My girlfriend has started a new regiment this week. She told me after coming home yesterday from work. Supposedly, this is supposed to help her achieve her “ideal form.” Every night now she is supposed to take these fluorescent green pills with her dinner. I don’t mind it too much. She becomes so sleepy afterwards, so I tuck her in our bed before sitting out on the couch for a couple of hours. Our flat is now quieter than usual.It seems the side effects are starting to take place in her body. This morning, she woke up before me squealing in front of the bedroom mirror. Her reflection seemed sickly in color that contrasted her cheerful visage. Grabbing my hands, she drew up my fingers to her cheeks. The skin there felt taut, reflecting the light from the ceiling fan. After we got ready for work, she texted me to go get some food and blankets for the upcoming weeks. Coconut, muskmelon, and vinegar for fruit flies. Her skin has begun to constrict, pulling back to reveal new valleys and canals. I asked her if she should be more concerned about her health, but she says this is natural. It’s harder to watch her stumble around more often around the apartment. I wrap cute bandages around her fingers from all the glasses she drops in the sink. Bruises color her thighs and hips. Her eyes have begun to cloud, a soft chocolate becoming milky blue. I have started to memorize where to run my thumb in circles at the front of her scalp, feeling small bumps under her skin. She asked me to help her this weekend hemming her jeans. When I run my hand along her vertebrae, she shivers while I test the new skin of hers.She quit her job. She told me that she won’t need it anymore. When my arms rest around her waist, foreheads touching, her new antennae curl in an arc and brush my ears. I asked her how much more fruit do we need to go through, and she giggled. She pressed her sharpened fingertips to my chest. Murmuring, she tells me how refreshing it feels now to breathe, to feel in her own skin. Next Tuesday, we’re supposed to get a humidifier in the mail to help her skin break smoother. The pills are starting to run out, so I have to go pick up her refill tomorrow and grab more trash bags.The night her new limbs emerged was the worst. I had just refilled the humidifier the second time while she begged to be held, covered in a cold sweat. Gently, I would roll her over on her side while I switched out the wet towels to toss into a bedside hamper. I would lay down on my side, rubbing her naked back in circles while the skin sloughed off to reveal a set of newly emerged elytra. I lean over to see her tear-streaked face, pressing my lips to her eyelids and her mouth, gently kissing where labrums fought to break out under her top lip. We both smiled. Once she fell asleep, I gathered her shed skin into a pile and shoved it down into trash bags. I got her the lavender scented ones this time.I like to watch her eat now, watching the juice run down her neck as she practices using her new, miniature mandibles. They click while she talks and when she annunciates her S’s. She told me that soon it might be harder for her to speak without proper vocal cords, so I signed up for a subscription to an American sign language course. She sits beside me while I review the alphabet, stroking my back with one of her new, dark legs that jut out from her waist. When we lay together in bed, I like to lay by her back and rub her newly fitted wings between my forefinger and thumb. She becomes more iridescent by the day. The flat has become lively again, with happy chitters reverberating throughout the place. I had to get her a pair of crutches today. Her legs were the next to go, as I watched the marrow into chitin. The thighs I would grip were now small enough to be held in my palm. As her bones start to hollow, it has become easier for me to carry her around the apartment. She covers her face whenever I decide to carry her like a princess from the bed to the kitchen for her meals. Slowly, she asks me what I will do once her transformation is done. I tell her that I will still love and take care of her regardless of her body. Her antennae wiggle in response. That night, I carried her to bed and held her tight to my chest. It felt like I was holding a bird.When I woke up this morning, the other side of the bed had a beetle sitting on her pillow. I put my hand out, watching her crawl up my arm to my nose. I walked her out to the kitchen and sat her by the sink. She spun while I cracked open a jelly from the fridge for her to squish into her mouth. Later, we went to the pet store to pick out a new enclosure. I brought her in her old water glass. She would point out which substrate she liked, what hide aways she wanted. Everyone else there was also carrying their girlfriend in cups. I set up her new enclosure in our bedroom after. She sat on my hands chewing my cuticles. She seems to really like her new spot on our nightstand by the window.My girlfriend died today. One morning when I woke up, the bed felt devoid of her presence. I shot up, running my hands and flipping up blankets and pillows, trying to find her. When I ran over to check her fish tank, I could see her on her back, arms curled up into her chest, bright green peeking out underneath. I scooped her up with my hands, flipping her over while I sat on her side of the bed. She was beautiful. I didn’t even know how to mourn. While I sobbed, cupping my girlfriend to my chest, the humidifier screamed waiting for its tank to be filled again. I decided to put her by the edge of my nightstand afterwards. When I turn in my sleep, I can twist and look into her honeycomb eyes before hiding under another blanket. I like to imagine that she is still there beside me with her cold exoskeleton pressed against my stomach.
