Lost Lambs
Author: Madeline Cash
Date: 2026-01-13 08:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Contemporary; Humour; Adult
Description: Rippling with humor, warmth, and style,Lost Lambs is a new vision of the charms and pitfalls of family dysfunction. The Flynn family is coming undone. Catherine and Bud's open marriage has reached its breaking point as their daughters spiral in their own chaotic: Abigail, the eldest, is dating a man in his twenties nicknamed War Crime Wes; Louise, the middle child, maintains a secret correspondence with an online terrorist; the brilliant youngest, Harper, is being sent to wilderness reform camp due to her insistence that someone—or something—is monitoring the town’s citizens. Casting a shadow
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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It made the children laugh and play
to see a lamb at school.

The gnat situation in the church was getting out of hand. It was Miss Winkle’s fault, she had brought the gnats and this was unforgivable, not in the eyes of God but those of Father Andrew, who was unable to extermignate the gnats, not for lack of trying—he’d employed every trap, spray, and swatter on the modern market—and yet his efforts had little effect on the greater gnat population. If anything, it was growing. Father Andrew imagined that soon the gnats might attract a larger pest—gnat-eating spiders, perhaps—which might attract, say, frogs, which might attract rats, which might attract cats, which might attract coyotes, which might attract a larger coyote-eating mammal, and so on and so forth. It was Miss Winkle’s fault because Miss Winkle had brought the plant into the church, “like God did on the third day!” Miss Winkle attended every church function with her brain-damaged child, who wore gun range earmuffs to mass—the organs startled her—and occasionally Miss Winkle brought plants from the nursery where she volunteered, tending the orchids. Surely she didn’t know that the plant had fungal gnat eggs in its soil, but why bring a plant into a church in the first place? thought Father Andrew. It wasn’t a botanical garden. A monstera plant too, meaning monster in Latin, assumed Father Andrew, although he wasn’t sure, hadn’t studied Latin at the seminary, majored instead in French Cinema. The plant topped his list of Reasons to Dislike Miss Winkle. Also on the list of Reasons to Dislike Miss Winkle was that she never dognated to the quarterly fix-the-church-bells charity fundraiser but complained quarterly about the lack of church bells. And she was in the habit of saying “I’ll say” when she hadn’t, in fact, said anything at all. She had never, in recent memory, offered an original point or enhanced a conversation. She simply tacked “I’ll say” onto someone else’s conversational enhancement, which was disingenuous and obnoxious and probably indicative of a deeper character flaw, maybe even inherent evil dating back to Miss Winkle’s apple-eating ancestor, or at least this was what Father Andrew told the state-mandated therapist. After that unsavoriness a while back with the priests and the altar boys, Our Lady of Suffering made some structural changes to its programming, such as weekly Consent through Christ workshops, an intimacy czar at every confessional, and mandatory psychoanalysis for the presbyters with the newly appointed parish shrink. The parish shrink often attributed Father Andrew’s “latent misogyny” toward Miss Winkle to “repressed sexual desire,” a diagnosis with which Father Andrew ardently disagreed. He was not repressing anything, had been with a number of women—thirty-three, specifically, one for every year of Jesus’s life—before joining the seminary. Plus, he highly doubted that his masculine desires would express themselves for Miss Winkle, whom Father Andrew often pictured to dissipate unhallowed urges.

On this day, the first of April, the rainless peak of the rainy season, Father Andrew was getting ready to leave and catch a cinéma français screening at the Vintage Theater when there came a knock at his office door from the youngest Flynn girl, Harper. She hadn’t been to church since her parents opened their marriage. Father Andrew fancied himself a progressive priest, but the Flynns’ marital “arrangement” seemed neither exploratory in the swinging-sixties sense nor justified in the new age liberal poly-whathaveyou sense but rather a creative avenue through which each spouse could inflict pain upon the other and their three daughters. Harper must have been twelve now, he thought, maybe thirteen.

Harper slid into his office. The stained glass window cast a rainbow palette across her little face. Her little freckles. Her slightly upturned nose. Her hair in twin French braids, rich and brown like a prayer bench. Like a well-kept horse. The three Flynn girls, Abigail, Louise, and Harper, no longer attended mass. They did not come to Sunday service and often skipped their school’s Wednesday chapel assembly. They turned in forged notes from the nurse at Sacred Daughters Preparatory School to justify their absences: toothache, feminine troubles, whiplash, duress induced by spoiled milk. They were missing from the community performance of Noah’s Ark and were later spotted in the parking lot, a lion, a fox, and a hedgehog, sharing a cigarette. They had not volunteered that year for the town’s winter food drive, the Christians for the Cure walkathon, the three-legged race for three-legged dogs, Apple Bobbing for Autism, or Knitting for Narcolepsy. There was no excuse, really, for poor attendance after the church’s employment of digital devotionals. Father Andrew was a practitioner somewhat canonized for his adaptation to the digital age, his multivalence when it came to mass. All places of worship in the town had adapted to the changing times—Rabbi Hoffman had even instituted a mobile bris service: Take an Inch, Give a Mohel. Yet the Flynn girls, the whole Flynn family, were AWOL. Father Andrew reminisced about how they used to love Apple Bobbing for Autism, a real shame.

“Take a seat, Harper.”

Father Andrew gestured toward the vacant chair before him. While biblically there were no coincidences, the family’s long absence had been broken by their father, Bud Flynn, who’d knocked and taken that same chair only a few days prior.

“Take a seat, Bud,” Father Andrew had said.

“Father, say hypothetically a friend of mine wanted to, say, terminate their time on earth. How would that play out, spiritually speaking?” Bud had said.

“Play out?”

“Like, would they go to hell—definitively?”

“Well, suicide is a deadly sin. God decides when it is our time. To deny Him of that is heresy—”

“And you’re confident that nothing slides through the cracks? It’s tight?”

“Like airport security.”

“Heresy, huh?”

Father Andrew gave a stoic nod.

“That sounds serious.”

“Perhaps your friend would like to explore this impulse further?”

“Yeah, perhaps.”

There came a sharp squawking from a couple of feral parrots. The birds had escaped a rich collector of exotic pets some years ago and nested in the church rafters. Father Andrew had hoped the parrots might take to eating the gnats, a gnatural solution to his problem, but they seemed content with foraging for nuts, the shells of which they dropped on the altar like mock offerings.

“Thank you, Father.”

As Bud Flynn fled the office, he deposited a five-dollar bill and a Mango Rooney’s punch card into the collection basket. It was one stamp away from earning a free smoothie. Now Harper assumed his seat, folding her hands in her lap. Her wrinkled button-down fell flat upon her chest, a body that had not yet begun its journey from girl to woman. Of course, Father Andrew was not thinking about Harper’s body’s journey from girl to woman as that would be wrong and no doubt prompt further visits to the parish shrink.

“BlessmeFatherforIhavesinned,” said Harper Flynn.

“You wish to confess something, Harper?”

“Yeah. I’ve broken the ninth commandment.”

“You bore false witness?”

“Yeah,” she said. “I lie all the time, actually. Every day, multiple times a day. Whenever I can and about things that don’t matter, like, if my dad asks what we had for lunch at school I’ll say pasta salad and fruit when we had chicken nuggets and celery sticks.”

“Perhaps we should examine the impetus behind your compulsive storytelling.”

“I’m a creative.”

“Let’s dive a little deeper. How are things at home?”

“I think my dad’s trying to kill himself.”

“What makes you say that?”

“He was looking up least painful ways to kill yourself on the family computer.”

“I wish that you and your sisters would come back to mass. We are more susceptible to darkness during times of hardship.”

“We’re reformed.”

“I think you’d find the general sentiment resonant.”

Harper liked being spoken to like an adult. Father Andrew could see the cogs turning behind her eyes. He felt tenderly for the little lapsed Catholic.

“Wait, I’m not finished confessing.”

Harper pulled a pink electronic cigarette from her jumper and took a long pull. It gave a gratifying crackle. “I’ve been stealing Mr. Friedman’s Trizoletin from the pharmacy and selling it at school. Sometimes I light small fires behind the laundromat. I started Father Hayworth’s nickname—Father Gayworth—and it’s really caught on. I sent a video of Nordic pornography to everyone in my dad’s work email—it’s a really specific genre, lots of pelts involved. I stabbed a pocketknife into the tire of the church van in the parking lot on the way in here. I have been teaching myself Latin to mess with my school’s Pentecostal group, burning my hands with a magnifying glass and claiming stigmata. I’ve racked up significant debt shopping Korean wholesale websites on my mother’s credit card. I stole some mousetraps from the Squeaky Mart. I don’t know what I am going to do with them yet. Last week I freed a lobster from the lobster tank at the Golden Dragon and left it in my sisters’ bathtub. And I cut off Missy’s braid in the locker room after tennis and put it in her mother’s mailbox.”

“That’s quite a litany,” said Father Andrew, maintaining an even tone. He’d always had his suspicions about Father Hayworth’s sexuality, they all did. “But it’s not lost on me that you prefaced this visit with your penchant for untruths.”

“You’re right. I just made all that up to get a rise out of you.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’re a precocious girl.”

“If I had to guess, gun to my head…”

“No one is holding a gun to your—”

“Gun to my head, I’d say, I’m incredibly, painfully, mythically bored.”

“I see. The disobedience of banality.”

“I am a victim of neglect.”

“We’re offering a virtual Sunday school—”

“I don’t want to go to virtual Sunday school.”

Harper hit her vape.

“Have you renounced your faith?”

“My virtue is post-theocratic.”

Sometimes, in profound silences such as the one that befell Harper and Father Andrew, he swore he could hear the ocean as it labored against the concrete pier at Alabaster Harbor™. But, considering the church’s distance from the marina, this was, of course, impossible. A trick of the inner ear, like listening to a shell, he thought.

“So am I going to hell?” Harper asked.

“No, Harper.”

“Excommunicated? In latae sententiae?”

“That’s not for me to say.”

“It’s literally for you to say.”

“Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s.” Father Andrew swatted at a gnat irritably. He had mercy on the Flynn family.

As he left the church that afternoon Father Andrew weaved through the pews, collected some nutshells, returned a few songbooks to their pouches, emptied the ashtrays from the alcoholics’ meeting. He locked the great doors and strode through the parking lot, where he knelt and plucked a pocketknife from the left rear tire of the church van.

Bud Flynn took four Trizoletin he’d pillaged from his daughter’s bedroom, masturbated into a tea towel, and prepared to drive the minivan into the sea. The passenger seat was piled with a global shrine of take-out containers—Mexican, Thai, Indian, Chinese, Ethiopian, fare from the independent island gnation of Tuvalu—the collective weight of which amassed to what the car’s internal system mistook for a small person, and it chirped at the containers to fasten their seat belt. He thumbed a wrapper once containing a candy bar, a kind that blended milk and dark chocolate. Bitter Makes It Better, quipped the label. The cruel hoax of marketing, thought Bud, assuring the consumer that the introduction of adversity into something otherwise pure and good only enhances said pureness and goodness. It was of general opinion that chocolate was already good, why did it need to be better? And why would change, markedly negative change, achieve this goal? Pretty Good As Is—that would be Bud’s slogan. Fine, consistent, mostly reliable Flynn.

Bud caught a glimpse of himself—his halo of hair loss—in the rearview mirror; it was the face of a man who hadn’t been cool for several presidential administrations. A man who, in his youth, had contemplated but ultimately decided against three different ironic tattoos and a man who, like his hair, still clung to certain material fantasies that for all intents and purposes no longer existed. Despite his deteriorating exterior, his insides were as reliable as the engine of a German car. A recent colonoscopy, endoscopy, and colorectal cancer screening had all come back clean, which meant he would not soon die, not gnaturally anyway.

Bud usually didn’t care for talk radio. It felt like he was eavesdropping on someone’s conversation. But now an anchor was reporting the latest on two men who’d escaped a local prison using only a permanent retainer, and it was, admittedly, compelling content. Not compelling enough to change the evening’s chartered course but enough for him to loiter in the driveway awhile. Yet when he drove into the sea, Bud wanted to listen to something of the power ballad variety, those musical vanguards who described thunder as “velvety” and sang of being “guided by light.” But, for the life of him, Bud could not understand how to access the car’s Bluetooth capabilities.

“Hit ‘pair with device.’” His daughter, the middle one, what was her name again—Louise!—was at the driver’s window.

“You snuck up on me, honey.”

“I’ve been standing here for, like, a minute and a half!”

He beckoned her to come inside the car. She dawdled, orbiting the vehicle like a minor planet before shoving aside the takeout and assuming the passenger seat. Women are ethereal creatures, thought Bud, always one foot in another world. The radio skipped onto a program called Social Light, about young celebrities who find Jesus. Bud disliked the program immensely. He twisted the knob until he landed on the hard rock station.

“This,” said Bud, “is my guilty pleasure.”

Though any pleasure, thought Bud, was a guilty one.

Louise Flynn sneezed serially into her elbow, spraying the dashboard. Children never failed to leave a residue. Like little snails.

“Bless you,” said Bud.

“What are we doing for dinner?”

“Can you have Mommy order Fabio’s?”

“Fabio’s closed. Like two months ago.”

“Kid. Can’t you just hop into the kitchen…” Bud clocked female scorn burgeoning in his daughter’s eyes. “I mean that in a strictly feminist sense. Like, regardless of your gender you should know how to boil some water.”

Bud wondered if, despite this misstep, Louise would once more show him how to work the Bluetooth.

They seemed to be having trouble building a dialogue. So instead they stared ahead at their house, the one bought by his wife’s parents, who used to remind him of this fact often. It was in need of a repaint, the lawn a sodding. The wraparound porch was badly eaten by wood mites, buckling in places. The wind chimes from which Catherine had, as a therapeutic art project, hung the children’s baby teeth, gave an unsettling jingle in the breeze. Bud found them horrific but decided to employ the axiom pick your battles, as there would inevitably be something worth digging his heels in over later, such as the color of the front door, which Catherine had wanted to paint orange—“no one on the block will have an orange door, William”—and Bud was able to remind her of his deference and diplomacy over the teeth wind chime and so they settled on a pale blue for the door, which was now peeling badly.

Their house was not the kind of place built to withstand an earthquake, though internally it looked like one had already occurred. Clothing was discarded, piled, and abandoned: school uniforms—saddle shoes, pleated skirts, pinafores, cardigans—mouth guards, berets, soccer cleats, kerchiefs from summer camps, and capes from school plays. Everything was initialed or monogrammed. His girls felt proprietary over the funniest objects—a snow globe, a ski cap, a box of stale cereal. Why claim the watering can, Bud thought, when they hadn’t any plants? A patina of buckwheat paste clung to every dish. It was the only thing the dietarily restricted youngest daughter, Harper, ate. The wallpaper, marked with the girls’ evolving heights, was now more generally defaced with notes in pig Latin and drawings of butterflies. Bud’s coffee table book on extreme golf courses propped open a faulty window. A board game, the objective of which was colonizing some neighboring country, lived perennially on the dining table, plastic soldiers frozen in place. Pillows with needlepoint Bible verses his mother had sent them were now stained from lip gloss and bloody noses. There was a near-constant bloodstream from these women—noses, knees, and elsewhere—and Bud wondered how they had any left.

A matriarchal headshot of Catherine hung in the family room. She’d had portraits of herself taken and blown up to scale for Bud’s birthday last year, which prompted one of their final fights before the “arrangement.”

“Of course I like it, I just don’t see why I need a photo of you. I’m not a war prisoner. I see you every day.”

Catherine wafted in and out of speaking with a pompous formal affect, calling him William, which wasn’t even his name. He was Bud, even on his birth certificate. Just Bud.

“It’s a nice sentiment, William.”

“Sure, I mean, so is a watch. Honey, I’m only kidding.”

Catherine had already grown distant, her eyes on a far-off light under some closed door. Perhaps Bud had not properly picked his battles after all and somewhere along the way had lost the war entirely.

Bud stopped opening drawers in the house after he’d discovered a roll of extra-large, low-friction condoms while fishing for a take-out menu. He assumed the condoms did not belong to his teenage daughters, whose school’s Sexual Education Fair had been replaced by the Abstinence-Only Fair the year before and the women’s health clinic replaced by the Glaze-a-Bowl, which meant the condoms belonged to his wife, which meant …

“This is a good thing,” Catherine had said. “A positive step for our marriage.”

“I can’t imagine how this is a positive step for our marriage,” Bud had said.

“Well, a step nonetheless. Maybe a lateral move.”

He’d felt like a soldier in the table board game, frozen in place while the other pieces moved around him.

“I don’t want to step! I don’t want to move!”

“That’s the problem.”

Since Catherine was the stay-at-home parent per their now-outdated agreement, Bud was the family’s sole provider, which put considerable fiscal strain on the Flynn family.

“Let me know if you ever need to borrow a couple bucks,” Jim Doherty, their neighbor and Bud’s domestic enemy, had offered at the time.

“We’re good, Jim.”

“I’m just saying,” Jim Doherty had said, trimming a rogue branch off his topiary.

Bud was the accounts and systems manager at Alabaster Harbor™—not some backwater artery of commerce but the primary port for the entire western coastline, the premier gateway for domestic and intergnational trade. It was a strange place to work, with questionable business practices, but Bud didn’t ask questions and was well compensated for it. Alabaster Harbor™ provided competitive wages to its employees and premium health insurance for Bud and his family. If Bud or his family were to, say, go down in a plane crash or if his girls were to fall victim to one of those ever-popular school shooting massacres or if a deranged killer were to come slaughter Bud or his family in the night, this would all be covered financially. Just last month Catherine had a mole removed, a procedure Bud was pretty sure was cosmetic, and this too was covered. Still the Flynns were a bottomless well of expenses. So, despite Alabaster Harbor™’s competitive wages, when the “arrangement” came to pass, Bud could not afford a second home, even temporarily. He took to the minivan last month after his assistant spotted Catherine and Jim Doherty at the mall, where they’d allegedly been standing in line at Helter Seltzer, musing over the variations of carbognated water. Bud’s blood pressure spiked imagining his wife cavorting in public, heading out of the mall, back to Jim Doherty’s Italian vehicle, STX Class, unable to contain themselves, groping and fondling in the back like teenagers. Catherine fumbling with her buttons, Jim Doherty licking her cesarean scar.

Louise toed a wilted Caesar salad on the car floor, a crumpled oxford, some mail that threatened FINAL NOTICE. Was anything final? She was imagining the effects her parents’ “arrangement” would have on her later life. Bud was imagining killing himself violently and in public, maybe at the mall. Bud was not a particularly hard worker and he remembered reading that death is just another job. Where, he couldn’t recall.

“Mom told me to take your car keys,” said Louise.

“Can we just sit here a minute?” asked Bud.

“Okay,” said Louise.

“Would you like your seat warmer on?”

At the end of the cul-de-sac, Jim Doherty’s STX Class vehicle sat in his driveway. The house had a weather vane, a birdbath, a vine-covered trellis. His mailbox was a burgundy rooster. A sign in his yard bragged AN HONOR STUDENT LIVES HERE. Bud remembered a Czech word that his garage rock band had once toiled over as a potential name, Lítost, which translated nearly as “the humiliated despair we feel when someone reminds us, through their accomplishments, of everything that has gone wrong in our lives.”

Bud felt the encroaching pricks of bitterness. Maybe Bitterness did Make It Better in that it served as a reminder of how good one once had it. If Bud shut his eyes he could remember—tweaked and perfected with hindsight—a time of pure goodness. A time of yes. It seemed, for a while there, that Bud and Catherine didn’t know no. Yes, let’s share one toothbrush. Yes, let’s shuck our own oysters. Yes, let’s do it in the garden, on the roof, in the tube slide at the park. Yes, let’s hop the turnstile. Yes, let’s drive to the horizon. Yes, let’s talk all night over two-dollar beers and one-dollar coffee. Yes, let’s dye our clothes with peach pits. Yes, let’s start a band, let’s build a tree house, let’s wade naked into the questionably colored pond water. Yes, let’s make out in the plush department store bed. Yes, let’s fool around in the back booth of Fabio’s. Yes, let’s snicker in the corner of the Western bar, encapsulated in a world all our own, while our friends are tossed off the mechanical bull. And yes, when Catherine first got pregnant and Bud popped the inevitable question, albeit more driven by practicality than romance, Catherine responded in the affirmative. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

Bud could not pinpoint when their yeses became noes—or worse, I guesses, maybes, whatevers—when passion gave way to indifference. They were failing to achieve that bitter/sweet balance, which made an altogether unappealing food product. Bud handed his middle daughter the car keys. He would not be driving into the sea that night.

“Are you an honor student?” Bud asked.

“No,” said Louise.

Catherine Flynn sparked a joint with the long-nosed fireplace lighter and eased into the bath. The bath smelled like oatmeal because she had sprinkled oatmeal into it. Abigail Flynn came to the door. Catherine’s eldest daughter was now allowed to wear makeup, which she applied liberally to her eyes, mouth, and cheeks.

“Are you smoking weed?” asked Abigail.

“Where are you going all dressed up?” asked Catherine.

“You’re smoking weed in the house?”

“I suppose I am.”

“Can I smoke weed in the house?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“This is medicinal. I had cancer.”

“You had a potential melanoma mole removed.”

“Where are you going?” asked Catherine.

“To see my boyfriend.”

“Who is your boyfriend?”

“I really don’t like talking while you’re naked.”

Catherine gave the joint a theatrical flick. Some ash dusted the bathwater.

“Since when do you have a boyfriend?”

“Is there anything to eat?” asked Abigail.

“Come eat some of my oatmeal bath,” said Catherine.

Abigail rolled her eyes. “I’m leaving.”

“Who’s driving?”

“My boyfriend.”

“What’s his name?”

“Wes.”

“Does he go to your school?”

“No.”

“They call him War Crimes Wes.” Harper Flynn appeared in the bathroom doorway licking buckwheat paste off a spoon. “Because he did some crazy shit in the war.”

“Shut up,” said Abigail.

“How old is Wes?” asked Catherine.

“I don’t know. Twenty-two, twenty-three.”

“Absolutely not.”

“You’re really no authority on relationships right now.”

“When you wear that much makeup, it tells men that you’re only interested in one thing,” said Catherine.

“Good,” said Abigail. “It saves me the trouble of telling them myself.”

Abigail stormed off before Catherine could escape the tub, suds clutching her like barnacles. She stepped out and put on a man’s bathrobe, cinched the belt tight, and scrutinized the menagerie of facial products monopolizing the countertop, each wearing a different ornate label but composed of the same basic elements. Late capitalism did its job of convincing Catherine that she was insufficient, an empty void, and thus needed to slowly fill that void with products that made her face smell like parsley or coconuts.

Harper watched from the sidelines, now nibbling the ends of her hair.

Such a strange kid, thought Catherine. Small but powerful. When Harper was eight, her teachers had called with concern when she explained that her teddy bears had implemented the death penalty. Then again, all children were a little strange. Catherine went to the kitchen and fixed herself a drink. She’d taken to wetting her martini glass in the afternoon and putting it in the freezer so that it was well frosted by cocktail hour. Some ice floated in the vodka. Diluted, but by which daughter? Abigail? Harper? Louise was so quiet, but it was always the quiet ones, wasn’t it?

Catherine traced a heart in the side of the glass and called her husband on the phone.

“Do you know that our daughter is dating someone called War Crimes Wes?”

“Have you fed the girls dinner?”

“Of course I fed the girls dinner.”

“What did you make?”

“First course,” said Catherine, “was salmon pinwheels and Gorgonzola-stuffed pears. Then a beef Wellington I labored over all afternoon with caramelized pearl onions. Bread pudding for dessert.”

Catherine opened the pantry. Some buckwheat. Stale oyster crackers. A scuba diving bath toy. She opened the fridge. A spoiled Mango Rooney’s Brazzel Bowl. A note in Abigail’s flouncy handwriting stuck on the crisper bin: GO TO THE MARKET!!!

“There isn’t anything but batteries in that refrigerator,” said Bud.

“Not even. We had those for breakfast.”

“Louise says she’s hungry.”

“Haven’t we taught that girl it’s unbecoming to snitch?”

“Don’t blame the hungry child.”

“Why don’t you feed the girls dinner, William?”

“Why doesn’t Jim Doherty feed the girls dinner!”

Catherine missed the days when you could slam a phone down into its cradle. Clicking a button—an image of a button, really—did not offer the same satisfaction.

For starters, Catherine wouldn’t call her and the neighbor’s sojourn through the mall a date. A few weeks prior, she had stopped over innocently enough, returning some of the Dohertys’ mail that had been wrongly posted. The Dohertys had a novelty mailbox, a burgundy rooster, surely a relic of Jim’s previous marriage. Catherine had considered leaving the mail in the rooster, but something compelled her to knock at the door. She hadn’t previously thought much about the neighbor, aside from an admiration of his trellis.

“Catherine!” Jim had said. “It’s been ages.”

“Some of your mail was delivered to us by mistake.”

“Ah, you didn’t have to do that. Probably all spam anyway. I’m on so many mailing lists. Apparently it’s up to me, single-handedly, to save about a dozen endangered animals.”

Catherine had caught a glimpse of Myles Doherty inside.

“I know one animal that’s going to be endangered if he doesn’t get back to bed,” Jim had called over his shoulder. “Kid’s got a cold today. Aka a math test.”

“Hah,” Catherine had said instead of laughing.

“It’s good to see you, Catherine. You look great.”

“Do I?”

“And you smell like a coconut,” Jim Doherty had noted. “You know that?”

“Oh?”

“Is that natural?”

Catherine had then laughed sincerely. She’d imagined the environmental or dietary circumstances that would make for one to gnaturally smell like coconut.

“You hear about these escaped prisoners?” Jim Doherty had continued.

“Yes, quite the saga.”

“I hope they catch ’em before they hit the border.”

“I don’t know. I’m almost rooting for them.”

“Whatcha mean?”

“Well, they worked so hard to get out with that retainer. And prison is so dreadful I hear and … everyone deserves a second chance.” Then Catherine’s voice had broken and tears had started streaming. She’d wept softly on Jim Doherty’s stoop. Jim Doherty patted her shoulders.

“Hey now. I know what you need. A nice cup of coffee. Unless of course you’re crying about how much you hate coffee.”

Jim ushered her inside. For a house that had not seen a woman’s influence presumably since the Dohertys’ divorce, it was tidy, pleasant, and warm. He’d noticed her approval.

“I can’t take credit,” Jim Doherty had said. “Fernanda just came.” He’d taken care to roll Fernanda’s r. It had never occurred to the Flynns to employ a housekeeper. Cleanliness was a luxury. Like bread pudding. Jim handed Catherine a tissue.

“Shouldn’t you be getting to work?” she’d asked. “I don’t want to keep you.”

“That’s the thing about being the boss,” Jim had said. He owned a nineteenth-century-themed British pub called Olive or Twist. “I make my own schedule.”

Myles Doherty eyed Catherine skeptically from the sofa. He was chubby and riddled with acne. He was about Harper’s age. Catherine had found herself hoping Harper didn’t bully him.

“Coffee, madam.”

“Thanks.”

She’d followed him into the kitchen, which was stocked with food and ingredients with which to make more food. Catherine had composed herself. She sipped the coffee from a lumpy glazed mug.

“Myles’s work?” she’d asked.

“Heck no,” Jim Doherty had scoffed. “I made it.”

“You—oh! It’s lovely.”

“Let me show you something.”

Jim Doherty then led Catherine out of the kitchen, through the laundry room, and down a narrow stairway into the basement. Catherine had briefly wondered, as all women do their first time alone with a man, if he was going to murder her. The thought passed. Jim Doherty pulled the cord of an overhead light, revealing a small workstation: a dirty pottery wheel, some paint, carving tools, a little kiln. More lumpy mugs as well as some lumpy bowls and lumpy vases drying on the adjacent wall.

“It’s my passion, what can I say?”

“This is quite a practice.”

“People like them don’t understand people like us.” Jim Doherty pointed up to the ceiling, to the suburbs above. “You’re an artist too. I could tell right away.”

Catherine’s palms had been slick around her lumpy mug. She hadn’t been recognized as an artist since she was a college girl studying photography, capturing coastal detritus and burned-down, abandoned factories filled with broken bottles and defunct equipment. Shoreline warehouses meant to support an economic flush that never came. Where were those photos now? In filled drawers as abandoned as their subjects. Prescient, her professor once called them, her lens a portal into the future. Surely their sleeping together had not impacted his assessment of her work. Different times.

“I haven’t been an artist in a while now,” Catherine had admitted.

“Just because the fire’s died down doesn’t mean the embers aren’t hot. They only need a little…” Jim Doherty blew a gust of air against Catherine’s neck and a pleasant shudder crept down her spine.

Later that evening, back in the modest Flynn household, Catherine had switched on the television to The Real Housewives of Baghdad. Fatmi and Saadia were at it again. But Catherine’s focus was elsewhere. She was imagining Jim Doherty on the squash court in shorts and shin-high socks, Jim Doherty tossing a cocktail shaker, Jim Doherty launching thick hunks of clay at his wheel. An urge crept over her. The embers crackled, catching new life. She’d pulled the curtains, laid down on the living room floor, propping a couch cushion under her hips, and slipped a hand under the elastic waistband of her house pants.

Catherine felt the youthful comfort of being understood. Jim Doherty got her. She was seen. The two artists had started seeing more of each other after that, a trip to the mall here, a stroll through the square there. Jim Doherty pointed out the pepper thistle that had begun opening up all over town. Catherine began to open up too. All over town. Every cutesy locale bore her tears, every park bench was her confessional. At Page Turner’s bookshop she told Jim Doherty about her relationship with her mother, a sage and uncompromising woman who left Catherine with so many unanswered questions, Catherine becoming an orphan in her forties. She broke open at Aunt Tiques market about the trials of parenthood; at one point having had three children under five years of age, she felt an acute trauma toward their picky eating and tantrums—so much hair and hair theater, lice and bangs cut into jagged stalactites and whole packs of gum wadded at the nape of a neck and how Catherine had neglected her own hair, which she once took so much pride in, letting it go wiry and gray. At the Maritime Heritage Center—the town’s only institutional art establishment—she expressed discontent with her marriage and how Bud was so different in those early pre-children days, how he’d been subdued by domestication, lulled into complacency. She wouldn’t mind adversity, growing pains, if only they could go through them together. But the love they once shared felt distant and inaccessible. Bud internalized her resentment and retreated deeper inside himself, deeper inside the minivan to smoke weed and listen to music alone. They often passed each other in the kitchen like strangers in a shopping mall.

“It’s a lot to ask from one person,” Jim Doherty had told her. “To be the stable husband and the sole provider and the Casanova.”

“But that’s marriage.”

“Forgive my candor, but have you ever considered outsourcing?”

“Outsourcing?”

“I’m just saying. It takes a village.”

Jim Doherty had not made any direct advances on Catherine, which only further titillated her. A knee jostle or the removal of an eyelash or the friendly pat of an arm—any standard human contact made Catherine blush as scarlet as a schoolgirl with a crush on the boy next door.

“You’re not living,” Jim Doherty had explained. “You’re just enduring.”

“I’m not living,” she’d repeated.

“Let me buy you a seltzer.”

The crush was galvanizing. Catherine had even retrieved her 35mm camera from the Everything closet, where it had lapsed into retirement along with Bud’s guitar, a hobby horse, a waffle iron, a set of golf clubs. She spent some time taking shots of the town. The mall and the salon and the crafts store and the bait and tackle store and the men who smoked outside the bait and tackle store and the people in the market and the dogs tied up outside by the people in the market. Jim Doherty was laudatory of her eye for suburban malaise. When she’d grown tired of her subjects, like many great female photographers before her, Catherine turned the camera around. While Bud had found her new interest in self-portraiture vain and trivial, Jim Doherty encouraged her. He said the photos were a raw and honest portrayal of a woman, unedited and unafraid of the ravages of time, the inevitable lines and wrinkles most women attempted to mask. Catherine had accepted the accolades, but she was in fact very much afraid of the ravages of time—she ate like a hunter-gatherer and plied her face with soaps and serums intended to suspend one’s skin in youth—yet she wouldn’t have the slightest idea how to obscure or manipulate inevitable age lines and wrinkles digitally. Airbrushing sounded like a hair treatment. Photoshop, a place to purchase film. Still she’d pressed on with her work and, with Jim Doherty’s blessing, became more raw, more honest, shedding more clothing until she was all but exchanging tasteful nudes with the neighbor. Catherine the Artist had posed Catherine the Model all over her single-family home, employing various household instruments as props. (Portrait of Woman on Dining Room Table Clutching Saucepan #3 was Jim’s favorite.) Jim Doherty would compliment the work just so—“I love the shadow cast over your left breast”—to communicate that he was invested in more than just her work and that she, Catherine the Model, had his attention as well.

Catherine did entertain the idea of an affair before settling on the “arrangement.” It came to her while watching The Real Housewives of Baghdad. Fatmi and Saadia and Jana and Solaf all bickered and backstabbed, yes, but more notably, they had strong, healthy—as healthy as a reality television program could depict—marriages to men chosen for them in early adolescence. Their marriages were built not on love or infatuation but on family values, breeding qualities, and statistical analysis. This was the stuff of a strong foundation. Their pleasure outsourcing was relegated to drink throwing and vicious gossip—an affair would be punishable by law—but Catherine had the true-blue American freedom to change the fabric of her marriage as she saw fit. Infidelity was still wrong, a deadly sin, and although Catherine had not kept up with her Catholic faith, anything prefaced with “deadly” was probably best avoided. The “arrangement” was better for everyone. A moral loophole. A creative outlet in the vastness of monogamy. Bud might even enjoy it too.

“Poly—what?” Bud had said. It sounded like a skin disease.

“I think this will increase our chances of survival,” Catherine had explained.

“Food, water, and shelter will increase our chances of survival,” said Bud. “Not fucking the neighbor.”

“I want to give it a try.”

“Fucking the neighbor?”

“The arrangement.”

“Is this why you’ve been acting so weird?”

“I have not been acting so weird.”

“You’ve been hanging naked photos of yourself all over the house. The kids won’t have friends over. And you’ve been talking like a diplomat.”

Where did she pick up this way of speaking? They were both from the same town.

“You could benefit from the arrangement too,” said Catherine.

“I don’t understand it,” said Bud.

“Divorce,” Catherine said. “Is that a term you understand?”

Catherine drank until the alcohol’s effects allowed for her to sleep. Alone in their bed, she thought about Bud. Every couple subsides off a narrative, a personal lore, and Bud and Catherine’s was that of young love and rebellion. She couldn’t pinpoint the exact moment that the myth lifted, but when it did, it was like coming out of a dark theater into glaring daylight. Though it must have been longer, she felt like they were only young for a summer, Catherine’s first year out of college. It was back when the town’s church bells still rang, setting the soundscape for their courtship in her mind. While they’d both grown up in the town, they’d never so much as exchanged a word to each other until one night Catherine saw Bud’s band playing at the dive bar in town, a bar that had long since become a coffee shop or pet hotel—maybe a hybrid of the two—but was then a bar with plastic cups and stickered walls and sticky floors and a small stage for local musicians. Catherine was barely old enough to be in the sticker-walled, sticky-floored bar when she saw Bud on the stage before an audience of twelve. He’d come into his own since high school, hair long and tousled. He was monumental up there with his guitar, a few paces behind the lead singer, who screamed about the White House and its political inefficacy into a deficient microphone. Though Bud didn’t seem to care for the crowd’s attention, he had it, hers in particular. It was hot and Catherine’s hair shellacked to her face, helmetlike, as the ice dissolved into her drink. She approached Bud after the show and said she liked his set in a casual way that sounded like she didn’t really like his set and he thanked her and then he asked her if she wanted a drink and told her that the bartender was a buddy, which meant that the drink would be free and the free drink was strong and it turned into two drinks and then three and then Bud asked Catherine if she’d like to take a midnight stroll around the marina and she briefly wondered if he would murder her but was too happy to care. They climbed onto a graffitied shoreline structure, him taking her hands in his and hoisting her up the concrete ledge, kicked their feet out over the lapping black water, and talked until their cheeks were numb from smiling. Two local kids before a sea of possibility. They called people “sellouts” and “sheep” and vowed to be different, even though what they were doing—what they were beginning to do—was utterly conventional: falling in love. Their parents had done it and their grandparents had done it, their teachers and neighbors, poor people and presidents, bohemians and churchgoers, the very denizens of the Bible had done it, but Bud and Catherine’s love was different because it was theirs and that made it transgressive and dissident and ineffable.

Bud took business classes at the rec center and worked part-time at the tuna cannery, the one that mutilated that local boy. “They say that his arm just got churned up and packaged with the tuna,” Bud had told Catherine. While Bud worked, Catherine sunned by the community pool, people watching, camera around her neck, and after his shift they’d lay in his dad’s truck bed, passing a bottle of whatever could be pillaged from his buddy’s bar, staring at the sky. Bud made Catherine guess: star or satellite. With all the light pollution, Catherine said it was impossible to tell and Bud told her that very few things were impossible. She made him wash the factory grease from his hands before putting them inside her. She’d return home to her parents’ house past curfew tasting like sweat and cheap liquor. Catherine had slept with one other man before Bud, a bookish boy in college who asked her is this okay? so many times that her answer changed. Bud was both tender and exhilarating sexually. They did it, carelessly, in just about every crevice of town. Catherine became pregnant in the fall. Though Catherine’s upbringing was not as religious as Bud’s—his mother, a fanatic—she could not imagine not having the baby. So Bud got a nine-to-five job accounting for the harbor to support them. They married in a courthouse so Catherine could take Bud’s health insurance and had a party in the town square for which Bud took dance lessons. Though their marriage was bureaucratic, Catherine felt that it would be forever. Catherine’s mother and father had parted ways emotionally long ago. Her father slept in the room with the stair climber and litter box. Her mother told her that a child is the only thing you can really love forever. It’s a gnatural love, like loving yourself, because your child has been inside you. If she had eaten some tuna containing that local kid’s arm, thought Catherine, then maybe she’d love him forever too.

Catherine feared that raising a child would be impossible, and Bud told her that very few things were impossible, this not being one of them. They moved to the city as those who “made it” did. In the early days of parenting Abigail, they were not “parents.” They were simply passing through this place on a much longer journey. Until one day they weren’t. Bud commuted to work, only to be pulled back out of financial necessity when Catherine got pregnant again. Comfort replaced possibility. Practicality replaced principle. Selling out was better for the babies. Babies loved sheep. Catherine’s parents helped them purchase their home, a house that could swallow their city studio. And the house slowly filled with things like coupons and guest linens rather than drying photographs and half-smoked joints. Bud adapted. He and young Abigail would fall asleep on the couch, their mouths falling open in just the same way. Perhaps Bud was still a rock star and had only defected to a different band: their family. He took to the new band as a loyal and supportive member. But sometimes Catherine longed to continue their journey, and occasionally she fantasized about going it alone. Then came guilt—bad mother, bad wife—followed by resentment, and then a cigarette in the backyard. They had a backyard now. Their apartment in the city did not even have a window, just a skylight that let a single pillar of sun into a single room. A room where splinters jutted from the unfinished floorboards and the occasional mouse passed through. Rickety furniture made by artist friends and a hot plate and a secondhand bassinet. Catherine thought about that place fondly—the dust and the noodles, the sex on an uncovered mattress—until the past became so vivid that the present began to appear uncanny. Where did it come from? Their ready-made furniture. These invitations to high school reunions. Catherine couldn’t recall the last time they took a stroll through the marina. The last time she’d taken a picture that didn’t feature a high-chaired child, face covered with cold cereal. When had her camera migrated to the Everything closet? She knew Bud felt it too from time to time, but he felt it in private. He receded with his hairline, at night stealing away to the car to listen to music from the past. They languished alone, in tandem. Catherine drew deeper into her memories. Had they ever been soulmates, Catherine wondered, or had it just been summer, had they just been kids sitting on a seawall? Because of her parents’ constant bickering when she was growing up, Catherine had vowed never to sweat the small stuff, to let go of trivial matters like the placement of a lamp or an irksome tone of voice. So Bud and Catherine rarely fought. They did not fight for many years. Passivity proved a greater strain than anger. Catherine saw her relationship headed the way of her parents’ regardless of the lamp’s placement. There you have it, she thought, even her crisis was a generational cliché. Can’t I have one original thought? she had thought, thumbing through the mail one afternoon and coming upon Jim Doherty’s name.

All complex female characters needed conflict and adversity, thought Harper. She was a troublemaker with no origin myth. No trauma pointed to her ennui, her restlessness. She had not escaped apartheid or been persecuted for her religion. She didn’t pledge to any one religion really. Her middle-class suburban family had their faults but, at the day’s end, loved her very much. One theory: Harper was too clever for her own good.

“You’re too clever for your own good,” her mother once said when, at age nine, Harper on a whim began to study for the district’s standardized test. She found ease in areas where others struggled. She knew the function of x and the phases of mitosis. If a train was leaving the station at sixty miles per hour, Harper undoubtedly knew when it would arrive at its destignation. Lion is to brave as Harper is to clever.

Her precocity was isolating. So that she was properly socialized, her parents enrolled her in numerous camps, clubs, and leadership programs, the brochures of which all depicted happy, well-adjusted children swimming or singing or playing team sports, from which Harper was eventually expelled for the nuanced and imagignative ways she disturbed the other children and administration alike.

“Why, Harper?” her mother had pleaded. “Why would you bite the little Carlyle girl?”

“Because,” said Harper, “she said ‘bite me.’”

Harper enjoyed solving problems almost as much as she enjoyed creating them. She did not subscribe to the notion that some things were the way they were, always had been, always would be. That the sun set early in the winter, limiting playtime. That, once out, toothpaste could not be put back in the tube. Things only were the way they were because she had not yet been around to fix them.

“She’s trying to communicate that she isn’t being challenged enough,” said the child psychiatrist who visited twice monthly and whose fee Harper’s father complained about twice monthly. “Her rebelliousness stems from a lack of stimulation.”

Bud sat Harper down in the dining room where the Serious Talks took place, as opposed to the family room, where the movies, puzzles, and pillow forts took place.

“Are you understimulated?”

“I’m sorry?” said Harper.

“I just paid a woman two hundred dollars to tell me that you’re understimulated.”

“We could have gotten forty-four scoops for that price,” said Harper without taking any time to calculate. She was of course referring to scoops of ice cream altergnatives from Anne Frank’s Dairy, a parlor that dognated some of its proceeds to a charity fighting antisemitism. Theirs was the only establishment in town that offered a dessert Harper could digest.

“Go do something productive,” said Bud.

“Like what?” said Harper.

“Learn Latin,” said Bud.

“Okay,” said Harper.

Having been made to take Latin himself as a boy, and retaining almost no Latin as an adult, Bud figured this task would keep his little genius occupied for a while. Harper had to visit three different libraries to find a Latin dictionary. What’s wrong with the world? thought Harper. For every fifty books on erotic monsters she found one book of Latin. She attended the Latin mass at the Roman Catholic church one town over.

“I’ll be needing bus fare,” Harper told Bud.

“How much is the bus these days?” asked Bud.

“Five hundred dollars.”

Bud gave her a five. She took to Latin quickly. Soon she could write real Latin in pig Latin, which she scrawled liberally on the kitchen wallpaper.

“Can you not?” asked her eldest sister. “It’s like you’re possessed.”

And possessed she was. Possessed with problem-solving. Discovering her aptitude for language, Harper next took to Russian. In a few weeks’ time she’d gotten the members of a Russian horticultural chat room to send her an endangered glowworm. She learned some Italian and convinced a designer retailer to send her a very expensive handbag. She didn’t like the handbag. She let the glowworm live in it. Harper conversed with the town’s Persian homeless man called Hobo Bahman. He told her that things had been hard since his wife passed and she offered her sympathy in Farsi. Death was a problem Harper could not solve.

The girls at school were vicious to weirdos, outcasts, and outsiders. God is to grace as schoolgirl is to cruelty. So Harper connected with the other outcasts and outsiders. She learned sign language and hung out with the Deaf kids. Their ASL club had better snacks than the others. Not that she could eat them. She struggled with Altaic languages. She asked the Sacred Daughters registrar’s office if she could change her language elective to Korean. The woman at the front desk told Harper that the school did not offer Korean, but she could take Spanish next semester.

“So provincial,” she signed to her friend.

Harper learned Korean anyway. She studied at night by the light of her glowworm. Language barriers were a problem that needed solving. Then Harper had a thought: What if everything was a language? The world opened up. Music, computers, electrical currents, braiding—the lingua franca of hair, the phonics of string—it was all just a matter of communication. Harper didn’t have a problem with communication, like the child psychiatrist said. In fact, she’d mastered it. Perhaps she could learn to speak with animals, elements, maybe soon Harper could speak to God. Her personal studies became all-consuming. She no longer had time for the eighth grade so she stopped going to class. When her teacher asked for a note of explagnation she wrote, “Education is a system of imposed ignorance,” for which she was promptly suspended.

“It’s ironic,” Harper told the school counselor, “that the punishment for not going to school is not going to school.”

“How are you feeling?” asked the school counselor. It was all she was qualified to ask.

“Like no one understands me,” Harper said. Which seemed strange, because she spoke seven languages.

Employing the rhetoric of more sinister outcasts before her—no one understands me, I’m alone in the world, one day, you’ll all see—Harper was under heavy surveillance by Sacred Daughters as they determined whether her rebellious streak was boilerplate angst or a sign of early psychopathy. It was recommended that she see the child psychiatrist weekly. Harper did not want to see the child psychiatrist weekly and sensed that, even if she did, it would put a financial strain on her parents that might negatively impact her, Harper, come Christmastime.

Harper grew bored while stuck at home. She read her textbooks and her father’s music biographies and her sister’s diary and a book by her mother’s bedside called the Kama Sutra, which she regretted reading. There should only be so many ways, thought Harper, for making love. She took her father’s work computer when he slept and combed the spreadsheets in his email. Her father worked for the harbor tracking and documenting all incoming and docked cargo and contents of said cargo. The program he used looked like a dull and rudimentary computer game. Harper liked computer games. She found some rather jarring gaps in Bud’s digital labor. It appeared that there were entire hauls of cargo that her father had failed to log. Harper had never previously contemplated her father’s work ethic but, like her eldest sister’s, it seemed to involve doing the bare minimum. She looked into Alabaster Harbor™. It handled about two million containers per year, mostly carrying industrial goods from China like metal and paper and wood, but since the port went private, there hadn’t been a public record of the cargo. Her little eyes lit up detecting the first sprouts of a mystery. There could be drugs in those containers, she thought, or rare plant genomes or racehorses, chemical or biological weapons. It was thrilling to imagine. She could be at the helm of a real scandal, the very conflict and adversity that would enhance her character.

