Vertical Poetry by Robert Juarroz (Translated by W.S. Merwin)

Willow Springs 19

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Vertical Poetry by Robert Juarroz (Translated by W.S. Merwin)

Labyrinth of the bitter and the sweet,

of the ripe seasons before the harvest,

of the mistaken expressions in the exact forges,

of the dead sweetnesses around the fruit, of the depraved acids

the blockade the tactile strategems of the afternoon,

thick walls of a climate that should have been future,

more future than the weather of any future day.

Taste drives mad

like a thread of blood that misses its veins.

Even the central trunk falls outside of the forest.

If a thing changes form

it changes taste at the same time,

not only its taste to others

but also its taste to itself,

the flavor proper to its mode,

the relish of its unpeopled gut.

And if in the procession or dissipation of forms

this thing should find its own,

should meet it again in the sealed cloud of its origin,

its taste would be the same as before,

but only outwardly, never to itself again.

Crack of imminence in the heart,

while the foot of hope

dances its blue dance,

in love with its own shadow.

There is an expectant hymn

that cannot begin

as long as the dance has not finished

its cultivation of time.

It is a hymn backward,

and inverted imminence,

the last thread to tie the fountain

before its flow carries it away.

There are songs that sing,

there are others that are silent,

the deepest of all go backward

from the first letter.

The roads leading upward

never get there.

The roads leading downward

always get there.

Then there are the roads in between.

But sooner or later every road

leads up or down.

Interior deserts,

vague litanies for someone who died

leaving all the doors open.

A gray cloak over another cloak of no color.

Excessive densities.

Even the wind casts a shadow.

Mockery of the landscape.

Nothing left to call to

but a flat dark sun

or an endless rain.

Or wipe out the landscape

with the wind and its shadow.

And there is one further resort:

drive the desert mad

until it turns into water

and drinks itself.

It is better to madden the desert

than to live there.

Fellowship by Susan McCarty

Fellowship by Susan McCarty

EVERY FRIDAY AROUND FIVE, we stack the sun chairs in the pump room of the Maple Hills Country Club and watch the servers from the restaurant roll giant table rounds down the paved walk between the tennis courts, past the gazebo where we sit in black, regulation one-piece suits, and down to the pebbled pool deck. It takes three servers to handle a single round-to bang the rusted legs into place and hoist the table upright, to toss a white polyblend covering over the entire surface with one snap. The buffets are brought down, the Sterno lit below them. And then: steaming steel trays filled with buttered corn cobs, the garlicky reek of Oysters Rockefeller, yawning mussels and pink whole lobsters, the faint bleachy tang of cooked mollusk shell. Never mind that the nearest body of water is the catfished Iowa River. Every Friday from five to nine, the club is a Cape Cod beach, and we-who have never seen the ocean, but find ourselves drawn toward water on some cellular level-perch on our lifeguard towers as if they are crow’s-nests, keeping our eyes on the water not for whales or land, but for children whose fearlessness makes them susceptible to sinking.

We dream nightly of escape. We would like nothing more than to see Iowa rolling out its infinity in the rearviews of our farm trucks, our Civics or Metros (all shamed to street-parking blocks away, to make room for the Lincolns and Caddies of the club guests). We rip through each National Geographic our grandfathers’ yearly subscriptions provide. We pay attention to television and the news. Beautiful, violent things are happening a thousand miles east. And if the water inside us draws us to the water outside, in search of equilibrium, this is also true of our dark selves, the mystery of our desires, which can find nothing external to match the pressures they produce in us-not here, in the friendly width of these streets, these fields, these grocery aisles.

THE POOL OPENS AT TEN, but I’m supposed to be there at eight to set up deck chairs and check the garbage cans and test the water and fix the mix, if it’s off, so the pool can open. today, I arrive at seven. I haven’t really slept since last night, when Mom and Dad called a “family meeting.” It was pretty goddamned obvious what they were going to tell us. It’s why James has been wetting his bed lately, and why I stole the Titanic picture from the family photo album in the living room and hid it in my old copy of A Wrinkle in Time.

Ian shows up at nine, late and stoned. He’s a swimmer on the college team and always has his shirt off, even when, like today,, it’s too cold. His back is ridiculous, an inverted triangle-shoulders wide and pronounced from all his hunching through the water. I always get a little nervous when he’s on the pool deck, on first position, on the stand by himself.

“Hey kid,” he says with an easy smile. I’m pretty sure he doesn’t know my name.

“Ian,” I say, “pH levels are good. I didn’t get to the cans yet though, so. . .”

“No problemo, chica.” He waves and wanders across the pool deck to the first garbage can. It’s not that I haven’t checked the cans-in fact, before Ian showed up, I walked around kicking the trash cans, making sure to take all the pressure on the hard rubber toe of my tennies and yelling “Fuck you!” every time, imagining my father’s soft, bearded face. He seemed the unhappiest of all of us, and this made it easy to blame him.

In one of the cans, the one by the wading pool, something shifted inside when I kicked. I drew the hinged top back and found two stupid eyes peering up at me. The thing hissed and I flipped the lid back down. I have kind of forgotten about it until I see Ian’s shadow fall long into the concrete slab of the women’s bathroom, where I’m stocking the toil.et paper with shaking hands, wondering what’s going to happen to my brother who isn’t yet old enough to realize what huge assholes his parents have become.

“Critter alert,” Ian says.

The philosophy of work at the pool is smelt it/dealt it. I let Ian think he’s found the raccoon. I grab the skimmer off its hook on the perimeter fence and follow him across the deck and through the little wooden gate to the baby pool area. He kicks the garbage can and there’s a skittering, claws on the heavy plastic lining. He’ll have to lay the an gently on its side and then get out of the way quickly, in case the coon is angry or rabid. I tell him I have his back and hold the skimmer defensively in front of me like a hockey goalie.

“Shit,” he grunts, and squats the can to the ground.

“Get out of the way.” I wave the net at the can.

“Jesus, get closer,” he says. “I think it’s coming out.”

As if we’re watching some sunny-day, rich-people horror movie, paws grasp the plastic lip and the raccoon emerges, spiky and damp and humping itself onto the length of the can, I an sort of frozen, watching it. I try to shake my head free of the buzz I haven’t noticed all morning until now, but my reaction time is messed up.

The coon seems to be checking out Ian, lookin him up and down in a leisurely, half-interest way, and then it lunges toward him. Ian makes a kind of hoarse squawk and jumps backwards. Unstuck by his yell, I leap forward, brandishing the aluminum pole, and get the raccoon’s head in the net, while it latches itself, all paws and teeth, onto the skimmer. I run to the baby pool and plunge the thing into two feet of water. The raccoon thrashes and I-or not me, but some reptilian part of me I have never met before-smash the skimmer to the bottom again and again, until I feel a brittle, twiggy snap. The coon goes limp in the netting, its neck probably broken. I feel like I might throw up.

Ian comes up beside me. He cranes his neck to look into the pool. He doesn’t want to get too close to me.

“Holy fuck,” I pant.

“You killed it.”

My chin is starting to do this involuntary crumple that means I’m about to cry. “I didn’t mean to.”

“You looked like you meant to.”

I drop the skimmer and it’s so loud on the pavement I have to bring my teeth together to settle the vibration in my head. The coon looks small underwater-no way it was an adult. I look at it and think, I killed that. Ian offers to clean up and I go sit in the gazebo, at the pool entrance, where people sign in and pay their guest fees.

When he comes up later and asks if I want to go home, the question makes me cry harder. And when I shake my head and wipe my nose on the sleeve of my lifeguard sweatshirt, he says. “Come to the pump room,” and I do because he looks confused and afraid, like I too might rise up and claw him, and I realize he thinks I’m crazy, all fucked-up over a baby raccoon, and so, when we squat on two bulbous gray metal meters growing out of the pump room floor, I tell him about last night, about my parents. I use the word they kept using-separation-a word that is pointedly not divorce. l I would rather it not be Ian who knows this before anyone else, but there is no one else. .He doesn’t say anything. In the dank, chlorine reek of the room, his lighter glows under the joint he’s brought for us, and the pain in my chest as I suck in smoke feels like something to be thankful for.

TWO HOURS LATER I’M STILL RED-EYED and dry-mouthed, but tear-free, sitting in the club gazebo in a manner I hope conveys both alertness and innocence. To the club mothers of Maple Hills, I want to look like the opposite of a person who would smoke weed on her guard shift. The reflective lenses in my sunglasses help-in my face the mothers see only themselves-but I realize I’m conveying too much alertness when Wendy Comstock glances up while she’s signing in and then edges the clipboard nearer to herself as if to protect the privacy of her signature and club number. As if there’d be anything to do with her club number if I did steal it. Maybe a lesson with the golden tennis pro, a tan Swede straight off the cover of a romance novel. I’m imagining him bending me over the net and spanking me lightly with a racket, when a tall boy with large, rubbery features and long eyelashes wanders up to the gazebo and signs in himself and his little brother, who looks like he’s about the same age as my brother James. The older one smiles and that’s all it takes. The heat, the weed, the thoughts of the tennis racket, and probably, perversely, even the new of the separation have all undone me and I feel hazy and discombobulated and like the only thing that will make it all better is to be pressed against this guy as soon as possible. Phallically, I need a single point of focus. When the boys and their hairless and tawny bare chests have swept past the gazebo, I pull the sign-in sheet towards me and spin open the Rolodex to find their family info: Wychensky, Wayne and Donna. Ted and Liam.

I must have given off some pheromone, because when the third guard shows up at noon and Ian relieves me at the gazebo for my snack bar rotation, the older brother-Ted or Liam?-buys a pack of M&Ms, but manages to look, somehow, like he couldn’t give a shit about actually eating them.

“You have to eat them fast, or they’ll melt all over you.” I try to say this in a suggestive way.

“Actually, M&Ms were invented not to melt. For soldiers in World War II. The candy shell?”

Simultaneously I feel like, You’ve got to be kidding me, and, I totally want to fuck you. And somehow he gets it, because he blushes, then grins an sticks the bag of candy in the pocket of his damp trunks and walks away. Hours later, I’m on the first position and the little brother comes up to the stand with his hand cupped over his eyes like a sailor. I make him stand there because my whistle and sunglasses and my great height on the lifeguard stand tens to scare kids and I’m not above enjoying that.

Finally, I acknowledge him with a nod.

“I’m Liam,” he says.

“Hi, Liam. I’m Sarah.”

He’s brown as an almond and his hair is curly and dark. He looks like Disney’s Aladdin and I’m sure someday he’ll be as hot as his brother. Hotter, probably.

“My brother says he thinks you’re pretty.”

I make no expression and don’t even move my head, but I find Ted with my eyes.. He’s rubbing sunscreen on his stomach like it’s the most interesting and difficult thing he’s ever done.

TED PICKS ME UP FROM WORK THAT NIGHT in his Chrysler LeBaron, and some time later, but perhaps not enough time, his chewed-at finger tips are fumbling their way past my underwear, and the smell of chlorine is all around us, and all of sudden I have a new summer project which doesn’t involve sitting around feeling sorry for myself.

In the next few weeks, we establish a routine: on my nights off we got to a movie, maybe for pizza and then we motor out somewhere more or less deserted and take off our clothes. Soon Ted has nuzzled, licked and put his finger s on and in almost every fevered part of me, but he refuses intercourse.

One night, I bring out a joint after we pull into a fallow field off the gravel road that winds behind a half-finished housing development. The cicada chatter around us and hundred of lightning bugs hand chest-high, at the top of the seeded grass, flashing their semaphore. I bop Ted gently on his beautiful Roman nose with a red Bic and twiddle the joint at him from my other hand. He takes the lighter and throws it out the window. “I’m not down with chicks who use.”

“What?” I pull back the joint before he can chuck it too.

“No drugs, babe. Them’s the rules.”

“Why are you talking like that? Whose rules?”

He looks less sure of himself, his huge Adam’s apple bobbing. “Pastor John’s.”

“Really? That guy?”

Pastor John is a balding twenty-something who specializes in Pear Jam covers on his acoustic guitar and speaks motivationally at our high school once a year. He runs a popular cross-town evangelical ministry for the kinds of kids who have great skin and expensive cars and brand of stupid, beautiful arrogance that almost takes your breath away. They get high on life and go to Very Good State Schools. Ted’s one of them-he’ll be off to Madison in the fall, which is close enough to pain me with a glimmer of hope that our summer thing might outlast the summer.

“Are you in his. . .teen group or whatever?”

“Youth group, and yes, I go to his Friends and Fellowship Fridays.”

Ted sounds defensive and he should be.

This is Pastor John we’re talking about. During last year’s all-school assembly about self-respect, he preformed a country version of “Ice, Ice Baby,” in which he changed the lyrics to Nice, nice baby. He frequently organizes long and awkward trust falls, preaches abstinence whenever he gets the chance. I am mortified for both of us, Ted and me. Pastor John’s biggest message is that intercourse is disrespectful of a girl’s body and the holy sanctity of marriage. Thank weeping baby Jesus, Ted follows only the letter of this law.

I try, I try, I do. I beg and plead and prance and suck and tease, but Ted is adamant. We seem to reach some sort of stalemate about sex, but I manage to disappear into him anyway. His LeBaron my salvation. Most nights of the week, I slide into my mother’s dark house late and pretend not to hear her weeping through her bedroom door and imagine a future for myself full of adult things without adults.

2. Trial Separation

IN THE EARLY DAYS OF DIVORCE, when it’s still being referred to as a trial separation, it seems that everyone does everything wrong. After swearing we won’t, we bring up custody. Some of us wake at night in a cold wet beds and cry out, and other of us ignore those cries, which seem to come from a planet we don’t want to inhabit, and which sound to our cringing ears like a symptom of some infectious disease we don’t want to come down with. Decisions are made and boxes are packed. Some of us are upset that others of us are taking all the records and hi-fi equipment, but these complaints are deftly turned inside out and become reasons to visit the new place, the new living situation, the new beige and black leather townhouse monstrosity with Berber wall-to-wall and white plastic vertical blinds that hang like blades and dissect the view of the spewing water feature in the center of the pond behind the development.

