Short

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.

WORK FROM HOME by Jenn Salcido

June 10, 2024

It’s not looking good for us, Jeremy thinks, as he opens the fridge and peers inside. A small, desiccated head of broccoli, provenance unknown, stinks up the whole place like farts. A pickle jar sits inert, nary a pickle floating inside. A sprig of grapes wilts on its vine. Jeremy shuts the door. “We don’t have any food,” he calls out to Dog, the dog. Dog barks. Jeremy makes a motion with his hands like what is he supposed to do about this, moves to the living room, and commences with his morning fretting routine. First, he backs his body up as far against the wall as he can, jamming his heels against the baseboards. Then he begins to pace. Dog eventually starts following him, whining every so often. The doorbell rings––a jangly, incongruously upbeat tune. Just as he’s about to turn the knob, the thing flings open. Jeremy was sure he had locked it but whatever. “Hi,” Jeremy says, warily eyeing his friend, Morris Beagle. He stands there, quiet, expectant, irritated, all of his usual states. Then he remembers how human people are supposed to act. “Uh, did you want to come in?” “Well, I’m already here, so,” Morris says, shuffling through the door and beginning to dismantle his scarf, coat, driving gloves, mittens, muffler, earmuffs, eye goggles, and so on and so forth, handing Jeremy a raggedy piece of neon paper. “It’s an OPPORTUNITY,” he says, and snatches back the paper almost immediately. “I took THE WHOLE THING so that NO ONE ELSE would get to it first.” “I wasn’t done reading it, Morris.” “Oh, you weren’t reading it,” he scoffs. “Anyway, I can tell you everything you need to know. I’ve researched it. Thoroughly.” Morris ruffles the paper in front of Jeremy’s face, points at some words. He’s standing too close. Jeremy’s stomach growls and he thinks of the empty, farty fridge, and so without really understanding what he’s agreeing to, he says, “I’ll help.” Morris sits down and pats the sofa cushion next to him, wanting Jeremy to join. Jeremy perches as far as he possibly can from Morris. “So I called these people yesterday,” says Morris. “I talked to them more this morning and they’ve sent some onboarding materials to my work email.” “You don’t have a work email, Morris.” “I do,” says Morris. “I do; you just don’t email me there ever.” The room is silent for a moment save the slurps from Dog, who is licking his crotch.“Okay, Morris,” says Jeremy. The flier describes the project as being “in the tech space,” and so Jeremy assumes this is going to have to do with food delivery, transportation, or pornography. None of these things are things that Jeremy would immediately dismiss, but he does have a few questions. “You know Relations.com?” Jeremy nods. He remembers seeing commercials for the service: you spit in a thing, you pay the lab, and then they send you a report about what the spit says. “It’s not that,” says Morris. “What it is is, it’s like that, but it’s for dogs. People like your friend here,” Morris says, motioning to Dog, completely without irony. “They’re just like us. They have chromosomes too.” Morris pauses to laugh heartily at himself, even slaps his knee. Jeremy is starting to feel like maybe this is a pyramid scheme. “Is this a pyramid scheme?” “What? No,” says Morris. “Why would you say that?” “It just seems like you’re trying to give me the hard sell,” says Jeremy. “Nah,” says Morris, and Jeremy can tell from Morris’s complete lack of facial twitching or leg jiggling that he is telling the truth. “I’m just excited about it. Don’t you ever get excited about anything?” Jeremy is quiet while he thinks about this. In short, the answer is probably no. But he really thinks. Inside him there is, as usual, a numbness, a feeling of deletion. “Okay, well, this is a problem for another day,” says Morris, his eyes bugging out in disbelief at the sheer anhedonia hanging in the room. “You might want to start by getting yourself out of this house. This house is unsettlingly beige.” Jeremy blinks, looks around. He’s always lived in this house.“Anyway, so this thing––what happens is, people can send in a small sample of their dog’s blood, and the company will tell you the precise genetic composition of the dog,” says Morris. Jeremy looks at Dog, who looks at Jeremy, who looks at Morris, who looks at Dog. Jeremy can’t remember why he let Morris in, or if he let him in. “We are to help translate these reports generated by the company into layman’s terms, so that people can really have a greater understanding of the precise genetic composition of their dog,” says Morris. “But Morris,” says Jeremy, suppressing a yawn. “We’re not scientists. Did you even go to college? I’m sure you recall that I did not.” “That’s elitist and entirely besides the point,” snaps Morris. “I’m assured by the company that they supply contractors with everything needed to accurately and satisfactorily complete the job,” says Morris, who then arches an eyebrow and waves a hand toward the desktop computer as if offering a kindness, a generosity. A chance. He gawks expectantly at Jeremy. “Well? What are you waiting for?” he asks. Jeremy rolls his eyes again, heaves himself across the room and into a creaky rolling chair set too low to the ground. He feels like a child with Morris towering over him and breathing his login details in his ear in hot whispers. “The username is Morris Beagle,” he says. “The password is Morris Beagle.” What Jeremy finds in Morris’s inbox makes his vision go momentarily blurry. There’s spam, and then there’s whatever is in Morris’s inbox. It is an oscillating galaxy of nonsense so impenetrable that it occurs to Jeremy, for the first time, that maybe Morris is actually some kind of CIA heavyweight and all of his emails are encrypted. What else could it mean that he has 47 unread emails from someone/thing called Hadabadabingbong, all of which have subject lines written purely in Wingdings? “Are you reading my correspondence?” Morris barks, displeased with Jeremy’s lack of discretion. “Don’t even look at that. Don’t think about it and don’t look at it. I want you to open the email at the top.” Jeremy does as he is told, clicking on an email titled “Work From Home! Earn $.”

