, Author at Post Road Magazine

T’pree

Greg Hrbek

A coincidental analog: when a planetary culture creates something out of its own imagination which also turns out to exist elsewhere in the universe. The idea pretty much blew the global mind. What were the chances of this? Turned out: surprisingly high. To quote directly from the UN speech delivered by S2M (as he was dubbed at light-speed on social media), “The multiverse has as many instances of coincidental analog as life-sustaining worlds.” Relevant example: in the Andromeda Galaxy, on a planet of bodiless beings who have evolved over time to form a collective consciousness via ethereal “root systems” of thought, there is a million-year-old legend about honesty in which, once upon a time, a strange creature, a young humanoid, used a weapon (known to us as a hatchet) to chop down a tree bearing a small red fruit (known to us as an apple), and subsequently told the truth about his action. The name of that humanoid was Georg Vashingtone.

Hansen was working that night, monitoring the astro-communicational intake computer. Fresh out of an astronomy PhD program at the University of Toronto, there he was—paying his dues, listening to the Static of the Spheres in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere (Mount Kobau, Saskatchewan, to be exact)—when the message came through on sub-space radio. In English. It began: “People of Canada . . . ” Had to be a prank, though on a scale almost impossible to engineer. Though maybe not impossible. Because the hackers, the cyberterrorists, in those early days of the new millenium, were becoming both bolder in their anarchic hijinks and increasingly expert at the manipulation of systems once the exclusive ground of trained professionals (in this case, astral communications)—and the next part of the message was so absurd, it had to be a hoax.

Calling the rest of the duty team into the room (there were three of them that November night), Hansen showed them the message. Couldn’t be authentic. And yet the computer insisted that the signal’s point of origin was approximately three hundred million miles away, somewhere between Mars and Jupiter, and was moving closer with each repetition. What else could the staff of Mount Kobau National Observatory do? They had to call the Director of the Agency, Heironymous LeClerc, a man no less ridiculous in physical appearance than the claim of the communication which was causing Hansen and the others to awaken the Director in the wee hours of the morning, Quebec Time.

“Who is this?” demanded LeClerc, after he’d come on the video line.

“Name’s Hansen, sir.”

“It’s three in the morning, Hansen,” he said, in his Quebecois accent. “This had better be a matter of national destiny.”

“It is, sir. I’m calling regarding a transmission we began receiving at approximately 11:30 CST from somewhere between Mars and Jupiter.”

“You’ve decoded it already?” he said.

“We didn’t have to. It’s in English.”

“English.”

“Yes, sir. I know it sounds bizarre— ”

“Read it, Hansen.”

Hansen picked up the printout and cleared his throat. When he was finished reading, LeClerc stared into the camera eye. His hair, red and Einsteinian, was even crazier than usual after a night of being alternately flattened and kinked. For long seconds, he stared at Hansen from behind the thick lenses of his oversized and outdated eyeglasses, before finally saying: “Hansen, you’re fired.”

Guy Hansen was, of course, not fired. On the contrary, he was destined to go down in history as the first person to encounter the message that would change the fate of a planet. A few days later, the news leaked: SOURCES SAY ALIENS ARE HERE. Sounded like an American Presidential Tweet. But the reporters and the panelists were totally serious—and the longer the coverage went on, the more a feeling formed on billions and billions of screens all around the globe, radiating outward . . . a feeling that something of epic proportions was unfolding. Pretty soon, a news conference was announced. And the Canadian Prime Minister went on TV. To inform the world that alien visitors had come to Canada. From a planet long-believed to exist only in the realm of science-fiction—but which, incredibly and unbelievably, we now knew to exist in fact. The Planet Vulcan.

Next day, a Vulcan was standing in the General Assembly Hall of the United Nations. Ambassador Senses Two Moons. The name struck Guy Hansen, as it did pretty much everyone on Earth (even those poorly versed in what we now refer to as “The Mythology”), as a strange one for a Vulcan. There was not, however, time to do anything more than mentally note the error, because the drama was playing out right before the eyes of the entire planet on its phones and tablets and TVs.

There he was.

At the podium. Pointy ears, upswept eyebrows, dark hair combed down onto the forehead. Before he said a word, it was clear to Guy Hansen. This is not an actor in makeup. This is an Actual Vulcan.

Guy Hansen was also in New York. He was scheduled to be a guest on The Late Night Show, the first of what would be many television appearances for the young astronomer whom everyone wanted to ask: how does it feel to receive the most important communication of all time? But the taping was not until two o’clock. Now he was in his hotel room high above the city, watching on television the Vulcan ambassador addressing the world. Telling of the ten year journey via wormhole from a solar system in the Sagittarius arm of the galaxy. Explaining the strange name—Senses Two Moons. Yes, he said, there are many things the Creators got right in their imaginations. The ears and the hand signal. (He did the hand signal and a ripple of laughter turned into applause and then, as he continued to hold the pose, a standing ovation.) However, he continued, the average “degree of correlation” in cases like this is about fifty percent.

Like all the other eyes from hemisphere to hemisphere, Guy Hansen’s were glued to the screen. He was perched on the edge of his seat.

The nerve-pinching. The mind-melding. Can Actual Vulcans make you faint by squeezing your shoulder with their fingers? If Actual Vulcans touch your face and stare into your eyes, can they put you in a trance and know everything you’re thinking? The answer to both of these questions was: yes. But, are Actual Vulcans incapable of lying? Is Actual Vulcan blood really green? Negative. And negative.

“As for certain other traits,” the Ambassador said, pausing at length—giving every Earthling sufficient time to get the gist—“the Secretary General and I feel that perhaps such subject matter does not befit this hallowed hall.”

And so did the momentous first step in the rest of Earth history end. In a state of suspense. With Guy Hansen and every other human left wondering: does an Actual Vulcan really do it only once every seven years?

That afternoon, Guy Hansen taped The Late Night Show. He told the Host his story, which personally he thought to be on the boring side, of how he’d been sitting at the astro-communicational intake computer, when the message came through from somewhere beyond Mars . . .

