Short

VISUAL SNOW by Drew Willis

December 19, 2024

Dano wondered whether he might be too old to be a Dano. He got the name like he got self-consciousness. It had happened without a pinpointable moment of happening. When he came online, it was online with him. Now he was twenty-eight, a functional boozehound, in debt big time. He was a salesman at a local music shop and had been for ten years. He was regionally famous. If you said “Dano” in certain bars, at least one person would perk up and say, “Oh, Dano rocks,” or “Fuckin’ Danooooooo.” He was likely the most naturally gifted guitar player in the state of Nevada, though he rarely played in public. His headaches were getting worse and more frequent, his vision was becoming increasingly messed up by floaters, halos, and static. And Frankie, his childhood bud, one of his five roommates, had become an officially missing person. “Could I be a Daniel?” Dano wondered.

Because of Dano’s skill, people often asked him why he or his band weren’t bigger, why they never toured or moved out to LA or Seattle to try to make it big. He tried, for a while, to explain the space that music occupied in his mind. It was like an alternate dimension. A trip. Undulating colors. Shapes that bent the sense-making parts of the brain. Time as totality. Where there is no order but things are always happening. It demanded a certain form of attention. He needed to be careful with it. He so wanted to escape his life. This was dangerous. The path afforded by the music space was not a way out but a way in. A way into the present; a way to know, not run from, his suffering. He knew, if he let it, that chasing glory, the adoration of so many strangers, could warp that space. Turn the way in into a way out. A justification for his being alive. A form of redemption, the thing he wanted most. The thing he detested. After a while he just started saying, “That’s not the point.”The night that Frankie took off, some of the crew came by their place. Dano had some Millers. People were in constant motion, coming in from smoking, going out to smoke. Erika, jazz bassist turned grindcore vocalist, was there. Erika asked Dano for a cigarette. Dano said he loved her. “You say that to everybody,” she said. It was true. “Yeah, that’s true,” said Dano. “That’s true. Fair point. I’m sorry. I just. I feel good.” “You look it. Why don’t you go play us a little something on the ol’ acoustic?” “I can’t.”“How come?”“I just can’t right now.” “Our Dano is suddenly shy?” “Not exactly.”“People don’t get into music like you because they want to stand all humble in the corner.” “Why do you do it?” The smoke that Erika exhaled was exaggerated by her breath in the cold. “‘Cause I’m pissed,” she said. “And I want people to see that I’m pissed. And know why. I can’t talk about why I’m pissed without sounding weird. But I can show it. And I can turn this like ugly thing into ugly music that’s actually, kind of, beautiful,” she said. Dano’s cigarette had grown an ash appendage. He wanted to say something, a lot of something, but he didn’t know how, and he was sorry for telling Erika he loved her in the way he had. “Can I have a Miller?” she said. They went inside. Frankie was out of his room, shirtless and pale, holding a whiskey bottle with maybe a quarter left. “Let’s get one in ya,” he said to the room. The bottle went around. Dano got Erika a Miller. Which spilled over with foam as she opened it. The lines on her flannel shirt vibrated. How long had they been doing that, he wondered.“Danoman, can I talk to you a minute?” Frankie said. Dano was not up for talking the way Frankie wanted to talk. It was an almost nightly thing:1) Frankie gets drunk and needs Dano. 2) Frankie details every soul crushing aspect of his work day. 3) Dano makes him feel better. 4) Frankie says he’s miserable. Hopeless. 5) Dano tells him that it sounds real serious, that he’s sorry, that his friends are there for him, that life is worth living and is there anything he can do for him? 6) Frankie smiles, says, “That’s okay, brother. Thank you. You always know what to say.” Dano tried his best to focus on Frankie’s face. There was definitely a change taking place there, the eye bags no longer a byproduct of the partying, but of something heavier, something drawing deeper lines. “Sure, man. We can chat,” Dano said.

III

Frankie had been what people call “big hearted” since Dano had known him. When they were thirteen, loitering outside the Hilton casino as they did most summers, a drunk guy locked eyes with young Dano. The guy was shredded, salon tanned skin under a small tanktop. He was short for a grownup but seemed massive to Dano. “That fucking kid’s looking at me,” the guy said to his group. “That kid’s looking at me.” The group laughed. They tried to move on. Dano got nervous. He was small for thirteen. The guy would murder him. “He’s looking at me,” the guy said. He tried to move toward Dano. His group laughed, held him back, told him to chill. “They’re kids, man,” they said. The guy pushed his old lady off him. Was that his old lady? Or was that a random? The guy moved toward Dano. There were too many things moving all at the same time. Frankie stepped between Dano and the guy. The guy pushed Frankie. Frankie fell onto his ass. The guy swung wide, lost his feet. His friends rushed him and got him through the shoulders and were dragging him away as the guy screamed at Dano. “Sorry, he’s real fucked up,” the guy’s friends said. Dano tried to hide his shaking. “Thanks, man,” he said to Frankie. “No worries,” Frankie said. Frankie would have taken that beating for Dano a thousand times over, would have taken it for anybody gathered at their place the night he disappeared. Dano sipped his Miller. He knew. He followed Frankie down the hall. He knew, but he did not want to hear it. He wanted to go to his room and shut the door. He wanted to go to the space inside him that held the music. He wanted to find something that was in him now, something he could not name but was in there and important. Frankie took a pull from a half-full bottle on the dresser. He would have done anything for Dano. They had been through more together than either would say out loud. “What’s up, man?” Dano asked. “Oh, you know, bud,” Frankie said. Frankie offered Dano the bottle, and Dano had a little pull. “Work’s been getting to me,” Frankie said. “I feel that. We’re in our busy season too,” said Dano. “I know I just gotta keep my head down, but it’s hard.”“I don’t know that you have to keep your head down, exactly.”“I guess. I’ve already worked sixty hours this week. I had over 120 hours on my last check.” Static formed over Frankie’s skin. Pixels shimmering in waves. “How about we go outside? It’s a party. What if we drown our sorrows a little?” The static over Frankie’s face arranged itself in disbelief. Frankie thought. “Alright,” he said. “Do you want a smoke?”“Nah.” The kickback went on like it had. Frankie stayed in his room, door closed. Erika got up on the coffee table, sang about being young and wanting to leave the place you grew up in. Dano went to his room, searched the music space within. There was nothing save the party noise barely muffled by his door. He searched, fingers over string. Indents in his calloused tips. He stayed like that for a while, years maybe, until he heard a slamming door. The tenor of the party noises changed. Erika’s voice, concerned. In the front room, Frankie swayed, hand on the front door for balance. “You can’t drive, man,” somebody said. Frankie looked at Dano. Through him. Frankie opened the door. Was out in the cold desert night, alone for a moment. Dano followed, reaching for the waist of Frankie’s sweatpants. Dano caught him up. Dano tried to get his arms around Frankie. Frankie pushed, clipping Dano’s jaw with an open palm. Frankie was in his Ranger. Frankie had the doors locked. Dano pounded on the window and pulled at the door handle. Frankie’s engine started. Frankie was pulling away. Dano hit the driver side window with the butt of his fist and reached beneath the wiper blades and hoped for something holdable. He got himself in front of the truck somehow, and Frankie stopped. Dano’s breath was huge in the headlights. Frankie revved the engine, peeled. Dano fell. Frankie stopped. He revved again as Dano got on his feet. Frankie peeled again, and Dano knew he wouldn’t stop. Something in the truck’s motion told him that this time was for real, and he felt his body moving out of the way, reaching for the side view mirror that held Frankie in moonlit profile. He ran with the truck, with Frankie, as long as he could, reaching, kicking at the door. Their friends had gathered outside. Dano punched a hole in the wood fence that ran parallel to their street. Somewhere, outside the city, in the desert, a fanged and starving body hunted. The mountains continued their falling into gravel. Dano’s head hurt. He wanted to leave this. Get out of his life. The music space was far away. And he did not want to go there. He saw no way inward. He wanted out. A savior, a heaven to hope for, something. Frankie’s taillights were around the corner, gone save for the streaks of afterimage they left smeared beneath the streetlights for Dano alone.

Dano wondered: “If I am not a Daniel, what am I?”The local music shop was in trouble. It was almost Christmas, and they were still sitting on most of their inventory. Foot traffic was negligible. They adjusted truss rods, swapped out pickups, repaired speakers and amplifiers, sold strings and vintage Gibsons and replacement parts for drum kits made in the nineties. To keep up his contracts with the major manufacturers, the shop owner had to purchase in quantities that hadn’t made business sense in decades. There were boxed guitars everywhere. Dano wiped countertops, updated inventory, tagged, labeled, arranged. A truck pulled up that needed unloading. The guys unloaded it. They smoked by the dumpster. Frankie had not come back. Dano was like you. All he wanted was a little mercy. “Kids don’t want to play rock music anymore,” said Sal, the manager. “Nobody wants a guitar. You know how much action you used to be able to get just by saying you were in a band? Now it’s, No, I’ll just sit on my ass with my phone, thanks. I’ll just be a DJ and press play on my computer like an asshole.” Sal looked toward some place that was just for him. “I don’t know anymore,” he said. “You know what, Sal?” Dano said. “Me neither.”Dano went down to the shop’s basement and stretched out in the narrow makeshift hallway where they kept the repair parts. The only cameraless spot left in America. He opened the band’s Instagram page and looked around. The initial wave of concern and support for Frankie had collapsed faster than he’d hoped. No more stories. Everyone that warranted contacting had been contacted. Dano had called, dm’d, driven. Frankie’s family had no idea where he might be, hadn’t heard anything, and other than his sister, none of them seemed to care much. There was nothing else to do. No one had even seen the truck. Dano’s eyes vibrated. Over everything, there was snow falling all the time that only he could see.The shop closed every day at 6:00. On Christmas Eve, after hours without a customer, Sal told the crew, “You guys can probably head out.” It was 5:27.

On Christmas Day, Dano and his brother met their dad for lunch at the Lucky Beaver Bar & Burger. “I heard about your friend. Frankie. It’s too bad. He’s a good kid,” their dad said. He was on his second beer. He looked old. “Yeah,” the boys said. There were a couple guys at the bar. Giants-Eagles on the tvs. One woman worked serving and bartending. When she opened the door to the kitchen, Dano saw, framed for a second in that space, two cooks kicking back, watching an unseen screen, smiling. “It’s what happens when you get older. Won’t be the last, I can tell you that,” their dad said. “He’s not dead,” Dano said. “Right,” their dad said.The snow in Dano’s eyes got bad. Randy said something Dano couldn’t follow. His brother’s mouth was moving, his eyes locked on their dad. His baby brother, a little kid crying through missing teeth and then a man, tall and imposing, with bigger and more capable hands than Dano’s, hands already bent from work, moving in wider and wider circles over empty beer bottles. The vein standing out now in their old man’s temple. Snow falling just for Dano. He remembered the first time Frankie hit him. They’d taken mushrooms before a house party up the street. He couldn’t remember who was there, only the sense of moving bodies. Doors. Carpet. Laughter. At some point, Frankie got down on his back on the concrete stoop, an X of limbs. He stared up the porchlight, smiling. Dano looked down at him. Frankie pointed up. “There’s snow everywhere,” he said. “I can’t even see you.” Dano got him on his feet. People on the stoop laughed. Their mouths were too long. “You don’t wanna fight me, do you?” Frankie said. “What?” Dano said. “You’re not trying to get tough with me?” said Frankie.Frankie contorted his face. The look became sound, a supersonic boom through Dano. “Are you trying to get tough with me?” Dano said. Frankie hit him square in the forehead. Dano didn’t even feel it, barely perceived Frankie’s fist in motion. Frankie recoiled, holding his hand. He held it up to the silent crowd on the stoop. It was already swelling. Laughter from everywhere again. Somehow the same laughter. As if the too long mouths had never stopped, as if they would always be there, on that stoop, laughing. Later that night, the night in which Frankie hit Dano for the first time, they walked home together. They sat on the couch in the front room. Dano showed Frankie a Youtube video. Frankie showed Dano a Youtube video. Frankie got on his knees and got Dano’s cock in his mouth. Dano didn’t realize what was happening until it was almost over. He did the same for Frankie. When the birds started chirping, when there was light outside and the spring smells came through the window, Dano put on Despisers of the Body’s new record. “What does he say right there, right before the drums come in?” Frankie asked. “I will not debase my suffering by seeking its end,” Dano told him. Dano’s head was on Frankie’s chest. His fingers moved over Frankie’s still swelling hand. “What does that mean?” Frankie said. “I don’t know,” Dano said. In the Lucky Beaver, as the bartender poured a double and Randy’s hands went around the table, somebody, a Giant or Eagle, scored. One of the guys at the bar stood up, hooted, hollered. Dano let the snow fall. His dad did not look beautiful in it. The Lucky Beaver did not suddenly glow. Dano did not need to convince his pops that Frankie was still alive. Frankie did not need to come back from wherever he’d gone to prove his being mattered. If you are really gone, he thought, I will never say that your life was not enough.