After Morris leaves, Jeremy walks Dog down a few blocks from their development, stopping every so often to let Dog check and mark his usual spots. Spring is slowly rumbling up from the ground, the rising temperature melting down the dirty snow piles that line the street on the way to Cumberland Farms. Jeremy goes in, gets his usual (a sad approximation of an Italian hoagie). He then floats into the video rental store nextdoor, mournfully eyeing the candy he can’t afford. The plastic smell of the videotapes is so comforting, and he resists the urge to pull a couple cases close and sniff them. He runs his fingers along the spines of the Die Hard films, sighs, and goes back out to Dog. There’s $5 in his checking account; he really needs Morris’s scheme to work out this time. He didn’t really want to quit his job at the supermarket, he thinks, chewing on the hoagie while walking back to the house. He liked it there quite a bit. Not only for the regular paycheck, but for the sense of order inherent to its universe. He remembers walking from the bus stop before his early morning shift––the air so cold and crystalline, it was like the molecules had stopped moving entirely. He remembers how it felt to come in before anyone else was there and to start stocking the place, section by section. Making sure each of the labels faced out on the voluminous array of pasta sauces. Grinding some beans to get the coffee sampling station ready. Each and every task slotted together in the most predictable, pleasant way. “I’m sorry, dude,” said Ron, his manager, when he finally came back to work after getting out of the hospital. He had essentially ghosted, couldn’t bring himself to call in and let them know what was going on. “We filled your spot. You can’t just, like, not come in.” Jeremy had nodded, sort of loosely holding his palms out and looking down at them instead of directly into Ron’s eyes. “I get it,” he said. Jeremy had wanted to tell Ron so many things: how much he needed the job, sure, but also how much he’d liked it. How much he appreciated the easy, weightless interactions with strangers. How much it helped keep the darkness at bay. Jeremy’s temples start to throb, little silvery jellyfish coming in from the side of his vision. He tries to wipe the thoughts of that time from his mind, concentrating instead on his feet in the slush, on Dog’s delicate prance. He strains his thoughts and his body, trying to root himself in the present and down toward the earth. Sometimes when he starts down this path of memories, it’s impossible to come back; he’ll spend days sleepwalking and hollow, his mind forcibly caught in a sinister time warp. Sometimes, he admits to himself, for a little while, it feels good, like scratching a bug bite. But that’s only sometimes.