We stood on top of our worlds as we knew them. The fall could kill us. Or worse. All part of the thrill. Henny, Walsh, and I were on the last level of scaffolding wrapped around the Bronson Windmill in Fairfield. We were heading into our senior year at Greenfield College Preparatory School. If you think we had on boat shoes judging from the last sentence, you’re wrong. Only Henny and I had on boat shoes. Walsh wore oversized flipflops with bottle openers on the soles. We sat down, dangling our feet over the edge of the scaffolding, swinging them back and forth above the hundred foot drop. Our cargo shorts were still damp from earlier when we jumped off the cliffs at Devil’s Glen into the river below, oblivious the devil was ever there or ever anywhere.Henny and Walsh were two of my best friends. I looked over at them. Walsh with his pellet gun slung over his shoulder and his Marine haircut to be like his older brother over in Afghanistan. Henny had our communal bong, Sir Bubbles Puffington II, in the padded bong case, slung over his shoulder like it was a bazooka. His babyface was angelic and devilish at the same time. Henny was short for Hennessy. He always told everyone he was from the Hennessy Cognac family. He wasn’t. His dad worked on Wall Street.I sat beside Henny and Walsh with a plastic bag full of three Coors Light forties from the bodega in Bridgeport that never ID’d us. I handed them their forties and we twisted the caps off.“Boat shoes are the cowboy boots of Connecticut.” Henny clicked the toes of his shoes together.“That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.” Walsh laughed.I looked out at the view. The windmill was on the tallest hill in town. We had a panoramic view. The kinda view suckers in our town paid millions of dollars to wake up to every morning. Ours was better though because it was free. Free for a limited time only though. The windmill used to power a dairy farm in the 1800s for some dude named Bronson. Then it was a nonfunctioning windmill for awhile, preserved to remind everyone of what came before us. Then a cell phone company bought it and decided to repurpose it into a cell tower which was why the scaffolding was up that summer. It was still gonna be a windmill on the outside, but it was gonna be a windmill wired to the gills with cell phone stuff too. Change can be crazy like that, turning a historic windmill into a cell tower, restoring it so it didn’t fall in on itself, didn’t just crumble to pieces. As for us three, we were falling in on ourselves a little up there at the top of our worlds as we knew them.I looked up at the sky. A high-flying jet from JFK or Laguardia was a fly buzzing over the clear blue edge of God’s dead face. God was dead to me then. Every plane, even high-flying ones, still looked like another news cycle. Walsh took his pellet gun off his shoulder and aimed it at the far off plane. I looked out instead of up, at Long Island Sound, what we call The Sound in Connecticut. To the east was The Sound, then Long Island itself, then the Atlantic. To the south, The City. The horizon aligned with the last level of scaffolding so perfectly at some angles it looked like a gangplank leading directly to the Manhattan skyline where things happened. We didn’t climb up for the view though. The view was a byproduct like resin caked in our bong. We climbed up to shout fuck you down at our town below, the words echoing back at us, too young to know what being on top of our worlds meant.It was the summer of 2004. The summer we climbed that damn windmill every chance we got. But that night was our last. After we smoked the bong and threw our empty forty bottles up in the air, after Walsh shot at them and missed, after the bottles shattered on a stonewall below, and after we shouted our fuck yous and climbed back down, we got in a bit of a pickle. We were smoking the bong again in Henny’s Jeep on the road beneath the windmill. Henny and Walsh were in the front seats. I was always paranoid, so I turned around and looked out the back window. A cop car had materialized outta nowhere a few hundred feet behind us. A cop got out, drew his handgun, aimed it down at the asphalt and tiptoed towards our car. I turned around and hunched into the front seats.“Cop, for real.” I placed the smoking bong between my legs in the backseat, covering the mouthpiece with my palm.Henny sprayed the Ozium and put all the windows down. We trained for this regularly. We were prepared. I looked out the back window again. The cop continued his slow march, one step at a time. When he got to the back bumper, I faced forward and stared straight ahead. I shoved my bag of weed under the driver seat. In my peripheral, the cop was almost at the driver-side window. That was when Walsh got out of the passenger seat. Walsh had his hands up. I didn’t know if it was because the cop told him to put his hands up, or he did it to show the cop he wasn’t holding anything. It was a blur. “Just meeting up to go out for the night.” Walsh walked towards his brother’s Wrangler he was allowed to drive while his brother was off at war. “I’m getting in my car. We’re leaving now. Sorry for any trouble, Officer.”The cop seemed confused. The cop holstered his gun and continued walking up to the driver-side window. He bent down to look at Henny. He looked like a rookie, only a few years older than us maybe. I cupped my palm over the bong even harder.“What’s on your lap?” the cop asked Henny.Henny was a smart dude. He was no idiot. He’d tell the cop it was oregano, spices for our youth group’s pizza night. He’d say anything except a bag of weed, Officer.“A bag of weed, Officer,” Henny said.A bag of weed, Officer. The honesty angle. The cop will understand. He was a teenager not too long ago.“Outta the car!” Rookie Cop screamed. “Put your hands above your heads where I can see them.”I took my hand off the bong. There wasn’t any smoke left anyway. Things got hazy for a few minutes. More cops arrived. Next thing I remember was us sitting on a curb with our hands cuffed behind our backs, unable to swat away mosquitoes eating us alive. So many cop cars it looked like a murder scene. Our wallets, cell phones, bags of weed, the bong, and the pellet gun were on the hood of Henny’s car.Rookie Cop told another cop “Three Stooges here were shooting that pellet gun on private property and smoking that big bong.” Rookie Cop had his hand on his holstered gun. “I responded to a shots fired call, guns blazing. Lady reported three men on top of the windmill shooting a gun. You believe it?”The other cop swatted a mosquito on his forearm, smushing it into blood and said “Don’t look like these three’ll be curing cancer anytime soon.”So the three of us sat on the curb with our hands cuffed behind our backs like a real meeting of the minds. I stared at our warped reflections on a cop car door. Walsh was crying. He struggled to wipe his tears with his shoulder because of his glasses. He kept muttering our lives were over, that colleges wouldn’t take us with criminal records. I looked over at Henny who had this smirk on his face like getting arrested was something to cross off his bucket list. I looked at myself. My hair was cut high and tight because Mom never let me grow it out and it was so blonde I got called Village of the Damned kid at school sometimes. I’d be lying if I said part of me didn’t think getting arrested was badass. I’d also be lying if I told you part of me wasn’t scared shitless.“I need the three bags in the back of the Jeep,” I told the cops. “My parents are divorced. I’m going to my dad’s tonight.”I was always explaining my parent’s divorce to people and not because I wanted to. And I was always having to lug around my duffel bag, backpack, and PS2 in its travel case whenever I went from one house to the other.“Relax, sweetheart.” One of the cops said. “You’ll get your bags.”The cops finished searching Henny and Walsh’s cars. Read us our rights. Crammed us into the back of one cop car. Our hands still cuffed and smushed behind our backs. We weren’t buckled in with seatbelts. Rookie Cop got in the car, turned it on, and hit the gas. But the cop car was still in park. The engine revved so loud all the other cops stopped what they were doing to laugh and bust Rookie Cop’s balls. I was surprised cops made mistakes too. I thought about asking him if they taught him that in the academy. Make the other cops laugh, bust his balls back after he busted ours, you know, live a little. Cops and robbers shit. But I remained silent.Once Rookie Cop figured out how to put the car in drive, we drove off. “Born in the U.S.A.” by Bruce Springsteen was playing on the radio. Reality hit me when we passed Mom and Pat’s house. Pat was my stepdad. It was the house I’d gotten picked up from less than an hour before, after I finished an SAT practice test and Mom searched my bags and my cargo short pockets for drugs, but she didn’t check the waistband of my boxers where I stashed the half ounce. I saw our white house with green shutters. Our golden retriever, Max, ran along the Invisible Fence line at the edge of his existence. I saw the giant sun-faded American flag that Pat had fastened to a clothesline