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i've been writing short fiction semi-seriously for about five years now, but i've been writing fiction in general since i learned how to write sentences. nowadays i mostly write literary fiction and some sci-fi and speculative fiction. i like making up hyphenated words because i had a totally normal reaction to reading beowulf. i hope you like my stuff i work hard on it.
unsure where to start? my current favorite is wonderland, a story about a girl who works selling snow cones at the boardwalk. my other best recent stories are the blizzard and jenny.
current works in progress:
- delta, about the angel who appears in a fry cook's apartment to get him to confess his love for his coworker.
- finding dr. robinson, about a woman who searches for the doctor who delivered her when she was born.
- our dad, going up, about a woman whose father keeps sleepwalking.
cw: homophobia
Jenny
I should have told you this before. A long time ago. Before you left. Before I made you leave, I mean. That last Thanksgiving, or even before then. It would have made you less mad at me, I think. I thought to tell you then, for that reason, but I didn’t, because I was afraid of your mom leaving and embarrassed by how silly it felt. Probably other reasons, too, but I don’t know. Anyways, I’m not sure I could ever make you less mad at me, now, but I saw the news on Facebook the other night, about the wedding. Congratulations. The whole thing looked nice.
Don’t worry, I haven’t been stalking you or anything on there. You told me you didn’t want me to be your dad anymore, and you didn’t give a shit I said you weren’t my kid, and I was trying to respect that, I guess. I only saw the post when your mom shared it. I’d opened my phone when the ads started playing on ESPN, when I was watching the Packers on my couch. I was happy, first. I really was. I was happy for you. And then, second, I was confused. I kept looking, on the first glance, and then the second, for some lady in white. When I realized you were getting married to another guy, I had to squint and re-read it three times to make sure it really was you, and it really was your wedding. And I saw your mother standing next to you, smiling.
And after that, third, I remembered. Not that I had forgotten. But my heart started hurting again, not the way that my doctor tells me to worry about, but the other way, the way it always does, deep in my ribs and right in the heart and the middle of the spirit. I remembered Jenny, and that I had wanted to tell you about Jenny a decade ago, but I had been scared at the time of losing everything. But I thought about it again, watching the Packers lose, downing one beer and then another and then another, feeling myself slowly wear a hole in my couch: I don’t have anything left to lose.
I started going out with Jenny when I was nineteen. It was January. She was twenty and in college with me, before I dropped out. She was in some history class with me, something about the Civil War, I don’t remember. That part’s not important. I remember the day we started dating because I didn’t ask her out, she asked me out, and I hadn’t expected it. Jenny always had a way of doing things I never expected. She asked me if I wanted to grab coffee before our next class, and I said yes. And we did.
Jenny had thick eyelashes, the kind that snow would settle on. Her dark hair always stood out against the white sky. We dated like normal people for two months before anything happened. She’d help me in class, and I’d help her when she’d get too stoned and couldn’t find her way back home to her apartment. We’d go out for dinner and then breakfast. She’d always be reading something when I met with her, that was always the thing I’d be interrupting. She liked big novels, stuff with something to say. She’d try to explain them to me sometimes, but I’m not sure I ever understood the messages. I liked the sound of her voice, though. Her brown eyes.
By two months in, she’d gotten me to get high with her and her friends a handful of times. I’d been hesitant, you know how I am. You know how your grandma was. She’d scared me straight, told me all those stories of kids who’d died from the Devil’s lettuce, or whatever. But Jenny had gotten me to try. Well, I guess that’s an oversimplification. The truth is, she never asked, she didn’t have to do any convincing, I just wanted to do it because she was doing it, and because she was cool. Everybody always said Jenny was cool.
Anyways, we’d all sit on the floor of her apartment and she’d put some record on and we’d smoke until I thought that carpet was going to swallow me whole, and I’d get trapped between floors of that building forever. I’d listen to the sound of her voice and her friends’ voices, the fluid motions between half-hearted argument and laughing at nothing at all. “Eddie, when you’re eighty-something and you’re dying, and you still gonna be thinking about that fucking guy you didn’t even date?” I remember she asked once to one of them. I was too high to really take notice of it in the moment. “Chill the fuck out,” Jenny said to him.
The first time the two of us got high alone, I laid on her bed while she got changed. Not for anything like that, mind you. We’d come back to her apartment early from a party. I kept looking back and forth between her and the poster of The Exorcist on her wall, and I kept spending longer on her each rotation. It wasn’t because she was beautiful, or anything like that. She was, but I hadn’t been thinking about that. I knew a few guys in college who’d get all touchy with their girlfriends when they got drunk or high or both, but I hadn’t ever gotten that. Jenny stood on the other side of the room, by her closet, unbuttoning her blouse with her back to me, and I just kept looking at the blouse. It was blue and satin-y. I remember it clearly, despite the time and drugs. This baby-blue blouse, with a pattern of flowers you could only see up close, just slightly shining different than the regular fabric. I was mesmerized by it.
“Enjoying the view?” Jenny asked, pulling a faded gray t-shirt over her head. I remember my face went all red, and I looked at the ceiling, leaning my head back against the headboard. I apologized to her for staring, and she just laughed at me, pulling shorts over her pale legs.
“I’m not mad,” she said. “You’re my boyfriend.”
“It’s a nice shirt,” I said, for some reason. I looked at where she’d thrown it over a chair, blue and shining in the dim light.
Jenny looked at me, raising her eyebrows. “Yeah?” I should have felt embarrassed about it, but I couldn’t have seen myself, mesmerized by a women’s blouse without any woman in it. I couldn’t explain it. I was sweating.
“I don’t know,” I said. “It is.”
She got a smile on her face, then, that looked like the Devil. Sometimes, I’ve thought she was. Her eyebrows furrowed together as she looked at me, just smiling, like I was some case she had cracked wide open. She hesitated a moment, I could feel it, when she walked over back to the chair, putting a hand over the blouse. But Jenny was always a bold kind of girl.
“Wanna try it on?” she asked. It was just joking enough to laugh off and forget and just serious enough to say yes. I should have been more embarrassed. I should have been embarrassed at all. I wasn’t even that stoned. When Jenny asked me about it later, when we fought, I always said I was less there than I was. I would have said yes to anything, I claimed. But I was there enough to think, and not there enough to feel embarrassed, and somehow, then, I said yes. The ceiling fan spun countless times in the following seconds, like a whisper. The air felt cold.
I have wondered, at times, if somebody made you feel like that. If somebody made you who you are, in that way, drawn you in and made you forget yourself and reason and the shit that’s supposed to make you a man. And I’ve wanted you to have said no. For your own sake. I should have said no, but I didn’t. In hazy silence, I took off my white t-shirt and stood with my back to Jenny as she led each of my awkward-lengthed bony arms into the long sleeves and slipped that blouse over my teenaged shoulders and pimpled back. It was soft. I was surprised that it could get around my shoulders, but it did, somehow. I held my breath when she turned me around to button each button up the front, one by one. She didn’t say anything, which terrified me. She terrified me. You’re married now. Maybe you get it, the way I was terrified of her.
When she had finished with the last button, she took a step back to look at me. I had expected Jenny to laugh, or wrinkle her face up in playful disgust, or even real disgust. I had expected Jenny to say Jesus, you’re high or oh my God, look at you, you’re crazy. I had not expected Jenny to smile at me again, closed-mouth and gentle, and trace the outline of my collarbone beneath the thin fabric, and say, “Looks good.”
This was the first of a series of times I borrowed Jenny’s clothes. The morning after this first time, when I finally got my head back on right, the shame caught up to me, and I apologized to her for the whole ordeal over breakfast in her kitchen. I assured her I wasn’t gay, or anything, I swore. I paced around the wooden floors. And she just nodded, taking drinks of black coffee out of her roommate’s chipped white mug. She said we could forget it, if I wanted. And I wanted to. I did. But I also wanted other things.
When I said I couldn’t remember the class Jenny and I met in? That was a lie. It wasn’t history, I remember. It was poetry. Jenny used to read it to me, sometimes, when we studied together. I’d lie in her apartment bedroom, wearing her clothes, her Led Zeppelin t-shirt and her running shorts, or her tank top and her blue jeans, staring at that ceiling fan, and she’d lie on the bed next to me kicking her feet back and forth in the air absentmindedly, and she’d read me all the words like each and every syllable was important. Taking her clothes stopped being a drunk or high activity. We started doing it all the time, in secret, when we were alone. Sometimes there was a heat to it, sometimes her clothes ended up back on the floor again, but most of the time, there wasn’t. Most of the time she’d just help me get dressed and I’d do my homework on her floor, in her sweater.
Jenny and I did this for three months after that, maybe two and a half, I’m not sure. It got warmer outside every day. Our second semester, we took a class on economics together, even though we both hated it. I hated it because it made me feel stupid. Jenny hated it because it made me feel stupid, and because she hated the professor, a man who seemed to be older than God and just as self-righteous.
My favorite stuff of hers became, funnily enough, the boyish clothes. The tomboy stuff. That’s what I always went to first, Jenny’s ripped-up t-shirts, and those button-up shirts they made to look like somebody’s boyfriend’s.
There was this leather coat that I think was even a men’s jacket, but because it was Jenny’s, because that’s what the cool girls were all wearing, I wanted it. It was funny– it took a few times of me trying that jacket in private, when we were alone, for us to remember that it wasn’t even really women’s clothing, and nobody would even bat an eye if I wore it out. Nobody could have known, when I started wearing it to parties, and to bars, and to class, that it was Jenny’s, but I did. We did. It was warm and chocolate brown. It smelled like her perfume and her cigarettes. I don’t think I even would have liked the jacket if I’d seen it where she got it, in her dad’s closet, or something, but something about the way Jenny wore it made it different. It made it hers and it made it for her, for somebody like her. I don’t know if that makes any sense. I just liked the feeling. I liked how it looked on me. And I liked that it was hers.
Jenny had a Polaroid camera. I never let her take photos of me in the real girl clothes, for fear of somebody seeing them, but, somewhere out there, there’s a few of me in that jacket. Some with her, some with other people, and some just by myself. Looking at a picture she took from far away, of me standing in the melting March snow, my hair unbrushed and growing into my blurred face, I remember thinking God, that could’ve been somebody else. The only recognizable part was Jenny’s jacket. Every other fact about that kid could have been anything, but whoever stood in that photo was hers, that was clear.
On my birthday, in late March, Jenny got me a present. This one’s a funny story, I promise. She went to the store, and she’d gotten this dress for me. She’d meant well, I’m sure. It was a nice gesture. But, the thing is, the dress was hideous. It was uglier than anything I’d ever seen, Sean. It was pink and white, in this absurd pattern of roses and leaves and vines. Something some kind of school teacher would wear, or one of those women on the HOA–do you remember Ms. Nichols? Like her.
Anyways, I know Jenny had meant well, so I tried it on, in front of her mirror, with her standing behind me, and I couldn’t stop myself from laughing. The dress went all the way down in a straight line to my dark-haired shins.
“Jenny,” I started. “Jenny, it’s…”
“Do you not like it?” she asked. She looked at my eyes through the mirror. She was so earnest, my God. I imagined her walking through the aisles of that shop, trying to find something that I’d like best, and somehow, in what could have only been a fit of romantically-induced delusion, landing on this horrendous dress. I turned around to look at her directly.
