Author: Stephen Graham Jones
Date: 2000-01-01 05:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Horror; Short Stories; Fiction; Fantasy; Anthologies; Adult; Paranormal; Weird Fiction; Mystery
Description: This collection of fifteen stories taps into the horrors and fears of the supernatural as well as the everyday. Included are two original stories, several rarities and out of print tales, as well as a few "best of the year" inclusions. Stephen Graham Jones is a master storyteller. What does happen after the people lights have gone off? Crack the spine and find out. With an introduction by Joe R. Lansdale. Stephen Graham Jones is the author of fifteen novels and five collections, and has some two hundred stories published. Stephen's been an NEA Fellow and has won the Texas Institute of Letters

PRAISE FOR
AFTER THE PEOPLE LIGHTS HAVE GONE OFF

“If I’ve read better horror writers than Jones, I’ve forgotten them. He’s at the apex of his game.
After the People Lights Have Gone Off is the kind of collection that lodges in your brain like a malignant grain of an evil dream. And it’s just going to be there, forever.”

—LAIRD
BARRON, author of
The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All

“Stephen Graham Jones is a true master of the horror short story. Inventive, quirky, unexpected and masterful.”

—JONATHAN
MABERRY,
New York Times bestselling author of

Fall of Night and
Bad Blood

“Stephen Graham Jones is a great devourer of stories, chewing up horror novels and detective stories and weird fiction, ingesting literature of every type and pedigree, high and low and everything in between. His stories betray his encyclopedic knowledge of genre and of storytelling, but what makes
After the People Lights Have Gone Off unique is how Jones never rests among his influences, going beyond what other writers might dare to craft terrors and triumphs all his own.”

—MATT
BELL, author of
In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods

ALL
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BOOK
MAY
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REPRODUCED
IN
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OR
BY
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ELECTRONIC
OR
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INFORMATION
STORAGE
AND
RETRIEVAL
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PERMISSION
IN
WRITING
FROM
THE
PUBLISHER, EXCEPT
IN
THE
CASE
OF
SHORT
PASSAGES
QUOTED
IN
REVIEWS.

THE
STORIES
CONTAINED
IN
THIS
ANTHOLOGY
ARE
WORKS
OF
FICTION. ALL
INCIDENTS, SITUATIONS, INSTITUTIONS, GOVERNMENTS, AND
PEOPLE
ARE
FICTIONAL
AND
ANY
SIMILARITY
TO
CHARACTERS
OR
PERSONS
LIVING
OR
DEAD
IS
STRICTLY
COINCIDENTAL.

PUBLISHED
BY
DARK
HOUS
PRESS, AN
IMPRINT
OF
CURBSIDE
SPLENDOR
PUBLISHING, INC., CHICAGO, ILLINOIS
IN 2014.

FIRST
EDITION

COPYRIGHT © 2014 BY
STEPHEN
GRAHAM
JONES

LIBRARY
OF
CONGRESS
CONTROL
NUMBER: 2014945162

ISBN 978-1-940430-25-6

EDITED
BY
RICHARD
THOMAS

COVER
ART
BY
GEORGE
C. COTRONIS

INTERIOR
ILLUSTRATIONS
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DESIGNED
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I no longer remember what I first read by Stephen Graham Jones, but it knocked me for a loop. Perhaps it was
Demon Theory, which is about movies in a way, written in what some would call an experimental style, and I would call the correct style for the story. That may well have been my first read of Stephen’s work, or perhaps it was one of his short stories, but whatever that first discovery was, I thought, wow, that was good, and it led me to his other works, and pretty soon his was a name I was watching for. I began to gobble his stories and books like a chicken gobbles corn, and if you are unaware of that activity, find a chicken, toss some corn on the ground and watch it work. If you want to be polite, put it in a pan. You’ll get the idea.

Stephen had novels, short story collections, experimental stories, horror and crime, memoir-style tales, and…a little bit of everything, and I was happy to discover that he had a lot of it. No grass grew under his feet, he was constantly moving, writing, creating new worlds for me to enter into. Unexpected worlds, not just a rehash of something he had already written, which in the literary world can be both a blessing and a curse. For most, a curse, as editors and agents love it when you do one particular thing and they can sell your next book as a clone of the previous. That’s a pretty dull writing life, if you ask me.

As I’ve said, I don’t know the first thing I read by Stephen, but I do know when he first came on my radar. It was on a Robert E. Howard panel that we both shared. I liked what he had to say, and I think he liked what I had to say, because afterward we spoke a little, and at some point in time I was invited out to a class he was teaching in West Texas. Not only is Stephen a fine writer, he is also a PhD, a professor, and a good one. Then teaching at a West Texas University, now teaching in Boulder, Colorado.

While out visiting him in Texas, I talked to him about some of his work I had read, and we had long talks about other things, and I discovered we had a lot in common. One of the main things we had in common besides an intense love for our families and stories about Neanderthals (it’s a weakness), was that we liked to read a lot. We are both fanatic devourers of words.

He liked books and stories and comics and film. He read everything from pulp to high literature, experimental fiction, cereal boxes and the ingredients on an aspirin bottle. Okay, maybe I exaggerate. That’s me. I’ll have to ask Stephen about that. You name it, we enjoyed it. It sounds like a simple thing, and most writers like to read, of course, but not all are as widely read as Stephen, nor are they as gifted, nor are they as hard a worker as he is. He does not mess around, friends, as you can see by his long list of books and stories.

Stephen liked to do what I liked to do with the books he read. He liked to measure each on its worth, not its supposed position in the literary cosmos due to genre branding. He also liked to blend genres to such a degree that you can’t really separate any one thing out enough to call it securely by any label. Literary intent moves through the crudest of horrors, the darkest of crimes and mysteries. Stephen is a real writer, and the thing I admire most about him is that he’s not doing it to show he can blend his work, he’s doing it because it is his work. It comes from some pulsing passion inside of him. He loves writing. He eats and sleeps it. But most importantly, he actually writes.

He writes in different styles, but I have come to the point now where I can recognize his voice no matter how different the presentation. Johnny Cash might sing rock and roll songs, country songs, you name it, but his voice is always his own, and Stephen Graham Jones is the same as a writer. He is uniquely always himself, and that self is also a Blackfeet Indian. And that background is frequently a part of what he writes, as in his books
The Fast Red Road, and
All the Beautiful Sinners.

This isn’t the first time I’ve said it, but it bears repeating: I love all manner of literature, but nothing is quite as exciting to me as the short story. I prefer it to novels, both as reader and writer, though I certainly wouldn’t want to have one without the other. A short story is a unique little gem, and you can write about so many different things, different expressions, as the short story is less confined to the market. Its markets are frequently broader, from literary magazines to genre publications, be they on paper are on your pulsing computer screen. You can write something absurd one week, something traditional the next, something experimental the following week, and then you can go for pure pulp, or a character pondering the importance of mowing the lawn without running over a yard gnome. You can go anywhere with a short story and in a short time. I love them.

And Stephen Graham Jones is one hell of a short story writer, and that Ladies and Gentleman is why we are gathered together here today. Put down your hymnals and take a seat. We are in the church of the short story, and you will soon have these stories from the Reverend of Words, Stephen Graham Jones. Amen.

After the People Lights Have Gone Off is a collection of fifteen swift little gems of weirdness, for they are all what we in the business call really damn strange.

I won’t go through every story and tell you about it. First off, Stephen tells you about the stories at the back of the book. I’m also afraid I might make a mistake and give too much away. But before I depart and leave you to the good stuff, I’d like to make some general comments on some of these stories. I’ll pick a few of my favorites.

“Thirteen.” I’ll simply say I’m a sucker for horror stories that have to do with theaters, drive-ins, and the cinema in general. This is one of those, and it’s a good old-fashioned fear of the unknown type that is like a kind of campfire story, or legend that is told as the truth, and in time seems to be the truth.

“Brushdogs.” I adore this one. The term brushdogs is an old country term I’ve heard used here in East Texas. You’ll find out more about that as you read. This story reminds me, for some odd reason, of Robert E. Howard’s, “The Horror From The Mound.” Perhaps it’s the atmosphere. It also reminds me a bit of David Drake’s much pulpier, “The Red Leer.” But it is still all Stephen. Stephen’s style is really lean and simple on the surface, not a lot of gesturing and purple window dressings. And it’s that knife-edge prose in this one, the very disturbing ending, that causes me to suggest you might not want to read this one before bed or in some place shadowy. It would creep a creep. Very fine.

“Welcome To The Reptile House.” Oh hell, this is so wrong and so good and so beautifully written. It’s a fine and marvelous trick when it doesn’t look like anything unique or stylish is happening in the prose, but it is, and you feel it, even if you can’t quite deduce it, and it builds and builds, like a pimple soon to burst. This one is a favorite for the writing alone, not that the story itself won’t pull the skin off your ass and over the top of your head, because it will. It’s got the skin-crawling goods, dear readers. You think I’m lying. Just wait. You’ll see.

“Doc’s Story.” My favorite monster is the werewolf. Always has been. Oddly, there are very few great werewolf films and books and stories as compared to others. This one is pretty special. It’s no secret what it’s about, but how Stephen approaches the idea is what makes it sweet. Darkly sugary, and like ice cream so cold when you bite into it you get brain freeze. The whole business with the ball-peen hammer gets to my nerves something dreadful. It reminds me of some things I’ve seen in my life and would like to un-see. That’s another key to Stephen’s work, no matter how fantastic: telling, realistic details. If the characters are believed, the setting is believed, you can tell any damn story you want, and it’ll work. Provided of course you have the writing voice for it. This is one of those stories. It’s got it all, and in not too many pages.

“Uncle.” Another real skin crawler. Disturbing.

Oh hell, enough said. I’ve already said more than I meant to say, and I still fear I might give something away. I’ve tried hard not to, and have mentioned only the things that are obvious and don’t harm the stories, but I’m getting nervous. And I don’t want me to get in the way of what matters here. This collection. Stephen’s stories. His voice. His unique talent.

You need this book. If you like anything close to horror, and also like your stories to have other elements other than just standing in the darkness with a bloody knife, you have the right book.

Enjoy.

I have no doubt you will.

—Joe R. Lansdale

March 25, 2014

Nacogdoches, Texas

FOR
THE VELVET DROOGS: IT WAS A GOOD RUN

I’ve always wanted to write a word on that burned skin, then wait, see if it’s one of those prayers that makes it through, gets answered.

But this isn’t about him. This is about the Big Chief.

It’s just got two screens, and they’re right beside each other. If you’re in the first one and there’s a war movie in the second, you can hear the machine guns and dogfights and heroic last words bleeding through. It’s one big room, really, you can tell. They just hung a thick curtain right in the middle so they could show two movies, double their money.

My dream’s always been for them to roll that curtain up one night, show us the big picture.

Maybe someday.

It’s been there for forever, the Big Chief. According to Trino’s uncle, a kid got castrated there about fifteen years ago. In the last stall of the bathroom.

Maybe that’s why this trick works.

See, first you go there, get your ticket, your popcorn, and settle in. It doesn’t matter what row, or which theater, one or two. And if you’re watching a horror movie—it’s supposed to only work with horror movies—what you do is, right when it’s most scary, right when whoever’s with you is probably going to make fun of you for closing your eyes, you close your eyes. And hold your breath. And don’t let any sound in, kind of by humming all your thoughts into a dial tone.

And then you count two a hundred and twenty.

Two minutes, yeah.

That’s the real trick.

And if you’re getting scared, if you can feel it starting to work, you can breathe out all at once, even though you could have gone five or ten seconds longer.

It’s safest to do that, really.

Just breathe out, laugh, maybe hunch over into a coughing fit. Spilling your popcorn’s an especially good tactic, even—who would do that on purpose, right?

And then look back up to the screen through your tears. See that the movie’s still up there, right where it should be.

Your laugh’ll be kind of forced, but your smile, that’s a hundred percent true.

That’s where the movies should be, up on the screen.

If you make it to a hundred and twenty, though, then open your eyes?

The screen’ll look just exactly the same. And your friends’ll still be sitting there by you, waiting for you tell them what it was like. To see if it worked.

How it works is that, when you’re not looking, or listening, or breathing—it’s like how you’re supposed to hold your breath when your parents are driving by the cemetery. If you don’t, then you can accidentally breathe in a ghost.

That’s sort of how it works at the Big Chief.

With you not breathing, playing dead like you are, it makes like a road, or a door, and the movie seeps in. Way in the background, like at the edge of town, not everything changing all at once. Nothing that dramatic.

But the movie’s there. It’s there because you invited it. Because you left a crack it could come through, because you made a sound like a wish, and the darkness just washed that direction, to cover it up.

Ask Marcus Tider.

If you can talk to the dead, that is.

Marcus moved here last year, but he didn’t come to eighth grade with us in the fall. If all the girls’ collected hopes and dreams had anything to do with it, though, it would have been one of us in his place. Just so they could have him to take them on dates all through high school. Just so they could pin all their hopes and dreams on him, bat their eyes every time he passed, and then sigh into their lockers.

But Marcus—at his last school, it had been big, like 4A, and they’d been a rich district, the kind that has a pool. Meaning they had a swim team. And Marcus was too blond and too perfect not to have been captain.

He could hold his breath forever.

It was only a matter of time before he ended up at the Big Chief.

He wasn’t even scared of the movie, either, said horror was stupid, all make-believe. We were all there to watch, except for right at the end, when me and James ran out to the parking lot, to see if we could catch the movie starting, off on the horizon. Just see a star dimming out, another winking on.

There was nothing.

Inside—we heard later, had forgot our ticket stubs, couldn’t talk our way back in—Marcus just opened his eyes, looked around at everybody waiting for him to say how scary it had been.

He’d just shrugged, looked back up to the movie, and, like he’d timed it all out, that was when the monster lunged close to the camera, its tentacles whipping all around.

Everybody but Marcus flinched back into their seats.

City kids always think they know stuff we don’t, all the way out here. And maybe they do.

But we know some other things as well.

Two weeks later, we all figured he’d cheated somehow. That he’d peeked, or sneaked a breath using some swimmer trick. Or that he hadn’t believed right.

The Big Chief doesn’t care if you believe or not, though.

For Valentine’s Day four months later, Marcus threw blood up into his construction-papered shoe box, already floating with secret admirers.

None of us said anything.

He had a tumor inside him. Mr. Baker explained it in Life Science right before spring break. He hauled out the movie to show us, finally got the projector going, and when we saw it, that tumor, it was what we were already expecting: a tentacled monster, lashing out for whatever it could grab onto, pulling that bit of meat towards its center. But it could never get enough.

By Memorial Day, he was dead.

We sat in our back yards and ate the hamburgers and hot dogs our parents had grilled for us, and they didn’t ask us about Marcus.

His parents moved away for July fourth, their rearview sparking with the fireworks we felt compelled to light.

Their house is still empty.

And now that movie’s over.

This is a double-feature, though.

Marcus was just the example, the test case.

Grace, though.

Everybody loved Grace, me most of all. You know how when you know you’re going to grow up and marry somebody? That’s who she’d always been for me, all the way since fourth grade. I would have stepped in front of a truck for her. And I wouldn’t have closed my eyes, either.

We were supposed to have gone to homecoming together, but I got sick, then ended up locking the door to my room, my
X-Acto knife hovering over my stomach, because I’d been too close to the Big Chief that night Marcus held his breath, I knew. I had a tentacle monster inside me too.

I never cut deeper than a scratch, though.

My parents went on to homecoming without me—it had been their first date, fifty-thousand years ago—then knocked on my door when they got home, so I could knock back on my wall, and the next morning I was fine. Mom drove me over to Grace’s to give her the mum corsage I’d been saving for since summer.

“There’ll be bumps in the road,” my mom said, pulling us away from Grace’s house. “You’ve just got to keep going, right?”

I nodded, hated myself.

To make up for it, two weekends later I saved up enough to take us both to the movies, and get a medium popcorn.

This was going to be our story, I told myself. Not my parents. That’s why I’d gotten myself sick. Fifty-thousand years from now, Grace and me were going to come to the Big Chief, to remember. It was going to be better than any stupid football game.

Her mom dropped us off, slipped Grace a five for concessions, then went home to sit at her kitchen table some more. According to Grace, since her dad left five months before, all his money mounded in front of the television like that was going to make up for him being gone, that’s mostly what her mom did: sit there and stare, like she was trying to backtrack to where this part of her life had started.

My parents felt sorry for her, they said, and then would hold each other’s hands, like to show they were different, they were better.

I held the door of the Big Chief open for Grace, already had our tickets.

It wasn’t a horror movie, either.

After Marcus, none of us went to the horror movies any more, even though it was almost Halloween and there was always one playing. We were still watching them after lights out at home, of course, but on videotapes we’d smuggle from our big brothers’ rooms, handle with extreme caution, like, if we dropped them, if that plastic cracked, the blood was going to come out.

We were still getting our scares, I’m saying.

But, with Grace, it was a love movie, where the girl looks and looks like she’s not going to get the guy, then, surprise again, she does.

I could sit through it. For her.

Maybe it would give her some ideas, even.

The theater was just usual-full for a Friday showing. Maybe six or eight seats between everybody, some movie with screaming playing next door.

I sat between Grace and that scary movie—her word—and held the popcorn on my knee for us, and, I admit, I kind of got into our movie. The girl’s dad in this one was trying to find her the perfect husband. He felt he owed her or something, because her mom wasn’t around to help her. But he was overdoing it, was pulling in everybody from his office, where he was boss, and then his friends’ sons, and on and on, when the guy the girl really loved was the guy who fixed the copy machine at her dad’s office.

I mean, I got into it, but I was also tracking the movie next door, of course. Trying to time to the screams. Trying to imagine if we were over there, how tight Grace would be clinging to me. How her knee would probably be up on my thigh and she wouldn’t even be aware it was happening.

But this wasn’t bad, either.

She kept having to bat the tears from her eyes, and had pretty much forgotten the popcorn altogether. Not me. I never forget the popcorn.

With the Big Chief, too, if Willard’s working the counter, he’ll even slip you a free refill if you promise not to make a mess he’ll have to clean up later.

Right when the movie was winding up for its final pitch, I whispered to Grace about our empty box, slithered out to the lobby for more. Willard fixed me up, and even let me peek into the other theater.

It was mayhem in there. Chainsaws and werewolves, it looked like—no, werewolves with chainsaws. The chocolate and peanut butter of the horror world. I didn’t even realize I was holding my breath until my eyes started burning.

It was all older kids in there, though. If I’d taken Grace in there, there would have been a timer over my head, just counting down to when the first senior leaned forward, whispered advice to me that Grace would have to pretend not to hear. And then things would just get worse and worse, and it’s not like I could fight any of them and win, so it would be a coke-throwing thing, and I’d probably get banned for the month again.

No, the love movie was the better choice for us. Definitely.

I got back just in time for the end.

Instead of a marriage, it was back to the office. The dad had hired the copy guy into the office, and now, with everybody watching, was promoting him up and up and up, to next in line to run the place, the girl just standing there beaming, crying, her whole world coming together just the way it should.

Grace was crying right along with her.

From where I was I could see her cheeks, shiny and wet, her eyes closed to try to hold the rest of the happiness in.

When I brushed her arm, climbing back into my seat, she jumped, and started coughing like she was going to throw up.

She ran out hiding her face and I followed, and Willard fixed her up with water and she hid in the Ladies until just before the horror movie let out.

And that was it.

My dad was waiting for us at the curb like every time, the car filled with his menthol smoke, and I held the door for Grace again and she just kept batting her eyes.

“Good movie?” my dad asked back, meaning completely different things, and I nodded just to shut him up.

Two weeks later it was Halloween.

Because we were in eighth grade, none of us dressed up, of course. And because the Big Chief was the Big Chief, none of us went there either. Not yet. Soon we’d be high schoolers, though, we knew, and none of the high schoolers ever died from holding their breath.

The kid who got castrated, he was supposed to have been thirteen or fourteen. Maybe that was why they were safe. Why we weren’t.

Anyway, because of what happened at the last Halloween party for our class (my dad’s menthols, Lucas’s dad’s beer, some light bulbs in the basement somehow unscrewed), this year the guys were going one way, the girls another. Most of the girls had signed up to chaperone the first- and second-grader trick-or-treating.

Where the guys went was the old graveyard behind the convent. Of course.

I called Grace before, to just mention it casually, where we were headed, so she could get how brave that made us, how we might not be making it back, all that, but she was already gone with her second-grader.

“Look for Bo Peep,” her mom said, instead of goodbye. Because she wanted us to be happy, I knew. Because she remembered how your heart can swell when you’re in eighth grade.

I met up with everybody in the alley ten minutes later and we were gone, my dad’s menthols safe in my chest pocket. I’d sneaked one at a time all week.

The graveyard, as it turned out, was still the graveyard. Crooked headstones, weeds as tall as us, and, when we first got there, a couple of sophomores making out on the concrete bench. We ignored them, or pretended to pretty well, but I guess they could tell. Then it was just us and the grossest cigarettes ever invented. And the town, spread out before us.

Marcus was buried back wherever he’d lived before. Not here. And it wouldn’t have been in this graveyard, anyway. This was just for people who died a hundred years ago, before the convent got condemned and haunted.

According to the seniors, there was a zombie nun who still carried a candle around in there.

We didn’t believe them even a little bit. But we didn’t get any closer than the graveyard, either. The reason we knew the nun wasn’t in there was that she’d been in our dreams already for years, her candle going out right when she got close to us.

So we sat on the headstones like they were nothing, and we blew smoke up into the inky-purple sky, and, squinting like outlaws at the full moon, we held our cigarettes up to Marcus, wherever he was. Like we’d even really known him.

We were pretending he’d been the best of us, that he was some tragedy.

We’d been the ones who paid for his ticket that night, though.

Soon enough, like always happened, I took a drag too deep, that green smoke filling my lungs, and I had to stagger off into the bushes, to throw up. Because it had to be some kind of bad luck to throw up on a hundred-years-dead person. It might be like giving them a little bit of life. Just enough.

I fell through the trees, finally got to the little cliff we’d used to drop our action figures from to test our bandanna parachutes, and I splashed my dinner all down that scar of white rock.

When my eyes could see again, what they saw was the east end of Saginaw Street, right before it hits St. Francis.

Five years ago, this was the best candy street of all. It was all old people, who only got to see kids on Halloween, pretty much. Better, they’d forget you almost as soon as you left, so you could go back to that same well again and again. Sometimes we’d trade masks, mix and match costumes, but I don’t think they’d have busted us anyway. Or cared.

Saginaw Street was still doing good business, too. Was still the place to be if you hated your teeth.

I stood up to go back to the graveyard, and, if I’d just done that half a second sooner, I’d have never seen the shepherd’s crook cresting over the Frankensteins and ghost heads. It was navigating through them, moving down the sidewalk.

Bo Peep.

Grace.

I smiled, nodded to myself, pinched the hateful menthol back up to my lips.

There she was, all right. Her second-grade robot holding her hand. Cars moving slow and heavy alongside her—all the parents who were driving their kids instead of walking them. That’s cheating, though. If you want the candy, you’ve got to earn it.

I waved my arms as big as I could then remembered one of them was glowing. I balanced my cigarette on a rock behind me then stood up again, waving bigger, and yelling.

By now Grace’s second-grader was moving up a sidewalk, his silver tubed arms and legs making him look like he was going to topple over with every step.

And she heard me, somehow.

Because of love, I think.

At first it was only her head angled over, like being sure, but then she turned around, her lungs filling with hope.

I jumped, jumped, but what she fixed on instead of me was one of the parents creeping past.

She leaned forward as if she hadn’t heard something all the way and the dad behind the wheel leaned out the open passenger window, holding out a white bow, the kind that goes on a good Bo Peep costume.

Grace looked back to her second-grade robot, still cued up for some grandparent candy, and the way she looked I could tell she was timing it. That she felt she had to, because what was this dad going to do with a Bo Peep bow, right?

Right.

She lifted the front of her big skirt, kind of ran out to the car, and, because I was a good almost-boyfriend, I kept my eye on her second-grade robot for her, watched him stiff-arm his plastic pumpkin up to Miss Massey, who used to teach English, and always tied verses of poetry to her candy.

Once upon a time the poem on my candy had told me the fields were white, the fields were long, the fields were waiting, and I’d always wanted to ask her for the rest of it, but never had the nerve.

By the time I looked back to Grace, she was in the passenger seat of the car, and it was pulling away slowly, no rush at all. Just melting back into the parade.

“No,” I said—what about the robot?—and started to step forward but my foot stabbed into open space and I had to balance back hard, my arms windmilling in space.

I fell back, ran along the cliff for the next break in the trees, the last piece of road before the highway opened up, and I got there just in time for the driver to look right through the bushes at me, and nod.

It was the dad from the movie, the one Grace had wished into our world.

He smiled his winning smile, his trustworthy smile, his smile with the sharp, sharp corners, and that was the last time anybody ever saw Grace Lynn Andrews, except as a photo on the news for two states in every direction, and it was the last cigarette I ever smoked, too, and it was the last year Halloween was the same for any of us.

It was also three months to the night before I crept out my window one Wednesday after lights out, and filled one of my mom’s good glasses with kerosene from the lamp her mom had given her, balanced it all the way downtown in the cold.

It wasn’t cold for long, though.

The Big Chief had just been waiting for somebody to burn it to the ground.

I stood there beside it and I held my breath as long as I could, the skin of my face drawing tight in the heat, my heart shaped exactly like two hands holding each other, and when I finally turned to go home, Lucas was there, and Thomas, and Trino, and they hid me, and they never told, and I’ll never leave this town, I know.

Not for the usual reasons, though.

In the flames that night before anybody got there, I saw a boy, the front of his pants wet with blood, and I saw Marcus, wearing his swim goggles, and I saw a pale white shepherd’s crook ahead of them, leading them through, leading them on.

Someday she’ll come for me too, I know.

I’ll be waiting.

ing, waiting for the sun to glint off some elk horn, Junior tracked himself back, stepping in his own boot prints when he could. And it’s not that he didn’t understand: coming out an hour before dawn, walking blind into the blue-black cold, some of the drifts swallowing you up to the hip, it wasn’t the same as watching football on the couch.

The bear tracks they’d seen yesterday hadn’t helped either, he supposed.

Since then, Junior was pretty sure Denny wasn’t so much watching the trees for elk anymore, but for teeth.

He was right to be scared, too. Junior was pretty sure he had been, at that age. But at some point you have to just decide that if a bear’s going to eat you, a bear’s going to eat you, and then you go about your day.

One thing Junior knew for sure was that if he’d been in walkie contact with his dad, then there wouldn’t have been any meets at the truck.

Junior was doing better, though. It was one of his promises.

So he eased up to the truck, waiting for Denny to spot him in the mirror. When Denny didn’t, Junior knocked on the side window, and Denny led him fifteen minutes up a forgotten logging road, to a thick patch of trees he’d probably stepped into for the windbreak, to pee.

“Whoah,” Junior said.

It was a massacre. The bear’s dining room. At least two winters of horse bones, some of them bleached white, some of them still stringy with black meat.

Junior had to admit it: this probably would have spooked him, twenty years ago.

Hell, it kind of did now.

“They’re supposed to be asleep,” Denny said. “Right?”

Junior nodded. It was his own words. The tracks they’d seen yesterday, he’d assured Denny, would lead them to a musty den if they followed them.

“Let’s go work the Line,” Junior said, and Denny was game.

The Line wasn’t the one that separated the reservation from Canada, but from Glacier Park. It was just across the road from Chief Mountain.

Twenty-five years ago, Junior had popped his first buck there, across a clearing of stumps he’d been pretending just needed tabletops to make a proper restaurant. That had been his secret Indian trick to hunting, back then: to not hunt. The same way you never find your wallet when you’re actually looking for it.

Just, keep a rifle with you.

Junior dropped Denny off right at the gate, told him to walk straight up the fence, and keep an eye out.

“Check?” Denny said into his walkie, stepping out, gearing up.

“Check,” Junior said into his walkie, his own voice echoing him.

“Just walk back to Chief mountain if you lose the fence,” Junior told Denny. “You’ll hit the road first. I’ll be up at that other pull-out. Maybe you’ll scare something my way, yeah?”

“Yeah,” Denny said, looking at the tree line with pupils shaped like bears, Junior knew.

Junior left him there, pulled over a quarter mile or so up the road.

He hadn’t been lying about them scaring elk or some whitetail into each other’s paths, either. It was how he’d learned to hunt, his uncles pointing down this or that coulee, telling him to slip down there, make some noise, they’d shoot anything that spooked up.

Denny wasn’t just a brushdog, though.

Really, Junior was half-hoping to scare something over to him. Every animal on the reservation, it knows to run for the Park when Bambi shooters are in the forest.

The kid deserved an elk this year, or a nice buck. Something to hook him into this way of doing things, instead of all the other ways there always were, in Browning.

Junior pulled his gloves on, locked the door, and beat his way through the brush, keeping his rifle high like he was a soldier fording a river, not a latter-day Indian with a burned arm and forty-percent disability.

Maybe a half hour into it, half-convinced the world was made of trees all blown over into each other, the ground under his boots tilted up sharply. Junior followed, eager for an open space.

Like was supposed to happen, the trees thinned the windier it got—the higher
Junior got—until he stepped out of the crunchy snow, then onto the blown-flat yellow grass of . . . not quite a meadow, but a bare knob, anyway. One of a hundred, surely, if you were flying above. But, standing on it, it was the only—no, it wasn’t the only one: directly to the west of Junior, like a mirror image, like he’d walked up to his own reflection, was another bare knob.

Except this one, it had a little pyramid of black rocks right at the very crest.

Junior looked away to search his head for the word, finally dredged it up:
cairn.

Like what you arrange over your favorite dog, when the ground’s frozen and you can’t cut into it with a shovel. Like what you put over your favorite dog for temporary, promising the whole while to come back in Spring, do it right.

But you never do, Junior knew.

Because you don’t want to have to see.

Except—who would bury a dog way the hell out here?

Maybe this was some super-old grave, some baby from the Lewis and Clark clown parade.

Or maybe it was older. Maybe it was real.

Junior brought his rifle up, leveled the scope on the cairn and steadied the cross-hairs against the wind, gusting like it knew Junior was trying to draw a bead.

The rocks looked just the same, only closer up now, and trembling, the scope dialed up to 9.

Trembling until they smudged out, anyway.

Junior took an involuntary step back, pressing the scope harder into his right eye socket—stupid, stupid, he said to himself—and then got things focused again.

When there was just blackness again, a fabric texture to it, Junior lowered the scope, looked across with his real eyes.

Denny.

He’d lost the Line, it looked like, was falling up through the trees as well, his rifle slung over his shoulder.

Instead of doing it like Junior had taught—two steps, stop, listen, look, wait, then two more steps—Denny was just stumbling across the yellow grass, his face slack like he’d been out there for hours, not thirty minutes. One of his gloves was gone, Junior noted.

His first impulse was to put the scope on Denny, so he could give a report later.
Saw you out there, Cold Hand Luke. Didn’t you see me?
Except, even if he drew the bolt back on his rifle, just the idea of putting his son in those crosshairs made him feel hollow under the jaw.

Saw you out there, son. By those black rocks.

Junior said it aloud, the wind pulling his words away.

And Denny was lost, Junior could tell. With Chief Mountain looming behind, the Park right there to the west, and Canada just a rifle shot to the north, if that, the kid had managed to get off-track somehow. Again. And in spite of how the Line was a three-strand fence for the first couple hundred yards. All you had to do then was walk where the fence would have been, if it went on. It didn’t even take a sense of direction. The Park Service had come through with chainsaws back when, shaved a line through the woods, to tell the Indians what was America, what wasn’t. Just follow the stumps, kid.

Junior had told him that at some point, hadn’t he?

Now Denny was doing one thing Junior had taught, anyway: going up the closest hill to eyeball for a landmark. To find Chief Mountain, like Blackfeet had been doing since forever.

“Looking the wrong way there, son,” Junior said, using his best John Wayne voice.

Soon enough, Denny was going to have to look over, see Junior waiting there for him. Even if he wasn’t scoping for Chief Mountain or for the elk he was supposed to be after, then he would at least be checking for the bear he probably thought he was climbing away from. That he could probably hear huffing and grunting right behind him.

His knob of hill was steep enough now that he was having to reach ahead, touch the ground with his bare fingertips.

Junior took a step higher, his back straightening, some alarm ringing behind his eyes.

It was nothing. Stupid.

You’re the one being stupid, Junior told himself, in his own dad’s voice.

With his hands to the ground like that, Denny had looked like something else. Junior wasn’t even sure what. A four-legged, as the old-time Blackfeet said it, in books written by white men.

And Denny still wasn’t looking across.

“Hey!” Junior called, but didn’t put any real force behind it.

Still, Denny’s head rotated over at an angle Junior associated with owls more than people, his face snapping up perfectly level, his jaw hanging loose, mouth a skewed black oval, eyes vacant even at this distance, and Junior’s breath caught hard enough in his throat that he had to cough.

By the time he was able to look back up, Denny’s front hand was reaching forward delicately to the cairn, like warming his palm by a cast-iron stove. Junior brought the soft back of his glove to his face, to rub the blear and the heat from his eyes.

And Denny.

The bald knob across from him, it was just that again.

No rocks, no son. Nothing.

Junior lifted the walkie, said, “Den-man? You out there?”

Fifteen seconds later, the walkie crackled back in Junior’s hand.

No words, just static. Open air.

Because of distance, he told himself.

Because these walkies had been clearance over in Cutbank, were pretty much line-of-sight pieces-of-crap.

When Junior stepped out of the tree line and into the ditch thirty minutes later, ready to tap the horn three times—their signal—there in the passenger seat of the truck was a shape that slowly assembled itself into Denny: hat, jacket, safety-orange gloves, frosted breath.

Behind the steamed up window, he turned his head to Junior and watched.

•

Because Deezie was in Seattle sitting by her dad’s hospital bed, Junior cracked open two cans of chili and poured them into a pan, shook their can shape away.

Denny was in his room, peeling out of his hunting gear. If Deezie were here, he’d have had to strip at the door.

Junior set the pan down into its ring of flame.

On the ride home he’d said the obvious aloud to Denny: that he’d found his other glove, yeah? Good thing they were orange, right?

Denny had looked at his hands in his lap, then out the window.

“I like hunting,” he’d said.

They were picking up speed coming through Babb Flats.

Once Junior had seen a whole herd of elk there, pale in the moonlight like ghosts of themselves.

“How many horses do you think it was?” Denny asked then, and came around to face Junior. His face up close was just normal.

“How many’d that bear eat, you mean?” Junior asked, changing hands on the wheel.

Denny nodded.

“We should have counted the skulls, I guess,” Junior said, raising his eyebrows to Denny in halfway invitation.

Deezie wouldn’t be home for two more days.

Maybe counting skulls would get Denny over the hump of his fear.

“Grub in ten,” Junior called down the hall.

Denny’s door was closed. No sounds from in there.

Junior knocked, said it again, about food.

“Check,” Denny said, like they were still talking through the walkies.

Fifteen minutes later, the game was on and the couch was the couch and Junior was making his same joke to Denny about chili: that people shouldn’t eat stuff that looks the same going in as it does coming out. Even Deezie would laugh at that one, some nights.

Like had been happening more and more lately, Junior fell asleep somewhere in the third quarter, woke to an empty room, a flatlined television.

And—an open front door?

“Den-man?” he said out loud, on the chance.

No answer.

Junior crossed to the door, hoisting his rifle up on the way. On that chance.

There was nothing, though. Nobody.

Junior had already closed the door when it registered, that something had been different outside. Not wrong, just… not the same.

Because he was the dad and couldn’t afford to be scared, he hauled the door open and stepped out without looking first.

His eyes adjusted, fed him what was different.

Another cairn.

Out where the road to their house crooked over the creek.

Another cairn had been stacked out there.

Junior walked half the way there in sock feet then looked back to the house, sure it was going to be surrounded now by ghost elk, or that there was going to be a figure in the doorway, watching him.

It was just the house. The same one he’d walked out from twenty seconds ago.

“Deezie,” he said then, quiet, secret, because her name always reminded him who he was. And because maybe, six hundred miles away, she would hear, look his way, and that would be enough to keep him safe.

To show himself he could—because she might be watching—Junior walked all the way out to the cairn. With his heel, his gun in both hands, he dislodged the top rock, sent it clattering down the side, taking a couple of small pieces of slate with it.

Under that top rock was just another rock. Because it was rocks all the way down. That’s all it could be.

Cairn was the wrong word, probably.
Pile would have been better. Like what you end up with when you’re trying to plow a field but keep snagging on rocks, keep having to carry them over to the one fence post left from when there were corrals here.

That’s all it was.

Junior studied the trees all around, his rifle at port arms, and heard himself telling Denny again that he just had to walk toward Chief Mountain to find the road.

Chief was too far to even see from this side of Browning, though.

Junior shook his head and went inside without looking behind him even once.

Hours later in bed, his leg kicked deep into territory Deezie insisted was hers, Junior realized he was awake, and wasn’t sure how long he had been.

After that came the realization that he’d been listening. With his whole body.

Something was moving down the hall, and Junior couldn’t have said exactly why, but it was something big, something too big for the hall, but it was lumbering down it all the same.

“Six,” he heard himself say, like an offering.

It was how many skulls there had been at the bear’s dinner table.

He didn’t know if that was a lucky number or not.

He rolled over, away from Deezie’s side, and his burned arm crackled under him and he flinched, had to fumble for the light to see that he’d heard wrong. That his arm was just the same, that it wasn’t on fire anymore. That all the therapy had worked.

Still, instead of sleeping, he rubbed the lotion into his scar tissue, into the moonscape of his melted skin, and then higher, into his shoulder as well. Just to be sure.

•

“But I want to see,” Denny said.

The six skulls.

They were in the truck. The sun was just happening.

“Later,” Junior said, and hated himself for it but did it anyway, again: glanced over at Denny’s hands.

One of his gloves was safety-orange, but the other was Deezie’s wool one. It was white with red-thread stripes that always looked like they were going to catch on something, tear away.

“What about that—that pyramid of rocks yesterday?” Junior said then just real casual, after running it through his head a dozen times, a dozen ways.

In reply Denny looked out his window.

He had no idea about the gloves.

Or the chili still crusted on his lips.

Junior swallowed. It was loud in his ears.

“Who won last night?” he asked.

“Patriots,” Denny said.

“Good old Pilgrims,” Junior said, leaning forward to rest his forearms on the steering wheel.

It was another one of his jokes: of course the Pilgrims won. Look around, right?

“I want to go to the skulls,” Denny said, his voice flat.

“After this,” Junior said.

“After what?”

“Chief Mountain.”

“Chief Mountain,” Denny repeated.

Junior moved his mouth in that way he used to do when his brother was torturing him and he was promising himself not to cry this time.

He cranked his window down.

“I saw a young bear here once,” he said, hooking his chin down the road they weren’t taking, the other way through Babb.

Denny looked down that road and Junior held his breath, waited for Denny to call him out: this wasn’t Junior’s story, it was one of his uncle’s. Junior was stealing it.

Denny just looked over, waited for the rest.

“I had that little Toyota then, the hatchback. Jace drives it now. The one with the primered hood?”

Junior could feel his face heating up, even with the window down.

“You were, like, papoose size,” he said, and waited for Denny to lodge his objection about that not being a Blackfeet word.

Instead, he just sat there with his one orange hand, his one white hand. Six skulls in his head.

“I was looking for this one old bull I knew had come over from the park,” Junior said. “I was just married to your mom then, and we needed meat, yeah?”

No nod.

Just the eyes.

“So I was just cruising along, and this young bear he just comes trotting right up the yellow stripes, his feet flapping like flippers they were so big. Like he was a cartoon of himself. When he stopped beside me to put his paw print on the flank of my trusty steed”—not even a blink of disgust—“I could see his collar, the one that told he was crossing the Line here, that he was on
Indian land now.”

The rest of the story was his Aunt Lonnie, using her favorite nail polish to trace the bear’s paw print in the Toyota, but Junior didn’t have the heart, and Deezie didn’t wear nail polish anyway.

This story had been doomed from the start.

“I miss that Toyota,” he said. “It was one of the magic ones, I think.”

“Papoose,” Denny finally said.

Five minutes later Junior turned them up toward Chief Mountain.

The truck coughed like there was air in the line, but it caught, pulled them up the black ribbon of road, the clouds cold enough that they were skimming the trees.

There was nobody else.

In the summer, people would come up to tie ribbons to certain branches, to trunks that felt right, but in the winter those ribbons were all faded and frozen, their prayers trapped.

“There’s where I came out,” Junior said, slowing to show his tracks crunching through the crust of snow in the ditch.

Denny was looking higher, though.

Junior slowed to a stop two hundred yards farther up the road, where the next pair of boots had crossed the ditch. And the handprints beside the boots.

Because he’d fallen, Junior told himself.

Because he was twelve.

“This is you,” he said, and Denny looked over to him, then back out into the trees.

“You don’t remember, do you?” Junior said, the lump in his throat cracking his voice up.

“We were here yesterday,” Denny said.

“We were here yesterday,” Junior said, and, because that’s what you do, Denny stepped down.

“It’s loud in there,” he said, pointing with his face into the trees.