he nailed between two trees almost three years ago, the week after The Towers fell and everyone put those little plastic flags in their car windows. The flag was three thousand ghosts flailing in the August breeze. The flag was a lot of things I didn’t understand.Rookie Cop drummed the steering wheel with his thumbs, softly singing the chorus to “Born in the U.S.A.” and mumble singing the verses. Every turn felt like the game Jell-O, our weight shifting into each other with the curving hills of backcountry Fairfield as we passed big houses with nuclear green lawns. Downtown, the houses got smaller, but the lawns were still nuclear green. Bush and Kerry yard signs everywhere. Sidewalks appeared. Everyone was staring at our meeting of the minds going on in the back of that cramped cop car. Joggers. Dog-walkers. Labs and golden retrievers. Lance-Armstrong-looking wannabes on expensive bikes. Young commuter couples walking into restaurants. Moms or nannies pushing babies in strollers with ridiculously oversized wheels. Old men with War Veteran snapbacks watering their driveways with gardenhoses. A gang of kids with glow stick necklaces around their necks about to bike through the haunted graveyard. OxyContin-addicted Phishheads from our youth group who robbed us for a half pound of pot smoking cigs outside the pizza shop they work at. Even a laminated memorial picture stapled to a tree, the picture of this kid who killed himself driving drunk a year ago. All of them had eyes that followed us. I was facing the kinds of consequences Mom and Pat had tried to prevent for years. They were always saying they didn’t want to see me end up like my stepbrother Ralphie. He’d faced all kinds of consequences from drugs.We passed Fairfield train station. Commuters walked up the stairs from a northbound local. If we hadn’t gotten arrested, we’d have driven in circles smoking the bong until we ended up at McDonald’s and ordered McDoubles with Big Mac sauce off the Dollar Menu. Henny would’ve dropped me off at the train station for the last train out of Fairfield, the 11:48 local to Stamford. I’d’ve taken the forty minute train ride, transferring once in Stamford onto the local to Grand Central which stopped in Cos Cob, a neighborhood of Greenwich without mansions, where Dad lived. Every Monday night and every other weekend, I went to Dad’s where I had no curfew, unlike Mom’s where I had to be home at 10PM sharp.Rookie Cop pulled into the back of the police station as Bruce screamed at the end of the song. We were unloaded from the car in an area resembling a grocery store loading dock. Henny and I smirked when we looked at each other. Walsh didn’t smirk whatsoever. We were led single-file into the station like a sad little parade. Henny and I were being charged with possession of marijuana (our separate bags were combined, a little cop trick, but still weighed a gram and a half short of a felony) and possession of drug paraphernalia. Walsh was being charged with the same, plus something about the pellet gun. Rookie Cop led me over to the fingerprint station. As he pressed and rolled each fingertip into the ink pad, then onto their little squares on the sheet of paper, I stared at a McGruff the Crime Dog poster. I’d met McGruff once when he came to my school in third grade for a D.A.R.E. rally while a uniformed cop helped him waddle around the gym. On the walk back to our classroom, we’d all seen it. A bald man with an upper and lower body much-like Scruff’s, but human hands smoking a cigarette and eating a sandwich. Scruff’s hollow head and front paw gloves were lying on the grass beneath the man’s paws. It was like learning Santa Claus wasn’t real. Scruff couldn’t take a bite out of a sandwich, let alone crime.When the fingerprinting was over, the ink stained my fingertips, smudges I’d carry into the future. Another cop took my mugshot. It was nice not having someone telling me to smile a real smile for once which was what Mom always said. I called Dad instead of Mom for my phone call. I’d’ve rather stayed in jail than gone back to Mom’s that night and faced Pat who sometimes cared so much about me I wondered if he cared about me at all or if maybe it was some long gone version of himself he was trying to save.“Dad, I got arrested. I’m at the Fairfield Police Station,” I said.“Jesus Christ, Sean. You were arrested a month ago.”That was true. I’d been arrested the month before in the parking lot of this Connecticut fast food chain called Duchess for yelling the chorus to “Tubthumping” by Chumbawamba at the top of my lungs and also for underage drinking. It was only a summons. No handcuffs. No cell. Just twenty hours community service and some fines.“What happened?” Dad asked.“We were smoking pot.”“I’m leaving now.” Dad sighed. I heard my stepmom, Paula, in the background, saying “What is it? What happened?” Then dial tone.I was led to a cell by a desk job cop. The cement block walls in the small row of cells made everything echo. A drunk guy in a wrinkled suit with no tie was in one of the other cells. He had his hands on the bars. He reminded me of the pirate trying to coax the keys to the cell from the dog while the jail burned in the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disney World. “When am I getting outta here?” the drunk guy asked. Desk Job remained silent and pointed at the empty cell for me. I walked in. The bars slammed shut behind me. I was alone. I thought about how being arrested would effect the future Mom had planned for me. College, all that stuff. The future I had planned for myself didn’t exist.Walsh was led to my cell shortly after. I wanted to say something to him like it was gonna be alright, but I wasn’t sure if things would be alright. Henny was dumped in shortly after Walsh. We were quiet for a while. The air-conditioning was blasting. It was freezing.“Our lives are over,” Walsh said. “I’m eighteen. I’m gonna be charged as an adult.”“It was some pot and a pellet gun,” Henny said. “We’ll be fine. Fuck the cops.”Henny gave the finger to the camera mounted to the ceiling. I shook my head and slouched up against the cement wall. My teeth clattered from the cold. Walsh cried again. In the moment, I felt strong not crying. I felt like a man, like an adult, like I was ready for the real world, though it would still be three months until I could legally buy cigarettes and blunt wraps or fight a war for oil or vote for one moron or another. My mind back then told me when you get arrested for smoking pot and shooting a pellet gun and you don’t cry, you become a man. Walsh was the manliest of us three. That was the weird thing. I pulled my arms and my head into my t-shirt so it was a little tent. There was a buzzing sound. I peered out through one of my sleeves. Desk Job came into the hallway, opened the cell door with a set of keys, and told Walsh his parents were there. Walsh got up and told the cop his life was over. Desk Job remained silent as he led Walsh away.I thought about Ralphie again. About how he’d been arrested a couple times. About how he ended up. About how Mom and Pat were gonna say I was on the same road as him, a predestined path to destruction because they’d been saying that since they caught me with a pack of EZ-Widers and a few weed stems and seeds freshman year and acted like I was shooting dope into my jugular. I already knew drugs were bad. I also knew they were good. And cool. I already knew drugs were bad though because of how Ralphie ended up, but I wasn’t doing the kind of drug he ended up doing. I swore to God on my mother on my father on my life I never ever would.“I got the munchies.” Henny laughed as he laid back on the bunk with his hands behind his head. “Do you think we’ll get any Burger King? My cousin got Burger King when he got arrested. Or bologna sandwiches like the TV shows?”I told him I didn’t think so. I told him I didn’t think we’d get any Burger King like his cousin or bologna sandwiches like the TV shows. I needed to tell myself something too. I needed to be like, self, listen up, when you’re in a holding cell, there’s always something you need to tell yourself. You need to tell yourself don’t be the god of poor decisions. You need to tell yourself don’t be the god of anything as a matter of fact. You need to tell yourself you're powerless over most of the things you wanna control and everything you think you know about life when you’re seventeen is bologna. You need to tell yourself you’re an idiot kid dousing his life in gasoline. But you don’t tell yourself anything like that because you haven’t lived enough to know the difference between what you can and cannot change. You need to ruin your life before you can tell yourself not to ruin your life. So instead, you sit and you wait for your parents to bail you out. You sit and you wait next to a drunk man in a suit with his hands on the bars like the cell is on fire and the keys are gone. You sit and you wait for the cell to burn down around you or for the cell to burn you up with it. You sit and you wait and from the top of your world you scream fuck you down at anyone trying to save you. You sit and you wait and you scream and all you hear are your own echoes.