We seem to be unbecoming a we. We seem to be becoming an us and a them, but even on either side of this dividing line we each stand alone, tucked into ourselves, the distance between us-even those of us on the same side, those of us who did not royally fuck up and irrevocably ruin it for the rest of us-enormous and growing with each passing, teary day. We hear each other’s clotted breaths in the night. We no longer eat dinner together. We sit in the basement pushing our injection-molded He-Men against each other (in love or hate we don’t know) and wait for the rest of us to join in, but we are scattered and wounded, and in our pain turn away from each other. Others of us see the slinking about and the downward cast of the eyes, and we understand at once. We try to sound patient and convincing: No one has every died from this. Lots of people go through this. We’ll all be okay. What we really want is to run away. What we really want is for those of us who are children to stop acting like children, even though this is impossible and, in itself, a childish wish.

For the first time in years, we are truly alone. We clip our nails and toenails carefully-there seems to be all the time in the world, now, for personal grooming. we feel happy for a few days, to finally be free of the dog hair, but after a few more days we realize how awfully we miss the dog. It’s the dog that finally sends us to our knees, our hands to our heads in front of the vertical blinds in the long, dogless night. When we look up again, we realize we are staring at the light on the water feature and that the color of the light is changing as we stare. We watch it go from green to blue to purple to pink to red to orange to yellow to green to purple until our lashes dry and our fists unclench.

THE SUMMER’S A LONG SLOW YAWN. James and I are at Dad’s two-bedroom apartment every weekend, which is actually more family time that any of us have ever spent together. It feels like prison.

Dad doesn’t have a couch, just a low glass coffee table in front of the TV, an ancient half-ton wood monstrosity with side panels and knobs, which sits on the floor, like us. James and I eat Cheetos off the coffee table from a family-sized bag. We’ve already watched our old pirated copies of Beauty and the Beast and Clue. Halfway through Tucker: A Man and His Dream, the TV screen fuzzes over and when the picture returns, there’s a topless woman with sky-high blond bangs, kneeling between the legs of a hairy man with his pants around his ankles. The man places one big mitt on her head, crushing the anemone-like structure of her hair. Dad flies up, blocking the screen, and fiddles at the control panel of the TV. A wet smacking sound precedes the silence.

“What was that lady doing?” James asks.

I can feel Dad looking at me for help. He’s always been short with us, impatient. His temper was a force that filled our house with its sound and fury, and it seems to me he’s been the chief composer of our misery. I do not want to help him, but I feel protective of my little brother, so I ask James if he wants to watch Clue again, which is his favorite movie, and he says yes yes like the six-year-old he is, and when I settle back next to him, Dad gets off the floor and retreats to the kitchen. I don’t know exactly what he’s doing back there. Pots rumble and the kitchen faucet runs. I hear the fridge smack open, twice. It’s not enough though-even from the other room, Dad’s shame fills the apartment like a gas leak. I look at the TV screen and narrow my focus to the wavering, over-red images. It’s a kind of meditation, except instead of calm and peace. I allow myself to fill with a rage so heavy it pins me to the ground.

It’s a long time before I can stand again, and when I do, I find the rage has not abated. I grab my keys and stomp to the door. I tell them not to wait up and snarl that I’ll sleep in my own bed, in my own fucking house. James is a perfect replica of my father: the “O”s of their mouths and their eyes like wounds. I open the door and no one stops me, so I slam it hard and feel, for one second, like I have won.

An hour later Ted and I are parked at the spillway. Ted is doing this thing in my vagina where he rubs one finger up and down the other, producing what I imagine is supposed to be some sort of crickety vibrato. I don’t know where he gets his fancy ideas, but I don’t want to hurt his feelings either. I arch my head back toward the half-open window to get a sniff of the barbeque smoke coming from a campsite downwind. All day, I’ve only eaten Cheetos. Ted takes my contortions as encouragement and the cricket quickens.

“Hey,” I say after a few more minutes of this. “Let’s go outside and look at the tube.” The tube is a mad explosion of water that rushes over the dam gate at 3,500 cubic feet per second, and though our car is parked slightly upstream, it’s a fairly easy walk, even in the dark, up the hill to the banked bridge directly over the outflow. Standing there, you feel as though you might be sucked into its deafening fishy roil.

Recently, before the announcement, but when things were already bad, when Mom and Dad stomped around their bedroom every night and bellowed at each other like a couple of cows about to be slaughtered, I was picking through a family photo album, trying to remember a time when their anger hadn’t rumbled every wall in the house, and I found a snapshot of them standing above the tube in a the golden light of an early autumn afternoon, the day we all went fishing together-maybe three or four years ago. I remember James was fascinated by the way Dad hooked the worm and the grieving worm families they’d left behind.

In the snapshot, my mother’s leaning against the chest-high chain-link that surrounds the damn gate. Her arms are spread at the shoulders like wings, her hair, longer then and maybe darker, ripples behind her. My dad’s hands are at her hips. They’re doing Titanic at the top of the tube. I didn’t realize how bad things had gotten, until I saw that photo. And now, I can’t even be here, can’t pretend to enjoy my boyfriend’s mediocre fingerbang, without thinking about my parents and wondering what’s to become of us all. I sigh and push Ted’s hand away.

“Did you hear me?” I say. “Let’s go up and watch the water.”

“It’s dark out-we could trip and hurt ourselves. Anyway, it smells.”

In an instant, the rage is back and I am ready to push this thing to the brink. I know what it takes to hurt us both. “Why can’t we just have sex like normal people?” I say. “I feel like a fucking freak out here.”

Ted frowns. “You know I can’t.”

“Oh right. Your pledge of chastity.”

“It’s important to me. You said you’d support me.” He turns away, his modest erection wilting in his jeans, and starts the car. I pull up my shorts and thrust my pelvis as high in the air as I can to button them.

“I was just trying to get you to fuck me.”

“Pastor John said you sounded like someone who’d resort to pressure tactics. And that I should be careful.”

“You talked to him about me?”

“I didn’t want it to be true, but now I see he was right-“

“What did you say about me?”

“-and I think. . .I don’t think we should see each other anymore.”

For the millionth time, I imagine Ted’s legs spread out before me as I ride him like a combine; Ted’s farm-boy bulk squashing me into the crumb-sharp fabric of his back seat in an ironic missionary; Ted’s ass tightening as he rams into me again and again. But now I see something else too: that asshole Pastor John staring at us with heaven’s disapproval souring his face.

I elbow the door open and start walking toward the top of the tube, which looks like someplace furtive and ugly in Ted’s headlights. Gravel, broken glass. I climb the steep spillway embankment and don’t look back. He yells for me twice, then backs his car out and drives away.

Up here, at the top of the hundred-foot drop down to the churning, angry water, is the last place I saw my mother smile at my father. The Iowa River races furiously toward me. Beyond the dam, the reservoir is placid and has the rotten fertilizer smell of something dead.

3. Youth Group

IN PLACE OF DARKNESS, there was the fluorescence of junior high hallways. In place of demons, Zach Hellerman’s man-sized fist sank into our stomachs. His spit hung, chrysalis-like, from the fringe of our bangs. Our glasses: bow-broken and skittered beneath a locker; our non-existent breasts: shamed; our prematurely large breast: shamed; our ball: kicked back into the cavity of our bodies before they’d even had the chance to fully descend..

After the darkness of our daily existence, the bread of our pain, who among us does not feel a huge unclenching inside, a sobbing relief, as we stare into the linoleum of the church basement floor and hear the stories rushing wild and full from each other like the river across the dam? We feel bathed in light. The peace we’ve been promised, for years, by parents and various administrators, most likely erstwhile bullies themselves, finally arrives in this unlikely and alien place which smells like the hospitalish rooms in which our grandmothers moan out the ends of their lives. How unlikely seems the bringer of our peace. His mousy goatee, the shaved head that we would later understand as an answer to balding, the way his voice twangs over the top of his acoustic guitar: too precise, show-choir trained, a hickish put-on. How fitting that our savior here on earth, the man who would tell us about our savior up in heaven, would the sort of head we would want to see punched, the kid of cringing attitude that would make us understand, finally, what was so hateful about ourselves.

And so, we have learned to speak forcefully, to repulse the twin evils of drugs and sex-although many of us are still waiting, just waiting, for someone, anyone, to offer either. We’ve traded our skin-care secrets and exfoliated ourselves to a rosy, Christian glow. We’ve kissed each other during church lock-ins, and at Camp Galilee, where we also learned that Mötley Crüe and Bon Jovi worship Satan, a lesson which Pastor John later encourages us to laugh off, but which nevertheless continues to freak us out. We have begun, some of us, to understand the price that such fellowship is asking-nothing less than our soul at the expense of our bodies. We have begun to fail each other.

One of us, just last weekend, tasted, finally, the seawater tang of his girlfriend’s vagina-the Southern Comfort still hot in his belly-and ejaculated into his wrinkle-resistant Dockers. Another welcomed the sweet curl of methamphetamine into her lungs. We have turned eighteen and visited the Pleasure Palace with our non-youth group friends and masturbated furtively into socks. There is, suddenly, a new vocabulary; bong, dank, nug, DP, creampie, money shot, crystal, crank, tweak. Something inside us hungrily expands until we feel larger than our homes and schools and even, or especially, the basement of this church. We wake at night and touch our arms and legs and heads, certain they must have flown from us in sleep. We long to ask each other: Are we being devoured by lions or are we becoming them?

THE CORN IS NOSE-HIGH and I’m on my way to a church basement on the other side of town to eat crustless sandwiches and fraternize with the enemy. It’s embarrassing, this sudden obsession. I’ve always prided myself on being cool with guys, less interested in a relationship then they were. The best thing about hooking up was the total-freedom feeling it gave me. Sex was something parents and school couldn’t access or control. But Ted has beaten me; he’s kept more of himself in reserve than me, has more secret rooms to which he could deny me access. He wouldn’t let me in, but he would let in Pastor John. I wanted to talk it out, but my calls went unanswered. I imagined he could hear my anger and desperation ringing out from under the bed, where he kept his phone, and that it repulsed him. He’d stopped showing up at the pool, though his brother still came. I was thinking about sending a note home with Liam, carrier pigeon style, when I realized I could confront Ted, and possibly (in my fantasy) also Pastor John at a Friends and Fellowship Friday meeting. I would expose John as a weirdo and convince Ted to take me back. Dénouement night sex would follow in the pond at my dad’s condo development. I got aa sub for my Seafood Night shift and set out to win back Ted.

But Ted has stopped coming to youth group, at least that’s what Pastor John tells me when I walk into the basement and interrupt a jam session between him and three groupies. The bongos guy I recognize from school, but the other two kids are strangers, though the girl on the guitar smiles at me. The friendliness of the group flusters me. Instead of introducing myself and calling out Pastor John for being a fraud, I say, “Um. . .where’s Ted?” and they look confused.

John rises, his puka-shell necklace slapping against the collar of his T-shirt, and says, “Haven’t seen him in a few weeks. What’s you name?”

I tell him and think I see a squint of recognition.

He says, “God’s casa es su casa, Sarah. Have some snacks. we usually jam until most of the group gets here. Then I call everyone to fellowship.”

I nod and walk toward the spread of drinks and food on the other side of the room, trying to avoid talking to anyone while the sunny creeps behind me sing, “I don’t need no doctor, all I need is Jesus love.” I drink cranberry juice from a Dixie cup and separate a long stick of mozzarella from itself, string by awkward string, as more eager kids file in and take up the joyful noise. When the music stops, I have just dragged a large piece of cauliflower through the dip in the center of the vegetable tray and put the whole thing in my mouth. In this new silence, it feels as if the protective covering around me has been torn away. A tambourine jangles faintly as its master puts it down. Pastor John yells into the calm and heavy air, “My Lord, lift me up to be with you! My Lord, call me and I will answer!”

I try to slow my stuttering heart as I turn from the buffet towards the youth group. They’re all sitting there with eyes closed, smiling. John’s hands are extended to the ceiling and they jitter, as if he’s been struck with a neurological disorder.

“Tonight we thank you for bringing us a new lamb, named for the wife of Abraham! Sarah! Sarah, come here Sarah, and say the Lord’s name with us!”

They open their eyes and look at me like puppies, and I realize they’ve left a notch in their prayer circle open for me on the mat. I point to my bulging cheek and keep chewing as though answering a question no one has asked. They keep looking and I keep standing there, pointing at my face, finger like the barrel of a gun, chewing, chewing, unable now to swallow as they stare, the creamy dip curdling against my tongue. My head is filled with the noise of my mouth, but I can tell the silence that binds us together is very awkward indeed.

“Sarah!” yells John, and a piece of cauliflower lodges itself in my windpipe. There’s a long moment, as I try to draw my breath to cough, when nothing happens. My body feels as though it has always been here and always will be and I’ll spend the rest of my life in this basement being stared at by Christian youth, me staring back-curiosities to each other, zoo animals watching zoo animals. The guitar girl’s mouth moves, and from a distance and sever seconds delayed, I hear the words, “She’s choking?” and then I’m on my knees, the cauliflower paste coming out of my mouth as I open it to the ground, and then someone strong and hippie-fragrant is kneeling behind me, enfolding me in a great hug, and the cauliflower is cutting a path back up my throat, and there’s the sound of my own wheezing life and pain in my knees and my lonely sinner’s blood pulsing hot in my ears. Like a newborn, I breathe and then I cry. The group makes noises around me and someone asks if they should call an ambulance, and then I uncurl myself from the cement floor, clear my throat, and walk out of the worship room like Lazarus from his cave.

I think about driving to Ted’s house, but I know what I will find: a big happy family playing Yahtzee, the Rolexed arm of Ted’s father slung around his tastefully small mother, their slippers, in the loafer style, parked side by side. Liam would say something child-wise and they’d laugh together like the stars of their own sitcom, like they were on their own cloud up in heaven and had forgotten the rest of us, down here, in our weird, hungry bodies on earth.

JAMES IS ALREADY IN BED and Dad’s bent awkwardly over the dishwasher when I let myself into the apartment. I take a beer from the fridge and sip it at the kitchen bar. It burns my throat. Dad doesn’t say anything about the beer so I tell him about Ted and how we broke up and I say I even went to his youth group, but it’s like he’s just disappeared from my life. And is this always going to happen, this disappearing? And what about you? Are you going to disappear too?

Really, I don’t ask that, even though I want to manufacture a father-daughter moment. I want things to all feel okay again, just for a minute. But I also know this would be a lie.

“Better luck next time,” says Dad as he closes the dishwasher door. “I’m going to bed.”

