Category: Fiction

Lucius heard the baby wail from the yard, where he sat cross-legged with his head leaned all the way back, considering the stars. In another life, he would have been an astronomer and known them all. He would have had the opportunity to see the flares of those distant suns, winking in and out of existence. But in his life, the life in which he felt increasingly trapped, they were as nameless and faceless as strangers on the sidewalk.

Somewhere, behind him, echoing softly out the open front door, came Madeline’s sweet refrain of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” The wail subsided; his son had been placated. But Lucius felt his stomach turn with the knowledge that that wail, that horrible piercing scream would come again and again. For every lullaby there would be ten more midnight alarms, ten more sleepless nights sprawled helplessly at the foot of his son’s crib, wondering how and why he ever agreed to this.

Had he agreed to this? Or had it all been her idea? That was the worst part about his anger and his fear—how he had found a target for them in his wife. Because if they were just his, if they amounted to nothing more than self-loathing, he could bear it. His father always told him that family was the one thing for which you sacrificed everything else. But he worried, with each passing day, if the love he felt for Madeline would be one of the things that he had to sacrifice in the name of family.

Inside, the telephone began ringing. He heard his wife’s footsteps passing through the house, a few murmured words. She appeared at the doorway behind him.

“For you,” she said. “Your father.”

Lucius joined Madeline in the doorway. There, in the pleated moonlight streaming under the eaves, she was beautiful. More beautiful to him than she had ever been, because in the half-darkness, he could pretend that they were the only two people left alive. He could fold her in his long capable arms, and they could hide, forever. Just the two of them, the way that he had always dreamed. As she handed him the phone, the illusion shattered.

“Hallo son,” his father said, “Thought I’d check to see how everything’s going over there.”

“Hallo,” said Lucius in the way of men the world over, parroting their fathers as soon as they raise a receiver to their lips.

His gaze followed Madeline through the open door and into the kitchen. As he watched her receding back he sniffed the air, hoping to recover the fading scent of love that made him burn for her and only her. He remained standing on the porch, where the wind and cricket-chirp and faint roar of the distant interstate might distract from his leaden voice, though he knew his father would never notice a thing like that.

“Yes, fine, thank you, we’re fine,” Lucius said.

“Capital,” his father said. “And money-wise? Everything okay on that end? You know we don’t mind helping out. Don’t mind at all.”

“No, we’re fine, no need for that. But thank you. We do appreciate the offer. You’ve done more than enough already. We are really so grateful.”

“Happy to, our pleasure, you know. We wish we could be there more, in the flesh as it were, but, well, with your mother, it’s hard to make the trip, you understand.”

“Yes, of course, I understand.”

“And Madeline, she understands?”

“Yes, she understands.”

As his father paused, Lucius could make out the sound of his ragged breathing. He could almost smell it – cocktail onions and Benson & Hedges.

“Well, I won’t keep you. I’m sure you’ve got your hands full,” his father said.

“Yes, well, it was nice talking to you.”

“Likewise. And remember…”

Lucius waited.

“Memorial Day.”

“Memorial Day,” Lucius repeated.

“Yes. Invitation’s open. If you’d like to come see us. We understand if you’re too busy of course. But just wanted to remind you.”

“Ok. I’ll remember. Memorial Day.”

“Memorial Day. Goodnight, son.”

“Goodnight, father.”

Lucius held the phone to his ear for a few seconds after the line clicked dead, as if straining to hear something through the dial tone. But there was nothing, so he went inside, closing the door behind him.

The foyer was cold and dim. The door to the nursery, behind the wooden railing on the second floor, was left slightly ajar so that Madeline could hear if the baby stirred or whimpered. She was in the living room reading a book and humming a tune that he didn’t recognize when Lucius entered. He approached the credenza they inherited from his parents, which clashed with the rest of the furniture but was too old and expensive to give away. He opened one of the drawers and withdrew a record. He placed it on the turntable and set the needle, adjusting the volume so that the soft classical music that issued from the speakers wouldn’t reach his son’s room. He turned to see her looking at him, not angrily, as he hoped, but inquisitively, with her head cocked.

“Sorry,” he said, “I didn’t realize you were reading.”

“That’s okay,” she said.

“I can turn it off if you like.”

“I said that’s okay,” she said, “Besides, it’s not very good.”

“Why are you still reading it then?” he asked.

She sighed. “Because I’ve started it.”

Lucius sat down beside his wife on the sofa. Together, they stared into the scarred black interior of the fireplace. The seconds ticked away on the grandfather clock in the hall. When the record’s side was over, Lucius went and flipped it.

“We should take a walk tomorrow,” Madeline suggested.

“Where?” Lucius asked.

“Anywhere,” she said, “I don’t care. It’s just nice to do things together, you know. All together.”

“I think it’s supposed to rain,” he said.

“Where’d you see that?” she asked.

“Farmer’s Almanac,” he lied.

“I see. Well then how about the museum? That’s indoors.”

Lucius pictured himself walking up and down the halls of curios and artifacts, pretending to notice them, when all he could notice was his own behavior. He imagined his whole sad family, out for a stroll; how they would look to other, equally sad families. His wife, dressed casually and yet still more radiant than everyone else in the crowd, pushing the stroller in which his son reclined fussily, and himself, walking two steps behind, sort of loping behind them like a bodyguard would. He found himself practicing the faces he would make to appear happy, but not too happy, to be out at the museum with his wife and child. The realization that he had to practice these faces brought a lump to his throat, which he hastily swallowed.

“We’ll see,” he said. “I mean, of course, that would be lovely, but Thomas is really riding me so I may have to go in.”

“Oh please,” she said, “It’s a Saturday. And Thomas has kids. He’ll understand. Spend the day with us. It’ll do you some good to get out.” She put her hand on his arm and the gift of her contact was almost enough to make him tell the truth. He could tell her everything. All the gory details: How his son didn’t look like a son to him, but just any other baby. How, on his worst days, he wished they could just leave, let the baby cry forever and head for someplace, anyplace else. And if she asked him how long he had felt this way, he wouldn’t have an answer.

“We’ll see,” he repeated.

Madeline rose from the sofa. She was off to bed. And though they had had this exact conversation dozens of times before, and he had always been thankful to see her go on those occasions, he now felt the sudden and uncontrollable urge to get her to stay.

“I mean,” he said, his voice shaking, “do you think it’d be alright for him? All those people, you know? Could be too much, don’t you think? I’m just thinking of him, is all.”

She stopped. Her shoulders rose and fell as she took a huge stabilizing breath.

Her voice low, barely above a whisper, she said, “I guess we’ll see, won’t we?”

And that was it. She was gone and he was left alone in their living room. He changed out the record for another—from Beethoven to Bach—but failed to clock the change in tempo or tone. It was all just noise. Meaningless, artless noise. Like the noise of his son’s laughter, he thought. The carbonated laughter that issued forth from his baby’s gooey mouth. The laughter never failed to bring an effortless smile to Madeline’s lips. But he had to force the smile. This artificial smile resembled his father’s, which he only remembered seeing once, when his mother cajoled them into sitting for a portrait.

He remembered posing beneath his father’s large muscular frame. The photographer’s cooing words.—Just a little to the left: now, put your hand on his shoulder. There, that’s it. Hold it.—The unfamiliar weight of his father’s stationary hand on his body. He remembered the flash and rubbing his eyes afterwards to remove the spots. The sudden brightness had been painless and yet, when it faded, Lucius felt as though he had lost something essential. The picture still hung in the hallway of his parents’ house. It was, to his knowledge, the only photo that he and his father had taken together, the only evidence besides his birth certificate and the way that he answered the phone that they were anything more than two people who had known each other for a long time.

Lucius had dozens of photos with his own son. Whole volumes had been dedicated to the child’s first few months, lovingly assembled by Madeline and chronologically organized on the bookshelf beside the credenza. If he were to take one of them out, he could find evidence of himself holding, touching, swinging, and loving his son. But the evidence would always be circumstantial, and perhaps, when his son grew older and Lucius’ lack of affection became something he knew rather than just something he felt, those photos would remind his son of all the ways that his father had failed him.

A sudden chill passed through the room. Likely, his wife had opened a window and now a stream of cold air was funneling through the house and out the doggy door in the mudroom. It was late. He wanted to be upstairs in bed with Madeline, but he couldn’t go up there yet. He couldn’t stand the silence, the way that it filled their bedroom. This silence that had found its way into their love took up too much space, too much oxygen. It gave new meaning to the phrase “take your breath away.” He remembered using this phrase when he proposed, back when they were twenty-five and attractive and sure that nothing would ever come between them. She had laughed then and still did when talking about the proposal. It was his bumbling self-consciousness, which she found endearing. For the first few years, he would laugh at himself when she told the story. But now, ever since the birth of their child, it stung with the same intensity as the jeers and taunts of playground bullies. His wife was no bully, but there was something in the way that they interacted that made him feel like a child.