She went out to the driveway, as her father had been spending a lot of time in the minivan—her parents’ marriage was a problem for another day—and brought him into the dining room, as opposed to the family room.

“Dad.”

“Daughter.”

“Since my suspension I’ve been reviewing your harbor records, and in March and April alone you’ve failed to account for over a dozen shipping containers.”

“Am I under arrest?”

“You may be complicit in some high-level trafficking. Probably biological weapons.”

“You’re accusing me of peddling biological weapons?”

“Inadvertently.”

“Did Mommy say if she’d be home for dinner?”

“I feel like you’re failing to grasp the gravity of the situation.”

Bud sighed. In truth, the computer all but did his job for him. He was merely the human surveillance system, the night guard, the checks or the balances.

“Didn’t I tell you to go learn Latin?”

“Ita vero.”

“Mortuum flagellas,” said Bud.

“I don’t know that one.”

“It means you’re flogging a dead man.”

“If you’d just look at these transit documents—”

“Child, have you ever gone without?”

“No, but—”

“Have I ever failed to provide you with adequate sustenance, clothing, or shelter?”

“No, but—”

“This is because I am doing my job right.”

“But something’s wrong.”

“Some things just are the way they are,” he said.

“But, Dad—”

“Let me ask you a question: Do you want to be right or do you want to be happy?” Bud enjoyed the rare moments in which he was still able to impart wisdom. His daughter would always be smarter, but he would always be older.

“Being right brings me happiness,” said Harper.

“Darling, sweetheart, light of my life, fruit of my loins, please refrain from going into my work email.”

Bud ruffled his daughter’s hair. Her disgruntled response affirmed that the gesture was as patronizing as it was intended to be.

Harper sulked. Like toothpaste, once released, her curiosity could not easily be returned from whence it came. But the next day when she went about fixing the problems of the supply chain, she found some new reading material on her father’s desk: a brochure from a wilderness program where unruly children were sent and straightened out through hiking and friendship circles. Harper’s desire to correct Bud’s work negligence didn’t match her desire to avoid hiking and friendship circles. The children pictured did not look like the ones on previous brochures. Their glassy eyes and plastered smiles said it’s too late for us, but do everything in your power to not wind up on this brochure yourself. She read and reread the brochure and, despite her language proficiency, could not quite process the words. A place for troubled children. Was she troubled? Willful and spirited—sure. Uncooperative—maybe. She’d cop to being a troublemaker—the arbiter of trouble—but when it became an adjective, troubled implied some greater character flaw, and this required a level of introspection for which Harper was not ready. In an adjacent room, she could hear her mother preparing an afternoon cocktail. Perhaps everyone in this house could use a friendship circle, she thought. Harper was too clever for her own good, which was why, in order to maintain her lifestyle, she agreed to drop the conspiracy and resume the eighth grade, where she began teaching the Deaf kids how to play blackjack.

Abigail Flynn darkened her God-given freckles with a marker and added new ones as if patches had cropped up overnight, like she’d been sleeping in the sun. She colored her lips and lined her bones, cheek and brow, and spun her hair into waves.

“You’re so pretty,” her mother had once said, like it was a bad thing. “Getting old is going to be difficult for you.”

Growing up, Abigail was often told that she could be a model—perhaps not a supermodel but a model for catalogs and brochures, a model who gestured on game shows, or a model who stood on a rotating platform at car dealerships. She was unquestionably pretty enough to be a recurring character on a Christian soap opera.

Abigail’s foray into makeup coincided with her foray into heartbreak. It started with some stolen drugstore foundation she used to cover up two small hickeys beneath the starchy collar of her uniform. The hickeys were bestowed by Abigail’s first boyfriend, an adjunct art teacher at Sacred Daughters. It wasn’t unethical, Abigail insisted, because she took fencing that semester. Art wasn’t even her elective. Nevertheless their relationship ended in disaster: a disgruntled PTA meeting followed by the teacher’s dismissal, a small lawsuit, and a long summer of sobbing for Abigail, swearing she’d never love again.

But come fall of her senior year, Abigail returned to the makeup counter, this time to dabble in mascara, then blush, then plumper, delighted by how it bloated her already full lips. She pouted in her yearbook photo. She focused on the ephemerality of love when she posed because she thought sadness added a depth to her beauty. A woman’s magazine her mother subscribed to had taught her this. All the models pouted, their eyes dark and empty and hopeless, like they’d just returned from a wake. Physical appearance became increasingly important to Abigail. She even taught the other girls how to look beautifully miserable. She daydreamed in class and her grades suffered. She received poor marks on a creative writing assignment because it lacked complex female characters. They were two-dimensional, preoccupied with beauty and status, her teacher said. But if looks were not one’s most important feature, reckoned Abigail, why would God have centered them so prominently? One did not enter a room with her personality. She often wondered which photos of her would be posted online by her friends and family after she died. She would be pouting posthumously.

Abigail’s looks received frequent male affirmation. She had been propositioned by every bachelor at the brother high school, a few boys at the local university, two junior accountants from her dad’s office, one lifeguard at the community pool, a pen pal from summer camp, and the landscaper who tended their neighbor’s bougainvillea. Abigail paid them no mind. No one had held her interest since the art teacher.

Abigail had met Wes at a party in the city just a month ago, around the time her father moved into the minivan. Abigail was not permitted to go to parties in the city, but her parental supervision had waned. She understood that her recent social freedoms were in direct relation to her parents’ marital strife and so she didn’t ask questions. She had never bothered to get her driver’s license and so she was chauffeured around by her friend Tibet. Abigail liked being a passenger. She liked when her friends didn’t bother her with details or decision-making. That night, Tibet bought them slushies from the Squeaky Mart and spiked them with liquor and Abigail stuck her head out of the sunroof like a meerkat and watched the Alabaster Harbor™ slip into the distance.

Her father had called, interrupting the continuity of the music. Abigail did not know much about her father if she really thought about it. She couldn’t remember his birthday or how he took his coffee. She’d declined the call.

“It’s a school night,” Bud texted.

“It’s Friday,” she responded.

“Today was a school day,” Bud texted, “so tonight is a school night.”

“That’s not how it works,” Abigail wrote.

The car wove through the hills to a pull-off that overlooked the city below, twinkling with nightlife. Tibet sprinkled some lavender crystals into their slushies with the precision of a bomb defuser.

Abigail didn’t ask what the drugs were or what they did, but Tibet had explained anyhow. She called them purples, as opposed to blues or yellows, which were taken for studying. Purples were manufactured to bring down the rat population but in small doses gave one the sensation of standing up too quickly from a chair.

From their perch, they had a clear view of Alabaster Manor on the hillside opposite them. Alabaster Manor looked like a Mayan ruin. The wealthy, Tibet had explained, liked to live in modern homes but the ultrarich often liked to live anachronistically. Paul Alabaster was a storied billionaire. He was the son of Warren T. Alabaster, the development mogul of Alabaster Harbors™ and of Alabaster Dams™, the Alabaster Compliance Tower™ and the Alabaster Lattice Mass™. While Warren T. ruled the real estate market, Paul Alabaster worked in the tech sector, creating a software that accounted for all of the harbor’s cargo in a database. It was a very successful enterprise.

“I heard he’s having one of his parties tonight,” Tibet had said.

She’d learned this from her cousin who worked security for Alabaster Manor. Abigail had heard rumors of the Alabaster Manor before. It was part of the regional mythos. Many political alliances were said to have been made and business dealings said to be brokered at the lavish and clandestine parties held there. There were more sinister legends as well. Some said that girls went missing at the parties—assistants or cleaning staff or an unknown plus-one—returning to the world only under strict NDAs and with large sums of untaxed income. No one knew for certain.

“What do you think’s going on in there?” asked Tibet.

“I don’t know,” said Abigail. “I don’t have 3D vision.”

“I mean, yeah, you do,” said Tibet. “Doesn’t your dad work for them?”

Abigail had shrugged. “Yeah, but like…” She’d flattened her hand and put it low down to illustrate Bud’s level of hierarchy at the company.

They had sipped their drinks and soon they were calling Tibet’s cousin, begging, bargaining, and pleading for an invitation. He said they were crazy. There were senators who didn’t get invitations. But they begged—please, please, please—and he refused and they begged—please, please, please—and he wavered and they begged more—we’ll do anything—and he relented. There was a way.

“Check in,” Bud had texted.

“I am going to your boss’s house,” Abigail wrote.

“You’re going to Allen’s?”

“Alabaster Manor.”

The purples had a funny impact on her decision-making.

“Abigail, I forbid you from going there. It’s dangerous.”

“What do you mean it’s dangerous?”

Bud didn’t know what he meant exactly.

“I don’t know what I mean exactly. Just do as I say,” Bud texted.

“Okay, I won’t,” Abigail had responded, and pocketed her phone for the rest of the night.

Then they had driven to the bottom of a large hill, left the car, and continued on foot. The manor was surrounded by a suite of security cameras that followed the two of them like opera glasses. The girls sucked down the last of their drinks, turning their tongues purple, extermignating their internal rats, and tossed their empty cups into a hedge. Tibet’s cousin met them and soon they were following him through the brush of the Alabaster hedges.

“I don’t suppose senators enter this way,” said Tibet.

“Hey, Tibet, shouldn’t you change your name to China now?” said her cousin.

“It doesn’t sound like there’s a party here,” said Abigail.

“The whole place is soundproof,” said Tibet’s cousin. He was paramilitary and his eyes twitched.

He ushered them through a service entrance, past waitstaff on smoke breaks, and into the heart of the party. Inside was dark and vacuous. People passed them as bodiless specters, like clothes on a dry-cleaning carousel. This was an effect of the purples, Tibet explained, a feature, not a bug.

And then one of the specters had materialized before them.

“This is my buddy, Wes,” said Tibet’s cousin. “He doesn’t talk much.”

“How do you do?” asked Abigail.

Wes said nothing. She was immediately intrigued.

“He was a special contract mercenary,” said Tibet’s cousin.

“They call him War Crimes Wes,” Tibet whispered into Abigail’s ear.

“He’s a beast,” said her cousin, winking at Abigail. She wondered what the wink implied. Then she realized that he had not winked at all. His eyes just twitched. That was just what they did.

War Crimes Wes had been relieved of his military obligations the previous fall. He now worked private security for the tech billionaire, who received fatal threats daily from environmentalists and other human rights groups. Wes fidgeted with an earpiece. He checked over his shoulder.

“What are you on the lookout for?” Abigail asked.

“Anything funny,” said Wes.

“Like clowns?”

Wes shook his head. Not like clowns.

“I can’t feel my hands in a good way,” said Tibet.

She ran off in search of celebrities and high-profile guests of the tech billionaire, leaving Abigail and Wes in a gaudy parlor.

“My dad’s an accountant for the Harbor™,” said Abigail. “So it’s kind of like we’re at his boss’s house.”

Wes nodded. As though he already knew.

“So, tell me something about yourself,” said Abigail.

“Today is my birthday,” said Wes.

“Are you serious?”

Wes nodded again. Abigail doubted that he was ever unserious.

“How are you going to celebrate?” asked Abigail.

Wes shrugged.

Abigail could not fathom a birthday slipping by unobserved. For her seventeenth birthday, her parents got her seventeen of everything: seventeen balloons and seventeen cupcakes and, despite her dad’s tightfistedness, seventeen presents, wrapped in yellow ribbon. Perhaps they had not entirely failed at parenting. She’d felt a little guilty, if only for a moment.

“Once,” said Abigail, “I received a birthday card picturing two snakes.” She explained how one snake looked upset with the other. He asked: Hey, did you eat my cupcake? The other snake said: No. But he had a cupcake-shaped lump in the middle of his long, snakey silhouette. Undigested evidence of his betrayal. A body that did not allow one to lie.

War Crimes Wes had been listening while still monitoring the party. The guests wore cocktail attire and drank from champagne flutes. A dwarf played piano while a limber woman in a leotard contorted into various poses. The performance was interactive. A small crowd stood around her and moved her limbs or fondled her breasts. Abigail had thought the dancer looked sad. It was shaping up to be quite the school night.

A man in a seersucker suit had clocked Abigail and smiled. She’d blushed and turned away. A few moments later, he brought her a flute of champagne.

“What’s your name, princess?” asked the man.

“Abigail,” said Abigail.

“Much obliged.”

Abigail shook the man’s hand. He wore two bulky rings.

“You can call me Dolt,” said the man.

“Is that a real name?” asked Abigail.

“Sure, it’s a real name. Just not mine.”

Abigail took the flute.

“Human sculpture,” said the man. “Something about how we’re all molded by one another.”

Abigail had nodded politely but was stiff and dismissive, her standard routine for unwanted advances.

“So, what do you do?” the man had inquired.

“After school,” said Abigail, “I engrave key chains at the mall.”

“You’re a minor?”

“No, the boys’ school is the Miners. We’re the Burning Bushes.”

“I mean, you’re underage?”

“I’m seventeen.”

Champagne foamed at the corners of the man’s lips.

“This is an exclusive soiree, young lady,” said the man. “Invitations are very hard to come by.”

Abigail glanced around, unimpressed.

“Scarcity fosters desire,” the man went on. “That’s true of parties and it’s true of business. How’d you sneak in here?”

“Through the bushes,” said Abigail.

“We’ve been infiltrated by schoolgirls.” Dolt had laughed, delighted. “I should have whoever snuck you in fired at once.”

“Oh, please don’t,” said Abigail.

“Alright,” Dolt vamped, “since you’re begging.”

Abigail had started to realize that the interaction would not soon end on its own.

“So, are the rumors true?” asked Abigail. “About the stuff that goes on here?”

“I could tell you,” said Dolt.

“But you’d have to kill me?”

“Never,” said Dolt. “That would break my Hippocratic oath.”

“You’re a doctor?”

“I’m many things: a physician, a philanthropist. I’ve been called an animal in the bedroom.”

She looked into his pointy face. If any woman had called this man an animal, surely they meant a rodent. Abigail twirled the neck of her glass, thin as a balloon string.

Then Wes had reappeared, leaned over her shoulder.

“Don’t drink that,” he’d whispered, barely intelligible.

Dolt clapped his hands together.

“Say, would you like a tour?” said Dolt.

“Another time,” said Abigail.

“This is a once-in-a-lifetime offer. To see how the sausage gets made.”

Abigail had seen documentaries about the making of sausage and other meat products and it was, quite frankly, disgusting. She excused herself from the man in the seersucker suit. He had frowned but did not protest.

“Until next time, schoolgirl.”

She poured the contents of her drink into the ornate pot of a large houseplant, or maybe a small tree, and rejoined Wes.

“Do you think that man put something in my drink?” asked Abigail.

The ex-soldier had only stared at her.

Wes had not been wearing a suit that night. He was wearing a threadbare T-shirt and cargo pants. Combat boots that might have actually seen combat, unlike the ones Abigail’s classmates sometimes wore—only to combat puddles, the journey to homeroom.

Tibet and her cousin rematerialized.

“I can’t feel my hands in a bad way,” said Tibet. Her hands dangled limp at the ends of her wrists. “What if I never feel them again? What if we never have another thumb war?”

“It’s alright,” said Abigail. “We’ve never had a thumb war.”

Abigail had wondered if Wes disliked their glorification of war. As they were leaving, he leaned in to Abigail.

“Maybe the snake didn’t eat the cupcake,” Wes said. “Maybe he was just shaped that way. Maybe he was just a different kind of snake.”

“I never thought about that,” said Abigail.

“He probably gets blamed for that kind of thing all the time,” said Wes.

After the party, Abigail had engraved a key chain for Wes at the mall. It read Thank you for your service. She’d skirted around her parents easily enough for her first date with Wes, which was long and lovely, albeit quiet. On their next date, she noticed her key chain was dangling from his car’s ignition. This was sign enough as any to Abigail that Wes was now her boyfriend. Tonight, or rather this morning, their third date concluded after hours of aimless driving just before her school alarm was slated to sound. She fumbled with her keys. In an attempt to make no sound she made more than usual. She checked on Louise in Louise’s room. She checked on Harper in Harper’s room, which was also Louise’s room because they shared a room. Corresponding names were stenciled above their beds, labeling them. Glow-in-the-dark stars glistened dimly over the desk where Harper had been studying airport codes, a recent hobby. She sucked her thumb. In her sleep, Harper was just a child, vulnerable, consuming herself, a little ouroboros. Abigail could hear that the television had been left on. It played reruns of a show called Dad University about an estranged father and son who, by a twist of fate, wind up college roommates. Abigail checked the garage, where her father was asleep in the back of the minivan with the door open. She got close enough to ensure that he was breathing. He was. She had the overwhelming urge to kick him. She did. She kicked him in the shin.

“Abigail?” Bud stirred. “Did you just kick me?”

“Yeah, sorry.”

“Where were you? Are you just getting home?”

“No. I’ve been home, sleeping.”

“You’re holding your purse. You’re fully dressed.”

“Yeah.”

“You just woke up, got dressed, picked up your purse, came into the garage, and kicked me?”

“Uh-huh.”

“I was worried!”

“You seemed worried.”

Bud stretched, rubbed his eyes, and adjusted his seat to the upright position.

“Why do you buckle your seat belt while you’re sleeping?” asked Abigail.

“Abigail, you can’t stay out all night.”

“And why don’t you just go stay in a hotel?”

“Hotels are expensive. I have to put you through college.”

He looked so weak, so helpless. Abigail didn’t like seeing her father this way.

“Do you want me to make you something to eat?” he asked.

“We don’t have anything to eat.”

“Do you want me to order—”

“It’s fine. I’m going to bed.”

Abigail didn’t go to bed. She took one of her mother’s chilled martini glasses from the freezer, filled it to the brim with vodka, and replaced what she took from the vodka bottle with tap water.

She washed her face. There were flecks of toothpaste on her mirror—white freckles on the inverse Abigail. She assessed her concave stomach, turned to the side, and sucked in, almost hoping she’d disappear entirely. I’ll show you a two-dimensional female character, she thought. Abigail preferred to be thin enough to evoke concerned looks from the other parents at her tennis matches but not so much that she deterred further breast development, which, she had read, could continue into her early twenties. A funny term, losing weight, thought Abigail. Misplaced in one’s youth, the weight could be found in later life. She knew many older women who had found it. Abigail rubbed oil on her palms and ran them through her hair. “You’re so pretty,” her mother’s voice repeated in her mind.

She assessed the crucifix tacked up in the hall outside the bathroom, a gift from her grandmother. It used to frighten her as a child. She had nightmares about the corpse of Jesus staggering after her, arms outstretched like a zombie, bloody palms grasping. “Jesus was five foot three,” her parents had comforted her. “Shorter than you. And he only lived to be thirty-three.” Jesus never had to grapple with aging. She wondered if he got thirty-three presents on his birthday. Thirty-three loaves of bread. Thirty-three fish. Thirty-three miracles. “You’re not so scary now,” said Abigail to Jesus, brandishing her martini glass, holding it the way her mother did: by the stem, not the base, like a plucked daffodil. She made her way out to the backyard, where she and her sisters used to tie daisy chains in the weeds. Morning dew already clung to the grass. Mosquitoes whined like the dying batteries in the smoke alarm. A dim light glowed from the tree house, where Louise had left the camping light on. A cat slunk into the yard. He passed through often but the Flynns did not know to which neighbor the cat belonged. He sauntered up to Abigail, depositing a dead finch at her feet. She stroked the cat’s ears, finished her cocktail, and got ready for school.

Louise Flynn was afflicted by the plight of the middle child. She had never broken a bone or been mistaken for a celebrity, had never done something to warrant a medal, certificate, or plaque. She did not have a sense of individual style. At school she wore a uniform and on weekends her sister’s hand-me-downs. Even Catherine bragged about the ease of easy Louise’s labor. While her elder sister had wrapped herself in an umbilical noose, and her younger sister’s urgency for autonomy—who could blame her; nine months tied to Catherine was a lot—resulted in an emergency cesarean, Louise came into the world in all of fifteen minutes. She didn’t even cry. Louise failed to inspire fear or awe in those around her. She swore that the guidance counselor had stifled a yawn in their last session.

Her younger sister Harper’s penchant for violence and overall derangement garnered a lot of attention. Her elder sister, Abigail, was taller, smarter, and more beautiful, and while Abigail never looked down on her sister—except for in the obvious physical sense—jealousy and inferiority brewed inside Louise. Her posture was that of an animal in anticipation of threat. She did not receive much validation from the opposite sex. Once Hobo Bahman had loudly expressed a perverse fantasy to Louise while she passed him in the square, but she could not seem to access any libidinal attention from men her own age. Louise was in a prison of her own mundanity. She’d taken to intentionally throwing out the metal forks with the food scraps when she scraped her dinner plate, just so that she might feel a momentary rush.

There was something that was uniquely Louise’s, a slight speech impediment that her sisters called Wide Wight Tuwns. It only came out when she was nervous or frustrated. They had discovered the impediment when, late to soccer practice, her sisters had asked on which side of the street to pick Louise up and, flustered, she had said the side with the sign reading “wide right turns.” Or rather, she had tried to.

By Louise’s age, Abigail was turning heads, Jesus was turning water into wine, and Louise was turning Rs into Ws. Hardly a character trait.

“Go to the activities bulletin board,” Abigail had said a few weeks ago when Louise had sought her social guidance, “and sign up for something. Anything. Then curate your entire personality around that thing.”

Louise went to the activities bulletin board after school: Auditions were being held for the school play—a student-written musical based on Dad University. Father Andrew was hosting a French film marathon at the church. The quarterly fundraiser to fix the church bells needed volunteers. There was astrology club, ballet, metal detecting, self-defense, Youth Government, still life painting, neo-expressionist painting, Peace in the Middle East through Painting, Save the Seals beach clean, onigiri cooking class, restoration of medieval weaponry, Abstinence-Only Alliance, chess championships, Call to Prayer, and a lecture series by the CFO of an environmental organization that made meat out of stem cells. How was Louise to know which of these activities would define her? She plucked one of the flyers at random. It was pink with a scalloped border: Our Lady of Suffering’s Spring Inner Beauty Pageant. Perfect, she thought.

“I don’t know, Lou,” Abigail said.

They looked over the flyer.

“What don’t you know?” said Louise.

“What about something more fun, like … parasailing?”

Louise felt a wave of exasperation. “Pawasailing?”

“It’s just, beauty pageants are kinda dumb.”

But this was an inner beauty pageant, Louise thought. She imagined girls judged for their stomach lining, immaculate aortas, their perfect pink organs. A little liver in a tiara.

When Louise got home that afternoon, like most afternoons, she took the family computer, the communal laptop, as she was not yet permitted to have her own, into the backyard and up the makeshift ladder to the tree house, where she signed in to a private server and waited for new messages from her Canadian lover yourstruly to appear on-screen. Louise met yourstruly a few months ago in a chat room for middle children. They were amid a theological conversation about an esoteric religious text yours had sent her.

YOURSTRULY: Have you considered what I have said about the immutable divine law of God?

Never had Louise’s opinions been so valued. Yours was sensitive. A good listener. He saw potential in Louise. She spent hours immersed in their discourse. It was often the highlight of her day. He reminded her that life was worth living because there were things that needed to be done, though he hadn’t gone into specifics about what those things were. It didn’t matter. She loved him for and not in spite of his flaws.

LF: my family can be so unsupportive

YT: I have also been persecuted for my beliefs.

LF: i am thinking about signing up for the beauty pageant at the church

YT: Do you remember what i have told you about the prophetic mythology?

LF: i just need an extracurricular

YT: Silent prayer.

LF: mayb it will be fun. there is a whole big ceremony

YT: A large gathering of christians in one place?

LF: ya

YT: Do it.

YT: I will lead you to victory.

It was an unconditional acceptance that Louise so craved. She was not alone in this world. Yours’s icon flickered like a heartbeat. What a strange and singular thing it was, she thought, to be in love.

The next evening, Louise went to the church. One doughy cloud hung overhead, threatening rain. The humidity set Louise’s hair into peak puffiness. Father Andrew was sweeping the chancel and speaking to Miss Winkle, the church lady, or rather Miss Winkle seemed to be speaking at Father Andrew excitedly as he attempted to sweep the chancel. Miss Winkle was a town staple. Though she was likely no older than Louise’s mother, she seemed to be and have always been an old woman. She was swinging a potted orchid wildly as she spoke. A stray cat darted by. The stray cats despised Father Andrew because he clapped loudly at random to kill idle gnats, in turn making a loud percussive sound that startled them. Louise remembered there were also some rogue parrots in the rafters. A regular zoo.

“Just take it!” insisted Miss Winkle.

“I don’t want to take it,” said Father Andrew.

“It will cheer people up,” Miss Winkle further advocated for the flower. “And isn’t that why one comes to church in the first place? For a little cheering up?”

“People come to church for many reasons,” said Father Andrew, “primarily to praise God.”

“I don’t see what harm a few flowers do.”

“There is a feedback section on the church’s web page.”

Miss Winkle persisted. “I simply cannot comprehend what you have against orchids! God’s little paintbrushes!”

“We’re trying to keep the flora and fauna to a minimum,” said Father Andrew. “It attracts insects.”

“I’ll say. You really should do something about the flies.”

Louise could have sworn she glimpsed Father Andrew make a fist, then release it.

“They’re gnats.”

“It’s just so dreary in here! And since you won’t fix the bells…”

“We don’t have the budget to fix the bells. Hence the quarterly fundraiser.”

“It has been over a decade,” said Miss Winkle. “There must be some—”

“Sorry to interrupt,” interrupted Louise.

Miss Winkle and Father Andrew shifted their attention to Louise. Louise thought Father Andrew might have looked relieved. She pulled the pink flyer from her backpack.

“I’d like to sign up for the Inner Beauty Pageant, please,” said Louise.

“Oh,” said Father Andrew. “That’s great, Louise. But unfortunately sign-ups are closed. Have been for some time now. The first round starts tomorrow.”

“Oh,” said Louise, crestfallen.

“Do you have any interest in our wind instrument workshop? We were just donated a lovely sixteenth-century pipe organ.”

“No, thank you, I’d just really like to be in the pageant.”

“It’s just that”—Father Andrew clasped his hands patiently—“as I’ve said, sign-ups are closed and it wouldn’t be fair to the other girls if I were to show you preferential treatment.”

“Please!” Louise said, surprising herself with her own urgency. “I need to do this!”

“Louise—”

Her voice wobbled. “I can’t go unnoticed fowever!”

“Are you sure a beauty pageant is right for you, dear?” Miss Winkle interjected. “There are harsh realities us women have to face, one being that we’re not all beauty queens.”

Louise and Father Andrew glared at Miss Winkle. She gave an exaggerated sigh and strode off with her orchid.

“Come into my office,” said Father Andrew. Louise followed him, curtsying before the crucifix as she passed.

The priest produced a pen from his desk and a pink questionnaire. The pen read JESUS LOVES THE HELL OUT OF YOU.

“It was a gift.” Father Andrew clicked the pen. “I get them all the time.”

“You’re letting me sign up?”

“I say, everyone should have a chance to express their inner beauty.” He winked at the Flynn girl. Then immediately regretted it. Winking at children must have been covered by the very lengthy tome of prohibited behaviors to which the church now adhered. He’d just meant to convey that he understood Louise. Going unnoticed was a terrible thing.

“Thank you, Father!”

“Name?”

“Louise Flynn.”

“Age?”

“Fifteen.”

“Height?”

“Five foot, two inches.”

“Religious affiliation?”

“I have been experimenting with Islamic fundamentalism.”

“I am going to put other.”

“Okay.”

“Biography?”

“Louise Flynn is fifteen and lives on Side Street.”

“You want to evoke a certain pathos with your biography. Show the audience that you have overcome adversity and are stronger for it.”

“Well, my dad lives in the car and my mom is dating our neighbor.”

“That may be a tad modern. Something along the lines of: you fell off your horse but climbed back on.”

“I once caught salmonella from my pet turtle.”

“Alright. Dream?”

“I have this one where I’m on fire, burning alive from self-immolation right in the middle of English class, and everyone just keeps going about their business, not paying attention to me, no one stops, they just keep doing their worksheets while I’m burning.”

“Sorry, more like your aspirations for the future.”

“Oh! To win Our Lady of Suffering’s Inner Beauty Pageant.”

“And any long-term goals?”

“I’d like to marry the love of my life.”

“Love is an admirable goal.”

“And I’d like to own a car like our neighbor Jim Doherty’s.”

“Ah, an STX Class.”

“That’s the one!”

“And talent?”

“What do you mean?”

“In what area does Louise Flynn excel?”

“Um, could you give me an example?”

“Well, Harriet Longhorne is playing hymns on the recorder. And Genevieve Malkov—now this is dear—is making a nativity out of balloon animals.”

Once again, Louise was faced with her mediocrity.

“I don’t think I have a talent,” said Louise.

Father Andrew wrote TBD in lieu of a talent.

“Okay, see you tomorrow at four p.m.”

“I made it to the next round?”

“This is more of a formality.”

“Thank you, Father! I won’t let you down.”

Father Andrew found himself hoping that she wouldn’t. Louise left the church with a new sense of purpose just as the cloud broke open and it started to pour. She was drenched by the time she arrived home. Drenched but determined. She walked around the house balancing an encyclopedia on her head. She found her dad in the minivan and asked him for four hundred dollars. Bud asked why Louise needed four hundred dollars and she said she needed to buy a swimsuit and an evening gown.

“You need a swimsuit for a child’s beauty pageant at a church?”

“This is totally standard.”

“Can you borrow one from Abigail?”

“She’s four inches taller than me!”

“We don’t have money for four-hundred-dollar dresses. I have to put you and your sisters through college.”

“Who’s going to college? Abigail will marry rich, Harper will go to prison, and after high school I have to surrender my life unto God.”

“Unto what?!”

“This is w—” Louise composed herself. “Really important.”

“I hate saying no to you, kid, but here we are.”

Louise retired to the tree house. Her initials were carved in the plywood beams. Ants collected on the remnants of a rope swing. The tree house was now used for storage and filled with the family’s old belongings. Afghans and books with dog-eared pages, an earthquake-preparedness kit, forgotten Christmas tree toppers and butterfly nets and a wind-up carousel, a hutch from a deceased rabbit, a tank from a deceased salmonella-carrying pet turtle, a music box filled with baby teeth, the dollhouse where doll-Louise’s little face peeled with age, doll-Abigail lay on the little canopy bed, and doll-Harper was in the kitchen making shark fin soup. Human-Louise logged on to her chat room. The rush she felt when talking to her sweetheart was comparable to that of a drug, Louise assumed. She’d never done a drug.

LF: ur the only one who understands me

YT: I want us to be able to communicate better.

LF: u mean talk on the phone?

YT: No. I want you to learn Arabic.

LF: is that what they speak in Canada?

YT: Yes.

LF: ok!

LF: can I tell you something?

YT: Anything.

LF: i’m afraid it will seem trivial

YT: Our primary life has not yet begun.

LF: um i’m afraid i’m not pretty enough for a beauty pageant

LF: and that people will laugh at me …

YT: Beauty is not on your face.

LF: i kno. it’s inside

YT: No. Beauty is in your dedication to God.

LF: oh

For dinner Louise ate some nine-year-old peanut butter that her father stored in the earthquake-preparedness kit and fell asleep on a stale sleeping bag. She felt more prepared already. She curled up next to the computer and felt yours next to her. They weren’t plagued by reality. Questions like What is he thinking?, Has he done the dishes?, Will we ever meet in person? didn’t matter to them. Their relationship was perfect in its simplicity. Louise woke up to Abigail poking her with a yardstick.

“Does no one in this family sleep inside anymore?” asked Abigail.

Abigail was in her school clothes but appeared to not have slept. She’d been hanging around with some new boy lately. Louise slammed the family computer shut.

“Why did you just slam the computer?” asked Abigail.

“I don’t know.”

“Were you watching porn or something?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“It’s true!”

“Last night you came up to the tree house to watch porn and then fell asleep.”

“Uh-huh.”

“What porn were you watching?”

“Um.” Louise glanced around.

“You weren’t watching—”

“Sexy dollhouse!”

“Sexy dollhouse?”

“Yeah, there are these life-size dolls and they just get—”

“Ew, stop!”

“You asked!”

“Okay, pervert,” said Abigail. “It’s time for school.”

Louise went to the Sacred Daughters Preparatory School registrar’s office and asked if she could change her language elective to Arabic. The woman at the front desk told Louise that the school did not offer Arabic, but she could take Spanish next semester.

The day moved glacially. After her last class Louise made her way back to the church, where Harriet and Genevieve and ten other girls congregated, primping into compacts and tending sausage curls. Louise brushed the wrinkles from her plaid pleated skirt and assessed her competition. Among the potential Miss Our Ladies was British Ellie, far and away the most striking fifteen-year-old in town. “Fifteen going on twenty-five,” as Catherine would say. There was also Casper, the only lesbian in the tenth grade; Melkorka, who was partially deaf; Pepper the orphan, whose parents died in a chemical fire—sure to elicit the sympathy vote—and Josephine, whose grandparents dognated quarterly to the church bell fundraiser. Louise was so sick of being average. If not profound beauty, inner or not, couldn’t she at least have generational wealth or a major disability? Father Andrew instructed the girls to recite the Pledge of Allegiance followed by the Lord’s Prayer. Louise’s eyes jumped from the flag to Carlin McCalister’s chest, where, as if overnight, one breast had advanced significantly faster than the other. Carlin McCalister looked like she might topple over.

One by one, the potential beauty queens sang, Riverdanced, baton-twirled, and ventriloquized puppets to tell Bible stories. Celeste applied a full face of makeup without looking in a mirror. Betsy double-dutched and Greer yodeled until the line whittled down to Louise, who took the stage without a prop.

“Up next,” said Father Andrew, “we have Louise Flynn, who lives on Side Street.”

Louise stood up so straight she was nearly five foot three.

“For my talent,” said Louise, “I am going to hold my breath.”

Some of the girls giggled.

“I’m sorry?” asked Father Andrew.

After taking a self-inventory, Louise realized she did have a talent after all: air deprivation. She could hold her breath for over two minutes, longer if she succumbed to fainting. Louise had long sought absolute stillness, temporarily pausing the gnatural rise and fall of her chest in pursuit of inanimacy. “Louise, you snuck up on me” was somewhat of a catchphrase around the Flynn house. “Louise, I didn’t hear you come in.” “Louise, how long have you been standing there?” Fifteen years, thought Louise. That’s how long.

She took a long drag of air, expanding her lungs to their fullest extent, overly puffing out her cheeks, and pinning her nose between thumb and pointer.

“Louise, this is rather unusual,” said Father Andrew, but the crowd was rapt.

The first thirty seconds were a breeze. Silence, lovely silence, swept the room. Silences didn’t make Louise uncomfortable. She reveled in them. The pain only set in around the first minute and even that was tolerable, familiar—motivating. If it hurt, then she was doing it right. The popular workout adage feel the burn came to mind.

Her chest ached at a minute and thirty seconds. Louise swore she heard the audience breathing harder to compensate. Otherwise, the room remained pin-drop quiet.

“Louise Flynn,” said Father Andrew, “I must insist you breathe right now.”

But she didn’t. Louise felt her eyes bulge. Her insides were railing against her. She resisted, trembling.

“Two minutes,” one of the girls cried.

“Go, Louise!” called another.

“Stop this right now,” said Father Andrew.

Her vision faltered, then blurred. Pretend you’re underwater, she told herself. Pretend breathing isn’t an option. Removing the choice entirely elimignated the fatigue of decision-making—to breathe or not to breathe.

“Two minutes and thirty-five seconds,” called another pageant girl, who wore sparklers in her hair.

Louise’s hand dropped from her nose in exhaustion but still she did not breathe. The church room was not dimming as the term blacking out might suggest, but rather it was bathed in light. Almost entirely washed out. Focusing on the light brought comfort to Louise, a reprieve for her aching little lungs. She let it absorb her.

“Three minutes!” the girls cried.

“Louise Flynn, start breathing this instant,” came the voice of Father Andrew.

Louise could no longer see him, the girls, the church, or the stage. She imagined the local paper lauding her for her power of will. For once, Louise would be recognized for her greatness, defying the one thing her peers couldn’t. Deprivation was a talent, a skill, a practice. She was an artist and carbon dioxide was her medium. While the other girls did, Louise didn’t. She was the best at not. She was a black hole. Her content was her lack.

“Three minutes, thirty seconds!” said the girls.

“Miss Flynn!”

The girls clutched their puppets and roller skates and jump ropes. She’d be a legend. Stars didn’t need oxygen to produce light. Or did they? She hadn’t taken astronomy. Louise crumpled to her knees and lapsed into unconsciousness.

The next morning, a list of names, five of them, was tacked to the activities bulletin board. A list of those who would be proceeding to the next round in Our Lady of Suffering’s Inner Beauty Pageant. A list that did not include the name Louise Flynn.

Louise left school at three o’clock on the dot, walked to the church, knocked on Father Andrew’s office door, and, when he did not answer, opened it anyway.

“Louise?” asked Father Andrew. “Would you mind coming back during office hours?”

“Carlin McCalister is a finalist!”

“Four p.m. to six p.m. Monday through Friday. It says so on the door.”

“I had the best performance of the afternoon and you know it.”

“Miss Flynn, office hours.”

“Is this because my sister started the Father Gayworth thing? I didn’t perpetuate that in any way.”

“I’m not punishing you, Louise.”

“I think you are.”

Father Andrew removed his glasses and looked up at the schoolgirl. “That was some stunt you pulled.”

“Thank you.”

“Making yourself pass out is not an approved talent.”

“Where in the rule book does it say I have to stay conscious?”

“I think your time and skill set are better spent elsewhere. Did you see that we’re hosting a beach clean?”

“I want to be Miss Our Lady of Suffering.”

“Maybe next year.”

“Do you know what being rejected from a beauty pageant does to a young girl?”

“This has nothing to do with your physical appearance. Miss Our Lady of Suffering is not just a title. She must be a pillar of the community. Someone who exudes the values of the church and helps those in need.”

Louise felt the rise of her speech-hindering emotions: pain and fwustwation. She composed herself.

“You don’t think I’m a pillar of the community?”

“I think that you are someone in need.”

“Carlin’s chest is completely asymmetrical.”

“Language.”

“If Carlin wins then your community pillar is going to be a little lopsided is all I’m saying.”

“Are you speaking to someone regularly?”

“Like in general?”

“Like a therapist.”

“No.”

“I want you to know that my door is open to you.”

“Monday through Friday. Four p.m. to six p.m.”

“Do you need the church shuttle to take you home?”

“I can wide my bike.”

Louise let control fall away, felt tears burning in her eyes. She’d almost made it through an entire interaction without tripping over her tongue. As she left Father Andrew’s office, she remembered what yours had said, that beauty was in her dedication to God. She looked at the distraught Virgin Mary mosaic on the chapel wall. Louise wept. Mary wept. Louise walked home and ate two strawberry Pop-Tarts for dinner. She climbed into the tree house with the computer under her arm. Yours was waiting online. Her last vestige of hope. She wanted to leap through the screen and exist with him in the ether.

YT: Did you succeed?

LF: no. i didn’t get in

YT: Blasphemous.

LF: i feel so alone

YF: Is it the christian way to turn on the weak?

LF: idk

YT: Your family has forsaken you.

YT: Your religion has forsaken you.

YT: You want a safe place to call home.

YT: Acceptance and camaraderie.

YT: You can have that. We can build it.

YT: Together.

LF: how?

YT: Can you keep this a secret, Louise Flynn?

LF: yes, i promise

YT: Don’t waste my time with doubt or hesitation.

LF: i won’t!

YT: You need to follow my instructions carefully.

YT: If you succeed, you will be taken care of.

YT: Here and in heaven.

YT: We will avenge you.

LF: i’ll do anything

YT: First. Can you get access to aluminum and potassium perchlorate?

The account and systems manager’s manager, Bud’s boss, kept Bud late one afternoon. Though it was not actually late, Bud had merely been leaving early.

“Bud.”

“Allen.”

“Overcast.”

“Yup.”

“Looks like it might rain.”

“It’s the rainy season.”

“Catch the latest on this jailbreak?”

“Yes, sir. Riveting.”

“Haven’t caught them yet.”

“No, sir.”

“I’ll get right to it then,” said the accounts and systems manager’s manager. “Bud, the team is concerned.”

“About the jailbreak?”

“No, about you. How can I put this delicately? You’ve been … distracted.”

Bud’s neck made a disconcerting crack. The minivan had been taking its toll. His mind wandered. If not working or parenting, Bud wondered what his wife might be up to during their nonconsensual nonmonogamous spell. Couldn’t she find God like his mother? Find anything, really. Find candle making, find mushroom hunting, find wine tasting perhaps. She liked to do that anyhow. He recalled a program on some deranged psychopath who kept his wife chained to the radiator when he went to work. Bud wondered if the psychopath’s wife had suggested sleeping with their neighbor.

“Distracted?” said Bud.

“Distracted.”

“Ah.”

“The team is worried that there is something compromising your performance at work.”

“Something?”

“How can I— Is there anything going on at home that might be compromising your performance at work?”

“No, there is nothing going on at home.”

“Right, let’s review your most recent health intake form.” Bud’s boss pulled out a stack of papers, presumably Bud’s most recent health intake form. “Flynn comma Bud. Gender: male. Race: Caucasian. Marital status: you wrote in wife is fucking the neighbor.”

“Could have sworn I dreamed that,” Bud said, wincing. “But my marriage is not compromising my performance at work.”

“The team feels otherwise.”

The accounts and systems manager’s manager offered Bud a series of brochures. “Some literature on local programs that we—they feel will benefit you, thus enhancing your performance at work.”

“Alcoholics Anonymous?” Bud flipped through the file. “Allen, I’m not an al—”

“Any of the programs will do.”

“Face-to-Face Recovery, the SOS Society, Motivation Management, the NotAlone Alliance, Intimacy Immersion, Holistic Healing, LifeLine Secular Reinvention, New Hope for Women, Lost Lambs Christian Guidance. Allen, some of these sound like cults.”

“You weren’t leaving for the day, were you?”

“No.”

“Because it’s only three p.m.”

“Lost Lambs seems interesting.”

“Excellent.”

Bud could not lose his mid-level accounts job. He braced himself monthly when checking his bank balance and had started tuning into all that talk about a diminishing middle class. Having failed at being a rock star, Bud Flynn could not fail at being an accounts manager. He did have to admit that, if marked on a graph, his enthusiasm levels had plummeted of late. Bud’s emotions had had a notably bad year and were showing no signs of an uptick. It was not a work-specific apathy. He felt little excitement for food, ball games, music, sunsets—from all of which Bud had once derived much pleasure. He could not even muster of late an elaborate fantasy for jerking off, but rather, with a few lackluster tugs, relieved himself to the centerfold of a men’s magazine, two tits sported by Miss July.

When Bud was charting higher enthusiasm levels, he sometimes watched the amateur videos ladies these days seemed to be making on the internet, until that content was put behind a paywall. To avoid leaving a perverted paper trail, Bud would otherwise rely on his own mind for pleasure, returning to a subset of erotic reverie, titillating in its utter taboo. Even after three children, his wife was, as the men’s magazine might put it, a ten-out-of-ten drop-down knockout, smooth and thin and toned but fatty where it counted. Yet Catherine and women like Catherine did not always whet Bud’s most primal appetite. To become aroused, like, really aroused, Bud returned to one particular scenario starring one particular fictional woman—plump and dowdy—not a centerfold contestant by any means, at least not in this century. The scene went like this: The woman is stripped down to her frumpy, threadbare undergarments by a room full of young, athletic, if altogether beefy men. She is at first bashful and attempts to conceal her figure, her various rolls and flabs and unsightly veins, but as the tableau progresses and the men lavish her with sexual fervency, the homely woman comes to life. She is eventually peeled from her orthopedic bra as the five to seven studs take turns sucking and rubbing and eventually pumping between her bowed legs until the woman and Bud climax in unison. While the scene varied in duration and wardrobe, the real clincher is what the woman calls out at the moment of orgasm—always: “Thank you!” Her gratitude, that was what did it for Bud. A polite affirmation that this was the release she so longed for. What drew Bud to the liberation of a heavy middle-aged woman through sexual pleasure was not worth examining further, he thought. But every time, her outburst would compel him to defile another tea towel, shove it into the nearest trash bin, and quickly change the channel in his mind to something banal and innocent. Resetting the water heater or remembering the name of a relative’s spouse.

But Bud had not directed one of his mental pornos in quite some time. The fantasy even started to strike him as a little sad. His mind could no longer stay constrained to the naughtiness of the moment but instead followed the imaginary dowdy woman into the coming days. What was she like? How did she feel about the scene postcoitus? Did she return to a place of embarrassment? Was she paid for the experience? Would her friends and neighbors find out? Was she really grateful or was her outburst merely performative? Was she engaging in a healthy extension of her comfort zone or was she pressured into Bud’s crass universe? And what about the five to seven studs? What was their level of willing engagement? Were they adult actors or merely college kids who found themselves in a strange situation, as the young often did? Ridiculous, of course, since none of these people existed outside of Bud’s mind, but that was how it went nowadays, so Bud put the studs and the woman to rest.

Our Lady of Suffering looked like a peak-hours train station. Groups congregated in every corner, praying and eating and improvising and mixing martial arts. There were kittens for foster and tartlets for sale. Donations were being taken for the perennially broken church bells. It took a moment for Bud to identify Lost Lambs. Lost Lambs was led by Miss Priscilla Winkle every Monday and Friday. Bud had known Miss Winkle, peripherally, since he was young, both growing up in the town, but had never really engaged with her, assumed she was, like his mother, a religious fanatic and thought it best to avoid all women with commonalities to his mother. He knew through the rumor mill that she’d undergone some hardship. Her husband had left her with no income and a brain-damaged child. But what was Bud to have done? Send a card? Miss Winkle’s daughter sat in a pew coloring, head bobbing in her gun range earmuffs. She colored the same shape over and over, deep and somber spirals. Her name was Perry and she wore a dog tag stating this and her home address, because Perry had a tendency to wander away. She didn’t need the dog tag. Everyone knew where Perry lived. Whose child she was.