Morris promised he’d come back a few days later, and now it’s a few days later, and Jeremy hasn’t opened the folders. The mail truck signals that it’s late morning, and finally Jeremy flips open the first folder, looking around the room for some kind of inspiration or assistance. Dog is stomping on his smelly sleeping cushion, curling around and around like an ouroboros. He cannot help Jeremy. Inside each folder, a stapled sheaf of papers awaits some kind of translation. As Jeremy feared, it’s entirely inscrutable: strings of numbers and letters, percentages and probabilities, an occasional bolded set of symbols. He opens the document that he downloaded from Morris’s email, the so-called onboarding information from the company. It’s pretty simple, just a word document with a list of steps. Step 1 is to open the folder. Step 2 is to read the file. Step 3 is to fill in the DNA report template with the findings. Step 4 is a black-and-white sideways smiley face.Jeremy closes his eyes, counts to ten, and tries again to make sense of the paper. He realizes with some relief that, on the second page of each packet, there’s a copy of a questionnaire filled out by each dog’s human. “Your name, dog’s name, dog’s age, breed,” he reads aloud to the room, Dog’s ears perking up at the two mentions of dog. He flips back and forth between the second page and the first, the one covered in a cipher of hard science. Then, manna from heaven: a third page, which is just a printout of one to three photos, some of them even in color, different angles of the dog as chosen by its person. This first packet belongs to a dog named Godzilla, and Godzilla looks to be 100% chihuahua. Jeremy checks the second page to be sure; yes, Godzilla is, in fact, a chihuahua. Jeremy flips back to the third page, holding it close to his face as he squints, trying to discern if there are any subtle traces of other breeds to be found in Godzilla’s countenance. He heard once that all domesticated dogs are descended from the Gray Wolf. He looks into the pictures for evidence of the wolf, looking occasionally over at Dog, a pug mix. Dog is asleep on his cushion, his paws flicking gently back and forth as he loses himself in dreams, probably rolling in something stinky and dead. After what feels like hours of staring into the flattened eyes of Godzilla, Jeremy opens up a second file that he’s downloaded to the desktop, the one called DNATEMPLATEFINAL-FINAL(3).DOC. He is pleased to find it’s pretty basic. He can work with this. He starts by filling in the identifying information on the second page, a small spark of comfort starting to glow inside his heart, one he hasn’t felt since his days stocking cans and shuffling jars. This could be it, he thinks, this could be the thing I do. Buoyed by the notion, he slides through the rest of the data entry for Godzilla, feeling something continue to unclench deep within his body. But then he gets to the part where he’s supposed to populate a table connected to a pie chart, and this is where things get hairy. Godzilla is 100% chihuahua, he thinks again. But when he types “Chihuahua” into one column and “100%” into the other, the pie chart fills in all blue. The full circle of it looks menacing, final. Jeremy wonders how much each well-meaning soul paid for these files. He feels bad for the people on the other end, feels that he owes them some sort of more detailed information. Not just contractually––which, of course, he does––but in the broader, more relational sense. What were they hoping to find, sending in a precious vial of blood from their dog? Jeremy begins to experiment with the table, adding different percentages and breeds. He starts with feasible selections from a pre-set drop down menu in the file: dachshund, beagle, terrier. He futzes with percentages and watches other colors pop into the pie chart, notices the pleasing interplay of bright primary colors as he assigns varying values and breeds. If he wanted to, he sees, he could make a pie cut into four for Godzilla and it would have all of his favorite colors: blue, green, yellow, red. Just then, Jeremy has another idea. He opens up his web browser. Typing “dog” into the search bar, he waits for the slow roll of information to come back from the ether. Once the screen refreshes, he quickly loses himself in a never-ending stream of professional photos of dogs. Minutes pass, then half an hour, and he’s imprinting on the dogs, tilting his head to the side to match theirs. He clicks on one photo, then the next; he clicks through so many photos that when he emerges he feels slightly seasick when he looks around the room, washed ashore in reality. Tom, the next dog in question, is more promising. His photo is a side view, for one, so Jeremy can see more of him. Tom is long and fat, his belly straining towards the ground. His butt has one of those truncated tails, like it was vestigial instead of integral to the composition of the dog’s spine. Tom’s feet splay out comically in front of his low, broad body, almost like the webbed flippers of a duck. His coat is kind of a brindle color and smoother looking than you’d normally expect from a corgi. The head is all wrong, though, Jeremy thinks. Tom has little ears that flop over themselves triangularly, echoed in the striking geometry of the head itself. It is blocky, heavy-looking, like a pit bull or rottweiler. Then a lightning bolt. Jeremy clicks back to his browser and types “corgi” into