There’s the ten over there on the court.

And the low sun going lower, the tall grass poking through cracks.

I watch the ten on the court do their circles, their footwork. How they orbit each other. How one is the sun, then another, another.

Five wear shirts and the others, well. I feel I shouldn’t look. But I feel that also of the shirted ones. How their sweat shows skin below their shirts. How they stretch to the net and their underwear, their collarbones.

They go, Get on him, and, Fucker.

They scatter like sailors on a capsizing boat. They stand, hands frantic in the air.

Then they orbit one sun. Then they orbit another.

Everything juts when they jump to the hoop.

A shot.

It repeats.

It repeats.

And I’m in a rowboat floating in the deep.

I know it’s not really a boat but a car.

I’ve never been stupid, despite what’s been whispered.

My car is parked. It lurks in the flora. I call it flora. This growth through the cracks in the lot. And I lurk.

I watch through the windshield thinking, Hey there sailors, and of if I went, Sailors, of what that would mean to someone else. To some neighbor girl standing on her stoop.

The girls always go in each other’s ears, Whisper whisper whisper.

I go, Take a picture, It’ll last longer.

But there’s no one in the flora but me. How it always is. Me in the flora, the boys on the court. Every evening in summer. In summers.

*

I find love songs on the radio. The ones that let thoughts become pictures.

I think of bare feet, wet grass. The clichéd crack of dawn.

I know dawn is not a crack but a smear.

Poetry turned it into a crack.

Poetry is why we have cliché.

It’s for when science is too hard to grasp.

So there I am in the backyard in spring. I’m seventeen.

I try to imagine a boy, a blue shirt. He crosses my yard. He reaches for me.

But all I can see is my father’s suitcase in the grass. My things are in it.

I’d run through grass until night.

But something inside my brain goes, Stay. Something inside goes, Graduate.

There’s only a month left of school.

I go back inside before the sun reveals me.

I had dreamed of running though grass the whole way.

But there are eggs on the table. Two. Poached.

The eggs are cold.

My parents whisper in the other room. Their war has ended.

I wash my hands and eat the eggs.

*

Love songs speed at three four three meters per second.

In air that is. The speed of sound in air.

I learned this in high school. I also learned of the speed of light. One eight six thousand miles per second.

We’re linked by speeding sound and light.

Thoughts I have on evenings like these. Thoughts of the type I often have.

I watch the clouds turn orange in the evenings. The tall stiff grass turns orange. This from sunlight. It strikes the flora and turns it to fire. Or to water. Depending on the time. Depending on where the sun is sitting.

And whatever the time and wherever the sun, I’m part of the flora. As is my car. As are the ten. We’re linked.

This would perplex the neighbor girls. They think science is hard.

If they were smart they’d go, What about someone who’s deaf and blind, What about him, How is he linked.

Meaning if he can’t hear sound or see light. Yes, I get it.

Because, I’d go, The waves still touch him.

Soundwaves, lightwaves is what I mean. The blind and deaf get touched by waves.

The girls would go, Stupid.

Though they’re the ones stupid.

But if a tree falls in a forest, they’d go. If they were smart.

I’d go, Cliché.

They’ve been trying to trip me up since high school.

They still stare when they stand on the stoops when I pass.

Take a picture girls, if you like.

All the neighbor girls have dropped out of college. All the neighbor girls are married with houses. They own their own stoops in the neighborhood. They own their own kids who stand on the stoops.

*

I think of one of the shirted ones in my car.

It goes like this: The ball sails over a shirted one’s head. It rolls past my car. Into the flora. Toward the woods. The shirted one chases it down. He sees me sitting inside my car. I smoke a cigarette. I go, Hey there sailor. He goes, Give me a smoke. I go, Get in the car. He gets in the car.

The love song goes and goes.

Then one thing, another. We talk at first. The light leaves the car. We sit a bit closer. Then the song is what links us. Sound, that is. Then we link ourselves in other ways.

Touch, I’d go to the neighbor girls. To see them squirm.

*

I have spent whole nights in the flora. I have fallen asleep across the front seat.

At sunrise I’ve noticed the sky looks bruised.

I’ve been wanting to jot this down in the dust. I’ve been wanting to show this to one of the ten as he wakes by me on the seat.

But for now the sky’s just turning orange. And they glow on the court while the low sun sits on their heads.

And if one of them goes, Take a picture, to me, I’ll go, I look where I want.

Outside my brain I see skin beneath see-through white. I see them orbit each other on the court.

Inside my brain a finger slips up and up.   The hair of a face on the hair of my face.

And regardless. Look. Inside my brain, we’re fucking.

The neighbor girls would go, Why did she think that.

I’d go, Because I think.

*

The girls knew nothing in high school science. It was all I could do not to leave the classroom.

When they opened their mouths, I covered my ears and quietly sang.

They made their cracks. Their, What is she doing.

Even the teacher went, What in the world.

The girls all laughed.

The teacher went, Would you share your song.

*

When the ball bounces past to the woods I duck. I duck when keys clink. Or when feet pound close.

I lower the song so they can’t hear it.

And when they’re back on the court, I turn it back up.

I never leave the car running in the flora.

I learned to play the radio with the car turned off. I learned to turn the car key backward. And the radio will play. And the lighter will work with the car turned off.

*

The pebbles on the car floor are rose quartz and white. The silver strips in the flora are mica.

I remember this from the last year of high school. And school ended one day after studying rocks.

The house was quiet for most of that summer.

Then a radio came by mail. My father’s gift for ending high school. Mailed to the house near the end of summer. I kept it below the bed with the dust. It played love songs at night that let me have thoughts in pictures.

Thoughts of standing in the backyard grass.

I’m waiting for a boy to cross my yard. He’s wearing blue.

And we run off together through the grass.

My father’s suitcase is packed with my things.

I’d gone, Stop your fighting.

I’d gone, I’m leaving.

No one heard me as I packed.

I stood in the backyard waiting for him.

Of course, he knew nothing of this.

I went back in the house.

The sun rose.

I ate.

*

When I leave in the evenings my mother watches from the window. I can see her face pressed to the glass.

She’s jealous.

My car seat is softer than hers ever was.

Soft enough to sleep on. And so on.

*

My radio worked for weeks before it didn’t.

It was a whole life change when the radio stopped. I lay in the dark below my bed. Blind and deaf with the radio off. I could feel my arms fuzzed in the dust.

I wrote to my father for the first time ever. I found his address in my mother’s drawer.

I wrote, The radio broke, on the back of a scrap. I mailed it to him.

He sent a used car in place of the radio. It was left in the drive behind my mother’s.

I don’t know who drove it and left it.

*

High school ended years ago. Was it seven years. It was maybe eight. Regardless.

I recall it ended with science. And science ended with rocks. I learned to tell quartz in a rockpile. Big deal.

And the science teacher wore a shade of blue. And his eyes. I could tell but won’t.

He went, Perhaps this could be your major in college.

And he meant it.

*

The dust on the dash takes my handprint and keeps it.

I stop when I find a love song.

It looks like they’re dancing to the song, the ten.

They go, Mother, and, Fucker. They grunt in ways like in war. They slap five.

Give me some skin, we went ago on the stoops.

Give me some skin, and we slid our palms as kids.

I’m happiest when the ball whooshes through without touching the rim.

Just imagine fucking that way.

I can hear the neighbor girls go, Why did she say that.

But imagine a clean whoosh whoosh whoosh.

I often think to join their game. I’d stand on the court in a high school pose. Sunshined hair flipped to one side of my neck. Head slightly tilted, wind whipping my skirt. And I’d ask for a light. I’d ask for a ride.

But the car, the neighbor girls would go. If they were smart.

What about her car, Why would she need a ride, they’d go. There’s her car parked in the flora.

Good questions.

Plus the car lighter. They’d be perplexed. Why would she need a light, they’d go.

I’d twirl my hair. I’d go, Okay, boys, The car’s mine, You caught me. But the lighter’s broken, I’d also go.

How my mother’s car lighter pushed in stayed in. I know it’s possible to break a car lighter.

I know it’s possible to break a whole car. Look at my mother’s. Four flat tires. Doors stuck open. Broken windows. And inside are years of weather. Inside are rough torn seats and broken switches and the lighter that never popped out.

Though the horn still blares. She always yells when I blare it. I never really do it now except to test it.

My mother’s always pounding head.

Her shut off car makes ticking sounds.

Her dark kitchen which I stay from.

*

A card on my car went, Happy sixteen.

Though I was seventeen, almost eighteen.

*

Should anyone ask: I’m doing study on ball, Taking notes on boys, For a college paper for when I go to college.

They go, Motherfucker! And, Inside!

Their ribcages jut with each shot.

I see underwear when they raise their arms.

But I’m not going to college yet.

I just want away from the quiet house.

And the twilight reminds me of an old shirt.

Not of a certain shirt but a certain color.

The science teacher. He wore this color. He meant nothing to me. He’s a blur.

My mother still keeps the house clean.

There are places to sit in the kitchen by windows.

When I leave the house I go, I’m going to study, and big deal when I walk in after dark. It’s only my mother in her shut off kitchen. I’m sitting on the stoop, I lie and who cares.

Big deal when I walk in the next morning after sleeping the night alone in the car.

I was out with the girls.

My mother silent in her kitchen.

*

The keys were left inside the car.

I started the car and drove.

School was starting back up again.

The boys were playing five-on-five.

*

My mother found me in the dark in her car. She held my arms and dragged me.

This was high school. Broken windows. A drag through grass. A door slam. A door slam. Another.

A wonder I could keep my head up high.

But the radio came the end of summer. The radio saved my brain.

The neighbor girls all went, She’s crazy, Keep away.

The neighbor girls made plans for their lives back then. Engagements. Showers. Kids.

When we meet by mistake on the stoops nowadays: So what are you doing with yourself. Well what are you doing. Well I asked you first.

And so on and so on.

A wonder I can keep my head on straight.

And should I go, I’m sitting in the car. Should I go, I’m watching five-on-five with songs in my car. Trust me they’d think the same old thing.

That I stole rocks from science.

That I fucked the teacher.

That I never could mix.

*

Sometimes there are nine. They play half-court four-on-four and the odd one shoots alone.

I consider a game with the odd one. A game of one-on-one.

And so what if he beats me. I’m no teen and it’s not about winning. It’s about contact. It’s about sitting in the car afterward.

You know how it happens.

One thing, another. I look at his mouth. He looks at my eyes looking at his mouth. I look at his eyes looking at my eyes.

And so on.

*

I sat in my mother’s car with the rocks on the dash. Fool’s gold. Mica. Quartz. Like pulled-up treasures from a capsized boat. I made wave shapes in the dust on the dash with my fingers. For a sense of sand, of wet.

I was captain of a boat. I had stopped on the shore to look at my treasures.

I knew I was not in a boat but a car.

This is metaphor. Poetry.

Because the science of this was too hard. I admit it.

Because the science of this was not of rocks. I understood rocks.

The science of this was of the brain.

I took the rocks from the classroom when the teacher was gone. I put them in my pockets.

I cannot describe how they looked on the dash with the sun coming through.

Then it got dark.

I blared the horn until dragged to the house.

The neighbors came out to their stoops.

The neighbor girls went, Did you hear what she did.

They went, She’s crazy.

Well there’s no fighting in the house nowadays.

World War Three, the neighbor girls called it.

They went, World War Three down at her house.

They tried to trip me when I passed.

*

The cliché goes, You’ll go blind.

And once I almost did. I was in the car and love songs played. So thoughts took over. My face pressed to a shirted one’s shirt. The shirt is blue. My face pressed so tight it feels like drowning. Like drowning in the ocean. Or in the sky. Or some other poetic bullshit cliché. A clichéd drowning in my brain. A clichéd fucking and fucking and fucking.

I stopped when I could. I had blindness sorting back to vision.

I saw the ten again as ten on the court.

*

For weeks it was me and the radio.

I hid beneath my bed singing radio songs. I made pictures from thoughts.

Me, the suitcase. The boy in blue. And this time we run through the grass.

But the boy in the blue shirt was never a boy. And he was never going anywhere I was.

And I was singing too loud at night went my mother.

She went, Do you know what it is to feel a pounding from inside.

She went, Do you know what it is to hear a pounding like a drum.

She went, Inside your brain.

*

I sat in my mother’s car with twilight coming blue through the quartz. They were fighting inside. Then it got dark. There was no more light coming through.

They thought I couldn’t hear the fight. But I heard it clear. At three four three.

My father went, Crazy.

My mother went, Crazy.

They thought I couldn’t see the fight. But I saw his hand flash through the air.

So I took the rocks to the car.

The neighbor girls could hear the war from their stoops.

I could still hear it clear.

I blared the horn to drown it out.

I was captain of my boat. I was thinking of my treasures.

Everyone heard the car horn blaring. Every dumb girl from every damn stoop.

My mother and father came running outside. My mother pressed her face to the window. I wouldn’t get out of the car. I had locked the doors. The windows were up. I couldn’t hear my mother screaming.

She smashed the windows to get me out. What did she use. A rock, I suppose. A rock from the drive. From the weeds.

No. It wasn’t a rock. It was a clump of cement. Conglomerate, we called it in high school science. A mix of rocks.

She didn’t have to smash all the windows in.

I was sinking it felt like before she smashed.

My mother dragged me into the house. There were cuts to clean.

My father took his suitcase. He took his car.

*

My car hides in the tall blue grass. My soft-seated car from my father.

There are no windows to my mother’s car. All crashed in holes. There’s no use hiding in that car.

*

The neighbor girls went, What is she thinking.

Thoughts, I thought and left it at that.

*

I returned the rocks to the classroom. I finished high school. No hard feelings.

The teacher let it slide.

He thought I was going to college.

The neighbor girls went, Keep away from her if you know what’s good.

When I sang in class that day, I felt the spotlight. Everyone laughed.

When the radio came in the mail with a card I thought, If only sooner.

If only I had known the radio songs to sing in class.

What was it I sang in there.

Row Row Row Your Boat.

The girls all laughed.

My face got hot.

*

The neighbor girls go, Whisper whisper.

Their hands flash out.

Their kids duck on the stoops.

*

The radio card went, Congratulations.

I had graduated. And no hard feelings.

I played the radio until my mother took it away.

Later that night I went, Where is it.