Does anything sound cozier than a dishwasher at night? Even in this sad bachelor wreck of a place, where each of us is tucked into our own separate corner like water molecules-bonded for a moment, but always breaking apart.

I open another beer. The VHS tape marked “Tucker” is still sitting on top of the TV. I let the slow motor of the VCR suck the tape into its broad, flat mouth. I turn the volume all the way down. I sit on the floor and listen to the rhythmic slosh and hiss of the dishwasher. I watch through to the end.

Bird Girls by Jill Christman

issue681

Found in Willow Springs 68

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Bird Girls by Jill Christman

I WAKE UP, a wife and mother, at five a.m. on a July morning in the middle of Indiana, not because my baby cries or my husband snores, but because the birds are going wild. Early bird nothing. They’re all early-and their racket shakes memory down from the maple trees in my mortgaged backyard like seeds from a feeder hit by a marauding squirrel. Everything shivers and trills. I’m in a Proustian moment, fifteen years ago, zipped into a tent with my then-boyfriend, Stevie, listening to this same cacophony of whistles and peeps, breathing in the smell of wood smoke and coffee.

Still dark on a late spring morning in Oregon, not much past four and the professor of Stevie’s birding class is about to take us on a trek through the woods. I know nothing about birds. Ignorant and cold, I shrug into the requisite Patagonia fleece jacket, duck through the nylon flap at the front of the tent, and join the others following the bearded ornithologist into the dawning forest.

Soft stepping over brown needles, he is our Pied Piper and we his captivated children. When he hears a particular bird noise, he holds his hand up to halt us, twenty or so bleary-eyed college students. Pointing to his ear, then to the source of the sound-sometimes visible, more often not-Bird Man whispers the name of the singer to us: Hammond’s Flycatcher, Lesser Goldfinch, Mountain Chickadee, American Dipper, Bushtit. Stevie, and the other students, scribble these names down in birding notebooks. I listen, impressed, and shuffle along behind the group.

I cheated just now with the names, of course, although I did remember Bushtit and Flycatcher and also seeing the spellings of the bird sounds-pzrrt, pip-pip, treip-and thinking, Huh. Bird words. (Stevie majored in biology; I didn’t wander far from the English department.) I remember riding in a university van to our campsite and I remember that early morning walk, but the thing that wedges in my brain between Bushtit and pip-pip is the sticky feeling that I didn’t belong, the black-tar goo of old insecurity.

I wasn’t in the class. I was a girlfriend tag-along, but there was more to it than that. I was the prissy one. I was too much lipstick, and not enough crunch. All of Stevie’s bird class friends were of the outdoorsier-that-thou category and I had brought along an inflatable sleeping pad and tiny jar of half-and-half for my coffee. I can’t remember anybody ever saying anything, just this sense that somehow I had been mismatched with my dreadlocked, kayak-paddling, pottery-throwing, Teva-wearing boyfriend. I felt girly in a bad way, as if my painted toenails and snug jeans were a romantic liability-no, worse, an identity liability.

MY LOVE OF BIRDS hadn’t brought me to that twittering Oregon glen: Stevie had to be watched. My adversaries were young women in tie-dyed shirts, hemp bracelets and baggy cargo pants, pockets stuffed with hand blown pipes an big-belled goddess figurines, and I wanted to say, You know what? You want to know oudoorsy? You want to know hippie chick? When I was a teenager I lived on a mountain in a plastic house, okay? I rode a horse to school. We weren’t camping. Yeah, I shaved my armpits, but I melted snow in a bucket on the wood stove to do it. 

This was all true. I had come to appreciate the pleasure of a soft bed and creamy coffee the hard, cold way when I was thirteen and my mother packed all our worldly belongings into a Chevy pickup tied down with fishing twine and moved us to a mountaintop in northeastern Washington. We were so far off the grid that in the winter, when the roads were impassable, we pulled orange sleds loaded with our groceries and pack animals. My mother claimed this was the kind of activity that built character, but another lasting effect of those frigid hikes was my reduced tolerance for those who thought a weekend in the woods was roughing it.

Stevie knew my mountain-girl history, of course, but I felt I needed to remind him of the tough girl that lurked beneath my feminine exterior. I wanted him to know that I could feather a soft nest and still hold off the egg snatchers with my piercing beak. Or something like that. Maybe I missed the day in biology where we learned that the females choose the males in the bird world. The males are the pretty ones. Think peacocks. Think the blue bower bird posing on his well-decorated threshold. In retrospect, some careful consideration of the actual facts might have saved me a few proprietary pre-dawn treks into the trilling woods. But like the Bird Girls, and like Stevie himself, mine was an identity in the process of becoming, and we were all involved in the awkward process of molting and feathering, craning our necks to check out our butts and see how our plumes were shaping up.

With more than a little shame, I recognized that the lessons I’d been learning in Women’s Studies 101 about the patriarchy perpetuating woman-to-woman competition hadn’t exactly sunk in. The Bird Girls weren’t my only rivals, and they certainly weren’t the crunchiest. The Ceramics Girls got dirtier, the Ultimate Frisbee Girls ran faster, the Kayak Girls, well, the Kayak Girls were tough-even I gave them that.

I tried to be the girl Stevie could love. I listened for birds in the woods, I straddled the pottery wheel and let it spray my jeans with clay juice, and I developed a mean (but ultimately ineffectual) forehand on the Ultimate field. I even paddled a small plastic boat into crushing rapids and thanked all the appropriate earth goddesses that I’d been born bottom-heavy and therefore managed to roll back up to breathe again. But I never felt tough. Worse, I never felt like the girl I was pretending to be.

YOU KNOW HOW this story ends. Not long after the bird trip, Stevie moved out, and when he left, as I predicted, he paired up with one of those gritty girls. Her name was Jill. This new Jill was everything that I was not: the anti-Jill Jill. In one of those too-honest, unnecessarily painful, post-breakup conversations, Stevie confessed that he’d felt smothered by my girliness-with me, he said, that was too much feminine energy.

A couple of months after we broke up, the Other Jill approached me on campus-baggy pants splattered with mud, shaggy hair not unattractively mussed, square hands holding a rope leash attached to a giant, drooling St. Bernard. She asked me if I’d seen Stevie. He hadn’t called in weeks, she said. Unsuccessfully, I fought the urge to feel pleased.

I shrugged. Nope, haven’t seen him. Poor Jill.

WHERE ARE YOU, Bird Girls, on this dawning Indiana day? The raucous songs of morning send me back to you, fifteen years and two thousand miles away. Settled, finally, in a nest I know to be mine, do I miss the parts of me that were you in those restless years of feathering and refeathering? Of never really landing?

Where are you, Bird Girls? Are you still sleeping? Perhaps you’re lying awake, like me, remembering walks in the woods with birds and boys, all long gone. Maybe you’re already up or haven’t yet slept-rocking babies, typing reports, finishing shifts.

On this morning in Indiana, the sun colors the sky pink and my baby girl rolls over in her sleep. Having learned to hear my daughter’s every shift and sigh, I know how I could have behaved on that forest path, tuning my ears rather than my jealous eyes. On the sidewalk with sad-eyed Jill, I might have said, “No, I haven’t seen him. But it isn’t you, you know. You’re okay just the way you are.” But I didn’t, and of course, I couldn’t. Sometimes we take our whole lives to feel safe in our nests, sometimes we miss that chance entirely. I am lucky.

Hey, Bird Girls, where are you now? Mine was a failure of empathy-for you, and for myself. Where are you?

I am here.

Hello out there. Pzrrt. Pip-pip. 

Two Poems by David Keplinger

Willow Springs issue 93 cover

2023 Surrealist Prize Finalists

The Immoral Jellyfish

A whorl of hair locked in the bristles of the hundred-year-old hairbrush: a
sculpture the brush is chiseling, in the shape of the dead woman’s ear

The cicada floating over salvia touches on the surfaces, sifting through its
files, everything in order, a competent desk clerk of the 19th century.

*

The prestige, that it happens, that death comes and swept away a
personality, made us talkative in the hospital waiting room, like children
during a field trip.

*

My shoeboxes were my first poems, houses for my disconnected objects.
Crickets chirped loudly in the forests of shirts and dress pants in the closet.

*

And in the winter the silverfish takes rule of my tub, circling. White sea. The
morning will be dark for five more hours. Much accrues as loneliness.
Pictographs of ice on glass. Bad plumbing of old regime.

*

The scary thing about losing everything, including consciousness, is that you
can really believe right to the end that you are the thing you are losing.

*

In his old secretary desk I find a camera with film inside, set to take the next
shot from his childhood, and a text on the immortal jellyfish, which ages
backwards to its birth, to be the youngest thing on earth, again and again.

*

The earth is my body, I am the tooth, eternity a doorknob, and time is the
string it’s looped to. My life, the instant it takes the door to slam shut.


Deduction

In order to deduct the costs of his office

he had to measure it well and he did,

starting with the window where the sun

shines through the winter trees, spoked

with branches. The sun was one centimeter

thereabouts, and the square of the window

it shined through, the size of a picture

frame. Under the window was a desk

which would have been about the shape

of a six-month old Polish elk, its head lowered

in the carpet’s scythed grass, but the desk

was red, a kind of unnatural cherry red,

so it would have to be called a large

stripped carcass on the tax form. A lamp,

the only artificial fluorescence in the room.

It had two small columns like the portico

of the Temple of Minerva. It was the size

of the end of a tiny harpoon. The chair

could not be mistaken for anything

but tombstone from the back. From the front

it was a child pushing two hands on the ground,

about to stand up for the first tie.

And he deducted himself, the size of

a man at the beginning of the end of

a story, the part where the thing inside him

is given shape in how he describes the sound

of a flute being played by a neighbor, the

cubit or so that held the breath, the fathoms

of the workings of that instrument.

Lift by Yessica Martinez

Willow Springs issue 93 cover

In San Pacho, my mother holds my hand.
They shoot a man.

We’re walking from our grocery
“La Familiar” when

a fledgling
baby
bird
of a man

fumbles in flight towards us.

His wing-mouth widens.
He dawns on us.

we pale transparent,
see-through as the air

he launches for and
falls.

At my feet. I’m the one my
mother picks up from the ground.

She shuttered. This story is a
Snapshot from her mind.

When she tells it, as though not to
me, she asks:

“I always wonder if she remembers.”

Watch:

memory, a pebble launched
from the Y of my slingshot.


Fire, Our Lady of Paradise by Annika T.

Willow Springs issue 93 cover

Fire, Our Lady of Paradise by Annika T.

Blood son
snatched from an undersea wave
Earthshape tied to the door
with shoulders pointed into the hazy caldera bloom

of night’s paradise

Spiral arms still have a few worlds to say
stirring from their outpost
Enlivened by half fallen zones of slanting sunds
Heads beating like poison wells
Phosphenes
Brute radiance
will rattle you without mercy
bringing the symphonic web of some new tragedy underground
Mouth shaped fog waiting inside columns
Ride them into the hot gates!
Lean forward into the next neighborhood
Wingless clock bludgeoning on
Its hooked string comes to make you sell
like a snakebite from the future
Yet sleep still stands
near the great avenues and capricious domains of street lamps

and frozen fire


Mono by L. S. Klatt

Willow Springs issue 93 cover

my name is white my
coat is white I work
with white mice in a
silo I start with
the house mouse after
months of breeding I
come up with a mutant
strain of albino
as well as what are
called waltzing mice
because they step
1-2-3 due to
an imbalance you
can’t begin to
imagine what gene
do when I knock
them out as a rule
I don’t condone
violence but I like
to play goddess now
& then it lets there
be lightness cutting
in on the dancers
I do my one thing
blasé as it is
edit slide edit


If the Physics of Falling Is an Allegory for Existence by Roy Bentley

Willow Springs issue 93 cover

If the Physics of Falling Is an Allegory for Existence by Roy Bentley

1. ACME Circus Company

That was Harmony, hoping to get the circus
listed first in the phone books. She got the idea,

she said, much later, from the Human Cannonball
who could bench-press many times his body weight

and was wicked-smart. Then, Harmony loved the art of
managing ten or twelve railroad cars of animals. Caricatures

of what is still being allowed to pass for human beings.
She said the ACME label worked like a charm—said

more than one Chamber of Commerce businessman-suit
optioning entertainment said that it felt wrong, and right

dialing the first listing he’d come to. Which was the place
she’d say the Human Cannonball was an expert on falling

and give him credit for the listing-name. Humble person.
I met Harm booking that circus of hers—straighforward

exchanges along the lines of this-is-what-I-can-afford-and-
what-will-it-buy-me dialogues ending with a three-day visit.

Scheduling arrival and departure times, I asked for a bond
against Acts of God and the failure to appear as contracted.

She says it’s why she loves me to this day: that I knew
the figure it would take for her to know I valued her, too.

2. A Plummeter’s Guide to the Physics of Falling Objects

Let’s begin with you skydiving, tandem,
noticing the scrolls of smoke drafting from
the flare the instructor wants you to observe.

You guess that it’s there largely to distract you,
the flare, flower-tresses of red a bright backdrop.
All around you, the boulevards of pending grasses

send up shadow-valentines of sweet warning to say
the planet has no business rising to meet the Falling.
But that’s how it seems, skydivers say: the earth is

rising. Which isn’t true. Call it The Elevator Effect.
On the ground, someone points to a bird that he says
was struck—an American Crow. It’s no raven, given

the size and strike-altitude. The bird present in a group
whereas ravens run in pairs. Shrewd-smart birds, both.
You’re hearing that divers have been hit by meteorites

but never birds. What you smell has lots of names—
you’re confident you kept you sphincter locked tight.
Deferentially, the instructor raises her goggles. Laughs.

You say that, while falling, you recall James Dickey,
his poem “The Performance,” where a soldier does all
the tricks he can before the Japanese cut his head off

and he falls, headless, into a grave. Light thinning on
billboarded horizon, someone has come forth to say
the crow must be up, and all right, since it’s flown.

3. And Every Cell of Creation Opened Its Mouth to Drink Grace
—Joy Harjo, “By the Way” (The New Yorker, December 5, 2016)

A promised job in New Jersey sent us home
with nothing to buy a house but my VA loan.
For her, stories were proof of wounding at the

hands of her wheelchair-bound mother or funny
in the way her father’s joke about a “can of pee”
and canopy bed is amusing once. Maybe twice.