“I love you,” I said, in a rush, between laughter. I hoped she didn’t catch it. It’s a silly first time to say that. I put my hands on her shoulders. “It’s really ugly, Jenny.”
“No!” she exclaimed. “No! Is it really?” She put one hand over her mouth, extraordinarily genuine. Her dark eyes started to well up. I moved my hands to the sides of her face, to her hair.
“No, I’m sorry,” I tried. “Don’t cry, it’s really not a big deal.” It really hadn’t been. In fact, all that I could think about was the gesture of it, that she had tried to buy something like this, just for me, just for our strange and insane routines. She put her head into my chest, somewhere between laughing and crying.
“I was just trying…” she said.
“I know,” I said. “It’s the thought that counts, it’s okay.”
She pulled back, wiping her eyes to look me up and down. “Jesus, you’re right, that’s fucking atrocious, oh my God, Frank, I’m sorry.” She laughed. “What was I thinking?”
I put my hands on her cheeks, resting along her jawline, and I kissed her. “I have no idea,” I said.
“Did you say ‘I love you’?” she asked, realizing. I’d been caught red-handed.
“Oh,” I said. “I think so.”
Jenny smiled. I turned twenty. This was not one of the times that the clothes ended up back on the floor, but only because we took care to fold up that dress cleanly, keeping the tags on it, so it could be returned.
I remember you turned twenty five weeks before I kicked you out. I’m sure you remember that, too. You were away, then, at school, but I’d called you, and sent you a package. I’d offered to drive up to the city to see you, but you didn’t want your dad coming up and embarrassing you. You said that in kinder words, but I got the idea. I was a little disappointed, but it was only natural, as your mom reminded me, and I figured you still had eighteen years of dad hugs to hold on to. And you’d be home soon enough for Thanksgiving, like last year, I figured. And you could make yourself breakfast, I told myself. You were old enough. You were twenty.
I sent you a set of those Lord of the Rings books. A nice set, the kind with matching covers. I’d never read them, I still haven’t, but you liked them. Do you still have them? If you didn’t, I’d get you a new one. Hell, I’d search all over just to find the same copies, if you wanted.
Anyways, sometime in May, I got embarrassed again. This would happen every few weeks, my brief returns to reason. This time, we were in her room, as always, but I hadn’t bothered to change out of her clothes before we both went to sleep. I woke up remembering, and had panicked, frantically scrambling myself out of her shirt and her shorts as if at any moment her roommate might come through her bedroom door and see me, see Jenny’s boyfriend sleeping in women’s clothes like a serial killer. When the clothes were off and I was back to just my underwear, I sat hunched and panting on the edge of the bed. I pressed the heels of my palms into the sheets.
Jenny, who had woken up at some point in my scramble, I guess, was then suddenly next to me, putting her hand in the place between my shoulder and the back of my neck.
“This is crazy,” I said.
Jenny didn’t say anything. She kept her hand where it was. She looked at my eyes, which were looking at the ground, at the clothes on the ground, at the rug, at my bare feet.
“This is crazy,” I said again, because it was true.
Jenny opened her mouth, then closed it again, then spoke, softly, unsure. “Maybe?”
“What?” I looked at her, then. I could see my own face fish-eyed in her eyes.
It was the least sure I’d ever seen her. “Maybe it is crazy? I don’t know.” Jenny was always sure. She always said the right thing.
“Okay, then we should stop. We should stop. Right? Shouldn’t we?” I said. “Yeah, we should.”
Jenny furrowed her eyebrows. She frowned. “Does it matter if it’s crazy? If you like it? I don’t know, Frank–”
“The fuck do you mean does it matter? Of course it does.” I raised my voice. I stood up. I took a step forward, backing away from the bed. “Jesus Christ, Jenny. Of course it fucking matters. It’s how we, I don’t know, organize a fucking society.” I was trembling, now, like that dog we used to have when you were younger. Lola was always afraid of storms, remember? I had to hold her tight in a blanket just to get her calm enough to sleep, and that would barely even work, I’d just be up holding her all night.
I pressed my palms into my eyes until my vision was all staticked even when I opened them again. “You’re not supposed to do shit just because you like it. You have to do what’s best for everybody. That’s how it fucking works.”
I didn’t realize until recently that I’d said most of the same things to you, that Thanksgiving. Does it make it better or worse to know you aren’t special for that? I hope better. I don’t know. But Jenny didn’t react like you did. Probably because she’s Jenny, and she was patient, and you’ve got all my bad genes in you.
Jenny just looked at me with those eyes. “Don’t raise your voice at me, Frank,” she said quietly, but firmly, frowning. She stood up from the bed to meet me face-to-face, eye level. “Look, if you want to stop doing this, you can. We can. But I need you to know it’s not me making you feel this. It’s not me making you get all embarrassed, making you regret shit. I don’t care, Frank. I’ve been with women before, all sorts, I–”
“What?” I said.
“The point is, Frank–” she tried to keep going.
“You’re a fucking lesbian?” I said.
“Frank, no, come on–”
“I’m your fucking boyfriend, Jenny. I’m not a woman,” I said, because it was true.
“Yeah, whatever–”
“No, not whatever. Why the hell did you say that?” I looked at the clothes on the floor, hers and mine and hers-that-were-occasionally-on-me. I looked again at Jenny’s bedroom, at the bed I’d slept in, the traces I’d left around the room. I wondered if the clothes that were mine enough were men’s enough. A thought snuck up my spine, then, that anybody looking at this room could follow my traces and outlines and belongings, looking for clues, and might not know from this investigation that I had been Jenny’s boyfriend, that I’d been a man at all. “I’m not some fucking crossdresser, Jenny,” I said, barely whispering the word.
“I didn’t say that,” she said. “I just meant that whatever this is, whatever we’re doing, is fine by me, alright? Isn’t that what matters? When we’re alone?” Jenny was always good at convincing. That was her problem. “When it’s just us?” She tried to take my hand, to unfurl my nails from my palm. I jerked my hand back away. I took a step back, too, and then another. I shook my head.
“I don’t know, Jenny.” This was the most clear-headed I had been in months. It didn’t matter what I or anybody wanted or felt or cared about, there were things that were just true, about the world, about Jenny, about me. “I don’t know,” I said. I found my clothes on the floor, my real clothes, and pulled them on as fast as I could. And then I was out of her apartment door, and into the street, going home.
And that was the last time I saw Jenny, I swear.
I have spent the last forty-odd years since I stopped seeing Jenny trying to forget her. I’ve wished, every day, to forget about all of it. To forget about those feelings. This, I think, is why that Thanksgiving went the way it did. Not that that’s an excuse. But that’s why I was afraid, and ashamed, and disgusted. The worst things I’ve ever said to you I have said to myself. This is what I need you to understand. I go back to that night all the time in my head.
You were afraid. More afraid than I’d ever seen you. More afraid than when you had that solo in the Christmas show in second grade, and more afraid than the morning before your first day of highschool, in the car outside, and more afraid than when you told me you scratched and dented up the car on a mailbox down the street. You said, “Dad, I need to tell you something. It’s important.” I told you I was listening, and I was.
“I’m gay,” you said, and seven quiet seconds passed. And then all I was thinking about was my fucked-up head, and how I’d never realized, although I should have, that it could have been genetic. All I was thinking about was how I did this to you. And about how I at least had the decency to keep things to myself. Because if everybody knows I gave this shit to you, then everybody knows about me. Everybody knows about Jenny. All that secret-keeping has been for nothing.
I know this is selfish. You can call me a narcissist, or something. You have. You’re right to, I think. But I’ve gotten all mixed-up inside, Sean. Hatred is a habit I got too good at. It’s a nasty habit. And I saw your wedding pictures, Sean, and I saw the spot I should’ve been standing in. I’d worked for the first twenty years of your life just to have that honor. I want to deserve it. Does it matter if this is selfish? I want to stop being like this. Maybe it’s wrong to want forgiveness after all of this, but I do. I’m always wanting things, that’s the problem. Or it isn’t. I don’t know anymore.
I should practice being honest. To that end, I have to tell you I was lying, again. It wasn’t the last time I saw Jenny. In fact, I apologized to her three days later. I called her on the phone. I told her I was sorry for yelling, and for leaving. In those three days, I had told myself to think rationally about the situation, but I hadn’t. I hadn’t wanted to. I had only wanted to go back to her room, to her closet, to her. And so I did. For another month and a half, until the end of the school year. It was good. In the summer, I went home. The distance made me remember myself. Well, the distance and your uncle Dick. We worked that summer for a cleaning company. I mopped the floors of the changing rooms at the pool in the Millertown Community Center until they were so clean that the bleach hurt my eyes. It felt good. I sweat. It was work. I shaved my head.
At the end of it, they were hiring for longer. And I thought about Jenny, and about school, and everything, but, as I’ve told you, I never liked school. I was never any good at it. It’s one of the ways you’re better than me. And I was scared of going back to Jenny, scared that last year had all been some dream, scared that Jenny had told our secret over the summer to her friends back home. So I didn’t go back. And I kept trying to forget. But Jenny and I didn’t end fighting. We ended without knowing we were ending.
I wasn’t sure if you’d respond, when I reached out. I found your work email on the Internet. I was even more surprised you agreed to meet. I said I’m sorry in that coffee shop a million times, it must’ve been, and it couldn’t have ever been enough, but somehow, because you are better than me, you said, “It’s okay. I know.” I was embarrassed, too, when I told you about Jenny, but you listened. I could see in your head that there were pieces moving together.
I ask about your life, because I want to know. I want to know all of it. And you look good. You look like you’re sleeping enough, which is important. You look healthy. Better than I did at thirty. I ask you if you still play ball on the weekends, a work softball team, or something. I ask you if you remember when I used to stand right up in the front row of all your games. “That’s why Thanksgiving hurt, you know,” you say. “You were always there until you weren’t.”
I tell you I am practicing doing things I want. I want to be here. There is bright July sun through the big window behind you. It lights up your hair all golden. I know you aren’t sure about anything yet, I know you don’t forgive me, not all the way. I wish you would, but you don’t, and you’re right that you shouldn’t, not for a long time. It’s not your fault I’m not any wiser at sixty-two than I was at nineteen.
But I pay for your coffee. Wrinkled bills fall out of my wallet, and you pick them up for me. My back is no good. Do you remember how I used to make you and your mom coffee, every morning? Even on weekends, even if I was sick, even when we fought. I don’t know if it was ever good coffee, but I tried. I am trying, again. For you and for myself. And, somehow, you believe me.
cw: implied past suicide attempt, hospitalization
WONDERLAND
Twelve years before they shut down the Wonderland Pier, she worked there selling snow-cones. It began in June after graduation: all the other girls, those with heads or eyes perhaps more hungry than hers, who wanted more, discussed plans of college, of the packing-up and the associated difficult decisions, of keeping in touch, and all the while Sadie, you know, the girl with the weirdo brother, Sadie C., stood there wondering when the credits would start rolling. And then they didn’t. She put her diploma in a file box at the bottom of her closet and thought now it’ll be done, we just had to resolve this last derivative metaphor, and then it wasn’t. And the snow-cone place was hiring for the summer.