The factory closed the week before Christmas. The owner had moved his operations to Bangladesh. Emanuel had spent eleven years on the assembly line. It was the only job he knew. Marta, his wife, could no longer cut hair. Her condition made her hands tremble to the point that her clients had begun to complain about nicks on their necks and ears. They were three months behind on rent, the electricity was shut off. Their kids were eating crackers and trekking through the snow with holes in their shoes.Emanuel had once had luck betting on football matches. That ended, as all good things do. He owed Ahmad, his bookie, three thousand francs. The man had already taken his scooter. Now the threats began.“Your wife is very lovely,” he said. “It would be a shame to put her to work, if you know what I mean.” “You know my situation,” Emmanuel said.“Meet me tonight,” Ahmad said, “and your problem will be solved.”Emmanuel tucked the children into bed, kissed his wife, and put on his threadbare coat.A wet snow was falling. Sloshy puddles had appeared on the street. The air was cold enough to make Emmanuel’s teeth chatter. He slipped into a dive bar he had often passed but never entered. Some men were yelling at the barmaid. Emmanuel ordered a glass of whiskey and downed it in a gulp. He ordered two more and found himself quickly drunk. Ahmed was waiting on the street in the posh neighborhood he’d directed Emmanuel to. “What do you want?” Emmanuel said.Ahmad lit a cigarette. “Not far from here lives a banker. You’re going to rob him.”They walked a few blocks and stopped in the shadows of the hedgerows surrounding a grand house.“See that window?” Ahmad said. “Climb in. Go up the stairs. The bedroom is on the right. In the banker’s closet, you’ll find a large, gilded box filled with his dead wife’s jewelry. All you have to do is get the box and bring it here.”“How do you know this?”“In another life, I was a woodworker. I built his cabinets.”Emmanuel clambered through the window. The house was dark but for a sliver of moonlight through the window. In the living room, a portrait of the banker and his wife hung above the mantle. Emmanuel crept up the stairs and snuck into the bedroom. The banker was snoring loudly. There was something ridiculous about the old man’s head on its enormous pillow. Emmanuel knew that if he didn’t take the box this very moment, he never would. Do this for your family, he thought. The box sat glimmering on a shelf. He snatched it quickly, too quickly, and slammed his knee into the closet door.“Who’s there?” the banker said. Emmanuel’s foot snagged on the rug. No sooner had he fallen than the banker punched his back. Somehow in the dark, Emmanuel found the box and smashed the banker’s face. The old man staggered back and crumpled to the floor.“I’m so sorry!” Emmanuel cried. “I’m so sorry!”The banker’s eyes fluttered, his lips bubbling with spittle and blood. “Help me, please!”Emmanuel wanted nothing more than to get away, but the banker gripped his coat. The old man was surprisingly strong. Emmanuel had to wrench himself loose, finger by finger. He ran down the stairs and out the door. Ahmad stood across the street, a cigarette dangling from his lips. Emmanuel thrust the box into his hands. Ahmad opened it and smiled.“Your debt is settled,” he said. Emmanuel stumbled home and collapsed to the bathroom floor. He lay there for a long time, praying that God would not punish a man in this position. After a time, he felt better. He undressed and crawled into bed beside his wife.“Are you okay?” she said.“Go back to sleep,” he said.
A nun was cloistered in a convent near me. I knew her. She was the Mother Superior. She was the main bitch. Top energy. She left that cloistered convent and moved to the Midwest. I was visiting the Midwest for poetry and to fuck a writer I’d been sexting with for months. I waxed my pussy right before I went on that trip and that was a mistake. My boyfriend dropped me off at the airport. I took a pill to fall asleep on the plane. When the plane landed, my head was resting on the stranger next to me. My head was on his shoulder but he never tried to wake me up. I was embarrassed but he was polite about it. I am no longer embarrassed and it's kind of a brag. I had my head on a random man’s shoulder on a plane and I was so comfortable and he probably wasn't but he was cool with it. I wonder if he enjoyed it.When the plane landed, the writer I was going to fuck was waiting for me. He rolled my luggage to a restaurant. We had sushi. We had beers and sex. I texted the nun. She texted me her address. I didn't know nuns could live alone. The writer took the L with me to the nun’s neighborhood. The writer made a racist comment about the neighborhood and walked me near her apartment. I asked him to leave. I called the nun. She came out. She asked me to come up to her place. We went up and down a very tight staircase. Her apartment looked exactly like all the memes about the coziest lesbian homes with green walls and mismatched furniture. This was the first time I saw the nun’s hair. I had imagined it when she wore her habit. Her current congregation allowed her to wear regular but modest clothing. She could show me her hair and I liked it. Her outfit was highly nun-coded. As expected. As it should be. And I loved it. I put on a black, velvet bodysuit and jeans to my date with the nun. I had my hair down. She drove me to an area the writer hadn't taken me to yet. It was a tourist spot by the water and it was beautiful. We walked on the boardwalk but didn't hold hands. We ate Italian food. She talked about how much she loved to go camping. We got ice cream cones. We licked the ice cream cones. I had never seen her licking anything before. Her licks were meticulous. When we got done licking, we got on the wrong elevator and got lost in the parking structure. Neither of us had paid attention to where she’d parked. We were too excited. We were on a date. We kept getting back on the elevator and coming out on different levels. I was getting sweaty. She said it was the priests’ fault. I thought about giving up and getting on our knees. Asking god for help so we could find her car.I imagined her having a sexy amount of authority as Mother Superior. Making sure a sexy amount of suffering happened at all times. An hour later, we found her car. I told her I would take the L back to where I was staying but she insisted on driving. When she dropped me off, she waited for me to go inside. As you should. When you go on a date with someone you care about, you wait to make sure they're safe. I went back into the writer’s apartment. He woke me up with his dick the next morning. It was similar to the ending of Kids (1995). A drunk Casper rapes Jennie as she sleeps. He was sober and we were in bed.I forgot to reply to my boyfriend for most of my trip, so when I got back home, we broke up in his parents’ living room.