Bud had privately fancied himself superior to the townies because he had left, ever briefly, experienced the world outside their twelve-mile radius. Yet here he was. Miss Winkle bumped into Bud, nearly spilling the tray of sugar cookies, tea, and holy pamphlets balanced precariously on her arm, waitress-style.

“I’m so sorry!” said Miss Winkle.

“Don’t worry about it,” said Bud.

“I’m so clumsy,” said Miss Winkle.

“Really, it’s alright,” said Bud.

“Always dropping things. How do you think Perry ended up that way?”

Bud must have looked taken aback.

“I’m just kidding! It was an off-color joke. She was born that way, of course.”

“Oh! No, that’s great. I love to joke about child abuse. I just assumed, with your being involved in the church and all, that you didn’t joke about child abuse.”

“In our situation, you have to have a sense of humor.”

Miss Winkle offered Bud a sugar cookie depicting a dove.

“A dove,” said Miss Winkle. “For reconciliation.”

“Right.”

Bud took the reconciliation dove graciously.

“I’m so glad you decided to join us, Mr. Flynn. We’re not like other self-help groups,” she whispered. “We have a cookout on Good Friday and I make my signature Lost Lamb Chops.”

Bud attempted a smile. Parrots squawked from the church rafters. Bud once heard that macaws mated with one partner for life. This felt downright shameful. Even the birds had better relationships than Bud.

“Circle up, everyone!” Miss Winkle called to the group. The group settled into their folding chairs. Bud surveyed the circle: there was the woman with the strange skin pigmentation that he sometimes saw at the market, a divorced dad from his daughters’ school, a man with arm tattoos symbolizing conflicting ideologies, a hostile-looking older woman, an obese teenager with cat’s ears on the hood of her sweatshirt. Bud bit his cookie. The hostile older woman shot him a look.

“Bless us, oh Lord, for these thy gifts, which we are about to receive from thy bounty,” said the woman. “You say it before you eat.”

“Sorry,” said Bud.

He’d already gotten off on the wrong foot in his cult.

“As always, we start with a deep breath,” said Miss Winkle. “Inhale. Exhale. Stay in your bodies.”

Bud found himself wondering where else he might go.

“Let’s welcome our newest addition to the group: Bud Flynn. Can we all say hello to Bud?”

“Hi, Bud,” said the group.

The obese teenager smiled.

“Here is how it works,” Miss Winkle continued. “Each member of the group participates. Each member contributes. We use all parts of the lost lamb.”

“Um,” said Bud. “I could bring snacks.”

“Oh, how generous,” said Miss Winkle, “but Kimble is already bringing snacks next week, aren’t you, Kimble?”

“Yeah, I’m bringing snacks,” said Kimble.

Bud realized that Kimble, as he turned, had two bandages creating an X over his left eye.

“Bud, is that a guitar pick around your neck?”

Bud’s hand jumped to his necklace, a Father’s Day gift from his eldest.

“Do you play?”

“I used to.”

“It’s settled then,” said Miss Winkle. “Next week Bud will bring his guitar and play us a little something.”

“Oh, please no—”

“Why don’t you kick things off, Bud?”

The group looked at him expectantly. Hands folded in laps.

“I wouldn’t know how, really,” said Bud.

“Do you know what phrase is repeated over three hundred times in the Bible?”

“Don’t lie with thy brother?”

“Be not afraid. Why are you here, Bud?”

“It’s work mandated, as I mentioned on the phone.”

“But why are you really here, Bud?”

Bud reached for his tie to loosen it and found he wasn’t wearing one. His throat went dry. Performing onstage in bars full of strangers was a cakewalk compared to this. And he was an expert, having witnessed at least three town cakewalks.

“I guess … I’m having some problems in my marriage.”

“Could you elaborate?” coaxed Miss Winkle.

“I’d rather not,” said Bud.

“Remember, this is a safe space,” said Miss Winkle. One of the Lost Lambs spit into a cup. Bud swatted the air. Was it just him or were there a lot of gnats in the church?

“Lost Lambs is about the power of healing through hearing,” said Miss Winkle. “You lead. We’ll listen.”

“I don’t know where to, um, lead you,” said Bud.

“Specifically,” said Miss Winkle, “what problems are you having with your marriage?”

“Specifically,” said Bud, “my wife is fucking Jim Doherty.”

The circle looked at Bud blankly. Some throats cleared.

“I’m sensing anger,” said Miss Winkle.

“Weird, I usually skip anger and go straight to depression,” said Bud.

“Humor is a common defense mechanism. But beneath it, I hear that you’re experiencing jealousy with its twin moons of rage and resentment,” said Miss Winkle.

“Uh-huh…”

“Love is the bedrock under my feet, the castle in which I live, Psalms 18,” said Miss Winkle. “When did you first notice these cracks in your love castle, Bud?”

Bud would hardly call it a castle. His love was more like a bodega, local and stocked with the essentials, nothing excessive. When? Bud was at a loss. His marriage had been plodding along as it always had. Sure, in retrospect there were small indications of discontent—Catherine vandalizing his copy of The Unexamined Life to say The Unexamined Life Wife, for instance, but this was just her enigmatic sense of humor. She had twice suggested they seek counseling, but who had the money for frivolities like mental health? Not him, when his daughters kept needing regular food and shelter and undergarments and psychiatrists. Sure, he’d once overheard Catherine on the phone to a girlfriend comparing him to a lead weight dragging her down into a dark, cavernous sea. And yes, following his therapeutic refusal there was a period of distance—Catherine had been spending more time alone, falling asleep on the couch watching The Real Housewives of Something or Other—but was this not the normal throes of cohabitation? They’d been married nearly eighteen years, he had held her hand through three labors, navigated financial crises, vacationed to both Canada and Mexico.

“I don’t know,” said Bud.

Miss Winkle patted his hand.

“It’s okay not to know,” she said.

The group moved on and Kimble began speaking about his suspicions that the government was poisoning the water supply. Be not afraid. The dissident in Bud objected to this. Fear was innate, a biological recognition of a threat. He’d be afraid if he damn well pleased.

Miss Winkle approached Bud after the meeting, once the dove cookies were polished off and the sun had set through the leaded windows.

“Thank you for your share today,” said Miss Winkle. “How did it feel?”

“Like a humiliating ritual,” said Bud.

“It’ll get easier.”

Bud sighed. He scratched at his unshaven neck.

“I don’t think this all is for me,” he said.

“Sometimes,” said Miss Winkle, “a lamb gets lost from the flock. If they’re lost for too long, there is a chance they will come across a wolf. It’s safer to stay with the flock, Bud. Understand?”

“I guess,” said Bud. “Would you mind signing this paper for my company saying that I was here and participated?”

“The shepherd rejoices when the lamb is retrieved,” said Miss Winkle. “Just as we rejoice in heaven when a sinner repents.”

“You’re losing me.”

Miss Winkle signed Bud’s paper with a little flourish at the end of her siggnature.

“God gives His toughest battles to His strongest soldiers,” said Miss Winkle. “I’m praying for you, Bud.”

“Great, thanks,” said Bud.

“And don’t forget…” Miss Winkle mimed a strumming motion.

Bud could see Catherine through the window as he pulled into the driveway, their mismatched curtains drawn. At first, by the way her body thrashed and jolted, he thought she was being attacked. He leaped out of the car but from the porch he saw no assailant. Perhaps she was having a stroke, a psychotic episode, a strong reaction to premenopause. Upon more careful speculation, it appeared that Catherine was doing some form of dance-based exercise routine. Bud heard the faint twang of music through the door. She was pirouetting and waltzing and two-stepping with a little samba thrown in. She jogged in place, flipped her hair. Her eyes were closed, fully immersed in the movement. Bud’s key in the door interrupted her workout.

“Don’t stop on my account,” said Bud. “I’m just passing through.”

Bud saw hope leaving her eyes. It seemed as though a considerable amount of time had gone by without either of them noticing. They blinked and a decade passed, older but no wiser.

Bud rummaged in the Everything closet until he found his guitar case. The instrument was years out of tune. Something rattled around inside its body. He shook out an Easter egg.

“Where are you going with that?” asked Catherine.

“Thought I’d go down to the pier to try and make a couple bucks,” said Bud. “How else will we afford your skin products?”

“Ha-ha,” said Catherine.

“It’s for my support group,” said Bud.

“Your support group,” repeated Catherine.

“Yeah, because you’ve decided to dismantle our lives, I now am part of a religious self-help organization for divine healing.”

“You think that expanding our horizons—”

“Fucking other people—”

“—is what’s straining our marriage?”

“Yes.”

“Forgive me for wanting more from life.”

“I don’t,” said Bud. “I do not forgive you.”

Catherine stared intently at Bud. Not at his face. At his chin.

“Don’t say I need to shave,” said Bud.

She didn’t.

“When did we get here? I feel like we blinked and a decade passed.”

“Well, while you were blinking, I was here living. You’re stuck, William.”

Bud winced.

“I’m still an artist,” said Catherine.

“What’s your medium, huh?” Bud continued. “Not doing the dishes? The artistic way you polish off a wine bottle?”

“I refuse to institutionalize.”

“I think you should be institutionalized.”

Catherine wiped a bead of sweat from her brow and sat on the arm of the couch. She shook her head, back and forth, back and forth. No, no, no, no, no.

“Our life is not the stuff of greatness,” said Catherine. “Nobody writes sonnets about their third toddler. Nobody paints portraits of grocery store aisles.”

“We might not be portrait-worthy people,” said Bud. “Is that such a bad thing?”

Bud took a hesitant step closer to his wife. Now she winced.

“Yes,” said Catherine. “It is. It is the worst thing.”

Bud put his head in his hand. His shoulders slouched, defeated. He wanted to scream but did not contain the energy screaming required.

“You’re impossible,” said Bud.

“You used to say very few things were impossible,” said Catherine.

“Well, I didn’t know what it would be like to be married to you!”

“What is it then, William? You just want me to give up like you?”

“What is it then, William,” Bud mimicked, his tone drawn out and embellished. “Sweetheart, they’ll fix the church bells before you become an artist.”

Catherine’s mouth contorted, almost smiling. It rather scared Bud.

“You can be so cruel,” she said.

Bud found a new reserve of energy. His voice rose. She riled him and he let himself be riled. He scoured her face for a flaw to focus on.

“You always make me be bad cop,” said Bud.

“It’s the twenty-first century, William. There are no good cops.”

“You know I resent that generalization. Not all cops are bad cops. My father was a good cop.”

“Maybe not all cops, but your father in particular was a bad cop.”

“How dare you!”

“Incredibly racist.”

“He was not!”

“At Thanksgiving he told me that Chinese people are just like ants because ‘there’s a million of them and they all look exactly the same.’”

“He did not say that.”

“Where do you think I got it from? My racist joke book?”

“I’m leaving,” said Bud instead of leaving.

“I wish you’d surprise me just once. Just one time,” said Catherine. “You know, we’ve never had sex in the shower.”

“The fantasy is better than the actual implementation!”

“Come on,” said Catherine. “Am I really the woman of your dreams?”

“Who cares!” said Bud. “You’re the woman of my reality.”

And their fight continued to escalate like it usually did, Catherine begging Bud to see things from her perspective, Bud unable. Bud would have given anything to go back to the night they met, to be back on that stage, performing to an audience of twelve, though it could have been a stadium, he swore, it could have been an audience of twelve thousand and he still would have picked out Catherine, not for her beauty, though there was beauty to factor in, but because of the transcendent thing that so many works of art attempted to articulate, the centuries-old thing that started war and divided boys from men, this love thing he felt. And did he feel it still? Who could say? They’d always have the memory of passion. Wasn’t that enough? Then Catherine shook her head like she always did and tried to walk into another room and Bud grabbed at her arm and she said “stop grabbing my arm” and he said remember this, this, and this. Remember when we … and how we … and shouldn’t that account for something? And it should, Catherine admitted, but it didn’t. Then it seemed they had exhausted all language and fell silent.

“I haven’t … with Jim,” Catherine said finally.

Bud hated how much relief this brought him.

“Yet,” said Catherine.

So Bud took his jacket from the back of the coatrack while Catherine went to the kitchen to fix a drink and when she returned, to her surprise, Bud and the minivan were gone.

Bud bought a half-pint from the Squeaky Mart and drove around, aiming for mailboxes and swerving at the last second, his tires churning the gravel. This was something he’d taken to doing, his little release ritual. There weren’t many skeletons in Bud’s closet, but there was as of last week a purple rooster mailbox in his trunk.

The car smelled like rotting takeout. Condensation steamed off the road. Moisture in the air frosted Bud’s windshield and he did nothing to abate it. The highway on-ramp loomed ahead. That would be a surprise, thought Bud, if he left and never came back. Or perhaps if he just let go of the wheel, allowed the minivan to drift into oncoming traffic or for the highway’s steep shoulder. Let fate decide. How was that for spontaneity? Instead, fate had another idea. Bud found himself pulling into the parking lot of Olive or Twist.

He sat down on a ruddy barstool. A woman in her fifties with bitten nails raised an eyebrow in lieu of taking his order.

“Anything,” said Bud.

“We’re all out of Anything,” said the bartender.

Bud sighed. How entitled service workers had gotten since he was one himself. Wasn’t the customer always right?

“Whatever. The house special,” said Bud.

Thunder cracked outside. Finally, some rain. Bud wondered if his daughters needed picking up from any of their extracurriculars but concluded that, even in the rain, it would be safer for them to walk. Besides, they hadn’t called. They never called. He paid so much for three cell phone plans and yet they never called. The bartender returned with a dark, cloudy beer and a darker, cloudier shot.

“God’s Son,” said the bartender.

“Beer and a shot,” muttered Bud. “This isn’t very special.”

Bud sipped the beer and winced. It tasted like a sponge dipped in vinegar. He had to commend them on their authenticity.

“Is Jim Doherty in?” asked Bud.

“Haven’t seen him tonight,” said the bartender.

“You know he’s fucking my wife?” said Bud.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” said the bartender.

Bud took the shot. “Well, he hasn’t yet.”

The bartender pretended to clean a distant counter with a rag.

“Jim’s the big boss man around here?” Bud went on.

“Jim is my employer, yes,” said the bartender.

She spoke in what Bud assumed was a low-class British accent. Was this part of the job? He couldn’t imagine how someone from England landed in this town.

“Jim isn’t even British,” said Bud.

“Can’t all be,” said the bartender.

“Can I get another one of those?”

The bartender poured and passed Bud another shot.

“What is ‘WC’ anyway?” said Bud.

“Bathrooms,” said the bartender.

“Does it stand for wife cheater?”

“It stands for bathrooms.”

“Can I get another one of those?”

“No.”

When the bartender turned her back, Bud reached over the counter and refreshed his beer from the tap. Then filled his shot glass from his personal half-pint. With another raised eyebrow from the bartender to the bouncer, Bud was promptly thrown out of Olive or Twist. He wobbled through the parking lot, where he had accidentally left the minivan door wide open and saw that a raccoon now occupied the dashboard, its snout and gloved hands in a container of rancid pad thai.

Bud looked up at the rain. He left the raccoon to its meal. The marine layer set in as he continued on foot, a fog so opaque that he almost missed the sign from above for which he’d been praying. A billboard advertising a new mattress or insomnia medication or something. It depicted sheep leaping over the head of a young man resting contentedly. Bud considered the sign. It either meant Bud should take a bottle of sleeping pills or attend a Lost Lambs meeting. There was not a Lost Lambs meeting at this hour. He fished the brochure from his jacket. Call, it read, in the event of an emergency.

Bud banged on Miss Winkle’s front door, puncturing a fist hole through her screen. He took a guzzle of the half-pint.

“Oops,” said Bud.

“Shhh,” said Miss Winkle. “You’ll wake the whole town.”

“I’m drunk,” said Bud.

“I’ll say,” said Miss Winkle. She was wearing a matching pajama set and smelled like dryer balls. It seemed that she’d been reading by the light of a table lamp. A leather-bound book lay open on its face.

“Were you reading the Bible?”

“It’s a collection of fables,” said Miss Winkle. “I’m allowed to have a little fun too, you know.”

She hustled him inside. Plastic slipcovers protected her couch cushions. She was waging a war against decline.

“I’m lost,” said Bud. “I got away from the herd.”

“Flock,” said Miss Winkle.

“What?”

“Sheep flock. Not herd.”

“The wolves are coming for me!”

“Shhh,” said Miss Winkle, indicating toward the back of the small house. “Perry is sleeping.”

“I have jealousy with twin moons of rage and whatever.”

“You didn’t drive here, did you?”

“I left the car at the pub.”

“That’s almost three miles!”

“I barely noticed,” said Bud.

There was an awkward pause. Miss Winkle did not care for awkward pauses.

“I do like this part of town,” she said. “Brutal in a lovely way. All the postwar architecture. I am going to make you some tea.”

She was so maternal, Bud thought, and wise—aware of which architecture came after which war. The house appeared to be a one bedroom. Bud wondered where Miss Winkle slept, if she slept at all. For all he knew, she just wandered around each night doing good deeds, helping the sick and needy, giving orchids to the orchid-less. She put Bud on the sofa—creaking, straining, reticent to visitors—and sat next to him.

“No, we have to sit in a circle,” said Bud.

“There’s just two of us,” said Miss Winkle.

“Two people can’t be a circle?” asked Bud.

Miss Winkle shook her head.

“You have a Christmas tree.”

“Yes.”

“It’s April.”

“Perry likes it.”

The kettle whistled and Miss Winkle went to attend to it. She returned with two matching teacups, full to the brim.

“Hot,” she warned.

“Can I ask you something?” asked Bud.

“You don’t seem to suffer from inhibition.”

“Why did you name your daughter Perry?”

“It’s a nice name, don’t you think?”

“Yeah, but, your last name’s Winkle.”

“Yes?”

“So the kid’s name is—”

“I guess that never occurred to me.”

“That never occurred to—”

“Let’s do a happiness exercise,” said Miss Winkle.

Bud sipped the tea. Winced. “It’s hot!”

“Think of something that brings you joy,” said Miss Winkle. “One thing.”

Bud considered.

“Nothing comes to mind,” he said.

“You like music,” said Miss Winkle. “How about a band?”

Names of bands and lyrics traveled through Bud’s head, but nothing stayed long enough to pin down.

“I can’t think of anything.”

Miss Winkle nodded. “Sometimes inundation is the most effective form of erasure.”

“Mostly I’ve just had a lot to drink.”

“Music in general then, this makes you happy. The fact that there is music in the world, music that moves you. Music that swells and dips and speaks to people, it invigorates and galvanizes. Take this feeling, the way you feel about music, and hold it in your chest. Keep it there like a marble. Do you feel it?”

Bud felt his chest for the happiness marble. He poured the rest of his half-pint into the teacup. Miss Winkle gave a critical look. She was kind of pretty, thought Bud. Brutal in a lovely way. There fell another awkward pause and Miss Winkle did nothing to mitigate it.

“Do you ever get lonely?” asked Bud finally.

“Yes,” said Miss Winkle. “I suppose I do.”

The burden of their child’s malady had been too much for Perry’s father to bear. Everyone knew this. He left Miss Winkle long ago. Settled a town over with another woman with whom he had two healthy children. Perry knew nothing of her father save for his siggnature on the endorsement line of his child support checks.

Bud sighed and stared into his cup.

“Think about life as a fence,” said Miss Winkle. “And each time we transgress, each time we hurt one another, we must tap a nail into that fence. When we’re ready, we can pull those nails out of the fence. But even still, there will be holes.”

“Can the holes be fixed?” asked Bud. “Can they be patched?”

Miss Winkle shook her head. Bud’s shoulders sunk.

“But it’s alright,” said Miss Winkle. “The fence is still standing. The light can shine through.”

“I never fully know what you’re talking about,” said Bud.

“Now can I ask you something?” asked Miss Winkle.

“Yup,” said Bud.

“Do you consider us friends?”

Bud puffed out his cheeks. “More like a sponsor? Spiritual guide?”

Miss Winkle looked a little wounded.

“Sure,” Bud amended. “We’re friends.”

“I don’t have many friends,” said Miss Winkle. She let out a nervous laugh and then covered her mouth as though laughing was a sin. Aside from a few college and golf course buddies, Bud also did not have many friends these days.

“Me neither,” said Bud. “To new friends.”

They clinked teacups.

“Well,” said Miss Winkle, “how about that.”

The plastic slipcover squeaked beneath them. Bud cracked his neck and grimaced.

“Been sleeping in the car.”

Miss Winkle clucked her tongue. She circled around Bud and began to massage his neck, kneading the skin with strong, precise hands.

“How does this feel?” asked Miss Winkle.

“Um,” said Bud. “That feels nice.”

She migrated her hands down his spine. People spoke of knots in one’s back. Bud imagined the things he tied in Boy Scouts—clove hitch, bowline—trapped just beneath the skin. Finally Miss Winkle knelt and moved down to Bud’s feet. She did not appear scandalized by his wet, worn, and pilling socks, removing each by the toe and placing them gently aside like snake’s skin. She looked up at him as she rubbed. Her hair fell into her face.

“Three miles,” she said to Bud’s foot. “Poor thing.”

Then Bud caught her eyes, held her gaze for an extended moment, him so weak and weary and her so strong and doting. This is kindness, thought Bud.

Perhaps he was emboldened by the liquor when he reached in for a hug, pulling her back up to the sofa. They held each other tightly. Miss Winkle was tense at first but slowly relaxed in his arms. Bud felt as though he could fall asleep in their embrace. He nestled his face into her hair, the crux of her neck. They began to separate, faces level. Bud didn’t want it to end. He kissed her. Then pulled away, ashamed.

“Well, how about that,” said Miss Winkle quietly. As if to herself.

“I’m so sorry, Miss Winkle,” said Bud, flustered. “I don’t know what came over me.”

“Priscilla, please,” said Miss Winkle.

And then Miss Winkle kissed Bud, clumsily, repeatedly, on his chin and cheeks. Tea and liquor splashed from their mugs. He kissed her back. Their bodies knocked over a community of porcelain Hummels.

Bud could feel her trembling, as though an inner conflict were trying to make its way out. The situation was simultaneously wholesome and arousing. She had once been beautiful, thought Bud. Still was. Though “beautiful” seemed too small to contain her. Miss Winkle held multitudes. Her fence had no holes, it was whole, she was holy.

Instinctively, Bud began to toy with the drawstring of her pajama pants, then hesitated, assessing.

“Are you alright?” asked Bud.

“I’m rather conflicted,” said Miss Winkle. “You’re married.”

Bud pulled back a little. “You’re aware of my situation.”

“God’s not.”

“We never actually married in a church. Just a courthouse,” said Bud. “If that helps.”

“It does,” said Miss Winkle. “But there’s something else.”

“Hit me.”

“I haven’t … in a while.”

“Me neither.”

“Twelve years.”

“Oh, whoa. I mean, that’s okay. Unless you’re going for a record.”

“I’m not celibate,” Miss Winkle assured him. “I had just given up on the idea.”

This broke Bud’s heart and turned him on all at once. She looked at him, so wise yet so innocent. Her pajama blouse depicted Italian locales; little ruins, little gondolas, little Colosseums over her great breasts. Bud wondered if Priscilla Winkle had ever been to Italy. He wanted to take her there. He kissed her again, more vigorously this time. The plastic couch protested.

“I’m not beautiful,” she whispered.

“Yes, you are,” said Bud.

That was the gnature of surprises: they could not be anticipated. Catherine exercised with neurotic frequency, a regimen that exceeded health standards and became compulsory. She plied her face with costly creams, as age avoidant as Miss Winkle’s sofa. Miss Winkle was more lenient with her appearance. She did not fight gravity. Her slowing metabolism was evident. Bud liked her humanity. He cautiously slipped his hand beneath her pajama pants.

“How does this feel?”

“Oh, Bud,” said Miss Winkle. “Thank you!”

Thank you, Bud thought. Perhaps one day he would thank Catherine as well, would warm to the “arrangement” with an understanding that could only come through time. When a lamb strays, it’s usually lost to wolves, vulnerable without its flock. But sometimes, just sometimes, if it’s lucky, it finds a new one.

The dehydrated cedar balls had been in the town square for as long as Harper could remember. Each was about as large as a man’s wingspan in diameter. The installation was dognated by the Alabaster Harbor™ Association as a cultural contribution. But the artist who’d created the cedar balls didn’t understand the town’s environment and the cedar balls quickly became dens for termites. Large nests the size of piñatas grew from the sculptures. They were so infested that, from afar, the balls looked as though they were covered in television static. The extermignation attempts only seemed to inspire the insects to burrow deeper into the art. The termites soon rendered the town square’s grassy common areas uninhabitable to picnickers and Girl Scouts and teenage lovers and children’s birthday parties and local political rallies and Hobo Bahman. By some, it was called Termite Square. Then money was reallocated from fixing the church bells to have the art removed and the balls were to be lifted by crane onto truck beds and taken to a warehouse for sterilization. Harper Flynn was up in arms. Harper was up in arms because she believed that the cedar balls were not a generous gift from the Alabaster Harbor™ Association at all but a covert spy apparatus. Ever since she’d read her father’s work emails, Harper’s suspicion of the Harbor™ Association brewed on the back burner. Each ball she believed to be filled with cameras and recording devices, trained to listen for insurrection. Destroying the balls would eradicate all proof of her theory. If she followed this line of thinking a step further, it seemed fully possible that the Alabaster lackeys started the infestation when it came to light that she, Harper, was wise to their operation. So obviously Harper had to try to save the cedar balls.

“Why on earth,” asked Catherine, “would anyone want to spy on our town?”

“There’s something nefarious happening in the harbor, Mother, right under our noses. They have to make sure we remain complacent or there’ll be mutiny.”

Catherine smiled at her daughter. The first great conspirator to carry a lunch box. “Mutiny, huh.”

“Remain a sheep all your life. Keep your head in the sand.”

“You’re mixing metaphors, darling.”

“Whatever.”

“Here’s one for you: Pick your battles,” said Catherine.

To Harper, it was a peculiar turn of phrase. She was confident that this was not a proper military strategy. As a soldier, you didn’t choose your battles. They were something into which you were thrust.

The next afternoon, Harper was pulled out of class and walked to the Mother Superior’s office. She could do the walk blindfolded. Her peers in the hallway snickered and ooo’ed.

The Mother Superior’s office was grand. There was a paddle mounted on the wall, with which, it was rumored, she beat the naughty children. Its corresponding plaque read: Holy Sisters’ Paddleball Champion.

“Do you know why I called you in here, Miss Flynn?” asked the Mother Superior.

“No, ma’am.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“Yup.”

“I called you here to discuss your contribution to the eighth-grade free speech board.”

Harper pictured nuns playing paddleball, habits billowing in the wind, and stifled a laugh. Not that they wore habits anymore. Vatican II had made their attire much more versatile.

“Something amusing?” asked the Mother Superior.

“No, ma’am.”

“As I was saying, the free speech board. Olive Carlyle says she wants more healthy options in the vending machine. Soo Kim would like one free-dress day per month.”

“Groundbreaking,” said Harper. Olive Carlyle was such an abscess. So prim and proper she was ready to pop. Harper would like to pop her.

“Harper Flynn wrote: The Cedar Balls Are Watching You.”

Harper cracked a smile.

“Do you wish to expand on this sentiment?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Expand on this sentiment, Harper.”

“We’ve been living in a panopticon.” Harper propped up on her knees. “The cedar balls are a psyop created by the Harbor™ Association, spying on the general public for signs of rebellion. I’m trying to stop their demolition.”

“Yes, I’ve heard about your little crusade,” said the Mother Superior.

“I’m hosting a sit-in on Friday in the town square,” said Harper.

“Sacred Daughters does not condone the spreading of false information, and this claim is factually inaccurate.”

“I guess you’re right. It’s not really a square, the town square, is it? More oblong?”

“You’re seeding fear and distrust of the establishment in the community.”

“Maybe the community should fear and distrust the establishment.”

Harper stared into the Mother Superior’s face. It looked like an origami crane, the creases deep but meaningful.

“Can’t you just advocate for a free-dress day? Is this really the hill you want to die on?”

“People keep using these military idioms that I just don’t think are relevant. I assume this is an allusion to a soldier’s or army’s willingness to die on the grounds of significance rather than cost/benefit. The sentiment doesn’t apply here, as I plan to fight many more battles on many more hills.”

“I know you do, Harper. And the school does not wish to stifle your enthusiasm…”

Harper wore a crucifix around her neck on a thin gold chain that her grandmother had given her. She now used the crucifix to clean under her nails. She watched as the Mother Superior picked her battles.

“Please, keep your falsehoods off school forums.”

“Oh, so now you’re censoring the free speech board.”

“Harper, if you proceed with your sit-in, I will have no choice but to suspend you again.”

“I mean, you have a choice,” Harper ventured. “You’d be choosing to suspend me again.”

Harper was dismissed.

She spent the evening weighing the repercussions of another suspension versus the reward of exposing corporate evils. Like many martyrs before her, Harper knew what she had to do. She proceeded with her sit-in as planned.

Nobody joined Harper on Friday afternoon except for the church lady’s brain-damaged child, Perry. She brought two cheese sandwiches and a thermos of juice. Harper had flyers at the ready mapping out the conspiracy in layman’s terms. But she had no one to educate, because the town square—the town oblong—was empty.

She handed Perry a flyer.

“I’m not here for that,” said Perry.

“Oh,” said Harper, “then why are you here?”

“For the termites,” said Perry. “They will have to kill all the termites.”

“So?”

“Termites have complex nervous systems and feel pain.”

Perry seemed to be an authority on pain.

“Is that true?” asked Harper.

“Is what you’re saying true?” asked Perry.

“It is from my perspective,” said Harper. “Do you know what perspective means?”

“Perspective,” said Perry, “is the appearance of objects in respect to their relative distance.”

“That’s true,” said Harper.

Perry nodded, like of course it is.

“But perspective isn’t just what you see,” said Harper. “It’s what you plan to do about it.”

They sat in silence for a moment and Harper imagined that she could hear the insects feasting on the public art. She looked into the wood, and the wood looked back.

“Just because your daddy comes over at night,” said Perry, “does not mean you’re my sister.”

Very few things could distract Harper from her mission. This was one of them.

“I’m sorry,” said Harper, “what did you say?”

“Your daddy comes over at night,” said Perry. “He visits Mommy.”

“Are you sure?” asked Harper.

Perry adjusted her earmuffs. Her eyes vacated, entranced by something she alone could perceive. She ran off to find her mother.

The next day the dehydrated cedar balls were sterilized in the warehouse, quarantined, doused with insecticide, and trucked back to the city, where they were incinerated in a lumberyard. Harper’s sentence of suspension was sent in the mail.

“Kid,” said Bud.

“Please don’t do this,” said Harper.

“You’re leaving me no choice,” said Bud.

“You have a choice,” said Harper. “You’re choosing to send me to child prison in the wilderness.”

“It’s not a prison. It’s a camp.”

“Right, an internment camp.”

“It’s just a week,” said Bud. “The school needs to see that we’re taking this seriously.”

Bud and Harper sat on the porch beneath the teeth wind chime. Harper stared into the overgrown front lawn. This was the extent of the wilderness she desired. A shudder ran the length of her spine. Bud draped his jacket over her little shoulders.

“I really think something’s going on with the harbor,” said Harper.

“I know you do, Harper.”

Maybe, thought Harper, those who advocated for justice were only revered retrospectively. Maybe one day there would be a Harper statue in the town square. But not today. Today she was just a troubled kid.

“Hey, Dad?”

“Yes, Daughter.”

“Can I ask you something?”

“Floor is yours.”

“Are you sleeping with Miss Winkle?”

“We can’t believe you’re dating a soldier,” the Biddle twins, Abigail’s least favorite members of her friend group, had said. Millie Biddle had thought she had the most exotic love life, having dated Caleb, the only Jewish kid at the brother high school. But a soldier? That was way cooler.

“Has he ever killed anyone?” they asked in unison.

Abigail did not know how her paramour got his nickname. War Crimes Wes, or Weston Wyley, as a peek at his license revealed, was a man of few words. Abigail knew that Wes hailed from a landlocked state where his family tended corn or wheat or grain or something old-worldy. She knew that Wes joined the military young with a young soul and came out with an old one, and she knew little else. Instead of asking, she imbued their silences with meaning. It was the best part of a new relationship, when you could fill a library with what you didn’t know about another person. Pure potential.

The kids at school all watched in astonishment as Wes picked Abigail up each day in his truck. They’d make out in the driver’s seat, one long beltless bench. He’d suck her neck raw, leaving a galaxy of welts, and drive her along the coastline, windows down, her manicured hand out the window, supported by the breeze. Abigail detected, above the stench of fish and oil, that love was in the air.

“You need to eat more,” said Wes one afternoon, laying on blankets in his truck bed, and Abigail blushed as though accepting a compliment. School, church, tennis, her family—it all fell away in the moments they spent together in the spring’s weak sunlight.

He lifted her like a dumbbell.

“Who are the bad guys?” Abigail asked him.

“When you’re contracted,” said Wes, “it’s whoever the boss tells you.”

“But who’s your enemy?”

Wes didn’t know. The truth was, his greatest adversary was his own colon. Wes had an autoimmune disorder that targeted his bowels, his body closing in on itself at short range. Remembering those long nights of boot camp, splayed on a cot and clutching his swollen gut, sent Wes into a cold sweat. He could still conjure the smell of the porta-john simmering in the day’s heat. This long internal torture contributed to Wes’s silence.

Abigail straddled him, inching her school stockings down, the elastic straining at her knees. He grimaced.

“It’s me,” she cried. “You think I’m hideous.”

Sweet Abigail, Wes thought, who always smelled like honey and milk and copper, could never be hideous. He opened up to her about his gastrointestinal tumult.

“No,” said Wes. “My stomach’s not right.”

“Oh,” said Abigail. “Well, I want to take it slow anyway.”

Wes shrugged.

“Whatever you want,” he said. “You’re the boss now.”

Abigail was fascignated by his indifference to sex. He wasn’t like the other boys. He was a man. And real men could abstain, could resist her beauty and charm, for a while anyway. He drove her home to Side Street, where they reluctantly parted.

Abigail found ways to keep Wes close even when he was at work, she at school or engraving key chains. She set her phone’s clock to military time. She made Wes’s birthday her locker combignation. The boys at the brother school averted their eyes when she passed through their adjoining quad, afraid her new boyfriend would cut out their tongues and string them around his neck.

“You don’t even know his middle name,” the Biddle twins had barked reproachfully.

“That kind of stuff doesn’t matter,” said Abigail, “when you’re really in love.”

Finding shelter for their love had proved difficult. Abigail was not permitted to see Wes and therefore he was not welcome at the Flynn household. In order to visit Wes, Abigail would say she was playing tennis with Tibet, who would, if called upon, corroborate her story. Her sisters knew to cover for her if their parents asked, but often the cover was unnecessary; their parents didn’t seem concerned with where Abigail was or where she’d been. Preoccupied by their own troubles and Harper’s, there was nothing odd to them about a ten p.m. tennis lesson. Wes had a single room in a tenement building just outside the city—the last stop on the bus—which he shared with a roommate, a veteran called Marshall, who had long greasy hair and was missing the lower half of his left arm, from just below the elbow. Their room was divided insofar as it had been separated by a thin screen through which Abigail could hear each word of the reality television shows Marshall watched. Wes said that Marshall did some crazy shit in the war that he didn’t like to talk about. But when Marshall got drunk, which he did often, he talked about it ad nauseam. Marshall subsisted off food stamps and daily sandwiches from the Korean deli downstairs, which did not accept food stamps but the clerk made an exception. The clerk made him sandwiches with the deli’s leftovers—pickles and eggs and sweet mayonnaise. She made up rules for what Marshall could purchase. For example, he could buy produce or medicine but not booze or cheese cradles. Marshall never caught on, but Wes admired the clerk’s kindness, which was why when Abigail tried to shoplift bubble gum from the deli, Wes said: “Not here.”

They stole from everywhere else: magazines from Page Turner’s and coffee beans from Holy Roasters, some knickknack here or there from Aunt Tiques. They hopped the turnstile at the Vintage Theater while the teenage attendant was on his smoke break. During the Sunglass Sultan’s 50-percent-off sale, Abigail took a full 100 percent off her new aviators, which she wore even at night. Wes did not like breaking the law but it gave Abigail an adolescent rush. That and they were broke. Abigail did not make very much at the mall. The tech billionaire paid Wes well but Wes sent most of his earnings home to his family, a family Abigail learned to never ask about. She never asked about his past, didn’t press as to why the Korean deli was sacred. Wes offered little by way of explagnation.

One night, Wes offered to make Abigail dinner. He prepared their meal on a hot plate while Marshall and Abigail played cards. Marshall could fan the cards out with his toes.

“Do you have a girlfriend?” Abigail asked Marshall.

“Oh, I got a girl,” said Marshall. “Only the prettiest on this side of the planet.”

He rifled through a Velcro sports wallet, retrieving a creased photo of a Labrador.

“She’s lovely,” said Abigail.

They ate hot dogs and macaroni out of mismatched bowls. When Marshall went to bed, Abigail studied for finals and Wes studied her. She felt his eyes memorizing her face, the soft curve of her jaw, each baby hair.

Wes read over her shoulder.

“The function f represents the current total population of sand sharks off the coast of—”

“Cut it out!”

“Why are you learning about sand sharks?” asked Wes.

“To pass high school,” said Abigail, “to get into college.”

Abigail planned on taking a gap year after high school but, at the behest of her parents, had the vaguest ambitions of pursuing higher education. Somewhere. One day.

“Sand Shark University,” said Wes.

“Did you go to college?” asked Abigail.

Wes shook his head.

“Do you want to?” asked Abigail.

Wes shrugged.

“How many years will it take for the sand shark population (f) to be ten times larger?” asked Abigail.

“Nine,” said Wes.

“Did you do that in your head?” asked Abigail.

Wes shrugged.

“You should totally go to college,” said Abigail.

“You go to college to get a job,” said Wes. “I have a job.”

Wes worked each day at Alabaster Manor protecting the tech billionaire. When he got off early, Abigail waited for him at the library, staring at the painted cherubs on the ceiling. He didn’t talk about his job, but Abigail did not find this strange, because he didn’t talk much in general. While her classmates assumed she was dating a warlord, a tyrant, Abigail saw Wes’s sensitivity. She could tell by his vacant stare when he’d had too many drinks with Marshall and brought him water from the tap. He was gentle, affected by the world’s random cruelness. Wes’s bad moods were not dissimilar from his normal ones, but Abigail was discerning and would rub his back affectiognately when she surmised that he had a rough day. She was inching her way into the impenetrable heart of War Crimes Wes.

Then, toward the end of April, about a month into their relationship, something changed, sudden and inexplicable. Abigail adored being the sole recipient of Wes’s attention, so the difference was stark and jarring when it split. He began working later, leaving Abigail waiting on the school’s front steps. He’d text a brief apology but never an explagnation. The door she had worked so hard to wedge open was pulling shut.

“Arcade calling?” she texted Wes.

“?”

“Sry. I put on fake nails. Are you coming?*”

Abigail already knew what his response said before she opened it. Wes could not pick Abigail up from school that day. He would be working late, and then he would be tired, and then working again early in the morning.

“Can’t today.”

“Why?”

“Stomach.”

“I know it’s not your hammock.”

“?”

“Stomach***”

“I’m sorry. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Abigail sat on the school steps and shined her shoe buckles with some spit on the corner of her sleeve. She saw the tandem shadows of the Biddle twins approaching. Millie and Maxine were embroidered on their backpacks, as though anyone needed help delineating them, Abigail thought. Maxine was clearly the prettier of the two.

“Where’s your boyfriend?” they asked.

“He’s not coming today,” said Abigail.

“Why?” they asked.

“He has a stomachache,” said Abigail.

“Your soldier boyfriend,” said Millie Biddle, “isn’t picking you up because his tummy hurts?”

“Shut up, Millie,” said Abigail.

The twin sensed a power shift in her favor, rising from her widely understood social desiggnation.

“What happens if he gets a paper cut?” said Millie. “He goes on convalescent leave?”

“I said shut up, Millie,” said Abigail.

Some fellow girls on the steps stole glances at them, sensing the tension. Abigail barely looked up from her shoe. The buckle remained discouragingly dull. Her tone stayed even and calm.

“Or maybe he’s lying,” said Millie.

Maxine made a face at her sister. The face said stop goading Abigail Flynn, the most popular girl in school, the prettiest girl in town. Abigail Flynn, who once dated our art teacher and is now dating a soldier.

“Maybe he’s with another girl,” said Millie.

There was an inaudible gasp from all those within earshot. Abigail looked up from her shoe and stared at Millie Biddle. She raised an eyebrow. It dared the twin to continue down this path.

“Wait,” said Millie. “I guess your family is into that sort of thing, right?”

Abigail stood up from the steps, dusted down her skirt politely, then punched Millie Biddle in the face. The blow made a disconcerting little noise as cartilage gave way to knuckle. Millie clasped her face, a brilliant rush of blood flowing from behind her hands and onto the white of her uniform’s poplin button-down. Abigail had not intended to hit Millie that hard, she’d later explain to the Mother Superior. She hadn’t intended to hit Millie at all, really, but she had twice asked the twin to shut up. It was an unfortugnate angle, the punch. Maybe something Abigail gleaned from the self-defense unit each sophomore girl was required to take. Hitting properly was built into the Sacred Daughters curriculum. Millie Biddle had two black eyes and a nasal bolster for a month, solidifying her, thought Abigail, as the less pretty twin.

Wes needed another set of eyes. His boss was a strange man. This was to be expected of the outstandingly rich. It was not uncommon for the tech billionaire to spend what amounted to more than Wes’s life savings on a meal of honey-coated grasshoppers, or to bid on a diplodactyl fossil at auction, or to commission a session of infrared antiaging treatment at the “light doctor,” or to construct an in-house zero gravity machine coined his Thinking Chamber. Wes did not have a doctor, light or dark. Lately though, since the start of spring, Paul Alabaster’s behavior was even less predictable—nervous yet also, Wes concluded, rather giddy. He checked his watch more frequently and smiled when he passed by, even struck up idle chitchat, which did not feel directed to Wes exactly but more at him, through him—“not much rain this season, no siree”—and Mr. Alabaster even laughed audibly to himself, a laugh both haunting and boyish. He appeared to be preparing to throw another party, the details of which fell to a girl who wore shapeless dresses and glided through the property as though skating over a pond. The girl’s job description was not apparently clear to Wes, though Mr. Alabaster referred to her once as his girl Friday, which struck Wes as odd since she also worked Monday through Thursday, but he never asked questions. He just guarded the manor. The girl went about overseeing the background checks of the waitstaff and valet for the upcoming party, ordered candles made by monks, sent for ice from the Arctic and linens from the equator, which were woven by silkworms or the women who bred them. And the invitations—it was all the girl worried about. How each was made by a Nordic calligrapher and printed on handmade antique paper aged like wine. It was all strange. But normal rich person strange. Nothing to blatantly trigger Wes’s military-trained, highly attuned sense of suspicion.

Work continued as per usual. Wes spent time admiring the manor’s vast collection of art, tapestry, and all the trappings of luxury living. It lulled him into a sort of trance, this abundance. One evening, toward the end of his patrol, Wes found Paul Alabaster’s girl Friday in one of the solariums, curled up and weeping over a shoebox-size package. Wes knelt beside her sympathetically, unsure to what extent their interacting might break the many NDAs he signed upon taking the position.

“It’s all ruined,” cried the girl.

“No, it’s not,” said Wes.

Wes did not know what the girl was referring to, so his gestures of comfort were empty. It very well could be all ruined. But, in Wes’s experiences, it usually wasn’t.

“The ink,” she cried. “It’s the wrong color.”

She unlatched the box and opened it.

“It’s midnight. It’s supposed to be raven.”

Wes glanced at the party invitations, the most beautiful parcels he’d ever seen, each enveloped and labeled in playful black script.

“He’ll notice, you know,” said the girl.

Wes knew. He knew Paul Alabaster would, if only for the sake of having a task carried out exactly as he’d commanded; he’d have the beautiful invitations destroyed and replaced with nearly identical ones. The girl shook as she cried and Wes patted her head with one hand, wistfully thumbing through the stack of parchment with the other. The names of Paul Alabaster’s guests all seemed to be men. Men with names that sounded like countries, like old professions. And then, there in the solarium, things went from normal strange to strange strange. Among the strong male names elegantly penned onto the envelopes, one stopped him cold:

Abigail Flynn

Now this triggered Wes’s military-trained, highly attuned sense of suspicion. Seeing Wes linger on and react to the invitation, the girl snatched the box back. Her eyes widened.

“Please,” she said. “You saw nothing here.”

She scurried away. But Wes had seen something here. He considered the possibility that his teenage girlfriend had forgotten to mention that she’d struck a casual friendship with the reclusive tech billionaire. It seemed unlikely.

Wes needed another set of eyes.

“I know a guy,” said Marshall.

Back at home that night, Marshall told Wes about a man who had, or could get, everything. A green card. A catalytic converter. An orangutan.

“I need a PI,” said Wes.

“This guy has everything,” repeated Marshall. “Knows everything too. He’s like a clairvoyant, this guy.”

Marshall handed Wes a card from his sports wallet. The card was minimal, just a phone number and a note: Don’t call after 7:30 p.m.

“What happens after seven thirty?” asked Wes.

“He’s got kids,” Marshall said. “Bedtime.”

Wes texted Abigail that he would not be able to pick her up from school. She sent a colon and a left parenthesis in response. His heart broke seeing this combignation of punctuation. He never wanted to make Abigail sad. He ached to turn off the highway at her town, pull up outside Sacred Daughters, and wait for her to appear through the throng of schoolgirls. Instead, Wes met the man who had everything at Chicken King after work.

“What’s good here?” asked the man.

“Chicken,” said Wes.

The man was short and bald and unremarkable save for his eyes, which were two different colors. They made him look wild and unfocused. Though it was not raining nor had rain been predicted—the rainy season exceptionally, concerningly minimal this year—the man wore a rain slicker and rain boots and carried a fat briefcase. He carried it gingerly, not like one carried a briefcase, but like one carried a baby. The man who had everything ordered a four-piece chicken meal.