My mother wouldn’t let on. She just laughed into a cry.

I was screaming from the stoop, Where the fuck is it.

The neighbor girls went, Still crazy.

I found it smashed in the weeds by my mother’s car. I stooped to the weeds and picked up the pieces. Some were very small and some were from the insides.

*

I’d never blare my horn. The ten would hear it blaring.

They’d turn to see me ducking to the floor.

They’d come up to the window. They’d ask what I was doing.

I’d step out of the car.

I’d go, Hey there sailors, I’m looking for my cigarette, It fell to the floor, Do you have a cigarette.

Or, Hey sweeties, Have you boys seen my boyfriend, He’s this tall and he comes here to play one-on-one, He wears a blue shirt.

Or, Hey you sailor-boys, Do you go to this high school, I went to this high school, I’m doing study on ball.

Or, Hey darlings, Do you know how to change a fuse, I think my fuse has blown.

I saw his hand flash through the air. I saw it reach her face.

I didn’t care that his hand flashed through the air. I didn’t care that she didn’t duck.

I didn’t care that he left and never came back.

I cared that he left me with her.

*

Once I was seventeen.

I stood in the grass before the sun rose.

The grass felt wet beneath my feet.

Then the sun began.

Then everything tried to grow.

*

If the ball bounces past I’ll jump out to chase it. I’ll pretend to take it. I’ll go, Just kidding, boys, and toss the ball.

If it travels to the woods edge I’ll chase it and stop it and toss it at the speed of sound. Three four three. In air that is.

I’ll toss it in a blink to the boys going how the girls once went on the stoops throwing rocks, Think quick!

And if they laugh going, What’s think quick, like it’s some kind of way we spoke ago but don’t speak now, I’ll laugh too. I mean I’m no teen striking a pose. I know these boys won’t give me some skin. I’ve never been stupid despite what they think. I know these boys won’t fuck me.

There was a time that they’d have fucked me.

But back then I never fucked.

Back then I only wanted one.

He had eyes like blue topaz.

I said I wouldn’t say it. But it has to sound poetic. It’s a harder science than light and waves.

He had a shirt the same color as his eyes.

I admit like twilight through quartz.

*

Soon the ten will all be shirted. They’ll slap five and walk off the court.

I’ll be tempted to shine my lights on them. To blare the horn. To go, through the window, Hey.

*

He went, Good job, when I spotted fool’s gold in the rockpile on the table in the classroom.

The girls went, Crazy motherfucker, when they found the rocks in my locker. And they found what they called my poems.

But they weren’t really poems. I wasn’t some bullshit poet.

They were notes on rocks. On the teacher’s shirt.

They called them poems.

They called them love notes.

But I called it science.

*

I went to my mother, I’m going to college.

My mother went, You’re going nowhere.

My father went, I’m going now.

I mean to say my father went. And I went, Wait.

*

Soon the ten will walk to my car. They’ll pass the ball back and forth.

I’ll be tempted to turn the radio up. To step out from the car and go, Hey boys.

But they’ll walk fast though the flora, and I’ll lower the song and duck to the floor as they pass.

*

Once I was seventeen. I had thoughts of being eighteen.

Now I’m this. I have thoughts of seventeen.

Once the girls went, You’re really crazy.

And I went, Better crazy than stupid.

Once the girls went, How’s it going.

And I went, It’s going, and left it at that.

Once the girls went, Give me some skin.

And we slid our palms like any kids.

Court has been republished with permission of the author and The University of Alabama Press, publisher of FC2 Books. The story appears in the collection Hydroplane  © 2006 Susan Steinberg.

Susan Steinberg is the author of Spectacle and two previous story collections. Her work has appeared in McSweeney’s, Conjunctions, American Short Fiction, and elsewhere. She has held residencies at the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo, and teaches at the University of San Francisco.

Boys with parachutes strapped to their backs lined up behind me in the cabin. If they ever spoke to me, or to each other, I couldn’t hear them over the engine. The boys fell through blue skies, white skies, black skies dotted with stars—opening their parachutes, floating.

At first, I watched them through the windshield. The boys jogged toward me across the mud, heavy with weapons and supplies. A few joked and laughed as they approached, but most wore expressions of austerity and focus.

Twelve, thirteen, fourteen boys.

On two occasions, before they boarded, boys vomited—one leaning against the fuselage, the other only halfway across the muddy field.

Soon, I started seeing black Xs over boys’ hearts. Not all of them, but one or two per drop.

I began studying maps while the boys approached me, maps I’d already memorized, instead of watching them jog. I started thinking of the boys not as boys, but as the feeling of pressure, warm touch. Their presence in the cabin was like a girl’s fingers clasped around the back of my neck. Sometimes I could even picture the girl—brunette, chubby, long eyelashes—head tilted back, laughing, but doomed.

Once the boys were onboard, I’d fold the maps and put them under my seat. I’d look back at the boys and smile, as if to say, You’re in good hands.

In that moment—the moment when I turned to look at the boys—I would relax my eyes and let everything blur.

It happened once that a boy’s parachute never opened, but I only heard about it much later.

I was targeted by a surface-to-air missile, and all I could think was, What took them so long?

At base, they’d tell me about the boys I’d dropped: boys missing, blown up, or shot; boys who lost it and went on rampages; boys who lost it and became heroes.

The more I tried to not look at the boys, the tighter those fingers clasped around the back of my neck.

One day an enemy fighter flew into my airspace. It got closer, was tailing me, was right on me, was alongside me, was hit.

This had happened once before; I’d radioed for help, had enemy aircraft brought down, a bouquet of flames hanging for a moment in its place.

But this time, when that plane was beside mine, I looked over into its cockpit, and I saw the pilot—a boy, acned, and about to be blown out of the sky—looking back at me as if to say, Can you believe we’re both up here?

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When the words returned they did not do so all at once and as if they’d never left him: no instant reawakening or sudden swing back to the real time world of the non-mute. He had to take things slowly, relearning words and associations, attaching and making them fit back to objects and meanings in ways which often felt to him arbitrary or just no good anymore. Aphasia, they called that. Synesthesia when he wanted a taste like the sound of water on stones or a sound like chocolate on bread. Dyslexia when he mixed up blocks and symbols or turned them around—blue for black, road for car, car for truck, cloud for sky, c for e, and e for o and a. Sometimes he felt a vague prickling in his fingers to accompany these misapprehensions, as if the weight of blood and the prickling sensation of his circulation had somehow gone outside him, inverted, and he could not say if his fingers were bloated pincushions or leathery and narrow as pincers. At times it was bad enough he’d have to hold his hands in the air minutes on end, waiting for the feeling to pass and for real sensation to return, trying not to let his fingers even brush one against the other. Until one day, driving with his father and sister to school it dawned on him that there was no going back. However he’d come to inhabit this misaligned world with its skewed meanings and not-quite-right words, its sky that didn’t match his notion of a sky, sister who was not like his “real” sister, bike that would never be fixed or brought back, and the forward momentum of his father’s car always too slow, too loud, just slipping aside its true path or trajectory—all of it, was in fact the only world he’d been given to know and to live in. The thought went something like: So it was all ruined to start with. There was never anything else. How come I only noticed now?

Twenty-five years later on a flight into Bakersfield he had to remember this all again—the failure to know words and speech, his sister’s wrecked bike at the bottom of the brook, de-tasseled and chipped, spokes undone—all of these things, and more, which he’d forgotten or pushed for years to the back of his mind, he revisited and with the sudden, heartbroken longing of one long estranged. Outside his window the familiar brown grey patchwork of farm land and roads. Mountains and scrubland. Wisps of cloud on the horizon. Thirty-six thousand feet up. Sky, after all, is not sky, even up close, inside it, he thought; it is only what you make of it looking up and dreaming of flight, or looking down and longing for home.

And for some time after the flight attendant’s announcement that they’d be attempting an emergency landing with no wing flap, and following her cataloguing of all related dangers on landing—nose gear crashing; tires exploding, igniting; brakes igniting; loss of control; slipping from the runway—he could do nothing but look out and study the distant, beloved ground. If, he told himself. If I make it back to that plain old ground I will never stop appreciating it. I will never come up here again. Ever. He knew it was a lie. Looked around the cabin—its narrowness and singularity, its well-constructed entrapment, bland blues and smoothly contoured, creaking plastic molding; nowhere to go and definitely nowhere you’d want to die; pressed his feet to the floor and gripped the armrests thinking still, If I make it down. If I make it down. Looked outside again and thought of his father’s favorite old car, the Saab bug with its domed roof and chipped paint—about as un-plane-like as any vehicle ever manufactured—and the time they’d driven north in it, Vermont, Maine, New Hampshire, him and his father, alone. Remembered the thing his father had said he loved best about that car: its freewheel transmission which allowed you to take the car out of gear and truly coast, not like a regular car in neutral, but really using no gas on any downhill. Freewheeling. No engine braking. Coasting down the Green Mountains and then revving back up them, on their way north for a full week of racing—good luck, triumph, money. He remembered the trophies on the winners’ platform too, one almost as big as his torso, and the ribbons and hundred dollar bills (his own, the first he’d ever seen—Benjamin Franklin smiling like he was stoned, and all the velvet-green design surrounding him that said yes! and you won! and first in your age group!), and the girl he’d met the night following the first race: Corrine. No last name. And on the way back home, stopping again in her town to see if he might find her, his father’s amazed words entering the same town from the other direction, southbound, in daylight, no race spectators, booths, cyclists, venders, road blocks, all of it gone: You never cross the same river twice. Remembered the spray of his own spit and toothpaste arcing out and flying straight back to hit him in the face and to cover the back panel and side window of the car, refusing to be let go, his father laughing at him for not knowing this simple fact about gravity and bodies in motion, as they freewheeled into town and he finished combing, spritzing, brushing, just in case he found her. Remembered last, the night months after this, with the same girl, scared for his life, and fumblingly (his first time) making love to her on the floor of her sister’s apartment, 4AM. Her words to him as he slipped inside her—Just don’t come-off in me. It’s OK.

Only as the ground rose closer, racing up on his left, trees warped by the terrifying speed, blurred but still in one piece, the woman beside him making a wordless noise in her throat that could only be called whimpering, head between her knees, only then with the flight attendant calmly intoning —brace, brace, brace, brace, brace—did the rest of it come back. He did not brace. Did not hide his face in his forearms or between his legs. He looked out at the ground rushing by, closer, closer still, and remembered why he’d lost the power to speak and why he’d been jealous enough of his sister to attempt to destroy the world by smashing her bicycle. They were one and the same thing after all—the mental freewheeling, the loss of speech, his jealousy, her, and all the subsequent years of his adolescence spent riding, riding, until his knees blew. The plane bumped down and back up and down again and this time stayed. Caught. Coasting, coasting, forever it seemed, an eternity—gravity weighing through his limbs and fingertips like love, pressing shut his eyelids, all that speed and deceleration thickening his senses until he felt sleepy and delirious, but for the terror. No fires, no blown out tires, no nose gear crashing. Yellow fire engines every twenty five yards down the tarmac. And still the words brace, brace, brace echoing through the cabin like a prayer, a chant to ward off danger or to cause the world to remain fixed in one place, true to all its given meanings.

GREGORY SPATZ is the author of the novels INUKSHUK, FIDDLER’S DREAM and NO ONE BUT US, and of the story collections HALF AS HAPPY and WONDERFUL TRICKS. His stories have appeared in many publications, including The New Yorker, Glimmer Train Stories, Shenandoah, Epoch, Kenyon Review and New England Review. The recipient of a Michener Fellowship, an Iowa Arts Fellowship, a Washington State Book Award, and an NEA Fellowship in literature, he teaches at Eastern Washington University in Spokane. Spatz plays the fiddle in the twice Juno-nominated bluegrass band John Reischman and the Jaybirds. Read more at his website, www.gregoryspatz.com.

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We watched my father’s touch grow brittle after that, chipping little by little against my mother’s cheeks, and withdrawing completely after the second storm, when light soaked through her hair in gray swaths and painted her fingernails white as eggshells. It became hard to say who in our house was more haunted.

I was tapped twice: on the shoulder, on the hip, a finger of light. Twice it pulled me out like a fish from the ice, and twice I was thrown back to my body, a cradle of bone. I told my sister that it felt like a sudden loosening, a seal opening somewhere inside me. Then that familiar tickle of liquid seeping down my thigh, like life sieving right through me. She said I shouldn’t tell such stories.

But only after my daughter was struck, and walked out of it as out of a lake—resplendent, blinking the static from her eye, shaking drops of lightning off her tiny hands—were we certain. Conductivity, the textbooks called it, the easiest path down to the earth. Bad luck is what my father said—to be loved by a force like that. Every storm was a prayer, then silence, a fear of last words in the air. Eventually, he left us. My sister, too—for the desert. I wasn’t surprised when my own husband vanished, terrified or simply tired of sharing his bed with our brand of death. You could smell it like smoke on our breath.

My mother’s skin had become translucent by then, and I could see a clearing burned inside her where regret used to sit. It was then I understood a woman’s body as a bowl, open to whatever may fall into it. But loss is a choice, she said, to become the haunt you’ve run from.

This story originally appeared in Versal and has been reprinted with permission of the author. Rochelle’s book, The Rusted City, was published this year by White Pine Press:  

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But, until the sixth time he saw the two prep school girls, the fact of his hatred and the fuzziness of the why of it had gnawed at him; it wasn’t right to hate without a reason. And he did not subscribe to Occam’s Razor in this case; the reason for his hatred could not be, simply, jealousy. He was not that sort of person. The reason lay deeper. The reason had something to do with the value of the girls’ souls not being equal to the value of their clothes. This was a truth that sat in him like a stone: his hatred was the result – the solution to the equation – but it was in want of what Dr. Lo called an elegant proof.

Dr. Lo kept a handsome scholar’s rock in the corner of his office that Tuan had openly admired and asked about several times. The rock, he’d explained, was a gift from his father, given to him when he first received tenure. His father had kept it in his own office when Dr. Lo was a boy, and Dr. Lo – David, then – had spent hours just staring at the rock, sometimes running his tiny hands over and inside it. There were four elements that contributed to the beauty and value of a scholar’s rock: thinness, openness, perforations, and wrinkling. This rock embodied the best of all four. It was a milky white formation, two sharp croppings wisping around a hollow space and meeting in a twisted embrace at the top. The rock was four-and-a-half feet tall on its rosewood pedestal; the first time Dr. Lo saw it, it was taller than him. His father had said the rock was older than the first settlements in America and had been passed down in their family from scholar to scholar. He’d also said, it’s good you’re fascinated with it. This means you’re going to be a scholar, too. Tuan wondered if his own fascination with the rock might mean something. If he, too, was destined for an office in a university, for tenure, to teach a course on the Mathematics of Beauty.

