The Murder Ballad

Sometime around the beginning of the decade, a song appeared inside my head and kept going. It was not a song I recognized, nor could I discover where I might have picked it up. I have never been a musical person. If there is music playing in a public place, such as a gas station, or a fast-food restaurant, rarely do I notice it unless someone points it out, and who is there, generally speaking I mean, to point it out? So, it is possible I heard this song at some point without noticing I heard it, since there was no one nearby to point it out; and that I absorbed it, I suppose, so thoroughly that it seemed to appear fully formed one day in my head near the beginning of this decade, which is now coming to a close. But I have not been able to discover the source of the song, nor any traces of its lyrics appearing in the world, if so. It is a mournful song. It has not changed its shape in any recognizable way in any of the years since it first appeared in my head. It tells the story of a young man and a young woman walking along the riverbanks of a town I do not recognize. The young man is described as being of a “wild and roving eye.” The young woman’s hair is described as “flaxen,” which is to say, like flax, a detail that supports the song’s prior existence somewhere outside of my own mind, since I have very little knowledge or personal experience concerning flax, nor could I even say what it looks like, beyond having a color at times ascribed to hair. They are described as “in love, each with t’other,” and the song goes so far as to specify that the young man “loved her more than life itself.” Whether they are speaking as they walk along the riverbank, or whether they are walking in silence, we do not know. In the morning they will find her by the riverbank, “her throat cut ear to ear.” The song is composed of forty-four verses; the first dozen describe the couple as they walk along the riverbank; the next dozen describe the town, in the distance, telling us of the activities of the baker, the miller, the washing-woman (although what relation do these have with the couple described?); the subsequent dozen verses describe, in long detail, the young woman’s murder. The remaining verses, eight in total, are devoted to the discovery of her body and, briefly, the young man’s surrender and execution. What I do for work isn’t important. I sit at a desk during the day. At times I put something into the computer that will change someone’s life, somewhere far off and obscured from me, often for the worse. Other times I talk on the phone. More and more I find myself humming to myself, though I try not to, because I am always humming the same song, and I worry that others, whatever others are around me often enough to hear my humming, might find its sameness distressing. Often, as you can imagine, I have wished for the song to change. If only to give me some relief. It is not a hallucination; that is, I do not “hear” the song in any sense outside of my own head. Still, it is insistent. I have been to see a psychiatrist, though I do not believe in psychiatrists, or rather do not believe in psychiatry, the science of it, I mean, though I allow that there are many things in the world I do not know. But the psychiatrist was no help. He asked whether I was having problems sleeping at night, and then several visits later he asked whether I was still having problems sleeping at night. I have never slept very well, though this, I am positive, has no bearing on the song, which appeared in my head at the beginning of the decade, although my difficulties sleeping stretch back much further than that, to an event which I am not proud of, which I will not describe. I have at times, as an experiment, attempted to will the words to come out differently, to rewrite the song, at first in significant ways, changing the actions of the young man or the young woman, once even attempting to “save” her from her fate; then later, contenting myself with trying to modify the song in its details, changing, for example, the word “flaxen” to “brown.” This has been entirely without success. The words of the song, as well as its notes, have proven immutable; although not being of a musical inclination, I know little of notes, and, having a bad ear, have not been able to hum the song sufficiently well, for example, to my psychiatrist, for him to tell me whether the song is in A or A minor or C, a question in which, in any case, he did not seem particularly interested. For a time, I wondered if the song was prophetic, if it was a warning, that in the future I might fall in love and then subsequently carry out the horrible acts described in the song. I would like to fall in love. Though I am no longer a young man, and was not, strictly speaking, a young man when the song first appeared in my head, now almost nine years ago, or ten, though I was of course younger than I am now; but I was not even then as young as the man in the song, and in any case I do not recognize either the town or the riverbanks described. Increasingly, however, I find myself interested not in the young man’s actions, the motives for which remain a mystery to me, and which I suspect will remain forever mysterious, but in the details of the town, which goes about its day in ignorance of the murder about to take place just beyond its borders: the church bells ringing out the hour, the half-hour, the quarter; the clattering of horses and carts; the baker, measuring out his grain; the miller, milling it; the washing-woman huffing as she hangs her clothes, wiping sweat from her face, who surely was once as young as the young woman described in the preceding verses and whose hair might even once have been reasonably described as “flaxen,” and who once had, surely, the same sorts of hope for the future as the young woman now walking with her lover along the riverbank, and, who can say?, perhaps like me holds fast to these hopes still.

The Remaining Child

He had a dream that one of his sons died. This even though, outside of the dream, his son was an only child. In the dream, he and his remaining child talked about the lost son, what it meant for the still-living son’s brother to be dead. They mourned together, each in his own way, the father, for example, by looking at photographs of his two sons together at the lake house their family owned in the dream (which may have been a lake house the father had once visited when he was a boy), the remaining son by placing trucks or blocks on the now-empty bed of his brother, as though attempting to include the missing child in his play. Though it was not clear, in the dream, how the dead child had died, the father had the sense it had to do with something he, the father, had overlooked; and this mistake and its outcome had introduced into the father’s life now the understanding that, though he could be sure of never making that precise mistake again, having experienced the worst of its possible consequences, there might exist some other mistake, equally minor, equally disastrous, which he could not foresee but which threatened at any moment to take away his remaining child. The surviving son, in the dream, was bookish and quiet, which did not describe his son in real life at all, though he had other qualities which the father recognized: a certain impulsiveness, an inability to modulate the speed or direction of his body such that he was always, without meaning to or even realizing it, bumping into things, knocking items off tables, getting tangled up in legs; a gentleness, if not of action then of spirit, which gave one the sense that it would never occur to the boy that he could hurt others, or would want to; a love, which surely could describe many boys but which nevertheless seemed to the father unique in its particulars to his son, of trucks or anything truck-adjacent. In the dream the father tried, and failed, to comfort the remaining son by explaining that somehow what had happened to the missing child would not happen to him; but his remaining son was not afraid, as it turned out, about the possibility of his own death, of which he was perhaps not yet able to conceive, but was terrified instead that the father, too, would disappear, a fear which the father found himself unable to console or dismiss, realizing, as he did, that he would eventually have to awaken, leaving the remaining child behind in the dream. And so he told him instead a story of a father who dreamed he had two sons, one of whom died, a loss which naturally affected him and his surviving dream-son greatly; and this dream was so vivid, the father said, that when he awoke, as he finally had to, he continued throughout his life to feel the loss of his child, never sure, however, whether the child whose loss had so affected him upon awakening was the son who had died in the dream, or the one who continued to live in the dream but not outside of it.

When the last cow died was the last time the family was all together. The cow had been moaning into the roof of the barn. The boy put his hands over his ears and asked the father to shut her up.

The cow laid down in the field one day when all the others stayed out grazing. The next day she refused to leave the barn. And days after, she sang her hurt to the rafters.

The father had cleaned between the claws of the hooves. He’d found field stones stuck between them and pried them out. It didn’t help her want to get up.

The boy stood over the cow. He felt her breathing into his shins. It slowed enough where he thought she might not breathe the next breath until she did. Then her breath hurried and thrashed within her snout, not knowing whether to breathe in or breathe out.

The cow’s eye looked at him the last time and closed with some calm. The barn smelled different to him ever since.

Announcing the death made him feel like he was part of it, but it didn’t hurt him as much as it made him feel taller. He looked up to the window to see if his mother already knew.

The father would need the neighbor to help when a cow was lost but he told his kids they were old enough to help him put it into the ground. He dropped three shovels when he said this and his wife walked out from the house.

The mother’s hands blocked the sun from her eyes. She wore a blue that her dress stopped at her knee. It was light like the sky was but if darkened in the river. Her daughter followed behind close enough to touch to the fabric.

In the barn was the leather apron hanging on a nail. The mother tapped it with her fingernails. In front of the cow, she held her hands behind her back. The daughter hitched her arms within the circle that the mother made. The son, with a shovel resting on his shoulder, watched them watching what the cow had become from when he was watching it before. He asked his mother how it happened that it died. The mother laid down on the chest of the cow and said she’d find out as soon as she could. The brother and sister crawled under their mother’s arms and they stared up at the barn ceiling, just as the cow had moments before.

The father took an axe to a square of land beyond the fencing. The only way the cows leave the farm was through sale or death. He took stones from the dirt and put them in his pockets. There would be no milk drunk on a dead cow day. He liked to take the brandy out and have too much of it while throwing stones into the river.

The mother felt the chest harden behind her head. She got up and got the kids to get up and she put on the leather apron. In a toolbox that was kept upstairs, she took out tools to open up the cow. She showed her children how big a heart can be. She showed her children how lungs fill up with breath. She showed them the infection at the hoof that caused the cow to die.

The backs of the children’s heads were bloody from the mother hugging them close. She dug her knuckles into the cow’s neck like she liked to do when they were showing a pulse. She hung the apron back on the wall on its nail. She walked back to the house, swiping red across her hips when she swung her arms past her blue dress.

The grazing cows watched them dig. The father with his heavy shovel fulls, the daughter with less, the brother with less than her. The father, when the hole was deep enough, told the children to join him at the river. They copied how their father splashed river water on his arms and rubbed the coldness into his muscles. The father did the same to his neck and back.

The field stones in the father’s pockets looked different enough from the river stones he sat on. He emptied them into a pile to throw them into the river. He’d pass one to his daughter and to his son. They splashed the same no matter who threw them. The father passed the brandy bottle to his daughter and allowed her one sip. She tried to make as little face as her father did when he took a sip. The son reached for the bottle too. The father said maybe the next cow. Then he wiped some off his chin after too big a sip and wiped it across his son’s lips.

The son thought how a disease can get into your hoof, how there must be a cut. It must get through the broken skin. Then it goes up and makes your lungs stop holding air. Makes your heart too tired then to beat.

The sister walked ankle-deep into the river and dunked her head, cleaning off the dead cow blood her mother had hugged into her. Her brother followed in to do the same, stepping carefully to avoid the sharp river rocks.

The father told the children to run on before him to gather the tarp to drag the cow from the barn. He took a big sip from the bottle and threw the last stone. He’d be throwing dirt on a dead cow until sundown and his bedroom would smell too much like death for him to get a good night’s sleep.

What they were doing they said was breeding puppies who would stay puppies forever, which I had mixed feelings about. Which I was ELATED about when I first texted my boyfriend, but was also in my gut unsure about because Black Mirror. I had just enough money saved from a jewelry commission, though, so I basically told myself to stop overthinking. Puppies are puppies. I drove upstate with my bf (Mikey) to pick up my Everlasting Dog. All the while he was grumpy (jealous). My chosen puppy was a female—gray, five pounds, with brown eyes, pointy ears, and a tail like a lion—and I named her Kim Kardashian. She was pretty + smart—she would hop up on the kitchen stool and press my blender ON with her nose (not easy)—and she looked into my face when I made kissy sounds and said her name—"Kim Kardashian”—or if I said her name in any context, like, "KK, did you have an accident?" she would look at me then lick my face. Then all was forgiven. She scratched at my bedroom door when Mikey slept over, which he hated. I started letting her sleep between us anyway. Because she was perfect. When Kim learned to wink, I was proud. Around that time, Mikey got “mysterious” sex warts and I told him we were broken up. I spent every night holding Kim and telling her about my day on the floor, what I’d sold, who I’d met. I didn’t tell her that Mikey called me Kim Kardashian in bed. I’d thought he would forever, but I’d had mixed feelings about that. Kim watched me talk and eventually laughed when I said something funny. She did. She laughed. When Kim started whining for a second daily Puppuccino, I gave in, as pricy as they were. When she began to walk on her hind legs, I decided to apply lipstick to her thin mouth. She was only a baby, but she held still and let me do it. I said collagen injections if she was good. My boss saw her photo and said I could bring her to the store. My sales picked up, because Kim enjoyed wearing doll dresses. We had six months. When Kim convulsed and died in her sleep, I assumed she could be revived. I called the breeders over and over while I cradled her in her blankie. Because puppies shouldn’t die. I left her body in the park near a tree that she peed on before she started using a toilet. Seven years later, I was divorced, working as a cashier at a deli, and stepping outside for a smoke—that’s when she came back to me. I was older looking, I know, while she looked dirty but the same, if not even more puppy-like than before. She licked my cold nose. Someday we would laugh together about everything. I was so relieved some things stay the same that I straight up licked her back.

