. But a cruel means. Or at least the aesthetic of cruelty, but beneath that it was genuine, kind-hearted concern. Her wellbeing at the forefront of all things. Yes, this was Mr. Dalton’s intention, the old woman’s wellbeing. Good intentions and, in the end, a good outcome. He was counting on a good outcome. Concern for the old woman’s wellbeing. Genuine, real concern. And curiosity? The desire to know? To see? Admit it, how often you think about her all alone in that sad cottage, just memories, and cloying dreams. Phantoms are real in a place like that. You know all about phantoms, don’t you? Recall your own mother, the whispers in the wind that you can still hear. Didn’t you let your own mother down? The surrogate whom you call Old Lady Murray, the care-drive of a son transposed. To help her. To bring her back. To gawk. That’s what this is all about, isn’t it? You voyeur, you pervert. No, no. Genuine concern. Care. Righteous intent. These are the things that matter. These are the truths at the root of your being, the goodness there, the generosity and charity. These are the things you know to be true about yourself. You need these things to be true about yourself.The drunken music faltered now and went quiet. Mr. Dalton looked up. The crowd had thinned, only a handful of supplicants remaining, the most zealous disciples of morbid fascination. The candles flickering in their puddled, dwarfed stumps. The waning of the grey light filtering through thick window glass and the weakening definition of the clouds beyond, which had become a single, soft sheet. And Old Lady Murray, clearly on her way out, moving across the boards towards him, curtsying to the well-wishers as she went. “Mr. Dalton, I think it’s about time for me to be headed home. It’s Little Arlo, you see, the babe needs his rest. And I’m feeling a bit tired myself, to tell the truth.”“I see. Well, come then, let’s walk you back.”“Thank you, but there’s no need. We can manage.”“I insist, allow me to walk you.”“Little Arlo and I can get by on our own. Isn’t that right, wee one?”“Ah, but please just wait a second,” Mr. Dalton said. “I was thinking about the war, you see, remember the war? Yes, yes, of course. See, it just occurred to me, it just hit me suddenly, you see—and I hadn’t realized it when you asked before, all those years ago—but actually, I woke up this morning with the pang of a memory that, yes—yes, I did see your boys. I did know them. We were comrades, don’t you see?”“My boys?”“Yes, I remember them, three of them, yes? I remember that they always asked after their mother. They worried about you, Mrs. Murray, and they always said how lucky they were to be your sons.”“Oh—”“And they asked me to take care of her, should anything happen to them. And something did happen to them, didn’t it? To each of them.”“Oh, my boys. My boys—” Old Lady Murray swayed and gazed miles away, out beyond the plastered walls of the social hall. Out to where her boys might be. Three of them. She saw them face down in the mud, no bubbles blown into opaque, grey puddles. No more holding them, no more feeling the weight of their heads in her lap, comforting them on a journey to a place that did not exist. I cannot hold you. I cannot throw a party—no parties for you, ever. No weddings. Boys in their blue uniforms with shining brass buttons, their eyes which had once been the eyes of children. To hold your heads, to feel the weight of you, to see your faces again. Never. Not since their farewell waves from half-opened train car windows. Not since the plumes of black smoke, white steam shooting geyser-like from heavy, sooty locomotive wheels. The cold, awesome machinery that rotated them around and around again.The old woman took on a look of syncope and crumpled into a nearby chair, still holding Little Arlo, pulling the swaddled infant inwards. The few remaining partygoers fluttered paper fans in her face, held tins of diluted whiskey to her lips. “Oh, pass me the child,” said Edith Wainbridge, leaning in beside her. “Give Little Arlo to me, Mrs. Murray, before you drop him.” Her aching arms suddenly unburdened, the swaddled object lifted up out