“Scare something good my way,” Junior told him, instead of everything else.

Denny kept looking.

“There’s a restaurant out there somewhere,” Junior said then, having to close his eyes to get it said, his chin trembling. “There’s no tabletops, but it used to be a—a place.”

“A restaurant,” Denny said, looking back to Junior, not seeming to care he was sitting there behind the wheel crying.

“They served venison,” Junior said, and looked hard the other way, toward Chief Mountain, stationed up in the clouds like a sentinel.

Junior prayed it was watching right now.

After a thirty-count, he looked back to the other side of the road.

Denny was gone, into the trees.

Junior turned around, pulled down to where he’d gone in yesterday—everything had to be the same—and stepped in all his same footprints as close as he could, and, crashing through the trees like he was, he could almost feel his uncles on the rise behind him, waiting for what he was about to flush out.

If they were still around, they could have told him what’s buried in the cairns, he knew.

Or told him not to look.

But it was too late now. He was already doing it.
They were already doing it, him and Denny, Den-man, father and son out in the woods, in the cold, trying to undo the day before, and Junior only realized it was too late when he opened his mouth to call to Denny and static from the walkie came out.

From deeper in the trees, his real son opened his mouth, answered with that same open-air hiss, and like that they felt toward each other in the new darkness.

I was twenty-two, still flashing my high-school diploma at job interviews. Still doing stuff like stealing an extra bag of ice from the cooler if the clerk’s not eyeballing me. Hiding a litter of mismatched puppies for the weekend for my friend Dell, and not asking any questions. Bumming smokes outside the bars, but sometimes having my own pack.

I was just getting into tattoos, too. Not on me—my arms had been choked blue not four months after I moved into my own place—but from me. That was the idea, anyway. I wasn’t officially apprenticing anywhere, and nobody’d offered their skin to me yet, but I’d always been drawing. My notebooks from junior high are like a running autobiography in doodles, and I’d worked one summer applying decals and pinstriping at my uncle’s bodyshop, and finally graduated to window tint before he trusted me with the front-door keys.

He should have known better.

But, tats, they were kind of the same as those junior high notebooks. They were the one thing I could concentrate on. Just for hours. Planning, sketching, tracing. For now I was practicing on the back of my right calf and the side of my left I could reach. Snakes and geckos mostly, though I could feel a dragon curled up inside me, waiting for the right swatch of skin. I’ve talked to the grizzly old-timers, the real gunslingers of the wild west of body art, and they say you go through phases. You get stuck on something and talk all your clients into it. What you’re trying to do is get it right, what’s in your head. You want to get it right and make it permanent, and then watch it walk away.

Like I say, though, tattooing was strictly a sideline, and, as I couldn’t afford supplies, it probably wouldn’t have been just super hygienic for me to draw on anybody, either. It was just me so far, so I guess that didn’t matter too much. But I could already see myself ten years down the road. My own shop, a girlfriend with my ink reaching north out of her bra, circling her shoulder, everybody but me having to imagine what the full image was.

Anyway, where it started: one night, to pay me back for the thing with the puppies, Dell’s on my phone, has a shiny new job.

“Seriously, morgue attendant?” I said, turning away from my living room of three people with names I hadn’t all-the-way  caught.

“Different,” he said.

I told him maybe, sure, but was there two hours after midnight all the same, a cigarette pinched between my thumb and index finger.

“Leave it,” Dell said, opening the door on me and looking past in his important way. Into the parking lot.

Saddleview Funeral Chapel and Crematorium.

I rubbed my cherry out on the tall ashtray, followed him in.

•

On the way through the maze of viewing rooms to get to the back, Dell told me how his uncle got him this gravy gig. His uncle had worked here forever and a day ago, sitting up with dead soldiers mailed back from war. Or, not sitting up, but sleeping in the same room with, like a guard. It was because there had been some political vandalism or something. Anyway, the boss man now had been the boss man then, and remembered Dell’s uncle, so here Dell was. His job was to buzz the alley door open for deliveries, and not touch anything.

He was Dell, though, right?

We toured through the cold room. It was slab city, naked dead people everywhere, their usually-covered parts not nearly so interesting as I’d kind of been hoping. We put those paper mouth-masks on and felt like mad scientists drifting through the frost, deciding who to bring back, who to let rot.

“Hell yeah,” I said through my mask, and, ahead of me, Dell nodded that he knew, he knew.

I told him about who-all’d been at my place earlier, maybe lying a little, and in return, like I owed him here, he asked me for the thousandth time for my little sister’s number. Not permission, he’d always assumed he had permission to do what and whoever he wanted. But he wanted me to middleman it.

“Off limits,” I told him, about her, trying to make my voice sound all no-joke. Because it was.

“Fruit on the limb,” Dell said, reaching up to pluck her. Except more graphically, somehow. With distinct pornographic intent.

“She’s not like us,” I said, but before we could get into our usual dance where my sister was involved, the lights dimmed. A second later, a painful buzz filled the place, coming in from all sides, like the walls were speakers.

“Delivery,” Dell said. “Hide.”

Alone in the room with the dead moments later, I looked around, breathing harder than I was meaning to. All fun and games until one of those bright white sheets slithers off, right? Until somebody sits up.

Finally I held my breath and crawled in under one of the tables, onto that clangy little shelf, some guy’s naked ass not two feet over my face, his body bloated with all kinds of vileness.

After ten minutes in which I got terminally sober, the double doors slammed back. They were the same kind restaurants have, that are made for crashing open, that don’t even have handles.

A gurney or whatever was rolling through, no legs pushing it. Just exactly what I needed, yeah. Finally it bumped into a cabinet, stopped. I breathed out but then its wheels started creaking again. It lurched its way over to right beside me, parked its haunted self inches from my face. Just far enough away for a hand to flop down in front of my face. It was pale, dead, the beds of the fingernails dark blue.

I flinched back, fell off my shelf, and Dell laughed, stepped off the belly of the new dead dude he’d been using like a knee board.

I flipped him off, pushed him away and lit up a cigarette. Not like anybody in there was going to mind. Dell took one too and we leaned back against stainless steel edges, reflected on our lives.

Another lie.

What he did was haul a laser tag kit up from his locker.

It was the best war ever, at least until, trying to duck my killshot, he crashed a cart over, a dead lady spilling out, sliding to a stop at a cabinet.

I read her toe tag, looked up to her face.

On her inner thigh was a chameleon.

Everything starts somewhere, Dad.

•

Before you get worried, no, this isn’t some necro-thing about to happen. I never asked Dell what those puppies were for, but I’m pretty sure he’d nabbed them from about twelve different backyards—people in the classifieds give their addresses over so willingly—and would guess he sold them from a box in the mall parking lot. Meaning they all have good lives now. He wasn’t sacrificing them out on some lonely road or anything. He wasn’t trying to conjure up a buddy to rape dead women with.

However, if what he was looking for was somebody to trade him rides and cigarettes and ex-girlfriends’ numbers for some quality time alone in his cold room with a tat gun, well: there I was.

When you’re looking to hire onto a parlor, to rent a booth—hell, even just to lure a mentor in—one thing you’ve always got to have, it’s an art book. A portfolio. What you can do, your greatest hits, the story of your craft.

Problem is, every two-bit dropout can pull something like that together.

But. What if, say, you’d moved to the city only a couple of months ago. And had always just done ink for friends, but were looking to go legit, now. And, what? Did I snap pics of any of those mythically-good tats?

Yeah, yes, I did.

Here.

Play with the hue a bit on your buddy’s computer, and a gecko crawling up a dead guy’s shoulder, his skin will look so alive. And there won’t even be any rash, any blood. Like you’ve got that light of a touch.

At first Dell would only let me practice on the bodies that were queued up for the oven, as that would erase evidence of our non-crime, but one night he left me alone to make a burger run—it’s cliché that morgue attendants are always eating sloppy food, but I guess it’s cliché for a reason—and I unplugged my gun, plugged it back in under the table of this woman I was pretty sure had been a yoga instructor. And recently.

Her skin was tight, springy. Most of the dead, I was having to really stretch their flesh out, then get Dell to hold it tight while I snapped the pic, so that night’s lizard wouldn’t look like it was melting off.

With her, though. I was just halfway through the iguana’s tail by the time Dell got back.

He had to let me finish, because who conks with only ten percent of a tattoo done, right?

It was a beauty, too. Just like in my head, I made the tongue curl the opposite direction the tail was, for symmetry. And where it was reaching, only her boyfriend would ever know.

Pretty as it was, though, I didn’t get any burgers—this was Dell’s punishment (like I would want to eat something his hands had been touching on)—and, to make him laugh, I inked X’s over the eyes of the guy at the front of the line for the oven. He was skinny, pale with death, still cold from the freezer, his two gunshot wounds puckered up like lips. He looked like a punk reject from 1977.

Dell shook his head, walked away smiling. I could see his reflection in all the stainless steel, and, as it turned out, Dell’s uncle’s reference didn’t mean much when the boss man’s just-dead, honor-student, choir-singing, yoga-bunny niece he’d been saving for the morning to embalm personally turned up with an evil bug-eyed lizard of some kind trying to crawl up her side, its tongue reaching up to circle her nipple in the most lecherous fashion.

Some people got no sense of art, I mean.

Dell in particular.

•

Like he had to, he came over, did what he needed to do to my face, to my television and my lamp. The television wasn’t mine, but I wasn’t saying anything. And then, so I would remember, he dug my tattoo gun up from my backseat, came back in and pulled me off the couch by the shirt I wasn’t wearing, sat on my arms with his knees so he could drill some bathroom-wall version of a penis into my chest. Or maybe it was a novelty sprinkler, or a leaky cowboy hat, I don’t know.

Chances are I could have bucked him off, but I kind of deserved it too, I guessed. Though if he’d been a real friend, he would have lit a cigarette for me. And maybe done a better job.

When he was done he threw my rig into the corner, slammed through my screen door, told me to forget his number if I knew what was good for me.

I spent the next two days turning his punishment tattoo into a Texas bluebonnet, because that’s where I’d been born. At least that was the new story I was going to have ready.

How a flower was going to fit with the iguana theme I’d been studying on lately, I had no idea, but maybe it didn’t matter so much either. Soon I wasn’t going to have any skin left.

A week passed, then another, and, standing outside a bar one night with my shirt already gone, I saw the last girl Dell had been shacking up with. I’d taken her to prom once upon a time, when prom still existed. She was riding by on the back of another guy’s motorcycle. Really pressing herself into him. Glaring us all down.

“She thinks we care?” I said to whoever was beside me.

“Probably thinks we did it,” whoever it was said back, taking a deep drag and holding it, holding it.

I narrowed my eyes, looked over through her smoke: Sheila. From when I was a community-college student for three weeks.

“Story?” I said, offering her one from my pack.

She held it sideways, ran her fingers along the white paper and sneered about it like she always did, like she hated cigarettes, like she was just smoking them to kill them. But she threaded it behind her ear all the same. Your monkey’s always whispering to you, I guess.

She shrugged, told me about Dell.

He’d been found not just normal-dead, like OD’d or stabbed or drowned in vomit in a bed across town. No, he’d been like exploded behind a club. A dental-records-only kind of thing. Smeared on the brick, important footsteps leading away, the whole trip.

I eeked my mouth out, stood on the stoop for more smokes than I’d meant.

The bluebonnet on my chest was waving with each inhale.

I went home, watched it in the mirror. Added red buds in the blue, in memorium. I think that’s the word.

When I searched Dell up on the newspaper site, two hits came up.

One was his obituary, the funeral I’d missed, and the other hit was about impropriety with the dead.

The blotter had nothing at all about the late-night, involuntary tattoo on the owner’s car-wrecked niece—I guess I could have been famous, started a career right there—but it did mention how Saddleview was getting the funeral home version of an audit. Evidently, one month it had taken in more bodies than it had buried.

I shook my head, clicked away. Dell.

He’d probably got the orders wrong. Pushed one too many into the oven one night, then tried to fix the manifest, had to burn a to-be-buried stiff as well.

It didn’t have anything to do with me, anyway.

That part of my life was over.

Lie number ten thousand, there, I guess. But who’s keeping count.

•

As for why Dell had turned inside out behind the bar, I had no clue. He’d always been high-strung. In junior high, he’d always been the first one to put his lips to the Freon tube, the first one to spray thinner into the rag, press it against his mouth, so I figured it was some accumulated chemical reaction. Something the military would probably pay big bucks to the get the formula for. They should have been monitoring us the whole time. Every night, we were out there, experimenting.

And, just because Dell was gone, that didn’t mean the lab was closed.

One night maybe three weeks after the funeral where I probably should been a pallbearer, there we all were, miles out of the city, in a field with a bonfire, like the bonfire had always been there, waiting. There were sparks and, when the wood started to run out, everybody had to donate one article of clothing. And then two.

It was interesting in a decline-of-the-world kind of way. I was kicked back in a lawn chair, zoned out, just mellow, my shirt burning, keeping us all warm. I was watching this one girl named Kelly, already down to her pink clamshell bra, and thinking I might have to wait this situation out when another car pulled up and we all kind of sighed.

Too many cars meant the cops wouldn’t be far behind.

Then, too, depending on who was in that car, it could all be worth it.

I shrugged to myself, leaned back to see who the new victims were going to be: first was a guy who could have been a surf bum in a movie ten years ago, second was his clone, and third was a red-headed girl I thought I knew from somewhere.

When the fourth stepped out, I knew where I knew Red from: my sister’s friend from down the street at the old house.

Gigi was here.

“Hey!” my non-buddy Seth called out, dancing behind her, pointing down to her with both hands.

I settled deeper into my chair, looked back to the fire like maybe I could blind myself by staring.

Soon enough she found me, stood there with a silver can in her hand and said, “Dad’s been trying to reach you.”

“Dell?” I said.

“You were his best friend.”

“He was a punk. A wastoid.”

“And what are you?”

“You should leave,” I told her.

“I’m the one who should be doing things, yeah,” she said, and that was it.

For a while some guys were running at the fire and jumping over it, but that was short-lived. It was mostly quiet and surly, at least for me. Just music and muttering, and too many snapshot flashes of my sister with surfer boy two, his arm draped over her in a way that was making me swallow hard.

Before the night was over, there were going to be words. And probably more. But first I’d need to make sure he was eighteen—too old to press charges, according to Dell, who would have learned the hard way.

I was nodding to myself about how it was all going to play out, how I was about to step across to the cable spool they were using like a love seat, and was even halfway counting down in my head when a chainsaw pulled up to our little gathering in the sticks.

It was Dell’s ex. On her new guy’s motorcycle. She stepped off—dismounted, more like—and he just sat there still holding the grips, inspecting us all, the fire dancing in the black glass of his helmet.

I swallowed, looked away like I’d never seen them, tried not to track Gigi even though I did register the t-shirt she’d had on at one point. It was in the fire. The first chance I got I went to pee in the tall grass, never came back, just stopped at a convenience store, called the party in.

You do what you can to save your little sister, I guess. Even cash your friends in.

In my living room the next morning, still awake—I hadn’t planned on coming home this early—I ran my hand over the elaborate, dragon-scaled salamander on the right side of my left calf.

I tried to keep the hair there shaved down, to really show it off, but, running my hand over it, it was crackly. And smelled worse than bad.

I sleuthed through my head, made the necessary connection: this was the leg I’d had kicked up on the cooler, close to the fire. On purpose, to show off my work, show what I could do. I’d even been wetting down the scales with beer when nobody was looking, just waiting for anybody to say anything.

Nobody had.

Instead I’d just curled all the hair on my leg, and singed the heel of my favorite shoe.

Everybody had to have seen, though. It was beautiful, it was crawling, it was alive.

I smoothed it down, passed out on the couch with that lizard warm under my hand, its eyes open for me, wheeling in their orbits, the pupils just slits, like rips you could climb through, into another world.

I should have tried.

•

I woke at dusk and flinched back hard, deeper into the couch.

There was a black motorcycle helmet on my coffee table. Watching me.

“Recognized your work,” a guy said from the kitchen, and punctuated it by closing my refrigerator hard enough to rattle the ketchup.

Dell’s ex’s new boyfriend.

“Be still my heart,” I said, clutching it, sitting up.

“Don’t be stupid,” he told me, and stepped in, my tub of butter in his left hand, his right index finger smeared glossy yellow.

He ran it into his mouth, pulled his finger out like he was sneaking frosting off somebody’s saved-back cupcake.

“Dairy,” he said, running his finger along the edge of the tub again, then shaking his head to get his oily bangs out of his face.

I nearly screamed.

His eyes.

There were two crude X’s tattooed over them. Two X’s I’d done. When he was cold and dead on a rolling cart, two bullets punched through his chest.

“Been looking for someone with your particular…talents,” he said, downing another fingerful.

I shook my head no, no, saw Dell smeared on a brick wall and stood to crash my way to the screen door, escape out into the night, into some other life.

The boyfriend’s helmet caught me in the back like a bowling ball, threw me into the wall by the door, the whole house shaking when I hit.

He turned me over with the toe of his boot, stared down at my chest. Eating butter the whole while.

“Thought you were into reptiles,” he said, about my bluebonnet, his accent tuned to the UK station, and just dialed over all the way to it.

I coughed, turned to the side, threw up.

He stepped his boot out of the way.

When I was done he kneeled down, jammed his butter finger into my mouth, smearing yellow all around inside. It was cold, wet, tasteless.

His face so close to mine.

“I’m sorry?” I said.

He laughed, pushed my head down, bouncing it off the carpet.

“You know cow milk is ninety-eight percent the same as cow blood?” he said, dipping his finger into the tub again.

I was just trying to breathe.

He shrugged, said, “Close enough,” and set the butter down on a speaker.

From my angle on the floor, he was forever tall, and still pale like a junkie. But he did carry himself something like a British Invasion reject, definitely. Something self-consciously waifish and bad attitude about the way he caved his shoulders in around his chest. The hollow where his stomach should be. His lowslung jeans, like he was just daring you to trace his belt line.

There weren’t supposed to be any of his kind anymore, though. Them and the dragons, they were on the extinct list, right? All there were that was even close anymore was all the goths, I guess, the Sandman dreamers, the Bauhaus die-hards, the velvet vest crowd who’d read too much Anne Rice, were probably going to grow up into good little steampunk rejects one day.

This boyfriend, though, I had a sense he was their original. That Neil Gaiman had seen him at a party in the UK, that Anne Rice had followed him through the streets of New Orleans one night, that Sid Vicious had taken a cue or two from him.

“This,” he said, giving me some jazz hands action over his face, his eyes, those X’s, “this isn’t just permanent, you know? With me it’s kind of forever, now, yeah? Get what I’m saying? What do you think of that, Jamie Boy?”

I pushed myself up against the wall, let some butter dribble from my mouth, down onto the bluebonnet.

“Jamie Boy?” I managed to say.

My dad was the only one who did that.

He just stared at me about that.

“She was nice,” he said, falling back onto the couch like it was a throne, licking his lips in the most exaggerated way. “But little sisters are always nice, aren’t they?”

“Who told you?”

“You did, telescope eyes.”

Meaning he’d followed her home. Thinking that’s where I was going to be. And then he’d made do with who was there.

I stood, but it was just to fall across the coffee table, into the hall. Not for any window but for the bathroom, for the toilet. To throw the rest of the world I used to know up.

In the shower, exploded, smeared all over the tile, was Dell’s ex.

She had a bar of soap stuffed in what was left of her mouth.

“Sorry for the mess,” the boyfriend said from the door, his leather pants somehow vulgar. “Got to clean up after you eat, though. If you don’t, they come back, all that. I’m sure you’ve heard.”

He was bored with it, trailed off, looking down the hall like at something important.

I knew where he was looking, though.

Four miles over, into the Crane Meadow subdivision. Into what could no longer really be considered a living room, I was pretty sure.

•

So, monsters are real. Surprise.

For some reason I’d never considered this.

Or—I’m lying again: one monster’s real, anyway.

And I get the sense that’s just how he likes it.

When I was done emptying myself into the toilet, I zombied my way back to the living room, my peripheral vision just a smoky haze.

Instead of killing me like I expected, like I wanted, like I deserved, he slapped a pair of blue nitrile gloves down on the coffee table, told me to rubber up, whirred my gun in his other hand.

I looked down at myself to see what room was left for him to do his damage on.

I had it backwards.

Until thirty minutes before dawn, his left hand cupped around my balls the whole time—he’d crunched a metal thermos into tinfoil, to show what he could do—I worked on his face.

Every tattoo artist has to be able to repair somebody else’s work. To cover up a name, fix a misspelling, fudge a date. Put a bikini top on that girl, make a pistol into a submarine, a submarine into a flying saucer, a flying saucer into a shadow, all that.

What I was supposed to do was make those dashed-on X’s over his eyes into something presentable enough for the coming eternity. Something he wouldn’t have to hide behind a helmet, a helmet he could only explain if he had a motorcycle, and he hated motorcycles. Everything went by too fast.

While I did my thing, holding his dead, cold skin tight—I’d had practice—he told me about 1976. How glorious it had been. No cell phone cameras, no bullshit DNA, no credit cards in the system, to track people with. Back then he never woke up in morgues, had to sneak out. Back then he was keeping the morgues stocked.

In his raspy singsong voice he told me about concerts and brushes with fame, and about a milkmaid he’d known with blond hair that curled on the side like she was an orthodox Jew, and how that framed her face so perfect, even though, where and when she’d lived, she probably hadn’t even known Jews existed. How he never knew her name, only her insides. How she tasted.

Because I didn’t have the barber patter down yet, and because this was my first time inking a face, I just worked, and kept light on my toes. It wasn’t on purpose, but his hand on my balls—going up on your toes is kind of a natural response.

Still, even working fast enough to sweat, I was only able to get one eye done.

I was being careful, I mean.

I handed him the mirror, let him look, my balls still in his hand.

He looked side-to-side at himself and squeezed gently, rolling me like marbles, my spine straightening from it, and then he looked me straight on.

It wasn’t bad.

That mime make-up trick, with a tapered, upside-down cross kind of coming through the eyebrow, leaking down onto the cheek? I’d taken some of that and mixed it with the diamond eyes harlequins in comic books have, and filled it all in solid, so that his right eyeball, looking out from all that black, it was seriously wicked. I’d gotten the idea…well, first from what I needed to cover that stupid X, but second from a facepaint band I’d seen one night—not KISS, please, and this wasn’t a juggalo night, and I’ve never seen Marilyn Manson live. Reading the show’s write-up the next day, though, the show-off reviewer was saying how the lead singer’s black-bagged eyes had been an insult to everything The Misfits had ever not stood for.

I didn’t know Glenn Danzig’s make-up well enough to make the link like the reviewer was—I was always more of a Sex Pistols kind of punk, I guess—but the guy with my balls in his hands seemed to recognize something. “Sick like a dog,” he said, and held the mirror over to get a proper angle on his face. Run his other hand over the stubble he would probably never grow.

He liked it.

I breathed out for what felt like the first time in hours and he stood up into that one moment of relief I had, his lips right against mine, my balls tighter in his hand now, so that I was practically floating, my eyes watering whether I was telling them to or not.

I turned to the side to let him do what he was going to do and caught the sun, just starting to warm the very top of my gauzy ancient hand-me-down drapes.

“Hey,” I said about it.

He hissed, brought his mouth down to my neck, his teeth grazing my skin there, and said, “We finish it tonight,” tapping his naked eye, and then him and his black helmet and his perfumed stench were gone, stalking out the back, leaving my kitchen door open behind him, his bike tearing the morning open.

At first I just zoned out there after he was gone, staring at the pattern of the skirt tacked onto the bottom of my couch, pretending it was the curtain of a show I was waiting for. Pretending a tiny actor was about to prance out, ask how I’d liked the show, how I was liking this joke.

I made my way to the bedroom, rang my dad’s phone.

No answer.

I shut my eyes, threw the phone into the wall.

Gigi. Gretchen, really, but really Gigi, since she was little.

I’d always felt like I was out here throwing my life one way so she could go the other way. Like I was sacrificing myself so she wouldn’t have to. Like this was the only way to save her, the only way to be a decent big brother.

It’s stupid, I know. But I’m not smart.

My dad could have told you that.

Still, sometimes.

•

What I’ve done now, all day, it’s scrawl a rough X over each eye. And then over every free inch of space I’ve got left on my body, I’ve traced out scales, like I’m going to shade them in with color later. On my left side, kind of where I always imagined my heart to be, four of those scales have names on them. Like tombstones.

Mom, Dad, Gigi. Me.

This is the kind of art that would get me space at any parlor in town. The kind of imagery bleeding into meaning that makes real tattoo artists wince.

But that’s all over now, I guess.

It’s almost dark again.

Soon the chainsaw sound will be dying in the air, the helmet on my couch. A monster kicked back in my easy chair, his right hand between my legs, keeping me honest.

One last job, right?

But it’s also my first.

To prepare, and also because I can’t help it anymore, I feel my way down to the bathroom, lick what I can off the tile walls of the shower, scraping the rest in with my fingers. Pushing it deep inside.

What’s left of Dell’s ex is black and dried, but that taste underneath, it’s to die for. To kill for. Milk could never be like this, not in a thousand years. Cows got nothing on people.

I wore gloves when I was working on him, yeah, so I wouldn’t catch anything that was catching.

But then I used the same needle on myself, and I went deeper than I had to for just the ink to set.

His blood spiked up and down me. All through me, hungry.

For two hours, between one and three, the sun right above the house instead of slashing in through the window, I’m pretty sure I was clinically dead.

And I kind of still am.

Will he be able to smell it on me right away, through the flannel shirt I’ve put on to cover my new ink, to cover the bluebonnet on my chest that’s now my chest cracking open to reveal the real me, crawling out tooth and claw, or will we wait to do this thing until I’ve driven the needles through his naked eye into what the centuries have left of his brain?

It doesn’t matter.

Either way I win.

There always was a dragon curled up inside me, Dad.

Tonight it’s going to stand up.

to take their stupid little drama public (again), but that seemed to be part of what made them work the rest of the time, too, right? If the screamed accusations about last weekend’s unanswered voice mails and the apologies each of them promised never to give didn’t have an audience, then it would be like those promises weren’t even real, like the fight never happened.

Meanwhile, this is a camping trip.

Nevermind that they’re still forty miles from the park, and not in the same car anymore, and Jonathan isn’t crying, is not going to give that to Lucas, and the boy sitting in the little folded-out shelf of the pop-up camper parked longways by the curb, the soles of his shoes barely scraping the ground in a rhythm Jonathan is having problems looking away from, he’s just staring, like waiting for something to happen.

Jonathan nods to the boy, gives him some of the fakest cheer ever in the history of roadside camaraderie—not the boy’s fault, any of this—and turns away, walks out to the farthest part of the pavement, where he can see the river.

It’s high, rushing. From some impossible distance away, probably. From the mountains they’re supposed to be going to.

And, out in the woods—looking back yet, to see if Jonathan’s following?—Lucas, still committed to the gesture of leaving, Jonathan knows, but already getting lost, too. Just to show Jonathan how serious he is about all this. Jonathan not going after him because he’s serious too. He’s committed, here.

Their new tent and telescoping walking poles and thick socks are all organized in the trunk, even, waiting for them. Marks on the map to show the last places to fill their two five-gallon water jugs. A note on the dash about sunblock, for Jonathan’s nose. Written in Lucas’s scrawly hand.

Jonathan closes his eyes tight. Throws a useless handful of gravel out towards the river. Most of it turns out to be dirt, grime, dust. It sticks to his face but that doesn’t matter, it can’t stick, because he’s not crying, he’s just going to look back to that boy sitting half in the pop-up and try to remember trips with his own family, back before everything, the six of them crawling across the map, taking pictures, mailing joke postcards to each other on the sly, so they’d be waiting at home when they got back.

The boy’s not there to cue all this up for Jonathan, though. Like the camper just popped up and ate him, has him in its innards now, is going to deposit him in pieces on the road at seventy miles per hour, for the badgers and possums to lick up between headlights.

No, though.

No bad things.

Jonathan taps his index finger against his thumb tip in quick succession, a private pattern, part of his secret conditioning, the big effort to start controlling his thinking, to not let it go directions he doesn’t want anymore. A drumbeat to keep the shadows away.

Like always, it doesn’t work, just gives the darkness a rhythm.

If he opens his eyes, though, then the boy has to be in the rumble seat of his family’s supercab Ford, doesn’t he?

Yes. Yes yes yes.

Enough that Jonathan really doesn’t even have to look.

The world is a normal place, where normal things happen.

The boy will still be looking back through the sliding glass, around a bumper sticker maybe, looking back and trying to shape the question in his mouth for his mom, about the strange men who had been yelling at each other, sputtering and spluttering their feelings, one of them holding his hands over his eyes, the other biting his upside-down thumb to try to focus the pain.

Good luck explaining that, Mom, Jonathan says in his head, in farewell, and takes the most mournful posture he can on the picnic table, sitting up on the eating part, trying to cut the perfect spiteful silhouette, just looking out from under his eyebrows at the pop-up camper still just sitting there—this is how the photographer would pose the model, if this were a shoot (black and white, the river a torpid grey slate)—but then balls his hand and doesn’t hit anything.

“Petty,” he says aloud. About himself. About this. And how he’s not going to be like that anymore. How it never helps anything, trying to stage the scene.

To mess it up as best he can, he ducks into the foul, cinderblock, nearly-all-the-way-to-the-roof restroom, and unrolls a single paper towel, isn’t just real sure what he wants to do with it. All over the stalls are scratched-in names, imprecations, rhymes, pictures, worse.

Jonathan folds the paper towel up into perfect quarters, leaves it on top of the holder—this is an apology—then breathes in, out, in, out, until he can control it.

When he walks back into the glare of the sun, a few more of the families and their campers and RVs are gone, sucked into the future. Replaced by others just the same.

Because he doesn’t deserve the river—it’s pretty, perfect, so blue—he sits with his back to it, sits on a picnic table, punishing himself with the jeans-model pose now, doesn’t even brush the crumbs and whatever off, sits long enough to see his shadow move across the pebbled walk, long enough that the chi-chi birds finally dart in close enough for him to reach if he wanted to. He doesn’t.

The black birds, though, the ones Jonathan has always thought must smell bad, they don’t come that close. Maybe he knows what they are.

Jonathan nods to them. Swallows.

His shadow sundials around him and he’s got to pee but doesn’t.

Fourteen carloads of family angle into their designated slots, back out again. Continue.

Jonathan cries. Refuses to wipes his face. Can’t stop thinking about the thick socks in the trunk, for some reason. How he was looking forward to sleeping in them. And the plastic taste of the water from the tall green jug that looks like a gas can.

He laughs at himself. Stupid, stupid.

At dusk, at what Jonathan considers to be precisely dusk, Lucas returns.

Not from the woods all around, but walking down the ramp from the interstate.

He got lost, Jonathan knows, and zeroed in on the sound of radial tires, stumbled out into the ditch.

Good for him.

His shirt’s tied around his head like this is an adventure, his ridiculous shorts rolled up past his tan lines. And he’s Lucas.

Jonathan steps down from the picnic table, the seat of his shorts adhering to something surely unmentionable—jelly?—because if Lucas has to walk the whole way over, this won’t work.

They meet at the yellow part of the curb, only awkward eye contact.

“We still have to get some sunblock,” Jonathan says, kind of biting his lower lip and hating himself for biting it.

“And water,” Lucas says, his hand close enough, swinging enough, that Jonathan can catch it with the side of his hand, the world taking shape around that slight contact, that skin-on-skin.

Now, the car. No hugs across the console yet, no pats on the thigh, no negotiated radio stations, just the click of the headlights, the wash of halogen before them like a spray of impossibly bright particles. Silence.

It’s enough.

At the next gas station, the sunblock on the counter, Lucas catches Jonathan’s eyes: his wallet.

Jonathan takes Lucas by the shoulders, turns him around: no wallet. Just the tacky tattoo of a ruler on Lucas’s lower back, that Lucas admits he regrets.

“You had your front pocket one, though,” Jonathan says. “Right?”

What he’s not saying: The one I bought you. That you loved so much.

“Wanted to go rugged for the trip,” Lucas shrugs back.

The wallet’s Lucas’s dad’s old one, Jonathan knows, and will never understand. But he doesn’t have to, he tells himself.

Jonathan buys the sunblock, stands in the parking lot looking back the way they came.

“Do you remember where you took your shirt off?” he says to Lucas. “Was it on the road, at least?”

Lucas doesn’t say anything, doesn’t have to. Something contrite about the way he’s standing there in front the ice machine.

How could Jonathan not love him, how could he not want worse than anything to go sixty miles back, feel along the shoulder of the road with their headlights, trucks slamming by inches from them, their campsite going unclaimed, the pasta they’d planned drying out in the back seat?

And, because of the way the exits are in this state, it turns out to be seventy-two miles, not sixty. Full dark.

“It’s black, right?” Jonathan says, creeping along the shoulder, leaning over the wheel.

“Dark green,” Lucas says, and then, after telling Lucas about car surfing and high school, proves it by spidering out his window without even checking the traffic. He lays bellydown on the roof, lowers his hand.

Jonathan touches it with his lips, holds it there, then slides the flashlight into it. The highway patrol’s just going to love them, right?

But still.

They are who they are. What else could they be doing? And anyway, if this won’t make a good story in a month or two, then Jonathan doesn’t know what would. Who needs a campsite when you can be as stupid as this right on the highway.

Every third or fourth truck blasts its air horn, too. Jonathan can only wince, thinking what Lucas must be doing to elicit this.

At this rate, it’s going to be midnight by the time they make the rest stop again. Jonathan wonders if his paper towel is still folded on the top of the trashcan in the bathroom, and then, more tactile memory than anything, remembers the jelly he had maybe sat in on the picnic table.

He sets his feet against the floorboard—the car’s only idling forward—thrusts his hips out, and, yep, he was stuck. The jelly drying against the seat.

That’ll be another part of the story. The part where everybody feels sorry for him but empathizes too, has sat in jelly themselves at some point, of course.

“Hold, hold!” Lucas calls from outside and Jonathan finds the brake pedal, finds it isn’t the brake pedal. Surges ahead instead, clumping over something.

And then he stops.

“It’s right under us, isn’t it?” Jonathan says. Just out loud.

The dog, the deer, the whatever it is the truckers caught with their tall chrome bumpers, slung out to the side, for the birds to feast on.

Lucas doesn’t answer, or, the smell coming in through the open window, it’s all the answer he needs.

Jonathan dry heaves, his first instinct to thumb the window shut, but then, because it’s part of a deal—all it would have taken is one wrong trucker to have seen Lucas’s ruler tat, and let his rig drift over two, three feet, play some fag tag out on the interstate—he makes himself breathe the decay in.

His eyes water, his hands tighter than tight on the thin steering wheel, and he clumps the car ahead, over whatever it was, the left tire even spinning a time or two in the—the—

Jonathan’s mouth fills with vomit, hot and burning, and he’s only just able to slam the car into park before diving from his door, losing it in the tall grass, completely emptying himself out, the kind that comes out his nose too so that his eyes are crying, his lungs contracting, trying to breathe—is that brains? am I throwing up brains?—and the grass is so tall that it catches whatever he had in his stomach, paints his face back with it.

This starts it all over again, Jonathan pushing away, getting his hands in it now, suddenly sure beyond a doubt that what really happened was Lucas tipped over the front of the car, under the wheels, had been asking Jonathan to stop, stop, please.

Blurry, blinding headlights streaming by, Jonathan looks to the car to be sure he’s wrong.

Like the boy in his camper at the rest stop, though, Lucas, he’s not there. Gone. Not rolled onto the hood laughing like Jonathan half-expected, not still on the roof, his ass to the truckers, his shorts nothing his father ever would have stuffed a wallet into, and not squatted there by Jonathan with a towel from the backseat, to help.

Just gone.

Jonathan wipes his mouth and nose with the back of his arm, wipes his arm on his shorts.

No, he’s telling himself. No. No no no, that wasn’t Lucas under the car, it wasn’t—

And then he hears him, Lucas. Beside, ahead, the woods. Isn’t going to smile but can’t help it either.

“Lucas!” he calls out, standing.

Just that sound: feet on leaf litter. Moving away.

The perfect time for games, yes. The most appropriate place.

“Lucas,” he says again, this time mostly just to himself, in explanation.

One last look to the road, the car, the dome light still on because the door’s open, the car in park, some unmentionable lump of gore just behind the rear bumper. The trunk packed with two days of perfect camping. Those thick socks.

And, on the other side of the ditch, in the trees, Lucas’s flashlight, bobbing dimly.

What Jonathan’s trying to pace out is whether this can be part of the story they’re going to tell. Does trudging back up the interstate at dawn, their clothes sodden from various riverside frolics, trudging up to a car stripped to nothing, probably vandalized, can that be the punchline? Or, what if the battery’s just dead? What if there’s just a tow-me pink sticker on the windshield?

Or—or what if Lucas panics out there alone, falls into one of the old mining shafts or whatever it is that’s always making the news out here?

An easy decision, really.

Jonathan steps out into the ditch, the bottom soggy down under all that grass, and follows.

If this is like he imagines Lucas wants it to be, then, a hundred feet into the cover, he’ll find Lucas’s shirt draped across a lower limb, then a sock, then those stupid shorts.

It makes him try harder to keep up, to keep that dim light in view, make a line for it.

Instead of shorts, what he finds, cocked open in the mud, the white license flashing, is Lucas’s dad’s wallet. Dark green, practically black.

Jonathan eases it up to keep it from spilling. Studies it—just what it is—wipes the dirty side on a tree, then the leg of his shorts, and pockets it. Front pocket, thank you.

But—does this mean Lucas had it all along?

Jonathan looks ahead, for the light. Makes a less patient line for it, only realizing once he’s committed that it’s not a flashlight at all, but one of the tall parking lot lights of the rest stop.

Already?

Behind him, though, there’s no longer any interstate sound. No still-open door, inviting him back in, to make the right decision.

Well then.

The way it had been in his head, Lucas had been on a grand trek, just lucking up onto the blacktop. How it is, though, is Lucas just walked through a couple hundred yards of trees, only out of the light for maybe thirty seconds, all told. The rest of the time he was, what? Sitting in the ditch? Or, no: a rig with a sleeper, parked on the side of the road?

Lucas wouldn’t, though.

Not even mad like he was, he wouldn’t have crawled up into that cab for the afternoon.

Never. Never never never.

But then why didn’t he even answer the voice mails last weekend? Why did he blow up instead of answer that one question?

Jonathan shakes his head no, no, closes his eyes, taps both his fingers against both his thumbs, a furious, desperate rhythm.

It could explain the diversion of the lost wallet, though. After an afternoon like that, Lucas wouldn’t be ready for any make-up fun, would at least need a shower first, or a swim. A staged fall into the river.

You can’t jump to conclusions like that, though.

Jonathan tells himself this. That there’s an explanation. That the place where he just walked into the woods, it doesn’t have to be the place where Lucas walked out. That the interstate for miles back, it’s a long curve, no place any trucker would stop to sleep, especially when he knew—don’t truckers always know where the rest stops with the big parking lots are?—there was a good place just a minute or two ahead. With a river, restrooms. Lights.

You’re being stupid again, Jonathan tells himself. Thinking the bad instead of the good, defaulting to disaster instead of joy, letting the world infect you. And you know better. That’s no way to live.

Jonathan flips the wallet open again, studies Lucas’s face. Forgives him.

For nothing, but still.

Thick socks, thick socks.

Jonathan smiles, steps ahead, having to duck around trees to get to the light, the wallet still in his hand like a prize, like a talisman, a charm. And that’s when he hears the sniffling.

It’s the boy. From the rest stop. Who was sitting in the shelf in the side of the unpopped-up camper.

Now he’s sitting beside a rusted pipe slanting up from the ground, some leftover of a drilling operation, or mining, Jonathan doesn’t have a clue. Rocking back and forth, hugging his knees, his face grimy with tears.

“Hey,” Jonathan says, kneeling from a spot a bit farther than’s easy, just because, if anybody’s watching—he’s not stupid—then of course all gay guys are pedophiles too. It goes without saying.

Especially out in the woods, alone like this. After dark.

“Hey, hey,” Jonathan says, touching the boy’s face with the back of his hand.

The boy looks up, his lips fluttering, and then Jonathan sees: he’s not using the pipe for support, or because it’s the one man-made thing in the area to hold onto. The index finger of his right hand, the one you always use to probe holes where there might be treasure, especially when you’re eight, it’s in a ragged hole in the side of the pipe. Stuck. For hours. Bleeding.

“Oh, oh,” Jonathan says, repositioning himself so he can hold the boy without pulling against that finger.

Even that makes the boy shudder, though.

How hard has he already been pulling his hand away? What does that finger look like, in there?

Jonathan, nodding to the boy the whole time—it’s all right, all right—stands, looks down the pipe but it’s dark, too dark. So he closes his eyes and feels: trash. Years of bottles and beer cans, kids out here, or the original roughneckers, who knows.

Something sharp in there, anyway. Something jagged, angled into the flesh of the boy’s finger. Keeping him there.

“I’m sorry, sorry,” Jonathan says, then looks to the lights of the rest stop, for help.

It makes the boy whimper, reach up, take the side of the Jonathan’s hand.