Here’s how it works. You save your money. Not in your sock drawer, that’d be stupid. It’d be the first place they’d look. If they suspected—even for a second—that you had something planned. It’s a cliché, for fuck’s sake. Be smart about it. Keep it in the air conditioning vent. Keep it in the cabinet full of plates too fancy for them to ever actually use or the gorgeous piano too expensive to touch. Maybe in the hole behind the smoke detector, but no. What if they change the battery? What if they find drywall dust on their pristine hardwood floor?

Get more than you think you’ll need. A couple hundred, at least. Not counting what you’ll use for the bus ticket. Collect coins you find behind vending machines. Ones and fives you manage to palm when it’s your turn to pass the offering plate, mouthing curses. One time even a twenty.

You’ll be so happy you’ll hum all night. A melody to keep you company in that coffin-sized room. Music makes things bearable.

It won’t be enough, though. Know that going in. It’ll never be enough and you can’t let that stop you. Later is another word for never. Now. It has to be now. When they and the other congregants descend on that diner after Sunday service, lean over. Whisper that you have to use the bathroom. Wait for the begrudging grunt of permission. Fight the urge to drift toward the jukebox. Quickly. Quietly. Using the hostess as cover. Ease yourself toward the door.

Don’t stop walking. Not until you round the corner. That’s when you run.

The bus isn’t going to take you all the way but it will take you close enough. If you stick to the plan. If you aim for the heart of the mountains like a bullet. If you remember which town you’re supposed to get off in. You can hitchhike the rest of the way. Dangerous, sure, but that’s why you’ve got a pocketknife tucked under your shirt.

What do you tell the guy who finally rolls to a stop? Not a lot. Not anything, if you can help it, which you can’t, because he asks. Asks what’s a kid like you doing all the way out here in the boonies? Headed up to the lake? You got family up there? That where your parents are?

Don’t answer ‘yes,’ in case he’s the kind of person who knows everyone living up there. Or the type to insist on driving you to where you say your house is. Someone who’d walk you up the driveway. Maybe expecting to be praised for his selflessness. Maybe curious about the kind of people you belong to.

Don’t answer ‘no,’ in case he’s the other kind. The type who might be trying to see if anyone’s expecting you. If anyone will worry when you don’t show up. If you’ll freeze up and keep quiet while the car slides off the main road and down a dirt path, slithering towards a place that only he knows about.

Say you’re meeting friends. You’re renting a cabin together. Maybe a couple wave runners or fishing rods.

It’s too early in the year for wave runners or fishing rods. Too windy. Too cold. It’s a bad plan, which is why it’s a good lie. People are always willing to imagine you’re stupid. Always happy when you prove them right. Try not to let it bother you. Not when you’re this close. Slouch down in your seat while that superior fucking smile crosses his face. He’s picturing it. You and your imaginary friends. Bored and miserable. Shivering and eaten alive by mosquitos.

Reach over quickly. Before he can stop you. Before he knows what’s going on. Turn on the radio and flood the car with music. Music makes things bearable.

Here’s how it works. There are hollow towns like this all over. Places where dark houses loom gigantic out of the pines. Set few and far apart on switchback roads over the water. Owned by people too busy to ever use them, except for one week in July and another in December. During those times you’ll have to figure something out. Every other day, though. Every other day, this place belongs to you.

People keep keys in obvious places. Under welcome mats. Fake rocks. The caps of lawn lights. And there are always second-story windows. Eaves angled low and steep for when the snow comes. Good for climbing. Half the time, you don’t even have to jump.

If people weren’t so stupid, it wouldn’t be so easy to do any of this. If people weren’t so cruel, you wouldn’t have to do it at all.

Don’t turn on the lights. Don’t open any curtains. Let your eyes adjust to the dark or find a flashlight if you have to. There’s always one somewhere. Under a sink, maybe. In one of the kitchen drawers.

While you’re down there, pillage the freezer. There are canned goods in the cupboards. Stale snacks in the pantry. Liquor. Somewhere. Sometimes on an old-fashioned bar-cart in the living room. Sometimes hidden under a bed or at the back of a closet.

Make it yours, because all of it is. As much as it is anyone’s. The framed pictures on the end tables—always variations on the same people, squinting against the sunlight and pretending to smile. The heavy boots and jackets you find in the mud room. The board games with pieces missing. The crucifixes on the wall. Sometimes with writhing, tortured figures on them, most of the time just plain. You can try not to look at them. You can try not taking them down and burning them in the firepit out back after dark. You can try as much as you want. Some things are too hard to resist.

Here’s how it works. You can’t go out during the day. Not without risking somebody seeing you. There are still locals. Year-rounders by the lake, surviving from one tourist season to the next. You can’t go out in the evening either. The sound of someone stalking through the night would raise alarms. Dusk is your time. The androgynous dark, when everything’s drenched in bruise-blue light and cut to pieces by shadows. Nobody driving down the road could say for certain you’re not somebody else. Someone who belongs here. Someone who belongs.

Through the gap in the trees, you can see the tumor of lights down by the shore. If you move your hand up, you can blot them out of existence. Then it’s just you, alone in the universe. Nobody looking at you. Nobody telling you what you are. This is your idea of heaven—empty.

Back at whichever house you’ve picked for this evening, sprawl on the couch in a stranger’s bathrobe. Work your way through the DVDs in the entertainment center. Through their home videos after that. It’s what you’d expect. Birthday parties. Weddings. Some private things that make you blush in spite of yourself. Some secret things that make you sick. A reminder. Why people aren’t worth the effort. Why people aren’t worth the risk.

Spend nights in an enormous bed, carried off by the music on a radio. Voiceless music. And the wind sighing through the branches outside. The insect chorus. Masturbate to the Greek statues in an art book you find. Sleep with your shoes on, in case you need to make a run for it. Except for the nights when you’re certain you’re safe. Or mostly certain. And there are more and more of those.

Here’s how it works. The days grow warmer. The night sky fills up with stars. You let yourself stay out later. Creeping across backyards. Vaulting over fences. Racing your shadow down the moonlit sidewalk for no reason except that you can. You migrate to a new house on a new street. One with a piano. A piano in tune, which should’ve been a warning. And a shower. A shower stocked with sweet-smelling soap, which should’ve been a warning as well. But there’s a record player too. Crate after crate of vinyls.

You play them quietly at first. Then louder, when you sit at the piano and try to teach yourself to play along. Then louder still, so you can hear it from the living room, where there’s a decanter of something sweet and burning, and crystal glasses, and in a live-laugh-love font on the wall, the words: Without music, life would be a mistake.

You don’t hear the sound of the car outside. The footsteps on the driveway. The key that turns in the door.

Beethoven saves you. There’s a poster of him over the fireplace. A reflection in the glass that you catch mid-pour.

Spin around. See a man in the entryway, staring at you with wide, watery eyes. Short. Pale. Wearing a Hawaiian shirt open to his belly. Clutching a baseball bat in his trembling hands.

Run.

Fling your glass at him. Miss wildly. Hear it shatter against the wall. The stranger’s high-pitched shriek as you rush at him, trying to get past him, trying to get to the door.

Duck right when he swings his bat. Fling yourself up the stairs. Scramble on all fours as your pocketknife falls out of your waistband, goes clattering down the steps.

Make it to the top. Down the hall. Into the room you’ve been staying in. Into the bathroom. He’s right behind you. Slam the door shut. Lock it.

Wait for the handle to violently twist. Wait for the door to buck in its frame as the stranger takes his bat to it. Wonder why he doesn’t as you sink down to the tiled floor, still wet from this morning’s shower. Don’t say a word. Don’t make a sound. Listen to him panting outside. Wheezing. Then his voice, delicate and soft, working its way through.

What are you doing in my house?

Don’t tell him that nobody was supposed to be here. Don’t tell him anything, if you can help it.

I don’t have any money. Are you sick?

There’s a window here. A square of fogged glass but you can pry it open if you try. You can see the ground, a long way down. But maybe you’d make it. If you don’t go head-first. If you manage to roll. There’s only one way you’ll know for certain.

Please, he says. I haven’t called the police yet. I promise I won’t if you leave right away. But you have to let me know if you’re sick. I have a condition.

Which is probably a lie. No matter how scared he sounds. No matter how pale he looked earlier—like something living inside of a seashell. Like something you’d find under a rock.

His voice gets softer. Gentler when he asks:

How old are you?

Don’t tell him.

Are you in trouble? Is that why you’re here?

But it’s a long way down.

My name’s Phil. What’s yours?

Don’t. Tell. Him.

Listen, I’m putting the bat down, alright? How about we just talk? Is that alright?

You’ll need more time to plan how to aim for the bushes. Only a little more time.

I’m sorry about earlier. You scared me, that’s all. I have a medical condition and…

It won’t be enough. It’ll never be enough and you can’t let that stop you. Later is another word for never. Now. It has to be now.

How about you come on out? We’ll go downstairs and we can talk this out. Whatever’s going on, we can find a way of working this out. Just us, okay? I promise.

The music’s still on downstairs. Hear it drift through the open window. Feel it vibrate through the floor. It mixes with the quiver in Phil’s voice. The pleading.

If you’re in trouble, I can help.

The people who can help don’t want to. The people who want to help, can’t. How many times do you need to learn that lesson? How much proof do you need?

Please unlock the door. There’s nowhere to go.

There is. You know it. Just a few steps away.

And the record downstairs spins on empty static. No more music. Music makes things bearable.

I’m a friend. I promise I am.

You’ve heard that before. You know you have.

But this time.

Maybe this time.

Here’s how it works. Take a breath and rise to your feet.

Dear Hot Mailman,

Dad’s house reeks of cancer right now, so I opened the kitchen window for some fresh air and there you were with your mailbag and those blue shorts that look bad on everyone who wears them. (How do they look so good on you?) It was a hot morning and you’d been walking all over town—I could tell because you were just the right amount of sweaty and your polo shirt was clinging to your shoulders.

I guess they switched your route because that was the first time I’d noticed you. I’m sure I’d have noticed the world’s most gorgeous mailman, had we crossed paths before. Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays this courier from bringing me to swift completion, if you know what I mean.

So, I burnt the bacon, and the kitchen was full of smoke, and it set the smoke alarm off and I had to grab the cat-shit broom and swat at the ceiling over and over again to find the off button. The racket woke Dad in the living room, and then he was yelling choice words at me, the bacon, the cats, and God, asking the Almighty why he couldn’t have an adult daughter who can cook—is that too much to ask?—and I yelled to him that he wasn’t helping, but a dying man can say whatever he damn well pleases. I said for the hundredth time this month that I was going to pack up my shit and leave, that he could hire a live-in nurse instead of wasting my relatively young years. He said I wouldn’t follow through, that I never follow through—that even if I tried to leave, I wouldn’t get very far before turning back. He said it’s always a matter of time before I turn back.