Even now, as he knelt alone before the fireplace in the house he bought for the family he started, he felt childish. He gathered a sheet of newspaper into a loose mushroom in his hands. He crossed a few sticks of kindling over the crumpled paper and lit it with a lighter. He watched as his hands carefully laid larger pieces of wood on the growing flame.

His father’s hands had shown him how to make fire. They had been used, in lieu of words, to show Lucius what was expected of him as a man: A man’s hands were a Swiss Army Knife. They should be able to do anything. They should speak for the man. Because a man shouldn’t speak.

The fire now lit, Lucius returned to the sofa, sinking back into the velvet folds. He leaned his weary head back against the gentle rise, rolling it to the left. He caught his reflection in the floor-length mirror that obscured the radiator. He saw himself, and his father, and, shuddering, he saw the man that his son would one day grow up to be. All three men, containing one another like Russian nesting dolls. Each son giving birth to each father, for what is a father before a son emerges? He is a man. And that is all he was ever asked to be.

Lucius remembered the noise and the blood of his son’s delivery. The sweat that caked Madeline’s head as she pushed and screamed. How he held her hand and stared deep into her clenched eyelids, whispering meaningless words that she would never hear. The smell of antiseptic and feces. His own exhaustion, fear, and doubt. How it had felt, oddly, as if he were the one emerging into some vast and terrible world. As if it had been him clawing to remain in the womb and not his son.

And then, he had a son—a red, wet ball of nerves and pain that trusted only her. He could feel it immediately, that bond between mother and son. He could feel it because he too felt helpless and cold and dependent on this brave and beautiful woman to save him. Tears welled in his eyes as he remembered those twin instincts when he first held his son—to surround him in a loving embrace or reach for the scalpel. The only logical reactions to meeting yourself.

Holding his son in that hospital room, he knew that affection between them had to be reciprocally earned. The disappointment of that epiphany struck him like his father’s fist, at which point, the anger and the fear came flooding into him, displacing whatever sort of immediate love he had felt.

But the love had been there, hadn’t it? He asked himself as he stared into the fire before him. He had loved his son, if only for an instant. And if he had felt it once, then he could feel it again, he was sure. He just had to try. To finish what he started. To bear the pain as a sacrifice, until he outgrew the shape of his father and finally found the courage to tell his son about his love.

The glowing embers cast a small halation through the tears welling in Lucius’ eyes. Somewhere deep in the bed of twinkling embers, he saw his son’s face. The face was too far away for him to touch. But it was there – his personal Polaris. And he decided then that chasing that face and the love that it would one day bring was worth all the exhaustion and the pain he would ever feel. Even if it killed him, it was the one thing worth dying for.

The music stopped and the record continued to turn, making pointless scratchy rounds on the turntable. It was a sound he associated with the end of things. But this wasn’t the end of something. This was the beginning of something. The clock on the wall chimed one time. He lumbered up from the couch, headed for bed. In the foyer, he removed his son’s shoes from the closet and placed them beside his own on the rack by the door. The black oxfords were impractical for such a young child, comical even, but Madeline would want them all dressed to the nines for a trip to the museum. Next to his own, larger oxfords, which were beaten and scuffed, his son’s tiny shoes looked pristine. He would buy a new pair for himself tomorrow and throw the old ones away. But his son’s shoes would never be thrown away. Even after they no longer fit his feet, Madeline would keep them in a box in the garage, because she kept everything. Someday in twenty or thirty years, Lucius would find the box while looking for something else, like nails or an old can of paint. He would remember how perfect his son once was and how much he had grown.

There are some sounds that cannot be heard. Trees speak to each other, sending messages through fungal networks belowground. Tadpoles wriggle through the murky waters of a still pond. The mountains crumble beneath the weight of themselves. Most of us are too busy listening to sound to sense these subtle changes in the world. But those of us who live with silence, like my Aunt Sadie, whisper along to the symphony of nature. And when she speaks, everyone stops talking so that they can listen.

Many years ago, when Sadie was a young woman who still had her hearing, and I wasn’t yet an idea in my mother’s head, no one cared to listen. Everyone spoke as loudly as they wanted, secure in the belief that it was only us, only people, who mattered. They told themselves that this made them healthy and happy, but really, nobody anywhere had ever been so miserable. When I ask Aunt Sadie why people lived like this, she explains that nearly the whole world forgot that the ear is a vital organ, even when it no longer works the way it’s supposed to.

On days when I feel self-pity clawing at my gut, I wish that my own ears stopped working, or started working in the way that Aunt Sadie’s and Rebecca’s do. I know that my hearing is an asset when it comes time to hunt or greet strangers. I know that not everyone can be blessed. But I still envy Aunt Sadie, because I wish I could add my quiet voice to the forest. Instead, my whispers sound alien and harsh, all wrong, as though I am singing in a different key from the rest of the chorus. I have decided to speak only when absolutely necessary.

…

My mother tries to convince me to speak more often as we pick blueberries on the Northern face of Big Slide. We do this every three days, waking early to make the 10-mile hike out to the trailhead from our cabin. We walk in silence the whole way there, barefoot because it’s summer and because that way we can hear if someone’s coming. But once we summit and arrive at the great open rock face for which the mountain is named, my mother asks me why I have given up speaking.

“You have such a beautiful voice,” she says. “Why hide it from the world?”

“I don’t,” I sign back. “And I am training myself to hear. Like Aunt Sadie hears.”

She shakes her head. “Aunt Sadie doesn’t hear.”

“You know what I mean.”

“No,” she says, “you don’t know what I mean. Aunt Sadie herself will tell you that she doesn’t hear. Hasn’t heard since the bomb that took her husband.”

“But,” I argue, “she told me that the ear is a vital organ. I know hers don’t work anymore to alert her to sound, but she still hears the world. She still hears so much more than you or I ever will. She hears the garter snakes molting, the birch back peeling, the waterfalls crashing. She hears it all, somehow.”

My mother looks up at the dull gray sky, so close from this high up. Today it is cloudy, but the intensity of the sunlight, even with the clouds, feeds the hungry blueberries. They cluster in tight bunches spread across the rock face. We are not the only ones who graze here. These purplish pockets of sugar entice birds and squirrels, who will eventually deposit the seeds in digested form. And the blueberries will spread. The whole chain of communication from sunlight to blueberry to squirrel repeats itself year after year for no particular reason except that this is how the conversation has evolved.

My mother sighs. “I can’t speak for Sadie. Wouldn’t dare. But it seems to me that she might be implying that the ear is more than someone’s ability to hear.”

“No shit,” I sign.

“Watch it,” she says.

We drop the subject, concentrating instead on filling our two large wicker baskets with berries. By the time we return to camp, our backs are cricked, and our calloused fingers bear new cuts and scrapes. We give both baskets to Rebecca, who pours them into a pot over the fire with a small ration of granulated sugar.

“Where’s Sadie?” I sign to Rebecca, but she just shrugs.

I’m too tired to go looking for her, so instead I head for my room with a small candle. I try to draw, to commit the view from the top of Big Slide to paper, but the horizon doesn’t come out the way I want it to, so I tear it in half. Then I look at the pieces on the floor of my bedroom.

When my father and mother were young, people split the Earth itself in half, looking for precious stones. They unzipped the clouds with puffy white chem-trails. They diverted rivers, burned forests, dumped thousands of tons of plastic into the ocean. Is it any wonder then that the elements themselves turned on people? That tsunamis, earthquakes, wildfires, and hurricanes rose up to stem the flood of human intervention? The Earth is old and much stronger than anyone realized; it was not the one who needed saving.

My parents speak of a time when other people were inescapable. Wherever you went, you found them. When they talk about this, my parents assume the far-off reminiscent look of golden days gone by, but to me, it sounds awful. We see people from time to time, crossing near our camp or when we’re out scavenging, but sometimes a year or more will go by between these sightings, which is fine by me. After the “natural disasters” – a title that I have never understood – took away people’s access to food and shelter, violence spread across the world. Those who couldn’t live quietly without supermarkets and televisions and SUVs were killed, either by themselves or someone else.