Peggy got down on her knees and asked God to send her a good man. She thought she had one in Jack but her friends told her that he wasn’t a good man, or if he was, he was good in the way that men are good which is different from the way that women are good. Something about the difference between a deal and a contract. Peggy thought all goodness was the same and maybe the goodness in Jack was hiding. For six months Peggy and Jack had dinner once a week until one day he stopped answering her calls. “He’s just not that into you,” her friends said. But wouldn’t he have said that around the time they promised that they would always be honest with each other? And couldn’t he have said that before or after he told her, I feel like I can tell you anything?She called his house at doubling intervals — one day, every two days, every four days, every eight days, every sixteen. “Stop calling,” her friends said. “He’s going to think you’re crazy.” But just in the way Peggy knew Jack was good, she knew she wasn’t crazy, so why should it matter. “What if he’s dead?” she asked. “What if he’s hurt?” Then one or another friend would say they just ran into him in the supermarket. So Peggy got back down on her knees. “Kind and capable,” she thought, that’s all I want God. Then she spoke it out loud in case God wasn’t listening with his brain-ears. “Kind and capable, please.”She had three recurring dreams about Jack. In the first one he was smothering her with a pillow. In the second he was holding her under the waves while she drowned. In the third, which was the most violent, he was stabbing her in the bony place between her breasts while she held her hands up and tried to take the knives in the smooth basket of her palms instead. The dreams were eerily silent, like the moment before Jack’s automated voicemail kicked in. The only voice in the dream was Peggy’s, always asking the same question: “Why are you doing this?” Years passed and God sent Peggy several ok men. Jack died, not from suffocation or drowning or stabbing, but prostate cancer. For months after his funeral Peggy told anyone who would listen that she was disappointed in the catering. “Jack hated horseradish,” she told her friends. “Jack hated cold cuts. Anyone who knew him would know that.”
She had only applied to work in the Halloween store because she thought it would be temporary. But this store was open year-round—the building owned, not leased, by a man named Ed, who was thin and wiry, nostalgic and ambiguous as a figure in a Grant Wood painting. The devotion he extended to the rows of ludicrous masks and cackling witch animatronics seemed more suited to the motions of a farmer, tending to something whose harvest would keep people alive, rather than fleetingly amused. Ed preferred silent, solitary work: keeping inventory, tracking shipments in the back room he seemed to live in. He wanted someone to take over the register, be more “front-facing.” “Are you a people person?” he asked her when she first came in. She lied and said yes. In the Halloween store, time was always running out, yet somehow not passing at all. Ed’s business philosophy consisted of keeping a permanent GOING OUT OF BUSINESS sign out in the front window to create what he called “a false sense of urgency” in the customer. The music that played during her shift was always the same recording Ed had made of a Top 200 countdown on Labor Day 1993, commercials and all, every day climbing the same apex towards “Heart-Shaped Box.” Then it would start its loop all over again, trapping her inside. She would think of all the other times she had heard these songs over the course of her life—these same songs again and again and now, a million times more. They were engineered for liminal spaces: checkout lines and waiting rooms and traffic jams, to give people the illusion of movement and rhythm when their lives were going nowhere. Usually this time of year, Christmas music took over, the ultimate opiate of the masses, to distract everyone from the cold fact that another year was slamming shut forever. But not in the Halloween store. The music didn’t change. It never would. That would mean something was coming; that would mean something was ending. To stay afloat, the store also sold other holiday items, stocked as if they were perennial: pastel Easter baskets of unraveling wicker, Thanksgiving wreaths of fake papery leaves, snowmen whose bodies were made of Styrofoam and crumbling glitter. It was the snowmen’s season now: winter, at least by some definitions. But this was Florida, and the seasons never really changed, not in any meaningful or significant way. That was her favorite thing about coming here: the pure indulgence in wasting perfect days, because they were in seemingly infinite supply. It didn’t matter what she did or didn’t do with each one, because another would reappear the next morning, new and clean and glaringly bright. She couldn’t possibly be held accountable to change if nothing else around her did. The store was listed on various obscure websites and in off-brand guidebooks as an “oddities destination,” although the people that stopped in were always on their way to somewhere else. Usually, they would stalk the aisles for a minute or two before walking back out empty-handed, muttering there wasn’t much to see, just the same old shit you could get anywhere in October. “Speak for yourself,” she would think as she watched them leave, staring out the display windows into the vanishing point of the horizon. The store possessed the most beautiful natural light she had ever seen in an interior space—that was its most extraordinary quality, what should have been advertised in the guidebooks. Every afternoon, the golden glow that seeped in and wrapped around her nearly brought her to tears. Its beauty had something to do with the time passing, a phenomenon that persisted outside the safe confines of the store. The light was a reminder that life was short, something which was easy to forget whenever she was inside. Even Ed’s sign out front was only a false alarm—time running out rendered merely a marketing tactic and as such, a lie. She came home at night smelling like the plastic that everything in the store was made from, the way she used to come home smelling like coffee when she worked at Starbucks, her first job, her first failed attempt to make a life for herself. But unlike the way coffee’s nutty sweetness had begun to smell foul, the pungent scent of the plastic began to smell not quite sweet, but the next best thing: unnoticeable. Like how when she was a child she realized that all of her friend’s houses had their own special scent, but she could never smell her own. The place she came from always smelled like nothing, like it wasn’t a place at all. From her view at the counter, she could see the rack of personalized tombstone decals, some of the store’s best sellers. People thought it was hilarious to pretend to be dead. HERE LIES ADAM. HERE LIES ANNIE, they went, and so on. She could see her own name hanging there, a straight shot at eye level. When she interviewed for the job, Ed had asked her what scared her the most. She considered the question, really thought about it. But then too much time had passed so she just blurted out, “Nothing.” The word lingered in the stale air of the store. She could sense it hanging over her, like a spirit. She felt it, she believed in it, but that didn’t make it real.