But Dr. Lo often chastised Tuan for rushing to the solution, to the X and the Y of things. The beauty is in the proof, he’d say. And Tuan would hunch over his work, hands fumbling his mechanical pencil, and worry about beauty and elegance, about the lack of them. About whether the lack of these qualities would mean the lack of a scholarship next semester, even when he arrived at the correct answer. His parents never understood this, had never understood why his grades were in danger when he was always right. To them, you sewed the garment and it was whole, you cooked the vegetables and they were food; you were paid for this work. This is what his father had done for seven years after he emigrated from Ho Chi Minh City, until he could afford to sponsor his wife, and then his mother. This is what Tuan was expected to do: sponsor a cousin. Sponsor an aunt. Maybe sponsor a future wife.

The reason for his hatred unfurled itself the sixth time he saw the prep school girls on the 35 Jane bus because Tuan shared a two-seat bench with an old Jamaican woman in a pink straw hat, whom he often saw in his neighborhood, and who was reading a lurid two-page article on local murderers. The two prep school girls reclined on the bench in front of him. One flipped her long blond ponytail over the edge of the seat and the other, whose brown ringlets shuddered from the growl of the motor, began complaining about a girl in their class: a Tess, who thought she was the shit. She lies, she said, about, fucking, everything.

The other girl sighed.

I can’t stand her stupid voice, said the ringletted girl. I don’t even know why we’re still friends with her.

And the other girl sighed. You know, she said, flipping her ponytail, her dad’s not going to win that case.

Tuan looked up from his notebook. The ringletted girl was looking, curious, at the ponytailed girl.

Why? Asked the ringletted girl.

Because, I just know.

Why? Asked the ringletted girl. She tugged on her friend’s ponytail. Why?

Because, stupid, said the ponytailed girl. She ran her ponytail through her hand like a length of silky rope. She sighed. My dad’s the judge. Remember?

Heat rose in Tuan as he watched the prep school girls’ pinked lips curl into ugly smiles. So many dark possibilities bloomed in Tuan’s mind as the bus muscled closer to the subway station: bribery and blackmail, personal vendettas. Tuan pictured the fat judge and his family seated around the dinner table, passing the lobster, laughing about the day’s court proceedings, about the judge’s opinions. Or, worst of all, he pictured the ponytailed girl whispering insults about Tess into the judge’s ear, the judge conjugating his daughter’s meanness into a courtroom decision: the outrageous possibility of that injustice.

The girls still carried their secret smiles with them as they exited the bus and squeezed through the turnstiles and disappeared past him onto the subway platform; he took this proof with him to school and he took it with him to Dr. Lo’s classroom and he took it with him to the exam, where it huddled close to his heart like a talisman. But he found himself, still, rushing towards an answer where questions asked him to flesh out his proofs. Too soon he would arrive at X and Y. He looked up, despairing, from his paper and thought he could see the topology of other students’ thoughts, their beautiful proofs floating just over their heads like halos. He wanted to snatch them down. He wanted to snap them apart.

*

Dr. Lo noticed the tiny women first, edging their way down a crag on the scholar’s rock with thimble-sized baskets perched on their little heads. They were singing a Chinese traditional song in high peeps like baby birds. Some laughed and glanced back at the others. Some strode forward. One lost her sandal on a nub of stone and had to bend down to retrieve it. The procession of tiny women snaked its way around the rock and disappeared into one of its many recesses, and then there was Dr. Lo, bent over in the corner of his office next to his bookshelf, squinting at his scholar’s rock.

But there were other tiny people. There were men and children and elders. Sometimes they’d peek out of one of the rock’s pores and sometimes they’d sit on the edge of one of its protrusions, dangling their legs. None seemed to notice him. Dr. Lo would always catch them out of the corner of his eye while he was busy at work on a theorem or reading a student’s paper. Once, while he was grading a test, a rangy brindled dog trotted around the side of the scholar’s rock and lifted his leg. When Dr. Lo leaned in to pluck the dog from the rock between his thumb and forefinger, it dashed away.

Though Dr. Lo was surprised by the existence of the tiny villagers, he found that he was not afraid of them. His concern was not the village in the rock, but the welfare of the village. It seemed to be suffering from a plague. Every now and then, the village doctor would rush from one pore to another, dangling a tiny sack full of tinctures that tinkled like a pixie bell when it shook. Sometimes sick townspeople would be carried up or down the rock on litters, babbling feverishly.

Had his father known the village? If he had, he’d never told his son about this enchantment. If he had, surely he’d seen the village through hardships like this before, as had his grandfather and his great-grandfather and all the scholars who’d been steward to the people of the scholar’s rock. But Dr. Lo didn’t know what to do, how to save the townspeople from dying. He left bottle caps full of fresh water at the base of the rock and sometimes they’d be gone the next day and sometimes they’d still be sitting there.

Dr. Lo was considering taking the rock to a specialist – a spiritualist? Someone who could see the village, maybe treat it – when a student arrived for his office hours, clutching his much-clutched exam. This student, Tuan, came to his office every week, always wearing a look of anxiety. As hard as he tried, Dr. Lo couldn’t nudge Tuan in the right direction. He began to suspect this was because he was not capable of doing so. The things he was asking Tuan to do were second nature to him, like breathing. He didn’t know how to explain them except to say, feel. And Tuan resisted feeling. He pushed himself too hard. He pushed himself to numbness.

Tuan sat across from Dr. Lo and opened up his exam to places he’d starred and highlighted himself, his long fingers skittering over his poor performance. And Dr. Lo tried to concentrate his attention on Tuan, tried to focus everything again on explaining the necessity of feeling, but he was distracted. Two townspeople had emerged from a pore in the scholar’s rock carrying a man on a litter. When they reached the farthest outcropping, they set the litter down, dumped the man onto the ground, and hurried away. The man lay in a tangle and struggled to breathe.

Dr. Lo wanted to creep over to the scholar’s rock and rearrange the dying man, make him more comfortable. But Tuan was begging him to explain, again, what was wrong with his proof.

You’re not being asked here to find the simplest or most perfunctory route, said Dr. Lo.

And Tuan sunk his face into his hands.

The dying man let out a miserable groan.

I’m going to lose my scholarship, said Tuan. I have to get an A in this course.

Dr. Lo had heard this before, many times, from many students. It hardly touched him now. Even their tears had little effect. Tuan tried to hide his, to blink them away, but Dr. Lo could always tell when a student was crying, even when the student was bent over a test while he feigned working out some line of arithmetic.

Please, can I do extra work? Can I write another test? I’ll do anything.

The dying man arched his back. He seemed to be suffering from cramps about his spine. He glistened with sweat. Dr. Lo watched, helpless, as he writhed. Tuan quivered in front of him. Compared to the dying man, Tuan’s suffering was a small thing. Perhaps it would even be good for him, this failure. Dr. Lo had seen many students like Tuan pass through his classes. Tuan would survive this. Even still, he considered, for a moment, himself at Tuan’s age; he never failed a course. When he worried about failure, his father was always there to assure him that he wouldn’t flounder, that scholarship was in his flesh and his bones. He assured him by saying, you will not. He assured him by saying, not my son.

I’m sorry, said Dr. Lo. If I gave you special treatment, I’d have to give it to everyone.

Tuan closed his exam booklet and stuffed it into his knapsack. Without a word, he left, and shut the door behind him.

Dr. Lo rushed over to the scholar’s rock, but the man had already died. He lay, unmoving, on the crag. Though Dr. Lo knew he could give the man a nice burial in the soil around his ficus, he hesitated to touch him. Instead, he watched as the dead man was discovered by one from the village: a woman, in simple work clothes, who came out from one of the rock’s deep fissures carrying an empty bottle cap. When she saw the dead man, she dropped the cap; it tumbled to the carpeted floor and rolled under Dr. Lo’s desk.

Dr. Lo watched as she sank to her knees beside the dead man, as she stroked his blue face and his thick black hair and rested one tiny hand over his heart. He watched her shut his eyes with her fingers and weight them with pebbles she drew out of a crack in the rock he’d only be able to probe with the end of a toothpick. And he watched as she craned her neck, illuminating her face by the cold sun of the office’s fluorescence, and let out the longest, softest howl of pain.

*

When Jocelyn’s dad gets home from work, all he wants is quiet. That’s the way it usually is when he’s working on a hard trial, but he’s wanted it quieter this time than it’s ever been before. He wants total silence. Mark and Jocelyn always take off their shoes at the door but now Dad says he can hear them creeping around in their bedrooms, hear their socked feet pressing on the carpet. Jocelyn lies on her bed, still in her uniform, and fills her headphones with music. She twitches her toes to the beat, and then worries he can hear her twitching her toes.

At dinner, Mom stands behind Dad and rubs his shoulders while he presses his eyes. She loops her arms around his neck and rests her head on his shoulder and he holds her hand. Mom and Dad have never done this before. Once they held hands at Jocelyn’s half-sister’s wedding.

It’s the videos Dad has to watch for the trial. He’ll have to watch them while the prosecution shows them to the jury, and he had to watch them in his chambers. Snuff films, says Mark. You know what those are? He flips the record on his turntable. His SAT practice worksheets are fanned out across his bed and Jocelyn’s sitting on them, crushing them, and she’s surprised he’s not complaining. Of course I do, she says. But she doesn’t.

It really messes you up, having to watch that kind of thing, says Mark. Messes you up permanently. Be nice to Dad, OK? And then he says, Can you get out of my room?

When Jocelyn gets off Mark’s bed she lets his papers slide and tear under her weight. Hey! He says. She doesn’t apologize. It makes her feel a little zing of electricity.

Her dad’s trial is a famous trial. It revolves around a gorgeous couple from Niagara Falls who killed so many girls. Everyone remembers this, especially girls her age, because there was a time when these killers were loose and when no one knew who they were or where they were or exactly what they wanted. Everyone just knew girls were going missing in towns and cities within two hundred miles each way of Niagara, and every girl who lived in any of those towns or cities felt a little like a magnet, ready to pull in some kind of death. First they snatched girls from mini-malls and late-night parties. Later, they took the wife’s sister.

Now Jocelyn learns what snuff films are, because there’s an article in the paper about the ones these killers made, about how there was debate about whether showing them would permanently scar the jury.  She reads and rereads and rereads the story, trains her eyes on the courtroom sketches of this beautiful couple, their handsome faces and non-displaced hair, and the judge, her dad, his bald head and his glasses, and how he seems to be melting them with his look.

Tess’s dad was the one at the head of the debate, arguing against these tapes being entered as evidence. He’s defending the gorgeous couple. It’s made him very famous as a lawyer, taking on these clients. And it makes Jocelyn look at Tess funny, like maybe she’s not supposed to like her, shouldn’t hang out with her anymore. Tess pretends she doesn’t like the attention she gets from girls at school when they talk about seeing her dad interviewed on TV, but she clearly does. She smiles and nods and digs into her locker. She also talks about the trial a lot with Jocelyn and Emma and the girls at school, even though she doesn’t really know any more about it than they do. She says things like reduced sentences and medium security like she knows what she’s talking about. She tries to talk to Jocelyn like she should know these things, too. Sometimes Jocelyn wishes it was OK to just stuff a gym sock in another girl’s mouth.

Jocelyn lies on her bed and listens to music and thinks about all those dead girls, about how beautiful and young this couple is in all the photos and the drawings, like Barbie and Ken, and how getting into the car with them must have felt amazing to those girls until the moment they knew they were in danger. To be wanted by a couple so beautiful, to be asked to join that: it’s special. Thinking about it almost makes her feel like she should be worried for herself. She’d get into the car, she thinks. And it makes her wonder about Tess, too. About whether she’s as worried as her. She thinks of Tess’s dad sitting next to this couple in court. And she thinks of him at the Father-Daughter dance, swinging Tess around, laughing, while she and her own dad watched and ate canapés from the seats. She couldn’t get her dad to dance.

Would Tess get in the car?

When she heads downstairs for a snack, Dad is in his study and the door is open. He’s reading. His green floor lamp is on, and he’s wearing his half-lenses, lying back in his chair with his feet propped up. She goes into his study, even though she knows she’s not supposed to bother him in there. And he doesn’t stop her. He lowers his book. He doesn’t stop her when she climbs into his chair beside him and he doesn’t stop her when she rests her head on his shoulder, even though she hasn’t done this since she was a little girl.

Why’re you making all those people watch those tapes?

For a minute he’s quiet, and she wonders if he’s going to get mad at her.

Because it’s important that people understand the case, he says.

Why can’t they just be told what’s on the tapes, instead of showing them?

We’re not going to talk about this, Jocelyn.

OK. She waits for him to shrug her out of the chair, but he doesn’t.

Do you like Tess’s dad?

He lets out a puff of air, adjusts his glasses on his nose. Yes. I’ve known him for twenty years.

Jocelyn expected him to say this.

What happens if he wins? She asks. Will you still like him?

He’s not going to win. It’s not about winning or losing. This is about sentencing. And that’s all we’re going to say about it tonight.

Dad, she says. She wants to say, what would you do if I were one of those girls? But she doesn’t. She can already imagine what he’d say. He’d say, You weren’t.

She says, Do you want some cookies? I’m getting some. She slips out of the chair.

No, he says.

The next day, Tess comes up to Jocelyn and Emma between Writer’s Craft and Calc. Watson is such a bitch, she says. She told me to shut up in her classroom and then threw chalk at me.

Emma turns to Jocelyn and rolls her eyes. Yeah, well, that’s Watson for you, she says.

And she feels it in her chest: the kind of meanness she’s held back pretty well since she was little, since the times when she didn’t know any better. Since the times she’d pinch Mark in the garden or push another girl down the slide. It’s rising from her stomach to her throat like she’s going to hurl, and this time she doesn’t try to stop it.

Well, she says. She folds her sweater. Maybe you should. Shut up more often.

Joss! Says Emma.