“The only people you can trust,” my parents once told me, “are us and Sadie and Luke and Rebecca.” That was ten years ago though, and my parents have started trusting again. I will occasionally see my father laughing with other men in town as we are scavenging. Or my mother will invite a passing stranger to share our fire and our food for a night. The lesson, I suppose, is that you can’t trust everyone, but most people are harmless. 

I fall asleep waiting to hear Aunt Sadie’s heavy footsteps outside my door.

…

The next morning, I wake at dawn, ready to help gather firewood or water, whatever we need. Outside, by the smoldering firepit, the adults are arranged into a circle, discussing something.

“She’s done this before,” my father signs.

“Something feels different this time,” my mother responds.

“Different how?” Luke asks.

“She’s my sister. I know her better than you all do. And this is different. Something has happened to her. Otherwise, she would be back here, at home, where she belongs.”

I feel my mother’s worry creep underneath my skin. They haven’t yet realized that I am eavesdropping.

My parents have told me that when they were young, they felt certain that they would live to see the end of the world, by which, they meant the end of human beings. Even before the violence and the death, they were told that the Earth would give up sustaining them. Nobody worries about this anymore. The abundance around us is so evident, you can sense it, or at least Aunt Sadie could. As I listen to the adults talk about where she could be, I feel a panic not unlike what they must have felt when they were young. I feel like I will live to see the end of the world.

“We can check in town,” my father says. “Maybe she went scavenging.”

My mother shakes her head, but says nothing. Then she sees me framed in the doorway and her frown deepens.

“I’m coming with you,” I sign to my father. He only nods, knowing that it would be futile to argue.

I don’t go into town often, not because I’m not welcome, but because I have little interest. The shops and the cars and the consumer goods do not trigger the nostalgia my parents feel. I have never known a world with them. For this reason, I am terrible at scavenging. I prefer to spend time around camp and in the woods, where the knowledge that Rebecca and Sadie have poured into my head is readily accessible. But I would walk through the rubble of urban sprawl for years if it meant finding Aunt Sadie.

I lace up my boots. Barefoot is not an option in town, what with the broken glass and rusted metal. I fill my backpack with water, a bag of nuts and seeds, and a pocket knife.

My father and I set out, following a herd path for a mile or two, until it joins a two-lane highway. Walking on the concrete feels strange, as though my feet are being slapped with each footfall. I jog a bit to keep up with my father, whose stride is long, his eyes set straight ahead. We pass cars and trucks, abandoned along the road where they ran out of gas.

Eventually, we come to a metal bridge above a river. Turning my head downstream, I hear the roar of the river reduced to a swift burble. A young stand of alder sprouts from one of the banks. This is a new bank, created by gradual buildup of sediment brought by the rushing water. The skinny white trees will reinforce the ground, until another storm comes and redirects the river again. Tufts of elk fur still cling to the trunks and branches.

Sadie once told me how alder may as well be a feather bed to an elk. They love the feeling of the closely packed trees on their hides. While rubbing themselves, they graze on the shrubs and shoots sprouting in the underbrush and then they deposit manure, which fertilizes the soil. More nutrients, more trees. The river is the director of this pocket drama, determining who goes where and when.

“Keep up,” my father says. He is a good twenty paces ahead of me, halfway across the bridge.

The air itself changes on the other side. It tastes like moldy upholstery and smoke. The moisture and fragrant spruce and pine have been masked by the stench of humans. As we draw closer to town, the houses get closer together, until one buts right up next to another. It never ceases to amaze me that people used to live so close to each other.

On Main Street, we come across a man carrying several bags. He looks exhausted, but still raises a hand in greeting to my father. “Howdy, Jim. This your boy?”

 My father nods and places a hand on my shoulder. “We’re looking for Sadie. Have you seen her?”

The man shakes his head. “Sorry, can’t say I have. Been staying home most days though, what with the new baby.”

My father smiles. “How is she?”

“Beautiful,” the man says, beaming.

“And Portia?”

“Recovering well. I’ll tell her you asked after her. She’ll appreciate it.”

“You do that,” my father says.

As the two men continue talking about the man’s family and the summer rain and what it will mean for our respective gardens, I drift away, seething. I hate my father for not feeling the same urgency and panic that I feel. I don’t understand how he can carry on about the weather at a time like this.

In the broken window of a ransacked pharmacy, I see an untouched greeting card display. The side closest to me has birthday cards. One of them sticks out to me. It features a cartoon bear with the words “Have a Grrrrrrr-eat Birthday!”. My father gave me this card two years ago. He must have found it on this very rack.

I remember that birthday, the gooey sweetness of the nut bars my mother made, dipping into our precious flour supply. I remember the fire and the laughter. I remember smiling so much that my cheeks were sore, and I had to keep massaging them. Sadie hadn’t spoken a word all day, to me or anyone. My father, drunk on sugar and protein, ribbed her for it, asking whether she’d forgotten that it was my birthday. Sadie ignored him, turning to me instead.

“Are you ready for your present?” she asked aloud. Sadie’s voice is a harmony of rough stone and smooth water. When she speaks, she directs, as powerful as a river. The adults quieted down so that they could listen.

“Your present is a story. A lesson. It’s the story of a birthday.

“Many, many years ago, all the world gathered for a birthday party. Everyone was so excited and nervous. Squirrel kept chittering from his treetop. River babbled incessantly to a silent moose. The pine trees shivered in anticipation, casting their prickly needles to the ground. They were all waiting for the guest of honor, a small hairless ape that they decided to call human.

“Human, it was known, would be born with a different kind of brain. There was much discussion about what this brain would do, but nobody knew for sure. Despite the discussion, which at times grew heated, the whole world agreed that they would treat the human as an equal.

“When the baby emerged from the womb of the world, tiny and pained, into the cold air, it arrived crying. This was not uncommon. Soft, gentle moss grew up around it. But the moss did not comfort human, who grabbed and tore and only screamed louder. Moss retreated and wolf moved in to swaddle the child with its soft fur. Human, though, threw its arms around wolf’s neck, squeezing tighter and tighter and not even redwood, with all its power, could pry them loose. Thinking that human might just need a distraction, trout swam around it, flashing beautiful pinks, greens, and silvers. But human was not amused. Instead, it took a huge bite out of trout’s back.

“Everything in the world tried to get this new creature to calm down, and everything failed, even the wind and the waves. The baby only grew more hysterical. And as they stood by watching the contagious pain and suffering of human, they wondered why it couldn’t just calm down so that they could end the birthday. Because it had been going on for far too long. And even the mountains had grown tired of it.”

For two years, I have tried not to cry or yell. I tread carefully so as not to crush snails or beetles underfoot. I do not want to take up space like human did on its birthday. But, standing here on the cracked asphalt in front of the pharmacy, I can feel a selfishness creeping up my throat. I let out a sob as I remember Aunt Sadie, the wiry wisps of her graying hair and the way they felt on my cheek when I hugged her. By the time my father finds me, my face is streaked with tears. He comforts me and we poke around a few more darkened buildings before heading home empty-handed.

…

A week goes by with no sign of Aunt Sadie. Then another. My mother cries herself to sleep every night. My father’s and my feeble attempts to comfort her accomplish nothing. She has been hollowed out by the pain and worry.

“This is normal,” Rebecca signs to me over breakfast one day. “We have to let her grieve.” My mother’s grief is jagged. She will sob for hours and then her mouth will twist into a violent scream, sending the birds – crows, mostly – flapping away. I cringe, ashamed of my mother for disrupting the world with her screams.

As summer turns towards fall, the rains begin in earnest. The damp earth is softer underfoot and the whole forest smells of decomposing leaf litter. Luke and Rebecca ask if I’d like to join them on the annual chanterelle hunt. I leap at the opportunity. Anything to get away from my mother for a few hours.

 Rebecca and Luke were Sadie’s friends in the city before they all moved here with my parents. Luke is stocky and strong, with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of energy. He maintains the house, turns dead trees into firewood, and still finds time to build snares and traps for small game. Rebecca is the opposite. Like Sadie, her contributions are mostly to our collective knowledge and understanding of the world. Born unable to hear, she doesn’t speak to communicate, but when she signs, we give her the same quiet reverence we give to Sadie.

 We find a small cache of the delicious mushrooms. As Luke kneels to harvest, Rebecca turns to me. “How are you?”

“Are you asking rhetorically or do you actually want to know?” I ask.

 Instead of answering, she kneels beside a spruce tree. Surrounding the tree is a ring of small white mushrooms that have recently sprouted through the needles and dirt. “Fairy ring,” she signs.

I nod. “Sadie told me how they sprout from threads of a single fungus, interwoven with the roots of a tree.”