For several days I have been followed by a man I cannot see— a man who presses his nose to the back of my head, who laughs quietly whenever I whirl around only to confront empty space. He casts no reflection. He never speaks. Who the fuck are you, I yell. Why are you doing this to me. Always at a steady pace, never sprinting, keeping my strength, I keep space between myself and my pursuer. I make sure to pass the lodge several times, the one that used to have the sign COMMUNITY SOUP KITCHEN draped over the doorway. I got a packet of sanitary pads there once; typical goods for the homeless. The woman who handed it over would not look at my face. I remember the foundation caked in her wrinkles. Now it is locked up. Frantic, I call for help a few times with no answer. I do not believe that no one is there. The solitary yellow window on the second floor winks out as soon as I rattle the door. I give up, trying to ignore the prickle at the back of my neck. But in the dark I feel the man gaining on me. I frequently slap myself across the face to stay awake. I wander the streets circuitously, in the cold and rain, until the sole of my left shoe is unglued and flapping, and my jean cuffs fray. When my bladder becomes a boulder I squat, timing myself. He always catches up.I fall asleep on my feet, head knocked back by a lamppost. The man touches my shoulders and my stomach swings like a hammock. Fuck off, I slur. I shrug out of my coat and jog into a crowd. Pedestrian eyes travel up the tracks on my arms. I haven’t slept in days! I scream at passers-by. I can hear the soft pad of footsteps behind me, not even struggling to keep up. His laugh. Somebody fucking help me!Limbs jostle me from all sides. The concrete sidewalk leaps up to smash my elbow. In the lodge there was a plaque praising community service above the kitchen entrance. I remember a penlight shining in my eyes, blurring the figures standing around me. My shirt was wet, sticking to the skin of my chest. The rank smell of vomit hung about me like a cloud. The voice of the woman wearing cakey foundation said, “these people are such animals.”Now, I’m in an empty hospital room. The only light is fluorescent. A poster to my left takes over the wall: Understanding the signs of addiction: we are here to help.The door slides open and a young PA with a tablet asks me how my elbow feels. I do not speak, because it is too late. I know I will not have his sympathy. I focus on my breath until he leaves. I finally feel that I am able to get up and stumble to the bathroom. To the mirror. And now you will leave me here, with the man blocking my way, as I cannot look around the back of his head. He stands here with elbows bent, shoulders rising and falling in the motion of tying a tie. I, doomed to occupy the space of a shadow, cast out and grasping for the physicality I’ve lost— I am disgusting to you. As days lengthen to weeks you’ll forget my pathetic begging. Smile, and, smugly, tell yourself that everything is how it should be, of course. Nothing is the matter.You’ll make way for him.You’ll call him sir.
This story could be called ‘The Christmas Blues’ if I told the story of Mama's Christmas eve swaying, watching the record player playing, glass glinting blue in her hand, tears, some dropping onto her festive plastic-aproned chest, and her blue-denimed legs, and the rest soaking into the faded-blue carpet pile, her bare feet pressing them in. This story could be called ‘No One’s Coming Home This Christmas’ if I told the story of why Papa, instead of just saying no, had to work Christmas day and every day, in some lab, lying to us about fixing acid rain, when we know he owes the ‘wrong kind of people’ money, from when he said to Mama on the house phone he can't come home or they'll make her work for them too, that he's gotta pretend it's just him, until he pays it all back, until maybe forever. This story could be called ‘So Santa Hates Poor Kids’ if I told the story of what was under our fake tree on Christmas morning, and how Mama held the telephone for Papa to hear us as we open presents, pointing at her face as she makes a fake smile and bops her head and waves her arms in fake delight and we play along, and really get into it, as we open newspaper-wrapped presents of our own stuff, wrapped up and it's not even a surprise, cos we watched Mama wrap them up last night, and we're just pinning all our hopes on the food today. This story could be called ‘The Christmas Happy Meal’ if I told the story of the four of us at the kitchen table, Mama in Papa's seat and me in hers, round the KFC bucket, Mama saying it's a tradition in some places and we nod, not caring, chewing on chicken bones and wearing the newspaper hats she made, and our paper-mache wings from the school Christmas play, and Mama says she's full from breakfast and smokes a cigarette instead, and the record player plays the song ‘Its Gonna be a Cold, Cold Christmas Without You’ and we sing along, mouths full and cigarette smoke blurring the edges of this happy Christmas scene.