Jonathan squats back down, his own eyes wetter than he’d want—he’d be a terrible father, could never be strong like he’d need to be—and tells the boy he’ll be right back, that he’s just going to go get somebody, that his daddy’s probably still there, right? Won’t Daddy know what to do?

The boy nods, scared, crying, and Jonathan turns his back, is going to make this as fast as possible, is going to run screaming onto the mown grass of the rest stop, his 911 voice, but then he can’t leave the boy there like that. So he does it all over, the assurance, the goodbye, the promises, even mumbling through some made-up recollection about how when he was a kid he got lost at a rest stop too, and his parents were so worried, and something something, it ended happy, and this time he leaves Lucas’s wallet with the boy, to prove he’s coming back. In the dark, the boy won’t know it’s not Jonathan’s.

The boy hugs the wallet to his throat, looks away, to some sound, and in that moment Jonathan’s gone, tearing through vines and whatever, crashing out from the edge of the woods, stumbling into the bright-bright light, seeing only, at first, the vague outline of the boy’s family’s pop-up camper, a shadow really, still hitched to the shape of the supercab—what?—and he breathes in to cry the alarm but in that moment the light at the top of its pole over the parking lot flares, bathing the whole rest stop, heating it up in a flash. Taking it back to that heat, back to the daytime, the afternoon.

Jonathan looks around, his jaw cartoon-character slack. Cars everywhere again. Families. Commotion.

What?

And—and and and there on the picnic table, his head in his hands, so obviously—okay, dramatically—distraught, cutting this perfect figure of regret, is Jonathan himself. Jonathan, rewound to this moment all over again, commotion all around him, panic he never even cued into, as lost in his own theatric grief as he was. As hiding in it as he’d been. As reveling in it as he’d been.

It’s about the boy, though.

The missing boy, the boy who just stuck his finger in a hole in the woods, is probably screaming for help right now. But everybody at the rest stop, they’re screaming too, at least with their eyes, and the mother, that’s got to be the mother, just collapsed by the trashcan, crying. All the other dads beating the bushes, scouring the cars. One trucker blocking the exit, so nobody can leave until the boy’s found. A tape-wound tire beater held down low by his leg, the brim of his cap pulled low and serious.

No.

Jonathan looks to himself on the picnic table, tells himself to look up, to help, to come into the woods, save the boy, save this boy, but now, now the inevitable: the boy’s dad, breathing hard, pulling open car doors in the parking lot, everybody standing aside.

Look, look, Jonathan says to himself, across all that space, all this time.

And he does, he looks up to the camper, to the boy unaccountably not there, but it’s too late, has always been too late.

By this point the boy’s dad’s striding across the grass to the fag on the picnic table, striding across, reaching down for the fag’s chin, tilting his head up, the fag’s eyes so guilty, so crying, and then the dad’s shaking his head no, not this, making the obvious connections—deserted bathroom stall, hide what was left in the river—his other hand coming around from his waistband, the pistol right against the fag’s face, the sound of the gun not even there, the father blowing off two of his own fingers even, the fag’s brains sloughing down onto the picnic table like jelly.

The mom, screaming something now, pulling herself up with the lip of the trashcan. The other dads pulling their families close here, now. One of them looking over his wife’s shoulder to Jonathan, standing at the edge of the trees. Seeing what Jonathan can feel now, should have felt all along: no shirt, his shorts so stupid and giveaway, rolled up a turn or two farther than decent company would ever accept. The ruler in blue ink on his lower back, extending out to nine inches.

Of course.

This is where Lucas went. All along, this is where he was, where he is.

That second dad pushes his wife to the side, steps forward. The first dad, the eight-fingered dad, sees too, and raises his pistol through the red mist still in the air, Lucas falling back from it, tearing through the trees, running headlong away, his own breath heavy in his ears. Finally crashing out through the ditch, falling up the other side, into the crush of interstate commerce, into a moment’s inattention, so that he could have been a deer, a dog, a bag of trash. Less. Only enough left of him to walk back to the rest stop at dusk, to what’s left of the love of his life, to take his hand and continue this camping trip, to keep doing it over and over until they get it right, find the mountains, drink their plastic-tasting water, rub sunscreen onto each other’s noses, push their thick-socked feet deep into their sleeping bags and know that nothing can touch them, up here. That it’s just them.

my didn’t die against the dashboard that day, but the surgeries are still coming. His prom date, she’s going to have to look inside to see the real him.

In quick succession, then, I flamed out of my year-to-year contract at our branch of the state university, was back to stocking tools and air conditioners at night.

And this. Talking about books.

More and more, I was thinking it was the only good thing I had in me. My only real gift. And that, if I didn’t share it, then the next time one of Jeremy’s bills came due, my wife’s dad wasn’t going to come through with a check, or the surgeon that day was going to have had one too many drinks at lunch.

I’d put up a flyer at the library, the Laundromat, the carwash, both coffee shops.

There were seven of us, most Wednesdays.

This week we were reading Stephen King again. Marcy from the bank had recommended him, because, she said, she was too scared to read him alone. So we went with her into those dark places. Well, I’d already been, but I toured them through—the life, the times, the legend—and then passed a photocopied story out for next week. For this week.

The story was “The Man in the Black Suit.” It was about a nine-year-old kid a century ago, just out fishing one day, then encountering the devil, barely getting away. It had some resonance to it, but no real gore. What I planned to tell the group was that how it worked was it was taking this kids’ blind faith—America’s stubborn Christianity—and making it real all at once. So, really, the story was a confirmation, a celebration. The old man who had been the boy, the old man writing this down in his diary, he was one of the lucky ones, the ones who never had to doubt if angels and demons were real. He knew.

So, the study question, it was going to be which is better, to know or not to know?

And, yes, of course Jeremy was nine that day I picked him up from third grade. He was a year older than his classmates—I’d taught in China for a year, when there were no jobs here—but his age didn’t mean anything to him yet. And now he was probably going to be two years behind. But alive. That’s the epithet I kept tagging onto everything: but alive. As in, this could all be worse. I should be thankful for whatever fell on me next.

Since my shift started at nine, we usually met at six, dinnertime. Each week a different person would bring a casserole, pass out the plates. This week it was Lew’s turn. He was retired Air Force, said he’d taken a stack of paperbacks with him on both tours. That he was the only one in his bunkhouse who would stay awake reading.

He brought chicken dumplings in a crock pot.

Aside from him, and Marcy—she of the bank—there was Drake, a straight-laced city planner, the one who’d told us about the community center; there was Evelyn, who always brought her crocheting to do but hardly ever said anything; and Jackie and her daughter Gwen, a junior in high school, there very much against her will for a taste of what literature was going to be like in college.

In the flyer, I’d of course mentioned my background.

So, we were a healthy group of bookworms. A good mix of backgrounds and ages, anyway, if not very diverse.

When the dumplings were gone and adequately praised, we put our plates under our chairs and dove into King.

Because it was his night—for food, but you could tell he felt responsible for the discussion as well—Lew pinched his jeans up his thighs, leaned forward like telling us a secret, and said that he hoped none of the ladies took a fright to this particular story.

Evelyn tittered, her needles flashing, and I got the sense that one of these nights Lew was going to ask her for coffee afterwards, and she was going to suggest the perfect place.

“Scared me,” Drake said.

He was still wearing his tie from the day’s work. Not loosed or anything.

“Me too,” I lied, just to not leave him hanging.

While King had stories that were terrifying, this one was, in comparison, safe. By burying the eight-year-old’s story in the frame of an old man’s journal, it was locating the devil in another time, another place. One far, far from us.

Jackie elbowed her daughter just enough to get her to talk: “You could tell right away who he was. From the eyes.”

“Those eyes,” Jackie said, seconding her daughter’s motion.

“How did he see out of them?” Lew said, leaning back, crossing his arms.

I nodded, was liking this.

The good thing about voluntary book discussions is that I don’t have to play dentist. Getting people to talk’s not like pulling teeth.

“Because they were—because there were flames in his eye sockets, right?” Marcy said.

We all nodded, as if seeing the devil again as King had drawn him: tall, neatly dressed in a black suit. Subtle claws at the ends of his fingertips. Instead of eyes, just orange flickering flames. And a mouth that could open well past what any human jawbone would allow. And the teeth. Those teeth.

“Maybe he doesn’t have to subscribe to our rules of biology,” I said, looking around the circle for support.

“He has to eat,” Gwen said, all on her own. “He eats that fish, right?”

“It’s not a human hunger, though,” Lew said. “Just doing it for meanness, like. To show off, scare that kid.”

“Good, good,” I said, wanting to stand because it’s the main way I know to think. “But, remember, this is eighty years ago for this old man remembering it now. What would you say if I offered that he just encountered a bad man in the woods that day, then, because of his upbringing, he started to remember him as the devil. He started to add the stuff he knew from Sunday school. Claws, flame, teeth…”

“He does fall asleep before it all happens,” Evelyn said, hooking another stitch, pulling it through.

She was our cynic.

“But is it any less scary if it’s a dream or if it’s real?” Marcy asked.

“Or even if it was just a serial killer,” Jackie added. “That’s pretty scary too, isn’t it?”

“Damn straight,” Lew said, clapping his knee.

“But for every killer there’s a cop, right?” I asked.

Shrugging nods all the way around. This is what they would have been paying for, had they been paying.

“So, follow me now. If there’s devils, then there’s also…?”

“More devils?” Gwen said.

“Kids,” Marcy corrected.

“He means angels,” Evelyn said, stabbing with a needle.

I nodded like I’d been caught, was about to shift gears into my thesis when Lew said, “But who wants to read a story about an angel, right?”

I lowered my face to smile—he was right—and when I looked back up to the group, the twin doors on the other side of the gym were opening up.

Because they were on cylinders, were designed to not crush fingers, we all got the guy’s outline before we got him.

He was tall, spindly, top-hatted. His dark suit ragged at the edges, and not quite long enough for his legs or his arms.

For an instant his eyes flashed, taking my breath away, but in the next instant he was wearing a pair of those old pince-nez, their twin lenses catching the light.

Beside me, Gwen flinched. Jackie took her hand, pulled it across, to her own lap.

“Speak of the—” Lew said just loud enough for the book circle, and chuckled.

The spindly man hooked a stray chair by the door, dragged it all the long way across the wooden floor of the gym to us and set it down, opposite me.

“Room for one more?” he asked.

“How’d you hear about us?” I said, trying to sound casual.

He gave me a smile and a wink, then flapped open a much-folded piece of paper. One of my flyers. All of which I was pretty sure I’d collected, once we had a quorum.

“Looks like he’s invited,” Evelyn said.

“A scarf,” the spindly man said, about her crochet-job.

“Don’t know just yet,” Evelyn said back. Definitely a challenge in her voice. For all of us.

We had a rhythm, had already relaxed into our assign-ed roles.

The spindly man’s eyes made the circuit of our little circle, lingering maybe a touch too long on Gwen, then launching two fingers off his right eyebrow in salute to Lew.

“Even the moneyhandlers,” he said, about Marcy.

“And you?” she said right back to him, like he wasn’t the first ornery customer she’d had to deal with.

“Just happened to be strolling by,” he said, refolding the flyer, stuffing it in the waist pocket of his vest. “What’s the story, doc?” he said then, right to me.

I breathed in, breathed out.

Evidently we were doing this.

“Stephen King,” I said, then, pointedly, “The Man in the Black Suit.”

“Ahh,” the spindly man said, his eyes on Gwen again. “The King man cometh. I know him well, you could say.”

“We were just talking about how if you admit devils,” Drake said, “then that means the door must be open for angels as well.”

“Or more demons,” the spindly man said, sitting back into his chair. “Inside every angel, there’s a demon waiting to claw out, right? But please, don’t let me interrupt.”

And so we went valiantly forward. Just with not much heart.

Instead of listening, or contributing, the spindly man extracted Marcy’s plate from under her chair, then used his finger to scoop her thin layer of leftover dumplings into his wide mouth.

I heard myself traipsing back through Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” for the group, trying to establish it as the literary antecedent for King this time out. Upon hearing “Hawthorne,” Jackie of course made Gwen recite what she knew about
The Scarlet Letter.

It gave the spindly man more excuse to stare her up and down. To—and this was the only word for it—malinger.

“But—” I started, not at all sure where I was going, just that I had to pull his eyes off Gwen.

The spindly man was already speaking, though: “Go into the forest, taste the intangible. You come back with the story, never the proof. Am I right?”

Silence. Welcome to the land of crickets, I said in my head, quoting one of my former students.

Lew coughed an old man cough deep in his chest. Marcy scuffled her shoes on the gym floor. Drake stared into his lap, his fingertips drumming some arcane, personal rhythm against each other.

“Good,” I said at last. “Proof. It’s what we were talking about before you got here. If you can prove the vital tenets of a religion, then you lose the possibility of faith. So, King’s man in this black suit, by showing this boy that he was real, he also cored out the boy’s eventual leap of faith. Leaving him to lead a hollow life, as established by all the years between nine and ninety being, as far as we see on the page, empty, devoid of content. Not even interesting enough to paraphrase.”

Sometimes you have to knock a student down with preparation.

The spindly man just grinned a sharp grin.

“Proof,” he said. “We’ve all got proof, man. I bet every one of us has a story like this kid’s. Don’t we?”

Nobody said no.

“You,” he said to Marcy. “You’ve seen the devil, haven’t you?”

“We usually don’t—” I tried, but he held a hand out to me like a crossing guard might, his palm and fingers straight up.

Worse, I actually stopped.

“I don’t know what it was,” Marcy said.

The spindly man smiled. Lowered his hand.

“We were twelve,” Marcy said. “I’d told my mom I was staying at Reese’s, and she said she was staying at my house. You know. So we were going to camp under the old windmill. It was a dare.”

“Dare, dare,” the spindly man urged.

“Of course we didn’t sleep,” Marcy said, her eyes flashing up to Jackie in something like apology, as if she were being a bad influence on Gwen here. “Then, about two or three in the morning, our flashlights both died at once. And we looked up the side of the windmill. The moon was bright that night, and right above us.”

“No,” Lew said, and I looked to him.

Did he know where this story was going?

“And then, coming down the side of the windmill, already about ten feet from the top, I don’t know. There was somebody, okay? Maybe it was just a jacket a worker had left tied up there.”

“Because they always do that,” the spindly man said.

“We ran,” Marcy said. “We ran and we ran, and he was behind us the whole way. We just knew.”

“And you came back with the story,” the spindly man said. “That’s your proof. Good. Do we think she’s lying, folks? Is her story enough for you, or do you need her to have scars on her back, from sharp fingernails? Or a dead friend, who wasn’t quite fast enough?”

“She did die,” Marcy said, her voice cracking a bit. “Later that year. Got hit on the highway, trying to go…we didn’t know where. Oh God.”

She turned her head, balancing tears in her eyes.

“And you?” the spindly man said to Lew.

“Me,” Evelyn said, uncharacteristically. “One night coming home from bringing dinner to my husband on the night shift, I noticed the fuel gage was too far in the red. And there were only cotton fields between me and home, and there were these wild packs of dogs that year. My cousin had already been mauled. But then, right when the engine sputtered, a pair of headlights popped on in my rearview, and stayed there all the way until I pulled into the driveway. And then the car died.”

“An angel,” Gwen said.

Evelyn just stared at the spindly man.

“Next,” he said, no humor in his voice at all.

“Who are you anyway?” Lew said.

“Somebody who needs proof,” the spindly man said.

“Of what?” Lew said.

“The intangible,” the spindly man over-enunciated. “You know.”

“I don’t have to tell you,” Lew said. “I never even told my wife.”

“Of course, of course,” the spindly man said, all manners now. “Just leave Marcy running home through the darkness all alone.”

Lew looked from the spindly man to Marcy. Then to me.

“So maybe I saw something once,” he said.

Just to have control again, I nodded for him to continue.

The spindly man shifted his chair in anticipation.

“We were at…well, it doesn’t matter,” Lew started off. “Way past the DMZ. Deep, no support. Somebody was shooting at us from a fortified position. So we ventilated his little roost, and he stopped shooting like you have to. Because you’re dead.”

“Exactly,” the spindly man said. “The dead don’t shoot, of course they don’t. What is this, television?”

Lew wasn’t listening to him anymore, though.

“Only, once we broke cover, that dead sniper, he came back up over the lip of his little parapet. Except—I was the only one to see it—he was still dead. And there was another man up there with him. Moving that dead sniper’s arms like a puppet. Putting his finger on the trigger. We lost three more men that day.”

“And you made it home,” the spindly man said. “Good for you. You’re living breathing proof of the intangible. You saw it, respected it, and were given your life in return. Who else, now?”

There was Jackie, Gwen, Drake, and me.

“When her father died,” Jackie started, her hand gripping Gwen’s knee, but then Drake cut in: “I used to lie in my bed all night. I knew there weren’t any monsters in the closet, or under the bed. That was stupid. But outside. Outside was much bigger.”

“It is, it is,” the spindly man said, smiling again, his lips thin enough as to hardly even be there at all.

“So one night,” Drake said. “One night I decided I was going to call it out. My fear, I mean. I was going to get up, go to my window, peek out the corner. If nobody was there, then it was just all in my head. But then, when I pulled the curtain to the side, there was a pair of eyes looking back at me.”

The spindly man laughed in his chest.

Jackie gripped Gwen’s hand harder.

“It was my own reflection,” Drake said then, right to the spindly man. “It was proof I was being stupid. That I was a kid. Does that count?”

“Did it feel stupid?” the spindly man asked. “Or did you sleep in your parents’ room that night?”

Drake didn’t say anything. Just drummed his fingers.

“After my husband passed over,” Jackie said then, speaking for her and Gwen both, evidently, “we could hear something in the garage some nights.”

“Mom,” Gwen said, trying to shut her up.

“And one time I finally went out there, with a spatula.”

“To scramble some brains…” the spindly man said.

“There was a puppy,” Jackie said. “He’d left us a puppy.”

“The garage door was open, Mom,” Gwen said.

“And, tell me,” the spindly man said. “Did you keep it, this puppy? Are you giving it unmonitored access to your house now?”

“Unmonitored?” Lew said, defensive.

“Who knows what our pets are up to when we’re away,” the spindly man said, angling his narrow face over at me now. “They could stand up on two legs, walk all around. Sniff at the vents for things only a dog could smell living up there. Waiting up there.”

“Stop,” Evelyn said.

The spindly man was still watching me.

“Good professor?” he said.

I looked from face to face of the group.

This wasn’t at all where I’d meant this discussion to go. But, I had to admit, what we were doing, it was showing what we brought to the story. Which had to reveal, in part, the means by which it had got to us. Like an archetypal well of shared stories. One King had the savvy to tap into.

We all had a devil on our back trail.

Or, in my case, in front of me.

“The day of the wreck,” I said, swallowing loudly. At least in my ears. “The driver of the furniture truck. I don’t think he was a person. Not anymore. I think he’d been waiting all day just to cross that intersection. He was—he was smiling when we hit him. And you don’t smile, do you? What kind of a person smiles when a kid’s about to get disfigured for life?”

Jackie reached across Gwen to pat my thigh.

“Now,” the spindly man said, to the group. “The good doctor here. Do you actually believe a man in a black suit was driving that truck that day, or has his own memory and guilt altered his memory of it?”

“This is over,” I said, standing, my chair scraping away from me. It was too loud in the tight gym. Too sudden. And I didn’t care.

“But—” Marcy said.

“He’s right,” Lew said, standing as well, his eyes with mine.

The soldier, always looking for someone to guard. It was so cliché, so stupid. And I was so thankful for him.

He went around collecting plates, everybody else standing to help, to arrange.

Everybody except the spindly man.

He hadn’t moved from his chair. He was just letting the group course around him, his arms crossed like he was in a pout, and wanted us to know it.

As was custom in our little group, I stayed in what had been our circle, shook hands and gripped shoulders. It made me feel like the captain going down with the ship. Lew held onto my hand longer than he had to, pulled me close.

“You good?” he said, meaning the spindly man.

“I’m golden,” I said, and smiled to prove it, then ducked my head for Evelyn to drape her just-made scarf around my neck.

She pecked me on the cheek, Drake shook my hand, and the last one through the double doors was Gwen. She looked back to me, her eyes plaintive, almost. Like she was telling me no.

I raised my hand in farewell.

Behind me, the spindly man coughed into his hand.

“We have to leave now,” I told him.

“Thought it went until eight,” he said, standing to face me.

“Not tonight.”

When I reached for his chair, to put it up, he took it instead, jerked it away.

“Good selection,” he said. “‘The Man in the Black Suit.’ I identify with it, you could say.”

“You never told us your proof,” I said. “Of the intangible.”

We were standing at center court.

“Some of us don’t need proof,” he said, measuring his words. “But, tonight. Next campfire I find myself at, I might tell the riveting story of the book group. The one who didn’t know what they were playing with. The one who thought stories are just made up. What do you think, doc? I got a winner there?”

“Tonight was a horror story for us,” I told him, more than a little proud of myself for coming up with that, “not you.”

“So I take I’m…uninvited?” he said.

“Will that stop you?” I said back.

He looked to the dark gym behind me. To get me to look as well, it seemed.

I didn’t. I wouldn’t.

“Maybe tonight’s story isn’t even over yet,” he said, then, before I could reply, he was pushing back into the double doors. “Tell Captain Lewis thank you if you will, for the dish. And for remembering.”

“Rememb—?” I started, but now he was tipping his hat, bowing out.

Gone.

I finally breathed.

And looked behind me, now that I could.

The whole gym was dark, a patchwork of deeper and deeper shadows. At work tonight, there was going to be walls and walls of shadows, I knew. Me moving silently through them with a cart, a dolly, a back brace. A broken son. One I was so grateful for it hurt.

I wanted to cry, I think.

Instead, I straightened the spindly man’s chair. It was already straight, but I wanted to make it straighter.

Next I turned like always, to nod bye to the ghost of the book group. To thank it for keeping me sane, for letting me give back, pay my dues.

And then I walked across the thick blue sideline, for the double doors that would lock comfortably behind me, and only looked up when I was almost there, to the crashbars, the door handles.

Two points of flame, flickering in the reflection.

My back straightened and I gulped air as quietly as I could.

Behind me. The spindly man, he’d crept around to a side door, let himself in, was standing behind me now, his fingertips extending into claws, his rows of teeth glistening against each other, his eyes on fire.

I jerked back from the reflection. It was a stupid move, should have sent me right into his chest.

Only—nothing.

I even looked again, which is always the first mistake, the first step onto that slippery slope.

Just emptiness behind me. The whole gym, nobody.

I spun back around to the doors, sure he’d got around me somehow, would be waiting.

It was just me.

I nodded that I was being stupid, that I was scaring myself like Drake had been talking about, and took another step forward.

The orange eyes faded in again.

I shook my head no, no.

The eyes did too.

And then, like I had to, I cupped my hand over the right side of my face. And then lowered that hand, covered my other eye.

It was me.

I was the devil, I am the devil, the one smiling behind the wheel that day.

In Stephen King’s story, the kid’s dad’s looking over his shoulder into the tangled woods, he’s cueing into some indistinct rustling in the trees. Some smell, some evil presence.

My face was lost in the brush, though.

He couldn’t see me hunched over and grinning, my face wet with tears, my split tongue reaching up to dab them off my cheek.

“Run,” I’d said to that kid, that nine-year-old. Or, I’d tried to, with every trick I had. If he stayed, then something might happen to him, something bad.

But it does anyway.

Just with the back of his finger at first, like hello.

Hello.

His mom throws it in with all of her wonderful finds and then they’re ducking back out into the bright, bright day.

•

By the end of the week, the hoodie makes it up from the utility to Dick’s room. Now it smells like mountain spring detergent.

Dick—Richard if he had the choice, or Rick, Ricky, hell, even Detective—Dick huddles in his headphones and watches the hoodie, pretending to interrogate it from his place on the bed. Waiting for it to make the first move, here.

Where his mom’s left it is draped across the back of his desk chair. Like Dick’s name, the chair’s a hand-me-down, like he’s standing at the bottom of the family hill, all this unasked-for history snowballing down onto him.

Thanks, Dad.

As for the hoodie itself, it’s black of course, but somehow not that stupid athletic shade of black. This shade of black’s better. Dick can’t really explain it, just knows that the vagueness of this particular black, it was what drew him to that one rack in the first place. And of course there’s no decal or insignia or corporate affiliation on front, back, or down along the waist. It’s the kind of generic that feels intentional, that feels paid for at some place in the mall, except Dick wouldn’t be caught stealing there.

His only fear about the hoodie is that Sammy at work is going to like it too. The way it doesn’t advertise. The way it isn’t crude. The way it’s just functional.

Sammy’s approximately eighty years old, if not more, but’s still bagging groceries alongside Dick.

Sammy’s a kid’s name, too.

It’s Dick’s that’s supposed to be for the senior citizens.

The world’s so upside down.

•

Next shift (it’s October) Dick discovers why the hoodie was only two dollars: it’s a factory second. The right arm’s a whole hand longer than the left.

Dick’s whole shift, he’s constantly chocking that sleeve up, trying to keep it out of the way.

There’s a hook in the back of the break room nobody uses. The shirts there are from ten years ago, a whole different style.

This is where Dick plans to retire the hoodie. Let it gather that fine coating of dust on the shoulders, become part of the scenery, part of the museum of uselessness this place already is.

But then, on state-mandated break, standing out by the dumpsters, Dick lowers his cigarette hand down along his leg—learned behavior, keeping your habit on the sly—and that long sleeve falls down over it, swallows his whole hand, so that now there’s smoke along his arm, that wonderful heat near his palm, but no cigarette. Just a black sleeve rising to Dick’s mouth every twenty seconds or so, for him to breathe from.

It’s excellent. The coolest thing all day, all week.

Dick rocks on his heels, forward to his toes, and pulls that invisible cigarette to his mouth again, drags deep. Holds it in.

•

That night at the carwash by the grocery store, the one that sells vanilla in plastic bottles, straight up from Mexico (it’s Dick’s mom’s birthday), Dick’s talking to Catressa at the counter when he becomes aware that he’s leaning on the display by her register. The impulse bin, that last-chance spread of junk before you pay out.

Without even having to think about it, one of the turquoise and silver lighters is up his hollow cuff, gulped into his extra hand of sleeve.

Talking to Catressa the whole time, of course. Eye contact and everything, the sleeve moving almost on its own, like an elephant trunk, just without the obvious rest of the elephant.

Dick buys his plastic bottle of vanilla with the rooster on the label and slopes across the parking lot. Never questions how the lighter’s gone from his sleeve to his pocket already.

Where else would it go?

•

The next week he wears the hoodie every day. His mom even goes so far (for her) as to compliment him on it. Compliments her purchase, anyway. The bargain she got for him.

Thanks, Mom. Gee.

Bagging old wenches’ cat food is the sweetest revenge, now. He can picture them unloading their daily haul in their Harvest Gold kitchens. Did I not get those mints Alfred likes? But it’s on the receipt. Dear, dear. And what about—what about that denture cream, now. Did it fall out in the car?

Go look, Dick tells them.

It’s a good life.

And the mints and creams and medications, they just go up his sleeve, are gone, Dick doesn’t care where, but he knows better than to ditch them in the trash under the register, or to try to reshelve them, or to get busted leaving with them. If his assistant manager makes him strip down one fine day, he’ll be squeaky. Insulted, even.

He’s already practicing making that face, like the world’s just confirming everything he suspected.

And—what about Sammy, right? Have you looked at him for this? He could actually use some of this old-lady stuff, couldn’t he?

Motive right there. Opportunity everywhere.

It’ll be perfect.

Nevermind that some of those nights, his shift over, his shows cycled down, his games beat again, he’ll wake with a mint-flavored chalkiness in his mouth, or with his teeth glued together, or just sick, throwing up purple and pink pills for ailments he’s not due for for another fifty years.

But it’s worth it.

•

Just to see if he can, Dick stretches the cuff of the hoodie out while stocking, until the elastic’s nothing, doesn’t remember its own shape. Then he lowers it over a romance paperback when it comes down the Black Belt of Doom.

Like usual, he continues the motion everybody, cameras included, expects, stuffing his hand down into the brown paper bag as if positioning the book to protect the eggs or some shit, and of course—why not?—when his hand comes back up, it’s empty. Ready for the next item, already being scanned.

That night, though, Dick wakes up crying, but happy too, the bitter aftertaste of a happy ending in his mouth.

He sits up, touches the tears on his cheek, and laughs at himself.

The next morning, the elastic cuff’s back to normal.

Dick would expect nothing less.

•

“Are you ever going to wash that thing?” Dick’s mom asks from her place on the couch, Dick slouching past, doing his best shadow act.

Part of that’s having his hood up. Hiding inside it. Just slashing his eyes out at this, that. Them.

“He’s going to marry it.”

This from Dick’s little sister, Gloria. A completely normal name for a complete freak of a humanoid.

Dick’s gone.

After school he grabs the bus to the store, begs an extra shift (shuffling, no eye contact: “my mom’s birthday”). The assistant manager is proud, impressed, can see Dick’s future spread out before both of them.

Dick wonders if the assistant manager’s head would fit up the sleeve of a hoodie.

“What’s so funny there, sport-o?”

Nothing, Sammy. Just move along, move along.

•

Sunday everybody’s in the store. Like a hurricane’s coming. Or zombies. Wrong: another stupid football game. Busy, busy. No stocking, just bagging, bagging, like working an assembly line, building the perfect fan from nacho chips and beer.

After a record stretch of abstinence—afraid taking some of those small jars of cheese dip might make him all rah-rah and brainless—Dick lets a slick package of condoms slide back up the heel of his hand, fade up his sleeve. It’s a joke. Except:

“Hey, um, yeah. Think I saw that, Dick.”

It’s Bruce. From school. Since second grade. One of the main reasons Dick can’t just be Richard.

Tittering in place beside Bruce, his girlfriend Rylene. Complete with pom-poms for some reason. Eating a Dorito from the bag she’s not supposed to have already opened. But the rules don’t apply, etc.

“Dick?” Tamara the Checkout Queen asks, popping the gum in her mouth like she can, and always does. Staring past that empty sound at Dick.

“Oh, right, right,” Bruce says, getting his momentum now that Tamara’s tuned in, “forgot who I was talking to. They’re like actual clothes for you, right? Raincoat…dick? What was I thinking.”

Rylene: crunch, laugh, crunch.

Tamara: pop, pop, giggle.

Dick: nothing intelligible.

In his right hand, though, unasked for, is the small knife he lifted from the carwash the other day. A version of it, anyway.

This one feels bigger. Sharper. Meant for things.

Not an impulse nab at all, apparently.

Bruce is still saying something too, more of the same, Dick knows the tone, the timbre (up through the chin, under the tongue, where there’s no bone), but just as the blade gleams out from the shadow of Dick’s sleeve—or, is the sleeve retracting on its own, like foreskin?—Sammy’s there with his twenty-five years of experience, stepping between, avoiding a scene. Showing Queen Tamara how to scroll through the receipt, then—for modesty—going to pull another box of condoms himself, instead of whispering for them over the PA.

Thanks, Dick doesn’t say.

Thanks, Bruce should be saying.

What Rylene leaves for Dick to remember them by is one of her red pom-pom streamers, winding down into the Black Belt of Doom.

Dick reaches forward, covers the sensor, stops the Belt from pulling the streamer any deeper into the guts of the store.

Nothing clatters from his sleeve.

•

Two nights later he wakes with a condom on. He peels it off and there’s another, and another, twelve in the pack.

Underneath them all he’s shriveled, bloodless, strangled.

“Honey?” his mom asks through the bathroom door. “Are you crying?”

Dick doesn’t answer.

At lunch he cuts school, heads back to the Goodwill. Wanders the racks.

There’s no more factory seconds. The hoodie was the only one.

He scopes the vases and cookware aisle, just hiding mostly, then lowers his hand to a fork with a bamboo handle.

Before he can stop himself, it’s his. Gone.

This is closing the circle, he tells himself.

He says it again that afternoon, eating early lasagna in his room with the bamboo fork. That this is it, that it’s over.

It even sounds like a lie to him.

•

At real dinner later that night Dick’s mom stabs her hand across the table, to flick Dick’s hood back.

This results in the usual amount of yelling and grounding and spaghetti floating through the air.

Thoroughly grounded, Dick sits in his room the next two days—school, home; school, home—finally reaches a hand up to the zipper at his throat, tugs down.

He’s not surprised that the teeth are jammed into each other.

It’s going to take some speed to pull them apart. Some momentum.

Reverse screw, captain. We’re rising, coming up for air.

Dick smiles, jerks the zipper up, and, instead of sticking, it’s like it’s been waiting for him to do just that: it bites him in the neck.

In the mirror nearly covered with band stickers, Dick can see the slow trickle of blood feeling down along the zipper’s thousand-switchback path. And then he gets involved peeling an oval sticker of a band that’s on the radio too much now.

When he comes back to his red zipper, it’s not red anymore.

Surprise, surprise.

•

Because grounding Dick from work would be like punishing Sammy, too—this is actually Dick’s argument, for which he does immediate mental penance, fifty lashes to the cerebellum, thank you, sir—Dick’s mom lets him take the Corolla in through the rain.

The kitchen smells like vanilla. The alcohol in it real and pungent.

Gloria watches Dick all the way out the door. Dick watches her back, wishes her well; she’ll be the first taste-tester of the afternoon, will have to gauge what’s in her mouth against their mom’s hopes, will have to either choke down slice after slice to the tune of network gameshows or spend the evening in her room, for being a little liar.

Dick knows.

The Corolla’s a stick, and the tires keep chirping on the wet asphalt with first gear, at least the way Dick does it.

•

Because it’s just a Wednesday, Dick’s the only one on duty.

But there’s a mystery to be solved, too.

Evidently.

Sammy strolls through the automatic doors in his old man raincoat, shakes the mist off his umbrella and asks Money-Order Rhonda if he can deposit this with her?

“Customer’s always right,” she tells him, taking the umbrella by the handle.

It’s their usual disgusting thing. Dick would call it flirting, except it’s the kind between a grandfather and his step-granddaughter, something creepy like that.

And then Sammy’s whistling up the aisles, just another shopper.

And of course—just one register open—soon enough Dick’s standing alongside Tamara as she pop-pops her gum and chats Sammy up.

What comes down the Black Belt of Doom, too: Dick knows immediately that this is a sting operation.

It’s cigarettes from Sammy’s own pocket, already documented somehow (receipts, photographs, special marks on the wrappers), it’s little corn-stabbers, it’s turkey thermometers that already look like a joke happening. It’s gum and a USB adapter and every other small, easy-to-miss thing Sammy could find that wouldn’t fall through the bottom of his basket.

Dick nods about each of them, processes them past, into their separate bags (perishable, non-, household, automotive, office), and the only time—he’s promised himself, after all, knows exactly what Sammy’s doing—he doesn’t feel the item fill its space in the bag, it’s one of the travel packets of shampoo. The ones shaped exactly like ketchup packets.

Or, no: mayonnaise.

Dick smiles, could have a plan here, if he wanted.

But no, no.

He shakes his arm as if his sleeve’s caught, feels the tiny impact below his hand.

Mystery solved, Sammy? he says with his eyes, and then carries the bags out to the car, lines them up in the trunk like corpses.

•

The next day it’s still raining, somehow.

Sammy’s waiting when Dick clocks in.

With the assistant manager.

Before Dick can object, that he didn’t take a thing, Sammy holds his hand up.

Between his ancient thumb and pruned forefinger is the turquoise and silver lighter.

“Got left in my shopping bag,” Sammy says, almost like a question. Except it’s not.

“A gift for the more loyal customers?” the assistant manager asks.

“Was wondering where that went,” Dick says, eyes all the way averted.

“If you’re wondering,” Sammy says, a definite glint in his eyes, “your little girlfriend next door’s been called in special, to see if she remembers this purchase. Or if she doesn’t.”

Dick sucks his cheeks in.

“She’s not my girlfriend,” he says.

“Either way,” the assistant manager says—stubby tie, short-sleeved all-business shirt, the gut always stained with blue ink, from the egg boxes he insists everybody’s too thoughtless with—“you either stole it while you were visiting, which is like her stealing it herself, or she sold a minor paraphernalia for tobacco products.”

“Maybe I was camping,” Dick says.

“Camping,” Sammy says, tossing the lighter across.

It traces a perfect arc through the storeroom.

Dick’s hand rises to meet it.

The sleeve anyway.

Eye contact with Sammy the whole slow time.

•

The four-hour shift grinds by. Two bagboys aren’t needed, but Sammy’s there anyway, whistling to himself when the customers aren’t around. Some sick melody not heard by humans for fifty years or more, until now.

“What’s her name, that one at the carwash?” Sammy asks once.

Dick flips him off. In his head.

Instead of bagging, he’s sweeping. Has to take the padded mats of all six registers out back, blow them out with the hose then hang them over the safety rail to dry.

Two cigarettes later, he’s slouched back in, the rain beaded on the black shoulders of his hoodie, a thousand tiny droplets, the world captured in each of them.

There’s trash to be hauled out, spills to be mopped, soup to be counted and (re)tagged.

An hour shy of ten—clock-out—Dick plays the mom-card: she’s making a cake, it’s her birthday, Glory has to go to bed early.

The assistant manager spins once on his metal stool, considering, and it’s finally a financial decision, Dick knows: that’s one less hour of minimum wage to pay out at the end of the week.

“She never knew, either,” Dick says, shrugging the hood up over his head.

“Cat?” the assistant manager asks.

Catressa, yes.

Dick says it with his eyes, mostly.

The assistant manager spins halfway back around, is already studying something on his desk.

“She’ll make a good waitress somewhere,” he says as goodbye, then his whole massive frame chuckles.

On the way out, Dick runs his hand along the label-edge of the condiments shelf, shifting all the prices one item over. Sometimes two.

His other hand balled tight in his sleeve, where no one can see.

•

One hour and nine minutes later—the car not late yet, Mom—Dick’s got the headlights off, is idling at the fire curb by the cart corral, where the squeaky wheeled go to die their slow public deaths.

The air’s grey, is at least half exhaled smoke.

Waitress my ass, Dick’s saying to himself every few drags.

The last cigarette he lit was fifty minutes ago. He’s not asking where the new ones are coming from anymore, or how they’re getting lit.

Off hatred, he knows.

Sixteen years of it already.

Dick smiles. Starts to rub a port hole in the windshield to see from but realizes at the last moment that that would mean looking at his right hand. So he uses his left, and, instead of a rubbed-clean hole—the defroster sucks—he writes his name backwards, so it’ll be readable from the front: D R A H C I R.

No idea why he never thought of that till just this moment.

Or, like he’s been saving it for now, yeah.

Like clockwork, then, Sammy ambles out into the night, leaning back to stretch his back, both his hands on his hips.

When he comes down from that stretch, he sees it, what Dick’s left: the turquoise and silver lighter.

Just standing there erect on the shiny blacktop.

Sammy cocks his head, takes a careful step forward, then another step, and Dick lowers his—not his hand, but the sleeve, he watches as the long sleeve of the hoodie swallows that five-speed little shifter, deep throating it.

And—more clockwork—the front tires chirp their warning just as Sammy’s leaning down for this impossible thing, this lighter, and, because he’s old, instead of standing all the way to take the Corolla’s impact, he only turns his face to the bright, bright headlights, his shadow thrown so far behind him. Almost as far as he’s about to fly.

Dick smiles, but it’s so deep in the darkness of his hood that Sammy never sees it.

But of course one day our father needed something flat and disposable to mix some JB Weld putty on, so he cut down into it with his pocket knife, just hacking a rough square from the side, and I admit that, one bored afternoon, I probably decorated one of the cut-out handles with the kitchen scissors. Nothing regular or patterned, just uneven little triangles snipped here and there. I was imagining if the cardboard were steel, then those points I was leaving would be sharp, would de-finger whoever reached down for a grip, would make the side of the box into a shark mouth.

Any day it was taking its fatal trip to the curb, I mean, and it would have that week if Mom hadn’t ditched a load of socks in it then not got around to folding them until after trash day. But the world, it always keeps turning, doesn’t it? She got around to the socks, and of course at some point in there we tried to trap the cat under the box (fail), tried to capture a bird in the backyard (partial success), then finally, perhaps overestimating its reliability, we tried using it as a stool (crunch). So we stapled it back together as well as we could, with the staple gun we’d been trying to reach in the first place.

That was what did it, too, we think.

We didn’t get the inner flaps lined up with the sides of the box like they had been, so the box’s dimensions were off a hair, and it wasn’t quite square anymore.

Big deal, right?

It was just a box, and we got the stapler back up in its cabinet, and nobody knew anything.

The next morning, though, our dad’s cereal bowl woke us, by breaking on the kitchen floor.

By the time we got there, we understood why he’d let his cereal go like that: the inside of the box was crawling with spiders. It was writhing with them, hissing with them, boiling with them.

My mom caught our father’s eye and our father just shrugged.

I smiled.

With a shovel, we guided the box across the floor, out the nervous bump the sliding door was, and tipped it off the back porch. The spiders didn’t explode away from the box, but they didn’t cling, either. They just ambled off on their own time, back to their dark places.

“The wax,” my mom decided. It had aged to some state of tastiness the spiders couldn’t resist.