Every day she drove the fifty-five minutes from her parents’ house to the pier. The traffic was hell. She spent the time memorizing license plate designs and playing one-player I Spy. Bumper sticker for the Phillies. Steven Singer billboard. Dented Honda Civic. When she was smaller this was a road trip in from the city, and she would watch the ocean appear all at once over the horizon and wrestle with her brother in the backseat yelling about whatever it was that day. McDonald’s drive-thru.
The donut place down the boardwalk opened early in the morning, so she’d stop there first before work, grab a coffee and a fresh-baked donut and let the sprinkles stick to her chin as the bikers flew by over the softened wooden boards, and then she’d walk back up in time to clock in at nine, half an hour before they opened. She liked these first few minutes, just opening, when it was so quiet you could still clearly hear the Atlantic crashing, only ever interrupted by seagulls and her own sounds of sweeping out the cramped snow-cone stand.
But then, of course, it began. The other opener arrived, most days a boy called Jay, and then everybody else did. Slowly, at first, especially when it was still early summer, but it began nonetheless: the rides started up in their hulking painted-metal bones and all the people trickled and then flooded into the concrete spaces between all the other stands and the fences and the various rainbow-colored attractions. Sticky-faced children with tired-eyed parents ran by no running signs and shoved five-dollar bills into her hands, and since her third day she’d stopped actually thinking about what she said to them when they came up, only repeating a meaningless string of syllables–Hiwhatcanigetyoutoday, Willthatbeall, Thankyouhaveagoodone.
Her and Jay didn’t talk much either, but they didn’t really have time to, she just took orders and five-dollar bills and smiled absently, and Jay just blended the ice and poured whatever flavor she’d told him and yelled out the other window for whoever ordered the small blue raspberry. She liked Jay. He worked shorter, since he was only sixteen, and every afternoon, when he left two hours before she did, he gave a small salute, silently, grinning. Sadie would salute back. Tiff, if she was closing that day, would always stare and roll her eyes at the two of them, but that was Tiff’s problem.
“You remind me of my brother,” she said one day to him, when it was cool and pouring rain and nobody bothered coming out to the beach.
“Shit,” he said.
“In a good way, I swear.” She wondered if the bags below his brown eyes had been getting deeper, or if she was just crazy. “He’d like you.”
“He in high school too?”
“Yeah,” she said. A white lie. Danny was high school age, that’s what Jay had meant by the question. Later, when she tells Danny about it, during visitation hours in that shitty peeling plastic orange armchair, he’d tell her she shouldn’t have lied. You don’t have to keep secrets just for me, Sadie, it’s fine. But she did, anyways. Their business was theirs. “You can probably leave early, if you want. Nobody’s coming out in this weather. You can borrow my phone to call your mom to get a ride.”
Thunder rolled even louder than the ocean. He’d taken the offer, saluted goodbye, dark arms silhouetted against the white-painted door, and Sadie made herself a mango snow cone.
By the end of June, Tiff got fired for stealing cash from the register when she closed, so Chris took over her shifts. Sadie had worked with him a few times before that, but not really. He was only part-time. But then Tiff was gone, and it became only Chris and Sadie for an hour and a half almost every afternoon, between when he showed up for the night and she left.
Chris smelled like cigarettes and would say things like god, I hate this job, have you seen that new alien movie, did you get a haircut, it looks good, yeah. When they were slow, which was rare, but happened sometimes, he’d dare her to make a snow-cone with all the flavors in one just to find out what it tasted like. He’d fill the machine with ice, blend it all up, scoop it into one of the little cups, and she’d go through the whole line of pumps of neon syrups and put them all in the cup until the pink and blue and bright green all mixed into one muddy purple. The answer was that it just tasted sweet. They theorized that half the flavor of any of them was only placebo, after all. That’s why the colors were so bright, to distract you from how the cherry tastes just like the pineapple ice. When she laughed, she leaned too close to Chris, so close she wondered if you can get secondhand smoke just from somebody’s breath.
“I’m covering a shift for Jay tomorrow, so I’ll be opening with you, by the way. We could hang out after,” he said. So they did, and they watched the sun go down over the sea and the lights turn on everywhere, and she’d never kissed anyone before, not really, but then she had. It was nice, she thought. The electronic billboard on the way home glowed red and blue and silver-white, and maybe this was what being a real person was.
And then it was July, and the sun was only ever hotter than yesterday, and there were only ever more people. She worked a couple closing shifts for the first time, and she didn't like it, so she asked to be kept to the mornings.
On her breaks, Sadie’d walk down the boardwalk and eat mint soft-serve and exchange knowing glances with the girl behind the counter. She’d watch kites on the beach over enough umbrellas to hide all the sand, aquamarine turtles and violet butterflies, and the planes would carry long lettered banners behind them that said janet, will you marry me? and happy 90th, aunt florence!, and her ice cream would drip green onto her thighs on the bench across the boardwalk from the entrance to the Wonderland Pier. She wrote down funny things she saw to tell Danny later in her notebook. I saw a girl say no to a proposal today. Outside the 7-11, there was a cop parked illegally. Someone asked if the snow-cones were organic.
She’d decided not to tell Danny about Chris. He didn’t need to know. He’d just crinkle his face in that friendly disgust, anyways. Instead, most days, the good days, she’d tell him the stuff from her notebook. “Everybody thinks it’s the big stuff I miss about being outside,” he’d say, "and it is, sure, but somebody’s gotta keep me updated on these terrible cop parking jobs, Jesus.” He’d laugh, dryly, and she’d smile at the sound.
Some days, she’d dare to ask him about his life. “How are you doing with it?”, she’d say. “I don’t know,” he’d say, or sometimes “bored as hell”, or when he was feeling particularly honest, “I’m sorry for doing all this to you and Mom and Dad.” And a few days, every so often, when Sadie would come into the hospital for their pre-scheduled conversations, he wouldn’t be there, and a nurse would say “Sorry, he’s not feeling up to it today.” But she’d come back next time.
In the morning shifts, she started sometimes bringing Jay an extra donut from the place down the boardwalk. “You don’t gotta,” he’d say.
“You have frosting on your face,” she said, wiping the counter.
“You’re not my mom,” he laughed. “Can you get chocolate, next time?"
She didn’t tell Chris about Danny, either. Well, he didn’t ask, so she didn’t bother. They’d talk about other things.
“The moon’s so pretty tonight,” she’d said once, at night in the parking lot outside of his apartment. It was full and bright and un-photographable. The neon signs lit up the asphalt.“Don’t you think?”
“I hate small talk,” he’d said. “Let’s talk about the real stuff, y’know? Get philosophical.” He was smart like that, because he’d went to college for a bit and read. He dangled a cigarette between his fingers. “Do you think there’s a meaning to life?”
She looked at her shoes, beat-up violet sneakers speckled with paint. In high school, she’d knelt on the floor of the cavernous auditorium, painting a tower on a wooden board for a musical. She remembered seeing that show, then, seeing a girl stand on a ladder behind it so she could poke her head out the tower’s window and sing.
“What, you’ve never thought about this?” he laughed.
“I don’t know,” she said. When Danny was fourteen, he’d said to her, softly, I’m tired of being like this, what’s the point, and she’d said Jacob Quinn-Hughes is a fucking idiot, and I’m gonna kill him for you, wanna get ice cream, I can skip class and drive us. “I guess I don’t like thinking about it.” Sadie frowned.
“I’m not sure there is one,” Chris said. “I think there’s just nothing. We’re just animals. Climbing through the night. Killing each other all the time, y’know?” He leaned in, breathing cigarette-smell into her face.
“You think?”
“Yeah, don’t you?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I think maybe it’s what you make of it.”
“Yeah, and the sun’ll come out tomorrow, sure.” He laughed again, sharply. “You’re so uncurious. That’s why you’re still here selling ice, y’know, not really thinking. It’s easier.”
She looked at her shoes again, embarrassed. “I guess,” she mumbled. Her face was red and hot in the cool night.
And then August came crashing into the shore, and it was the hottest summer on record. Red-eyed teenagers ordered snow-cones and forgot to tip. License plates from New York and Maryland drove down the highway. Jay yelled out, medium pineapple! small cherry! large grape! She watched bikers and kites and kids running on the concrete. The horses on the carousel glistened in the sunlight. The swing ride spun screaming children around. She was getting tired of that noise. She’d started hearing it in her ears when she closed her eyes to sleep, the screaming-laughing children and the ocean and the loud whir of the ice machine. And then, one cooler morning, something rose out of the monotonous rhythm of taking orders: “Sadie?”
A girl with long blue braids and a university t-shirt stared back at her. She placed her: a high school classroom, maps on all the walls, three months ago. Mary. When Danny left school the first time, Mary had said to her gosh, how terrible, I’m so sorry, are you okay? y’know, it’s such a terrible thing to do to someone and Mary’s boyfriend had said, when he thought she couldn’t hear, ha, knew that guy was fucking crazy.
“Oh my God, hi! Crazy that you’re working here this summer! How fun!” Mary said.
“Oh, hey,” Sadie said. “Yeah, just something to do, y’know?”
“Totally. Are you just for the summer, or like…?” Mary trailed off. Sadie knew what she meant.
“I mean, we’re only open for the summer, so, yeah. I guess,” Sadie paused. The morning sun hurt her eyes. She forced a laugh. “I guess I don’t know after that.”
“Yeah, I get that.” Mary smiled politely. “Anyway, can I have a medium cherry flavor?”
“Yeah, that’s five dollars.”
That night, Chris had called her. She stood in her parents’ kitchen, feet cold on the tile, lit up by the refrigerator and by her laptop on the counter on some job site glowing white and green. “Sorry to do this to you,” he said. “I just think this isn’t gonna work out. This girl I dated is back in town, y’know. I don’t feel like we have stuff in common anymore, really.”
It was 11:11pm, and she wished he was dead. Or that she could scream. Or she wished she could call Danny. Your fault for dating a guy seven years older than you, he’d say. Or maybe, you’re better off without him.
She went upstairs, up to her room, up to the closet with the file box where her diploma sat. She just sat down and stared at it, at the closet door. At the wall next to it, at the painting she’d done in fifth grade, a vase of flowers in pink and yellow and brilliant blue. Before that, in kindergarten, somebody asked her what she wanted to do when she grew up. She hadn’t said sell snow-cones, she knew that. I’m gonna be a knight, she’d said. They don’t have those in real life, though. That’s what everybody said in response, they said no, Sadie, silly, what job do you want to do when you’re a grown-up? and she said fine. firefighter.
“What are you gonna do when the summer’s over?” Danny asked, scratching marks into the chair. “That place closes, right?”
“I’m looking for other jobs, yeah,” she said. “Got an interview at Dollar Tree.”
Danny frowned, then. She almost liked seeing him frown like this, it was better than that nothing stare or the grin that said don’t worry about it. “I don’t wanna be the reason you don’t go to school or something,” he said.
“You’re not.” In her head, she traced the taut string that went from her eyes to his, like if she kept it just like that he’d know she wasn’t lying. “I don’t think I’d like it,” she said. “I didn’t like it in high school.”
“Okay.”