About halfway through the interview, the Host—a sketch comedian who had made himself a household name by impersonating a wide range of fools and criminals from the previous Presidential Administration—said: “Gotta take a commercial break but we’ll be right back with Canadian Astrologer, Guy Hansen, and a Special Surprise Guest, so don’t go anywhere.” Guy continued to sit on his seat. He was wearing a new Brooks Brothers suit tailored especially for the occasion and was sweating bullets. In fact, he was extremely concerned that there might be sweat stains coming through the jacket. That’s when the Host leaned closer to Guy and said, with a sort of wink, that it looked like he could use a handkerchief (or maybe a car wash sponge), and Guy said that no one had mentioned to him anything about a Special Surprise Guest. “Right, that, well, look— ” But the Director was already shouting, yelling, starting a countdown, and the Host was giving Guy some helpful claps on the shoulder while Guy endeavored to strike a pose that would conceal from the cameras and the studio audience (now applauding on command) the perspiration stains at his armpits.

A few moments later, she was emerging from backstage. The most beautiful humanoid Guy Hansen had ever seen. Long dark hair pinned back and cascading over her shoulders. Form-fitting silver dress hemmed above the knee. Ears curving to exquisite points.

Her name was T’Pree. When she left the Planet Vulcan, she had been thirteen Terran years old. Making her now twenty-three. Guy Hansen was twenty-six. He sat there, in his armchair on the sound stage of The Late Night Show, staring at her profile and listening to her talk, low soprano and slow, though Guy hardly knew what she was talking about because of a high-pitched whine in his ear comparable to the feedback caused by a looped signal between microphone and amplifier—caused, in this case, by the signal looping between her voice and his heart.

The taping was over by four o’clock and Guy Hansen emerged from the network building in midtown Manhattan into a brilliant peaceful snowfall. Snow in New York City, snow this far south, snow anywhere, had become less and less common in recent years; and Guy Hansen couldn’t help but draw a connection between the rarity of these tender crystalline flakes of frozen water vapor and the woman from another planet who, backstage, after the interview, had made a request of him so extraordinary that he stopped now, as if the cold air had slapped some sense into him, and asked himself if this was all a dream he was having at the astro-communicational station back in Saskatchewan . . .

The taping had ended and he was trying to figure out how to say goodbye to her. What else was there to do? But how should he do it? Shake her hand? Bow? Simply say, “See you later”? Should he try to get his fingers into the configuration of the Vulcan salute (the emoji of which he jokingly texted from time to time)? For some reason, everything, not just his personal fate, but the course of galactic history, seemed to hinge on how he said goodbye to her forever—except, as we know, that isn’t what happened at all, because she was the one who approached him, and said:

“Dr. Hansen, I pride myself on my knowledge of Earth cuisine. I have been studying your cookbooks and restaurant menus for ten years.”

“Wow.”

“How do you like French-Vietnamese Fusion?”

“It’s my favorite,” replied Guy Hansen. “After pizza.”

She lifted an eyebrow, said, “Ah, a joke, quite clever,” and asked him to meet her in three hours at a place on 22^nd Street.

After walking for a good hour in a daze through the fine snowfall, reminiscent of the aftereffects of nuclear detonation, he found himself in a bar with a sign on the wall that said: IN COMPLIANCE WITH THE 18^th AMENDMENT, NO INTOXICATING LIQUOR ALLOWED ON THE PREMISES. Guy Hansen ordered an 8.5% beer; and after he’d gotten half of it in him, he felt tipsy enough to believe the situation. In two more hours, he would be eating French-Vietnamese with an Actual Vulcan.

The television was on above the bar. A commercial spot came on. For The Late Night Show. “Tonight,” the announcer declared, “Dewey welcomes Best Actor Nominee Balso Snell, Canadian Astrologer Guy Hansen, and a Special Surprise Guest from the Actual Planet Vulcan!” The bartender, a twenty-something in a tank top shirt whose right arm, shoulder to wrist, was tattooed with the circuitry of an android, said:

“Can you believe this shit?”

“What.”

“All this Vulcan shit.”

Guy looked at him for a long moment. Drank some of his beer. While drinking, he took a very close look at the man’s arm. “What do you mean?”

“What do I mean? What do you think I mean, man? Remember the old ‘military-industrial complex’? Well, this is the totalitarian-intellectual property complex. Did you see the speech this morning? That dude isn’t real. He’s an actor. Go back, watch it again. Slow the audio down, slow it to half speed, and then put it through this algorithmic program that analyzes the accent in somebody’s voice, and guess what . . . The guy is Turkish-American. Yeah. And you can tell the ears are prosthetic. Just blow the video up and you can see the glue. It’s all BS, it’s all fake, the media knows it but they want you to think it’s legit. And don’t tell me ‘we’ve seen it all before.’ This is a whole new level. This isn’t just domestic, this is international.”

The commentary didn’t shock Guy. Why should it? Practically everything that happened these days was claimed by someone to be nothing but a fabrication. Still, he was confused about the theory implicit in the speech. Say the whole thing is a government conspiracy, an international conspiracy (which Guy knew—better, perhaps, than anyone else—it wasn’t): What would a country, or a bloc of countries, stand to gain from staging the arrival of extraterrestrial life based on a TV show? Guy Hansen finished his beer, laid a ten on the bar, and left. There was no point in explaining, I’m the one who received the signal. People like that, you can’t get through to them.

As we know, that bartender’s particular rant (that the Vulcans were not Vulcans at all but human people playing Vulcans) had been trending on social media for hours, since the minutes after the UN speech—and was soon joined, as we also know, by a competing theory:

That the Vulcans were real, and they had been here before. To be specific, they had first come to Earth in the year 1963, when they assisted in the construction of a supposedly fictional character from a planet called Vulcan. Now they had returned, claiming that the situation was “coincidental,” when in fact it had been deliberately planned to create an illusion of coincidence.

What could be the endgame of such a scheme? That part was murky. But those who subscribed to this interpretation were not so concerned with the logistics of motivation. It was the premise that hooked them.

At five minutes to seven, Guy Hansen arrived at a restaurant in the Chelsea District of Manhattan called Franco-Siam. It was Zagat-rated and had been given a grade of A by the city inspectors. Just inside the door stood a hostess of Vietnamese descent. For all Guy knew, she might also have some French in her from way back—and it struck him that, if she had pointed ears, she could also pass for Vulcan. “Good evening,” she said. “You’re Guy Hansen, yes, the astronomer? Your companion is waiting for you. She is seated by the jade Buddha.” Yes, she was. Sitting alone. Looking down at something in her hands, which appeared to be a smartphone, while the Buddha looked over her shoulder. And another thing. A kind of scarf wrapped around her head that covered the tips of her ears.