What? Isn’t that what you were just saying this morning?

Tess stands there for a second, sways, with a dumb look on her face. Fuck you, she says. Jocelyn watches Tess push her way out of the locker room, and as Emma swats her on the shoulder and then lets out a little giggle, she thinks she feels the magnet pull.

*

Tuan still holds the exam paper as he rushes from the math building and he still holds the exam paper as he slices across the green quad, dotted with students like grazing sheep, and he still holds the exam paper as he leaves campus, as he worms down into the station, as he rockets below the city. All the time, the paper in his hands is transmuting into a creased rag. The longer Tuan holds it the less it becomes, until it begins to tear at the edges where he’s worried it. When he gets out at his station, the exam is all but gone. He drops it into a trash bin. He goes to wait for the bus.

This is not his usual time for going home. If today had been a usual day, if he weren’t a failure today, he’d be in the lecture hall now, and he’d wait for the bus late at night with the shift workers and the truant teenage boys. The sun resting on the tips of the neighborhood houses is a new sight for him; he’s never returned before dark. The people, too, are new: Ukrainian grandmothers with mesh sacks full of carrots; tired nurses in scrubs; high schoolers with their overstuffed knapsacks and their cell phones; rolled down knee socks, a high-cut kilt, a blazer, a soft ponytail.

She stands alone on the bus shoulder, tipping her toes over the edge. When she tips too far, she steps down into the driveway to regain her balance. Tuan watches her from the crowd. She’s waiting in just the place to be first onto the bus, ahead of the grandmothers and the nurses.

He watches her board the bus and he sits across from her and watches her kick her legs out into the aisle and back, watches her float her gaze from window to window. He still feels it, the hatred, but he thinks now maybe it’s a baser thing. Now, maybe, it is plain jealousy. He wants what she has. She has no fear, no consequences, no pressing needs. He wonders what it would be like to disembark at her stop, at the old gates that open onto the old brick road that corkscrews into the old neighborhood. What would it be like to walk down that old road, shaded by the old trees and the old houses, knowing that home was one of these houses? What would it be like for the trees to whisper about him overhead? He wonders these things and he wonders these things and then he finds that he’s done it, that he’s walking the old brick road, and the ponytailed girl is twenty paces ahead. At first there’s the hot wash of shame, fear of being collared and expelled. But no one stops him: not the gardener raking a lawn nearby, not the Filipina nannies who push strollers full of doughy white babies, who must smell their own neighborhood on him. He goes freely forward. Up ahead is the ponytailed girl.

*

Tiny buzzards wheel around the scholar’s rock, ripping tiny hunks of meat off the tiny corpse. Dr. Lo snatches at the buzzards like he’s snatching at flies, but they zip just out of reach every time. He leaves his office to escape the gruesome miniature, buys a coffee at the Student Center, watches the students mill around him. When he returns, the corpse’s flesh has disappeared. In its place, a sun-bleached skeleton, hardly visible against the white of the stone. Time moves faster on the scholar’s rock, the way time must move faster to the drones in an anthill. One minute to Dr. Lo might be a week to his tiny villagers. One day to Dr. Lo might be a month.

He lifts the tiny skeleton off the rock with a sheet of printer paper. He buries it below his ficus, in a hole he’s dug out with his fingers.

*

Tuan follows the ponytailed girl deep into the neighborhood, her yellow ponytail a standard, leading him on. The trees hiss and crackle and send down their brittle leaves. The neighborhood cuts into a ravine, where tall pines grow. It cuts farther and farther back, so far back Tuan can’t imagine its boundaries. He wonders where her house is. He wonders how far she walks every day.

The ponytailed girl stops at the edge of the ravine, in a tree-thicked place where the closest house is half a block away. There’s a moment where she stands still, and then she turns to face Tuan, like she’s known he was there all along. Fear needles his heart; he quick-steps backwards, ready to bolt, but she motions for him to come closer. Against the trees she’s a pale ghost. He approaches her, slow.

Hello, says Tuan, sheepish.

*

The judge gets home early. There are no cars in the drive and there is no one in the house; his wife is on an errand. His son is with his SAT tutor. His daughter is just leaving school.

As much as he demands silence, sometimes silence is too thick. Silence lays a soft carpet of grass for his dark thoughts to run on. Against silence, the shutting door is a thunderclap. Against silence, the whistling teakettle is a scream. He needs a prickly baseline of white noise: his wife, opening and shutting the sliding glass door, the footfall of his kids, getting older up there in their rooms. He turns on the radio. On the talk station they’re discussing the trials, the tapes. The host asks, what punishment do you want to see? And callers let forth a stream of bile and imagined violence, eye-for-an-eye. The judge changes the station. The soft notefall of Chopin.

There’s a bay window in his study. The window is the reason he bought the house. In the mid 70s, he and his first wife and their toddler stood in front of the window and looked out at the few other houses on this stretch, on the ravine at the end of the block, emerald and wild. Yes, they’d thought, this was the view they wanted from their living room. They raised his older daughter in that living room. She grew up and moved away, as daughters do.

In the mid-80s, when he married his second wife, when he made partner, he needed a quiet space where he could work. The house was rearranged. The living room was moved to the back of the house. And the view was his.

And now he stands at the window, with his tea and the soft patter of Chopin about the room, and his view, and there is the wild ravine, its old trees, leaves on fire, bowing and swaying.

And there, in his view, is his unmistakable Jocelyn: her rumpled uniform, her soft loose ponytail, her overstuffed backpack. She wouldn’t like to be told she’s funny. She wouldn’t like to be told much of anything, he thinks, but sometimes it tickles him: the largeness of her backpack compared to her lovely slight body.

She is walking with a boy he’s never seen before. A much older boy. And the boy wears a look he has seen before, in the courtroom, on the faces of accusers and the accused, their families and friends. Anger and contempt and something deeper.

The judge learned from his first daughter that a father should only interfere when he knows for certain something is wrong. Is something wrong? It’s so hard to tell with Jocelyn. She holds her secrets tight. Even if he needed to, if it were a matter of life or death, he doesn’t know that he could get at them. He stays where he is. There’s something in the act of watching, in just knowing what’s happening to your child; that’s a father’s job, too.

Right now, as she glances toward his window: does she see him?

*

The ponytailed girl steps forward. For the first time, Tuan looks her in the face, not sideways on or in stolen glances. She’s plain. He’s seen prettier girls Sundays at his parents’ church. Her face is wide and milky. Her eyebrows and eyelashes are so light they want to recede into her skin. Her lips are pale. Her eyes are copper coins.

What are you going to do to me? She asks.

What? Asks Tuan.

You followed me here. What are you going to do to me? She steps closer. Tuan could reach an arm out and brush her with his fingers.

The question hangs between them. Tuan wants to snatch it out of the air, throw it down, crush it under his foot. He is not. He would not. Of course she assumes.

But here he is, and he’s followed her.

Nothing, he says. I’m just walking.

Really? She steps closer. Close enough that, if he wanted to, Tuan could reach out and fit his hands around her neck. A girl who was afraid wouldn’t come this close. He’d seen girls in his neighborhood scoot from the bus stop to their apartment towers with their heads tucked in to their chests. The ponytailed girl’s boldness is alarming.

But, beneath her boldness, in the tree-shade, she’s close enough that Tuan can see she’s shaking. He recognizes the pleading in her eyes. She needs something. He doesn’t know what. If he knew, he might like to deny her it. But he can’t, so he has to feel for an answer.

Really, he says. He backs off a pace. Go home.

She waits.

Go home, says Tuan. It’s getting late.

And he turns away, and he starts back the way he came. When he glances over his shoulder, she’s still there at the edge of the ravine, hunched under the weight of her knapsack. He walks as far as he can before the ravine edge will disappear from sight, past jack-o-lantern leaf bags slouching on lawns and netless basketball hoops in flagstone driveways. When he looks back again, she’s gone. She might have slipped into the ravine or she might have headed for home. Tuan wonders what it means for her to get what she wants. He’s afraid for how she might get it.

*

Jocelyn heads back towards the house. When he sees this, the judge sits in his chair, turns on his lamp, picks up his magazine, waits for the sound of her entrance. She drops her backpack at the door. She kicks off her shoes; they thump against the baseboard. There’s a moment where she lingers in the hall, and there’s a moment where she follows the music to the door of the study.

You’re home early, she says.

The judge looks up at his daughter. Her hair is mussed and wilting away from her ponytail; her undereyes are pillows.

Everything OK? He asks. It might not be the right thing to say.

Yeah, she says. She casts her eyes up towards the corner of the room, and the judge isn’t sure whether she’s hiding away tears or whether she’s just gazing at the corner of the room.

I’m going upstairs, she says. I’ll be quiet.

And then she’s gone.

*

Dr. Lo tucks his books and papers away into his briefcase, cleans and straightens his desk. Outside, the afternoon is purpling into evening. As he puts on his jacket and makes to turn out the lights, a tiny noise from the scholar’s rock. A procession of villagers is climbing the rock, scrabbling up its rough edges, pushing each other forward. A man reaches the pinnacle and unfurls a rope of bright prayer flags. He attaches it to the tip of the rock, where the two croppings twist together, and the other villagers pull the loose end down to a lower point, secure it there. Then they retreat into a pore, and all that’s left are the flags.

Dr. Lo watches them. By tomorrow, they’ll be faded to white. Maybe they will have already fallen away. But, now, they flutter in whatever breeze secrets around the scholar’s rock, kicking their prayers out towards everything: blue, white, red, green, yellow.

This story originally appeared in Bellingham Review and has been reprinted with permission of the author.

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But then everywhere I looked, birds in poems. There were song-sought warblers, sandhill cranes lifting like faint gods at dusk, Inca doves that make their home in the ironwood. A poem would be about feudal weaponry and then, boom, a bird in the last couplet. I couldn’t find a poem that didn’t have a bird in it, if you counted the ironic ones. Birds were watched through windows after people made love. They turned up as the thing dead and mourned by the roadside, or were hailed for crossing an ocean using ancient optical magnets the scientists just learned about last year. The poets had them swirling and coasting, moving in great geometries, mostly reminding us humans of all the ways we can’t fly.

And it was not a poem but almost when the bride’s mother came back from the vending machine. Look, she said, Oklahoma. I put my book down. The one quarter she didn’t have yet, heads as always, tails a bird we didn’t know but looked up on the Comfort Inn’s internet connection: a scissortail flycatcher, soaring over a bed of Indian blanket. The ceremony was done at four and the party by seven. It rained the whole time. The town we were in was too small to go back to, so we were waiting for her son Adam and his girlfriend to come across the hall and watch the cable none of us got back home. I waited till the bride’s mother had closed her wallet and gone back to her book to open mine again.

When we turned the lights off, I thought I could hear the vending machine lolling its slotted tongue over its treasure, money dressed in poetry’s attire—birds and trees and, in the case of Ohio, flight itself.

__

Who takes this man? The priest looked at both of them and spoke as if the bride were a question no one had ever been asked before. We waited, sweating, for a candle behind him to be lit. In the rafters, the ceiling fans spun their night-bicycled noise. The program gave away the ending: she would.

__

Before she did, the bride and I were friends for a long time, years, though we lived in the same city only once. Mostly, we wrote letters. She wrote letters that would make you fall in love, which is what happened, we think. The thing was that no one really knew. The groom’s best friend said he just knew they had written to each other since college. In the motel room that night, her mother said that it was one Thanksgiving in Pennsylvania with him, and when she got back there were plans. I told her I found out in a letter.

She understands the power of what you don’t say, her mother told me.

I was one of the volunteers to camp on the in-laws’ farm after the wedding, but when the newsmen guaranteed rain a week out, the bride wrote: My mother will have an extra bed on the second night, and you’re welcome to stay with her. Our flights left around the same time, so I agreed to take the bed she wouldn’t need on her wedding night.

__

My flight was late, wheels down after midnight, and I drove the rental car two hours north from Pittsburgh alone. I thought of you only at the rivers. Pulled over for coffee when I realized I’d crossed the Allegheny twice without knowing it.

There were two men in tunics ahead of me in line. The woman with them wore a falconer’s gauntlet on her belt. Everyone ordered quarter-pounders with cheese. Chris the manager convinced the raiders that the third-pounder Angus burger on the late-night menu was the closest to a quarter-pounder you could get at this hour. He spoke about raw meat volume and about value. Having left their swords in the Camry, they moved their sheaths aside to sit down at the booth. The maiden’s braids wrapped twice around her head.

The world was funny, but I was no longer telling it. I was night-driving, trespassing the insomniacs’ camp like a mute who takes communion just for the chance to use her tongue.

__

The bride stood on the steps of the church to make her decree: Cake and punch will be served in the fellowship hall now. She wore shoes with pearl straps that dug in. Her mother wore polka dots and sat with the groom’s family. The bride’s father and I had not met before, but when he introduced me to his wife, we acted as if we had, and I offered to bring them both punch, even though I could see that she couldn’t have any.

The rain we’d been promised began, light at first. I watched it worry the surface of the punch and tried to remember how old I was when I still knew where the birds go before a storm.

__

[Before Pittsburgh]

The night we ate the oysters, the front desk only had Scope, so that’s what we brushed with. The oysters were lined up like paint swatches—Duxbury, Wianno, Wellfleet, Salutation Bay. Having nothing absolved us: we did not plan to stop there.

One of us said something about an EconoLodge, I remember that much. The sea had gotten to us, and we agreed that stretch of 1A should be driven in daylight.

The place you turned in had a quiet clutch of rooms set off the highway, and a treed path to a convention hall with great ceilings and a drive that ringed the lawn. The doors to the hall opened often like gills, exhaling music and purple dresses. We sat at the fountain, brushing sand off our calves.

Listen to it, you said. That’s the jive, without a doubt. I said: If we had different shoes they’d let us in. We listened to heels click on the asphalt.

Stay here, you told me, and I waited while you went to check in. Later, when the ice machine woke us, I felt the mint sting on my cunt and gave thanks for the stranger who needed ice at three. You brought a washcloth to bed and dried my hands with it, and I lifted your head to take the wet towel without waking you, and who could prove these other than vows?