“You’re not gettin’ anything?” asked the man. “It makes me uncomfortable to be the only one eating.”

“Stomach’s not right,” said Wes.

Wes watched the man polish his meal to the literal bone, leaving a graveyard on the table. He did not seem uncomfortable at all, Wes thought, observing the man lick the grease from his fingers. Wes couldn’t place the man’s accent. It had a contrived twang. He fell in and out of it.

“Let’s get down to it then,” said the man.

He set the briefcase on the table and opened it. Wes glanced inside: clear, water-filled sacks tied at the top containing round, spiky fish.

“Five hundred for one, twelve hundred for three,” said the man. “That’s the best deal you’ll get, so don’t waste my time bargaining.”

The fish eyed Wes from their bags. Mouths in Os.

“There’s been a misunderstanding,” said Wes. “I need some information on somebody.”

“No fish?”

“No fish.”

“No fish, he says,” repeated the man. He shut his briefcase and drummed his fingers on its gravelly leather. “So, who we lookin’ into then?”

“My boss.”

“Trouble, trouble.”

“I need some information.”

“And who, pray tell, is your boss?”

“Paul Alabaster,” said Wes.

The man’s floating eyes leaped to attention. “You want intel on Paul Alabaster?”

Wes nodded.

“The man’s more mysterious than God.”

Wes nodded.

“You’re messin’ with me, right?”

Wes shook his head.

“Hell, he invents security systems for a living. You want info on that guy?”

“I thought you could get anything,” said Wes.

“Course,” said the man. “But, damn, you sure you don’t just want a fish? The venom in their spikes creates a high you never felt before, my friend.”

“I’m willing to pay,” said Wes.

“That’s a given, the payment.”

“Whatever it takes,” said Wes.

“Whatever it takes, he says,” repeated the man. “You’re goin’ up against an Alabaster. No wonder your stomach hurts. Might I ask why?”

The man cast his arm casually atop the booth, like he was cradling an invisible date. Wes stayed stoic as always.

“He’s acting funny,” said Wes.

“He’s a capital-B Billionaire,” said the man. “Course he acts funny. No one with that kinda dough is totally right in the head.”

“Funnier than usual.”

“This is about a girl, isn’t it?”

Wes stared at the man. Nothing about him struck Wes as clairvoyant. The LEDs flickered, casting eerie shadows on the linoleum of Chicken King.

The man registered the silence as his answer. “These are the upper echelons of society we’re talkin’ about. A little tax fraud here, an insurance scheme there, that’s all pretty standard. I get the sense you’re lookin’ for somethin’, how should I put this, on a larger scale.”

Wes nodded.

“You already know how this goes,” the man went on. “It’s like a scary movie, right? If you go down to the basement, sure, you’ll find somethin’ horrible and it’ll probably tear your head off, but if you don’t go down to the basement, well then, you got a different kinda movie. A nice movie.”

Wes’s gut bristled. He gritted his teeth.

“No need to get upset, friend. I’ll take your money. All I’m sayin’ is that it’s usually not worth goin’ down into that basement, in my humble opinion.”

Wes picked at the table’s peeling shellac. Dirt had accumulated under his nails.

“You don’t seem like a frivolous guy, you sure you—”

“I’m sure,” said Wes.

The man clasped his hands in front of him.

“Alright, he’s sure.” The man nodded to the chicken bones. “I charge for incidentals.”

Wes left cash on the counter.

“Right, then,” said the man. “I look forward to workin’ with you, Mr.…”

“Wes,” said Wes.

“Alright, I look forward to workin’ with you, Mr. Wes.”

Then the man who had everything put up his hood and left Wes in Chicken King. As Wes walked through the parking lot, it started to pour. Buckets, a forceful spring shower. The sky betrayed nothing—cloudless, until the storm moved in like a covert mission. Pedestrians ran for cover, sheltered under newspapers and shop awnings. The gutters flooded, cans and bottles rafting atop the stream. Water sloshed in Wes’s truck bed as he drove home. A drenched Abigail waited on his doorstep. He rushed to her with his jacket overhead like a tarp and escorted her inside.

“I’m sorry I didn’t pick you up from school,” said Wes. His voice echoed in the bleak concrete lobby of his tenement building.

“I didn’t have school today,” said Abigail.

“Is it a holiday?” asked Wes.

“No,” said Abigail. “I didn’t have school today because I’m suspended.”

“Why are you suspended?” asked Wes.

“Because I punched Millie Biddle,” said Abigail.

Wes shook his head.

“I don’t mean to be dramatic,” said Abigail, “but if you don’t tell me what’s going on I am going to kill myself.”

Wes stifled a laugh. Her negotiation tactics were novel, holding herself hostage, weaponizing her opponent’s love—did he love Abigail? It had only been a month. But of course he did, thought Wes, he had from the start.

“Millie says you’re having an affair,” said Abigail.

“Don’t listen to silly little girls,” said Wes.

Inside the apartment Marshall was watching his soap on the portable. His sleeve was tied off over his missing arm. Towels and T-shirts had been jammed into the corners of the room.

“Some flooding,” said Marshall.

“Tell me,” Abigail pressed. Wes was significantly taller than her, even when she shifted to the balls of her feet. As his hair grew out, her soldier looked younger, more boyish.

“I have to protect you,” said Wes. “It’s my job.”

“So, you’re ignoring me to protect me?”

Wes nodded.

Having overheard many a standoff between her parents, Abigail had learned that no good could come of digging her heels in. She conceded. Softened.

“I like your hair like that,” she said.

“It’s too long,” said Wes.

He went to the bathroom to fetch more towels. Marshall eyed her hand, wrapped in gauze.

“I punched someone,” Abigail told Marshall.

“Attagirl,” said Marshall.

“Let’s get you home.” Wes draped Abigail in a towel. “It’s a school night.”

“I’m suspended,” Abigail repeated.

All the same, Wes drove her back to town. They sat quietly, listening to the rain, the radio. The criminals are still at large, said the radio. Thank you for your service, said Wes’s key chain. As they approached her cul-de-sac, Abigail pivoted to face Wes, her eyes wide and glassy. She took a deep breath, like she did before a lap across the community pool.

“IthinkIloveyou,” said Abigail. It came out as one word.

“What?” asked Wes. He’d heard her fine.

“I said I think I love you.”

Wes smiled.

Then he grimaced.

“What’s wrong?” asked Abigail.

“Stomachache,” said Wes.

The Lost Lambs met in the church every Monday and Friday, except for Memorial Day, when they met on Tuesday. Miss Winkle liked the meetings to bookend the week. She had no formal experience certifying her in leading others. She felt her life as a Christian, her years of dedication and servitude, were qualification enough. Many great vanguards were not professionally trained as such, and though only radicals and cult leaders were coming to mind at the moment, she knew this to be true.

Her life was full. In her spare time, outside of parenting and her parenting group for parents of disabled children and Lost Lambs and church and church-related functions and heading the planning committee for church-related functions, Miss Winkle cared for the orchids at the nursery. She loved the finicky little things, which demanded conditions to be just so or they’d simply up and die. She had to respect it.

Miss Winkle listened intently each week as her lambs lamented the trials of their lives and offered a prescriptive verse when she thought it relevant. Miss Ansel with the vitiligo abused her prescription medication. Kimble was downright convinced that the local government was funneling chemicals into his tap water to elicit homosexual inclignation.

“Why,” asked Miss Winkle patiently, “do you think the government wants you to be gay?”

“Hell if I know,” said Kimble, “but I wasn’t like this before.”

Miss Winkle knew that sometimes the lambs could be advised but sometimes they had to find their own way, just as she had. When Perry was born, she accepted the child’s illness simply as another divine test. Same too when her husband left. She took it in stride. The Lord giveth and He taketh away. She was kind and civil to her flock but kept a safe distance emotionally. Getting close made it difficult when they left, graduated, migrated on, which they always did. The lambs did not stay lost forever, if she did her job right. She was the only permanent member. So she avoided deep, personal involvement in the lives of the lambs. Until Bud Flynn came along.

When it came to Bud, there were two voices in Miss Winkle’s ears—one of an angel and one of a, well, perhaps not a devil, but definitely one that was a little more fast and loose with the rules. The voice of the angel told her that Bud was married and breaking the marriage oath was a deadly sin. A commandment, in fact. There were only ten of them. How hard was it to follow ten rules? And while, sure, Bud and his wife were only married by law and not in the eyes of God, he had still made a vow, a vow he and Miss Winkle were breaking, frequently, multiple times now, in the back of his car and on her sofa and once in a matinee at the Vintage Theater. Whether made to a priest or a clerical worker, a vow was still a vow, and this fact wracked Miss Winkle with guilt. How could she lead her lambs by example when she herself was not acting in good faith? She was breaking the rules—God’s and her own. She wasn’t a rule breaker. Why start now? Because, plain and simple, it made her happy. Sublimely, giddily, irrationally buoyant. A pure, absolute joy that revitalized her, settled into her bones, carried her through the days. The other voice in her ear, the more modern and lenient one, told Miss Winkle that happiness of this caliber was rare, finite, and not to be squandered.

Miss Winkle was no stranger to adversity so she took this new joy with healthy skepticism. Surely God would taketh away Bud as He had her last husband and her figure and that discontinued brand of milk chocolate she adored. Now they were mixing milk and dark chocolate, asserting that Bitter Makes It Better. Nothing had ever struck Miss Winkle as less true. In life’s pervasive bitterness, one was lucky to receive a moment of milk.

In the weeks that followed their first dalliance, Bud brought over dinners and tactile toys for Perry and shared with Priscilla anecdotes from his workday. He’d awakened something in her that had been long buried. She put rollers in her hair and bought a fragrance from the department store counter. She found herself humming as she prepared meals. Surely Miss Winkle’s happiness would not last, and when Bud left she would take it in stride, but Miss Winkle savored this iota of sweetness. She watched affectiognately when he fell asleep on her sofa, the rise and fall of his breath, and thought maybe the world wasn’t so cruel after all, if the world brought her Bud Flynn.

On a lovely late April afternoon, Miss Winkle arrived for her Lost Lambs meeting to find the church covered in a red-and-yellow-striped tarp. It looked like a fun house. A sign was tacked on the front—not even lamignated, she noted—explaining ALL HOLY PROGRAMMING POSTPONED DUE TO FUMIGATION. Miss Winkle gave a little huff. It was said that if one wanted to make God laugh, one should make plans. And while Miss Winkle did not fancy herself any kind of divine comedian, plans she had. Where would the lambs meet now? They were making such headway on Stella’s eating disorder, on Billy’s sex addiction. She took out her cell phone and called Father Andrew’s direct line, the number he’d instructed her only to use in the event of a major emergency occurring in or around the church, such as a fire or flood or toxic gas leak.

“Good afternoon, Miss Winkle?”

“It certainly isn’t.”

“Is there a major emergency occurring in or around the church?”

“Yes, of sorts…”

“A major emergency such as a fire, flood, or toxic gas leak?”

“Well—”

“Is there a fire, flood, or toxic gas leak in or around the church?”

“No, but—”

“Please don’t abuse the emergency number, Miss Winkle.”

Miss Winkle gathered herself. She glared at the cell phone. Never had she met a priest with a worse attitude.

“But, Father, there’s something going on with the church.”

“It’s being fumigated.”

“Well, that’s just unacceptable!”

“Did you read the sign on the door?”

“I don’t see any sign on the door.”

“There is a sign on the door.”

“Perhaps it blew away. Did you remember to laminate it? You should always laminate important notices.”

“The church will resume regular programming tomorrow.”

Miss Winkle stamped her foot. The frustration this man of the cloth could evoke in her was downright childlike. No one can make you feel anything, she told herself.

“But my meeting, Father,” she proceeded, straining to remain chipper. “My meeting is today. Not tomorrow. Lost Lambs meet every Monday and Friday, except for Memorial Day, when we meet on Tuesday. It has always been this way and will always be this way. These are very fragile people, Father. They are accustomed to their schedule. For some, it’s all they have.”

There came a silence from the cell phone. Miss Winkle thought she detected a sigh.

“Perhaps you could host today’s meeting in any number of the town’s other public recreational areas, such as the square or the music bowl or the youth center.”

“No, no, no.” She was losing her cool. “Lost Lambs doesn’t meet at the park or the music bowl or the youth center. We meet at the church. We circle our chairs. We say the invocation and we free-speak for one hour and thirty minutes, then socialize for fifteen minutes over libations.”

Under her arm, Miss Winkle carried a tub of ham salad.

“This is an instance,” said Father Andrew, “where I must encourage, no, insist upon your flexibility.”

“The garden,” said Miss Winkle to the cell phone. “That’s my final offer.”

“This is not a negotiation.”

“I’m feeling a bit like Mary,” said Miss Winkle. “No room at the inn.”

“The ‘inn’ is being pumped with—”

“Chemicals,” said Miss Winkle, regaining her stride. “Which means the church was in or around toxic gas, which constitutes a major emergency, which warrants this phone call.”

Another pause, another sigh, more audible this time.

“Please clean up after yourselves,” said Father Andrew.

“And after today, the gnats will be gone?”

“Yes,” said Father Andrew. “After today, the gnats will be gone.”

He ended the call.

Miss Winkle wiggled her fingers at the advancing lambs and led them into the garden. It was a nice change of pace, she had to admit, meeting among the budding greenery, beneath the broken church bells. The roses and the birdbath. Bud was absent due to some corporate business engagement. This would make a fine anecdote to tell him later. Lambs in the garden.

“We’re going to do something new today,” said Miss Winkle.

The group stared at her vacantly.

“Oh, come on, don’t be so sheepish.”

She passed the ham salad clockwise. Kimble spat into the dirt.

After the meeting, Miss Winkle collected Perry from childcare. The nun handed her Perry’s drawings from the day, concentric circles, dark and haunting, crayon mashed against legal pad and into oblivion.

“So creative,” Miss Winkle remarked.

The nun only stared at her with pity.

As they drove home, Miss Winkle marveled at how the days had gotten longer. Another blessed hour of sun.

“Why don’t you tell me about your drawings?” asked Miss Winkle.

“What about them?” asked Perry.

“What are they?”

“The inside of my throat.”

Perry fiddled with the car radio.

“How about grilled cheese for dinner,” asked Miss Winkle, “and fresh tomato soup?”

It was a rhetorical suggestion. Grilled cheese and fresh tomato soup was all that Perry ate lately. Sometimes a chicken nugget, if it was shaped like the right dinosaur.

Perry pulled down her earmuffs and wore them around her neck.

“Something bad is going to happen,” said Perry matter- of-factly.

“Why would you say that?” asked Miss Winkle. “Nothing bad is going to happen, dear.”

“Something bad is going to happen soon.”

This didn’t seem to concern Perry. She was simply conveying the information to the relevant parties.

Miss Winkle caught a glimpse of herself in the rearview mirror and shuddered. Wrinkles spread from the corners of her eyes like advancing root systems. How could she tell her daughter that something bad happened to everyone, eventually? Confessing these realities was what she found most difficult about being a parent. If only she could tend Perry like an orchid, keep her warm and safe forever and ever.

“Listen to me,” said Miss Winkle. “Everything is going to be alright, darling girl.”

Perry shrugged like don’t say I didn’t warn you.

“You don’t need to think those scary thoughts,” said Miss Winkle.

She stroked her daughter’s hair with her non-driving hand.

“You don’t believe me because I’m retarded.”

“No, I don’t believe you because you’re eleven.”

“I know something bad is going to happen.”

“How do you know?”

Perry settled on the same radio station she always did, which wasn’t a station at all but a dead zone playing only static. Miss Winkle inwardly assured herself that this wasn’t a satanic tendency.

The child gazed out the window listening to the static.

“What’s that over the church?” she asked.

“They’re tenting for the gnats,” said Miss Winkle. As soon as the words left her mouth, she wished she could return them. Perry’s eyes doubled in size.

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” said Miss Winkle.

Perry started to scream.

Miss Winkle dodged oncoming traffic as she tried to pull over. They had only just gotten through the termite extermignation. Nights of wailing and weeping until neighbors made noise complaints. Seeing her child hurting, however irrationally, decimated Miss Winkle. She’d save every gnat and termite on earth to ease Perry’s pain.

Headlights sped by. Getting the townspeople to adhere to speed limits, thought Miss Winkle, was a battle for another day. Safely parked on the road’s shoulder, she reached over the cup holder and grabbed Perry’s hands. The screaming persisted.

“I’m a gnat,” sobbed Perry.

“You are not a gnat,” assured Miss Winkle.

“It hurts,” she cried.

Miss Winkle wiped Perry’s eyes to no avail. They were faucets.

“Make them stop,” she cried.

“I can’t, darling girl.”

Perry bawled. Her breathing quickened and her lips trembled as she choked down each sob. Miss Winkle went around to the passenger door and took her daughter in her arms. The car chirped at them to buckle their seat belts.

“You are not a gnat,” she whispered. “You are not a gnat. You are not a gnat.”

Eventually, the crying began to subside into sniffling, then a quiet whimper. Perhaps Perry was right. Who were they to play God? To alter an ecosystem for the sake of minor convenience? The gnats had just as much a right to be there as humans did. Biblically, insects were sent as punishment, a plague to endure and suffer, not annihilate with a circus tent. Maybe the whole town should be mourning the gnats. Why was the burden on Perry alone? The children, thought Miss Winkle, they’re onto something. Closer to the truth somehow. Could still see what the grown-ups had lost sight of. But Priscilla Winkle did know one thing for certain, because she’d make sure it was so until her last dying breath:

“Nothing bad is going to happen to you,” she said.

Harper Flynn felt she had gotten too close to the truth and for that she must suffer. Saint Peter’s Nature and Wilderness Retreat was a weeklong intensive program for troubled youth. Still, a “retreat” nominally implied beds, Harper figured, if not cabins, if not a full-service spa. Zip-lining. Tennis. Water sports. Internet access. A mess hall with a taxidermied deer head. Harper had come up with that imagery on her own. The camp’s brochure was ambiguous enough as not to suggest otherwise. Saint Peter’s Nature and Wilderness Retreat did not have a spa. As the bus pulled onto the freeway a counselor, who more closely resembled a prison guard, with hair cropped like a boy, came around with a lockbox to collect cell phones. There was no singing of bus songs or playing of MASH or braiding of hair. The girl next to Harper picked at an infected nose ring while they watched civilized society disappear into the distance. They passed mesas and billboards for Mormon meetinghouses. Billboards objecting to domestic violence and advertising casino buffets. An hour into the trip, one girl with fraying dreadlocks attempted an escape at a gas station rest stop. The others watched from the windows as she was detained by the counselors and returned to the bus.

They drove up up up to where mountain met sky. Where heaven met purgatory. Harper was handed a backpack of petrified meat to carry, four rods, and a sheet of fitted canvas.

“Where is my duffel bag?” asked Harper.

“We start with nothing,” said the short-haired counselor. “Your belongings are a luxury that you can earn back with good behavior. But we start with nothing.”

At Nature, bug spray was a luxury. Fresh underwear was a luxury. Razors, mouth guards, and combs were all luxuries. Books that were not considered religious texts were a luxury, as were lanterns by which to read—luxuries Harper had not earned. Luxuries were earned in one of two ways: intensive manual labor or sincere vulnerability.

The nature of Nature was revealed over the coming days. Answers were a luxury. The group was backpacking, but to where and for how long was unclear. The days were so exhausting that Harper started to understand the program’s efficacy. The deprivation of food and sleep stifled the urge for lying or stealing, for starting fires—luxury fires, not the kind for warmth and cooking; those fires were encouraged. Harper waded through freezing water with the other delinquent tweens. She walked miles in thick heat.

At night, the counselors held court around a fire. Harper scanned her fellow troublemakers and wondered how close to the truth they’d all gotten. The girls were encouraged to speak, tell their tales of neglect, disordered eating, sexual assault. At campfire, the girls were lined up, blindfolded, and made to admit their greatest fears.

“My greatest fear,” said Harper, “is having my phone taken away and being sent to wander the woods.”

The short-haired counselor asked Harper why she was at Nature.

“Because I know too much,” said Harper.

“Can you elaborate?” asked the counselor.

“My family is being watched by a secret cabal of billionaires.”

This did not earn Harper any luxuries.

One by one the girls grew tired and docile, their spirits broken. Their nose rings healed. They learned to fish. They foraged mushrooms and berries. They pretended to cry at campfire to earn dental floss.

Harper was strong. The other girls missed things that Harper did not miss. They missed makeup. They missed shaving their legs and plucking their eyebrows. They missed various boys and friends and shopping centers. They carved their crushes’ initials into trees. Harper missed the nuns at Sacred Daughters. Their punishments seemed quaint: go sit in the corner, write the Lord’s Prayer on the chalkboard. She missed detention. She missed the internet and the cold screen of her phone. She missed the way her street looked at night and the muffled sound of her mother watching television in an adjacent room.

Harper decided that she would have to participate in order to survive Nature. At campfire, again the counselor asked Harper why she was there.

“My parents are weird,” said Harper.

“We try not to use words like ‘weird’ here,” said the counselor. “Can you be more specific?”

“Yeah, um, my mom’s dating our neighbor and my dad’s dating the church lady who runs his self-help group.”

The group stared at Harper.

“That is pretty weird,” said the nose ring girl.

“To be fully transparent,” Harper went on, “I was getting into trouble before all that, but I’m sure the events of this year have exacerbated my petulance.”

“How does it all make you feel?” asked the counselor.

Harper considered.

“Like my parents will split up and my life will change,” she said.

“Change is scary,” said the counselor. “Maybe change is one of your fears.”

“Maybe,” said Harper.

That earned Harper a dehydrated brownie. It was the best thing she had ever tasted.

The next morning, Harper awoke at dawn in a little pool of blood. She quickly ran to wash her underwear in the river. For the first time in her life, she longed for her mother.

She went about her day feeling strange. Harper felt like crying when she gutted a salmon and found eggs in its belly. She did not cry. But there was a tightness in her throat, a river behind her ears.

Another camper had earned a pink compact for good behavior. When Harper borrowed it to start a fire she caught her own eye in the mirror. She’d gained new freckles and lost some baby fat, which brought her cheekbones to prominence. The girl looking back was pretty.

The last night of Nature, campfire blazing, Harper was asked a final time why she was there.

Harper shrugged. “I guess I didn’t know as much as I thought.”

On the bus home, she studied herself in the window’s reflection. Harper picked at a scab on her knee until she drew blood. She wiped the blood across her lips, reddening them.

“Our rock star has arrived!” said Miss Winkle, seeing Bud’s guitar case.

“No, it’s actually a shotgun. I was thinking I’d just kill us all.”

“No homicide jokes at LL, Bud.”

Miss Winkle gathered her lambs.

“Kimble, how’s that eye, buddy?” said Bud.

Kimble grunted.

He wasn’t into all the religious stuff at first, but Miss Winkle advocated for its importance. She told Bud that the spiritual part of Lost Lambs was like the wet part of the ocean. It was intrinsic. So Bud was reintroduced to Christian values and, lo and behold, his life was changing for the better.

“Some housekeeping before we begin. Don’t forget the Save the Seals beach clean this Saturday,” Miss Winkle said in her announcement voice.

“I ain’t cleaning no beach,” said Kimble.

“That’s your right,” said Miss Winkle. “And just a reminder that the church is accepting ongoing donations to fix the bells.”

A collection basket circulated.

“Moving on,” said Miss Winkle. “We are going to try something new today.”

They tried something new every session.

She handed blank notebooks around the circle.

“It’s a creative writing exercise. I want you to invent a world, similar to your own but with no people or places that exist as you know them. They may be analogous to reality but must come strictly from your imagination. For example, in your world Mango Rooney’s might be called Sylvester Strawberry, and so on. This is an exercise in control, you decide everything about this world. In this world, you are—”

“God,” said Kimble.

“Well, no, that would be blasphemy, but in this world you’re the boss. Everyone got it?”

“So I can make everyone, say, perish in a fire then?” said the tattooed man in the dirty overalls.

“It’s your world,” said Miss Winkle. “If that is what you wish to do with your absolute authority, then so shall it be.”

“Can I give everyone fish gills?” asked the divorcée.

“You certainly may,” said Miss Winkle.

“Can I give the me character millions of dollars?” asked the teenager.

“Of course,” said Miss Winkle.

“Can I take away their pain?” asked Miss Ansel with the strange skin pigmentation. “Like, can I make it so my people do not feel pain the way that we do?”

“Yes.” Miss Winkle smiled. “Yes, you can.”

The circle seemed to collectively approve of the assignment.

“Now,” said Miss Winkle, “a special treat from our newest member.”

The circle turned to Bud.

“It’s been a while,” said Bud. He had not played guitar since the band broke up in his early twenties, except a few lullabies he strummed to his girls. They were a harsher crowd than most.

“So,” said Bud. “My mother was crazy religious—”

“Let’s not use ‘crazy’ as a pejorative, please,” Miss Winkle interjected.

“Right, okay, um, my mother was a batshit-insane devout lunatic who’d pray for my mortal soul if I ate store-bought peanut butter,” said Bud. “So I picked up a few hymns in my youth.”

He started playing before he could be interrupted again. The adage like riding a bike came to mind, but Bud doubted he’d hold his own on a bicycle these days. He instructed the group to sing along if they were familiar. Miss Winkle winked at Bud. He’d call her later, he decided. He’d make that beach sparkle. His song went like this:

Lord, thou came from up above

To bless me with thy holy love

Thou help me even when I stray

That is just thy holy way

No matter what thy will commands

Thou feed me from thy holy hands

And when I consume the flesh of thee

Thou share that holiness with me

Abigail, Louise, and Harper Flynn lounged in the back of the cluttered minivan like a taxi. No one offered to sit in the front with Bud. Harper had just returned from bad-kids camp. There was something different about her, thought Bud. She was sitting up straighter. He internally congratulated himself on a parenting job well done.

“Are we forgetting anything?” Bud asked the rearview mirror.

“How would we know,” said the girls over one another, “if we’re forgetting—”

“How about an audiobook?” said Bud.

A collective groan from the back.

“Why did you bring your guitar?” asked Louise.

“I thought later we might have a sing-along,” said Bud.

“A what?” said the girls.

Bud pulled onto the highway. The girls pouted. They had put up such a fuss over the beach clean that eventually Bud offered them fifty dollars each in exchange for their participation. It was a good investment, he assured himself. He turned up the audiobook. The Flynn family would be pillars of the community, even if they had to be bribed.

“Louise, what are you wearing?” asked Abigail.

“I have to use the restroom,” said Harper.

“This is my bathing suit!” said Louise.

“It covers your head,” said Abigail.

“It’s so I can enjoy American recreation while remaining modest and deferent to God,” said Louise.

Harper and Louise took turns playing the Game Square, an off-brand console Bud had purchased for one of the girls’ birthdays, half the price of the name-brand consoles with basically the same functions. Same functions or not, it was not the name brand and the girls never let Bud forget it. Sometimes you pay for the name, Catherine had said to him later. This was something he was learning. Husband, father—those were names Bud paid for. Abigail stared out the window. She was too old for the Game Square.

Catherine had opted out of the beach clean to visit her sister for the night. Catherine’s sister, Colleen, had moved a few towns over, needing more space to breed quails. She had two large Dobermans, which the girls called “the cousins.” Everyone dreaded the annual visit to Aunt Colleen’s. She fed the girls candied cashews that tasted like soap and told them about the plummeting currency that was their youth. The year before, the cousins had gotten into the quail pen. Harper liked that part.

“I feel carsick,” said Louise.

“Just look out the window,” said Bud. “Enjoy the scenery.”

“What scenery?” said Abigail.

“The postwar architecture,” said Bud.

“I have to use the restroom,” repeated Harper.

“There are restrooms at the beach,” said Bud.

“I said I have to use the restroom, not I want to get hepatitis.”

“The beach restrooms are fine, Harper,” said Bud.

“In case you didn’t know,” said Harper, “I get my period now, so when I say, ‘I have to use the restroom’—”

Bud pulled off the highway’s next exit so fast that beach provisions went flying. The sunscreen and sandwiches and waters toppled over the girls.

The beach was gray but pleasant to Bud, the sand slick with runoff from the oil refinery. It blackened the bottoms of the volunteers’ feet. Upon arrival the girls were offered shirts that read SEAS THE DAY, which they each politely refused.

Father Andrew handed out skewers to the townspeople for trash removal, his constituents a bumbling chain gang. Someone carried a portable speaker playing Christian rock. The altar boys fought with squirt guns.

Bud stabbed a piece of plastic with his rod.

“You’re missing some good trash over here,” he called to the girls. They dragged their feet in the shallow water. Bud had grown up coming to beaches like this, abject and contaminated but almost lovely in their bleakness. He jabbed at some seaweed, which turned out to be a woman’s hair extension.

Father Andrew did not care for the beach. He did not like the relentless sand that lingered on his car’s floor mats like a foul memory for days to come. He did not like to watch seabirds defecating on rocks and listening to the deafening arrhythmic crash of water. And he especially did not like to see the partial nudity that swimwear promoted. Not everyone, concluded Father Andrew, was made in God’s image. Before he became a man of the cloth, Father Andrew had made love to a woman on the beach upon her request. Dreadful experience, as he remembered. Highly overrated. Today he all but glared at the ocean. The parish shrink had likened the ocean to a woman—mysterious, fickle, and governed by the moon—deducing that Father Andrew’s loathsome attitude toward the tide was a form of misogyny. The parish shrink really took any opportunity, thought Father Andrew, to explore his repressed sexism.

“How are you doing, Bud?” asked the priest.

“You know, not too bad,” said Bud, and he meant it.

“Did everything work out for your friend?”

“Who?”

“Your friend with the suicidal ideations?”

“Ah,” said Bud. “Yeah, he’s working it out.”

Some yards away, Bud saw Priscilla Winkle and smiled. She waved to him with her shish kebab of garbage. Miss Winkle had an enamel of sunscreen across her face. Her child sat in a nearby tide pool, sifting for hermit crabs. In her shapeless cobalt sack, Miss Winkle resembled the very seals they were ostensibly saving. Bud wanted to see her balance a ball on her nose, his little porpoise. He looked away. They had agreed to keep their liaison a secret. What would everyone think? The Lost Lambs, the community. Bud wasn’t sure what he thought himself. He planned on telling the children that very evening.

“And how are the girls faring?” asked Father Andrew.

“Oh horribly, Father,” said Bud. “The therapy alone is costing me a small fortune.”

“My,” said Father Andrew.

His time in the seminary had not prepared Father Andrew to navigate the domestic throes of the Flynn family.

“Summer’s in the air,” said Father Andrew.

Bud nodded.

“Though it’s different year to year,” said Father Andrew, “spring always turns to summer.”

“Is this a parable?” asked Bud. “Or are you just explaining seasons to me?”

All heads on the beach turned as Abigail Flynn removed her shorts and T-shirt, revealing a wispy bikini about a size too small. She was magnificent and Bud’s role in her production gave him a perverse pride. How she once swam from his scrotal caves and evolved into this perfect specimen, the stuff of magazine covers and male fantasy. Though other men would inevitably enter into her life, only one had made her.

The Flynn girls had abandoned their rods completely, and Louise her head covering, and they were taking turns braiding each other’s hair in the shade of a rock overhang. They complained about the Christian music, the chemical tinge to the air, and discussed what they’d each do with their fifty dollars. They could pool the money for a bigger prize, not that they shared many material interests these days. Harper showed them a book from camp, some sort of survival manual diagramming a tourniquet, the Heimlich, how to cauterize a wound. Abigail peered over the top of her sunglasses at her father.

“Something’s up with him,” said Abigail.

“What do you mean?” asked Louise.

“I don’t know,” said Abigail. “He seems … happier.”

Harper picked some sand out from between her toes.

“Maybe it’s because he’s sleeping with Miss Winkle,” said Harper.

Abigail and Louise turned to their sister in unison.

“No way!” said Louise.

“Yes way,” said Harper.

“Don’t spread rumors,” said Abigail.

“I’m not,” said Harper. “Her kid told me.”

“I don’t get it,” said Louise.

They watched Miss Winkle lumber down the beach scolding local children. Abigail lit a cigarette and was promptly scolded by Father Hayworth via megaphone. She put it out in the sand and stabbed the butt with her trash rod.

“You know what else?” said Harper. “I don’t think Mom’s at Aunt Colleen’s.”

“Now you’re just being paranoid,” said Louise.

“I saw her pack lacy undies,” said Harper. “Who’s that for? The cousins?”

“You think she’s with the neighbor?” asked Abigail.

“Mm-hmm,” said Harper, sage-like.

“I don’t want to know this!” said Louise. She scrambled to her knees.

“What are you doing?” asked Abigail.

“I’m praying for them,” said Louise.

That night, after each girl had showered and the Flynn drains filled with sand and tar, Bud called a family meeting. Harper, Louise, and Abigail gathered in their dining room as Bud set the table, a hodgepodge of unmatched plates and cups and napkins. The girls crinkled their noses with confusion at Bud, who was humming.

Bud could hardly believe his own elation and it was all thanks to Miss Winkle. He’d bought a new tie, one of a much more playful variety than his others. He’d become increasingly adventurous with the food he ate, even the porn he watched. Bringing joy to Bud Flynn was just Miss Winkle performing one of her many miracles.

Bud was humming a personal remix of a hymn he’d just learned to the tune of a rock song he once loved. His shirt was tucked in. This struck the girls as particularly strange. They looked at one another as if to ask, he didn’t tuck in his shirt on our account, did he?

“What happened to all the forks?” Bud asked his daughters. “Has the silverware gnome been through here?”

The ________ gnome was a childhood staple, responsible for the inexplicably lost. The sweater gnome, the mouth guard gnome. Then Abigail started dating her first boyfriend and Harper told their parents that the virginity gnome had snuck in. That put a stop to the bit.

From under a pot lid Bud revealed a chicken Parmesan. Under another was a beet salad. An apple tart. A saucer of buckwheat paste. He refreshed Louise’s drink, tap water over ice. He poured Harper a glass of milk. Wine for himself and Abigail.

“All of the tea towels are missing too,” said Louise.

“Let’s get started while it’s hot,” Bud said quickly.

“I thought this was a family meeting,” said Abigail.

“This is a family meeting,” said Bud.

“But Mom’s out of town,” said Harper.

“Poor coordination on my part,” said Bud.

Abigail scrutinized Harper. “Harper, are you wearing my lipstick?”

Harper sunk a little in her chair, embarrassed.

Then Abigail turned to Bud. He served the salad.

“What’s with the tie?” said Abigail.

“What do you mean?” asked Bud.

“What is going on with everyone!” said Abigail.

“Oh!” said Bud. “I forgot the breadsticks!”

He fled to the kitchen.

“They’re getting divorced,” said Louise. “This is a divorce dinner, isn’t it?”

“Maybe he’s moving,” said Harper.

“Moving where?” said Louise.

“To Italy,” said Harper. “I read his search history. He’s been looking up stuff about Italy.”

“Like what?” said Louise.

“Like what side of the road they drive on in Italy,” said Harper.

“And he’s made Italian food!” said Louise.

“He’s not moving to Italy,” said Abigail.

“Why were you reading Dad’s search history?” asked Louise.

“I read all of your search histories,” Harper said.

Bud returned from the kitchen.

“Breadsticks!” said Bud.

“Are you moving to Italy?” asked Louise.

“What?” said Bud. “Why would you ask that?”

“These breadsticks are from Angelo Mama’s,” said Harper. She squinted. “All of this food is from Angelo Mama’s, actually.”

“That it is,” Bud said, “and it was very expensive, so dig in.”

“You bought dinner from Angelo Mama’s, threw away the containers, and served it on our plates?” asked Abigail.

“Why didn’t we just go to Angelo Mama’s?” said Louise.

“I love you girls very much and want nothing but your happiness,” Bud began.

The girls each sat up stiff as ironing boards, bracing themselves.

“It’s a tad early to be discussing this, but news travels fast around here so I’d rather you hear it from me,” Bud went on.

It was the quietest the Flynn dining room had ever been, as if each girl were holding her breath. Louise was, in fact, holding her breath, as she often did.

“As you know, I have been going to Lost Lambs at church. It has really helped me see the light,” Bud continued. “Particularly, Priscilla has helped me see that light.”

“Who’s Priscilla?” asked Louise.

“Miss Winkle,” said Bud.

“Oh,” said the girls.

“That’s what this is about,” said Abigail.

“We know you’re dating the church lady,” said Harper.

“You do?” he asked.

They nodded in unison.

“Alright then,” said Bud. “Any concerns you want me to address?”

The girls looked at one another.

“Can I have some wine?” asked Harper.

“No, Harper,” said Bud. “You’re not twenty-one.”

“Neither is Abigail!”

“Isn’t it wrong to date the woman who is leading your support group?” said Louise. “Like a conflict of interest?”

“No,” said Bud. “Any more questions?”

“Mom is just so—” Abigail began.

“Special, I know. Nobody will replace your mother,” said Bud.

“I was going to say pretty,” said Abigail.

“There are many types of beauty, Abigail,” said Bud.

“Right. I’m referring to the physical kind,” said Abigail.

Harper took a slug of Abigail’s wine. Bud let it slide.

“Like,” said Abigail, “objectively there’s just such a disparity—”

“Are there any concerns not relating to Priscilla’s appearance?” asked Bud.

The girls shook their heads.

“Wonderful. I have one request,” said Bud. “I hope you will all be kind and welcoming to Priscilla’s daughter, Perry.”

“The retarded girl?” asked Abigail.

“We’re always kind,” said Louise.

“And welcoming,” said Harper, mouth full of buckwheat paste.

“See,” said Bud, “calling her ‘retarded’ would be an example of an unkind and unwelcoming behavior.”

“Does this mean you’ll stop sleeping in the car?” asked Louise.

“I do not sleep in the car,” said Bud. “I have fallen asleep there once or twice.”

“You literally sleep there every night,” said Louise.

“You exclusively sleep in the car,” said Harper.

“You’ve been sleeping in the car for at least a month,” said Abigail.

“I feel like we’ve exhausted the subject and can move on,” said Bud. He looked down at his plate. He had torn a breadstick into many pieces. As if preparing to feed a pond of ducks.

“Louise, why don’t you tell us more about your secret project in the tree house?” said Bud.

Louise shifted uncomfortably. Her eyes darted.

“Yeah, what is going on in the tree house?” asked Abigail.

“It smells like fertilizer up there,” said Harper.

“Dad, Harper reads your search history!” Louise digressed.

Harper kicked Louise beneath the table.

“Shut up, Wide Wight Tuwns,” said Harper. “You’re such a narc.”

“Harper, don’t make fun of your sister. And don’t read people’s search history.” Bud’s mind leaped to his recent erotica. “Do you want to go back to camp?”

“No, sir,” said Harper.

Louise stuck her tongue out at Harper.

“Your search history is really weird, Louise,” said Harper under her breath.

“Okay, I think that’s good for family time,” said Bud.

In exchange for his new lease on life, Bud wanted to give Miss Winkle the world, beginning with a trip somewhere. His company offered some work incentives, a Teamwork Award, which, because of the solitary nature of their work, was rarely won by members of the accounts team. It was a modest sum, not enough for the Italian respite Bud dreamed of but enough for a more modest weekend away, if he cut corners for a little while, forgoing teeth cleanings and foreign beer.

Bud set out to win the Teamwork Award. He started to arrive at his office on time, then early. When he went to the break room, he refilled the Happy Coffee and asked his neighbors, loudly, if he could grab them anything from the supply closet. He helped others adjust the lumbar support on their desk chairs and clean their keyboards. He refilled the watercooler and straightened the magazines in the lobby.

At first, Bud’s boss did not take notice of Bud’s teamwork. As long as Bud turned in his Lost Lambs attendance slips, his boss was satisfied. So Bud, to better get his boss’s attention, turned his focus to Dottie, the accounts and systems manager’s manager’s assistant. He saw that she liked to keep fresh flowers on her desk so, on Tuesday morning, Bud decided to buy her a bouquet, a bouquet with a big card reading HAPPY TUESDAY —BUD, a card his boss could not miss. Flowers were a minefield. Some said “Congrats!” Some said “I love you!” And some offered condolences for sickness or death.

“What do these say?” Bud asked the flower salesman.

“Fertility and rebirth,” the flower salesman said.

Bud did not want to evoke fertility in the assistant.

“Which ones are the cheapest?”

Bud bought Dottie a bouquet of pepper thistles and a big HAPPY TUESDAY card and returned to the shipping income forms.

As the morning wore on, Bud’s eyes began to glaze over like they often did when scanning the shipping income forms. The endless scroll of digital entries became a foreign language, hieroglyphs needing interpretation. This was generally when Bud hit “approve” and got another cup of coffee. Despite his newfound energy, he was no employee of the month, as his youngest daughter had pointed out. Harper had also noted “inconsistencies” in his work when she had broken into his email a few weeks earlier. Bud figured that making his work consistent could lead to a bonus, a promotion, a pat on the back instead of a slap on the wrist. He narrowed his eyes until the symbols solidified into focus and he could interpret the monthly reports. Standard, standard, standard, standard, thought Bud, standard, standard— Then he found it, just like Harper had said, there in plain sight, right under his nose. A dock had been purchased by INTERNATIONAL VENDOR NAME: REDACTED reporting only a container of CARGO CONTENTS: REDACTED. While it was peculiar for an invoice to withhold a declaration of cargo, due to the high volume of containers moving through the harbor and the speed at which they needed to be processed, lapses were not uncommon. Bud checked the system for more information. The system was referred to colloquially as the CargoCounter 3.0, though there was not a 2.0 or a CargoCounter 1.5. The CargoCounter 3.0 digitally accounted for all of the harbor’s cargo, the first record of commerce of its kind. It was created by Paul Alabaster himself. Outside of the rare ribbon-cutting ceremony, Paul Alabaster stayed out of the public eye, and that solitude brewed rumors. Some said he hunted big game—buffalo, lion, hippopotami—while others said he froze his stem cells, experimented with immortality, discovered the secret to hair loss prevention. Why one would want to live forever was lost on Bud. Life was too long as it was.

The CargoCounter 3.0 was new technology and left a large margin for error. Slight discrepancies were not something the old Bud troubled himself with, but the new Bud, the bonus-bound Bud, was more vigilant. He scanned previous reports for routing lapses. And there it was again, the same declaration of cargo was missing this time the year before, and the year before that. A vessel from INTERNATIONAL VENDOR NAME: REDACTED reporting only a single container of CARGO CONTENTS: REDACTED. He felt puzzled, like he was only now discovering a mole he’d had his whole life. He leaned over to the desk nearest him, Len’s. Len had a screen saver of a woman wearing a basket of fruit on her head and nothing else.

“Len,” said Bud.

“Bud,” said Len.

“You know this vendor?”

Bud turned his computer screen with the aforementioned report.

Len shrugged. He returned to his own work, his half-eaten fritter.

Bud did not ask questions at work. He was not “the man” that his band had once condemned, but he was admittedly a cog in “the man’s” machine and, sure, undisclosed cargo could be deadly weapons or pieces for manufacturing deadly weapons, but the world functioned well enough on its own, Bud typically thought. Why pry? While Harper adored mystery, mystery exhausted Bud. Mystery was a hop and a skip from misery. On the other hand, bonus-bound Bud could use this lapse to his advantage, bringing the discrepancy to the attention of his boss. That would certainly earn him some extra office points. He could even call the whole thing “fishy,” adding some nautical humor to his revelation. He’d be dubbed the Harbor™ Hero. No one had ever read shipping income forms so closely. He’d earn an expense-paid trip anywhere his heart desired with a stipend for childcare and perhaps even a mineral bath.

“Mr. Flynn.” Dottie, the assistant, stood over him clutching the pepper thistles.

“Dottie!” said Bud.

“I have to return these, Mr. Flynn,” said Dottie. “I think I’m allergic to them.”

“Could you identify this international vendor for me, Dottie?” Bud clicked a button on his computer that sent a signal to the printer at his desk. It coughed out a sheet of names and numbers that he then handed to the assistant.

“The flowers are pretty and all, but the truth is,” said Dottie, “I have a boyfriend.”

Bud wasn’t listening.

“There it is again,” he said, scanning the report.

REDACTED. REDACTED. REDACTED. Dottie left the bouquet wilting on his desk.

Bud sneezed. He went to the break room, where another assistant from another department was hanging muted streamers for a nondenominational holiday celebration. Bud refilled the Happy Coffee, selected a milk substitute at random, and took a generic mug from the cabinet. The mug depicted a pile of spreadsheets and read: FREAK IN THE SHEETS. The milk Bud had selected was not from an animal but an almond or an oat and it clumped into miserable icebergs at the surface of the coffee. Dottie came into the break room and approached Bud. She appeared to be keeping a safe distance.

“I couldn’t find anything in the system for that international vendor,” said Dottie.

“Interesting,” said Bud.

During his lunch hour, Bud headed to the basement, where they kept archived records of all shipping logs prior to the advent of the CargoCounter 3.0. The basement was dim with flickering fluorescents and none of the whimsical office art that adorned the upstairs. The security guard manning the archives looked at Bud’s badge as though it were mocking him. Bud scanned the floor-to-ceiling filing cabinets. He felt like he was in a detective film, wished he had the butt of a cigar to chew. He began pulling records from the last ten years. There was so much content he nearly toppled over from the files’ weight. Annually, the REDACTED cargo appeared again and again and again. Same date, same information, or lack thereof. How had this stayed hidden for so long, right here in plain sight? He considered all the ports owned by Alabaster Harbor™, commercial ports, passenger ports, marinas, coves, inlets, and estuaries, each hosting an almost innumerable amount of cargo. The best form of erasure is inundation, Bud thought. He could have squealed with glee. Someone was exploiting the harbor, and Bud alone had solved the mystery, or rather spotted a pattern that would lead to the mystery’s solution. He decided that, when interviewed by the local paper, he would not mention he was initially tipped off by his adolescent daughter. Now he was a cog in a better, arguably cooler machine; the machine of maritime law. Maybe he’d get a medal. Just as his lunch hour ended, he received an email from his boss scheduling an impromptu meeting.

“Allen,” said Bud.

“Bud,” said his boss.

“Spring,” said Bud.

“Finally,” said his boss. “Brief rainy season.”

“Gets shorter every year.”