Maybe.

The next morning, it was just a box. Our father stood at the sliding door and ate his cereal and watched it lay there on its side, harmless at the edge of the porch, the sun breaking over the back fence.

Later that day, Mom not watching, we crawled out to the box on fingertips and toes, smelled it. It was just cardboard, a bit damp, its top side sagging in a touch now. We caught spiders, dropped them in, but the spiders didn’t care, just hooked a leg up on the side, then another, and crawled up, out.

The next morning, the box was full of tarantulas. Ones that weren’t even supposed to come up from their holes for months, if this year at all.

“Burn it,” my mom said.

“It’s not the wax,” our father said.

He took the day off from work, applied the made-up science in his head to the box. Polaroids, rulers, protractors, compasses, spiral notebooks, yarn, coins for size, different kinds of light, different kinds of metal. Magnets, smoke, water vapor. Tuna, but the cat just jumped in, ate it, growling at us the whole time.

That night he pulled a chair up to the sliding glass door and made a pot of coffee and watched the box, out on the porch.

The spiders came to it like a spill of oil seeping across the lawn. Like a shadow, spreading, and, according to our father, he never saw them come up over the edge, even, to get inside. But they must have. There they were.

My dad called in sick again, his fingers jittery.

Backing out of the drive for either the hardware store or the library, he backed over our third new dog for that year. It was a solemn lunch. Promises were made, tears were snuffed back up into sinus cavities.

We buried Blackie Dos in the alley, me and my brother standing guard at either end for the trash truck, who might report us.

Before we could come back through the gate, Mom handed the box over the fence.

Our father knew when he was beat.

He went in to his shift the next morning, never saw what we were pretty sure we did: Blackie Dos—or Blackie Dos’s exact twin, just more raggedy—limping down along the fence line behind all the houses. Going to live on some other street.

The box he’d crawled out of was tumped over by the trash.

After our father had dropped it in reverently, moving his shoulders and arms either exactly like a good husband or in exact imitation of a good husband, we’d got it back out, set it carefully by the dumpster, because it had to be sitting up like that to work, we were pretty sure.

But it could have been the wind that tumped it over. Or cats. And there were Blackie Doses everywhere that summer.

Still.

That weekend, his second six-pack giving him ideas, our father took apart our old toy box and raided the woodpile, re-built the box but larger this time, and sturdier. But he kept to the exact dimensions, was consulting his spiral notebooks before each pull of the saw.

He told us that what had happened was that we’d stumbled on some secret of the universe, some private geometry, some magic dimension that allowed things to happen that usually couldn’t, but that probably always wanted to. And spiders were tuned to that, or had enough eyes to see it right. Something.

I reminded him about the decorated handle. The razor blade handle, the shark mouth handle. He studied the Polaroid, compared it to another Polaroid, got the file and adze out again, but only after tracing his cuts with a pencil, and coloring them in to be sure they were going to match.

By morning, it was real.

“If a little one got spiders?” he said, and balanced it into the bed of his truck. It was the same box, just scaled up from peaches to…to watermelons. Or whatever fruit’s one bump up from that.

We took it to the edge of town, out by the dump, and set it down by a fence, pitched our tent a few truck lengths away.

We fell asleep first, like always, in spite of our best efforts and our promises to keep pinching each other awake.

The next morning there was a scuffling coming from the box. We edged in behind our father, behind the lever-action he’d smuggled out of the house.

The scuffling was hooves.

There was a baby horse in the box.

Its legs were broken, though.

We followed its drag marks back to an old refrigerator somebody had off-loaded against the fence that kept the dump in.

“Why would—?” our father said.

“What?” I said up to him.

“Do this.”

Itself, I thought, but didn’t say.

I felt like crying.

By the time we got back to the box, it was on its side. The baby horse was trying to stand. And then it was.

“Warm the truck,” our father told us, tossing the keys over, and we heard the rifle fire once behind us. Heard the splat it made. It made us walk faster, with our hands made into fists, to keep the pictures in our heads from happening.

We balled the tent up and pitched it into the back of the truck, its poles and stakes sticking out like bones, dragging like fingers. On the way past the box, our father reconsidered, veered a little over, ran over it enough for it to crunch, explode beneath our feet.

“We won’t talk about this,” he told us, and he was right.

Nineteen years later, though, after my wife and daughter had what happened to them out on the interstate happen, I used the insurance money for a cinderblock warehouse on the east side of town. The old part of town.

From our father, I’d inherited a box of measurements, of crumbly Polaroids, and I was an engineer besides, and had been having wrong dreams even before the wreck.

I took out the north wall of the warehouse, had it rebuilt eight feet, two and one half inches in, and I had the roof removed, had what I said was going to be a loading bay cut out up near the top of the east wall, and I cut out some handles for giant hands, decorated them with a cut-out saw while I hung from the bucket of a rented truck.

And then I swept the floor, unrolled a sleeping bag, and waited. And waited.

It was the cement pad, I decided. It had to be. At some point it had heaved, it had buckled, throwing the secret geometry off just enough.

I leveled it, un-leveled it, re-leveled it, used the last of my savings for one last day of work from the crew, then finally—it was so obvious—had them pour some fresh, like wide steps at either end, except those two steps almost met in the middle. Flaps, I’d forgotten the flaps we’d restapled, just slightly off, making an unevenly-sided butter in the middle, like a channel that might run off an altar, for blood. It was what had originally pulled the north side of our box in that necessary amount—which I’d already done to my warehouse, in spite of the warnings about instability and zoning. To appease the contractor, I’d let him install a guide wire on the backside of that leaning wall, like a buttress, except pulling instead of pushing. He’d left the nut in the cable, too, so that, if anything settled, I could pull back on the wall.

And then he was gone, and his crew was gone, and it was just me and the box, all around me now.

The heat rising from the concrete kept me warm in my sleeping bag. I thought again of my wife’s last moments. Of my daughter’s next soccer game. Of a baby horse, trying to stand on legs that had had to be broken, to fit into a refrigerator.

Instead of sleeping, I stared straight up, through the roof that wasn’t there, and imagined I could see a giant, silent spider with its legs out. It was drifting down through the galaxy like I wanted, like I needed, like this world deserved, for what it had done to me.

Or, a hundred of them were drifting down, a thousand of them, crawling from planet to planet to get here.

Either way.

The box was smart, though.

It always had been.

One street over, just past the old park with the rocket ship pointing into space, is the cemetery. The graveyard.

And the thing about that box was, we never had a lid for it.

I’m the one who started all this, yeah. But it’s not my fault. We never should have moved to this town. My dad should have gone to work more. And who buries dead animals in refrigerators? And why isn’t the breakdown lane on the interstate wide enough for somebody to actually park there if they need to, when their husband’s just called them on their new phone?

At least that graveyard by the park wasn’t the one they were resting in.

Not that it matters, now that death’s become an infection.

To be continued.

But I guess that’s a lie.

After picking her up, too, saving her from the bus, there’s the kids at three-thirty and three forty-five. Nolan from his school, Samuel from the corner just down from the junior high; Samuel insists it’s faster like that, and that he doesn’t care if it’s snowing, or whatever.

Shane remembers being thirteen, yeah. All too well.

The corner’s fine, even on a day like today, where if you let the delay on the wipers space out too far, a crust of ice will form on the windshield, and, bam, like that, twenty dollars for new blades.

Behind him in the parking lot are the mounds of dirty snow, months of it already. On Saturdays, when Nolan’s here with him to pick Mommy up from work, Shane always pretends to have just seen a miniature door kind of embedded in one of those big snow piles, or a window, and—is that a chimney? Is somebody living there?

Each time he circles slow around the mounds, trying to stay ahead of the security Jeep, Nolan’s head will track those igloos, his mouth held in that doubting, pre-smile mode. Because what if, right?

Shane doesn’t remember exactly what it was like to be eight, no. But he knows what he would have liked it to have been like.

He plans, one day, to come out here, fix some mock window—just a pipe, even, up top—into the snow, watch Nolan’s chest swell with magic, but it’s always cold, wet, impractical.

Like the man coming into focus by the empty fountain.

Shane waits for the wipers to sweep the snow dust away again before leaning forward from his magazine.

Yep.

Guy’s standing there in short sleeves, the cuffs of his jeans rolled and hanging loose, cigarette dangling from his lip like this is an audition for a fifties musical.

Except the bowler hat, Shane supposes.

Is this the new breed Molly’s been calling “hipster,” maybe? And, aside from being famously poor tippers, are hipsters impervious to the elements as well?

Shane smiles to himself, goes back to the article.

It’s something about current trends in education. He flips through to the end—four pages—gauges that against the time left: thirteen minutes. Three pages every thirty seconds, then, with time to keep an eye out for Security.

Golden.

It’s a word that hipster should know, and use.

Shane looks up as if to tell him that across all this distance, through all the glass and steel and unfamiliarity, and sees him instead in the rearview mirror. The back seat.

“Hey—!” he blurts and pushes on the brake for some reason, cringing up against the wheel in a way he’s already ashamed of.

The hipster isn’t hip anymore, either.

Instead of a t-shirt and jeans, it’s now a shabby three-piece suit with an antique wool overcoat, like one of Shane’s professors used to wear. The only thing the same as before is the snugged-down bowler, the snow on it not even melting yet. And the eyes. They penetrate, don’t look away. Are amused somehow, at how Shane’s swaying his back in, preparing himself for the gun, the knife, even just the hand, reaching all the way to him.

“If you have a minute,” the non-hipster says, making a production—elbows, three layers of sleeve—of opening the leather briefcase now on his lap.

“What are you—you can’t just—” Shane tries, his heart beating again now, and the non-hipster waits this out, his hands still holding the briefcase open.

Is he wearing eyeliner too?

“You can’t—” Shane says again, still stuck on that.

“It’s about your, your…” the man begins, shuffling through papers in the briefcase “…Nolan, is that his name?”

Shane fixes his eyes into the rearview mirror against this man.

Is this how it starts? Ransom situations? And what kind of competent kidnapper would target him, Shane?

But never mind all that right now.

“What about him?” Shane says, the world narrowed down to just the two of them now.

If need be, he can drop the Impala into gear, bound ahead twenty yards in one surge, through the glass doors of that store that keeps changing names every season.

It’ll accomplish something, surely.

“I’m sorry to tell you this,” the man says, and hands a stiff brown paper over the top of the briefcase to Shane.

No, not paper at all, but—film? Like an x-ray?

It makes a noise like small, fake thunder when Shane tries to flap it straight enough to read.

It is medical film.

Only, this isn’t—the skull’s shaped all wrong. Not like Shane’s seen before. He angles the film to the side, turns it all the way over, and finally sees it: the skull’s not the same because the shot was taken from above, some angle like that. Looking down. The shadow of a backpack zipper floating at the bottom of the sheet.

It’s not quite an x-ray, though. More about soft tissue.

The brain.

“I don’t know how you got in here,” Shane says into the rearview mirror.

The man nods, acknowledging that difficulty but not bothering to address it, and then cocks his left arm up, for his watch.

Shane studies the film again, touches it with the pad of his index finger, half-expecting his finger to dip into something syrupy, or for the image to flicker, slide like a touchscreen.

It’s just what it is, though.

“Do you see it?” the man says, clicking his briefcase shut now, leaving it on his lap, the base of it angled up.

A gun in there, pointed at Shane? A pinhole camera?

“How do you know his name?” Shane says.

And no, he can’t see it on the film.

The man smiles with one side of his mouth, watches a tall woman in tall boots walk by, her purse slung all the way around to her back.

Shane looks to her too but she’s nobody.

“Security will be here in about half a minute,” he says. “They make rounds every — ”

“A bike rack turned over in front of the foodcourt,” the man says.

Silence, silence.

“What is this?” Shane finally says.

“This is opportunity,” the man says, knocking on the plastic back of the passenger headrest.

So he’s real, then. At least that.

Shane breathes in, breathes out.

“What is this,” Shane says, waggling the film.

“Glioblastoma multiforme,” the man shrugs. “That would be a type four. Basically inoperable, at least when situated like that.”

Shane feels his face heat up. He doesn’t know if that means the blood’s all left at once, or if it’s all swirling there under the skin.

“What are you saying?” he asks.

“I’m going to need that image back, of course.”

“Who?” Shane shakes the film for emphasis. Doesn’t give it back.

The man purses his lips, looks out the window again. This time there’s nothing. Just not-Shane, Shane suspects.

“Nolan,” Shane says.

The man does his shoulders in apology.

Now the heat’s all in Shane’s eyes. Going to spill out.

“What are you?” he whispers.

“Not who?” the man says, a flicker of a grin there.

“I don’t—” Shane starts, can’t finish.

“Tumors like that are unusual in a boy his age,” the man anticipates. “But, you know. It’s a crazy world, right? Anything can happen.”

Shane’s studying the film again.

This is Nolan?

In twenty-two minutes—no, fifteen, now—he’ll be stand-ing at the curb in the hug ‘n go lane, his insulated hood pull-ed up over his head. He’ll be doing what he calls “switching feet”— going back and forth in a stationary waddle, to keep warm. The whole way to the junior high he’ll be looking around the side of the passenger seat, to be the first one to see Samuel.

“No,” Shane says.

The man just nods, though. “Fourteen months,” he says. “Not all of them good.”

“But I can—”

“Even if you take him to the hospital today. Right now. Last week. I’m sorry.”

“Who are you?”

“And if I said you just get one more question here?”

Shane says it to himself, in his head: Think.

“This is what you would ask,” the man offers. “Not who I am, but what I can do for you.”

Shane nods. Yes, this. My one question.

“How long we got here?” the man says then.

Shane does the math in his head, off the radio clock. It hurts.

“Eight minutes?”

“Ten if she’s still got a table,” the man says, opening his briefcase again. Shuffling, shuffling.

It’s what Shane had been about to say: ten if she’s still got a table.

He realizes then that he’s crying. Either on the outside of his face or the inside, he can’t tell.

Nolan.

“Opportunity,” he remembers the man saying.

The man nods as if in response, still picking through his briefcase. Refiling a piece of paper nearer the front.

“I didn’t say that out loud,” Shane says then. Out loud.

The man keeps nodding, smiles, whatever he was looking for finally there in his hands. He closes the briefcase in victory.

“You might call this a special deal,” the man says, “a one-time offer. You understand we don’t provide it to everybody?”

For a moment Shane’s heart leaps, a woman cresting the stairs, but then it’s not Molly. Just Molly’s hair.

“You can’t even have gotten into the car,” Shane says into the rearview mirror.

“Of course not,” the man says. “Neither could I have a magnetic resonance snapshot of your son’s limited future, but, well—”

“That’s not how MRIs work,” Shane interrupts. “They’re at—they’re at hospitals.”

The man smiles wide this time, doesn’t disagree at all.

His teeth are watery brown. Years of coffee, cigarettes. In the fifties they didn’t know.

“What can I do?” Shane says.

“What would you do?” the man asks back.

Shane laughs through his nose, both hands still to the wheel.

“Trade,” he says.

“Yes,” the man says. “Trade. Exactly.”

Shane isn’t surprised. The only story he remembers from his junior high English anthology is a kid getting into an elevator with an old man, one whose daughter was delivering a baby, only everything was going wrong with the delivery. Somehow the kid got involved in the drama of it all, until, in the bathroom, he hears the old man offering his life for his daughter’s, for his granddaughter’s, and then, hours later, in the cafeteria, the kid reaches up to touch the old man’s forearm, tell him it’s all right, and the old man collapses into ash, and the daughter and granddaughter live, and the kid, he’s the only one who knows why.

Shane is that kid now, he knows.

Or, no: he’s that old man. Has been all along, ever since his lower lip shook after reading that story.

When
Molly gets here, she’ll find the car idling, waiting, empty.

“And he’ll live?” Shane says into the rearview mirror.

“Have his own family someday,” the man in the backseat says, then narrows his eyes, looking at something definitely not in the headrest. “A foreman, looks like.” He comes back to Shane. “His crew likes him. Respects him. As they should.”

“Give it to me,” Shane says, holding his hand up for the paper. Three minutes until Molly.

“It won’t be like that, though,” the man says. “In stories people can turn to columns of ash. In real life, a person can die for months, for years. Not even know himself at the end.”

“But he’ll live? Nolan?”

“He’ll watch you die, yes.”

Already Shane’s picturing better ways. Accidents, insurance.

Except—wouldn’t that be not treasuring each minute he has left with Nolan, with Samuel, with Molly?

At least this way, the man’s way, he’ll get to say goodbye. Again and again probably, surgery after surgery, but that’s got to be better than a police officer at the door. Doesn’t it?

“It’ll destroy him, sure,” the man says, “but he’ll get put back together. Him and Samuel both. Children are made for this kind of trauma, it would seem.”

“Two minutes,” Shane recites, his voice already dead.

Still, it’s been the easiest decision of his life.

What father wouldn’t take that bullet for his son?

The man in the backseat smiles with his eyes, in agreement, and begins folding the paper tinier and tinier—all Shane can see, in flashes, is the occasional line of crayon—until it’s an eggshell-white origami capsule, every edge smooth.

He hands it over the seat, delivers it to Shane’s fingertips.

“Glioblastoma,” Shane says, inspecting the cancer from all angles. It’s heavier than just one piece of paper. As it should be, he suspects.

“One minute,” the man says, tapping his own watch.

Shane swallows the nothing in his mouth, in preparation, then deposits the pill onto the back of his tongue. It’s dry, sucks all the moisture from his mouth, but, only gagging once, he gets it down. Tells himself he’s grateful for it, even.

“That’s all?” he says.

“They won’t be able to see it on the machines you have for two weeks, give or take,” the man says, “but yeah. That’s it.”

“She’s late,” Shane says, nodding to Molly’s stairs, and for a shrieking instant he knows this has been a trick, that he should have read that paper before swallowing it, that what it had to have said or been a kindergarten picture of was that he was trading Molly’s life for Nolan’s.

But then the man’s hand is on his shoulder, assuring him.

“And as you know with blastomas,” he says, “the memory becomes unreliable. At some point, you might not even remember me as I am now, would you agree?”

“But we made a deal.”

“And it’ll hold,” the man says, his voice suede now, his hand still cupping Shane’s shoulder, “but soon, much sooner than you would think possible, all of your memories, they’ll be tinged with foreknowledge of this cancer, as if you were picking up cues—like some part of you saw it coming all along. It’s completely natural. And, correct me if I’m wrong, but you’re reading about school matters?”

Shane holds the magazine up. “Education,” he says.

“So you were already thinking about that story with the old man in the three-piece suit. Add that to the cues you’ve been picking up, the signals your body’s been sending for months now, and it makes perfect sense for your mind to project someone impossible like me—to show,” he opens the door, the babylocked door —“have him deliver the news to you, perhaps even arrange it such that the cancer is voluntary, a sacrifice, an act of heroism, of—of…”

“Love.”

“Yes, that.”

“And you couldn’t have changed clothes that fast,” Shane says, playing along with this charade. This fantasy. This joke. Already remembering it as a joke with himself. A coping mechanism. An explanation for why he has to die. A way to shape the past such that he can accept the future.

And the grandfather in the story had been wearing a salesman suit, like he’d come from work, been sitting in that waiting room for days already.

The man tilts his head to the side, in agreement.

“Neither could I know that what Molly wanted you to do this afternoon was get some nail clippers for the dog,” he adds.

Because they’ve been using wire cutters now for all these years. Courting disaster, infection, blood on the kitchen linoleum.

She’d told him twice this morning, before kissing him goodbye.

“Clippers,” Shane repeats.

“Clippers,” the man says, one leg down to the snow now.

“And he’ll live?” Shane says.

“Two children of his own,” the man says, shifting his briefcase across, looking suddenly ahead, to the stairs. “T minus twenty-two seconds,” he whispers. Excited in a grim way, it seems.

Before he’s gone, though.

“Why me,” Shane spurts out. “Why broker this kind of deal just to me?”

The man stops his climb out of the Impala, chews his cheek a bit as if collecting his words.

“Did I say
‘broker?’” he asks, a glimmer in his eyes now. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but brokers are the middle man, yes? The agent?”

Shane nods, a wariness clenching inside him now.

The man smiles, pats the seat he’s just sliding away from. “Agents work for other people,” he says then, less coy now. “Me? I work for myself, Shane. For me and me alone. To help people like you, in need.”

“Thank you,” Shane says—an apology, really—and the man tips his hat, steps up into the blowing cold, and is already walking toward the mall, his gait not curt like Shane would associate with an overcoat like that, but young, loose, happy…satisfied?

He just saved a boy’s life, though.

That has to be it.

He allowed a father to be a hero, allowed a boy to live.

Not a broker at all, but some type of angel. Somebody running interference on Shane’s part. Or Death, giving Shane the one get-out-of-jail-free card he has each year.

Or, not free, really.

A life for a life, Shane guesses.

But why? That’s what’s sticking. Had the man been a broker, then he would take a cut, but if he’s working for himself and himself alone, then he must be the dealer himself, the trader.

And…why trade?

Why does anybody?

Because they can trade up. Get something better, something they want more.

But how is Shane’s life worth more than Nolan’s?

It doesn’t make sense. But neither does the man being there at all. And maybe that’s part of the forgetting him: a logical inconsistency at the center of the experience, that makes it easier and easier to forget, to dismiss, to laugh away, to never tell anybody about, because they’d see the obvious holes in the story.

Shane smiles, rubs his throat with his index-finger knuckle, and then Molly crests the top of the stairs, the wind catching her hair, her scarf whipping up behind her.

Shane smiles—only two minutes late today—is already trying to gather an excuse for the no-nail-clippers thing, and then the man, a hipster in shirt-sleeves again, he steps slightly aside for Molly to pass, and tips his hat to her as well, pinches the cigarette away from his face.

She nods, passes, holding her coat together at her throat, then stops a step or two later, to watch the man recede, like she knows she should remember him, and like that — though it lasts for hours in Shane’s head—Shane sees him at one of her booths, sees him talking earnestly of impossible things, sees him telling her that she’s the daughter in that story, the one who shouldn’t have lived, the one who’s number’s being called back in now, he’s sorry, he really is. The whole time folding a piece of paper, one of Nolan’s old pictures, folding it smaller and smaller, then passing it across the table, under his cupped hand. Leaving it there for her like a decision, one she’s already forgotten.

She would do anything for the kids too, of course.

The trade wasn’t one-for-one, it was two-for-one.

Of course.

Shane closes his eyes, opens them, and, for the first time since he’s been picking her up like this, stands from his side of the car, crosses to meet her.

“Um,” she says, flashing her eyes around for the security Jeep.

“Moll,” Shane gets out, his voice cracking, eyes hidden, then takes her hand, is leading her to her side of the car but then turns around. “I’m saving you from the bus,” he says right into her ear, and steps to the side, raises her hand to pull her to him so that she spins under his hand, stops with her back against his chest, her hair against his lips.

“My knight,” she says. It’s part of their old routine. From some movie.

Shane swallows. They’re all alone now, the snow swirling around their feet, some distant mall bound shoppers making their way across the parking lot, their shapes small against the months of mounded snow.

“The kids,” Molly says then, because it’s time.

Shane nods, knows. Wonders if this is what it’ll be like after. If they’ll be able to see Nolan and Samuel through the snow, far away, moving into their own lives.

“Wait,” he says back to her, and leans forward over her shoulder, squinting. Not at the distant shoppers but at the coffee-colored negative blown from the front seat, sliding across the snow now. Behind it the snow mounds that seem so permanent, so—

Shane smiles.

“See that?” he says to Molly, and she looks down along the top of his arm, his index finger pointing to the top of the tallest, oldest mound. The quiet little pipe jutting up from the snow there.

“What?” she says, and Shane nods to himself, says it like talking from a dream, “Home,” and then switches his feet back and forth twice, for warmth, for magic, for everything.

caked with blood, his whiskers not grown in like you’d think, him having run off into the woods without a razor.

When the hair pulls back in to wrap around your bones or wherever it goes, it’s like a reset button, I guess. If you had a beard before, you’ll wake without one.

One of those mornings he had to go into town to the doctor, though.

Another thing you don’t expect is the bugs. If it’s summer or even a late fall without a hard enough freeze yet, the insects’ll still be crawling, and if you pull a deer down, then, well, ticks, they just care that you’ve got warm, drinkable blood, and can’t reach all your scratchy places.

What my Aunt Libby figured happened was that, while Grandpa was rooting around in the slit-open belly of a fat deer, one of that deer’s ticks jumped ship, went to where the beating heart was.

It wasn’t Lyme Disease that sent Grandpa to the doctor, though. Wolfed out, his system probably could have kicked smallpox.

No, what sent him to town was that tick. When Grandpa fell to sleep on the porch and his hair started slithering back into its pores, that tick was a cartoon character, climbing a tree that was sinking into the ground as fast it could climb, and then just riding that hair down.

It impacted itself in one of the wide pores on the back of Grandpa’s arm, just under the shoulder. If it hadn’t been headfirst, then it would have starved, shriveled up, turned to dirt.

Headfirst like it was, though, it could slurp and slurp and slurp, its sides and back swelling lighter and lighter gray, stretching that one pore wider than any pore was meant to, making Grandpa’s whole shoulder throb.

The doctor took one look and said it was either pop her—he knew the tick was female, somehow—let her little ticklings all pour out onto Grandpa’s skin, and maybe into his blood, or he could lance her with something hot, killing the mama and boiling all the babies at once. Grandpa wasn’t exactly sold on either option, so the doctor made the decision for him, heating up a piece of baling wire with his lighter and stabbing it in slow and thorough, then digging the head of the tick out with what looked like a dental hook.

Before he could antiseptic it Grandpa rolled his shirtsleeve down over the fleshy crater so the doctor couldn’t dab away the blood, maybe get some on himself.
In himself. If you’re born into the blood, you’re fine, but if you catch it, then it’s bad. Those werewolves, they never last long.

By the time I started coming around at eight years old, the scar on the back of Grandpa’s arm from the tick was just a smooth little dab of skin that could have been from anything.

This is the way werewolf stories go.

You hear about it, hear about it, are breathing hard it’s so great or so gross or so scary or so close, but then at the end, whoever’s telling it pushes back a little, like in satisfaction of a tale well-told, nods at you like you’ve just got to believe it, now. Because it’s the gospel truth.

Never mind any proof.

•

Where this is going is my grandfather lying to me one afternoon.

I wasn’t living with him, really. Where I was living was with my Aunt Libby, my mom’s twin once-upon-a-time, but she had a job sewing bags of feed closed out west of town, and said she didn’t trust that her ex-husband wouldn’t come around while she was gone. And she didn’t want me there for that.

Uncle Darren would have been my fallback there, but school was still in session, and he said the truant officer’d be all over him if word got around I was running produce back and forth to Tulsa with him three times a week.

“Produce,” Libby had said about that.

“Produce,” he had said back, but the way he looked away, I could see they were talking about something completely different. Something I was too young for.

Grandpa it was, then.

By that time he wasn’t moving from his rocking chair by the fire much, and everything on his shelves I said I liked, he’d tell me I could have it.

The first time I took something—it was an old ceramic car that was a cologne bottle—I carried it around with me all afternoon, finally had to admit I didn’t have anywhere to take it to.

My mom had been dead since I was born, and my dad was anybody. Aunt Libby said I was to call her
Aunt, not Mom, but I still did sometimes, in my head. Anybody would. She was what my real mom would have looked like, if she’d lived through me getting born.

Her and Uncle Darren and Grandpa all shuttled me back and forth from school, and because I knew they’d have tried, I never asked them to help with my homework.

Werewolves aren’t any good with math.

Not that Uncle Darren or Aunt Libby ever shifted anymore, mind. At least not on purpose. Sometimes, asleep, you can’t help it. Or strung out like Uncle Darren gets on the road.

He’s wrecked two trucks so far, is with his third company in five years.

Grandpa understands.

He’s the one who tells them to save it, their shifts. He’s the one always saying look what it’s done to him.

You’d think he was eighty or a hundred, as frail and twisted up as he was then, but he was fifty-six.

It was because he hadn’t had anybody to tell him, to warn him.

When you’re wolfed out, running around the woods on all fours, snapping at rabbits and birds and terrorizing the villagers, you age like a dog. And Grandpa, as a young man, he’d always preferred to run his dinner down rather than work for wages to buy it at the grocery.

It had made sense. Until the arthritis. Until his skin turned to rice paper. Until his left eye glaucoma’d up like there was a storm building in there.

There was.

Two years after he got stuck with me those three weeks, he stroked out.

Aunt Libby and me found him half in, half out of the front door. Halfway between man and wolf.

“He was going for the woods,” Aunt Libby said, looking there.

I did too.

•

Because we didn’t need the questions—and the social security checks didn’t hurt—we burned Grandpa on the trash pile a few times, then Uncle Darren showed up with a front-end loader, pushed the pile back and forth until there was nothing left anybody’d want to dig through.

This is the way it is with werewolves.

We don’t have secret graveyards.

We move a lot.

And, I say
“we,”
but my real mom, even though she was oldest, she was the runt of the litter. It’s what Grandpa called her. And he’d always add how she was the lucky one.

Not all the children born to a werewolf are werewolves.

Even Aunt Libby and Uncle Darren, they’ve got half of my grandmother in them. You can tell when Uncle Darren lets his beard grow in, to prove to Grandpa he isn’t shifting. It’s tinged red, like Grandma was supposed to have been as a girl.

How she died, it was in another town, some rival pack. I’d never gotten the complete story of it back then, but I had enough. Grandpa’s gone hunting, and the other crew comes calling, and there’s my grandmother standing in the door with three shots in her rifle, her three kids peeking around her skirts.

What Aunt Libby claims to remember is shifting for the first time right there in the front part of the living room, shifting a cool seven years before puberty, when it’s supposed to happen. How she screamed and tore at herself, and this made Darren start changing early too.

And how my mom, she just stood there.

“Run,” Grandma’s supposed to have whispered down to them, and they did but they couldn’t, they didn’t know how to use their new legs, so my mom—is this why there’s always a human in the litter?—she dragged these two little wolf cubs along, she pulled them by the shirts they were growing out of, she pushed them ahead of her, only stopped for a moment, when three shots fired off behind her.

That night Grandpa found the three of them, smelled them out from twenty miles of lost woods.

He was red to the shoulder, the other pack’s blood steaming off him, and Aunt Libby said it was right then she knew nobody she ever married was ever going to be good enough.

Uncle Darren tells it different, but that’s the way it always is with werewolves.

We learned thousands of years ago to always keep shifting, always keep the story changing.

That way nobody can pin it on you.

•

I was trying to do my geography, trying to believe that triangles mattered, were going to help me someday, when Grandpa’s voice creaked that way it did, a minute or two before he got wound up enough to start saying whatever it was he’d thought of.

I waited it out, free-handed the angle of a corner out on my paper and erased it, drew it right beside itself, like tracing a ghost.

It was a blind stab at the correct answer, a bad guess, I knew, but if you erased enough, Ms. Chamberlain would give you points for effort.

Sometimes she’d have a baggie of shelled pecan halves for me too, for lunch.

“It was that time that one with the black tail came in smelling like skunk,” Grandpa started off, laughing behind the words like it was all coming back.

I looked up to him and past him, to the fire. It was banked low, a
“daytime fire,”
he called it. An old man fire.

Such are the last days of mighty werewolves.

But there had been a time, I knew.

Each time I looked at him, I would try to see it.

“No, it was the dock-tail,” he said, nodding to himself about it.

“Dogs,” I said.

Dogs, he nodded.

You’d think a family of werewolves would have a soft spot for farm dogs, but it’s kind of the opposite.

The dogs know, and never trust.

You smell like one thing, look like another.

“It was high summer,” Grandpa said, licking his lips, his one rheumy eye shiny wet. “It was old Doc.”

“For dock-tail,” I filled in.

He nodded, shot me with his finger gun.

I sat back, hooked my arms around my knees.

“Done there?” he asked, about my homework.

Aunt Libby’d be all over both our cases if my geography wasn’t done by the time she came in covered in feed dust, half the cattle in the county trailing her in the door.

“Done,” I said to Grandpa, flipping the textbook closed to prove it.

He knew I was lying, but he knew that stories are more important, too.

“It was high summer,” he repeated again, “and old Doc, he was what you might call an egg-sucking dog. Know what that means?”

I shook my head no, couldn’t imagine.

“Chickens,” Grandpa said, smiling in a way that told me clear as day that he was something of an egg-sucker himself. “Some dogs, they can’t keep themself out of the henhouse. They know it’s wrong, they know they’re going to get the business end of the shovel afterwards, but that don’t change a thing, nosiree. Once they look through the fence a certain way, then the deed, it’s already half the way done.”

“But you said it was a skunk,” I said, squinting like trying to keep up.

“So I did,” Grandpa said, rocking back. “What you got to understand about this, it’s that Doc, he was of a type. It wasn’t that he liked chicken meat or eggs so godawful much, it’s that he couldn’t ever keep his nose out of trouble. And that’s what finally did his dumb ass in.”

He was still talking about himself here, I knew.

Aunt Libby’d told me once that all of Grandpa’s stories, they were really complicated apologies. Most times to people who weren’t even alive anymore. That that’s how it is when you get old.

But she also said that if I listened, I might learn something.

I wish she’d been wrong.

•

Grandpa’s story as it unfolded went around and around the house. This was what Uncle Darren always said anytime Grandpa got wound up, started remembering out loud.

“I don’t want to go around and around the house with you, old man,” he’d say, and slap his cap on his pants leg like killing a fly, or hammering a gavel.

But he did go around and around the house with Grandpa. He would.

Me too.

So there’s Doc with his docked tail that hadn’t really been docked with shears or a pocket knife to keep it from collecting burrs—it had been shot off with a twenty-gauge, from a neighbor who cared about his chicken stock—and he’s traipsing through the woods. Partly because it’s shady and cool back in the trees, and partly because there’s nothing going on up by the house.

“When you’re young, you like to roam,” Grandpa said, looking me straight in the face to see if I was young or not.

My heart, it was out there with Doc.

Grandpa winked his blind eye.

Now Doc’s on the scent of a bitch in heat, he thinks. Or wants to think. His nose to the ground, his ass haunched up in the air, that little tail working like a librarian’s finger. Whining the way a dog will on the trail—exactly the way a wolf never would, Grandpa made sure I understood.

I might have been the kid of a human, but Grandpa still treated me like a werewolf.

It meant everything.

Soon enough, following his nose like that, Doc crosses the creek, winds into the part of the woods the neighbor’s cleared of underbrush so his tree blind has lines of sight on everything.

Doc too.

Standing in the middle of the clearing is a king skunk, one of those ones with two stripes instead of just one. One of those kind that don’t back down.

Doc’s lip quavers, the growl building in his chest.

The skunk just glares across at him, not remotely concerned. Its feet, though, those tiny black claws—Grandpa held his own hand up to show, and for a breathless moment I thought his fingernails were going to curl around, that I was finally going to see it happen—they were gripping onto the top of the ground.

“Just like you have to anchor a cannon down on the deck of a ship,” Grandpa said.

If he’d ever been on the open water or even to the Gulf, I didn’t know about it.

I did know backhoes by then, though, and they had those robot arms that would reach out on each side, dig in.

It was the same way for that skunk, I knew.

He was about to deliver a payload.

That night, Doc skulked back to the house whimpering.

His muzzle was still scarred from the last time Grandpa had had to take pliers to the porcupine quills barb-deep in that velvet black skin behind his whiskers.

Porcupines don’t carry rabies, though. They can, I suppose, I’d just never heard of it.

No, rabies, it’s what the bats bring to the coyotes, what the coyotes give to the prairie dogs, what the prairie dogs special-deliver to the polecats.

This skunk Doc had tangled with, it didn’t necessarily have rabies.

But maybe.

And, when you’ve got dairy stock and other dogs and bats living in the attic, maybe’s enough.

Grandpa didn’t want to rouse Darren and Libby and my mom, though. They were still kids, and he didn’t want to deal with the way they’d dive between Doc and the end of the gun, how they’d promise Doc was okay, never taking their own safety into account even for a slip of a moment.

The only way to tell for sure he didn’t have rabies, it was either to wait for it to be too late or to cut Doc’s head off, mail it into Tulsa for testing.

Either way, it was the end of the line for Doc. What had started with his tail was going to find completion after all these years.

Grandpa turned the porch light off, wrapped a bandanna around his face—even when not shifted, the smell of skunk still hurts—and hooked a finger through Doc’s collar, led him past the barn.

What he had looped in the painter loop of his pants was a ball-peen hammer. Not one a working man would like, with a two-pound head that completes the swing for you, just one to bang something straight on the anvil.

It would be enough. More important, it would be quiet.

“Except,” Grandpa said, laughing in his wheezy way—this was the punchline he’d been building towards—“after I hit Doc between the ears that first time, I like to have never got that next lick planted, let me tell you.”

And he laughed and laughed, and the fire found a few pops of sap, and for a few moments I could see him out there, the silhouette of him anyway, holding the silhouette of a big rangy dog by the collar, that dog pulling him around and around, that long-handled hammer whistling through the air, trying to deliver its kindness down, and then trying again, all through dinner.

You have to smile, sometimes.

•

Three years later, Uncle Darren had found us a place outside Sprayberry, Texas.

All the trucks were oilfield trucks, their dashboards black with it.

He was running pipe now, back and forth to El Paso.

Aunt Libby was clerking at the gas station. They had a video shelf on the back wall, and she’d let me bring home the movies nobody’d rented that night, then sneak them back in her purse, “find” them behind the cereal or the soup cans if her boss was there.

This is what werewolves do.

Until one night Uncle Darren walked up out of the highway. It was just like the opening credits of a show I’d been watching on television, so that I felt the ground shift underneath me, like somebody had their hand on the channel dial.

Aunt Libby heard or smelled, came out, her hands dusted white with flour.

“No,” she said.

Yes.

Hooked over Uncle Darren’s shoulder was the creaky black belt of a state trooper. The pistol was still there in its molded holster, the handle flapping against his side every other step.

“Go inside,” she said, pushing me away.

She should have pushed harder.

We didn’t need anybody to tell us what had happened here.

For weeks now, Uncle Darren had been coming in from his runs cussing the smokey that’d been dogging him.

When Uncle Darren drove, he liked to drink wine coolers. Just to stay awake.

He’d been doing it so long that he’d become a real and true marksman, could hang a bottle out the window on his side, flip that bottle over the top of his rig, nail the mile marker reflectors each time.

And he never got drunk. It was just wine coolers, right? I wasn’t near old enough, was just pushing twelve, but I knew they tasted like watered-down something else, I just wasn’t sure what. But they sure weren’t beer, or anything stronger.

This one state trooper who worked 20 just east of Stanton, he didn’t agree.

Uncle Darren had taken to muttering how bears and wolves, they weren’t meant to get along.

Whenever Aunt Libby heard him, well. It was on, like Grandpa would have said. Screaming and cussing, one of them storming out into the mesquite darkness.

Aunt Libby was right, though, I knew.

She’d always been able to control transforming better than Darren. Like, she could get mad at somebody and not wolf out on them.

It kept the gas station from becoming a killing floor. It kept her boss alive, day after day. It kept his grabby hands connected to his pale wrists.

Uncle Darren, though, he’d taken to long-haul trucking specifically to avoid those kinds of confrontations.

Until this one state trooper.

Fifty miles behind him, I knew, his rig was cocked over in the ditch, the running lights on, the door swinging, the dome light glowing down on three or four bottles of what had been a six-pack. Of strawberry wine coolers.

That big chrome gas tank, it would be tacky with blood, I knew.

Maybe some splashed up onto the mirror, and the backside of the windshield.

Uncle Darren had torn through that trooper like the human sheet of tissue he was, and come out the other side with that thick black belt in his teeth, a prize.

Then he’d run up the yellow stripes until the pads of his feet were raw.

And then he’d stood, a man.

Aunt Libby didn’t even stop from him being both naked and her own brother. She walked right out into the road, straight-armed him direct in the chest, nearly dislodging his trophy of a belt.

Uncle Darren was ready, but still he had to give a bit.

He tried to keep sliding past her, for the house, for clothes, for the suitcases because we were moving again, we had to, but Aunt Libby hauled him back, and I should have gone inside, I should have been inside watching a stolen movie about ninjas, I should have been inside already packing.

But I wasn’t.

I heard.

Not the growling—it wasn’t the first time I’d heard it from Aunt Libby—but the words. The human words.

At first Aunt Libby was talking low and steady, about how she had a good job this time, how this was a good place. How they were going to know who did it.

Like Darren, though, I wasn’t really listening, here.

What I was doing was watching him.

I could see Grandpa rising up in his son. I was seeing Grandpa as a young man, itching to roam, to fight, to run down his dinner night after night, because his knees were going to last forever. Because his teeth would always be strong.

Darren’s skin was jumping in folds, cringing back from the shift. Aunt Libby was pushing his every last button, and—he’d never been a talker—he didn’t even have any good defense, aside from that Trooper Dan had been asking for it, that he’d been asking for it his whole life, and that they could go back now if she wanted, they could steal a truck, fake a wreck. Pretend Trooper Dan had been doing a ticket when a drunk veered, and, and—

Aunt Libby slapped him.

Her claws were out, too.