“Dr. Hansen,” she said. “How pleasing to see you.”

“Miss— Um . . . ”

She set the phone down. So magnetic was her stare, his eyes seemed to throb. She said: “I trust you’ll sit while we eat.”

He sat.

“You really must call me T’Pree, Dr. Hansen. My surname you could not pronounce. As for my head covering by which you are so preoccupied, it is a trope of your culture’s portrayal of us, is it not? Every time they go back in time, the Vulcans must cover their ears. Is that not a principle of the storytelling? Also, I thought you might find it alluring.”

His heart backflipped.

“I am being facetious, Dr. Hansen. The purpose of the scarf is entirely practical.”

“Oh.”

“Can you imagine if I walked about with my ears showing . . . ” She indicated the phone she’d set down on the table. “A time will come when people will hardly notice us. We will be like anyone else. For now, however, camouflage is the wisest course. Nonetheless,” she went on, “it would be inaccurate to assert that, in wearing the scarf, I did not have the ulterior motive of inspiring in you a desire to remove it. Shall we order?”

11.

Guy was surprised when T’Pree ordered the Phô with beef. He was not an expert in the Mythology, but he thought he remembered that Vulcans were vegetarians. Well, they weren’t. Some are, she said, and some are not. “Personally,” she said, “it is my intention to eat Terran cuisine of a different national or ethnic variety every day with the full spectrum of indigenous ingredients. Tomorrow, I intend to consume a pork enchilada.”

12.

Not all vegetarians. In fact, the most popular food on Vulcan was a patty made from the meat of a creature that bore a striking resemblance to the giant chickens of Earth prehistory; and the tentacles of a certain cephalopod found in the northern ocean were considered a delicacy in some regions (though too sacred to be eaten in others). Still, culinary habits were insignificant examples of “analog gap.” The imagining culture always made much larger errors. For instance, psychology. In the specific case of Vulcans: feelings—or the lack thereof. Did Vulcans purge themselves of all emotion in a ritual on an altar at the foot of a smoking volcano? No. To the contrary. They felt all kinds of emotions. By comparison, the human range of feeling was sadly limited. Vulcans, fluent in not one but two emotional “languages,” simply did a very good job of what human psychoanalysts would call “repression.” And yet even such psychological issues were of relatively minor importance compared to those of biology.

“You know of what I speak,” T’Pree asked.

“I think so.”

“Do you find it probable, Dr. Hansen, that my species mates once in a lunar alignment?”

“Well, it does seem kind of silly.”

“Silly. No wonder your planet suffers from such racial and religious strife. To devalue the meaning of another being’s sexuality with such a word.”

“Forgive me,” he said, earnestly.

She touched her wine glass to her lips. “Oh, I’m being quite cruel. Of course it’s silly, Dr. Hansen. We, to utilize your Earth vernacular, ‘do it’ at any time we wish and with whomever we wish. Admittedly, on a certain southern island, there is a very peculiar lottery system, but that is an exception. Overall, in this regard, Actual Vulcans are very much like Actual Humans, with one caveat: As a rule, Actual Vulcans are pansexual.”

A few minutes later, they were in a taxi on the way to her hotel, the Ritz, where she had a room overlooking Central Park. On the car’s television screen, one of the new 3D holographic types, a US senator and a terrorism expert (a man with hair balding in the pattern of a crop circle) were decrying the shortsightedness of allowing aliens to simply land and start walking among us without any system of background checks in place.

Of what they were saying, Guy Hansen could be only half aware. Because the hand of the most fascinating female ever to walk the face of the Earth was resting just above his knee, on his inner thigh, kneading gently.

14.

Before disappearing into what she called the salle de bain, T’Pree requested that Guy do the following: light the candles that were positioned on various surfaces in the room; disrobe; wait for her on the bed.

“Also,” she said, “select some Terran music which best represents your personal definition of romantic.”

Guy was compiling a playlist (hands shaking) when the news alert popped up: an Actual Vulcan had been killed at Universal Studios Theme Park in Hollywood while waiting in the line for The Wizarding World of Harry Potter. As we now know, that young male’s name was Touch the Stars. Two Caucasian men had approached him, wanting to know where he got off, him and all the other green-blooded freaks, just landing on our planet and walking around like it was going to be theirs, when it wasn’t theirs, it was ours.

Touch the Stars responded: “You are a life form sustained by the planet. A planet cannot be ‘possessed’ by a life form which it sustains. As for my blood, it isn’t green. It’s the same color as yours.”

They shot him in the head.

15.

On the edge of a king-size bed in the Ritz-Carlton, naked in flickering candlelight, holding a smartphone, weighing his options, sat Canadian Astronomer, Guy Hansen. He could tell the news to T’Pree the moment she emerged from the salle de bain (in which case, the night of a lifetime would be tragically ruined); or he could make believe he hadn’t seen the story. It was, he determined, no time for self-centeredness and opportunism. Whoever had been murdered, it was someone T’Pree had been traveling the stars with for ten years. To withhold such information while going to bed with her would be almost immoral. Of course, he was going to tell her. Then the door across the room opened and she stepped out of it and into the tongues of flame which could not stop licking her bare flesh while a girl-boy indie rock duo sang a cover of “Leather and Lace.”

16.

He said: “T’Pree, there’s something I have to tell you.” (She was already kneeling over his lap.) She responded: “Your relationship status, Dr. Hansen, is of no importance.” He shook his head and told her that wasn’t it, it was something else. He shifted her off of himself and took her hand, glimpsing in her dark hair the white curve of an ear . . . She listened to the report, drawing her legs up against her chest, clasping her hands around her knees. Teardrop: inner canthus of right eye. Reflection of candle flame sparking within it. Twinkling starlike. And when, with an acrophobic vertigo, Guy leaned forward and kissed it away, he discovered that the sadness of an Actual Vulcan tasted exactly like the sadness of an Actual Human.

He said: “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t apologize, Dr. Hansen. It’s not logical.”

T’Pree closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and held it. It seemed she might never let it go, until she did, and said:

“I knew him since childhood. We grew up in the same village—and when the time came to leave, we left for the same reason. It’s true, we came to Earth because of the analog. But the analog is not the reason we left.”

“I don’t understand.”