The Christmas after Jo’s mom died was bad. Her older sister Jules showed up the evening before Christ’s birth, driving the 13-hour stretch from Chicago to Western Pennsylvania in one go. Jo and her dad watched on the front porch as Jules’ Prius rattled down the driveway, Brittany Spears blasting from open windows, tires crunching against the snow. The car was in poor shape, salt-covered, and trembling like a racing dog whipped past its limits.Jo’s dad shifted nervously as his eldest daughter climbed from the car and trudged toward them. His hands were folded down the front of his apron, which read: “My Spawn R The Coolest.” “Greetings, family,” Jules said. “The season is upon us.”Jo had seen her sister worse off, but not by much. Jules’ Boston University sweatshirt was covered in dark stains. There were raccoon circles where her eyes should’ve been. Her duffel bag was half-unzipped, a tumbleweed of cords dragging in the snow. “Jesus, kiddo,” her dad said. “Did you drive the whole way straight?” “I dozed off some in Ohio,” Jules said, wiping the back of her wrist across her nostrils. “And I’ve been banging down lines every ten minutes, which helps with the concentration.”Her dad made a face. “I hope that’s a joke.”“Fine, don’t believe me.” Jules pushed past him, hugged Jo, and took her bags inside.Her dad turned, bewildered. “She was kidding, right? About the drugs?”Jo lifted and lowered her shoulders.Her sister was skinnier than she remembered (“Soul Cycle,” she said dismissively), but Jo knew it was the cocaine. She figured that was why Tom, her husband, hadn’t joined her. Jules only did drugs when she felt insecure about her weight. She didn’t care enough about Tom to watch her figure when he was around. It must have been a new lover. “Don’t ask me about Tom,” Jules said. “Don’t ask me about my job. Don’t ask me about going back to school or having kids or anything that might ever come within the fucking realm of my personal life.”“Fine by me,” Jo said. Christmas Eve dinner was bottles of wine, plates of pasta as an accessory. In years past, they’d have something unique– sushi or kebabs, Mediterranean. Jo’s mom never liked typicality. The pasta was a deliberate choice, both in its blandness and the family’s ability to ignore it even as the food filled their bellies. The girls quickly finished a bottle and then another. When they drained the good stuff, they broke into the cellar and found a few old cabernets that had never been opened. They were questionably sealed, some rodents had gnawed little holes in the wax. But Jo thought it was excellent, well-aged, like drinking buried history. (This is what mummy semen tastes like,” Jules said). Jo drank until she felt sick, scarfing down breadsticks and trying not to cry when her dad started talking about the semester at school, which had been rougher than the ones previously.“Don’t worry about your major,” her dad said. He held up his smudged glass and tipped it towards her. “Explore your interests. That’s what college is about– shedding your old self and becoming the person you’re meant to be.”“I appreciate that, Dad, but I have to pick one by the spring,” Jo said. “Or else I can’t graduate on time.”Her dad was already tipsy. He waved his hand. “ You’ll find the right path, trust me.”Jules frowned into her pasta. “Jesus, Dad,” she said. “Pull it together.”“What?” “I’m just saying, don’t do that.”“Do what?”“Go all Mr. Rogers on our asses. Just admit it– your kids are fuck-ups.”“Hey,” Jo said. “Don’t lump me in with you.”“I’m so proud of you two,” Her dad said, teary-eyed. “You both are perfect. Perfect angels.”“No, I’m not,” Jules said. “Yes,” he said. “You are.”“Please stop talking.”“Guys,” Jo said.“Let’s just have a nice dinner.” Her dad let out a low sigh and rotated his eyes toward the ceiling. “Can we agree on that?’“I have to make a phone call.” Jules stood and drained her glass. “I have people who are relying on me. Business and associates and important things.”“Okay, honey,” Her dad said. “I’ll put your leftovers in the fridge.”“Whatever.”Jo and her dad sat in silence, clinking their forks against porcelain. On television, Ralphie from A Christmas Story demanded his parents purchase him a Red Ryder air rifle for the holiday. Shortly after, he beat the shit out of that hillbilly kid and betrayed his best friend for saying the F-word, nearly blinded himself with a stray BB shot. Ralphie was kind of a psycho, Jo realized. In modern days he would’ve fit the profile of a school shooter. Or a Republican candidate. Jo asked, “Can I have more wine?”“Sure, babe.” Her dad refilled the glass and looked up at the overhead fan, its blades shaking from the force of Jules marching back and forth in her room. “But you have to watch your consumption. Alcohol can be a gateway to a more–ah–complicated life.”After dinner, Jo helped with the dishes and poured herself another drink. She thought about school– whether she would major in dance or writing or maybe something useful in the real world– economics or whatever. In high school, she took Advanced Calc, and the patterns revealed themselves to her easily enough. But the idea of tabulating figures and sums for the rest of her life put a sour taste in her mouth. Being 20, being without a mother, she knew that life wasn’t as simple as all that. You removed something or someone from the equation and the results weren’t linear, or predictable, they were something else entirely. Finished cleaning, Jo grabbed her coat and decided to go for a walk while her dad wrapped presents. She cut a path across the yard, boots kicking up shallow tufts of snow in the late December light. Beneath the darkened tree line, she paused, bowing her head in reverence. The family pets were buried in the frozen dirt here– Toby the Dog, Sam the Cat, and Garfield, the defenestrated guinea pig, who met his maker via a leap of faith from the girls’ jungle gym. On nights like these– cold, forlorn, biting– Jo was grateful that her mother had chosen cremation. It didn’t seem right to put someone in the ground and forget about them, to have their only memory as a headstone, half-buried, collecting snow in the wintertime, a bunch of wilted flowers in the summer. Was that love? Paying tribute to something that wasn’t there, that had– as far as anyone knew– moved on to another plane of being? Fuck, Jo thought. The wine was making her philosophical. That happened sometimes when she drank; she felt a flash of wisdom that disappeared just as quickly as it arrived. Upstairs, Jo flopped on her bed, definitely drunk now, listening to Jules talk in serious undertones with her lover through their shared wall. It was easy enough to imagine him: older, flabby, likely with a kid in high school he never saw. The guy thought Jules touched something deep inside him– something “he never knew was there.” Jules had a type. Not a good one, but a type, certainly. In high school, Jo had found herself the unwilling recipient of many a lurid tale. Jules complained about her life, her teachers and boyfriends, varsity sports, the “hoes” talking shit. Back then it had irked Jo, her beautiful, do-no-wrong sister, bitching about the cosmic forces out to get her. Now that they were both older, Jo figured Jules had simply been ahead of her time.But here, on this night over eight years later, Jules vented to someone else. Jo heard the dry-nostril snort of her sister bumping a line and talking to this new guy, Kirk.“Kirk– no, shut up, this is serious. Okay, listen– and then my mom died. And my dad is a fucking weirdo–snort!– and I think Tom secretly had a vasectomy and is planning on moving out. Hold on a second– Jo, are you there?”Jo didn’t say anything. She was counting the watermarks on the ceiling, trying to recall what it was like to be a child, how life looked endless, rhythmic, inescapable.“I’ll call you back.”Click.