Where the brown leather stools and chairs suction to the patrons’ skin until they bruise. Where the tables wobble and the menus are always sticky and the food listed changes every day. The bar is slanted and the floor dips and your uniform remains the same except for the endless supply of toothpicks you carry in the pockets of your apron. Where you are the only employee. Where food cooks itself. Where you can gaze at a new apocalypse just outside the window every time the bell that hangs over the door sings a brand-new carol and a new customer arrives.
***
A man asks for an eyeball in his large glass of gasoline served with a bendy straw. A foot with clipped toenails dipped in ketchup to go. He’s a zombie and you’re a zombie well versed in the language of snarl. Your hand falls off while pouring a bag of teeth into the coffee grinder and you watch it spin and change into liquid. You return to the man with your steaming liquid hand mixed with the teeth of strangers and snarl that all you have left are shoes. But your jaw falls off and lands in his lap and he takes it, replacing his own.
***
A mother and her two children grab a booth by the window while the ocean consumes the world. Their lips are purple, their skin withered, and they drool mini-puddles when they talk. One child, a girl, tries to detach the menu from her cheek. The other, a boy, rocks the table until the salt spills and dissolves in the water around them. Their eyes turn red, your eyes turn red, and both you and the girl clench your hands into fists. You rub your eyes and she rubs her eyes and you both suck your teeth. You think clutz. The girl says clutz and you laugh because she sounds like you.
***
The man asks for green Jello — no whipped cream — and a single french fry with ketchup. But you’re a mannequin. You are both mannequins and cannot move, which doesn’t matter, since all you have are peaches. You ask the man if he likes mushrooms because that’s what the cloud blooming behind him reminds you of. You don’t hear his answer. He’s suckling two ketchup packets. The cloud, you say, again and again, and watch his jaw melt into his lap. You feel the heat of all his words as they hit you and throw you like the depleted packets flicked from his thumb.
***
The mother asks if you will watch her children. Her daughter has bat wings, feathers instead of hair, and teeth like a shark. Her son’s eyes blink sideways. He has green scales and a tail that curls around your waist. He picks you up and brings you to their table. You’re needed as a guest, a witness for the wedding, at the special request of a toothpick pulled from your pocket. She wears a ketchup packet for a veil and is marrying a butter knife. The girl plucks blue feathers from her scalp and showers them over the bride as she hops down the aisle. You remove a few toothpicks from your pocket and place them on both sides in the audience. After the couple kisses, the children devour them all. They screech and howl, shatter the window between you and the apocalypse, and invite you to go hunting with them.
***
The man is a teenager covered in boils who asks for the cure but you only have a bowl filled with Imodium. You push the bowl closer to him and notice your hand, soft, but your fingernails are chipped. Your reflection displays your teenage self, listening to a young man talk about football. How he loves the sport, but math is his passion, and you reach and touch his hand. The boils that burst beneath your fingers remind you of the poppers you threw with...who? You weren’t alone then, you aren’t alone now, and recognize the surprised look on the young man’s face. He pulls away, knocks the bowl of Imodium over, and you watch them spill into his lap.
***
The boy is a robot who detaches his jaw and places it on the table. The girl, who is a floating orb made up of the sequence for Pi levitates a toothpick between her brother’s metal teeth. She clicks about humans; how helpless they would be without them. But instead of “humans” you hear “mothers” and “if she ever wonders about me.”
***
The man is back to being a man and asks if you at least have pancakes that look like Darth Vader and ketchup he can use as a lightsaber? And you tell him no, you don’t, because the microwave and oven and stove and dishwasher all quit to rule the world but you provide him two packets of ketchup.
***
The girl picks her nose and pulls a clone of herself out and she tells you, on her planet, children rule. She keeps picking and pulling clones of herself until the diner is filled with clones. You search for her brother. Didn’t you promise their mother you would keep an eye on them? You search for him amongst the girls but all you find is a toothpick sinking into a perfectly swirled pit of ketchup.
***
Are you ready to go? The man asks, holding the door open. All the humans have left, except the two of you, boarding a ship to the moon. You tell him not yet, that you’re waiting for someone. She’s not coming, and you know you’ve heard this before. You look for the children, reach into your pocket, feel your palm fill with pinprick kisses of toothpicks. Are you ready to go? And you still aren’t sure until he removes the ketchup packets from his pockets.She never comes back, you hear him say, and you can’t remember ever seeing her leave.
After work I met Alexa because we were trying out the idea that we could be just friends. Together we walked to Barnes & Noble where they were having an event for Dan Dashiell, author of a celebrated sad novel about a dying husband who spends the last month of his life teaching his wife how to cook the family’s favorite meals. Every chapter is a different dish and life lesson. Alexa knew Dan from the internet and I think they read together once, before he became a successful young novelist. Also I believe he was at one point fucking Yvonne. After a store employee introduced him he read an excerpt from the book, an early chapter dealing with regret and spinach lasagna. Afterwards people lined up and Dan sat and signed books for them. I went to look at magazines while Alexa hovered around waiting to say hi.Upstairs I found a couple of literary journals I’d recently been rejected from and read their lists of contributors. In one I only recognized a few bigger-deal poets but the second had like ten people I know, including a popular new Irish poet who had recently read at K Bar. I remember a bunch of highly-emotional poems involving a lot of muck and root vegetables. I flipped to his page and read the fragment “plough nigh / upon aching furrow” and closed the magazine and put it back in the wrong place and tried to leave my body for five heartbeats.Alexa and Dan were chatting when I got back downstairs. Dan and I shook hands and he kind of leaned in and half-patted, half-hugged my shoulder even though I couldn’t remember us ever being friends. I told him congrats on the book.“And how’s your writing life going?” he asked me. I told him I was chipping away. He sighed in a way that I think was meant to convey affinity or professional understanding and then steered the conversation to his book tour, so for a while we all compared notes on the people he’d met along the way. Alexa told a good anecdote about the organizer of a longstanding Seattle reading series involving a Top Gun-themed party and a bag of angel dust. I tried to think of quotes from Top Gun while Dan listened intently and laughed. Eventually a bookstore lady stepped in and started to kind of politely corral Dan towards the back of the store.“Let me know whenever you have a reading,” Dan said to Alexa. “I really want to hear your new stuff.” Alexa made a mock-shy, flirtatious expression. “You too,” Dan added, swiveling part-way towards me as he was swept away by the bookstore lady. “Love all that stuff you do. So great. So great.”I had three good poems and maybe two hundred starts of things, dumb ideas, abandoned drafts. God keep me from ever completing anything says Moby Dick but I’m pretty sure that’s meant to cover stuff that’s already pretty much finished. E.g. Moby Dick is like six hundred pages, not five lines and a working title.At home after the platonic bookstore outing I opened a file where I’d started collecting physical descriptions from profiles of dead writers: Ted Hughes has a huge face; Simone de Beauvoir is clear-eyed and rosy-complected; Borges’ features are vague, as if partially erased. Adrian was online and I messaged him to say I was considering rebranding from poet to “text-based artist.” “Ok,” said Adrian and I waited for him to write more but he didn’t. I added some line breaks to the dead writers document then clicked away and read a NY Times article about a recent outbreak of violence in Central Africa. The phrase “crucible of war” popped into my head, somewhat melodramatically, I felt. I searched online for “crucible of war” but couldn’t find a satisfying answer for why the phrase seemed so ancient and indestructible. I cycled back to see if Adrian had written anything then scanned through my chat contacts where recently people I didn’t know had started appearing, maybe via a technical glitch or some runaway algorithm. I recognized the name of a successful early-career artist and briefly considered messaging her about her recent show in which everything had been extremely black. Instead I opened a new document on my laptop and wrote “The worst thing about being the darkness must be knowing there’s no darkness coming,” which, for the time being, seemed good and sad and true. I stared at the page and wrote “Black” then deleted it and wrote “Black” again, then closed Word completely. On my laptop I put on an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation in which there’s a C plot involving Riker falling asleep at Data’s poetry reading. Midway through the episode Data asks Geordi for feedback on his poems and Geordi, whose first impulse is to spare the android’s non-existent feelings, ends up advising Data to focus more on what he wants to say with his art, and less on how he says it, which struck me as good advice for an android and very bad advice for everyone else.I put on the end of a Knicks game and idly scrolled through old pictures while drinking a poly-vegetable juice for I guess dinner. My phone ran out of battery just as the Knicks surrendered and emptied their bench. Mourning doves strafed each other outside in the darkening space between buildings. I sat very still and, while everything grew deep blue and gelatinous, thought about an iron plough tearing through the deep black earth.