“Been out to the driving range lately?”

“Scarcely ever,” said Bud. “You keep me busy.”

Bud sat before the accounts and systems manager’s manager. His desk chair was much nicer than Bud’s, a finer material, a newer model.

“Bud, it has come to my attention that you made Dottie uncomfortable earlier.”

“With the flowers?”

“Yes, with the flowers. What’s up with the flowers?”

“Nothing!” said Bud. “They were friendly flowers.”

“Friendly flowers?”

“Seasonal.”

“My assistant didn’t think so. Your marriage may be more … progressive than others’, Bud, but—”

“I wasn’t being fresh,” assured Bud. “They were just flowers.”

“Just flowers,” said Bud’s boss. “Alright then.”

Bud’s boss cleared his throat and laced his fingers together.

“Is that why you called me in?” asked Bud.

“No, Bud. Could you close the door?”

Bud had never been asked to close the door before. He closed it.

“Dottie also mentioned that you were looking into some old records. Why were you looking into old records, Bud?”

“I am trying to improve my performance.”

“Would you mind improving it with future records?”

“I noticed something strange,” said Bud.

“Strange?”

“Missing cargo.”

“That’s hardly strange,” said Bud’s boss. “Clerical error. Staffing levels. Negligence. Not necessarily yours.”

“Right, but there’s a pattern. The same vessel goes unrecorded at this time year after year … and it seems like it’s happening again in just a few weeks.”

“You’re sounding like a conspiracy theorist, Bud.”

“I just thought it was—”

“Strange. As you said.” The accounts and systems manager’s manager took off his glasses and folded them to punctuate the discussion. “A coincidence, nothing more.”

Bud wasn’t so sure. He adjusted his tie.

“But the contents are always redacted,” Bud continued. “Isn’t that strange?”

“Could be anything. Auto parts for domestic assembly. Toothbrushes. Light bulbs. Biscuits. Diapers. No point in speculating. Do you know how dependent the public is on seaborne trade?”

“Why wouldn’t it be reported then? Biscuits or diapers.”

“You know our motto here: Transparency Where It Counts,” said Bud’s boss. “Do you know what that means?”

“That we provide a free and open database of public trade?”

“Where it counts. If it’s not transparent, it doesn’t count. You see?”

Bud felt the jittery aftermath of caffeine. Or was it something else?

“No,” said Bud. He didn’t.

“Just forget it, Bud. I don’t mean to sound condescending, but don’t worry about stuff like this. It’s above your pay grade.”

“My apologies, Allen.”

Bud’s shoulders sunk a few inches.

“Are you doing alright, Bud? In a grander sense?”

He perked up again at the opening to talk about his newfound happiness. “Yeah, actually, I’ve started seeing someone.”

“Like a shrink?”

“Like a woman.”

“Hey! That’s fantastic!” said Bud’s boss. “My wife thinks your arrangement is completely unorthodox but it sounds like you’ve hacked the system, if you ask me.”

“I was hoping to win the Teamwork Award bonus and book us a little weekend getaway,” said Bud. “She likes that kind of thing. The woman I’m seeing.”

“Is that what this is about?” asked Bud’s boss. “The bonus? Christ, Bud, I thought you were going screwy on me. Listen, you can be employee of the year if you never bring my assistant flowers again.”

Bud’s boss pushed back in his chair and smiled, kicked his feet atop his desk. Evident relief.

“Yes, sir, it’s just—and I’m sorry to harp on it—but I think I’ve come across something quite irregular, perhaps even corrupt.”

This wiped the smile from Bud’s boss’s face. He grew very stern, cold even.

“I thought I just told you to drop this,” said Bud’s boss.

“I’ve cross-referenced the first occurrence of the redacted cargo with the turnover of leaseholders.”

“I did, didn’t I? Just now. In plain English, the language we both speak.”

“The port’s funding didn’t even go private until five years ago and the pattern predates that,” Bud went on. “It’s not a leaseholder. It’s external. They’re exploiting—”

“Who is they?” Frustration mounted in Bud’s boss’s voice.

“The cartel? Foreign intelligence? I don’t mean to be dramatic but this could be a whole operation.”

Bud had only cared for the bonus before. Mystery = misery, etc., etc. Sure, Bud figured his company was a little evil, the way any huge conglomerate was probably a little evil. But to what extent had never interested him. As he spoke now, he realized the depth of his own investment. Bud Flynn cared about the greater good. All this Godly nonsense had started to seep in. An entire upbringing with a dogmatic Christian had no effect on his moral code, but two weeks with Miss Winkle had him humming hymns and investigating malpractice. Her methods were different from his mother’s—gentler, nuanced, and, sure, more erotic. Perhaps sex was the secret to religious adherence. Now that would make for some interesting Sunday school lessons, he thought.

“Okay.” Bud’s boss released a stream of air through his teeth. “I am going to say something controversial now: So what?”

Bud furrowed his brow.

“So what?” he repeated.

“Yeah, so what?”

“Well, we can’t just—”

“We can just. We’re highly compensated to just.”

A small, self-sufficient vacuum cleaner skidded by Bud’s feet on its journey around the carpet.

“Why did you have me go to Lost Lambs to enhance my work performance,” Bud ventured, “when you don’t, in fact, want my work performance enhanced?”

“The team was mostly worried you might kill yourself. Killing yourself would be a huge liability, you see.”

Bud shook his head in disbelief. “I can’t just ignore this, Allen. I’m a Christian now.”

“You’ve been a Christian for two weeks.”

“Nonetheless.”

“We offer a competitive salary. Increased four percent annually. Your family is well accounted for. We have given you a cumulative six months of paternity leave. If anyone in your family were to—bless them—pass on, you would be offered ample bereavement time. PTO, in fact. Your health is insured. Your girls’ health is insured. As is your and their dental. Not that you’ve shown any interest, but we have a comprehensive exercise plan.”

“I don’t see how—”

“Every year for your birthday we get you a cake. Not a generic cake. It always reads Bud Flynn in buttercream icing, which you indicated was your favorite upon starting here. That is sixteen buttercream Bud Flynn cakes in total. As a senior member of the team, we grant you certain leniencies, like when you fall asleep at your desk or get too drunk at the nondenominational holiday party. We looked the other way when you sent around all that pornography—”

“That was my kid! She’s troubled.”

Bud’s boss held up a finger to indicate that he was not finished. His delivery was calm but stern. The kind of voice Bud used when reprimanding the children for a more serious offense.

“Your desk is south facing and receives abundant light. When you retire, you’ll collect union benefits. An unparalleled compensation package. We provide 401(k) matching. The airline miles you accrue on your company card may be put to personal use.”

“Allen, I want to bring this to the attention of the board.”

“Do me a favor and take the rest of the day to think about it. Consider what I’ve said.”

Bud considered what his boss said. He left the office with a stiffness in his chest. He walked past his desk, which received ample light, but did not return to it. Instead, he walked to the elevator, through the lobby, and outside the building. Bud walked past the employee lot, where his minivan had its designated parking space, one with optimal shade, and headed west. Past the main strip of little shops. Past the town square. Past the Vintage Theater and the retirement home and the urgent care and the old carousel and the new bed-and-breakfast. He walked until the air grew briny and the sky became purple. Past the pier and afternoon fishermen, the private marina with yachts parked in tandem, the anchor monument pocked with dried barnacles. Bud walked to the harbor and paused before the statues of Paul and Warren T. Alabaster. Two oversized figures in a dark, stainless metal. Bud squinted at the metal men, then kept going. An autopilot within him had kicked in, propelling him forward, past a security guard in a pea-green vest. Bud flashed his employee parking pass without stopping. They were coworkers, in a sense, the security guard and him. Received the same Alabaster signature on their paychecks. The harbor was massive. Everywhere Bud looked were forty-foot cargo containers in red, orange, and navy stacked skyscraper-high, their tops white with seabird droppings. Men in hard hats moved the containers off barges with cranes then loaded them onto forklifts and assessed them with clipboards and sometimes smoked cigarettes atop them, overlooking the black water. Bud was affronted by the sheer mass of the operation. The steel and titanium and concrete. Despite the air pollution, it almost felt organic. A mountain range. The green-vested security guard approached in a patrol cart.

“Sir, you need protective gear to be on-site,” said the security guard. Bud was escorted from the premises. Back at the office, Bud’s was the sole car in the company lot. There was a note on his windshield.

ATTN: Bud Flynn

Your presence is requested for a meeting on behalf of the Alabaster Harbor™ Association:

TOMORROW 5 P.M.

A car will arrive 15 minutes prior to escort you.

-AHA-

“I got this salad today,” said Miss Winkle.

She wore a mohair vest depicting tropical fish.

“Bud, are you listening?”

“Mm, yes, salad,” said Bud.

“And as I’m eating, what do I find in the salad? A screw!”

“A screw?”

“A screw!”

“Well, they do say spinach has a lot of iron in it.”

Bud wasn’t fully present. His heart raced. His mind wandered back to the harbor. An untouched grilled cheese sat in front of him.

“Is everything alright?” asked Miss Winkle.

“I’m sorry,” said Bud. “I had a bad day at work.”

Bud briefed Miss Winkle on the trials of his workday. The meeting, the pepper thistle, the note on his windshield. She examined the note from behind her reading specs. The print was quite large so Bud figured the glasses were for effect. Miss Winkle speculated that Bud might be getting a promotion. Bud did not think he was getting a promotion.

“Something in the milk ain’t clean,” said Bud.

“There’s a screw in the salad,” said Miss Winkle.

Bud nodded.

That night, next to his lover, Bud dreamed he was wandering through the marina. In the dream, he approached a cargo container that seemed to be swollen, almost breathing, bursting at the seams, the metal buckling to restrain its contents. Bud approached the container, comically bulbous and menacing, and, with a trembling hand, unlatched the lock. The crate erupted into a rainbow flurry. Confetti exploded out, all over Bud and the surrounding concrete, like a can of worms. He was drenched in streamers. Then there came laughter: Catherine’s, his boss’s, Priscilla’s—the whole town having a laugh at his expense. And Bud stood there, a sad clown. One by one the townspeople surrounded Bud and backed him into the crate. “Wait,” begged dream Bud. “No, please!” He stumbled over piles of confetti. The laughing continued as he was shoved inside and the door hinged shut, leaving him in darkness.

Catherine had not gone to visit her sister. She hated the drive to her sister’s house and she hated her sister’s house and she hated the cousins and she rather hated her sister. Instead, Catherine had been planning a night away with Jim Doherty—their first official night together.

While Myles Doherty was at his mother’s and Catherine’s girls were saving the local marine life, she and Jim Doherty would drive to a hotel in the city and spend an uninterrupted night speaking about art and philosophy and life and sex. The latter interested Catherine most. Accommodations in town were limited. There was the new bed-and-breakfast next to the old carousel. But there they ran the risk of seeing or being seen by someone they knew, or someone who knew their families. Then rumors would spread and people would get confused and judgmental and things would get broken: hearts, noses. There was the Day & Night, a pay-by-the-hour motel near the water where that cult did that self-immolation ritual. This was not where Catherine wished to consummate her and Jim Doherty’s relationship either. So they expanded their search to the city, where they were unknown. Catherine did not want one of those hotels that resembled one’s home. No “homes away from home.” That defeated the purpose of not being home. She wanted the hotel experience. Wine from cups placed over doilies by the sink and room service under silver cloches on trolleys and a closet with white terry cloth robes and a bed with starchy white sheets. A firm mattress upon which many had made love before them and many would in the future.

Catherine had prepared her overnight bag with tactical provisions as though packing for a perverted camping trip: lubricant, condoms—which until now had been lying dormant in the Everything drawer—dental floss, and a crumpled lace teddy that she liberated from the back of her closet. She hesitated in front of the full-length mirror, feeling a pang of anxiety at her reflection. Her good looks now had qualifiers. She looked good for a woman her age who’d birthed three children. She looked good considering she’d never had work done—not out of principle but out of financial restraint, there was so much she’d nip, tuck, prod, and peel had she the budget. Catherine missed when she just looked good—full stop. When her beauty turned heads and stopped traffic, provoked wolf whistling and horn honking. She briefly considered bringing Jim Doherty a photo of her younger self. She would slip it into conversation: “Oh, I used to wear my hair differently. Wait, I think I have a photo!” But she ultimately decided against it. Catherine tried to internalize some of that new feminist rhetoric—you’re enough, you’re beautiful the way you are, the way God made you, and being beautiful means being yourself, something like that—but it was to no avail. The saccharine aphorisms of modern self-worth made Catherine roll her eyes. She was thin by any metric. She often subsisted an entire evening off just a pack of spearmint gum. She was not a cook. To her, the apron was a straitjacket. If her girls, vastly better equipped to navigate the internet, wanted a particular meal, they could find the recipe online and make it themselves. She’d even purchase the ingredients and tools necessary, skillet, fryer, or wok, but Catherine would not partake in the monotonous effort of cooking, followed by the even more grueling task of cleaning. Nine out of ten times, the girls’ laziness overcame their hunger. Call her parenting unorthodox, thought Catherine, but no one in the Flynn family suffered from this obesity epidemic the news always went on about. She sucked in her stomach, sprayed a cloud of her eldest daughter’s perfume into the air, and walked through it. The perfume smelled like sour candy and sheep’s milk. Catherine had stopped in the guest bathroom to wash her face a final time and found that the faucet was not producing water. She scrawled faucet broken on the back of a homework assignment and taped it to the bathroom door. She may never be the picture of domesticity. She was a complex and multifaceted woman, beautiful the way God made her.

The weather that day had been blustery and manic, sun coming in and out of cloud cover, the perfect day to break the vows of marriage. Not that she was breaking them per se. The “arrangement” allowed her this very indulgence. Sure, Bud had not agreed to the “arrangement” in so many words, but it had been discussed at length. Killing was permitted in battle even if the opponent didn’t agree to the war in the first place, thought Catherine. Part of her felt sad to think that Bud might have become her opponent after years on the same force. Jim Doherty had been standing on his front porch waiting for her. Despite the nip that clung in the air, he wore a half-unbuttoned—or half-buttoned, depending on one’s worldview—Johnny Jamaica shirt adorned with grinning monkeys. The anxiety returned to Catherine. She could still turn back. The road would always lead her home. Literally, because the road was a cul-de-sac. Then Jim Doherty had let out a long, slow whistle—wheet whoo.

“Wow, Cat,” he’d said. “You look great.”

Cat was a nickname she’d long detested. But now repurposed by her paramour, it had a new and pleasant sheen. Why had she hated it? Cat was cute! She loved Cat. Sly, sensuous creature that she was. It was only fitting that in her new life she had a new name.

“Come in!” Jim Doherty had said.

“Shouldn’t we get going?” she’d asked.

“I want to show you something first.”

The house was messier than before, much messier. It did not smell like sour candy or sheep’s milk but sweat trapped in fabric and decomposing garbage. Perhaps Fernanda was on vacation. Dishes piled in the sink. As once again Jim Doherty lured Catherine down into his basement, she’d once again wondered if this was the time he’d murder her.

“But, Jim, you’ve already shown me your pottery.”

“I know,” said Jim Doherty. “Now, I want to show you my real art. The pièce de résistance.”

How, Catherine had wondered, could Jim Doherty have two art practices when she could not even maintain one? Further still he led her into the bowels of the cellar. She contemplated the square footage of the house then chastised herself. Real artists mused over institutional corruption, societal collapse, the limits of political correctness. Real artists did not muse over square footage.

“These are my masterpieces,” said Jim Doherty.

It had taken Catherine’s eyes a moment to adjust to the dusky basement, and even when they had adjusted, it had taken her some time to understand what was in front of her. It was a wall of misshapen and poorly crafted ceramic vaginas. Fifty or so, lining three shelves.

“They’re…” said Catherine.

“Pussies!” said Jim Doherty.

Catherine squinted.

“The beginning of life. And the end of fun,” Jim Doherty said cheekily. “Just kidding. Just a joke. Some pub humor.”

“Oh my…”

“I’ve been making pussies for as long as I can remember,” said Jim Doherty. “Have to keep ’em down here. Don’t want the kid to take one to show-and-tell. Imagine that parent-teacher conference. Plus the temperature is better. The pussies like a consistent temperature or else they swell.”

“Right.”

“Each of these pussies has touched my life. This one—here, hold her, it’s alright—this one is my college girlfriend, Teasey. Teasey had the tightest pussy I ever felt. Could crush diamonds, as they say.”

“I don’t think they—”

“This one is my favorite.” Jim Doherty selected another one of the yonic sculptures. “This is my first wife’s pussy.”

“You were married more than once?”

“Three times, yeah. Don’t worry, she was deported after we split so she’s back in England now. This one’s a Bri’ish twat, innit.” Jim Doherty laughed, moving the sculpture side to side like it was talking, a contorted mouth. They all seemed to be talking, actually. All of the vaginas were telling Catherine to run, run while she could, get out of this house and never return.

“So these are all the women you’ve…”

“They are less depictions of something than depictions about something. You know what I mean? These pussies are moments in time.”

Catherine had scanned Jim Doherty’s moments in time, his terra-cotta soldiers of sex. She’d fancied herself the misunderstood luminary of the town. She did not think her open-mindedness had a limit. But in that moment she felt prudish, like her mother, like Bud’s mother, like the mother that she was. She clutched her overnight bag. There would be no city, no seedy hotel. She’d found herself wishing she’d visited her sister after all.

“You know what,” said Catherine. “I think I’d better go now.”

“But we’re going away for the weekend.”

“I’m sorry, but something’s come over me. I don’t feel well.”

Jim’s expression slowly twisted into annoyance.

“We have a nonrefundable third-floor room at the LuxWing. There’s a free continental breakfast.”

“I’m sorry, Jim.”

“What about my masterpussies suddenly made you ill?”

Jim Doherty scowled, a stark contrast to the happy monkeys on his shirt. Catherine glanced around for the exit.

“It’s a lot all at once.”

“Is my art too subversive for you?” He’d started to raise his voice, echoing in the small cellar. “I thought you’d understand.”

“I thought I would too,” said Catherine.

Then he’d gotten rather quiet. Defeated.

“You’re just another boring suburban housewife scandalized by a couple snatches.”

Catherine had looked past Jim Doherty and cocked her head at the wall. Was crushing a sensation one wanted for one’s penis? So much she had yet to learn about men.

“I’ll show myself out,” she said.

“I really thought you were different,” said Jim Doherty.

Catherine had retraced her steps through the makeshift studio, back up the stairs, and out into the brilliant late-afternoon light. Her favorite time of day. As a child, looking up at the contrails, she used to think that God had dragged his fingernails across the sky. The air smelled like early summer, like hot asphalt and sprinkler slides and barbecue embers. She’d felt comforted by the neighborhood’s familiarity, the patriotic bunting on windows and bicycles strewn trustingly on front lawns. It was bright, if only for another hour. All would be okay, thought Catherine, as long as her genitals and her daughter’s genitals and any future Flynn genitals in the generations to come never ended up imprisoned in Jim Doherty’s basement.

Back in the empty house, Catherine had felt the brutal shock of reality returning, an experience comparable, she imagined, to a cold plunge, something she’d never done but kept reading about in women’s magazines. She loved Bud, she loved her girls and their home, and while minor improvements could be made, she didn’t need to reinvent the wheel.

Catherine did not care for apologies—giving, receiving—but sensed one might be warranted. A grand gesture of sorts to return things to normal. She’d considered taking Bud to get those cocktails they once liked, the ones that came in fishbowls and halved pineapples, except she recalled her husband was in some sort of twelve-step program and did not want to enable him. Then it had hit her. She’d buy groceries. A gesture both simple and rich with meaning. She’d fill the fridge with all five food groups. Her family would be home any minute. Catherine headed to the market on foot with a new domestic determination. Each aisle was bright with possibilities. Once she would have picked exotic and costly items, like pork neck and chard and tinned Atlantic salmon, for the sake of their novelty. But she knew what Bud would appreciate most: staples like eggs and bread and off-brand cereal, things with high nutritional value at low price points. So Catherine had hunted down sandwich supplies and resisted the twenty-dollar strawberries from Bavaria. Hers was the shopping cart of a good wife, a wife who listened. Catherine and her penance cart had made their way to the over-twenty-items checkout line and parked behind two old gossiping ladies from the church.

“This town’s going to heck in a handbasket,” one had been saying.

“Did you see the flyer outside the Vintage Theater?” replied the other. “It had a breast on it! A woman’s breast.”

Catherine had smiled behind the women. She’d imagined being their age. She’d wear clashing patterns and bleach her gray hair platinum blond like she’d always secretly wanted. The chatter of the old biddies became white noise as Catherine drifted into daydream. As a rebellious youth, why had she never dyed her hair? Once pregnant, she’d feared the chemicals would percolate through her and into the baby. Catherine had always cared, in her own way.

“Did you hear Wallace and Mini are getting a divorce?” the ladies continued their rag.

“Ah, yes. Shame, shame.”

“Did you hear that Tegan girl is pregnant?”

“No! I just thought she was enjoying the bake sales a little too much!”

“Pregnant.”

“Well, did you hear Bud Flynn—”

“Oh, of course.”

Catherine was jerked out of her daydreaming. Perking up at Bud’s name, she had tuned back into the ladies’ conversation. The wife who listened, listened.

“And Priscilla Winkle!”

“They’re an item now.”

“Shame, shame!”

“He’s still married too.”

“It’s hedonism!”

“Priscilla is such a good woman.”

“And that poor child.”

“That poor, poor child.”

“Such a tragic malady.”

“Did you hear about the mall’s new hours?”

“Two a.m.!”

“Nothing good happens after midnight.”

Catherine’s mouth hung open. It couldn’t be. Was the rumor mill implying that Bud was with that frumpy, proselytizing teetotaler? With in a romantic sense, not an obligatory, charitable one. Not with her to, say, help her across a busy intersection. No chance. It couldn’t be.

“Excuse me,” said Catherine. Both old women turned in unison and, upon seeing Catherine, became two shades whiter than they were previously.

“Would you mind repeating what you just said,” Catherine asked kindly, “about William Flynn?”

In the bathroom at the LuxWing, Catherine breathed deeply, letting the stench of bleach fill her nostrils. How much could one person take in a day? And she was the arbiter of her own misery. She’d finally driven her husband to insanity. What now? she’d thought in the grocery store parking lot. She couldn’t go home. Catherine had felt she needed to be alone. Not around Bud or Jim or the children or the townspeople. It occurred to her that she had not slept alone—really alone, without a baby in a bassinet or a husband in the garage—in seventeen years. At the day’s end, who was she? Did she even know? That was when Catherine had looked up and caught sight of a billboard advertisement picturing a sleeping man, sheep leaping over his prone body. Then she’d remembered the continental breakfast, the terry cloth robe. Bud had the car, so Catherine ordered a taxi to the market’s parking lot. She’d steadied herself, whoever she was, gotten into the back of the cab, and told the driver to go to the city.

“The LuxWing,” said Catherine.

“Just you?” asked the driver.

“Yes,” said Catherine. “Just me.”

She had instructed the driver to make one stop on their way, at the beauty supply store, catching it right before closing. She ran in and purchased a box of blond hair dye.

After school, Abigail Flynn and Tibet went to the now termite-free town square, pulled sodas in glass bottles from their backpacks, and lay in the grass. They each built little caves around the other’s face as they lit cigarettes, briefly discussing the difference between classic and electronic smoking, both agreeing they preferred the former. Recently, and perhaps in direct correlation to her drug use, Tibet had become a moderate conspiracy theorist. She droned on about things she’d read online, about black budgets or aliens or the military’s use of covert funds to hide the existence of aliens, or evidence contradicting the scientifically agreed-upon shape of the earth, skeptical of Big Pharma and Big Oil and Big Tech and Big Tobacco and Big Dairy and government, big or small. But all Abigail could think about was the acute pain of first love.

Wes was quiet and weird to begin with but he’d become quieter and weirder ever since Abigail had confessed her true feelings for him in the passenger’s seat of his truck. He hadn’t said it back, hadn’t said anything actually, sped off with a stomachache. Abigail didn’t hear from him for a full day after, and when he did finally break the silence, it was not to say I love you. It was to see a movie at the Vintage Theater. Ironically, a silent one. Silence was feeling less like a virtue and more like a death sentence.

“Yellow or blue?” asked Tibet.

Tibet poured the contents of her pencil case onto her lap and plucked out a pill canister. She tapped out two sizable capsules, scientifically used to cure animals of heartworms.

“I have tennis later,” said Abigail.

“Yellow then,” said Tibet.

The girls chased the pills with their sodas. Tibet offered Abigail a spoonful of her fruit cup. Abigail declined.

“Eat something,” said Tibet. “You look emaciated.”

“Thank you,” said Abigail.

“No, like, you look like a war prisoner,” said Tibet.

Wasn’t she? Her heart was anyway. Abigail looked down and admired her own small limbs. Having less of her to hold forced people to find more of her to love. She found this thought poetic.

Tibet went on explaining how many of the world’s older and heavier structures simply could not be man-made. Abigail wasn’t listening. The grass tickled the backs of her legs. She watched the sky above ripple gently as the yellow made its way into her system. Abigail reached for her backpack.

“I got this in the mail,” she said.

She showed Tibet an envelope, hand addressed with Abigail’s name in frolicking cursive. Inside was a place, date, and time—nothing more. Tibet recognized the address from the party. Alabaster Manor. The home of the tech billionaire.

“That’s crazy!” said Tibet.

Abigail shrugged like it happened all the time. It didn’t. In fact, Abigail had been delighted to receive the summons. She hoped her grown-up life would be filled with a constant stream of elite invitations.

“You don’t think it’s a little odd,” said Tibet, “to invite a high schooler to a business party?”

Abigail shrugged like not really.

“I must have made an impression last time,” said Abigail.

“Are you going to go?”

Abigail shrugged like maybe, hadn’t really thought about it. But she had. Abigail had been planning outfits since she received the invitation. Something mature but formfitting. She’d even requested extra shifts engraving key chains in order to afford the perfect mature but formfitting attire. Wes would almost certainly be working at the party, Abigail figured, and wouldn’t want her being there no matter how maturely she dressed. Wes thought that the Alabasters were creepy, as was anyone who associated with them. But Wes was being quiet and weird and perhaps if she acted out, thought Abigail, she might earn some much-needed attention.

“Can I borrow this?” Tibet asked.

Abigail handed the invitation to Tibet. “Just don’t lose it, okay?”

“I won’t,” said Tibet. “I just want to do some research.”

Abigail ashed her cigarette in the fruit cup. She studied the wrinkled receipt. “Can you believe the price of artificial fruit?”

“You shouldn’t touch receipt paper,” said Tibet. “There are toxic chemicals in it that disrupt hormone production.”

Abigail shoved the receipt into her mouth.

“I’m going to ask Wes to the Sisters of Sorrow Summer Dance,” said Abigail, muffled by the receipt.

Sacred Daughters’ senior year concluded in the Sisters of Sorrow Summer Dance, a stand-in for prom after prom had been deemed a sin. Prom derived from the Latin root promenade, which meant a long and leisurely walk, often taken by prostitutes, or something. Abigail couldn’t quite recall.

“I don’t know if you can bring someone who isn’t enrolled in high school,” said Tibet.

Abigail furrowed her brow like just be a supportive friend regardless of consequence.

In truth, Tibet was hurt, as the girls had agreed to go together. She’d secretly been glad of Wes’s recent weirdness, returning some of Abigail’s time and attention to her. But a girl only got one Sisters of Sorrow Summer Dance in her lifetime. It should be enjoyed to the fullest extent.

In the sun, they peeled off their innocuous uniform sweaters. Abigail thanked the Lord that this was her last mandatory year of education. There were no nuns in college, no enforced skirt lengths, no unflattering cardigans. Abigail wanted more from life than this town. Her life would be rich and full and cover every genre—travel and romance and mystery. Her parents thought that her being young meant she lacked some understanding of how the world worked when, in reality, it was they who didn’t understand. She would not end up trapped like her mother. Her mother’s light was like that of a dead star: still shining but with nothing behind it. Catherine had had so much promise. How did she end up back here? Saddled with three kids and a bad marriage on Side Street? Pitiful, thought Abigail. She pitied her mother.

“I want to get out of here,” said Abigail.

“What about tennis?” asked Tibet.

“No, I mean, like, in a grander sense.”

Tibet looked at Abigail like duh.

“I’m serious,” said Abigail.

Tibet propped up onto her elbows. “You know how they say if you want to make God laugh, make plans?”

“You mean, like, don’t jinx it?” said Abigail.

“I think it means more like, things will never look the way you think they’re gonna look.”

That was true, thought Abigail. They’d look even better.

A nondescript black vehicle retrieved Bud the day after he received the note, as it had said, at four forty-five p.m. A tinted partition separated him from the driver. They drove silently into the city and up the hill to the area where the streets didn’t have names. The billionaire’s house looked like a ruin, thought Bud, Aztec maybe, or Mayan. He wished he’d better prepared himself architecturally, wished he’d read up on his ruins. “Prewar,” he could call the place, but which war? Everything was pre–some war.

A girl in a shapeless black dress opened the car door.

“Right this way, Mr. Flynn,” said the girl.

She looked about Abigail’s age. He followed her over a bridge above a deep waterway. Bud imagined having a moat in front of his house on Side Street. One could feel the house’s mass just being in its proximity. Oh, the pre-Columbian facades are simply wonderful, Bud would say, had he prepared.

“This is quite the place,” said Bud. “Prewar?”

The girl laughed politely. “You could say that.”

What a strange informality you could say that was. Of course he could. He just had. Bud began to regret his choice of tie. It was so … festive, as his eldest had pointed out. Too large, more of a kite than a tie. It suddenly seemed to be wearing him.

“Each block was imported,” said the girl. “They’re extremely heavy. The house is sinking into the land, little by little every day.”

“What’s your name?” Bud asked the girl.

“Oh, I’m nobody,” said the girl.

“Say, Nobody,” said Bud. “What do you think of this tie?”

“I think it’s exquisite, Mr. Flynn.”

The girl smiled, more genuinely this time.

The front doors swallowed them whole. There was a painting in the foyer that Bud recognized from textbooks, not some modern surrealist what have you, but a real honest-to-God painting. It pictured a crying boy.

“Boy Crying,” said the girl.

Bud nodded. She led him into a parlor and offered him a seat on the “canapé,” by which, Bud realized, she meant the sofa.

“I’ll need to hold on to your device,” she said.

“My what?”

“Your cell phone,” she said. “It’s standard procedure.”

Bud handed over his phone.

“There’s no service up here anyhow,” assured the girl.

Peculiar, thought Bud.

He admired the great piano in the corner. Pianos, he thought, like chessboards, were important objects to have around even when they weren’t being played.

A chill went down Bud’s spine.

“It’s kept at exactly sixty-two degrees,” said the girl, “for the health of the stone.”

While it was rather cold, the chill had come from elsewhere. Bud understood he was being observed. He felt a presence beyond the girl in the shapeless dress.

“You get used to it,” said the girl. “The cameras.”

“Quite the cautious guy, our host,” said Bud.

“As you are aware, the Harbor has built a reputation around its robust security measures. And security, like charity…”

“Begins at home?”

“Exactly,” she said. “Mr. Alabaster is very excited to meet you, Mr. Flynn.”

Bud’s suspicions had been confirmed that he had tapped into something—as his boss put it—well above his pay grade. Fear and excitement simultaneously coursed through him. He looked behind him out of a window and into the fleeting daylight, the moon already visible.

“Do you know what they call it, Mr. Flynn, when the moon’s out during the day?” asked the girl.

Bud shook his head.

“An errant moon.”

“Is that so,” said Bud.

“Because the moon is misbehaving,” said the girl. “It’s poking around where it shouldn’t be.”

He nodded slowly. Bud wondered if the girl was instructed to make such small talk. How versed was she on the situation? Was she just a cog like him, or was her clearance level higher? How high did this all go? The girl clutched her right ear, beneath her hair.

“He’s ready for you,” she said.

“You sure I shouldn’t lose the tie?” said Bud.

She laughed, childlike. “He’s already seen it.”

Bud followed the girl down a hallway culminating in a mighty door. Mermaids were engraved into the door’s wood. Not enchanting franchise mermaids, but garish creatures with spears and pointed teeth. Monsters.

“You know,” said the girl, “shipping has been in his family since 1798.”

Bud did know. It said so on the company’s website. His business cards. The Alabaster Harbor™ memorial anchor.

“It’s in his blood,” said the girl.

Bud imagined Paul Alabaster’s arteries as canals of commerce. What was their relationship, Bud pondered, Mr. Alabaster and this girl? She certainly seemed fond of him. Or was it simply her job, to pay him lip service?

“You can go in now,” said the girl.

She padded back down the hall in catlike quiet. Bud used his shoulder to push open the door. The office was papered in nautical toile. Roped curtains covered the windows like fishing nets. Bud took a seat before a desk, a hefty thing, engraved like the door with nightmarish sea creatures. He looked more closely now. One of the desk mermen bore something in its teeth. It appeared to be a human limb.

“It belonged to Bernhard Gilroy.”

Bud spun around to face Paul Alabaster. Unlike the desk—gallant, impenetrable—Mr. Alabaster was gaunt and spindly, appearing to suffer from a lack of sunlight. He had thin lips that revealed artificially white teeth when he smiled, and he was dressed in a plain quarter-zip sweater. A Solis glinted from beneath his sleeve. A mythic timepiece. Bud had never seen one in person. It looked oversize on his wrist, like a child trying on his father’s watch.

“Gilroy was quite the ambitious sailor,” Mr. Alabaster continued. “He was carrying goods home to his village—two dozen jars of peaches, seven sacks of grain, and a pound of pig’s feet, if memory serves—in an eighteen-foot schooner. Two hundred and thirty-seven miles in twenty-nine days. As the legend goes, a sea monster capsized his boat, probably a whale, and he drowned with his cargo. This desk is a reminder of our radical advancements in naval technology, our stronghold over nature. Now we pilot giant ocean liners. We’ve conquered the sea monsters. We watch whales for recreation. We keep them in zoos.”

Bud fiddled with the knot of his tie.

“Nice to officially meet you, Mr. Flynn.”

“I— I believe we met,” stammered Bud. “Once, a few years back. At the Retreat Toward Progress.”

Seated, Bud felt in a place of inferiority. Paul Alabaster stood over Bud and shook his hand. Bud allowed his hand to be shaken. His mouth was parched; all the water had drained to his palm.

“Drink?” offered Mr. Alabaster.

He motioned toward a bar cart stocked with glittering bottles of brown, yellow, and clear liquor. One of the bottles contained a viscous white liquid. It bubbled in a familiar way.

“Pure, prenatal milk,” said Mr. Alabaster, following Bud’s stare. “I source it. Does wonders for the skin.”

From what animal, Bud wondered, was the milk acquired? Cow? Whale? Human? The affluent were fascinating.

Mr. Alabaster used a pair of tongs to drop a single ice cube into a glass, filling it with one of the liquors. His skin, Bud had to admit, was smooth and unblemished, like a baby’s.

“A single malt from just north of here, actually.”

His glass met Bud’s. A creature mounted on the wall eyed them. It was like a rabbit but larger, with reticulated antlers.

Mr. Alabaster took his chair across from Bud. There was a deep silence, the house rumored to be soundproof.

“How’s that drink, Mr. Flynn?”

Bud gave a thumbs-up. In recent memory, Bud could not recall ever giving a thumbs-up. Bud realized that it was his turn to speak. He could not conjure an anecdote, a pleasantry. It was as though he’d never participated in a conversation. He slumped a little in the leather chair. He’d never felt so fine a leather.

“I like a man who doesn’t mince words,” said Mr. Alabaster. “So we’ll get right down to it. I hear we have a problem.”

The cargo. Bud had completely forgotten.

“Just a minor discrepancy,” said Bud.

“And you brought this discrepancy to the attention of your supervisor?”

“Allen, yeah.”

“And what did Allen say?”

“He told me to drop it.”

“Do you often disobey instructions from your supervisor?”

Mr. Alabaster gave a lighthearted smile.

“Allen, respectfully,” said Bud, “is acting in willful ignorance … to what I think might be a big problem.”

“And why would Allen do this?” asked Mr. Alabaster.

“Big problems generally mean big paperwork,” said Bud.

“Allen doesn’t like to stir the pot,” said Mr. Alabaster.

“Exactly,” said Bud.

“I like a pot stirrer,” said Mr. Alabaster. “Sometimes the pot needs stirring. How else are you going to make something? I’m genuinely asking, I’m not much of a cook myself.”

Bud laughed. Allen didn’t get it. He was just another product on the corporate conveyor belt. But this guy, thought Bud, this guy got it. Bud could see it all unfolding, the two brave men who weren’t afraid to stick their noses where they shouldn’t. The comptroller shaking his hand, offering him the key to the city before flashing cameras. LOCAL ACCOUNTANT BREAKS MAJOR MARITIME SCANDAL. Paul Alabaster would be grateful to Bud for bringing to light this abuse of his technology, for saving his company’s legacy. This would be the first of many single malts. He saw dinners at Mr. Alabaster’s house, weekend getaways. A shared cigar on the veranda and the shared silence of men. Men at peace.

“So, what is this big problem, Mr. Flynn?”

Mr. Alabaster relaxed in his chair, placing his hands behind his head. Though seemingly banal, there was something menacing in this gesture. Bud couldn’t put his finger on what.

“I’ve noticed some cargo that has gone … unaccounted.”

“As an accounts manager, shouldn’t that be your purview?”

“Yes, but there is nothing to account for. They’re missing. I oversee every crate, every container, that passes through the harbor—or rather, the CargoCounter 3.0 does.”

“The CargoCounter 3.0?”

“That’s what we call the software—your software.”

“Charming.”

Bud, emboldened, went on. “We keep meticulous records of import, duration of dwelling, export, marine exchange—but there are these … these consistent inconsistencies. The contents are being repeatedly miscalculated. I believe it may be intentional.”

“This is quite the speculation. You’re starting to sound conspiratorial, Mr. Flynn.”

Mr. Alabaster eyed Bud curiously.

Bud sipped his drink. He noticed something in the center of the single cube of ice.

“Quail egg,” said Mr. Alabaster.

Bud rested the drink on his knee, trying to cloak revulsion. They were getting off track. A track Bud hoped would lead to a summer time-share.

“There are a litany of reasons for backlogged cargo,” said Mr. Alabaster. “Gridlock, bottlenecking, clerical error. I doubt we’ll solve these problems in my office.”

“But there is a pattern, sir,” said Bud. “They aren’t lost. These unmarked containers are docked but never logged, omitted from public record. The international vendor does not have a registered licensing number in the system or in the physical archives, which is unprecedented and, well, illegal.”

“Illegal,” repeated Paul Alabaster.

Bud’s host stiffened.

“It’s my job to be skeptical,” said Bud.

Mr. Alabaster spun his drink, making little waves.

“Thank you for your profound attention to detail, Mr. Flynn. Clearly we’re in good hands. I’ll take it from here.” Mr. Alabaster cleared his throat. “Are you hungry? I’ll have my chef pack something for you. Have you ever tried Siamese grouper? Prohibitively difficult to source, they only reproduce every five years. Still on the endangered species list.”

“That’s all?”

“No, I’m sure he’ll make a side salad.”

“In terms of the big problem,” said Bud.

Paul Alabaster stood to freshen his drink. The quail egg in his glass crowned as the ice cube melted.

“Am I sensing correctly that this is a personal matter for you, Mr. Flynn?”

“I’m just doing my job.”

“And how would you describe your job?”

He stood over Bud again. Bud craned his neck to meet Mr. Alabaster’s gaze.

“I am the accounts and systems manager. I oversee the accounts and the systems.”

“Isn’t there something you’re forgetting?”

“I keep us adhered to an annual budget—”

“Loyalty, Mr. Flynn.”

Mr. Alabaster began to pace, slow and deliberate.

“You perform for and with respect to the Harbor, the institution of commerce, and to capitalism at large, yes?”

“I’d have to check the handbook,” said Bud.

“It’s not a professional problem you’re broaching but an ethical one,” Mr. Alabaster said with the utmost composure. “Because perhaps something unlawful is happening here, right under your nose, and I’m asking as your employer, a majority shareholder in the harbor, and as a man who values loyalty in his subordinates for your discretion. In this instance, doing your job involves not doing your job. Business is a funny thing.”

Bud swore he felt the house sinking into the earth, if only a fraction of an inch. How foolish he’d been to entertain the idea of camaraderie with a man from such a vastly different societal caste. This meeting was a formality, a necessary irritant to maintain life’s harmony, like jury duty. A time-share, thought Bud. This man didn’t share time. He owned it.

“I can see I’ve disappointed you, Mr. Flynn.”

The company was corrupt, this Bud already knew. But he’d been hoping for the maintenance of a minimal level of corruption. And why did it have to be right under his nose? Why not the nose of someone more qualified to dismantle the system, stir the pot? Bud had no nose for deviance.

“What happened to stirring the pot?” asked Bud.

“You’re here, aren’t you? Consider it stirred,” said Mr. Alabaster. “But I have a lot else cooking, so—and apologies for overextending the metaphor—I am going to need you to get out of the kitchen.”

“I don’t understand,” said Bud. He watched a ring of condensation form around his glass, leaving a circle on the knee of his trousers.

“I don’t need you to understand. Some things are just the way they are. When I built this harbor—”

“Respectfully,” said Bud, “your father built this harbor.”

Anger inundated Bud. Paul Alabaster narrowed his eyes into slits, pursing his lips.

“Let me tell you about my father, and my father’s father before him.” Mr. Alabaster gestured to the wall where an oil painting hung of two men, larger than Paul Alabaster but with similar brow bones, each holding a rabbit by its foot. Pierpoint Alabaster and Son Warren T. Alabaster at Annual Easter Hunt, read the gold plaque below. Bud wondered if this was a tradition they still upheld. He felt categorically closer not with the men but with the limp rabbit dangling from their clutches.

“You know this man on the left as the man who made your town. Who revolutionized the twenty-first-century shipping industry. Mastering both land and sea, he thought there were no worlds left to conquer. But there was a world he overlooked.” Mr. Alabaster patted his desktop computer. “I made my own name, my own dynasty. Control what people do and you’re a king. Control how people think and you’re a god.”

Bud saw his host before him, a very powerful man with very profound daddy issues. As a child, Bud had often tried to picture the human incarnation of God. It looked nothing like Paul Alabaster.

“What are you smuggling?” Bud asked, almost a whisper.

In just a few weeks the REDACTED crate would arrive, as it had every year for the last decade, and it would disappear like the others into the ether. Lost in history.

“Are we failing to deliver on any of the promises stated in our mission?” Mr. Alabaster asked, ignoring him. “Are we not maintaining an efficient, sustainable economy, adopting new technologies to improve the reliability of global cargo flow? Are we not annually investing in capital improvements to ensure that shippers worldwide have access to a broad selection of carrier and service offerings, superior goods, and outstanding transport to and from our great nation? Are we not at the forefront of the revitalization of waterfront trade, improving public access to information and transforming the shoreline into a world-class visitor destination? Have you been to the pier? Have you ridden our Ferris wheel? Well, of course you have. You have three children.”

Bud tensed at the mention of his family.

“Three daughters,” said Mr. Alabaster with a knowing, wicked grin. “Harper, Louise, and Abigail, ages twelve, fifteen, and seventeen. Isn’t that right, Mr. Flynn? Clever, your youngest. She’s the one who found the cameras in my cedar balls.”

Did Bud detect some glee in his delivery? The house was not sinking, thought Bud. It was being swallowed into hell.

“No children myself. I can’t imagine it,” said Mr. Alabaster. “I hear it’s like having your heart walk around outside your body.”

Bud clenched his non-drink-holding hand into a fist.

“There’s no need to get excited. You looked into my affairs so I’ve had a peek into yours,” said Mr. Alabaster. “Bud— Can I call you that, Bud? Despite our socioeconomic disparity, Bud, I’d like to consider us acquaintances. I can’t share the plight of the everyman but perhaps we can come to an understanding. And if we can’t, please be aware that this interaction is being recorded from multiple angles, and there are at least three armed guards present on the premises, all ex-military.”

Mr. Alabaster wiggled the quail egg free from the ice and cracked it into his cup. He sipped the expanding yoke.

“You’ve heard about this prison break?” asked Mr. Alabaster. “I’m sure you have. Two guys tunnel out of jail using a permanent retainer. One was a dentist, one was a landscaper. Perfect pairing for this sort of venture. My production company is already looking into optioning their life rights. But what you don’t know about the story is that there was a third guy, another inmate with a rap sheet as long as the Bible. Serving twenty-five years to life. This third guy became aware of his colleagues’ escape efforts. He noticed little—what did you call them, Mr. Flynn?—consistent inconsistencies in his fellow inmates’ behavior. The second guy started speaking differently without his retainer, for example. Here’s where it gets really interesting. Are you with me? Not only did this third guy know what the other two were doing, he covered for them, unprompted, on several occasions, to various guards. Why would he do this? There’s nothing in it for him. When asked why, he said, and I’m quoting here: ‘I ain’t no snitch.’ Now, that’s a loyal guy. I’d sure like to take a meeting with that guy.” Mr. Alabaster gave his neck a disconcerting crack. “My assistant will show you out now.”

The girl in the shapeless dress rematerialized, laying a light hand on Bud’s arm. A flash of sympathy in her young eyes. She returned his phone upon guiding him out of the property. Bud did not want to be God. He began mentally writing his Lost Lambs exercise on the drive back to town, behind the dark partition. In his world, no one cheated, no one lied, no one ingested prenatal milk or raw quail eggs. Paul Alabaster was wrong, thought Bud. The physical and the digital were not the only conquerable frontiers. There was the world inside oneself. Where right and wrong were day and night. Waves beat against the walls of Bud’s spiritual world. Dark frothing waters of unrest. It was twilight when the car arrived back in town. Bud stepped out, exhausted, dazed, and hungry. The driver popped the trunk and lingered until Bud walked over and opened it. The trunk revealed a silver cloche under which there was a hot fish dinner, a side salad, and a very large check made out to one Bud Flynn.

Bud pulled into the driveway and decided that that night was as good as any to sleep in his own bed. His children were out and the lights were off. His wife sat on their sofa in the dark, the fabric more stained than patterned at this point, though once it had been the crown jewel of furniture acquisitions. Not the popular L shape but rounded more like a C. C for Catherine. C for couch. C for Can we spend this much on a sofa? It’ll just get ruined anyway.