__

When my mother called her mother to say she was to be married, her mother said that she had a very busy teaching schedule, and it would be hard for her to get there. She hadn’t even said when yet. We were drinking wine when she told me this, wearing sweaters in some air-conditioned happy hour last August, years after her mother was gone. Her second question was going to be, will you give me away? So instead she wore a suit. She said to me: Our hunger for contingency makes us weak.

__

The bride’s mother took the bed by the window. Adam is going to breakfast with Bill, she said to me in the morning. She was already dressed, and watching the parking lot. Did he mention anything about breakfast last night? I said he hadn’t. The TV had tornado warnings for the next county. Rental cars were being returned in Pittsburgh, and down the road, her daughter was waking up in someone’s inn a wife.

__

[Before the oysters]

We were on our way to the shore when you told me your mother was sick. She is in pain most of the time now, you said. You said: I cannot leave, so it is plain with us then. (If it were allowed, this is where I would say how I took your hand.)

Once I had dreamed to you about going back west, and you’d played along: Of course you could leave winter for these arms. Meaning mine. The children we were never sure of wanting were suddenly alive and there between us on the center console, but we knew by the way they struggled with the iPod charger that they could not live on both coasts at once.

I thought of the poets in the books I’d read, how this is where they would cut to a meditation on the migratory patterns of arctic terns, flying the distance to the moon in their lives but hardly ever landing, or the cliff swallow, a monogamist who insists on building her nest on the sheerest of margins. But I just looked out the window, the sea on my side, and listened to the swoop and caw of the seagulls, that sturdy bird of the prose writers—always stealing a character’s food, advancing plot, interrupting a conversation to keep the protagonist from saying what she means.

If you would stay near your mother, and I near you, then there would be cards home, flights at Christmas, calls on Sunday. But if my parents are to be more than a return address, and not hold the children gingerly, then—. I saw what my mother meant. We are contingent. I so believed this that when I got home I looked it up. Middle English, from the Middle French from Latin’s contingere: to befall.

__

The problem with a small town is there are three breakfast places, and an ex-husband might take his son and his girlfriend to any of them. Knowing him, probably all three.

There is a McDonald’s down on Route 8, is that okay? the bride’s mother asked. I said I loved McDonald’s, and to prove it, I paid for hotcakes and an Egg McMuffin, no ham, no cheese. There were single, dye-tipped carnations in vases behind the booths, and the cable talking heads had found us, even here. I did not know where the bride was born, so her mother told me. A mountain town. I nodded. She and the bride’s father were high school sweethearts. God what was I thinking, she asked her hotcakes.

I didn’t mean to, but my head heavy with you, I nodded again.

__

[Before the drive to the sea]

We had not talked for months, which have been declared small years in the country of our old bed.

__

After McDonald’s, the bride’s mother and I walked around the town. It was ten on Sunday, and we could smell smoke from the VFW in the next block. Nothing was open but the churches. We stopped to look in a junk shop window taped with ads from a happened parade. The shop had antique license plates and end tables made with antlers and a bird nesting box that hung from a chain in the ceiling. The door is built too low, she said, pointing to it. See? And its mouth is too wide. She told me how big birds like ravens will eat the babies, or before that, the cowbird can get in and lay eggs, tricking a wren to raise birds so big her own will starve. Who builds a birdhouse without first reading about birds? We didn’t know, but we suspected they were in church.

__

The obvious candidates for this construction project are the poets, who have spent their days apprenticing the birds. Who else has studied the properties of cedar and oak, and the diameter of a purple martin’s nest? Certain ones have transcribed encyclopedias of their songs. They know the hours a wren will spend in her nest, how far from the ground she builds it, and have memorized the wingspans of everything.

And since they can no longer safekeep the birds in verse, I propose the poets raise great numbers of bird houses to replace the ones I’m buying up to burn: nesting boxes with proper doors through which only the belonging birds will fit, structures to stand near more precarious trees.

__

[Beginnings]

We worked in the same room. I am glad you are here, writing, while I use this glue gun. That’s the kind of thing you said. I told you to put awnings on everything, to bring the castle back. You said every story should have at least three walls in it, and every poem one high, unreachable window. We saved old bread for the ducks, though half the time we made French toast instead.

Back then, the things I wanted to tell you used to occur to me like the highway lines I tried to count as a kid by clicking my teeth, so fast and many that as soon as I had one it was gone. But now they happen like unfamiliar rivers you come to late at night and cross without knowing, until the ground returns itself beneath your wheels and you feel, through the radio dark, how it had been gone.

This piece originally appeared in New England Review 32.2 and has been reprinted with permission of the author.

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Her neighbor asked if there was something wrong. Like what? With that one. His eyes and all. His head it flops. He has been checked out?

He has been checked out.

Her babies sat in a double stroller made by Swiss, an engineering marvel really, its frame hollow yet strong like bird bone. But the babies perched inside had a few kinks: Sal in shotgun with his eyes and all, his lolling head; Michael bringing up the rear, bug-eyed and fetal. Both cautiously bundled, tiny bodies wedged in a nest of blankets.

Their neighbor was from some South American country too war-torn for tact, though she made the most wonderful watermelon punch. She pointed to the back. “He is the healthy one?” The mother nodded. Right. It wasn’t obvious. “That’s good,” she said. “You can give the other one away.” She smiled sweetly. It was a condolence.

The mother tried to smile back. “I love both my babies,” she said. She sounded convincing. It was true.

“Of course,” their neighbor said. She leaned over and pinched Sal’s cheek. “Cute.”

Jesus. Mary. Joseph. “Say bye-bye,” the mother told her babies and pushed forward. Go back to the hut you came from, she wanted to say, though her neighbor said the husband had been in government, an exile. Maybe he murdered people. Or gave them away to be murdered.

Down the block, children hit a blighted tree trunk with cardboard swords covered in tin-foil (hi-ya!), the silver flaking into the grass. A yard over, kids played keep-away with a foam football, a whimpering child darting back and forth between her tormentors. Good if her babies were never that. Don’t run. Don’t even walk.

The mother had wanted these babies so bad, wanted to be a mom. She waited patiently for her husband to finish med school, and when he dropped out, they started trying. It took two years and one miscarriage, but it finally happened. She taught the new girl how to feed numbers into the computer and would cut back her hours when she got closer. Then at work she pissed her pants. God, she’d never hear the end of it. What else could it be? It was too soon. And then.

Feed the numbers through again. This can’t be right.

She had walked with her friends and their babies and knew the protocol: how people fawned and humiliated themselves, suddenly fluent in some idiot dialect. But when they saw her babies they paused. Their eyes darted up (I’m sorry), then back down. They chose their words carefully. How cute. There was something wrong.

She pushed them along the uneven sidewalk. It needed repaving. The Swiss should’ve made shocks. They can’t think of everything. She didn’t want to be crying when her husband came home. On the phone to his mother he’d said post-partum. He’d said tough time. But it wasn’t like she didn’t have a reason. And he was far from fine. When he got home he smoked cigarettes on the deck as if he’d rather go off by himself and get cancer. She didn’t want to think about it. They were babies. They cooed and cried. Shit machines. But they were supposed to come with working parts.

Her husband wouldn’t show her Sal’s brain scan, but she saw the dark patch, the gray petal. It was behind her baby’s eyes. The doctor said it was the worst bleed he’d seen, as if she should be proud, as if her baby was already so accomplished. Maybe vegetable, the doctor said. Could be a cabbage in the front seat. The mother was a gardener. She would lay him in the soil, cover him in peat moss, and wait until he grew into something else. But her husband said the baby was plastic. His brain would grow back if given enough. Wait and see. She’d shake the rattle in his face. Grab the ring. Straighten those eyes. Say: No, I can’t do that yet.

When she got them home, she’d lay them down on knitted blankets. Michael’s left eye would start to drift, going lazy as he tired. She’d snap her fingers in his face and he’d blink, steadying his pupil before it wandered off again. Where do you think you’re going? Might self-correct, the doctor said. Might not. Every morning she crossed her fingers. Wake up straight. Not you too.

But for now, she pushed them down the block. They were hers. She had to practice.

Ramp

It was uneven. As soon as he drove home the nail, he knew. The boards didn’t kiss up against each other. He had measured carefully. Used math. Carried the one. Double-checked. Watched countless hours of This Old House. His calculations, the very laws of the universe, said these boards should conform. And still, there was a bump.

She would complain. Not right away. She’d say she loved it and walk down the ramp to the sidewalk and up again, pushing Sal in his new wheelchair. She’d say, ‘VIP entrance,’ or something. His wife knew he could do it, even though she said to hire a guy. But the father was right to build the ramp himself, because they were tight on money, and he’d taken shop in high school. He’d watched a kid saw off his finger, which rolled in the wood dust like another scrap. He wasn’t exactly skilled, but he also wasn’t that kid. He’d do the moonwalk down the ramp and up again. She’d laugh and kiss his cheek. She might even forget about it. Then, days or weeks later, she’d trip, or Sal would catch a wheel on the crooked board, or Michael would trip (he was clumsy as hell), or she’d just plain notice it often enough, and he’d come home to her mad. But it was too late to fix.

“Shit,” he said, and looked up. His kids were watching from the front stoop. Sal was safe. Sal wouldn’t tell a soul. Mum’s the word for Sal. But Michael was bound to repeat it in the way a four-year-old specialized: Shit. Shit. Shit, he’d sing. The kid stared at the world through those wide-open bug eyes. He still looked shocked to be alive.

She’d parked them out here so she could take a power nap. It was her idea to start the daycare. She felt guilty about staying home, and they needed money. Selling medical supplies wasn’t exactly hauling it in. But now, by the time he got home, after dealing with Sal and Michael and those pint-sized terrorists, her nerves were frayed. She lay on the floor with her feet on the couch. She was too young for her back to hurt like that. With this ramp she wouldn’t have to drag Sal up the steps. Sal sat in his new chair. He was higher up now from the stroller, and he swiveled his head from this new vantage. You could tell the chair made him feel important. Michael’s hand rested on Sal’s handle. He kept touching it. The kid wore those overalls. The father didn’t know why she dressed him like a train conductor.

Their neighbor peeked out of her curtain. It was 6:30. He waved the hammer, which seemed both friendly and threatening, the tone you had to take with her. Uno momento por favor. It was getting dark. His knees ached. He was almost done.

“Michael, can you hand me another nail, buddy?” Michael looked into the shoe box. “One of the big ones.”

Yesterday Michael asked why Sal was in the chair. They were waiting for it, thought they were prepared. But they stammered. What could they say? What’s the right answer? He was in the chair, because he’s not in the stroller. Ha-ha. But that’s not what the kid wanted. The father knew the medical reasons. He saw the scans. He was an almost-doctor, and they paid him the professional courtesy. Periventricular bleed. The motor neuron was almost completely wiped out. Little pockets of cell death throughout, Sal’s brain like Swiss cheese. He couldn’t tell that to his wife. So he said we’ll see. He noted recent studies on brain plasticity and made fun of the doctor’s Australian accent. The doc had said vegetable. He had actually said that. Thanks, mate. The scans translated into cerebral palsy, into mental retardation, but Sal was growing into something else that smiled, that tracked you with his soft eyes, that laughed when you burped. Still they waited for Sal to steady, to stand, for his moans to make words. Say: No, I can’t do that yet. Or ever. So what do you say? How do you tell and how do you answer? His wife spoke first, said something about God and luck. Good enough. Look at the time. No more questions. Let’s play airplane. This is your captain speaking.

Michael was kneeling now, raking his little hands across the metal. He was having trouble, too. They watched him for signs. Michael had run into a screen door and bounced back. His wife said clumsy is not a disability, but the kid took it to a new level. They should probably start playing catch, but he’d get a baseball in the face. Yet, the kid hit all the milestones, if on his own sweet time. He was on the lower end, but still typical, which almost made it worse. He was a constant reminder of what Sal wasn’t doing. In the lab, they would call him the ‘normal control.’ If this was an experiment, which it wasn’t.

“Buddy, it’s the biggest one. It’s right there.” The father could see the nail he needed. Michael’s hand was on it. Grip it. Grab the freaking nail. He dropped the hammer. He breathed. Be careful with the boy. One wrong word. Who knows what he’ll remember?

The boy plucked out the nail and lifted it over his head like a crackerjack prize. “You got it!” the father said. Thank God. The boy walked down the boards and handed it to his father, who settled the point at the pencil mark. He still had to put up railings and stain the wood, but the ramp itself would be done, bump and all. Good enough. “Ready?” he said. He raised the hammer.

Trick-or-Treat

Michael kneeled over Sal and pinned down his wrists, mock-socked him in the gut and jabbed him in the sides until Sal was soundless and shaking, until Sal gasped like he’d been held underwater and laughed again.

He wedged his arms under Sal’s back and rolled, pulling his brother on top of him, Sal’s mouth open and drooling on Michael’s chest until his brother’s forearms found the floor and hoisted him up. Then, hovering over Michael’s face, Sal’s head drooped and wobbled until Sal steadied, raised his head, and roared: “Ahhhhh!” his mouth open wide like a baboon flashing fangs. He meant: Now I’ve got you, or something.

Michael pleaded toward the kitchen tiles: “Help! Mama, help!”

Their mother walked into the living room, wiping her hands with a dishrag. “Be careful,” she said. “Don’t hurt him. Watch his hips.”

A month ago they’d removed Sal’s cast, a white plaster shell up to his waist. They cut his bones and put them back together with a pin. Michael had seen the X-rays: his secret skeleton brother glowing with a bolt in his bone, under the red line of raised skin under Sal’s diaper. Sal only cried at night now. He was back to his old self.

“No, he’s beating me,” Michael said. Sal Ahhh-ed again. “Sal just said his hips are fine.”

His mother smirked. “He did?”

“Yes.” Michael was not supposed to say what Sal was saying.

“Is that what you said, Sal?”

Sal had no comment.

“You want help?” she said. “Okay. I’ll give you both help.” She tossed up the dish towel, and before it hit the carpet she was over them, wiggling her long fingers into both their sides, Sal collapsing onto Michael’s chest and biting his T-shirt as they shook together, as she took both their breaths.

“I’ll pee,” Michael said. “I’m peeing.”

“Bet you wish you had Sal’s diaper,” she said, jabbing him again until it was not funny, until it hurt. When she retreated, Michael pushed Sal back on the blanket. He dabbed at the slobber marks on his T-shirt. Wet blotches. Damp wounds.