My eyes took snapshots of every single frame of that arc her hand took. It was the first real wolf I’d seen. It was what I’d been waiting for ever since Oklahoma, ever since Arkansas. Ever since ever.

It proved that these weren’t just stories, that they weren’t just excuses.

A piece of Uncle Darren’s lower lip strung off his mouth, clumped down onto his chest. The lower part of his nose sloughed a little lower, cut off from the top half.

His eyes never moved.

By his legs, his fingers stretched out as well, reaching for the wolf.

“No!”
Aunt Libby yelled, stepping forward, taking him by both wrists, driving her knee up into his balls.

It’s another thing about werewolves.

Mid-shift, a knee to the balls can bring you back to the human side of things. Pain is a weight. It anchors you.

Uncle Darren balled up, curled on his side there on the asphalt where anybody could drive by.

Aunt Libby stood over him breathing hard, still growling, her skin jumping in the most beautiful way.

All that bullshit about packs and dominance, alphas and submission?

Right then I believed the hell out of it.

“You can’t just say whatever story you want and make it true,” she said, finally, about the wreck Uncle Darren wanted to stage.

“Learned from the best,” Uncle Darren said, and Aunt Libby whipped her eyes up. Right to me.

“‘I found all three of you out there by the old—by the creek’… is that what he used to say?” Darren managed to get out. “I mean, I mean, is that what he used to sell?”

Aunt Libby was still staring at me. With her real self.

“Three shots,” Uncle Darren laughed, still holding himself, speaking directly down into the hot black rock. But I could hear him. “There were three shots in that rifle, Lib, three shots, three shots and three ki—”

Aunt Libby kicked him before he could finish, but it was too late.

Three kids.

You don’t tell your children to run, not when the wolves are at the door.

No kid can outrun a werewolf, much less a riled-up pack of them.

What you do is you deliver the only kindness you’ve got left. What you do is you hold each of their little heads and kiss them on the forehead, and then replace your lips with the open mouth of a gun.

But my grandmother hadn’t gone all the way through with it. Grandpa had come home right at that moment, or they’d slipped away out a side window, or the other crew had come through the door, or Libby and Darren had changed, and fought her back with their sharp baby teeth, or—or a hundred other things.

None of which mattered.

Once you make a decision like that, you can’t take it back.

And, because Grandpa loved her and not hated her, I guess—because he understood—he’d made a lie up about that day. He’d made it sound good.

And it probably wasn’t the first time.

I could see it in the way Libby had slashed her eyes to me, tried to hold me with them. Tried to keep me from understanding. From seeing through.

“Doc,” I said, in the new quiet Uncle Darren’s pained breathing was spreading all around. “There never was a dog named Doc.”

“Don’t,” Aunt Libby said, her mouth tight, like keeping a secret.

I turned, I ran.

She let me.

•

The next few weeks were quiet.

We were living in the panhandle of Florida, slapping bugs off our necks every few soggy breaths. Uncle Darren was working the boats at night, like Grandpa never had. There weren’t any cannons on them. Just contraband. It was why he had to work naked: so they’d know he wasn’t smuggling anything himself.

Aunt Libby was taking coupons and making change at an oil change place. I worked down in the pit. I wasn’t old enough, but they didn’t have to pay me as much, so it all kind of worked out.

Down there turning my wrenches, that liquid clicking of the ratchets swelling up all around me, I ran through Doc’s story from every angle I could, trying to peel it back to a different truth, a better truth.

All I kept hearing, though, it was what Grandpa had really been telling me, his one eye pressuring up to burst back into his brain.

All I kept hearing was what he’d really been apologizing for.

My mom.

It had to be.

If Aunt Libby hadn’t thinned her lips that night when I said Doc’s name, I probably never would completely flashed on what Grandpa was saying.

But she had.

Still, there was some assembly required.

Another story Grandpa told me, it did have proof, is maybe the only werewolf story in the whole history of werewolves to ever have proof.

It was where dew claws come from. Why they are.

On dogs, they’re useless, just leftover. From when they were wolves, Grandpa insisted.

It was about birthing, about being born.

Just like baby birds needed a beak to poke through their shells, or like some baby snakes have a sharp nose to push through their eggshells, so did werewolf pups need dewclaws. It was because of their human half. Because, while a wolf’s head is made for slipsliding down a birth canal, a human head—all pups shift the whole time they’re being born, can’t help it—a human head is big and blocky by comparison. And the momma-wolf’s lady parts, they aren’t made for that.

That’s the reason for the dewclaws. So the pup can reach through with his paw. So that one claw up on the back of their forearm can snag, tear the opening a bit wider.

It’s bloody and terrible, but it works. At least for the pup.

And I’m reminded now each time I reach up to wrap the strap around a dull orange oil filter.

On my forearm, there are two pale slick scars that I’d grown up thinking were from the heating element of a stove in Arkansas, when I’d reached in for toast before I understood anything. Two slick little divots in my life that I always figured were my secret connection to Grandpa: he had a scar from a stupid tick, I had one from some stupid toast. It was the story I’d been told. I’d never had call it to question.

Until now.

It wasn’t a skunk-bit dog Grandpa dragged out behind the barn that night, to take care of in the most personal way.

I can see it now, in his words.

Some days it’s the only thing I can see.

A woman starts to have a baby, a human woman starts to have a human baby, only, partway through it, that baby starts to shift, little needles of teeth poking through the gums months too early. It’s not supposed to happen, but the wolf’s in the blood.

The thing about that night in Sprayberry, when Uncle Darren came up the road naked, when Aunt Libby slapped him down, the thing I hadn’t questioned at the time but couldn’t get over now, was that I’d heard him talking low into the asphalt, from all the way back at the house.

I’d heard him without thinking, from farther away than a human should be able to.

My mom, I didn’t just tear her open, I probably infected her.

Werewolves that are born, they’re in control of it, or they can come to be, at least. They have a chance.

If you’re bit, though, then it runs wild through you, it burns you up fast, and hurts the whole time. All you can do is feel sorry for those wolves. They never understand what’s happening to them, just run around slobbering and biting, trying to escape their own skin.

That skunk, it did have rabies, Grandpa.

That skunk, it was me.

And so, the real story, it’s that a father carries his oldest daughter out past the house, he carries her out and she’s probably already changing for the first time, but he holds his own wolf back.

This is a job for a man.

He raises the hammer once but isn’t decisive enough, can’t commit to this act with his whole heart, but he has her by the scruff, and she’s on all fours now, is snapping at him, her infant son screaming on the porch, her twin sister biting those baby-sharp dew claws off for him, and for the rest of that night, for the rest of his life, this husband and father and monster is swinging that little ball-peen hammer, trying to connect, his face wet with the effort, the two of them silhouettes against the pale grass, going around and around the house.

We’re werewolves.

This is what we do, this is how we live.

If you want to call it that.

so that all the mourners flinched and ducked. Sai included.

Of everybody seated in rows and standing at the edges, though, Sai was the only one looking back to the parking area at that exact instant. Because Marissa was there, propped up in the passenger seat. Because she’d insisted, just as she’d insisted Sai come up to the grave like this, to see Mark off for the both of them.

Sai hadn’t heard anything the priest had said and hadn’t looked at Mark’s casket for more than a glance.

Marissa. He had to keep watching the car.

The last ten months, ever since the diagnosis, if he didn’t have a clean line of sight on her, panic started to well up in the back of his throat.

This wasn’t the farthest he’d been from her. But it was far enough. And the clock, it was definitely ticking. His plan was to hug Dava for a three- or four-count and then scurry at right angles across the cemetery to Marissa, and after lunch there was another specialist, and then after that the next thing would happen, and then the next, and if he tried to think too far into the future, he’d stop thinking altogether, he knew.

Moment-by-moment. It was the formal greeting at Group. And the farewell, each meeting, each phone call.

Moment-to-moment.

It worked.

Or—Sai could still function, anyway. Life had become a series of discrete tasks instead of an avalanche he was trying to wade into.

And soon enough, if the specialists were right, there would be the task of selecting Marissa’s casket, of boxing up her life—

No.

Sai had told Marissa he didn’t want to come to Mark’s funeral. That it was the wrong place. That it would be like walking through shadows for him, shadows of an event not happening quite yet.

Marissa had laughed and told him a funeral was a celebration, silly, and how could he argue? What if he won that argument?

It didn’t mean he couldn’t watch her the whole time, though.

Which is why he was the only one to see.

•

When the thunder cracked and all the mourners did that thing where they covered the back of their necks from this gunfire or out-of-control truck or crashing plane or whatever that sound was, Sai flinched too, he couldn’t help it, but, unlike everyone else, he kept his eyes steady on where they’d been.

It was training. Conditioning. Over the past ten months, the world had become a negotiation: if he could catch this door in six steps, then maybe the specialists were wrong; if he held his breath until that commercial was over, then there might be some good news later in the week; if he could remember the singer on the radio before the song got to the chorus. If if if.

Not looking away from Marissa in the parking lot, it was a way to keep her alive.

In a straight line between Sai and the car, though, were the three mourners who had crept in during the eulogy. They were wearing standard-issue funeral attire: overcoats, black gloves, ties, sunglasses. Two men and one woman.

In that instant between the rest of the crowd ducking and the sound registering, everyone looking sheepishly up to the sky, smiling at themselves, unfurling their umbrellas, these three… didn’t.

It was as simple as that.

When the thunder cracked, not one of them flinched or had any kind of response. Or, Sai told himself, time moving past him in still frames, that wasn’t exactly it. It was more like this human response they did finally fall into, it had to roll back across the funeral. Like, it needed time for them to see it, to take their cue from the crowd, and adjust appropriately.

The thunder was already dying when two of the three did their exaggerated pantomimes of flinches, and the third—the waveringly tall man—only jerked his shoulders up when the woman pinched his sleeve, gave a sharp tug.

And then the alarm on Sai and Marissa’s car went off. From the storm.

The rest of the cars chimed in, their headlights flashing in the daytime.

Where the rest of the mourners unholstered their key fobs, aimed them at the parking lot, Sai broke formation, ran hell for leather across the dead, to make sure Marissa was all right.

The woman at the back of the funeral placed her hand in the chest of the tall man and guided him back, out of Sai’s way, and, for two weeks, Sai completely forgot about them, and how they hadn’t understood what to do with the thunder.

•

The next funeral was for Dava.

It was suicide, but everyone in Group knew better.

Just like Mark, she was a victim of the disease. At the last meeting, Sai had tried to recast it, say that Marissa —and Mark, and the rest—they weren’t so much victims of the thing in their blood as they were victim of being born when they had been. Were Marissa being born now, Sai argued, or in five years, then, thirty years later, when her genetic alarm clock rang, there would probably be a cure, right?

It wasn’t rationalization, Sai told himself, enduring the polite applause. It was true. It was obvious.

Marissa insisted on being wheeled graveside, for Dava.

Sai had two umbrellas, just in case.

The sky was clear, though. The sky was perfect.

The funeral went off without a hitch. It wasn’t a celebration, but still, they were together now, maybe, Dava and Mark.

Their guest speaker at Group had told them not to think like that, that if they allowed themselves to think like that, then that made the rest of the steps easier to fall into, but still. It made a certain kind of sense, Sai knew.

After Marissa’s gone, wouldn’t he want to join her?

It didn’t matter. After the news about Dava, Marissa had made Sai promise, and, because he was still in negotiations, Sai had made the promise real in his head, not just a placating group of random words.

Marissa’s argument was that, wherever she went after death, if it was in fact eternal, then that would also mean it was timeless, wouldn’t it? As in, all the moments are the same moment. One big long moment, a now that goes forever. So, whether Sai showed up five minutes after her death or fifty years, it would be the same to her.

“Probably,” Sai had said. “Sure.”

She hadn’t made him promise anything about accidents, though.

Maybe he was going to get into base jumping the week after her funeral. Maybe he was going to become an alligator-feeder at a second-rate carnival. Maybe spelunking alone was how he would manage his grief.

When the preacher—Dava had been vaguely Baptist—shut his bible, the meager crowd dispersed, trailing away to the rest of their lives.

Except Group. Except the Survivors.

They held their own ceremony. It was just clasped hands around the casket, each of them saying something nice for Dava to take with her if she was listening, but it was right, and it was good, and Sai found his eyes heating up in spite of his efforts.

He was supposed to be the strong one. For Marissa.

He shook his head and looked away, to find something to center on, to suck his attention away for a five-count.

What he saw were two tall men standing what had been three rows behind the folding chairs.

Sunglasses, ties, overcoats. Those black gloves in the heat. No sense of protocol whatsoever.

One of them was leaned over to whisper something to the other, but when Sai looked back, he stopped but kept his hand up, his mouth still covered. Like, the instant Sai looked away, he was going to continue.

Sai had to chuckle.

“You,” he said, too quiet for either of them to possibly register.

Except they did.

“Wait, wait,” he said, turning down to Marissa in her chair, to make sure the wheels were locked, and when he turned around he was already breathing deep, for whatever this confrontation was going to be.

Except they were gone.

“What?” Marissa was saying, craned around in her chair in her awkward way.

Sai panned across the whole of the cemetery, the parking lot, the street beyond, the buildings past that.

The two men were gone.

“Nothing,” he said back to Marissa.

It was his first lie to her in ten months.

•

There was no way to research the interlopers, Sai finally figured out. After three nights of thinking on it. On them.

Interlopers was the right name for them, too.

The problem was, funerals were made for interlopers. Death guilts distant relations and tangential connections out of the woodwork. There’s usually a guest book to sign, but if you choose not to, nobody presses you. Whereas at a wedding you’ll get asked if you’re there for the bride or the groom, at a funeral, you’re just there for the dead. And, if you don’t want to talk about it—of course, of course. We understand. We miss him too.

And, though Sai imagined there were probably photographs of funerals, he couldn’t think of any obvious repository for such photographs. And he could hardly imagine a grimmer photo album.

And of course nobody videotaped. People recorded births, sure. But cemeteries are different. Cemeteries are private. Your grief is a wall, your anonymity a given, if you need it. There are no strangers at funerals. Everyone’s a past lover, a childhood friend, a coworker from three jobs back. And everybody’s just there to say goodbye, anyway. There aren’t champagne flutes on circulating trays, there aren’t cookies to abscond with, there’s no shiny pile of gifts to pilfer.

Still, Sai knew.

Those three from Mark’s funeral, and then the two from Dava’s, they didn’t belong.

He could feel it.

Maybe they had a fetish, maybe they were doing a study, it didn’t matter. What did was that they were stealing. They were sneaking in and taking something.

Just to be sure, Sai called the groundskeepers at Mark and Dava’s cemeteries and had them check on their graves, to make sure they hadn’t been disturbed.

Everything was normal, the groundskeepers said. Why?

Sai thanked them, hung up.

The next call should be to the police, he knew. To report a crime. To report that three and then two people probably not connected to the deceased had stood in the back of the funeral and observed, yes. Very maliciously. With bad, bad intent.

He didn’t make that call.

Instead he called the priest who had officiated Mark’s funeral.

Just to talk, Sai said. About the future. About his wife.

“Are you Catholic?” the priest asked back.

“I just want to talk,” Sai said.

•

“What happens to her when she—when it’s time?” Sai said the following morning, Marissa asleep in their bedroom, the baby monitor flashing a line of red dots on the coffee table.

The priest watched it and considered the question. Or something.

“Where does she go, I mean?” Sai added. He’d been practicing.

The priest looked up to Sai.

With his white hair and black collar and sensible shoes and lanky frame, he was so cliché that Sai had almost grinned when he opened the door.

The priest for Mark’s funeral had been young, dark-haired.

Just like at a car lot, Sai figured, at some point in the deliberations they send the manager in, to close the deal.

“You’re telling me you’ve lived to be thirty-five,” the old priest said, wiping at his lips with his gnarly fingers, “and the basics of Christianity have somehow escaped you?”

“Thirty-two,” Sai said.

The priest just stared.

“You’re still trying to save her, aren’t you?” the priest said. “Are you wanting me to be part of that bargaining, is that it?”

“The—the last shall be first,” Sai said.

“And the first shall be last, yes. It doesn’t matter when you believe, in the cradle or on your deathbed, at the recruitment table or in the fox hole. It’s not about how much credit you’ve built up, the world still doesn’t owe you. Blah blah blah.” The priest leaned forward, boring his eyes into Sai. “Pretty shitty system, isn’t it?”

Sai nodded, afraid not to.

“Flipside, though?” the priest went on. “It also means that, if your wife’s dying in the other room, then it’s not because you ran over a squirrel when you were seventeen. Or didn’t help some lady across the street last week. Each moment, the world washes its hands of you, starts all over again. Easy as that. Wonderful as that.”

Sai watched the red line of Marissa’s breathing on the baby monitor.

“And when you die, when she dies,” the priest went on, palming the monitor away, “then what that leaves you with is regret. That you didn’t do more while she was alive. But, you know what? That’s so the next person you meet, maybe you can do more. Because now life’s got an expiration date, right? And if you work hard enough, if you’re good enough, you can work off all this regret you can see coming. This is how the world becomes a better place.”

“I just wanted to know—”

“What happens after she dies, yes,” the priest said. “Maybe what happens, it depends on what you believe. What do you believe?”

Sai swallowed, squinted his eyes as if studying something on the far wall. “That we bury her,” he finally said.

“Well, good,” the priest said, standing. “That was easy enough. Now, if you don’t mind, I’ve got some serious—”

“That we bury her and that people who aren’t people come to her funeral,” Sai said.

The priest kept standing, but he wasn’t leaving anymore.

“Demons, angels,” Sai said. “Ghosts?”

“Strangers,” the priest said, staring down at Sai.

“Are they real?” Sai asked, his voice almost cracking.

The priest turned away. “Are they real?” he repeated, huffing it out like it had been a punchline.

“They are,” Sai said.

“We don’t know the world as well as we think we do,” the priest said, and Sai looked up into that weathered face. The one that must have looked across the heads of five hundred funerals, into the eyes of . . . of what?

“I don’t want them at my wife’s—when she—”

“Then don’t have a funeral. Don’t invite them like that.”

Sai studied this tall white priest.

“Cremation,” the priest said. “Scatter her ashes. Strangers don’t care about that. Throw a funeral, though—”

“And they come,” Sai finished.

“Like flies,” the priest said, lowering his head to take his hat, his eyes never leaving Sai. “And, what’s the thing about flies?”

“They’re not human?” Sai said.

“There’s always more,” the priest said, and let himself out.

When Marissa asked through the monitor who that had been, Sai didn’t know what to say at first. Or how to say it.

•

Two weeks later Marissa checked into the hospital for what the specialists said was the last time. Her lungs, her counts. The disease.

“I wish she’d been born later,” Sai said to them, his lower lip trembling, his eyes pleading.

They had no reply.

In the bathroom, for the third time in his life, Sai got down on his knees and prayed. He tried to pray to God, to any god, but all he kept seeing when he shut his eyes was the white-haired priest ducking out the front door, the brim of his hat lowered against the sun.

To make the transition—the nurses’ word—easier, they kept Marissa’s IV line swimming with painkillers.

It meant she was conked out for days at a time.

Sai lived on vending machine food and coffee from the gift shop on the first floor.

He wished he smoked, so he could stand out of the wind in the courtyard with the rest of the families, slit his eyes at the grim future, but smoking just made him cough. So what he did was walk the streets at nervous right angles, still making deals with the world. Just offering whatever he could.

The world answered by delivering him to a cemetery. To an afternoon funeral.

Sai looked down at his clothes, to see if he was somehow wearing the tie, the overcoat, the black gloves.

Maybe we’re all strangers, he told himself, using the priest’s word.

But no.

The way he could tell was that the real strangers were there already, standing at the back of the group of mourners. Just watching. Whispering to each other.

Sai thinned his lips, balled his fists.

There were three of them again, the two men, the one woman. To anybody else, they wouldn’t stand out. Except they were so normal. Except they fit in so well.

Except, the whole twenty-two minutes Sai watched, they never shifted their weight from foot to foot, or tracked a bird floating above the trees, or turned to a car, honking. And there was no thunder this time to give them away, and Sai didn’t know how to fake a backfire in a tailpipe, and he didn’t think he would have anyway, because that would have disturbed the whole funeral, not just the three interlopers.

What can they be doing? Sai asked.

Also: what did it matter?

It wasn’t like them standing there was actually hurting anything. It wasn’t like the person being buried was floating above the casket, counting heads, separating them into groups. Not like the wife or husband or mother or father would have the presence of mind to identify strangers and have them removed.

The perfect crime, Sai knew. Made all the more perfect in that it’s not a crime at all.

Still, when the funeral broke up, he followed.

In his hand was a neatly folded twenty. He was going to tug on the sleeve of one of them and apologize, say he saw it fall from their pocket. The whole time, he was going to be taking mental snapshots of their faces. And probably screaming inside if those faces were blank. If the eyes were solid black. If the mouth opened onto a void.

Stupid, Sai told himself. It was stupid, all of it. Stupid enough that Sai started to turn around, go back to the hospital.

The three had stepped into a post office, though.

Not a diner, not the subway, not a taxi.

A post office. Like the funeral had just been another errand. One all three had to run. And now all three had to visit their mailboxes, or mail a package.

Sai shook his head no, no, and lunged ahead all the same, catching the door just before it would have shut.

Later he would think that that was probably why he was able to see them. That, if the door had closed all the way, they would have just been gone, nobody the wiser.

As it was, he stepped into the cool blankness of a thousand aluminum mailboxes.

The strangers were standing beside each other at the front window. He would have thought they were watching people pass on the street, except they were facing slightly away. Like they were looking at something in the glare of the window?

Sai looked too, and when he came back, the one closest to the door was looking directly at him.

The woman of the three.

“What are you doing?” Sai said, his voice harsher than he meant. Either that or he’d only heard his nurturing voice for ten months now.

The two men turned his way. With their whole faces. All of their praying-mantis attention.

“Where are you from?” Sai asked.

Still just the staring.

A postal customer walked in front of the three and never saw them. Either looking at his clutch of mail or he couldn’t see them.

“Was it part of the ceremony?” the woman said.

To show what she meant, the two men moved in around the woman. She held her hand up to the tall one’s chest and guided him out of the way. For the Sai from Mark’s funeral to run past.

“The noises from the transports,” the tall man said. “Was that intended, or was that happy circumstance?”

“Happy circumstance,” Sai repeated, realizing it was a not-quite-there translation. “Who are you?” he said.

“It was unhappy circumstance,” the other man said. “Otherwise it would have happened at other—”

“Why do you care?” Sai said.

“That we could look away?” the woman said, incredulous, and when she tried to affect a grin, Sai finally saw the vertical line at the back of her jaw.

“You’re a puppet,” he said, stepping back, reaching for the wall. Just to be sure it was still there.

“Puppet,” the third man said, and after processing the word for a moment, the tall man moved his arms and knees as if he were a marionette on strings.

Sai had his back to the wall now, his fingers spread wide against it.

“What are you?” he said.

“Visitors,” the woman said.

“To . . . to our funerals? Our post offices?”

“Post office,” the tall man said, looking around as if seeing it for the first time. “Tiny sleeping chambers.”

“Funerals,” the third man said, not wanting to lose this line of inquiry, it seemed. “Do you think—do you think that they will grow, if you plant them deeply enough?”

“It’s almost too much to believe,” the woman added.

“That you don’t know their names,” the third man said.

“That you leave them there,” the tall man said.

“That it really and truly does happen here like that,” the woman said. “The legends are true.”

“About what?” Sai said, a postal employee sliding past, between him and the three, adjusting his gait slightly to avoid stepping on a wide black shoe but never quite registering the man standing in that shoe.

“You just discard them,” the woman said. “As if you’re done with them. As if they have already served their reason.”

Sai was breathing hard now. And not screaming.

“Their reason?” he said. “Their purpose, you mean?”

The three looked among themselves, as if for confirmation. And then back to Sai.

“Everywhere else you travel,” the woman said. “After the first calamity—”

“What you call final death,” the third man slipped in.

“Final?” Sai said. “How many calamaties are there?”

“Eight,” the third man said, in a tone evidently reserved for children.

Sai studied him.

“After the first,” the woman went on, “everywhere else you can travel, everywhere except this place, the loved one will have whispered their secret name to their most trusted.”

“We don’t—” Sai started.

“But only right at the end, when the calamity precipitates,” the third man said. “Otherwise, they might say it beforehand, in anger, or in their sleep—”

“Or even say it after the calamity, at the least proper time,” the tall man added, his voice hushed.

“Whole worlds have been ravished,” the woman said.

“Ravaged,” the third man corrected.

“Ravaged,” the woman repeated, agreeing.

“From saying a name at the wrong time?”

“They rise then, but not as their former selves,” the tall man said. “As—as animate husks.”

Sai looked up and up to him.

Was he taller than he had been before?

“But what if—what if you say it at the right time?” Sai heard himself say.

“Then the cycle continues unabated,” the woman said. “As intended.”

“You’re saying,” Sai started, then started again: “You’re saying that if you say someone’s secret name after they’re dead, then that person—”

“Continues,” the tall man said.

“Otherwise it all becomes madness,” the third man said. “Otherwise there is no reason to—” but the woman touched her palm to his chest, shushing him.

“Apologies and forgiveness,” she said to Sai. “He doesn’t mean to offer description of your world.”

“He does,” Sai said.

“You just throw them away,” the tall man said, amazed. “Nowhere else does this happen. We had to see for ourselves that the legends were—”

“We bury them.”

“You don’t have to,” the woman said, and smiled her remote-controlled version of a smile.

It made Sai look away, to the deadspace their forms were leaving in the glare of the front window.

When he looked back to them, they were gone.

•

At the hospital, instead of waking Marissa for her secret name, Sai held her hand. For eight days.

On the ninth, she squeezed his index finger once and died.

The nurses let him have twenty minutes alone with her. He kept the side of his head to her sternum the whole time, his eyes closed.

At the funeral four days later, there were no interlopers. No strangers.

Walking away after everyone was gone, though, there was something.

A white cardboard box for mailing packages. The free kind from the post office.

There was no address on it. The flap wasn’t even closed. It still had the strip of paper on it, protecting the glue.

Inside, a phonebook.

Sai held it, looked all around, and left it flapping on the curb by his car, along with the white box.

He hadn’t really followed anybody, he told himself.

It was wishful thinking. He’d needed the universe to be large enough to accommodate the remote possibility of Marissa surviving, and so had invented alien tourists who knew, and could divulge, the secrets of the universe.

It was wishful thinking.

Feed anybody days of vending machine cookies and complimentary coffee, let them breathe the second-hand antibiotics of a hospital, then load them with enough worry for the rest of their life and usher them out into the city.

Of course Sai had seen meaning in every interaction. Even to the point of walking through a haze of his own making, fabricating those interactions.

It was all a way of putting off the inevitable, wasn’t it?

It was all a way of not dealing with what he was going to have to deal with.

That the interlopers had conveniently disappeared after Marissa’s death only confirmed that they’d been coping devices all along. Defense mechanisms. A way to avoid, to stall.

Still, for four nights in a row, Sai didn’t go to Group. He did answer his phone, though, and assured each worried caller that he wasn’t going to pull a Dava, no. That Marissa had made him promise, “she’s still saving my life,” at which point his voice would crack and he could escape again.

He just needed some time alone, he told himself. To cope. To find new tasks, new moments.

Most days he ended up at the curb by Marissa’s cemetery.

Twice he staked out the post office, but that’s all it was. That’s all it had ever been.

When people die, they’re dead, right?

What other option could there even be?

The world didn’t work on magic, on fantasy.

And of course, at the cemetery, he wasn’t alone.

There was a woman, a completely human woman, who visited a headstone some four times a day. She would collapse, lie there for minutes, then gather herself, leave only to come back three hours later.

Sai felt sorry for her, but knew better than to approach.

What she needed, he knew, were some imaginary alien tourists, to give her hope.

He smiled to himself and went home, and stayed there for a record two days.

On the third, he was back.

It was dusk.

He had asked the aliens all the wrong questions, he knew now.

How was he supposed to know the right time to say the secret name? Was it pre-ordained, or different for every case, every death, every—he chuckled, saying it—every calamity.

Except it was the right word.

And, if you did whisper someone back with their secret name, if you said it at the right time, would they remember you, or would they be starting all over? And would they be decomposed, embalmed?

Or, no: other worlds, they wouldn’t embalm, of course. That was stupid.

And they wouldn’t bury, either. Rather, the dead were probably laid out on a table, their loved one vigilant, always there, waiting for that right time to say the secret name, bring this one back for another round.

It wasn’t fair.

Sai knelt by Marissa’s headstone and slammed the sides of his hands into it.

When the groundskeeper on duty approached, Sai ran away at right angles, so as not to step on anybody.

He wound up in the subway entrance. At a bank of phones nobody used anymore.

Four of them were shiny new. No gum, no graffiti, no grime. They even still had phonebooks.

Sai felt his way there, opened one of those phonebooks, his lips moving over the names, and, turning a page, he looked three blocks down, to the cemetery, could already see himself hunched over Marissa’s grave this night or the next, reading all these names to her.

One of them was going to be right, he knew.

One of them was going to be right and, down there in the darkness of her casket, her eyes were going to roll open, and the world, it wouldn’t be different at all after this, it would just be exactly the same as it had been, as it should be.

Sai knew. And he pulled at the phonebook until it came free.

This is how it started.

I had my Library Science degree in one hand, a beer constantly in the other. Officially, I was taking a post-graduation break before entering the rat race. Just catching my breath before putting my soul on the auction block, all that. Unofficially, two of the three professors I’d asked for recs were putting me off.

Under my library degree, though, there was an undergrad one in American Lit. And that was Janet’s excuse for coming to me for help. Never mind that I’d just fallen into American Lit my last semester, when my advisor noticed that if I took this one class on the Beats, I’d have a specialization, and specializations look a lot like intent and focus to grad app selection committees.

I got into library school, so I guess it worked, and luckily nobody ever quizzed me on Hawthorne or Woolf.

According to Janet, though—she didn’t know about my missing rec letters—I was on my way to permanent barista status. To stocking the produce at the grocery store and calling that enough. From where she was, still in the thick of her studies, my little vacation was threatening to become permanent, I mean. And I can’t say she was completely wrong on that.

Helping her with the research for this production, then, I guess it was supposed to spark me awake. Make me remember why I’d wanted so badly to become a reference librarian at a research university.

So, in that regard, I guess her plan was a complete success.

In other regards, though, I think she might have killed us all.

•

The short story Herr Director was having his capstone class adapt up for the stage was from 1926, “The Night Wire.” He gave the whole crew double-sided photocopies that you had to hold right up to your face to read. As for why a story instead of a real actual play, it was so everybody could learn about staging, adaptation, all the compromises and discoveries that are supposed be built into the process. As for why something that old, it was that Spring had always been for period pieces, so the wardrobe specialists and set-designers could get hands-on experience with that particular kind of headache, and so the actors could all study the old tapes in the basement, for enunciation, body language, how to hold a highball like Jay Gatsby.

And the story this time around, it actually wasn’t bad.

I crawled into the library’s database from Janet’s living room, poked around for this H.F. Arnold, who’d written the story.

It was one of three he’d ever done, evidently. Before dying in 1963, his death decidedly not going out on the “night wire” specific to his story. And, to further complicate the background I was supposed to be getting together for the program, (“since I wasn’t doing anything else”), H.F. Arnold was more than likely a pen-name. Because these stories had shown up in the pulp mags. The supposition was that whoever Arnold really was, he was in journalism in some way, didn’t want to mess his real name up, but, again: nobody knew.

The story, though, this “The Night Wire,” it was one of those that have such a simple premise you wonder how nobody’d done it before. Even in 1926. All it was was two guys working the night wire—I picture a teletype clacking, though that’s complicated, as I’ve never actually seen a teletype—two guys sitting back-to-back, essentially taking dictation from some analog version of a news crawl. They don’t even pay attention to what’s going in through their eyes, out their fingers. Just copy, copy, copy.

My undergrad profs who taught me about “Bartleby the Scrivener” never knew about “The Night Wire,” no. Its first printing was in
Weird Tales, though, which I guess explains that.

Anyway, one of these two guys is our trusty narrator and the other is the workhorse John Morgan, who’s known in the business as a “double man,” meaning he can have his hands on two typewriters at the same time, and type different things into both of them.

For me, that’s exactly where the story steps into fantasy, but for everybody else—Janet really liked the story—it’s when John Morgan starts entering data for some killer fog creeping into the town of “Xebico,” and people in that fog get into all their predictable screaming and dying. Our narrator can’t keep his eyes off of this newsfeed, either, is hanging on Morgan’s every keystroke, until—dot dot dot—it turns out that not only has John Morgan been dead and cold for a few hours now, typing from the other side, as it were, but this town of “Xebico,” it doesn’t exist in any atlas. It doesn’t exist at all.

Legitimately creepy, yeah?

The lighting guys were going to have fun with this one, I was pretty sure.

But the program guy, he was kind of coming up short.

Luckily he knew his way around a research project, though.

•

In the movie version of my life, the digging-up-facts part of this would be an action sequence, like when the boxer’s training for the big important fight: lots of music, close-up on my bloodshot eyes, the ragged toe of my left shoe tapping, a stern-faced librarian shushing me when I finally stand up with a discovery.

I wish.

And that stern-faced librarian who would never shush me, it’s because her name’s Wendy, and we had Methods together once upon a good time, and used to meet up on the fifth floor stacks, well before Janet. Maybe not “well before,” okay, but they hardly overlapped.

File this with my non-recommenders, under Things Janet Doesn’t Need to Know.

But, H.F. Arnold.

I forget where I picked this up, or maybe I just figured it out, but anytime you see an old-time writer using initials, don’t fall into the trap of assuming that that writer’s male, and just had an ugly name.

My knee-jerk , twentieth century suspicion—this was a play, after all, and he was a playwright—it would have been Horton Foote, of course.

It wouldn’t have been that far off.

“Hortense Francis Arnold.” Maiden name “Winters.”

She was hiding, not pretending to be a guy, but letting people think whatever they wanted. It’s a male narrator, after all, and a cheap-o horror story.

Yet, and in 1926, Hortense, she had some inside information on the world of journalism, yes?

Another action sequence of me digging, digging, digging through the microfiche, and the money shot at the end, it’s this nobody guy who died in 1952. Who actually might have worked in a newsroom up in Fresno in the twenties.

Mr. Samuel G. Arnold.

His marriage certificate showed him married to H. Winters in 1920, freshly minted as a World War I hero, shrapnel limp and all, I’m sure.

I waggled my fingers over my keyboard like they were magic, like I could conjure anything.

And who knows.

•

The coincidence part of this that I was banking on was that H.F. Arnold was going to be buried in some overfull cemetery within driving distance. That I was going to be able to steal Janet away from rehearsal for an afternoon, deliver her to some picturesque leaning headstone, show her that I was more than a lifetime barista.

H.F. Arnold died in the Midwest, though, where, according to her birth certificate, she’d been born. Where she’d retreated to.

It wasn’t “Xebico” county, either.

When I picture her there as a girl, she’s Dorothy from Oz. Waiting for this impossible soldier to sweep her away. Three stories burbling in her head, filling her eyes, a Shirley Jackson in waiting.

I was kind of getting a crush on her, yeah.

Nine years after she died, her story was reprinted in one of the new and temporary pulps, something called
Terror Tales, a title that shows up in exactly the dripping font you’d expect. The pencil illustration over the story shows a woman’s bare breast for some reason, though there’s no bare breasts in “The Night Wire”—no women at all. The year H.F. Arnold died, though,
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest would have still been a big thing on the roundracks at the drugstores, even in the Midwest, I’m sure. The book with Nurse Ratched’s bare breast figuring quite prominently.

It’s probably nothing, I told myself. You’re being stupid. Just because you know some American Lit doesn’t mean you get to apply it wherever you want.

I gathered my notes, went to rehearsal.

•

For weeks already, Janet had been telling me that casting this, it was an
Of Mice and Men kind of thing, where George is the crux of the moral dilemma, sure, he’s the character who can finally change, who can win or lose and have to live with it, but it’s the big hulking Lennie who’s the real center of it all.

Our Lennie was John Morgan, typing while dead. Even though he’d only have a couple of lines, still, when his chair spins around—he was going to be every bit as important as Norman Bates’ mom.

The problem, though, it was make-up. For the stage, your face gets all amped up, overshadowed. He couldn’t play dead just by letting his jaw go slack. He’d need some real time in the make-up chair. And “The Night Wire,” the way Herr Director’s class had written it, it was a one-act play. No intermission.

Until I went to rehearsal, I had no clue how this was going to work.

That didn’t stop me from picturing John Morgan, though. Just the way H.F. Arnold had written him: a heavyset guy in a too-tight worksleeves shirt, his hair flyaway and greasy, skin pasty from the night shift, both hands kind of potentially busy. Voice meeker than you’d expect.

Evidently that was how Herr Director had been picturing him as well. Even from the back of the auditorium, my research clutched to my chest, I could tell. It was like John Morgan had stepped up from 1926.

Janet was working him through his blocking. In the story he never stood up, but fiction had the luxury of being static like that, of course. Actors, though, they like to walk and talk. To be grand and dramatic and sweeping, whether the story calls for it or not.

I settled into a seat halfway down and watched Janet work, and felt more than heard somebody sit down behind me, more away from the aisle than I was.

Herr Director, I figured, about to cut in on Janet, tell her how to tell somebody to block—that, what, did she want to ruin this whole semester’s work? The usual, I mean. Janet hadn’t named him after Hitler for nothing.

As for the set, it was historically accurate, as near as I could tell. Except for the huge white screen that took the place of what I’d think would have been a ratty window on the back wall. But what do I know about theatre.

Whoever it was behind me chuckled to himself when John Morgan sat down in his chair and it wasn’t wide enough. His hips caught on the wooden arms and the chair wheeled back so that John Morgan had to stab a hand out, clutch onto Janet, who held him up but just barely.

I looked back to, I don’t know, share the moment, commiserate—where were they going to find a chair with the right girth?—but then I flinched so hard I dropped all my precious papers.

It was John Morgan.

The double man.

He looked over to me slowly, settled me in his dead eyes.

A twin. Fresh from his first make-up test, his face grim-reapered up.

He smiled and stood, and, as he passed me by, clamped a large hand onto my shoulder, telling me it was all right.

I swallowed, didn’t believe him.

•

I forwarded my H.F. Arnold bullet-points to the address Janet gave me, and was already dreading what Herr Director’s student writers were going to do to my simple yet elegant facts. Maybe at least they’d see that this was going to be first time Hortense Francis Winters from Nebraska was going to be this close to the story she’d made up.

Well.

Made up or heard, I guess.

I mean, it could be that the dead night-wire operator was an urban legend by 1926, right? Melville’s “Bartleby” had to be sixty or seventy years old by then—old enough for somebody to have read it, half-forgot it then told it again at the bar, making it actually exciting.

Or maybe it had really happened to her husband, Samuel G. Arnold. Maybe “The Night Wire” was her way of exorcising it.

Get enough people to feel that guilty chill the story had, then laugh it off, and it would be like maybe it was made up, right? Like it had never even happened.

But I kept thinking of that pencil-lined bare breast over the word “Xebico” in that 1972
Terror Tales—the year I was born. Like this story had been waiting these past seventy years for Janet to bring it home to me. Like H.F. Arnold had been waiting for it to get to the right reader.

You wouldn’t think it, but your heart can just pound from research.

To keep my hands busy—and Janet happy—I put in an application to manage a jewelry kiosk in the mall. Just for temporary.

When the phone rang, though, I just let it ring.

I’d had the idea that keeping necklaces in line on their felt necks would be like cataloging books, like arranging them all spine-out, LC numbers lined up. I wasn’t having that idea anymore, though.

Just because she was there, I guess, I took another run at H.F. Arnold, trying to exorcise her, and dug up those other two stories. 1929 and 1937, “The City of Iron Cubes” and “When Atlantis Was.” But then I couldn’t read them. And I knew if I looked those years up the right way, they’d be somehow important for “Herr Wolf.” For Hitler. And Herr Director was definitely Janet’s alpha these days.

But none of it mattered, either. It was all just me spending too much time alone in the living room, my face too close to the laptop. Not enough lights on around me.

And it might have had something to do with Wendy, too, if I’m going to be honest. Wendy, the student librarian I’d talked up to the fifth floor after microfiching Hortense Winters up from the past. As celebration. One last time.

It might have been her ringing Janet’s phone all those times, I mean. Not a guy wearing a gold rope chain.

And Janet—I don’t know.

She didn’t suspect, couldn’t have, but somehow that was making it all worse. Even though I never would have been at the library looking for Hortense Winters if not for “The Night Wire.”

It wasn’t my fault, I mean.

Any of this.

And never mind who I saw on the fifth floor that day when I closed my eyes in the PN1995.9 aisle.

That’s Library of Congress for movies and stageplays. For  drama.

Not for Dorothy, standing at the end of her dusty driveway somewhere way back in the past.

And it wasn’t Dorothy anyway.

•

The night of the opening, I drank five and a half beers before leaving Janet’s apartment. The last half of the sixth I poured into her sink, because a whole six-pack would have broken my promise to her. I was supposed to show up sober, and not clap like an ape.