the search bar. He clicks on a photo. Then he hits print. Then he types in “pit bull.” He clicks on another photo. He hits print again. Aligned with the whirring of the printer, something comes to life inside him. Even Dog notices, lifting his head up from his bedding to watch Jeremy rifle through the desk drawers for some scissors and glue. He makes some quick cuts, then slathers the pieces with glue. Proudly, he arranges them together on the backside of Tom’s photo printouts. It is rough, true, but it works: clearly, Tom was the result of a corgi and a pit bull who had made love. After pushing the pieces around a little bit here and there, and after he is satisfied with the alignment of the head on the body, and after taking a good, long look at the actual photos of Tom, Jeremy opens up another report file and starts typing. His fingers fly with a surety he feels in his very marrow. But then he is confronted by a new issue: the math problem of the pie chart had effectively stopped him in his tracks. Does a dog’s body account for 50% of its composition, the head being the other half? Or is the head merely 25%, due to the relative length of the head versus the body entire? Or should he technically be subdividing more––assigning a percentage to each leg, each paw? The tail? At this thought, Jeremy’s left shoulder starts to twitch. Noticing the twitch, his other shoulder twitches, then the original begins to twitch again, each twitch exponentially reflecting the next twitch and the next. This is a side effect of Jeremy’s medication, one he takes for anxiety, which is then exacerbated by his anxiety, multiplying infinitely. “FUCK,” he screams, pushing himself away from the desk. He was doing so well! Everything that had unclenched within him has gnarled itself up again like ancient tree roots. He shakes his hands loose. He inhales, holds it, and exhales. He looks at Dog, no longer sleeping, up on all fours and alert, the worried pathways of his forehead wrinkles on full display. “I’m sorry, pal,” he said, calling Dog over with a clicking noise. He scratches under Dog’s chin, feels himself release and relax a little when Dog closes his eyes and points his snout up. Jeremy lies down on the floor and tries to affect the effortless cool of a fish in a clear, cerulean sea. But his mind is on another trajectory, sinking towards shipwrecks of impossibility down below. More than anything else, this is what had led to the logical conclusion of the hospital last time: the idea that possibility was beyond him, not necessarily because of any moral failing or inherent weakness, but just because it was in one realm, and he was simply in another. Trying to explain it to the doctor at the hospital, he had likened it to standing in front of a full cupboard of food and being unable to eat, being unable to comprehend the meaning or purpose of food. More than that, even, he felt physically unable to reach into the cupboard, to comprehend the feeling of wrapping his fingers around any one item, much less pulling it down and preparing it. At least this was the closest he could come to making any sense of it, and he could tell from the doctor’s expression that it had not, in fact, made any sense at all. At the conclusion of this thought, Jeremy’s mind clicks into a familiar track, and he is thinking in pictures: the carton of Camels his roommate let him filch from, the woman who left on a Monday looking triumphant and hopeful and returned on a Friday looking like a crumpled paper bag. The ginger ale from the dayroom. The thoughts come faster and faster, the twitch traveling to other extremities. “Are you okay?” Jeremy opens his eyes. The light in the room has changed. He’s not sure how much time has gone by. Dog is in his bed, snout on paws, watching him intently. Morris, above him, peers down. “Yeah,” he croaks, realizing from the cobwebbiness in his throat that he may have actually fallen asleep, his body shutting down as part of a well-oiled dissociation mechanism he’d honed long ago. He gets up slowly, feeling dizzy. “I was just taking a break.” Without his usual machinations, Morris puts down his ever-present briefcase and goes into the kitchen. After a few minutes, he comes back with a glass of water. He opens his briefcase, extracts a small bag of trail mix, and hands it to Jeremy. “Here,” he says, “why don’t you sit down for a little bit and I’ll take a crack at it.” Jeremy is too tired to argue, and slides with relief onto the sofa, appreciating the cool water and the snack. Appreciating Morris. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I thought I had a good thing going, but I got a little hung up on some things.” Morris nods, assessing the papers spread out around the computer. “This is great,” he says, almost softly. “I don’t know what you’re worried about.” Jeremy explains it to him, most of it anyway: the process, the math, the frustration, the lack of possibility. He leaves out the twitch but knows better than to think he can hide it. Morris has been onto him for a long time, not so much about the twitch, but what lies beneath, deep down in Jeremy’s nervous system. Morris has been with him for so long, Jeremy thinks. Morris might be the kindest person he knows. “I think we can solve this,” says Morris in the voice of some primitive authority figure, trying to galvanize himself and Jeremy, potentially also Dog. “I really do.” The clouds (the screensaver is clouds) part as Morris