“I’m gonna move out, though,” she said. “Not far, just out of Mom and Dad’s. You can visit, when you’re out.”
“Okay.”
On the hottest day all summer, her last day there, a boy came to buy a snow cone.
“Hey, Jay-jay!” He looked right past Sadie, through the window, smiling wide at Jay. “How’s it going?” His words didn’t match the syllables, which were sharp and cruel. “Still working this shit?” the boy said.
Jay stood frozen. Sadie leaned sideways so her face was between Jay’s and the boy’s. “Can I get something for you?” she asked.
“Nah, I just gotta talk to him,” he said, again with the lying smile.
She held his gaze in practiced restraint. “He’s working right now.” She held the edge of the counter.
“What, are you his mom?” he said. “Jay, you got this bitch talking for you now?”
She looked behind her, into the whites of Jay’s wide eyes, his too-loose shirt. Danny had said I’m tired, Sadie, but she hadn’t been.
So she knew what she was doing before she did it. It was the only thing. The ocean crashed like cars, like metal locker doors. Blood rushed in her ears and the crowd swelled and roared in idle wordless conversation. She didn’t hear it. She leapt over the metal counter, through the window, between the plastic signs. The tip jar shattered on the concrete, and the napkins flew into the August wind coming in from the sea, and the plastic spoons clattered around in tinny applause. She pushed her hands right into the chest of that boy, shoved him hard. In second grade, she’d gotten in trouble for pulling hair. A girl had called somebody stupid. Her teacher had said violence, Sadie, is never the solution. She was confused, then, what everybody meant all the time by telling her to stand up for what was right and good, but she guessed maybe they meant tell the teacher.
She wondered, sometimes, if she’d have called it violence if she just yelled at the girl until she hurt herself instead. The boy fell. His hands hit the concrete and scraped the paler flesh. She hoped his hands bled like rivers.
When Danny got out, in September, she told him about it on the quieter end of the beach, in the early hours of the morning, when the wind was still cold but the sun was lighting up the beach grass. The bikers weren’t even out yet, just the gulls, which screamed in inpatient anticipation of the day. Danny said, “You really shouldn’t have done that.”
“He was being an asshole.”
“Lots of people are assholes, Sadie. You can’t fight all of them.”
“I want to, all the time,” she said. The sand sunk between her toes in her flip-flops.
“You’re way more insane than I am,” he said, laughing. “One day, you’re gonna get arrested or something, and I am not paying your bail.”
Sadie laughed, and shoved her brother. “Am not,” she said. “I’ll have you know I only hit that guy ‘cause it was my last day. Nobody’s telling the Macy’s an hour from here that their new checkout girl’s a violent psycho.”
“Alright, fine.”
“Wanna get donuts from that place down there? They open in five. I’m paying.”
The town began, slowly. They watched it from the bench across from the rainbow-painted sign over the entrance to Wonderland, with coffee and donuts. Rainbow sprinkles stuck to Danny’s chin and she laughed at him, and the bench sighed under their weight, and there were children and tired parents and older couples walking past, vacationers and people having a beach day and employees and everybody sponging up the last warm drops of summer so they could bottle it up for forever. September brought some kind of desperate air to everybody.
“I don’t know how I’m supposed to be a person,” said Sadie, quietly.
“Okay,” Danny said, “but you are. Wanna go up the Ferris wheel?" His hair shone in the yellow sun like auburn silk.
It was twelve years before the Wonderland Pier shut down, before she said to somebody, laughing, God, that place was falling apart, I’m not surprised, and ten years before she got regional manager, and eight before Danny’s college graduation, before there were beautiful couples at Christmas, and five before the next hottest summer on record, which burned all up and down the coast. Apartment keys pressed against her thigh in the pocket of her denim shorts. At the top of the Ferris wheel, Danny said, breaking the silence, “I thought everything was going to end, and then it didn’t.” She followed his eyes to the sea. She could see him tracing the horizon in his head, wondering if he could see the curve from this close, if he just squinted.
“Me too,” she said.
comet-boy
The day the summer sun was downed,
He leapt above the flaming ground,
The fastest boy in seventh grade
Watched home and shelter burn unbound.
He flew above the land unmade,
From frigid stars he saw the blaze.
The wooden-floored gymnasium,
And scarlet fields all, to him, bade:
Goodbye, my boy, the troublesome,
I keep right here your chewed-up gum,
Your fireworks, your favorite hill,
Goodbye, my boy, now forget ‘from’.
The boy stood silent, then, until,
He nodded slow and said, “I will,”
And though the air went cold and blew,
The shooting-star-boy went on, too.
cw: (child) death, war, terminal illness, brief suicidal ideation, homophobia
THE BLIZZARD
I.
You are a very small fox in a very small hole, or a man in a dirty uniform, or a boy who is afraid. Above your soft body, bullets swing through gray-green-yellow sky, a sideways rainstorm, and every panting breath is so thick you think the thousand million bits of air moving through your throat could be a crowd of people on a street, pushing and shoving against each other. If you’re still on Earth, you can’t begin to imagine Hell, except that it might feel an awful lot like this August.
On Christmas when you were ten, there was a blizzard. It had come in on the twenty-third and hadn’t left; the snow kept coming down in sheets and sheets, a silent downpour over the city. If you were older you might have been concerned about the dangers of it, about if people would die, but you were only ten, and the only people who ever died were your mother and Jesus, neither of whom had anything to do with the snow. It kept snowing regardless of whether you liked it or not, but you did like it. You liked that it didn’t stop.
You are thinking of the blizzard, now, because you are praying for it. You are panting and pretending to fire your gun and sweating and the whole time you’re wanting just an inch of snow. Something cold, something that makes bodies fall quieter, something turning the night indigo blue instead of black. You are, unspeakably, praying to be home for Christmas, and if you can’t have that, then you’d at least like a silent night.
When you were fifteen you were a poet, an awfully terrible one, and there was a boy called Samuel that you loved how your father loved your mother– in other words, until it killed the both of you. He lived down the block. And at night, every night you could, when you told your brother Jesse you were going out, you held him in his bed and you loved him. You loved him like a girl ought to. And when he died, you wanted to go upstairs with him. You wanted to hold him in Heaven, to wrap your angel bodies up in clouds like old blankets, until Jesse told you he wasn’t there. You didn’t believe him, though. Jesse didn’t know your boy was beautiful and so all the stories, all the idioms about beauty, all of them were about him. If he wasn’t in Heaven, then nobody was, ‘cause it wouldn’t be Heaven. But, then again, you were only sixteen, and you didn’t tell Jesse that. You didn’t tell anybody that, not your father or your sister or your notebook or God. You might have gotten better at poetry, had you ever learned how to tell the pages the truth, but in the meantime, you just tell Samuel the truth. Every night you’ll tell him what otherwise could have been the greatest poem anyone's ever seen.
You don’t know why you’re thinking about him now. Maybe the blizzard reminded you of him, not that you needed to be reminded, not really. Maybe the thought came because he was the first dead boy you ever saw, maybe because you know you will be seeing him soon. Maybe you’ll die like him, of fever that feels so hot your stomach boils. It’s easy to die of sickness. But then again, just as possible you’ll be shot or torn apart or any number of ways.
Meanwhile, ten thousand boys are sweating out of unwrinkled dirt-covered skin and decreasing in number, ten thousand foxes you know are going to die. You want to write a poem and can’t, so you tell it to him, whispering a kind of a prayer but to him instead of Him, and it feels more like telling him a secret, or like wanting, which is the same thing. Everyone wants something, of course, but you want worse and more terribly than anybody else. You want a dead boy, and you want to tell everyone you wanted him. You want to tell him how you wanted him. You want to dig up his body just to tell him that, to drag him down from Heaven just to tell him to his beautiful face how you don’t care if it’s better for him up there, you want him down here in the sweltering heat and the earth-shaking noise.
The wind howls. Someone screams nearby. You breathe in.
You also want to see your brother again. You want Jesse not to die the way you will. And you want grace for your father– it is a bad time to have sons, and you want that he’ll still have one by the time it’s all over. You wonder briefly if Jesse’s dead, and the news just hasn’t reached you yet, but that’s unlikely– he has always been better at fighting than you are. You kneel wondering how long it will take him or your father to find out, after you die.
That’s what one of the other boys, Henry, told you, when they were sending you and him out, that you were going to die. You knew that he was right in that, too. You knew you would die like this, just as you knew that the sun would set in the west. You knew it like fact: you were eighteen, and tomorrow was a Sunday, and you were going to die.
What Henry said next was so you might as well go out fighting, though, and you found that clause harder to believe. He must have, too, because he’s sitting next to you, down here, and he’s howling and shaking like a thousand running-away footsteps he wants to take, like a dog afraid of storms. He doesn’t want to die fighting, not really. And there’s the other thing, speaking of wanting– you don’t want this. You don’t want to die, not even for your country, not even for a good reason, not even for all the best, most moral reasons in the world. It’s going to happen soon, you can feel it, it comes, but you want snowfall, and you want Christmas, and quiet, for once, and to sleep until the late-winter sun wakes you up. You want to climb a tree on the first warm day of the season. You know you’ll die, but you don’t want to die pretending to kill somebody one more time.
You wonder what Henry wants, desertion or peace or love or his nineteenth birthday. Next time he goes up to fake firing, he takes a bullet straight through his chest, falls backward, and goes to Heaven. He screams. His head hits the dirt after his shoulders do. It’s not the second dead boy you’ve ever seen, but it’ll be the last, you know it, absolutely. You aren’t sure if you believe in prayer, all things considered, but, then again, it doesn’t really matter, because all this yelling coalesces into one lesson, one lecture: there are no atheists in foxholes, and no theists there either. There is no ceremony, no handsome martyr here laid down, no prayer material but no lack of asking for it. Dirt makes no distinction between the strong and the weak, the poets and the wrestlers, the boys beat bloody in the schoolyards and the boys walking home with bruised knuckles. There are only the dead and the things they wanted, and the dirt under your fingernails.
Henry dies without saying a word, but he looks at you and you look at him for a moment or two, even three, right in the eyes, before they go blank, and then you are afraid, too, because you’re going to die just like this, just like Henry. It’s going to hurt.
The sky sounds like it cracks in half, then, and you go up to fake-fire and you’re struck in your cheek and your eye with what must be lightning, or fire, or hot twisting metal. Here’s when it happens, you’re going to die. It comes. Is this how Samuel felt, hot and sick and bile rising in his throat? Thoughts escape you. You sweat. You open your mouth to scream and the movement in the forty-three muscles of your face against the metal shreds flesh. It’s burning. When you were very, very small, you tripped into a candle, burnt your leg. This is not like that, but it is. You collapse, your knees hit the wet dirt, left and then right. There are no poems you want to write about this.
And then, not by miracle or prayer or justice or chance, but by a boy you won’t ever know, you don’t die. Most of your body makes it out of the hole, out of the horizontal-rain line-of-fire. They take you and put you in a bed and a man who smells like bitter soap stitches your face up with pieces from your arm. You will have to lie there for seven hundred years before you’re all fixed. The heat outside will die down, autumn will come, they say, before you are a man once again. You have your doubts.
II.