I flashed my retired student ID to get the discount price—Janet said she couldn’t comp me, and I of course was reading everything into that (had she picked the phone up one of those times, heard the fifth floor yawning in the silence?)—took my program and zeroed in on the two rented smoke machines under the table.

The “fog” was going to drift in at the end of the play, just creep in on ghost toes, be there before the audience could really register it—everybody was going to be trapped inside the fourth wall tonight—and then, though this was going to be a judgment call, the other John Morgan was going to walk in with that fog, all of Xebico wailing behind him.

He’d be available for that because, early in the play, after his last line but before his “death,” he was going to slip through the trapdoor at his knees, be replaced by his already made-up twin. Easy as that. Leaving him to get made-up himself backstage, then wait up front, the unexpected twin.

It should have been a Fall production, yeah. Halloween.

I took my seat, studied the abomination they’d made of my bullet-points and flipped it over to the back, to see if I was acknowledged.

Ha. But screw it.

Soon enough the light drained from the auditorium, the muttering faded, the shoes stopped scraping, and the pressroom on stage glowed awake. “The Night Wire” was creaking open.

The audience was rapt.

It was short, they knew that—crossing the parking lot, at least one car in every row had had a dog yapping in the front seat for what was just going to be an hour, the windows cracked enough for me to offer them the back of my hand, let them be my breathalyzer—but it was also a story this particular crowd never encountered, and that counted for something.

With those who had showed up it counted, I mean.

Want to guess what font the assistant director’s loyal boyfriend told her would be perfect for the poster pasted up all across campus? It dripped, it bled, it told you to show up if you dared.

Only about half of the usual crowd had dared.

Herr Director was going to lay that on Janet, of course, and of course I’d try to take what of that blame I could, look over her shoulder at a point on the cabinet and try to think of nothing at all.

This is the way relationships work, isn’t it?

I leaned back so I could rest my head against the back of my chair, cocked my knees up against the vacant seat in front of me, and that big white screen Herr Director had for a back wall, that I’d thought had to just be temporary, a placeholder, it lit up. From the backside.

I smiled.

That part in the story, where the narrator’s reading John Morgan’s typings, his newsfeed or whatever it is?

Instead of having him say it out loud all stupid, they were showing us what was inside his head.

It was perfect. They’d even used an actual typewriter to do it, but what really impressed me was that they must have typed it backwards, then copied it onto a transparency, then flipped that transparency on the overhead they were using, to splash the letters up there backwards from how they were on the clear sheet, but now in the right order for us. Meaning that when you looked at it before the projector light pushed through it, it would be another language, an ancient spell. Not words at all. The illegible inside of the narrator’s head. Of H.F. Arnold’s head.

The typed words even flickered when the narrator scratched at his temple—scripted or accidental?—and it was so perfect that I wanted to clap. Except I’d been coming to these long enough to know better.

Somebody couldn’t help it, though.

Eight rows up, to the side, her heels off the ground, toes pointed in polite excitement, her already-short cocktail dress riding up her leg.

Wendy?

She kept her face forward, prim and proper, clapped two more times.

•

Because I knew to watch for it, I’d seen John Morgan slip under his desk when the spotlight was farthest away from him, our trusty narrator juggling a coffee mug with wax coffee in it that could never spill, and one time I saw Janet’s black-gloved hand come past the curtain—they were as thin as pantyhose—make a stop gesture to some crewdude in the lighting rig.

I felt the change in my lungs, too, when the fog started to drift in.

It was kind of perfect.

Good for Janet.

This is what really committed boyfriends think. What boyfriends with plans and futures think. That’s just how they are.

On-screen, now—they’d pre-recorded what was supposed to be the narrator’s point-of-view at the end of the story, fumbling through atlas after atlas. Looking for Xebico. Looking faster and faster, more and more desperate, like finding it could save everything.

It was jarring, seeing him do this from the side, on a drafting table, while at the same watching what he was seeing, on-screen and enlarged, but it was also just intensely pleasant in a way I think only the theatre can finally ever pull off.

After a few atlases of this the narrator stood, was obviously lost, this was too much for him, and from the edges of the curtains behind him—what we were to understand as the open windows, the cracks under the doors of this last outpost of civilization—the inevitable fog started to drift in. And you could tell from the narrator’s face that he knew that this fog, it carried death with it.

And then—maybe Herr Director had planted a freshman in the audience, in street clothes?—somebody from the far side of the auditorium screamed, her voice cutting through the manufactured six o’clock gloom. I knew better than to flinch but did anyway, and looked to Wendy to see if it had caught her off-guard as well.

She wasn’t there.

I cast around for her distinctive cocktail dress, that flash of leg again, but the fog was in the aisles, and rising.

Xebico, a voice said through the big speakers, and this was a haunted house now, not a play.

I loved it.

At least until a woman near the front stood in an unscripted panic, tried to step across a guy’s lap to get to the aisle and faceplanted, her glasses skittering under the chairs.

She was the trigger, the crack in the dam, the snake under the horse’s hooves. Like, when she fell she’d dissolved into a fine mist of panic. Everybody was breathing it in, passing it on, blind with it, standing just to fall, trying to claw their way up, screaming for help, until, from the stage, in a voice you had to obey: “Lights!”

It was Herr Director, glaring out at us, his hat exactly the kind he had to be wearing. That he had to have been born in.

His terrified crew turned all the lights on, and that made it worse, like pulling your brights on against a fogbank. The whole room was glowing now. More screams. A few hesitant, guilty laughs.

I hunkered down, held onto my armrests.

In the flash that I remembered to remember, Wendy’s seat was still empty. Meaning she’d never even been there. Meaning I’d put here there. In that unlikely dress. In this unlikely place. The last place I wanted to see her.

Or else—or else Janet had comped her a ticket, right?

You always whisper the worst things to yourself.

I shook my head no, closed my eyes and opened them to nothing. The crew was correcting their error, was shrouding us all in wet darkness now. The fog made it closer.

I wanted to laugh but didn’t want to open my mouth, in case somebody was about to crash into me.

“Sit, sit!” Herr Director told us all then, his voice cutting through the blindness, and, slowly and by audible degrees, the audience calmed.

The house lights rose slow, the smoke machines cycled down. The joke was over. Everybody was smiling into their shoulders, looking around for confirmation that smiling was the right thing to do, here.

The first place I looked, of course, it wasn’t to Janet’s usual place just off of stage left. It was to Wendy’s seat.

She was back, delivered by the fog, by the darkness. But—her dress.

Where had she been?

It was dirty. She must have fallen, I told myself. Into a grave.

I shook my head in affected disgust—this stunt was too much—rubbernecked for other grimed-up theatregoers. Everybody was still just wearing their normal going-out clothes, though.

I came back to Wendy. Who wasn’t Wendy at all.

Her hair, it was a different color. How had I not noticed? Brown where it had been streaky blonde. And it was higher up on her head, old-fashioned. The kind I associated with those cat-eye glasses from sockhops and malt shops, from movies with races in concrete culverts.

But then she turned to get a line on the door, and her face, it was grey, and hollow, and not timid. No cat-eyes, no glasses at all, just a sloughing off that suggested decay, and—but it had to be the lights—no irises, no sclera, no pupils. Just those terrible egg-whites.

My lips went numb, my eyes hot, my fingers digging more into my armrests.

First-year make-up student, I told myself. Too long in the chair. Contacts, it was Little Orphan Annie contacts.

But I knew better.

•

In H.F. Arnold’s story, the one thing I could never—until that moment in the theatre—wrap my mind around, it was how it must have felt to be dead in your chair but typing anyway.

When that thing looked back to me, though, I got a taste. A whiff.

In a flash like cards shuffling, a face in there that shouldn’t be, the world shifted around me. Under me.

Was I still in Janet’s living room, plugged into my laptop, trying to ignore the phone?

Kind of, yeah. Opening night was still weeks away.

It was just a defense mechanism, just my way of making the theatre something on an index card, something I could report on from the safety of a faraway second-floor apartment, but still. It felt as real as anything, and I think it might have been. Like I actually was in two places at once. Until I had to choose.

Or until the choice was made for me.

I pushed up into the worn-out cushion of row 19, seat M, and the seat retracted up under me, creaking alarm.

Nobody heard.

Like it was her duty, her exit fee, her camouflage, the woman in Wendy’s seat started a round of applause that swelled through the house. Everybody standing behind it like they do, Herr Director staring back at them, his teeth set, his neck gills surely open, to drink all this in.

I started to stand with them but a clammy thick hand came down on my shoulder, held me down.

I looked up into the dead eyes of John Morgan.

He patted me once and was wide enough that for too long, for agonizing pieces of a single second, I couldn’t see the seat I needed to see. Where Wendy who wasn’t Wendy was. If she was going to be there waiting for me when John Morgan’s hulking form was gone. If she was going to be right there.

I pushed back into my seat, ready to…I don’t know, take her hand when she offered it? Run? Collapse?

All of the above.

After John Morgan had shuffled his way past, the woman was just then standing from Wendy’s seat, her dress one she had to have been buried in, except I knew better than to be thinking like that. I knew better than to allow that kind of thinking.

But then the night trespassed on itself. Went beyond all thinking.

The woman, when she stood it unbalanced her, so she reached out with a veiny arm to steady herself, her waterlogged bare breast flashing through the tattered side of her dress, my eyes locking on it as it moved under its own skin, the puckered nipple pale, drawn back, retreating like something that doesn’t want to strike, but will.

It made me see her as a girl, standing at the end of her dirt  driveway.

It made me see her as a bride, her husband in his dress greens beside her.

It made me see her in what they once would have called her dotage, her eleven-year widowhood. Holding for a moment too long the magazine one of her stories had shown up in, then burying it on the shelf with the rest, pushing her cart on down the aisle. Me the next aisle over, tracking her through the dead space between the books.

Wendy.

She was crying and trying not to.

She was coming up the aisle of the theatre at me, older now, placing one foot intentionally in front of the next.

I fell back into my chair, and when I turned to leave and never look back, to not let her touch me like I knew she was going to, like I knew I was going to let her do, everybody else was making for the door as well, their breath close to me, their bulk surging me ahead with them, the rush of shoulders and elbows and shuffling feet delivering me to the parking lot, to the last bits of the surprising daylight.

I stood there blinking, the crowd suddenly gone. Or else me standing in place long enough for them to drift off.

It’s always like this after a good play. Like the world’s been remade, and just for you.

I shook my head about it all and only turned back to the theatre when somebody called my name.

Janet, in the doorway, her pantyhose hand raised, calling me to the after party. Telling me the night had been a success. That I was part of that.

In my pocket was a pair of earrings for her.

I lifted my hand to her and it was an awkward enough move that it unbalanced me, made me reach down for the hood of the car I was parked by.

The alarm didn’t go off and the dog inside didn’t explode against the glass.

I started to step away, to the after party and then the rest of my life, but found myself hesitating. Like I’d heard something. Or—not heard something.

The dog. It wasn’t barking.

I angled myself politely away from the car and came closer at the same time, the way you do in case the owner’s watching, and leaned over to cut the last of the glare.

The dog was on the front seat, slit open from throat to tail. Like something had been torn up from it. Like something had been birthed. Like something had been waiting there all along.

I cocked my head, tracked past this locked door, these unbroken windows. Tracked over the vinyl top of the car to Wendy.

She was standing on the grass that leads to the lake, and was young again. Herself, except for the ragged dress. A slightly smaller, still-wet dog on a leash by her side, licking its side, its eyes missing like they’d never been there. Like it didn’t need them, where they were going.

That Winters girl, I heard in my head.

That dirty-kneed Winters girl.

But still.

I tugged at a sudden hot point just under my throat, perfectly between my collarbones, and looked back once to Janet, still holding the door open, parentheses around her eyes now, and then I didn’t look back anymore, just stepped forward, around the car, into Xebico.

lor had been older, say, even a year old, if he’d made it to his first birthday, would I then need more time to grieve, as presumably, I would have had more time to become attached? More than two months, I mean.”

Dr. Corinth leaned back in his high-backed chair to study Maddy.

She kept her face pleasant, her hands still.

Like the bowler, watching his ball hurtle down that slick lane.

“Maddy,” Dr. Corinth finally said—a playful, fatherly scold to his voice.

“I need to work,” Maddy said. “The experiment is in a crucial phase.”

“And you’re sure you can—”

“I’m fine. Thank you for your concern.”

It was a lie, of course, but everything had been a lie for the past two weeks. Why should work be any different?

•

That afternoon, Maddy used the ten-inch forceps to help a butterfly unfold from its cocoon.

The light in the terrarium was meant to simulate sunlight, and, while it cycled at the proper times—not an off-switch, but gradually fading, then slowly warming again hours later—Maddy was increasingly certain there was some vital element not reproducible with light bulbs. Thus the forceps, the help.

“There you go, there you go,” she cooed to the butterfly.

The butterfly was twenty-eighth generation.

Sixteen generations ago—twelve generations in, so Maddy could record what was baseline, chart what was to be expected—Drs. Romin and Chang next door in Commercial had introduced an amino acid to the brood of caterpillars.

Maddy’s task now was what it had been for the past year and a half: monitor, record, and report at prescribed intervals, so Romin and Chang could write their reports for Commercial’s director to approve, forward on to the make-up company.

While some of the science that went on in this wing was maverick and revolutionary and potentially paradigm-toppling, a bigger portion was corporate lipstick jobs—a term in play well before Maddy had hired on.

Zenomarque Laboratories had been contracted to push the caterpillars through forty generations, for what the eventual packaging would probably call “quality control.”

The amino acid now cycling through this cultivated variant of
Hemiargus isola was nothing new, either; she was pretty sure it already had cousins on the shelf in cosmetics. But butterflies of course don’t stop by the beauty counter. They don’t need anti-aging creams.

However, to keep her vision properly tunneled—let others interpret, hypothesize—she didn’t research or otherwise prejudice herself. Otherwise the results would always be suspect, at least to her.

In the artificial sunlight, now, specimen G44H3a was drying its wing luxuriantly.

Maddy stepped over to check the patterning on the wings, see if it was still symmetrical, and gasped a bit.

Eyes.

And then she laughed at herself.

Eyes like a peacock’s tail feathers, eyes like some moths’ wings, eyes like the
Mycalesis patnia were faithfully expressing in the other terrarium generation after generation,
“eyes”
like the
Bicyclus anynana
Maddy had read about: mimicry-as-survival strategy. All this
Hemiargus wanted to do was fend off its eventual predators. It was designing itself well.

Except—these
“eyes”
were distinctly hazel, and seemed to be striated concentrically, even.

An almost familiar pattern. One only a mother would know.

Maddy slapped herself on the wrist, shook her head no.

She had had long enough to grieve, she told the Dr. Corinth in her head.

She had.

Still, it was her assignment to record every last minutiae, so she did, even lightly sketching in the suggestion of pupils, and noting how they seemed to track the viewer.

You never know what’s going to matter.

•

Sixteen days later, at what should have been the end of G44H3a’s life—the lab had ordered this particular strain for its advertised brevity, allowing them to reach forty generations quicker—instead of fluttering around with senility, its stimulus-response little brain winking out cell by cell as nature intended, a grand torpor settling in across its light frame, G443H3a instead began to form a cocoon.

Maddy tapped her pencil against her lower teeth and puzzled over this.

This is why she’d gotten into science, she finally told herself, allowing herself a grin.

To artificially extend a butterfly’s life, discover that the world had never known the butterfly at all. At least not in its true form. Either it was programmed to cocoon at regular intervals, some undiscovered alarm clock in its metabolism telling it now, now, never knowing that this cocoon was to be a mausoleum, or else it was escaping death by transforming again and again—into what?
Meaning all along it had had multiple instars coded into its DNA, just waiting for this particular combination of amino acid and artificial light to express them.

But to what end, finally?

Maddy started a new log, a private log, and, though it was policy to leave the terrarium key on the hook by the specimen drawer, that night she left them in the back of the file cabinet. As if she’d forgetten them there while looking for some paperwork.

Completely understandable.

•

Eight painful days later, G443Ha’s cocoon trembled with life.

Maddy helped with her probe and forceps as much as she could. The videocamera hummed on the counter beside the terrarium, recording these momentous events.

What the camera caught on its grainy screen was—it was a lizard. Of sorts.

Before Maddy could catch it, it scampered into the foliage.

Maddy blinked, swallowed, tried to breathe.

Had it gotten into the terrarium on its own, burrowed into the cocoon and slurped up the newborn?

Maddy hoped not.

•

The next morning was carnage. Maddy walked into the lab to find Drs. Romin and Chang at her desk, flipping through the log.

Her heart spiked, but then it was just the public log, not the diary she’d been keeping.

“Doctors?” she said, her hand still to the doorknob.

Dr. Corinth stood from the other side of the terrarium.

“Looks like you’ve had a fox in the henhouse,” he said, and directed Maddy over.

The rubber seal in the rear corner of the terrarium had been leaking—the misters ran at regular intervals—was cracked now, very finely.

“Here’s where it got in,” Dr. Corinth said.

“Twenty-eight generations,” Romin said, pooling his fingers out to show where those twenty-eight generations had gone.

“Not her fault,” Chang said.

He had been at the memorial, Maddy was pretty sure. Not because he knew her—he didn’t—but way in the back, as if fulfilling a personal debt. As if keeping a secret promise.

“Faulty equipment,” Dr. Corinth finally agreed, though something about his tone suggested that this conclusion was a one-time compromise.

“You can manage the maintenance form?” Romin asked.

Maddy nodded, dazed.

“And order more of the . . . the—”

“Hemiargus isola,” Maddy filled in, her face flushing.

“I am sorry,” Chang said, squeezing her upper arm on his way past, for the door.

“We all are,” Romin added, and then they were gone.

On the gravel bed of the terrarium were the savaged remains of the whole twenty-eighth generation.

Maddy closed her eyes.

When she opened them, the lizard was looking back at her through the glass.

Its eyes were hazel, the irises striated, the pupils a deep well.

•

Protocol was to sterilize the terrarium in preparation for the next brood. To gas the lizard out. To defoliate, to run the gravel through the scrubber. To dip the glass walls, completely remove the contaminant.

The new order of
Hemiargus isola was still six weeks out, though.

Maddy opted to monitor the lizard, the one with the heart of a butterfly.

It was the twenty-ninth generation.

•

The next day, its belly full, the lizard burrowed into the decay, pulled the covers around itself again and again, tighter and tighter.

It trusted Maddy.

She casually locked the door, threaded the private log from the file cabinet. Cued up the videocassette she’d since replaced.

The artificial sun went down, came up, and went down again.

Four days later, a mouse pup nosed through the soil.

Maddy cried.

In the private log she wagered that every planet produces one animal that contains every form of life. A genetic chimera. For purposes of repopulation following some global calamity.

This had probably happened before.

Just, never in a lab.

And, though Maddy knew what the calamity in this case had been—Chang could have guessed as well, she would wager—she didn’t write her son’s name in the log even once.

•

Three accelerated generations later—they ate the cocoon now, and whatever else she could smuggle into the lab—Maddy recorded the birth of what she strongly suspected would grow into a star-nosed mole, if given the chance. Something burrowing, anyway. Something born pregnant. With itself.

Maddy’d taken to sleeping less, in order to document. And Dr. Corinth didn’t bother her about grieving anymore. She was the busiest body in the lab, helping out in each experiment, always checking the day’s mail for her shipment of
Hemiargus isola.

Soon enough, after gnawing down a pigeon Maddy had trapped under a cardboard box on the balcony of her apartment, the mole developed enough to gecko up the glass wall of the terrarium, spit a cocoon around itself in the high rear corner.

Maddy camoflouged it as well as she could, all the while recording temperature and sound, and humming to it in case it needed to know her voice. Even on the bus, she noted, she was humming.

It wasn’t a bad thing.

Two mornings later, she found Dr. Corinth probing the flaky shell of the cocoon with a probe.

Maddy’s coffee dropped, and she didn’t even register the splash on her shins.

“Dr. Greenwald?” Dr. Corinth said to her, his pants legs spattered as well.

“It’s, it’s—” Maddy said.

“Amazing,” Dr. Corinth said.

Drs. Romin and Chang agreed.

Thermal readings were taken, and taken again. Evidently the reason the cocoon was flaky was due to the exothermic process happening within, that Maddy’s delicate thermometer hadn’t pushed deep enough to feel.

The flakes from the cocoon were preserved, frozen, wondered at.

Other lab personnel toured through. The way they held their eyes was the way photographers hold their cameras at important but fleeting social events. Because they knew this area was soon to be cordoned off, Maddy knew, and didn’t want to know.

In an effort for her access not to be revoked, she produced the private log, the secret videorecordings.

“I call him Gabe,” she said.

Chang’s eyes flashed up to her about this, but he didn’t say anything.

Nobody was thinking about the lipstick job anymore. Instead they were all composing their speeches, for the awards that had to be coming.

Drs. Corinth and Romin and Chang and the other lab-coated rubberneckers retired to the break room at mid-afternoon. The big television was there. They wired Maddy’s camera to it, watched birth after birth, freezing the frame to argue. Each instar confirmed a suspicion. Each new life was the first of its kind, a new entry into the fossil record.

The tree of life was branching into finer and finer filaments.

For them, anyway.

Maddy stood alone in what had been her lab.

Meaning she was the only one there when the cocoon trembled again.

Calmly, watching her hand more than controlling it, she disconnected the leads that would have drawn everyone in from the breakroom.

The cocoon shuddered, cracked, and dripped, finally exhaled a moist breath of steam.

Maddy helped it down to the floor of the terrarium.

The cocoon weighed 1905.1 grams. Dr. Corinth had written it down already.

X-rays were scheduled for this evening.

Now they wouldn’t be necessary.

Maddy dialed the light down, used forceps and a probe to separate the fibrous tissue.

Two eyes looked through to her from another world.

Two eyes with dark pupils swimming in hazel, striated irises.

Then a hand pushed through, reaching for her.

Maddy touched her own throat with her fingertips, realized she’d been humming again.

Five fingers, she noted.

Human.

Maddy shook her head no, no, and parted the cocoon more, more, enough to see that this wasn’t Gabe at all, like she’d been insisting.

This was Taylor.

Again.

Each letter of his name had cost seventy-five dollars, in granite.

It was a price she hadn’t anticipated.

Gabe was better, more economical.

Or, no: Ty. Ty would be perfect.

Maddy nodded to herself, her eyes crinkling in amusement at her folly, and then, just like last time—in science, you learn about repetition, about achieving the same results—she held her hand over Taylor’s small wet mouth, and counted him back to sleep.

at the digital clock on the stove, and try to call up the way those greenish letters would shiver the instant before they changed, like they were about to hatch? Like they held the future in their vertical lines, their muted glow.

And I’d always be waiting for them to change.

It’s my fault, what happened to Kelly.

You can ask why I’m still here, and that’s my only answer: that it’s my fault.

She woke falling, the cool, unbreathed air of our new house rushing past her, all around her, her nightgown fluttering back from her upper arms, from her thighs. And it was a dream, she says, in her little girl voice. The air was cushioning her, was soft around her. She was safe. She knew because she’d been floating there for minutes, it felt like. For hours.

Since then, I’ve read up on dreams. How they’re not what we think, aren’t grand and Freudian, aren’t these strange windows into those parts of our heads we’re not familiar with.

Trick is, if our eyeballs don’t stay in some state of motion throughout the night, then they would dry to the backside of our eyelids. It’s that simple. So they twitch back and forth on their own schedule, and, because our mental defenses are down, each of those muscular twitches sparks up a knee-jerk association: what we saw the last time our eye was looking this way, and that way. Keeping our eyes wet so we can see in the morning, it kicks up random images all night.

That’s not dreaming, though. All that is is you, lying in bed, all these mismatched flashcards floating in a jumble above you. But—you know how sometimes when your alarm rings, or you hear the garbage men on the curb talking before sunrise, how that can weave its way into your dream? And how, even though that alarm, those voices, they’re what’s waking you, can’t have lasted more than a few seconds, still, the narrative you cough up to contain them, it feels like the alarm’s been going off for hours. Like those garbage men have been telling their life stories out there.

It’s not that dreams unfold at a different pace than waking life, it’s that, when you wake, all those flashcards floating above you, they fall onto the floor of your mind, and, because we’re human, always insisting on faces in wood grain and in bowls of soup, what we do is run a story thread through all those images. It’s why dreams don’t make sense, half the time: of course that apple doesn’t go with a talking carburetor. The apple just happened to fall by that engine you saw earlier, and that engine, the reason it can speak is because it happened to fall by this grey blazer a woman in line at the coffee shop was wearing, and—you can remember if you try—she wouldn’t stop talking on her phone, would she?

Because we want our mental time to count, though, we assign meaning to those dreams. Or try to extract it. Try to make them these magical communiqués from our subconscious.

And it can be meaningful, sure, but it’s the self-analysis that actually gets you somewhere. You’re just using the dreams as a springboard to dredge up whatever your real issues or concerns are. You’re using them as a trigger to look inside yourself, for whatever you’ve been denying. But they’re inherently empty, are always accidental.

And I didn’t want to know any of that, understand.

I wanted Kelly’s last memory, of floating, to be a gift the world had given her. An apology for what was coming.

Instead, it was just physiological: she was asleep when she rolled out of the loft, off the edge of our bed, and she slipped away, her senses delivering those sensations to her all at once—air rushing past, weightlessness, no impact—and when she glimmered awake mid-air, she maybe grinned a little in the darkness.

To be flying, to be floating.

Those are always the best.

Until the ground rises to meet you.

•

When I say it was my fault, what I mean is that I shouldn’t have smuggled her from her office that Friday, even going so far as to carry her giggling over the threshold of the elevator. I shouldn’t have already had a bottle of red wine in the backseat. We shouldn’t have stopped for the family meal of fried chicken to go, and then the Rolos from the gas station, an impulse buy because she never allowed herself those anymore.

It had been a special day, though.

We ate the Rolos at the first stoplight, the wine at the second, and only got to the chicken later, and didn’t have nearly enough napkins for what it did to our fingers, our chins.

It didn’t matter.

I killed the car maybe two hundred feet from what was going to be our driveway—what was already our driveway—but left the headlights on.

We coasted in like thieves, the windows glinting at us, the plywood exterior still showing streaks of blue spray paint from its former life in the lumberyard, or on a truck.

What we were doing was breaking in.

Not the kind of break-in that would land us in jail—her father was building the house, the lot was ours—but still, we weren’t supposed to be there yet. Later Kelly would have to make decisions about fixtures and doorknobs, later I would have to say how high I wanted the mailbox, and together we might decide on a wind vane for the eave above the third floor study—this was the country, after all—but there weren’t supposed to be any midnight picnics, any sexual romps like we were teenagers, our fingers greasy with dead animal.

But, sonograms: if you could, you would reach into that black sheet, wouldn’t you? Run the pad of your finger along the delicate curve of your unborn child’s forehead, anointing him into the family, into your care?

That’s what we were doing. Christening this room with Mark and Kelly, then, when we could, the next room, until, by the time we retired to the third floor loft, all we could do was take turns blowing up the air mattress I’d had in the trunk. It was supposed to be for guests, for old college friends someday, but for now, it was for us.

Later, her father would look away and ask me why way the hell up there?

Because it was cool, Stan. And because we were hot. And because our love buoyed us up to the dizzy heights.

What I told him was nothing, because there was no answer that would explain, really.

I just shrugged.

We were standing in the antiseptic hallway of the hospital, then. Were the only ones there for minutes and minutes, the only time I ever saw it like that, all the months I lived there.

And, as for why I slept on the left side of the air mattress that night, not the right, it was because that was my assigned place. In our townhouse downtown, the left side of the bed was the side closest to the door that opened onto the hall, and it had never locked right. Or, the knob would lock, but the brass tongue would never catch in the strikeplate properly, so sometimes when the air conditioner sighed on, the door would just drift open.

It freaked us both out a few times, but, because I was the new husband, was trying to be the protector, the brave one, I switched sides of the bed with Kelly, so that anything that rushed gibbering down the hall, through the door, it was going to get me first.

We were kids, yeah.

Nine years later, though, it was habit, it was custom: the left side of our marriage bed, that was my side.

Which is no excuse, I know.

Sometimes I think that my dream flashcards, they’ve all spilled in my lap. A bed in the clouds, a straw, a squirrel. And all I’m doing is threading myself through them, ducking into this one, stepping into the next one.

She never screamed, either, Kelly. That night.

And we’re not even for sure when it happened.

Our best guess is that we finally nodded off close to midnight, our mouths sticky with wine, and each other. And, though I’d thought ahead enough for the air mattress, the wine, the chicken, and to ask off early for the afternoon, I’d of course forgotten about any kind of flashlight.

Kelly’d told me it wasn’t my fault, I was just being the typical male, worried only about certain developments, but still, before bedding down, to sleep, we’d had to go barefoot, hand in hand out to the car. The lighter was the closest thing to a flashlight we could think of, and we were each too jumpy to feel our way to the one working toilet in the dark. And, since there were no walls around it yet, and we’d always been bathroom shy, somewhat, the solution we came up with was that one of us would sit in the driver’s seat of the car, pass the lighter up when it popped, then the other would take it, scramble for the bathroom, and sing to him or herself the whole time so the other would know everything was cool.

We were still kids, yeah.

The world never lets you stay that young, though, does it?

•

So, sometime during the night, and in spite of the chicken bucket I’d set up as railing for us—it had the lighter from the car in it, which was supposed to rattle if we nudged the bucket—Kelly rolled over, rolled off into open space.

I’m thinking it took her between three and four seconds to reach the concrete floor of what was going to be our foyer.

When she landed, I imagine the sawdust kind of whoomphed up around her and hung in the air for long moments after, insulted. Or curious.

The reason I can guess at the seconds is because our family meal, it had come with drinks, even though we had wine.

Before bed, we’d laid bellydown across the mattress, our faces and arms hanging over the edge, and we’d sucked drops of lemonade and tea into our straws, held them there by sucking, then, on the silent count of three, opened our mouths, let them hurtle down to the floor below.

There’d been just enough moon through the stained glass framing the front door for us to see the splashes we were making. Just enough moon for us to laugh at what her Dad was going to think when he saw it. How he was probably going to send the youngest kid on site up onto the roof, to check for leaks, even though there’d been no rain. And why were the ants so interested in these splashes?

But that’s not how any of it went.

That squirrel I mentioned earlier?

It wasn’t a squirrel. Even though I could see it in my mind so clear, could mentally track the tremble of its cheek each time it puffed out to make its distinctive rattling screech, still, it wasn’t a squirrel.

It was Kelly.

I’d woken with the sun in my eyes, the country sun of our new house, and that noise I was hearing, it was the only thing it could be, all the way out here: a squirrel.

And, the reason I can’t say for sure if Kelly fell for three seconds or four, it’s because the foyer, it’s where the stairway starts. Where the thick railing comes to a stop, where the banister swirls up into a knob of wood the size of a cantaloupe.

On the way down, Kelly’s lower back cracked into that knob of wood.

And then her momentum flopped her over, facedown on the concrete, two of her teeth cracking halfway up, blood seeping from her left ear. There was sawdust on her open eyes, too.

Stan told me about that part. That that’s why he thought she was dead. That that’s why he thought his little girl was dead.

But he spit into them—fathers are the most desperate, stubborn people in the world—and he rubbed them wet again, got her to cough, pulled her head into his chest because he didn’t know the first thing about first aid.

And, me? Mark, the husband, the protector, the brave one?

I was up in the loft with a hard-on, listening to a squirrel chatter.

Kelly’d been making that noise all night, the way she tells it. It was all she could do, all she had left. The only way she could scream.

I haven’t eaten a piece of chicken for months, now.

But the house, our house.

It’s finished, now. It’s ours.

•

Because Stan’s Stan, the whole time Kelly was having surgeries and doing physical therapy and telling me it wasn’t my fault, he kept building. I know it didn’t go down like this, but the way I picture it is he fired everybody off the job, even the subcontractors, and did it all himself. The wiring, the plumbing, the taping and the bedding, the tilework in the foyer. The high gloss trim on all the molding. Staying late to get it all just perfect.

His listing in the phonebook has always been STAN THE MAN, with a cartoon picture of how handy he is, how resolute, how fair.

What really, happened, though—I’ve seen the work orders—is he doubled up on workers, called in favors.

The house was done in two months. The only thing was, because he thought it would jinx her—builders, I’ve found, are the most superstitious people you’ll ever meet—he refused to make any of it wheelchair accessible. Because she wasn’t going to need any damn wheelchair, he’d grumble to me if I asked, which I finally stopped doing.

How he would have made it wheelchair accessible, though—man.

That front stairway? It’s grand, no doubt, but the footprint of our house, it’s small for the square footage involved, something our architect had had to do because of our craggy lot. Translation: our staircase doesn’t sweep up dramatically, like Kelly had probably been dreaming of. It can’t. What it does is go up about ten steps then switch back, to hug the wall. That wall-hugging part of it, sure, we could put a chair lift there. Those first ten steps, though, they just have railing to either side. Throwing up some structure solid enough to allow a lift to be attached—Stan could have done it, but it would have gone against his aesthetic, his sense of ethics, his push to always preserve the resale value, and a ramp, to be long enough to actually use, it would keep the front door from opening.

The workaround we finally settled on, it was two wheelchairs, one on the first floor, one on the second, and me telecommuting. I’m basically a consultant anyway, and had already been just going into the office twice a week, so it wasn’t that big a change. And Kelly’s lost so much weight through all this that I can hoist her up into my arms with no problem. The stairs are dicey, sure—steps are always a trick when you’re top-heavy, can’t see your feet—but carrying her, I don’t know. I feel like a protector again, yeah? Like I’m making up. Like I’d carried her over the threshold of the elevator that long-ago Friday and had never put her down.

Nobody recommends we keep doing it like this, of course, Kelly’s physical therapist especially—and she rallied the doctors, and Stan—but in the end it was our decision, and Kelly said she trusted me not to trip. For my part, I said that old thing about valuable cargo.

The compromise was that I promise to wear back support, that I keep one brace at the bottom of the railing and one at the top. It isn’t to protect me so much as to keep me from shifting my weight to allow for this or that soreness, thus upping the chances of our big fall, the two of us spilling us down into the front door. Kelly says it’ll only hurt her half as bad, so she’s not worried. I tell her I love her.

The way it really worked out, though, after the physical therapist was gone, after Stan wasn’t making daily visits, was that Kelly’s found she can pretty much just live on the first floor, only calling upon me for occasional visits upstairs. Over the months, it’s kind of became understood that the upstairs, it’s mine, the downstairs, hers.

“A house divided,” she told me one night over dinner, grinning.

“Can stand forever,” I toasted back, and held my cup there until she nodded yes, yes.

Still, in the mornings I collect my laptop like a ritual, tell her I’m off to work, does she need anything before I do my making like a tree act?

I’m just standing at the bottom of the stairs when I go through all this, of course. By the front door, but we rarely open it, mostly use the garage door instead, which I had somebody else build a ramp up to—I thought on the sly, but then when I went to pay, the handyman backed off, said Stan wouldn’t allow it.

So we shook hands, and he rattled off in his truck.

Leaving us alone with ourselves.

It had been our dream, why we’d bid on this lot when everybody was telling us it had always been empty on purpose, that building a house here would be more trouble than it was worth, that there was a reason it had been vacant so long.

We were too far in to give up, though.

And maybe someday she would walk, right?

Maybe this was all just a test.

From the first step of going to work, I nod to her on the couch and she smiles back, her chair cocked there beside her, then I follow the banister upstairs, steeling myself not to look to either side like always, for fear of seeing her mid-fall. For fear that she’d look over at me.

•

During the day, the phone calls and emails and teleconferences up in my aerie, as she calls it (with a grin), I can hear the wheels of her chair on the first floor, creaking. It isn’t that the bearings need grease, anything maintenance like that, it’s just the grabby rubber of her tires. Especially when she brakes one side, to turn.

I can muffle the phone against my chest and tell when she crosses from the tile of the foyer to the hardwood of the living room, and I can distinguish the expansive squish of the large tiles of the foyer from the smaller, rougher ones of the kitchen.

The only time I can’t hear her is the hall, that long rug there—runner, runner, runner—just wide enough for her wheelspan, if she drives absolutely straight.

For those silent parts I often find myself holding my breath, imagining the thousand things that could be going wrong right now, but after my first few crashes down the stairs, taking them five at a time, flinging myself around the banister like a cartoon, I’ve learned to give her her space. That I’m her husband, not her day care attendant. That she can get along for hours at a time without me. Probably for days. That you can mother-hen a person…maybe not to death, but to annoyance, anyway.

Anyway, I’m down on and off, just in the regular course of the day. She usually gets our lunch together on the tall counters then wheels down to exactly the spot she fell, calls up that it’s getting cold, come and get it.

It’s usually salad or something that’s supposed to be cold, but, you know. It’s also become kind of a game for her to have to call me twice, even though after her first call I’ll just be up here waiting for her to call again in her chiding voice. It’s somehow thrilling for her to use it on me, is some return to normalcy.

Which—I know, “normalcy,” that being before, when she could come upstairs, reach over me, click my monitor off, saving me from myself, “this” being now, the un-normal times, it’s not helpful to anybody to think like that. But you can’t always control how you think, either. Or, you can’t help how you feel from leaching up to your head.

Not everybody I consult with is on central time like us, though. The international contracts, they sometimes pull me upstairs well after dark, Kelly’s shows murmuring below.

A time or two I’ve slept up there, even, on the futon, half on accident, telling myself it’s because I didn’t want to wake her.

I tell myself a lot of things. One of them’s that my left side of the bed, it’s not jinxed now.

I can’t ask her to change, though, can I? After all these years.

The loft, though, it’s strictly storage, now. Stan didn’t have the framing in place to wall the ledge off, and’s too professional to just tack something in place, but the rails he’s put there, they’re burly, are no joke.

I haven’t been up there since we were unpacking, and Kelly’s never been back.

In a book or a movie, of course, it’s exactly where she’d have to go, it’s where we’d go together, to have sex again, christen that room, washing it clean of its sins.

Except this is real life.

If your dog got run over in a certain intersection, you don’t find yourself lingering there later, do you? Just waiting for Rex to stand up from the asphalt, shake the years off.

No, you move on, you keep moving.

You pretend that intersection of bad ideas, it isn’t there at all.

It’s just where old files go, where you put things you don’t want to think about anymore.

A happy home is one with dark rooms, yeah.

That’s not what I’m saying.

•

In my random, mean-nothing dreams, I’m never flying.

Because I’ve conditioned myself that it’s all just mental tiddlywinks, maybe, my dreams about half the time, they’re looking over my own shoulder as I work, like I’m revisiting the chores of the day. I guess that’s the stimulus-response of my eyes, how I’ve been conditioned. Muscle memory, associations I’ll never be able to shake.

The other half of the time, I don’t know what my dreams are. I just turn off at ten or eleven, come back with Kelly creaking away from the bed in her chair, and then it all starts over again, just like the day before.

I’m not complaining.

One of those times I turned off, though, it was late, an international conference call that a client had been called away from—his dime—and when I came back, it was to a different sound.

Downstairs.

I licked my lips, studied my monitor until my eyes were good enough again, then pushed back silently in my chair, automatically punching the speaker button on my phone, settling the receiver down soundlessly.

I stood slowly, using mostly my legs—the arms of the chair were leather, loud—and, like always, because the ceilings in this corner of my office are angled, short, I steadied myself with my fingertips on the clearcover I’d taped up there to keep from making a grimy spot. Resale, resale, all that; Stan had infected me, I guess.

He had also built the floors up here to be quiet, had told me early on that that was the mark of a good framer: you couldn’t hear people stomping around upstairs. So long as the owners weren’t stupid enough to put down something other than carpet, that is.

Since we weren’t stupid, I was able to cross to my railing, bend down to get a line on Kelly.

My first thought was that it was later than I’d figured—Kelly’d gone on to bed, wasn’t on her place on the couch, her legs tucked up beside her.

But then…it didn’t make sense.

Not the hour, but the chair.

It was still there.

I gripped the railing, swallowed, and behind me the client came on finally, was asking for me, saying my name over and over across all the thousands of gallons and miles of the Atlantic Ocean.

I studied the couch again, and then all the parts of the floor around it I could see.

It didn’t make sense, this.

Kelly couldn’t walk. Kelly couldn’t have walked anywhere. There was no room in the world for a third option.

But then there was that other sound, the one I didn’t know, couldn’t catalogue, couldn’t associate.

It was a steady pulling, punctuated by breaths.

I leaned out over my railing, trusting Stan’s mounts, and just caught sight of a leg, a side view of a leg. Which I could only have seen if the person was lying down on the floor of the foyer,  right?

Right.

A few pulls and breaths later, Kelly clumped up onto the couch, dusted the front of her sweat pants off, then reached down for first her right leg, then her left, and hauled them up beside her, unpaused her show.

I watched her watch, my client still asking for me from my desk.

“You didn’t want to wake me,” I finally said down to her but mostly to myself.

She’d heard my keys stop clacking, knew I wasn’t talking on the phone, maybe had even heard me snore a time or two. And I’d told her a few days ago, pretending I had special husband radar, that my hearing was getting better to compensate for how I couldn’t see through walls yet, that I knew the individual creaks of her wheels on different surfaces.

“Asking for a glass house?” she’d said.