wakes up the machine, his fingers flying with assurance whereas before Jeremy had only ever seen them hunt and peck. Jeremy finishes the crackers and feels a little trickle of life enter the base of his spine, understanding that the future is not entirely out of his grasp. Just for a second. It is enough. He gets up from the couch and hovers behind Morris, watching magic unfold. Morris is searching and zooming and cropping and printing. The high-pitched whine of the printer is getting to be a little too much for Dog, who galumphs out of the room like that’s enough of that. “What are you doing?” Jeremy asks, not in the usual tone reserved for when people ask Morris Beagle what he is doing. Then Jeremy feels as though he is in the company of a secret genius, even though he has no idea what’s happening. Isn’t that how genius is supposed to work, he wonders, thinking about all the movie montages that felt just like this very moment. “I think you’re not looking closely enough,” says Morris. “I don’t mean this as an affront to you or anything, let’s be clear.” Jeremy lets a smile creep across his face. “No, no, never.” “This is what I am proposing.” Morris gathers up the printouts and starts cutting, printer paper clippings flurrying around as he does it. Jeremy watches intently as Morris assembles a jigsaw puzzle with a glue stick: there’s an ear from a French bulldog, another ear from a Boston terrier. A muzzle from a petite German shepherd puppy, the worried eyes of a Vizsla. “This is truly unholy, Morris,” says Jeremy, in awe more than anything else. “I don’t think it’s going to work with the pie chart, either.” “Oh, fuck the pie chart!” “But, like, the pie chart is for the people who are paying us?” Morris waves this off with one hand like it’s truly some insane suggestion; the other hand stays on the mouse clicking print, print, print. “If they don’t see that this is a million times better than a pie chart, I don’t really want their money.” “I kind of do, though,” says Jeremy, thinking less of the food and more of all the Die Hard tapes he had to leave behind in the store. “We have to think bigger.” Morris smiles at Jeremy. Jeremy returns the smile, gestures at the screen, invites Morris to continue. There is no twitch left in Jeremy’s body now, only readiness for what comes next.

A FINAL AND PERSONAL PRINCIPLE by Sean Cavanaugh

June 6, 2024

Connor’s room had big windows and blinds with strings that touched the floor, and which were always drifting unevenly, a little to the left or to the right, halfway up or basically closed, but always open slightly because of an interceding object or a crease in the PVC, so the sunlight was partial and unfulfilled. There were a few old trophies on his dresser and a fishbowl, forever bubbling, with two statuettes and a little red beta. In front of the bed was a large TV, and to the side was a small leather couch where he’d sit with his friend Neil. Tonight, Neil brought Girl Scout cookies. He said they were selling them off of a table outside the Stop & Shop, that there was a Salvation Army guy, but he didn’t stand a chance. “Cookies,” he said. Then he laughed. Connor asked if he’d seen anything good lately, and he said, “Different Chinese movies.” He said I’ll show you later, then they got into the cookies, which they ate thoughtlessly and with little dialogue, and which they finished in a few minutes. Fuck, they said.Neil asked if they could step onto the balcony for a smoke, then they did. The snow made things look matted out and finished. Connor’s backyard, really his dad’s backyard, had a bunch of evergreens in a circle in one corner, and whenever it snowed, it looked like they were guarding something obscure. He never mentioned it, but he actually did trudge to the trees one winter, not even when he was that young, to lie in the middle and look up. It was generative, like resting on the stigma of a big white flower, and he decided then that something could enter his life and change him from the inside. He said he liked the snow in their town, and Neil said it snowed other places, too. After they finished, Neil washed his hands and Connor didn’t, and they sat on the couch and watched a movie that Neil had in mind, one he thought they’d both like.Neil picked the movie for the same reason he always did: because he had stronger opinions about movies and, though neither acknowledged it, because he had a forceful way with his friend, a tendency to assert himself that didn’t show up elsewhere in his life. At one point, Connor noticed that he’d been tracking his time with Neil’s obsessions, like a mnemonic device—That happened when he was into Gundam, so I was working at Bagel One. The phases lasted about two years and revolved around movies, games, books, shows, anything that he could consume at night then go on his phone and read the context, build taxonomies. Privately, Neil was acting in total earnest, driven by a zeal for the new and a desire for knowledge, deep and wide. Connor understood that, and tried his best to engage with his friend’s interests, even to the point of occasional revelation, but he didn’t like feeling coerced.Tonight’s movie, for instance, was a Taiwanese actioner from the 1960s, and Neil spent the runtime explaining the Republic of China and the significance of the tropes used, eventually settling into a low-volume prattle of actors’ names and their other famous roles. Connor talked too, making jokes about the costumes