“Did she also tell you what they mean?” she asks, fixing me in her pale green eyes.

“What do you mean, what they mean?” I ask.

“People used to believe that you could get trapped in them. That they would turn you invisible if you stepped inside.”

“The tree’s still there,” Luke observes, joining us.

“Only people could be cursed in this way,” Rebecca explains. “Unable to communicate with everyone you left behind. It’s tragic sure, but I never saw it as a curse. If our absence is felt, is it still an absence?”

…

After a month, I decide that I am going out to look for Aunt Sadie by myself. Nobody seems to notice me coming and going; Luke and Rebecca are too busy providing for us and my parents are too deep in their grief, too certain that she’s gone for good. Somebody needs to figure out what happened to her.

Sadie and I used to take walks together, always following the old trails that people cut into the forest floor, since partially overgrown, so that we could easily find our way back. I follow the main trail from our cabin for a few miles, eventually stumbling upon the old dam, which has broken. With no one to repair it, the water streams through the gaping holes in the wood. One day, it will collapse, and the lumber used to construct it will become part of the riverbank.

Above the small pond created by the dam, I see Tahawus, forever keeping watch over our lives. This is the name that the people who first lived here gave the mountain. The people who came after them called it Marcy, but we prefer Tahawus, “Cloudsplitter.” The peak grazes the sky. It is a silly thought, childish even, but I wonder whether I couldn’t spot Sadie from that great distance. Without another idea, I set off on the trail to the summit.

After a few hundred yards, my path is blocked by a fallen tree. I begin snapping off branches, recklessly, until I pause, sensing something on the underside of the limb in my hand. Slowly, I turn it over to reveal a nursery web spider nest, the webbing thick and matted, like a tarp partially covering the spiderlings. Dozens of them are tucked away behind the intricately woven silk. I have always wondered how spiders learn how to weave these delicate homes. It occurs to me now, looking into this web, that they spend their formative moments ensconced in an example. I see through their miniature eyes, looking up and studying the sprawling patterns of glittering white thread, so that one day, I will know too. And I do this until these shapes and patterns are all I see, all I know.

Keep your eyes moving and your ears open, Sadie once told me, and the world will reveal all its secrets to you.

My gaze shifts to my feet, where I see the shiny arc of a broken bear claw, stuck between two rocks. This one is tiny, less than an inch long, and must have belonged to a cub. I feel adrenaline prickle across the skin of my neck. I have been taught since my infancy that bears are mostly harmless unless you come between a child and its mother. The claw is clearly old, but I still can’t shake my fear.

I pause, standing in the middle of the trail, and scan the surrounding woods. I don’t hear or see anything that would indicate a bear. Just before moving on, my eye catches on something that should not be there – a scrap of purple cloth snagged on a tree limb. My breath catches as I recognize it, immediately, as a piece of Aunt Sadie’s favorite coat.

Suddenly, I can see it, the whole scene appearing before me. Sadie walks this trail to collect her thoughts and gather whatever she can. She comes across a bear cub, its claw broken where it caught between rocks. Maybe a bit of blood lays fresh on the ground. Sadie pauses. Perhaps she knows that this is it, that she has found herself in a dangerous situation without a way out. And then she takes her last deep breath, sucking in all the delicious air that this world generates, before the bear’s mother is upon her.

I walk over and retrieve the scrap of cloth. Sadie is back there somewhere, but I don’t dare look. Nor will we make any attempt to retrieve her body. She always said that however she died, she wanted to be dragged into the woods and left to be eaten and decompose like all the other dead things. There is something unspeakably beautiful to me in the fact that the world granted this wish.

…

Before hiking back to camp, I take the scrap of cloth up to the top of the mountain, thinking all the while about the bear and my anger. Anger can only be satisfying when it has a target. But try as I might, I cannot attach it to the bear. I understand her actions. They were justified. She killed my aunt to protect her child, just as my mother would kill a bear to protect me. But I need some outlet for my anger. It cannot stay inside of me, or I will slowly devour myself.

A light rain begins to fall. I remove my pack from my back and insert the scrap of cloth. I have to show it to my mother. I have to be the one who tells her what happened. But not yet.

The summit is bare, a mound of stone capping the mountain. A large pile of rocks, half-scattered, sits at the peak. I asked my father about these once and he told me that people used to bring rocks to top of the mountain because they considered it a tragedy that the mountain was crumbling. They thought that the rocks would become part of the mountain. They thought that they could save it.

Nothing can be saved. That is the simple truth that Sadie taught me. Everything is temporary – our lives, the rivers, the mountains. All will end, but the ends have meaning, insofar as they make room for beginnings. I take a deep breath, connecting with my anger as I wonder what strange beginning will come from its end.

I live to see the end of the world. Each moment that this Earth survives is also a moment of death. Life and death overlapping and releasing a scream like hot iron in water. I thank Aunt Sadie for showing me how to sense the world, all its end and its beginnings. Tears fall from my eyes, joining the raindrops, and all this water tumbles down the mountaintop where it will run into streams and rivers and eventually, the ocean, which beats against the sand and stone along its shores. The wind whips through the Big Leaf Maples, showering the ground with their helicopter seeds. I can feel them turning in swift circles as they fall. The whole world and everything in it comes together to form a song, loud as life and quiet as death. I open my mouth to howl my pain to the clouds overhead and for the first time, I am on key. The scream that I produce is pitchy and uneven, but it is honest. It belongs. And so do I.

Yes, and the way he pronounced Penelope with three syllables like cantaloupe. Fresh fruit that breaks inside your mouth and dribbles down your chin, sticky for days afterwards. She remembers picking seeds and fibers from her teeth at the Orinda Country Club pool with her tongue through dull metal braces.

And the tight white denim jeans he had on were so like Paul Newman’s in the dirt bike racing scene in Sometimes a Great Notion, the movie to which she nightly pawed at herself at twelve, learning, yearning for a man like Hank Stamper. She yearned for a man like that, a man from the North. This man, she would find out later, was from the North but the wrong North: the North of ivy and red-brick walk-ups, not Douglass Fir and slick, dark stones licked by beating waves. But him so like Paul Newman with those blue eyes that flitted about her body devilishly. He was a devil, a rogue, impetuous like a child. Like the young boy who had once mispronounced her name in grade school, erupting the class into wild and cacophonic laughter. So unlike, for he was not a clown, was deadly serious as illness or fathers or ill fathers, so familiar to her. He felt so familiar brushing up against her midsection with a tan arm when passing a drink to someone else, fleshy white underneath like a fish slithering through cold and familiar waters, the water already beginning to break inside her. He could open her waters with a single touch.

Introductions brought them together around a low coffee table strewn with beer cans and ashtrays. Marriage, trying to get marriage out of her brain and coming back up, resurfacing. Trying to get it out like trying to remove a vital organ while still alive.

The laughing, head-thrown-back cackling of mirth and new friends filled the air. The mirth passed from person to person around the strewn coffee table above which the lights shaded low and dark this strange now-not-stranger’s first face for her. For her. For you, his eyes seemed to say without lips moving. They spoke to her in the longing forlorn way he looked up over the cards to some game they were playing that she couldn’t make sense of but he seemed to know innately. Not love, not lust, not curious, not nothing. Beautiful he was in the braided lamplight over the drinks and the smoke and the cards, she remembers, beautiful.

Pass, who’s turn is it? You? No, you? Is it me? It’s you. Who? Penelope pronounced with three syllables like cantaloupe. So daring to mispronounce after proper introduction. It was intoxicating to be forgotten immediately after making herself known to him. Marriage, this now-not-stranger, was he married? He blew smoke across the table in big puffs that obscured the space between them, shaking her resolve to know him. She didn’t want to, didn’t need this, another man, another one, another marriage. Marriage, she remembers.

But the no-winking no-nonsense way he looked at her without saying anything. She loved being there in that moment, held in steely blue cold-crusted eyes like diamonds glinting in the overhead light. Then the game wrapped up and the people sat back talking the no-talk that follows such games when everyone should be an adult and should know what to talk about, but still so young all of them. After all, all after or during their first marriages of which there will be so many. Marriage was repulsive to her then.

But, she remembers, a little thing. When she arrived and the moon hung overhead big and bloated like an egg over the griddle streets, she stood with the true stranger in white denim pants. True, for she had not known him then and had not known that he would be coming inside with her. The two of them the only bodies in the swaying liquid cold of the December evening. Thinking in those moments not of marriage, not of beautiful, not of nothing. Not thinking. Drinking. Drinking in the sight of a pensive man looking up. The way he held his cigarette between thumb and forefinger like pinching a delicate flower. She pictured the gardenias he could one day pick for her. She pictured putting them behind her ear, tucking them up into the blonde waves. She pictured the life above the two of them as the sky turned. He had not seen her, had not met her, but was there for her. For her. And she had only to accept the unwanted, uninvited intrusion of this stranger’s body in her life. She had only to accept it.