her lap, empty fingers curling around nothing, pale eyes held shut, wet-lidded.Edith brought the bundle up into her own chest and was surprised by the heft of the thing. Certainly not just a roll of fabric. Too heavy, it seemed, for even an opossum. She felt a definitive movement within the swaddle, a subtle throb and an occasional twitch. There was something alive in here. The remaining partygoers closed in around her, many hands outstretched, many eyes wide and searching. It struck Edith now, a stab of frightening consideration, that this may indeed be a child. And then, with haunting clarity, she noticed that she was rocking the swaddle, gently bouncing it against her clavicle. Mr. Dalton met her confused, startled eyes and held his arms out, as if the child were the sphere of Atlas, a titanic burden which he would accept without complaint. She passed—nearly tossed—the babe to him and then took a seat beside Old Lady Murray, almost as pale herself now. The onlookers shifted their focus to Mr. Dalton as he unwrapped the quilted pupa. How strange to peel back so many layers and then to keep going, the fabric growing damper, more yellowed as he approached its center. And then that smell, at once acrid and appealing, it caused a tingling in his sinuses.Outside, the early evening became dusk. Crepuscular animals stirred in the forested valleys below. But up here on the bald mountain carved up like a rotten molar, up here it was stone silent. Up here, twilight seemed to last for hours—darker than midnight, when the moon casts its image upon all things. Up here, where there was no shade. A century from now, dark nights would be rarer still, but by then, Nimbus would be a ghost. Its buildings devoured by the first pioneer species of ecological succession. The families who had nested in its once lamp-lit homes, long since dispersed and integrated into the larger cities of the region: Charleston, Pittsburgh, Columbus, Huntington, Cincinnati. The last few layers of swaddling were oil-slick and stuck to themselves, audibly peeling away from the surface beneath. Mr. Dalton was the first to see the babe, its bald, blue head, elongate and ambiguous. The sphincter of its mouth, clenching and unclenching. Its huge, dark eyes that reflected but did not blink. And arms, delicate arms. A number of thin arms, but which number? More than two. They twisted and reached, one of them winding around Mr. Dalton’s wrist, an immense strength apparent despite how slender, how gentle. “My Lord! Wha—God, what is it?”He dropped the thing to the floor with a wet thud, where it made the first sound anyone had heard from it. A sound like a puppy’s sigh, more a whimper than a whine. And then silence again. Deep silence. The small crowd of supplicants staring dumb-eyed, something breaking within each of them, something long fermenting at the center of it all, suppressed by the decades of politeness and boredom. They shrieked and pointed, some of them fainting. It was in this commotion that Old Lady Murray awoke, slowly habituating to consciousness, and then upon seeing her child on the ground, leaped up with a throaty, glottal yelp. A mother’s yelp. She dove forward and hefted the child over her shoulder, bounding out into the twilight, heavy double doors swinging shut behind her. Then just the crowd standing baffled, lingering with confused, dumb eyes, the terror of a deer on the interstate. Some of them mumbling, some of them shutting their eyes and shaking their heads.What words are there to describe that which cannot exist? Mr. Dalton was the first to capture and transform the horror—the first to reach desperately for rage. For violence. “Get it! Devil! Get—God, stop!” his voice buzzed in a new, tinny register. “Go get her! Stop her! Devil!” He pushed through the herd and pulled an oil lamp from the wall, sprinting out after the old woman, the others following quickly behind. They armed themselves however they could, cutlery, long-handled collection baskets, heavy-bound hymnals, bottles, their own pocketknives. They ran out into the dusty streets after the old woman. Only Edith Wainbridge remained, locked to her seat.