Pressing the palm of her hand to his cheek, she said she could answer all of his questions. He could know the whole truth. Who they really were and why they’d really come from across the galaxy and how his fate was entwined with hers.

“Allow me,” she said. “To join your mind.”

17.

More than once had he seen it, in storylines spread across the breadth of the Mythology. But watching it on a screen was no preparation for the real thing. ‘She’s going to touch my face,’ he thought. ‘Then our thoughts will blend.’

But there were two things Guy could not know.

Number one: how it would feel for him, the meldee. How he would come, in the first instant of mental connection, to comprehend the truth of the human mind: solitary confinement, living burial, a hostage of its own privacy. Now, all at once, he was going to realize the meaning of freedom. Actual Freedom.

18.

The other thing Guy Hansen couldn’t know is that Actual Vulcans can mind-meld and have sexual intercourse at the same time.

So, while Guy was reaching epiphanies about consciousness, T’Pree was also kneeling over him, right hand on his face, left guiding that other part of him inside her as a mellow voice crooned: “It’s a fantabulous night for a moondance . . . ”

19.

Must have passed out during the climax. Because all of a sudden the room is still, the candles are nearly burned down, and the music isn’t playing anymore. Though she is still there. Asleep. It all comes back to him. They did it in every position (and she never broke hand-face contact!)—and she shared her backstory . . .

Their society. How far from the Utopia of human imagination! Logic? A façade! Emotional control? Hypocrisy! It was all an act. Underneath, tortured by feelings just like ours. Infected with the same troubles. Violence, poverty, prejudice, addiction. A drug called Kallokáay. Used by everyone. And while the people who make it profit from its use, the users can’t stop using it, and killing in its name. A troubled world, an unsafe world.

Those who left, who came here through the wormhole, T’Pree and Touch the Stars and the others, were children when they left—and they left their parents behind; for, above all else, the parents valued the futures of the children. Now here they are, two hundred of them, interstellar journey scarcely over, and what happens?

Hate lessens their number by one.

Well, what did they expect? Didn’t they know the sociopolitics of this world had been slipping for decades into the dark ancient isms? Yes. But the analog! Underlying all of it, at the heart of things. The ideal of the analog, which is called coincidental, but is really something closer to magic or destiny. Name it what you will, it brought her to him, brought them to this place, together . . .

Moving closer, he touches his lips to her cheek.

“Dr. Hansen,” she murmurs.

“You look beautiful when you’re sleeping.”

“In that case,” she says, eyes still closed, “why wake me up?”

“Is it true?” he asks.

“Is what true?”

“What you said, well, not said, but, when our minds were joined—what was in your mind. What you told me. About us . . . ”

20.

Once upon a time, a highly advanced civilization sent forth into the cosmos a fabulous time-traveling probe bearing in its memory banks the record of every coincidental analog that has been, currently is, and ever will be. Through the multiverse it travels, transmitting from its matrix the histories, past and future, of kindred worlds—and by chance or design, these tales are sometimes heard, and sometimes heeded.

So did the Vulcans know of Earth.

Faraway planet that had already dreamed of them. Thus did a woman with pointed ears, a refugee, a seeker of asylum, journey through spacetime to find a man who studied the stars. As it was archived, let it now be. To them may a child be born. And the tide begin to turn. Toward a more perfect version of us. An image to be remade in.

Greg Hrbek‘s novel, Not on Fire, but Burning, was an NPR Best Book of the Year and a New York Times Book Review Editors Choice. His stories have appeared in Harper’s, Tin House, and The Best American Short Stories anthology.

Big Mouth

Rachel Aydt

There’s a woman in my neighborhood named Big Mouth. That’s what I call her, anyway. I see her walking down the street, talking to everyone like she owns the joint. It’s deeply annoying, because of course she doesn’t. It’s not like she’s the freakin’ mayor of the East Village. You’d think she was in charge of the whole show. When I see her leaning on her walker, against the wall, I wonder if she’s a drug spotter. When she sees the cops, she runs her hands through her hair or makes a loud noise, Hey, Papa, she yells to the window with the lovebirds sitting in their cage on the balcony. Hey! And the drugs get flushed down the toilet or stowed on the roof from the back fire escape or maybe even under the oven. Or some other place I wouldn’t think about— certainly not the toilet, because they do that so much in the movies.

She’s not the only big mouth. Big Mouth number two walks with a limp (what is it with all of these limps and walkers anyway?). She wears big glasses and has frizzy hair that goes on forever. She tries to be cool, like when she wants to say something took a long time, she’ll say it took her a minute. Which is confusing to me, but then I realize she must have heard it on a sitcom and it must make her feel better for her pathetic existence which involves some fat cats, and one of them has diabetes and the medicine is expensive, and I wonder what kind of miserable life is that cat living anyway, holed up in a tiny apartment with horrible tasting vet-prescribed food, a litter box, and Big Mouth as a minder, one who has to give you shots?

And there’s a woman who I used to call the crack whore. She wears tattered clothes and hangs around the non-working phone booths that remain, and she’s kind of dirty and has a bad dye job—brassy and tangled and fighting with extensions so none of it looks real. She walks fast and has an edge to her. Her hands are dirty and she talks to herself. I started saying hi to her and she would smile and stop and say hi, and then move along on her merry way. Over the years, her face began to look older, her smiles tighter and radiating with lines. She didn’t bother to put on makeup anymore. Her clothes went from tacky to dirty. Our conversations got longer. She knew me and would ask how my family was, and I’d say Fine, thank you. And a year later, she would ask me the same thing, but she would hold out her arms and embrace me. Except, it was really me holding out my arms to embrace her, but she was a willing recipient. And her hugs felt so good! She was strong, and she hugged me like she meant it with an intensity in her eyes that proved too much for me to bear. I would look back at her, and ask her with my voice dropped a half an octave, How are you? Like I understood her plight. And she would start telling me how there was some bitch down the street who she didn’t want stepping to her anymore, and she knew the way some people were, and didn’t I know, too, and I agreed, like I knew what she was talking about. In the moments when she went on and on, her stories grew more and more paranoid but I felt honored that she was sharing these paranoias with me. I almost asked her over for dinner. But I don’t even know her name, and I can’t believe in these years and years I’ve never bothered to ask her. Is it Natalie? It’s not Crack Whore. At least it’s not anymore.