Was there a choice? Did she have a choice? Him, making her question these and many other. Him, complicating the delicate balance of her now jaded world with his presence. Him just looking up, pinching his smoke, with no notice of her. Him, making her question marriage being so like a trap and a trial and a procession of days. Him, seeming like a story without end, and an asker of questions with no words. Or with one word. The right word pronounced wrongly. Penelope, like cantaloupe. Yes.

Published in Brain Mill Press’s Ab Terra 2020 Story Collection (January 2021)

I start talking to myself. This happens only after I build all the models, read and reread all the books, stare through the porthole at nothing for hours. 

This happens. 

I tell myself it isn’t my fault. It isn’t like I intentionally call my voice forward. It’s a product of the boredom, just like the models and the dog-eared, ink-smudged pages of the books. My voice sounds croaky and raw, at first.

In this conversation with myself, things occur to me that have never occurred to me before. This is strange. I thought I already knew all the things I know but evidently, I don’t.

The first thing that occurs to me is that talking to myself is a better use of my time than building models and reading books. Unlike these activities, there’s no definite end to my speech, no finish line towards which my thoughts are travelling. And it turns out that talking is more exciting than thinking. My thoughts are so insignificant out here that they seem almost non-existent. Words, on the other hand, have a discrete reality. Their presence is evidenced by the fact that I can hear them as they leave my mouth. It’s comforting to be surrounded by something, even if that thing is invisible.  

It then dawns on me that my time isn’t really mine to use. It doesn’t belong to me any more than my current trajectory through space-time does. Working backwards through all the memories that constitute my life, I can’t find any in which it felt like I was really in control of anything. It seems that I was the one being controlled, though by whom or what, I can’t say for sure. 

I see myself boarding this ship, almost a year ago now. Sunlight glares off the polarized visor of my helmet, reflecting up into my squinting eyes. My jaw is firmly set and my right arm holds my helmet pinned against my side. I walk this way because I saw it in a movie once and I need to do something, anything, to distract myself from how afraid I actually am. I pretend that this is a story, that it’s not real, so I don’t have to think about how I may never see another human again.

I see this ship for the very first time. It is smaller than I thought it would be: a runty white egg with a single black porthole in one side, standing with its long side vertical atop three spindly legs. The hatch at the base hisses when it opens to let the ladder down, as if warning me not to enter. Inside, the air is cool and smells of new car. 

It is several years before that and I see cornfields out the window of my eighteen-wheeler. The green stalks and golden ears sway in the late afternoon breeze. As the land dips below the road, I see the point where the fields meet the horizon. The ears will be picked, processed, and packaged before they are loaded onto rigs like the one I’m driving. Then we will deliver them to supermarkets where they will be stickered, sold, then eaten, and eventually turned into waste.

I see myself on a dock in the sun, an even younger me, lying back with the weight of someone else’s head on my stomach. She and I are lovers, each other’s firsts. The fingers of my right hand graze the water lazily. I have assignments to finish for school and jobs to apply for, but I ignore them for the moment. Running my other hand through her blonde hair, I feel comfortable and safe. Her head rolls to face me. “Don’t you just love wasted days like this?” I tell her I do.

I know much more about waste now. Waste is the stuff that leaks from my body. It is the chewed-up, the digested. It is the corn that I once deposited in porcelain bowls and then flushed away with gallons and gallons of water so I wouldn’t have to see or think about it again.

Of course, I don’t have a regular porcelain toilet in the ship, only an aluminum can roughly the diameter of a basketball. The waste collects in a tank and ejects automatically every few days. The waste I generate follows me in frozen islands leading all the way back to the place where I took off, like a trail of breadcrumbs leading home. Out here, waste is a noun, not an adjective. Out here, days are in such abundance that they cannot be wasted. I’m moving through space-time faster than the speed of light but I can’t seem to make my days any shorter. 

Days are a terrestrial concept. If you aren’t bound to observe the movement of a single celestial body, then any unit of measurement for time will be arbitrary. But I still mark the passing of every twenty-four hours on Earth with a small tick mark on the July page of a pin-up calendar, tacked above the control panel beneath a small reading lamp. There are 342 tick marks on the page as of today. Pretty soon I’ll have to move on to another page.

The pin-up girl on the July page is pictured in a field, surrounded by daisies. The two-piece bathing suit she wears is electric green with little white polka dots. Hair the color of pinewood falls from her head, which is tilted back. Her mouth is agape, her eyes wide, as if she is laughing or in horrible pain. A flowery script beneath her reads: “Honey.”

Honey was almost certainly not the woman’s real name. Or maybe it was; some things are as they appear to be. The calendar itself cannot be more than a few years old, judging from the smell and feel of the glossy pages, but Honey looks plump and rosy and people just don’t look like that anymore. 

A woman who may or may not have been named Honey opens her mouth and smiles for a photographer sometime in the latter half of the twentieth century. She tilts her head back and sunlight glints in her eyes. In the moment before she closes them, the photographer snaps his picture, capturing that glint, which travels 250 years through space-time to me, here, in this cockpit.

I look up through the porthole. I know it’s impossible for me to see, but somewhere out there, in a wholly unremarkable section of the universe, there’s a planet that I call Earth, orbiting a star that I call Sun. I imagine that I have a telescope that lets me see all the way home. 

The telescope would be more like a tunnel, extending from Earth to my current location. I could travel back through it by following the trail of breadcrumbs I have left. It’s a tunnel of light and the image gets brighter and brighter the closer I get to the planet. As my vision stretches back along this tunnel, I see everything that has ever happened to the Earth.

I see molten rocks spewing from great chasms, burning and letting off acrid smoke and ash. Lava oozing across the surface of the young planet, forming mountains and valleys. Gases mix and mingle atop the solid crust, creating a bubble, an atmosphere, within which, water begins its slow and methodical renovation of the planet. Water adjusts its shape to fill the crevices and cracks left by the lava. Dark pendulous clouds drift in the air, shooting flashes of lightning to the ground. For a long time, the air, the water, the earth, and the fire are all that exist in the light of the Sun.

I see something sprout in one of the oceans. It is a living thing, meaning that it can die. And when it dies, something new arrives to take its place. This process of substitution continues, gradually accelerating. Bacteria begets algae begets everything else. And within this everything else, there are things that move of their own accord, called animals, and things that don’t, called plants and fungi. They spread across the land and water. They change into new things, killing and reproducing and dying.

And within all this chaos, Man arrives. He is born. He decides to order the chaos, to make it purposeful. He creates the illusion of control to prove to himself that his efforts are successful. He tells himself that he can own the light and time that surround him. He kills everything he comes across.

At this point, I’m so far through the tunnel that I’m almost on the ground. I see Man building cities that reach for the clouds, reorganizing Earth’s matter to support his needs. He learns that this reorganization is killing things too quickly. He has ruined this planet. He has turned it into waste. So, Man sends some of his own lightyears away through space-time to look for new planets, new places to call home. And it’s hopeless, as I know all too well, because out here, there is nothing. 

I know that what I see through my tunnel of light is not entirely accurate. It is a reconstruction of events, a figment of my imagination created from some kind of collective memory that is flavored by both history and myth. The appearance of Man occurred so recently – relative to the age of the planet – that if I were to accurately recount the story of Earth, it would probably not be worth mentioning. 

Staring up into the light above the pin-up calendar, I clear my head of all thought, letting words drip from my mouth. The domed reading lamp looks like the porch light that my wife promised she would always leave on for me. 

I see the porch light flickering softly as I pull up in my rig, many years before I leave on this one-way trip to the stars. Gnats and moths orbit the dirty bulb, bashing into it and each other, drunk on light. Through the closed front door, I see the home that the porch light represents. There are coasters on the coffee table and clean towels hanging in the bathroom. The water boiler drones its one-note song from behind a cabinet. The air inside smells of us, like cardamom and chamomile. My wife sleeps alone, hugging a pillow that will soon be replaced by my body.

Returning my gaze to the porthole, I look out at the nothing once more. But this time, I don’t see nothing. I see that porch light, flickering by itself in the vast emptiness of space-time. I see it back at the end of my tunnel, all the way home along my trail of bread crumbs. It is unlikely that I will stand in its light ever again, but I see it. I see it somewhere out there on a planet I call Earth and I know that it is the only home I will ever know. 