***
Follow her past the tavern and up the slope of the bald summit. The vision-fade of twilight, the lactic burn, the stiff and frightening arthritic pangs. Little Arlo clings to her now, blank eyes full of knowing, mouth opening and closing in mollusk fashion. “Hold onto me child, you won’t be harmed. I will not let them. Lord knows they will not lay a finger upon you.” And the jeering mob closing in behind, the cloud churning up beneath their footfalls, their mean noises. “Hold on, Little Arlo, cling tight to Momma,” her words spitting out between laborious pants. “They are the devils and you, an angel.” She rushes past her cottage and continues to the other side of the summit, where she hears faint bells ringing out in the gloaming. A soft chime and deeper, brassy harmonies.The mob gains and corners her against the mountain’s far-facing flank, just the steep valley beneath. They form a wide line and choke in, no choice for her but to descend the harsh slope. She has trouble with the steepness of it, the breakaway shale beneath her feet. Her gown catches on a pathetic hemlock fledgling and she comes down hard on her knees, cries out, but does not drop Little Arlo. She does not even flinch to catch herself, arms in a firm cradle as she tumbles end-over-end, rolling down the talus until she crashes against a sandstone boulder. A phosphene flash in her vision as something—many somethings—shatter within. The feeling of warmth beneath skin. “Help her!” Shouts Mr. Dalton, “Get away from it!” The mob clamors down the slope, shards of loose stone bunching up in mounds beneath their feet, the talus spilling down and burying her bloodied legs, pebbles bouncing up into her face. And all through the hurt, the old woman smiles at her child. Little Arlo, still unharmed. Little Arlo, still protected. “Take me to them, Little Arlo. Take me away, please, you angel, you divine thing. If my boys are somewhere, please take me to them. Please, you’ve been there, you’ve seen them, I can tell by the look in your eye. If they are nowhere, I’d rather be nowhere. But they are somewhere, aren’t they? What place is it? Tell me, is it the place where you’re from? I’m not your mother, I know that. I’m not your mother, but I could be. I could show you what it is to have a mother, to have brothers, to be held, to be worried. Please. I’m ready now.”The child does not nod, but closes his eyes, becomes a mess of limbs that stretch out and wrap themselves around the woman. Her arms and legs now bound in blue helixes. The crowd watching in gape-mouthed horror as the child encompasses and subsumes her. Kudzu on a maple tree, the union of two beings. The old woman then rises to her feet as Little Arlo stands up on her behalf, walks for her, moves each of her limbs in his own. He turns her around and sprints down the slope at a full gallop.“My God!” cries Mr. Dalton. “My Lord, God Almighty!” He has no other language for this. His ears ring, a tightness at the base of his neck, blood rushing past his temples. He’s heard stories from the war, strange lights in the night, wounded bodies that emit a green glow and are healed, but nothing like this. His head pounds and his body trembles, shaking without his permission—an angry body with a frothing mouth—the reptile inside him cursing and yelling, grieving for itself. And beneath it all, genuine concern. Genuine guilt. An expanding thought loop that would not cease until his death three years later. The distinctions of memory collapsing, subjects losing their referents. There is a gestalt that precipitates from this soup of recollection: the woman who raised him, the woman who taught him, the woman who bore God. His mouth hangs open as he cries out, “Mother!” “Little Arlo,” says Old Lady Murray, her voice weak now. “I’m ready,” and then her body goes limp inside his. She is carried down the mountain at panicked speeds, eyes closed, smiling, listening to the bells that are so much louder now. The same bells she has heard each night for the last forty years, but never so loud, never so clear as this. And something else, too, something so quiet, interpolated over the percussion. Something like the voices of young men. No words. Only meaning. Little Arlo carries the old woman into a small cave, nestled beneath a curving, gable-like syncline that is etched with glimmering veins of quartzite. Nobody watching as mother and child disappear into the mouth of the Earth. Then there is a sharp green flash and a sound like thunder. Stones break and crash down, burying the entrance. No more cave, no trace ever found.
***
Unseen by anyone out in the deep night, out in the forested isolates that pen the river in, there is a heap of refuse where the waters meet a bend and regurgitate their burden. Here, an opossum searches for her meal. It is bleak, hard winter, when the insects are buried, and berries do not fruit. She eats garbage, bones not stripped of their flesh, whatever smaller creatures have congregated here for the same purpose. She must eat well tonight. Her pouch drags against the ground, sagging under the weight of four babes. She must eat well.