“Jo.” Jules’ mattress creaked. “Were you listening to me?”Jo didn’t respond.Jules knocked on the wall. “Jo? Are you still up?”After a long time– too long– Jo said, “No.”There was a pause, and then Jules said, “Do you want to do a bump with me?”That night was the first time Jo did cocaine. She and Jules kneeled like Catholic schoolgirls on the fuzzy carpet, snorting messy lines off their Sleeping Beauty mirror. They giggled at this, the mixture of adult life and childhood sweetness, their sloppy handling of the drugs as they passed the rolled-up dollar bill back and forth. With each line, Jo felt increasingly lit up, like a candle was burning inside her chest. Overtop their frantic sniffling, the Irish Christmas song played from the living room below. It was their dad's favorite– that duet about the NYPD Choir and Galway Bay. The drunk couple calling each other every slur imaginable as they poured out their fucking hearts and prepared for the new year. “Tell me about school,” Jules said. “Any boys?” “A few,” Jo said. “But it’s whatever.”“Want to talk about it?She shook her head, “I'm good.”It was nice of Jules to ask, but Jo didn’t feel like delving into the events of her love life– disastrous as they were. There had been a fight over a boy, in particular, at a frat formal. Jo threw a drink at a girl and then the two of them were tangled together on the dance floor, swearing and shouting and hitting. Jo had been afraid of expulsion, but the school showed leniency, let her off with a warning. It was like that with her other faux pas, too– the late homework and passing out drunk in the communal bathroom. There was no shortage of sympathy from the administration or her group of friends. No matter how badly she acted, she was forgiven. After all, her mom had died. All roads led back to that. It was all anyone ever talked about. Sometimes, she thought, it was all she was.She didn’t even realize she was crying until Jules reached over and patted her softly on the head. “There there,” Jules said. “Do another line, kitten.”She decided to take Jules’ advice, dropping her face to the mirror. Immediately, she felt better. She liked the cocaine. The forcefulness of it. It was like a locomotive pushing all the bad thoughts from her head, clearing a path through the snow in her brain, the residual slush and soot. With a providential foresight, she could almost sense how tomorrow would go– Jules sleeping in late, vomiting in their joint bathroom, refusing to come downstairs for presents. Her dad, harried and emotionally drained, playing cheerful music to drown out the awkwardness. And there was Jo, stuck in the middle, feeling the cave walls of her heart collapse on itself. But that was tomorrow, and today was today. You had to deal with these things accordingly. You had to take them one step at a time.“Promise me you won’t make the same mistakes I did,” Jules said. Her eyes swiveled and popped in their sockets. Jo noticed for the first time how red and thick her capillaries were, like hard candy. “Promise me you’ll do something fucking important with your life.”Jo did another line and looked at her sister. “Yeah,” she said. “I promise.”“Good,” Jules said. “Good.She held out her hand, and Jo took it. Together, they sat with their backs against the wall, closed their eyes, and listened to the music.
He is the big stud with the big arm and the big serve and king of the courts. She is the glitter girl, the glamor queen, the incandescent prodigy of homecoming competitions. She consorts with star basketball players who are six foot eight and academically challenged but cocky because they can dunk blindfolded. However, everything changes the afternoon she looks at him in that certain way through the wire fence of the tennis facility and says something that is lost in the wind. But he rises to the occasion by asking, “what in the world are you doing on this side of campus when the basketball facility is definitely over there,” and points with his racquet. “I like tennis players’ legs,” she says, hooking polished fingernails coyly through the fence. “Yeah,” he says, “and they’re tanned too, not like that anemic white you get from running around in gymnasiums. Those guys might as well be living underground like goddamn Morlocks.” And she laughs. The two of them dine that evening in the university cafeteria and then stroll to the school’s arboretum—that facilitator of budding romances and carnal lust—where they neck for several hours. A month later they are sitting in the student lounge sharing an ice cream cone and discussing his plans to enter the professional tennis ranks. She shakes her head and says, “darling, you’re a wonderful tennis player, but only a few pros make any money on the circuit and I don’t want to be a tennis widow sitting around waiting for you to come home. I want to get married and live a normal life. You need to decide how important I am to you.” He will wonder many years later if he made the right decision. So they marry at a country club during the summer and very soon acquire a home on the eighth fairway of the same club. There follows a nice middle-class existence of friends, social events, theater tickets, and vacations to exotic locations. There is little to complain about
Antithesis
until he is sitting contentedly on the patio one evening with a half-consumed daquiri in hand and she sits down somberly to inform him that she is planning to visit her sister in Philadelphia and would be staying for a while so she has “time to think.” A vague ripple of anxiety passes down his spine and he wonders if perhaps he has not paid sufficient attention to the subtle changes that have been occurring in his marriage over the past year. William Shirer, the writer, once remarked that “time and circumstance take their toll” on marriages, but he never believed this applied to him. The following day he stands mutely in the driveway as she pulls away in her Toyota Avalon with hardly a backward glance, and returns to a home that has suddenly undergone a dramatic transformation. It is silent. In fact, the silence is palpable, infiltrating his mind and body like some poisonous radiation. He realizes for the first time that he has never been alone. In the beginning there was his family and then the dormitory with all the guys horsing around and then the marriage. And now . . . . He stands in the middle of the living room while a knot forms in his stomach. In the next few weeks the knot worsens and he begins walking around slightly bent over like an old man. He visits a physician and complains, but the physician is clueless. He asks, “have you been experiencing any stress lately?” He laughs. His wife phones and informs him that the marriage is over and she is “moving on,” plunging him into a profound depression. For months he goes through the motions of daily necessities but is curiously detached. He is reminded of Sylvia Plath’s “The Bell Jar”: sealed off from the world while everyone else is blithely carrying on their activities. Food is tasteless, relationships don’t matter, work is a boring waste of time. Rage wells up inside him as he struggles to figure out what he has done to deserve this. Christmas eve arrives. He knows getting up in the morning will be a struggle. Why bother? Instead, he decides, take your useless, sorry ass down to Walmart and buy a nice Christmas holiday weapon of your choice and then go home and get your joyous holiday affairs in order and type out a note on the computer that serves as your Last Will and Testament for these wonderful holidays and make sure the cat has enough food and water to last a couple of days in case your sorry, useless ass isn’t discovered while everyone is celebrating the wonderful holidays and then put the gun into your mouth and squeeze the trigger . . . .
Synthesis
but a tennis court materialize before him, the university tennis court, the final match of the season, the conference championship, for all the marbles, with his eternal nemesis Harper Ruff on the other side, serving his last serve, that big kicking monster you can barely return, allowing Harper to volley sharply into the opposite corner, a shot seemingly out of reach, but you anticipate, sprint madly, racquet drawn, wrist cocked, for that final headlong dive to send the ball screaming over the net, just out of Harper’s reach, the ground crashing into your body, watching the ball as it soars down the line, as Harper looks on, as the crowd looks on, as time stands still, as the ball descends, drifts downward, gently, to kiss the outside of the white tape, leaving that glorious mark of victory, and you are, by god, for the first time ever, the conference champion. “Memories are not key to the past, but to the future,” Corrie ten Boom once said. Yes. It is time to move on. There may be a way out of this. Christmas is calling.