Through Christmas Eve, it kept on coming down, you remember. That night your father taught you why the snow falls the way it does, and you ran your small hands down the foggy glass, drawing pictures in the white. Afterwards, he told you all the stories again, or he tried to. He was still learning, then, how to tell them as good as your mother, who was in Heaven. He always got the timing wrong, skipped straight to the ending without telling you how the sky looked over Bethlehem. But who could blame him? The details are hard to remember.
After the story was done, you got into bed all on your own. The wool scratched against you when you pulled it up to your cheeks, but you did it anyways. The snow coming down gently and quickly outside dampened any noise that could’ve come in from outside, but the blue light through the window made it hard to fall asleep, so you just lay there knowing you’d go eventually. You wondered if the snow scratches like wool on the rooftops, but you knew better. It would pile up and up over the streets and balconies and everything, soft on top and thicker and thicker the further down you go. You remembered when you were smaller and your brother, when he was ten, hit you up close with a snow-ball made of the further-down ice, the kind that’d give you a bruise on your arm for a week or two. Jesse laughed and you frowned and he laughed some more and so you laughed back. You weren’t sure, lying there in the third winter since, if you’d hit him like he did you, if you were ten when he was seven. But maybe you would.
As if you’d brought him upstairs for bed just by thinking of him when he was your age, the bedroom door creaked open and Jesse slipped in. You kept your eyes closed, faking sleep, but you knew it had been him from the particular sound of his boots on the wood. You listened as he hung his coat and walked across the small room to his bed. The springs whined as he sat down, removed his shoes (which thunk on the floor), and paused. You heard him breathe as if about to say something, but it ended almost before it had begun.
Another whine of the bed and creak of floorboards as he got up again. You wondered where he was looking while he just stood for a moment or two, or if he’d just been praying standing up. His shirt rustled and his belt buckle clinked as he changed slowly. You didn’t know they existed at the time, and you couldn’t see them, but the bruises dotting his chest and ribcage and side he’d later tell you about were still there, probably even still hurting if you pressed them. Jesse’d been getting into fighting. He’d tell you about the wins two years later, and tell you never to make his mistake a year after that. Fighting like that’s for kids, Peter. Get a job or something. But he’d still been a kid this Christmas, so he’d keep making that mistake for the time being. You heard him put on his pajamas.
The clock tower rang twelve times, you counted. You wondered if the guy ringing it ever overslept. It’d be easy to do in this weather. Your eyelids are drifting from dishonestly closed to pleasantly heavy, the kind of almost-sleep when your thoughts must pack up and go home for the night to their own wool blankets.
You heard the rustle of sheets as Jesse settled down again under his wool blanket, identical to yours, and maybe the tiny ones your thoughts have. He sighed like your father was known to do, like it shook his whole body. You could hear him breathe in through his nose, short and kind of wet.
“Merry Christmas, Peter,” he whispered. You listened to him roll over and lie there, but you were asleep before you heard snoring.
In the morning, you did presents. Your brother gave you a knife for Christmas, and that was the last year you saw snow– these things, of course, were unrelated, except for how you predicted both of them.
III.
But autumn comes, to your surprise, and you and your body go home with a gentle heart still weakly beating and one glass eye, slightly off color from your real one. Your father helps you get an apartment. You haven’t talked to your neighbors yet, but you see them, sometimes. In the park, husband and wife with two children happy to see their father’s seemingly recent, seemingly unharmed return. You can tell it’s recent, but before yours, because his hair’s grown out. A respectable length, of course, but the kind of length his kids could reach and hold onto if he lifted them.
In the evening, the gold light spills out their windows so much you can see it from your own window, as if just the light on its own could warm up the November-to-December chill beginning to set in. Not enough to take off a sweater, or anything, but warm enough not to shiver. It’ll be a warm drink in blankets sort of season, for them. The kids’ll run outside in the park down the block and watch their breath ‘til Dad comes home, when they’ll take their mittens and scarves off and run back to the kitchen, rosy faces still tingling. Golden light out the windows turns off when they’re tucked in, but while it still flows from the home, you drink it up like a thief. You wish you could bottle it up just to take more, to drink it like a tonic at all hours, after the children have gone to sleep, but it’s only light. You stick to your prescribed doses.
Instead, in the night, in your darkest coat and hat pulled low, you head deeper into the city. Your shoes clack-clack off the concrete; your healing skin glints in the streetlight. The wind winds through the city in a maze. It can’t get you when those buildings wall you off from any of it, though.
The place you’re headed is underground, like it’s making a bad joke about Hell and its patrons. The floorboards creak when you enter like an outlaw, a few heads turning your direction. You keep your hat low, but the people who know you know you all the same. You smile with the half your face that works as it's supposed to as you sit down at the bar.
You order a drink or several. You watch the room, make predictions. The woman onstage sings of starting over somewhere different, somewhere new. She’s going to make it there, but it’s going to hurt. You suppose that’s what everybody here would like to do, to start over. Some look to be trying here, men dancing close to other men, dressed illegally, graceful shining in the dim light.
A man sits down next to you. This is always how it goes, sitting down next to you, or making eye contact, exchanging glances. This time the man is older by a few years, dark-haired, slim. You can’t tell in here, but his eyes are blue, and his watch is expensive. When you’re done, he’ll go home to his wife, you can tell. You will never learn his name.
He buys you a drink, and you call him beautiful, because he is, and because in response, he asks you to leave with him, and you do. You go separately to your building, and he waits to go in until a long time after you enter. You pull him into your bed and he’s even more beautiful here, not that you would say that now. You sweat and move and writhe until his and your needs are satisfied, and then he leaves with a simple goodnight in your bedroom doorframe. He does not kiss you, and you know, just know, that it’s because he’s afraid.
IV.
Two years before you even leave for war, you’re still holding Samuel. You climbed up his fire escape and, when he opened up his window, in you went. The air stood still, like any wind could have broken whatever spell both of you were under, staring at each other, him in his pajamas and you in your darkest coat in the silver moonlight.
Samuel steps closer. You are still discovering what you can do in secret, in his room when the city sleeps. Even before you yourself are in the war, you are a soldier in uniform, playing war, albeit an awful one who can’t even follow orders. But in his room– desertion. There is no pretending about battles, no running around hiding behind trees. You are replaced, somehow, by the boy you could have been, the infant, soft-handed. You can predict nothing. You step towards Samuel.
He smiles, his tanned skin crinkling in the corners of his mouth. If not for the vow of near-silence that falls when you enter the room, you could have said poems just about that.
“Hey,” he says, half-whispering, grinning.
You smile, and your hand, pale and tender, finds his. You close the distance between you and him, kissing him gently, and all the fear and morbid projections in the world slip out through the window. You are here, and he loves you. His hand rests steady on the small of your back, as if to remind you that he’s got it. You squeeze his hand tighter.
Your head falls to his shoulder, your mouth on his neck, laughing just a bit. He takes off your coat, a burgeoning gentleman, and steps back. Samuel always folds it like you’re supposed to, neatly and unwrinkled. He places it on his bed, and returns to you.
One of his hands traces down the back of your arm, the feeling light as snow and standing your hair on edge just the same way. You forget how to breathe without thinking about it. He smiles, watching your reaction as always. Every meeting seems to be a series of tests between the two of you, various inputs from either party, innumerable variables on any given night, and various reactions, various outputs. New information learned, new hypotheses formed, to be tested later. Samuel’s the primary mind behind this kind of system. He wants to be a chemist when he’s older, and he’s been reading all the books on it.
But tonight, Samuel tests his fingertip on the back of your arm, and you find out what happens when you put your hand on his hip when you kiss. It becomes too many variables for him to keep track of, and you learn you like getting him out of his head. You have a new hypothesis, though: when he kisses you, he hums just slightly, sometimes. You’ll have to try again to check, though, because you kept forgetting to pay attention to anything except for feeling.
Eventually, you end up as you always do, lying in the bed together. You don’t do anything, you just hold him, and you talk, partially to avoid falling asleep, and mostly because Samuel says he likes the sound of your voice, and the way you line up words one after another in what seems like the order they were invented just to be in. You tell him all the stories you’ve ever heard, every building you pass on the walk to his fire escape, the shapes of all the clouds you’ve ever seen, everything you remember about your mother, everything you miss, everything you love, until it’s far past midnight, and the moon doesn’t shine through that window anymore.
“Time to go, I suppose,” you say. You sit up.
“Wish you didn’t have to.” He holds your hand, and sits up next to you.
“I know.”
“Dad keeps asking if I’ve got a girl yet.”
“Do you?”
“Come on, Peter,” he laughs quietly. “I wouldn’t.”
“You could. That girl next door seems,” you trail off, looking for a word, “nice.” Hell of a poet, alright.
Samuel shakes his head, grinning, then leans in to kiss you again quickly. “You’re my girl, Peter,” he whispers, playing. “Prettier than Nancy, too.” He stands up, lifts up the hand that’s holding yours to pull you up standing and spin you around like a ballroom dancer. You whisper-laugh. He kisses you again.
“You’re my girl, too, then, you know.” You laugh– oh, you forget where you are, you are foolish, Peter, foolish. You forget, for just a second, that you’re in his bedroom, and you laugh and forget to whisper. Samuel stands straight up. A dog barks outside, in one instant, the fear’s shot back through the open window. His eyes are wide and scared, and he turns towards the door. Somewhere, a floorboard creaks, deafening. The sound strikes you through the chest. Everything collapses in on itself, the spell of silence breaks. You grab your coat from the bed, run to the open window, the fire escape, you tear your knee open on the metal, but you get out, get down to the street. You want to look back and you never do, but you hear Samuel shut the window behind you.
It’s only correlation, but the next week, Samuel gets sick.
V.
It hasn’t snowed since you got back, not like you’d hoped. It’s a dry Christmastime, except for the sweat in your bed and the drinks at the spots you don’t say you’ve been going to. Some days and nearly all nights, you think you did die. No, that’s not right. You think that if it snowed, and if you closed your eyes, you would think you did die and go to Heaven. But all the snow’s stuck in the clouds, in Heaven, so it doesn’t snow here. You wonder sometimes when your itching prediction will be right.
It’s odd. You didn’t have to shave before you left– you were always growing up late. Now you do, every day. It’s a part of your routine. You wake up, for the seventh time, this time at the correct time. Sometimes there is a man-shaped indentation in the bedsheets next to you, and sometimes it’s just your own sweat. You go to the toilet, and you shave half your face, and you stare at yourself in the mirror. At the dent in the side of your face, where the raised skin curves inward, up your cheek, over what remains of your nose. You breathe, every day somehow deeper than you thought you could, your lungs shaking, and you put in your eye.
You’re doing Christmas with your father and your brother and his new wife this year. Charlotte’s beautiful and hates her husband, not that it’s your business. She makes a wonderful meal, roasted duck and carrots and wine, and you sit with her and your brother and your father in their home that is tidier than yours. She’s used the nice dishes, and the silver, and it’s almost so beautiful you couldn’t even be resentful about how lovely it all is.
“Got your eye on any girls, Peter?” She asks. She’s good at this, at making talk that doesn’t matter, and you appreciate the effort, mostly because it’s better than anything anybody else wants to talk about.