In the mid-eighties most Prescott High band members cheat on the terminology test, since Mr. Madison can’t see past the front row. Brass and woodwinds retreat toward the percussion section, sit with answer keys on their music stands. Percussionist Colin Andrews sits alone, no cheat sheet, scores a 96%.All three percussionists, Colin, Danny Gabriel, and Liz Reynolds, live in Perch Hollow Trailer Park. Colin gets it: growing up on the poor side of town naturally makes them want to pound the shit out of something.Liz lets all the neighborhood boys practice on her in her father’s shed; they learn tricks they’ll use later when they’re out with their real girlfriends—at Lavio’s for pizza, the Prescott Theatre for Ghostbusters. Liz is tall, with broad shoulders, narrow hips. She stands behind the bass drum with a mallet in each hand, thrashes both sides like it deserves it, like it used to be her friend.The percussion section chills while Mr. Madison rehearses the clarinets.“Why didn’t you cheat on the terminology thing?” Liz says.“I just like to know them.”Colin doesn’t mention his favorite, legato tongue: the subtlest of articulations, a connecting pulse on a wind.“You keep staring at the flute section. You have a thing for Keri, maybe? Missy?”“No.” Colin imagines the sweetness of Missy Lavender’s voice, her flute’s soft trilling. “I don’t have a thing for anyone.”Colin’s the oldest sibling, the first to go through puberty. Bad breath, smelly armpits, straggly chin whiskers, barbed wire crotch hair that’s constantly itching: of course he has a thing for the flute girls; he has more things than he can tally. But Missy is his primary. Across the band room he admires the flicker of her fingers, imagines the warmth of her breath, the moistness of her dabbing, darling tongue.“Believe me, I have nothing to hide.”Liz is alone, singing “Open Arms” in the band cloak closet when Colin goes in to find a marching band jacket. She laughs, tells him all the jackets are too big for him, he looks like a scarecrow.Behind school at lunch she lights a cigarette. “Jesus fucking Christ,” she says, watching Denny Carpenter walk past with Missy, who’s wearing Denny’s football jersey.Liz exhales while Denny and Missy sprint across the street through the drizzle, says “fuck” again, as if she’s telling it to the rain.Colin nods, shifts away from the smoke, understands. Of course Liz has things, for Denny, for whoever: her mom left them, her dad is the neighborhood asshole. Everyone hears him yelling at the dog, yelling at Liz to quit thrashing her drum set, the rattle of slammed doors, the shatter of plates as he screams at her to keep those boys in the shed, don’t bring them inside, it’s nasty.Liz and Colin are sitting on the grass behind her father’s shed.“So you want this or not?” Liz says.“Yeah, sure.”Liz gives him a beer. “You’ve done it before?”“I’ve done a couple things.”“You have a few beers, it'll be fine.” She sips. “I'll show you my tits.”Halfway through his second beer Colin’s head is swirling. “Where’d you get your drum set?” His tongue feels thick. “I hear you playing sometimes.”Liz touches his leg and Colin’s heart jumps. “Mind if I have another beer?”On a mattress in the shed, between broken lawnmowers, Liz shows him her breasts, but they’re not like the ones in Playboy. They’re damp, patchily red with a couple large moles, wispy hairs around the nipples.“Just let me take care of this.”She kisses his forehead, nose, chin, belly, with each leaves a splash of spit with her tongue—then goes down, uses her whole mouth to caress and envelop him, as if his penis is the most precious thing on earth. She gets him into a rubber, eases herself onto him. He’s taking deep breaths, trying not to panic.“That’s it, follow me.”She grunts with him as he climaxes, eyes closed.“Just be quiet about this, okay?” she says after, reaching for a cigarette while Colin tugs up his underwear, bangs his forehead on a lawnmower. “Nobody needs to know.”From your percussion section admirer, reads the note Colin slips into Missy’s locker, with a drawing of a flute and a snare drum.The kids pass it around at lunch the next day, laugh uproariously. “What a douchebag.”Two days later in band class, Colin’s sitting near the trumpet section, laughing when they laugh, pretending he's part of it. They’re loud, everyone can hear them. Liz keeps her head down as she walks past.“I hear Miss Austin found Liz and Bonkers Benny going at it in the janitor’s closet,” someone says. “She was sitting on a slop bucket, fucking wolfing up his dick.”Liz sits in the back corner, reaches for her Walkman. Colin tries not to remember her tongue twisting between his lips, her breath mingling with his when they kissed: sour cigarettes, the slanted sweetness of warm beer.Liz stays in the corner, doesn’t play at all, bobs her head to her Walkman. No one takes over her bass part, but Mr. Madison doesn’t say anything.That weekend, while his parents are away, Colin drinks three of his mom’s wine coolers, walks to Liz’s trailer in his marching band uniform, and knocks on the door. Her dad opens the door, stands in the doorway: tank top, red-rimmed eyes.“Is Liz home?”“Why the hell are you wearing that?”Colin sways, steadies himself. “Tell her it’s Colin Andrews, from down the street.”Her dad disappears; after a minute he comes back with a wicked grin. “She says she never heard of you.”What can Colin say? His stomach’s roiling, the world’s sliding to the left, soon he’ll need to throw up. He lowers his eyes; his band pants swish as he turns and walks away.“Get the fuck outta here!” Liz’s dad calls after him.