As was his habit, he lay down for an afternoon nap, although next door they were building a church. The sounds of drills, hammers, and other tools kept waking him up. He fumbled his way to the kitchen, drank two glasses of absinthe in quick little swigs, plopped back in the armchair, and stared at the ceiling. Up there, the light was moving back and forth, forming streaks and patches, devouring itself. They were puttering around next door, and he remembered that the foreman had once said to the workers that not all of them would live long enough to see the completion of the church. He was a slim and sinewy man; he smoked while he talked; he lit up a few cigarettes. He watched him from the balcony, then eventually he reached for a cigarette, too. The workers should remember, the foreman explained, that there are sanctuaries and churches whose construction lasted five hundred years. Think of the many churches in the world that are up and running, but they’ll never be finished. They’re not yet finished, but services are already taking place in them. The workers should remember that a church might never be truly finished. And when it is finished, does everyone get there in the end? No. Not everyone gets to the church they plan to go to. Because along the way they get lost, find another church, take a different path, get sick, die.The workers then began to ask questions.“Then why bother building it?”“I don’t know,” the foreman said. “They’re paying us, aren’t they?”They are. That’s true. If they weren’t paying, they would quit for sure. But because they’re paying them, they’re working. Then one of the workers asked a strange question:“Could a prayer be ever finished?!”“Perhaps if it’s genuinely heard,” the foreman replied, but he already regretted saying it.The man thought that once services were being held, he’d go over there to pray too, perhaps get down on his knees, and ask the Lord not to let the bird land on his windowsill anymore. Is that what he really wanted though? The window was open, and if he were to close the window panes, he’d suffocate. The heat was unbearable. At least with the window open, there was a small draft. He got up from the armchair, and looked back to see what kind of imprint his body left behind. He turned the radio on, and the scratchy sounds, emitted with each turn of the button, also sounded like a prayer. He listened to the news. Another catastrophic mine accident somewhere. The hot spell was here to stay. A protest was underway. The man turned the radio off. He drank another glass of absinthe, opened a can of beer, and watched the slowly disappearing brownish foam; by then, the bird was already standing on the windowsill. Truth be told, it usually dirtied it up and, once again, it pooped right there.The men below were puttering around.The bird was the town’s parrot, it flew from window to window, no one knew who its owner was, whose cage it escaped from. Someone might have let him go, shoo, fly away, we don’t want you anymore, bird. He thought it might have stayed around this area because of the construction of the church; maybe it was fascinated by the sounds of drills, chisels, hammers. The temperature was so high that the dripping sweat boiled on the temples. The city was suffocating, windows everywhere were wide open, as if they were human mouths. Large, hungry mouths, breathing in the heat and exhaling human vapor, the scent of dust falling from the leaves of indoor plants, the stale smell of furniture. The curtains, like souls ready to escape their imprisonment, swayed back and forth. The parrot was an exceptionally intelligent being.Its small colorful head tilted left and right, it listened, it eavesdropped. It picked up and learned the intimate whispers and shouts that circulated in each home, then it moved on. In the next home it repeated what it heard earlier. Sometimes the parrot told the man, stay with me.“Stay with me.”“Go away.”“You’re not enough.”“You’re too much.”The parrot whispered, be nice, be nice.“Let’s dance, darling.”The bird acted out how the church was being built. It imitated the drilling, the chiseling, the loud hammering, as though it were an echo. After a while it flew away, the man wiped off the yellow poop from the windowsill, and emptied another glass of absinthe down his gullet. He sat down, stared upward, and gave names to the cracks on the ceiling. He spotted a spider. He might have even dozed off. That’s when the doorbell rang. It was the foreman from the construction site, with a cigarette hanging from his mouth. His face looked tormented. They had exchanged a few words before, back when the construction started. He was now holding a bag in his hand, said hello, and asked to come in for a moment. He had something to say. The man nodded, of course, and stepped aside. The foreman accepted the glass of absinthe and lit up another cigarette. “This is how we pray,” he said “during work.” “We never get to the end of our work, but we pray regardless.”The bag was still in his hand.“I see,” the man nodded. “Did the parrot used to visit you, too?”“I never chased it away. Sometimes I might have even waited for it,” the man nodded.“Do you know what one of my workers said? He said that the bird is the voice of history.”“That might be a bit of an exaggeration,” the man said, and he poured another glass. They clinked their small, but thick glasses.“While we were working on our construction site,” the foreman said, “the bird kept repeating a woman’s name. In your voice. We couldn’t work because of it.”“You couldn’t work because of a name?”The foreman didn’t answer.“It was so ridiculous. The youngsters, the younger workers, they kept laughing,” he said as he wiped his forehead. “Don’t be angry with me, but it couldn’t go on any longer.”“I see,” the man nodded. “Don’t be angry with me, you all.”“Here you go,” the foreman said, and he slowly lowered the bag on the table. He chugged another glass of absinthe and left. He didn’t say goodbye. His steps echoed in the stairway, although during such heat waves stairway noises usually sound muffled. Blood seeped through the brown pastry bag. They must have caught it by hand, and then wrung its neck. The man placed the carcass on the windowsill, right where it pooped a few hours ago, and then, as had been his habit for some time, he began to talk to it.