GIFTS MY MOM GAVE ME by Tex Gresham

December 17, 2024

She was told to smile. She was always told to smile at the start of her shift. Cammie, give ‘em that smile. Not a suggestion, but mandatory. And she’d give it to ‘em.But tonight…The clients in here tonight crave holly jolly and so most say Smile, baby as they slip a tip in the thin hip strip of her thong. It’s the floor clients who say this mostly––the newcomers, the one-and-done-ers, the lonely men looking at her instead of looking at those waiting for them to get home this eve. The ones who walk in unnoticed. The ones who order the Santa’s Steak & Spaghetti Special, rare and wet, and slurp the blood-soaked noodles and smack open-mouthed and stare at her like a toddler holding an iPad as she gives them a preview of what they could get the full attraction of in a private room.They say Smile, baby with words traveled on breath tomato-tanged and beer-burped.And, of course, she does.It’s just business, a job. Nothing personal on her end. Everything personal on theirs. She’s used to it by now. There’s a joke about a guy who gets a dancer’s number and tells his friends No, dude, she actually likes me. Usually she laughs at this.But tonight…Each time she hears Smile, the words are like whispered slivers of glass in her heart. She tries not to assume to know anything about the clients or picture in her mind the lives they wear beyond the doors. Being neutral to who they are helps her play her role and convince these clients to give up what they would to someone else if it wasn’t her. A job. A game. It’s her life.But tonight…All she can picture are the families these men hide away from, sees these wives and children and she wants to think Taking them for granted but that’s the kind of thought that makes smiling real hard. Harder than it already is on days like today. This time of year… The idea of taking people for granted and then you no longer have them around, can’t tell them Thank you for being in my life because they no longer are…She struts by a man who sucks salt and cream sauce off his sausage-thick finger and runs that spit-slick finger up her arm as she passes. She stops, wags a finger at him, slow like wheat fields in the wind, and through the best smile she’s got says, “No no, sweetheart. No touching.”And the man laughs and chokes a little on the food in his mouth––a mouth so full that the mashed up food is both on his tongue and already halfway down his throat. His other hand, the one not still uncomfortably close to her, caresses his crotch in a three-finger pinch and roll.She keeps moving.The DJ crackles over the intercom with, “Now on the stage. Vixxxen.” Stretching out the “x” so that it hisses like a snake. The high-twang guitar of “Jingle Bell Rock” kicks in and half the place starts clapping along vaguely on tempo.Vixxxen comes out in her all-red break-away one piece and thigh highs. She’s got bells attached to the ankles of her 8-inch platforms and they jangle each time she heel bangs. The Santa hat on her head doesn’t move as she does a brass monkey.Cammie turns away from the stage and notices a man sitting at a high top against the back wall. Alone. Maybe forty or fifty. Not eating the special. Not watching Vixxxen. Just sitting and sipping. Waiting for someone to come to him. So Cammie does.She slides up next to him, runs a finger from one shoulder to the other. Up close she can smell his cologne and see that his hair is more gray than color and that his face has more lines than smooth. Older than she thought. Maybe sixty. Not wearing a ring––because most men who have them keep them on when they come in here. Want all the girls to know, thinks it makes them forbidden. But it just makes them look like schmucks. And this one isn’t wearing a ring. When she touches him, he seems to both tense up and resign. Almost like his head drops.She says, “Hi, baby. What’re you doing over here alone?”“Just sitting…”“And no one’s come talk to ya?”He shakes his head.“Well I’m here now. So time to cheer up.” She puts her face down closer to the table so that he has no choice but to look at her. When he does, she plasters that mandatory smile on her face, cartoonishly wide. Trying hard to be the right shade of aggressively cute men his age melt over.“Yeah,” he says, but doesn’t show any sign of cheering up.Any of the other girls would’ve rolled their eyes or walked away or both. But Cammie presses on. Knows what’s here in front of her.“You look like you got a lot on your mind.”“I do.”“Well… You wanna go to a private room and we can talk about it?”He nods. He feels around his pants like he’s looking for lost keys. Takes a quick hitched breath.And she takes his hand. But he doesn’t move. His feet stay anchored to the floor. He grabs the glass of wine and downs the rest of it.“Oh, baby… You can take it to the room with you. You don’t have to––”But it’s gone, down his throat.She says, “Okay then.” And leads him out of the main room. Down a blue hallway, into Private Room 2. And shuts the door.She eases him into a recliner that no one can tell is Costco cheap because of the room’s redlight darkness, and the two agree on a ten minute private dance. She sets her phone timer, opens Spotify, and pushes play on a holiday playlist. She eases out of her clothes.Halfway through those ten minutes she’s perfected counting up in the head, she notices wetness on his face. Some clients sweat in the private rooms. Sweat bad. Nerves and old age and the tension that maybe this is the time the dancer will finally give them something extra. She’d feel that wetness on her bare skin through their clothes or on her fingers, salty slick, as she caressed their faces or necks. The reek of their bad diets and bad habits seeping out in that sweat.But tonight…This isn’t sweat.She slows, hips pumping gently on his lap. She looks him in the face. He doesn’t look up at her, still hasn’t, eyes finding everything else in the room but hers.She says, “Babe… Are you crying?”A beat, like he’s trying to dig up a lie. But he doesn’t say anything.“I ain’t that bad, am I?” A joke because who wants to give a private dance to a crying man. Though it’s hardly the first time. Usually the tears come from guilt. But that’s not what this is, is it?“No no no. Not at all. It’s not you. It’s just…” And like he can barely find the words: “I miss my mom.”She stops moving, sits still in his lap in a thong and nothing else.He adds, “I always miss her this time of year.” And because she's already been tiptoeing around the thought tonight, already been fighting the stomach pit numb that tonight and tomorrow bring for her now and for the last six years, and because the sudden change catches her off guard, she says, “Me too.”He looks at her. “You too? But you’re so young.”“Sometimes it happens, baby.”“You think it gets easier but it doesn’t. Tonight… This, all this, holiday or whatever… It’ll never be the same for the rest of my life and… I just want to give her a gift tomorrow. Or open something she thought I’d like.”“Sometimes that’s just how it goes. No more gifts when they’re gone, ya know? But…”“But what?”She tosses her hair back with both hands. Runs her fingers through one side. Rubs an itch at the tip of her nose with her palm. Then looks at him with that mask she’s been wearing gone. This is her, really.“Can I tell you a story that might cheer you up?”“Please.” And he really means it.She adjusts how she’s sitting in his lap, like she’s preparing herself for a story that she’s been holding onto for too long, hasn’t told anyone. She shakes out her nerves, tossing around her hands and hair in a playful way, and then performs.“Can you keep a secret?”He nods, already leaned in and interested.“Well… My real name…is Ezlynn.”“Oh… It’s not Cammie Soul?”“Ha ha, funny guy. Thought you were supposed to be sad or something.”He looks down with his whole head. But she didn’t mean it like that. She lifts his head back up with a finger to chin so that his eyes are on hers again as she talks.“So my name is Ezlynn. Which is a good name if you ask me. But it’s an unusual name. You ever met an Ezlynn before?”He shakes his head, eyes stationary on her.“Right. Me neither. I was named after my grandmother. My mom… She said she loved that name––Ezlynn––and wanted to say it all the time. Growing up I hated it, wanted to be Christine or something. But now… I love it too. Mom was right.”“It’s a good name.”She puts a finger on his lips.“So… I was at the store the other day. Thinking as I always do but especially this time of year––I wish I woulda spent more time with mom. When all a’sudden this lady comes down the aisle, looking right at me. Like I’m in trouble––maybe a wife whose husband gave me up when the bank statement came in. And she says Are you Ezlynn? and I think Oh shit. I’m ready to start throwin hands, ya know? And so I say Yeah, so what? and she goes Your mother is looking for you.“And I kinda went all cold, couldn’t really say anything. Maybe I said something like My mother? because the lady goes Yeah, this real petite woman with red hair. And now I don’t know if you can tell in these lights, but two of the many gifts my mother gave me is this head of luscious red hair and this petite body.”She bounces on him once. The side of his mouth lifts in a half-smirk that feels like a courtesy. His eyes look like they’re begging for this story to give him something. So she continues.“I got my nose from my daddy. But so this woman is describing my mother. My mother. Who is dead. And she’s looking for me? And this lady goes Yeah, she’s up at the front of the store. Come with me. But I can barely move cuz I’m kinda like freaking out. Right? Who wouldn’t? But I start following her. And the closer we get to the front I’m like fully expecting to turn the corner and see my mom up there waiting for me, that the last six years have been some kind of mistake.“But…“Of course it’s not, ya know?“We get up there and it’s this women who looks nothing like my mom, even though she’s petite and her hair’s red. And she’s talking to this little girl, maybe ten or something, saying things like Ezlynn, I told you not to blah blah blah. Standard worried mom stuff.“And so the lady who came up to me in the aisle stops and goes Oh… I guess she found her. Guess you’re not the right Ezlynn. And I just kinda go Yeah cuz what else can I say? “And had that been the end of it I woulda been like That was weird and moved on but the lady said What are the odds? and I said What do you mean? and she said Well it’s weird… My name is Ezlynn too. Named after my grandmother.“My mouth musta been wide open cuz she said I know. Three Ezlynns in the same place. What are the odds? But it wasn’t just three. It was five. Three here and the two we were named after. All there in that one moment.“The lady smiled at me in a dismissive kinda way and then left. And I kinda shuffled back to my cart thinking Your mother is looking for you.”She stops talking. Realizes he’s staring at her, tears in his eyes again.He says, “You are very lucky.”“Lucky?”“People go their whole lives without getting a gift like that. Something to help them… believe.”“Or it was a coincidence…”“No… That was something.” “There ya go, sweetheart. That’s the good thinking.”And then he says, “Doesn’t that make you feel good?”“About what?”“That you got an answer. That you were thinking of her and she answered. Let you know she was there… That you aren’t alone.”Her phone jangles a fake fire alarm. The timer she’d set just in case the up in the head counting got away from her. Which it did.She says, “Oh geez… I’m sorry. I spent all your time talking. Here… Let me set it again so that––”She reaches for her phone, but he reaches out and grabs her hand. Stops her. She lets him.He says, “No.”She feels her eyebrows go up high. “No?”“This was more than enough. Thank you.” Says it like he really means it.And they don’t say anything else as she stands and gets dressed. Stage music throbs through the walls, fills the silence with some heavy metal version of a Christmas melody. He stands, adjusts his clothes. She guides him to the door with a hand on his shoulder. She can’t feel sweat through his clothes. He stops in the doorway and she looks at him, the two standing close. She has to look up to meet his eyes. Tall.He says, “Do you think she was there?”“Maybe…”“Do you think she’s here now?”She lets out the weakest laugh you’ve ever heard. Then, “No… I think she knows to give me some privacy.”He smiles, nods. His eyes break away from hers. Go up to the door frame, to the mistletoe hanging there. She sees it too, wonders who put it here. She smiles at him, then kisses the tips of her three fingers––ring, middle, pointer––and places those three fingers gently on his forehead. He closes his eyes, breathes in deep. Like he’s just been given a blessing.“Thank you.”And then he hands her five hundred dollars, crisp bills folded over. She takes it.And before he’s gone and she never sees him again, he says, “I don’t know if anyone has said this yet and meant it but… Merry Christmas.”The smile that comes across her face doesn’t feel like one she’s been told to give. She says, “You too.”And then he’s gone.She goes back out to the floor and wanders, not really looking for another client. Not really interested in anything other than what he said. It was something.Because maybe it was.But tonight…She watches Crystal on stage, also all in red, also with a Santa hat stuck to her head.“Saw you go private with that sad one.” Prancer walks up to Cammie and gets within kissing distance. She always does this. “You told him that one story, didn’t you?”She shows Prancer the money.“Biiiiiitch,” stretching it out in that playfully jealous way. “You buying me a drink later.”“Alright, alright.”And then Prancer struts away on heels tall enough to be illegal, throwing her ass-length blonde hair around like it’s her best quality. Maybe it is.All of the girls think it’s a made up story, just something to tell when she finds the sad ones. A way to scheme them out of a few more bucks than they were willing to give. Maybe it is.But it’s also real. It happened. Exactly as she told it. Not something recent, but it happened. And she knows exactly what it means to her.So tonight…Ezlynn stands there, not seeing. Only listening. Trying to feel that something he said it was. Trying to feel like her mom was there is there always will be there. And just like the five Ezlynns all in the same place at the same time, the song playing as Crystal dances brings all of that coincidence that maybe isn’t coincidence at all into a new kind of focus that makes smiling feel okay and makes her heart do exactly as the song says for the reason the songs says: And hearts will be glowing when loved ones are nearIt’s the most wonderful time of the year. And then Crystal’s heel bang brings her back and she’s okay with it.She squeezes the money and says, “Thank you, mom.”

BEACH LAND by Lucas Flatt

December 9, 2024

Bushels of sargassum had washed up among the rental chairs. They clogged the beach. And so, fittingly, the day began with disappointment.Marjorie hated it, done up in strawberry print and pale as the moon with sunblock on her little face, thick like cream cheese. She scooped and hurled the stuff away from the chairs, scowling, haranguing the clods of seaweed.Gracie, implacable behind her sunglasses, rummaging through something on her phone, wouldn’t look Paul in the face.Paul toed the pile before his chair. “It’s got berries. We’ll make wine out of it.” Gracie frowned.“I have our tagline: ‘It’s not gone off…it just tastes like that.’”Their daughter made a move for the water and Gracie half-stood, but the little girl sat instead to pout in the damp sand a yard back from the water, to throw into the surf a limp plastic shark, and Gracie settled back into her seat.“It just tastes like that,” Paul said again.The sun climbed and bore into their left sides. Their little girl returned to the work of casting off the seaweed and asked, as ever, for the hundredth time that morning, “Will you play?”Paul took a branch of the sargassum and gave it a long sniff. “Notes of ocean water and fish butt.” “Will you play with me?”“It’s the answer we’ve been looking for–we’ll have to move down here to set up the vineyards.”“Will you play with me?”“I guess we’ll have to cultivate in the ocean. How much is ocean per acre?”Gracie groaned and put her thin hands over her face.“You’d think it’s less than beachfront, at least.”“You play with me.”Gracie lifted her hands, their shadows imprinting on the tight skin around her mouth. “Who are you talking to?”

***

By the pool, Paul still watched Gracie’s face in profile while she watched Marjorie swim with two brothers around her age, one probably younger and the other older by as much. She’d asked the boys to play; she’d ask anyone.Paul asked Gracie, “Why are you mad at me?” He couldn’t stop himself asking.“I’m not mad. Everything is fine.”If Paul ever heard the expression “everything is fine” again he vowed to pick a direction and run forever. Forever for his body would not be long or far, but he hoped his soul, such as it was, might propel then from his eyeballs and keep going at least a little farther.For now he climbed down the pool steps and swam to the deep end and floated there. And just as on each prior afternoon, he recognized that he did not care if he sank or emerged or simply dematerialized. “That’s my daddy,” Marj told the boys.This brought him back. He sang, “Do do, do do,” went under, holding one hand up vertical like a fin. When he caught hold of his daughter’s ankle, she didn’t squeal or kick. The thin bones of her ankles felt reedy and the clouds came across the sun and Paul closed his eyes and lay there long as he could, until she pulled away.

***

On the pretense of buying ice cream for them all, Paul went down to the taco place across the parking lot from their condo and waited in a long line to order a drink. He’d been sober almost seven years. When the sandblasted Heidi asked his order, Paul teared up. She opened her gray eyes wide, as if to say, This isn’t the line for existential crises, and he ordered a rum and Coke. He never used to drink rum and Cokes. He’d drunk beer, which made him fat, which made him uglier.It occurred to him, squeezing into a stool at the far corner of the bar, away from the lines for drinks and tacos, that he might be feeling sorry for himself. That seemed possible. He took a sip. It helped, a little. The weight of the guilt of breaking another promise to Gracie never fell onto him. It just floated up there with the rest of it. A woman near his age took the empty seat beside him despite a good line of empty stools stretching back to the crowded part of the bar. “This seat taken?” She looked him dead in the eyes.“No.”She resembled his high school sweetheart, or at least how he imagined her twenty years later: small face shaped like a heart, round body, hair dyed an aggressive crimson, very tanned. Maybe local, though this bar seemed to be for tourists. She wore a Gov’t Mule t-shirt with the sleeves cut off. “I’m Jen.” “Paul.” They clinked their glasses. He took a bigger drink and the rum curled his lip. “Guh.”“Not much of a drinker?”“No. I always think I’ll like it. Whiskey.” He looked at his drink. “Rum. Whatever. It looks good on commercials.”She slugged her drink, which looked like rum without the soda, and smacked her lips. “Love it.”“It just tastes like what it is. Like you put corn or wheat or whatever in a barrel and left it there and forgot it and then came back and poured it in a glass.”“Well you got some soda pop in there. That should help.” She muttered something, maybe “pussy,” and killed her drink.“Did you call me a ‘pussy?’”She gave him another long look. “What if I did?”Paul considered this. He didn’t have an answer. He said, “I’m not,” but didn’t believe it.“Put your arm up,” Jen said. She slapped the bartop.“I’m sorry?” Paul pulled back on his stool.“Do it, pussy.” “Are we going to arm wrestle?”“You’re goddamn right.”He won without much effort, but when he’d pinned her hand they left theirs clasped on the sticky bar. Paul’s last clear thought before he made himself let go and take another drink was, Buddy, this is getting out of hand.

***

They grunted and tried to dry-hump in the front seat of her SUV, some kind of Jeep, but didn’t fit well behind the steering wheel. Paul wished like Hell he’d look out over her shoulder and see Gracie likewise straddling some douchebag somewhere in the half-empty parking lot. Maybe also in a cobalt-colored Jeep. But all the Jeeps were empty save this one, steaming up.“Yes,” Jen stage-moaned.Her butt-bone dug into his thigh. “Shift a little,” Paul said.“Ooh.”“Uh huh.” Just as things became pleasantly frictive, Jen pushed back till she squashed against the wheel and said, "I don’t know if I want to.”This was a relief. “Me either,” Paul said. “I already feel guilty.”“Me, too. I'm married. We're separated. I came down here to spend my savings and drink myself to death, I guess. Like that Nicholas Cage movie.""Face/off.""Yeah." Jen reached down to the console for a pack of Camel Lights. "Let's just talk.""Ok. It's kind of hot in here.""I didn't mean dirty talk.""I wasn't.""Tell me something about yourself, Paul." She stayed on his lap and felt in her shorts for a lighter.Paul thought. "I always park in the same place at the grocery store so I don't have to look for my car.""That's honestly fascinating.""It is?""No, Paul. I wish you'd told me any other thing in the world."“Where’s your husband?” Paul tried not to sound peevish, but mostly everything he said these days did.“Home. Birmingham.”“Why are you split up?”“He wants me to stop drinking. I told him I’d quit the first of the month.” Today was the tenth. “My wife told me I had to ‘get over it’.” Paul waited for Jen to ask about “it.” She did not. “I think I want a divorce. I’ll probably tell her about this. That’ll do it.”“Don’t tell her.”Paul ran his hands through his hair. “I don’t know how not to.”“Just don’t.”“That’s the problem. I just do. Every little thing that bothers me, it’s like I have to. It burns in here if I don’t.” Paul rubbed his solar plexus."OK, tell her, then. Sounds like it won’t matter. Because I’m sure she didn't mean to marry a big whiny bitch." She slid into the passenger seat and lit her cigarette.Paul considered. “That’s probably true.”"She must be a profoundly strong woman to put up with you. You should run back to her fast as your mismatched legs can take you." "I forget my legs are different sizes."They both regarded Paul's legs. Jen frowned. "I'm afraid I never will." Paul coughed and popped open the driver’s side door. "Well, enjoy drinking yourself to death." He hung in the doorway, waiting for her snappy retort, but when none came he looked back at Jen's tight-lipped profile. She stared ahead at the sunset through the steamed-up windshield. This was a record, two women he'd put that long face on in a single afternoon.When he'd made it halfway to the cross walk toward the beach he looked back and saw Jen pouring the last of a bottle out of her window. She nodded to him and jumped the curb and screeched off toward highway 98.Or anyway that's what he pretended he'd seen, not looking either way at the intersection, just watching his legs carry him to the water.