A––––– hasn’t been anywhere, or seen anybody, since her unemployment money ran out. Iron wind chimes jangle when she knocks on the door, and jangle again when it opens. Someone named Sara leads her to a table in the center of the shop. Sara is wearing a cloth mask with a red and white geometric print, which makes A––––– feel self conscious about her own KN-95, like she showed up wearing a suit when Sara is just wearing a cozy sweater. Everything inside of the room is white, everything outside is gray. This makes any small moment of color extremely vibrant - each thread on Sara’s Mexican-style embroidered blouse, the raku vase of flowers on the table, the tiny mustard stain on A–––––’s pants extremely vibrant. A––––– tries to believe that she belongs in this space, full of very expensive Japanese home goods and craft objects. If she holds her head the right way and blurs her eyes slightly, she can picture it.“Thank you for taking the time to be here,” says Sara, and A––––– nods. “I want to start by hearing what made you apply.”A––––– remembers her notes, diligently written and rewritten in her notebook. Through research online she’s built this shop into a temple, and not just because it’s the only place that responded to her application. The salvation guaranteed by employment here is the answer to the question that she’s been wrestling with in the months since the pandemic began. She chooses her words carefully.“One of the things I love most about your selection is the way your products call people to slow down in their day,” says A–––––. “Treating everyday objects, like a teacup, even a trash bin, as things worthy of thoughtful design is very inspiring to me. It matters, making small things beautiful. Slowing down.” “Well,” says Sara, “we like that slowing down, of course. We’re not Amazon.” A––––– nods. She almost believes that she’s never ordered from Amazon in her life, even though there are blue and white envelopes in her recycling at this very moment. “But you know,” Sara continues, “In the shop, it can be very busy. We work quickly. There is so much to get done, all of the time. There aren’t that many opportunities to rest. Is this okay with you?”A––––– smiles, and tries to express that appreciating supreme aesthetics and working with unprecedented speed are two compatible characteristics. It’s all very abstract. It’s been so long since A––––– really applied her efforts to anything. She straightens her spine. She shakes off her pre-emptive doubt. If Sara sees her as valuable, she will be valuable. “Well, that’s great,” says Sara. “And you’re aware, this is probably a temporary position? We usually just need the extra help to hold us over through the holidays.” A––––– can’t afford to worry about the future, so she nods. “There’s just one more thing. I’m sorry if this is an assumption…” Sara starts to laugh, raising her hands to cover her mouth, which is already covered by her mask, “but you’re not… Japanese.” “Definitely a correct assumption,” A––––– says, realizing that her mask hides the curve of her undeniably Jewish nose. “Well, you see…” Sara becomes very serious. “You would be the only one. The shop owner, Taku, moved here from Japan 20 years ago. Our staff is always majority Japanese. Even if we were raised over here, we all have Japanese heritage. And there are things we take for granted that you might not really… understand. I wouldn’t want you to feel on the outside.” A––––– bows her head and says, “Sara, I would be honored to learn more about Japanese culture. I wouldn’t feel on the outside when given this kind of opportunity.”Sara’s eyes crinkle into a smile. They stand up to start a tour of the shop. Just outside of the main room, Sara gestures to Grace, who waves at A––––– warmly from a minimal wooden table. Grace’s thick-rimmed glasses, and long hair, trigger a deja-vu type recognition for A–––––. She follows Sara but twists her neck to catch Grace thumb off the lid of her pen. The shop is so quiet A––––– can tell the cap is metal by the sound it makes when it drops. “Taku built that desk,” says Sara, “he built everything in here.” This includes rows on rows of modular cabinets, all crafted from the same unfinished plywood. A––––– learns that Taku selected each silver connecting joint from a vintage collector in Niigata. She learns that Taku designed every ceramic mug, plate, teapot, and bowl in the shop. He selected the cool glazes. He chose to leave some items without any glaze at all. A––––– picks up a small dish. It fits exactly in the palm. . So many people must have palms this size, she thinks, if Taku sculpted this without ever having met me. The plate is completely flat, except for a tiny outer ridge and an even smaller, inner indentation. “For soy sauce?” A––––– asks, but Sara is already at the exit.A––––– returns the dish to its spot on the shelf. The display has lost some of its balance. Price tags, tiny and black, are more noticeable. A––––– senses Sara’s gaze, and taps the dish, trying to leave things just as perfect as they were before she arrived. “We’ll be in touch,” says Sara, and then A––––– is on the outside. She sees a short man, his arms covered in tattoos, maze-like spirals and repeating wave patterns. He walks past her and into the shop. A––––– resentfully identifies him as a rival for her position. She clicks her car keys, and the responding chirp sounds farther away than she remembered. It takes over an hour for A––––– to get home. Meandering through side streets because the I-10 is too jammed, she passes through Culver City, Mid-Wilshire, and Koreatown. On every street, whether it’s lined with palms or apartments, homeless people or lawns, A––––– wonders what the fuck is wrong with her that she would bow her head and describe herself as “honored” to a Japanese woman.Honored.A––––– has never bowed before in her whole damn life. For soy sauce… unbelievable!Like Truman Capote dragging around his baby blanket, or Yukio Mishima bodybuilding with religious fanaticism, sometimes A––––– believes there is something special about her that sets her apart from everyone else. Small humiliations like these are just evidence of the quirkiness that comes along with her true greatness. But other times, the limitations of her world make her feel totally delusional. The “something special” is just a curse, because she has no idea how it will ever materialize. A––––– gets the job. Seiji, the man with the tattoos, also gets the job. Two new hires. No more all alone. She has a place to drive to, early every morning. She has a time card to punch.From the beginning, A–––––’s gestures appear loud, and overexaggerated, around her new cohort. Her limbs feel unpredictable and clumsy, like she might move around too quickly and destroy one of the objects she’s made the commitment to work around.A––––– helps Grace haul four brown boxes into the center room of the shop, placing them next to an oval plywood table. Behind her mask and thick glasses, A––––– realizes that Grace looks exactly like her ex-girlfriend. “Taku built this table,” Grace reminds A–––––. “If you look closely, you can see it’s made from one rectangle. After carving out the oval shape, he used the discarded corners for legs. He thinks every part of the wood is essential, even what others might have thrown away.” Grace scrapes the top of the boxes with a blade, slicing through red stamps and green tape covered in Japanese characters. Inside each box are tens of tiny brown packages, each one imprinted with Taku’s design label. Grace models how A––––– should help, placing each small parcel on the table, spreading them out so no one hides the other. Grace’s hands are tiny. Her hair is long and thick, and it hides her face while they work.A––––– is moved by Grace’s resemblance to her ex-girlfriend, who hasn’t been in touch for almost a year. There is such a disconnect between that old life and this new one. It’s better for A––––– if she doesn’t try to mesh the two and forgets about things like drinking and dancing and kissing. She wants to keep her present and her past divided, like the shop itself, which separates the bright, open, naturally lit showroom and the dark, twisting, back-end passage packed from floor to ceiling with boxed inventory.Grace hands over a sheet full of barcode stickers once all of the boxes are evenly spread out on the table. She shows A––––– how to match the UPC on each sticker to the code on the outside of the box. They stack the boxes, sorting each shape into tilting towers of rectangles and squares. A––––– feels like a child while they sticker. They work in silence, a quiet warmth floating between the two of them. When every box has its barcode, A––––– is left with a glossy sheet of blank paper. It’s done. She’s finished.They balance the barcoded boxes, and sidestep lightly to file them onto black metal shelves. There’s no ambiguity, no room to wonder whether this task was worthwhile or not. It was.“That’s Taku’s desk,” says Grace, gesturing towards a tiny table in the dark corridor, tucked behind a shelf cluttered with stacks of books, action figures, sketches, and broken inventory. Everything is only half visible, interrupted by cardboard. “I still haven’t met him,” says A–––––.