I like to think you’d like my sister, Jen. You both have the same purposeful walk: back straight, arms pumping, quick to smile. She’s a real Type A in denial, always writing me emails about Mercury being in retrograde and sending links for places to buy sage to burn and telling me how our lives exist in seasons and tides, bossing me around and telling me to go with the flow at the same time.

She told me that in this season I need to live in the moment and dwell in my pain. Then she mailed me a box of rocks and crystals, which I used as a paperweight for Dad’s bills, and a daily planner filled with motivational quotes. She wrote in the card that I needed to take one moment of every day to do something purely for myself as an act of love. She just read an article in a magazine about the burden on caretakers, how they never think of themselves, and worries that I’m not selfish enough. Dad would disagree.

So, when he took an afternoon nap, I tested out the new vibrator I ordered online in a bout of touch-hungry insomnia. I sat on the edge of the tub thinking of you in those ugly blue shorts and stupid hat and your kind eyes and feelings that I’m sure would be tender or, at least, caring enough. When I bang my head off the edge of the porcelain in the closest thing to passion I’ve felt in years, I tell myself it’s an act of love.

-18 Chestnut St.

Dear Hot Mailman,

I made Dad’s breakfast early and then, after the inevitable rejection, brought his eggs out to the front porch for myself along with a Faulkner novel. I’d been planning this for a week; it’s not an easy task, choosing which book to be casually discovered reading. Too trashy, you’re ruined. Too pretentious, you’re inaccessible. And then there was the matter of choosing where to sit, how to sit, what to wear…

I knew exactly how it would go, step by step. I thought about it while doing laundry at night and peeling the dry skin off my feet. You would walk up and see me sitting on the front steps, so engrossed in my book that I hadn’t noticed you (of course I noticed you), and say hey as you hand over the mail: bills, a Halloween card from Aunt Margaret, election pamphlets. I would say hi back, aloof yet friendly, a polite customer. You’d make small talk, mention how the cool weather is finally here, and ask what I’m reading. I’d show you the cover—noncommittal, nearly embarrassed to be caught lounging in the sun and reading when there are dishes to do and fathers to nurse. You would say that you read that one once, a long time ago. Maybe it was in high school. You didn’t get it, but you thought the words were pretty. You thought the part where the mom’s coffin falls into the river was funny. I’d grin and ask, “Why don’t you give it another try?” and “Did you know that Faulkner was once a mailman too?” I thought you’d like that. Coincidence smacks of perfection, and perfect people love perfect things. As you leave, I would try hard not to stare at your ass but sneak a glance anyway.

So there I was, Wednesday morning, paperback and cold, gross eggs in tow. I saw you down the road. You were wearing a jacket; the wind is getting chillier. I tried to read but ended up scanning the same sentence over and over again, starting and restarting between sips of the sight of you: Beneath the quilt she is no more than a bundle of rotten sticks. You stopped to pet the German Shepherd next door. He jumped up and put his massive paws on your shoulders. You laughed. Beneath the quilt she is no more than a bundle of rotten sticks. You rifled around in your bag until you found your prize: a dog treat. (Of course, you carry dog treats on you. That is so perfect.) Beneath the quilt she is no more than a bundle of rotten sticks. I’ve never seen anyone like you: handsome yet bashful, friendly yet assertive. You charm everyone in your path. I used to wish I could be like that. Beneath the quilt she—

Dad shouted from inside. He had to shit. I yelled at him to hold it and returned to my page. He yelled back “Sure thing, but you’ll be the one to clean up the mess.” I told him that I was renting a car that afternoon and going back home. He screamed that I don’t have one of those anymore, so I threw my book into the yard and told him to crap his pants for all I cared, I’d let him die in a mound of his own shit and laugh. You turned to see what the noise was. I ran inside. Pathetic.

Here’s my problem: I can’t imagine you doing anything but delivering mail, like how kids think their teacher lives at school and never goes out to the bar, gets wasted on tequila shots, and fucks the vice principal in the backseat of his Nissan. If only it were that simple. I want to grab the next fourth-grader I see off the sidewalk and blow their mind: Kid, your teacher Mr. Coles used to have a nice life until he slept with Tammy at the Christmas party and now he has the house but none of the furniture and he can barely cook for himself and wears the same polo shirt again and again until he’s forced to wash it. He kept the dog and the car too and texts me once a week. He is not a robot, nor is he a god. He is a man: a smelly, horny man with student debt who gave your whole class an A on their long division worksheets because he was too preoccupied in his love nest to bother correcting them.

And regarding the shitting and yelling, I don’t want you to think Dad’s always been like this. It’s the cancer or the treatment or something in between. We enjoyed a typical array of dysfunction for over thirty years: soccer games and dinner table arguments, time-out chairs and trips to the ER. But Dad can’t walk himself to the toilet anymore. I move him into his wheelchair and then transfer him to the can in our well-negotiated shuffle, like some obscene, absurd facsimile of a waltz. We do not make eye contact. Neither one of us wants to acknowledge that the other is here, that I’m shimmying down his pants and waiting outside the door while he dumps out.

When I was a kid, he used to read me that book Everyone Poops as I learned to go use a toilet instead of a Pull-Up. On our good days, I chant that through the door like a mantra and it makes him laugh. On our bad days—today—I sit in the hallway and wait for the flush to summon me back.

It’s strange. I can’t picture you taking a shit or eating a pizza or picking out underwear in the morning. Logic tells me that you do all these things; instinct says that you are reborn uncorrupted every morning. No sensations set your nerves alight. Your guts do not twist when you see me the way mine do for you. You materialize in your windbreaker, bag packed with letters. You photosynthesize. You dissolve.

Love,

Chestnut Street Book-Thrower

Dear Hot, Kind Mailman,

By Monday morning I resolved to preserve you as nothing more than another deposit in the spank bank. Dad was watching some pundit yell about climate hoaxes at an eardrum-shattering volume, and I was on hold with the newspaper because the crossword had a typo. The litter boxes hadn’t been cleaned. I needed to fold my underwear. That was, of course, when you knocked on the door. I answered in all my morning breath glory.

You need to know that I have never once begged God to immediately smite me from this earth until that moment—not when Robbie Edelstein let go of me during teen night at the roller rink and I busted my chin, not when I had to get my stomach pumped for drinking perfume in college, not even when Tammy the Slutty Principal showed up to watch me move out like it was a boxing match. But when you saw me, tits akimbo, in my BOOKWORMS READING COMPETITION 1998 shirt, I began a mental prayer for some sort of natural disaster to take me then and there.

And so, it was time for our first full conversation. You had a certified package that required my signature. The instinct to make a joke about your certified package struggled below the surface of my mortification.

It was the first time I really saw you up close, as I signed your clipboard. I couldn’t take you in all at once; I got each feature independent of the other like one of those sketches of serial killers they put on the news. (You’re not a serial killer, you’re perfect—and even if you were, I’d give you an alibi.) You’ve got a crooked bridge of your nose. A mole on your cheekbone. Sun damage near your hairline. A wedding band. Two ears, probably. I have two ears, too. That was a good start.

I signed my name, with a few extra letters and an exclamation point. You asked if I was having a good day. I panicked and said no thank you, then closed the door, clutching the package, imagining all the other ways that could’ve gone. Imagining clutching you on the other side of the door instead.

I spend so long planning for every interaction every day. I run the conversations in my head back and forth, every direction they could take, every funny thing I can say, every fact about myself that I need others to know for reasons beyond my understanding. But it never makes a dent. They’re unpredictable. Always. You were no exception, asking me if I’m having a good day.

Then again, I should’ve expected that one.

The package was addressed to Mrs. Brian Coles, which I guess is how you know me now. (Fuck.) I knew it was coming—yesterday he called and said something about Tammy and babies and moving on with our lives, how we’ve been apart long enough and should make it legitimate. He said he doesn’t like to waste time. I thought of the past ten years and couldn’t help but disagree.

He doesn’t know about you, and yet some base part of me couldn’t help but think that he’s engineered all of this to torture me: the new object of my affections delivering the packet that will cleave me from my marriage. Of course, he doesn’t know about you—what would I tell him? Well, Brian, while you were settling into your new life, I was busy doing more important things, like having fantasies about fucking the mailman during his lunch break in Dad’s laundry room. He’s a better lover than you ever were. He never asks me about ass stuff. I think this separation has done us both a lot of good.

I don’t mean to insult you, to make you just the mailman. He never possessed my mind the way you do. It numbs the sting, thinking about you in bed and in the shower. I find myself lying awake at night imagining what the holidays would be like with you on my arm. You’d be polite yet warm to my family—you’d drink beer and joke around with Dad and play hide-and-seek with Emily and Henry. We’d sit around the fire at night and tell embarrassing stories. I’d pretend to blush, but I like it. I like you knowing. I like knowing you.

Love,

Mrs. Brian Coles Angela

Dear Hot Mailman,

Are both of your parents still alive? Do you want them to be?

I’m starting to think that those are the first two questions everyone should answer on their dating profile. It would save me from a lot of mommy-issue dorks and psychos with a romantic streak. Well? Are they?

There have been more envelopes addressed to me than ever; you’ve been packing them all into the mailbox with expert precision. They’re fascinating specimens of genre, sympathy cards. Nobody lies through their teeth more readily than in one of those flowers-and-crosses cardstock monstrosities. Dale was a kind, generous man. Always attended church. Always put a smile on my face. Brian even sent one. Tammy signed it, too. They wrote that my father was a blessing in their lives (Plural? Really?) and that they hoped I would visit Cleveland soon. Polite destruction is an art. I have to hand it to them.

We all have parents in some way or another, which means you are no exception. You seem like the nuclear family type. Donna Reed mom, Andy Griffith dad, a sister and a brother all in a shag-carpeted house. They probably gave you a bowl cut or two in the kitchen and grounded you from TV when you broke a window playing baseball. You spent your allowance at the ice cream truck and read comics in a treehouse. Only something as idyllic as that could have produced something like you.

I want to see your baby pictures—God only knows why. Is that every woman’s instinct after a certain period of infatuation? To do the math on how cute her babies would be? I need to know you more; I can’t stay at this distance. I want to know what you look like when you sleep and when you’re shuffling around making coffee illuminated by the first rays of the morning. I want you when you have the flu and need more Kleenex and when you’re drunk and when you’re taking the trash out and raking leaves.

I want you to see me at my ugliest, too, and like me anyway.

That’s my sin: I always need more. I’m never satisfied with occasional glances or cocktail party conversation or monthly emails that linger in my inbox, opened and reopened at night after a drink too many. It’s not enough to know you think of me (Have you ever thought of me?) or to live on the scraps of a single conversation alone. I am a stray dog. If you feed me on the back porch, I will return to beg for more.

I’m sorry I’m not being funny or charming. I want so badly for you to think of me that way: smiling, witty, wise. But Jen’s coming tomorrow and I’m cooking for the wake and cleaning out the house and the cat has run off and I’m fresh out of a personality that makes people fall in love. I never had one to begin with. Forgive me for my self-pity. Forgive me for it all. You didn’t ask for this; you’re just a mailman doing your job and I’m a woman on the fucking brink timing a single Amazon delivery daily this week to ensure you’ll be here to ask me how I’m doing so I can lie through my teeth.