It was Friday: Halloween. When their father came home, Sal would be a ship. Michael would be a pirate. Michael really had no choice, as everyone already expected the costume on account of admitting defeat and not self-correcting. He’d been wearing an eyepatch for three weeks to get his eye in shape, their second try. Next stop eye surgery, but for now, in first grade, children arrrr-ed at him. They called him “matey.” They told him to walk the plank, to swim with the sharks, to drink rum and get drunk and die. Or else during recess he was forced to be the generic “bad guy” and summarily pink-bellied. He wanted to be a devil, something really evil, but his father said just go with it. “Pirates are plenty evil. And it’s one less costume piece to buy.”

Their mother fried ground beef to violins from a horror movie. Someone screamed. As if to match it, Sal let out a howl that ended with a “Momma.” Michael asked him to please repeat. Even with the clue, he hadn’t heard him clearly, which was happening more often. Michael might be losing it. He called into the kitchen: “Sal said he wants you to get on his costume.” It was a guess.

“When your father gets home,” their mother said. “He just called. He’ll be late.”

“When is he gonna get here?”

“Michael, enough. He said he’d take you guys.”

Michael was especially not to say what Sal was saying when his father got home. Their mother let him, but she didn’t ask Michael to translate anymore. It wasn’t just that Michael could guess what Sal was thinking from the shapes of his eyes, the slant of his brows, the flex of his cheeks, and curve of his lips. Any idiot can read a face. But Michael could read Sal’s sounds like Morse code. Before the hospital Sal said nice things. I love Michael the most. You are the best mother. Sing to me. Hold my hand. Their mother would ask and Michael would tell her. Their father shrugged and said it was a twin thing, well-documented. But then Sal and their mother went to live in the hospital, and the twins’ bedroom was too quiet. Michael had to turn on the humidifier just to fall asleep. When Michael visited the hospital, all Sal said was It hurts it hurts it hurts. Michael wrote his name on Sal’s cast with a felt-tip marker and drew a jagged face that was supposed to be smiling, but the plaster was too rough. The face was more of a smudge. Not his best work.

Afterwards, Michael’s father took him to the toy store and Michael got a giant plastic Godzilla that he drowned in the tub. Michael asked if Sal would come back fixed. His father said, “No, but he’ll be more comfortable.”

When Sal came home, he wanted things he missed. Bring me a juice box. Fetch me that bear. Play me the Muppets tape. He said, Don’t worry about those jerks down the block. Play with me. Then one day Sal was sitting in his wheelchair at the dining-room table, staring down at his casts, Michael coloring beside him. Sal said, What kind of face is this? He wanted a new face, a happier one. Draw it right this time. “It’s too rough,” Michael said. Then somewhere else. That wall looks good. Michael made perfect swoops with blue crayon, demonstrating fine-motor skills.

His mother thought it was funny, and kept saying, “Sal, did you get your brother in trouble?” which made Sal laugh and Michael feel better, especially after his father forced Michael to scrub the crayon until his elbow ached.

Then, during his dad’s Labor Day barbeque, Sal told Michael to kidnap his cousin’s Baby-Feel-So-Real. Sal was lying on the living-room floor with his casts propped up on pillows. While everyone else was outside, Michael brought the doll to his brother. He pried apart Sal’s balled-up fist and wrapped Sal’s fingers over the baby’s arm. “Does it feel real?” Michael said, and Sal said, No. It’s squishy. Not even fat babies feel like that. “How’s it held together?” Michael said, and Sal said, Let’s see if there’s a bolt in its bones. So Michael went to the kitchen for a steak knife and slid the blade along the baby’s hip until it oozed caramel. More evidence. It made his fingers sweet. Michael dabbed some on Sal’s tongue and Sal smacked his lips. He said, Just as I suspected. You could put it on pancakes. Michael wiggled his fingers inside its skin to scratch at its skeleton. It was smooth, hard plastic, an upside-down Y. But there were no pins or bolts. A complete fake. So Sal said, The jig is up. Get out all the gunk, which required a few more incisions on its shoulder and legs and the soft spot on its head, and Sal counted down Three-two-one before Michael jumped with both feet. The goop shot out in all directions, splattering the carpet, the couch, the wallpaper, Sal’s shirt and right cheek. Sal fluttered his eyelids and laughed while Michael panicked, spread the slime thin with paper towels, and threw the deflated baby-body behind the couch.

Their little cousin cried, and a search party was sent out to shut her up. Michael and Sal were careless and sticky. When the dog sniffed her way into the living room, Michael tried to shoo her out, but she scrubbed the carpet with her tongue. “Who spilled here?” became “What spilled here?” and then the family detectives deduced. The body was discovered. This time their mother was horrified (Am I raising Jeffrey Dahmer?), but their father found it hilarious (At least now we know what makes it feel so real).

Michael got some serious time out. Sitting with his face to the wall, the exact spot he scrubbed a few weeks before, Michael asked why Sal wasn’t also being punished.

His dad rubbed his hair. “He’s sort of always in time out, buddy.”

The last incident, right after Sal got his casts off, neither parent found funny. Sal said, Take the matches from the drawer. He’s the one who wanted Michael to hold the match under his nose so he could watch it spurt alive and curl under the flame before Michael threw it with a hiss into the toilet. He’s the one who said again. When Michael, with his one-eyed depth perception, missed the toilet and hit the shag foot rug, Sal was out of ideas, especially when the rug started to smolder and then jumped with flames. Michael pushed Sal down the hallway, past the alarm that screamed and past their mother (also yelling) to safety. He was a hero, but all his parents could talk about was the two thousand dollars in fire damage, that Michael was getting fire damage for Christmas. When his father came home, he used a belt for the first time. Michael thought he’d never walk again, that he’d have to ask Sal to move over and make room, that he’d have to go to the closet and unfold the double stroller.

After Michael stopped crying, his father said, “Enough. It’s not cute anymore. It’s getting creepy. It’s not nice to your mother. It’s not nice to me. You don’t speak for Sal. You want attention, fine, but you don’t blame your brother.” So he was not, under any circumstances, supposed to say what Sal was saying.

Three weeks ago, he started seeing a psychologist. It was a fun game to imagine what Sal might be saying, wasn’t it? They talked about the difference between reality and fantasy, so much that Michael doubted himself, which was when Sal got all staticky. Come in, Sal. Come in.

Then last Sunday, of all things, Sal started speaking for himself.

They ate manwiches without their father. Their dog whined and barked from the basement as three groups of trick-or-treaters came to the door, with better fathers who loved their children more and were not late all the time. Michael’s mother rewarded them with peanut butter cups dropped into their buckets. She sat beside Sal and held a triangle of manwich between her fingers. She said, “Tell Mommy. Do you want more? Tell Mommy. Eh or eh-eh.”

Sal sat in his wheelchair with his hands splayed out like a praying mantis. His blond hair was framed by a black cushion, and a gray chest strap covered his striped shirt like a plate of armor. A plastic bib was draped around his neck: pastel dog paws. After his hands tightened to fists, he raised his head ever so slightly, as if it held an incredible weight, and grunted: “Eh.”

“That’s my boy,” their mother said. “That’s my baby. You tell mommy. You’re still hungry, aren’t you?” Every word was still a gift. She shoved the end of the triangle into Sal’s mouth, and he smiled before pressing his bottom lip to his front teeth, biting off the end.

“Mom,” Michael said from across the table. “I’m still hungry. I’m really hungry.”

His mother turned to him. Michael thought her pretty enough to be a T.V. mom and had told her so. Her hair was a blond helmet that protected her high cheekbones and beaklike nose. She wore a headband with cat ears. She said, “I know, Mikey, but you’ve already had a whole one. What did we talk about?”

They talked about Michael being a little on the husky side. They talked about switching out potato chips for carrot sticks. They talked about what the psychologist said.

“And you’re gonna eat all that candy. For now, honey, have some corn.” She smiled and passed the bowl of golden nubs still swimming in their can water. She fed Sal another bite and tipped a hard plastic cup to his lips. Michael scowled with his covered eye. All his parents seemed to do now was try to make Sal talk in that grunting idiot’s code.

Their mother looked at her watch. “Jesus Christ.”

“You could take us,” Michael said.

She shook her head. “He’s taking you.”

They waited. More children rang the doorbell and hit up their mother for candy. Eventually their “trick-or-treat” became sing-song and slurred, as if the words made them sick.

“All right,” she said. “We have to get ready without him.” Michael ran to their bedroom and threw on his red-striped seaman’s shirt, his black vest with the sewn-on crossbones, and his ripped knickers. When he came back into the kitchen, his mother said, “Let’s get on your peg,” and wrapped his leg with brown construction paper and shipping tape. She handed him his hook, rubbed his chin with charcoal, scarred his cheek with lipstick. She rubbed and scarred Sal too. Then she took sheets of cardboard, onto which she had drawn wooden slats with black marker, and tied them to the sides of Sal’s wheelchair. She duct-taped plastic wiffle bats as cannons to his wooden wheelchair tray, the deck. Behind Sal’s headrest she duct-taped a broom handle fastened with a pillowcase as a sail. She emptied the black leather bag that hung from the back of Sal’s chair, dumping out its wet-wipes and spare diapers, its plastic poncho and sticky insulated lunchbox, its sunglasses and bug spray from summer. “You’re gonna fill this up,” she said.

More trick-or-treaters came to the door. Every knock or door-bell chime was torture. It seemed like his father would never come. Michael thought he might just slip out the door and tag along with strangers. Then, finally, their father pushed through a cluster of kids, using his briefcase like a battering ram.

“Hi,” his wife said. “What are you supposed to be?”

“Sorry?”

“It’s seven. They have less than an hour.”

“I know. I know. I couldn’t help it.”

“I would’ve liked your help. This was supposed to be fun.”

“Okay. Can we not argue then?”

His mother clenched her jaw. Michael worried she’d lock herself in the bathroom again, or start throwing canned goods. They were still trying to eat the dented ones from last time. Now that Sal was better, his father was working longer. The surgery had cost money, but his father was gone too much. Michael was afraid he’d be one of those kids who slept at two houses. But tonight she just pursed her lips. His father walked past her and inspected. “Are we ready? I’m ready. Michael, you’re looking quite evil. Sal, a bit more duct-tape and you’re seaworthy.” He flung off his tie as he jogged to his bedroom and returned in a blue sweatshirt with a rubber wolf mask over his black curly hair. He stuffed his face with manwich, beef crumbling from his mouth. “I’m ready.”

His mother kissed Sal’s cheek and knelt before Michael. “Will you be okay?”

“Yes,” Michael said.

“Remember. It’s just pretend. It’s not real.”

Michael nodded.

“Okay.” She kissed him on his lipstick scar.

They descended the ramp, the father easing Sal over the bump. Their mother yelled, “Get me some gumdrops.”

His father sighed. “Yeah. Yeah.”

“Are you getting a divorce?” Michael said.

His father smiled, lowered the wolf mask, and lit a cigarette. “I don’t think so. Unless you think we should.”

Michael didn’t say anything. Smoke wafted out of his father’s muzzle. “No? Okay. Then let’s get lots of candy so your mother’s not mad at me. Sal, speed it up a few knots.” His father leaned into Sal’s chair handles. Sal creaked forward. Sal set sail.

***

It was dark when they came back to port. Their father pushed Sal up the ramp and rang the bell. Their mother swung open the door, and the dog sniffed Sal’s shoes.

“I’m out of candy,” she said. “How was it?”

“Fine for a while, but he’s doing it again.” She looked down the sidewalk. Michael hobbled in the shadows. “We had a bit of meltdown. I got pissed, and he started pouting. Now he won’t walk normal. He’s method-acting.”

Their father pushed Sal through the door. Michael caught up and swung his peg leg up the ramp, scraping his hook along the railing. His mother asked, “What happened?”

“Sal got mad,” he said.

They had been doing fine. Their neighbor, Mrs. Isabella, set the tone. She opened the door, saw the tandem costume, and said, “Cute.” She dropped coffee-colored foreign candy into Michael’s plastic bag, and their dad swung Sal around to receive cargo. She had to go down several steps. “For my sea-robbers,” she said, walked back up and closed the door.

“She doesn’t have a costume,” Michael said.

“She doesn’t need one,” their dad said.

One house over, the Zeigenhagens pronounced them “adorable.” Mrs. Zeigenhagen, wearing cloth horns, put her hands up at the sight of Sal’s cannons. “Don’t shoot. Take our treasure.”

“Okay,” their father said. As they turned around he whispered, “We’re gonna get this all night.” They did get it all night, but people also seemed happy to dump extra fistfuls into Sal’s roomy sack. After one particularly large haul, their father swung Michael up by the armpits onto his shoulders, holding Michael’s peg leg while pushing Sal with his other hand. Michael felt like he had climbed on top of a towering mast. His father said, “We’re cute! We’re adorable! Now hand over your freaking candy!”

“Arrrr,” Michael said.

“Ahhhh,” Sal said. Michael clenched his father’s rough chin. His dad didn’t even need charcoal. As he swayed, he looked down. Sal’s bag was almost half-full, the wrappers glittering in the streetlight.

But things were also not fine. The other kids stared at Sal. Michael heard one ask: “What’s he supposed to be?”The kid was pulled forward by his mother, who told him to shut up.

Then at one house the door opened to a man with an arrow through his head and a beer can in his hand. He said, “Let me guess. A pirate.” He pointed down the steps to Sal, tilted his arrow and squinted. “And a hospice patient.”

“He’s a ship,” their dad said sharply.

“Shit,” the man said under his breath. “I see it now.” He dumped half a bag of Snickers into Sal’s sack.

A few houses over, the door opened to a man with brains oozing out, patches of brown hair mixed in, and blood dripping in rivulets from his forehead. He stumbled forward, his arms stiff, eyes rolled back. He said, “I’ve got a bit of a headache. Perhaps I hit my head.” Michael ran down the steps and jumped below deck, crouching behind Sal and whimpering.

“All right,” their dad said. “We get it.” His dad nudged Michael with his foot. “Mike. Come on out. It’s a costume. Thanks, buddy.”

“Look, kid. It’s a pump.” The man held a green plastic ball sloshing with dark liquid and attached to tubes that ran up his plaid shirt. “Jeez. I’m sorry. I have peanuts.”

“You’re gonna do that and then hand out peanuts? You’re sick.”