“It might be a while. He only comes into the shop when no one else is around. Very late at night or very early.”“Is he afraid of getting Covid?”“He behaved that way even before all of this. It’s just the way he likes it. Look,” Grace points to a pile of geometric bronze incense holders. “He was here today. I realized I had made a huge error, not having these on display in the main room. He catches every little thing. He always notices.” A––––– looks over her shoulder, half expecting Taku to be right behind her, nodding with solemn approval. She wonders if Taku knows who she is and if he agrees with Sara’s decision to add her to his payroll. Maybe he wants her to keep working after winter comes. Maybe that something special inside of A––––– is the willingness to do exactly what Taku wants. The sun goes down before the end of their shift. Before setting the alarm, they attempt to complete a ritual. “Otsukaresama desu,” says Grace.“I sound so stupid when I say it,” says A–––––.“The trick is to avoid placing emphasis on any vowels. That’s a big difference between Japanese and English. No stress on the vowels.” “No stress on the vowels,” A––––– repeats, instead of saying thank you for your hard work in Japanese. Driving home in the dark, A–––––’s arms ache from carrying boxes. Her back hurts from being on her feet all day. She passes palm trees and her radio drones on with vaccine rumors and diversity initiatives. Her thoughts are strangely calm. She doesn’t have to question her value. The boxes weren’t stickered before she got there, and now they are resting in their correct place, organized efficiently, waiting for Taku’s inspection. Tomorrow there will be more ways to make herself useful. Life outside the shop has shrunk to just a few hours flanking her commute. She doesn’t speak to much of anyone. She mostly watches TV. It would be cool if she could propel the functionality of the shop into her own tasks, like laundry and grocery shopping, but instead they pile up chaotically in her studio apartment. She wonders if her coworkers are like this too, only fully alive when they walk through those shop doors. The store is closed to customers for the first half of each day. It can feel cavernous in its minimalism, yet it’s very difficult for A––––– to find a place to sit and eat lunch. She could irreparably damage Taku’s hand-carved tables with a spill, or scratch. This leaves only three options: the tiny bit of counter space between the microwave and the sink in the kitchen, the tiny bit of surface space on the packing table, and the passenger seat of A–––––’s own car. She feels stumped by Taku’s lack of forethought. Every product in the shop implies a graceful and respectful way of living, yet there is nothing to accommodate a team of people working here for eight hours a day, with a lunch break too short to vacate the premises. It’s uncomfortable. For lunch, A––––– heats up a curry from Trader Joe’s. While it spins in its microwave circle, she crushes up sheets of paper towels to cover her garbage in the trash can. She assumes that she is the only one who doesn’t cook her lunch at home, imagining her coworkers’ apartments as extensions of the shop, while hers just kind of sucks.A––––– carries her Trader Joe’s lunch with sweater sleeves pulled over her hands, buffering the heat of her ceramic dish. The dish is one of Taku’s designs that was ultimately rejected because the clay was too damp when it was fired. Mold is growing inside each piece. The unglazed gray clay will eventually mutate into a greenish tinge. ‘Till then, these dishes belong to the staff. On her way to the packing station, she sees Sara’s bright dress crouched over Taku’s desk. A––––– sees the back of Sara’s head and metal lunch containers, open to reveal thinly sliced pickles, white rice dusted with furikake, and a poached slice of salmon. Sara is holding bamboo chopsticks. A––––– hopes Sara will turn around and A––––– will see her face. Instead, before A––––– can reach her, Sara pulls up the blue surgical mask dangling from her ear.They don’t even have a moment of eye contact. Sara schedules A–––––’s shifts and sets the terms of A–––––’s employment, which feels less and less permanent as the holiday season sneaks closer and closer. If A––––– tries to visualize Sara’s face, she can’t.A––––– eats her curry at the packing station, keeping her elbows drawn tight to her sides. She covers her mouth and nose with her hand while she chews, careful to angle herself away from where Seiji is working. He’s tearing paper, crumpling it, pulling tape across brown boxes with a shriek from the dispenser.As winter gets closer, A––––– starts packing online orders. The shop’s website has become the main point of sale. A––––– feels robbed, watching this influx of Yuletide commerce without getting to meet the customers behind it. There are no faces, or affects to attach to the people out there paying high prices to attain immaculately designed teapots and coffee strainers and metal canisters and etched glasses and iron bookends, only 90210, 90240, 90265. A––––– stands next to Seiji at the packing station. He instructs her.“The first thing you want to do is unpack the object and make sure it doesn’t have any defects,” says Seiji, leaning against a metal shelf full of white paper bags. He pulls a small gray box out of one of the bags and opens the lid, emptying a tiny brass paperweight into the palm of his hand. It’s in the shape of a house, glowing gold. He passes it to A–––––. It’s very heavy and pulls her hand down to the matte surface of the packing table. “What do you think it is about this paperweight that makes it worth…” A––––– opens the packing slip, “$354?” A––––– anxiously watches Seiji for his reaction. She can’t tell if he carries the same idolization of Taku in his chest, or if repetition and physical labor have worn him down. Seiji shrugs but A––––– thinks maybe he’s smiling. “Isn’t it obvious?” he says. He might be scolding, or sarcastic. “Taku designed it.” All afternoon, Seiji shows A––––– how to layer corrugated kraft paper just so to create a 1-inch buffer between each box and its enclosed object. He teaches her that products will break not from impact with the ground, but from impact with each other. This is why it’s important to make sure objects packed together are separated by padding. Once the box is sealed, you shouldn’t be able to hear any movement when shaking it around. Every object should be squeezed together as tightly as possible. No room for any shifts or collisions. Seiji pulls out another order. They inspect a porcelain white cup with three indentations on one side. “You know,” says Seiji, “This was designed to be enjoyed by blind people. Anyone can enjoy its texture. Here, close your eyes.” A––––– closes her eyes. Smooth porcelain coating. Her fingers trail around the cup and she almost loses her footing until she finds the indentations. Three on the left side. Her pointer finger, middle finger, ring finger. They fit. She shifts her fingers around. They fit perfectly again. She raises and lowers the cup in her hand. It’s like playing the piano. When she opens her eyes, Seiji is looking right at her. “It really is beautiful… ” says A–––––, and hands back the cup. “I guess Taku knows what he’s doing. It’s not the kind of stuff I would spend my money on,” Seiji chuckles, “But I can’t deny it, there’s no one else out there like him. He’s one of a kind.” As he says it, the computer screen lights up with news of another purchase. A––––– does mental calculations of how many hours she would have to work to own any of these objects. Like the lack of a comfortable place to eat her lunch, the number makes her feel squeezed. Counted, minimized, contained. They clock out and A––––– gets in her car. She tosses an empty water bottle and McDonalds wrappers from her breakfast into the back seat. Just a block away from the shop, she sees Seiji smoking. His face is softer than she imagined it to be. He looks ten years younger than she had guessed, almost a boy. He doesn’t see her when she passes, but the whole way home A––––– replays the image: his tattoos covered by a quilted jacket, his round cheeks tightening with each inhalation, a silvery cloud above his head. In the dark, A––––– thinks about her life from before. Her old self would be surprised to see this new discipline. No more neurosis and uncertainty. Her stacks of worry and regret now subsumed by categorization, structure, routine, and service. All it took was Sara’s commands, and the presence of a great artist, somewhere, somehow, shifting the scenes. At work, A––––– microwaves her Trader Joe’s meal and clutches her bowl. She sees Taku’s desk. No one is sitting there. She can’t resist. She collapses into his chair. It feels overly luxurious after so many crammed lunches. She thinks, maybe this is how I should have been doing it all along. She chews her food slowly and stares up at the shelves. Unlike the shelves in the store, there is no governing order to the stacks of paper, dusty objects, and images tacked up around here. Unlike the matte minimalism of the objects