See you tomorrow.

Angela

Dear Hot Mailman,

Jen sent another package, and it was finally supposed to come today: charms, self-help books, pictures of Emily and Henry in their Halloween costumes. She’s been sending me daily updates of the tracking information, trying to get me excited about it. A few days ago, we spoke on the phone, ostensibly to plan the Great Move. She complained about how slow the postal service has been lately, how everything always gets lost and even if your mail makes it to its destination it’ll take about forty years and show up broken in half. She said that she might as well send it by Pony Express, and some disjointed joke about mailmen and reverse cowgirl knocked around in my head before dissolving. It wasn’t worth the effort.

I asked her where her peace and love was now, or if it didn’t apply to the post office. She snorted, then asked me why that was the thing I decided to care about today. Don’t I have better things to do right now? I said that she’s always so quick to preach kindness and forgiveness and then the first to bitch and moan and that maybe once she should think about what’s actually going on in other people’s lives.

She said that if I had this amount of passion and enthusiasm a year ago then maybe I’d still be in Cleveland.

I hung up on her.

She texted the next day with a breezy apology and a promise to come for Thanksgiving to help me move out, and so today I sat and waited for my mail, watching brown leaves relinquish their grip on life and float down to clog the gutters that I’ll never be able to clean on my own.

Your van pulled in down by the corner, right on time. Then a short and squat woman hopped down, dwarfed by Jen’s package, and the only coherent thought I could form was that you are usually much taller.

It was only after she struggled up the front way with the giant box and dropped it at my feet that I fully registered the situation. I rammed the box inside with my foot—it was right at home in the city of cardboard I created—and kicked it too hard with my big toe, which was already sticking out of the hole in my sock. That was when I started to cry and punch things and stomp and truly frighten the living daylights out of the cat that’s inexplicably home again and also mine.

I yelled at the box and the hordes of tchotchkes that I need to pack. I yelled at Jen for living so fucking far away and at Dad for dying and the cat for existing and you for leaving me, just like Brian, though now I’m the one in an empty house. It was the first time I heard my own voice today. You didn’t need to know that, and I need to get a goddamn grip. You’re the mailman. You come and go just like everybody else and if I was better, I would move on in my life like a normal person. And then I knew why I’m so easy to leave behind. Why I always only ever make it to the edge of an impression; why I never get past the first step. At the end of the day I will burn these letters or use them to spit out old gum or learn origami if I’m feeling ambitious and you will finish your postal route and go home.

Home, where I can’t bear to think of you being. Where you are yourself, a person I will never know. I do not want your existence to reach outside of my own. You had a wedding. You watched your children be born, held them in their first moments, took them to preschool and the zoo. You are human and whole; I am an alien unable to keep her cover. You have more people who populate your days than I do—to me, you are a constant presence, a permanent fixture; to you, I am part of the background noise, the set dressing. I’m filled to the brim with other people’s lives and have nothing of my own to give away.

Tell me what I’m supposed to do with all of this. I know Brian’s Chinese order from the place around the corner from our first apartment. I know that Jen buys new socks every six months and folds them like little dumplings. I know how much Dad’s coffee cost and which brand of gum he chewed. I know that you wear string bracelets that your kids have made at summer camp. What can I possibly do with any of that?

Sorry.

Angela

Dear Hot No-Longer-Mailman,

I’ve never liked the holidays, so tell me why this year I am mourning for Thanksgivings and Christmases past. There’s something about that feeling that I long for: driving through the dark autumn evening and returning to a warm, bright home hand-in-hand with someone I love. I guess that must have happened once—I don’t know why else I’d pine for it.

Mother, father, sisters, and their families all happy under one roof, at peace for a week at least. Instead, we’re a ragged group of five people, one ancient cat and two urns gathering for a final turkey dinner on the table Dad bought for Mom after we broke the old one with a childhood tabletop dance party.

I went to get the moving van today because it would take a miracle for me to break away from Jen’s schedule for the next three days. I walked into the shop and there you were, standing behind the counter. They gave you a red polo shirt here. It looked good on you. Everything looks good on you. You noticed me and smiled, then asked how I’m holding up.

I told you that I’ve finished packing up the house. Obviously, I’ve finished, otherwise I wouldn’t be getting a moving van. I said that, too, and clumsily slipped in the fact that I’ve missed your mail-carrying expertise. The new lady always folds up the letters. They have better hours here, you said, and of course they do—mail carrying isn’t your life’s passion.

I told you about Jen and the kids and how we’re baking pecan pie even though we hate it because Dad loved it and how we know we look crazy baking a pie for a dead man. You always make eggnog at Christmas for your Grandma even though she passed fifteen years ago, you said, and pecan pie is delicious. Then you finished running my credit card and handed over the keys and I left with a foreign calm in my stomach.

In three days, I’ll finish loading up the van, save for the uneaten, slightly stale pecan pie. I’ll leave it at the front desk with your coworker on my way out of town—you took the weekend off to spend time with your family. I’ll leave no message, no note. I’ll keep you in my back pocket for emergencies, think of you from time to time when I’m once again weak and hideous.

I drove around, looking at the nearly bare trees like bundles of bones stuck into the ground, a few final, shriveled leaves still clinging. I passed by the post office one, two, three times before I finally pulled into the parking lot, then spent five minutes trying to get my pen’s ink to warm up, alternating between holding it against the vents and sitting on it. Finally, it loosened up and I spelled my name right this time—Angela Joy Coles—over and over next to every sticky note SIGN HERE arrow. I even paid to have it overnighted to Cleveland.

By the time I got back to the house, Jen’s blue minivan was in the driveway, and she was pissed because she forgot her key and they were waiting in the car for half an hour and Henry really had to pee. I unlocked the door, and he sprinted upstairs, action figures in tow. Emily ran into the house, too—she was cold. Greg lugged their bags up the steps, refusing my offers of help, and Jen pressed a neat stack of mail into my hands: bills, a magazine, and some coupons addressed to Dale Hart or Current Resident.

-A

Miasma was upset. The hordes of teenage girls did not want to buy yogurt from the failing frozen yogurt shop she had inherited. They only wanted to play with the Mystic Love Algorithm. The girls would drop months of allowance into the machine in the hopes of conjuring a card that would dictate their romantic future to them. Would their lovers—pimpled country club pool boys, sweating volleyball girls—ever return their admiring glances? Would it be a perfect sort of love, where they wore their emotions painted to their face, and knew always what the other was thinking?

Miasma watched the girls play the machine. One girl—nervous, anemic, crying—slipped a quarter in.

“State the object of your heart’s desire,” the Mystic Love Algorithm said.

“Brad,” the girl typed, her fingers so spastic she could barely punch the letters. Her friends covered their mouths with their hands and shrieked.

The Mystic Love Algorithm made a noise like an alien approximating a Louis Armstrong solo. It deposited a card into the breathless girl’s hand. She turned it over, full of fear. Her lip quivered.

“The Desecration of a Breathless Corpse,” she said. Her friends laughed and pointed.

Miasma made almost no money from this machine. The arcade company paid her a nominal fee each month for the privilege of her corner space. An attendant came monthly to empty out the quarters. Beyond the fiscal concern, Miasma was disenchanted with love. She had a boyfriend, Jackson, who seemed not to understand the trappings of romantic desire. He was outside her store now, tying flowers to the trellis. She watched him the way a mother watches a toddler eat lint off the floor.

Jackson was a plain-spun mechanic whose charming southern accent was offset by the fact that he only knew how to say three things: (1) “This weather ain’t been too good,” (2) “I ain’t too worried about it,” and (3) “Well I’ll be damned." On top of his cadaverous conversational skills, Jackson had been badly hurt in love before, and he concluded with imbecile certainty that he was the first person to have ever suffered heartbreak in the history of humanity. This led him to perform all sorts of irritating rituals in the name of cautiously distant affection, including his habit of tying flowers into the slats of the trellis outside Miasma’s shop and then leaving without acknowledging her. The first time it happened Miasma was charmed. She thought it was some grand display. After three weeks of this, however, Miasma began to fear that he was some kind of parasocial animatron, sent along with the yogurt shop by her parents from beyond the grave in an attempt to prove some kind of point about the danger of letting your heart fill with aspirations.

She banged open the door, and Jackson looked at her, startled, like he had been caught jumping into a zoo exhibit. The trellis was covered in white carnations that obscured some of its wooden shabbiness. The groundskeeper had discovered the wood was rotting from the inside, and he was convinced that somebody’s child would injure themselves climbing the thing. He had put up a sign, but children had a tendency to ignore the omens they were given. They had toddler ideations of surmounting the trellis. They ran up to it with their hands outstretched, like it was the ladder to heaven. Sometimes the groundskeeper would stand near the trellis and make rude gestures at them until they went away, but he had many responsibilities and little time.

“Are you going to come in and talk to me?” Miasma asked Jackson.

“This weather ain’t been too good,” Jackson said.

Miasma looked up at the perfect, cloudless sky.

Jackson tied the remaining carnations, dusted off his hands, and gave a self-satisfied nod. In his mind the perfunctory ritual was complete, and he had succeeded in showing care without getting caught in the mire of emotional consequence. He grabbed his bike, hopped on, and began to pedal with great optimism through the crowd of people milling around the square.

“Don’t bike into traffic,” Miasma shouted, seething.

“I ain’t too worried about it,” Jackson called over his shoulder.

Miasma watched him depart. She had a clinician’s mind—neat, orderly, uniform. She had been a paralegal before fate gave her yogurt. Her inclination was to arrange her feelings in tight compartments, labeled spaces where none of them could touch or sully. One time, during a fight, she had taken out a miniature whiteboard and threatened to write up a pros and cons list while Jackson sat in the corner, dumbstruck. Was it any wonder her love was feeble and weak?

“Come on, Sexy Heartthrob,” a girl—neurotic, emaciated, trembling—said, crossing her fingers and swatting at the army of adolescents trying to tear a turn from her. The Mystic Love Algorithm made a noise like a foghorn trying to wolf-whistle. “The Savagery of the Inquisition,” the girl said, turning over her card. The other girls snickered behind their hands.

“You know,” Miasma said, “The yogurt is only sixty-five cents per ounce.”

Each girl grew quiet, and the entire store fell into a heavy silence. They hurried outside, their humor ruined by adult discontent and pedantry. Miasma wasn’t sad to see them go. She took a quarter from the register, walked over, and placed it into the Mystic Love Algorithm.

“State the object of your heart’s desire,” the machine prompted.

Miasma typed “Jackson” into the stiff keyboard. There was a noise like a bounce house full of rubber chickens, and colors—scarlet, fuchsia, goldenrod—flashed across Miasma’s vision. She grabbed her card and turned it over. Impotence at the Hand of Fate. In the image, five gloved fingers squeezed at a chicken’s throat. Bright spots of blood swam in globules in the chicken’s eyes as it struggled for air. It was a frozen scream the chicken was stuck in, made all the more haunting by its tongue, wedged in its mouth like some purple alien worm. Miasma shuddered. For a machine focused on love, it sure gave depressing portents.

The Shop was not a creative name for a frozen yogurt joint. Miasma had hoped a vague name would inspire a sense of mystery, and that her bohemian decorations would transcend the boundaries of frozen yogurt aestheticism and enter the territory of trendy coffee roastery or eclectic barbeque restaurant. Instead, people saw The Shop as some kind of off-putting shithole. What’s more, everyone seemed to have decided that frozen yogurt as a fad was over. It was just sour ice cream and—even worse—you had to pour it yourself.