One story was of a sister pinning her to the floor
under a dangle of saliva meant to tease. Trust me,
to bully. Look closely. See if you aren’t visioning

the thick cord of spittle fake-launched. Launched.
Lonely is the child and lovely are the russet eyes
flashing as she raises a slurry of damning spells.

I’d like a spell for those who took everything.
Once, in Wisconsin; then, in Florida where we
loved sun, the starry dark as surprising as a

dropped handkerchief. No one gets out what
they put in. It’s not even close. Nevertheless,
sooner of later, they’ll pin you down. Spit.

4. The Qualifications of Working As a Fortune Teller

This isn’t a calling to be entered into lightly. Although
anyone can do a thing, that class of democratic thinking
ends at the wisdom in knowing that not everyone should.

But, all right, say you’re clairvoyant. A psychic prodigy.
What Billy Collins would call the bread and the knife.
In his poem, he reaches into a painting—what if I reach

into Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam and slap
away Old Gray Beard’s hand? What if I did just that,
calling attention to the shape in the background behind

God and the angels? See the halo-shaped cloud encircling?
Is any of this helping you decide if the telling of fortunes
is in your future? All morning, I watched a squirrel mad-

scamper a stairway-to-heaven of black locust branches—
if any of us is the bread and the knife, it’s a squirrel
storied into at least one future, thanks to a poem.

It’s always Forever in a poem unless some asshole
set’s fire to the world, completing crumbling futures
you’d like not to foretell. What is coming to pass is,

if you follow any part of this, you’re a fit. Go ahead.
Opened your heart to what soundlessness says in words
of wind. Or, as we say in the Midwest, the Mysteries.

5. Bastard

My father had a ’48 Plymouth. A beast-car
with an interior a kid could get lost in. Seats
that smelled of Old Spice Aftershave Lotion,

L & M cigarettes, and gasoline. Taken together,
they were my father’s smell—he adored cars and
told me he was in the Army and overseas in Korea

before he realized his gift. His mother (Susan) had,
years before, when he was a boy, been shuttled off
to the state sanitarium in Frankfort. He was raised

by relatives who couldn’t agree with his mother
loosing bullets towards the man—a married man who
said that he wasn’t in the habit of supporting bastards.

He said it like you’d spit out on e of the Devil’s names,
and my grandmother with a gun she knew how to use.
The story goes, she emptied a Colt and was reloading

when a sheriff stopped her. Maybe my dad figured
if things went bad (the wheels came off, so to speak,
as they had for her), he’d have that Goliath with the

hawk’s-beak hood. He had to rebuild the carburetor
in the rain more than once, so there were hood-dents
from his fists. One in the shape of the Commonwealth

of the Great State of Kentucky. To say he was angry
is tamping it down. To say he had a sort of need to slap
or slug someone—anyone, and soon—would be right.

6. The One-Night Cheap Hotel of Divinity
Answering All Arguments to the Contrary

That’s what our god graduated from, if there is one
a God although insisting on one is magical thinking.
So gobbledygook spawned God—rabbis and priests

and mullahs talk this rabbi- or priest or mullah-speak.
Without physical knowledge of God beyond The Torah
and Talmud, The Quran and Miles Davis. Nevertheless,

given the argument against the existence of an afterlife
posed using General Systems Theory—if there is a Deity,
she has an apocalyptic bent to her, and is a drama queen—

which centers around the nature of systems and subsystems.
What’s the name on her diploma?—The One-Night Cheap
Hotel of Divinity Answering All Arguments to the Contrary.

Which correspondence doctoral program? I won’t laugh—
we draw Whoopi-Goldberg-on-a-Good-Day kindhearted-God?
That explains a lot. Mercy in a mini-skirt, stiletto high-heels,

dreadlocks. Striking but busy filling the job of being God.
And passing the buck back to that old standby Free Will.

7. If the Physics of Falling is an Allegory for Existence

Questioning things has always been my true north.
So if the physics of falling is an allegory for existence,

then why not ask what hands will hammock your falling?
Am I hearing William Wordsworth? the Divine in nature?

Wordsworth’s connection with the earth is a connection
to something akin to the Divine Spark—and now I’m

thinking of my sister Steph and her friend Ann Colliver
setting fire to the garbage cans behind our house in Ohio.

I was in the Air Force and on active duty in another state
and so I missed my father swearing as he put out the blaze

by himself and tried to put things right. The world is on fire.
But if it had been the handiwork of kids, general mischief,

responsible parties would still be getting yelled at. As if
there’s no fixing it, is there? And no end to the scorching.

A big-for-her-age ten-year-old, in rainbows-and-unicorns
pajamas, has come out form a bedroom to face the music.

See her pausing in the hallway to beg mercy or promise
an impersonation of the kid in The Exorcist in which she

will start swearing up a not-nice storm. See her making
her mouth dramatically shape the phrase It’s your call.


The Remainder Salvaged by Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum

Willow Springs 68

The Remainder Salvaged by Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum

NILS SCOOPS AWAY THE SNOW carefully at first, with a trench shovel, then desperately, finally getting down on his knees and scraping with his hands at the thick stratum of ice when he believes he’s found another body. Twice what he has uncovered has been not a body but someone’s luggage—the olive-green duffle of a soldier the first time, and now, an hour or maybe two hours later (time has become hard to measure out here in the dark and the cold), a lady’s brocade valise. He sits back on his heels and breathes the rimy air in ragged gasps. The fabric of the bag was so certainly a woman’s overcoat an instant ago, the round shape of it her curved back. He kicks at the bag with the toe of his boot and pulls off his gloves.

It is March, but there is no sign of spring here. Snow is still falling, and Nils’s fingers are still with the freezing temperature. He works at the buckles and the bag opens; when he shines the beam of his lantern inside he sees the cream colored satin of a woman’s under slip, a pair of gold-rimmed reading glasses in a soft drawstring pouch, a silver compact with a clamshell design on its case and a mirror inside, the glass clean and unbroken. He snaps shut the clasp on the compact and drops it into his pants pocket, tosses the bag aside, and pulls on his gloves again to keep digging.

Here and there flares poked into the snow fizz and hiss, their sulfuric halos trembling and bright against the white drifts. In their odd, low light the wreckage of the avalanche seems imagined, too strange and awful to be real: trees snapped to raw splinters, and the whole, wide swath of the mountainside cleared; metal sheets ripped from the train car’s sides, the frames twisted and freed of their axels and carriages, shards of window glass and the steel cages from the train’s internal light fixtures tossed out onto the snow. Near the tracks, where the train had stopped to wait out the weather, the rotary plow and both engines sit mangled and half buried, wheels upturned to the sky. Two of the three passengers cars that were once hitched to one another have been flung apart and lie on their sides, farther down the mountainside—one only a hundred yards from the tracks, the other picked up by the tide of snow and ice and swept a quarter-mile downhill. Both look as if they’ve been exploded from the inside, the metal roofs blown out by the force of the snow, their wood siding broken and strewn. And everywhere precarious collisions of logs, evergreen needles, and bits of gravel and dirt churned up by the slide.

There is also what the searchers have uncovered as they’ve dug: a silver coffee carafe, and nearby, the book someone on board had been reading, its pages open and face down, the paper softening now. Nils comes across suitcases and purses; checked blankets and white pillows, stamped PROPERTY OF GREAT NORTHERN RAILROAD; and several shoes and boots somehow separated from their owners. As he walks, he spots a single seat ejected from the train and detached from its aisle mate in the accident, sitting upright between the shorn stumps of two fir trees as if waiting for a passenger to amble up and sit down.

The snow underfoot here is wet and dense and grainy. It was compacted in the rush down the mountainside, and a rigid crust has formed beneath the inches of loose, new snow, making it hard for Nils to keep his footing. There is a strange, mineral scent in the air too—stirred up by the slide—something like the smell of a river. Nils realizes he will smell this odor again when the thaw begins in the spring and this years will think not of new life, but of destruction.

He passes a new mound every few feet that looks the size and shape of a body. Sometimes he stops and digs. Sometimes he just plunges his shovel into the snow and hopes the blade won’t strike anything solid; he sighs his relief when it goes in cleanly, pulls it free again, and keeps walking. There are drifts taller than men, wider than the train cars, and the task of unburying whatever lies beneath them seems impossible and useless. This is already the second day of searching—it took Nils a full day just to arrive, with the tracks blocked by the avalanche and the only way to get up the mountain by foot. No one else will be found alive.

He recalls his mother telling him about the midwestern blizzards of her childhood. Cows out to pasture suffocated when their own breath froze in their nostrils. Farmers caught in a storm and lulled to their deaths by the monotony of white and the chill of hypothermia. He imagines children curled like rabbits in burrows beneath each mound of snow here, their eyelashes coated in tiny grains of ice, their lips sealed, their skin marbled blue.

“Here!” a man’s voice yells from several feet down the mountainside. “Here! Here!”

Nils lunges forward against the snow, breaking the ice shelled just below its surface. He feels as if he’s running through deep water; every step requires double the usual exertion. His boot tops fill and the snow melts with the warmth of his legs and soaks through the canvas of his pants, the wool of his long underwear. He sweeps the beam of his lantern across the white drifts, the kerosene inside the sloshing, and catches the shadowed columns of evergreen trunks, the shadowed bodies of other men straining to run. The men at his back holler to one another as they plod forward; one man in front of him carries an axe and a shovel, their blades clanging together as he moves.

“Where are you?” Nils yells in the direction of the voice. His exhalation is a bright cloud in the sphere of his lantern’s light. Snow whirls and kaleidscopes as it passes through the round of light.

“Down here!” calls man up ahead, and the other join him. They’ve been in a small meadow, Nils sees now for the first time; the railroad track is at the top of the short rise about them, and the voice hollering for help is thirty feet below, at least, down a steep incline.

He uses his shovel to steady himself. Some of the men use pickaxes they’ve brought, and there is the rhythmic pitch-and-stick sound of their blades cutting into the snow and holding, then dislodging as they make their way down the grade. The snow glints and shimmers inside the rails of light extending from their lamps. Overhead, most of the snow clouds have cleared, but there is no visible moon, and it is as if a lid has been screwed onto the jar of the world. The circle of sky is a hard, polished black, punctured only by the tiny, pale holes of stars.

By the time Nils reaches them, the others have already uncovered the body of a man and are lashing it to a toboggan with rope. Nils looks on and feels nothing, and then is guilty for this nothing.

The man’s skin is gray with the cold. They’ve wrapped his body in a checkered wool blanket, his face and feet sticking out at the end of the sled. He’s still wearing dress boots and hand-knit socks. Someone takes off his own hat and puts it on the dead man’s bare head. The gesture seems ridiculous out here, an unnecessary show of warmth that can’t possibly matter. The man’s face is frozen in a grimace. His eyes are shut.

“Jesus,” someone from the back of the crowd says. “They’re all just icicles.”

Two men take hold of the toboggan’s ropes and start up the mountainside to the tracks. They’ll take the body into the station town to be counted and once the rails are cleared, onto the train, which will take it west, over the pass to the morgue in Everett.

The other’s stand for a moment. They pull flasks from their coat pockets and take off their gloves to slap their hands against their thighs, warming their fingers again before slipping gloves back on. Someone has brought a pail of sandwiches and passes it around. Nils takes one and eats quickly without tasting what’s between the bread. He crumples the waxed paper the sandwich was wrapped in and stuffs it into the top of his boot.

“It’s two a.m.,” the man next to him says, and so they pick up their shovels and startup the incline again, hiking with high steps, asking the beams of their lanterns up the rise, toward the blue-black stand of evergreens at the top of the ridge, and back and forth across the angle of the mountainside, looking impossibly for anything salvageable.

HE IS IN HER BED. Her sheets smell like summer to him. When he says this, she tells him she cut lavender from the garden in August and dried it for sachets to keep in the linen cupboard.

It’s October, two years earlier, and the house is chilled, though it is late afternoon and there is still sun behind the thin drape at the window, lighting the collection of potted plants she keeps on a side table beneath the sill—spider plants and ferns, a white-blossomed amaryllis on a lim stalk, a geranium with petals colored on oxidized red. On the floor sits a pot overcrowded with a spiny bed of hen-and-chicks. “I think you’d bring the whole yard inside if you could,” he says.

“Not the weeds. Not the bugs. I can honestly say I don’t miss a single aphid or wasp all winter.” She lays her head on the pillow beside his.

Iris grew up in California and winter here makes her homesick. “I remember the air at home smelling like persimmons. But maybe I”m misremembering. My memory is an optimist. In my memory of this moment you’ll be younger and I’ll be prettier.”

“I’ve never seen a persimmon,” he says.

“How can that be true?”

“Are they like apples? Because I’ve had my share of apples and yours too, probably.”

“Here I though you were worldly. What else have you missed?”

Iris is thirty-four—eleven years his junior—and plain, really. She wears her dark hair cut as short as a man’s, the bare stretch of her neck exposed even when she’s fully clothed. She was widowed suddenly last spring, after only nine month of marriage, when her husband’s appendix burst. He’d been the librarian in town, a fisherman on the weekends. He left her a very small savings, a wide bookcase of books, and this house—a one-bedroom bungalow a mile out of Wenatchee, with a little outhouse in back and a porch overlooking the river and mountains.

“What will you do in the winter here, alone?” Nils asks.

“I’ll be fine. There’s the stove, and I’ll buy wood.”

“You’ll have to walk them mile in the snow alone.”

“I’ve done it before. It doesn’t bother me.”

“What does bother you?”

“You pestering.” She chucks him on the chin and he pulls her toward him, kisses the flat of her chest.

“Don’t worry,” she says. “You love to worry.” Her body is warm against his. She lies still long enough that he wonders if she has fallen asleep, but then she sits up.

“Look away,” she says, and she reaches for her robe at the foot of the bed.

“I won’t. That’s ridiculous.”

“Fine. Have it your way.” She is thick across the hips and has a round, white belly into which the rose of her navel disappears when she bends to pull on her socks. Her breasts swing forward matronly. She’s never had a child. Now that she’s alone, she’s told him, she’s glad of this.

“I do worry about you,” he says. He wants her to meet his eyes, but she doesn’t. “I want to keep worrying about you.”

“Don’t,” she says. Then turning away: “Persimmons look like pale tomatoes. Orange, rot red. But they taste like apples, you were right. Nothing special, really.” She pulls a sweater over her head, swifts her fingers through her short hair. “You haven’t missed anything.”