on sale, here there are bright colors, odd combinations, and unlikely shapes. A stack of small bowls, sand colored and unglazed, have been repaired with bright gold seeping through the cracks. Gaudy and exaggerated, flaunting imperfection, defect. The binding of each shard reminds A––––– of the borders between stained glass in a church. They must have been broken, maybe shattered by an overly enthusiastic hand gesture at a dinner full of wine, and hearty laughter. It wasn’t the end for them. Post-it notes, written in Japanese with a blunt pencil, are stuck to the wall at crooked angles. Further up, there are framed woodblock prints of poodles. The prints are full of bright yellow and pink. The poodles are haughty and expressive, eating bowls of cherries with big silk bows in their curls. There is nothing utilitarian about these decadent dogs, smiling and snarling from their gray walls. Resplendent. A––––– chews her food. Emotion wells up inside of her chest. Her eyes travel over vintage Japanese action figures. I love these, she thinks. She thought she loved the shop, and she does, but it feels so free in here. Like she could come up with anything. Or Taku could come up with anything, she corrects herself. She looks at adverts from ULINE held up with metal push pins, covered in big sharpie circles and Taku’s handwriting. Massive exclamation marks, question marks, underlines. Hanging from a nail above the shelf is an oversized charm bracelet, each charm a different American fast food item. My microwave meals! A _ _ _ _ _ thinks. My McDonalds wrappers! She feels like she has been obeying the completely wrong Taku this whole time. She wonders which one he prefers - the shop-Taku, or the desk-Taku. If he doesn’t sell objects like the ones gathered around his desk, is that because he doesn’t take them seriously or because his customers don’t take them seriously? She wants to write him a note and ask, but her English letters seem foreign and unintelligible. He wouldn’t be able to read them the same way she can’t read the Japanese notes that are already around the desk, trying to pass along messages for future designs and projects and disciplines and inquiries. A––––– remembers Seiji saying with such certainty, There’s no one else like him. She closes her eyes and tries to invent a completely original design. Instead, she can only picture objects Taku has designed before she came along. She can’t come up with anything that just belongs to her and her alone. She wonders if this is a flaw in her DNA, or her cultural surroundings, or the amount of money in her bank account, or just the fact that there can only be one; for great artists to exist, there have to be people that aren’t quite as great, people that only look up.A–––––’s alarm goes off. Her lunch break is over. She returns to the front of the store, her hands washed and her mask in place. Her mind is racing. Sara looks at her and tilts her head with a frown. The next day, before A––––– takes her lunch break, Sara grabs her arm. A––––– is shocked by the physical contact. “Please be sure to either stay in the kitchen or at the packing station when you eat your lunch,” says Sara. Her voice is steady. She’s deadly serious. “Of course,” A––––– says. She’s burning up. She looks at the ground. Sara nods and squints.The rest of the day, and then the rest of the week, A––––– works as diligently as ever, but she can’t stop thinking about Sara’s hand on her arm. It had felt involuntary. Civil and soft yet still tense around the knuckles. A––––– saw Sara sitting at Taku’s desk weeks ago. She was sitting there with her chopsticks and her poached fish. The treasures at Taku’s desk, the mysteries and the idiosyncrasies, are for Sara? Was this kind of exclusivity, and hierarchy Taku’s intention? A––––– imagines them meeting together, late at night. Taku bends Sara over his desk and fucks her, manicured poodles leering overhead. They keep their masks on. In a muffled voice, Sara praises Taku’s intellect while he slaps her ass and tells her to work harder. Her eyes squeeze shut, she knocks a jar of pens onto the floor. Sara likes it. They roll around. A––––– wants to laugh. Huh, she thinks, you really want all this for that?Every time A––––– thinks about Taku’s desk, she feels a yearning for a type of originality that she could claim as her own. If she wasn’t so tired after working all day, she might have the power to figure out what exactly that could look like. She starts to realize that by crowding out the rest of her life, she crowded out this possibility too. December is almost over. There is a near constant line of customers to get into the shop. The team functions, all together, at a high level. Behind a table full of stickered boxes, A––––– sees Grace drinking from her water bottle. Underneath her mask and thick glasses flecked with dust, Grace doesn’t look anything like A–––––’s ex girlfriend. Her nose is longer, her jawline less developed. The resemblance must have come from something in her body language, or maybe the tininess of her hands. “Has Taku ever told you something directly?” A––––– asks. “What do you mean?” Grace responds, pulling her mask back over her nose, “Taku and I talk every day. That’s a big part of my role.” “Well, it’s just that he’s so present in my life, but I never meet him. I never hear directly from him. It’s always, ‘Taku says this,’ or ‘Taku says that.’ Is that really how he is?”“He’s controlling…” Grace says. “Sometimes people don’t like that. It’s probably part of why he’s such a recluse.” A––––– grips the metal shelf. Her paychecks are small. Her commute is long. Her body is tired. When she lies in bed at night, she dreams about stickers and categorization. Customers want something they see on the shelves, and she searches in the back of the shop endlessly for the box, with its embossed label and deliberate packaging. She takes too long. She can’t find it. She’s become undisciplined, lazy, too tall, the word for each object sticking strangely in her mouth—Kenzan, tenugui, katakuchi, donabe, kekkai. She doesn’t even have the vocabulary to ask for help. A––––– walks into the shop, and Sara beckons her into the cardboard box hallway. No one else has arrived. Sara points at barcode stickers A––––– applied the afternoon before. “Do you see how some of these are straight while others are slightly off-kilter?” Sara says.A––––– nods. “It’s really important that you keep the barcodes straight when you sticker,” she gestures at Taku’s desk, as if A––––– didn’t already know about the stained glass church bowls, and the action figures, and the golden charm bracelet. “This is the kind of thing that will drive Taku crazy. It’s impossible for him to concentrate on his important creative work if there is no care put into the details. For Taku’s sake, please sticker more intentionally.” A––––– agrees meekly, too stunned to figure out if Sara is right about what does or doesn’t disturb Taku.In the dull, heavy light of the storage space A––––– gently peels off each crooked sticker and delicately presses them back into place. Perfectly aligned, perfectly straight. She tries to contact some of the childlike joy of those first days. Back then, a job was the only thing she needed. Instead, she feels redundant, or worse. It takes her over an hour. She hears Grace and Seiji moving about the rest of the shop, their voices muffled past the point of comprehension. When A––––– emerges, Grace is at the packing station. “Sara and Seiji are talking in the other room,” Grace says. Her eyes don’t invite any follow up. A––––– walks past Grace towards the kitchen, briefly passing through the main room of the shop. Seiji and Sara are sitting across from each other on the table Taku built. Seiji’s voice is deep enough that A––––– can pick up a few words. She hears “paid time off,” and then she hears “healthcare,” and then she hears “sick leave.” She hears him say “benefits,” and sit back in his chair, hand at his chin, brow furrowed, taking in the explanations Sara is laying out with open hand gestures. She points, she shrugs. No one has ever said these words to A––––– in the shop and A––––– has never asked to hear them. Almost like bringing up the topic would force a decision. Maybe if she never said anything, Sara would keep scheduling A––––– for 40 hours a week. But as soon as A––––– mentions it, it will all disappear - A–––––’s time card, her lunch break, Grace, Seiji, Sara. Of course, there wouldn’t be room for both of them to stay past the holiday season. Seiji will be chosen. A––––– will be discarded. A––––– catches Sara applying chapstick. A––––– has never seen Sara’s face before and tries to look away as fast as she can. It’s like vertigo. Total revulsion. Sara’s nose is too wide, her lips are too big. Nothing looks the way A––––– had imagined. The beauty of Sara’s eyes and eyebrows were lying to her. A––––– got too comfortable trusting their symmetry. She thought she knew what Sara looked like. At the end of the day:“Otsukaresama desu.” “Otsukaresama desu.” “Otsukaresama desu.” A––––– tries not to stress a single vowel. Two days before Christmas, A––––– drives in circles after the shop closes. She