***

At the showers by the beach access were a few sandals and someone’s boogie-board leaning against a splintery railing. It wore the Tasmanian Devil and seemed too small for Paul, who stole it anyway. If he’d ever stolen anything before, he couldn’t recall it. He thought someone might shout for him to stop, but there was no one around.By sunset the beach was empty save the kid who rented chairs who stood up from his tented kiosk and welcomed Paul by name. “I just broke down your chairs,” he said, apologetic but not offering to set them back.Paul waved him off. “Thanks, Brayden.”“Hunter,” the kid said, still apologetic. Paul nodded and headed in. The tide was out and he had to walk a good way before the water reached his knees. One family watched him from the sandbar.He waded to the bar, went over into deeper water and began to float on the boogie board. The water was warm and he paddled out, unhurried, wondering how far he could get. There was some kind of fishing boat puttering along the horizon. When he looked back, the beach was far and someone–probably Brayden–stood cupping their eyes and looking out, probably at him. He waved; the person didn’t wave back.The waves came heavier and he had to hold on to the boogie board to keep it under his flabby torso. The family on the bar were looking out at something his way. Here it is, he told himself. It’s time. He really wanted another drink, shuddered away the image of Jen in her Jeep, glad at least not to have to explain that to Gracie, or anyone.Out of habit, he still imagined himself explaining, how he’d bring it up, what combination of words would yield which response. He didn’t know how to stop. But what he wasn’t imagining, despite blinking hard several times and wiping the salty haze from his eyes, despite truly hoping that he was, were the sizable dorsal fins trolling toward him from farther out to sea. The people on the sandbar shouted.“Fuck,” Paul said.The sharks neared. They circled, two fins, one significantly larger than the other, like a mother and child, perhaps. A father and child. He was going to die as some kind of hunting lesson for a shark.He held very still, but the circling closed and closed. He tried to pull himself up entirely on the beach board but the scrabbling only seemed to excite the sharks.He decided to try something. He lied to himself. Paul, you can fight off these sharks.It helped. He said out loud, “I’m OK. This is going to be alright.” And just before the shark clamped down on his leg–the smaller shark on the smaller leg–he finally had it, just a glimmering thought, but halfway to a plan that possibly might save his marriage.“Ah, fuck!” It really hurt.

***

In the end, he did fight away the sharks. In his shrieking and flailing he kicked something several times. It didn’t fight back. He must taste bad, was the only logical conclusion. The sharks circled. They trailed away, possibly regrouping.When his panic ebbed, he felt himself and found what he guessed to be a decent tear in his calf. Blood came smokily up in the water rolling around his board.For once, his mind was truly blank. Then there was a great noise and he violently peed himself. It was an air horn blast. The fishing boat had spotted him in the dying light and shone some kind of spot his way. It trundled on. Somehow he knew the sharks were gone.Any semblance of life-altering epiphany had voided with his bladder. He let go of the board, slipped into the water with his eyes closed, and shouted away his air, his breath bubbling and his head immediately light. He was deep enough to turn all the way over and with his head facing down he kicked out his arms and legs and sank. He opened his eyes to the saltwater, expecting silty purple-black, but found instead a tawny haze. Then it was like he could breathe in some kind of air bubble, and in the golden light he saw someone, a person, smiling at him. A radiant woman. She wasn’t a mermaid. She had on a pastel blouse and very kind, pale blue eyes, and a gnarled hand with swollen knuckles reaching out for his. He took it. It was his mother, who he’d not thought about in maybe a week. She shook her head and held his hand. She looked into his eyes and then Paul rolled over into the purple-black and kicked up into the spotlight of the fishing boat.

***

After the old couple had helped him aboard with a rope and a lot of undignified scrambling, his shorts halfway down his ass, his leg bleeding on the boat’s slick beige finish, Paul sat in the cockpit with blankets around him and a towel done up on his head. The old lady had gone somewhere out of sight looking for a first aid kid. The bite on his calf was curved and long as a hand.The old man, Hank, sat above him and worried with a radio. “We watched you for a while but you seemed like a strong swimmer. We didn’t think anything until we saw the sharks.”“That’s OK,” Paul told him again, touched, honestly, to be called a good swimmer. He loved compliments.“What were you doing out there?”He was cold. It was hard to remember. “I guess I meant to drown myself.”“Huh.” The old man, Hank, turned that over in his head. “Well, we could get you out past the sharks a ways and let you out.”The old woman, Joanne, was back in the cockpit with a box and flashlight. She gave her husband a long look, shaking her head. “God damn it, Hank.”

***

The last of the sun burned out and the navigation lights glowed so that the horizon dimmed away and they were just rocking on the purple-black. It might well have been outer space.Hank gestured around them to the boat itself. He’d been extolling it for a while, Paul thought. They were borrowing it from a friend. “If we buy it, we get to name it, of course. What should we call her?”Paul knew without thinking. “Sweet bitch of the evening time.”Hank squinted at Paul, turning this too over in his head. “Did you say ‘time’ or ‘tide?’”“Tide.” Paul liked that better.

***

Heading in, Paul played out what he would tell Gracie. He thought about seeing his mother and that she wanted to tell him something. What was it? What had he been thinking before the sharks attacked?“What was your name?” Hank asked.“Carlos.” He lied, and felt better, and it was coming back, the answer to everything. He leaned against the cockpit railing and closed his eyes. “Carlos Santoya. My folks are from Spain.”When the dock came into view Paul said, “Hey, I think I was just in shock before. I wasn’t really trying to drown myself.”“Oh yeah?” Hank frowned. “Nope. I was training. Boogie boarding. Walton County, regionals.”“Regionals?”“Oh yeah.” Paul nodded with big emphasis. More emphasis than he’d had in years. All of it, surging back.

***

He came into the condo wild-eyed, angry for no reason that Gracie wasn’t waiting at the door, and found her on the couch, Marj sleeping with her head in her mother’s lap. Don’t blow it, he told himself, knowing that he was.She asked, “Are you OK?”“No. God, no. I need to go to the hospital.”She looked at his bandaged calf.“Did you get hit by a car?” “No!” Paul’s hands curled into fists, which Gracie hated.“You don’t have to.” She looked down at Marj, awake now, feigning sleep. “You don’t have to be an asshole. Where were you?”“It doesn’t matter. I need to go to the hospital.”“Let me see it.” Gracie reached for Paul who pulled back.“Not for that. Not that kind of hospital.”And they were fighting, and the girl was awake. Before Paul could get a handle on himself, she was carrying Marj into the bedroom, locking the door.

***

That’s how Paul imagined it, provided the old Paul. The elevator smelled like cat urine and some kind of slime glazed the carpet. He braced himself at the door, punched in the code and slipped in quietly, limping, laden with ice-cream.Marj slept in the bottom bunk and he knelt there and tousled her hair.“Paul?” Gracie looked asleep, and scared, standing in the kitchen.“Sorry, babe. What a night!”“Where were you?”“Let’s get this in the freezer.” He limped there for effect. “I went to talk to Brayden about the chairs.”“Who? Hunter? The chair guy?”“Yeah, and there was all this pandemonium.”Only now did she seem to notice his limping.“Oh my God!”“People were running around. They were pointing at something in the water.”“Oh my God.”Paul closed the freezer. “There were some kids out there and this lady was just yelling, ‘Come back, come back,’ and people were watching. The lifeguard was dragging over a kayak or something.”“You went in?”“Well, I’m a pretty good swimmer. But it was just instinct. I didn’t really even know what was happening. I went in with my shoes and everything.” “You got bit by a shark?”“A little one.” Paul held his hands apart yay far.Gracie made some kind of squeal and wrapped him up. Marj climbed out of the bunk bed, mostly asleep, came dragging her blanket and wrapped up their legs.“Oooh, easy,” Paul said. But it didn’t really hurt. “Daddy’s a hero,” Gracie said. She was crying hard into his shoulder.“No, no,” he said. “It was the lifeguard who got the kids.”

***

Later, with Marj back asleep and the ice cream containers stuck to the coffee table with the spoons standing up together, Paul and Gracie held each other on the couch.“I’m gonna fix everything.”She squeezed like maybe she believed him.“Oh yeah?”“Oh yeah.”She pulled back and put her hand on his collarbone, her eyes wet. “I want you to know, you don’t have to change yourself. You don’t need to be a different person for me to love you.”He pulled her in. “I know that.” He grinned over her out the balcony window. Lying felt better and better.She called him a hero again. He let her. “I guess I am,” he said. He tried to push away any kind of questions. The only one kept resurfacing was, what now? How does this end? Maybe that’s what his mother wanted to tell him. She’d seemed worried. That had been her way. But not now, maybe. Why should she? She was like a mermaid queen all gold and radiant in robes that billowed in the undertow, emerald scales. Or maybe she wasn’t. She’d just been his mother, underwater, quite unhappy. Her pale eyes pleaded. She was mouthing something, but there wasn’t any sound, of course, underneath all that water. Probably she’d wanted to tell him not to start this. You light it, you build it up, you’re glowing and you’re billowing, it seems like you’re coasting over, it seems like the answer, but when do you stop feeding the fire?He looked out into the dark toward the ocean where heaven must be. He wished he could tell her. It was OK. For once he had the answer. You never do. Not ever.

DEAR PHONE MAN by Karris Rae

November 22, 2024

Hello. I am Roy Whitaker. I have mailed you before, or maybe not you but someone else at your office, because my phone has been disconnected. I think this is because you think I am dead, but I am not dead, so I would like you to please reconnect my phone. I am waiting on a call from my daughter and if I have no phone I will never get it. And I would shimmy up that pole and see if I could reattach it myself only I am pretty old anymore and I do not have a little neighbor boy or young man or really anyone to help me. So you can see why I am stressed.I have mailed your office every week for two months and still every day my mailbox is empty. You have probably noticed that I have not been paying my bill. I refuse to pay for something I do not have, which is a working phone. How could it be so hard to find my house when it is the only one even around. I am waiting here with my toolkit and if you tell me ahead of time I will make sun tea.Maybe if I tell you why this is so important, you will make sure it gets done. See, there are these five girls in my house. Wait no, I will start with the rooms so when I get to the girls you can imagine them each looking the way they do. So to start, my house has six rooms. A living room, a bedroom, a bathroom, a porch (which is not really a room only it is screened in and I think anywhere bugs can not go is a room), a kitchen (which also has a dining table) and another bedroom. I do not need two bedrooms, but it was already there, so now that is where the phone lives. All the other rooms have a girl, and they all kind of look like my daughter, only I guess she is an adult now and the girls in my house are different ages. I do not really know I do not know when they got here but one day when I came in from knocking icicles off the front porch light there she was, sitting at the dining table. About gave me a heart attack! She looked cold and tiny, and I did not have any coats her size, so I wrapped her up in a blanket, and in the summer, I take it off. The kitchen girl is probably my favorite one. Her head is down, like she is praying before dinner, even though she never eats. I peeked under her hair once at her face and not to be rude, because I know she can not help looking like that, but I will never do that again. But I like her because when she is praying like that, I think about how lucky I am to have a full pantry, which we did not always have, plus that even if my phone is disconnected (which, it is) at least they did not come to take the whole phone when they thought I died. Which, I did not.And just so you know, I did not take these girls away from places they should be. I have tried to give them food and ask them, would they like to go home? But they never move or talk or eat, or nothing. It is okay that they are here. There are all kinds of animals in those woods and I would not want them out fighting coyotes and bobcats for sleeping places. There are even black bears. Only, I wish that they would talk to me because no one else is here, and even if my daughter is trying to call me she can not because my phone is disconnected. But you can tell I am alive because alive men are the ones who write letters. So, that is the kitchen and dining girl. The porch girl is the youngest. She has a face like the other one, and her, I kind of wish she would move because she is on my porch swing so I am afraid to use it, because if I swing too hard maybe she will slide right off. I sit beside her on the swing (not swinging) and we watch the sunset together. It is like when my daughter would come home for the summer every year. She was such a little thing back then and had so much energy, good Lord, but she would settle down in the evening to say good night to the sun. And then it was back to bouncing off the walls. But when she was all quiet looking at the sun I could see the beautiful grown woman I am sure she became. Actually maybe, this one is my favorite. I hope you are still reading, sir, because I have not forgotten about you. It is just important that you know about the girls so when I tell you what the phone is doing to them, you will understand why we have to make it stop. And that means reconnecting my phone, and fixing this whole not-dead kerfuffle.The girl in my bedroom gives me the heebie-jeebies. I feel bad about this, so when you do come here to fix the phone please do not tell her. First of all there is the way she looks, which, as I have said, the way these girls look is not my favorite. But probably cats were creepy to the first people they lived with, too. Staring, and such. Which is what this girl does, sitting there in the rocking chair that looks right at my bed. It was hard to get used to and this is why I leave the light on when I sleep now. Which means you have one less excuse about finding my house, because even if you got really lost and showed up way after dark, you would see the light on. You must not have tried very hard.There is one thing I like about the girl in my room, which is, she is the only one that moves (usually, but I will get to that). She rocks back and forth so the chair creaks. Sometimes she touches the chair with her nails and it makes quiet noises like tck tck tck. I always liked sleeping while someone else knits a hat or nurses her baby or takes notes for night school after her husband goes to bed. Anyway, long as I face the other way and keep the light on, I sleep way better now that the girl is there. And if anyone ever breaks in and tries to kill me or some such, she will scare the bejesus out of them. There are two more, yet. And I know that some people would think it is weird that I am just an old lonely man with all these little girls in my house, but I like to see it as, if a stray cat came and had her babies on my porch I would suddenly have a lot of cats. I did not pick it, and even I tried to just leave them there, but then my daughter named the babiest one Pretzel and once the darn thing is named, it is too late to put it back. I even tried not to name the girls, calling them the bedroom girl and such, but then that became her name before I knew it. My own father told me “Whitaker” means wheat field. I guess a lot of names are plain like that, Pretzel (because she twists all up to lick her rear), Bedroom Girl, Whitaker (wheat field), and Hope.Actually right now I am sitting beside the girl in the living room. This girl is mostly just quiet and keeps me company while I work on important things like this letter. She is the quietest child I ever heard of, and she does not distract me, or ask questions about nothing like normal children do. The last book she read was Jane Eyre. Or, she was looking at it and when I walked through the house at night for a glass of water or something, usually because I did not want the bedroom girl looking at me anymore, it would remind me to turn the page. When the books are out of pages I get a different one for her. These are not my books, I mean, I guess I own them now, but I did not buy them. They are all women’s books, like Jane Eyre and Little Women and Wuthering Heights. Sometimes when I have a few glasses (my mother always said find what you love and let it kill you, I love Scotch) I read to the living room girl. I do not know if she likes it or even hears. Sometimes I come to a sentence or something that feels like I have read it before, even though I have not, and I hear it in my wife’s voice. Then I stop reading for the day. Then there is the one in the bathroom. I did not leave her last because I like her less, but she is kind of hard to put into words and I had to think. The reason for that is, she is only inside the mirror. Or maybe she is outside it but also invisible, but I am a little nervous to touch the place where she is standing. I do not touch any of them if I can help it. That one must not be wearing shoes, because when I drip water on the floor it pools around in the shape of small, naked feet. Like a footprint but the opposite. Her feet are shaped the same as mine, with a high, girly arch that is not good for playing sports. She is lucky she is a girl. I maybe am not lucky for that, though, because her being a girl is why I have to wrap a towel all around myself before I take my pants off in there. It is also uncomfortable to hold the towel up while I am having my time on the toilet so she does not see anything shameful. As a man, I am sure you understand. Or maybe this is the first time I’ve thought you’re maybe the receptionist? In which case, I am sorry for bothering a lady with details like that. Please give this letter to the phone man and he will know what to do.Anyway, I started putting a towel down on the floor when I step out of the shower, so no more puddles, which means no more footprints. The ladies, my daughter and my wife (now ex-wife, I guess), complained about that forl so many years, and I only changed once they were both gone. It is funny how that works sometimes. The bad thing is that she never gets any older, but I do. When she stands behind me it is like a side by side comparison of our faces and wrinkles, or no wrinkles, depending. And her with not a lot of other things on her face either, eyes and so forth. Me, I never thought I would have so many. Wrinkles, I mean, not eyes. I always thought I would die sometime in my twenties, which I guess is why I made the decisions I did. And here I am, so many years later, and I never stopped making decisions the way I do. And now it is too late to change.See, this is why you have to fix the phone, sooner than later. Some people I am sure have months to sit around with their thumbs up their behinds, waiting for the future. And maybe I am wrong today about dying tomorrow, but I am running out of days to be wrong. Me and my daughter, we have not talked in a while and I just want to know is she okay, is she married, does she hate me. And then when I die for real you can have my phone and anything else you want, I do not care. Only I do not know what you would do with the girls because a school would maybe not know what to do with them. I guess I had better be not-dead for as long as I can.Unless you would be willing to take them home with you? Would you do that for a tired old man? They do not need much, but I can not stand the thought of them here all alone after the Lord calls my name. Especially as the critters and plants all creep into the house, and you people cut my electricity and water too. That girl in the bedroom sitting alone in the dark for who knows how long, making little tck noises for no one. No one around to even see the bathroom girl, who otherwise kind of is not anywhere. Maybe I think too much of myself, but I feel like they need me as much as I need them. Anyway, just consider about it. But I have not even gotten to the part where I explain how the girls and the telephone are all part of one big thing. What I mean by that is, I think the girls like when the telephone rings, and they do not like it when it doesn’t. The telephone has to ring every once in a while or else they get restless and start moving around, which is fine, only I would be lying if I said it doesn’t make me nervous. As I said, after her brothers and sisters all ran away I used to have a little cat named Pretzel (this is before she got eaten by coyotes) and she was such a smart cat, she knew when it was dinnertime. She followed me around until I thought oh no! I forgot to feed Pretzel, and when I did she would go back to mostly ignoring me. But like in that way of ignoring that actually means love. Poor thing, I never should have put her out that night she got eaten, only I was so mad at Hope for throwing out half her dinner again, like I wasn’t busting my rump to put food on the table. Another bad decision.But when the telephone does not ring for a while, the girls follow me like Pretzel used to, wanting something, only real slow. So slow I can not really tell they’re moving, only when I leave a room and come back, I realize they’ve moved a whole bunch back to their normal spots. And it is very hard to read their faces, because they do not look like mine and yours (probably, I can not see you), but I am pretty sure the look on their faces is not happy. Usually this is when I get a call from a telemarketer, or those awful phone banking people, and it puts them in their places for a while. But no such luck these days. Please do not say you won’t take them now. I am sure that you, a Phone Man, probably have a better phone than anyone else. You probably get calls all the time from your friends and ex-wife and daughter. Actually, my girls might be happier with you, and if I was a better man I would beg you to please take them now. But as I said, I have always made bad decisions.I have to say, the worst one for the moving is the bathroom girl. These days I shower with the curtain open, even with the water going all everywhere. Else when I open my eyes from washing my hair, I see the shapes of little fingertips poking into the curtain. And then I rip it back, wham! There is her reflection of her standing on the other side, reaching for where I was not two seconds ago, not in the corner where she belongs at. At least when there is water everywhere (and I do not bother with the towel on the floor anymore), I can see the not-footprints coming to me. Somehow that makes me feel better. It means she is not just in the mirror, so I do not have to worry about seeing her behind me upside-down in my spoon when I stir my coffee. I will be honest and say that I have not been washing myself as much as I should, but after all, there is no one around to offend their nose. To be clear I do not think she would do anything bad even if she did get her fingers around that curtain but it is hard to explain, I do not want her to touch me. The way her little fingers curl is like when you are so angry that there aren’t any real thoughts in your head, just noise. I know how that goes. Please Lord let her not touch me.These last few days I have not been sure where to sleep. Usually the bedroom is a good place, but now that the girl in there is moving, I can not fall asleep. It is like she gets up out of the chair in slow motion. It puts her in positions other people can not hold for so long. I dragged a chair over beside her so I could try to match her, and maybe it is because she has young legs, but I can not do what she does, hovering with my legs bent for hours. And the whole time it is tck tck tck with her nails only when she’s out of the chair they are making that noise against each other, not wood. Sometimes I dream that she is making that noise against my teeth.So when the tcking gets too close I take my pillow and my blanket and I go to the living room. I do not really know what the living room girl wants me to do when she gets like this because she keeps standing up and the book falls out of her lap. But she stares down into her empty hands like the book is still there. It makes me wonder if she ever wanted the book at all, or if there has always been something on her hands only she can see. So she shuffles toward me with her head down and her fingers spread as if asking what have I done, and meanwhile I am just trying to sleep. I know when it is time to go back to the bedroom when I hear her feet slide through dust. My ex-wife would say I should vacuum more, but she never trusted that I have reasons for the things I do.And the thing of it is, and it is hard to tell, but I think that the girls are getting faster. The tcking and sliding noises come a little earlier every night. I had to move from my bed to the couch and from the couch to the bed again last night. I will probably have to from now on. Whatever room I am in, there she comes, all wanting something except what? I already let them stay under my roof out of the cold and away from the animals. I even gave the one books. What else could they want from me?Are you starting to understand the pickle I am in? This whole time I have to keep moving from room to room. I never fall all the way asleep so I can hear when they get too close. I do not shower for very long either, and when the weather is nice sometimes I go outside and use the hose instead. But hose water is so cold, and I know there is no one around to watch, but I do not like being naked outside and my feet all muddy, especially when the cold has shrunk me all up (if you know what I mean). It is just not the best situation. And I keep feeling like maybe this is the day I die (not from the girls who I am sure would never hurt me but maybe their skin feels like a dead thing’s and I never liked that), all before I ever hear Hope’s grown-up voice. I know that your phone office probably did not realize all of this when you disconnected my phone line. And maybe still you are thinking oh, he should just leave, but I can not leave, because this is the only phone number my daughter ever had for me. I can not leave and I can not die because if I do, I will never tell her that I did not mean to mess everything up with my bad little decisions every day.Thank you for reading my letter. I know it is probably longer than most of the letters you have to read, but if I may, it is also your job. I hope this will convince you that I need help and that your company are the ones to do it, because as I have said, this situation is not the best. And thank you for taking the girls to your house after I am gone. They will be going to a good home.I hate to ask, but could you do one more thing for me? It is a very little job, but it is everything to me. Please, if something happens, please tell my daughter that I am sorry I was not a part of her life for so long. I would like to say so much more but I do not want the message to be so long you forget the most important parts. I will put out some sun tea today so it is ready when you get here. I also have cards.Sincerely,Roy Whitaker