What’s upsetting is that sometimes I think I might be turning into one of them. By them, I mean, someone who uncontrollably talks to strangers. Who can’t stop talking to babies, like every one who’s pushed by in a stroller. Ooh, she’s so cute, I’ll say, without knowing whether it’s a he or a she, and I’ll make the snap judgment based upon their outfit, which is ridiculous, though eight times out of ten I’m right. Or, I’ll be on a train and I’ll sit next to an old woman with fancy, red, sparkly shoes and I’ll tell her how much I love her sneakers, and she’ll smile and thank me, and I won’t stop. I’ll say, They’re like Dorothy’s! Which is so annoying and obvious. But before I know it, she’s telling me about her life and how her son was shot and I touch her arm and ask her if she’s okay and she says Oh yes, it was years ago, but of course I still miss him, and I start weeping and tell her my stop is coming up, and then I tell her to have a good day before getting off at 42nd Street, which is actually one step beyond where I had intended to get off.

Rachel Aydt (rhymes with light) teaches writing at the New School University and The Writing Institute at Sarah Lawrence College. Her published essays and fiction can be found online at The White Review, HCE Review, and more. She lives in New York City. Twitter: @Rachelrooo / Website: rachelaydt.com.

In the High Prairies

Elizabeth Hart Bergstrom

The railroad tracks carry the smell of dead things warmed by the midday sun. In the high prairies of Montana, it’s been a cold March—but this morning a northwest wind swept in, bringing mild air that makes the ice on the trees crackle and sigh. The snowdrifts are deep and not going anywhere soon. The girl starts to sweat as she walks along the edge of the tracks. She’s thirteen and supposed to be in school.

Around her shoulders hangs her father’s favorite jacket, made of heavy wool in dark green plaid. He called it a hunting jacket, though she never saw him hunt anything except scaring off squirrels with a BB gun. Although she’s tall for her age, the sleeves are still too long. He left a little folding knife in the pocket, the inside pocket hidden in the lining, and she can feel it swing gently against her ribs as she walks.

The girl is bleeding for the first time, not like when she cut her foot open on the sharp rocks at the quarry. She’s bleeding and doesn’t want to be and doesn’t know how to tell anyone, so she just keeps walking along the railroad. She wishes she could shed her body like a snake sheds its skin.

Somewhere up ahead, nearly three hundred dead antelopes lie in piles along a lonely stretch of track. There are bucks with their horns broken, tongues lolling out. There are does with heavy bellies, who would have borne their young in May. More than anything, there are flies.

Last week, spring snow buried the county in powder so deep that animals sought open ground to rest. Without meaning to, the trains cleared a place for them, the locomotives with their sturdy plows barreling through the drifts. A whole herd of antelope came down onto the tracks. On a moonless night, in the narrow beam of the headlight, the engineer didn’t see them until it was too late to stop.

The local sheriffs came out to help with the mess. A welter of antelope lay scattered over the snow with broken legs and ragged wounds. One of the deputies had hunted pronghorn with his brother-in-law, even shot one himself. But this wasn’t the same. The antelopes’ eyes widened with fear as the men came close with their rifles. The animals had long eyelashes and cream-colored patches on their cheeks and throats. Soon the deputies ran out of ammunition and had to send someone back to the station for more.

Too long ago for the girl to imagine, this place used to be an inland sea. Then the glaciers formed and receded, leaving behind erratics—oversized boulders cropping up from the prairie like the gravestones of giants. A few hundred years ago, the Blackfeet, Sioux, Assiniboine, and Gros Ventre people ranged across this land, hunting herds of buffalo so vast that their hooves were as loud as a storm-crazed sea. Then Europeans came and killed nearly all the buffalo and drove the indigenous people onto reservations. The railroad helped them do it, carrying white men with rifles who shot buffalo and left their bodies to rot, carrying settlers farther and farther west. The girl’s history books in school describe this colonization as if it had been something inevitable, unstoppable, like the flow of water in the streams that cut through this landscape.

The girl has learned some of this other history from her older brother, who works at the video store and goes to community college and reads a lot of books by Howard Zinn. Her brother is wrong about a lot of things, and she doesn’t hesitate to tell him so, but she thinks he’s right about this.

The girl isn’t in history class not only because of her period, but because of what she heard outside the drugstore this morning. A sheriff’s deputy was on the payphone talking about how the dead antelope are still there, and the railroad company needs to send a front-end loader. She told herself she didn’t want to see the antelope, but curiosity gnawed in her stomach, then she felt the warm blood start and her feet carried her toward the railroad.

As soon as she gets out of sight of town, she grabs a handful of tissues from her backpack and stuffs them down the front of her underwear. Her boots sink deep into the snowdrifts beside the rails. Pain radiates through her lower belly in waves. The film strip her teacher showed them in seventh-grade science class didn’t prepare her for this. She hates her body for doing something she can’t control, her blood not staying put like she’s always relied on it to do. Her mother has never talked to her about this, only said vaguely, “When the change happens, tell me.”

But everything is changing—the girl’s shoe size, her shape, her skin, the way she looks at herself in the mirror, the way her mother doesn’t talk when she gets home from another late shift at work, the empty space in her parents’ double bed where her father used to sleep.

So the girl walks. The bad smell starts to wrinkle her nose by the time she takes a hundred steps. She walks until she spots the shape of something around the next bend. It’s about three hundred feet away. The dense stink catches in her throat. The sheriff doesn’t need to put up a fence: the smell is clear enough saying, “Go back.” But she ducks her head and pulls her shirt over her nose, and that’s when she sees the poppies under her feet. They’re yellow, the color of butter against the snow. Her grandmother showed her poppies like these when she was little. They aren’t supposed to bloom until summer.

The worst part for the engineer was how long it took to hit them all. The herd had strung itself out along the track, breathing out clouds of vapor, drowsing in the early morning dark. The engineer braked hard, but soon she felt the first thud of flesh. The noise echoed through the cars and seemed to ripple the solid steel. The train struck one antelope after another until the battering sounded like a hailstorm.

Most passengers in the sleeper cars startled awake to the sounds of impact. They stumbled out in their pajamas to ask each other what had happened. A few slept on, with earplugs in and last night’s miniature bottles of wine leaving them dead to the world.

The engineer hated the feeling of the train still barreling forward out of her control, its own weight and momentum so much larger than hers. Usually it was comforting, being aboard that great mass of steel, but on this night it was terrifying.