Catherine hadn’t attempted to mask the smell of smoke on her clothes, weed and cigarettes alike, and Bud didn’t attempt to mask his irritation. He walked past her to the kitchen, turned on the lights, and threw the endangered fish into the sink. Its preparation included the eyeball. It stared at Bud.

Catherine joined Bud in the kitchen, leaning on the wall they once planned to knock down, to “open up” the space. The space remained closed. In the light of the kitchen, Bud noticed she’d dyed, or rather attempted to dye, her hair a shocking brassy blond. He made no comment. He stared at the fish.

“You’re wearing your nice trousers,” said Catherine.

“How was your sister’s?” Bud asked sarcastically. His tone steeped in contempt.

“You wear your nice trousers to your little meetings?” Catherine’s tone matched his.

“Sometimes,” said Bud.

“Are you planning to get laid at your religious cult group?” said Catherine.

Bud turned to her. “I also wore these to the Kids with Asthma walkathon. Do you think I was planning to get laid there too?”

“I know about Miss Winkle,” said Catherine.

Her expression was stony, her eyes stoned. Bud felt that if he touched Catherine she might turn to stone entirely.

He let out a long breath. “Well, what’s it to you?”

“What’s it to me? You’re sleeping with your spiritual adviser.”

“You’re sleeping with Jim Doherty.”

“I am not sleeping with Jim Doherty. You’ve completely mythologized the situation.”

“You never corrected me!”

Catherine pulled her chilled glass from the freezer along with a bottle. There was no liquid left in it. Even the water-diluted remnants were gone. She looked around, then settled on a bottle that had sat on their counter for at least a decade, containing some red liquor, a Christmas gift. It was Christmas in Catherine’s glass.

“Were you with her just now?” asked Catherine.

“I’ve had a long day,” said Bud.

“I know you were,” said Catherine.

“Could you try a little harder to mask your midlife crisis from our children?” asked Bud.

“How could you do this to us?” she said, suddenly irate.

“Oh! So now it’s us. When I meet a nice woman who takes care of me—”

“I don’t take care of you?”

“Nor are you a nice woman.”

Catherine looked Bud over, as though through his nice trousers to the spot on his thigh where he had once threatened to get a tattoo of a sumo wrestler but never did and, though relieved at the time, Catherine now wished he had. She sipped the red drink.

“Do you love her?” Catherine asked.

Bud’s exasperation mounted quickly to match hers.

“You initiated this,” said Bud.

“You can’t do this!” said Bud.

“I’m getting whiplash,” said Bud.

“You’re so selfish,” said Bud.

“You, you…” said Bud.

Bud punched the wall. He recoiled quickly. “Jesus—I hurt my hand.”

“You punched the wall.”

“I’ve had a long day and am going to bed.”

“Wait,” said Catherine.

Bud looked at her, wild-eyed. He cradled his hurt hand in the other.

“What do you want from me?” said Bud.

“Where did you get that fish?” said Catherine.

“Should we just call it off?” said Bud.

“I’ve never seen a fish like that,” said Catherine.

“You’re high,” said Bud.

“Maybe so.”

“Let’s get it over with,” said Bud.

“Don’t say divorce.”

“You said it first!”

“Let me get you some frozen peas for your hand.”

“We don’t have any frozen peas.”

Catherine poured the liquid from her drink out, dousing the fish, and held the frosted martini glass to Bud’s hand. He resisted at first. Winced. Then resigned himself to the treatment.

In the silence of their ceasefire, Catherine was nurturing. She pressed her lips to his wrist.

“Stop that,” said Bud.

“I’m sorry,” said Catherine.

“I don’t care,” said Bud.

Catherine ignored him. She moved her lips up his arm to the crux of his neck, lifting to her toes to reach. He grabbed her by the hair with his good hand and pulled her off. She stood there startled for a moment, kitchen light glinting in her patchy hair. Bud surrendered, set down the glass, and kissed her. They kissed as they had many times before, but not in recent years, with mouths open, tongues exploring. Bud pushed Catherine against the wall they didn’t knock down. He filled his good hand with Catherine’s hair. He detected the alkaline flavor of tears between them, hot and bitter. Bud hoisted Catherine up by the bottoms of her thighs, navigated out of the dim kitchen, through the obstacle course of their undone laundry, and to the bedroom, depositing her onto the bed in which he had not slept for over a month.

“I’m sorry,” Catherine repeated.

“Shut up,” said Bud.

He splayed her over the duvet, hiking up her muumuu. An abhorrent garment, thought Bud. Catherine had bought it after she read that the queen wore muumuus while in mourning. What queen? What was she mourning? He ripped the cheap cotton, putting an end to her bereavement. A look of legitimate surprise came over Catherine and he exposed her breasts. Their lovemaking didn’t usually possess such fanfare.

“My muumuu!” said Catherine.

She wore nothing by way of undergarments and Bud could slip inside her easily, though he hesitated at the moment of entry. How scandalous it felt, fucking his wife. Until recently, his sole lover of seventeen years. Mother of his children. The mother of his children cried out performatively.

“William!”

“Shut up,” Bud panted.

He appreciated her effort. He pumped harder. Lifting her legs the way she liked. Then flipping her over the way he liked. Pushing her face into the pillow. Neither of them liked it now. Sticky flesh mashed together. He controlled her by the hips, hands at ten and two. Her pleasure was not the objective nor did it seem to be an incidental result. He felt her flinching with each thrust. When Bud succumbed to exhaustion, he had not orgasmed and did not think Catherine had either. His hand throbbed. Catherine looked a little dazed as she turned over. And then her eyes filled once more. It wasn’t the first time their sex had ended in Catherine weeping, but it was the first time Bud didn’t care.

“Okay,” said Catherine, “let’s call it off.”

It was another routine day of security. Wes surveilled Alabaster Manor, slipping from room to room in utter silence. Instructions filtered through a small microphone in his ear. Wes did not know to whom the voice in his ear belonged, probably someone deep below watching him lap the property on large security monitors. One could spend days wandering Alabaster Manor and not see everything there was to see. Several doors remained locked, even to security. Paul Alabaster’s office was one of those doors. Wes admired the craftsmanship of its door when he passed by. Some rooms only contained one object—a chest, a cello, a mounted elephant’s head. Wes avoided those rooms. He had signed a multilateral NDA on the day of his hiring. Anything he saw in the house was not to be spoken of outside of the house, or at all for that matter. They had also done extensive research into his own background and presented said research to him in a way that had the suggestive air of blackmail. Wes was not to worry about their business and they would not his. It was easy. He didn’t talk much anyway, he told the lawyers.

The house had many kitchens, one of which was stocked for the guards with beer and tinned cakes and crackers, assumed fare of the working class. Wes rarely patrolled the staff kitchen. While little helped his stomach ailment, the consumption of gluten made things notably worse. Growing up on a wheat farm was just one of life’s cruel ironies. His childhood home was forty miles from the nearest market and decades away from understanding the concept of a dietary substitute. To Wes’s father, gluten-free bread was as absurd as alcohol-free liquor, and if young Wes were to complain about his cramping small intestine, his father would offer him a beating the likes of which would certainly not be pain-free. The other kids lauded Wes in military school for his deadpan attitude and almost inhuman ability to accomplish the task at hand, whatever that task might be. Wes never complained about the ruthless exercise and sleep deprivation. He saw basic training as no different than the reaping, threshing, and winnowing of wheat stalks. From military school, he was recruited for private mercenary service and this was where his record tapered off, only to be dredged up by the lawyers of the tech billionaire.

His ear spoke.

“We got a crazy one at the east end,” said the device.

Visitors were not uncommon, or rather protesters, those who, for one reason or another, wished to contest the tech billionaire’s various societal impacts, often loudly and with signs, megaphones, and sometimes paint. The tech billionaire was all but unreachable. There was a feedback section on his website where complaints could be filed into a virtual void. The billionaire’s property was inaccessible at street level, hedged by twelve-foot fencing covered in vines with sharp thorns jutting from their root systems, and equipped with more modern security measures such as cameras and motion detectors. A house cat could not slip by, let alone a dissatisfied citizen. How Abigail had snuck in the night of their first meeting Wes would never understand. No one entered Alabaster Manor uninvited. Perhaps she had been invited all along.

The protester outside the property’s east end was a woman, middle-aged and missing large chunks of hair, fleshy patches of scalp poking through. Her eyes were wild and she was screaming.

“Liar! Fascist! Murderer!”

Wes approached her with trained stoicism.

“Ma’am,” said Wes.

“Murderer!” she yelled. “Mur-der-er!”

“I’m going to have to ask you to move along,” said Wes.

“This is a public street,” cried the woman. “I have a right to be here.”

Wes spoke barely above a whisper in an even, placating voice. A low tone tended to subdue the nervous and frantic, he found.

“Ma’am, there’s nothing for you here,” said Wes.

“Is that your boss in there?” The woman pointed through the gate and inside the compound. “My house is next to the Alabaster Oil Refinery. Lived there all my life. When they built the refinery ten years ago, they said it wouldn’t have any impact on the area. But they lied. The air is toxic. The water is toxic. I have lung cancer, stage four, never smoked a day in my life. I won’t ever see my baby grow up. She won’t ever see nothing, was born blind, a birth defect from sulfuric acid exposure. It’s in her blood, doctor says. We don’t have no money, can’t move. That house is all I have. Your boss in there’s a murderer and you’re no better.”

Wes looked at her with sympathy. A black car pulled up beside them.

“This car will take you home,” said Wes. He patted the top of the car. It would be a nice ride. The driver would offer her clean water, bottled from a stream far from here, and she could listen to whatever she liked on the radio.

“Home to my poisoned piece of earth,” said the woman. “I won’t make it ’til Christmas. But you, you will have to live with yourself and the company you keep.”

“I’m just security, ma’am, nothing more.”

“What do you know about the man you’re protecting?”

The woman got into the car. Wes held her door. His temple twitched.

“Blind,” she repeated out the window. “My baby girl is blind.”

The car pulled away from the property, taking the woman with it. Wes clenched his fists. The warring factions in his stomach were at it again, the enemy gaining new ground in his bowels. They planted a flag and set up base camp, clomping around his colon with steel-toed boots. He sipped from the bottle latched at his side and spat. It was a vile concoction of cold herbal tea and vinegar, meant to flush out the enemy within, though Wes was not convinced of its efficacy. Nothing helped for very long. He might as well be slugging liquor—it’d taste better and help pass the day. Wes’s phone rang in his back pocket, inches from his pistol. He answered it. The service on the hill was inconsistent, nonexistent inside the manor.

“I’ve got—” said the man who had everything.

“What?” said Wes.

“Something,” said the man.

“Something?” repeated Wes.

“Meet me at Catwok. Chinese strip club. It’s got the big oriental dragon out front. Make sure you aren’t—”

The call cut out.

“I’m not what?” asked Wes.

“Being followed,” said the man loudly.

“I’m not being followed,” said Wes.

“It’s said that if you see a mountain lion, they’ve already seen you.”

Wes hung up the phone. He stared at the fence and knew it stared back. It had a somber wisdom, the fence. It didn’t want. It just knew. Then he touched his ear and said that he’d be taking his lunch. To a passerby it might have appeared as though Wes were speaking to the fence directly.

Catwok was tucked into a strip mall, making close neighbors of a nail salon, a head shop, and a notary. The booths were made of cracked red leather. An apathetic stripper occupied the one stage. She might as well have been checking her watch between twirls. Wes took a seat and ordered a tea. Two seats down sat the man who had everything, attacking a bowl of cold peanut noodles with a pair of disposable chopsticks and drinking a beer with the label picked off. Again, as if to no one, Wes spoke.

“Well?”

“You ever played with one of these?”

The man tossed over a Chinese finger trap. A little cylindrical toy with its colorful latticed weave. It landed in Wes’s lap.

“Yes.”

“So you know how it works.”

“Yes.”

“The harder you pull, the more stuck you get.”

“I know how it works.”

Wes’s tea arrived, a pleasant green with steam rising from its surface. Despite the table’s innumerable ambiguous stains, the waitress placed a coaster beneath the cup. Wes found this endearing. Taking pride in one’s work was a lost art.

“How’s your stomach?” asked the man.

“Excuse me?”

The man pulled a manila envelope out from the breast of his coat. “Because what I am about to show you shouldn’t be viewed with a weak stomach.”

“My stomach is never well,” said Wes.

“Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

The man slid the envelope down to Wes, who unwound the tie and pulled out a photograph. It was enlarged and thus grainy, time-stamped from spring a few years ago. It pictured three men in suits with Venetian masks over their eyes. Despite the mask, Wes knew the thin-lipped smile and bleached teeth of the man on the left—Paul Alabaster. Wes remembered the second man from the party, the one who spoke with Abigail, who called himself Dolt. Wes did not recognize the third man. They stood flanking a chair, a chair in which a young girl was tied up, a wrist to each of its armrests. The girl wore a thin nightdress and a full face of makeup. Overapplied blush and lipstick like a child who’d gotten into her mother’s vanity. She was thin and pale with long hair. Her head drooped at an unsettling angle. The girl did not appear to be conscious.

“Where did you get this?” asked Wes.

“I have my ways,” said the man who had everything.

Behind the subjects of the photo the shapes of other men passed in the background, similarly dressed in suits and masks. None in focus enough to identify. They held wineglasses or champagne flutes. A party.

“This man.” Wes pointed to Dolt.

“Dr. Orson Lancaster III. The Alabasters’ physician. Had his medical license revoked a few years back.”

“D-O-L-T,” said Wes to himself. “And the girl?”

“Don’t have a name for her, just initials: AB.”

“AB,” repeated Wes.

“Whoever she is, I doubt she just fell asleep like that.”

Wes gritted his teeth.

“The date,” said the man. He pointed to the time stamp. “This time of year, five years ago.”

“Thank you,” said Wes.

Wes didn’t touch his tea. The waitress eyed them like petulant children. The stripper yawned. Wes overpaid and returned to his truck in the empty parking lot. The man followed, hands in his pockets, looking regretful.

“What do I owe you?” asked Wes.

“I’ll send my bill when the job’s done,” said the man. “That said, you know the best way to deal with a finger trap?”

“You relax,” said Wes. “Give in.”

“That’s one strategy,” said the man. “But the best way is to not stick your fingers in there to begin with.”

The man took a cigarette out of his pocket, long and skinny, the kind made for women and French people. They both stared at the entrance of the strip club. A long red dragon snaked around it.

“Who is the third man,” asked Wes, “in the photo?”

The man licked his lips.

“Now that, we do know,” he said, and pointed his cigarette at Wes. “He’s a holy man, believe it or not, from a little town just south of here.”

Wes cocked his head.

“He’s called Father Andrew,” the man went on.

“A priest?”

“Mm-hmm. Does the Alabasters’ private religious consulting.”

Wes contemplated the dragon, its teeth, its talons. Paint chipped off its once-intimidating mouth.

“They can’t get away with it,” said Wes.

“Don’t be naive. Course they can.”

The man who had everything said he’d be in touch and went back into Catwok, leaving Wes in the afternoon sun. He drove back up the hill, his stomach performing its acidic cartwheels, and to the gates of Alabaster Manor. From the car window, Wes placed his security badge, as always, beneath a barcode scanner. But instead of flickering green and granting him entry to the property, the machine turned red and made a pessimistic buzzing sound. He replicated the process, garnering the same results. Wes refashioned the device back into his ear.

“Trouble with my card,” said Wes, “at the north gate.”

He waited. Cigarette ash twitched on the dashboard, gently rocked by the truck motor’s soft purring. Wes touched his ear once more. “Do you copy?”

“We copy.”

The voice in his ear was different than before. Calm and clear above the standard transmission static.

“I need to be let in at the north gate,” said Wes.

“I’m afraid we can’t do that.”

“My card’s not working,” said Wes, irritated.

“Your card has been deactivated, Mr. Wyley.”

Wes sat up straighter in his seat. The machine continued blinking red. The voice went on.

“Your service here has been terminated. Your last payment will be sent to your place of residence. Have a good day.”

“Wait!” Wes yelled to no one, to silence, to the sunlit spores in the air. The light had a familiar quality as it filtered through the dirty windshield. Wes tapped the device in his ear, which had clicked off with chilling permanence. He tapped and tapped but it reacted no more than a stone would, an acorn.

The sexual harassment and better practices training day at Our Lady of Suffering was a seven-hour seminar and roundtable discussion regarding which behaviors technically qualified as sexual harassment and which, technically, did not—according to both current legislation and the will of the Lord. Father Andrew’s eyelids flickered like prayer candles as the instructor prattled on about the various ways one should not touch members of their congregation—men, women, and children alike. They were instructed on the proper stance for a baptism: an arm’s length between one’s body and that of the baptee, offering both maximum security and ample distance. One should, under no circumstances, touch, wash, or caress their parishioner’s feet, even if said parishioner indicated that they wanted their feet touched or washed. If a child indicated that they had a sore throat, one should not peer inside the child’s mouth to assess the situation or palpate the child’s neck for swollen nodes—even if said cleric had a medical background—but rather alert the child’s parents or legal guardian to their potential illness.

As if Father Andrew wanted to palpate any of these townspeople anyway. His mind drifted back to his undergrad thesis on female sensuality in French cinema. In the cinéma français, nobody batted an eye at a foot rub or a routine medical examination. In fact, such gestures were welcomed, encouraged even. For this, among many other reasons, Father Andrew loved the world of French film, where a girl’s sexuality gave her agency, where there were fewer restrictions and more topless chain-smoking on the beach.

The Mother Superior blushed as the sexual harassment instructor demonstrated on a CPR dummy where not to touch a child. Perhaps Father Andrew’s laissez-faire attitude toward modern sensitivities had harkened from French cinema, but he had only grown more irritable as the culture grew more touchy—or, rather, less. This was why Father Andrew began conducting his virtual seminars. Some time ago now, one of his videos went rather viral, garnering liberal backlash for his vocalization of traditional values.

Various progressive cults of self-improvement had started using the church space to gather. Groups intended to inspire and galvanize their members through the power of positive thinking. Father Andrew watched them champion one another’s delusions: One might be told that their body was perfect just the way it was when their rotund, prediabetic body was not perfect but, in fact, killing them. Another might be assured that they would find love by simply believing, but not by bathing, exercising, working, or applying themselves in any way. This all seemed rather antithetical to the father’s formal training. God helped those who helped themselves. Father Andrew knew this. It was why he’d been misallocating the church bell fund for almost a decade. So obnoxious, the church bells. Was it really necessary to chime every hour? As though time’s passage needed such an extravagant announcement.

He didn’t need an instructor of uncertain morals and pronouns to tell him how to do his job. Father Andrew did not want to molest anyone. He just wanted society to chill out a little.

“Father Andrew,” said the instructor, “why don’t you share how you found yourself in this line of work?”

He’d rehearsed the answer to this question many times over.

“Really, it found me,” said Father Andrew.

He explained how, during his junior year at university, a priest was giving a poorly attended talk about his missionary work. Father Andrew, admittedly, had slipped into the auditorium unaware of the lecture’s contents but soon became so enraptured by the words of the charismatic priest that he hung around after to buy the man a coffee. Within a week, he’d switched his major to a pastoral track, become involved in the local parish, and went on to pursue a master’s in divinity, later becoming ordained as a deacon and so on. The priest he first spoke to remained in his life throughout his studies and to this day they discussed theology and played cards on weekends.

“For fun, of course, not for wager,” concluded Father Andrew.

The sexual harassment instructor carried on the conversation, satisfied. Father Andrew had not been dishonest in the traditional sense but instead, when it came to his origin story, had mastered the lie of omission. Yes, he had been a junior at university when he began down the righteous path, and yes, he met a charismatic priest and proceeded to take the proper steps and go through the proper channels to take the Holy Rite. It was what led to that decision that Father Andrew failed to disclose. What bright, ambitious, and handsome twenty-year-old wants to take a vow of obedience, poverty, and chastity? Perhaps one who, over spring break in a poor country with beautiful beaches and vast jungles, had been driving a rental car with his girlfriend after having a few too many of the local cocktails. Say youthful fondling, petting, and caressing had taken precedence over proper road etiquette and the vehicle swerved ever so slightly into the oncoming lane. And sure, it was too dark to say whether the subsequent thud belonged to human, animal, or even a rogue tree root—of which there were many in that part of the world—but the sinking feeling along with the shrieks of his girlfriend led Father Andrew to believe that maybe it was not a tree root, or an iguana, or an ocelot. And then say that this feeling did not dissipate but instead settled inside of him, haunting him, not just as he continued driving, but after he left the country and went back to university, following him into his dorm and taking residency in his chest day in and day out, coming to film class and parties and football games. Maybe he’d cut ties with his girlfriend, she being a reminder of the terrible thud, and fallen so deep into despair that there was nowhere else to turn but to Providence. Only then might a boy like him confess to the visiting priest and swear to spend his life atoning, improving as many lives as possible for the one he ruined. And though years passed and truth, memory, and imagination blurred as they were wont to do, that feeling still might live inside him like a piece of glass beneath his skin. This part of the story he did not share with the sexual harassment and better practices instructor and had not shared with anyone in almost thirty years.

His train of thought was interrupted by the call to lunch. The training-day company had supplied libations for the parish with so many alternative options for the dietarily challenged—meat-free, wheat-free, lactose-free, legume-free, oil-, seed-, and sodium-free—that Father Andrew wasn’t able to identify a single meat-full, bread-full, dairy-full food product in the spread. It didn’t matter. He’d spent so much of the last week sweeping dead gnat bodies into dustbins that he’d never consider eating in the church again.

His desire to return to traditional values: this was how Father Andrew first met the prominent man, a man whose descriptors might include the words magnate and mogul, chairman and chief. It was some years ago now.

That day was like any other. It wasn’t entirely uncommon for a stranger to wander in looking for spiritual advice, but it was for one of the prominent man’s pedigree. It was strange that he was in the town at all.

“For what it’s worth,” the prominent man had said, sitting opposite Father Andrew in his small office, “your sermon on embracing timeless values in a changing world resonated with me.”

“Thank you,” said Father Andrew, “but I am afraid you’re in the minority.”

Father Andrew had once ventured into the comments section below his video. This section was where true evil lived.

“I’m no stranger to digital hostility,” said the prominent man.

“As the prophet wrote: The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever,” said Father Andrew. “Change often appears enticing, as it promises progress and novelty. But when we forsake tradition, we risk compromising our principles. Becoming morally bankrupt.”

“I am not a fan of bankruptcy of any kind,” said the man.

Father Andrew hadn’t understood the reason for the prominent man’s visit but went on doing his job as always.

“What brings you in today?”

“I’m having trouble grappling with something, Father. See, the word of God stands forever part, that I get. It’s the grass withering. The flowers fading. That part doesn’t sit right with me.”

“You’re struggling with ephemerality.”

“I have no interest in withering. Nor fading, for that matter.”

“It’s a fool’s errand,” said Father Andrew, “to contest mortality.”

“Call me a fool.”

“My greatest ambition in life is to become immortal … and then die.”

“Is that from the Bible too?”

“No. French new-wave cinema.”

“Ah. I thought it sounded familiar.”

The man had folded his hands in his lap.

“Father,” he continued, “I understand this may sound strange, but I’d like to employ you … as a private consultant.”

Father Andrew had knit his brow, considering the man. “What sort of consulting?”

“To provide in-house spiritual guidance.”

“I’ve never heard of such an arrangement.”

“I believe we can help each other.”

“I am a priest,” said Father Andrew. “My relationships are not transactional.”

“I’m a capitalist. Everything is transactional.”

Father Andrew smiled and held up a hand of polite refusal. “You’re welcome here, in this house, free of charge. My office hours are Monday through Friday. Four p.m. to six p.m.”

“The payment is not so much for your services but for your discretion. What I’d like to discuss is delicate in nature. Do you know who I am? I’m a very high-profile individual.”

“I do know who you are,” said Father Andrew, “and everything you say is under priest-penitent privilege.”

“I think I’d prefer an NDA.”

The priest studied the prominent man. How much he’d enjoyed having a real, articulate, albeit unusual conversation. A conversation that didn’t revolve around bake sales or church bells or pageants or raffles. It was a shame it had to end.

“I’m afraid I cannot help you.”

“I’m not a bad man,” said the man, “but when I take moral inventory, well, let’s just say I could use a better bookkeeper.”

“Would you like me to absolve you?”

“No, you can advise me. As I’ve said. And you can do so over a meal cooked by my world-renowned chef. I’m not here to talk about absolution. I’m here to talk about the future of being human.”

Father Andrew, smiling cordially, shook his head.

“Perhaps what you’re after is more akin to an analyst,” said Father Andrew. “I know less than you think.”

“And I know more than you think, Father,” the prominent man had said. “Have I mentioned that there is a lot of travel in my line of work? Business has sent me to all kinds of places. To beaches, deserts…”

“How lucky for you.”

“I’ve gone down dark roads in vast jungles. Some of these places, it’s like the land has its own memory, you know.”

Father Andrew had been puzzled, and he righted himself in his chair.

“I didn’t know,” Father Andrew said.

“Personally, I like to keep track of memory in different ways. Digitally, mostly.”

Father Andrew’s heart had raced as he’d begun to comprehend the situation. He’d tried to call upon God but the line was dead, nothing but a divine dial tone.

“Is there anything else I can do for you?” Father Andrew’s voice shook.

“You can come to a party tonight,” said the man.

“I’m afraid I’m indisposed,” said Father Andrew.

“Come on, what’s a priest doing on a Friday night?”

“I have a card game with an old friend.”

“We all make mistakes, Father,” said the man. “Saints and sinners alike. It’s what we do with those mistakes, how well we hide them, and the lengths we go to keep them hidden, that matter.”

The man’s lips had all but disappeared when he smiled. Father Andrew shivered.

“Just to make sure nothing is lost to subtlety, I am of course referring to the vehicular manslaughter committed in your youth.”

“I am aware.” Father Andrew had been unable to move. He didn’t think his legs would support him at that moment. “As I’m sure that you are aware that blackmail is a sin.”

“I like you, Father. I think we could work well together. Just take it under consideration,” the man had said. “I look forward to your next sermon.”

The prominent man then dropped a single business card into the collection basket, embossed with succinct, sleek type, and left Father Andrew’s office without shutting the door.

“We’re going to visit Pop-pop,” Bud told the girls. Catherine no longer counted as one of the girls. She was not invited to visit Pop-pop. Mostly because Bud did not want to talk about their sexual situation.

“I think we should discuss our sexual situation,” Catherine had said before Bud and the girls left.

“I’m taking the girls to visit my dad,” said Bud.

“I think we should have a threesome,” said Catherine.

“I don’t think Dad’s up for a threesome,” said Bud.

“No, William. With your little friend. Or rather your big friend, actually…”

“I’ll be back in a couple days,” said Bud.

Years ago, Bud’s parents had moved a few states inland to a minor city that touted record-breaking heat near a college that reported record-breaking date rape. The commercial appeal of the city was its proximity to one outlet mall, one government rocket-testing facility, and the Museum of Miniatures. Bud’s parents had chosen this austere locale for their retirement because they were able to buy significantly more land than they would have been able to elsewhere, land on which they built a sanctuary for retired police horses, but due to old age and heat exhaustion the police horses died with alarming frequency and their sanctuary more resembled a horse cemetery. Their backyard was full of horse headstones. Bud’s father, retired from the force himself, found it unsettling and prophetic, as though he too would soon join the horses beneath the parched earth. Bud’s mother tended the living horses. Mr. Flynn rarely left his Co-Z-Man recliner.

Inside was a home of the eclectic elderly: a hutch displaying formal pictures of relatives, a grandfather clock, a mechanical bass that sang when one walked by. A nativity that lived in the cactus garden year-round. Bud’s mother had had what Bud called a codependent relationship with God. She had prayed for everything: for Bud’s soul and the souls of Bud’s children, for rain and for discounted bread and for the provocatively dressed bank teller. She had gone to church three times a week, two hours from the house. It was the only church that still offered a Latin mass. She had made Bud learn Latin growing up, and sparing Bud from Latin lessons was not a battle his father picked. She had checked with Him before beginning any task, from folding laundry to snipping the bottoms off flowers. She had found the notion of Halloween demonic and offered proverbs to the children who knocked at their door. This had made the house subject to mild vandalism, assault by egg, by toilet paper. When she at last died, Bud’s father rose from his Co-Z-Man recliner to buy the bread and fold the laundry. But he did not step foot in church again. So he would never know that the church two hours away had renamed their prayer garden after his wife.

Bud had bought four plane tickets with his accumulated company airplane miles on a budget airline called SkySavings a few months prior to his cash infusion. Bud did not cash Paul Alabaster’s check for three days. Then, on the fourth day, he deposited the check but vowed not to touch the money. He watched the digital numbers of his bank account grow. He certainly couldn’t spend a penny of the bribe on himself—that would be immoral—but couldn’t his family benefit? It was his job to be the provider, and in some roundabout way he had earned the money, hadn’t he? Within a week, Bud was spending his blood money. First he put a significant chunk away to “do its thing,” as his concerningly young accountant had put it. In a year, it could be three college funds. Three rounds of bail. Then he bought Louise the dress she wanted, which, to his relief, was quite conservative. He bought Harper a new game console, brand name, and two inordinately violent games, which, in an instance of violent video games actually doing more good than harm, kept her busy and away from his evil employers. Bud bought a bicycle for Abigail. Since she didn’t know how to drive he figured this would be a gesture of liberation, of trust, and would disincentivize her from riding around with boys in trucks. The girls were suspicious of their father’s new financial liberalism but didn’t look a gift horse in the mouth, lest it end up buried in their grandparents’ yard. Bud ordered a set of vintage teacups for Miss Winkle, hand-painted with vignettes of foreign towns. For Catherine, he purchased a carton of cigarettes, pocketed one pack, and left the rest on her—once their—bed.

Bud and the girls sans Catherine took a car to the nearby airport. As they arrived, the driver got out of the car to help the girls with their bags. The girls fussed and argued groggily as the morning fog burned off the sky.

“It says we’re boarding group 127,” said Harper.

Bud considered that he now had the financial freedom to upgrade their tickets. Yes, he’d do that. He’d surprise them. None of them, Bud included, had ever flown first class. That is what I’ll do, thought Bud. Use a bad thing to good ends. Use his blood money to pamper those around him. And what Bud wanted just happened to be free—the joy of their gratitude. That was all he needed in return.

The airport security workers held a conversation across the conveyor belt of suitcases. The Flynns took off their shoes and deposited them into bins.

“They find fecal matter on these bins,” said Harper, “if you look under black light.”

“We did hibachi for your birthday last year,” said one of the airport security workers to another. She checked Bud’s boarding pass. She popped her gum. She waved over a Hasidic man in a shtreimel.

“Sir, you’re gonna have to remove your hat,” said the airport security worker.

The man shook his head.

Bud passed through the metal detector. Abigail passed through the metal detector. Harper passed through the metal detector. They collected their things from the bins with the fecal matter. Six shoes. Three disposable water bottles, three pink airplane pillows. Bud relooped his belt. He walked over to a floating screen to check for their gate.

The airport security worker scanned Louise’s boarding pass under her boarding pass scanning machine. It lit up differently than the trillion times she’d done this action. Her expression changed.

“Oh shit,” she said.

Louise’s eyes widened.

“Step over to the side for me,” said the airport security worker.

Louise did as she said.

“What’s the problem?” Abigail called from beyond the metal detector.

“She your sister?” said the airport security worker.

“Yes,” said Abigail.

The line was growing restless behind them.

“Says she’s on the no-fly list.”

The airport security worker picked up a phone attached to the wall.

Louise avoided eye contact.

“Dad,” said Harper. “Louise is going to airport jail!”

The man in the shtreimel shook his head.

Abigail and Harper waited outside the little room. They had never been to this part of the airport. There were no T-shirts or key chains or magazines or coffee kiosks—none of the consumer pleasures they’d grown to associate with flying. The bigger room, outside the little room, was medically sterile, with armed military personnel standing expressionless at either door. Bud was inside the little room with Louise and whomever the airport security worker had summoned. It must be a misunderstanding, thought Abigail. She wondered if they would still make their flight. It was likely boarding. Their phones did not have service in the big room outside the little room.

Bud and Louise came out in tandem. Louise was looking down at the carpet patterns, holding a sneaker in each hand. A tall suited man tersely addressed Louise.

“Pull a stunt like that again and you’ll end up in juvie,” said the suited man, “and I don’t see you particularly thriving in that environment.”

Louise nodded. Eyes glued to the floor.

“It’s not a mistake?” Abigail asked Bud.

“Why are you on the no-fly list?” Abigail asked Louise.

“Hello?” Abigail asked everyone. She realized that they were not walking out of their own accord. They were being escorted. Another large man set their pace. His jacket bulged at his hip. A holster.

They drove home in relative silence.

“I mean, Harper I would understand, but…” Abigail said.

When they arrived back on Side Street, Bud walked briskly through the house and to the backyard. He had abandoned all their things on the front lawn. Three suitcases, three disposable water bottles, three pink airplane pillows. Catherine was smoking a joint on the elliptical in the living room. Her eyes drooped. Bud traipsed by soundlessly. Louise followed with her little head hung.

“What’s going on?” asked Catherine.

“Louise is in trouble,” said Harper.

“Why aren’t you at Pop-pop’s?” asked Catherine.

Bud climbed the ladder to the tree house and ducked inside. Louise followed, sheepish, eyes averted. The girls, including Catherine, gathered below. Catherine tried again.

“Can someone please…”

“Could one of you…”

“Honestly, William, what’s going…”

Bud ignored her. Per yourstruly’s instruction, Louise had a collection of aerosol cans and colanders, flour, starch, and sugar. A deconstructed pressure cooker. A gas mask. A manual on pyrotechnics.

“Please,” said Bud to Louise in his most serious parenting voice, “tell me you were making cupcakes up here.”

Louise shook her head.

Catherine called up to them. “What in the living hell…?”

“Kid?” asked Bud.

“It’s called a baker’s bomb,” Louise muttered.

“And what did you plan on doing with it?”

Back and forth, back and forth, Louise shook her head, tears making waterfalls down her cheeks.

“What is it for, Louise?” he said.

“The beauty pageant.”

Bud put his head in his hands.

“I didn’t want to huwt anyone!” said Louise. “Youws told me to.”

“Youws?” asked Bud.

Louise composed herself. She held her breath and let it out.

“Yourstruly. But then he got in some trouble with the government and he had to give up a list of names…”

“What is yourstruly?” asked Bud.

“My boyfriend,” said Louise.

“Christ,” said Bud.

Of course. The totality of love. Bud had done crazy things himself under its influence. He slumped against the tree house doorframe and threw his hands up to God.

“I don’t really know what to do in this situation,” he said. “They don’t cover this sort of thing in parenting books.”

Or maybe they did. He’d never read a parenting book. He kicked the pyrotechnics manual. Bud pulled Catherine’s cigarettes out of his pocket and placed one in his mouth. God gives His toughest battles to His strongest soldiers, he thought.

“I wouldn’t light that in here,” Louise said softly.

Since their daughter’s attempted act of domestic terrorism Bud and Catherine had reached a truce, united in the throes of parenting. One of them was to be home at all times to monitor Louise, who’d scarcely said a word since the unsuccessful trip to Pop-pop’s. She had been suspended while Sacred Daughters took the situation under review. The third Flynn girl in two months to receive a suspension.

Word got around fast that Louise had attempted to bomb Our Lady of Suffering’s Inner Beauty Pageant. Phone calls and letters of discontent flooded the Flynn household. Kids scrawled terrorist in hopscotch chalk on the sidewalk outside the house. An explosives removal removal team came in gas masks and air-purifying respirators and blue gloves and white jumpsuits. They swarmed the tree house while Louise watched from the window. Tears in her little eyes. All of her work was siloed into explosive-removal bags and taken away for investigation.

It seemed that the Flynns had been on a downward spiral since the dawn of the “arrangement.” Now the house fell into an even greater state of disarray. The surface mess only distracted from the more profound flaws. Catherine finally decided to address some of the problems in the home, the physical ones at least, starting with the downstairs bathroom, which had not seen running water in weeks. She snapped on her cleaning gloves, lit a cigarette, and took to the sink. The pipes were rusted and leaking, which produced a film over the back wall from which grew a spongy mold or moss that one could only hope was the nice kind of mold or moss and not the kind that poisoned the bloodstream. The downstairs bathroom floor tiles were framed by gray matter but a lick of a sponge proved that they were supposed to be framed by white mortar. What kind of mother was she? Raising her children in filth like piglets. No wonder they were all so odd. Their unformed brains were subject to spores from unknown mosses and molds, and that was just the downstairs bathroom. Who knew what else was lurking under the rug in the TV room or behind the island in the kitchen, which now served as a shrine of empty wine bottles Catherine had planned to turn into candlestick holders. Catherine, half under the sink, ashed her cigarette into the foul mess.

That was where Bud found Catherine, on her hands and knees. He stood over her.

“How’s Louise doing today?” he asked her.

Catherine ignored the question.

“This bathroom is repulsive,” she said. “The whole thing needs a remodel.”

“Don’t you think, respectfully,” said Bud, “that we have bigger fish to fry? That our time and attention might be better spent elsewhere right now?”

He spoke carefully to heed their truce, to keep the war cold.

“The pipes barely work and the tile is filthy and this wallpaper is so outdated. It’s time for a change.”

“Elsewhere,” Bud enunciated, “like on our delinquent children?”

“What were we thinking with this wallpaper? Sailboats? Who among us enjoys sailing? I’ve certainly never been sailing.”

“And is there any world in which maybe you are projecting your focus onto what seems like a more leisurely undertaking than, say, child-rearing, and are in fact using our disgusting downstairs bathroom to deflect from—”

“There’s no running water, William,” she interrupted. “It’s like a third-world country in here.”

Bud let out a slow, steady breath. An exercise he no doubt learned from that horrible home-wrecking church woman, thought Catherine.

“Seeing as we have two other bathrooms and a kitchen all with functioning faucets,” said Bud coolly, “and considering that not one but two government agencies have called after our fifteen-year-old daughter this week, at the risk of starting controversy, maybe we should funnel our collective efforts solely into—”

“I’m thinking modern traditionalism. For the bathroom.”

Catherine stamped out her cigarette on the floor. She’d foregone any veneer of subtlety.

“While I commend your attempts to marry two very disparate styles,” said Bud, “can we just consider the issue at hand?”

“Is it hardwired into your DNA?” asked Catherine. “The need to ridicule every single thing I do?”

With that, the war was hot again.

“You know what?” said Bud. “Knock yourself out. I forgot that you’re an artist and an interior designer. Do you also happen to be a mechanic? The ‘check engine’ light is on.”

Catherine fanned a book of paint chips.

“Something striking,” she said. “Manchurian. Salamander Blood?”

“One way to keep the house clean,” said Bud, “might be smoking outside of it!”

“Something in the red family,” Catherine continued.

“Do you know that there is a green mass rotting in the crisper bin?”

“Chard. It’s called chard.”

“You need help,” said Bud.

“You’re right,” said Catherine. “We should hire a contractor.”

“Mental help, Catherine.”

“Stop being so theatrical, William.”

“We have bigger fish to fry.”

“Stop using that expression,” said Catherine. She stood up. “You have never in your whole life fried a fish. Never. You’re stealing valor.”

“From who? Fish fryers?”

“You say that like it’s so ridiculous.”

Bud’s frustration was more powerful than his breathing exercises.

“It is ridiculous!” he yelled. “They don’t care what expression I use because, well, they literally have bigger fish to fry.”

“I’ve got it!” Catherine exclaimed. “A clawfoot tub. I’ve always wanted a clawfoot tub.”

“Impossible woman!”

“The tub in our bathroom is so small. I have to bunch up my knees when I take a bath.”

“Yes, you can lounge in the new clawfoot tub while I visit our daughter in federal prison.”

Bud huffed into the kitchen. Catherine followed. She set the paint chips on the counter.

“You lavish the girls with bicycles and video games and I can’t have a functional bathroom?”

Then, to her surprise, Bud relented. He leaned on the kitchen wall, the wall against which they’d been kissing just the week before.

“Okay,” he said. “Fix the bathroom.”

Bud pulled the checkbook from the Everything drawer and placed it over the paint chips.

Catherine went to the town bulletin board—a digital bulletin board now existed in some capacity but Catherine still preferred the analog board, the process of engaging with the ecosystem—where townspeople listed services like babysitting and extermination and vacuum repair and, lo and behold, contracting. One contractor called himself Big Mike, and his specialties included “plumbing, electrical, and whatever.” Catherine imagined this apathetic, maybe recently jailed man tracking mud through her bathroom with giant work boots and continued on to the next name: Remy. Remy’s flyer listed a respectable skill set in an alphabetized, grammatically correct list above his telephone number tear-offs, of which there was only one left. Catherine tore it.

“Good choice,” said a voice behind Catherine. She spun around to find Carlin McCalister’s mother approaching the bulletin board. “You’ll like Remy.” Carlin McCalister’s mother said you’ll like Remy in a funny way, evoking the junior high implication that Catherine might like like Remy, which was to say that not only was Remy in high demand but also handsome and perhaps those two facts were not mutually exclusive. Had all the mothers in town employed Remy for “contracting” work? Catherine pocketed the number, smiled politely at Miss McCalister, and headed home.

Catherine left word for Remy the Contractor over his generic voicemail machine. He answered via text asking the date and time and services desired. So when Remy the Contractor finally knocked on the Flynns’ door, Catherine’s mind had filled in the blanks of what he was to look like. A handsome blue-collar man with a blue-collar sense of humor and sun-kissed skin hinting at ancestry south of the border. She imagined handing him items from a red toolbox like a nurse would to a doctor during surgery. “Scalpel.” “Allen wrench.” In Catherine’s imagination, she went to fetch Remy a glass of ice water from the kitchen and, when she spun around from the tap, he would be standing there sweaty and thirsty for something of another sort. And this was when her fantasy took on a life of its own, when Remy the Contractor would flip Catherine around, hike up her house dress, and give her the old Allen wrench, the old Phillips-head. (Catherine knew nothing of tools but assumed these were phallic ones.) While not formally educated, Remy would have deep emotional intelligence, would sense that Catherine had needs that weren’t being met. Their coupling would take place on various surfaces around the house in each iteration of the fantasy, but each time concluded with a “thank you, ma’am” and a “no, thank you” from Catherine.

Catherine’s mind could not have anticipated the tool-belted specimen who arrived promptly at their agreed-upon time. First and foremost, Remy was a woman, and while Catherine fancied herself a feminist of some wave or another, considering labor statistics, a lady contractor was unusual in and of itself. Remy the Contractor was not just a woman but, as a men’s magazine might phrase it, a ten-out-of-ten drop-dead knockout dime piece with the jawline of a supermodel. A short, chic haircut framed her face.

“Remy,” said Remy.

The subsequent handshake was hardy and self-assured but Remy the Contractor’s hands were smooth and dainty, despite her line of work. Catherine struggled to conceal her shock.

“You know Miss McCalister?”

“Sure, did her back house last year.”

Huh, thought Catherine. Carlin McCalister’s mother had meant nothing unprofessional by her “you’ll like Remy” comment after all. She simply meant that Catherine would like Remy and the work that Remy did. Catherine led her guest to the downstairs bathroom.

“What are we thinking?” asked Remy.

“I’m thinking modern traditionalism,” said Catherine.

Remy the Contractor raised an eyebrow. She turned the knob of the unresponsive faucet, crouched, and began poking around beneath the sink.

“I have some paint chips,” said Catherine.

“Your piping’s all rusted over,” said Remy.

“Is that so,” said Catherine.

“And you’ve got a serious mold problem here.”

“How about that.”

Remy laid on her back like she was fixing a car, maybe milking a cow. She dug into the sink’s intestines.

“You didn’t know?”

“Not a clue,” said Catherine.

Remy placed a stray cigarette butt on the counter, the filter coated in Catherine’s lipstick. Catherine smiled innocently.

“Let’s start with the basics,” said Remy, “before we talk paint chips.”

Remy the Contractor was stoic, blunt, almost expressionless, her face betraying nothing. She preferred to work in private. She didn’t need Catherine buzzing around her. She could grab her own Allen wrench. Catherine made herself scarce, went to the kitchen, fixed a cocktail. Bud had taken Louise to her appointment with the court-mandated child shrink and the house was quiet save for the faint clinking from the downstairs bathroom. Catherine set down her afternoon drink and resumed a workout routine she’d started earlier that day. Though thousands of women subscribed to the exercise regime, it mostly just felt like clumsy dancing, flapping one’s arms and shaking one’s head yes and no. She stepped left, right, up, and down in accordance with the instructions that came to her over the speaker that you could address like a pet. She was so absorbed in her drink and her gyrating that she startled when Remy the Contractor appeared behind her, cross-armed in the doorway, unfazed.

“Sink’s working,” said Remy.

“How about that,” said Catherine.

Remy was back the following day and the day after that, until “the fun part” began. That was what she called it—“the fun part”—the part that came after the plumbing and electrical. The sink, vanity, and shower. The artistry. Each day Remy’s hair was shellacked with gel so it didn’t fall in her face as she hammered and drilled and caulked and glued and measured and it looked impossibly stylish, Catherine had to admit. Catherine felt a twinge of resentment toward Remy. How could a woman be so beautiful and wind up in her line of work? Beautiful and useful, a positive addition to society. Catherine contributed nothing to society, she thought. If anything, she was a hindrance to its progress.

Catherine fixed her afternoon drink. Louise was at community service. Bud at work. Catherine was alone again, like she’d thought she wanted. Her time at the LuxWing had been beneficial. She’d taken a bath and dyed her hair with the boxed bleach and ordered room service and a pay-per-view movie and charged it all to Jim Doherty’s account. She’d sat in the hotel bed and smoked in her nonsmoking room, the fee for which she assumed would also fall to the neighbor, and pondered her life to no satisfactory conclusion. Her night alone was not revelatory or clarifying except in showing her how much she didn’t want to be alone. She couldn’t finish all the food she’d ordered and it sat there getting cold. Her hair looked terrible when it dried, largely because there was no one to do the back. Catherine felt so lost. And perhaps she should find herself, but she much preferred that someone do it for her.