“I look like a bird killer?” I’d said back.

But, this. With no chair.

She’d needed to hit the bathroom past the kitchen, I knew—her bathroom, with the handrails I’d mounted into the smooth wall myself—and it was all tile between the couch and there, so she’d just poured herself off the couch, gone there on her hands. Pulling herself along like a mermaid, and probably not for the first time.

The next day, after lunch, I swept all of the tile I could get at, and then, while she was napping, rolled the runner in the hall up as well.

“What are you doing?” she’d asked, running the dishes under water, me carrying the rolled-up rug on my shoulder like a  body.

I just kept doing it.

•

If it had stopped there—well.

It’s been nearly a week since that day, now.

Same routine, same everything.

Except.

Three nights ago, I woke on my side of the bed certain I was back in our townhouse again. Like time had slipped, was giving me another chance. Like Kelly’s father was about to rush up the long dark hall and lean over the bed and breathe too close to my face and vomit up blueprints, his late wedding gift, now that it looked like our marriage was going to stick.

I jerked up into the headboard, scrunching the sheets to me, and…there was no resistance. Nobody over there to weigh them down, fight me for them.

I let myself settle back into the present. Into our new house, our new life. This situation.

The one where the sheets should be tucked under Kelly like she always did.

I was alone.

My heart slapped the inside of my chest in terror. Not that a hallway was about to open up impossibly beside me, spitting out all kinds of horror, but that—the last time I woke to her gone, that was the night she fell.

This was the first floor, though, right?

Much as I hated to give it voice even in my head, it was her prison. And, barring electrical sockets and, I don’t know, some jagged grout, she was going to be all right.

As far as I knew—and because she wouldn’t need them—she didn’t even have keys to open the front or back doors from the inside, and the garage grinding up on its long screw would have shaken me awake.

“The bathroom,” I said out loud, to myself.

That bathroom the bathroom the bathroom.

Never mind that there was one a few steps from the bed. Or, a few rolls of the wheels.

You’re not always thinking straight when you wake in the night, you’re simpled down, like. You might think just “bathroom,” then go to the one you’re most familiar with.

On the far side of the kitchen, then. On silent wheels.

I straightened the sheets back out as best I could, somehow certain that they were now arranged in some unnatural way that would, in a glance, tell her I was still babying her, was still too worried.

But the way I straightened them back out, it was obviously fake.

I smiled at myself, shook my head and stepped down, was halfway across the cold floor to the short hall when something registered.

I stopped, turned my head half around.

Kelly’s chair.

Over the top of the bed I could see its handles. They were looking back at me.

I stumbled to the side a bit as if punched, found myself breathing hard, and then heard it again, just like before: pull, pull, breathe.

I shook my head no but followed the sound.

It was Kelly, of course.

She was a black shape, pulling herself past the kitchen island. Scraping her bare, senseless legs on the rough tile there.

I opened my mouth, reached for her but couldn’t say anything.

I was standing not three feet from her, was going to have to step aside if she didn’t stop, and—she wasn’t stopping. Wasn’t even dimly aware of me.

She was still asleep.

I gave her room to pass and looked ahead, down the long, runnerless hall.

We went down it together, her crawling, me shuffling behind.

At the turn in the foyer she slapped a hand onto the thick, decorative post that had broken her back and pulled herself around.

Two minutes later she was back by the kitchen island, only, now her thighs were leaving occasional streaks of blood.

I sat down by one of them while she made her slow way down the hall, rubbed at it with my hand, just making it larger.

Do I wake her? I thought. Is that bad? Where does she think she’s going? What does she think she’s doing? Why now?

I caught up with her at the foyer, stepping around the masking-tape body I still imagined right there.

I put my hand to her shoulder.

She snapped her mouth over, bit me.

When I didn’t touch her again, when I was just a useless, crumpled ball of flesh sitting against the wall, holding his hand to his throat, she pulled herself around the corner, kept going, her dead feet the last thing to slip out of my sight.

I turned my head to the kitchen, to await her return.

•

The next morning, Stan was there. He’d forgotten to even take his tool belt off, must have driven the fifteen miles out here with all that weight jabbing into his lap, tool handles catching on the steering wheel, nails rattling in his pouch.

As for Kelly, after what the night had done to her, she was still asleep.

“Sleepwalking?” he said, squinting about the term.

“She wasn’t awake,” I told him, stepping out onto the porch, pulling the door shut behind us. “This ever happen, growing up?”

Stan turned his weathered face toward the city, as if tunneling his vision all the way to the house he’d raised her in, her mom dead in labor. As if looking in the window at her, sleeping at twelve years old, at fourteen, at eighteen.

Finally he shrugged one shoulder helplessly, came back to me.

“Listen,” he said. “You’ve—I’m proud of you, Mark. Kelly chose well, I’ve got to give her that. But this…it’s too much, out here alone like this. Nearest house is, what?”

I turned to show it to him, like he couldn’t already see it through the trees: maybe a hundred yards? The country, yeah. The realtor had said you could even get deer if you put out salt, or planted whatever it was that grew acorns.

“What are you saying?” I asked him.

What I was wearing was my robe, my slippers, my jaw rough, eyes bleary, hair its usual mess.

Stan looked like he’d stepped out of a cigarette ad from 1962.

“You need help, I’m saying,” he said, catching me in his steely blue eyes.

“I love her.”

“I’m not saying you don’t, now, don’t get your back hair up. Just hear me out.”

“About what, Stan? About Kelly?”

Stan squinted again in his leathery way, turned half away from me.

Across the highway by his truck, one of those promised deer was watching us, her tail switching back and forth.

He grumbled out a satisfied laugh about her.

“This isn’t just for you,” he said. “Or her either. But—you know me. I’ve been doing this for a long time, now, right? I know generally I’m the builder, not the investor, but this house, she’s…I believe in her, okay? I know every joist, have my initials under the paint on each interior wall. Made sure the wires were insulated and tied back, if you get my drift.”

“No, Stan. I don’t.”

“Let me buy this from you at a fair price. Just name it. Then you and Kel-Kel, you can move back to town, I can help you with that too, it’ll be…if she’s doing what you say, getting up at night, then you can’t be out here alone. That’s all there is to it.”

For that last part, he came around to face me. To challenge me to say no.

“It’s a generous offer,” I told him.

“Fuck you,” he said right back, suddenly a step closer, talking to me like I was somebody on his job site, trying to tell him about zoning or permits. “She’s your wife but she’s my little girl, and I’ll be goddamned if she’s going to go like her—”

He ate the rest of it, though.

We just stared at each other.

“Her mother?” I finally said.

He shook his head no, that that was all.

“One-time offer,” he said. “I’ll write the check right now, you’re back in town by the end of the week, she can get whatever care she needs, my ticket all the way.”

“She’s just sleep—”

I couldn’t say “walking,” though.

“Fair price,” Stan said. “Next house, it’ll be accessible all the way, I guarantee.”

“You’re trying to buy her back,” I told him, then didn’t look away either.

“It’s not like that. I’m in a position to help, and I’d like to.”

“I can take care of her.”

“Then why’d you call me?”

“Because I can’t call her mom.”

Stan just stared at me about this.

“But she’s okay now?” he said.

“Sleeping. Maybe up by now, I don’t know.”

He stared at the house, reached over, tried to shake one of the porch posts. It had no give, was going to be there long after we were all gone.

Satisfied, he nodded, stepped off the porch but, on the way, said, as if speaking out to the road, “Pantyhose.”

“Sir?”

“I used to have to tie her mother’s ankles with pantyhose, keep her from walking all over the damn house.”

Pantyhose.

Around her waist, keeping her in bed? Or just lock the door? Make her sleep in her chair?

For some reason I thought of those caltrops they put up in parking garages—shark teeth, my mom used to call them—to keep you from driving out the sneaky way.

I was going to have go around the first floor, check Stan’s work. Make sure every nail head was flush.

I reached across, shook the porch post he’d just tried.

Sawdust drifted down into my face.

I looked up into it, sputtered it off my lips, twisted the knob of the front door.

It was locked, had locked behind me.

I closed my eyes, prayed Stan wasn’t watching, knew I couldn’t push the doorbell in—I was either going to wake her or was going to make Stan (and myself) nervous when she didn’t wake—but then the door opened on its own.

Or, not on its own: Kelly, in her chair.

I smiled, told her good morning, sunshine.

“What are you doing?” she asked, not quite accusatory but definitely humorless.

She’d already looked out the window, seen us out here.

“Being your husband,” I shrugged, and lowered myself to kiss her, morning breath or no, and exactly when my lips touched hers, an arc of static sparking between us in spite of her rubber wheels—it was my slippers, I knew—right exactly then, we heard it happen behind us.

It was a series of sounds all jammed up into an instant: tires squealing, crunch of metal, then the undeniable scrape of flesh on asphalt.

I felt all the blood drain from my face and, for the first time, I put my foot on her chair, pushed her back into the house, taking advantage of her condition. So she wouldn’t have to see this.

I pulled the door shut, held it there, pressing my forehead into its cool wood.

A first drop of blood fell from my nose, went unimpeded all the way down to the threshold, and then the rest of the drops came. From tension, my mom used to tell me. From stress.

I brought the belt of my robe up to stopper it and turned around, made myself look.

Stan was standing up from the rocker panel of his truck, looking over the hood.

A heavy sedan had hit that deer, was pulled over now, up by our neighbors.

The deer, she was half in the ditch, half in the road, flopping, screaming.

Stan waved me away, shaking his head no, that this wasn’t for me.

He was right.

•

In the kitchen, Kelly had the windows open—extra long strings on the blinds—so it was bright, cheery. The complete opposite of last night.

“It probably happens all the time,” she was saying about the deer, pouring my coffee then hers, setting the pot on an oven mitt between us, her eyes fixed on the white pad of gauze on the back of my hand.

I’d let her boil it out with hydrogen peroxide. It was supposed to be from some mystery nail—a cluster of them that were in that unlikely arc of human teeth—under the sink upstairs. I’d been looking for more toilet paper.

She bought it?

Who knows.

She didn’t recognize it, anyway. Didn’t match it up with her own teeth.

“Sleep well?” I said, hiding my mouth with my cup, using my good hand to hold it.

“What do you mean?” she said. “What was my father doing here? You called him about the nails?”

What was my father doing here. What was he doing here.

I was a character in a sit-com. One who had to cover. Now.

“Asking about your birthday,” I came up with faster than I would have guessed possible.

“My birthday?”

“Next month.”

I was hating myself so much.

“What you might want,” I said, taking her hand in mine. “You know, Daddy’s little princess. But don’t tell him I told you. I promised.”

She stared at me, said, “So? What am I getting?”

“I told him you wanted a twenty-four inch monitor,” I said, smiling, and, like she was supposed to, she slapped me on the forearm.

“Just what I want,” she said, heating her eyes up to punctuate it.

“Maybe two, side by side,” I added, holding my hands up to show how much better my desk would be with them sitting there like that.

“I hate you.”

“I’m hateable, yeah,” I told her, and in this way she never knew about pulling herself around and around the house.

Not from me, anyway.

And no, I couldn’t ask her about her mom.

I don’t think it would have changed anything, really.

Her mom sleepwalked, and she’d inherited it. To dig deeper would just uncover what was best left buried: if she really died in birth; why her father never said anything; where her mom had always been trying to go, and why.

The past is the past. Sometimes it should stay there.

I stood, looked around, something nagging at the edge of my thoughts.

“Probably does happen all the time,” I said, about the deer.

“Shave,” she said, handing my coffee up to me, “shower. Become human.”

I leaned down to kiss her—no jolt this time—but, when I didn’t close my eyes all the way this time, I saw past her, to the tile floor.

It was clean. No blood.

•

At my desk the following day, just spacing out over a spreadsheet that wasn’t supposed to be my concern—not the particulars, anyway—I dropped my bit hand down into the trashcan just behind my chair. It’s embarrassing, I guess, but it’s become something I can’t help, and I don’t even want to guess at the why of it. Just, where that trashcan is, when I’m leaning back—plop, my hands falls right into it, if I’m thinking too hard.

I call it my fortune trashcan. Whatever I’m stuck on, whatever’s got me leaning back like that in what I never want to call defeat, I usually try to deal with by reading the random, crumpled piece of paper I haul up.

It’s like the dreaming, I guess. There’s no real magic or science or meaning to it. All the old paperwork does is get me to come at the problem from a different angle, one I never would have tried without a trigger. And sometimes it works. I mean, all the problems, I figure them out eventually, right? Only trick is, I give credit to the fortune trashcan.

Sometimes it’s a page number, other times a name.

Either way, it’s my secret, is nothing I’d ever tell Kelly.

So, because I was stuck again—and because the upstairs trashcans are strictly off-limits for anything but office trash—I came up with a sheet of paper. When I usually crumpled everything, I mean, just because I liked the way it poured out into the big trashcan out back. Like tennis balls, or potatoes.

“Good one,” I said, getting the paper right-side up in front of me.

It was a duplicate of a back sheet of our tax return from six years ago.

I turned around slow in my chair, studied the loft.

Did the light even work up there anymore?

I stepped up onto the ladder bolted to the wall, peeked my head over.

It was the same as I’d left it.

“Not getting me,” I said then, and balled the sheet up, rolled it across the floor instead of trying to dig up whatever box it had blown out of.

If the house wanted me to go up there, then I was staying in my office.

Below, the sound channeling up, Kelly’s tires creaked from the kitchen to the living room.

Last night I’d shut the door, put a loafer behind it like a doorstop then chocked a belt buckle under the heel, so, if the door opened, the metal of the buckle would scrape me awake.

This morning, the belt had still been there.

A one-time thing, then, Kelly.

I wanted to look at her legs, too, to tend to them if I could, boil the memory of that night out, but there was no way to ask. I was going to have to see them on accident, which, since they’d shriveled and she was shy about them—unlikely. I wouldn’t let her lock the door when she bathed, but I wasn’t invited, either.

I didn’t like that she’d had to clean up that blood, either. Didn’t like to picture her leaning forward out of her chair, trying to reach, then rolling across to the trashcan, realizing there’s a spot of it on her tire, that she’s tracking it everywhere, that it’s following her.

Or maybe she slipped down to the floor, her legs to the side like Cinderella.

Making me the evil stepmother, yes.

I shook my head at how stupid this all was—me, my thinking—and came back down the ladder, half-expecting a bolt to dislodge, spilling me back into the desk.

Nothing.

“Not that kind of story,” I said aloud.

“Lunch!” Kelly called up, startling me.

I agreed with her about lunch, even shook my head yes yes yes all alone up there, and, in the shower later—when you work from home, your schedule’s jacked—I found something on my right hip, not on the bone but…I don’t know. Kind of right where the hinge is? Where the top of the thigh officially stops. Where I always figured I’d get a hernia, if I were going to get one, as it felt like a weak spot.

If it was just a brownish purple discoloration, a bruise almost, I wouldn’t have seen it, of course.

But it was coarse, too. Like a mole that was just suddenly and unaccountably there.

I bent over as far as I could, studied it.

Not a perfect circle. Obloid, colored unevenly. No hair.

The only thing I’d been pressed up against though, it had been the ladder, right?

Right.

A splinter? Some chemical that came through my pants?

For the rest of the day and all through dinner, each time I thought Kelly wasn’t looking—men don’t give women enough credit in these matters, I know—I’d slip my hand down the front of my pants, rub that patch of skin, interrogating it with my fingertips.

That night, then, after wine that was supposed to keep us both down, I woke to the bedroom door open.

My hand went immediately to the rough spot in my groin, and my breath shallowed out.

Instead of getting up, I counted seconds.

From before, I knew Kelly would take just shy of three minutes to make her sleep round, her mermaid trip, looking for what shore I couldn’t guess.

Two-hundred and twenty seconds later, I looked over to the bathroom door, even though the light was off in there, and then, from Kelly’s side of the bed, her wheelchair creaked.

Not the rubber-on-wood creak I knew so well, but the creak of something pushing on the frame, making the hinges that never moved move.

I pulled my right hand from my underwear, swallowed, and looked over.

The wheelchair was definitely moving.

I shook my head no, please, and then Kelly rose beside it, pulling herself back up onto the bed, her hair a black shroud, her left arm reaching all the way across, almost to me.

And then her right.

She pulled herself up, wound herself into the sheets, and never woke up.

The blemish on my hip was throbbing, my fingertips slippery from touching it.

If I cried quietly down the back of my throat, it was a perfectly natural response.

The next morning, not even remotely aware I’d slept, there was another blotch of skin on my left hip. Like somebody had cut me down the middle in the night, licked my spot, and folded me over, pressing until the spot twinned itself.

•

“Your father wants to buy the house,” I told Kelly over breakfast. Mostly because this wasn’t a sit-com. Because the audience was yelling at me not to lie, that that always comes back on you.

She looked up to me, to be sure she’d heard right.

“For your birthday,” I added. “He says he can build another. You know, to suit.”

She studied me, studied me.

“‘To suit,’” she repeated.

I dug deeper, deeper.

“He says this one’ll be a good investment, he has somebody lined up. That another project will keep him busy. That he wants to do it.”

“But—but this is our house,” she said, finally. “Our home.”

“One half’s mine, one half’s yours,” I said, shrugging, slurping, doing everything I could to deflect attention. “Add it up, it’s ours. But it’s not…it’s not ours together, yeah?”

“You don’t like it?”

“I love it.”

She was staring at me now.

Our names were traced in a rough heart in the foundation at the northwest corner, under the living room.

Her spinal column was in the foyer.

“Happy birthday,” she said, just that.

I read it approximately six thousand different ways, up in my office hours later.

I was sitting in the upstairs wheelchair, too. For no reason I could explain. I think maybe because I wanted to be sure it stayed in place. That it wouldn’t sneak up behind me.

The back was too short for me, but my palms, they fell perfectly to the tops of the handrims.

It kept my hands out of the front of my pants, I mean.

The blotches, the moles, the guilt cancers, the whatever-they-weres, they were seeping, now. The rough skin cracking open.

I wanted to laugh, needed to cry.

According to my email and phone, I was out of the office.

It was true enough.

I rolled back and forth, the carpet absorbing the sound.

What I couldn’t get away from in my head, it was Kelly’s legs. The tops of her knees.

After breakfast, I’d faked a coffee spill (waiting until it was definitely not hot), had finally seen them.

The skin was pink, fresh, unmarred.

Had I just dreamed the other night, then?

Was that why the blood was gone from the kitchen floor? Because it had never been there?

The blood from my nose, on the threshold, I understood what had happened to it: raccoons, coyotes, whatever will lap up that kind of taste after the people lights have gone off.

But the kitchen, the mess there, it being gone only made sense if I’d dreamed it. Even though dreams are stupid.

Guilt, though: could that kickstart some indictment of a movie while I slept, maybe? If I thought about something long enough, wouldn’t it eventually bubble up to the surface in the night? Was I wrong about how dreams worked? Was this my punishment for not respecting them?

Except—except Kelly’s mom, whatever the story was there. And her rising on her side of the bed the night before, rising so steadily I thought at first it was by her own leg power, or that there was a Peter Pan hook in the meat of her back, drawing her up, up.

“The house,” I said to myself, rolling back and forth in the chair, faster and faster, the loft never quite leaving my sight.

It had…I don’t know. It was doing something. To me. Just by being there.

There was a reason nobody had built here, right? Like, like that same way when the big bridge finally collapses on the weekday morning, there’s fewer cars on it than usual? Because people know, down at some level they don’t acknowledge, are too sophisticated to acknowledge.

We should have stayed in town. We aren’t country people.

Or—what if I could trade, right?

The thought calmed me.

Maybe this was just a negotiation.

I looked up to the loft, directly into its slithery, tax-form darkness, and pictured myself ducking the roof, stepping over that stout railing. Plummeting down like should have happened in the first place, my back cracking into the finial at the end of the banister.

I’d be making up, I’d be evening things out.

Except I’m not that stupid, am I?

I rolled over to the top of the stairs, dangled my feet over that crashing fall then nudged forward and back, coming closer to the lip each time. The deal I was making, and not leaving myself time to back away from, or think myself out of, was, if this was what the house wanted, then all it had to do was tell me. All it had to do was let me misjudge once. I wouldn’t fight it, would just let gravity have me, would go peaceful to my hall in the hospital, then do my physical therapy like I was supposed to.

A negotiation, yes.

I rocked forward, back, came closer, and just when I felt my right wheel going past that point of no return, somebody grabbed me from behind, hauled me back.

Just going on instinct, I both let myself be saved and leaned out, away from the stomach of whoever this was, or wasn’t.

This was the message, though: don’t.

I breathed in, nodded, and threw up down the front of my shirt, didn’t turn my head when the ladder behind me creaked with the weight of some body climbing it.

•

Another shower, this one longer, hotter, steamier. Like there’s another world on the other side of it all. Kelly calling to me from the bedroom but I still can’t make words, am still unpacking what happened upstairs.

The more I think about it, the more it was like I was seeing myself from the side when it happened: me, normal, just normal, in a wheelchair, my elbows cocked back against the handrims, and, behind me, clothed in darkness, a standing-up version of Kelly. Kelly as she should have been. Kelly as she’d been trapped. Like the impact with that concrete floor under the foyer tile, it had split her in two, like her former self had stood up from it in the swirling sawdust, looked around, and come back upstairs.

To me.

“Okay,” Kelly tells me over our late lunch, my hair still wet, skin puckered. “My dad, the deal. The gift.”

I look up to her, and all around her.

“Really?” I say. “Why? We don’t have to. I don’t want to make you.”

“Just one more night,” she says. “We’ll call him in the morning. Together.”

I smile, take a bite, say it in my head: Oh.

We’re talking in code, then.

One more night.

Of course. Yes. Naturally.

One more night.

I can find out that Kelly hasn’t been sleepwalking at all, that I’ve been dragging her around and around the house by her hair. I can go out back, find some dilapidated old burial site, some clear indication that this was the wrong property. There can be shades of hanged men from the big tree. I can call her father, let him whisper things to me about his dead wife, and how she was just declared dead, how she found a way through. I can take a pickaxe, find our names in the concrete, and spit blood into that fingerwide heart framing them, wait for the night animals to come apply their tongues to it.

I can go hand over hand up into the loft one last time.

I can punch the ancient buttons on my hips in the perfect sequence, the secret order, so that wet new legs fold out, giving me four legs now, so I can carry Kelly safely up and down the stairs, however many times she wants. Forever and ever, please.

That’s all I ask. All I need.

“What?” Kelly says to me, her fork of grilled cheese—that’s how she eats it—halfway to her mouth, the fork not even trembling.

“I love you,” I tell her.

She appraises me. Regards me.

“You’re just saying that because I’m so beautiful. So athletic.”

“I do.”

She grins into her plate, completes the bite, runs the dishes under the water and I’m sitting there after she’s wheeled out.

One more night.

Maybe we should order chicken. Enough for three. You, me, and this house.

Or maybe we are the chicken.

•

I lose the rest of the day. Like I’m asleep, but not.

What I’m doing is maintenance. Re-seating this flange behind the toilet in her bathroom, and packing steel wool behind it against the mice. Tightening the screws in the top hinge of the heavy door between the living room and the kitchen, that I never think to close. Testing the float on the sump pump, then testing it again, giving it a hair trigger.

Instead of retreating up to my aerie to cap off the day’s work, I take a position on the couch by Kelly. It doesn’t make her nervous—I have done this before—but I can sense a hesitation in her fingers, on the remote. Like she wants to pick the perfect show. Not scare me away.

When she has to get up, she uses her chair, and I insist on pausing the show until she’s back.

Above us, probably standing in my darkened study, her hands gripping the railing of the loft, is the other. She’s watching us with deer eyes.

I don’t even have to look up there. I know. But I’m no actor. Each time I lick my lips, each time I reposition the throw pillow I always hug to my chest while watching television, it feels mechanical.

By bedtime, I’m exhausted.

“What’s with you tonight?” Kelly says, rolling in from the bathroom in her old nightgown, a touch of toothpaste at the left corner of her mouth.

The oval mirrors above our sinks, they’re too tall for her. I keep thinking that those fancy chains they hang on, I could just lengthen the chain on her side, so that the mirror would lean out from the wall more, like looking down at her. So she could look back up into it.

Because of stray toothpaste on her lip, though?

Does that really matter?

And what if it fell over onto her? What if she fell up into it?

What’s with me, she’s asking.

“You,” I tell her, then brave the kitchen in the dark, return with my back so straight, nearly a whole bottle of wine split between two oversize glasses. The priest with the sacrament.

We toast each other. This life. Us.

I picture carrying her waifish form upstairs. Never looking back. Her arms circling my neck. I go back to that Friday I smuggled her out of work a lifetime ago, and, stepping over the threshold of the elevator with her, I look down this time, into that crack between worlds, into that empty chute, that blackness. All the open space.

Something looks back.

Maybe that’s where it started. Maybe it’s been starting forever.

I still don’t have a lighter in my car.

Earlier, still trying to force a trade, trying to make this into a business transaction, I sat out in my car longer than I had to, the engine idling, and finally licked my finger, slipped it into that perfect hole in the dash.

Nothing.

I opened my eyes on the same world. To the face of the house.

“Mark?” Kelly asks, doing her awkward dismount up into the bed. I know not to help.

“Should we go upstairs?” I say, my voice thready.

“Upstairs?” she says, settling into the sheets.

“Like before.”

“You’re different,” she says.

“You’re different,” I say back, our call and response from the old days, but it comes out all wrong. I see it flicker across her face.

She tilts her glass back, sips just to hide the new vulnerability in her eyes.

“Remember that first night?” I ask.

“The kitchen,” she says, an impish grin creeping in. “The breakfast nook.”

“The future,” I say.

“Not this one,” she corrects.

“Exactly this one,” I tell her. “Any future with you, you know that.”

“I don’t want to sell.”

“I know.”

We smile in different directions. I study the walls and the corners, the furniture and the shadows.

“You’re scared,” she tells me.

“Just something I saw on tv earlier.”

“The cooking thing?”

“A lot earlier. When I was a kid.”

“But—you’re okay, here? Tell me.”

“I’m with you, yeah. That’s pretty okay in my book.”

“I want to be in your book too,” she says, and we draw close but it doesn’t go anywhere, and I think to myself that this is good, that this is right. That this is what I always wanted.

Twenty minutes later her side of the bed relaxes, steadies out, and I change my mind about this “one more night” charade. About this passive suicide I’m consenting to, just by pretending that everything will be all right in the morning.

I rise as silently as I can, go to the open bedroom door, grit my teeth to ignore the draft at my back, wanting to pull me through.

We will sell, we will get out of here. Earlier, before, when Kelly’s other half touched my shoulder at the top of the stairs, that physical contact between worlds—it put Novocaine in my brain all afternoon. It made me suggestible, made me easy, dimmed me like a bulb. Gave me a toolbelt to show my allegiance with. Made me too thankful for not falling down all those steps. Made me feel like I owed something back, like I was part of some circle, some cycle, some secret, timeless dynamic.

“Tomorrow,” I promise out loud.

Tomorrow.

Standing at the door, though, something splashes into the sawdust on the cement of the foyer. One drop, then another.

Tea, lemonade. Racing to the bottom.

From above, giggles.

I don’t want to, but I reach out, catch one of those drops. Lick it from the skin of my palm. It tastes like—

But no, no.

I wipe my tongue on the sleeve of my robe, ease the door shut, lock it.

Because Stan measures twice and cuts once, the brass tongue snicks into place.

I nod yes, that this is good, and walk backwards to bed, feeling my way under the covers, my eyes never leaving that slit of light under the door. It’s from the porch light, bleeding in through the stained glass around the door. There’s no reason for it to waver, no reason for it to waver.

It doesn’t, it doesn’t, and then at some point in the night, it does.

Not a solid shadow like a person would make, even a person made of shadow, a person pulling herself around and around the first floor by hand, but…something lighter, even more insubstantial.

It chatters a noise from its cheek and I open my mouth to scream, can’t even begin to.

A squirrel.

There’s a squirrel out there, its nose to the base of the door, its black marble eyes judging me.

I slither my hand under the sheets, find Kelly’s arm and hold on, keep watching, keep watching, and finally that line of light, it burns into my retinas, I think. I can’t see it anymore in any kind of real way, can only see it as afterimage, and, because it’s still there like that, I can shut my eyes, rest them for a moment.

Sleep.

There’s no clear space I step over to get there, either. Just, at some point, I realize that that yellow line I’m watching, it’s the blurred together stripes on the highway, that I’m whipping down some interstate at night, my head out the window, hair stinging my neck, and the only way I’m keeping straight, it’s by staying fixed on that line.

“Careful,” Kelly says from the passenger seat, and I reach over for her hand, find the top of her thigh instead.

Not wormy and mushy, but firm, young.

It’s how I know I’m asleep. It’s how I know I’ve been tricked, that I’ve been tricked by my other self, that I was setting myself up. Bringing syrupy red wine to bed. Working my muscles all afternoon. Spiking my adrenaline at the top of the stairs, then at regular intervals throughout the day, every time I’d look upstairs. Of course I had to crash eventually.

When I come to, instead of a jolt, it’s slow, like I’m floating up to the surface, like I’m a corpse, the gases of my decomposition giving me lift, the birds singing me up into the moonlight, to feast.

The whirring sound of radial steel on blacktop dies away, the yellow line chunking itself up into hashes, into one single hash, one line of light below the door. It’s unbroken, and the door, it’s still shut, surely still locked.

I nod too fast in desperate thanks—only a few hours to go, right?—and part of my little celebration, I guess, my private little ceremony of gratitude, my way of evening the world out, it’s to rub that rough knob on my left hip, that external, infected hernia, that new sphincter trying to push its way to the surface, my pointy fingertip just feeling through for the way in, pushing hard enough to crack the knotty surface, reach through, touch my bones.

But—no.

I take inventory of both of my hands, all my fingers.

They’re not in my underwear this time.

I turn from the line of light and—

It’s Kelly.

She’s asleep, has her face in my crotch, her lips sucked onto that mole, that patch of skin, that…that hickey.

I hook her thick hair loosely between my thumb and forefinger, smooth it onto her back, and when her eyes look up to me like they have to they’re black, they’re all pupil.

They don’t see me, but they don’t look away either.

I rub my hand along the side of her head.

Her legs, they’re run up alongside me, I can see that now. And my own, they’re tingling, a numb kind of emptiness, like something’s being steadily drawn from them. Something deeper than blood. Something more important, more basic.

For an instant her lips break the suction, slurp up, and I see a sticky line of wet shadow string up from my hip to her mouth. And then that string, the marrow of my dreams or whatever it is, it pulls her back, colors her throat on the way down, branching away for dark pulses, and in this way I know that I’m hers, that she’s mine, that we’re together as we should be. As together as any two people could possibly ever be.

Beside me, just to prove it, her left foot, it curls up against her pillow in the cutest way, those muscles remembering what they’re for, and my face warms into a smile.

Of course.

My wife says she woke falling.

What she doesn’t know, though, it’s that I was already down here, waiting for her. That I was going to catch her all along. That I would never in a thousand years let her hit the ground.

That one of these nights we’re going to walk upstairs together, hand in hand.

That, in some houses, love really can last forever.

in a Western when the camera’s focused down alongside the thigh of a quick-draw artist.

I figured it was the last thing she ordered because it didn’t show up until two weeks after the funeral. On some slow boat from Malaysia, probably. Meaning sending it back was going to be a headache, especially since she’d used her credit card.

Returning it, too—I don’t know. I guess it would have felt like a betrayal, sort of. Like I was passing judgment on this one last thing that was supposed to have somehow made everything better. Like I was telling her it was going to take more than something she saw in an infomercial to fix our marriage.

Before she died, we’d been sleeping in separate rooms for three months already. Keeping our take-out on different shelves in the refrigerator. Only using the ketchup at different times, using our cells instead of the landline, all that.

Neither of us wanted to say it out loud, but it was over, me and her. Not because of any particular revelation or event, though I could name a few if pushed—her too, I’m sure—but, stupid as sounds, it was more like we’d just started going through different drive-throughs. Our tastes had changed. I mean, you need difference, you need friction in a marriage, sure, this is talk show gospel, but what it came down to was that
I was perfectly content to let her keep on with her chicken tacos with sour cream thing, and felt zero need to convert over to the goodness of
Caesar salads with a small bowl of chili. I didn’t care what she was eating, and
I don’t think she felt particularly sorry for the heartburn the chili kept leaving me with.

Soon we were watching different shows in different rooms, changing our own batteries in our separate remotes, then falling asleep apart, waking up on our own.

And then, as if to complete the process, she drifted into a busy intersection under the false safety of a green light.

The police came to my office to tell me about the accident, took me to the morgue.

I identified her, I called her parents, we buried her, and now I had a handheld laser IR thermometer to show for our three-year marriage.

I unboxed it, batteried it up and held it to my forearm like a science-fiction hypodermic, pulled the trigger: 98.4 degrees.

Perfectly normal.

•

According to the packaging, home inspectors were big on these handheld thermometers. It made their job worlds easier.

Supposedly you could use it to double-check the temperature in your oven, or track pipes in the wall, or do something I didn’t understand with the hot-water heater. You could find air leaks around windows, too, especially in winter. The living room might be a balmy, draft-free seventy-two degrees, but run this dusty red light around that dried-out caulk line in the sill, and you’ll see where your electricity bill’s really being spent.

I took it to work, checked the heat on the electric pencil sharpener, on the copy machine, on the coffee pot, on my supervisor when he was walking away. My deskmate Randall shoved it down the front of his pants before I could stop him, pulled the trigger to prove how hot he was.

The microwave was nearly the exact same temperature off or not. The only difference was its light bulb, probably.

On the bus a woman across from me screamed when I pulled it from my pocket.

I got off at the next step, my hand still on the pistol grip.

When Teresa and I had first been dating it had been winter. One of our things was to walk to the liquor store seriously bundled-up in scarves and jackets and stocking caps, so that, cutting across the parking lot, we’d joke about how we were going to stick the place up—at least that’s what the clerk was going to think when we walked in.

Walking home after the bus, I stopped by a different liquor store, paid for a six-pack, the thermometer’s grip warm against my stomach.

The beer was Teresa’s brand. I didn’t even notice until my first drink.

I drank it anyway, had two gone by the time I made it home.

Later, I settled my red pointer on the late-show host’s cheek. It made me feel like a sniper.

And then I checked the living room out.

The walls were warmer behind the set, cooler by the door. The lamp that I’d had on while eating was still comparatively hot. The doorway to the kitchen was the same as the wall. My foot was the same as the wall. The late-show host was on fire. The window was the Arctic, the ceiling indifferent, the carpet the same.

I tried to write my name on the wall but wasn’t fast enough.

Finally I was able to draw a heart, slash an arrow across it.

The audience on television exploded with laughter.

I nodded in acknowledgement, sighted along the top of the gun down the hall, to my bedroom, but stopped at Teresa’s instead.

Everywhere else in that darkness, the temperature was hovering around seventy.

There was a spot right in her doorway, though.

It registered as body heat.

I sucked the red light back into my hand.

•

The next morning I called in when I knew I was going to be late if I tried to make it. One more tardy and I’d have to talk to somebody about it. I was a widower now, though, right? Surely they’d give me a day or two extra.

After the sun was up and the neighbors had gone to work, I strolled around the front yard to make sure I was alone and then checked the faucet under the window, followed the hose—frozen solid—around the side of the house, where I was aiming.

I peeked through Teresa’s window.

Her room was just her room, her doorway her doorway.

So I aimed the gun in.

Nothing, no one.

I nodded that this made sense, this was right, thank you, and spent the day at the movies, and walking around, and buying more batteries.

We hadn’t had insurance on each other, but the other driver’s policy had given me a big enough check, I suppose. Not enough to buy a person, but I could buy an ATV if I wanted. Maybe two. Or all the batteries I could carry.

I would have felt guilty taking the money, as she was kind of a careless driver, even if she had been in the right this time, but we had bought that car together. I told myself it was kind of like getting my investment back. And out of the marriage to boot.

When I got home, a package was waiting for me on the stoop.

It was a little hand-held movie camera, with nightshot.

I left it in its box.

•

Three days later, the thermometer had lost its novelty. And I wasn’t turning the light in the hall off anymore.

Sitting in my chair in the living room, I could lean over, have a clean line all the way down to my bedroom—to the one I’d claimed in the bad old days. Those days being the ones when Teresa was alive, yeah.

Now, in these good and unawkward days, I could stake out the master bedroom again.

Except I wasn’t.

The morning after the camera came, I’d finally pulled Teresa’s door shut, nodded to myself that this was good, that it wasn’t my job to clean it out.

That afternoon, it was open again.

And that doorway, it was always a few degrees warmer than the hall. And the curtains over her window had shifted, so I couldn’t stand in the bushes and see inside anymore.

I filed it all under Things You Never Expected to Know, and went to work, the camera in my bag.

Randall bought it from me for a hundred and fifty, half to be paid next check, half before summer.

That night he called me for a refund.

“You didn’t pay me anything,” I told him, still trying to watch the show I had on.

“I mean on owing you,” he said.

He dropped the camera off, stood on the porch like I was supposed to invite him in, and finally looked to the street behind him like somebody was waiting, sloped off for the bus stop.

I fiddled with the camera over a second microwave dinner.

Three beers of the six-pack I’d bought were still in the refrigerator. They weren’t an offering, but I couldn’t seem to drink them either.

At work they’d asked if I wanted to see a grief counselor. I’d said thanks, but no. Because there was just show-grief, not real loss, real sadness.

As hard as I tried, even at the funeral with her parents and little brother there, still, it felt more like relief than sorrow. Like I’d hit the lottery without even buying a ticket. Game over, reset, start again.

There was no way what had happened was my fault. And, as far as everybody knew, we were happily married, pretty much. As happy as anybody. Except for the debt she’d been piling up, mail-ordering stuff, we didn’t even have anything to argue about, really. And the card was in her name.

Instead of throwing the camera away—the invoice said it had cost her three-fifty—I flipped through the manual, arguing with Randall in my head that it was brand new, no way could it be broke.

I fell asleep with it in my lap, woke to a distinct pop.

The kids in the street, cracking baseballs into the horizon.

I dragged my blanket to the couch, sat on it backwards, on my knees, and parted the curtains, watched them.

They were letting the new kid swing. And he could. He so could.

Without thinking, I raised the camera, zoomed in on him, and, like I hadn’t been able to make the camera do all last night, the little red record-light glowed on in the eyepiece.

Because nobody had catcher pads, the kids had rigged a soccer net behind the batter.

The new kid didn’t need it, though.

He lofted ball after ball into the sky, everybody craning to track it each time, run it down, his little brother—they were like different stages of the same kid—ready to collect the ball, if any of them made it over the imaginary plate.

I left them to it, trolled the refrigerator for the nothing I already knew was there then skirted Teresa’s door, aiming for my own.

And it hit me, the smell.

From her room.

It was one of those thick smells that are like particles in the air, that feel like an oil on your skin.

I fell over dry-heaving, trying to hold it in because I didn’t want to clean it up.

After throwing up in the toilet, I hitched my shirt up over my lower face and stood in her doorway—it didn’t feel warm—flicked her light on, but it was dead.

I came back with the flashlight, cruised its yellow beam over her magazines and pillows, her shoes and purses. Over me in her dresser mirror, standing there in my boxers. Nobody staring over my reflection’s shoulder, even though my skin was crawling.

That dead-raccoon smell, though. I could feel it settling on my face.

And then, over my shoulder, the skin there sensitive in a way it hadn’t been since childhood, something crashed.

At first I thought it was a hand, clamping down.

Then, rationalizing at a furious pace, I told myself it was one of the beers in the refrigerator, exploding.

Wrong, wrong.

It was the shorted-out doorbell, hanging right behind me. Pile-driving into my ear, the sound straightening my back so fast that it was going to be sore.

Somebody was at the door.

I made myself smile.

Probably the new kid. He’d fouled a ball into the backyard, wanted to walk through.

Sure, sure.

I opened the door.

It was another package.

I stood there, opened it, the white peanuts drifting down to the floor, some clinging to my legs.

Air freshener. Twenty-four cans of it.

•

This was all because I’d faked my way through the funeral, I knew. Or, it was all in my head, was just coincidence—she’d ordered all this weeks before—but, if it was all in my head, was just guilt, then that meant I could fix it, too.

Right?

I took the remaining three beers to the cemetery, poured them into her dirt, drinking the last drink of each like we were sharing. Like I was letting her go first. Because it hadn’t all been bad. There had been a time when we—well, we weren’t going to conquer the world, show them how it was done. But we were going to close the front door of our house, and do whatever the hell we wanted in there. Wear pajamas all day, eating chips and playing videogames. We weren’t going to play by the world’s rules, we were going to make our own. Screw the rat race, all the pressure to be upstanding, start a family, leverage our way to a bigger house, better car. We could fake it for work, sure, but after we left our cubicles, we were just us.

Because we felt the same about all that, I guess we figured that was love. Or close enough. And I’m not saying it wasn’t. That it couldn’t have been.

I stood at the bus stop to go home but then crossed the street, went the other way instead. Just walking.

I left the camera on the slanted-frontward brick ledge in front of a liquor store window, the manual folded back as well as I could, tucked under. The world could thank me later for that.