Once the train had come to a full stop, the crew climbed out to survey the damage. There were pieces of antelope caught under the wheels, in the snowplow on the locomotive. There were small sounds coming from the mouths of the animals still living. The crew members had snow shovels for storms and chainsaws for fallen trees, but they weren’t equipped for this. They radioed the local sheriff’s office.

“This is train seventy-four, about two miles outside of town,” the conductor said into the radio. “There’s been a collision.” The engineer climbed down the steps from the door and stood beside the train, where so much blood splashed across the snow.

The girl presses one hand over her face, breathing through a gap between her fingers. She’s one hundred feet away from the antelope. Fifty. She coughs and it only makes the ache in her belly sharper.

She thinks of the old Chevy coughing the night her father left, the way it always coughed and grumbled when someone tried to start it up. It was a dusty gray clunker whose engine would stall out and die if you didn’t nurse the gas pedal just right, and her father was the only one who could make it run without breaking down.

Her parents’ fight that night was not about the car, or about money, it was about everything at once, from what the girl could hear from where she was hiding in her room. She’d been partly deaf in one ear since she was a baby, but their shouting traveled well enough through the closed door. They’d fought plenty of times before. She looked through the window to see her father throwing a suitcase into the backseat of the Chevy and slamming the door.

The girl listened to the grumbling of the Chevy’s engine driving away, until she couldn’t hear it anymore. Her father had only taken a few of his clothes and toothbrush and razor with him, and in his hurry he forgot his favorite jacket.

A few days later, the girl answered the phone when her mother and brother were at work.

“Hey, it’s Dad,” her father said, as if she wouldn’t know.

“Dad, where are you?”

“Chicago,” he said. The girl had never been to Chicago and couldn’t believe the old car had made it that far.

“Have you seen my hunting jacket?” he asked.

Was that really the first thing he was worried about? “No,” she lied, because she was angry with him. She’d found it on a coat hook the day after he left.

“How’s school going?” he asked.

“Fine.”

“How’s your brother?”

“He’s fine.” It made her sad to realize how little they had to say.

The girl doesn’t know anything about Chicago except that it’s windy and people there eat a lot of pizza. She imagines her father standing on a city street corner with his back turned against the high wind, eating an oversized slice of deep-dish pizza from a paper plate. Then she remembers he doesn’t have his jacket to keep him warm, and a pang of guilt hits her, so she imagines him in a long trench coat like she’s seen in old movies, with the collar turned up against the wind. His fingers drip tomato sauce and he smells like garlic. She can’t imagine this version of her father ever coming back home.

Finally the girl’s feet carry her close enough to the carnage to see details: fur caked with dried blood, splintered hooves, eyes no longer glassy but dark with ants. A litter of empty shell casings on the ground. The flies never stop moving.

She stumbles and retches onto the snow. Her belly and back ache in symmetry. She crouches with her palms on her knees. Her boots have snapped the stems of a cluster of poppies.

It’s not as if the girl hasn’t seen dead things before. Gutted whitefish from the Milk River, a limp coyote tacked to a fence by a rancher. Her grandmother’s body turning cold in a hospice bed. Her grandmother had lived with them until she got too sick. When the girl had cried over the dead coyote, even though she was terrified of dogs, her grandmother said to her, “You have a soft heart.”

The sun dips behind a cloud and the temperature is dropping. She knows she should turn around and go home. Instead she fastens the buttons of her father’s jacket, pulls the collar close around her throat. The wool is rough but warm. Then she steadies herself and steps onto the tracks. It feels easy to walk on the wooden ties after trudging through the snow. Her good ear listens for a train horn. But there’s only supposed to be one train a day, and sound travels a long way across this flat landscape. The smell makes her stomach clench into a knot again.

She walks forward and looks so steadily at her feet that she doesn’t notice the huge bird crouched ahead of her, not until she’s close enough to see the outlines of its feathers. The vulture is nearly black from neck to tail, with a bald red head and uncanny eyes. They stare at each other for a long minute. The bird blinks once, twice, then hunches its shoulders and lifts its body into the air with a tremendous lurch. It flies to the low branches of a nearby tree and stares at the girl balefully, opening its beak to let out a low hiss.

The girl breaks into a run, sprints past the vulture and between the piles of antelope. Her legs are strong and she runs for a long time. She keeps going after she’s passed the last of the animals and can breathe deeply again. The smell clings to her hair and her father’s jacket. She can feel the blood has worked its way through to her blue jeans.

The girl lopes slower, her breath tight in her chest. Her boots are still bounded on either side by the twin metal rails. Being on the tracks gives her a queasy thrill. She turns her head to look for a place to cut through the trees and circle back toward home, and that’s when her boot slips on a patch of ice. Her foot skids to the side and her ankle twists as her body crumples downward. Instinctively she throws her hands out to break her fall, and as she hits the ground the closed pocketknife jabs hard against her side.

She lies there stunned for a minute. Slowly pulling herself to a sitting position, she realizes she’s still on the tracks and tries not to panic. But her heart pounds faster as she takes stock: pain shoots through her left ankle, and she must be miles from town by now. Gingerly she straightens her leg and crawls a few feet away from the railroad, sitting in the snow and panting. She’s scraped the palms of her hands, and her skin burns.

She looks around and sees no houses in any direction, no roads, no people. Suddenly she’s desperately hungry. She opens her backpack and takes inventory: science textbook, composition notebook, ballpoint pen, tissues, English textbook, pencil, and a paper bag holding a packet of store-brand Pop Tarts and a carton of orange juice—what she’s been packing herself for lunch most days since her mom has been too tired to notice. She rips open the Pop Tarts and wolfs them down, licks the frosting from her fingers, drinks the orange juice slowly.

She pulls herself to stand but can’t put weight on her hurt ankle. She takes a few steps forward and the faint line of a fence appears to the west, below a row of spruce trees. A fence means a farm, maybe someone home. She’s starting to shiver and her clothes are damp from snow and blood. The girl limps toward the fence. It’s slow going through the deep snow, and she winces with each step.

She’s almost to the gate when a trio of farm dogs rush up to the fence, put their paws up on the top rail, and open their mouths in a wild, keening howl. When she was little, the neighbor’s hound dog got loose and bit her on the face, and she still has a cluster of tiny scars denting her cheek. She stumbles backward in fear. The huge dogs are a mess of fur and grinning jaws as they leap and fall over each other.