and references to other movies, and Neil would grunt in assent or bob his head left and right, indicating a contention. They ate snacks from downstairs and hit Connor’s dab pen, and for long stretches, they just enjoyed the movie. At one point something happened, and Connor said holy shit, and Neil said fuck, I know. Neil had been worried to see how the night would go and was surprised to be laughing as much as he was. He thought Connor seemed better than usual: he’d been very distant lately, and he’d never been good with his phone. It was stressful to know that if Connor was mad, he’d never say it—he’d just leave. After the movie, they ate ice cream in the kitchen, where they had to be quiet, and Neil asked if he’d applied for jobs or anything. Connor pulled the spoon out of his mouth and frowned, then made eye contact: He was moving. Neil asked where, and he said Saint Paul. “But we live in the South Shore.” Connor grabbed two glasses from the pantry and filled them with water. Neil asked why, and he said he met a girl online. Wasn’t that a bit rash? Connor didn’t think so. Neil pulled a chair out from the table and sat down, then traced his finger around his cup. He asked Connor if he had a job waiting for him, and he didn’t, but he was convinced he could find one because he had someone who believed in him. “Unbelievable,” said Neil. He’d been unemployed for five years, but he’d just go out there and find work. Did he realize how stupid that sounded? Connor said he’d apply to gas stations and coffee shops, that one benefit of underqualification is the ubiquity of bad options. “So that’s that?”“Come on,” said Connor.Neil told him not to call when his fish died, then walked out of his life forever. He didn’t think it would last that long; he knew he wouldn’t reach out, but he figured Connor would. Still, he was wrong about the fish, which he thought would die within the month, and which would actually live for two more years in Saint Paul. He started buying fish for Connor when they were twenty-three because he thought it would help him build responsibility, and eventually self-respect. The program was a disaster: they flushed whole schools over the years, from goldfish to clownfish and blue tang, purely because Connor couldn’t muster the discipline, and because he eventually switched to overfeeding, unable to moderate himself long enough to keep something alive. Whenever they died, though, he would FaceTime Neil during the flush, always really hurt, sometimes on the verge of tears. Once, he paused for a moment to ask why he couldn’t do it, if there was something wrong with him, if it was obvious to everyone else and they just wouldn’t say. The move to Saint Paul, disastrous though it would be, marked a milestone in his pet stewardship. Eventually, he would get a dog. After that night, they would exist in each other’s lives as a bad possibility. Neil would block Connor on social media to keep himself from stalking his accounts, which he did for the first few months, and which gave him a feverish thrill. Connor would have regular nightmares where Neil reached out to him, a call he would have to answer, and which would fundamentally upset his life. After he left, he saw what Neil did to him: he told him what he was capable of (more than this, man), what was beyond his means (college, most women), what to be proud of (he could draw), and where to point his shame. It felt good to be who his friend thought he was, even if that meant affirming a cruel assumption. One night, after a week of abstinence, he caved and bought cigarettes. He called his friend, truly despondent, and was treated to warm, homely love. “I get it, man. It’s fucking hard.” Smoking on his deck that night, he wondered how it would have gone if he’d quit for real. No phone call, no affirmation. Neil would still smoke himself, he’d just be weirder about it.And Neil was already weird about it. It was the week after graduation, the week he moved back home, that he sniped at Connor most directly. They were at a townie bar, The Spout, that was a little further out from the rest, a little shittier, and much less likely to spawn unwanted high school acquaintances. Connor started going there when his dad stopped inviting him to the Elks, and since then, he’d gotten kind of good at darts. That night, he beat his friend handily and they ducked out to smoke. Neil grimaced, then asked if he felt bad for getting him started. Connor paused; it hadn’t crossed his mind. He’d never pressured him to do anything, and they were teenagers when they picked up the habit. Still, Connor gave him access. Left to his own devices, Neil may have lost interest before he reached eighteen, and his addiction might not have followed him, as it would, to the end of his life. Connor felt himself tearing into doubles, triples, incompatible co-parents of the truth. He felt staticky and nauseous, and he didn’t know it yet, but he felt resentment, too.