pulls over next to glowing windows in dark west side mansions. Maybe they’ve used objects from the shop to give their homes a sense of Eastern authenticity, not knowing anything about the man who designed them, or the intention he had behind each decision. Maybe they rhapsodize their reverence for the handmade when their guests dish out compliments. Maybe they don’t even notice the life of the objects in their homes, having trusted a decorator to populate their shelves. So removed from their own tastes and preferences, they don’t even know what they want. A _ _ _ _ _ watches palms swaying in the wind. She rolls down her windows and smells jasmine. I might as well get ahead of it, she thinks. The writing is on the wall. They don’t have enough space for me. She pulls out her car manual and rips out the last page, which is blank. She writes a note about how much she appreciated everything Sara and Grace and Seiji taught her. She wishes them luck in the new year. She’s surprised to find herself crying. She drives back in the direction of the shop. A homeless woman is napping on the bus stop bench, two streets before A––––– arrives. One street before A––––– arrives, she sees a black cat. The lamps are on in the shop, even though A––––– turned them off, with Sara and Grace and Seiji, two hours earlier. Light pools warmly outside of each window, a golden semicircle forming in front of the curtains. A––––– battles the urge to turn around. Maybe Sara or Grace stayed late, doing some sort of inventory count or reorganizing that had to happen because of A–––––'s turbulence, fully on display despite months of best effort. Her note seems silly. She rehearses what she will say if she is confronted. “I forgot my lunchbox here,” she says, even though she throws away the containers of her microwave meals after every use. “I forgot my scarf,” she says, even though it’s not quite cold enough to wear one. “Sara told me it’s important to check, if you think you have lost something.”The door to the shop is unlocked. A––––– opens it. She has never seen anything so bright. She squints, and stumbles towards the back room. When she gets there, there aren’t any boxes. There aren’t any black metal shelves. No excellently proportioned packaging, no tools encased in soft brown paper. No treasure of mugs and spoons and kettles and bookends - all etched, hammered, sculpted, stitched, carved, and cast. There is only this bright, white, brilliant light. And Taku, more beautiful than A––––– could have ever imagined, hunched over his desk. There’s a bandaid on his thumb, and he’s picked at it till the edges are frayed with loose strings. He turns around when he hears her, softly and fluidly. It’s no surprise that she’s there. “You know,” he says in perfect English, without any hint of an accent, “here, there’s room for all of us.”
BUY A COPY OF 'AMERICAN AIR' HERESPOKESPERSON FOR MELLINGER CO., LOS ANGELES, CALIF., DEPT. 54Friends, you've heard me speak before in praise of Barns for Nobles. Well I'm no longer with that company. I'm here today to tell you about a new product I'm even more enthusiastic about called Count Branula. It's a new cereal that tastes like bran. In fact I can't even tell the difference. THE EARLIEST SALADSProbably the earliest salads were nothing more than some greens dumped in a bowl. VASEI was at Mom's and I dropped this vase. I was upset cuz it was her favorite and there was no way to replace it. I remembered I was playing a record when I dropped it. So I just played the record backwards until the broken vase came together again on the floor and hopped up to my hands. SIMPLERWhat could be simpler than the gift of a solid gold baby? STRAY DIALOGUEA tooth fairy so much as touches my kid I'll blow his head off. MOSQUITODid you know that a mosquito in really bad storms can hang onto a raindrop and ride safely toward the ground? A PLAY"Do you want to give the babysitter a ride home, honey?""I let Freddie Kruger drive her home.""Oh, no!" TOP TIPI read somewhere that the female praying mantis always cannibalizes the head of her mate post-coitus. Take it from me, fellas, my wife tried this stunt when we were on our honeymoon and it seemed to take FOREVER!! NEW YORKERSNew Yorkers have always had trouble with those idle low-lives called poor people. Ever since NYC was built, poor people have been plaguing it--sitting on park benches, buying fruits and vegetables from the farmers market & so on. You can hear them at night sometimes playing the piano. BUY A COPY OF 'AMERICAN AIR' HERE
The human heart on the street wasn’t mine. It came from the crumpled body thirty feet away. Another thirty feet behind the body was a pair of boots, which may or may not have had feet in them. Just behind the boots was the sedan. The bumper was barely dented from where it had struck the man.A severed vein sticking out of the heart looked big enough to stick my thumb into. Black skid marks streaked the fat on the lower part, as if someone had plucked out the heart and skipped it like a stone across the street. A few flecks of goo dotted the concrete around it and there was a smear where it slid to a stop. Somehow the heart had sailed all that distance and stayed intact.We hadn’t slept at all that night. There’d been one medical call after another, and fire watch from three to five A.M. (Fire watch is one of the cruelest assignments an engine can get. We sat around making sure a fire that other crews had put out didn’t rekindle). After that, the heart called me here.“Mantis,” said a voice.It startled me. “What?” I looked up. “This mess isn’t going to sweep up itself. Get the kitty litter.” The voice came from behind me. My driver, Jimmy.I got the absorbent from the fire engine and dumped it on the pools and streams of car juice. “How did it stay in one piece? I can make out the vena cava,” Jimmy said as he started spreading out the absorbent with a push broom brush-side up so the absorbent could be ground into the street with the flat wooden bar. I picked up the other broom. I wished every person who’d ever written a song about a broken heart could see this. A heart doesn’t break. Everything around it mangles and disintegrates until the heart lies alone on starless asphalt.“The heart is one tough muscle,” I said.“I want to take it and put it in a jar. Do you think anyone would notice?” Jimmy said.“The owner might want it back,” I said.“I doubt it.” Jimmy flipped his broom and used the bristle side to push the used absorbent into a pile. I got the shovel and industrial trash bag.“How did it get out?” I said when I got back.“I don’t know. I tried to check. But it’s like the guy is missing half his bones. He’s just a pile of meat.” Jimmy grabbed the trash bag and I started shoveling the absorbent into it.“You’re not really going to take it, are you?” I asked.It was gross. It wasn’t his. Someone would notice it missing. The saint of lost hearts would come for us both.“I’ve got to.”“No, you don’t got to.” Sometimes it could be hard to know if Jimmy said something because he believed it or because he was worming me. Not this time; I could tell he wanted it by the way he didn’t pause to enjoy my outrage. I wasn’t going to let him have the heart.“How badass would that be,” he said as he tied up the bag.I put the shovel and brooms back on the engine and then came back to Jimmy, who stood by the heart.“It would make the best conversation piece. Maybe I could put it in a lava lamp. I’m gonna get a bag.”“You can’t take the heart.”“Why not?”“Because it’s wrong.” Because it wasn’t his. Because it had done its part.“It’s not like he needs it. I’ll be putting it to good use. Reduce, re-use, recycle.” He made for the engine. Everything was cleaned up and we were ready to go but he didn’t pull the chock blocks from the tires. Instead, he opened a compartment.I had one last moment to listen to what the heart had to tell me. Maybe it would tell me what to do, tell me how to save it. As I waited for instruction, I started to become one with the wrecked car, the deflated body, the grief of those who knew him, the sorrow of the person who’d struck the man and tore his heart from his chest. The heart had grown and I’d stepped inside it.The sound of two paramedics and a cop talking pulled me from this vision. Jimmy took a bag from the engine and came towards me. “Y’all aren’t going to believe this,” I shouted to the paramedics as I waved them over. The cop and the paramedics were standing by the body. They looked at me but didn’t move. If Jimmy could have shot lasers out of his eyes, he would have torched me right there. He walked faster. If he could get to the heart before they did, he knew I wouldn’t proactively rat him out. “It’s the dude’s heart!” I shouted. That got their attention. They trotted over, arriving just after Jimmy did. There was no way for Jimmy to get it now and I was sure that no one else was going to trap it in a lava lamp. There wasn’t anything more I could do for it. Although it would remain free a little longer, the heart would soon be incinerated. Back to ash. After a lifetime of service, that seemed a better fate. Dawn came and sunlight fell on the heart for the first time.