Miasma sat on her little stool next to the register, scrutinizing her ledgers. She hoped the intensity of her eyebrows would scare the numbers into a shape that didn’t mean total financial ruin. The cost of her lease had exploded in the past two months, owing to a complete redesign of the square outside. The once-insipid strip mall had become a fashionable and trendy rendezvous for coffee and Sunday shopping. Organizations began to schedule events at the bars and restaurants surrounding. Miasma liked to stand in the doorway of The Shop and try to sell yogurt to the departing clubs.

“You know,” Miasma said to a group of sweating, smiling dancers as they left the square, “We have over seventy-five unique toppings.” The dancers put their hands up as if to say they didn’t have any money. But Miasma had watched them leave cash tips at the bar they had been practicing at next door.

“Wow,” a little boy cried, craning his neck at the height of the trellis, “It goes up and up and up.” He put his hand on the wood. The trellis groaned.

His mother squeezed his hand. “Come on,” she said, “Or the yogurt lady will try and get us to buy something.” They wandered through the maze of string lights and disappeared.

Miasma dialed Jackson’s number. He picked up on the third ring. “I love you,” she said, “I love you, I love you, I love you.”

“Well I’ll be damned,” Jackson replied.

Miasma hung up, satisfied. She hoped the call would lead to an atrocious fight that would end either in good sex or separation. She feared the other voice in her head, which was more intimate and realistic, and which laid out a future so pitiable and bleak that she had no choice but to regard it as a near-certainty: Neither of them would mention the call and would instead prolong their lukewarm affection for a few more months—as many as they could squeeze—until their orbits had passed so far from each other that they didn’t even bother with the ponderous bubble of a goodbye text. She feared that Jackson would develop more rituals that prevented communication. She resented her life in that moment, which seemed to her so bland that she could not even enjoy heartbreak properly.

The next morning, The Shop’s front window lay scattered across the floor in a constellation of glittering fragments. Miasma fumbled with her key, fearing for her yogurt, her money, her livelihood. The tables were shiny with polish amidst a crooked slab of morning sunlight, the napkin holders were neatly stocked, and the rows of yogurt machines were wiped down and spotless. The register was secure, and the back room had not been entered. Only the Mystic Love Algorithm had been tampered with. Its operator’s door hung limply open. The quarters had been removed and the cards were in a loose pile at the bottom of the machine. Miasma tried to push them together to better arrange them. One card fluttered to the floor, and as Miasma picked it up and turned it over, she saw that it was blank. A dew of sweat formed on her neck. She looked around. The wind whistled idly through the broken window. She turned over three more cards, each of them as blank as the first, and a bitterness crept phlegm-like into the back of her throat. The Shop had turned suddenly sterile, scented with cleaning detergents, and despite the warm morning she shivered. The cards felt heavier than she remembered, weighted, with fine cut edges and glossy textures. Where once they had been playthings, they now seemed more solid and real between her fingers.

Outside there came a cracking sound and then a single scream cut short. Many people began to talk at once, and a glass broke from across the square. Miasma stepped outside, blinking in the sun. A little boy had fallen from the trellis. He lay in a mangled heap on a pile of wood and dust, covered in the petals of white carnations. His eyes fluttered open and closed, mired in the spasm of a seizure. The whites of his heavy-lidded eyes swam with bright red globules of blood.

“Oh god,” the boy’s mother whimpered, “Oh god.”

Miasma pushed into the huddling crowd, hoping for a clearer glimpse. The throng of people stood still, captured by their passive horror, running their hands in agitated circles across their skin. The boy shook viciously, his head hitting the pavement over and over, his hands reaching aimlessly for anything around him, gripping splintered wood with complete abandonment of faculty, and across his pants a thin puddle of piss began to bloom.

“His tongue,” a man said, “He’s going to bite off his tongue.”

“Please,” the mother cried, “Is anyone here a doctor?”

There were no doctors and the boy bit into his tongue and his mouth filled with blood and he began to choke. Two men wrestled him to his side and blood began to fall from his mouth like dark bile, mixed with spit and froth, a viscous, strange syrup. Miasma feared that his tongue would fall out of his mouth and wriggle across the pavers like some strange, alien worm. But it did not happen.

Two men held the boy until the ambulance came and took him away and the group of people dissipated in a wordless haze, unsure of whether the little boy would live or die. As the crowd diminished the air swelled with a gray, pregnant haze that meant looming rain. Miasma closed her shop and sat on the curb and began to chew her nails. She was shaking, and the bitterness from before had fallen into her stomach where it jumped around and turned against itself. She pulled at her nails with her teeth, felt them sliver in her mouth and, despite her disgust, she could not stop.

Sometime later the groundskeeper cleared away the debris, lamenting the fact that he had not been around to shoo the boy away. Later still the evening rush hurried through, oblivious to tragedy. The dancers came and went, unsettled by Miasma’s quietude. The afternoon turned to night, and the sky did not clear but only grew more purpled and swollen, like a bruise.

At the very end of the night, Jackson emerged from the darkness, soft and muted, on his bicycle. He approached the trellis and tried to tie a carnation in the spot where the little boy’s foot had been too heavy to support the weight of his dreams, but there was nothing there anymore, and Jackson grew confused and looked around to see if he was being tricked.

“I ain’t too worried about it,” he said, wringing his hands. But Miasma knew that this was a lie. He was so worried that he was shaking. He was terrified.

Prone to nostalgia, Najwa keeps her distance from memories, good or bad. It doesn’t help. Memories insist upon themselves in moments when, uprooted, one must take stock of what she has: twenty-two boxes, a bedframe, a dining table with one chair; the photograph hung the wrong way.  

It was hung vertically so that the horizon bifurcated sky and sea like a wall rather than a floor, its stark gray line an impenetrable barrier between everything on either side of the water’s edge. Left of horizon: the sun before it set; one wispy cloud. Right of horizon: dark water; the black-scarfed head of the woman she’d met on shore, surfaced during a swim.

It wasn’t an artistic choice, hanging the photograph this way. It was the only frame she had. She’d stolen it from a chest of drawers in the formal living room of her parent’s home, setting it on the plastic-wrapped couch until she finished rummaging. The frame had one screw eye and an easel back placed so that every photo had to be a portrait, or at least a vertically oriented landscape. None of it mattered. The photograph would have to come down now that she was leaving, and still, she wanted from it more than it could offer. 

She, the woman in the water, had smelled like clove cigarettes. 

It had only been a few years since that day at the sea in her so-called motherland, but developers had finished building the power plant on the beach and begun building the oil corridor into mainland China. In the capitol city, aspiring workers were learning Mandarin rather than English in the basements of the internet cafes. Najwa had forgotten that the woman in the water’s name was Suri, though if she waited, it might have returned to her.

For her part, it was enough that it had been 52 days since her release. She was moving to a bigger city. She had an apartment there. No job, but enough left in the $5,000 her father had collected in an investment account for her to pay the deposit. The day ahead was dedicated to a close. She wore loose jeans, her hair tied in a knot at her neck. Her frame was long and solid, and had anyone shared the home with her, they might have said something about her misdirected worry, the way it focused on a photograph rather than the boxes that still needed to be packed. But it had always been easy to lose herself in memory. And that day had been a purposeless day, the day by the sea, a day she had woken up with her father, who was tall like her but seemed to feel everything much less intently, his placid face always bagged with fatigue so heavy it seemed bored. She asked him simple questions over a usual breakfast such as “Doesn’t it feel empty now that everyone else has left” and “Is it a vacation if this was your home?” to which her father responded that if he was forced to do nothing all day, by whatever logistics of power outages and poor Wi-Fi then, yes, it was a vacation. He didn’t address the question of home. 

After breakfast, her father dressed in the small windowless room they shared, adjusting the mosquito net that Najwa had carelessly and fatally left open. He went out and made his way to the sea, so green it was almost black, a liquid forest in a sunless place. Najwa watched him from the hut. On the drive in, he told her that the beach was built for French and British tourists back when French and British tourists visited their country. The faces of the visitors have changed now but the effect was the same. 

“Don’t you think it’s strange,” Najwa asked him when he came back from his swim, “that they’d let another country build a nuclear power plant right on the nicest beach?” “Strange, how?" he asked, “The country needs power.”

Power was gray and concrete and smoking. Small beside the sea. Everything else—the muddy-white of the stray dog sniffing the fire, the crust of a forgotten samosa on the countertop, the blue of her Baba’s shirt, and his resignation to the water that soaked through it—reflected the faint sun.

The water was choppy in January. It was hard not to think of the base of the world, which for a brief, fire-lit moment, had held them all the evening prior.

Najwa and her father had been in Karachi for a cousin’s wedding, the only representatives from the American Muzafars. When the wedding ended, they were invited to spend a few days at a hut—bare, concrete—like the power plant—with three walls and an opening towards the sea. An uncle rented it from the local villagers year round. They drove in that night with two more cars of family. More huts were borrowed from their friends. Her uncle had plenty of friends. They grilled lamb chops on a charcoal grill and took Jack Daniels out of the bottoms of coolers from the trunks of the cars for whiskey cokes.

After the lamb chops, the refreshing of drinks, and the twelfth cigarette, everyone gathered around the fire in front of the hut to share blankets and stories, squeezing onto benches and camping chairs. The chat was scattered—gossip, politics, a child’s recent acceptance to an American university. Najwa’s father sat next to a man with arms like a bear. Every so often the man would burst into agreement with whichever man spoke to him, waving the bone of what was once a chop. It was the man’s wife who goaded him into the story, her voice soft and sparkling like the glitter on her cheekbones. The man first shook his head no, motioned his arms, said not a word, but then he raised his bone as if to say enough and fine. The bonfire set the tone and the dark and rushing waves silenced the group as his arms grew wide. His shaved face opened too. 

“Fooled by god himself, the great whale was trapped beneath the sea, destined to carry the weight of the world,” the man began, and it became clear to Najwa that he was drunk. Each of his words sunk heavy into the sand. 

“These waves wash wounds,” he said, gesturing to the sea. “Carve rocks by their existence. Carry unfathomable dust along shorelines and into darkness as easy as breathing. As easy as the breath of the whale. As easy as following the shoreline into the darkness where the water remains blue-black. They say you can swim past schools of fish into the depths, into oceanic caves. Find the blood-red mountain at the root. It would be hubris to imagine humanity built atop the ruby, but remember that it is about the whole world. Remember that under the red mountain is the bull. Kuyutha. Remember that his forty thousand eyes see only the ruby and the black. That our earth could fit like a grain of sand inside its nostril. The Nun. The base of the world. Kuyutha breathes and on the surface, the waves rush the shore. Kuyutha remains still and who’s to say he misses how it felt to graze, to gore with any of forty thousand horns. Even he is resting on a whale, a whale who was fooled by Allah himself, tempted by his own lust, to carry the world above him. Who’s to say if any of it’s true, though from time to time the earth shakes, Kuyutha riotous for his freedom like anyone inside a cage, his feet pawing,” a crescendo, “the whale beneath–” 

And at this, the friend of her uncle threw his bone into the fire with a dum. Embers flew. He was smacked by his wife. One woman put out the coal that had fallen on her wool chador.