“Sorry man,” he said, “It’s one of those things.” Really, Connor thought some vices waited for people. They could dodge them for decades, maybe forever, but they knew who they were, and they would always be convenient. It seemed less likely that he got Neil into cigarettes or Neil got him into weed. The causal tellings got things backwards: their mistakes were always ahead of them, tied to their waists, pulling them into each other’s lives. If they got the impression, which they shared by the end, that they were engaged in a tug-of-war, then they were correct, but they were wrong about the sides: they were pulling together, and they were losing. Neil would start reading history in a decade, and would be comforted by the way it could ignore the will. In a movie or a novel, disaster is an incitement to life, but in history, it doesn’t have to be anything. Resentments go untested, addictions go unbeaten, the rare big bads leave craters that don’t fill in. The night of the confrontation, Connor bought him a beer and they made up. Connor didn’t get his fatalism from Neil, though. He got it from his dad, and it was his dad who kept it around. The woman who brought him to Saint Paul lost interest after two months, then he was alone except for his dad, who called weekly. When he heard about the girl, he said, “That’s about right.” When he heard about the roaches or the heatless winter nights: Fucking management, fucking assholes. Connor didn’t have much to report, though, so he mostly listened. His aunts were always getting sick, his uncles gambling and buying new cars. Grandma was mad because someone made a comment about her dog, but they couldn’t apologize because she wouldn’t say who it was. When his mother died, she left his father a second, messier family, and if he abused them to his son, it belied a real gratitude. He had a drive to observe others, a greed for behavior and judgment, judgment and acceptance. She wouldn’t need the surgery if she went to the doctor in the first place. But that’s your grandma. He loved them the way he could love anyone, Connor excluded: a mocking, back-slapping kind of love that delighted in failure because it affirmed his suspicions. With his son, though, he had all of the tolerance and none of the judgment. He loved him for the obvious reasons.It was for those reasons that, when Neil left for college, Connor’s dad embarked on a project. His son, once a laid-back and observant child, then a skilled appreciator of life, wasn’t even gaming anymore. Instead, he was on his phone or just lying there, vaping. One day, in a tone that never sounded convincing coming from him, he enlisted his help: You don’t have a choice. He was building a pizza oven in the backyard, and because of a recent surgery, he needed someone to handle the bricks. He would build the wood frame and machine the half-blocks, but Connor would deal with the adhesive, the laying, the leveling. At first, Connor was happy to have a to-do. He was bored, deep-tissue bored, even before his friend left. After, he was just material, an unmixed pile that would stick around until something better came along. (Later, pushed to failure in a Minneapolis pizza kitchen, he would remember his weeks in bed, the way he spread outward while time drew to a point.) He took to laying bricks with a newfound conviction, something real and anxious that had been missing from his life.Then it got hard. September is a summer month in Massachusetts, and he’d always stayed indoors if he could help it. “That’s a sunburn,” his dad said, “It’s a new look on you.” Because the project started with pavers, which were heavier than bricks, and which his dad dumped on the front lawn, his first task was a series of back-tearing sprints that muffled his ambition and brought home the possibility of actual, physical failure. At that point, while his dad cut some of the stones, he laid them in a small, open square, staggering their placement to ensure integrity and correcting their alignment with a wooden dowel. Between the stones, he spread landscape adhesive in ugly swirls, and after a few layers, he began to enjoy the way the bottle gripped his hand, the resistance it put up, and its give. That evening, when his dad checked his angles and he placed the cornerstone, he felt exhausted, but refreshingly so, more like something spent than gone dry. He could probably do the same thing tomorrow.His dad joked: Good job with the warm-up. Soon, they both had beers, and they were sitting on the patio, stifled by the cooling air. “Listen,” said his dad. Years ago, he had a friend at the firm: he did M&A, and his buddy did wealth management. They would lunch together and talk about the people they hated, the handies and sleights that made up their world, the soft basis of material life. Sometimes, he told his friend he’d had enough. Don’t you say it, his friend would tell him, don’t you leave me; so he didn’t. Connor’s dad stayed on long after there was anywhere to go, enduring rubbery, overcooked performance reviews and whole-team emails directed right at him. He managed the hunger of bosses that were five years, ten years, twenty younger than himself, and watched Netflix originals so he’d pick up on their references. At one point, they brought in a consultancy, and he realized that, if he had to defend his position, he would decline to comment. He wasn’t laid off, just moved around. Then his friend left for China.