THIS MINE OF MINE by Brandon Forinash

October 28, 2024

You wouldn’t guess it looking at me now, but I had a pretty ordinary childhood and early adulthood. My parents weren’t rich, but we weren’t poor either. I grew up in one of those suburbs where every house is a variation of four basic designs. I went to a state school for college and took out student loans. I got a job in a satellite city which had nothing to do with what I studied in university. Along the way, I had several more or less serious relationships which, by the time I was twenty six, made me rethink my definition of love.Anyways, all of that changed, kind of got lost in terms of my identity, when I became a mining camp in South America.I should explain.I did one of those DNA/ancestry tests and found out, along with the fact I’m not even a little bit Irish, that my body contained a very scarce earth mineral. I didn’t know anything about the mineral at the time. For legal reasons I can’t tell you what it was. All I can say is you probably interact with it every day. It is used to make a very small but essential component in a technology you could certainly live without, but with a markedly lower quality of life.So I found out I was largely Scottish (what?!) and I also contained this random mineral and I needed to cut back on sugars because I’m genetically predisposed to diabetes, but I got on with my life. I stopped eating cereal for breakfast and the movie Braveheart hit somewhat different, but other than that, no big deal. Except I started to get these letters and emails with offers to buy the mineral rights to my body. I ignored them at first, because it seemed like a ridiculous premise, but then the mayor showed up at my door.“James!” he said. “May I call you Jim?”“It’s the same number of syllables, but sure.”“Jim, I’d like to talk to you about a little proposition.”I could see where this was going. “Sir—”“Now hold on a second. I want to ask you to sell your mineral rights to the city. Opening a mine in your body would be a big thing for our town. It’d mean jobs for a lot of people and growth for our struggling businesses. Not to mention, it would help me out a great deal in the upcoming election, and then I’d be in a position to help you.”I could see the reasoning. It weighed kind of heavy on me. But I also didn’t want to be mined, didn’t know what I would be after the process, so I politely refused.“Jim,” he said, “I am so disappointed in you.”So they filed a petition for eminent domain to obtain the rights to mine this rare essential mineral from my body, and they won. They had vastly better lawyers. In retrospect, I like to imagine my lawyers, by comparison, as hand-puppets who are comically bungling the legal process. A flurry of felt and misplaced documents while the tall one flapped, “I thought you were supposed to file the grievance for harassment of our client”, and the short one would respond, “Harassment? You’re the biggest ass I know!” Sorry, I harbor a lot of resentment from the experience.We lost in court. I couldn’t stop it. And even though I was opposed to it, there was a kind of wild exuberance in those early days. Hungrily, they used pressured water to blow off my top soil, revealing rich veins of ore for the drills and bulldozers to excavate. They carved great pits in me ringed by long ramps for trucks to haul out the essential minerals from my body. They used blast charges to break up the larger rocks and expose deeper deposits.Everybody made money, and not just the people directly profiting on my scarce earth mineral. The local university received a nice endowment and brought in some of the top minds in engineering. A wife of one of the big-wigs in the mining company was a former ballerina, I think, so her husband helped build an opera house near downtown. This whole new arts district sprung up after that with nice restaurants and boutique stores and increasingly expensive art galleries that locals couldn’t afford. After a few years, I could sense the city’s feeling about the mine, and me, had shifted. I would be at a party in the backyard of a small old house, the kind of house realtors now described as “craftsman” when they listed them for 3x their old value, and somebody would say something. About how the city had lost some of its charm, or how a lot of the poorer (if I’m being honest, minority) residents were being priced out of their homes and businesses by all the affluent (white) newcomers. Who were always referred to as Californians, even if they weren’t. Somebody would mention that they have a friend who’s a doctor and their friend had told them they were seeing more and more children born with heart defects and they think it was from the runoff at the mine.And then people would remember that I kinda sorta am the mine (people would sometimes forget because by then I wore a lot of baggier clothes to hide my scarred landscape). They’d apologize and do the whole, “That’s just what I heard,” thing.And I would say to them, “No, I get it. I agree! But there’s nothing I can do.”There would be an awkward feeling at the party after that. The taste of the local craft beer would be less hoppy. I’d make some excuse to leave early, and then I made excuses to not go in the first place. And then I stopped getting invited to things at all, which I told myself was what I wanted.At that point I was in my early thirties, still paying off the student loans, and the city had grown out and then surrounded our satellite (not a little bit fueled by the mine). The scandal with the runoff and the heart defects briefly made national headlines. A question actually got asked about it at one of the Democratic national debates—I really liked what Elizabeth Warren had to say (sigh). There was a protest at me for a couple of weeks, if you can imagine how that feels. And then they closed the mine and sold my mineral rights to a firm out of China. I had some suspicions, had seen a lot of new faces in and around the mine, and then the mayor confirmed it.“Jim,” he said, “The city council, the city planner, the railroad commission…well, we all talked about it and we think the best thing we can do for the city is move on from the mine.”I didn’t know what to say at first. And when I did, I thought better of it.You might disagree, but I’ve learned from past relationships that when someone says they’re leaving you (or, in this case, that you’re leaving them) it’s pretty pointless to argue and can only lead to hurt feelings. You ask what you did wrong, what you could have done better, and find out she doesn’t like how passive you are. And when you say you were just trying to go with the flow, she asks why, in finger quotes, “going with the flow”, means that every evening y’all get dinner delivered and watch Netflix/HBO/Disney+. You suddenly have to revise everything about yourself and your relationship, because you always appreciated those evenings settling in on the couch with her, coming home from a job you didn’t fully understand.So I didn’t make a fuss about it. I left this city my essential mineral had helped build, and the Chinese firm placed me in a narrow valley which had been carved by glaciers over many millennia. The glaciers were all gone now, but the mountains remained, and a river ran between them which emptied into the sea through a Pacific port city (I can’t remember the name. I never had a chance to visit). It was rather stunning and for a while, as they brought in the mining equipment and built sheds and a refinery out of aluminum siding, cinder block dormitories and outhouses for the miners, brought in modular housing for management, as miles of pipes were laid to bring up water from the river—Forgive me, where was I?So they placed me in this valley carved by glaciers, and while the camp was being built, I got to hike the hills, go up into the mountains. I’d look down at the mining camp, look down the valley at the local village, the adobe and rust colored buildings, the green and yellow fields being farmed. I would turn to my security contractor—one or more would always accompany me—and I would point and ask if we could visit. And they would shake their heads. Just to eat, I would gesture. No, no, they would shake their heads.Still, it was a nice break, rather joyful being up there, the smell of the earth. But once the work got started, I didn’t get out much again. My experience as a mine had been different when I was located outside a major city. I would watch the trucks go in and out of me. As each new pit was dug I could feel the detritus, the tailings, moved and dumped into the last disused pit inside me. But there was so much I hadn’t seen which I had been kind of oblivious to as I was locked in my day-to-day or sat at home, scrolling Instagram, ordering food for delivery.There at the mining camp, there wasn’t any hiding it, that rough work reopening the mine. The filled pits were dug out again. Dams were carved into me and filled with the runoff and debris, the water variably a metallic yellow or azure blue. Great mounds of tailings were set around me. When the wind came through the camp it would create a cloud of dirt and gravel which would hang at the level of your mouth and eyes until it rolled down the valley, following the river.At night local diggers would mine with picks and shovels and buckets. They built these shacks or set up tents at the periphery of me and dug down, made rough mine shafts into my fingers and toes. I wouldn’t feel it while they dug during the night, but in the morning there was tingling in my extremities. Even though I didn’t tell anyone, couldn’t tell anyone, didn’t speak the language, I watched as more and more uniformed men with guns showed up around the camp.I think I knew what was going to happen.And then everything did.The security forces cracked down on the local diggers. The locals protested and blocked the roads into the mines. More security forces and the military came in to break up the protests. The protesters threw rocks. The military had guns. The roads were cleared, but costs had gone up and output had diminished. The company cut staff, denied raises. The miners went on strike. The local diggers continued to dig, but had to take greater risks. There were accidents. Some diggers lit tires on fire to try to break up some rock. They were poisoned by the smoke and nearly died. The strike was broken by the government with some concessions made for raises, but corners were cut at the mine. Farmers complained that some of their cattle died after drinking at a nearby stream. The company trucked in water. I saw all that coming. I didn’t expect the flood.I don’t know what I could have done. Even if I knew, I didn’t speak Spanish and they didn’t speak English, and I didn’t have much of a chance to learn. The miners had enough of their work from the day to eat with me in the canteen. There was a security contractor I nicknamed Kurt, and some evenings he would sit down with me and play cards while he worked on a fifth of vodka or rum. And I would try to talk to him, but he didn’t really say anything. Therefore, ‘Kurt’.Still, when the dam failed and the tailings flooded down into the river, and the river flooded the village downstream, it was my dam. It was my inattention to detail, my callousness, my attempt to cut corners, maybe knowing that if the dam broke, it wouldn’t have to be me who paid for it. Because I didn’t want to pay so much for it, for the lifestyle I’d had growing up in the states that I didn’t think, or really didn’t care, to live without. So it was my dirt and debris and polluted water, flooding that village and killing those 17 people.I think they were mostly the very old or the very young.The company paid those families the cost of a life, about 120k, and they built for the villagers a brand new village. And the mining continued, until at some point there wasn’t any more me left to mine. It actually took going past that point. It took the cave-in of my left cheek, for my lungs to collapse, and finally a dip in the stock market, an inevitable tragedy experienced by a few after several tragedies of the many, before the mining actually stopped.Nobody told me it would happen. It didn’t happen all at once.At first the equipment left, and then some days later the workers, and then the security personnel. I was empty for a while, there in that great valley carved by glaciers, amid the slanted cinderblock buildings. But then armed rebels came in and claimed me. They brought in local diggers who surveyed my last ribs, talked about mining into the spine of me. They shook their heads. The rebels pointed their AK-47s and then the diggers tried for months.They tried, painfully, and the rebels became increasingly quarrelsome with the diggers and each other, until the winter/summer rains came and they quit the mine, went off to raid the local villages once more for supplies, and then go north. It rained and rained. I waited for something to happen. I watched the muddy road that ran up to me and tried my best to stay dry. And then an old woman, definitely a local, came and she placed flowers against the heart of me, and she got down on her knees, there in the mud, and she prayed. I am sure she was grieving the death of a digger, but the way I felt, I was a thing to be grieved too, and not totally for myself, for the death of the mine too, and all the potential that I had carried so deeply.What I’d become, I don’t know how to put it into words. I had been beautiful once. I know that isn’t attractive for a man to say about himself. But I look back at old pictures of me, and I really was something to look at, even though I didn’t know it at the time.I’d stopped looking at myself in the mirror a long time ago. I think I disassociated from my body. I think it was something I needed to do or else I would have lost it. But for once I took a look at myself. Everything that had been done in the mine was written into my skin and muscle, fat and bone. What hadn’t been excavated was mostly debris. There were these rivulets of waste running off my abdomen, pooling around my hip bones.But more than that, people had died in me. I was a crime scene. I was a cemetary. I had been gutted and fished and swallowed up, time and again. I had been displaced, not only my being, but also the various parts of me, across the world. I didn’t know how to talk to people anymore, because—let’s say that you ask me about the weather—I don’t know if you mean the weather here or at my elbow, my left shin, behind my right ear. I stammer. My fluency—let me try to get this right—my ability to speak and to talk about myself and my place in the world and all of the things going on in it.I’m sorry. Please forgive me.I really meant to say something just then, but I can’t tell you now what it was. There’s so much to it, and so little left of me.So I watched the woman pray in the mud, and I tried to pray with her. She crossed herself and then got up and then she walked away.And so I got up, and nobody tried to stop me, and I used every last dollar and sol that I had hidden away, and I went home, back to the U.S. It took a long time, and there was some hard going along the way, but I finally came home, and I found the city had prospered. It had shaken off its roots as a mining town, and it was now this beautiful gem of a city, but the mayor had lost his seat (which I was happy to see). Where my mine had been was now a golf course and a shopping complex.I was getting a coffee with a friend there just the other day. We spent the afternoon catching up; she’d recently gotten engaged and I was so happy for her I didn’t really go into my stuff. It was late November and she asked if we could talk and shop. We were in a store, I won’t tell you which, but I had this undeniable feeling a certain product contained a very small part of me. I picked it up; I turned it over. I looked at the price. I tried to calculate how much it would cost to buy back everything, all of me, to pay for all of the damage to everyone and everything. The math was beyond my imagination.So I put it back. I can’t really afford to be frivolous right now. I’m still paying off my student loans.