AT FIVE THE SKY FLUSHES pink along the white and jagged eastern crests of the Cascades and a man dressed in a parka and holding a record book appears at the top of the ravine to call out that it’s time for a shift change. He’s brought with him a new crew of men—some of them company men, like Nils, dressed in winter coats with Great Northern patches on the breasts; and some members of volunteer search crews from Wenatchee and Everett and other surrounding towns. They start down the ravine as Nils and the others who have been out all night tromp up.

The man in the parka gives them a verbal report of the search, taking a small pad of paper from inside his coat to read off the numbers. Ten bodies recovered alive, eight of those injured, all ten recovered in the first hour after the wreck. Since then, thirty bodies recovered deceased. Various luggage and personal effects will remain on them mountain until the missing persons search has concluded. There are fifty-two bodies still missing, he tells them. And the third train car still hasn’t been found. “We’ll keep at it.” His voice turns falsely bright. “Thank you all for your efforts,” he says, releasing them. “Go get warmed up and rested.”

They make their way along the railroad grade. Usually the tracks would have been plowed already, but there were smaller avalanches to the east and west that have blocked the pass from both sides. In some spots the tracks are buried beneath twenty-foot drifts. The temperature is still frigid, and Nil’s fingers and feet, knees and hips have long since numbed. He seems to moving forward without willing it, and has a sensation of dislocation from his own body that makes him question for a moment if he is not maybe among the dead.

“You look dazed, Riis,” the man walking beside him says and slaps Nils on the back. The man’s familiarity startles him. He’s seem him at the rail yard in Wenatchee—he’s a mechanic, maybe, but Nils can’t think of his name. He offers his flask, but Nils declines.

“I’m fine. Just a long day.”

“Long night, you mean.”

“That’s right. That’s what I meant.”

“You need a hot plate and a warm bed.” The man takes a swig from the flask himself and nils can smell the alcohol like a tremor of heat on the cold air.

The town is small, and they arrive at the west end, the railroad tracks suddenly opening into a wide valley in the crotch of two ridgelines. Slaggy cliffs rise up on either side of the town, and a narrow creek with water so emerald green it looks like flowing paint runs parallel to the railway on the other side of the one paved street. It’s a company town, run by the railroad, with one grocery, one hotel, a post office in the railroad station, a single building to stand as both schoolhouse and church, and a few saltbox houses lining the few dirt roads off of Main Street. The avalanche swept into the far end of town, plowing through a set of barracks set up to house railroad crews. Five men asleep inside at the time of the slide were killed.

With the barracks gone, search teams have taken over the hotel, the injured being tended to in first floor rooms, and the crews sharing beds upstairs. When they arrive, Nils and the other men stand on the front porch stomping snow from their boots and lining their tools along the wall before entering the dark lobby.

There’s a crowd filling the dining room already, and the noise of conversations and the clatter of dishes being passed seem chaotic and louder than usual after so many hours in the cottony quiet of the snow. Nils finds one of the few free seats in the room, next to a man still wearing gaiters and scarf. “Pardon me,” he says. The space is tight, the chairs pushed close to one another along the table so that Nils has to ask him again to make room when he pulls out his chair to sit.

“You gentleman have left me no place to eat.” A tall woman still dressed for the outdoors stands near the table with a bowl of stew and a mug of beer in her hands. Melted snow has beaded on the wool of her coat and large leather gloves gape from her pockets where she has stuffed them.

A man across the table from Nils looks up. “You can have my seat, Sister.” He hunkers over his bowl and shovels the last spoonfuls of stew into his mouth in rapid succession, then pushes back. “I’m done anyway.”

She walks the long way around the table and the man hold the seat, nodding at her as he lifts his coat from the chair and leaves.

When she takes off her own coat, she’s wearing a man’s sweater beneath it, the brown wool loose on her narrow frame and the cuffs rolled. Her face is ruddied with the night’s work in the cold air, her hair straying in gray-blond wisps from the braid that circles her head. Around her neck is a wooden cross on a leather cord.

“Morning,” she says, brightly greeting the table of men, and then she bows her head and says a silent grace before taking up her spoon.

“WHAT DO YOU DO when you’re alone?” Iris asks.

“What do you mean, what do I do? I eat and sleep and read and work—what everyone else does.”

“No. I mean, do you ever get tired of yourself? Do you ever say anything? Just to keep yourself company. I do, sometimes. Not because I mind being alone, but because it just seems so quiet.”

“I never feel obligated to talk.”

“I’ve noticed. It’s one of your faults.”

He laughs at this.

They sit at the table in her small front room, eating the doughnuts Nils has brought from the bakery downtown.

In his mind, he places this moment earlier than the memory from the bedroom. This is September, not long after they met. He recalls with certainty the doughnuts, the dark and butter perfume of coffee in the room. Through the cracked bedroom door he can see just the foot of the bed, the yellow and blue quilt hanging lopsided as if she never pulled up the blankets after waking.

Most of the specifics of the morning are frustratingly foggy though—what she is wearing, what she does with her hands when she speaks—and trying to force his memory to clarify is like trying to draw an object and then looking down at the paper to find the image vaguely familiar but also lacking the shadows or peculiarities that make the real thing real. And so Nils fills the gaps with what is likely: Her shirt is blue, big—probably one of her husband’s. Her hair is uncombed, wild still from having slept on it, and she touches it again and again, tryign to smooth it down as they talk. A novel lays facedown on the laptop, still opened to the page she was reading when he appeared at her front door. He wasn’t invited, but she doesn’t seem surprised to have him across the table from her now, her face as placid and content as it has been each time he’s seen her.

“I wouldn’t know what to say to myself,” he tells her. “What do you say when you’re in here yakking to your shadow?”

She runs her thumb along the rim of her plate, collecting the sugar crystals that have fallen from the doughnut, then touches her thumb to her tongue. “Me and I, we talk about the weather. The cost of flour. Sometimes I complain about men. We have a wonderful sense of humor.” She grings at this. “No, actually, I mostly just sing.”

“I bet you do whole routines. Where are your tap shoes?”

“I can tap,” she says. “You’d be surprised. Come over for dinner sometime and I”ll do a little soft-shoe for you while I cook.”

“I’d like to hear you sing now.”

“What would I sing? You’ll just laugh.”

“I won’t. Sing something I’d know. Sing ‘Oh! Suzanna.’ Everyone knows that.”

“No, I’ve never liked that one. It’s too sad. I’ll do ‘Red River Valley.'” And then she signs a few lines, keeping the rhythm against the table, waving him onto join in. Her voice is high and round and clear.

After this he notices her singing all the time—as she makes coffee in the mornings, as she leans over the washbasin to rinse her face at night. Once he catches her singing as she works in the yard, her figure bend toward the gound, a pail of pulled weeds at her knee.

“Come on,” she says. “Don’t leave me out here on my ow. Join in.”

His voice is a buzz in his throat. He hasn’t sung in ages.

She drops off a few beats before him, letting him hum the last notes of the song alone, the claps when he’s finished. “Bravo! Well done!”

“I never sings,” he says.

“I can tell.” She picks up her novel, and he sips his coffee, and they sit at the table together in quiet.

HE WATCHES THE SISTER as she eats. She is ravenous. She gets up to refill her stew bowl and returns also with another hunk of bread in her hand, a slice of apple pie on a plate balanced on top of the bowl. A man down the table offers her the glass of veer in the pitcher, and Nils is surprised when she accepts. The men pass the pitcher down, hand to hand, and she takes it and fills her glass quickly so that a thick white froth forms at the top. She licks this, the drinks in gulps. He has never seen a woman eat so much as so hungrily. The other men seem to find it just as startling, as they pause in the midst of their conversations to look at her.

“You worked up quite an appetite,” Nils says.

“Didn’t you?”

“Of course.” He refills the coffee cup in front of him from a carafe on the center of the table. “I’ve just rarely seen a woman enjoy her food so fully. That’s all.”

“Maybe you’ve known only joyless women.”

“I’ll give you that,” Nils says. “You’re mostly right about that.” He nods. “You’re part of the search?”

“I’m a trained nurse. Though it turns out nurses outnumber patients up here three to one. They’re stumbling all over each other trying to be useful.” It’s true: Nils has noticed several young women in nurse’s uniforms darting in and out of the lower hallways and lobby. “It’s wonderful to see so much compassion when there is a tragedy,” she says. “But too many ladles in the pot ruins the soup, if you see what I mean.”

She forks the last bite of pie into her mouth, stacks her plate and bowl, and sits back. “That was good,” she says. “The cold did make me hungry.”

“You’ll acclimate. And you can always stay in if it’s too much—the cold. There are plenty of us out there.”

“I’m here to help. I volunteered. And, as I said, another nurse is the last person needed, so I’ll go out again, cold or not, where I might be at least a little useful.”

“What order?” Nils asks.

“Sisters of the Holy Names. You’re Catholic?”

“My mother was.”

The sister nods. “It’s not for everyone.”

“I’m surprised you’d say that.”

“If anyone could have turned your mind, it would have been your mother, would it not?” Her face softens when she smiles. “But I’ll pray for you if you like.” She pushes back in her chair and collects her dishes.

“No, that’s fine. Thank you.”

She leaves, and in a moment Nils gets up too and goes to the desk in the lobby to inquire about a bed. The men are taking shifts, and when he gets to his room upstairs, he finds the last man has left the bed unmade, a pair of damp socks hung over the foot rail. The sheets smell like kerosene. He lifts his hands to his nose and finds that he smells kerosene on his fingers too. Everything smells like kerosene and wet wool and that gray, elemental scent of snow. He’s losing his mind up here. He shakes his head at himself, tucks under the quilt, and is quickly asleep.

SOME DREAMS COME IN SCENES: He is a character of his own mind, and watches himself. Here he’s walking around the orchards just beyond his childhood home. Or here, he’s at work in the rail yard office, bent over a record book; it’s any routine day. Sometimes he’s back in her bed, her body just a warmth beside him. In another dream, it’s his childhood bedroom: he is sick and his mother is in the chair beside his bed knitting, the quiet tick-tick-tick of her needles registering in the deep nautilus of his ear as he dreams, so that when he wakes he actually sits up and looks for his mother in the room with him. He is both inside the dream and very definitely outside it, sleep separating him from himself like an orange peeled of its skin.

But in many dreams there is no double, no order. Sometimes there is just chaos, the wreckage of fuller memories washing up against the short of his mind. The heavy metal scoop of his trench shovel slicking again and again into the snow with a metered, pitching sound. A white teacup whose reassuring weight he can feel in the palm of his hand, though there is no hand, no palm, no him. That bucket of her weeks. A windowsill piled in an inch of snow. The disembodied smell of his childhood house—so strong!—like soil and clean linens and fresh ashes in the fireplace—but no accompanying vision of the house. In one dream, the pincushion on her night table, stuffed with hair pulled from her dead husband’s brush.

And today: twenty flares, lit and hissing like a nest of snakes burning up the dark landscape of the dream, burning red against the ceiling of his head, burning up the backs of his eyes with their ed incandescence.

THE SISTER AT THE FRONT DESK when he returns to the lobby at two o’clock. He’s slept only five hours, the exertion of the search leaving him strangely too tied to sleep well.

“Hello again,” she says. She has combed and re-braided her hair, pinned it up wreath-like around her head.

“Can’t sleep either?”

“We keep a routine of prayer at home. The day begins at five a.m.”

“Well, it’s not exactly morning, but I’m looking for coffee, if you’d like some.”

“I would, thank you. I can’t seem to get warm.”

“Sit by the fire. I’ll bring you something.”

Nils fills two mugs from a carafe in the dining room and brings them to the lobby, where the sister perches on the stone ledge of the fireplace hearth, her back to the fire. She thanks him and takes the cup, holding it between both hands and closing her eyes for a moment before taking the first sip. “Thank you,” she says again.

“I found a photography while I was out there last night,” she says. “It was of a man with a heavy mustache, and beside him a little boy holding a toy drum.” She smiles. “He must have been carrying it in his pocket.”

“Sometimes you can almost see their lives from their things,” Nils agrees. He remembers the mirror and nearly takes it from his pocket to show to her, but doesn’t.

The sister raises her cup to her mouth and drinks. Steam is still rising from the coffee, and she looks contented, the way she pauses after swallowing. “I’ve ridden this train route,” she says. “Have you?”

Nils shakes his head.

“You feel every jostle of the tracks. It’s unsettling.”

“I haven’t traveled much.”

“You should. Just the going changes you.” She looks at him. “That sounds romantic, but I believe it. You are changed.”

“We’re changed even staying as still as possible.”

“Yes. Stillness is important. That’s true, but it’s not exactly what I mean.”

“That’s not what I mean either.”

“Tell me what you do mean then, Mr. Riis, if I’m getting it wrong.” She sets her coffee cup down on the hearth and looks at him. Her expression is so earnest for a woman who has known him only a few hours.

“Sister, I’m not young. Neither are you, if you don’t take offense to me saying that. And in my experience, most of the life just happens to us. It’s not as if you have to go out looking for it.”

“You sound grizzled. I think your mother would have told you to remember Providence.”

“Providence. Of course.” Nils puts down his cup and buttons his coat, fishes his gloves from his pockets and pulls them on too.

“I can see I’ve upset you,” she says.

“No, but we’ve come to the fork in our agreement.”

“You are upset.”

“Sister, I’ve finished my coffee. Any more standing around next to the fire would look like idleness. You’ll have to excuse me now.”

Outside the temperature has risen slightly and the light is thin and tinny, the sky over the mountaintops the color of water in a glass pitcher. Icicles hanging like stalactites from the edge of the porch roof drip hollows into the mound of snow below. Nils stands on the porch taking deep breaths, then collects a shovel and lantern from the line of them leaning against the porch wall and, feeling steady again, starts back toward the wreck.

SPRING NOW—March maybe, or early April, and the weather not bad for walking. He’s still far from her house when he hears the dead thuds of the axe. It’s a heavy violent sound, and he can’t place it exactly, though it sets hi heart racing, turns his stomach over. “Iris?” he calls.

The sound continues. He is running now, and in a moment he can see her. She swings the axe again and again at the tree, cracking heavy blows into its trunk, her body bending with the weight and motion of her swings. The bare branches above her quiver.