“I’m a dentist.”

“Then candy’s in your economic interest.”

“I’ve thought about that.”

They turned around. His dad rubbed Michael’s head. “What a jerk. But you’re about the wussiest pirate I ever met.”

“I am not,” Michael said.

His dad shrugged. “I haven’t met that many.”

Sal Ahhh-ed. Michael could not interpret and looked into his face. His eyebrows were relaxed and his lips were slightly parted, his eyes peering forward to what’s next. Sal was in a wheelchair, not blind. He saw the same brains and blood as Michael. He even had two eyes to do it with. Why wasn’t he scared too?

They were fine for a few houses. They got high-quality candy from people with costumes that were clearly fake and maybe purchased at the last minute. Michael forgot about brains and peanuts. He didn’t think about what Sal was supposed to be. Once again they were adorable. They were cute.

Then they came to a nice brick house with flickering electric candles in its windows. Someone had smashed a pumpkin in the lawn, a wax nub on a bed of slimy pulp. Toilet paper hung from a tree like Spanish moss. Michael climbed the steps. He had a bad feeling about this and looked back at his father, who nodded. “Go ahead.” Michael adjusted his patch and pushed the glowing button. It sounded like a telephone.

To Michael’s relief, the door opened onto a grandma, or at least a fat woman with gray hair. It was dark inside. She stooped but seemed too young for it, as if the skin wasn’t loose enough on her face. “Hello,” she said. “What do we have here?”

She laughed sweetly and held a tray of caramel apples, their sticks at attention. “Take one,” she said. He reached out, but stopped. They looked like they were covered in his cousin’s baby doll blood. And then he saw a flash of neon light from the lady’s left, and a glowing skull appeared above her head and growled. Michael screamed, knocked the tray out of her hand and ran. He saw Sal stiffen in his chair, and when he looked back he could see the whole glowing skeleton in the doorway, still howling, with bony hands raised like claws. It had come to steal Sal’s bolt for its own bones. It would make his brother fall apart. But now Sal was yelling and for the first time in a long while, Michael heard him clearly. He said, Ready the guns. He said, Fire. He said, Get away from me, you dickbreath, you fuckface. Michael interpreted at the top of his lungs.

***

Their family sat at the dining-room table. His mother poured them juice, and his father twisted open a beer. “They were very apologetic,” his father said. “Just some hippies having fun. The guy got out this guitar, but he just made things worse. Sal was really upset, because Michael was so hysterical. I have no idea where he learned those words.” He turned to Michael, who had his elbows propped up on the placemat and was holding his face. “What are we going to do with you?”

“Sal said it,” Michael said.

“Jesus Christ. You do not speak for Sal. He’s not your imaginary friend. He’s your brother. He can speak for himself. Listen.” He scooted his chair closer to Sal, who was still in his wheelchair though they had untied the cardboard. “Did you call that guy a dickbreath?”

“All right,” their mother said.

Sal smiled.

“Sal,” she said. “You don’t have to answer that.”

“Sal, eh or eh-eh.”

Sal took a breath, curled his fingers into fists and lifted his head ever so slightly. But he just held it.

Their mother got up and went to the back of Sal’s wheelchair. “I think what Sal is saying is what’s the big deal. Right, Sal?” She unhooked Sal’s leather bag and balanced it on the table.

“It’s not a big deal, because you secretly like it. You let him do it. You encourage it.”

She glanced at Michael. They had been discovered. Michael wanted to cry. She would not let him do it anymore. Sal would only get to grunt. “Can we not talk about this right now?” she said. “You’re the only person on earth who can be this unhappy in front of this much candy.” She spilled the candy onto the table, as if she had just busted a piñata. Michael thought that very T.V.–mom of her.

“Fine,” their father said, rummaging through the pile. “I’m sorry.”

“Pick out the tootsie rolls. It’s the only thing soft enough for Sal to eat.” She spread the candy with the back of her hand. “Where are my gum drops?”

“It’s trick-or-treat. It’s basically begging. It’s not like we went to the store.”

***

Michael couldn’t sleep. It wasn’t just that he had eaten too much candy. It wasn’t just that Sal was snoring at exceptional volume on the mattress across the room. When he closed his eyes, the skeleton appeared as he ‘d first seen it, glowing in the darkness of the doorway, before the lights came on and the guitar. He kept looking at the closet, thinking he’d see toes illuminated under the door, right before the thing jumped out and fell upon Sal, wiggling its fingers inside the scar on his hip, leaving Sal a mess of parts and goo. And then there was the guilt. Because as they separated out the candy, as his parents poached favorites for themselves, all he wanted was his brother’s sad little hill of Tootsie Rolls. He hadn’t even liked Tootsie Rolls before that. They looked too much like his class rabbit’s shit-pellets, but as soon as the candy became exclusively Sal’s, he wanted it. He didn’t like this about himself. That didn’t matter. The psychologist said he only had to recognize his feelings. He thought about the candy so much that after taking a piss he went to the kitchen drawer where his mother stashed Sal’s cut in a sandwich bag, and he’d eaten two pieces. They were delicious. They made his spit taste like chocolate, and for a moment made up for the fact that his parents loved Sal more, that his mother wore a bathing suit with Sal in the bath and held his head to her chest as she soaped him while Michael got to shower alone or with his father, shivering in the cold until his dad stepped sideways and let the warm water hit him. Most of all, he was worried that his dad and the psychologist were right. He was worried that Sal had not said what Sal was saying.

Michael checked the closet door for glowing toes one more time and swallowed hard. He peeled back his covers and crawled across the carpet with chocolate on his breath. He reached Sal’s mattress. Sal was breathing like Darth Vader, but his eyes were wide open. In the moonlight Michael could see the whites of his eyes. His pupils flickered over Michael’s face. His neck was hot and sticky. Their mother had put on too many blankets again, so Michael ripped one off.

“Hi,” he said. He pushed Sal toward the wall, crawled under the covers, and slid his arm across Sal’s back. He said, “We had a good time. I won’t let the skeleton get you.”

Sal kept his steady rhythm, his back heaving up and down. His face was slack, with his mouth open and tongue still.

“Can I have some of your candy if I don’t let the skeleton get you?”

Sal’s snore broke. He closed his mouth, hissing breath through his nose and swallowed. “Wa,” he said. Michael took that as a yes.

“Do you forgive me?” Michael did not know for exactly what. He waited. Sal’s cheek was flush against a pillowcase with a damp balloon of drool around his mouth. “Can you talk to me?” Michael pulled the pillowcase forward, giving Sal a dry section. Michael folded over the slobbered cloth and scooted closer, so their faces almost touched, so that Michael could feel Sal’s warm breath wash over his lips. “Can you say something, Sal?”

Sal’s head moved. Michael heard the springs creak. Sal said, “Ehh-uhhh-eh.” Michael shut his eyes to let Sal’s sound enter his ear and vibrate in his brain until it signified in a voice like his own but not. Michael didn’t dare move, not even to disturb a spring, and held his breath so long his heart started thumping in his chest, and he felt like he was drowning. But the voice didn’t come. He had lost Sal forever.

The brothers watched each other for a long time. Before Michael fell asleep, he saw Sal scrape his bottom lip over his front teeth. It might’ve been a kiss.

***

She said wait until his father got home. He’d eaten his brother’s candy. He’d only meant to eat a few pieces after school, but he kept coming back to the drawer when his mom was out of the kitchen, and then there was only a few pieces left. He thought if he took it all she’d forget where she put it. He had not self-corrected. He had not been good. He had proved that he needed to see the psychologist, for him to nod and scribble and whisper to his mother behind doors. He had proved he was a fat-ass.

The dog screwed him again. She pulled a Tootsie Roll wrapper out of the trash, took it to the living room near Sal on his blanket, near his mother’s feet on the couch, and licked the black taffy still stuck to the wax paper. Michael had given his “Wa” defense. Sal said he could have some, which helped him take the candy, but now when Michael explained, even he didn’t really believe himself. His mother wouldn’t hear it. She asked if Michael thought she was stupid, and Michael paused too long by accident, which made her more angry. What had he been thinking? She didn’t know what to do with him. Wait for your father. Michael thought: The belt. Michael thought: Do it right this time.

Michael, Sal, and their mother waited at the table with spaghetti simmering on the stove. Their father trudged up the ramp, and the door creaked open. “Hi,” he said, tired but smiling. He looked at his mother and then Michael. “What’s wrong?”

“Your son is doing it again,” she said, shifting blame for his existence. “And he ate Sal’s candy.”

“He said I could have some,” Michael said, as a reflex, and because he wanted the belt.

Their father set down his briefcase. He massaged his face. “Can we just have one nice night?” He walked into the kitchen, went to the stove and dished himself some pasta. He came back in, pulled up a chair and sat down. “Let’s eat,” he said, and showered his plate with parmesan powder.

Michael and his mother looked disappointed. They rose and got plates for themselves and Sal. They sat down and ate in silence.

His father cracked open a Diet Coke. He said, “Sal, did you say Michael could have some of your candy? Eh or eh-eh?”

Sal clenched his fingers, tilted up his head, and said, “Eh-eh.”

“There you go, Michael. That’s Sal speaking for himself. No.”

Michael dropped his fork onto his plate. He felt betrayed. He felt a pressure in his throat.

His mother raised her eyebrows and said, “No wonder you’re not hungry.”

Michael sat at the table watching everyone chew and then stayed there after they got up. He wanted the belt. He wanted to pay up. He wanted to cover his free eye with another patch and disappear.

Eventually, his father called Michael into the kitchen. “Okay. Quit moping. You’re so keen on candy. You got a whole mountain to eat.” He sat in the greenback chair, holding Sal in his lap and watching football on the counter television. Their mother was leaning against the counter reading a magazine.

“I’m sorry,” Michael said.

“Don’t apologize to us,” their father said. “Apologize to your brother.” His father held Sal under the armpits, with his brother’s hips balanced on his father’s knee. Sal’s head was on his father’s chest with his hands loose and splayed out. Sal’s mouth hung open. He hadn’t covered for Michael, but was he angry? Did he care? Sal’s face was still. He wasn’t giving anything away.

“I’m sorry,” Michael said.

Sal stiffened and flexed his eyebrows. He said, “Ahhh-rah,” and turned his head.

“Oooh. He’s mad at you. Sal says, ‘I’m pissed off.’” His father grasped the ends of Sal’s fingers, curving his wrists and bobbing them in the air. “He says, ‘I’m gonna kick your butt.’ He says, ‘Put up your dukes.’”

Michael stood with his hands at his sides. He looked at his mother. She had put down her magazine. “Stop,” she said, took a step forward, but then smiled. She relaxed. She would let it happen. She put her fingers to her lips. Was that a laugh? It was a joke then, but his father said, “Come on.”

So Michael raised his fists. He bounced like he had seen them do on TV. Sal’s hands floated in small circles, and Michael moved from side to side. Then Sal swung and Michael weaved out of the way. “All right,” she said, but laughed again. It was all very funny. Sal’s hands kept bobbing. Michael didn’t know what his father wanted. Did his dad want him to punch Sal in the face? Or pretend to, as a joke? Michael stepped forward.

He saw a flash with his covered eye, felt a burst of pressure, and his head snapped back. Then he was sitting on the linoleum. Half of the kitchen was so bright.

His mother said, “Hey, that’s too rough.”

His father said, “He walked into it.”

Michael’s eyepatch had shifted above his brow, leaving his other eye bare and blind. He squinted, adjusting to the light, but he couldn’t see his father. He could only see Sal and his hard wrist, Sal’s soft eyes looking down. He heard Sal clearly for the last time. Sal said, Be careful. Sal said, Even I can hurt you.

This story originally appeared in Ninth Letter and has been reprinted with permission of the author.

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We lived in a valley between two hills with a brown stream that hooked at the bottom, cutting us off from the rest of town. On one of the hills was a telephone tower. Below, there were houses and a tavern and store. There were also churches and a burial mound. Children played on the mound. Adults stayed away unless they had someone to put inside. The neighborhood was dense with priests and old women who had settled close, toes clenched, to watch each other.

In the few weeks before the storm, priests walked in silent lines through the streets. Women hid inside houses and sheds, making pies.

The children fed black birds that gathered on the mound. The birds ate bits of meat from their fingers.

The tavern was open to everyone, but always full of men. The men’s backs curved like hooks as they leaned over the bar and talked into their drinks. The older men in the neighborhood developed bent shoulders with lumps that resembled the mound.

In the evening, candles were put outside of houses here and there throughout the neighborhood. Candles in front of priests’ homes were prayers. Candles in front other homes were spells or placed there to light the way for children and husbands so they would come back at night to be warm.

I was the only child who stayed away from the mound, whether there was a funeral or not. I had no friends because of this. I wandered the streets and alleys with my little sister, Ruth, who pitied me. I made her hold my hand sometimes. I pretended that it was for her sake. She pretended too. Ruth only avoided the mound when she was with me, but it felt like we were always together.

Some nights our mother left candles for us or for our father. Our father was inside the mound.

Ruth collected candy in hordes and tucked it away in invisible places. Worried mothers left out sweets for the children, hidden around doorsteps or tucked into gardens and under lawn ornaments. Ruth saved them for what she called “Emergency Special Occasions.” I collected nothing but my own thoughts. I couldn’t help myself. Even bad things. I replayed my life in my head all day long, until I went to sleep at night. I forgot things anyway. Mostly good ones, I bet.

I replayed the events of the storm in my head even though they hadn’t happened yet.            Neighbors grumbled about who predicted the storm first. The only thing we all agreed on was that we could feel the air changing and it was best not to talk about, or to talk about very quietly.

Ruth and I walked everywhere together. People saw us so much that the whole neighborhood thought we were spying on them. Ruth didn’t mind. She would have suffered any reputation to make me feel comfortable.

There was a tension in the air like static. The telephone tower hummed. Matches were more easily lit here than in other places. The air sizzled and tasted like copper buttons. My mother lived her whole life in a nervous daze, as if she had just been slapped while alone in an empty room and was trying to ignore the presence of ghosts. She pretended that life was not beautiful, but pretty. She kept plastic flowers in water until mold grew on the stems. She raised us like dolls from an old play set, I thought. She held us up to her heart sometimes and other times it was like we weren’t there at all.

I knew the neighborhood and maybe even the world beyond that was beautiful. And anything beautiful was also terrifying. The hole in our family was at the top of that list.