We shook on it.If we won the final game of the season, Coach would run fifty laps around the gym. Some time around the eighth lap he collapsed and died.Some of us cried. Others stood in monastic silence. McClusky threw up in the Gatorade cooler. Coach’s death was relayed on the morning announcements after news that the cafeteria was out of waffle fries. This was not, we believed, the memorial Coach would have wanted. He loved waffle fries.We felt an obligation then, a hefty responsibility, to give Coach the send-off he would have wanted. After all, Coach made us who we are. He taught us you could beat a breathalyzer by swallowing a roll full of quarters. That any bowel troubles could be remedied with an egg cream in the morning. And that laws proscribing gambling on youth sports were antiquated and in need of legislative reform.Baumiller proposed planting a ficus tree. Coach was partial to the natural world. He often referred to the forest as earth’s dampest of pleasures. Many of us knew him to steal away to the woods after a particularly stinging loss. Once, after going missing for three days, a jogger found him at the forest’s edge, naked and covered in sheep’s blood.There were rumors that Coach had children of his own. Connelly, who worked at the mall food court, once saw what looked like Coach with a child in tow berating a Smoothie King employee. But for all practical purposes, we were his children, and we wouldn’t let his memory perish in the crucible of time.Coach wasn’t perfect, but he was our coach.Chakravarti said we should set a dove loose in the gym rafters. But where does one even acquire a dove? Someone suggested wrangling a pigeon from the parking lot, but we felt that a pigeon lacked commensurate gravitas.We were drinking our egg creams when Roskowick proposed burning an effigy. No objections were raised.Shapiro nicked a set of Coach’s clothes from his office. Ramirez found a mesh bag of half-deflated volleyballs. We filled Coach’s trademark polo and khakis to a generous girth. In the cold light of dawn, we propped his body against the visitor’s goal post.Markelson took out his clarinet and played a beautiful rendition of a Brahms sonata. Stuart-Byrd read a sestina by the English poet W. H. Auden.We tried to hang his beloved orange whistle from his shoulders, finally losing patience and stuffing it in his shirt pocket.Roskowick doused the effigy with rubbing alcohol from the team manager’s first aid kit, then set it alight.We watched the flames consume his body, smoke filling the air. It spread to the rest of the field: a great orange blaze that turned seedling to ash.Markelson quietly uncoupled his clarinet and packed it in its case.The flames rose, swallowing the equipment shed and bleachers, lapping at the painted scoreboard with our school crest.When we heard the sirens behind us, the voices calling our names, we didn’t turn our heads. We didn’t run or flee. We knew we’d done nothing wrong.
The Yucca Valley had plenty of pool cleaners, but none as good as him. Jeb started cleaning pools because he didn’t want to sell meth like his cousins Rob, Kyle, Tyler, and Clay. He liked the roteness of skimming the surface of the water with his net, the reading of pH strips, and the satisfaction of a job well done. He’d cleaned some of the most beautiful pools in the desert – he even did the one at Sinatra’s house once. But what he really wanted to do was own a vintage cowboy boot store. He was born and raised in the sand. He knew there was demand from city-slicking Angelenos who came to bake in the sun and dip in his pristine pools. Jeb’s dad had skin like leather. He’d raised Jeb in several different RV parks across the valley – Apache Mobile Park was the one they lived in the longest. Jeb suspected this was because his father was always something of a ladies man, and the girls had been prettiest at Apache. The year Jeb was set to graduate from high school there had been at least three “desert tens” who lived there with emotionally absent or physically abusive boyfriends. This was also the year that the prettiest of them all, Winnie Lynn, helped Jeb realize his dream of small business ownership. She was tattoo artist and unofficial babysitter to the park’s families. She was 19 and loved being her own boss. “If I worked in some gay-ass office, I’d have to cover all my tats, dye my hair brown, use an ashtray… I’d be miserable! And for what? $11.50 an hour? Please.”She held a Michelob Ultra and a menthol in her decorated hands, which were illuminated by the small campfire Jeb had taken to building between their neighboring trailers on Thursday nights. When she saw the fire, she’d come out and chill with him before her boyfriend – this asshole Kyle – came to pick her up and take her away for the weekend. This week, he was running particularly late. So they kept talking.“You could do it too, Jeb,” she’d said. “Why give anyone the right to tell you what to do? Let them tell you how much you're worth? Fuckin’... yeah, right. It’s your time! It’s your life! It’s the most valuable thing you got. You’re so much better than that.” She meant better than his father, who was always getting fired from one hard labor gig or another for showing up drunk or fucking the boss’ girlfriend. She took another swig and stared into the flames.“Thanks, Winn,” he’d finally said, distracted by the shadow her plump upper lip cast below her perfect little nose. “I love you.”She took his virginity on one of the dilapidated lawn chairs by the park pool shortly thereafter. To this day, nothing got him harder than the smell of chlorine and Camels.Winnie moved to LA to do tattoos on TV and Jeb stayed with his father at Apache, in a trailer of his own. Inspired by recent events, De-Luxe Pool Maintenance was born.At night he would ride his black with lime green dirt bike out to where he wanted to put the store, between Oasis Dentistry and the Eagle Club on route 60, cutting across wide swaths of desert, past the nice houses that multiplied every year. He never got too close. He was just trying to stay sober. Going fast helped with that.
***
Valerie went to the hot tub every night while Liam talked shop, doing lines or smoking Js with Micheal, Mike, and Wesley. On these desert trips, she preferred a glass of vino and the company of her own womanly thoughts to talking to the boys all in a group. It was just the 5 of them, for miles. The guys had no wives or serious girlfriends, probably on account of their emotional immaturity and erectile dysfunction from the Adderall dependency that had originally bonded them at Berkeley. Their group had met while ironically attending a Communist Society meeting to find bisexual young women with unnaturally colored hair – something Liam had playfully admitted to Valerie while describing his “best bros” on their second date. Sometimes the other men brought OnlyFans models they were dating, or baristas they were toying with, but never anything real. Being the only constant feminine presence had felt unsafe in an exciting way, but after Liam proposed, that changed. It was fun to be the hot girlfriend. She could be gone tomorrow. She could be a house mother to all the boys, maybe even get in a drunken flirt here and there.. She was embarrassed and bored as the hot fiancé. Judging by the number of times Liam had accidentally knocked her up premaritally, she’d probably be pregnant soon after the wedding, and then all this really had to stop. In the intoxicating heat of the tub, she willed her stream of consciousness to slow to a dribble and sipped her wine. It would be dark soon. She surveyed her beige legs floating passively, waving against the jets. Her phone dinged. Liam had texted her from inside. “b-storming again tonight before investor meeting tomo, wanna hit the slopes with us?”“All good babe plz don’t go too crazy tho lol. Don’t u leave for Vegas lowkey early?”“So fucking annoying fucking cocksucking loser” she whispered into the water. It didn’t matter that their little fraternity were the majority stakeholders and founders of Bossi, the third-most utilized AI-powered KPI measuring application on the market or whatever. She was a beautiful mermaid with long black hair that floated like she was on an album cover in the clear, steamy water that held every inch of her body. And so no, she wasn’t going to get fucked up with her husband-to-be and his boys. Every time they did coke, Wesley did a Jamaican accent for the rest of the night. She could be pregnant, for fucks sake. She looked up to the stars and searched for constellations. The wine and heat made her dizzy, possibly hallucinatory, and she was seeing ones she hadn’t before. She heard a dirtbike in the distance and got the sudden urge to show her tits to whoever was driving it.