“No, not really,” you say, because as much as you appreciate Charlotte trying, you’re a terrible liar, and you hate to invite questions. This is also easier to say than before the war, because now you’ve got an acceptable reason that nobody wants to ask about. Really the only gift of having a hole in your face. You grimace, just to imply the point further, because her wording really was quite unfortunate, and then you feel guilty, because now everyone’s silent and Charlotte probably thinks she’s insulted you.
Your father coughs and changes the subject. You aren’t listening. You know Charlotte can tell, because you know she’s not listening, either.
You look outside the window behind her, because you think if you look away and look back it might start snowing. It occurs to you, sometimes, that maybe it is snowing, secretly, but you can’t see it out of your dead eye. Maybe you got stuck in summer forever. You make eye contact with Charlotte, then, and you both make all the motions of listening to your brother. She talks to you in some silent, motionless way, like she knows that you know you can hear her without speaking. You know she knows you, knows the address of the bar from the dust on your coat.
You take a drink of the wine, and you don’t like it very much. It spills slightly out of the corner of your misshapen mouth, and your father glances at you guilty again. You wonder if he’s praying for you. You drink the rest of your glass.
Your brother’s slurring his speech by now. It’s the same sway, the same tilted voice as when you were fourteen. He leans towards you.
“Bet you glad you got hit in the face, Peter,” he says, half-grinning. “You got to get out of there no problem.”
Your face can only go half red with shame. All of a sudden you are seven years old again, and you want God to strike down your brother dead. You feel hot. You open your mouth and have no response, as always. Why do younger brothers always have to be clever? You make the mistake of looking up and meeting your father in the eyes, and he’s waiting.
Jesse shoves your shoulder, teasing. You flinch, and he laughs. Your father breathes out, shakes his head. You know what he’s thinking in only that breath: you shouldn’t need him like this anymore. Smaller children ought to develop enough wit or spirit to balance the field; it’s only natural.
“Lay off him, Jesse,” he says, tired. You say nothing, and your face remains half-red. Jesse leans back in his chair, bored. Even Charlotte looks at you with pity, and your shoulder begins, easily, to bruise again.
VI.
When you leave Jesse’s, you know Charlotte knows where you’re going. Your darkest coat, your nicest shoes on the concrete in the silver moonlight. Hell is emptier on Christmas, but they’ve decorated just a bit, tinsel on the stage and around the bar. Your shoulder hurts, and there’s still wine on the front of your shirt like blood.
Why won’t it snow? You feel dizzy, nauseous, hot. You keep thinking today will be the day you’re a man, but something new reminds you you’re still a child and a crier and a girl, no cleverness or strength or ambition. You miss your mother. You hate that you miss her like nobody else seems to. You miss her terribly. You know you didn’t know her, not really, but you can tell from the outline, the things she must have said from the things your father is bad at saying, the things she must have loved from the things your brother doesn’t do anymore. In your understanding, she hands you a notebook and a pen. She kisses your head. When you come home late at night, a deep gash in your knee, she cleans and bandages it without question. She says I love you no less than fourteen times a day, and she loves the summertime, and she plays the piano you found in your attic. Sometimes, when the air is just right and your prediction itches particularly strongly, you even dare to wonder how she might have felt if you died before she did.
You drink, let it spill out the side of your mouth again. Where’s that blizzard when you want it? You hope today is your day. You can’t keep wondering when you’ll die, you can’t keep predicting it when it keeps not coming.
But you can rest your head on the wood of the bar for just a moment, just like that. It’s alright. The wood is cool and soft against your forehead. You close your eyes. Cry, Peter, like glass shattering, like a snowstorm, burning like wool against skin. Feel it bubble up through your throat, heaving, falling. Cry, sob, quietly as you can, until somebody comes to your side. You let him put his hand on your shoulder, pull you into his chest.
After seven hundred more years in his arms, you look at him, the stranger. His face is soft, worn, old. You know he knows you, more than anybody, somehow. He’s missing his left arm, and you wonder where it lies, and you know he doesn’t remember.
“I’m going to die,” you whisper.
“Maybe,” he says.
“I want to.” You wipe your nose, sniffling. “I should’ve gone already.”
He smiles just a bit, gently. “Maybe you should’ve.”
You look past him, to the door. Somebody enters, face hidden, hat low. They shake something white off their dark boots.
“You gotta go, Peter.”
Snow falls. You sell your coat, and your furniture, and your books, and your uniform. You make good money on it, on everything. Come on, Peter. The city spins and it makes your ears ring and everything you hear seems to tell you the same words the stranger did, go, Peter. Buy a suitcase and pack it. Pack light, but be smart, keep your knife in your pocket, keep your boots. Buy a pen. Buy a train ticket. Buy a notebook. The snow is coming harder now. Put on your scarf, your hat, your new wool coat. Don’t look back to your apartment, don’t look at your neighbors’ windows, leave after those kids have gone to sleep. Hear the train, now, the mourners’ morning bells. Don’t tell your father, or Jesse, or even Charlotte, although Charlotte knows. Step onto the train. See the snow in the windows, fogging up. Breathe, be prepared: Peter’s going to die, and you’re going to go somewhere else.
BEAUTIFUL WORDS THAT MEAN NOTHING
WRITING IS SCULPTURE FOR ME, CONSTRUCTION, GRAMMATICAL OR OTHERWISE. IT IS ALL ABOUT THE RHYTHM BEFORE THE MEANING, THE PHONICS BEFORE THE DEFINITION. MODERN ART TRANSLATED TO MODERN WRITING - THE FORM AND COMPOSITION BEFORE THE REPRESENTATION. DREAMSPEECH - FORGET ALL BUT THE FEELING AFTER YOU FINISH, AND NEVER RE-READ:
ELECTRICALLY, JESSICA SEEKS A NEW BEGINNING. DUST-GIANTS FLOCK TO HER LIKE COUNTING SHEEP, SHEEP-DOG-FIGHT, AEROPLANES MADE OF JUPITER AND SATURN. ELEPHANT PLANETS, IVORY CORES, WHITE.
ANDY STRIKES TO NEW VIBRATIONS - VIOLENT NIGHT-LIFE CELEBRATIONS. RESOLUTIONS, FIRE WORKS, NO DAYS OFF, WORE BLACK IN CHURCH. BIRDS FLY PAST - PRESENT PERFECT AVIATION.
FAITHFUL LEAPS - LOSING YOUR RELIGION. JESUS, JUDAS, JACK THE NIMBLE, CANDLE-STUCK. WAX MELTS ON YOUR HANDS, TRUST FALLS. HE WAS THE FASTEST BOY IN THE SECOND GRADE AND HE BECAME A TORTOISE ON PURPOSE, GREEN TO DIFFERENT GREEN.
HULKING ICEBERG SHATTERS NON-DISCREETLY. GLASS HOUSES, HONEY. JAMES BOND WHIP-STITCH SILVER SPORK WEDDING, SHE TRACES THOUGHTS ALONG YOUR SPINE. CHILDREN WILL NEVER LEARN THIS STORY. YOU ARE A RAVEN AND A SCOUNDREL - SCINTILLATING TITLE!
cw: medical horror
light-eyes
Inside the hot coffee in my hands, there’s a woman I don’t recognize staring back in shades of brown. When I blink, she ought to be gone. She’s not.
“What the hell happened to you? If you don’t mind me asking,” the man– John– asks. He’s on the couch across from me, and his eyes don’t display anything but concern. It occurs to me once how lovely the shape and size of them is, although I’m sure upon further inspection they’re around average. I tell him the truth.
“I’m not sure.”
“We got a long while before Forest Service’s coming to help you out of here,” he says. “Start from the beginning?”
“Not sure there is one,” I tell him. That’s the thing, the thing none of them down here get. There is no beginning.
I am in a metal cage. Above, metal. Below, metal. I don’t know where the light is coming from, or why I can see the walls of a uniform, windowless cage. There’s wet, in my eyes, and metal-smell, blood– oh, that’s right.
They put a light in my eyes.
It hurts. Oh, God, it hurts.
A different time than when they put a light in my eyes, I am below, in the forest. I really had meant to wake up earlier, to get to camp before sunset, but nobody’d ever called me exactly disciplined.
So it’s one unlit foot in front of the other through blue atmosphere. This kind of blue’s my favorite, I think. I usually enjoy it more from sitting down to eat on the root-covered ground, but it’s almost as lovely from a walking pace. It’s a quiet sort of color, but the kind of false quiet found here. Natural quiet’s never all silent; there’s always some kind of rustle. Thinking about this between footsteps, though, it occurs to me briefly I may have reached some kind of exception.
Absolute silence. No rustle of squirrels or other creatures, no wind, no nothing. Absolute silence using absolute like absolute rule, oppressive. Silence like fog pressing down on my skull, ringing in my ears. For a moment I’m sure even my heartbeat has silenced.
The silence hangs heavy over several slices of time. Probably twenty-seven seconds, to you, or me in a different time.
And then there is light, brilliant cutting through the blue dusk. And I wonder if it was an angel.
“What, you got abducted by aliens or something? That’s not..”
“You’ve lived here a long time, John. Trail legends never got to you?”
“Not the kind involving lights in the sky. Sure, there’s things that live in those woods, devils and other sorts. But they’re just as terrestrial as you or I. ”
I laugh, with an echo of disdain. “Some things are more beyond us than others, then? How d’you sort it? How much can you handle seeing?”
He doesn’t answer. Understandable.
“You’re afraid of it,” I say. They all are. I am.
He laughs again. “I’m afraid of bears and my generator breaking, not little green men.”
Now it’s my turn to not believe him. He’s so afraid of it he won’t even take the chance of belief.
If the piercing light was of angels, I think I ought not to step into a church anymore.
When they take me up, it’s as if every atom in my body is pierced by it, split, sewed onto a different half. It is agony, and if the silence had ended I think half the country might have heard me scream.
When the taking is over, there is no noise left to spill out of my mouth. And yet it comes like thunder after lightning.
I am inside it. I assume this is their vessel, but perhaps it’s a beast in itself. It feels as though there could be flesh, under all this strange metal.
They strap me to the platform, and if I hadn’t been swallowed up by terror, I might have been reminded of those stories my niece likes. The ones with the green men from Mars. I might have thought about how none of the stories get it right. It’s un-imaginable– that’s where the terror really lies.
You imagine something that looks an awful lot like yourself, comparatively speaking. You do not imagine this, you cannot. It lies somewhere between anglerfish and rabbit and millipede. It is seven-legged. It is a color you cannot see. It hasn’t even got eyes, but it’s got other senses, I know. They showed me. They showed me the other sense.
And the tests. Odd chemicals into flesh, 3rd-degree burns. Machines down my throat until it produces vomit, to collect samples. Frostbite test. Full-consciousness brain surgery.
None of that was the worst, though. The worst was the lights in my eyes. Behind the whites of them, little miniature machines, LEDs or something. I don’t know how it works. I don’t know why they did it. Maybe they believed it a gift. Maybe they just wanted to see if they could.
But the light comes out of my sclerae, and I see, unstoppably. Closing my eyes is worse, almost. Seeing the flesh. Not to mention how the light comes at the expense of some sight. I’m not sure if it was on purpose, or a mistake, but the edges of my vision are gone, now. Beyond my eye-line, there’s only light.