Someone laughed loudly in the commotion. The group scolding began and fizzled not unlike the embers and then the gathering resumed discussion of other friends and other parties. A second cousin turned to Najwa, who was still thinking about the story, to ask if she was seeing anyone. She said, yes, I’m seeing someone and walked past him to the party, unbothered by her lie. 

The friend of her uncle had gone off. There were fires going at three or four huts. Najwa didn’t know what she’d have asked him regardless. It was hard enough to imagine an eternity attending to the burden of her own mass let alone the mass of the world. Every so often, Najwa felt herself pulled towards the center of the earth and stretched horizontal in response, her consciousness curling into her ribcage. This happened first at a rooftop in New York, when she realized she had absolutely nothing to say to anyone around her and she wanted desperately for words. Fireworks were bursting in celebration of a freedom she didn’t believe in. It happened a second time during her cousin’s wedding. Her mother was weeping with her cousin’s mother, seeing the newlyweds off. Najwa could hardly see for the world pressing in. 

What she wanted in those moments was to feel nothing. Nothing, so tantalizing behind the thin veil between her and eternity. She apologized to the whale for her weight and thought of the stars, wondering why some were allowed to transcend and some were destined to be crushed beneath the weight of everything.

Everyone left the next morning. It was a Monday, and most of them worked. Some litter and a forgotten sweater, pale yellow, marked their absence.

“What’ll we do today,” Najwa asked her father when he returned from his swim, and he gestured at the expanse of the beach. It wasn’t that her father was resigned, she thought, but that his unfailing logic led him to believe in a finite answer to anything that for Najwa might have caused existential disruption. He called it her “urge for melodrama.” Once there were words for it, she began to dismiss it herself. 

Najwa picked up a book she’d been trying to read and sat with it until she heard tires skittering over the gravel. 

In the car, she saw a family of three. Two parents, a daughter in a black hijab. They waved getting out of the car and received waves in return. Najwa set down her book and walked away from them, towards the edge of the beach, where the rocks built a path towards the power plant, not a glance at the car.

Cold rocks might never warm with just a body’s warmth. They can be thought of as a scar, grown white. Najwa wants the same thing as anyone: to be pummeled by the waves without drowning. Why else stand in the ocean and wait? It didn’t matter that in January, at the end of a disillusioned year, she decided to want nothing, to empty herself of want, only to find that it was impossible. 

“Smoke?” the stranger from the car asked, having expanded into a person beside Najwa on the rocks. Behind the stranger, there were more rocks, more huts, then sparse trees, the expanse of sand, and the village at a distance.

Najwa handed her a cigarette and the box of matches. “Are you allowed,” she might’ve inquired, but she didn’t. The stranger seemed Najwa’s age or younger. She had a smooth and plain face, undistinguished except by the dark hair growing on her cheeks.

She went through three of the matches before Najwa cupped her hands around the end to protect it from the wind. The stranger had long fingers, the pronounced knuckles of someone who often cracked them, and perfectly ovular nails. The stranger inhaled, coughed, and admitted, “I never smoke.” Najwa’s smile was crooked—eked out despite herself. The stranger asked how old Najwa was, and they discovered they were the same age. “Suri,” the stranger said, hand outstretched. 

Suri was studying to be an optometrist.

After a moment, Najwa had to ask. 

“My father sent you over here.”

“You thought you were mysterious walking over here alone. I was just following you.” 

Mysterious. Najwa pressed it to her palate. Melodrama. She resisted an urge to jump up and dive into the water fully clothed only to emerge laughing as if to prove that she wasn’t. 

“I get it,” Suri began without letting Najwa respond, too familiar for the fact that they had just met, which endeared her to the part of Najwa that wanted to skip anything that resembled not knowing. “I hate cleaning my apartment. It’s always better after I’ve done it and then I feel absurd.” Her face held a thrilled seriousness. “You know what I mean. I hate to cook but I love the food. Then I love to cook, but I hate to clean. Every aspect of the thing becomes the joy of the thing, the thing you hated, the thing you love then hate. It’s all so cliché. Ambivalence is much preferred.” 

She paused, as though waiting for Najwa to agree. Najwa kept her eyes on the sea, and then, uncomfortable, on the rock. Suri continued, “You know I had a friend. His girlfriend of several years dumped him because he was going nowhere in life.”

“That’s not a nice thing to say about your friend,” Najwa said softly. The waves rushed. 

“What did you say? Speak up.” 

“That’s unkind to say about your friend,” Najwa said, louder than to outspeak the water. 

“It was true. He’s better now. But then, he thought they would do their whole life together. I suggested we get tea one afternoon, since he was so sorrowful and still, but his driver was occupied and so was mine, so we had no way of meeting up. I thought, what a shame neither of us drives. You can’t relate.”

“To not knowing how to drive?”

“You do, don’t you.”

Najwa did, but she also knew that if she’d grown up here she would not know how to drive. “I do.”

“You’re lucky!” Suri continued: “I told him we should learn. So we started together that weekend. Our driver taught us. He was a young man. Closer to our age than he looked. He was a good teacher, showing us around side streets, keeping us off the main road. Neither of us was very good. We couldn’t even park, but we took the car and went on the road ourselves. My friend was a better driver than I was, but even he hit a few cars. Small dents, we didn’t let it get to us.”

“And did it help your friend? Learning to drive?” Najwa’s eyes stayed on the ocean, the way it seemed so dark but crashed colorless against the rocks. 

“Not really, but it was a foundation. Before you ask, no, we didn’t get together. I thought about it, but we were just friends who had always been friends, and he was depressed, and I had my own problems. It wouldn’t have been the thing. Anyway, I was scared, as you can imagine, that he’d do something stupid. He made constant jokes about everything being worthless, made fun of me to push me away until I asked him to stop. 

“One day, we drove out of the city. Outside Karachi, it’s all dirt roads and trucks until you find the river, which we did. He was acting so strange, barely talking. We sat by its banks under a tree we quickly realized was growing guavas. I asked him to climb up with me, and he hesitated but he did. They were perfectly ripe, oh God, I can’t even tell you. We climbed into the tree and got the guavas. We began eating them sitting up there. At first we were talking and eating normally, and then he kept eating them. One after the other. Not talking at all. Then he started throwing them into the river. I begged him to stop but he kept doing it. I begged him to stop. When he stopped, I asked him, why are you wasting the guavas, and he said, I was ready to die today. I never thought I’d find a guava tree. He had prepared for this to be our last day together. Had a rope and some dozens of pills waiting for him at home, a method to be decided on, I guess. Anyways, he didn’t. It was the guavas. Have you had them?”

Najwa looked at her companion, her arcadian smile. “That happened in a movie once.”

“I like that movie too,” Suri replied, her smile unwavering. “But the fruit is the only part of the story that is a lie.”

“Did you study film,” Najwa asked. 

“No. Did you?”

“No. But I like movies. What happened to your friend?”

“He’s fine. He’s moved to Berlin for some technical job.”

“Why not cherries?”

“I like guavas.”

Najwa had long since finished her cigarette. The girl asked her for the butt, and put it with hers in a small sequined bag she had draped over her shoulder. 

“You could toss it,” Najwa said, but her companion did not. In the silence, the waves continued, as they had when they were speaking. The birds spoke to each other from the ground, and the girl began whistling a non-tune as though speaking to them.

“They can’t understand you,” Najwa said. 

“I don’t have anything to say to them,” said the girl. “And you? Was there something you wanted to say?”

“Nothing,” Najwa responded. Between rope and pills, she’d choose pills. Easeful.  

The day had grown brighter and Suri rose, saying she wanted to swim. She set down her bag next to Najwa and peeled off her outer layers showing the wetsuit she wore beneath. Leaping from the rocks, she dove in. She swam with broad strokes, a dot of black on the gray of the sea. Najwa looked at the camera facing her from the bag Suri left. Looked out and saw Suri still swimming. She picked up the bag and stood. When she returned to the hut, Suri was still in the water but had stopped where she was. She floated on her back, still for a moment but for the undulations of the water, then rose, her head bobbing again as she looked around her. She seemed to recognize where she was and returned to her back. 

Najwa took the camera out of Suri’s bag and took a photograph. Instead of putting the camera back, she hung it around her neck. 

“I don’t like it when you smoke, Najwa,” her father said to her. 

“I didn’t like it when you smoked either,” she replied. She put on her swimsuit and dressed over it. She returned to the shoreline with the same book waving to Suri’s mother next to their own hut. Najwa took a photograph of her with the sky looming. Suri looked like her mother. Najwa did not note that she’d waved back despite Najwa’s lack of a salaam, though she had. Najwa opened her book but did not read. She forgot that she’d meant to eat. 

Suri returned to the shoreline and walked slowly through the sand to Najwa. “It’s been forever, hasn’t it.”

“We only just met,” Najwa replied.

“Of course. And how will anyone know what you’re about if you don’t say? If you don’t say, how will you know either?” 

“Have you seen the power plant,” Najwa asked. 

“Of course I have. I know what you’re thinking, but aren’t the Chinese better than the Americans? It’s good there will be more jobs for the village. I hope they maintain it well.” 

The fisherman walking down the beach had long white hair and an armful of seashells. He said his salaam to Najwa’s father and asked if he could sit. Najwa, still on the shoreline, saw and stood. She returned as the man had begun helping her father light a fire, followed by Suri. 

The man remarked on the grayness of the day, to which her father replied that its beauty was kind of terrible. 

“A poet then,” the man said. 

“But you look the part better.” 

The two men laughed together, the fisherman’s laugh heartier than his frame. Noticing Najwa and the companion who’d followed her he pointed to the shells he’d left at the edge of the hut’s surrounding wall. Each shell had been beaded onto brightly colored threads. 

“From this beach,” her companion asked, and they were. The girls were offered necklaces, and Najwa, wary of being sold something after years of American conditioning was reassured that they were being offered as gifts. Her father asked if the man would bring them fish, and the fisherman agreed. Each young woman took a necklace, Najwa receiving a set of small conches threaded on deep purple that she’d eventually hang on her wall. Najwa turned to her companion.

“Your family won’t miss you?” 

She and Suri looked to the cottage next door where her parents were sitting in two side-by-side chairs, one occupied by a book, the other by the paper. 

“We live together. I don’t think so.”

A stray dog made its way around the house sniffing towards the neighbor’s fire until it was shooed. It limped slightly. Its tan hair was matted. Suri did not take Najwa’s hint about the parents and asked the fisherman how things were in the village. 

The fire had been lit. The man paused. He asked if they had heard about what happened two days prior, and everyone shook their head. He spoke in a rapid Urdu Najwa could not understand. She turned to her father, “What happened?”

In every pause, a rushing. The birds pecking at the sand. The dog lying down. 

They sat quiet for a moment. Inna lillahi wa inna illayhi raji’un, said her companion and her father repeated it, and the fisherman repeated it. And Najwa did not know to repeat it, so she remained silent. The fisherman looked to the fire which had grown big and remarked on how big it had grown. "You’ll need your fish," he said, and he left to retrieve one.

“What happened,” Najwa insisted. 

“A girl was found washed up on the beach,” her father explained, “Just married a few months ago. They’re saying she swam out in the night, that she was caught in the wrong tide. But a neighbor says she’d been arguing with her husband. Who knows? There are riptides.”

Suri shook her head, and Najwa thought she might say something. She didn’t. There was the sea keeping time’s measure, its push-pull marking cycles of birth, war, and quietude.