“What are you doing?” he hollers, picking up his stride. He cups his hands to his mouth and yells again. But she doesn’t hear him. Her face is pinked with fury and she pulls back again, swings a loose, wobbly arc at the tree. The triangular head of the axe embeds itself again and she yanks to wrest it free.

“Whoa!” Nils calls as he jogs into the yard. “What are you doing?” He reaches for the axe when she swings back again and the force of her motion nearly knocks him to the ground.

“Let it go,” she says. “I’ve got it done already.” He steps back and she lunges with the next swing so that the noise of the axe in the wood resounds around them. In two more blows she’s cut through. There’s a sound like bone breaking, the fraught pause as the tree sways then crashes. Its branches snap and splinter as the tree hits the dirt. It’s a crabapple, and there are berries everywhere softening, leaving behind their rust-colored pits in the dirt.

“I’ve hated this tree since I married him,” she says. She swipes the back of her wrist across her face. Her cotton housedress is stained with a deep V of sweat. “And I’m sick of its mess. The crabapples attract the birds.” She drops the axe and stands catching her breath. “And then the birds get into my garden.”

“You could have waited for me. I would have done it.”

“I couldn’t look at it anymore.”

She’s barefoot, he sees now. The last of the winter’s snow has just melted and the earth is soft and wet, the pads of her feet caked in mud. She wears a dishcloth around her waist as she does when she’s cooking.

“What were you doing before I got here?” Nils looks towards the house. The front door is open.

“What does it look like I was doing?” Her face is still flushed, and she flashes him a look.

“This is crazy.” He reaches to put his arms around her, but she walks away from his embrace adn back toward the house.

“If you want to do something for me, cut that into firewood,” she says over her shoulder. “Or don’t It doesn’t matter. I just wanted that tree gone.” She disappears into the house and the door slams at her back.

Nils picks up the axe and begins cutting away the branches, piling them to burn. It takes him all afternoon to chop and stack the wood, and by the time he’s finished and knocks on her door, she is herself again, her dress changed, her face washed, a fire going in the cook stove and a pot of potatoes boiling furiously on the stovetop for dinner.

“WHAT DID HE LOOK LIKE?”

“I hardly think of him anymore. He seems like someone else’s husband, not mine. Or I was someone else then, maybe.”

“I’m trying to see you life then. What did he look like?”

The room is sunk in the blue of midnight. There’s ice on the window glass, and the thin strains of moonlight coming through it are wobbled and distorted. He shifts to reach the water she left on the bedside table and pulls long sips from the cup. She brings water to bed every night; there is a white ring on the table’s surface.

“Not like you. Is that helpful?”

He gets up, walks across the room. There’s a mirror the shape of a large egg mounted to the wall and he stands before it. In his reflection, he can see his breath coming from the dark hold of his mouth in gray bursts. “Then I guess this: full head of hair, and body wide as a tractor. Or else he had red hair. Soft guy. Piggish eyes.” He turns around to face her. “Which is it?”

HE can’t see her but he hears her sigh. “Your either laughing, or I’m wearing you down,” he says.

“It’s both,” she says. “Come back.”

He gets in bed and she puts her hand on his face so he knows she’s looking at him. “Don’t ask me again.”
“We’ll see.”

She falls asleep curled into him beneath the weight of the blankets, her knees in his stomach, her nighttime breath a little sour on his face.

BUT BEFORE IT ALL, there is this:

She is sitting at a back table eating a plate of roast and mashed potatoes, wearing a yellow blouse, a book open on the table in front of her.

He is in his usual spot.

The waiter brings him his sandwich, his coffee. He eats dinner here after work most nights before going home. He has a newspaper rolled in his bag to read over eating, but doesn’t reach for it. Instead, he catches her turning her pages, stirring the potatoes on her plate. He sees her close the book and sit for a long minute with her hand on top of its cover and her eyes fixed in thought, as if the story is still unspooling in her head.

He argues with himself, then just gets up and carries his plate to her table. He’s never so forward, he tells her—she’ll have to forgive him—but he’d like to sit down.

“Go ahead,” she says. And he does.

IT HAS TAKEN only this small rise in temperature to start a thaw, and the mountain groans and creaks as it warms. Snow sloughs from the boughs of the evergreens in wet slumps. The branches still under mounds snap and sigh with the burden. Far off, at a higher elevation and across the valley, there is the muffled thunder of the snow tumbling down the mountainside: another slide. Nils finds himself digging faster. The sun slips from behind a raft of clouds flares one last time as the clouds part, then falls behind the mountains, bleeding a spill of bright yellow light, like an egg yolk broken across the lower reaches of the sky and gilding the mountains’ edge and the boat-bottom undersides of the clouds.

Nils stops and fishes a match from the box in his pocket, strikes it until it sparks, and lights his lantern.

The search has focused now on finding the third train car. He hears voices farther down the incline and starts moving toward them, his heels gouging deep holes int he snow as he descends.

It’s a long way down, and at the bottom the ground levels out again. Through the blue stalks of tree trunks the beams of other lanterns flicker and shine.

“You again,” the sister says. “I wondered if I’d see you.” She stops working to lean on her shovel, wipes the back of her glove across her wet nose.

“Any luck?”

“No. We’re at the end of it. They’ll call us in soon and end the search until spring. Whatever is still under the snow will have to stay that way until then.”

“I don’t like the idea of that.”

“Of leaving it unfinished? Some of these searches turn up nothing, ever. This one’s been productive, really.” Nils uses his teeth to pull his gloves from his stiff fingers, then cups his hands around his mouth and blows onto the blanched skin. There’s that kerosene smell again in his nose; it’s begun to make him sick. He takes a deep breath to quell the twinge in his stomach. He’s lost felling in his fingertips already, and his knuckles ache when he bends and straightens his fingers to get the blood moving again.

“No, of bodies staying lost. I don’t want to abandon them here.”

“I don’t quite see the difference. They’re buried in here or someplace else. Someone somewhere will miss them, whether we find the bodies now or not.”

“Why are you here then? If it doesn’t matter?” She looks angry for a moment, and Nils nearly apologizes, but he’s too tired to start in with her again.

“I work for the railroad,” he says. “I do what they tell me to do. But I didn’t say it doesn’t matter.”

The sister sniffs at this answer. “Well, you do as you wish, Mr. Riis, but I’m going to keep moving.”

“Don’t get proud and go wandering off. I never said I was quitting.” He looks toward the other lights, still a fair distance away. “If you want to follow me, it’s probably better we stay a pair. The temperature’s going to drop again, and it’s already dark.”

“I’m sure I’m fine.”

“I’m telling you not to go alone.” He works to stuff his dull fingers back into the gloves. “Please. Just follow me.”

As he works his way horizontally down the side of another slope, he hears her a few paces behind, her breath coming hard. She doesn’t speak though, and he doesn’t turn to look at her.

MAY—OVER A YEAR AGO NOW, unbelievably. When she tells him, she’s already sold the house. “This has never really been my home,” she says, and when he presses, when he says he’ll go with her and they’ll make a new home together somewhere else if she likes, she says only no.

“I have money saved,” he says. “I’ve been saving all these years for something without knowing what.” But, no, she tells him. No. She’s made up her mind.

He lies beside her on her bed. The bedroom window is open. Outside, the goldfinches and robins in her garden chirrup and flit, singing at one another, squabbling over scraps and seeds. The river down the hill is overfull with runoff from the mountains. It moves with a sound like boiling water. It turns up all sorts of flotsam onto its banks, spits out a bubbly brown froth that rides on top of its current.

He get’s up and stands looking at her. “Are you afraid of me?” he asks.

“No,” she says.

He picks up her hairbrush with the silver handle and throws it at the mirror. The mirror breaks. The glass scatters in shards across the wood slats of the bedroom floor.

“You knew all along you’d leave,” he says.

“I didn’t know. I stayed longer that I might have if I hadn’t met you.”

“Are you in trouble? Are you not telling me everything?”

“There’s not child.”

“How can I trust you?”

“I’m not a liar.” She meets his eyes. “Sometimes there’s no reason. I need to leave this place, and that’s all. You can’t understand that?” She is crying now, but quietly. She gets up from the bed and kneels on the floor, sweeping the bits of glass into her palm.

“You’re running away from a dead man, is what I think.”

“Stop it,” she says, her voice even. “you’ve never been cruel. Why are doing this now?”

“It’s not meanness. It’s fact. I should have seen it earlier.

“Fine, then.” She raised her far to him. “You need a reason? You’re too much. You and this place. You need too much.”

“You’re all excuses.”

“Stop it now, I won’t argue with you. I’m tired.” She sits back on her heels. “It’s decided. And you should go now.”

He gets his clothes and begins pulling them on. He tries to keep his balance, but stumbles puttin this leg into his pants, steps back and feel needles of broken glass embedding themselves on his bare foot. He curses under his breath.

“I’m sorry it’s all turned out so badly,” she says. “I am.”

“You’re making your choices.”

His foot is bleeding; he pulls his socks and shoes on anyway. He leaves the buttons of his shirt undone.

When he goes, he slams the front door hard enough that the windows rattle at his back.

I’M ASKING YOU TO RECONSIDER. I want you to say something. I want you to stay. He writes this on a piece of paper, slides it under her door, and walks back to town.

HE ALLOWS HIMSELF TO WALK past the house once, after she is gone. The stump of the crabapple is there, but the new owners till over the garden. They put up a chicken coop where she planted strawberries and squash. The white and red chickens stalk around their fenced square scratching at the dirt, bobbing their heads at each other.

As he stands watching, two of the birds take up a fight. They circle and charge each other. They flap their wings and kick sprays of dust that rise from the ground then shower back down on their heads. In only a moment the scuffle is over, the dispute—whatever it was—settled, and the two amble away from each other. The other chickens, who paused to watch the fight, resume pecking at the ground as if nothing has happened, though their patch of yard is littered with shed feathers.

For the rest of the day he thinks of. how she would hate the ugly coop, hate the chickens and all their mess.

HE IS UNUSED to sleeping alone then. He stares at the wall of his bedroom until the square of light from the window brightens, brightens, and finally goes white with morning. He gets up and his thoughts float like fluffs of cotton through his mind. He feels like a sleepwalker, lurching through the day. He goes to work in the railway offices, comes home. There is summer and then fall again. A fine crust of first first frost on the bedroom window glass and the color of morning pale blue now, or gray. Snow then. A new year. Winter. The river calcifies with ice. A flock of starlings roost on the roofline of the building across the street—so many dark bodies all in a line. They rise all at once and circle overhead, once, twice—a knot tying and untying itself in the sky—before they are gone. He taps the window with his forefinger and beads of condensation slide down the glass. Everything comes at him as if he is lodged far beneath the surface of his own perception. His body is layers of bundling, and somewhere beneath skin and muscle, bone and gristle, he is half awake and listening for what?

IT IS NEARLY SEVEN O’CLOCK—long past dark—when the third train car is found a quarter mile down the mountain and far to the west of where searchers expected it might be. There is hollering, cheering and clapping, and Nils and the sister raise their heads and move toward the noise. Far off, the lights of many lanterns throw a faint halo around the site where the other men are digging out the car.

The sky is clouded over again. The clouds are heavy and big-bellied, full of more snow and looking less like tufts than like something wet and solid. Like soggy newspaper, Nils thinks. Or sacks of wet feathers. He says this to the sister, and she makes a sound that is something between a chirp of laughter and snort.

“I have an awful memory of plucking the ducks my father raised one winter, so we could all feast on Christmas Day,” she says.

“We kept geese and chickens. I remember it being awful.”

“My mother saved all the feathers to stuff bedding and pillows. But she wanted to wash them first, to get rid of dust and mites. There were wet feathers stuck everyplace. My hair, my sister’s arms, all over the the dirt. We had to throw them out. There was no good way to dry them.”

“She didn’t know what she was doing,” Nils says.

“No. She’d been raised in the city. But my father let her do it. HE didn’t tell her it wouldn’t work. It was better she find out by experience, or she’d never have let it go. She’d have gone on worrying about mites in the beds ’til kingdom if he’d told her she wasn’t to was the feathers.”

“And you didn’t have Christmas ducks the next year?”

“No, we did. But Mother and Father did the work themselves. We children got in the way, they said. And I don’t know what happened to the feathers, but they weren’t washed, I know that.”

“Do you miss them? Your family?”

“My parents died years ago.”

“But when you first left.”

“Of course. Isn’t that true for you too? Don’t you miss your mother since she died? Your dad? Sometimes I get nostalgic and even miss the girl I was when I was young. As if she was someone not me. That’s silly, yes?” She pauses in her walking and Nils stops to wait for her to catch her breath.

“Not silly,” Nils says. “I’ve had a similar thought. I’ve come across shed snake skins before and have thought what a thing it would be to do that—get outside your old skin as easy as taking of a jacket.”

“We’re saying different things again, I think. I’m talking about nostalgia, not regret. But maybe that’s the gift of my life: my devotion keeps me in the present. For that I’m still grateful, even all these years later.”

She shifts her weight and clasps her gloved hands together. Nils pulls his hat down over his ears.

“I’m ready,” she says, and starts ahead of him. “It’s getting cold standing here, and I”m talking too much for you again, I can see by your silence.”

“I was rude earlier.”

“You were,” she says over her shoulder. “But it’s fine. We’ve made up now. Let’s go.”

Nils lifts the lantern and follows her.

They don’t get far before the sister stops him again. “Have I been out here too long, or am I seeing something there?”

Nils treads through the snow towards the spot she’s pointing out. The slide seems to have come to a stop down here, and there are more trees still standing. They are not far now from the others. The sounds of the med shoveling out the inside of the train car have grown louder, and just ahead there is debris from the car still on top of the snow—what looks to be a piece of siding, a strip of metal from the car’s undercarriage, bent and curled up at an odd angle.

Nils stops near a fir tree and tilts his lantern so that it illuminates the sunken round of shadow beneath the tree. He gets down on his knees and moves snow aside with his hands.

“What is it?” the sister calls. “Is it anything?”

Nils hesitates. “It’s a dog,” he says.

They clear the snow away from the animal’s body. The dog ism ale. His white fur is matted with ice, his legs folded close to his abdomen in awkward, unnatural angles. The pink pads of his feet have gone gray-blue, and his nose is spongy, his eyes open and their stare waxy. When Nils lifts the dog’s body a dark blot of blood is revealed in the snow beneath him; the dog’s right ear is gone, sheared off completely, and that side of his face is crusted brown with frozen blood.