I think Ruth had yet to find any of that out. She just nodded and pet my hand when I told her what I suspected about life. We both worried about our mother but I think I worried more because Ruth was so busy worrying about me.

The storm was about a week away. I heard men whisper or laugh through the opening and closing tavern door while I played pinball in the mud room in front with Ruth at my side. They never mentioned the storm directly. They wanted sandbags and batteries, the prayers of the faithful or a new girlfriend, without saying why they needed these things. I heard a story from the mouths of other children who were walking through my alley on the way to the mound. They said somebody was building a boat. They said they were building it to save all the bones.

My mother stood in the window and watched the mound. There was a row of houses between her and the mound so she couldn’t see it with her eyes. She stared straight through the houses as if they didn’t exist. Ruth and I coughed when we entered the kitchen. We walked with heavy feet so she would know we were home.

“Hello, Children,” she said. Or something very close. Her eyes were big and watery. She was holding a pair of large scissors. Lately it seemed like she was always holding something sharp when we came home. I looked around the kitchen for scraps. She had not been cutting anything. I put my hand on Ruth’s shoulder.

“Hello, Mom,” we said. Or something very close.

Ruth offered her a piece of licorice. She first looked at the candy noodle as if it was a worm. Then she bit into the candy and chewed. “There’s a storm coming,” she said, with a shiver.

“We know,” Ruth said and pulled me upstairs.

I was young when my father died and the memories I had of him were like a faded recording, worn thin and crackly and full of empty spots. Ruth was a baby when he died. I imagined her memory of him to be like a tinny song winding down on a music box. I couldn’t imagine how my mother remembered him. It was probably like a symphony.

We locked ourselves in my closet with a flashlight and cookies. The coats and sweaters were like a wall of soft vegetation. “I’m scared for Mom,” I whispered.

“Did you say ‘of’ or ‘for’?” Ruth asked. “We don’t need to whisper. We can just talk normally.”

She was waiting for me to tell her “Both.” I didn’t need to. The fact that she was waiting meant she already knew.

“I think she’s scared of the storm,” she said after a while. “People act weird when they are scared.” She gave me a look. “You should know.”

I didn’t say anything. I ate a cookie.

“Maybe part of her wants the storm too,” she said.

I swallowed. “Why would anyone want a storm?” I asked. I had been trying to figure this out for a while.

“I don’t know.”

We sat in silence for a long time and ate cookies.

“I guess people get sick of waiting for things,” Ruth said.

We made shadow puppets on the wall of the closet. Ruth created black birds with her little hands. I made a lonely dog. When I fell asleep her birds were still circling the closet, like they were trapped.

For a week it drizzled nonstop. A light grey mist filled the streets. Candles were still put out at night, under awnings or shielded by lampshades. Birds flew through the sky and the other children still played on the mound. They stared outward in a circle, waiting for someone to come for the dead. I watched two old women wrapped up in black scarves mumble back and forth through a knothole in their fence as they tended to their gardens. I made Ruth stop and stand still to listen. One of them said something about “wicked duration, not ferocity.” The other made a noise like a squirrel.

There was a group of priests on a corner of the main drag through our neighborhood, the road that led to the mound. They were in long black or grey coats and huddled very close together as if to hide from the cold. They were all very tall and thin and their hats made them look taller, like giants. Even in their silence, I got the idea they were trying to remind us of something. Their presence was a warning. I thought if they did talk, icicles would come out of their mouths. I stopped to watch for a moment, then walked past like everyone else.

I thought of Mom at home alone, waiting for the storm. She didn’t need to be reminded of anything.

That morning she talked about what it must be like to drown. “Suffocating,” she said a few times over breakfast. “Suffocation.” She said she dreamt about being smothered as a little girl. In her dream she was choked by wet cloth, like her blankets were sweating on her. She looked at the ceiling fan and took a breath. Then she gave us a lesson in how to breathe. “In through the nose,” she said. “Out through the mouth. It keeps your heart beating regular.”

She asked if there were a death we would prefer to drowning.

“Death by chocolate,” Ruth said.

The rains picked up over the weekend. On the radio there was talk of mud sliding down the hills and covering our neighborhood, turning it into a giant mound. The stream was swollen and rushing. It carried broken limbs and bits of trash. I had already been out for a walk. Some houses were sandbagged and boarded up, while other houses, like ours, had done nothing at all to prepare. The other children were circled on the crest of the mound, looking outward.

The tavern was packed. I suggested our mother go there to wait through the storm with our neighbors. I was always trying to get her out of the house to meet people, even if she already knew them. I wanted my mother to be happy because I thought if she was happy, I would be too.

Mom didn’t respond to my suggestion. She walked over to the window and looked toward the mound. She picked up a knife and ran her finger along the serrated blade. It was the knife we used to cut bones when we needed to make stock.

Ruth asked me to take her out for another walk. We sprinted from tree to tree for cover. Ruth seemed to know where she was headed. I didn’t care. I just didn’t want to be at home. I didn’t want our mom to be home alone either. I didn’t want anyone to be alone or get hurt or feel bad. More than that, I didn’t want to think about those things anymore. I imagined crawling underground to sleep for a long time, hundreds of years, and yawning when somebody found me.

I thought about our house being washed away as I ran and the more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea. I thought about moving somewhere else, but I knew my Mom would not leave the neighborhood unless the mound was washed away too. It felt as though we had all forgotten you could leave.

If the mound was washed away, would our ghosts be free to follow us?

The streets would be littered with bones either way.

Ruth was too fast for me, even though her legs were smaller. I caught up with her under a weeping willow tree. It didn’t provide much protection, but enough for us to talk. Lightening lit up the clouds and made them look like floating brains, sparked with electricity. Ruth was smiling. I was not.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“Behind the store,” she said.

I just looked at her.

“I have candy there,” she said.

I wondered why she would keep candy behind the store and not in the house. I wondered why I didn’t know any of this about her.

“It’s not like we’re joined at the wrist,” she said.

“I know that,” I said. I hadn’t though. Not really. It was like I had been learning to pedal a bike and I just found out there was no one in back holding me up. I felt alone, but okay.

Ruth had already taken off running. I followed behind.

The store was catty-corner to the tavern. Both were full of people. I watched the customers in the store window as they rushed to wait in line, green baskets all stocked up with boxes and cans and batteries. There was a man outside under a tent selling ice. Across the street at the tavern people were smoking cigarettes out of cracked windows, huddled close to watch the lightening. The churches at the far end of the street were all lit up but empty. Ruth and I scurried down the middle of the road in our raincoats. We cut into an alley behind the store. The wind was picking up. I worried about the kids on the mound. I hoped they would go home to get warm. I did not think a boat was coming.

There was a pile of tires by the loading dock in back of the store. I had never noticed it before. The pile was covered with a coal blue tarp. Ruth pulled me under the tarp, which was being lifted at the corners by wind. She pointed at a crack between the tires. We peered through. There were huge black trash bags sealed with zip-ties smooshed together and piled heavy inside like limp bodies.

“That’s our candy,” Ruth yelled through the rain.

She looked at me with an expression of hope when she said “our.”

“I need your help to move the tires,” she said. “Because I’m too small.”

I didn’t understand how her tiny body could have gotten so much candy inside there. I asked her why she kept her candy in the tires.

“For emergency special occasions.”

“But why not keep it at the house where it will stay dry?”

“Because it’s delicious,” she said. Even yelling, her voice sounded matter of fact. “I would eat it all.”

We removed the tires and got dirty doing it. Ruth had black smudges on her cheeks. The wind ripped the tarp off the stacks. It flew through the air like a kite. The tires fell toward Ruth. I got in the way and they knocked me down. I pushed the tires off. Ruth was smiling at me in the mud. She helped me up. I told her to stand by the loading dock as I got back to work.

Soon we stood in the growing rain with five giant trash bags that weighed more than both of us combined.

“Let’s go,” Ruth said and grabbed my hand.

We loaded three bags on my back. Ruth put one over her shoulder and one we shared between us. We plodded down the center of the street side by side, trying to keep each other’s pace. Water was collecting along the sides of the roads.

I glanced at the mound as we moved past. Under a flash of lightening, I could see the black shapes of children scattering. Ruth led us down an alley and over two yards, until we were across the street from our home. The bags of candy felt like they were full of packed mud. The rain started to sound angry as we came inside.

Our mother was watching out the kitchen window. Our bags made a mess on the floor. Ruth began to light candles, even though the lights hadn’t gone out yet. She brought us into the living room, in front of the arched doorway, and sat us in a triangle. Mom carried a pair of scissors, which she held in her lap. The wet trash bags slumped on the outside of our triangle. They leaked sludge on the edges of the Oriental rug. I tried to hide a black puddle by sitting on it. Ruth pushed me away. She was over hiding things, I think. Mom didn’t seem upset about the mess. She seemed like someone who was being swept off her feet.

Wind shook the bushes outside. Rain fell harder.

Mom and I sat quietly on the carpet as Ruth went upstairs and came back down with blankets and sleeping bags. We were unsure what to talk about. The weather was too obvious. We said, “I love you.” It worked to fill the space between us. Then she held me and said, “Let’s stay warm.”

Ruth was still out of breath from our mission in the rain. She plummeted down the wooden stairs in a huff, riding on the blankets. There was nothing in her little pink face except a desire to make us comfortable. I got up to help her. I think my mother was going to also, but Ruth plowed over the hardwood too quickly for us. She was like an ant carrying dead beetles. We made a nest of pillows and sweets.

Two of the trash bags were filled with assorted candies: gum, toffee, jawbreakers, chocolates, and everything else we could imagine. The wrappers sparkled like glass. The other three bags were full of red shoestring licorice. Ruth encouraged us to eat all the candies, but she kept the licorice to herself.

A lot of the candy had gotten wet. It was sticky.

“Candy is good,” Ruth said with her mouth full. She kept nodding. You could tell she thought we needed convincing. She weaved strings of licorice together as she spoke. “Let’s just eat candy and be happy together,” she said, chewing. “Let’s just do that, okay?”

We ate candy for a day and a half. We ate it by candlelight after our power went out. The storm cooped us together. It made us feel close and crazy. We spoke to each other in made up voices. We stretched toffee between us until we fell back and hit our heads on the floor. We laughed at thunder. We sang. Our bellies ached but we kept eating.

Ruth told us stories in which the three of us were characters. They were wild fictional stories where anything could happen. In one of the stories, we floated up to heaven and had a picnic. Heaven was not how I imagined it. It was more like real life, but people had forgotten to be unhappy. Our father was there. Ruth described him as if she had known him for eternity. I have never seen my mother so attentive. She played along, adding touches to the story; things like broken glasses and a cowlick and lost keys. She squeezed the scissor-handles like they were a stuffed animal. Once she clapped like a seal and left the shears on the carpet, as though she’d forgotten they existed. She held my hand and squeezed. I held on too. It felt like I was taking a bath.

I noticed chipped fragments of rock candy stuck to my mother’s cheek. I picked them off and ate them.

As Ruth narrated, she weaved more and more licorice until there was a very large red sheet braiding out in loose folds from her lap. It flooded our living room and out into the hallway. The whole house smelled like sugar and artificial strawberries and candles. Our mother sniffed deep, like she was in a garden. I wondered if Ruth was making us another blanket, or maybe a flag. I wanted her to tell me on her own, as part of a story maybe, so I didn’t ask.

It turned out she was making a sail.

This story has been reprinted with permission of the author. 

Timmy Reed is a writer from Baltimore, Maryland. He has recently published in, or has work forthcoming from, a number of places including Akashic Books, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Everyday Genius, Necessary Fiction, and Atticus Review. He recently published a collection of stories, Tell God I Don’t Exist, and has a novel forthcoming from Dig That Book Co. 

In this new piece, out now in Hayden’s Ferry Review, he imagines a futuristic world where the moon has outlived its use as a shipping and transportation center.

When the initial steps were taken, most  of the plan’s  organizers  were focused  on the simple  practicality of the decision.  With the success of the newer space stations farther out, the moon was no longer being put to much use as a transportation hub. The hundreds of dormitories that once housed the staff needed to operate the moon’s electromagnetic freight cannons and launch compounds were now mostly empty. And while the colony’s public administrators would have been happy to sell the place off to commercial developers of condominiums and resorts, the idea seemed laughable. After all, who would want to go to the moon?

He’s posted the full story on his website.

Read More ]]> https://litragger.com/fiction/seth-fried-understands-the-internet-and-prisons/feed/ 0 https://litragger.com/fiction/this-is-the-viral-cat-story-youve-been-waiting-for-by-andrew-nicholls-new-world-writing/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=this-is-the-viral-cat-story-youve-been-waiting-for-by-andrew-nicholls-new-world-writing https://litragger.com/fiction/this-is-the-viral-cat-story-youve-been-waiting-for-by-andrew-nicholls-new-world-writing/#comments Wed, 28 May 2014 14:00:33 +0000 https://litragger.com/?p=3155 Read More]]> Let’s face it. Cats rule the internet. For all we know, they invented the web as a way to control our minds, and that’s why cats lurk everywhere you turn online, watching, waiting to pounce and smother you in LOLz.

Andrew Nichols’ story “They Were the New Cats” over at New World Writing, the online journal edited by Fredrick Barthleme (formerly of Mississippi Review), is, as you might expect, about cats:

They were the new cats.  They were Cats of Great Authority.  Driving cars around the coun­try, super­vis­ing lane clo­sures and inter­sec­tion full-stops, chas­ten­ing speed­ing scofflaws.  Why cats?  Because they were expend­able. Because they were already some kind of cops.  Cats behind bill­boards.  The rea­son they hadn’t liked car trips before was, meow meow.  Who could inter­pret that?  They didn’t steer, they “ini­ti­ated in-car met­rics.”  They were the Bold and New and Brave Cats.  An obser­vant being was required.  A being paid in tuna.  My mother with her chin twisted to one side like Edward Norton in that movie said Jesus Christ on a hot dog bun now she could die, she could die because now she’d seen everything.

But the piece encompasses so much more. It tackles progress, technology, the feeling that the world is zooming by at 120 mph in a car driven by a pretty adorable tabby.

It’s speculative cat fiction. It’s an entirely new genre. It’s one of the best things we’ve read this week. Seriously.