Published in the Wells Street Journal, Issue 12: Mapping the City (December 2019)

Touchdown at Stansted at 23:20 and he groans, doing the maths, figuring he won’t be on a train until 23:35 at the earliest. Likely not till 23:50, putting him into Liverpool Street at 00:35, at which point Tube services will have closed for the night. He’ll have to take one of those creepy, nauseating buses that he detests and walk the half-mile from King’s Cross to his flat on feet that ache. And the whole way he’ll be snorting like a hog because one sinus keeps dripping down the back of his nasal cavity, and he’s determined not to let the mucus reach his throat and get him sick, though it’s probably too late.

He alights, stands at the top of the mobile stairway for a moment, stunned to see a pair of idling buses rather than the roped-off path into the terminal he’s used to seeing after these short flights across the Channel. Apparently, there’s been some mix-up with air traffic control, and they’ve landed way the hell out there by the blackened model airplane that firefighters use to practise, which looks as though it has been constructed from wine-cask-sized toilet rolls. So now, because they have to bus to the terminal, he amends his schedule, adding twenty minutes to his subsequent ETAs and subtracting twenty minutes from the brief window of sleep he expects to get tonight.

The bus smells of mildew, sweat and unwashed clothes. A man beside him mutters “fucking ridiculous,” and he wants to agree, except that he’s decided he hates this man. The man is well over 200 pounds, is positioned directly in front of him, and will only hold him up further because you just know he can’t move with a purpose on those legs.

He’s furious. The full and crippling indignity of his hour-to-hour existence has finally dawned on him. He feels like a greasy rat in a baroque maze, designed by scientists hell-bent on torturing their subjects. Modern transportation and the time-obsessed mentality that comes with it have turned him and everyone around him into smelly, mindless rodents, shuffling between boxes of various form and function, engaging in the most low-down, dastardly self-centrism in order to get to wherever it is that they are going one or maybe two minutes faster than they thought they would. Like the grandmother with the tiny piercing eyes who elbows him in the groin as they’re getting off the bus so that she can pull her obese, snot-nosed grandson to the front. And the boy is not even paying attention because his eyes are locked on the game system in his hands, which is just too damn important to set down, apparently. But what’s really bothering him is not the sharp pain of this old woman’s bony elbow in his crotch, or the ripe smell of the people, or the fact that everyone, including himself, looks forward with the ashen, droopy-eyed expressions of the undead. What’s really bothering him is quite a bit harder to pin down.

Perhaps it’s the text that comes in when he finally gets service, from her, saying, “Love you,” and the knowledge that if he responds, she won’t get it until the morning, and he’ll be back in the air by then. Perhaps it’s the fatigue and the tendrils of nausea working their way up his oesophagus from the clumps of masticated ALDI sandwich, reduced for quick sale, melting in the turbulent acids of his stomach. Or perhaps it’s the realisation that in this maze in which he is just a tiny, insignificant rat, there is no THEY, no scientists who, sadistic or not, take note of what works and what doesn’t. In truth, he is both rat and scientist. In truth, he has no one to blame but himself.

-OR-

Touchdown and he smiles, feeling lucky to be alive. His head bobs up from between his knees, his ears red and rosy from being nestled up against the soft pleated legs of his trousers. His ears feel warm, but it’s a good warm – a fireside, sweatered, Christmas Eve kind of warm – and he smiles even wider. He looks psychotically happy. Other people have started to notice and make no secret of their displeasure; nothing hates a good mood like a bad one. Doesn’t matter, he decides, they can suffer all they want. He’s going to smile and be happy.

He checks his watch – 23:24. Stansted Express is still running, but maybe he’ll take the regular service to Liverpool Street, so he can watch the people of the night as they get on and off the train. He can decide when he gets to the platform. Either way, he’s on his way back into London. Back to her.

As he steps out into the cold night air, perfumed with the scents of hot rubber and asphalt and jet fuel, he feels like a pigeon released from its loft. The world awaits. He can go anywhere, yet he knows exactly where he wants to go, where he needs to go. This, he thinks, this is true freedom. The sounds and smells of the airstrip speak to him of all the places he could choose to go, if he wished. But Occam’s Razor has cut all the other choices away, leaving only one, only her.

He is funnelled into one of the buses waiting on the tarmac, behind a large man in a tight T-shirt with a florid face, who leans over and says, “fucking ridiculous.” The discrepancy between the colour of this man’s face and arm skin is frankly obscene. He stifles a laugh and nods his head, agreeing with the large man, whose honesty he decides he loves.

He loves the large man because the man reminds him of all the ways in which we try our best. Maybe the man is peeved because he wants to get home to kiss his daughter goodnight and she’s already up way past her bedtime. The bus won’t move any faster than a bus can move, but by voicing his discontent, he’s speaking for the rest of them, for all of them. He’s speaking for the old woman who elbows him in the groin as she hurries her distracted grandson off the bus. Maybe she hurries because she has a grown child, sick in hospital. And now, between the countless meetings and surgeries and consultations, she has to look after her child’s child. She loves him, without question, but maybe can’t relate to him, so she lets him park himself in front of screens all day. This probably suits the grandson just fine, the screen being something of an escape from a reality that gets progressively grimmer by the minute. The look of concentration and focus on his scrunched-up, little face suggests that he might be fully immersed in his game, that he’s not thinking of sickness or hospitals or the smell of 409, all too familiar to this boy. All these things remind him of the ways in which we try our best, but it’s not the only reason why he’s happy on this particular night.

Perhaps it’s the text that comes in from her, saying, “Love you.” Just to know that someone is waiting for him, that someone cares whether he makes it home or not, even if it’s just for one night. Perhaps it’s the feeling of nausea in his throat, reminding him that he’s alive, that his body still responds negatively to the junk he can’t keep himself from putting into it. But he’s doing his best. He feels lucky and wonders who he should thank. If he’s a pigeon, should he thank his breeder for showing him the right path, for showing him what true freedom means? But no, because, in truth, he is both pigeon and breeder. In truth, he has no one to thank but himself

Published in Visual Verse Vol. 6 – Chapter 12 (October 2019)

She calls herself Theseus. She’s a fixture in the galleries and museums. She goes to all the openings, drinks wine from long-stemmed glasses, talks knowingly about perspective, layering, composition. Every step she takes in this abstract world is a step taken away from the concrete, away from where she’s been. 

Her stocking-ed calves ache from wearing heels all day. It’s a good pain, far removed from the growing pains of her youth, when Mother rubbed Tiger Balm into her calves and whispered, “Cara mia, va bene, va bene.” She remembers Mother’s strong fingers and the smell of camphor in her nostrils – a sweet sting like a happy memory.

And the first time she wore heels, her sister’s, going to see Rocky Horror Picture Show at the Village Theatre. She was a virgin then, dragged up before the crowd, tottering in the unfamiliar shoes, stripped to her pants. The audience laughed and called out but there was no threat in their voices, no malice. It was the first time in her memory that she did not feel ashamed of her body.

She started going more often. Every Saturday night. She taught herself how to put on makeup. She split herself in two and lived in both bodies, longing to put herself back together into one – the one that wore boas and corsets with pride. This body came with its own family and the feeling of their love was intoxicating.

It was her chosen family that convinced her to sing. She never before realized that she had a beautiful voice. She used to be quiet, still was around Mother, who also had a beautiful voice but rarely sung. In the darkness of the Village Theatre, she sang loud enough for both of them.

Now she lives in a loft. People pay her good money to tell them what she thinks about art, but they don’t want to know, not really. She’s gotten good at lying for money. 

If you buy her a drink, or give her a smoke, or maybe if you just smile at her in the right way, she’ll tell you what she really thinks. She’ll tell you that she’s a work of art. She’ll tell you about her perspective, her layers, how she composes herself. She’ll tell you that she is both a subjective object and the process that creates that object. She’ll tell you why she is Theseus and how you can be too.

Published in the Wells Street Journal, Issue 11: The Liminal Edition (April 2019)

My wife tells me that she can never see herself in my work so I say I will make her a mirror. She doesn’t laugh at my lame attempt at comedy, maybe because we actually do need a mirror. We both take our showers in the morning and I wake up before her most days so by the time she gets to the vanity to do her makeup, our bathroom mirror is one impenetrable blur of grey. 