I find a pocket universe in my apartment building. A whole ass other universe two floors below me! On the 23rd floor to be exact. You’d never know it was a pocket universe by looking at it. From the outside, it just looks like another normal door to another normal apartment. The pocket universe feels like it’s made for me. Like its dark energy and matter and various particles all exploded from the nethermost parts of my soul during its creation or my creation, or maybe they happened simultaneously and that’s how love works. The first night that I’m in my pocket universe, I sleep. That’s it. I sleep the best sleep I’ve had in years. No alarms. No construction outside my window. No neighbors fucking so loudly that I get a little jealous but also a little horny. Just the purest form of rest known to man. I wake up to a fresh cup of coffee just the way I like it on the nightstand with a little note that says: Good morning. I love you. At sunset, I walk through the field of black velvet petunias and watch how the rays of light bounce off the petals and bounce upward to illuminate the coming stars and my heart bounces around in my chest and wow wow wow, look at how beautiful everything is!I tell my pocket universe everything: how stupid my boss is, why I chose to wear whatever I chose to wear that particular day, how my diet is/isn’t going, my working theory that anyone who drives a KIA is a bad driver and anyone who drives a BMW is an asshole—everything! My pocket universe listens and laughs and through signs and wonders lets me know if I'm right or if I’m being judgmental. It’s not long until I pack up most of my shit and move into my pocket universe, only going back to my home universe when I need to water my plants or get a haircut or see how the San Diego Padres are doing this season or something. I work remotely, and my pocket universe has great WiFi, so I’m still able to make money even though I don’t have to pay for rent or gas or groceries anymore. My pocket universe provides everything for me free of charge. Nights are spent by the ocean, drinking coffee stouts with the dolphins. Mornings are spent having friendly debates on various topics with the redwood trees and the skyscrapers while scarfing down the best fucking breakfast burritos I’ve ever had. In the fleeting moments, I stare at the sun because here it doesn’t blind you. Here, it illuminates the version of you that you’ve always wanted to be. The version of you you’d always hoped was somewhere inside of you. It shines its light on that part of you like a miracle, and you start to believe.
***
I notice it in the sky first, like slender cracks in glass slowly crawling from one end of the horizon to the other. My pocket universe tries to convince me that everything is fine. That it’s not a big deal, nothing to worry about. The water is next. Once clear and pure, it muddles and is soon overrun with leeches. The sun dims from brilliant gold to a metallic gray. Still, my pocket universe tells me it’s okay. That it will pass soon enough, that it’s just grateful I’m here. I tell it I’m just as grateful. That I love it too. That I love it more than words can express. That no story or song or poem or picture or suicide pact or anything could ever express. That’s when the crimson in my veins turns black. My skin pales as the dark lines stretch along every inch of my body. I lose sight in one eye, and my lungs only take half their normal amount of air. Every breath feels suffocating. “I’m killing you by staying here,” I say. “Maybe I don’t belong here. Maybe I was wrong. What did I do? Why is this happening?”The mountains explode. Fire mushrooms up and rolls out like tidal waves across the canvas of sky, setting my pocket universe itself on fire. Stars crash down around me. My pocket universe whispers in my ear, “I’m so sorry,” and I black out. I’m lying on the floor of the hallway, covered head to toe in ash and soot. The door to my pocket universe expands and retracts as though taking its last breaths. I reach for the doorknob, try to force myself back in. I’m thrown into the air like a fucking rag doll, past the other doors in the hallway that lead to regular apartments and not pocket universes, and into the elevator. The doors slam shut, and I’m sent back to my floor.