“Oh, no,” the sister says. She puts her hand over her mouth as if she may be sick.

“Someone’s pet,” Nils says. He sets the body back down and begins to cover it with snow.

“What’re you doing?”

“They’re not going to haul a dog out. There’s enough to do with human casualties.”

“Don’t do it yet.” the sister says. “Please.” She’s crying quietly, and Nils looks away from her. “I’m going to pray.”

Nils sits back on his heels and waits as she bows her head. She keeps her voice low, her words materializing as a continuous strand of chilled exhalation. When she finishes, she leans over and touches the dog’s face with her own, puts her hands on its flank, her forehead to its ribs.

“I’m starting to feel like everything I’ve ever lost is under here,” she says. “Like if we looked long enough we’d find the brooch my grandmother gave me when I turned seventeen, and those ducks, and my parents. Maybe they’re all here.” She turns to Nils. “When I was young, a neighbor woman lost a baby in the middle of a very long winter and then drowned herself when the pond between our farms thawed in the spring.”

“My mother was sick in bed for several days before she died,” Nils says. “Her priest came at the end to perform the last rites, and when she went, he told me she was needed more about than there on earth. ‘She’s been called by her maker to join Him in heaven. Take solace in knowing that her Redeemer needs her now more that you do.’ I remember he said that.”

“That’s a horrible thing to say to someone in grief. He should have known better.”

Nils smiles. “I can’t say I appreciated it much.”

“They try to be reassuring. I’m sure that’s what he meant to do. But he should have thought better of it and said something else.”

“It wouldn’t have made any difference. I wanted him to say nothing, I wanted every noise to stop without her there to hear it.” He pushes back and stands . “But that kind of thinking is as useless as his consolation.”

“She wouldn’t want you to stop your life.”

“She wouldn’t have, but that hardly matters. What you’d will doesn’t matter. There’s no stopping. And that’s all. I didn’t see that then, but now I do.”

Nils buries the dog, digging first beneath the snow to bare ground, then a couple of feet deeper into the frozen dirt. The soil comes up in solid chucks, and he’s clumsy with the shovel. The exertion warms him though, slowly, and soon his hands and feet tingle with sharp needles of pain as they begin to come back to life. When he lifts the dog, he brushes the snow from its flank, fingering its leather collar for a moment and rubbing his thumb over the mirrored oval of its tag before lowering the body into the hole and covering it.

“We should see how the others are doing and then head back for the night,” he says.

They walk without speaking toward where the others are still digging out the third train car in the growing dark. Several more flares are lit, poked into the snow and throwing a low, trembling light on the wreck; some of the men have also strung their lanterns from the limbs of the evergreens and these sway and bob as the breeze moves the boughs, their warm glow bouncing against the trees and drifts, their long files of light stretching across the shadowed mountainside.

Nils takes off one glove and tucks his hand into his pocket to feel for the compact. Still there. It’s a heavy, round weight in his palm, its solid heft and curve reminding him of nothing so much as the skipping stones he collected as a boy. He’s not sure now why he took it, nor what he thought he’d do with it, this token of so much lost; but it would seem wrong to toss it away, into the snow, where it would be just another thing gone. And so he holds onto instead.

“Are you okay there, Sister?” Nils asks.

“I’ll be fine,” she says.

He nods to himself and keeps walking through the snow, toward the noise and the lights just ahead.



Color by Numbers by Stacia Saint Owens

Issue 66

Color by Numbers by Stacia Saint Owens

1.

SHE WAS BORN in St. Julian’s Hospital. Her mother remembers (incorrectly) that it was storming that night, because her water broke while she was at the bowling alley, and the cavernous rumbling of falling pins got stuck in her head, something thunderous and dooming to focus on through the pain. But it wasn’t she who rammed through that mother’s body with an eager bald head. It’s amazing the accidents that can happen if you turn your back for just one second.

HE WAS BORN in St. Julian’s Hospital, on the same night, maybe as much as a half hour later. Things were inexact in the hospital that night. His mother was not in so much pain, considering. She always suspected that something went wrong. When the Doctor slapped him, he cried like a girl, which wasn’t his fault.

THE OB-GYN NURSE WAS DISTRACTED. This was because the Doctor was sexually harassing her, but there was no name for it then, no policy. He would sneak up behind her and caress the bend in her knee through he opaque white stockings. Then he would laugh with supreme good nature, so that she would have felt like a nitpicky stick-in-the-mud to say anything about it. The back of my knee, okay, she thought, but what if he fondles my ass? As she was typing the paperwork for the two new babies—birth certificates, ID bracelets—the Doctor crept up behind her and fondled her ass. The sensation of being pillaged shot up her spine, something left over from her horn-helmeted great-to-the-6th-power grandmother the Viking, and it resulted in a birth the same as if he had surprised her with a more specific thrust, which they did have a name for back then, though the punishment for it had softened since her ancestors’ marauding time. The Doctor laughed like a claymation Burl Ives and she keep her eyes on her papers the whole time. She spelled the baby girl’s name wrong and put down her sex as “M.” You’d think somebody would have looked into it, but authorities were different in those days. Nobody questioned authorities. Authorities were home free.

2.

SHE LIVED DOWN THE STREET from him. Nobody remarked upon how she failed to resemble her parents, because her parents were hardworking and careworn and complacent in their baldness and jowls. In school she was admired, but not very well liked. She went through the usual phase of longing for her parents to sit her down and tell her some dark secret about her past: that she was adopted, or had been born illegitimate, or was actually a robot. She never really felt out of place in their home, so eventually she resigned herself to living there. She created an imaginary little sister named Dawn to whom she told her secrets and blamed for all punishable offenses.

She was bright, but she worried about how she sounded when she spoke up in class. She heard a recording of herself early on, part of somebody’s science fair projects, and she could hardly stand the nasal sound of it—she sounded like a rock instead of a stone—so she decided that talking about academic subjects was ugly. Still, there were tests every year, and the authorities found out she was intelligent and shepherded her accordingly. Her father, a mid-level administrator at the city Parks and Rec Department, took her test scores as proof of his own wasted potential, and began to drink heavily. He was a tidy drunk and no one seemed to mind.

She took physics with a roomful of boys, and on the day it was announced that the town would be holding a Junior Miss pageant, these boys showed a rare solidarity, and urged her to enter. After a brief moment of confusion, she decided that they were complimenting her, and because her beetle-browed mother had trained her to accept compliments graciously, she smiled, making eye contact with as many of them as possible, these heirs-apparent hunched on lab stools, faces stained with erratic pimples, clutching tuning forks, their eyes darting around in double-fast drumstick time.

He was in that class, and although they had been neightbors their entire lives, and were mandatorily invited to each other’s backyard birthday parties, she didn’t linger on him or gave him any sort of special recognition. He had strange hair and the wrong cut of glasses and he didn’t play any sports. There was a yellowed snapshot loose in the back of her family’s album, of her and him as toddlers, running through the silvered saliva of yard sprinkler. His mother had dressed him in a pink hat, and he was chubby, which made him seem to have mocking little breasts. The photo gave her the creeps. She blamed his mother for the sickly way he turned out—it seemed like his mother made no effort to buy him miniature cars or force him into the Boy Scouts. She hated his mother, a bossy-toothed, whippet-thin lady with stainless steel hair and a ballerina’s sense of style. At Memorial Day picnics, she and his mother glared at each other over sun-curdled potato salad and neither of them knew why.

HE LIVED DOWN THE STREET from her. He didn’t look like his parents, but then, they didn’t look anything like each other. In school he excelled but was often overlooked. His mother was overbearing, stridently feeding him vegetables. His father didn’t pay much attention to him. His father liked ’em young, young enough to fear legal repercussions, and this kept Dad preoccupied. His father was cunning and charming and frequently slobbered-over at bridge parties, but the only thing that really turned him on was the presumptuous knob of a sixteen-year-old’s ankle. He never had to compete with his son for teenage action because his son pretended to be indifferent to girls. Although she lived down the street and had maddening ankles—which she exposed all summer in rubber flip-flop thongs, the little tart—his father never gave her so much as an inopportune glance. She was sure-footed and resplendent in lipstick. He could imagine her screaming bloody murder. Instead, his father targeted a roly-poly girl with a hatchet job of a haircut who was flattered by the attention and already knew the singlemindedness of the male backhand.

His father never did get caught. The son never suspected his shining dad’s sexual deviance. Instead of exchanging insults with jittery girls, the son pulled the legs off the grasshoppers and burned the twitching torsos with a magnifying glass. He realized the insects were suffering, and secretly longed for one of them to stand up to him, punch him in the eye, and make him stop. His father never drank because with his habits, he could not afford to get sloppy and loose-lipped. His mother would gulp sun tea and eye her son, unconvinced.

THE DOCTOR KILLED HIMSELF violently—there was a gun involved and golf cart—in a public place but late at night when there was no one around. It was not because of his many medical mistakes (some of which irreversibly altered the course of innocent lives) such as a raspberry eye infection that went untreated and the undiagnosed walking pneumonia and the eating disorder that was allowed to slide until a promising young scholar died at age fourteen, buried with her flute case and stuffed pandas. He never saw the dead girl’s skeletal face chomping at him, exacting revenge. Nor did he kill himself over the sexual harassment. As the limits were defined and made punishable, he stayed one step ahead. He learned to target pudgy, bewildered women who were going through divorces, and ones who couldn’t afford who couldn’t afford to lose their jobs but made stupid mistakes like stealing from the petty cash to buy granola bars from the vending machine. He killed himself because the drugs were too easy to get and even all the people who should have been after him, it was gnomes that he saw marching half-legged over every hill; he could hear their stunted grunts on the line when he made phone calls; they spit blue pulp into his coffee. He would never have turned to drugs if they’d only kept the old nurses’ uniforms intact. The new baggy scrubs drove him to despondency. His one indulgence, as he saw it, was the plum ripple at the back of a woman’s knee, straining against white nylons.

3.

WHEN IT CAME TIME for the prom, she got a phone call from him on the white plastic phone in her bedroom. HIs invitation was no more or less inept than the rest of them, but it was out of the question. She was angry at him for not realizing this. She didn’t laugh about it with her friends. She never told anyone. If her mother had found out, she would have insisted that her daughter go to the dance with him. Her mother was strangely protective of the boys who darted around her daughter, as if she were afraid the girl harbored sinister intentions.

As for the father, he didn’t steel-grip their teenage basketball hands and toss them gruff intimidations. He winked at them from his reclining chair and secretly wished them luck. If he had not been drunk, he would have sat in the same chair feeling nervous and invaded, clearing his throat.

Meanwhile, she was kissed by man many always-boys in their Catholic school neckties. She drank wine coolers and relied faithfully upon their Virgin Mary complexes. She only missed her curfew a couple times, which is amazing when you think about it.

WHEN SHE REFUSED to go to the prom with him, he swore off girls forever, even though he didn’t know it until years later and always thought it was the checkered waitress who sent him over the edge. When she left her house in aquamarine satin and a sickly dyed corsage, bumbling and bobbing at the elbow of a bristling athlete, his mother spied through the slit in the blinds with his bird-watching binoculars. Her dress was backless and her pointy witch-hat shoulder blades, cocksure as shark fins, both wounded his mother and filled her with ravenous pride.

His father was staring into an auto club magazine, his scalp sweating, calculating how to slip out and meet up with his homely jailbait girlfriend, who didn’t get invited to prom. His mother picked a fight over an unpruned shrub, and his father ended up raising his voice, almost yelling: “Why do you need so many clothes? You’re working me to death.”

The son was upstairs with baseball playing on the radio, jerking off to a relatively tame nudie mag because he was not actually disinterested in girls. He didn’t have a favorite picture. They all looked the same to him.

SHE AND HE BOTH READ about the Doctor’s spectacular suicide in the town newspaper. Neither of them lost their appetite. He noted where the Doctor had gone to school, and spat out a mouthful of mile to show that he was not impressed. She wondered who would get the Doctor’s money now.

4.

SHE WENT to the state university. This was right when people stopped writing letters and started sending e-mail, but her parents didn’t have a computer, so they fell out of touch. She had a profound longing for neckties, so she started hanging around fraternity houses, where she could glimpse a tie now and then. She discovered that not all boys have Virgin Mary complexes. She didn’t pray for restraint, but for the physical prowess to disengage herself when she was ready to stop. This whole period was obtuse and dissipated. She learned to pronounce a few German words. She majored in communications or something like that. Right before graduation, she lopped off her long hair so she could be hired as a news anchor, but she was never sure how to go about applying for those jobs, so she spent the next five years will her hair back. It grew in one shade darker and fuzzy as yak fur. If someone had told her that the story of her life was almost half over, she would have barricaded herself in a root cellar and written an epic poem, though this was never entered her conscious plans at any point, no matter how dismal things looked. It would have been purely a knee-jerk reaction. This poem would not have rhymed and would have been painfully off-rhythm. She would have paid to have it printed by a vanity press, along with a photo of herself back when she had good hair.

HE WENT TO MIT. When she heard about this, she didn’t yet have the good sense to be sorry she hadn’t gone to the prom with him. His mother celebrated by serving organic strawberry ice cream with no preservatives the night before he left for Cambridge. He packed only one suitcase. He brought his magnifying glass, but no recorded music in any format. His father drove him to the airport, dangerously distracted by all the billboards advertising cheap rates for hotel rooms out there. When they got to the airport, they didn’t embrace or shake hands. The father sighed and stared off at the scab-pink horizon and said, “Son, if you could harness the energy from all the heartbreak in this town, you could power a trip into space,” without raising his voice to account for the roar of the jets looming and receding.

At MIT he discovered that not all girls cared if you had strange hair, and that quite a few girls had strange hair themselves. You’d think he could have found someone. But he was already too masterful with his pretended disinterest, too well studied, so he flicked away the masochistic ones that fell for his aloofness and ran up astronomical credit card debt at various strip clubs, all of which had no-touching policies. He would lumber home drunk from Le Bare, do his astrophysics assignments, then burn holes in the paper with his magnifying glass. Several cats went missing from his neighborhood around this time, but he had nothing to do with that. Despite the traditional feline corollaries, he thought of women as puppies, eager to please and in need of his training, though he never used the word bitch, not even in the circular commentary running rampant and scissor-fisted inside his head. Once he saw a stripper who he thought he remembered from his trusty high-school-era-jerk-off mag, but it was just the lighting and the lilac smoke and when she made eye contact with him he felt like swatter her on the nose, for her own good.