Sleep does not even grant me darkness. I fear, sometimes, that not even death will.
They dropped me down like pebble into pond, when they were done. Around where I was when they took me, though maybe another mile down the trail. And I saw his cabin, John’s cabin, from a distance, golden light soft from the windows. And oh, how known and familiar it seemed!
He let me in.
“Where’s your daughter, John?”
“What?”
“Your daughter?”
“I don’t have a daughter.”
“Oh,” I say faintly. There’s definitely a daughter, here in this house, somewhere in time. “‘Past’ or ‘future’ then. Tell her hello, if you can, for me.”
“You’re insane.” Once again with the fear.
I laugh. “And I’m the blind one.”
There is something beyond the third dimension– time. This, even we know to be true. Somehow, through one act of evolution or another, perhaps, we, and likely every other Earthly species, have developed (and are developing and will develop) as solely three-dimensional creatures. Time, on the other hand, is largely imperceivable by our three-dimensional selves, in that our perception of it is uncontrollable. We understand its effects, like shadows on the cave wall, like reflections in cups of coffee. You can see a silhouette and understand it must truly be a three-dimensional object, and some part of us understands, or tries and fails not to understand, that in our only three-dimensional perception there is a fourth dimension.
They did something to me. I do not understand it. I do not understand any of it. But somehow, they have shown me time. Whether or not it is related to the light eyes remains and will remain unknown, but as easily as seeing a cup of coffee in three dimensions, I can see four dimensions clear as anything, an unimaginably immense number of a-fraction-of-a-fraction-of-a-second-long images together again and again and again.
I do not think I was supposed to see this. My head hurts, like looking at something far away, squinting all the time. Whenever I try to look at it, something I’m not supposed to, it hurts even more. My nose bleeds. I am scared.
“You ever learn about Plato, John?”
“Do you think if I did, I’d be here?” He laughs.
I smile. “He’s got this story. These guys are chained up their whole lives watching shadows on the walls of a cave, and their whole life they think that the shadows are all there is. That it’s all one-dimensional. One of them escapes, and he sees the truth– he sees the sunlight, you see? He sees the truth, and he comes back to tell the other prisoners, but he comes back different. He goes blind, ‘cause of the sunlight.
“And so none of them believe him. They don’t want to leave; they think the free man was injured by the outside.”
“And?”
“They put a light in my eyes, John.”
cw: death
canary
70 miles into the belly of the beast, when the cavern’s swallowed you up entirely, it’s hard to remember anything but black. Dusty dark walls, monochrome in the light, stone pillars reaching out into the vein-like tunnels, rocky ground beneath feet. Even the other workers in front of you look gray in this light. I’d imagine it feels a lot like being buried alive, though I’ll never know that particular experience. Getting consumed by the Earth entirely, back into what birthed you. Letting it suffocate you like a candle without oxygen, if likely only for a moment.
Centuries ago, you might have needed a bird to enter the Earth. Now you’ve got me, your very own little technological marvel. A metal canary. Not exactly shaped like a bird of course, and can’t exactly make any pretty noise, just a little beep and a few silent words on my screen, but you call me Canary, so thus I become one.
They gave me to you when you set out, when my metal flesh was shiny and new, before dirt and grime. Now, of course, I’m less sliver and more slate as you carry me down the mine.
I don’t pick favorites among the workers in my protection. But you might be mine. You’re the one that carried me down here, anyways. I’ve had the most time to get to know you, as we work.
Every time you check my sensor, you touch your collarbone, like a talisman of good luck. I wonder if there’s a necklace beneath your uniform, there. I wonder who it used to belong to. Your eyes are bright, like shining rock, but your face is older. When you’re working, you hum an old lullaby. You, I’ve found, are a quite illogical creature. Lullabies when the sleep is yet to come, and good luck tricks with no real link to the desired outcome.
This is what I do when we work. I watch. I am vigilant in my duty, but I have time to watch you, all of you, taking time to notice all the details and record them. I’ll never have enough time for a full report, but these facts keep you in my memory. I am getting to know you.
Step after step after step on dusty ground. It repeats. You work, I work, I am getting to know you. On and on and on. There is a light at the end of the tunnel– the light of your fellow workers. It is always at the end of the tunnel. On and on. In, out, in, out.
On October 7th, 2237, there is a rumble in the cavern. A great shaking movement, a nausea in the belly of the beast. You all retreat, running, running, but–oh, your leg. That’s right.
You lied when you got the job. When you were sixteen, you broke your ankle. It never healed right, even decades later. But you needed the job, and you’ve gotten awfully good at hiding the slight limp.
But you can’t hide it now. You stumble, I hit the ground with you, and then it all comes down in front of us.
And then there is darkness, even more consuming than before. The exit’s blocked. Just me and you and the darkness left, I suppose. Mostly just you and the darkness.
You groan, heave your way to sitting up. You turn on a light.
“I’m alive,” you say, like you don’t believe it. You laugh. I tell you the truth.
“CONNECTION LOST.” The words flash on the small screen, along with a little beep.
“I know, birdie. I know,” you say, out of breath.
“DANGER.”
“Yeah, you could say that.” You touch your collarbone. “You know, birdie, not sure we’re making it out of this one.”
Beep.
“Yeah. What I thought.” You are tired, but you smile, just softly. “Hey, at least I’m not alone, huh? I got you.”
This is another one of your little falsehoods, the evidence of your irrationality. I cannot say that, not with beeps or preset inaudible messages.
“What am I saying? You’re…” The words you meant to say would have been correct. Machine. Et cetera. “You’re all I’ve got, now, I suppose.”
Beep.
“Doesn’t feel like I’m alone, anyways. I guess that’s what matters. If it helps, you can be my last friend.” You lay down, shining your light above you on the top of the cavern.
Beep. “CARBON MONOXIDE LEVELS: HIGH.” Beep.
“Thought so.” You breathe in deep, then out. In, out. On and on.
I want to ask you about your collarbone. I want to ask you why you laugh. I want to ask you about why you do not think you are alone. I want to ask you why you insist on irrationality when it will not save you.
I cannot. Just beep again.
“CARBON MONOXIDE LEVELS: EXTREME. EVACUATE. EVACUATE. EVACUATE.” Beep. Beep. Beep.
“Not happening, sorry. I’m afraid our evac route’s blocked.” That laugh again.
I can feel it. All around us. The gas. It swallows us up like the Earth. I’m afraid you’re a candle out of oxygen.
There is something else. First priority was my duty, the gas, but there is something else.
“BATTERY LOW.” Beep. I am dying.
“No, not you, too. C’mon, birdie. Little canary. Hold out a bit longer, will you?”
I want to tell you I am sorry. I am sorry. I am sorry.
“EVACUATE. EVACUATE. EVACUATE.” With levels this high, you ought to be reaching the end soon. I am sorry. I am sorry. I am sorry.
You are breathing heavy. It will not help you. I am sorry.
“BATTERY LOW.”
One last breath for you, with fragile lungs. In, out. No longer on and on.
Then one last breath for me.
“BATTERY LOW.” Beep.
“I AM SORRY.”
cw: death, car accidents, animal death
vulture
Maeve Webber is born dead on the twenty-eighth of August, in that kind of rotting late summertime that sits humid in the air like buzzing flies, with autumn sitting and waiting to shrivel all the leaves. Jean Webber, her mother, cried when the doctors stopped hearing a heartbeat two weeks ago, and she cried again when its body comes out of her black and blue and motionless.
(Her father– if you can even call him that, the absent fucker– is still nowhere to be seen. Didn’t bother for a corpse.)
There is a change in the sterile air, all of a sudden, like the atmosphere before lightning strikes an oak tree. Petrichor, and a drop in temperature, and a flatline in the room next door piercing the solemn quiet of the room. Somewhere outside the windows of the concrete hospital, a migrating bird drops from the sky, dead.
And then Maeve Webber takes her first gasping breath. She can feel the sudden aliveness; she can feel it all through her body, all five-and-a-half pounds of bone and fat and muscle. She doesn’t understand or remember it, of course, because her brain’s still fleshy and soft, but it’s enough to keep her crying until she passes out while the nurses rush her away to run tests and keep her alive.
Even the most scientific of doctors call it a miracle, and Jean Webber won’t stop telling everyone about her miracle-baby like it’s the goddamn second coming of Christ, until everyone moves on and accepts the fact that sometimes unexplainable things happen and sometimes you have better things to do than sit around and question the hand that feeds you.
In early spring, when Maeve is seven, she falls out of a tree.
It was supposed to be a fun day in the park, the first warm day of the season, with her mother and her baby brother, but Jean is still learning not to take her eyes off Maeve around climbable trees.
Maeve makes her way up the first few thick branches, six feet or so, before her mother notices.
“Maeve! Maeve, get down from there!”
Maeve turns towards her, and her foot slips off its hold, and she slips and comes tumbling down onto the grass. Her mother can hear the crack sound from a few feet away and swears she saw her ankle bend ninety degrees the wrong direction.
She swears it. She knows she saw it. But it couldn’t have, because four things happen very quickly, almost at once.
1. Maeve Webber cries out in pain, and holds her ankle, rocking back and forth.
2. A change in the air. A drop in temperature. Petrichor.
3. Something brown and small and fuzzy drops from the tree and lands two feet from her body crumpled up on the grass.
4. Maeve stops crying, and stands up. And she’s smiling.
“Sorry. I’m okay. S’all good,” Maeve says, grinning and making a thumbs-up like her ankle didn’t just snap in half. Except no, because her ankle isn’t broken, it’s fine, and Maeve walks towards her without even a limp.
Must have been a hallucination. Sleep deprivation can cause that, you know. And Jean should be getting more sleep, certainly. Except Jean knows what she saw, she knows it.
And then she notices it, eight seconds after Maeve does. The something that dropped from the tree, now lying on the ground. A squirrel. Jean stares, slowly moving her foot towards it to poke it, to check for life. No response. It’s dead.
Maeve moves towards it as well, and Jean quickly takes a hold of her hand to stop her, but before she does, she sees the look on Maeve’s pale face. Not repulsion, not disgust, nothing like the expression she makes at the smell of stinking city air. It occurs to Jean that this little squirrel might be Maeve’s first encounter with something dead, and that occurrence pushes bile up her throat, because it is not disgust that shows on her face, it’s interest. Maeve looks at the dead thing with curiosity, like she wants to pick it up, feel its bones in her little chubby hands. The word hunger rises in her like the bile, but she pushes both of them down.
“No, Maeve. Don’t touch it. Just…” She leads Maeve away from the squirrel, towards the stroller, gently, firmly, but the image of the frozen dead thing stays burned behind her brown eyes like a curse.
Jean doesn’t know what to think of it. The whole afternoon. She supposes, perhaps, to some extent, it’s another miracle. She supposes that, well, Maeve is a perfectly normal little girl, and it’s not like she wishes harm upon her. She supposes she should be glad, and they couldn’t have afforded a hospital trip, anyways. She supposes that Maeve is happy, and she supposes that’s all she has power over.
It’s hard to treat it like a miracle, because the whole unexplainable thing rattles around in her brain and her chest. But Jean supposes that she doesn’t much care what dies, if her daughter is okay and smiling.