***
Every morning and night, I walk past the door that leads to my pocket universe. The cracks in the wood heal in a matter of days, weeks, months until it’s as good as new. I heal, too. But I know I can never go back to my pocket universe. That if I do, it’ll kill us both. For whatever reason. It doesn’t matter, I guess. It just is. Instead, I lie in bed at night and dream of my pocket universe. Of its beauty and its brilliance and its whole ass existence being a miracle. And in my dreams, in my mind, I find a new pocket universe for me and my pocket universe to be together. One that hopefully won’t kill us both.
Jitterbug Johnny made it to the back of a dozen trucks and sports utility vehicles in the form of a sticker: “Jitterbug Johnny 1965-2023 – ‘Drive faster than an eagle takes flight!’” Jitterbug said the phrase any chance he could: before and after taking a shot, getting out of cold above-ground pools, even while receiving the toothiest blow job.However, it was a phrase that bothered some folks, sticking in their ear like a stubborn wad of wax. Did eagles take to flight faster than most other birds, they would wonder, shouldn’t this pithy encouragement have more to do with eagles soaring unparalleled heights rather than the immediacy with which they took off?These were understandable questions to ask of a man who also drove a beat-up sedan that couldn’t reach 30 miles per hour without shuddering and shaking across the land it traversed. And shit cars aside, Jitterbug usually preferred to stumble home most nights, the pounding tread of his unsteady boots his only company at 2:30 AM.After his death, choking on a chicken wing alone in his studio apartment with no curtains and a crunchy carpet that would scare even the bravest set of bare feet, the truly unspectacular mystery of Jitterbug Johnny’s motto that, without realizing it, garnered years of mental estate by those who knew him, rose to the surface, ready to be evaluated.Bored by their regular brews, Jitterbug’s bar buddies, a comingling from two different, dimly-lit establishments, met in an agreed upon abandoned parking lot to speculate over who “Jitterbug Johnny” really was and why he proselytized about driving faster than an eagle takes flight.First, the bar buddies decided to bust down Jitterbug’s front door, a place, they all discovered, they had never been invited back to.Their first batch of clues was the adornments: a Mexican flag on one wall, just to the side of the bulby TV, and, on the other, just above the couch, hung a life-sized poster of Howie Mandel wearing a burgundy suit—official 2007 promo for the show Deal or No Deal.The buddies stopped in their tracks, thankful for the safe, cleanish confines of their work boots traversing across the crackling carpet, their feet inside burdened enough, sore, weary, from working their hauls, their men, and their minds throughout the day.With fewer answers and more questions, the breeze drifting over the felled front door, the bar buddies scratched their beards and polished their bald heads shiny, forgetting why they felt so compelled to come, until the leering face of Howie Mandel sparked a discussion, a speculating as to why Johnny, a live alone bachelor, would have a poster of a sharp-dressed man and not a woman with honeyed hair and cleavage like an overstuffed couch?What, ultimately, they didn’t say (“Johnny was a queer!”), out of reverence for the dead, screamed louder than what they did (“Deal or No Deal? Solid network TV!”)Then the baked-in smell of spicy chicken soup, advancing from the hallway, comforted their searching minds and, together, without further debate, they realized Howie Mandel, at heart, was a stand-up comedian, an uncovered masculine aspect to the poster and the dead man who had tacked it up with three rusty nails and one bobby pin (“Certainly a souvenir from one wild nooner,” the bar buddies nudged each another with a grin.)But the Mexican flag they still cut their eyes at, wanting Jitterbug to be a full-blooded American. That is until one of the buddies, either the one a full inch shorter than the rest or the one who was always “pickin’ his seat,” chimed in, “I remember Jitterbug sayin’ his dad was half Mexican? Or…Maybe…It was his grandfather?”Ah yes, the bar buddies nodded. They too had a half-Mexican father and/or grandpa.The buddies split up, combing through the rest of the apartment, hoping to turn over the right “shell” and gain more clarity, more understanding so they could get back to their respective bars and nod with added certainty whenever someone spoke Jitterbug’s name.Drawers opened, cabinets closed, and fingers of the buddies gripped, tousled, and upturned what they could find only to come up