In the functioning upstairs bathroom, Catherine looked in the mirror. She’d since had her dye job professionally fixed, reset to its usual brown. She squeezed a dollop of product into her hand and slicked back her hair. She thought about colors for the upstairs bathroom and flipped through the beige and white section of paint chips, paused on one called Absence, and held it to the wall. She then migrated to her room, to the desk where she’d last set down her camera. Outside of picking paint samples, Catherine hadn’t done anything creative in some time. And after seeing the effects that midlife creativity had on Jim Doherty—to whom she hadn’t spoken since their quarrel in the basement, despite his receiving what must have been a massive bill from the LuxWing—Catherine was ready to throw in the artistic towel entirely and replace it with an afternoon aperitif. Through the “arrangement” her husband had found both partnership and spiritual fulfillment. And what had Catherine found? Absence.

Remy appeared in the door. “Ma’am?”

“Yes, Remy?”

“Do you have a moment to talk hinges and knobs?” asked Remy the Contractor.

“Yes,” said Catherine, “I have a moment to talk hinges and knobs.”

“Nickel is cheaper but stainless steel looks better, in my personal opinion.”

Catherine sighed. “How much more are we talking?”

“The price point is marginal, but it’ll make all the difference.”

“Well, alright then.”

“I’ll get everything ordered.”

“There is some Chinese food in the kitchen,” said Catherine. “Help yourself.”

“Thank you, ma’am.”

Remy turned to go resume her work.

“Remy?” called Catherine.

“Yes, ma’am?”

“Do you find your work creative?” asked Catherine.

“Yes, ma’am,” said Remy the Contractor.

“So you find your work spiritually fulfilling?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“No?”

“No, ma’am. I do not derive my spiritual fulfillment from renovating bathrooms.”

“Oh.”

“Kitchens are another story.”

Catherine smiled. It took a moment to pick up on the humor in Remy’s dry tone.

“There’s one more thing,” said Remy the Contractor. “I found these tucked behind the mirror when I removed the medicine cabinet. That too should be lined with steel, rather than nickel or brass, in my personal opinion.”

Remy held up a baggie of colorful pills.

“Huh,” said Catherine.

“I’ll just leave them with you.”

“They aren’t mine!” Catherine said indignantly.

Remy put her hands in her pockets, detached as ever, her body language inscrutable. “It’s none of my business, ma’am.”

“Well, they’re not.”

“None of my business.”

Remy would be good at tell-based card games, Catherine thought.

“You think I’m some pill-popping housewife?”

“I’m just here to fix the bathroom.”

“They must be my daughter’s,” said Catherine.

“Yes, ma’am,” said Remy the Contractor.

“I don’t even know what they do,” said Catherine.

There was a pause between them. Dead air.

“Well,” said Remy the Contractor, “there is one way to find out.”

Catherine and Remy the Contractor laid in the overgrown backyard grass. Dandelion tails floated by. The moon was out in the daylight. The grass smelled wet and sweet. Catherine wondered what the moon smelled like.

They had each taken two pills, one yellow and one blue. The effects were gentle and immediate, casting a beaded curtain over Catherine’s mind. She saw no change in the contractor’s behavior. They had spoken more about hinges, and then some about lighting fixtures. Remy had many personal opinions about lighting fixtures. First Catherine had offered Remy a glass of wine. Then she had suggested they lay down in the grass.

“I like when the moon’s out during the day like that,” said Catherine. “It feels like a glitch. Like God hit ‘day’ and ‘night’ at the same time.”

Remy the Contractor nodded.

“It’s called an errant moon,” said Remy.

“How about that,” said Catherine. “So, how does a woman like you wind up in your line of work?”

“A woman like me?”

“As someone who works frequently on the installation of mirrors, you must have an idea of what you look like.”

Remy shrugged horizontally, gazing forward at the lighting fixture in the sky.

“My dad was a contractor, his dad was a contractor, and his dad was—”

“A contractor?”

“No, his dad was a Soviet peasant farmer.”

“Ah.”

“Are you spiritually fulfilled by what you do?” Remy asked.

“Well, that’s just it,” said Catherine. “I don’t do anything.”

“Aren’t you a mother?”

“By trade, I’m a photographer.”

Spring was turning to summer around them. The grass licked their limbs.

“Mother is a much more profound medium,” said Remy, “in my personal opinion.”

“Really?” asked Catherine.

“Steel versus nickel.”

“I never thought of it that way. It’s not a creative position, after all.”

“Isn’t it? Your kids, they’re your masterpiece.”

“You haven’t met my kids.”

Remy shrugged horizontally.

“My marriage is no work of art either,” said Catherine.

“Marriage is just an institution that informs the tax code.”

“Oh.”

Catherine watched the light hit Remy’s wineglass, the last sip of sediment idle in the bottom. Remy drank it.

“Don’t drink the sediment,” said Catherine.

“I don’t like to see anything go to waste,” said Remy, “descending from Soviet peasant farmers and all.”

“Let me get you another glass,” said Catherine.

She made her way to the kitchen and smiled. With Jim Doherty she would always be a pill-popping housewife, but not with Remy. Remy saw her as an artist simply by being female, doing what women had always done: creating life. The thought was far too simple to be Catherine’s invention, but that was the power of the blues, the yellows, to make the mundane into something revelatory. Catherine cleaned out the empty wineglass and let the sink water run pleasantly over her hands. She’d never be alone because she had her art, her children.

Catherine felt a presence behind her even before turning. When she spun around from the tap, Remy the Contractor was standing there, stoic as ever, eyes level with Catherine.

“Can I get you anything else?” asked Catherine.

Remy shrugged vertically.

Then Catherine took one bold step forward, one small step for Catherine, under the errant moon. This step put the women’s noses inches from each other. Catherine felt her heart pounding, her hair rising on end. On her arms, her neck. It might have stood straight up on her head had she not gelled it down.

“Is this okay?” asked Catherine.

“Yes, ma’am,” said Remy the Contractor.

Everyone in Tibet’s family was named after the place in which they were conceived.

“Your cousin should have been called Airport Steakhouse,” joked Tibet’s mother.

Tibet did well in school. She received high marks. Her extracurriculars were well-rounded and reflected a litany of different interests and avenues down which she might pursue a future career. Her college of choice was prestigious, as were her backup and safety schools. She passed her driver’s test on the first try and engaged in a meaningful discourse with her instructor on the nuances of self-driving cars. She only wore makeup that looked as though she were not wearing any makeup at all and the hemline of her uniform skirt hung at knee length, unflattering but stipulated by the school’s administration, a mandate most of the girls ignored. Each morning Tibet made a peanut butter and banana smoothie for herself and her little brother, Phoenix, before they left the house. After school, and after after-school tutoring, after volleyball and cello and volunteering at the animal shelter, after church and Compost Club, art modeling, horseback riding and Renaissance theater, after dinner and dishwashing and family time and a ten-step skin regimen, Tibet took to the computer and researched conspiracy theories while taking pills intended for animals.

The biggest conspiracy of all? This whole love thing.

“I just don’t get it,” Tibet said to Abigail walking home from school one afternoon.

“It’s because you’ve never felt it,” said Abigail.

Abigail got it. She had been suspended for punching one of the Biddle twins, risking her education and future for what— a boy? Tibet was definitely missing something. She was irritated. But beyond the irritation, Tibet was jealous, for she had never felt something so galvanizing, had never utterly relinquished control, never let someone drive her ballistic or ecstatic or let someone drive her anywhere for that matter. Tibet always drove. How could she be that vulnerable to someone? It seemed incredibly stupid, as most fun things did.

“It’s so painful,” Abigail went on. “But so worth it.”

“Totally,” said Tibet. “Seems like a super valuable use of your time.”

Tibet knew that what she could not understand, she could always insult.

“Like researching conspiracies and aliens is such a good use of your time?”

Abigail walked off without saying goodbye. Perhaps there was someone who had some control over Tibet. After her many extracurriculars and a particularly long bout of family time, Tibet took to her room and examined the invitation Abigail had received. She recognized the style of writing from her calligraphy class—not classic copperplate, Spencerian, black letter, not uncial but Leviathan, a rare form of penmanship that gained popularity in Eastern Europe. Only six houses still produced the style and, after calling each of them pretending to be a disgruntled customer, Tibet learned that only three had sent out orders to the States that month. Two were located in a small European mountain village. Only one made the invitation she held in her hand. A rotating nursery lamp cast shadows across her walls. Over the phone she solicited a list of other invitees from the flustered calligrapher, each name he’d been instructed to reproduce in Leviathan script. Despite their language barrier the calligrapher was starting to sense that she was not a customer at all but still parted with the names when Tibet slipped into her sensual voice, a tone that transcended language. Huh, thought Tibet. The list of names was all male.

She took to her forums. A loyal conspiracy community at her fingertips.

What do you know about Paul Alabaster?

Within minutes she was flooded with responses, opinions, photos, links to articles, microfiche scans, songs played backward. Tibet waded through. Discerning fact from fiction was a key component of her work. She employed the assistance of a drug she kept stored in a hollowed-out encyclopedia. It was meant to sterilize camels but had a stimulating effect on women sixteen to thirty-two. Compelled by the veterinary pharmaceutical, she started down a trail of headlines until a through line materialized.

LEGACY SHIPPING TYCOON CELEBRATES 35TH BIRTHDAY … AGAIN?

BILLIONAIRE TAKES STAND AGAINST THE “IDEOLOGY OF THE INEVITABILITY OF DEATH”

RICHEST 100 BUSINESS MOGUL GOES ON RECORD SUPPORTING CONTROVERSIAL ANTIAGING TECHNOLOGY

THE BLEEDING EDGE OF AGING: ALABASTER INC. INVESTS IN AMBIGUOUS MEDICAL CONGLOMERATE

LEGISLATION BANS PURCHASE OF “YOUNG BLOOD” FOR TREATMENT AGAINST AGING AFTER 70 MICE DIE IN BLOOD TRANSFUSION

YOUTH OR FICTION: EFFICACY OF BLOOD REJUVENATION PROVEN? EVIDENCE STILL LARGELY ANECDOTAL

BE POSITIVE: HOW A GOOD ATTITUDE AND SOME VITAL FLUID CAN INCREASE LIFE EXPECTANCY

BLUE BLOOD REDEFINED: ARISTOCRATS EMBRACE YOUTH ELIXIRS

VEIN-TURE CAPITALISTS GO TO UNPRECEDENTED LENGTHS TO SECURE YOUTHFUL DEPOSITS

Up her nose went another line of powder. Down the rabbit hole went Tibet. She read of an ancient ritual, a human portmanteau involving a Greek term—parabiosis, or “living beside”—binding the old and the young through shared blood. Occasionally, nestled among threads about secret societies and government cover-ups, she’d found reference to this practice in the past but had never paid it much mind. Now she looked up young blood infusion antiaging. She looked up Pope Sangue VIII drinks blood of Jewish boys, she looked up vitality of young blood bestowed to Chinese elders, she looked up lamb to human transfusion, she looked up drinking blood of fallen gladiators. She looked up death-cheating evangelist. She did another line of the finely crystalline powder. She could feel her own blood. It had gone from a lazy river to a white-water rapid. She looked up stem cells, reparative tissue, circulatory systems, organ repair, neurogenesis, ethical dilemmas, access to clean blood, price per pint. She looked up do pretty people have better blood? There was an acrimonious discourse on the subject if you knew where to find it. Tibet knew where to find it.

It was time for school before Tibet had time to sleep. She purchased two cups of caffeinated tea and met Abigail by the flagpoles.

“You look awful,” said Abigail, clearly still peeved from the day before.

“Haven’t slept,” said Tibet.

“Don’t get too wrapped up with these online freaks,” said Abigail. She made a carousel-like motion with her pointer finger. Tibet frowned, an online freak herself. She handed Abigail the invitation and Abigail delineated her plan for the following night: to arrive at the party where Wes would surely be working, in a stunning outfit she’d purchased from the mall, and remind him of the fun and spontaneous schoolgirl he’d first fallen in love with a few months ago. Tibet asked Abigail if she wanted a ride to the city, to which Abigail said no, it would be much more romantic if she trekked there herself.

“The Alabasters are really creepy,” said Tibet.

“That’s all just talk. People make up stories to cope with the mundanity of life.”

Every once in a while, Abigail accidentally said something quite profound, thought Tibet. She did not disclose how she’d spent her night, plumbing the deepest annals of the internet for tales of corporate espionage, coastal elites, medical malpractice, generations-old secret ceremonies, corporate connections, and immortality.

“I honestly don’t think you should go there by yourself,” said Tibet.

“You’re paranoid,” said Abigail.

“Will you at least buy a weapon from the girl in the bathroom?”

“Sure,” said Abigail. “I’ll buy a weapon from the girl in the bathroom.”

Tibet hugged Abigail, sloshing caffeinated tea.

“I’m just worried,” said Tibet.

“Don’t worry about rumors,” said Abigail. “None of it’s true.”

During her study period Tibet’s mind wandered. She dreamed about college, somewhere far from their town. Maybe she’d live close to Abigail, who’d be at a no doubt less prestigious college but nearby nonetheless, and they could get a house off campus, could make their own schedules, could own a closet full of dresses with hem lengths of their choosing. She’d take a semester abroad, somewhere like Polynesia where she’d learn and write and one day meet a man, someone who’d look into her eyes, brown like the mineral-rich Polynesian soil, and there she’d fall in love and get married and they’d call their first child Poly for short.

But her mind found its way back to the conspiracies, like it always did. The theories all morphed together like a multiheaded beast, the existence of which was evidenced by footprints in the north. She wasn’t alone. So many people were on a quest for truth. Abigail’s words—“None of it’s true”—replayed in her head. Tibet was skeptical, had started to question the very nature of truth. Was truth objective? To say there is no absolute truth is self-refuting. If it’s true that there is no absolute truth, that in itself is an absolutely true statement. Human beings are confined to their perspectives, thought Tibet, only experiencing a tiny fraction of reality, limited by the scope of mental faculties and senses. If humans were entirely subjective, the only truth she had access to was subjective truths and not objective/ultimate truths. Everything is true from a particular perspective, and also everything is false from a particular perspective. And around this point in her reverie was when the nihilism kicked in. Ultimately, it didn’t matter if the moon landing was faked, if governments created diseases in labs to combat overpopulation. It didn’t matter to her, Tibet, sitting in study hall with her cheek in her hand. It did not play a role in her college aspirations, future living arrangements, health, or romantic prospects. Her life would not be fazed by the discovery of nonhuman bones in faraway deserts or ritualistic blood cults, real or not. She could grow to a very old age without ever needing to know who really assassinated which president. So, Tibet concluded, truth’s truthfulness didn’t matter so long as the lies weren’t affecting her directly. And yet she found herself picturing the Alabasters’ party invitation, the stylized words that she’d read again and again and again until they were committed to memory. She did understand love, she thought indignantly. The truth was that she loved her friend Abigail and didn’t want her anywhere near these perverts.

“What I’m about to show you,” said the man who had everything, “is a little disturbing.”

Wes nodded. An evening breeze swept off the water and ruffled his collar.

“Anyone follow you here?”

Wes shook his head.

It had been four days since he was fired from the Alabaster Manor’s security detail and he still hadn’t told Abigail. Couldn’t bear to let her down. To fail her. He did not want to go back to the wheat field, but perhaps Wes was not cut out for the city. For where he was cut out, he couldn’t say. Some people don’t quite fit anywhere, he thought. But never had he felt so assured, so in-the-right-place-at-the-right-time than when he was with Abigail.

Wes followed the man deeper into the harbor, through the municipal bulk. Cargo containers stacked six stories high. The surrounding steel felt cold and lifeless. The man who had everything mumbled to himself. Wes realized that he was counting. They came to the end of the line, an area that appeared to be less frequented by the longshoremen—fewer cigarette butts littered the ground, an abandoned forklift sat rusted—where a single container was docked, pushed up nearly to the dark water. It had been broken into, apparently with the crowbar that jutted from its mouth. Wes raised his eyebrows.

The man who had everything extended his hands in an after you gesture. Wes pulled open the container’s door and squinted into the blackness. The man shined a flashlight. The little circle of light illuminated the crate’s narrow interior. It flitted over some jugs of water. A few white plastic gallon pails. Food, dried and packaged. Some untouched. Some torn open, crumbs and powders discarded on the paneled floor. A rotting smell wafted on the breeze.

“Food,” said Wes.

“Good food too. Most of it’s organic.”

“Someone was living here?”

“Quite a few someones by the looks. And it doesn’t seem like they were livin’ here of their own accord…”

The man shined the light along the container walls, where notes were carved in the paint in a language Wes did not recognize. There was damage done to the inside of the vaulted door, dents and scratches at its locking bar.

“Oh my God,” said Wes.

“God’s about a million miles from here,” said the man.

A bitter chill shot not down Wes’s spine, but up. Like a strongman game. From his gut to his head.

“Where did they go?” asked Wes.

“Looks like someone got here right before I did,” said the man.

Little lines were carved in the crate’s walls. Markers of time.

“I hate to take off on such a morbid note,” said the man, “but I got three kids and a wife who’s gonna raise hell if I’m not home before bath time.”

Wes nodded. The flashlight flicked off and he blinked into the dark hull. An open mouth.

“You gonna be okay?” asked the man.

Wes nodded.

“Need a ride?”

“I’m in the lot,” said Wes. The lamplit parking structure, his dirty truck, it all felt like it was from a different world.

“I’m not one for I-told-you-sos,” said the man who had everything, “but what did I say would happen if ya went down into the basement?”

Wes ran his hand over the crate’s tampered lock, felt the grooves made by repeated, desperate picking and prodding. The crescents of little fingernails.

“I’d find a monster,” he said.

“I’ll be in touch with my bill,” said the man.

Since Nature, Harper had been in a state of limbo. No longer just a mischievous child, not yet a sensuous woman. She feared any misstep might get her sent back to bad-kids camp, so she barely stepped at all. Who was Harper Flynn? It might take a few more sessions with the child psychiatrist, she feared, to answer that question. For now, she was a specially trained military scientist developing a secret bioweapon. On her on-brand game console, Harper was organizing a special task force, digitally delegating orders. Dusk turned to night outside. Harper sprawled out on the C couch. The coffee table was covered in cigarette ash, teacups, and teacups that had become ashtrays.

There came a ringing from the Everything drawer.

Louise popped her head into the living room. They stared at the ringing drawer.

“My phone was taken away,” said Harper.

“Mine too,” said Louise.

The ringing persisted. At least three calls in a row.

“It could be an emergency!” said Louise.

“You get it then,” said Harper.

“You get it!” said Louise.

“I don’t want to get in trouble,” said Harper. “What if it’s a test?”

The drawer rang a fourth time. Louise finally opened it. Inside, both Harper’s and Louise’s cell phones took turns lighting up with a call from Tibet. Louise answered Harper’s phone, the next to ring.

“I can’t talk,” said Louise. “I’m grounded.”

“I think Abigail might be in danger,” said Tibet.

“It’s Tibet,” said Louise to Harper. “She says that Abigail might be in danger.”

“Put it on speaker,” said Harper.

Harper jumped over the back of the couch and pressed her head close to Louise’s.

“Why do you think Abigail might be in danger?” said Harper to the phone.

“So Abigail went to this party tonight at Alabaster Manor,” said Tibet, “and she’s not answering her phone and, well, I know this sounds crazy, but I have reason to believe that Paul Alabaster runs a large-scale child-trafficking ring.”

Louise circled her finger around her ear like cuckoo.

“That does sound crazy,” said Louise.

“No,” said Harper, “it actually doesn’t.”

“Could you check in on her?” Tibet continued. “I’d do it myself but it’s family time and my dad has rented a film about cave diving.”

“You did the right thing calling us,” said Harper. “We’ll take it from here.”

“We will?” said Louise.

Harper hung up the phone and called Abigail.

No answer.

“All that stuff they say about the Alabasters,” said Louise, “is just rumors.”

“Maybe,” said Harper.

She felt purpose returning. Harper rifled through the Everything drawer farther and grabbed the meat mallet. The mallet still had on its tag, yet to pummel or tenderize meat of any kind. The girls crept into Abigail’s room. Harper did this with some frequency. She liked spending time among the clutter of her older sister, discarded homework assignments and French face creams and stuffed animals with secret pouches in their backs. Harper rummaged through Abigail’s desk, retrieving her diary. The book was sealed with a dainty padlock, a shackle the width of a fairy’s arm. Harper hit the lock with the mallet. Louise let out a little gasp. They flipped through the previous year’s pages of Abigail waxing on about the adjunct art teacher—he’s taught me so much about perspective—followed by her crushing heartbreak, swearing off love forever, followed by high school drama, gripes, and gossip—Millie’s nose job isn’t fooling anyone—then—I am in love with a soldier.

“Blah, blah, blah,” said Harper.

If Wes blows me off again I am going to take a handful of my mother’s sleeping pills.

“She’s so dramatic,” said Harper.

Harper, if you’re reading this, I know you think I’m dramatic but one day you will fall in love and one day you will know just how it feels. A complete and total lack of autonomy over your heart. It’s unbearable, in this really amazing way.

Harper skipped ahead in Wes and Abigail’s narrative.

“Bingo.”

I am going to a party at Alabaster Manor. Wes says it’s dangerous but I don’t care.

“I knew it,” Harper said to herself.

“What did you know?” asked Louise.

“I don’t know,” said Harper. “I just knew.”

Louise nodded. “I believe you,” she said.

“I think we should go get her,” said Harper.

“Legally I can’t leave this municipality,” said Louise.

“We’re going to need backup,” said Harper.

Wes’s number was not in Abigail’s diary. It was not in her planner. It was not on her computer or the margins of her notebooks. But there was Wes’s address, scrawled in their sister’s delicate handwriting across an old movie ticket. Louise’s heart raced.

“I don’t want to get in twouble,” lisped Louise.

“You’re already in twouble,” said Harper.

Louise threw her hands up.

“Istaslama,” said Louise.

“Don’t know that one,” said Harper.

“It means I give my power over to God.”

Bud and Catherine were both out with poor excuses for their separate dates. Each assuming the other forgot, they’d both left money for food on the kitchen counter. Harper took the money and called a taxi. Louise gave her power over to Harper. Off they went.

Louise was still in her pajamas, polka-dotted, sneakers pulled over fuzzy socks, and Harper still wore her school uniform. A brittle Peter Pan collared shirt tucked into a plaid pleated skirt. Two navy socks pulled up to mid-calf. A wool tammy hat. A blazer minted with the Sacred Daughters emblem—a burning bush. The taxi drove out of their town and past several others, toward the outskirts of the city, passing stands for illegal firecrackers with sun-yellowed awnings and car dealerships with apathetic sign twirlers and stucco government housing and billboards for injury attorneys and divorce attorneys and the casino with the medieval aesthetic. Louise handed the cash pile to the taxi driver without counting it and the children filed out into the street at Wes’s apartment complex.

First they pressed the buzzer—broken—then they yelled in unison. A rousing “shut up” followed by some dog barking quieted them. Finally, they snuck inside as a neighbor left the building and scurried up the stairs.

“You knock,” said Louise.

“No, you knock,” said Harper.

“How do we know it’s his unit?”

“It’s 4C.”

“But it doesn’t say anything.”

“You think he would put ‘War Crimes Wes’ on a nameplate?”

“Why can’t she ever have a normal boyfriend?”

“At the same time?”

“Ready?”

Two little fists banged at Wes’s front door.

Wes answered.

The whole apartment was visible from the doorway.

“We need your help,” said Harper.

“Who are you?” asked Wes.

The girls frowned.

“We’re Abigail’s sisters,” said Harper. “Obviously.”

Harper’s uniform was untucked and wrinkled with after-school casualness. He let them inside. Louise looked notably disturbed by the state of the apartment.

“Who’s that?” said Louise.

She pointed to Marshall.

“That’s Marshall,” said Wes.

“Ladies,” said Marshall. He bowed with his stub.

“Abigail is at Alabaster Manor,” said Harper.

“For a party,” said Louise.

Wes’s face changed.

“Are you sure?” asked Wes.

The girls nodded in unison.

Then, abruptly, Wes punched the prefab countertop. The fake marble dented.

The girls were quiet.

“That is a very dangerous place,” said Wes.

Harper couldn’t hold back a smile. Validated. The mystery unfurling. What she’d found in her father’s work email. She was right. And she was happy to be.

“Don’t you work there?” asked Louise.

Wes hung his head. “Not anymore.”

Then Wes gave Marshall a nod and Marshall jiggled loose a panel on the wall. From the gap behind the panel he pulled a large gun and, with a quick forward punch, loaded it using one hand. Harper’s eyes popped. It looked exactly as the ones did in her game.

“What’s that for?” said Louise.

“Could I hold it?” said Harper.

“This is not a civilian rifle, little lady,” said Marshall.

“It’s beautiful,” said Harper.

Louise wrinkled her nose.

“A feat of ballistic craftsmanship,” said Marshall.

“Shouldn’t we call the police?” said Louise.

Marshall and Wes looked at each other like the idea had never occurred to them.

Wes drove with Marshall riding shotgun in a Chicken King cap and the girls in the truck bed. The night was starless and low clouds threatened rain that never fell. Up up up they drove into the wealthiest part of the city. The hills. Most of the houses were tucked far off behind gates, covered by vines, plaques warning of intense security systems. They must have nice views, thought Louise, her ears starting to pop. Then there were no houses for a while. Urban wilderness. A family of coyotes trotted by. At the very end of the road stood the most spectacular home the girls had ever seen, though they’d seen it before online and from a distance on the occasional trip to the city. It was even more spectacular in person, looked even more castle-like. Wes made a call at the gate. He stepped out of the truck so as not to be overheard. When he returned, they all waited in silence until someone approached the gate from within.

“How’d you do that?” asked Harper.

“I cashed in an IOU,” said Wes. “A big one.”

The gate parted for them.

“I will get fired for this, man,” said Tibet’s cousin.

Wes nodded solemnly and thanked him through the driver’s window.

They parked outside of a staff entrance. Two white-aproned men sat outside smoking.

“We won’t have much time,” Wes told Marshall. “Once we’re in they’ll send security.”

“A rush job,” said Marshall.

“Wait in the truck,” Wes instructed.

The girls nodded.

“You wanna be the getaway driver?” Marshall said.

Harper nodded vigorously.

“She’s twelve!” said Louise.

“I’m almost thirteen,” said Harper.

Marshall winked and leaned into Louise’s ear. “Don’t tell the firecracker, but you’re in charge, okay?”

Louise fought a smile.

“Attention, troops.”

The girls sat up straight. Proud.

Wes gave a two-fingered wave to the smoking men. Marshall tucked the gun under his chore coat, a distressed American flag patch sewn onto the sleeve. Harper saluted them.

Louise shivered. How much time had passed, she wasn’t sure. Hours, surely, though on second thought, it could have only been fifteen minutes. A loud clanging came from the staff entrance, the sounds of shattered glass. Followed by swearing in another language. Harper fanned out a deck of cards.

“Pick a card,” said Harper.

“Not now, Harper.”

“Come on,” said Harper.

Louise picked a card. Stared at it. A joker.

“Okay, now what?”

“Just wait,” said Harper.

“I’m tired of waiting,” said Louise.

“Me too,” said Harper. “Let’s go.”

“War Crimes told us to wait in the truck.”

“Look,” said Harper. “Do you want to be a pussy or do you want to be a hero?”

Louise shrugged. She wanted neither. Louise wanted only to be wanted, to be noticed. She missed yours.

The girls climbed out of the truck bed. Their sneakers landed in the gravel with a soft thud. The path to the staff entrance was lined with topiary, dense bushes shaped like chess pieces. Harper moved them in her mind. The entrance led to a large industrial kitchen where identically dressed men were preparing hors d’oeuvres. The food looked gelatin and inedible. The cooks paid the girls no mind. Music swelled in the distance. Deadpan servers picked up the trays of food and walked down a corridor toward music. Harper and Louise tailed one of the servers out of the kitchen, down the corridor, up a stairwell, and into the party.

“You shouldn’t be here,” said the server without looking at them.

“We’re just running a quick errand,” said Harper.

The server went on to circulate the tray around a parlor room. It was difficult to see anyone’s face. The room was dim, lit only by candles. Plus everyone was wearing a mask.

“Weird,” said Louise.

“Yup,” said Harper.

“They’re all…”

“Dudes.”

The room was filled entirely with men, men dressed for a funeral, in black suits and black ties, men on the chaise, at the piano, men smoking indoors, playing cards, and sipping from crystal rocks glasses. Like the server, the men did not acknowledge the girls’ presence in the parlor.

On the walls hung large paintings, also of men, but men of a time past, on horseback, hunting quail, brandishing swords, swinging dead animals. The girls scampered down another hallway, tugging on the knobs of locked doors. So much of the house consisted of hallways cast in shadow, decorated with oil paintings in gilded frames.

“Abigail!” said Louise.

“Shhh!” said Harper.

“We already went this way,” said Louise.

“No, we didn’t,” said Harper.

“Yes,” said Louise. “We passed that painting of the man with the cannon.”

“No,” said Harper. “This one is different. This man is wearing a hat. See?”

It had been a while since they’d seen anyone, guest or waiter, when a figure appeared in the hallway, clocked them, and froze. There was a moment of deliberation. Then he approached. A masked man, tall, with a familiar saunter. He moved toward the girls slowly.

Louise and Harper froze, like deer, like game for the painted men.

“Harper?” said the man as he reached them. “Louise?”

The girls squinted at him.

“Father Andrew…?” the girls said simultaneously.

“What are you doing here?” asked Father Andrew.

“What are you doing here?” said Louise.

“Is this what you do recreationally?” said Harper.

“You have to leave,” said Father Andrew.

“We got a little turned around,” said Harper.

“It’s not safe.”

“I’m sorry for trying to blow up the pageant,” said Louise. She fidgeted nervously with the top button of her pajamas.

“We can discuss that during office hours,” said Father Andrew.

“What’s this all about?” asked Harper.

“You girls need to get out of here,” said Father Andrew. “Now.”

“We need to find our sister,” said Harper.

“Abigail’s here too?” Father Andrew crossed himself. “Oh, heavenly Father.”

“Do you know where she might be?” asked Louise.

Father Andrew nodded gravely. “In his study…”

Suddenly and inelegantly, the organ music jolted to a halt and a chilling quiet hung in its absence. Guests emerged from around corners, out of previously locked doors, flocking toward the silence. They were speaking, but they weren’t exactly talking so much as chanting, all in unison, in harmony, even those who were not walking together. Latin, Harper noted.

“Go,” said Father Andrew again, now in a whisper. “Down the hall in the east wing there is a staff kitchen. It leads out to an alley. You can reach the street level from there.”

“Which way is east?” said Louise.

“Do you seriously expect everyone to know cardinal directions?” said Harper.

“Where is the study?” said Louise.

Father Andrew turned, his face gaunt in the flickering candlelight. “I must go.”

“Father Andrew, one last thing!” said Harper. “Could you reach in your pocket?”

Father Andrew furrowed his brow. But he obliged, reached in the right-hand pocket of his suit jacket, and retrieved a playing card. His face asked questions but before he could vocalize them, another chanting group passed by. Masked eyes stole glances at Father Andrew. He handed the joker to Harper, then strode off to join the group without a second look.

“That’s a really good trick,” said Louise.

“Joker always finds the joker,” said Harper.

In her new modest but formfitting dress, Abigail had taken her bicycle onto the bus and into the city. It dropped her on a busy drag where bars were lighting their windows for the evening. It wasn’t the kind of city where smoke billowed out of manholes and off-duty hookers loitered under flickering marquees. It was a smaller city built out of a commerce industry, lacking any real personality or tourist attraction. There was no Hall of Fame, no famous sculptures. The buildings were neither notably tall nor beautiful. The city’s one modern art museum had lost funding some time ago and its renovation was never completed. No one famous hailed from the city, or retired there; no one had been assassinated there because no one was important enough to warrant it. It was a city of anonymity. Nothing flagrant, nothing flashy. What attracted a person to a place like this? thought Abigail. The most boring city in the world. The answer was obvious: escaping the most boring town.

Abigail hiked up her dress and rode her bike from the bus stop into the hilly residential area. In the pocket of her jacket next to the party invitation, Abigail stashed a Taser that she had purchased from the girl in the bathroom, a senior twice held back who sold butterfly knives and firecrackers and sometimes rare coins. She told Abigail that she could get her a vial of holy water from the Vatican. Just the Taser would do, Abigail had said. The girl warned Abigail of its strength.

“This will stop a kitten’s heart,” said the girl.

Abigail did not inquire into how the girl knew this. People came from all walks of life. She paid the girl and would smile kindly when they passed each other in the halls, which she knew lent the girl a certain clout.

The hill was too steep to bike up, which meant, from a certain point onward, Abigail was on foot. She broke a sweat mounting the hill and stopped every once in a while to dab at her face and reapply her makeup. The climb took nearly an hour. She stared at the dark screen of her phone, rendered useless by lack of service. She’d tried to text Wes to no avail. The black canyon roads were indistinguishable. Blisters threatened beneath her shoes, new patent leather heels with a bow on each toe. Light pollution cast off from the city below snuffed out the stars. The road grew narrow, the houses thinned out, and night birds circled the dry brush. Abigail was panting when she reached Alabaster Manor. The expanse of property looked just as it had before, the night she met Wes. She began locking her bike to the gate.

“We’ll park that for you, ma’am,” an older man with pale wet eyes dressed in all black said to Abigail. Dryness consumed her mouth. She felt like it was stuffed with cotton balls.

“I’m here for the party?” said Abigail.

The man nodded. She retrieved the invitation from her pocket and handed it to him. He touched his ear. For a moment, Abigail thought she detected pity in his pale eyes. The gate parted for her with a mighty exhale. Cars filled the interior driveway.

“He welcomes you,” said the guard.

“Wes?”

“Mr. Alabaster.”

Abigail’s bike was parked among the black luxury cars. She cautiously approached the door of the tech billionaire’s house. The knocker was a ring within a lion’s mouth. It was opened by an attendant who did not make eye contact with Abigail as she brushed by. Her dress was long and black with bishop sleeves. It elevated her already record-high confidence. The hall was lit by candelabras. Her shadow splayed out behind her, getting longer the farther she ventured into the house. She dragged it along as though it were reluctant, a stubborn dog. Music swelled in a distant room, not party music but something more akin to what they played at church, tinny and somber like an organ. Two men in black suits strolled by. They mumbled to each other, pausing their conversation as they passed Abigail, like gossiping schoolgirls. She glared at them. Then she noticed that each man wore a mask across his eyes. A funny time of year for a costume party, thought Abigail. Perhaps it was some club or fraternity gathering. An eccentricity of the exceptionally wealthy. Those afflicted with money did strange things to fill their time.

She passed room after room of suited men. Though they appeared to be ignoring Abigail, she felt their masked eyes on her back. The men not wearing suits Abigail assumed were staff. They ignored her as well. She was not accustomed to being ignored by men, especially when dressed as she was.

“You again.”

Abigail whirled around. It was the man in the seersucker suit she’d met at her first visit to the manor. Tonight his suit was not seersucker but slick and black like everyone else’s.

“Dolt,” said Abigail.

“Good memory.”

“I’m not party crashing,” said Abigail. “I was invited.”

“I know,” said Dolt. “I invited you.”

“You?” Abigail sunk. “Oh.”

“A reaction I love getting from women.”

Always the men you don’t want that want you, she thought, never the ones you do.

“I was hoping to see my boyfriend here,” said Abigail. “His name is Wes Wyley.”

“Never heard of him,” said Dolt. “Would you like something to drink while you look?”

“No, thank you,” said Abigail. “Why is everyone wearing masks?”

“Anonymity is important to this crowd,” said Dolt.

“Well, it looks silly.”

Dolt smiled, amused. “The schoolgirl says I look silly.”

“You have a bloody nose,” said Abigail.

A browning substance stained the front of Dolt’s dress shirt.

“Just some wine,” he said.

Abigail rolled her eyes. She’d spilled enough wine in her time to know what spilled wine looked like. Everyone here was so weird and secretive, thought Abigail. Why be embarrassed about a bloody nose? Millie Biddle probably got them all the time now.

“So who’s in charge around here?” asked Abigail.

“You don’t know?”

“Mr. Alabaster?”

The man smiled but did not confirm.

“Do you know him well?” asked Abigail.

“Sure, I know him. He has a history of obstructive pulmonary inflammation.”

“I’m sorry?”

“I’m his physician.”

Behind the mask, Dolt had beady yellow-gray eyes and his teeth were like seashells, thin and white.

“Do you think I could speak with him?” said Abigail.

“It’s polite to banter at a party,” said Dolt.

“I’m a bit pressed for time,” said Abigail. “My curfew is twelve.”

An excuse, of course. Abigail had never respected curfew.

“She’s all business and no banter,” said Dolt. “Have it your way.”

She followed a few inches behind him through the heavy stone hallways. The walls were textured and recessed in places, like a catacomb.

“What is your real name, Doctor?” Abigail asked.

He tapped his mask. Brought a finger to his lips like shhh.

A name, thought Abigail, was just another thing the wealthy felt proprietary over. Abigail had no ideological attachment to her own. She was who she was, not what she was called. They neared a door with frightening mermaids engraved into the wood. Their faces were twisted and anguished. Inside was an office with busy wallpaper and large oil paintings. A book propped open on a stand beneath glass casing. A large desk. A man behind it.

Paul Alabaster wore a tuxedo. His face was carelessly shaven and his bow tie was undone and slung around his collar. He stood politely as Abigail entered the room. Dolt closed the door behind them.

“Abigail Flynn,” said Paul Alabaster.

She gave him a look of appraisal. This is the man, thought Abigail, that all the fuss is about? His was the kind of build—slight and lanky—that got one bullied at the all-boys school. His features were pinched and came to a point at his puckered mouth. He looked less like a king and more like a meerkat.

“I’ve had about my fill of your family,” he said congenially.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Sit.”

It was more an instruction than an offer.

She sat across from the tech billionaire. Dolt remained standing, somewhat menacingly, hands folded in front of him. On the far side of the office was another great door. Abigail thought she heard a faint noise from beyond it.

“Drink?”

She shook her head.

“Well then. What can I do for you, Miss Flynn?”

“I’m looking for my boyfriend,” she said.

“Your boyfriend.”

“A member of your security detail.”

“I have a lot of people working for me, Miss Flynn.”

“Wes Wyley.”

Paul Alabaster furrowed his brow. “Why, didn’t he tell you? Mr. Wyley was let go last week.”

“No,” said Abigail. “He didn’t tell me.”

Abigail felt like a kitten struck by a Taser. How naive she’d been, dragging herself all through the city. Wes didn’t even work here! Where had he been the last few days? Certainly not with her. Perhaps Millie Biddle was right. Perhaps Wes was having an affair. An older girl with a harder edge. One who’d don a safety pin in lieu of an earring. Who’d sell butterfly knives in the bathroom. How could Abigail have been so foolish? Was that all she was? A beautiful little fool? Her mind flitted from thought to thought, each worse than the last.

“I’m sure he had good reason,” Paul Alabaster comforted, “for keeping it from you.”

“I’ll take that drink now,” said Abigail.

Paul Alabaster’s lips almost entirely receded, giving way to a platinum smile. “What are we having?”

“Wine?”

“I don’t keep wine. Wine is too expensive from a caloric perspective.”

“Whatever’s fine,” said Abigail.

He saw to the request personally and made her a cocktail without asking her preference in liquor, using tongs to insert a single ice cube. Abigail watched his hands attentively, as one does when one does not wish to get poisoned. He handed her the drink and reclaimed his seat behind the desk. She received it with skepticism.

“An After-A-While,” said Paul Alabaster. “Invented the recipe myself.”

Abigail scrutinized her glass.

“Sir,” said Abigail, “I think there is something stuck inside this ice cube.”

“Indeed,” said Paul Alabaster. “A crocodile embryo.”

“Oh, totally,” she said.

Again came a sound from the door across the room. A faint thud.

Abigail craned her neck toward the noise.

“Is there someone in there?”

“Only my dogs,” said Paul Alabaster calmly and without a backward glance. “They’re a bit too rowdy for a party.”

“So,” said Abigail, “do you and a hundred of your closest male friends hang out in suits and masks often?”

“Every year,” said Paul Alabaster. “Though it’s a pleasure to be joined by a beautiful young woman for a change.”

Abigail blushed, averting her gaze to the thawing reptile in her glass. When she looked back up, her eyes met Paul Alabaster’s.

“What are you staring at?”

“I was admiring your skin,” he said. “The melanin, the buoyancy.”

“If Wes is not here,” said Abigail, “I’d better not take up any more of your time. Thanks for inviting me all the same.”

“It’s no imposition,” said Paul Alabaster. “Enjoy your drink a while longer.”

“Okay,” said Abigail. “But can you stop looking at my buoyant skin?”

She took a sip of the drink. Admittedly, it was pretty tasty.

“Let’s play a little game,” said Paul Alabaster.

Abigail felt tired. The walk, the hill—they’d taken their toll.

“Name something that you cannot buy,” instructed the tech billionaire.

Abigail considered. “A sunset.”

“Yes, very good,” said Paul Alabaster. “You’re a sharp one.”

Though the condescension in his tone was not lost on her, Abigail still liked being lauded for something other than her beauty.

“The value of ephemerality,” Paul Alabaster went on. “I can purchase the land beneath the sunset, the airspace it occupies, but I cannot own the moment, the rays of fleeting light. This frustrates me, Miss Flynn.”

“Totally,” said Abigail.

“Your sardonicism is noted but indulge me a moment longer. Another answer to the question I might have accepted is youth. Youth is like a sunset. It eludes capitalism. One cannot buy youth at a department store.”

Abigail sipped her drink, felt the gentle prick of carbonation on her lips.

“There is a thriving economy built on those attempting to harness, bottle, and market youth. Serums and night creams that claim to slow or mask the inevitable. I view these attempts as a bandage for a broken arm. Putting cucumbers on your eyes will not keep you young. Then there are the more involved forms of life extension: your red-light therapies and your human growth hormones, multispectrum skin treatment, high-frequency electromagnetic stimulation, intravenous pea proteins. Likewise these methods are not putting a dent in the greater wall of mortality.”

Abigail sucked the inside of her cheek.

“Then,” Mr. Alabaster continued, “some time ago, I came upon a medical journal, out of print, banned, even, in some countries.”

Paul Alabaster gestured to the book trapped beneath the glass display. Abigail could not make out what it said, the words crammed into tight, dense paragraphs neighboring a diagram of two mice.

“Are you familiar with the concept of parabiosis?”

She shook her head.

“Two organisms sharing one system through blood and plasma exchange. People first started tinkering around with this in, oh, say, the mid-1800s, tethering mice together—one young and vivacious, one old and disease-ridden. The question was: Could the younger mouse revitalize the elder? Could the blood, plasma, bone marrow, and stem cells from one being promote general health in another? Do you know what happened when the mice were conjoined?”

“The procedure worked?” Abigail offered.

“Of course it didn’t work. Both mice died. Right there on the operating table. That’s curtains. And they tried it again and those mice also died. When they tried a third time, the mice lived for a week and then they too perished.”

Abigail missed Wes. She wanted to share one system with him. She wanted to mingle their organs and tissues and tear ducts. She wanted to feel what he felt and think what he thought and understand what he understood. She wanted to see through Wes’s eyes. Now, her own flickered with exhaustion.

“Why are you telling me this?” asked Abigail.

“I took an interest in the study,” Paul Alabaster persisted, “invested in some medical research, funded a few tests, always finding that we were quite a ways out from human trials. But all the while, there was fervor growing around the project, at least in my circles, from those in my milieu.”

“Rich men who want to live forever,” said Abigail.

“I like your bluntness. Yes, it was garnering interest from some people like that. So you see my dilemma? How do I satisfy public interest without having, proverbially speaking, a bunch of dead mice on my hands? What does one do when consumer demand outpaces medical advancement?”

Abigail shrugged.

“You fake it, Miss Flynn.”

Paul Alabaster turned around his computer screen to display the factory-set screen saver. A sunset, perennially vibrant, over a distant tropic.

“As you can imagine, my project thwarts federal approval. So each year, we have this little gathering, a personal trial for special friends and interested parties, to sample the product before it hits the market.”

Abigail found Paul Alabaster’s story more nerdy than creepy. That was all he was, she decided, a big rich dork.

“You have, like, a vampire party.”

“Tragic—the vampire,” said Paul Alabaster in an overly formal tone, thought Abigail, like her mother’s. “Stuck in the drudgery, tedium, and toil of everlasting life. Knowing and accepting our temporality, my cohort simply strives to enhance their quality of life, while they’re living. A more apt parallel might be a mosquito.”

“Why tonight?” asked Abigail.

“Well, tonight is the night the product arrived. That, and it’s a blood moon. I have a penchant for pomp and grandeur.”

“The product?” asked Abigail.

“The mice, so to speak.”

Abigail had prayed for an interesting life. And there she was, in a situation vastly more interesting than tennis lessons. Dolt kept his place standing to the side, quietly observing them. There came another thud from the dogs behind the door.

Abigail found herself feeling for the Taser in her pocket. It was gone.

“Seriously, why are you telling me all this?” she asked.

“You seem like someone who puts an emphasis on physical appearance. I thought we might understand each other. And quite frankly, I cannot allow you to leave here and risk sharing the identities of my guests.”

“Mr. Alabaster,” said Abigail, “I can’t feel my hands.”

Paul Alabaster smiled again, threw his head back a little, as though she’d just shared a delightful joke.

“That is because the skin of an unborn pin-crested crocodile is paralytic.”

Abigail strained against an invisible weighted blanket. Her glass fell to the floor, spilling the remainder of her drink onto the oriental carpet below. Her face and throat prickled like they would after a visit to the dentist.

“You should regain sensation in about thirty minutes,” said Paul Alabaster.

Dolt left his station and sauntered over to them.

Though her limbs were unresponsive, her heart did backflips.

“Please don’t rape me!” Abigail cried out.

The men looked at her, insulted.

“That’s not what he’s after, princess,” said Dolt.

“I say this without a breath of irony: I could have any woman in the world. I don’t need to go around drugging schoolgirls,” said Mr. Alabaster. “I have no interest in you sexually, child. It’s not personal. I find women in general rather grating.”

“What do you want with me then?”