On Maeve’s twelfth birthday, Jean lets her sit in the front seat of their car for the first time when she takes her and her brother out for ice cream. It’s still warm in the late summer, so it should be a nice treat, she thinks as she drives. Hell, it’s a nice treat for her, too. It’s been a long week. She wonders if she could get a coffee on the way.
“Are you guys excited?” She asks, hiding the tiredness in her voice, turning halfway around to see Maeve and her brother cheering.
And then she takes her eyes off the road. Just for a second or two. Maybe longer. Jean’s so tired she feels like she’s moving in slow motion.
But it’s long enough for her not to see the silver car running the red light to her right. They slam into the left side of the silver car, and the front of their car crumples like plastic. Jean quickly looks around to check on her children, and that’s when she sees Maeve, slumped forward against the dashboard. Her head’s bleeding. It’s bleeding so much.
“Maeve,” She says, leaning over. “Maeve. Maeve!” She shakes her. Her brother starts crying. “No, no, no, no, no. No.” Jean lifts up her bleeding head, holding her chin like she did when Maeve was too small to hold up her head herself. She’s gentle. And then she lifts her up to look her in the face, and there is nothing in her eyes. Glazed over. She’s dead.
And then there is a shift in the air. Petrichor. A silence, a ringing in Jean’s ears. Jean’s eyes go wide a half second before they glaze over, but in that half second, she is not afraid. She is not angry. She looks at Maeve one more time, and she smiles, and she forgives her, as mothers do their daughters.
And Maeve Webber gasps.
cw: death, terminal illness
thyme & time again
Adam’s favorite smell is thyme. T-h-y-m-e, not t-i-m-e. T-h-y-m-e with a silent “h” and an out-of-place “y”, like his mother (and later, he) picks and chops and adds to chicken and sour-sweet lemon in their kitchen, letting the smell of it in the oven travel up through the rooms of their little house.
When he was still young, Adam always got thyme and rosemary mixed up. Thyme, he thought, should be long and thin leaves, sticking out from hardy stems like lines, like how children draw straight hair. But that, he learned, is his second favorite smell, rosemary, who’s curving letters and pretty sound ought to describe something like thyme. Thyme, instead of rosemary, is round-leaved and small and repeats itself over and over. It is illogical, Adam thought, that a round-shaped word like rosemary should belong to a line-shaped plant, and a rigid, limited thing like thyme (or time, maybe) should belong to something with repetitive leaves like round oblong dots.
But, regardless of his strongly-held opinions on the shapes and names of plants, Adam picks off the leaves like his mother shows him at 8 years old in their light-filled kitchen. Rosemary, she says, can often be slid off the stem easily if you do it right. She holds his small hands to show him, one hand on one hand on the end of the stem, the other hand on his other hand sliding down it. If you hold it right and slide your hands along it correctly, she shows, pinching it between the pads of your fingers tightly and running them firmly but smoothly against the stem, then it comes off easy and smooth onto the wooden cutting board like soft rain against his bedroom window.
Adam’s mother’s hands do not shake when she holds the stem in his hand; her hands are strong and firm and rough, scarred with dots of times her hands have slipped while chopping or cooking with hot oil. But she guides Adam’s soft child-hands along the plant, and the leaves slip off like the way years pass, faster and faster. But the years have not passed yet. Adam’s hands are soft, and his mother’s hands are rough, and soon enough there’s a pile of rosemary at the wooden kitchen table, lit up by morning haze through their windows.
When the rosemary is just hay-like leaves on the cutting board, Adam’s mother chops it up with a knife (Adam, still soft-handed and unlittered with dots of time, is not yet allowed to chop), so fast Adam doesn’t know how she doesn’t cut herself. The chopping lets out more of that wondrous smell, and Adam breathes it in and thinks it is his new favorite thing, the smell of rosemary chopped by his mother on the wooden cutting board in the afternoon light.
They store some of it in little glass jars for future meals in the fridge, and save the rest for dinner.
Adam cleans off the kitchen table and sets for three, like he always does, and his mother adds the rest to fresh bread baked to the crisp color of honey, and a steak that feels nearly as rich as celebrities on the television, and when Adam’s father walks through the door, briefcase in hand, just in time, they sit down the three of them.
“How was your day?” His father asks, and Adam beams.
“I helped with dinner!” Adam swings his feet back and forth as he talks.
“Did you?” His father smiles, contradicting and yet counteracting the tiredness visible in the corners of his eyes.
“M-hm,” Adam nods enthusiastically.
“He’s quite the chef,” his mother says.
“Mom taught me how to do thyme!” he says, still swinging his feet like a grandfather clock.
“Rosemary, honey,” she corrects.
“Oh, yeah.” Adam scrunches up his face when he says it, drawing out the syllables, forming them in his head. “Rosemary.” He smiles, taking a bite from his food.
Adam smiles when he tastes the herb, and quickly decides rosemary is his new favorite smell.
When they cook together again in a few days or weeks, his mother shows him to pick thyme. Thyme is harder than rosemary, she teaches. Rosemary is fast, and easy to slide, if done correctly. But thyme takes time and patience. The leaves are small and many, and you have to pick them one at a time, without shortcuts or waste. No amount of practice makes it take shorter.
His mother is patient, she picks the thyme one leaf at a time and makes Adam do the same. And Adam listens, he picks one leaf at a time, even when he can barely sit still and his fingers ache, even when his mother hushes his complaints and whining words. He sits for a very long time, and only finishes a couple sprigs by the time that his mother has finished the rest, but when he finishes, his mother congratulates him, and chops the thyme, and they eat another meal together, this time just the two of them, with his father miles away on a business trip. Adam smiles when he tastes it, but decides he still prefers rosemary, because his fingers still ache and he is impatient, as children are.
Rosemary is still his favorite smell when his mother teaches him to chop herbs. They pick the thyme first, and Adam complains profusely, as he always does, but the thyme ends up in a picked pile on the wooden cutting board nonetheless.
She puts her hands on his over the knife, careful, careful. Adam is not new to using a knife, having previously learned the art of cutting apples into slices and other simpler tasks, but he’s new to the quick precision of chopping. She tells him gently, calmly, that chopping is a game of balance. You must always chop precisely, carefully, or your hands will end up like hers, scarred and rough. But you must chop confidently, smoothly, or the leaves will be crushed instead of cut.
But when she lets go of his hands and lets him cut by himself, Adam, reckless by his 11-year-old nature, is too fast, too confident. He slices shallowly into the top of his thumb, and red young blood spills out of it. He pulls his hand back, wincing, leaving the knife on the cutting board. His mother, having watched closely with band-aids nearby, went quickly to examine the cut to find its lucky shallowness. She is gentle with her rough hands as she bandages the hand.
“You went too fast,” she says. “That’s what you get.”
And Adam, still wincing from the injury, just nods in the way that upset children do, having been told their mistake, not yet old enough to rebel against their parents.
But his mother chops the rest of the herbs while Adam washes and cuts up the potatoes, and his mother cooks up some sausage with the vegetables, while Adam sets for three.
They eat together, Adam and his mother and his father, and Adam still smiles when he tastes the herbs.
Rosemary is still Adam’s favorite smell, even when nobody has asked his favorite smell in several years, when he is seventeen.
The pair, Adam and his mother, are in the kitchen, and his mother picks the thyme one little leaf at a time with weaker-growing hands, and Adam chops the other vegetables, having refused the thyme every time his mother insisted. He hates it, the slowness of it. What he likes is the next step.
When the vegetables and thyme are chopped, he throws them into a pan with hot oil, and he cooks them all together and it is hot and fast, and he dances around the small kitchen, back and forth and back and forth between pots and pans and dishes. It’s almost too fast for his mother, who instead makes a salad for the side.
They don’t talk as they cook anymore. “It’s distracting,” Adam says.
His parents try to make conversation, but Adam is quieter and rougher around the edges like teenagers sometimes would like to imagine they are. When they eat the meal, Adam still enjoys it, but he eats quickly, and cleans up, and goes to his room. “Work to do,” he says to them. “School.”
It’s always fast with him, his mother thinks. Always rosemary.
His father doesn’t think much at all. He’s tired, and he’s busy like Adam, and he’s never been quite good at that stuff, anyways.
When Adam comes home from culinary school, Adam’s mother’s hands are even older than they were when he was eight, and arthritis is snaking its shaking grip into her hands. Adam notices it up close one day, when he is home for the holidays and the two are once again in the kitchen. She can’t pick the tiny thyme leaves anymore; instead, Adam watches with rising shock as she chops the thyme without picking it, stems and all.
“Why aren’t you picking it?” He asks, with a growing sense of betrayal.
His mother shrugs. “I can’t pick it anymore, with my hands. It’s pretty much just as good like this.”
“You made me pick it for an hour when I was a kid, no shortcuts allowed! I hated it!”
His mother keeps chopping. “It’s still better if you pick it. For all sorts of reasons. But cooking’s not about perfectionism, Adam. I wish I could still pick it, but I can’t.”
“It was certainly about perfectionism when I was a kid.”
His mother rolls her eyes, and laughs back gently. “You still are. And no, it wasn’t.”
“I’m just mad I’m only now finding out about this shortcut,” he laughs, with a bitterness like dandelion greens.
“It’s not a shortcut. But fine.”
She finishes chopping the thyme, stems and all. They eat together, with his father, like when Adam was younger than he still is, and every time Adam cooks with thyme for the next several years he chops it whole without picking. Shortcuts.
And then Adam’s mother is sick, and Adam’s favorite smell is still rosemary when he receives the call from his father to come home. He is in his apartment, about to go to bed, and the phone rings, and then he’s making the drive all the way to his hometown, and his car air freshener smells fresh in a way entirely unlike the natural freshness of herbs.
She is in the hospital, with smells of soap or the sterility of nothing at all. He sits by her bed, next to his father, and neither of them are crying, and Adam holds her hands, still rough and scarred, his hands growing less soft every day.
“I want to make you a meal,” he says. “Hospital food probably sucks.”
His mother smiles. “You gonna pick the thyme properly, or take the shortcut?”
“Gonna bring a basket here to pick. I don’t wanna leave here for too long…” He doesn’t say why, but his mother knows. She nods. “I’ll be back soon,” he says, getting up.
Behind him, his father leans his head onto her bed. He sighs. “Fuck.”
Adam doesn’t lie, he is back soon, with a basket of thyme and other herbs, more than he could ever need for one meal. He sits on the chair next to his mother’s hospital bed smelling of nothing green, with an empty wooden bowl in his lap and the basket full of unpicked herbs on the chair next to him.
Adam picks the round leaves one at a time, one after another after another, dropping them into the wooden bowl. He picks carefully and slowly, like maybe if he takes the time to pick it one by one by one then the basket of unpicked herbs next to him will stay full and green forever, like he wouldn’t eventually pick all the thyme in that basket, and have to finally cook it all. Like he wouldn’t eventually run out of time.
Adam decides then that thyme is his favorite smell. Rosemary is quick, and rosemary is easy, but thyme demands patience, demands stillness and persistence and unchanging, repetitive work, and the smell of thyme sits with Adam and Adam sits with his mother and thyme does not run out for a very long time.