short of filling in the deep gaps of just who all these men had considered a friend.Was Jitterbug the broken comb wedged under the one recliner, not the one with the blood stain but the one that smelled like box? Was he the TV, stuck on the weather channel for a different state? And where was the car manuals or bird ephemera for all that talk of driving eagles and flying cars. What was the saying again, the buddies shrugged, the permeating soup smell now a given, no longer a comfort.Tired, the buddies scratched themselves a final time, resting their other available hand on their hip until that posture felt too feminine and they all quickly shoved their hands in their pockets and left.Back at the bar, a new one, but as divey as the ones they had known, floors sticky, the beer cheap and shitty, the buddies sighed collectively.“Remember the time Johnny chipped his tooth?”Yes, they remembered, their smiles flat and foamy. Jitterbug had gotten blackout drunk and smashed his face into the pinball table just because no one had ever thought to give it a try.“Remember the time Johnny shit his pants?”Yes, that too they remembered until a bar buddy said, “Which time?”They all laughed over their beers, promising they’d learn from Jitterbug’s mistake, stopping at three, rushing to the toilet if they felt any “hot chocolate” coming on.Then a lull settled and the bar buddies noticed the football game blaring from the many screens and the two women playing pool who, yes, did have smaller breasts than they would normally hope for but it would be rude not to chat them up after the next round brought out the courage.It was this kind of casual moment of nothing, before that chicken wing refused to budge, when Jitterbug Johnny would’ve appeared, telling them all to drive faster than an eagle takes flight. The bar buddies acknowledged his absence with back slaps and mug raises. They didn’t have more any information about their dead, beloved friend. And they still didn’t understand his confounding catchphrase, but one thing was clear: you can argue with your boss for sticking you with the night shift, you can argue with your girlfriend on how best to shut that newborn up, but you can’t argue with the dead.“Hear, hear!” The bar buddies cried, clinking their glasses, letting the beer spill over the rim as it pooled on the bar top. “To Jitterbug Johnny!”
No NameI looked at her picture to see if she was more attractive than me. I looked up her family’s ancestry to see if they had ever owned slaves. They hadn’t; they were quakers. I looked at the picture of my boyfriend and her when they were in Italy together. I had never even been to Italy and he knew this. Yet there he was four years ago eating gelato with her with his eyes closed and a big grin. He probably wouldn’t take me to Italy because I was dull and uncultured. She worked in academia at a fancy university and had degrees that I would never have. I worked as a preschool teacher and everyone thinks I just finger paint all day. I don’t, and we mostly use colored markers anyways. She was born in a city, a really important one. I was born in a town with no name. It did have a name, but it hardly deserved one. She was not prettier than me, but somehow that made it worse. She must be really special while I am just attractive. Being attractive isn’t special. Anyone would date someone attractive because they assume they're good at sex. I am not good at sex; I just lay there. She probably did really kinky stuff. Like finger stuff. I heard ugly girls do that to compensate. She was not actually ugly, but I needed to say that she was. It was all I had. Cool Party I had finally been invited to a cool party. I was wearing a long skirt. I couldn’t drink because I was on antibiotics so I ordered an apple juice at the bar because I thought it would at least look like a beer but the bartender handed me a bottle shaped like an apple. I was wearing a long skirt and drinking apple juice and everyone thought I was Mormon and they hated me. Nobody had said they hated me, but I could assume they did because nobody was coming up and talking to me. The most popular person at the party had invited me. He was talking to everyone else and everyone wanted to talk to him. I was alone in a corner watching a Youtube video on mute, which probably wasn't helping. Then someone came up and began talking to me. He asked about the Youtube video. I told him it was two really funny guys that play video games and he asked if I played video games and I said no because I didn’t play video games, I just liked watching other people do it. He excused himself and walked away. I was jealous of him because he could walk away. I finished my apple juice and went home.