THE OSTRICH ECONOMY by Audrey Lee

September 23, 2024

Cammie has a Hermés Birkin pulled up on a resale website. She pushes the blinding screen towards my face across the white tablecloth between us. She’s talked about wanting a Birkin before, but I didn’t really think about it that much. “It’s ostrich leather,” Cammie says, and she pouts. Her raspy voice is hushed over the trepid steakhouse pianist on the baby grand. What does it take in life to become a steakhouse pianist? “It’s an investment piece. Ostrich leather is going to have better resale value than cow leather. But it's much less than crocodile.” The orange pinpricked leather looks like a nest of mosquitos stuck themselves into the smooth hide and had a feast. “How much?” I ask, hesitant as I take a bite of the rare filet alone on the massive plate in front of me. I really don’t like fat. I’ve carved the excess off to the side because I asked the waiter to tell the kitchen to remove any fat after the steak had been grilled, but no one listened. Grease pools across the glassy steakhouse plate.Cammie’s turn to hesitate. She shrugs and glances away. “Nineteen thousand dollars.”God. I choke. When I glance up at Cammie, I can’t breathe. She is beautiful and unimpressed. Her taut cheekbones and the small point of her nose are lit only by the flickering tea candle. Tense wrinkles cast shadows under her eyes. I panic, less at choking, and more at my beautiful, unimpressed, embarrassed girlfriend. I grasp for my napkin. I remember when she would have hidden a laugh in her own napkin instead of watching me cover my mouth, as the chewed, swollen wad of meat rolls up into the back of my throat. I take the wad down again with a desperate gulp of water. Cammie looks away and sighs as I clear my throat. “I’m sorry,” I dab at my mouth with the napkin and glance around. No one at the other tables saw me. . Only Cammie, but she’s the last person who wanted to. “Just chew your food,” she says. She brings the rim of the glass of Sangiovese to her plumped lips that I so want to kiss when I don’t have ice water dripping from my mouth like a blubbering, drooly baby. I watch as she tips the wine back along her tongue, and her eyes look beyond the rim of the glass. She’s not looking at me, but she’s looking at something far behind my shoulder. I get to kiss her, lips sweet with wine, later that night, and she almost smiles at me. “Thank you for dinner,” she whispers, the small point of her nose brushing up to mine. I watch her naked back rising and falling under the plush duvet next to me in bed. She has a small tattoo on her ribcage that she got when she was eighteen of her grandmother’s name in thin cursive. It sinks in the concave skin between two ribs. She wants it removed. I can’t stop looking at handbags. Bong would say That’s so gay. On my walk to the office through Battery Park I spot bags made of saffiano leather, pebbled leather, and calfskin. A few are coated in scales but I doubt that they are real snakeskin, or crocodile. None are ostrich leather with its swollen, plucked pinpoints. This is a universal male experience: to buy your girlfriend or wife the very expensive handbag or jewelry or shoes that she asks for, or to tell her not right now and that you’d consider it closer to Christmas or for her birthday? I think my mother would tell me to marry her first, but two-and-a-half years together was too soon. I think my father would tell me to just keep her happy, look at all I do for your mother but I was bad at that. I made Cammie happy when I broke up with her friend Samantha to date her instead. Sam was bright, but at the bar she could barely order for herself. In our last year at Columbia, Cammie was getting her J.D. I was splitting my time between class, rotations at BNY Mellon, and spending my analyst paycheck on blow in the bathroom of Soho House. She clocked me for what I was: doing what I was supposed to do. Desperate. Stumbling. Too caught up in my own pride. She was calculated. She was going to be such a good lawyer. Had I made her happy since then? I got my MBA. I deleted my blow dealer’s number from my phone. I work seventy-hour weeks to pay for rare steaks and two Soho House memberships, and handbags, and maybe even an engagement ring. I take this elevator to the thirty-sixth floor of my office to put up with my bosses. She is rarely impressed. Neither are my bosses at work, which is what keeps me meeting expectations. Bong says she’s always busting your balls. He says she’s bleeding you dry, man. Bong knocks on my office door at end of day, right before the sun dips below the horizon on the Hudson. He walks in before I can answer. I call him Bong to Cammie and when I told her to never repeat that, I put my finger to her lips, shushing her. She kissed my hand. Her eyes smiled at me. “He’s gotta be the most relaxed motherfucker in IB. I know he doesn’t smoke, but he’s just… disheveled. He went to UCLA anyway.” Cammie told me a few months later after last year’s company holiday party that Bong was a little drunk. He told her he had a Xanax prescription because otherwise, he’d throw himself off the bridge. “Hey,” he says.“I’m finishing up.”“Jason and I are going to get drinks at P.J. Clarke’s. Come with.” I look up from my computer. “Jason?”“Junior director.” “I’ve never met him. P.J. Clarke’s?”I lean back in my seat. Bong is on the fritz: his hair is more disheveled, his shirt is more crumpled, but his eyes are wide open like saucers. “You’re freaking me out.” “We need to talk,” Bong says. “With Jason?” I stand up from the desk and start to pack my stuff. “Yes,” says Bong. “Get your shit together.”We take the elevator down from the thirty-sixth floor to solid ground and walk to P.J. Clarke’s in complete silence. I think that Cammie wouldn’t touch a place like P.J. Clarke’s. She’d be embarrassed to know that I’d even stepped inside. She would scoff at the checkered tablecloths and paper menus with crosswords for children printed on the back. “Why are we here?”Bong walks me over to the bar where Jason is sitting. I’d seen him around the office and we’d spoken once or twice in passing. He is younger and baby-faced. His Brooks Brothers sport coat is tossed over the seat next to him, presumably for me to sit at. He’s got a leather messenger bag by his seat, his phone face down on the bar next to a bottle of Bud Light. He stands up from the pleather barstool, stone faced, and claps me on the back. “Is this an intervention?” I ask. I feel like I could chew the tension between the three of us. Bong and Jason sit down and I follow. “We need you not to yell,” says Bong. They were very diplomatic about it all. The situation was laid out as dull as a boardroom meeting. There was no needful reason to yell because they were right. Why P.J. Clarke’s? Because no one at P.J. Clarke’s knew us if I did yell. This was a good strategy on their behalf, but P.J. Clarke’s was not where I wanted my relationship with Cammie to end. Jason pulled up screenshots on his phone of Cammie’s Hinge. The first photo was a selfie that she had posted on her Instagram. Her lips were just healed, and they were pursed slightly around her teeth, the angle of the phone camera low enough that her eyes looked down on you in disdain. Camilla, 28. From Bethesda, Maryland, but lives in our apartment in Murray Hill. Associate, of Counsel. Columbia graduate. Capricorn. Figuring out her dating goals. Her other photos were of her and her girlfriends at Le Bain, at her sister’s wedding in a lavender bridesmaid’s gown that she had desperately hated, and a photo I had taken of her pinching the stem of an espresso martini glass at a Soho House party. She was in an oversized blazer cut down to her chest, staring down the camera like she could kill it. A fact about her that surprises people? She wanted to become a nun until high school. Give her travel tips for… Portofino, where we had talked about traveling for our three-year anniversary. A green flag for her? Spontaneity. And I knew all of this about her. But this wasn’t for me to care about anymore. Cammie had answered one of Jason’s prompts: I’m looking for… the best Sazerac in Manhattan, Jason had answered. Cammie said she loved the one at Apothéke in Chinatown, why didn’t the two of them meet up after work this week? Jason said “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” after every sentence. He couldn’t have been more sorry. He was sniffling and couldn’t make eye contact. He had no idea she was Cammie, as in, my girlfriend Cammie. She had no idea he worked in my office. He was right. He found her Instagram, checked her tagged photos, and recognized the photos I’d tagged her in. He asked Bong if Cammie and I were dating.“I looked at him like what the fuck are you talking about?” Bong said, hushed. “Like, of course, you’re dating. You’ve been dating for-fucking-ever. Good luck prying her out of your arms. How’d you even get this idea of going out with her? And then he showed me his conversation with her on Hinge, and I was, like, oh shit.”“I’m sorry if you didn’t want to know,” said Jason. “I’m sorry. I unmatched with her. Immediately. Never got drinks. She doesn’t know I’ve told you, or anyone. I’m sorry.” I’ve been staring at Jason’s open phone, cast aside on the dull wood bar. The screenshots of Cammie’s Hinge profile glow, then dim as the phone just sits while Jason and Bong stare at me in desperation. They fill the air with apologies. They wanted to do the right thing. They wanted me to say something. They are terrified. Finally, the phone screen turns to black, and Cammie’s taut cheekbones and pointed nose and eyes are gone. And it was all very diplomatic, and very fast. I hear myself tell Jason “Thank you. I have nothing against you. You did the right thing, and I respect that.” I hear myself ask Bong if we can leave. I am watching myself being diplomatic and calm from behind my eyes, where complete numbness sits heavy in my chest. A cinderblock. A hydraulic press. Cammie lying on top of me in bed. I swing my coat over my shoulders and clap Jason on the back. Bong rushes out of P.J. Clarke’s behind me. “You gonna be okay, man?” I keep walking. “Hey,” Bong yells behind me. “Hey! You’re not gonna kill her, are you?” I stop. I watch myself turn towards him and hear myself say “I’m not that kind of guy. I just need to go home.”“You’re not gonna kill yourself?”“I thought you were gonna do that.”“What?” It’s been a year and a half and I haven’t spoken to Cammie. I haven’t seen Bong. Or Jason, or the thirty-sixth floor. That doesn’t matter to me, and I don’t care about them. On my walk to the coop, the summer squall of cicadas hisses in the maple trees, from the gutters on the roof, wherever the hard-shelled bugs are screaming and fucking and dying. My boots are covered in shit and dirt. Everything smells like hot shit and dirt: earthy, putrid, sour. I went to the Governor’s Ball one time and it smells worse than the portable toilets used by thousands of sweaty office job workers rolling on molly. The trepid tittering of the ostriches reaches a fever pitch as I unlock the collapsing coop door and seven bowing, writhing, growling birds teeter outside into the sunlight. They rasp and cluck. Their taut faces and thin, pale necks ebb and bounce as they stick their faces into the brown grass and feast. Their bird eyes roll in the sockets with wrinkles collecting underneath them. They are dumb, savage creatures. I check on the incubator with ten bulbous ostrich eggs baking inside. It barely needs to be turned on in the summer heat of Arkansas. I got here with four monogrammed suitcases that still sit on the floor where my mattress is, in the apartment above the garage. I had walked into JFK and thought I’d go visit my parents in Chapel Hill. By the time I got to Charlotte I thought I’d kill myself. The flight to Little Rock was three gates from where I landed. No one asked questions, and I’m happy they didn’t.But that doesn’t matter to me, now. I’ve got four acres, paid for in cash. I bought eight African black-necked ostrich chicks from a wildlife farm I tracked down in Eureka for $250 a bird. The man who sold them to me didn’t tell me his name. He had a silver knob pierced in his eyebrow and the top of his head was bald; strings of long, white hair tangled around his sunburnt shoulders. The 2017 Toyota Tacoma I got off a used car lot was $19,250. A Birkin, I thought to myself, and a bird. I took P.J. home as a puppy in it. My neighbor’s golden lab had puppies and I picked one up. That was the only time I’ve seen them in a year and a half because they asked if I was from animal control. They were suspicious of me. I told them no.I push through another door that separates the coop from storage. The hides, strung up to dry, flutter in the drafty breeze. They are ghastly, pale, amorphous spreads, like maps, every follicle a pinpoint. This was the first ostrich I’d skinned of the eight chicks. She was a sweet bird. She never growled at me, or tried to kick me like some of the other birds did. She didn’t put up a fight. I sliced her open. I strung her up. I plucked her feathers to sell wholesale, each bone begging to stay in her skin. I watched myself butcher her, all diplomatic and fast and about it. Of course it was gross and at one point I threw up in the dry grass outside, where the other birds trot over to inspect the vomit. I let them be. P.J. herded them away. I let the birds distract me. The process of mopping up the blood, carving off the fat, plucking and cleaning and fleshing and cleaning and tanning and scrubbing and salting and tanning and wringing the leather out is excessive for a handbag. I have the bag designed in my head. I haven’t thought about how I’d get it to Cammie yet, or where she is or who she’s with. I don’t want to think about this. She hasn’t found me, or at least hasn’t tried to. I care for the birds, really. When I sell the bird’s eggs at a farmer’s market, I get comments that I’m different, that I can’t be from around here, where was I from? How’d I get to ostrich farming in Arkansas? Did I have a family nearby, a wife? And I smile. I watch myself tell these well-meaning locals It was a long time coming. Something God had planned for me. But that doesn’t matter. None of it does. It’s just me and the birds, now.