WITH THE KIDS AWAY at school, their parents became entwined. Her father’s drunkenness progressed from tidy to delusional and energetic. He believed he was a star of black-and-white movies whose genius was being unfairly hobbled by the studio system of the 1940s. He was displeased with his wife. “I’m their top box office draw!” he would bellow, with a rakish disregard for enunciation. “Their cash cow! And they pair me up with that frump! Jack’s gonna get an earful from me, brother, and how!” Her mother would smile vacantly and continue quilting, which was her new hobby, though it was meticulously slow work and she never succeeded in finishing an entire quilt. His mother, who’d always had a grandiose streak and imagined herself to be too big for her present life, found her father’s spoiled-star raving to be intriguing, then exciting. His father hadn’t touched his mother since she twisted her ankle while weeding the garden three years ago; he had walked in on the unexpected sight of her swollen ankle propped on the sofa, packed in ice, staring up at him with the dumb offensive ugliness of an overlarge insect, some fat albino roach who had flourished off the household’s careless leavings. So his mother really couldn’t be blamed for seeking out affection elsewhere. At one point during the affair, she thought she might be pregnant, and for five days she was radiant and rewound, but it turned out to be a false alarm and her face fell back to its usual fretting.

5.

SHE’D NEVER HAD ANY INKLING of how hard it was to work. She took a series of entry-level jobs that were supposed to lead to greater things, but she lacked ambition for those things (an office instead of a cubicle, a cell phone account, being in charge of the people still working in cubicles) and all of the job led to sexual harassment. It was definitely reportable and punishable by thins point, but she was one of the stupid ones who really needed the job but did punishable things, like calling her friend Beverly, who was backpacking through Europe, every day on the company phone. The sexual harassment because so inevitable that she would stay lte after her coworkers and gone home, to make that tiresome first move more convenient for her bosses. She discovered that she didn’t just like neckties. It was a full-blown fetish. She worked at places where her bosses wore neckties, so she was able to explore the possibilities to extend. Still, she would stare at the jostled boxes of copy toner and dream of being rescued. She always thought she should have a father capable of swooping in and plucking her from all hurricanes. But her father was slouched in a canvas director’s chair, slinging back gin and tonics, whining that musicals were a hot ticket these days, they should stick him in a musical, he could really sing, if they’d just give him half a chance, dammit.

She still went to Maas and eventually a genuine always-boy surfaced there, Virgin Mary complex and necktie intact. They were married and her new husband took a job in Boston.

She and he never ran into each other, never passed each other unnoticed on the street, never got on the same subway train but different cars. Their lives had absolutely no commonalities.

She had two babies, both girls. One looked exactly like her and the other looked exactly like her husband. The hospital in Boston was very exacting. One of the doctors had been nailed with a sexual harassment suit earlier that year, and everyone kept their hands in their pockets and their eyes on their work.

HE GRADUATED WITH HONORS, although no one could remember having had him in their class. He skipped the graduation ceremony. His diploma came in the mail. He unrolled it on the baked June sidewalk and torched it with his magnifying glass. Then he placed the magnifying glass carefully on the ground and crushed it with his bare heel, which took several stompings and should have resulted in stitches, but medical attention would have placed him in the same hospital where her children would later be born, and what ifhe had struck up a relationship or dependency upon some doctor or nurse or medication there, and kept returning, and been at the hospital on one of the afternoons when she was giving birth to her children? No. The coincidence would be too uncomfortable, require too much circular follow-through. He plugged up his foot with a mound of sticky band-aids and bled through his strtchy black dress socks as he started his job as a software engineer.

At work he made no friends. He figure out how to insert pornographic Japanese anime into the government spreadsheets he was programming. There were a few complaints, but he got no thrill from this. Even though he did stupid, punishable things, no one sexually harassed him. If asked, he would have said that he had no fetishes, it was all the same to him. He had his first ever girlfriend, the checkered waitress a domineering woman twice his age with a blaring South Boston accent, the ends of all her words blunted, cut off like fat cigar tips. Her uniform was not checkered. He called her that because of her past, which she deliberately kept murky. She was a crystal meth addict who never slept, so she listened to oldies radio all night and quilted. She completed seven quilts while they were together, and left them all behind when she disappeared. She didn’t say she was going out of the paper or cigarettes. She just left, jangling her keys.

He didn’t feel like getting another girlfriend, but not because he missed her. He was too good for her. He went to the movies and he was certain that he looked like the stars, despite his strange hair.

His mother made a special trip to the public library to e-mail him his old classmate’s address and phone number in Boston. She did this because things were shaky between her and the girl’s father, and she was grasping at straws. He printed out this information. With his magnifying glass now smashed, he had to be satisfied with ripping it to shreds and chawing it into a big wet spitball.

THE IMAGINARY LITTLE SISTER, Dawn, still lived in the house with her parents, utterly forgotten. One time Dawn walked in on her father and his mother having fumbling, drunken sex, and she was traumatized. His mother immediately felt a tingle of cold air spider up his spine. She disengaged herself from the tangle and wept inconsolably into the half-finished quilt on the bed. She had the distinct feeling that she had been pillaged.

6.

SUDDENLY IT HITS HER: She is trapped in the wrong life. She blames this on having made a poor choice of spouse, as this is the popular diagnosis of the day. By now she lives in the suburbs of Boston, a place she clipped and doubled coupons to get to, but the squat mailboxes guarding each driveway infuriate her with their pastel indolence, and when her daughters show her the color-by-numbers activity they’ve completed, she feels like screaming at them that all they have to look forward to is sexual harassment, and any idiot can do color-by-numbers, all the choices are already made, so wake up girls and figure out how to grow a thick skin. She gives her daughters styrofoam cups of hot coffee (Don’t tell your dad) and watches as they choke it down black to please her, the volume of its bitterness turned up to blasting level on their naive children’s taste buds. She has to get out. At the public library, she finds a Spaniard who speaks English as though he were reciting a recipe for hypnosis. She craves something foreign, someone who will perform an oxytransplantation so that when she lies down with him, she will wake up in a new life that she can’t even pronounce.

She leaves matter-of-factly, in plain daylight. Her older daughter, the one that looks like her, watches her go with a stunned expression. She has named the younger daughter Dawn, and she convinces herself that the older one will turn out okay because she has something to tell secrets and blame for all punishable offenses. But Dawn once walked in on her parents having desperate, fumbling sex during the bad years, a necktie wound in an exotic knot tourniquetting her father’s thigh and flying like the streamers on a coat of arms, and little Dawn was traumatized and never speaks. She won’t make much a companion, neither confidante not acceptable scapegoat. The older daughter known that she has been screwed. She gets her first twinges of that pillaged feeling at a dangerously young age.

HE DOESN’T HAVE THE PATIENCE for a magnifying glass anymore. The men in the movies who look like him all finger cigarettes with debonair deliberation as they show the second-billing females who is boss. He doesn’t smoke, but he buys a solid silver Zippo, a sleek rectangle that feels like a rock in his pocket, makes him think of a slingshot. It’s terrible what he does to them. He’s never really fit in anywhere and when they beg for mercy he just can’t seem to put himself in their moccasins. His feet are large and enviable. He can’t be expected to relate. They are so easy to get. He just mimics all those movies, which were obviously based upon his future. They all want to be rescued.

At first, he lavishes time on them, choosing one, following her, observing, researching, perfecting the fantasy, ringing the doorbell then either loping away or making up some excuse, masquerading as an authority, but not yet, until the day he does. Then it is a split-second pounce. He has it down to a science, the Zippo tucked inside a sock.

Ding dong. He is not nice looking but he stands erect and territorial like this is his closeup and when they answer the door, they are of two minds about him and their faces struggle. They are polite but can’t bring themselves to welcome him. What a crushing disappointment. How infuriating. It might as well be the same house, because it’s the same expression: the stiffening, the suppressed revulsion. They wish he were someone else. He slings back the weighted cotton pouch and socks them square in the nose. The skull caves in and he counts out the blows until the head is reduced to a mound of bloody mush. The lips disappear. He feels relieved, no longer waiting for a smile.

He keeps the bodies intact. He indulges in a last dance—”Stairway to Heaven,” he knows every note before it hits the tympanic membrane, he practically invented this song—dragging her around the room, free from the torture of his eye contact. He no longer wishes that one of them would stand up to him and punch him in the eye. He’s been adrift in the world for a long time. He’s a different person now.

THE ENTIRE CITY IS OUTRAGED by his perversions. Police bulletins pop through the airwaves. Girls clutch each other by the elbows and scare themselves by peering into the eyes of any man in a hat. They nowilayme themselves to sleep, combating the roar of flight rushing through their rational at-home-with-the-deadbolt-locked stomachs. Her drastic fleeing to Catalonia goes unreported, conveniently eclipsed. Her husband is too despondent to make sure his daughters are safe from the maniac at large. The husband drinks himself into incoherence and one night he takes the color-by-numbers activity off the fridge, removing the magnets as gingerly as he once brushed back her sleeve to look at her watch when he still had his Virgin Mary complex and need an excuse to touch her. He burns holes in the color-by-numbers with the tip of his newly acquired cigarette, and he doesn’t know why. It isn’t out of anger. It’s because his home is askew and he can’t recognize any of the furniture and there’s no place for him to sit. He passes out without remembering to lock the door. Fortunately, her daughters are safe as babes. He’s never liked ’em young.

7.

THE SPANIARD is of course abusive, or else a freeloading lout, or maybe he insists upon watching her perform sexually humiliating acts with unbathed gypsies. She comes crawling back to her husband with a newfound appreciation for domesticity and suburban mailboxes and the concept of Home, as this is another popular diagnosis of the day, from the backlash camp. Only her husband has developed a taste for the drink, and now he can all her a whore and she really has no comeback after what went on with the gypsies. Despite the fact that her own father is a drunk, she never developed a craving for a usual codependency cycle, never covertly searched for man like her dad. Neither of her daughters will speak to her. The older one pours two cups of coffee every morning, hands one to the younger sister, and non one tells them that coffee will prevent them from sleeping at night or stunt their growth. She knows it was a mistake to come back. She finds the color-by-numbers activity with the holes burned into it, and this gives her a refreshing feeling of solidarity; in fact it keeps her from going insane.

She leaves again, but this time she sneaks out in the middle of the night with no lover loitering at the train station. She does leave a note, which is more of a rambling poem, but the older daughter burns it without reading it, gulping black coffee she’ll never develop a taste for.

Most of the time she is sure-footed, marching through the streets like a blazing torch, scalding the open air. It’s only when she goes to the movies that she gets lonely. When she sees a couple sitting together at the movies, any two, extinguishing sand rushes up her throat, and her oneness feels start and uninviting as a straight pin, thoroughly unnatural. She should stop going to the movies, but she is drawn to dark rooms with a reflective blue glow where she can remember the father who never came to rescue her and dream that right this minute he’s on his way, his ticket is being ripped, he’s grabbing the stub and rushing into this very theater, straining his super-eyes until he spots the empty seat next to her, gliding to her side with a plan for escape and a tub of popcorn. Sharing a tub of popcorn with someone is the one act that proves that, despite our best efforts, humans are still not solitary animals. It helps her to make up theories, even far-fetched ones, as she watches the humans reach for a hand, a shoulder, a fistful of popcorn, watches them reach and reach for things they have already accurately pictured inside their minds.

Her death occurs years later. It is beside the point.

HE IS APPREHENDED at a multiplex during a matinee, and he identifies not with Lee Harvey Oswald but with JFK. The police take him back to the station and he finally gets that punch in the eye, but this, too, is disappointingly mild and fails to put him in his place.

His father has made an obsessive study of the legal system and even has a generous defense fund saved up. His father should reserve this for his own day of doom (there is another homely teenager in the neighborhood whose ankles he is ravishing), but despite his many failings, he has always known that if ever his child were in real trouble, he would swoop in and rescue him. He wonders why his son never realized this. It is by far his best quality, and should have formed the basis for a special bond between them.

His mother is too unsurprised to comment. Her mother brings over a loaf of banana bread and a quilted dishtowel, which is finished, as it’s smaller. She deliberates on the doorstep for a moment, then leaves the bread on the porch without knocking. A dog eats it and all his mother finds is a mauled dishtowel stained in crumbs and slobber, and she feels pangs of outrage, as if she has somehow been cheated.

Her father sees the neighbor boy’s mug shot on the evening news and has a panic attack thinking of all the young bucks streaming into the Hollywood Greyhound station, lying in wait, slicking back their body hair choosing new alliterative names, scheming to take his place.

A reporter for the Boston Globe and one form the Los Angles Times each get ahold of his high school yearbook, and have their assistants systematically track down all of his classmates and call them for comments and anecdotes. No one can remember him clearly, but they’re willing to go on record saying that he was a creep who deserves to fry. When the reporters’ assistants try to call her, it is her ex-husband’s number. One of her daughters answers. She tells the man that the person he’s looking for is dead.

He is found guilty. He is allowed to wear a suit, provided by his well-heeled father, to hear the judge sentence him to death. He somehow smuggles the necktie back into his cell and hangs himself. Even in his final seconds, he is arrogant, telling himself he’s getting away with something. He has to have this attitude because it makes his chest feel big enough to house him.

THE OB-GYN NURSE GOES BLIND. She does not relate this to her mistake of the switched babies, a mistake she never realized she made. Nor does she see it as a punishment. It’s comforting to be an invalid, to be waited upon after all those years of catering to the birth-sick. When the Nurses’s daughter complains that her married boss makes inappropriate comments and calls her “doll” in front of clients, the Nurse flexes her thick legs and smiles wanly, assigned to the deceased Doctor’s fingers a searching sincerity that she knows they never had. But to be blind and pillaged would be too much. She would give up altogether.

At night she tunes the radio to the opera and now that there is no one to watch out for, she lets her dead pupils and the raw mollusk insides of her eyelids perform a complex mating ritual, always falling asleep when it’s still that first harmless glance, when it’s all trilling and swelling, the rumble of the tympani heralding something too far away to start hoping for yet, before names are assigned and exchanged, before any sort of consummation, before the terror of a beginning.