There is no one else here to help her. From her chest she summons her deepest, sternest voice to tell them: “Off. Get down. Chill out.”

The dogs look chastened and stop howling. They are still jumpy and overexcited, licking her hands and yipping as she opens the gate, but she says, “Down. Shoo,” and they listen.

There’s a faded white farmhouse at the end of the long dirt drive. She limps along the slushy wheel ruts, the three dogs following behind her with barely contained excitement.

The blue paint on the front door is peeling, revealing the bare wood beneath, and the doorbell is broken. The girl knocks as loudly as she can with her scraped hands.

No answer. She waits and knocks a second time. A stubbly-faced man with a wad of chewing tobacco in his cheek opens the door a crack and narrows his eyes at her. “Not interested in Girl Scout cookies,” he says.

“Wait,” she says before he can close the door. “I sprained my ankle and can’t get home. Can I use your phone, please?”

“Sure can’t,” he says.

“Why not?”

“Because I couldn’t pay the bill last month, and when that happens, the telephone company gets snippy. Get it? Snip.” He holds his index and middle fingers like scissors and makes a cutting motion. She hates adults who talk to her like she’s stupid.

The girl tries to peer into the front hall, but she can’t see much. Is he telling the truth about the phone?

“Are you sure I can’t call my mom?”

He scratches the back of his neck and sighs. “Guess I could give you a ride home. Where do you live?”

The girl hesitates. She has watched her share of after-school specials. Don’t tell strange men where you live, don’t get into cars with strangers, always be careful or a weirdo might kidnap you and you’ll be murdered and never be seen again. She looks closer at this stubbly-faced man. The whites of his eyes are tinged a little yellow. He’s maybe her father’s age, but looks older. His hair is scruffy and he’s wearing Carhartt work pants and a white T-shirt. In other words, he looks like most of the men she sees around town, but the way he stares at her makes her stomach turn over.

What other choice does she have? She can’t walk as far as the main road. And then what, hitchhiking home? Getting hypothermia out in the snow? She remembers the folding knife in her pocket and it gives her courage. She clears her throat and says to the man, “I live just off of Route 2.”

“All right,” he says. “Lemme get my jacket.”

He disappears and reappears in a barn jacket and ski cap. He comes through the front door with a shuffle and a slam, and the girl follows him to the pickup truck parked out front. The dogs whine and press against his legs, but he says, “Go on, get out of here, you stupid mutts.” He spits dark tobacco juice into the snow.

The girl thinks she has never been so cold before. An icy wind gusts and the branches of the spruce trees make a sound like running water. She limps after the man, who doesn’t offer to help her, just gets into the driver’s seat and waits while the girl struggles to climb up into the high cab with her hurt ankle. The sight of the tan vinyl seats reminds her of her bloody jeans, and she feels a flush of humiliation. But what choice does she have? She climbs in and sits miserably in the passenger seat. Through the window, she sees the three dogs lie down on the porch and hang their heads between their paws.

“So,” the man says as he starts up the engine. “What’s your name?”

“Annie,” she lies. In the cab, the man’s smell of chewing tobacco and sweat is strong. Her fear rises, knowing she’s trapped in here with him. She slips her hand inside her father’s jacket, unzips the inside pocket, and holds the small knife tightly between her fingers.

“How old are you?” he asks as he pulls onto the road.

“Thirteen.” Her teeth chatter as the air vents blast on her face. “How old are you?”

The man laughs. “Where do you live?”

“I’ll tell you where to turn,” she says.

“You need a blanket, there’s one in the back,” the man says as he drives one-handed. The girl looks behind the seat and pulls out a scratchy blanket, which stinks of dog. It’s better than nothing.

The girl imagines what she’ll do if this man tries anything. If he tries to kidnap her, she’ll jump out the passenger door and make a run for it. True, she won’t be very fast with this twisted ankle. If he tries to put his hands on her, she’ll slash his throat with the pocketknife. She imagines blood soaking his white T-shirt, like the blood staining the snow where the antelope were killed, and she is not ready but her knuckles clench around the knife until they turn white.

Every muscle in her body is still tense when the man finally turns down her street and shuts off the engine. She realizes it’s too early in the afternoon. Her mother and brother are probably still at work.

“Want me to walk you inside?” the man asks.

“No, thank you.” She shakes her head and fumbles with the passenger door handle.

“You sure I can’t help you?” the man says. He leans closer, his rank smell filling her nose.

“No,” she says. “My dad is waiting for me.” She slides down from the cab, clenches her teeth against the pain that runs through her ankle, and limps to the front door as fast as she can. She turns her key in the lock, locks the door behind her, and slumps against the door as tears run down her cheeks. The pickup truck starts up and rumbles down the street, and she listens until it’s gone.

Her brother comes into the front hall. “What’s wrong?”

“I hurt my ankle,” she says in a tone that she hopes will cut off more questions. He stands there as she staggers into the bathroom and locks the door behind her.

The girl shucks off her wet clothes onto the floor, hangs her father’s jacket over the towel rack, and sits in the tub under a hot shower until she finally stops shivering. Of all people, she doesn’t know how to talk to her brother about what’s wrong. She rummages through the cabinet under the sink to find her mom’s pads, then ruins the first one by getting the adhesive tabs tangled and stuck to themselves. She wraps it back up in its pink plastic wrapper and stuffs it into the trash can. She takes a second one from the box. There’s a knock on the bathroom door.

“Not right now,” she yells.

“OK,” her brother yells back.

Finally she wraps herself in the biggest towel, tucks the pad in the crook of her underarm, and opens the door a crack. When the coast is clear, she sneaks to her bedroom. She sticks the pad into a clean pair of underwear, puts on black sweatpants and a sweater, and walks unsteadily down the hall. Coming around the corner into the living room, she’s surprised to see a chipped mug of cocoa on the coffee table, giving off little curls of steam.

Her brother is sitting on the couch in front of the TV. He looks away as his sister picks up the mug. She sits down next to him and they watch cartoons on one of the few channels that get reception.

“Do you need ice or something?” he asks.

“I guess,” she says.

He walks to the kitchen and comes back with a lumpy bag of ice cubes she drapes across her ankle.