PATATINA by Rosalind Margulies

September 11, 2024

My boss is a dog and today is the dog’s birthday.Okay, not really. I like to say that my boss is a dog, but it’s just one of those things you say to make it easier, you know? But it is her birthday.The dog’s name is Patatina, which is Italian for little potato. The dog’s owners, Mr. and Mrs. Bianchi, are Italian. I’m from India or at least my grandparents are. And Patatina is a Papillon.(Patatina can also mean pussy. In case you were wondering.)Here: Lake Oswego, 15 minutes from downtown Portland but several income brackets removed. Me in my shitbox 1998 Volvo with a busted window and no license plate because it keeps failing the Oregon emissions test; I park around the back of the garage of the Bianchi’s nine-bedroom mansion so none of the neighbors get scared by my car. Pat is in the garage. She does a few happy loops when she sees me, leaving a circular trail of piss in her wake. It’s nice to have someone who’s always excited to see you.My job, basically, is to hang out with Patatina. Mr. and Mrs. Bianchi are too rich and busy to watch her – he owns a firm that creates value for shareholders and she runs a blog on how to practice yoga in a God-honoring way – and Patatina is too much of a free spirit/biter for doggy daycare so I get twelve dollars an hour to play dog nanny. Take her for walks, you know, throw the ball for her, sit on the couch with her and cuddle, pick up her shit. Sometimes when I’m walking Patatina next to a busy street and she shits and I have to pick it up, I imagine that I’m in one of the cars passing by and I’m seeing something about myself that I can’t from the inside, only I have to imagine what it is.Pat isn’t really my boss. I guess we’re more like coworkers. I use a treat to lure Patatina into the back of my car. She knows the routine and settles right in and starts gnawing on the seatbelt. I put the address in Waze even though I mostly know where I’m going. Halfway there, I get an ad for Burger King; “Buy A Bacon Cheeseburger,” it instructs me, and covers the map so I miss my turn. At red lights, I watch Patatina in the rearview mirror to make sure she isn’t eating my carpet or seizing or anything. She’s cute, I guess, the way a stuffed animal is. She has those plumey Papillon ears that little kids love to touch without asking. She’s either descended from four generations of Sicilian show dogs, or a rescue, depending on whether it’s someone from the Women’s Ministry or the Animal Protection Alliance asking Mrs. Bianchi. Today she’s four years old.Patatina, not Mrs. Bianchi.While the groomer washes Patatina, I wander through the Target next door. I get a text from Xiaowei: good morning baby 🙂 and then three red hearts. I send her back four red hearts then use Mrs. Bianchi’s credit card to buy trail mix for me and a pack of doggy salmon chews for her. Patatina, not Mrs. Bianchi.When I pick Patatina up she has pink bows clipped to both her ears. “For her birthday,” says the groomer, scratching Pat on the under part of her chin. Pat closes her eyes and puts on a face that suggests she’s approaching climax and the groomer says aww. I give her a salmon chew and load Patatina back into my car. Pat’s party isn’t until four, which means we have a couple hours to kill. Usually I’d take her to the dog park or for a walk by the river, but Mrs. Bianchi wants her pretty and good-smelling for the party so I don’t want to risk getting her dirty. Instead, we kill time at an artisan pet store. A man in a dirty black sweatshirt with a garbage bag slung over one shoulder paces back and forth in front on the sidewalk screaming garbled obscenities at me and Pat but I ignore him. Inside, I examine bags of dry dog food that cost more per pound than the chicken I buy at Safeway and ask the clerk if they sell hamsters. The clerk, an attractive green-haired person, shakes their head.“We don’t sell any live animals,” they say. “It’s inhumane.” Outside, the man has begun repeatedly slamming his head into the glass wall of the store with a dull thung, thung, thung like a mallet on a held gong. “Okay,” I say to the cashier, disappointed. I wanted to look at hamsters. The cashier tells Patatina to sit and gives her a milk bone even though she doesn’t. Patatina’s birthday party is nautical themed though the nearest ocean is hundreds of miles away and I don’t think she’s ever so much as shit on a seashell. The party was gonna be an intimate thing, Mrs. Bianchi told me, real piccolo affair, just the family and the neighbors and about three dozen of Patatina’s closest well-wishers. Two white tents have been set up in the Bianchi’s sloping lake-side backyard and silent caterers mill around slinging canapes. I accept a beetroot and walnut blini shaped like a dog bone. I can’t relax, though; I’m on duty. This party is a warzone and my weapon is a metal dish. The Bianchis didn’t get shortlisted for the 2023 Lake Oswego Excellence in Lawn Care Award by accident; whenever I see Patatina squat, it’s my sworn duty to get the dish under her and catch whatever excrement emerges before it can hit the ground. If I miss, the consequences to both the Bianchi’s Bermudagrass and my time-and-a-half party pay could be dire.Navy SEALs aren’t under this much pressure.After my fourth trip inside to flush I return outside to find Patatina’s head vanished into my backpack to the general amusement of the guests. I yank her back by the collar and find that she’s gotten into the trail mix. Cashews and raisins and M&Ms rain from her jaws and she tilts her head back like a duck, snapping her teeth as she tries to funnel as much gorp down her gullet as possible. “Stupid fucking dog,” I mutter. Patatina licks me on the nose and I get a whiff of macadamia nut. One of the caterers laughs at me. A little later on, Mrs. Bianchi finds me to say hi. “Dhivya,” she purrs. She wraps me in a hug and kisses me on both cheeks, taking care to avoid the dish in my hand. Mrs. Bianchi is tall and old-lady fit, sinewy and tan like a piece of beef jerky. She’s in company mode, which means she’s actually talking to me and also about 500% more Italian than usual. Mrs. Bianchi talks like Mario whenever her friends come around. She used to hide her accent until Mrs. Tyndall, the wife of some retired Blazers benchwarmer, said she thought it made her sound continental and now Mrs. Bianchi rolls her Rs like politicians roll logs and talks about her childhood spent stamping grapes in Genoa every chance she can get. “I hope-a Patatina didn’t give you too much-a trouble,” she says. “Oh, you know Pat,” I say vaguely and she laughs like I said something very funny, like, yeah, I do know Pat, that darn dog, always getting up to capers etc.By six p.m., Patatina has wearied of begging trophy wives for hors d'oeuvres and retired inside so I am honorably discharged and Venmoed $150 for my service. Inspired by both the knowledge that Xiaowei is at home waiting for me and the three glasses of champagne I snuck from the party, I treat red lights like stop signs and make it home in record time. Xiaowei and I share a studio apartment downtown above a Korean restaurant. It can get cramped and it always smells like bibimbap but it’s air-conditioned and plus I don’t really mind the bibimbap thing. I find Xiaowei sitting on the sunken in part of our mattress, painting her toenails white. “Hi, baby,” she says. Xiaowei and I have been dating for two years. She has a tattoo of a heart next to her eye and kind of a lot of lip filler but I like the way it looks. I tell her about the party and when her toenails are dry we have sex, just the one time, because she has work soon and doesn’t want to get sweaty.Xiaowei is the first girl I’ve ever been sure I loved.When we’re done, I eat an edible and lounge in bed and scroll through Twitter and watch Xiaowei put on her work makeup.“I might order Mexican for dinner,” I tell her.“Mm,” says Xiaowei, who’s doing her eyeliner and can’t move her face too much. That’s when I get the phone call. I roll my eyes when I see the caller ID and pick up on the third ring. “Hello Mrs. Bianchi,” I say.“Dhivya,” she says. Her accent is about as Italian as mine so the party must have ended. “We just left the veterinary urgent care with Patatina.”“Oh shit,” I say. Xiaowei, now applying glue to a false eyelash, pauses. “Sorry, I mean, oh no, what happened?”“Patatina was throwing up and throwing up. And then she tried to stand up and she couldn’t.”“Oh shit,” I say again. “Jesus.” Xiaowei shoots me a look but I ignore her. “She gonna be okay?”“Well she has to stay overnight but the vet thinks yes,” says Mrs. Bianchi. “It was lucky, Marco went to get a hammer from the garage and noticed Patatina wasn’t well. The vet says it’s lucky we got her here so soon.”“Thank God,” I say. Xiaowei relaxes, turns back to the mirror, raises the eyelash to her eye and begins to fit it in place. “Do they know what happened?”“Yes,” said Mrs. Bianchi. “They gave her some hydrogen peroxide to make her throw up and they found all sorts of things in her stomach. Raisins, macadamia nuts, chocolate candy. All sorts of things that are toxic to dogs. The vet said it was like she had eaten a bag of trail mix.”Ah.“And Clara Tyndall,” Mrs. Bianchi continues, not bothering to hide the anger in her voice anymore, “told me about a thing she saw at Patatina’s party. Do you know what?” I don’t but Mrs. Bianchi doesn’t wait for an answer. “She saw Patatina eating trail mix out of your backpack while you were not watching her although you were being paid to do just that. And she also said she saw you drinking a glass of champagne while, again, on the clock.”My eyes are focused on Xiaowei, who’s moved on to her other eye. She dabs eyelash glue on the band of the lash with the practiced hand of an Old Master.“Well? Do you have anything to say to that?” Mrs. Bianchi asks me. “I had three glasses of champagne. Not one.”“Hilarious,” she says, and then tells me I’m fired.I allot myself four days of feeling bad for/about myself and spend the first two stoned out of my mind playing video games and the second two wandering around in various parks, also stoned out of my mind. The fifth day I log into Indeed and apply for every job that pays at least fourteen dollars an hour and only get medium stoned.I apply as a gas station attendant, a line cook, a budtender, and a cashier at 7/11, and a bus driver even though I don’t have a CDL. Xiaowei tells me she might be able to get me an interview as a barback at her club but I don’t think she means it. I ask if she wants to get lunch with me at the food carts but she says no, she has to get waxed, so I drive down to the waterfront and eat my Chicken Nanban sando alone, sans the occasional passing biker and a probably homeless woman passed out on the grass a few yards from me. It’s a beautiful day; the sky is paint-sample blue and the Willamette River is dotted with sailboats. I’d figured that the one good part about getting fired would be that I’d be able to spend time with Xiaowei outside of the overlapping hour or two a day we got when I was done with work and she hadn’t started. But she seems pissed at me. I’m not sure why.I might know why.I guess I should tell you why.The CliffNotes version: the last time I was unemployed, I cheated on Xiaowei. It wasn’t that cut and dry, obviously. It wasn’t like I lost my job and thought to myself, Man, this sucks. I better go cheat on my girlfriend about it. It just kind of happened. I’d been working as a busser at a French restaurant downtown and failed a drug test. My manager, who I had done coke with during work hours on no less than a dozen separate occasions, told me that he was sorry but there was really nothing he could do. It didn’t matter if he meant it.Xiaowei, who I’d been with for about a year at that point, could tell I was feeling down so she invited me to come to work with her, which you might be thinking doesn’t sound like a whole lot of fun but one thing I haven’t mentioned is that Xiaowei is a stripper. So going to work with her meant I got to watch my girlfriend and half a dozen other assorted hot girls waltz around naked, and occasionally she’d bring me a whiskey sour or give me a free lap dance. Basically I got to be the king of the strip club.Except that night there was this Seattle tech-bro type guy sitting right next to me who made it very clear that he was interested in Xiaowei. Four-fifties-in-her-G-string-before-she even-took-her-top-off kind of interested, I mean. So she did this thing where she kind of crouched down facing away from him and put her ass cheeks on his chest, and he was rubbing on her ass and handing her twenties, and I was pretending like I couldn’t see them even though like I said I was sitting right fucking next to him. And he was talking to her, saying all this stupid Pretty Woman shit, like I can get you out of here and You’re way too good for a place like this and Have you ever been to Vernazza? And actually it was that last one that got to me. Vernazza is this Michelin-star restaurant over in Southeast where they make the mozzarella right in front of you. Xiaowei’s always wanted to go but I’ve never had the money to take her. All I could think about was Xiaowei on a beautiful romantic candlelit date at Vernazza with this dickhead, both of them all dressed up, playing footsie under the table, maybe. And that was so much worse than her having her ass on his chest.By the end of the night I was majorly pissed in both the American and British senses and Xiaowei and I got into a shouting match on our walk to her car. I told her that she was basically as good as cheating on me and she told me that that “cheating” was what was paying our rent because, in case I forgot, I did not have a job currently, and I told her that if she cared that much about money we could drive over to the Motel 6 on 82nd and find her her own pimp right now. And Xiaowei told me to fuck off. And so I did.I fucked off to my buddy Max’s apartment for the night to cool down. And his friend was there, some red-headed girl with the kind of face you forget while you’re looking at it. And then Max went to bed.You know what happened next.When we were done, I went outside to smoke a cigarette and I called Xiaowei. I’d had a few more drinks after arriving at Max’s and I barely remember what I said, to be honest. I think I said I was sorry. I think I told her I didn’t know why I did it and that I didn’t know what I’d do if I lost her. I think I cried. I think I said something about Vernazza.I know I told her I loved her.Which wasn’t a big deal in and of itself, honestly. I’d been telling Xiaowei I loved her for a couple months by that point.That was just the first time I meant it.I got the job watching Patatina a week and a half later, which I think went a long way toward smoothing things over with Xiaowei, though it took a long time for her to trust me again. At the interview, I told the Bianchi’s that I’d had a dog growing up, a ferrety terrier mix named Lucy. She was big and scruffy, like the kind of dog you’d see in an apocalypse movie digging through the trash after the bombs have gone off and everyone’s dead except Will Smith. When I was 15 I went on a run with her after she ate dinner and her stomach felt like a balloon afterward. The vet told us that it was gastric torsion and that surgery would be fifty-five hundred dollars, and there was a sixty percent chance it wouldn’t work anyway. I’d actually started to cry a little bit by the time I was done with the story which I was really embarrassed about at the time but ended up getting me the job. Mrs. Bianchi told me that she could tell that I really loved Lucy and that she hoped I’d love Patatina the same way. I return the other half of my sandwich to its box and walk up to the sleeping woman. She’s wearing a ratty pink pajama set and up close, I can see the tinfoil clutched in her hand even in sleep, like she’s so scared someone might try and take it from her it’s become instinct to hold onto it as tightly as possible at all times. I watch her chest until I’m satisfied she’s breathing, then leave the sandwich box next to her and walk back to my car. It’s nearly one p.m. but the call wakes me up; I’ve begun adapting to Xiaowei’s schedule, which means late nights and later mornings. Early afternoons, really.“Turn that off,” Xiaowei groans from next to me.“It’s not an alarm,” I mumble, sitting up to accept the call. “Hello?”“We have a bit of a situation,” says Mrs. Bianchi without preamble.I yawn. “You fired me,” I remind her. “I know,” Mrs. Bianchi says, and I can picture her rolling her eyes. A strict botox regimen keeps most of her face petrified so this ordinary movement becomes extraordinary on her; it’s like watching a whirlpool in a still lake. “I know, and this would just be a one-off, one-day thing. But we could use you. We could use your discretion. Five hundred dollars?”“For just one day?” “Yes.”I tilt my head from side to side until my neck cracks. “Six-fifty?”Mrs. Bianchi sighs.By the time I’ve gotten dressed and pulled up to the Bianchi’s house, it’s two. I park behind the garage like always and head into the house, an enormous structure of white squares that resembles an angular cloud. The main floor is basically one enormous room, shiny white kitchen and living room and dining room all in one. Patatina is curled up on a leather ottoman but scrambles up when she sees me and runs in circles around my feet, yipping and pissing all the while. Something’s definitely up; neither of us is usually allowed in the house.Ms. Bianchi stands by a polished marble island in the kitchen sector. She’s dressed in a mauve-colored lounge set and holds one hand to her head like she’s nursing a headache. “Hello Dhivya,” she says.“Hello Mrs. Bianchi,” I say, trying to sound dignified, which is difficult while fielding an eight-pound dog who seems to want to lick every inch of your sneakers. I get down on one knee like I’m proposing and Patatina hops up so her front paws are on my bent knee and her face is almost level with mine. Her tongue is out in an expression of vacant ecstasy; I scratch her behind the ears.Mrs. Bianchi sighs. “So, you know Big Sexy,” she says, which would be an incomprehensible question if I didn’t know Big Sexy.“Of course,” I say. Big Sexy is the terrible chihuahua owned by Josh, the terrible crypto-zillionaire California transplant who lives next door to the Bianchis. He’s chased off so many Amazon delivery drivers that Jeff Bezos probably knows him by name. He’s got absolutely no training and free run of the neighborhood. Big Sexy, not Josh.Actually, Josh too.“Well, it seems Patatina has also become acquainted with Big Sexy recently,” says Mrs. Bianchi, grimacing. She gestures towards Pat, who’s still perched on my knee. I notice now that there’s a new roundness to her stomach, a slight distension of her nipples. Pat wags her tail. Maybe she can tell we’re talking about her. “And Patatina,” Mrs. Bianchi continues, “cannot have puppies. I am secretary of the Portland branch of the Animal Protection Agency. I hosted the Spay and Neuter banquet last year. I gave a speech on the importance of pet population control. And I absolutely cannot be seen taking her to get a — a late-term spay. I am a chairwoman of the Lake Oswego Women's Ministry. I co-chaired the Northwest Oregon Pro-Life Dance-A-Thon just last week. They’d eviscerate me.” “Over a dog abortion?”“Late-term spay,” she snaps. “And yes. Last year it came to light that Naomi Zweig’s Persian Max was actually a Maxine, but by that time she was already a month along. Clara Tyndall saw her taking her to the vet, and…” Mrs. Bianchi shakes her head. “I still have nightmares about the Facebook callout posts,” she says. She looks so miserable that it’s hard not to feel bad for her but I manage anyway.“So that’s why we need you,” Mrs. Bianchi continues. “I’ve gotten the appointment with the vet all set up, and everything is paid for. You just need to bring her in, sit in the waiting room while they do the operation, and then bring her back here. Two hours, max.”Patatina licks me on the nose.I put the vet’s address into Waze even though I mostly know where I’m going. Halfway there, I get an ad for Burger King. “Buy Two Bacon Cheeseburgers,” it instructs me. The ad covers the map but I make my turn anyway. I get a text from Xiaowei: Goodluck with the dog abortion lol. See you tn. Xiaowei’s got a rare night off and has agreed to spend the evening hanging out. Nothing crazy, just takeout and maybe a movie. Completely unremarkable except it’s the first time she’s agreed to spend any real time with me in the two weeks since I lost my job. At a red light, I heart react her message and send back Can’t wait! I park in front of the vet's office and bring in Patatina, who’s excitedly wriggling at the end of her leash like a landed fish.I don’t know if she’s too dumb to know that she’s at the vet or if she does and she’s too dumb to care. The receptionist calls Pat’s name and we follow her through the door behind the front desk into an examination room. It’s dingy and smells like cat. The vet, a woman with smooth gray hair pulled into a low ponytail, enters a moment after we do, clipboard in hand. Patatina rushes to greet her.“Yes, yes,” the vet says to Pat, who’s trying to climb up her leg. “Hello to you too.” She smiles at me. “You must be Patatina’s Mom,” she says. “Sure,” I say.The vet writes something on her clipboard. “And we’re getting spayed today, correct?” I dislike her use of “we” but say yes. The vet nods. “I do feel I should tell you,” she says. “We don’t commonly spay dogs while they’re pregnant because it can be very distressing for the dog. They don’t understand what happened, why they lost the litter—any of that. They can get very depressed.”“Ah,” I say. I twist one of my earrings.“I just wanted you to know that,” says the vet.I sit in the waiting room while they spay Patatina and page through a huge encyclopedia of horse breeds that looks like it's meant for children. The woman next to me holds a pet carrier in her lap. An electric green iguana sits coiled inside.“He has a cold,” the woman tells me. Her micro-bangs are slightly crooked. The iguana sneezes.An hour passes, then two. I go for a walk, skirting the large homeless encampment set up in a vacant lot next to the vet’s office. A handmade sign nailed to a tree among the tents reads “IF YOU LIVED HERE, YOU’D BE HOME BY NOW.” I find a coffee shop and buy an Ube coconut milk latte that costs seven dollars, not including tip. I spill a little on my shirt and the stain it leaves is purple.At three hours, I start to worry. I return to the vet’s office and ask the receptionist if everything is alright, and she assures me it is.“Patatina’s out of surgery,” she tells me. “The vet just wants to observe her for a little while, make sure she comes out of the anesthesia okay.” I text Xiaowei and tell her I might be a little late, then return to my horse encyclopedia.A half hour later, just as I’ve finished admiring a picture of an Orlov Trotter, the door behind the desk opens and a young East Asian man in blue scrubs emerges with Patatina trailing on a leash behind him. She looks slightly dazed but still manages a slow tail wag when she sees me. The man hands me a manilla folder and a small bottle of pills.“She did great,” he tells me. “You’ll need to watch her pretty closely tonight, and tomorrow. Keep her up and moving around, if you can, to help her recover from the anesthesia, but don’t overexert her.” He gestures to the bottle of pills. “Half of one every three hours or so. She’ll be in a lot of pain. There’s more aftercare instructions in the folder.” I nod and lead Patatina out to my car. She’s moving much slower than usual and needs help climbing in. She sighs and stretches out on the seat and immediately closes her eyes; no seatbelt gnawing for her tonight. I get in the driver's seat, twist open the pill bottle, and dry swallow two. It’s nearly eight when I pull back into the Bianchi’s driveway and lead Patatina inside. I was just expecting Mrs. Bianchi, but Mr. Bianchi—a handsome man with hair that always looks like he’s just got back from the barber—is here too. He’s dressed in a well-tailored three-piece suit; Mrs. Bianchi wears an ankle-length silver dress, and her hair is arranged in a complicated updo. They’re obviously dressed to go out, or maybe they’re just getting in.“Hello, Dhivya,” says Mrs. Bianchi. Mr. Bianchi nods at me.“Hi,” I say. Patatina doesn’t move toward her owners, just stands next to me and yawns. I hand Mrs. Bianchi the folder and the bottle of pills. “The surgery went fine. All the information is in the folder. The vet said you need to watch her pretty closely tonight, but she should be okay after that.”“Oh,” says Mrs. Bianchi. “Well, we were actually just about to head out to the 2023 Lake Oswego Excellence in Lawn Care Awards Ceremony. So if you could stay for a few more hours, keep an eye on her, that would be great.”“I’m sorry,” I say. “I can’t.”“What?” says Mrs. Bianchi. “Why not?”“I have a, um, prior engagement.”Mrs. Bianchi stares at me for a moment, then turns and says something to her husband, too quietly for me to hear. He nods, and she turns back to me. “We’ll pay you one hundred extra,” Mrs. Bianchi says.I think about Xiaowei. “I really can’t.”Mrs. Bianchi purses her lips. “Three hundred extra. Nine-fifty total.”That’s my half of rent, and then some. I swallow. I put my hands in my pockets. I scrunch and unscrunch my toes in my shoes. I think about Xiaowei waiting for me, about our plans for tonight. Barely plans, really. Barely anything. I could take her out to dinner. I could use part of the money and take her out on a real date. I could even take her to Vernazza.“Yeah,” I say to her. “Okay.”Mrs. Bianchi, not Xiaowei.