Then, when I finally made it back to the house, the baseball kids stalling their game so I could hunch-shoulder past without getting beaned in the forehead, I came back onto the porch with a screwdriver, pried the middle two numbers out of our 1322, put them back as 1232.

And I pulled Teresa’s door shut again, and this time looped a bungee cord over the handle, tied it off on a cinderblock I dragged in from the backyard, and when I shouldered it open enough to reach in, make sure the light switch was off, I was pretty sure there was a shape in the mirror that had two shoulders, couldn’t have been me.

I let the door click shut quietly, didn’t want to draw any extra attention.

My heart just slamming in my chest.

I went to the refrigerator to reload and stopped a couple of steps away.

The floor was tacky.

With beer. It had come from the refrigerator. No empties in there.

I laughed, rubbed my smile in with my hand and turned on all the lights in the house, even the front and back porch lights, then set there with my thermometer pistol, checking each bulb from my chair.

Teresa’s door never opened. Exactly like it shouldn’t have. And none of the light bulbs exploded for no reason at all.

It was just me, sitting awake all night. The kids out there playing night ball, the baseball dipped in rubbing alcohol and lit with blue flame, just like some big brother had showed them.

With nightshot, it would have looked so excellent.

I thought I was dreaming it until the two police cars rolled in, to keep the city from burning down.

Or maybe we were all dreaming.

•

By now I was carrying the thermometer in my pocket at all times. And calling in for the week.

Randall messaged me but I let it slide. I had enough cash from Teresa to ride it out for a few weeks if I needed to. If it came to that.

In a way, it was being loyal to Teresa, really. I wasn’t playing the world’s game, wasn’t doing what it expected me to do.

Or, I was being loyal to the Teresa I’d married. Not to the one who I’d kind of started thinking was looking in a different way at my sisters, maybe. At their perfect, reasonable, cookie-cutter lives. Their husbands and their nice neat families. Their living rooms that were grown-up living rooms.

We didn’t want all that, though. It’s not what we’d signed on for.

I sat the day out, cleaning my recorded TV shows off the DVR, telling myself this was a chore I had to get through. That I wasn’t hiding, I was doing stuff, I was taking care of things.

Because I still didn’t trust the refrigerator, I ordered a pizza.

Thirty minutes later the doorbell chugged in its diabolical way.

It wasn’t the pizza delivery guy but one of those respectable dads. With a letter for me that had shown up in his box.

I nodded thanks and he reached past me, tapped the street numbers by my door.

“This is why,” he said.

I turned as if just seeing them.

“Kids,” he explained, and we laughed together and he asked if I needed help getting his address off my house, and the question under that was about his mail, if I’d been getting it.

I told him I’d flop the numbers, it was nothing, and thanked him, stepped inside, left him there.

Behind me, the whole house was dark. For the first time in days.

Finally the dad stepped away, walked down the sidewalk instead of crossing the grass.

I aimed my thermometer at the letter. It was just normal.

I aimed it at all the light bulbs, knowing where they were by instinct, now. They were all cool, like they’d never been on.

The letter was from the city, had never touched human hands, was just machine-printed, machine-stuffed, machine-stamped, and machine-mailed.

It was a traffic ticket.

Teresa was being cited for the light she hadn’t run. When the other driver had run it, it had triggered all the traffic cameras in the intersection.

The picture—black and white and grainy—was down in the corner of the ticket, supposed to be proof that she’d really done this.

I didn’t look, didn’t look, and then I did.

The camera had her from above, of course, and from the front.

And it was her, no doubt. That wasn’t the part that made me try to step away from what I was holding.

What made me step away was what she was clutching to her chest. Over her shoulder.

A baby.

•

To show I could, I left all the lights off, slept curled up in my chair, the thermometer pistol-gripped in my hand, pressing into my face.

Once when I woke I’d been pushing the trigger in my sleep, the beam lasered straight down the hall. Not making it all the way to the end. Stopping at something there.

I clicked the gun off, didn’t look at the temperature. Made myself close my eyes again.

She was telling me something.

I shook my head no, though. That I didn’t want to know. That no way was I going to call the coroner, ask if that woman from the wreck had been pregnant.

It wouldn’t mean she’d been seeing somebody else. Six weeks ago, like a game of chicken, like we were each daring the other to enjoy it less, each waiting for the other to call it off, say it wasn’t worth it, call uncle, we’d had sex and ended up laughing afterwards. At ourselves.

So she could have been pregnant. I guess. Her parents could have been grandparents, had she not pulled into that intersection. My sisters could have been a gaggle of perfect aunts.

No.

Even if she was, it’s better the way it happened. Even if she was secretly thrilled about it, it’s better she pulled in front of that car. That he was late to wherever he was going.

It’s wrong to say it, I know, but it’s the truth.

If three people bit it in that wreck instead of two, then okay. Now her and that unborn baby, they could be together forever, I guess.

Which covers no distance at all in explaining why she’s still here.

The doorbell rang again and I slammed the door open.

It was my pizza.

I took it, ate it with water from the tap. Remembered splitting pizzas with Teresa.

Our first date had been pizza, then the arcade in back.

When we were going to make it forever.

I don’t know if I missed her, but I missed that, I guess.

I nodded thanks to her, stood with a mouthful of the past, went to her door and pushed it open, the bungee cord humming with tension by my leg.

The heat billowed out like a rancid breath.

I came back with the air freshener she’d thought to send, sprayed two cans’ worth, until I was coughing and laughing, my hand leaving tomato-sauce stains on the wall by her door.

Somewhere in there, I cried. I tried to tell myself it was for her, for us, for what we’d had, what we’d meant, but I don’t know. It just hit me, that I was here, now. Alone. That this was it. That everything was just going to keep getting worse, now, from here on out.

I cried and cried, just sitting there on my knees in the hall, holding Teresa’s door open the whole time. Like telling her I was sorry and meaning it, now.

Like isn’t this enough?

No.

The doorbell rang its broken ring.

I shook my head no.

I stood in the hall. The doorbell rang again. Then again.

“Wait here,” I said to Teresa’s open door, and let it close gently, made my way to the front door, to whatever this next punishment was going to be. From the Philippines, from China, from Kentucky.

It was from six doors down, on the other side of the street.

The new kid’s little brother. He was holding a bat, shuffling his feet.

Behind him the street was empty. Just the soccer net.

He’d come out alone to practice. To get good enough to play with the big kids.

Until now.

“Let me guess,” I told him, and he nodded, couldn’t make eye contact, and I saw him through the camera again, from a distance, with nightshot.

The way Teresa would have.

I stepped aside, shrugged, and he leaned his bat against the porch wall, came in.

In the living room now, some of the lights were on, some off. In the whole house. Perfectly normal.

“I think it went—” he started.

“I heard it,” I told him, leaving the front door open, and ushered him down the hall, pushed against Teresa’s door with my fingertips.

“What’s that smell?” the boy said.

Teresa’s room was as scattered as it had been, just me and the boy’s dim outlines in the mirror, but, in the direct center of the bed, like the bed was a nest, was a baseball, the curtains in the now-open window rustling like it could have come through there, sure.

“If anything’s broke, my dad will…I’m sorry,” the boy said, about to cry.

“No worries,” I told him, “it happens,” my hand to his shoulder, and guided him in like Teresa had to be wanting, held the door open just long enough for him to get to the edge of the bed, look back to me once. And then I let the bungee cord snick the door shut, collected the bat from the front porch and settled back into my chair. There wasn’t even a muted scream from down the hall. Just the sound of forever.

In it, I aimed the gun into my mouth, pulled the trigger.

The readout said I was still alive, still human.

As far as it knew, anyway.

and the universe. She’s learned her lesson. It doesn’t need to go any farther. It doesn’t.

But it already is.

He watches her from the edges of the room. From just past the light, where it doesn’t reach all the way to the wall. His Catwalk of Shadow. His Dark Hallway. His Night Path. His whatever-he-calls-it.

She pictures him designing this room in his mind for years.

No windows, one door. Cement floor. A hole in that cement for the toilet—a ritual she’s learned to close her eyes for. There’s even studs to attach the legs of her wooden chair to the floor. She wonders if the chair’s wooden because he’s going to wheel a car battery in. She wonders if dogs are next. Or rats. Birds.

She wonders a lot of things.

She can feel her bra, still on. Some bra, anyway. No panties, but something that’s got to be a catheter.

Her clothes have been replaced by scrubs. Because scrubs are easier. They still have the creases in them.

Is he saving her clothes to dress her in again, after?

Does he work at a hospital? At a laundry?

Her hair, it was down the toilet hole the first day. She assumes. She woke and it wasn’t on her head anymore.

Because her mouth was taped, because it’s always taped, she couldn’t ask him why. She couldn’t ask him anything.

And he doesn’t turn the light off.

The game she plays is to close her eyes for forty seconds or a minute, then open them fast, in the direction of the place in the room he last was, or the next place he should be. The idea is that her light-starved pupils will somehow drill through the shadows, and her mind can take a snapshot of him.

The game he plays is more hands-on.

•

On the fifth day he steps into the light, his eyes already watching her.

Her body shudders and she kind of barks a sob out. She hates herself for it, but if she wasn’t tied to the chair she’d be reaching for him, she knows.

In her arm is the IV that must be feeding her.

The clear tube snaking out from it trails off into the darkness.

It could be a sedative, though. Or worse.

He could be doping her into some sort of mental twilight, then spooning clam chowder into her mouth twice a day, touching the corners of her mouth with the corner of a napkin.

It doesn’t stop the other parts, though. The parts she’s awake for.

It involves the duct tape from the meat drawer of the refrigerator.

She assumes it’s the meat drawer.

What he does after stepping into the light is drag another wooden chair across the floor and sit down directly across from her.

It’s not a torture chamber, she tells herself.

It’s an interrogation room.

He just has some questions, that’s all.

If she answers right, she can go home.

Except he isn’t speaking. He’s just watching her. Licking his top lip once, but not in a particularly hungry way. More like he’s waiting for some mental cuckoo clock to announce the right time.

You don’t say that out loud to someone in his position, though. Even through tape.

He hears anyway, unpockets a utility knife, balances it on his right thigh. It takes a few seconds to get it right, but then he remembers, snicks the first quarter inch of blade out, has to balance the knife all over again.

She pees heat into her catheter, screams her throat full.

He waits for her to calm.

His face isn’t masked or bagged or painted or disguised, and she doesn’t want to see it anymore. She doesn’t care. She wants him to know she doesn’t care. If he would just look into her eyes, listen to what she’s trying to mean.

He’s checked out, though. He’s waiting.

She’s breathing as hard as her nose will allow, now. For a moment that feels like luck, like providence, like the universe answering her, one of her tears slips behind the adhesive of the tape over her mouth and under her chin, and she tastes that saltiness, and realizes that if she cries enough, the tape might let go, and then she can scream until the right person hears.

Except she isn’t at all sure there are any right people within hearing.

And then it’s time.

•

The game, his game, he teaches it to her slowly. Patiently.

It involves the tape. And the utility knife. That first quarter inch of it, anyway.

At first he just leaves the knife and the tape there on the top of his leg. For her to get used to them. The same way she’d once seen someone on television get a horse used to a saddle. He’s easing them into this. Together.

What he does next, minutes later, after she’s ridden the swell of her fear back to a place where she can breathe halfway normal, is tear off three or four inches of the dull grey tape, then press the part still on the roll back down, lining it up edge-to-edge.

With the same deliberation, then, the same attention, he presses that torn-off piece of tape onto her forearm, and rubs it down with the undersides of the fingers of his right hand so that, for the first time, the tape brings heat, doesn’t draw it out from her.

She throws up, her head rocking with it, and he cuts a slit in the tape over her mouth to keep her from drowning.

It doesn’t stop this from happening, though.

Nothing will.

He tapes new tape onto her mouth when it’s dry enough, when she’s calm enough, and sits back down on the very front part of his chair. Moving slow and holding the knife out like a demonstration, keeping it flat in his open hand at first like that’s supposed to help, he brings it towards her left arm. Toward that strip of tape he’s pressed there.

At right about the center of it, both lengthwise and width, and holding the knife with both hands for precision, he pushes the bright leading corner of the razor blade through the grey, into her arm. A quarter inch into her arm.

And then he traces a small triangle only as long as it is deep, her blood welling up through the new lines. The blade dipping out and in at the corners, to make proper points, to connect the lines all the way. Like that’s a rule. Like there can even be rules anymore.

When he’s done he looks up to her, right into her eyes. He’s not breathing.

She bucks and strains and cries and screams more in her throat.

He holds his index finger up.

She thinks it’s shhh, but then he rabbit-ears a second finger up.

He’s counting.

On three, and without breaking eye contact, as if looking down to what he’s doing would be cheating, he rips the length of tape up from her forearm.

When she can see again, there’s a small, dull grey triangle of tape left on her forearm, blood welling up around it.

She looks up to him about it and he sits back in his chair.

Moving slow, with obvious reluctance, he stands to lower his black, military-surplus pants to his ankles.

She’s shaking her head no, now. Please, please no, not this.

But it’s not what she thinks.

He’s lowering his slacks to give himself access to the fishbelly flesh of the top of his thigh, his right thigh, the wiry black hairs sparse there, like a forest that burned a quarter century ago. The top of his other thigh matted with ropy scars of untended cuts, all at about the same angle.

He purses his lips, looks up to her, and draws a neat red line into the skin of his right. It makes him lower his head. In pain. In prayer. In something.

The blood is going both ways around his leg, to the seat of his pants. It doesn’t look like spider legs or like a ribbon or like melted candy. Just blood.

When he looks back up to her, his eyes have resettled themselves. His face is remote.

“Fair’s fair,” he says, and pulls his pants up, snaps them shut, drags his chair back into the darkness.

He lost.

She keeps saying that to herself.

•

The next time he pulls a strip of tape up from her arm, the triangle of skin comes up with it, dangling by a gummy thread.

This time he doesn’t cut himself.

It’s a simple game, really.

Three times in a row, by willpower alone, she holds onto her triangle of tape, the top of his right thigh opening up like the back of a butterflied shrimp, over and over, his meat dull and striated before the blood rushes in to cover it.

Like with her arm, he isn’t applying bandages or ointment or care to himself.

Fair’s fair.

The triangle either stays in place, a tiny island in a sea of blood, or it hang-gliders up into its sky.

But then she loses six times in a row, and he has to switch to the other arm.

At what’s either the second week or the third week, her family’s kitchen probably stacked with uneaten casseroles, their porch mounded with flower baskets, he brings a flashcard in with him.

On it is a hieroglyph, or an ideogram, or a cuneiform in ink.

She looks from it to his face, then back to the card.

He holds it up even with her eyes, and, moving slow again—this is his knife hand—he peels the tape from her mouth, from under her chin.

She licks her lips ravenously, never had any sense that was something she could long for so deeply.

“I’m sorry,” she says.

She’s been practicing. She’s made promises to herself. She knows her lines. This is the first step. This is her chance.

It doesn’t matter.

He holds the card closer. Waiting.

She narrows her eyes. She looks past the card to him.

“What do you want?” she says, off-script.

Nothing. No response.

“I’ve—I’ve got a daughter,” she says, remembering her plan. Her strategy.

“To trade?” he asks, a grin ghosting the corners of his mouth up.

She closes her eyes, looks away.

You can’t die from holding your breath, she tells herself. And you can’t die from just wanting to. Not with your arms taped down. Your legs. Not in this room.

Moving with what she wants to read as fatigue, he tears off a three-inch strip of tape and applies it, snicks the razor from the knife.

It’s just sounds to her, now.

It’s not really her body anymore.

He cuts deeper, until she has to agree that it is still her body.

It’s worth it. It makes her triangle of tape stay behind.

He cuts himself just as deep and has to tilt his face up, to keep his eyes from spilling.

She loves him a little, in thanks. And hates herself for that.

•

Next is her lower lip.

It’s the day the roll of tape runs out.

He studies the leftover cardboard tube, the spinout her daughter used to call it—right?—then nods, leans over, deposits it in the hole of her toilet.

Like everything that goes down there, it falls and it falls.

She shrugs like oh well. Nothing to do.

He doesn’t agree.

Instead of going back to his refrigerator for more tape, he uses what they have, what’s already there, on her mouth. But only after holding the flashcard up again. Giving her one more chance.

It’s still nothing to her. Less than nothing.

He stands to hold her forehead when he pushes the knife into the tape. And it’s good that he does. Otherwise the tip of the blade would be all over her face.

The triangle of her lower lip goes with the tape this time, and when it does she slings her head back, sees the afterburn of that ideogram on the ceiling. That hieroglyph. That cuneiform, that inkdoll, that Rorschach blot.

It hangs in the air before her for a moment then slips back to wherever it came from. Wherever it goes. Wherever it lives.

It’s been a month, at least. It has to have been.

She’s been replaced at work. Her family’s in mourning.

He stands there with her strip of tape in his hand, by his right thigh, a deep piece of her lower lip stuck to the tape, as rubbery as octopus meat, and he lets her scream.

This time when her tears slide down, they seep into the open wound her lip has become.

She screams through it. That she should have watched closer, she should have been better, she knows. She screams that she’s sorry. She screams that she hates him. She screams that she’s the wrong girl, can’t he see? It’s not her. He wants somebody else for this, whatever this is.

He just watches her. Studies her.

“What do you want?” she asks when she can, out of breath, blood and saliva stringing off the bottom of her chin. Onto her wrists. Under the tape.

Up here, she tells him with her eyes. Keep your eyes right here.

He looks down the backside of the tape he’s holding and pinches her bloodless triangle of skin up from it. He inspects it like it’s a bug. Like it’s piece of a bug, and he’s trying to guess at its true form, its lifecycle. What it eats and what it doesn’t. What it looks like sleeping.

And then he folds the tape shut over it, presses it tight, giving it the burial it deserves, and when it makes its wet fibrous sound she feels another jolt of pain.

Her bottom lip’s discharge goes clear hours after he leaves. Clear like the fluid in her IV tube. It’s what she’s made of, anymore, she knows.

She tilts her head back to try to keep it in, and stays that way for most of the night. Or what she thinks is the night.

•

The next two weeks it’s that same idiot of a flashcard. That same hateful symbol, sign, letter.

He brings new tape, just as chilled.

She’s taken to laughing when he has to cut himself. To making herself laugh.

She tells him his lap is what the mall Santa for cats must look like. She tells him to go slower, so she can watch, so she can hear. She stabs her tongue into the hole in her lip to stay awake.

The tops of her arms are ruined by now, a patchwork of bloody triangles, all pointing at her bicep. The IV is spiked into the top of her foot. She doesn’t remember it happening. Or her daughter’s name, either.

She tells herself that’s the real pain, that that hurts the worst. But then she’ll see the knife again, from across the room.

He holds the card in front of her and she tries spitting on it, just to get a new one. Just to switch the station, please. Her spit doesn’t make it past her chin, even. Just her right wrist.

He saws the front of her scrub-shirt open, lays a strip of tape on the pale top of her left breast.

She lays her head back, stares at her favorite spot on the ceiling.

Moments later both cups of her bra warm with blood, not just the left, like she was expecting.

It’s something. And maybe not her bra, even, so there.

She doesn’t even look down to see if she won or lost.

On the ceiling, she moves her eyes in the brushstrokes of the hieroglyph, and she isn’t sure whether she’s telling herself to do it or if she’s watching herself do it.

In school, she’d studied business, not ancient cultures. Not languages. Not art. Not even international business. She only knows of cuneiform from a project in sixth grade. But they were writing in English, for it. Their boyfriend’s names. With hearts they had to smuggle onto their tablets, hide until the clay dried.

“You’ve got the wrong girl,” she tells him again, just speaking straight up, her throat stretched tight, her words easy in spite of that, because her flesh is less every day. “You can keep doing this, but I’ll never guess.”

“You don’t have to guess,” he says, his voice smooth like he’s been talking all day. “You already know. You just don’t know it yet.”

By the time she looks up, he’s already limped away.

His cuts are just as infected as hers. Just as festering. Just as boiling with pus.

She wonders if this is love.

She watches a bubble climb her clear IV tube then stop at the incline.

She tries to suck with the veins in her foot but the bubble is stubborn.

In it is a world, she knows. One she could live in.

•

He has to shake her awake. It’s later. It’s always later. Never before. No matter how hard she tries.

Her legs have hairs pushing up through the scabs. She imagines a giant, sloppy dog walking in in its lanky way, licking the dried blood from her. Licking and licking. Watching her the whole while.

She’s pretty sure the clear fluid coming through her tube is saliva, too. His, probably. He’s been saving for months, before finally working up the nerve to grab her.

Maybe this is sex, for him. For somebody like him.

Maybe it’s better.

He lets her shoulders go as soon as she’s awake.

“Hey, Billy,” she says, her voice light, noncommittal. “Hey,  Ron.”

It’s her new game.

He doesn’t play along.

“Frederick,” she adds, over-enunciating by about half a mile. It’s hilarious.

He holds the flashcard up.

They’re onto her scalp, now. It’s been re-shaved. She’s having to trust him, about whether the grey triangle is staying in place or not.

But she does. Trust him.

“Jonathan Mutragen,” she says, with all proper flair. “Junior.” She almost smiles from it. “The third. ‘Esquire.’”

When she looks back to the silence he’s emanating, that she can feel roiling off him, he’s lowered the card a bit, and he’s breathing deep. His eyes alive like he’s getting away with something, here. No: like he’s gotten away with something.

“Jonathan?” she says, honestly scared for the first time in weeks.

He flips the card over in his hand.

On the back is the hieroglyph’s meaning. The ideogram’s meaning. What the Sumerians had meant, when they pressed it into clay.

Three.

The most complicated, useless, ornamental three there ever was in the world. In the whole history of man.

She swallows, looks up, and feels her face flush with accomplishment.

It’s the first day they don’t play the game.

Because she guessed right.

She stamps her feet as much as she can. In celebration. She pees her cathether tube full, imagines it frothing in there, lapping at the sides in joy.

“Three!” she yells out to him in his dark corridor, his black catwalk, his hiding place. “Three three three third!”

It doesn’t matter that he stays back there. That he doesn’t respond. She can see his project, now. The dim outline of it. There are right answers to his questions. And those answers, they’re answers she couldn’t know.

He’s improving her. He’s making her better. He’s making her reach inside for what he needs, for the trivial, impossible solutions to his arbitrary problems, but she’s not reaching into herself. She’s reaching into some place deeper. Some place the world’s forgotten how to access.

Until him.

He’s turning her into an oracle. He’s bleeding the truth from her.

It’s what any crazy person would think.

The next day—she’s back to days—he uses a ballpoint pen to write on the palm of his hand.

It’s numbers. And letters. Operators. Blue ink, calluses.

Algebra, trig, calculus, something far past any chalkboard she’s ever seen.

R(5,5)=

An obvious blank on the right side.

She looks up to him.

•

The game when it gets to her collarbones hurts in the same way the dentist used to hurt, when she lived in that world. When that world was real. She can hear the narrow point of the blade scraping bone.

None of those grey triangles stay on. Not even one.

It doesn’t matter.

Soon she’ll be The Girl Without Skin. The Twice Naked Woman. The Lady Made of Pain.

The One Who Disappeared.

The Oracle of Open Flesh.

He moves onto the virgin expanse of her back. What he can get to, around the chair.

Her shoulder blades. The ridges of her spine.

She tries to imagine herself as somebody else. Somebody else getting a tattoo. The most complicated tattoo.

She cries afterwards, just from habit. Some of the tears are making their way to her right wrist, she notices. Under the tape.

Because her daughter would want her to try, wouldn’t she?

Whatever her daughter’s name is. Or was.

No, is. Is is is.

Always is.

When he comes in next, he’s got the roll of tape, the utility knife, but a pad of paper, too. Graph paper.

Meaning the answer to R(5,5), it’s more complicated than three was.

She looks away.

Not because she doesn’t want to try. Not because luck isn’t real. It’s because he’ll have to remove her tape to let her try, which would start that tape over.

“Red on bottom,” he prompts. Like reminding her. Priming her.

She tastes this, considers this.

He’s talking about the graph. The one she guesses she’s going to need map colors for. To make it red on bottom.

She chuckles in her chest and her shoulders move with it.

“The tongue, then,” he says, obviously disappointed, putting the pen back in its pocket, the sound of that plastic barrel on fabric deafening, an avalanche, each thread a rope, the pen’s yellow skin impossibly rough.

“I’m sorry,” she says, not meaning it, and then her daughter stands up on her toes, whispers something in her ear.

44?

She repeats it, but not to him, to her. Wherever she’s scampered off to. Whatever her name is. Was.

“Forty four?” he asks, his breath coming hard and sudden, his eyes too full.

She remembers him, she comes back to him.

“Nothing,” she says.

“Forty four,” he says again, insisting, and reaches into his back pocket. “Ramsey’s Theorum. ”

The strip of paper with R(5,5)= has the blank filled in. With a range of numbers from 43 to 49.

“It’s a range because it’s unsolveable,” he says, watching her eyes. “That’s as close as we can get.” He breathes in, breathes back out. Adds, “Until now.”

She shakes her head, amused.

At the end, that’s the main thing left.

“Sweetie?” she says past him, into the Black Hallway. Through the Dark Curtain. To the distinct scrape of a little girl’s shoes on concrete.

He looks with her, and when he doesn’t see, could never see, she reaches up with her right hand. No: she sees her right hand reaching up.

The soggy tape tears away, trails behind.

He goes solid, his eyes alive in a new way—she’s messing it all up, she knows—but when her right hand gets to him, it just climbs his chest finger by finger. To his shirt pocket. For the red pen.

She takes it, clicks it open.

He offers her the pad, his face awash with wonder.

“Thank you,” she says, and he sets it on her lap, the thin cardboard backing already sticking to the tops of her thighs.

“Forty four,” she says, and, point by drilled-in point, as if she’s taking divine dictation, she starts to plot a line that must have been nestled inside her, her whole life.

All it needed was the right person to cut it out.

She draws like this through the night, or what she thinks must be the night, and when sleep starts to insist upon itself, she pulls one eyelid out as tight as it will go, reminds him about the utility knife, and at the precise moment of incision she remembers her daughter’s name, her beautiful, beautiful name, and has to suck her breath in through her teeth.

“Again,” she says, guiding his wrist, “deeper, please,” and she’s in the right room after all, it turns out. She was the right person all along.

Thirteen

I told Paula Guran I would write a Halloween story for her, but every time I tried to think “Halloween,” I always ended up at some Neil Gaiman story I never can remember the title of, that for some reason reminded me of Harlan Ellison’s “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ said the Ticktockman.” So I did what I always do: fell back on the horror stories I heard growing up. This one was of some bad stuff that happened in the bathroom of the Big Chief movie theater in Midland, Texas, bad stuff that made us all so scared to go there that it finally just shut down. Then I called it “Thirteen” because there was a movie just out with that title, that everybody kept telling me I had to see, but I was scared to see it, and still haven’t. So that title was scary for me.

Brushdogs

Richard Thomas and I had hammered out the story order for this collection, but there was a big gaping hole in position two. So I told him I’d write something, probably with an angel in it—a story I’ve still got swimming in my head. But then Ross Lockhart and Justin Steele hit me up for a story for a Laird Barron mythos kind of story, and I was just days back from hunting, where, eating dinner one night, one of my cousins had said how when he was a kid he’d always been a brushdog for one of my great uncles, and that was a word I hadn’t heard. And, that cairn: I saw it on top of a hill, and walked back there—took like an hour, was a lot farther than it looked through my rifle scope—climbed it, and hadn’t brought nearly enough jackets. It was super windy up there. I can’t remember if I left a rock on top or not. I know I didn’t mess it up, though. And I didn’t walk between it and the drop-off it was close to, either. Because I wanted to live.

Welcome to the Reptile House

T.E. Grau had just started editing fiction at
Strange Aeons, and he asked if I had anything for him to consider. I think I said no, but give me a few days. And I wrote this. But it wasn’t working. I was talking to Zack Wentz about something at the time, so I got him to help me with it, and he made it work. Bauhaus, or whatever that band is? No clue. That’s all Zack. And any other music or punk culture stuff. I listen mostly to country and hair metal, I mean. I can plug John Conlee or Kix into any piece of fiction at any hour of the day, but with punk, all I know starts and ends with Adrien Brody’s character from
Summer of Sam. At the same time, if I got those details wrong, the story would feel fake. It’s good to have smart friends. They save me all the time.

This is Love

I wrote this story for Vince Liaguno’s
Unspeakable Horrors II: Abominations of Desire, where it might still show up, but when Steve Berman asked if I had something for
Icarus a couple of years later: yep. And then when he selected it for
Best Gay Fiction, man, wow, an honor. Anyway—seen
Retroactive?
Triangle? I crawled inside that whole genre years ago, such that it’s hard for each story I write not to be shaped like that. Like this one, I mean. And I think I’m halfway ripping off Gene Wolf’s “A Fish Story.” Or, there’s a key scary thing that happens in there that I couldn’t get out of my head while writing this one. Also, I wrote it right after driving from Montana to somewhere way far away, and there were a lot of rest stops involved, and each one I went to seemed more primed for something bloody than the last. And, years before that trip, I’d once walked into a rest-stop bathroom of nothing but blood, so, you know: of course I’m going to set a horror story at a rest-stop.

The Spindly Man

Thanks to Ellen Datlow for allowing me to sneak this one into this collection. It’s showing up a little bit close to its appearance in her
Fearful Symmetries. I should dedicate it to Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, though. I mean, I knew King’s “The Man in the Black Suit,” of course, but hadn’t read it for a while, until their
The Weird. And then it hit me that King was kind of doing something really elegant there. Something about the tone or voice or distance in that story, I realized I could step into it for a few pages, maybe. I mean, I realized I was going to the next time I wrote something, so it seemed kind of fair to go ahead and reel that story into this one, so as not to pretend I was coming up with it all alone.

The Black Sleeve of Destiny

I wrote this right after I’d done a reading in Orlando, Florida, for Toni Jensen. When she asked what I wanted to do with some free hours I had, I said “Goodwill,” of course. It’s my favorite place. I never need historical sites or museums or fancy restaurants. Take me to a thrift store and I’ll be the happiest dude of all. Anyway, skulking around there, carrying all my treasures, I started watching people more than usual. And this black sweatjacket, I nearly bought it, until I realized it was a factory reject, had one sleeve too long. Also, that word, “hoodie,” I don’t handle it so well. I’d already tried to get okay with it by naming a character “Kid Hoodie” in one book, but, I don’t know. It’s still not a term I feel remotely comfortable using. It’s terrifying to me. To use it would be to trade in a piece of my soul. So, since it was already scary, I figured I’d see if I could spook it up for others as well.

The Spider Box

This is one of those rare times where I had the title before the story. I just sat down one afternoon, knew I had two or three hours for writing that I wasn’t going to waste, so I put this title up-top, to see what would happen. What I completely figured was that spiders were going to take over the world. Except spiders are startling, they’re not really scary. Or, they’re harbingers for the real horror, like. At least to me. At least here. And, as for the dump: my grandad used to take me and my brother there some Sundays, let us play. It was the best place ever. Every single item was more magic than the last, but we were always under orders never to lock ourselves in the old refrigerators. So they became these magical portals to other places, in my head. And, portals can work both ways, of course.

Snow Monsters

My wife was working at the mall one winter, and would always get off way late, and since I didn’t like her walking in the parking lot alone, I’d always try to be there waiting. But, I’d always be waiting among all these giant dirty snow mounds. And I got to watching them in my mirrors, and wondering who was living in them, and what they might say to me if they came to talk. Also, I’d run into a dude who wore one of those, like, small-brimmed, straw, not-really-a-fedora hats, and that whole night I was in the room with him, I just kept watching him. Because I’d never seen anybody wear a hat like that. So, because he was so hard to explain for me, I figured he maybe lived in a snow mound in the parking lot. This story kind of terrifies me, too. Because it’s a trade we’d all make in a heartbeat. It’s a trade that might be happening all around us all the time. A trade we might have benefitted from, even.

Doc’s Story

Jesse Bullington had invited me to submit a story to his
Letters to HP Lovecraft anthology, where we all respond to some passage from
“Supernatural in Horror Literature,”
which is a long essay that synopsizes a lot better than it actually reads. But, I knew it already, of course, and had it dialed up a moment or two after Jesse’s invite. And what I searched for in there, it was “werewolves.” Bingo. I wrote back, told him I could write a werewolf story, sure, one skirting the boundaries of Gaiman’s werewolf issue of
Sandman but also somehow involving a “grandam” (HPL’s word) telling a story to a youngster (which is the context for the werewolf passage I chose to ramp off). Except, a hundred and twenty pages later, I hadn’t found the end of that one. And I still haven’t. So, one day before this was due, I ate a whole jar of chocolate-covered sunflower seeds, studied hard on a werewolf action figure I’d bought at a toy store in Baltimore with Matthew Hobson, and wrote this. In under two hours, I think. And now it’s the first chapter of a novel I just finished. And, the core of it, that dad with the ball-peen hammer, that’s from my great-granddad Pop. It was a story he used to always tell. It was hilarious, the way he would tell it, trying to hold that dog’s collar with one hand and whap it with the hammer at the same time, the dog kicking and yowling and biting the whole time. It’s the main story I remember from him, growing up.

The Dead Are Not

It’s really hard for all of my stories not to be about aliens. Whitley Strieber fried my brain at an early age. Whenever I wake up sore, my knee-jerk thought is always that it’s because the aliens just re-assembled me. Of course there’s going to be some stiffness. Get over it, dude. Be happy they got everything back where it’s supposed to be. But, this story in particular, I think it comes from how alien we all feel at funerals. Or, me, anyway, I’m always trying so hard not to think about what’s actually happening that I halfway study the people I don’t recognize, and wonder what’s their story. And this is usually where I land: they’re tourists, studying this unusual phenomenon. Because it is so, so unusual, yes? I don’t quite understand it yet. And I guess I hope I never do.

Xebico

Another one stemming from
The Weird. I so loved and will forever be a fool for H.F. Arnold’s “The Nightwire.” Whoever “H.F. Arnold” was, or wasn’t. And it’s not because of the possibility of Xebico so much, but because of that guy who can type different stuff with both hands simultaneously. I still get shivery, just thinking about that. Freaks me completely the heck out. I researched it as much as I could, too, but this is the only place I find it. Which makes it more real for me. It’s just a throwaway detail, something to make this station real in the story. But it’s also the center of the story, for me. The beating heart. I didn’t want it to be over just yet, or ever, so I tried to make Xebico more real. Just to touch the magic, I guess. Or fool myself that I was. I had to use both hands at the same time, though. I’m not like that guy in the story. And I don’t guess I want to be. But I can’t stop watching him, either.

Second Chances

Until “Brushdogs,” this was the newest story in the collection. And all I had going in was this idea that each animal on Earth might be Noah’s Ark. It just needs to be artificially sustained in order to exhibit its true potential. Which is a science fiction story, of course, not horror. Not until the end, which surprised me. I mean, I went into this one for the wonder, but then that wonder turned itself inside-out in just a single line. And, the pared-down diction of this one, that’s always so fun for me. My two favorite styles to adopt are just-the-facts and “ridiculously ornate” (see Dalimpere’s letters in
Ledfeather, or the narrator for “Captain’s Lament”—each of those are my natural voice, pretty much). But this scientist, she wasn’t going to be indulgent with her prose, of course. She’s indulging herself in other ways.

After the People Lights Have Gone Off

I was doing an independent study with Nick Kimbro on the haunted house and reading all his papers and responses, and talking through all the books with him, I realized that I’d never written a straight haunted house story. So how then could I actually pretend to speak with any authority on it, right? This is also why I wrote
Not for Nothing: because somebody asked me how a detective novel worked. It was a question I could answer like a critic, like a lifetime reader, like a fan, but to really understand, I had to get my hands dirty. So, with this one, I did. I just stirred in a new house, a perfect couple, and let things cook for a few pages. And, her rolling off the loft like that—I should cite my sources: that happened to my teacher in eighth grade. And I’ve always felt bad because I got in a fight in her classroom once, and there were desks scattering around everywhere—me and this dude were really going at it—until the History teacher had to come from next door, lift us apart. And I remember looking up to my English teacher on the way out, and the way she was looking at us, I could see she wasn’t mad, she was just worried we were hurt, and that was the worst part. That’s the part I still can’t shake.

Uncle

Another story for Paula Guran, one I wouldn’t have written if she hadn’t asked me to. I always seem to get lucky when she asks, though. And that’s not always the case. Sometimes an editor hits me up for story X, and I have to write stories Y, Z, and another Z before I ever circle around to the X I need. But, for Paula, I always get lucky, it seems. Which is to say, this story, it creeps me right out. I got the idea for it walking around a house I was buying with an inspector. He had one of those pistol-grip thermometers. It was so cool. I knew immediately that I had to have one, but then I knew also that I would terrify myself to no end if I did, because each unexplainable variation in temperature, that would be proof I wasn’t alone. So I haven’t bought one yet. And I don’t plan to. Way too scared.

Solve for X

This story took a lot of drafts to get right. Initially, it had a spaceship taking off at the end. But that was a little bit stupid. The tape and the cutting and all that, though, it was in place from the get-go. And the math-questions; I think they’re indirectly from a
Discover article about unsolvable problems. Or maybe it was
Wired. Either way, I thought, man, that sucks, not being able to crack these problems. Why can’t we? What’s wrong with our loser selves? Then the obvious answer, it was that we were stuck using machines to do the calculating. And some things require a more direct approach, a more human touch. I figured, what if you just asked a person, but framed that question exactly right? So that’s all this story is: it’s trying to ask the question in a way that the person can answer without having to think about it. Which is to say, they can accidentally say the truth, which is always there, we just don’t know how to get at it. Which is both a rip of Douglas Adams and of Plato, I know. But I suppose there are worse people to steal from.

—Stephen Graham Jones

31 January 2014

Boulder, Colorado

All of the stories in this collection are reprinted with the permission of the author, except for “Second Chances” and “Spider Box,” which are original stories, and are appearing here for the first time. “Thirteen” originally appeared in
Halloween: Magic, Mystery and the Macabre; “Brushdogs” originally appeared in
The Children of Old Leech; “Welcome to the Reptile House” originally appeared in
Strange Aeons
(and was later reprinted in
Best Dark Fantasy and Horror 2013); “This is Love” originally appeared in
Icarus
(and was later reprinted in
Best Gay Stories of the Year); “The Spindly Man” originally appeared in
Fearful Symmetries; “The Black Sleeve of Destiny” originally appeared in
Amazing Stories of the Flying Spaghetti Monster; “Snow Monsters” originally appeared in
Juked; “Doc’s Story” originally appeared in
Letters to H.P. Lovecraft; “The Dead Are Not” originally appeared in
Bourbon Penn; “Xebico” originally appeared in
Weird Fiction Review; “After the People Lights Have Gone Off” originally appeared in
Phantasmagorium; “Uncle” originally appeared in
Ghosts: Recent Hauntings; and “Solve for X” originally appeared in
Mixer.

Thanks to Richard Thomas, for asking if I had anything horror. Thanks to Nick Kimbro, for talking haunted houses with me enough that I finally wrote the title story. Thanks to Ann VanderMeer and Jeff VanderMeer; peeling through this TOC, I see that I wrote a few of these stories kind of in response to their
The Weird. Two others I owe to Paula Guran, who hit me up for a Halloween story, then a ghost story. Thanks to Ellen Datlow, for letting us include “The Spindly Man.” Thanks to Jesse Bullington, for inviting me to an anthology, for which I wrote the only werewolf story in this collection. Thanks to Steve Berman, for prompting me to write another of these. Thank to Zack Wentz, for making “Welcome to the Reptile House” better. Thanks to T.E. Grau and Cameron Pierce and Joe Pulver and Jack Wang and Erik Secker and Steven Owen for running some of these in their magazines and books and sites. I always write stuff, get to the end and come up wondering what just happened, and what am I supposed to do with this evidence now? Why would anybody even consider a story like this? So, editors, thanks for considering. Thanks to Paul Tremblay, who read one or two of these before they went out. Thanks to the fiction workshops I’m supposed to be teaching, for looking at some of the other stories, making them better. And thanks just to the horror crowd. You’re about the most real people I know. And thanks to my wife Nancy, for giving me the afternoons it took to get all these down on paper, sure, but for giving me all the mornings and evenings and nights and weekends and weeks and months and years—for this life I can’t get enough of, thank you, always. It’s been just shy of twenty years. Let’s triple that.

© GARY ISAACS

Stephen Graham Jones is the author of fifteen novels and five collections, and has some two hundred stories published. Stephen’s been an NEA Fellow and has won the Texas Institute of Letters Award for Fiction and the Independent Publishers Award for Multicultural fiction. He’s forty-two, married with a couple of kids, and lives in Boulder, Colorado.

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Table of Contents

Praise

Title Page

Copyright

Introduction

Dedication

Thirteen

Brushdogs

Welcome to the Reptile House

This Is Love

The Spindly Man

The Black Sleeve of Destiny

The Spider Box

Snow Monsters

Doc's Story

The Dead Are Not

Xebico

Second Chances

After the People Lights Have Gone Off

Uncle

Solve for X

Story Notes

Acknowledgments

About the author

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