“Oh my God, I could have killed him.” But he didn’t. The day he got the news, his friend swaggered to his desk, rapped the edge with one hand, then led him to the elevator and down the street to ‘their’ café. The hostess told them to sit anywhere, and they laughed because they had a table. Their presence had become a joke, the way “how’s it going” becomes a joke after months, or how anything becomes a joke after years. “Nothing good in Worcester?” His friend shook his head: The offer was perfect. As he was now, he couldn’t imagine a better life than he had in Massachusetts. His wife was an angel, his kids were very happy, and his friendship with Connor’s dad felt like a final and personal principle. He wouldn’t always be this way, though, not even in a few months. Obviously, his surroundings would be different, but he saw something other than that. “Arnold,” he said, “The scale.” He set his jaw and rocked his head back and forth. It had been over for a while, Connor’s father knew that, but he would think of that moment for years to come. The night they stopped talking, Neil showed Connor Dragon Inn, a martial arts epic about a Ming dynasty eunuch who murders his enemies’ children. The eunuch trope struck him as odd, and with further viewing became “funny,” a reminder that he was watching a movie from another country. A decade later, when he started reading again, he read a little about China, then bought a book about eunuchs, which he read over a few days, and which would inform how he thought about people in time. The practice of castration was litigated throughout the Ming dynasty, but the station of the eunuch stuck around, and even exhibited a capacity for expansion. Even as the state enforced bans on non-official castrations, people cut themselves or their children, convinced it was the only option for advancement, or the best one available. At one point, twenty thousand self-made eunuchs mobbed the capital demanding work, and when they were rejected, enough killed themselves that the emperors started hiring the remainder. Neil liked that story. He liked how something built to defeat itself could change face and propagate, expand for generations. He liked that a practice, once a stand-in for death, lived for millennia, and he liked that it was dead now, ready to be studied. Neil felt that comfort when he thought about Connor, but especially when he thought about one particular memory, one of their really fine days together. The summer before his junior year, one of the few times he’d ever been grounded, Connor broke him out and they went driving in the mountains. It was late afternoon by the time they got there, so they drove through huge sloping shadows and looked at the valleys and the brightness above, and they smoked cigarettes out the windows and played shitty music very loud. He told Connor almost the entire plot of Evangelion, and he actually seemed to blow his mind. “So is she like…” She’s his mom, dude. At one point, they saw a hawk, and they both said, “Fuck, a hawk,” which they meant in earnest, but which they repeated as a joke, alternating their tone and accent to make the other laugh. The river below looked pleasant and blue, but there was no way to get down, so they just looked without mentioning it and drove along.Eventually, they pulled over to a rec area with some picnic tables and a good view. Connor grabbed a frisbee from his back seat, and they played catch for a while, lobbing big tosses and “weird ones,” diving for catches and twirling the disc on one finger. Sometimes, Connor would throw it straight and Neil would clap his hands in a great whooshing arc, slamming the plastic between his palms with his legs planted a little further than shoulder-width apart. Sometimes, Neil would throw it straight into the sky and Connor would shout, “DEFCON KICK,” and kick it out of the air. It was rare that Connor felt truly athletic, but he did here, jogging to catch the disc and throwing it with style. He felt like he was better at things when Neil was around, like there were areas he could learn from him, and opportunities to shine. They tossed the frisbee until it turned dusky and they started getting eaten. Connor shook his legs off and yawned, then grabbed their camp chairs and started to pack the car.“No but watch this,” said Neil, peeling off to climb a nearby oak. He hugged the trunk at a fork near the ground, then hefted himself up, scrambling for footholds while he swung into a straddle, then a crouch, then he chose the thickest branch and put his belly on the leaves. “Cigarettes,” he said, and Connor tossed them. He kicked his legs and took in the sky, a white pane splotched with color, nighttime settled at the bottom like chocolate syrup. There were birds up there, and clouds, and he could watch it all spill over mountains and into the valley, the water, the flood of life invisible from above. He pictured himself soaring down, cheeks puffed with wind, interminably set on the original source. He blew smoke down at Connor, and it all came back at his face. “Fucking asshole,” said Connor, but Neil just laughed and turned to lean back. Then he felt a crack in the wood and fell twenty feet to the ground. Connor said fuck, fuck, and put a hand behind Neil’s head, the other on his chest, and tried to help him breathe. He was croaking, trying to tell him something, something that wouldn’t come out: I just, I just, I just. Connor grabbed water from the car, and when he handed it over, Neil put an arm around him and smiled. He was grateful and wincing, and there was blood between his legs, where the branch was. Later, when he was able to talk, he didn’t want to say much. They drove back, and Neil’s parents gave them hell; they didn’t expect this from him, a family is built on trust, if he thought he was grounded before, he had another thing coming. It was only the next day, when Connor was cleaning his car, that he saw the stain on his seat and wondered if something more serious had happened.