THE ARTIST by Ruby Zuckerman

August 27, 2024

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.”

MISTER INTERNATIONAL INCIDENT by Kirsti MacKenzie

July 15, 2024

“Told you,” says Dirt. “I knew he’d lose his shit.”I’m not losing my shit. Annie doesn’t say anything. She keeps her eyes trained on the gym bag under the desk. “Pay up,” says Dirt.“Fuck off,” says Annie. Dirt’s desk chair squeals as he leans back, lacing his fingers behind his bald head. The chairs are old and broken, an afterthought. Like everything else here. I’ve got my jacket halfway off and a glass container with dinner in my hand. I put the container on the desk, then grab it again.“He can’t get it,” scoffs Dirt. “He’s a raccoon, not Garfield.”“How do you know it’s a he,” says Annie.Dirt rolls his eyes. I put the container down again. “I dunno,” says Annie. “They’ll do anything for food. They get garbage bin lids open, those fancy ones in Toronto. With their little paws.”I scoop the container again, furious. “I thought you said it was knocked out.”“It is,” she shrugs. “But if it gets hungry, I’ll feed it.” She taps a granola bar laying in front of her dusty keyboard. “I’m thinking rabies,” Dirt says, “and this guy’s first thought is but my lasagna.”“No,” I say, “what if there’s an emergency?”“This is an emergency,” Annie says.“Like a real one,” I say. Annie cuts me a look under her beaten Habs ballcap. She folds her hands across her belly, straining against her camouflage vest. Plants her hikers and rolls her desk chair back and forth, back and forth across the carpet, carpet so worn it’s greasy under the wheels. The job requires a certain kind of tolerance for mess. Nobody’s here unless they fuck up, or they’re fucked up. You’d think, given the gravity of it—intercepting terrorism, foreign interference, war strikes, cyber attacks, all that shit—they’d give us better digs, but no. Somehow the most important, least important station there is. The gym bag shifts slightly under her desk. Dirt eyeballs it, but Annie stares me down. “Guess you’ll handle it, bud,” she says evenly.

***

“Annie showed up real early,” Dirt says. Dirt is always on time. It’s his one redeeming quality and the only thing Annie and Dirt have in common. “They drilled that shit into us,” he repeats, like I don’t know they’re both former military.“Hate rush hour,” Annie says. “Leave early, when the roads are—”Dirt goes, “Jesus Christ, Annie, I’m trying to tell a story here.”“You’re telling it wrong,” Annie says.Dirt goes, “I get here and you know what Annie does? She shushes me. I think she’s being a bitch so I go, fuck off Annie, real loud, right? Then she goes, Two things: One, shut your mouth. Two, I called animal control. And I’m about to go off cuz I think she means she’s calling me an animal. But she points to her GoodLife bag under there. Now I’m confused, like, maybe, it’s the first day since basic training Annie decides she wants to grind out some pushups—”“Holy fuck,” Annie says, “you’re a moron.”“You tell it then!” Dirt says.“He didn’t believe me so I unzipped the—”“—and I go, shit you weren’t kidding—”“—anyway it was just lying there on the road, and I jammed on my brakes, and poor thing, its foot was at a funny angle and it was breathing funny so I called animal control, and they said they can’t be bothered with roadkill, they’re backed up with a coyote problem in Gloucester and someone reported a black bear in Orleans so I’m standing there arguing, like what kind of person would I be if I just left—”“—so she grabs the GoodLife and a granola bar, what a fuckin’ hero our Annie —”Annie holds up a finger. “Dirt,” she goes, “you’re a sick bastard and you’re a troll, but I know you wouldn’t have left him behind, neither.”“No,” Dirt says, after a beat. Annie cuts me an emphatic look. “—so,” Dirt says, “she rolled this little guy into an old sweatshirt in the GoodLife bag and fired him into the passenger seat and drove to work, still got the operator on Bluetooth in the car, mind you, kept this poor sucker on the phone til she got downtown, parked, marched her ass upstairs holding the bag like a newborn—”“—trying not to shake him—”“—him!–”“—it, whatever—”“—and she swiped her pass all the way up and into the office and she put the bag under the desk and said to the operator, get this—”“—now it’s no longer a roadkill problem; there’s a live raccoon in a government building and I am requesting your assistance; here’s the address. See you soon—”“—and she hangs up.”

***

Dirt follows me into the break room, leans against the counter rattling a protein shaker. Ka-chunk, ka-chunk, ka-chunk. Stories followed him from DND. Burpees and jump squats and incline sit ups with his feet hooked on stairwell railings. The grunting, the smell. Dirt’s first computer monitor is for work; his second one is for gambling; his third one is for porn. Sick shit, too. We know because he leaves his computer unlocked when he takes a shit, unlocked when he goes on mid-shift dates, which are frequent. Somebody at DND threatened to report him—the smell, the gambling, the porn, the dates—and legend has it Dirt got his name because he just laughed and said go ahead, make my day. Dirt’s the one who told the legend, so take it with a grain. “She’s not supposed to tell them where we are,” I say, watching my lasagna spin in the microwave. “That’s like, rule number one.”“They have to get that thing out of here,” Dirt shrugs. “They don’t need to know what we do. She’ll just meet them in the lobby.”“Why haven’t they come yet?” Dirt gestures broadly with his shaker. “Coyote problem. Black bears.”I pull my lasagna before the microwave beeps. Burn my tongue on the edges but the middle is still cold. Another thirty seconds to get it right.“What if it gets loose?” I ask.“Yes,” Dirt says. “Gimme rabies. Time off. Big fat workers comp settlement.”“She could get fired,” I say.“Not Annie,” says Dirt. I chew my lasagna slow, shaking my head.“Annie’s name isn’t Annie,” he says. “You should ask how she wound up in this shithole.” Stories didn’t follow Annie the way they did Dirt. All anyone ever says is that she’s a tough broad. Good soldier. Best kind. Everyone here has some kind of story: they buried the wrong document or threatened a director or brushed their teeth with a fifth of something high proof before the 9 a.m. priorities call. Not Annie, though. This is the first I’ve heard anything of Annie’s story. “Still,” I say. “Nobody here gets fired, man,” Dirt laughs, spraying chocolate shake. “You know that better than anybody, after what you did.”

***

“Dare you to look,” says Annie. I grimace and shake my head, staring at my phone. “Tim’s run says it’s hentai this week,” she says. “Thought I heard squeaking earlier.”Dirt left for his midshift date. We have five minutes after he leaves. On my first shift, Annie asked me to lock Dirt’s computer and laughed and laughed when I found the gambling, the porn. Said everyone who stays here long enough winds up a bit of a sicko, so don’t judge.Annie looks like some kind of back-camping, born-again Christian bush mom so I thought she’d be shocked, but she just bets me double-doubles on what kind of kick he’s been on, or whether he’s losing money on the Oilers again. “Squeaking,” I mutter. “That’s probably your new pet.”“Jesus,” she says with some degree of awe. “You’ve really got a stick up your ass about this.”“You brought a fucking raccoon into the office—”“What would you have done?”“I don’t know,” I say. “Leave it?”Annie snaps her fingers into a gun, fires it at me. Cold expression settling into her weathered face. “You sure about that?”“Look,” I say, “Something bad happens in the country, anywhere in the world, we’re the first to know about it. We’re supposed to focus—”“Don’t need you explaining the job, bud.”“—so doesn’t it seem like if a raccoon gets loose in an office—this specific office—it’d draw a lot of attention? Nobody takes us seriously. Now you drag a raccoon in here? If that thing gets loose it’s not only a cliche—it’s a legit national security risk—like, total shitshow—”“Yeah, no, for sure,” she says. “Don’t want another one of those, do you.”I suck my cheeks in. Bite down hard. Not gonna take the bait.Annie dons a pair of leather driving gloves, takes the granola bar from her keyboard and breaks the wrapper. She reaches under the desk and I hear the zipper peel back slowly. Slowly. Faster now, all the way to the end. There’s no squeaking, or rustling, or munching sounds. “Shit,” she mutters.“Dead,” I scoff. “Nope,” she says. “Shit. Shit.”

***

Annie gave me the sweatshirt and gym bag as defense. I didn’t want to touch them at first, and she called me a pussy. Sometimes Dirt takes naps under his desk with this ratty old quilt and she asked if I’d rather have that. It looks and smells like PigPen’s blanket. I put my jacket back on and took the sweatshirt and bag.“He couldn’t have gone far on that foot,” Annie reassures me. “He was pretty out of it.”“Probably juiced on adrenaline,” I say, like I know what the fuck I’m talking about. We creep around the office. Annie takes the lead because, logically, she was the one to pick him–it, whatever–up in the first place. Maybe she has some kind of bond with it. Maybe it’ll recognize her smell, or something. “Any word from Dirt?”I check my phone. Dirt’s got a system for the mid-shift dates. Takes ‘em to a movie theatre around the corner, mostly to hook up. He has Annie text 9-1-1 half an hour into the date. If they’re ugly or boring, he checks his phone and uses the text as an excuse to bail. Tells ‘em it’s a matter of national security. But today the text came from me, and the response I got was nice try, fucko so either his date’s really hot or he doesn’t take my 9-1-1 for real seriously because national security events never happen that often. Well, almost never. “I don’t wanna mention about the raccoon because he’s on his work phone,” I say.“Like texting 9-1-1 every single shift isn’t heatbag enough?” gripes Annie. “Nobody’s monitoring our texts.”“What if it gets in the news?” I protest. “What if some animal control person spills that there’s a fuckin’ raccoon in the national security comms centre?”“Right,” she sighs. “I forgot they sent you from narc city.”We creep around cubicles, checking all the corners, and under the desks. We have the whole floor to ourselves but only a corner of it gets used. Most of the office looks like what I imagine a crypt might. Everything covered in a thin layer of dust from the ancient central air system. Even the cleaners know we only use part of the floor; they’ve given up on the offices that line the outside of the building. I move to open one but Annie sighs.“Don’t bother with the closed doors,” she says. “Raccoons can’t open doors. This isn’t Jurassic Park.”Feeling like an idiot, I take my hand from the knob. I lean against the office door, scanning the hallway. Dull fluorescents hum overhead. Red EXIT/SORTIE sign glaring at the end of the hallway. It’s the exit Dirt uses for his incline sit-ups, for his dates. Only one with a broken security camera. Straight shot from our desks. “What if he—it, whatever—tailed Dirt out of the office?” “Maybe that’s his date today,” snorts Annie. “Better than his Tinder. He swipes right on some real uggos.”“Look, Annie,” I say, “Dirt says your name isn’t—”But Annie’s neck snaps to the left, toward our cubicles. Something grey and black streaks across the hallway toward the break room. Surprisingly fast for something fat and furry and limping. Annie takes off after it and I take off after Annie and when we round the corner we see it scramble up the break room cupboards, clamoring for my dirty lasagna container on the counter. It looks at us with big, panicked eyes and for the first time I can see why Annie couldn’t leave the stupid thing behind. Annie gives me a shove.“Get it into the sink and get the bag over it!” she yells.Her cellphone starts ringing.And goddamn her, she answers.I lunge toward the counter, but between me and the cellphone the raccoon shrieks and lunges at me so I shriek and feint with the bag covering my face and it bolts off the counter, shrieking even more as it lands on its busted foot and skitters under the table between metal chair legs and I drop to a crouch and hold the bag open muttering it’s okay you know her smell now and all the while Annie’s hollering the address and directions and can’t you get here any faster for fuckssake it’s been hours and just as she hangs up I lunge again and the raccoon shrieks and blazes past me and I shriek and bump my head on the break table, hard, swearing, as it tears past Annie and back into the hallway.She hangs up, shaking her head.“They’re on their way,” she says, adjusting her ballcap. “Lost it again,” I huff, rubbing my head.“I think I know where we’re gonna find him,” she says.