She is reduced to standing in the hallway where there is a small, rhomboidal mirror by the door. She hangs her makeup bag from one of the coat hooks on the wall and goes through her routine with her free hand planted firmly against the locked door. My wife is terrified of someone breaking into our flat while she is home alone. She keeps the window across from the mirror in the hall perpetually shuttered so that stalkers won’t be able to see which flat she lives in. Her anxiety is higher in the morning because of her compulsion to do her makeup in the nude with her thighs and back lobster-red and steaming. Ripe and ready for a serial killer, she always says. I have offered to move the mirror from the hallway to our windowless bedroom but she told me not to bother. She said she doesn’t mind, but I know she does. 

My wife is the kind of person who refuses to go into stores less than 30 minutes before they close. She is constitutionally incapable of inconveniencing anyone; the only exception being herself. Whenever I remind of her of this fact, she sighs and pats the top of my head, a gesture that I find patronizing in the extreme. I grimace. She smirks. And then I say I dropped something and jog back to the store to buy whatever it is she needs. Other people call this kind of behaviour passive aggressive. 

On those mornings that I sleep in, I awake to see her through the doorway, standing at the end of the hall. In her left hand, she holds an eyeliner pencil; the right holds the door closed. Morning light leaks through the cracks in the closed shutters of the hallway window, casting soft golden bars across my wife’s salmon-coloured body. The light shimmers and throbs, bursting with the potential to mature into the pale ubiquity of day. I like to sculpt in the mornings when the feverish impatience of morning light falls on the marble, iron, and wood in my studio, provoking the raw materials to change into something else.

My wife leans in to the mirror to get a closer look at her eyelid, then lifts her chin, pulling her mouth into a frown. She drags a fingernail a fraction of a centimetre along the corner of her top lip, where the gloss has spilled over. Then she wraps her left arm around her head and finishes drawing on her eyeliner. She became ambidextrous when we moved into this flat, now preferring her left to her right even on those days when I am home, when she doesn’t have to hold the door closed. 

She inspects her work, herself in the mirror. She smiles. She grimaces. Then she tilts her chin up, eyes wide and curious, lips slightly parted. Everyone who knows my wife thinks of this expression when they picture her face. If it were possible, I would want my mirror to capture this moment, to preserve for her not only the image, but also the freedom and self-awareness that she experiences on those mornings when she hasn’t yet felt the familiar weight of my gaze. 

She turns and sees my open eyes. She walks back into the bedroom and opens the closet doors. She clicks her tongue a few times, then speaks to me over her shoulder. She tells me that her clothes are hideous and that she looks fat and ugly. I tell her that’s not true. She says which? I say both and she says yeah, but you’re biased. And then I can’t find anything else to say. This is your classic no-win situation, what my Father called a Kobayashi Maru, and even after a combined total of sixty years of marriage, neither of us have figured out how to get out of one. 

I know that my wife doesn’t actually believe that her clothes are hideous or that she’s fat or ugly, at least, not all the time. She says these things because it triggers the same conversation every time and that kind of consistency can be comforting. I do the same thing when I ask her what she thinks of my work. I will ask her opinion of something and she will say “Oh, D, you know I think all your stuff is marvellous.”  

The only time my wife has ever told me the truth about my art was when I had a piece commissioned by the Seattle Sculpture Garden. I constructed a loose tepee of telephone poles, interspersed with boulders, at the far corner of the garden, where the grass falls away to a rocky beach. I wanted it to look like an abandoned bonfire, like man’s hubris reduced to refuse, destroyed by the tides. I remember showing my wife the design the night before the unveiling. She was sitting on my lap, taking liberal swigs from my beer. She looked at the plans for a long time. 

“What’s it called?” she asked.

“I don’t know yet, thinking about just calling it ‘Untitled’… thoughts?”

“How about… ‘ode to phallus’?”

She looked back at me, and, on her face where I expected to see levity, I saw only that look of calm curiosity. She thought that the title would be appropriate. My wife saw the piece for what it would be: another monument to man’s love for his genitalia. She didn’t seem particularly bothered by the heavy-handedness of my approach, but then again, she had been confronted by the image throughout her life. What was one more sculpture of a penis to a woman who had spent most of her life in cities?

I didn’t tell her that I had intended the piece to express the opposite of virile masculinity. I saw it as an ode to the pull of the moon, that temperamental goddess who can destroy any man she wishes, ripping his structures and statues to shreds with pressure and time. I didn’t tell my wife any of this, but when I spent the evening of the unveiling drinking flute after flute of prosecco and sulking beneath an enormous red Chihuly elsewhere in the garden, she recognized her mistake. She didn’t apologize—my wife never apologizes unless she thinks she’s wrong—but she made the decision to abstain from commenting on my work.

The morning after I tell her that I will make her a mirror, I wake up at sunrise next to my wife. I rise from the bed carefully, trying not to wake her. She moans as my presence leaves the warm enclosure of our sheets. I go to the bathroom, shower, shave, and come back to the bedroom to get dressed. As I button my shirt, I look down at my wife’s troubled brow; she has never been a good sleeper. I lean down and plant a dry kiss on her temple. Her weary arms raise on invisible marionette strings, wrapping themselves around my neck.

“Go make something grand, baby,” she mumbles.

I break out through London’s bitter morning air, heading for Queensway Tube Station. I take Inverness Terrace rather than the more direct route down Queensway because the trees waving above my head make me feel like I could be anywhere else. 

I don’t dislike London but I do feel out of place here. My wife acclimated immediately, inserting herself into her rigorous studies and picking up a gaggle of good-natured friends in the process. The crowd of artists and intellectuals that I continue to meet at galleries and theatres bores me. They wax philosophical about the bourgeois sensibilities of the modern precariat, trying to find the most obscure and esoteric way to express themselves. My wife says I don’t like these people because I see too much of myself in them. She’s probably right. 

While my wife has built a life for herself here, I have occupied myself with my work, which ironically translates to the production of fewer and fewer pieces. My art is becoming increasingly theoretical. For example, my last piece was a discarded Costa Coffee House cup, crushed beneath the wheel of a garbage collector’s truck on a deserted street off Primrose Hill. No one would see the mangled maroon remains of the cup and no one would care. But it was art, and beautiful, nonetheless.

Despite my reduction in output, I still keep a studio. It is a small office beneath a vegan restaurant off Bond Street. The rent is atrocious but I need somewhere other than our flat to keep my materials and tools. 

I reach Queensway and descend to the platform on the crowded lift. A husky, unshaven gentleman peers blearily at the other occupants. His XXXL T-shirt is stained with grease and I can smell the vinegar and bitter on his clothes and breath. Beside me, a young woman taps at her phone in an uninterrupted stream that sounds like small raindrops pattering against a skylight. A boy with a black bowl cut clutches his mother’s hand. He looks up at me with pure curiosity on his face. His green eyes remind me of my wife’s but before I can smile at him, the doors open and we all alight from the lift. 

On the tube, the darkened tunnels darting past the curved Plexiglass windows create a funhouse mirror that morphs my fellow passengers into grotesque amalgamations of limbs and features. The large man sits next to me. His cranium has disappeared, replaced by a shrunken, inverted reflection of his whole body, which sprouts from the crest of his Cro-Magnon brow. Two sets of eyes, divided by one set of eyebrows, gaze into the middle distance. The woman, standing between the row of seats, has been reduced to a pair of double sided-legs, leopard-print designer heels on all four feet. The boy with the bowl cut and green eyes giggles as he elongates his features one at a time by exposing them to the curve in the glass. His nose bulges out, then his mouth, then his chin. 

I notice that from where I am sitting, my eyes are invisible in the reflective glass. They have been consumed by a second pair of cheeks, resting comfortably atop their clones. I try to sit perfectly still and merge myself with the thing that I see in the glass. Like an embarrassing memory from childhood, what I see is both an image of me and not an image of me. I shudder because, in some other world, I could look like this. 

My wife and I share the same fear that maybe we are hideously deformed in some way. She tends to think in terms of mental disabilities whereas I can only picture the physical. I think about how life would look to someone who looks like I do in the reflective window of the Tube. I don’t think it would be too bad if you knew that that was how you looked. The crux of our fear is that the whole world has created a conspiracy, complete with doctored mirrors, in order to keep us in the dark about our deformities. We are terrified that we are the only people who can’t see how hideous we truly are. 

I think about my wife waking up and going to stand at the door to do her makeup. I think about how she teases me for taking myself too seriously, for being too self-important. I love how she can tease me for this and then tell me with a straight face that none of her friends like her and that they’re all just pretending. 