When the man came back, Najwa’s father had already situated the fire to put a grill on its top. The man cleaned the fish and they sat together to season and cook it. Suri’s parents came over and Suri was natural with them. Everyone spoke to everyone, empty clatter to Najwa’s mind, which sought the ocean floor. At the base of the world, there was a whale who wanted and was trapped. At the edge of the sea, Najwa imagined walking out, no gun at her back, walking until she sank, until her mouth bubbled, until the waves carried her back empty as an hourglass broken in a fall.

Najwa never thinks about the arguments she had with the man who used to stay in her apartment or the way that one night, she woke up to him on top of her, and said nothing, and stared at the wall, the place where there was a crack, the crack she’d covered with a photograph she conveniently needed to hang longwise that it might cover more of what was there. Memories insist upon themselves, but there are things one can forget. 

Having taken the photograph off of the wall, Najwa walks into the half-empty living room. She considers the paint-chipped walls, the baseboards that she’d meant to caulk to stop the insects who crawled through from outside. Even in the city, the buildings fight the dust and water only to be eroded. 

Sometimes Najwa still greets Death, “Are you still there?” 

And Death responds, “Are you still there?” The ever presence, not a thing outside of her but an instinct from her root. The first time Death appeared, Najwa was picturing the thinness of the veil. She was beneath him and he had a hand around her throat, and she was convinced it was love. When she asked for more, she was searching for dissolution and she was right there, so close that thirty seconds longer she might have been a dandelion beneath her mother’s breath. 

She told her psychiatrist at the hospital that she thought about method but never made plans. She’d checked herself in, but she never could tell him that she spoke to Death, who made everything easier. She could say, “Good morning,” and Death, polite and patient as it was unknowable would say, “Good morning.” 

“Will I always carry you,” she might ask, and Death would reply, “Will I always carry you.” 

In her lowest moments, when Death quietly expands inside her, reaching a long arm behind her ear, extending a leg into her shoulder, she quietly asserts that she is not ready. In a museum, she saw a crisply drawn still life of a skull and pomegranates. A bouquet bloomed beside it, perhaps on the last day before a wilt.

To live and be open to the possibility and to be a flower anyway. That’s a part of it too, that Najwa is not a flower but might call herself one.  She thought about never being able to choose if one is crushed under the foot of a dog run out to the backyard, the kick of child searching for a ball.

“You’ve really found your stability,” the psychiatrist said before signing her release papers, and Najwa smiled, feeling the bull snort beneath her.

Once the fish on the beach was nothing but picked bones, Najwa asked her father about the whale and her father said, “What whale?” And Suri said, “What whale?” and Najwa, unsure of what else to do, told them, “The whale at the base of the world,” because after everything settled at the previous night’s barbecue she had been able to find not the friend of her uncle but the wife of the friend of her uncle and she asked her about the story. 

The woman wore a plain black tunic over jeans. She wore gold sandals. She had wide hands and skin speckled by acne scars that must have been decades old. Najwa had asked, “What was the story your husband was telling us?” and the woman replied, “It’s just a myth. That at the base of the world there’s a whale, Bahamut, carrying a bull, Kuyutha, on whose head there’s a ruby mountain, on whose head there’s the world,” so Najwa told the same story to her father and to Suri and as she told it she followed the shoreline to the base of the ocean with her words, noting the nearly descended sun that would never reach the whale. 

At the end of the story, Suri asked, “What does it mean that God used love as a trick to support the world,” and Najwa let surprise crack on her face like concrete above a weed. That night, when they kissed, Najwa pulled away from Suri, as if to tell her that there was no place for either of them in each other, regardless of how they spoke. They weren’t children. They couldn’t spend a day together at the beach and treat it as what it was. Najwa went back to her tent in the dark, following the light from the fire by the hut. 

Najwa didn’t say goodbye to Suri when she told her father she felt ill and that they should leave that night. Her father shook his head, but he agreed to drive back to the city. Nor did she ask Suri if she could take the camera. She paid $12 to have the roll developed when they returned to the home they’d chosen. The other photos were mostly of Suri’s family. Najwa looked for a photo of the friend from Suri’s story, and didn’t find one. She did find a still life of fruit on a plate, and Najwa assumed the small spheres were guavas, but it was hard to tell in black and white. She did not feel guilty about having to reach to remember Suri’s name—there was no better way to exist. A memory without a name is an eternal thing. 

“Every morning, I replace a protective sterile mesh of fabric on the back of my head: vapor-permeable, the kind of dressing you’d likely receive for a healing skin graft. The crack in my skull, covered by this mesh, has been open for years, a slim cavity rounded by stretched skin to cover the jagged edges of bone. You can hear my thoughts as they leave my brain, an effect that made my first actual skin graft problematic, muffling the sound as it left my head, eventually leading to the graft’s removal. The fabric mesh is there to keep everything clean, to keep my new mouth open and clear. Today, the dressing is replaced by an adhesive flesh-colored silicone hugging my skull, hidden beneath a black beanie. The soft, incoherent babble of all of this might leak through if you are standing close enough. We are burying my beloved mother. Beloved by most, at least.”

My father squeezes my arm as the priest speaks. He can hear the past squeaking through the fabric, hum of disembodied voices, his brother, my younger self, his dead wife. I look at him then around at the congregation, dozens and dozens of people dressed in their best for a woman most of them barely knew. Some are crying, which is hilarious to me. But I continue on.

“Things are haphazard in recollection. Many of my memories aren’t visual. The most visceral of these lie dormant until something unexpected comes to me. That smell, that arrangement of light, that sensation. The sounds of my memories haunt my dreams. Even after waking, the remnants echo around me until I’m able to drown them out by thinking of something else. Sometimes, I can’t tell what is real and what is remembered because no noise is impossible for me to recreate.

“I wasn’t born like this. From the beginning, my mother was convinced I was selectively mute out of shyness or some nascent anxiety, despite what the doctor had told her. In 2001, I was five and knew enough sign language to make myself understood by others. But my mother didn’t want me to learn, she considered non-verbal speech abnormal, the purview of specialists or the handicapped. At two years old, the cranial sutures in the skull fuse. At three, the brain is most of the way done growing. At five years, it’s the size it will always be. The skull locks into place by the time you’ve learned to run.”

My father turns his head, shifting uncomfortably. He hears the ghost of his dead wife’s voice, a low, scratchy tenor that used to climb higher and higher when she felt she wasn’t being understood. “Most children are just timid! Even me. Being a kid is terrible. Shyness is common. That’s all it is.” My father opens and closes his hands, looks around the small gathering. No one seems to have heard anything, but my mother’s voice continues to echo inside. An elderly couple stands nearby, the woman’s arm looped through. As I think, they turn their heads ever so slightly.

“In her diary, my mother wrote down a selection of medical procedures to treat my supposedly temporary muteness. Under two columns, the words Legal and Questionable. In 1987, when she was 18, she had gone abroad to visit her grandmother. Together, they witnessed a man with broken vocal cords speak without opening his mouth. Onlookers were invited to touch his throat to prove it wasn’t an act of ventriloquism. My mother asked him how he could speak. ‘He smiled at me, in a patronizing sort of way, and shook his head. But beneath his scarf, I glimpsed a terrible gash. He did not speak to us again and yet I could not stop thinking of the source of his voice. It was clear and unobscured. Did it come from that hole?’ Clearly, this was her intention for me as it was the only procedure she had written under Questionable.”

Slowly, so as not to disturb the eulogy, my father steps away from me, holding his head stiff. Yes, he knows this story already. He was there. He helped. The casket is still above ground and everyone’s heads are bowed. All these people. I readjust myself, pull the beanie further down, patting the silicone patch underneath. Sweat makes it feel like a loose bandaid. On my right, there’s a woman with a purple bow who is almost certainly closer to me than she was before, her ear tilted to the side.

“No doctor would consult with my mother after my birth. There was no denying my condition was physical, irreversible. As for her experiences abroad in the decade prior, no credible source could be found to substantiate what my mother saw. She had been alone with my grandmother on that street that day and my grandmother was long dead by the time I was born. My mother hadn’t told anyone about the performer, apart from my father whom she met some years later. The entire time that my mother looked and scrambled and denied my condition, my father watched and kept silent. He was obliging, supportive in the way that involves the least amount of effort, happy to listen.

“They had spoken about a procedure, experimental in nature, that a low-level surgical technician could perform. My mother had been taking night classes at the university, had bought a drill and a slew of military-grade emergency medical equipment she had found on Craigslist. All of a sudden, my father wasn’t so bemused anymore. She could perform the procedure herself, she said. ‘You don’t have to believe me, I know I can. We’ve all seen this movie before.' So had my father, who refused to participate. What he didn’t do, however, was deny the possibility that it might work. Instead, he demanded my mother find a willing medical professional. The cost would come later, but she herself couldn’t be the one to do it.

Across from me, her face visible above the casket’s bouquet, is the woman my parents eventually found. Ours was a situation that manifested strange attachments. The mad scientist obsesses over its creation. The child burns its ant colony under the scrutiny of a magnifying glass.

“Entries to my mother’s diary drop off after she meets the doctor. ‘Had a consultation with Clarice Kepler regarding T’s health. I appreciate her professionalism and her curiosity. Previous consultations have been disappointing up until this point.’ My mother was deliberate in her omission of the other doctors she spoke with. Even my father didn’t know who they were or what they were told. I don’t doubt that she sat in a bevy of examination rooms, made up her mind as soon as the doctors walked through the door. It would certainly match the sporadic way we moved neighborhoods every few years, her suspicion about people’s attention raised quickly and without effort.

“There aren’t any documents of the procedure, unsurprisingly. My father told me how it happened, the pediatric clinic since shuttered, where I was laid down and sedated, the coldness of the room, how the echo of the crack traveled off the walls. To this day, he refuses to divulge how much Dr. Kepler was paid. Evidently, it was enough for her to couch her own moral misgivings since she not only performed the procedure but stuck around for years after. Or perhaps, there are people who dream of this sort of thing, who jump at the chance to dive into the unorthodox.”

The woman with the purple bow is no longer being subtle and, beside my dad, a family of three seems to be doing all they can to stare straight towards the priest. Maybe I’m not being as quiet as I thought.

“I remember staying in bed the morning of the crack. I awoke to an empty house. Later, I found out that my parents had left to retrieve Dr. Kepler’s cash from the bank. Our dog, Farley, bounded toward me when I stepped out of my room. I remember signing for him to sit. He licked a cut on my hand. Beyond that, there’s nothing left of that day. To me, it felt like I never left the house. I awoke again back in my bed days later, fuzzy, with Farley warm at my feet.

“The door to my room was ajar. My mother’s feet were visible through the gap, sunlight from the floor-to-ceiling glass window in the hallway overexposing her face. My eyes couldn’t focus on anything, even when I looked down at my hands. A sharp ringing pierced through the room and Farley jumped onto his feet, barking. I remember hearing mom and dad push into the room barefoot, slapping skin. The blurriness didn’t dissipate as I looked up. They were staring, my father gripping my mother’s shoulder. Farley was trembling, barking at me. The ringing everyone heard was coming from my head.”

The crank begins to turn and the casket lowers into the ground. I am apathetic and very, very angry. My mother’s death is a tragedy for these people. She did everything she could to prove the world wrong about my condition and was greeted with admiration, though she never told them exactly what she did. “Aggressive therapy," as she called it. How unfair it is that, in my case, she ended up being right.