***
“Nice boots,” said a man’s voice behind her.She turned from her place in the checkout line to face a young man – he couldn’t have been older than 30 – holding a six-pack of double zero Heinekens. He had thick eyebrows, sun-damaged skin, and a buzzcut that made his nose look extra pointy. “Oh! Thanks,” Valerie said, looking down and planting the toe of her old leather cowboy boots into the tile, extending her leg and twisting it ever so slightly to show off the custom embroidery. “They were my moms. Her feet got too big when she was pregnant with me. I guess I wanted them for myself even then,” she said with a polite laugh. The severity of his features had caused her to overshare. He smiled.“Jeb,” he said, using his free hand to point his thumb at his chest. Like a monkey. Jesus Christ. You’re a goddamn moron, he thought.“Layla,” Valerie lied, for no reason other than vanity.“Pretty,” Jeb said.“Next!” the clerk demanded. Valerie dutifully unloaded her cart full of chicken breast, white wine, and bagged Cesar salad. She felt the man’s eyes on her backside as she bent over into the cart to retrieve her items for scanning. He knew that she felt him looking, his pupils boring a hole into the ass off her denim cutoffs, but he refused to avert his gaze. Her burning face twisted into a smile. He liked how her earrings moved with her center of gravity. He liked making her nervous.“Have a goodun’,” the clerk sighed, waving Jeb up the queue. He paid for his six-pack with a ten dollar bill, watching Valerie wrangle her plastic bags of booze and raw meat. “Want a hand with those?”
***
Pretty blonde women and men in distressed jeans lauded Valley Boots for their “Silverlake cowboy aesthetic”, which brought more entitled clients, which brought more psychological pain. Jeb still rode his dirtbike late at night, even though Valerie was pregnant and she wanted him to hold her, and tell her she was as beautiful as the day they met. Her boots – her mother’s boots – didn’t fit anymore. She kept them behind the counter and denied their sale to women who were younger and smaller than her as a way of taking back her power.Valerie was better with the clients at Valley Boots. They were obnoxious like her dead fiancé. He, Michael, Mike, and Wesley had been drunk driving the Cybertruck back to California from Vegas, which would’ve been fine had they not been struck by a regular, drunker truck driver. She treated everyone that walked through the beaded curtain off route 60 with kindness, mostly out of guilt. Had Jeb not brought her to orgasm on the ledge of the hot tub that day, would God have willed Liam to live? Would he have been pulled from the twisted aluminum, battered, but still as beautiful as he was? The paramedics said the metal had turned molten in the resulting fire, their melted skin had to be carefully separated from the seats and their caskets welded shut, for their mothers’ sakes. One month later, Jeb’s father got drunk and drowned in the Apache pool. Jeb had just cleaned it, too.
On the table apricots blush, sliced to their stony seeds. A faded bowl of walnut brains sits untouched and long wet spears of cucumber sweatbeside them. Goods grown right here in Fresno, just like you. The professor picks you up by the waist and sets you next to the spread.His beard is silver spangled and his brows touch. He resembles your uncle Varouj who plays the piano at Christmastime, except this man doesn’t smile as much. Until his grab, it had not crossed your mind to be afraid.“You can always trust Armenians, they’re family,” your mom once promised. “But Turks and Azeris, you must never speak to. They cut your great grandfather in half. In. Half.” That was third grade.The man rips free the hard pit and holds a piece of apricot in his fingers, where hair sprouts above the knuckle. “The mother tree is from Hayastan,” he tells you, so you’re aware it is special. His wife, who is tutoring you in pre-algebra so you can earn a scholarship to a private high school, so you can get into an elite American university, so you can break the barrier into sky-high economic mobility, is supposed to be home. She ran out when she got a call that her son broke his leg on the parallel bars. Her husband, the history professor, stepped in and said he could tutor you instead—how hard could pre-algebra be? First though, he insists, we must nourish the stomach before we can nourish the mind. He sounded so fobby with his accent that you dismissed him.“Eat,” he demands, and pushes the orange pink flesh into your mouth. You expect summer sweet, but the apricot is sour and tough and you feel like a fool, knowing you’ll never be able to swallow it. When his finger broaches your lips, fingernail scraping your tongue, you are thankful there is no extra taste but the apricot. Perhaps a light salting. Your eyes fix upon a thickly framed painting of Khor Virap Monastery, the peaks of Medz Masis and Pokr Masis looming above the lone cloister. You remember seeing the real thing two years ago on that charity religious trip to Armenia. Wandering the fruit market, your mother bought carton after carton with a moneyed hunger, collecting fragrant raspberries from a pail, larval mulberries in black and beige, and a pound of the treasured golden orbs. This is what a real apricot tastes like, she said, mouth full, eyes half closed. You weren’t sure what to make of the foreign fruit. Flavorful, sure, but so soft your mind feared rot. Picked too close to the beginning of death. Americans were terrified of letting anything spoil and you’ve grown accustomed to eating produce before its prime.That afternoon in Yerevan, you and your mother gorged yourselves in the art-less hotel room save for the window giving you a full view of biblical Mount Ararat. You had washed the fruits with tap water, so the following day you developed a fever and vomited every sweet thing you’d eaten. Your mother screamed at you for wasting her hard earned cash.Paused, awaiting your reaction, the man stares past his finger into your split mouth. He seems to be giving you a choice. You are too ugly to have been kissed before. You are, honestly, equal parts frightened and flattered. With your tongue, you roll his sandpapery digit to your teeth and chew to test, like a puppy. He appears delighted. Last month, your class watched The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, and you forgot most of it except the little boy who was stretched apart on the bed, then the clink of Talaat Pasha’s belt unbuckling. A traitorous part of your heart always wondered if the horrors of the genocide were exaggerated, but today you realize, they weren’t. Few believed them, none will believe you. His finger swims against your budding wisdom teeth, expectant, moving toward an answer. The apricot mush sags in your cheeks.You vaguely wonder if your great-grandfather died quick enough not to feel anything. He did not have the option to run away and pretend to forget. This man who moments ago squeezed his hands into your nonexistent hips and lifted you up, his ancestors were also tortured or killed or escaped. Every Armenian has a similar sad story. Even when you are betrayed, you are lucky.Your eyes wander again to the eternally icy caps of Ararat. Miss Froonjian’s Tuesday pop quiz may have revealed you do not understand fractions, but now you feel you have received new insight.Fruit is meant to be picked at, taken apart: halved, quartered, devoured. You reassure yourself, that’s the only way a new seed can grow. Still, like the math problems on paper, you cannot solve this one.