My wife and I always come to the same conclusion about our fear—that it is unwarranted. We tell each other that we are normal in looks and intelligence. We remind each other of our faults and our virtues because we draw no difference between the importance of these things. We decide that we can trust each other because we can be honest with each other, even when we can’t be honest with ourselves, even when being honest means never telling someone what you really think. Ruth and I are two mirrors, facing one another. When I look past her, past the two of us, I can see my face repeated ad infinitum. And each repetition is both an image of me and not an image of me. 

As the train screeches to a halt at Bond Street, I take one last look at myself in the reflective glass. I smile because I look ridiculous, vertically doubled into a misshapen hourglass of a human being. I smile because I can never see myself as well as I do when I am with my wife. And I smile because she makes a better mirror than I ever could.

Published in Wordsmith_HQ’s The Purple Breakfast Review: ‘Nightmares and Daydreams’ (June 2019)

Sasha awoke to the sound of a bell.

The hotel room was uncanny, the darkened furniture seeming both familiar and unfamiliar. Slowly, the details of the past day began to assemble in Sasha’s brain, falling into place with each deep clang of the bell: the hours they had spent driving through the flat arid landscape, arriving well after midnight in this town, Wilson; the palm-sized iron key that the receptionist handed them across the counter, a wide smile frozen onto his pale young face; holding the bannisters as they ascended floor after floor – the hotel had no elevator; fitting that key into the lock and turning it to hear the firm crunch as the bolt slid back; the door opening and a crack of light falling on the bed; falling onto that bed.

Maybe we overslept, Sasha thought. Maybe it’s Sunday morning already and the congregation is gathering across the road. 

Darkness visible through the crack between the curtains confirmed that it was still night. Sasha rolled over, twisting a pillow around her head for a pair of makeshift earmuffs. The LCD screen on John’s wristwatch was turned down into the covers, his splayed arms and legs immobile in unconsciousness. Sasha didn’t bother trying to turn him over. His wet, hiccupping snores tore through the room’s interior, momentarily overpowering the sound of the bells. They had spent enough nights together for John’s snoring to recede to the outskirts of Sasha’s mind, only noticeable under direct scrutiny. The bells did not cease. 

The curtains billowed and flapped, prodded by the prairie wind that brought the faint smells of hay and manure and warm asphalt into the room. Sasha rose and went to the window, remembering that it had been sealed shut earlier.  Operator error, most likely. Maybe John managed to pry it open to let the air in. 

Sasha passed through the slit between the curtains and stood at the windowsill, gazing out into the dark night. The window wasn’t just open but missing, removed from its hinges and frame and squirreled away. The warm air circulating around Sasha’s lithe, naked body felt like a river of tepid water; the sensation was pleasant and – for a moment – her eyes closed in rapturous, wilful ignorance of everything outside of the feeling of night air on bare skin. 

But the tolling bells forced Sasha’s eyes back open. They were drawn to a sign, which read “DRUNKEN BRETHREN CHURCH” in bold black capitals against a whitewashed board. Behind the sign, the building was a silhouette, considerably darker than the charcoal farmland stretching out under the black horizon. The sky was a pool of crude oil and the church was but a drop, clinging to this pool by the thin trickle of its bell-tower.

A faint prick of light appeared at the door of the church. It glowed like the flame of a tea candle, emitting a soft halation and swaying in the gentle breeze. It began to grow and move, widening every second. As it streaked around its predetermined course, Sasha recognised that a general shape began to form: a rather tall man with what appeared to be a cane in one hand and a bottle in the other. 

Sasha was so engaged with the emergence of this one man that the appearance of other pricks of light nearby almost escaped her notice. They sprang up around the entrance to the church, swaying and spinning in the same manner as the one that had produced the man, who was now nearly complete as a deathly pale gentleman in a smart, white tailored suit with tails and a white top hat on his head. Sasha could even make out the wisps of a silver moustache above his top lip, curling outward like the last few sparks off a dying ember. 

The other figures that emerged around the gentleman – all of whom were equally pale and equally elegant – formed a tight crowd around the door to the church, which was now sufficiently illuminated for Sasha to see the ornate carvings in the old, varnished wood. As a crowd, the individuals were hard to make out; standing together, they overlapped to form a miasmic mass of white and silver and grey. But around the outside of the crowd, a few were visible, dressed in slightly less formal attire, rumpled suits and frayed collars unclosed by ties. They shuffled in place, looking bored and aimless as they looked down at their boot-clad feet. 

Then, the crowd by the door began moving more vigorously, cheering and dancing and clasping pallid hands high above their heads. The bells increased in volume, clanging metallic thunderclaps out across the deserted landscape. Sasha wondered whether the sound would rouse John, but the familiar hiccups and gasping snores continued. 

The bride and groom arrived in style, bursting forth from the church doors as a couple. Little grains of white rice and a fine mist of sprayed champagne rained down upon them. His suit shimmered like velvet, but seemed to grow brighter in the folds rather than darker. It was made of a different material than the ones worn by those who surged forth to clap him on the back and tussle his silver hair. The overall impression was of a man clothed in moonstone. 

Compared to the majesty of the bride’s dress though, his suit looked like a cheap rental. Every square inch of the flowing, floor-length, gown contained a supernatural glow. Like a round brilliant diamond, the dress both reflected and refracted the surrounding light of the crowd. The strapless sweetheart cut attracted Sasha’s eyes to a small, teardrop necklace resting against her sternum. Her smile was wide, and though her lips and cheeks had not the slightest hint of color, she looked happy and healthy, as every young bride should.

The couple walked on through the hail of rice and silent cheers. The bells, having reached their zenith, receded. Stillness and silence overtook the night. As the newlyweds crossed the street into the village green, they were followed first by the gentlemen and ladies who had gathered around the door, then by the few who had lurked on the church lawn, casting forlorn glances at the crowd. 

They all assembled around a gazebo, where the beautiful couple took the floor and began a slow dance. The silence was total, but the visible rhythm of the first dance provided the beat and Sasha’s memories of past waltzes were enough to supply a melody; she couldn’t help but hum the inaudible tune. As the two dancers spun, the bottom of the bride’s gown twirled and rode up slightly, revealing a pair of glass stilettos. They looked impossibly fragile, yet her movements were fluid and carefree. She seemed to float in his capable hands, round and round and round.

As they came to the conclusion of their dance, he spun her outward on one arm. Her body pirouetted with the effortless grace of a professional ballerina, one arm extended up toward the starless sky, the other sliding along her companion’s sleeve. As her upraised arm fell, so too did her body and the body of her companion into a deep bow. The crowd around the gazebo erupted into silent applause. When the couple stood straight once again, they made a sweeping gesture of invitation. 

In a moment, everyone around the gazebo had paired off and commenced a wild dance. The shabby men who had previously kept their distance were indiscriminately mixing with their social betters. Powder-faced women wearing large semi-spherical hoop skirts joined hands with bare-chested men with bald bandanas encircling their necks. They paraded around the gazebo. Men danced with men, women with women, and all their heads were thrown back in noiseless laughter. 

Up at the window set into the oxidised copper roof of the Midland Railroad Hotel, Sasha felt a sense of melancholy rising with the revelry of the celebrants in the village green. She had, until this point, given no thought as to who or what these figures were, but began to feel as though the whole charade was an invitation addressed to the lonely person in the window. But the lonely person in the window will not budge, Sasha decided. The lonely person in the window will remain lonely because loneliness is a feeling and feelings are only palpable to the living. 

The smiles and laughter of the happy couple and their party were a facsimile of happiness—an imitation of the feeling. They smiled because they were stuck in this empty, isolated place. They smiled because if they didn’t, they would cry and the image of a crying bride is too cliché, even for a ghost town. They smiled because they had forgotten the pain and the pleasure of living and so had no reason to do anything else with their faces. They smiled for the same reason that the receptionist at the front desk of the hotel smiled: because it was inoffensive and polite and welcoming. 

There’s nothing like standing at an open window several floors up, thought Sasha, to make you question mortality.

Sasha turned from the window without another glance at the wedding party. The room was hot and heavy with the stench of human sweat, the rasping breaths that escaped from John’s cavernous mouth seeming to perfume the muggy air. Sasha sighed and slipped into bed behind him. Their two bodies fit together like a lock into a key. Though which one was the lock and which one was the key was never clear to Sasha. Maybe John is the lock because he keeps me grounded, providing a view of the world as one solid, unremarkable entity. Maybe John is the key because he opens all the doors I never could. Maybe we’re both locks, fastened to each other through the best and worst of life’s fortunes. Or maybe we’re both keys, unlocking the secrets of this world together. 

Whatever they were, they were together. They were alive and they were together.