“In the years and days following the procedure, my parents found that my predilection for lip-syncing in time with my thoughts was sorely lacking. I had spent my most fragile years shaping my hands into a mouth. I didn’t know what it felt like for sound to come from my throat, flexing my tongue was awkward, and shaping my lips: humiliating. The two streams of voice, my thoughts and what actually came out, rarely matched. And my voice, well, I had never heard my own. I was suspicious that the one that spoke from the crack wasn’t even mine, but rather an amalgamation of the people closest to me or the ones I heard on our television. The voice didn’t crackle or warble. There were no stutters. Volume rose or fell with my moods. If thoughts conflicted, they sounded at the same time, overlaid pieces of me in disharmony, or they would cut off completely.

“Once, I overheard my father talking to my mother over the phone when she was away on business. He went over the speaking lessons we had tried. His tone was jovial at first. He whispered about what came after, the sounds of my memories, and his loving frustration at my lack of enthusiasm. But then he brought up the fact that I had made him cry. During the lesson, I had unconsciously recalled the time when, having knocked over a stack of paper on his desk, my father called me a little shit. ‘It just played, then and there. A perfect recreation. Like there were two of me in the room.’

“In their attempts to have my mental ventriloquism match natural spoken language, my parents neglected to realize that no one’s thoughts are inherently this linear. There is a fog and then there is what manages to get pushed through that fog into the world. They were right in keeping me from others, if only for fear of what might occur if anyone found out what had happened to me. The useful side effect, according to my mother, was that being raised in isolation leaves you more silence to put into relief what your thoughts are trying to convey. And I am very good at silence. It’s the only unnatural creation I have.”

The funeral attendees are all looking at me and my father now. The casket has reached the bottom of the pit. We are what’s left to remember my mother by. Before the priest began his eulogy, my father had started to talk about a light that shone brightly in the world, and how that light was my mother. Bright lights can lead to overexposure. My father looks around the crowd of bodies draped in black. His grief has pushed him into two dimensions, his features so deepened and lined that the shadows in his wrinkles look like they could stain your finger. I put a lot of hope for guilt in him even though I know we’ve just buried the one who is truly guilty.

“I’m not sure everyone is aware of what it means to be a good parent. I doubt many parents themselves ever stop wondering if they’ve ceased being someone else’s child. Now we are standing in the literal wake of it all. I hesitate to call what my mother did an act born out of stubbornness. There’s a sense of amusement and virtue to that description. I’m not sure what I’d call what she did. There’s a lot of uncertainty. For now, all I have is this cavity.”

Friends and colleagues of my mother step away reverently one by one, the ones closest to me looking over their shoulders again and again, trying their best not to be obvious. Dr. Kepler makes her way around the plot toward me. I reach beneath my cap and remove the adhesive patch. There is enough space between us and the few remaining people that I don’t bother to move my mouth. She says it’s nice to see me. A chuckle emanates from the back of my head. I think about Dr. Kepler’s annual pediatric check-ups, how they felt more like glorified talent shows, her and my mother standing in front of the tissue-papered doctor’s room chair with their arms folded as I thought and spoke. She has no context for what she is hearing in the moment, only the buzzing memory of fluorescent lights and the crinkling of paper.

My father comes over, embraces Kepler. They begin to chat. I am tempted to tell the doctor about the projections that have started. Perhaps they aren’t new so much as being newly noticed by me. On a restless night, I lay on my back, turned onto my side, and saw a reflection of light bouncing off the walls. It took several frantic turns of my head for me to realize I was attempting to see something that would always be behind me. I walked into the bathroom, leaving the lights off. Behind me, in the mirror, I could see a shaft of light spilling onto the wall, pulsating through the crack in my skull. As my eyes moved, so did the light, each color vaguely matching those I could make out from the dark room. As I moved, so did the light, its parallax in perfect tandem.

During the day, this light is nearly impossible to see and I keep the cavity covered regardless. But I wonder what I am not seeing. I’ve wanted to know how far the fissure spreads. I am a speaker and now a projector. As far as I can tell, this changes nothing about my condition. But I sense my condition is no condition at all, just the way things really are beneath the bone.

When I was little, my mother used to pull on my arm, beckoning me closer, hugging me tight, collapsing my body against her own, fingers circling the crack in my head, the one that she had put there. My voice would emanate between her fingers, the vibrations bouncing through her hand, back to my scalp skin. I could feel her smile against my forehead at my voice, playing like a shoddy radio under her chin.

All of this goes bad over forty degrees, Tab tells me, kicking at the compressed soda can in the dirt as if to make sure it’s dead. For the past half hour, he and I have been sunning on the roof of this abandoned beverage factory a few miles off Rockwell and sipping a sample of what he calls the Jagging Joplin, a mixture of gin and some precarious ingredients he claims to have experimented on at home for fun. The drink is the color of stale avocados and has a Dr Pepper on the side of its refilled bottle.

Fahrenheit or Celsius, I ask.

Doesn’t matter, he says, what matters is that it goes down fast, like, really really fast, then adds that orange is the worst kind, that it only takes about a minute or two before all sorts of fruity flavors infiltrate one’s body as poison. I nod at all the right moments, trying to guess when we’re going to kiss. I pass on the bottle. Why drinking under the sun drives some people to speak in thick American drawls escapes me, but it still obviously cuts it for men like Dad and Tab.

Let’s bounce, he says.

On the surface level there seems to be nothing wrong with Tab. He doesn’t even look half bad as far as the creeps in our town go. Sometimes he can speak a lot of trash but I know he does it in good faith. He values everything we do together, including those K-Pop parties we crash every Friday evening, where he tries so hard to impress me with his variety of improvised cocktails he names after dead rockstars. He and I met at this juvie upstate a few years back, at one of those old facilities dedicated to restoring lost Sunday school souls across the county. I was doing my second term at St. Josephine’s at the time, helping the department pastor with his laundry and stuff. Tab seemed to be the only person in the mixed courtyard with no drama lurking behind the façade and who was cool enough to have an afternoon smoke with. He found me idling by the basketball court one unseasonably hot October morning and said right off the bat that I didn’t look too bad for a Catholic girl. I never told him I faked the choir to get out of P.E.

We move on to our next destination for the day, which is the mall in the next town over. Tab expounds on the key differences between an alligator and a crocodile the whole time. I nod every few words, trying to look impressed. I take out my phone at one point to try and take a picture of this electric pole, on which a mother crow is fighting her children along a wire.

By the time we arrive at the mall, the day has begun to wig itself around us in a lick of orange and purple, like the poison in fruit soda. Tab tells me to wait and then scurries toward this vending machine by the sliding door to buy himself a drink. From where I stand, I can’t make out what flavor he picked, something pink with green stripes. He shakes the can before hissing it open and takes one big gulp through the mayhem of bubbles and foam.

He returns to the parking lot with a schoolboy grin on his face and extends me the drink.

I guess we kind of have to share it, he says.

I peer down at the can, unsure of what to say. It’s a brand I’m not familiar with, and even from a step afar, it smells melony and sour, like someone tried to cover something bad with something worse. A dog barks somewhere in the distance. I finally take the can from Tab’s hand and have a sip with my eyes closed. The taste turns out to be much worse than I expected, competing with the stinginess of my mother’s cough syrup. I swirl the drink behind my teeth until the roof of my mouth goes completely numb. My face must have given away a lot, for Tab snatches the can from my hand with what I take for genuine resentment. He kneels on his haunches to grab a handful of dirt from the roadside curb and peppers them into the drink. He then takes three quick sips from the can, but his face, too, scrambles in distaste.

It’s probably past the expiration date, he says, more to himself than me, then kneels back down to add more pieces of grass and daisy leaves sprouting from the edges of the asphalt into the drink. Standing up, he shakes the can harder but the result won’t change.

We enter the mall soon after and munch someone else’s leftover fries to shake off the aftertaste. We kill some time with the arcade games they keep out in front of the neighboring drugstore. When we run out of coins, Tab asks me if I’d like to hit home with him and take a nap. I nod, with no questions asked.

By the time we arrive at his place, the drink from before has made my stomach upset. On my way to the bathroom, I stop in the middle of the hallway and peek through a door that’s probably supposed to be closed. There’s a big bronze cross hung on a wall facing a pair of bare feet popping out the end of a blanket, and the low-pitched moans of an elderly man. This is the room where Tab’s father spends what little time he’s probably got left in the world, stuck in a bed the size of a coffin. He used to be a big squarish man who looked as if he was carved out of some cement block back when he was still healthy enough to work nights at the beverage factory Tab and I hung out earlier today—before he lost one of his arms to the compactor machine and had to retire. For all those years I’ve known him, he looked sadder and sadder by the day, with that same stonewall expression of all underappreciated, underpaid men in California.

Back in Tab’s room, we lie down on his bed and play with each other’s hair to do something efficient with our hands. When the silence between us grows awkward, Tab gets up to turn his PlayStation on. We start killing a lot of Nazis side by side, mostly by luring them out to this tavern bustling with the Allied NPCs. He takes sips from three nonalcoholic cocktails simultaneously, each a gem of his imagination and existential anxiety. He curses in some made-up or foreign language every time his character dies and respawns somewhere far away. We let go of our controllers after a while and start touching each other with no emotions involved. We kiss for a minute or two, but his tongue fails to settle on a trajectory, like the tail of a stray dog. He says he’s not super jazzed about attachments of any kind and that’s partly why he has zero to no practice in romantic affairs. Also why he only drives rental cars. I shake my head the whole time and say it’s all right. Don’t sweat.

Would you like something to drink, he asks, while I button my shirt and scrub my lipstick off with the back of my hand. I’ve got this new killer cocktail I wanted to show you all day.

On our way to the kitchen, I glance away at the hallway, in the direction of Tab’s father’s room. There’s a different kind of tranquility that has taken over the house and the moans seem to have stopped. Once inside the kitchen, Tab places the half-full can he scooped from the vending machine on the countertop and shakes some salt and pepper into it. Waiting for him to finish up, I flick through the photos on my phone and then stop at the picture of the family of crows on the wire. At some point, Tab slings out a meat knife from the top drawer and starts slicing one yellow fruit after another, and then some oranges. He takes out a blender from the nearest cupboard and sets it right beside the chopping board.

What’s that, I ask, gazing down at the fruits. That’s a lot of oranges.

It’s not for us, Tab says after a moment’s silence as if those few words sufficed to explain it all. He hauls the ingredients into the blender by the palmful. It’s not for us, he repeats.

The slices in the blender gradually turn to mush in a deafening roar. The liquified fruits assume an unhealthy quality as Tab rolls the lid of the blender open and pours everything into the can that is already partly stuffed with stale soda and mounds of grass and dirt.

Who’s it for, I ask again but my question goes unheard.

A loud moan comes in from the hallway all of a sudden and muffles the roar of the blender. When I turn to look, the white of Tab’s pupils is cast by a shade of something I haven’t seen in the longest while. I think back to our days at the juvie and how Tab, when the night was cold and raw, used to dream that his bed was suddenly lifted up in the air by this huge orb of light that felt neither too warm nor too cold but familiar somehow—caressing, caring; haunting. He used to tell me he would wake up in the middle of the night and cry his mother’s name into the wind to let her know that he knows, that he, too, can’t find a way out, trapped just below the membrane of the world, feeling the walls of his cell give to the touch and swell against his palms, his complexion having turned the color of bricks.

We don’t talk a word of it now as I watch him place the can next to a couple of nameless pills on a tray, which somehow looks menacing in all its mundaneness. He lifts the tray up and takes a deep breath. He sighs like a full stop.

Let’s bounce, he says.