***

We crouched first. Came down slowly, so we wouldn’t scare him. It, whatever. He watches us with sad eyes while his paws work the granola. It’s one of those Nature Valley bars, the ones that crumble the second you touch them.He scoops little bits out of the green wrapper and shoves them in his mouth. We’re blocking his exit from the cubicle, bag and sweatshirt ready to grab him if he makes a move. Annie peels her gloves off.“Think that’s wise?” I ask.“He’s too tired to bolt,” she says. “Guy told me he’d be here in twenty minutes anyway.” We sit silent and watch him. He finishes the granola bar but paws at the cellophane, looking for more. He’s dextrous enough that I think he probably could have opened a door, if he wanted to. Like if he’d been on the shoulders of another raccoon. Or little stilts. “Get your gun,” she says.“What? I don’t—”“My name isn’t Annie,” she says. “They named me Annie Get Your Gun a while back. When I was still serving.”I can’t take my eyes off the raccoon, but I glance at her. “You know that day on the Hill?”“The shooter?”“Yep.”I whistle. The raccoon’s ears prickle, and he crouches defensively.“Some shit went down that day that you don’t hear about,” she says. “I know about the shit.”“That’s why—?”She nods.I swallow hard. “I know I said sorry before, but I just wanna say again—or like, thank you—I don’t know, sorry and thank you, I guess—”She waves me off, then points to the raccoon. He’s still crouched, watching us with sad, wet eyes.“When I walked into that shift you looked exactly like that,” she says. “Scared shitless. And you know what, yeah. You fucked up real bad. Three nations? False alarm? Holy shit did you fuck up.” I wince. Tears prickle the back of my eyes.“But they’re never gonna fire me,” she says. “Union says so, for one thing. But more importantly—”“You know about the shit.”She nods.“That’s why you—? For me—?”“Yep,” she says. “Dirt says you’re nuts,” I say, staring at the raccoon. His eyes are drooping and I pray to fuck he’s just tired and not dying. “Says he would have thrown me under the bus in a heartbeat.”“Well, they’ve got enough to can him,” she says. “The porn, the sports betting. Don’t think they don’t know about the movie hookups, either.” “But they can’t touch you,” I whisper. “Nope.”I study the stitching on the GoodLife bag, trying not to cry.“So you fucked up,” she says. “So what.”“Twice.” “That just means you won’t fuck up again.” She snorts, shaking her head. Rough smoker’s laugh rattles her chest. “China and Iran, fuck. You really know how to pick ‘em. Mister International Incident.”Somewhere down the hall, the door opens. All three of us turn our heads toward the noise.“Animal control?” “No,” she says. “I have to meet them in the lobby.”“We should tell him,” I say.“Nah,” she says, pointing at the monitor above the raccoon. Dirt’s ragged stressball and protein shaker are next to the set up. It’s his cubicle. She slaps my shoulder and rises, creeping around the partition, motioning for me to follow her. “Not yet. Tim’s run says he screams like a girl.”

THE SECRET AGENT by David Hansen

June 12, 2024

After many years of covert development the CIA perfects a method of creating ghosts. It’s a huge breakthrough. The CIA feels ghosts will be the ultimate spies: invisible, non-physical, and totally disinterested, as in, not vying for personal advantage, the way living spies sometimes do. One day the department heads circulate an internal call for volunteers for “a very important mission.” All the star agents show up. Guys who are at the absolute peaks of their careers. Guys who have done it all. Wet work, PsyOps, dark ops, other stuff no one has even heard of. Company men to the core. No wives, no kids, no nothing. They’ve given everything to the agency, and here they are, ready to give more. They look at the department heads with the neutral readiness of good dogs. Ordinarily these guys would be just what the department heads are looking for. But not today. Today the department heads are looking for something else. A certain X factor. They’re not quite sure what it is. They figure they’ll know it when they see it. And in these guys, they don’t see it. Just as the department heads are about to call it quits and go back to the drawing board, a last guy shows up. He’s got very neat hair that is combed too flat to his scalp, narrow, sloping shoulders, very little muscle mass, and soft, flimsy-looking skin, like the skin on a pudding. The department heads have no idea who this guy is. They have to read his file right there, in front of him. Luckily it’s not much of a file. Mostly desk work. A few actual missions, but nothing big. Nothing sexy. He’s past his peak. Or rather, he’s never had a peak. His career is just a long straight line. “Check, check, check,” think the department heads. In the preliminary part of the interview, the guy seems distracted, or not very interested. He keeps looking around the room. The department heads point this out and he says they’re right; he’s not very interested. Not in this, not in anything. He’s bored. More than bored. Or, less than bored. Not even bored. He feels like his life is a train that he missed. Like he got to the station just in time to watch it whizz by. So he figures he might as well make himself useful before it’s all over. The department heads confer with one another silently, using just their eyes. Because this is the guy they’re looking for, quite clearly. But there’s a snag; his file says he’s got a wife, and a teenage son. That’s a problem for the department heads. They think of his wife and his son going on without him. They think of their own wives, their own sons, going on without husbands, without fathers. How incomplete those lives would forever be. So the department heads tell this guy thanks but no thanks. They don’t want to bust up a family. They don’t want that on their consciences. Because whoever goes on this mission isn’t coming back. Their voices have a faint tone of censure. Then they pause, to see if this guy has anything to say to all that. The guy is quiet a moment, and in that moment he no longer looks bored, uninterested. He looks like he’s focusing very hard, feeling a single feeling very strongly. Then he says his wife and son aren’t a factor. Things haven’t gone the way he’d hoped in the family department, and it’s his fault. He did everything backwards. He hoped marrying his wife would make him love her. He hoped having a kid would make him want to be a dad. But surprise surprise, it didn’t work. He’s a good enough husband and father. But good enough isn’t good enough. Not for them. They deserve better than good enough. And maybe they’ll get someone better if he gets out of the picture. The department heads take a moment to process all this. Because on the one hand, bingo. But on the other hand, they’re a little grossed out emotionally. They recoil from him despite his unique perfection. They hate him a little. They are glad they aren’t like him. They suppose this antipathy toward him is additionally perfect because now they won’t feel so bad when they do what they’ll have to do to him. But it’s a cold comfort. The department heads tell him the mission details. That he’ll die and become a ghost and do a lot of deep spy work, the deepest there is. They tell him he’ll help put America back on top. He might even prevent World War III. The guy hears these details like they’re no big deal, nodding a little, continuing to look all around the room, which is a small room with yellow-brown soundproofing panels on the walls and a two-way mirror with no one on the other side of it. When the department heads have told him everything, they ask him if he accepts this mission. He says yes and a few days later they put him on a hospital bed and stick an IV in his arm. The mood is awkward. The department heads wonder if this guy said any kind of special goodbye to his wife and son. Did he tuck his son in last night like everything was normal and tomorrow would be like every other day. Did he hesitate at the door this morning on his way to headquarters and look at his wife where she stood in the kitchen, scraping their toast crusts into the garbage. Did he have a moment’s doubt where he felt maybe he was wrong. Maybe there was still a chance for them. For all of them. The department heads look at him, trying to see in. But to do that, he’d need to try to see inside them too. That’s the way intimacy works. And he isn’t trying to see inside them. He isn’t even looking at them. He’s just looking up at the ceiling, waiting for this to happen. Finally, the department heads decide there’s no sense prolonging this further. They thank him for his sacrifice. This is what they’d planned to say, but now that they hear themselves say it, they hear how small the words are. They wonder if the same words would have sounded less small if they hadn’t planned to say them. Then they give a signal and someone somewhere else turns the IV drip on and soon the guy is dead and his ghost rises off his body, like a puff of steam in the body’s likeness. He looks down at his own body. It isn’t the first dead body he’s seen. He saw his father’s body. But his father’s body had been in a casket. An undertaker had done it up. It looked like a shoddy wax sculpture of his father. The guy’s own body, on the other hand, looks exactly like him. He feels a sorrow for himself that he usually only feels for other people. It occurs to him that he didn’t feel this sorrow when he looked at his father’s body. He was too freaked out to feel sorrow. The sorrow came later, accumulating gradually, like a carbon-monoxide leak. These thoughts linger and then pass and he floats up, up, up, out of the depths of CIA headquarters and across the American countryside, through the heartland, over the Rockies, heading west. He floats across the Pacific Ocean, bound for Beijing, for Pyongyang, for Moscow. He floats over the surface of the water, loosely hewing to its undulations. He passes oil tankers and big shipping barges with cartons that must be the size of skyscrapers. They are far away from him, and from each other. Seeing them gives him a forlorn feeling. But why? Why should they make him feel forlorn? Why should they make him feel anything? What do they have to do with him? His journey takes him several months. It takes as long as it would take someone to cross the ocean at the speed he’s crossing it, which is more or less a brisk walking speed. Once in Beijing, in Pyongyang, in Moscow, he secrets himself into the deepest, most sensitive layers of these enemy governments. He sees so much, hears so much. He feels like his head is too small to hold all this, but it just keeps filling and filling. He sees how badly the CIA misjudged these powers. Their plans, their capabilities. The CIA assumed these powers were plotting against America. But they aren’t. Mostly they’re just plugging along, trying to keep their heads above water, like everyone else. Finally, when he’s seen and heard everything, he returns. But he doesn’t go east, the way he came, across the Pacific. He keeps going west, through the Mongolian steppe, over the Caucasus mountains, through Europe, across the Atlantic. It’s a much longer route, but after so much time in military and governmental spaces he wants time to decompress. As he goes, he tries to appreciate the beauty of the many vistas. The sight of fields of waist-high wheat waving in breezes. The sound of fishing boats knocking against piers in port towns. He supposes these things are beautiful, but this is more a thought than a feeling. Then he makes the long, lonely ocean crossing. The Atlantic isn’t like the Pacific. The Pacific was blue and warm. The Atlantic is gray and cold. It’s a total slog. The tide seems against him. When he gets back to CIA headquarters, he’s worn out, physically and emotionally. He floats down, down, down, into the bowels of the CIA. There, through a psychic medium, he discloses his enormous supply of military and political intelligence. This happens in the room with the yellow-brown soundproofing panels, the two-way mirror. Only this time there’s someone on the other side of the mirror. He can tell. He watches the medium writing down his words. But because of the spirit divide, she gets a lot of stuff wrong. He tries to correct her, but she bungles some of his corrections, too. He sees it’s no use trying to get everything right. Something strikes him as darkly funny about all this, but he’s not sure what it is. He laughs. The medium jolts in her chair and looks all around. Through the intercom someone asks her what’s wrong. She says it’s hard to explain. Then the guy falls silent. He’s said everything. The medium listens, her pen poised above her notepad. Then she sets her pen down. Gingerly, she lifts a cup of water to her lips. The cup is a styrofoam cup with an abstract pattern of ocean waves running around it. The waves have peaks like the peaks on a lemon meringue pie, only blue. The cup trembles in her hand. The guy realizes listening to him wasn’t easy. It was hard. She seems drained and spooked. He feels bad for putting her through that. He looks at her very closely, suddenly attuned to her many details. She is wearing a rough-knit sweater with horizontal bands of color; turquoise, magenta, green, black. The weave is loose, like the weave on his son’s hacky sack. She is sweating. The beads of her sweat are tiny, and they don’t run down her face. They just stand there, catching the light. She has her eyebrows drawn on in pencil. She has her hair braided in tight rows that have dark brown furrows between them. Here and there she has strung colored beads into her braids. The beads are candy colors; pastel pink, pastel blue, pastel yellow. He finds them surprisingly beautiful. Then the department heads come into the room. They ask her if it’s over. She says she thinks so. They take the notepad from her and review it. He sees the department heads have aged significantly. They’re thinner. Not thin like they lost some weight. Thin like how a t-shirt gets thin after you’ve worn it a long time. He can almost see through them. Then they look all around the room, wondering where he’s standing. To no one in particular they say thank you. Their thanks have the non-specific feeling of a prayer. He tries to tell them they’re welcome. But the medium isn’t listening anymore. She’s looking into her hands. That is the last thing he sees before he leaves this room for good; her hands. The skin on the backs of her hands is so brown. Her hands look so rough and worn, like she’s done a lot of hard work with them. He wonders what her deal is. How she went from manual work to this work. Whether she comes from a family of mediums, or whether she’s the only one. Then he floats out of this room, up, up, up, into the world. He drifts around and around, waiting for a destination to occur to him. He realizes he maybe didn’t think this all the way through. He didn’t think about what next. He’d thought about it for a second, when the IV drip started going and he knew it was for real. He’d assumed when his mission was over, he’d just die. Either the department heads would kill him, or he’d kill himself, or it would just happen. But he’s already dead. He can’t die again. He feels an awful feeling that is more like an utter absence of feeling. He wonders if this is the feeling he will feel from here on out. He is in a park when this feeling hits him. Stricken, he looks around. The park is bounded by a string of maple saplings. One day they will be full-grown maples, as tall as houses. He supposes he’ll be here to see that happen. When he was alive, he dreamed of living forever and getting to see stuff like that. Trees growing. His son growing. The human race getting its act together. But now that he’s here, living it, he wants to die for real and be done with it all. It occurs to him that in lots of ghost stories, the ghost “dies” when it settles some big piece of unfinished business. He wonders if that’s the way this will work or whether those were just bullshit stories. Finally, he drifts “home,” to his old house. He has no specific intentions. He’s not even curious, really. It’s just literally the only place he can think to go. He gets to his house and sees many changes have been made to it. Little changes and lots of them. The shutters are forest green now. And there’s a new mailbox. That’s good. The old one was so busted. By its mere presence the house seems to beckon him inside. He is about to go in by floating through a wall, but he stops himself at the last second. That would be wrong of him. It isn’t his house anymore. He left. He has to take responsibility for that and not try to weasel out of it. Still, he wants a peek inside. Just to see how the house looks. Just to see what his wife and son are up to. So he floats around from window to window, looking in. Some rooms have been rearranged, some haven’t. The fundamental motif of the house is the same; very modern and open, very monochrome. White floors with black shelves, white throw cushions with black buttons and black tassels, black-and-white tile in the kitchen. He goes to his son’s room’s window but the curtains are closed. He puts his ear to the glass but can’t hear anything. Maybe his son is in there, lying on his bed with headphones on, tuning everything out. He hopes so. That’s what he’d do if he was still a part of this world. Then he finds his wife. She’s in the upstairs bedroom. He floated up there effortlessly and now he stands on air just as if it were solid ground. She’s folding laundry. She’s dumped it from the hamper onto the bed, and now she’s folding it. So there are two piles; one rumpled, one folded. He watches her awhile, wondering things vaguely. Does she miss him, does she not miss him, is she happier without him, what. He wishes she would look at him. Then he’d know. But she doesn’t. She can’t. He isn’t even there. Pretty soon his thoughts fade out and then he’s just watching her, waiting. Not for anything in particular. Just the next thing, whatever it is. And the next thing is, she folds the last piece of laundry and comes to the window where he’s looking in at her and pulls the curtains shut. Behind the curtain a light comes on. The sun sets and the moon comes out. Frost grows on the panes of every window, on the leaves of every tree. A chilly wind snaps the flag that’s flying in the next-door neighbor’s yard: Fwip! Fwip! Fwip! And that’s pretty much that.