“About 650 milliliters of your blood.”

“Has anyone ever told you,” said Dolt, “what nice veins you have?”

Abigail’s head lilted to the left, lolling on her neck.

Dolt placed a black medical bag before her on the desk. He snapped on two surgical gloves and began to pull tubing from his case, thin and clear as rice noodles. Then came a spike, a bag, a needle.

“Such a pretty young mouse,” cooed Paul Alabaster.

Dolt gently tied off Abigail’s arm. Paul Alabaster began chanting, speaking in a language—Latin? Greek, maybe?—that Abigail did not recognize. In school, Abigail took French. Paul Alabaster was not chanting in French.

“He’s thanking you,” said Dolt, “for your contribution.”

“Please,” said Abigail. “My blood’s no good. I don’t eat very well. I drink and smoke and take drugs.”

He ignored her and continued readying her arm, slipping a small needle into the crux opposite her elbow and taping it down. The tubing ran red. Abigail called out faintly.

Paul Alabaster brandished two crystal chalices from below his bar cart. When the blood bag filled, Dolt tapered it off and poured its contents into the chalices until liquid reached their brims. Paul Alabaster said another incoherent string of phrases, then the men raised the cups. They took her blood like shots, a ring of red around their mouths.

“Why are you drinking it?” said Abigail. “It’ll just go into your stomach.”

Even Abigail, who wasn’t the brightest apple on the family tree, knew this.

“Ceremony,” said Paul Alabaster, “is, if not more, as powerful as acumen. At communion, do we mainline the blood of Christ?”

The men stood and adjusted their ties. Dolt sucked his teeth and collected the equipment back into his case. He then came behind Abigail, plucking her limp body from the chair. He lifted her beneath each arm and gently dragged her to the door across the room. The dogs had quieted.

“I’d better be returning to my guests,” said Paul Alabaster.

Abigail could do little by way of protest.

“I hope to see you again soon, Miss Flynn.”

“Please,” she said weakly.

Dolt opened the door, deposited Abigail inside, and closed it with an emphatic clicking of the lock.

Marshall did not belong in Alabaster Manor, aesthetically speaking. The maimed soldier had never given societal reintegration a real go. His beard and greasy shoulder-length hair, tucked under his Chicken King hat, stained pits, and single pair of jeans should have immediately alerted the guests to his status as an outsider.

Wes waited for security to escort them from the premises. Yet not a soul so much as glanced Marshall’s way. The party’s well-dressed coterie kept their gazes straight on at some horizon invisible to the likes of Wes and Marshall.

“Scuse me,” Marshall addressed two party guests, clad in black suits and Venetian masks.

“Have you seen a girl, ’bout yea high?” asked Marshall.

The guests continued on mechanically without the slightest indication that they’d heard him speak at all.

“Feels like fuckin’ middle school again,” said Marshall.

Each room echoed with the deep drone of organ music and, distantly, choral singing. It transported Wes to masses of his childhood. The musical accompaniment of Eucharistic liturgy bristled Wes’s father, who was of the mind that church was a time for silent resignation. But Wes always liked the organ, the chanting, especially for nuptial or ceremonial occasions. When light filled the room, Wes used to think that the sounds came from angels. “Praise him with strings,” he recalled from Psalms.

They moved through the house toward the music. Wes could tell it was seeping in from the great room around which most of the Alabaster parties revolved. Despite Alabaster Manor’s otherwise geometric mazelike structure, it met in a central atrium where one could look up and see each tier of the structure, like slicing into a cake. This plaza created an echo chamber and usually served as the party nucleus, the dance floor, the stage. Down corbeled passageways, Wes led Marshall toward Alabaster Manor’s core. Others flocked past them. They came up a final corridor, which opened out into the plaza, and paused near some oil paintings of pheasants, dual candlestick holders, large planters of bamboo shoots, a suit of arms. The music came to an abrupt halt.

“Weird shit,” said Marshall.

Wes nodded. It wasn’t like the last party Wes had worked. Profoundly weirder.

From a lofted stage, twenty or so suited masked men had been singing, a choir accompanied by a lavish pipe organ. Forty or fifty others came from every aisle and funneled into the room’s center around what appeared to be a large, shallow pool. Wes blew out the candle lighting their corridor and pulled Marshall back into the shadow. The soldiers blinked at one another.

“Psst.”

“The fuck?” said Marshall.

“Did you find her?” said a voice from behind the large planter.

There Louise and Harper were crouched, knees to chests.

“Thought I told you to stay in the truck,” said Marshall.

“Don’t you know,” said Harper, “that you’re not supposed to leave children in the car?”

Wes put his head in his hands. This was not the setting in which he wished to be babysitting. All was still. Errant vibrations came off the great organ. Wes noted that each man held in his hands an empty glass. A chalice. A final man entered, his footsteps breaking the silence, and approached the shallow pool. His mask was more ornate than the others’, gilded and heavily decorated with gold embellishments. Before the pool, the man began to chant, slowly at first but with increasing speed and urgency. Wes recognized not the dialect but the voice—his former employer. The chanting became more spastic and jilted, as though its deliverer were suffering a series of strokes. The other men joined in, first the choir, then the general audience, chanting in concert.

“Apeiron,” Paul Alabaster concluded, and raised his empty cup.

“Apeiron,” the room echoed, and raised theirs to meet him, each then lining up before the shallow pool.

“Means boundless,” whispered Harper, “or an end to limits.”

They watched from the shadows as each suited man in turn dipped his chalice into the pool, filling it with dark liquid, thick and viscid. Once each man had filled his cup and resumed his station, attention returned to Paul Alabaster.

“ἀπάρχεσθαι,” called out the tech billionaire.

Wes looked to Harper.

“No clue,” said Harper.

All glasses raised. The men drank. The music resumed. Merriment commenced. There was dancing, arm in arm. A red tinge to the men’s teeth.

Wes, Marshall, Louise, and Harper couldn’t peel away their eyes. They watched compulsively in astonishment.

“What the…” said Marshall.

Louise looked as though she might cry.

“You were wight,” said Louise to Harper, “when you said you knew it.”

“This, specifically, I did not know,” said Harper.

Wes felt compelled to shield the children from the scene. He herded them away from the ceremony. Marshall lit a cigarette as they retreated.

“These people got too much time on their hands,” mumbled Marshall.

Wes instinctively reached to his ear for instructions, but with no device, no instructions came.

“We need to go to his study,” said Harper. “Do you know where that is?”

Wes nodded. He patted her little head.

The candles waned and darkness descended. Wes led them back through the channels of Alabaster Manor and toward the engraved door that had always remained locked. Two sirens caressing the handle. It was hinged shut tight.

“We don’t have much time,” said Wes.

“You got a hot date?” asked Marshall.

Wes nodded to the rafters.

“They’re watching. Security will come. Discreet Removal Training.”

“Alright, then let’s stop fuckin’ around,” said Marshall.

He pulled the gun from his jacket and shot the lock. It made an awful crack and Louise winced. Harper’s face lit up. The metal mermaids fell away, releasing the lock. An alarm sounded, piercing and accompanied by strobing light. Marshall propped the gun on his stump, his right hand on the trigger, and led them nose forward inside Paul Alabaster’s office.

The room was empty. Wes eyed the two cups on the desk, stained dark with drying fluid. The girls marveled at the walls, the maritime regalia, the books and heavy curtains and paintings and busts of men they did not recognize. The group turned at a noise behind a second door. Not the door from whence they came, but another interior door, a closet maybe. The noise persisted. Panicked thuds. Harper ran to it. This door too was locked.

Marshall moved Harper out of his way, shot the lock, and pushed the door open. The room was dark.

“Let’s go, kid,” said Marshall.

“I can’t move,” said Abigail.

“Then who made that noise?” asked Marshall.

“They did,” said Abigail.

Twenty sets of eyes looked up from the darkness.

“Where do you think you’re going with those?” said Bud.

“What do you mean?” said Harper.

“Harper,” said Bud, “you’re carrying six pizzas.”

“They’re for me,” said Harper.

“You got six large pizzas for yourself?”

“Yes.”

“You can’t eat pizza.”

“I think I’m growing out of my dietary restrictions.”

“Last time you ate pizza I had to give you an epinephrine shot.”

“People change.”

“Are you having a party?”

“No, I’m not having a party.”

“You’re not having a party.”

“No, I’m twelve.”

“What’s that noise?”

“I don’t hear anything.”

“Are there people in the TV room?”

“Must be the TV.”

“So, if I go into the TV room right now, it will be empty.”

“That’s correct.”

“Why do I feel like you’re lying to me?”

“Could we discuss this later?”

“Kid, what’s going on?”

“Are you familiar with the popular adage ignorance is bliss?”

“Harper.”

“I think it applies aptly here.”

“I’m going to count to three.”

“What happens at three?”

“One…”

“You’ve never employed this method of discipline before.”

“Two…”

“Grounding? Privilege restriction? Are you going to beat me with a wooden spoon?”

“Th—”

“Fine, Jesus! Don’t say three.”

“Well?”

“Well. Um. Where do I start? Um. So, Louise and I went to rescue Abigail—”

“Rescue her?”

“Yes. Abigail went to a party at Paul Alabaster’s house, where Wes used to work as freelance security. But Wes wasn’t there because Wes was fired because Wes found out that Paul Alabaster is part of this secret rich-person cult that involves drinking blood during a masked ritual every year, so we go to the house and find Abigail locked in a closet with all these other girls—twenty of them, to be exact—who the men had kidnapped and we think trafficked over in a big cargo container through a hidden shipment at the harbor—I brought this to your attention earlier, if you recall—so, of course, we rescued them too. I think they’re Albanian. It’s hard to say. Anyway, they couldn’t stay at Wes and Marshall’s apartment because it’s really small and their landlord is really strict so we brought everyone here in Wes’s truck. I imagine this is a lot to take in all at once.”

“There are twenty Albanian girls in the TV room?”

“And they’re pretty hungry. What with all the blood loss.”

“This is an odd bit.”

“It’s not a bit.”

“Where is your mother?”

“She’s with the contractor.”

“Why?”

“I believe they’re having a lesbian relationship.”

“Oh.”

“Strange few months.”

“Harper, I’m going to go into the TV room now.”

“Okay.”

“Oh my God.”

“Yeah.”

“There’s…”

“Twenty Albanian girls in the TV room.”

“Who is that one-armed man in there?”

“That’s Marshall.”

“Who’s Marshall?”

“Wes’s roommate.”

“Where are your sisters?”

“Louise went to the 24/7 Deli to get more food and Wes put Abigail to bed because she was drugged.”

“Drugged?!”

“By a baby alligator.”

“How did a baby alligator drug Abigail?”

“No, Paul Alabaster drugged Abigail.”

“Did you say that there is a boy in Abigail’s room?”

“He’s on the trundle.”

“Have you called the police?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because fuck the police?”

“No, Harper. Not fuck the police. You call the police in these situations. This is what the police are for.”

“This specifically is what the police are for?”

“Yes!”

“The situation is pretty unprecedented.”

“When you find victims of sex trafficking,” said Bud, “you call the proper authorities.”

“I hear what you’re saying,” said Harper, “and this might be pedantic and irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, but I don’t think the girls were being sex trafficked per se. Just regular trafficked.”

“I need to sit down,” said Bud. “You understand them?”

“A little,” said Harper.

The shipping container. The lost vessel. Bud had known. Bud had known and done nothing. Worse: Bud had benefited from literal blood money. Bikes and video games and teacups and bathroom tiles. Just earlier that evening he’d ordered appetizers with dinner for him and Miss Winkle. And wine with a French label that dripped down the sides of their glasses in a way that indicated high quality. Even the car reaped the advantages of his newfound prosperity since he had finally had the engine light checked, the interior detailed.

His mind shook like loose pennies, equally useless. When he looked up from his palms, twenty little faces gazed at him, twenty-one including Marshall. Bud had had dreams like this in which his daughters quadrupled, propagated, split like amoebas until they filled the house. But he was awake and sober and the excess girls were not disappearing when he rubbed his eyes. It was all real. Louise returned with the snacks and the twenty girls lit up.

They were far and away the most beautiful people Bud had ever seen. Each had pillowy lips and faultless skin, large regal noses and striking jawlines. Any one of the refugees could be pictured on the cover of a woman’s magazine. They had each been through so much, Bud thought, plucked from their hometowns, ripped away from their families, and forced into a dark shipping crate for God knew how long. Bud watched the kidnappees as they tore into fruity cakes and lemon Twisles from the 24/7 Deli. The trauma only added depth to their beauty. The guilt was crushing.

“Can I smoke in here?” said Marshall.

“No,” said Bud.

“But Mommy does it,” said Louise.

“You’re such a narc, Louise,” said Harper.

Harper sat down next to Bud. He took her hand.

“You were right, kid,” said Bud.

“I know,” said Harper.

“The cedar balls, the cargo. All of it.”

“I know,” said Harper. “But thank you for saying so.”

Bud took out his phone.

“Who are you calling?” asked Harper.

“Your mother,” said Bud.

Catherine paced the kitchen with remarkable aplomb. This was a feature Bud had always loved about Catherine—how she acted in a crisis. She’d be a fabulous soldier, he thought.

“What do we do?” Bud asked again.

“I’m thinking,” said Catherine.

“We should call the police,” said Bud, “right?”

“Right,” said Catherine.

He noted the way she was wearing her hair, slicked back with product. When had she started doing that? There was still a gulf between them, albeit a diplomatic one.

“How are the girls?” asked Catherine.

“Our girls or the other girls?” asked Bud.

“All of the girls.”

“I don’t know,” said Bud. “They’re playing charades with Harper. They’re smoking all your cigarettes.”

Catherine kept pacing.

“I knew,” said Bud.

“Sorry?” said Catherine.

“I knew. I mean, I didn’t know know but I knew something was going on and I didn’t … They even gave me money to stay quiet.”

“So that’s where the money for the remodeling’s from!”

“Yeah,” admitted Bud. “That’s where the money’s from.”

To Bud’s surprise, Catherine placed a hand softly on his shoulder. His own hand was wrapped in fraying gauze, from when he’d hit the wall.

“You can’t blame yourself,” said Catherine.

“I can,” said Bud.

“Well, you shouldn’t,” said Catherine.

She paced more. Bud was starting to panic. His breathing exercise wasn’t cutting it.

“Breathe,” said Catherine.

“I can’t,” said Bud.

“Smell the roses, then blow out the candles.”

“What?”

“That’s how you should breathe.”

“Oh.”

“You’re a Christian,” said Catherine. “Well, there’s biblical precedent for covering your own ass.”

Bud shook his head hopelessly. Tears filled his eyes.

“Judas only betrayed Jesus to protect himself, his family. That guy gets a bad rap, in my opinion.”

While Catherine didn’t have the best grasp of the Bible, Bud appreciated her effort. He gathered himself, summoned that inner reserve of strength like Catherine always did, and began to pull on his jacket.

“Where are you going?” asked Catherine.

“To be a good Christian,” said Bud.

“Now’s not the time to be cryptic,” said Catherine.

“I have to do something,” said Bud. “Can you hold it down here for a little?”

“Don’t you dare not come back,” said Catherine, “and leave me with twenty-three children.”

They embraced tightly.

“I’m going to call the police now,” said Catherine.

Bud nodded.

He ran into the street and was searching for his keys when Jim Doherty jogged by, commencing his early morning run. He removed a headphone from his ear.

“Hey, Bud,” said Jim Doherty.

“Hey, Jim,” said Bud.

“I heard about your daughter being a terrorist and all,” said Jim. “Tough break.”

Bud got into the front seat of the minivan.

“I heard you have a basement full of ceramic vaginas,” said Bud out the window.

He revved the engine and took off for the city.

The gates to the Alabaster Manor were open. Dazzling morning light streamed in every window. Smell the roses, blow out the candles, thought Bud.

He wandered through the now vacated compound. There wasn’t a trace of its previous inhabitants, save for Boy Crying, which still hung in the foyer.

Below it, a rotary phone sat on the floor, plugged into the wall.

It rang.

Bud answered.

“Mr. Flynn,” said Paul Alabaster.

Bud froze.

“Where are you?” asked Bud.

“You’re like a truffle pig for trouble, aren’t you?”

“You paid me off.”

“That I did.”

“And you blackmailed me.”

“That’s not explicitly true. I might have tacitly implied that the well-being of your family was dependent on your compliance.”

Bud began to pace, but the phone’s coiled cord did not give him a long leash.

“You’re a sick person, Mr. Alabaster.”

“I prefer bribing to blackmail. Positive reinforcement. Ruling with love instead of fear and all that. But I suppose I have employed blackmail as a tactic before, in a pinch.”

Bud leaned against the stone wall. “You have no remorse.”

“There are worse things a man can do, Mr. Flynn.”

“Human trafficking has got to be the worst thing a man can do.”

“Human trafficking is a bit hyperbolic, no? Think of it more as borrowing. I’m kind of an ask-for-forgiveness-rather-than-permission guy. All the girls get duly compensated. Their families are duly compensated, retroactively, of course. Everyone is generally returned unharmed. Yes, there is a slight margin of error, but nine times out of ten my mice are returned unharmed.”

“Your mice?”

“It’s more of an internal term.”

Bud cradled the corded phone between his neck and ear. He pulled his cell phone out of his pocket. No service.

“Couldn’t you go through proper channels?” asked Bud. “Go to a blood bank or something?”

“And take away from those who need blood? I’m not a monster, Mr. Flynn.”

Bud heard sirens in the distance, growing nearer.

“Also, my constituents and I require the best of the best,” said Paul Alabaster. “I won’t take just any mid-tier blood, no sir. That Abigail, now she has some good blood.”

Bud slapped the wall. It was surprising each time—the blinding anger that ensued when his family was threatened.

“You’ll be caught, you know.”

“Perhaps. I have a sneaking suspicion that you’re wrong, but anything’s possible, I suppose.”

“I’ll kill you for what you did to my daughter,” said Bud. “You’ll rot in prison and when you’re least expecting it, I will come kill you, slow and painfully.”

Bud had never spoken to someone in this manner before. It was quite satisfying.

“The punishment simply doesn’t fit the crime. I did nothing to your daughter. Or next to nothing. My procedure was no more invasive than a routine physical. Don’t let your imagination wander. You know what they say about the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master? Rein in your mind. Your daughter is safe.”

Bud could hear the whine of sirens getting closer.

“Your daughter is safe and home because I allowed for it. Do you know why? While disloyalty is not something I can respect, a good father is. You stick your neck out for your family. I can’t say my old man would do the same. This is all to say, you have my respect, Mr. Flynn.”

The sirens cried now at full volume. Bud fumed. He’d show Paul Alabaster where he could put his respect.

“It was nice meeting you, Mr. Flynn. You’re an interesting guy for an accountant. I think under different circumstances we would have been friendly.”

“You won’t get away with this.”

“Not friends per se. Acquaintances, more like. Perhaps we’d share a beer after a ribbon-cutting ceremony, something like that. Our disparate income brackets would likely prevent any more profound camaraderie, I’m sure you understand. It’s really not all that lonely at the top.”

“Stay away from my family and my town,” Bud barked into the rotary phone.

“Let me be perfectly clear: I have no pressing desire to spend any more time in your little town than is absolutely necessary for me to tie up loose ends.”

Bud wondered if the world had enough string.

“You really think you’ll get out of here unscathed?” asked Bud, incredulous.

“I don’t think,” said Paul Alabaster. “I know, without a shadow of a doubt, that I will get out of here unscathed. I’ve never been scathed in my life. You forget, Mr. Flynn: my family made this harbor.”

Bud pulled out a cigarette.

“Oh, please don’t smoke inside,” said Paul Alabaster.

Bud spun around, saw nothing but his own reflection in the glass windows.

“The granite is so porous. All imported.”

Bud’s eyes searched the ceiling for cameras, found none.

“And it’s bad for you,” Paul Alabaster continued through the phone. “Terrible for the skin. How about a joke to lighten the mood?”

Bud lit his cigarette and blew it toward the porous stone. Still no Alabaster in sight.

“A cop pulls over two priests one night. Cop says, ‘Hey, I’m looking for a child molester.’ The priests look at each other and then say, ‘Okay, we’ll do it.’”

The sirens grew nearer.

“It’s okay to laugh,” said the phone.

“I don’t think it’s very funny,” said Bud.

“It is funny! Why? What’s funny? There’s truth: the joke speaks to police inefficacy and corruption in the Catholic church. The truth is funny! You must try navigating harsh realities with humor.”

Bud ashed his cigarette on the floor.

“The real point of the joke is merely that the most important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. So we have to find new ways of doing so. Understand?”

Bud could now see the rotating beacons of the cop cars in the driveway.

“Agree to disagree then.” The line clicked and Bud was alone. Bud slammed the phone into the receiver. Police flooded Alabaster Manor. The painted boy cried. Bud removed it from the wall and took it with him as he walked into the morning to meet the barrage of law enforcement.

Abigail Flynn liked being the prettiest person in the room. But, she relented, in the tech billionaire’s dungeon, Abigail was the twenty-first-prettiest person in the room. While she had sympathy for the abducted girls, she couldn’t keep a creeping resentment at bay. Theirs was the sort of beauty for which wars were fought. Each girl was so striking, so indifferent, so weary from travel and blood loss; how could Abigail compete? This was what she was thinking in her childhood bedroom when Wes stroked her hair and asked:

“What are you thinking?”

She didn’t respond.

There came a rap at the door and Marshall popped his scruffy head inside.

“Your parents are gonna call the cops now, and rightly so given the circumstances and all, but I got priors so I’m gonna take off.”

Wes threw Marshall the keys to the truck, which he caught with his one hand.

“You stayin’?”

Wes nodded.

“How is she?”

“Hasn’t said.”

Marshall came and sat at the foot of Abigail’s bed. She recoiled a little as his filthy trousers came into contact with her lavender duvet.

“I’ve seen some shit in my time,” said Marshall. “You don’t go overseas and not see some shit. May I offer a word of advice?”

“I know, I know,” said Abigail. “I have to talk about it.”

“Was gonna say the polar opposite, actually,” said Marshall. “Shove that shit down. So deep down it’s out of sight. Don’t spend another moment on it. Make it go from a reality to a memory to a feeling you sometimes get on winter days. Then let that feeling drive you to do somethin’ great. You got any priors?”

Abigail shook her head.

“You’re gonna be fine.”

Then Marshall left them in Abigail’s bedroom. The early morning sun streamed in. Her night-light flickered. Three fluorescent bears holding hands. Abigail and Wes listened to the truck’s ignition sputter before Marshall pulled out of the driveway and looped the cul-de-sac.

Wes put his hand on Abigail’s.

He thought of the grainy photograph of the girl—AB—how it had not been her initials on the photo at all but her …

“I would give you my blood,” she said softly. “If it would make you live forever.”

Wes smiled. “Your blood’s no good here.”

“This may be an odd time to ask,” said Abigail, “but there is this school dance next Saturday…”

“Get some rest,” said Wes.

Abigail closed her eyes.

“So,” she said, “what happens next?”

What happened next was: The kidnapped girls got in touch with their families. Most were reunited and flew home but some opted to stay, preferring the town to their own. They enrolled in school. Were taken in by local families. No one could communicate with them other than Harper, who could communicate with anyone. Harper could probably communicate with God if she tried. Reporters flooded the town from papers and television stations, local and national. Timeses and Chronicles and Posts and Journals. The Flynns were regarded as local heroes. Tibet handed the list of guests over to the authorities. She got into every college to which she applied. Paul Alabaster was rumored to be hiding out on one of his islands, but no one was sure of his whereabouts, or the whereabouts of Dolt, or Father Andrew. Father Hayworth was made head pastor. He and his Unitarian boyfriend married in the church. Kimble was vindicated when it came to light that the tech billionaire had indeed been pumping chemicals into his water supply as part of a personal experiment. Harper and the ASL club won the children’s blackjack championship. Perry Winkle won Our Lady of Suffering’s Inner Beauty Pageant. She was a pillar of the community. Louise was glad of this. She had been banned from attending the ceremony. A large anonymous donation was made to the church, more than enough to finally fix the broken church bells. Bud smiled as he walked down the street, the bells chiming in each hour. Perry disliked the bells. Bud bought her better noise-canceling earmuffs.

The spring turned to summer, as is the nature of seasons. Bud had wanted to take his lover to Italy but Miss Winkle said she was unable to leave Perry alone for so long. Instead he found a theme park a few towns over called Italy World and booked them a night in the castelletto room with a ceiling painted with cherubs and a pastaria downstairs. To Bud’s surprise, Catherine volunteered to watch Perry.

“We’ll watch her,” Catherine had said. “Remy and me.”

Miss Winkle was wary and had provided her a list as long as Leviticus with food and phone numbers and doctors and songs that soothed the child when she needed soothing.

“I’ve been a parent for seventeen years,” Catherine had said. “I can handle a night.”

As Remy the Contractor prepared dinner that night, Abigail watched her mother with the brain-damaged girl as they colored in the dining room. Catherine didn’t smoke or speak in a phony voice but was nurturing, even complimentary of Perry’s artwork. Abigail didn’t pity her mother at all. She was struck—like many before her and many since—with the realization that her mother hadn’t failed, hadn’t given up on her dreams of being an artist and a bohemian, of leaving the town for a bigger life. She’d stayed for her—Abigail, and subsequently for her sisters—to be a parent. Abigail believed this was more commendable than the pursuit of an art practice. She had as big a life as any.

Before bed that night, after Perry had gone to sleep, while Remy and Louise and Harper played a board game in the living room, Abigail poked her head into the downstairs bathroom, where Catherine was soaking in the new clawfoot tub.

“I just wanted to say thank you,” said Abigail.

Catherine grinned, confused, but didn’t push.

Abigail turned to go join her sisters and leave her mother to her bath.

“Wait,” said Catherine. “Come sit!”

“I don’t like talking while you’re naked,” said Abigail.

“Oh, come here,” said Catherine.

Abigail came. Sat.

The bathroom was coming together. It was modern, but also traditional in a sense.

“Now,” said Catherine. “Tell me all about this boy.”

The last day of senior year was a blur for Abigail, as most things had been since her rescue. Lockers were emptied and textbooks were tossed and uniform skirts were rolled by their wearers to inappropriate lengths. What could the nuns do now? Tibet and Abigail walked home arm in arm until the road split to take them to their respective homes.

“See you tonight!” called Tibet.

That evening, Abigail waited for Wes to pick her up for the Sisters of Sorrow Summer Dance. His pickup truck pulled up on Side Street promptly. He’d have her home by curfew.

Wes pinned a flower to her breast. Abigail wore another new dress from the mall that clung to her slender frame and glistened like starlight.

The school gymnasium was painted with a fake sky vastly more beautiful than the real sky. The boys from the brother school wore formal attire. The nuns wore their best bonnets. Tibet spiked the punch. Even the Biddle twins looked fetching in matching lace dresses. It all felt like a dream. There came a flash of memory from Alabaster Manor and Abigail shoved it down as instructed, channeling the feeling toward something good, pivoting her attention to Wes. It was the first time she’d seen him in slacks, in dress shoes. His bow tie hung limp around his collar. Neither of them knew how to tie it. They watched a video on their phones and laughed and laughed and laughed. Wes, who could load an assault rifle in the dark, was foiled by the bow tie. Wes had never been to a dance. They didn’t have them in military school. Abigail guided him out to the middle of the room and they swayed like wheat stalks. The other students joined them on the dance floor, whispering about Abigail’s boyfriend, the soldier, the hero. None of the administration had put up a fuss about his attendance. They picked their battles when it came to the Flynns.

Some of the luckier boys had gotten some of the kidnapped girls to agree to be their dates. They drifted around the room, ethereal and lovely. But Wes had eyes for only Abigail.

“So, what happens next?” she asked again.

The song playing was a popular and rather raunchy radio hit, paced down to accompany slow dancing.

“Whatever you want,” said Wes. “You’re the boss.”

Abigail let Wes hold her tight, less dancing and more a merging of systems, taking what was good and healthy about the other and becoming one stronger entity.

“I love you,” said Abigail.

“Drop that pussy to the flo’,” said the song.

“Përshëndetje,” said one girl to another.

“I love you too,” said Wes.

He rested his hands on Abigail’s protruding hips.

“Come on,” he said. “Let’s get you something to eat.”

Louise Flynn was having a crisis of faith.

“I am having a crisis of faith,” she told the child psychiatrist.

Even after the bomb incident, attention almost immediately returned to her older sister. The story of Abigail’s kidnapping had spread to front-page news and Louise was once again cast into obscurity. During her week of suspension, she had pillaged a cigarette from her parents and lit it backward. She turned it around and lit it properly, then smoked it down to the filter and buried it in the ashtray with the others. A pleasant lightheadedness overcame her. She instinctively reached for her pocket where her now-confiscated phone would normally be.

Despite it all, Louise missed yourstruly. Her little heart ached, truly, just like the term implied: heartbreak. The efficacy of yours’s rhetoric was only potent insofar as he was Louise’s only companion, her community, the one who saw her when no one else did. Because what Louise Flynn wanted more than God, more than heaven or hell or seventy-two virgins, more than a higher power or a lower power or retribution for the wicked and redemption for the pure, was, plain and simple, a boyfriend. She missed the sound their chat made when she received a new message. They had shared intimacies. Stayed up nights discussing religion and literature and what household chemicals were most flammable. Yours had a purpose and gave Louise one too. After her therapy, and psychiatry, and meetings with government agencies hunting domestic terrorists, Louise lay in bed and wept alone.

The child psychiatrist suggested that she join an activity, club, or group.

“I don’t think so,” said Louise.

“I’m required by law to give you this.”

The child psychiatrist handed her a pamphlet on suicidal ideation. It bullet-pointed the many ways one might ponder ending one’s life. Household painkillers and kitchen knives and jump rope and shoelaces. Stoves and ovens, cars in garages, ten-story buildings and taking the shortcut down, a tunnel at rush hour, a lethal cocktail of Eastern herbs. Bud eventually confiscated the pamphlet. He said it more resembled an instruction manual.

Why kill myself? thought Louise. If life is nothing and death is nothing, why make a lateral move?

Though her parents became more lenient after the Alabaster debacle, Louise had been grounded, not permitted to leave the house unless going to see the therapist or to mandated community service at the retirement center. The J in the center’s sign had long since fallen and now read: ewish Home for the Aging, which Louise felt was a blunt description for the environment. She ran the slide projector and counted out medication and carried starchy bedsheets from one closet to another. During her shift one early summer afternoon, Louise smoked a cigarette, less carefully, letting a comet tail of ash trail behind her. She perused the Home for the Aging’s bookshelf—historical fiction, cookbooks, self-help manifestos by underqualified gurus—until her fingers fell upon a text she hadn’t read. Louise withdrew a copy of the Torah. There was only one Jewish girl at Sacred Daughters, who lived in the nicer part of town and had at her bat mitzvah an oxygen bar and a candy bar and a DJ—a real one, not just Father Hayworth in a gold chain. Louise opened the Torah at random and skimmed.

“That’s my favorite part.”

Louise looked up, startled, to find a boy from the brother school, about her age, staring at her and smiling.

“Excuse me?”

“I’m just playing.”

Louise blushed. The boy continued looking at her.

“You go to my sister school,” said the boy.

“You recognize me?” asked Louise.

“Yeah, I recognize you. I’m Caleb,” said Caleb.

Louise braced herself for ridicule, a crack about her act of terror or her parents’ weird marriage or her hot sister or the blood cult, but it did not come.

“Can I help you with something?” she asked.

“I come here every week,” said Caleb, “for my bubbe.”

“What’s a bubbe?”

“That’s a bubbe.”

He pointed to a woman in the rec room wearing a pressed suit. She flipped through a women’s magazine and sipped a martini while a nurse’s aide crouched and gave her a pedicure.

“She seems cool,” said Louise.

“She’s great,” said Caleb. “Do you want to meet her?”

Next thing she knew, Louise was shaking the manicured hand of Caleb’s bubbe, who poured Louise a martini from her pitcher.

“Girls these days,” said Bubbe, holding up the women’s magazine, “all look so sad.”

Louise looked at the models, thin and pouty.

“Maybe they’re just hungry,” said Louise.

“I like her,” said Bubbe. “Would you like to join us for dinner?”

Louise looked to Caleb, who appeared neither disgusted nor irked with his grandmother for offering. So she accompanied Caleb to the dining hall, where Bubbe seemed to have a regular table. Louise mused over the hot trays of overcooked lasagna and undercooked meatloaf. Which should she choose? What would that choice say about her? Indecision won out and she returned with nothing. Bubbe refilled her martini.

“We put fruit on the seder plate now,” said Bubbe, “for feminism.”

“Oh,” said Louise, “thank you.”

“It’s very progressive,” assured Caleb.

Bubbe talked about the hardship of the Jews. Persecution. Mosaic law. Pogroms. Modern antisemitism. Bubbe talked about heaven. A resting place for souls. It was not gated. Anyone could go. She pointed at Louise, like even you. Her nails were pristine.

Louise knew nothing about Judaism. She’d once watched the beginning of some Israeli pornography left open on her father’s computer but, based on the subsequent content, did not think it held any historical accuracy. Caleb took Louise’s hand under the table. Held it. Music filled the dining hall. Many of the residents got up to dance. Bubbe joined them.

“Your grandmother got me kind of drunk,” said Louise.

“You’re really pretty,” said Caleb.

“I’m not really anything.”

“Don’t listen to those kids at school.”

“Okay,” said Louise. “Don’t listen to them about what exactly?”

“I think it was really cool of you to protest the pageant,” said Caleb. “Take a stand against institutional beauty standards.”

“Oh,” said Louise. “Yeah, thanks.”

“I’ve seen you around here,” said Caleb. “You always look so sad.”

Louise’s heart raced. And when her heart raced, her mouth couldn’t keep up. Please, Jewish God, thought Louise, please don’t let me lisp in front of this boy who thinks I’m pretty.

“But maybe,” said Caleb, “you’re just hungry.”

Louise smiled. “I am going to have a cigarette.”

“You smoke?”

“Yeah, I just started last week.”

“That’s cool. Can I join you?”

Louise considered her earlier stance on religion. If all the ideologies were racing for her endorsement, then the one to push ahead would be, certainly, the one that could provide her with a boyfriend. And Judaism had stolen an unexpected lead.

Louise felt lighter all week long. She brought the Torah home with her. She sat on the porch studying. Summer pressed on.

A few days later, she awoke to her father perched at the foot of her bed.

“Hey!” said Bud.

“Hey?” said Louise. “What are you doing?”

“Took off work! I thought we could hang.”

“Hang?!”

“Yes, hang,” said Bud. He made a hand gesture like cowabunga, dude. “How about I make you an egg-in-a-hole? With a bacon smiley face.”

“I’m not eating bacon anymore.”

“Since when?”

Louise sat up in bed. She shrugged. Harper’s bed was empty. She’d already left for whatever Harper did.

“Maybe we could go to the Maritime Heritage Center,” said Bud.

“The Maritime Heritage Center is closed on Tuesdays.”

“How about Saturday then?”

“I have to rest on the Sabbath.”

“Kid, don’t get weird on me again. If you blow up the church, or the school, or the post office, really any municipal building, I will feel like I failed as a parent.”

Louise sighed. She patted down her frizzy hair.

“I understand that rebellion at your age is somewhat standard,” Bud continued. “But couldn’t you just do drugs and get pregnant like the other teenagers?”

“Only those who fully realize how little they deserve grace will find it in the end,” said Louise. “That’s in the Torah.”

“Sweetheart,” said Bud. “The end of what? You’re fifteen. You don’t need to be worrying about the end.”

“Are you worried about the end?” asked Louise.

“Hell yeah,” said Bud. “But I’m a little older than you, if you haven’t noticed.”

“Do you deserve grace?” asked Louise.

“I dunno, kid.”

Louise smiled a little.

“I know I’m grounded,” said Louise, “but can I invite my boyfriend to Harper’s birthday dinner?”

“Is he part of an online terrorist organization?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Then yes, you can invite your boyfriend to dinner,” said Bud. “Now come on, let’s go to the mall and buy something stupid and expensive with my blood money.”

“Okay,” said Louise. “I need a mezuzah.”

It wasn’t difficult for Myles Doherty to maintain his honor student status, as he had little by way of social distraction. Myles’s face was pocked from untended acne. It looked like a honeycomb, an ice cube tray. The reactions it evoked at school were not subtle. The other eighth-grade boys were unkind. The kids labeled the moon in the solar system diorama Myles for their surface resemblance.

“Nice face, Doherty,” they’d say.

“Fall in some battery acid, Doherty?” they’d say.

The girls were worse than the boys, not with their words but with a lack thereof. They pretty much ignored Myles entirely, interacting with him as one does with a lamppost or a tree stump, which is to say not interacting very much at all. Fine, whatever, Myles didn’t like girls anyway—not because he was gay!—because they were the lesser species. Sometime after his father’s divorce, not from Myles’s mother, from some other lady whose staple sunglasses made her look like an insect, Jim Doherty ended yet another vitriolic phone call with a sigh and turn of phrase: “Bitches, man.” These two words came to justify all of Myles’s subsequent interactions with women. When a girl he sat next to on the bus would wrinkle her nose or when a girl would deny his existence and cut him in the lunch line, when his mother—on Mondays, Wednesdays, and weekends—would tell him that screen time was over, it was bitches, man. Classic bitches.

With Dad, screen time was never over. It was screen time right now. Myles sat in the corner booth at Lucky Penne playing his handheld war game across from his father, who vehemently emailed. They briefly looked up from their individual screens and scanned the pictorial menus. Legal sodium warnings prefaced each dish. Though positioned as a fast-casual Italian restaurant, one could get any food item of any origin from Lucky Penne. Today, Myles felt like egg rolls and mac ’n’ cheese.

Jim Doherty excused himself to make a call. Myles poured mustard, ketchup, salt, and pepper into the remainder of his off-brand soda and looked around for someone to dare him to drink it. No one ever did. No one cared enough even to torture Myles Doherty. He returned to his game. The three neighbor girls, the ones who lived in the house with the overgrown lawn and sunken porch with the wind chime that seemed to have children’s teeth hanging from it, filed into a booth to Myles’s left. They were just within earshot, talking emphatically about their summer plans. The beach. The nicer one. The one that wasn’t slick with oil. About ear piercings and bonfires and late-night movies. The youngest girl, about Myles’s age, who had been at some reform school or something, was wearing a crown made of paper. She looked different. When sensing their conversation was being perceived, the Flynn girls switched to pig Latin. Hattay siay hetay eighbornay idkay, said the girls. Ommay atedday ishay adday. Myles shrugged. Bitches, man. He returned to his game, where, in a sprawling near-future metropolis, Myles’s character, an anti-corporate activist, tries to expose and dismantle the elite power structures that control the city. Myles tapped his screen. He had successfully infiltrated a government headquarters, gunning down two security guards.

“Suck it!” Myles cried out.

His nose was pressed to the console.

“Suck my cock,” said Myles.

Another guard down.

“Suck my big fat cock,” said Myles.

“How are we doing tonight?” asked the waitress in a voice that sounded as though we were doing quite badly tonight, horribly even, in fact at any moment we might go into the back and slit our wrists tonight. Myles asked the waitress for egg rolls and mac ’n’ cheese. The waitress nodded and carried on. The television over the bar was broadcasting a news update: two escaped prisoners had found amnesty over the border, were safe and healthy, had even started a charity for other escaped inmates.

“You might want to skip the mac ’n’ cheese,” the oldest Flynn girl, Abigail, the pretty one, called to Myles.

Myles looked at her.

“What?” said Myles. “Why?”

“Well, obviously,” she said, “the weight goes straight to your big fat cock.”

Myles blinked at her a few times. The girls erupted into giggles and returned to their conversation. The middle one, Louise, sat with her arms wrapped around her chest like she was protecting herself. They were soon joined by the Jewish kid from Myles’s school, who squeezed in next to Louise, causing her to blush as red as the booth itself. Then by that soldier who dated Abigail. Then by the Flynn father and—God, these booths were large—that portly church lady and her brain-damaged child. Then by the Flynn mother accompanied by the hot lesbian contractor. Myles had overheard his father talking about that situation on the telephone. “I should have known she was a dyke,” his father had said. “Dodged a bullet there.” Myles wished that he had bullets to dodge. No one was firing at him. Jim Doherty returned from his call.

“Freaks,” said Jim Doherty under his breath when clocking the Flynns, shaking his head. Myles had of course heard whispers of the family’s unconventional dynamic but had never observed it in action. They were freaks, thought Myles, although they did save all those immigrant girls from medical trafficking, which was, admittedly, pretty cool. He overheard the church lady wish Harper a happy birthday. “You’re finally a teen,” she said. The Flynn father lazily rested his arm around the church lady’s shoulder. Abigail announced to the depressed waitress that she was ordering lamb vindaloo. The hot lesbian got steak frites. The brain-damaged child wanted grilled cheese and tomato soup, which wasn’t on the menu but exceptions were made.

“They have no shame,” said Jim Doherty, “flaunting their perversions out in public like that. I can’t control what they do behind closed doors but this is a family joint.” He slammed the table with his open palm like this here was the family joint, filled with family blood, bone, and ligaments, and the Flynns were an infiltrating force, a cancer.

Jim Doherty’s phone rang again and Myles was alone once more in the Lucky Penne booth. He returned to his game but found his focus was broken. It now belonged to the Flynns.

“Alternative names,” said the Flynn father. “Go.”

Everyone chimed in.

“Penne for Your Thoughts.”

“Go Tagliatell-it on the Mountain.”

“No Shirt, No Shoes, Gnocchi.”

And so on.

Food came out of the kitchen.

“She didn’t bring me chopsticks,” said Abigail.

“Indians don’t use chopsticks,” said Harper.

“I have to admit,” the Flynn father said to the lesbian, “the bathroom is really coming together.”

“I’ll say,” said the church lady.

“We’re going in on the kitchen next,” said the lesbian.

“Shall we say grace?” said the church lady.

“We’re Jewish,” said Louise.

“It’s alright,” said the boy next to her. “Grace transcends denomination.”

The waitress presented their feast: curry and carbonara, nachos, clam chowder, a shrimp cocktail, a wedge salad. And before they ate, to Myles’s astonishment, each member of the party bowed their heads while the church lady recited the bless us, oh Lord refrain that had been hammered into Myles from a young age in Sunday school—but why had he never really thought about the words until now? What were these thy gifts? Some lumpy, discolored porridge was set before Harper with thirteen candles sticking out of it. The table all sang and ruffled her hair and presented her with cards and gifts. Myles watched them serving one another, cheersing, Abigail removing a stray hair from Louise’s cheek. The girls, the dad, the mom, the boy from school, the church lady, the dyke, and the war criminal all seemed so … something. Myles couldn’t place it. Sharing silverware. Passing naan and disco fries and sneaking sips from wineglasses. They were—was he hearing correctly?—laughing. Not fighting or looking at their phones or sitting in stony silence but laughing. Laughing and eating and drawing on the paper tablecloth with dull crayons. The dad fed the church lady a bite of a lobster roll. The contractor stroked the mother’s hair. And the girls—they were each alert and engaged. Prodding one another playfully. Talking about how the youngest had just gotten her first period—gross—and how the eldest would travel, then be applying to a nearby college for the spring semester. How unique her college essay was. There was love. Myles felt a wave of emotion he was ill-equipped to identify, would not be able to for years to come, until after a stint in therapy decreed by a post-college girlfriend. Something the therapist would call by a foreign name that would translate to homesick, but homesick for somewhere he’d never been. This moment of joy and communion transcended the Flynns’ obvious domestic flaws like grace transcended denomination. Was it delusion? Hysteria? Whatever made this family freaks seemed to be making them very something … very something indeed. Something where something had no business being. Like how people who almost freeze to death report feeling warm. That was what it was: warmth. It was positively tropical in the Flynn booth. Myles watched them, bewildered. Unabashedly staring until he was noticed. And that was when the family flagged him over. Beckoned him to their table, away from his game where his avatar was stabbing a masked soldier in the neck with a butterfly knife. Away from the digital gore. Away from his half-eaten egg rolls. Was it a trap? They were saying they had way too much food. Why not join them? Why not have some sodden chicken and why not squeeze in next to them and why not tell them about school? How was it? Was he enjoying the weather? And had he sprouted up since the last time they saw him? He was so tall now! He should go out for basketball! And wasn’t life funny? And wasn’t life grand? And Myles thought life is funny and life is grand and he is enjoying the weather and he had sprouted up—thanks for noticing—and the spicy vindaloo was particularly good tonight and Myles smiled under the stained glass Lucky Penne windows, through which, when hit by the setting sun, the light splintered against the wall and reified into angels. And when Myles’s dad returned from his call and found him nestled among the freaks, talking and laughing and quite literally breaking bread, Jim Doherty had little else to say but “Come on, Myles,” and Myles got up to leave the Flynns to their weirdness but lingered a beat, and when he lingered his dad said, “Now, Myles” and “Come eat your supper, Myles.” But he was already full.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thank you to my mother, Susan Cash; to my editors, Jackson Howard and Bobby Mostyn-Owen; to my agent, Michael Mungiello; my other agent, Jason Richman; and my other agent, Rachel Savage; to my boyfriend, Christopher; to my best friend, Anika; and to Nat for her illustration and support. There would be no Lost Lambs without your meticulous time, patience, and constant validation. Thank you to the Giancarlo DiTrapano Foundation for letting me do line edits in an Italian castle. Thank you to Aunt Brenda for housing me during that tenement fire. Thank you to my nemeses for inspiring me. Thank you G*d for watching over me.

ALSO BY MADELINE CASH

Earth Angel

A Note About the Author

Madeline Cash is the founder of Forever Magazine and the author of the story collection Earth Angel. Her fiction has appeared in Granta, The Baffler, The Sewanee Review, and The Drift, among other publications. She lives in New York City. Lost Lambs is her debut novel. You can sign up for email updates here.

Contents

1. Title Page
2. Copyright Notice
3. Dedication
4. Begin Reading
5. Acknowledgments
6. Also by Madeline Cash
7. A Note About the Author
8. Copyright

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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Copyright © 2026 by Madeline Cash

All rights reserved

First edition, 2026

Illustration at end of text by Nat Ruiz.

Cover art and design by Na Kim.

Ebook ISBN: 978-0-374-61924-4

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, organizations, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, places, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.