They don’t talk for a while. The girl blows on the cocoa to cool it, but the first sip still burns her tongue. She loves instant cocoa made with two packets instead of one, and she’s surprised her brother remembered. He looks at her sidelong for a minute.

“What?” she says. She is still ashamed, and her ankle is throbbing. The music of a cheery advertising jingle plays on TV.

“Do you want to talk about it?” He stares at the TV as he talks.

“Not really,” she says.

He nods and shrugs his shoulders. They watch to the end of the cartoon and her brother looks over at her again as the credits roll. She drinks the last of her cocoa.

“It’s gonna be OK,” he says.

Maybe he’s wrong about this, like he’s wrong about a lot of things, but she decides to believe him.

Elizabeth Hart Bergstrom’s work appears or is forthcoming in The New York Times, Catapult, Fourteen Hills, The Offing, Hobart, and elsewhere. She was born in Virginia and earned an MFA in writing at Sarah Lawrence College. You can find her online at lizbergstrom.com.

We Must Work on Mother’s Day to Meet the Corporation’s Deadline

Dana Dean

After the tornado scattered Uncle Larry’s farm for miles on Mother’s Day, our parents arrived to do the heavy lifting. They forgot about us, their children, as they strode toward ruin. We wandered among crumpled bulk bins ripped from foundations, tractors overturned with broken windows, empty feed sacks waving in tree branches, insulation strewn across the yard.

We organized. We gave ourselves serious tasks. We plucked coopless chicks from the wet ground and placed them in boxes with straw. We caught loose piglets by back legs and placed them in a makeshift pen.

We grew hungry and tromped to the powerless (yet spared) farmhouse, determined to pop popcorn under the glow of our flashlights. Cousin Elizabeth braided Cousin Lauren’s long hair to pass the time it would take the kernels to pop. Our hopes waned. The glow of a flashlight was not strong enough to bust the kernels white. Our stomachs grumbled. When dusk-pink started to peek through clouds, a neighbor arrived with a box full of cold-cut sandwiches. Our bedraggled mothers walked to the house to collect us and a sandwich before heading home.

Even though we slept, heavy from exhaustion, some of us were tossed from the refuge of sleep by images of twisted steel. Storms still unearth memories of the small farm our parents tried to lift back up.

Our parents knew the weight of farming, lifting the 730 tractor out of the crushed and blooming lilac bush, lifting a dead horse struck through its barrel by a two-by-four, lifting us onto their hips and turning away, shielding us from the scene. They told us it was in our best interests to study—stability existed in books and monthly paychecks—never in the weather, weather that didn’t even observe Mother’s Day.

So we find ourselves, the farm kids of yesterday, animals in confinement. Our feet in clean shoes beneath desks, because our parents warned us. The wail of a weather siren takes us back, makes us wonder if picking up a family farm in the late ’80s from a tornado’s wrath was an act in vain. What would it have meant to leave the pieces strewn about, the animals to roam, because the pieces were never to be ours?

Seasons change outside our office windows. Anti-depressants are covered by healthcare plans. An acre of land sells for $6,000 in Buccan County to an absentee landlord in California. Tractors drive themselves.

The standard issue brown and white office clock reads 4:56 pm—the time we most feel and recognize the aching atrophy of our muscles. We crave their use, to fling open the office exit doors. There is a glitch, however. Our red-faced supervisors herd us into boardrooms at 4:57 pm. The corporation’s new global positioning software is erroneously stamping time. The supervisors hum dissonance with the fluorescent lights that hang above our heads, drone the language of machines. On and on and on they methodically prattle.

Their idle words do not carry the weight we long to lift.

Dana Dean grew up on a pig farm in rural Riverside, Iowa, during the Farm Debt Crisis of the 1980s. The once-struggling family farm has since evolved into an environmentally sustainable Black Angus production ranch, Trails End Angus, which can be followed on Facebook. Dana holds an MFA in Creative Writing and Environment from Iowa State University and teaches rhetoric at the University of Iowa. She is currently at work on a collection of linked short stories set in rural, agrarian Iowa from 1980–2016.

Mermaid

Gregory Spatz

Tonight Charlie’s stuck with the mermaid she likes least, Belinda. What Charlie dislikes about her is that she hopes she’ll never turn out like her – late forty-something, thick skinned, hair chopped to just above her ears to minimize the chlorine damage, and a wry, know-it-all, joylessness about the job. Belinda has a move that Charlie would like to copy or steal. A few moves, actually. She can spin the ten feet from the water’s surface to the bottom of the tank headfirst, straight down, like some kind of spiraling human drill, and lie there on the floor of the tank, just out of sight of the bar patrons, blowing bubble-rings from the tank floor for a full twenty seconds, all on one breath. Also, she can tread water upside down and spin, waving and blowing kisses at the people on the other side of the glass, and she can triple flip from one side of the tank to the other. Charlie’s inability to match any of this makes her dislike Belinda not just because she’s less acrobatic underwater, but because Belinda works so hard at pretending that she doesn’t care. Pretending she isn’t the best mermaid, the only one with years of synchronized swim-team training, most expert and eldest (also, therefore, the closest to proving herself somehow immune to the passage of time) – it’s all part of the joylessness Charlie dislikes but hasn’t yet found a way to ignore or address. I’m twenty-eight, she tells herself. I am not here to stay. I came home because things with Avram got so fucked up. So it’s a little temporary time out, because my step dad had an apartment I could crash in rent free for a few months and because once upon a time I really liked this job. I loved this job. As a teenager. I can leave any time I want. I will leave whenever I feel like it.

Belinda’s red-purple wig hair floats around her in a half-circle as she lies back and strokes with her arms to the other side of the tank. She reaches with both hands to secure it, tugging down hard on the rubberized elastic webbing, and snugs the cups of her goggles against her eye sockets. “Well,” she says. She’s doing one of her synchronized swimming wrist tricks now to keep herself afloat, flat on her back, toes inside her mermaid tail pointed straight out like a ballerina on point. “As my old man used to say, thank god we have arms and legs!” It’s the same thing she says at the start of every shift, like a form of invocation or prayer. “You ready?” she asks. And before Charlie can answer, Belinda falls backward, out of sight, the fabric of her fins disappearing with a little splash and sounds of water suction.

Charlie’s own personal prayer or invocation, if she had one, would have to involve something about water’s power to transform and elevate. Its power to make everything a little more beautiful. Because even though the costumes are fairly concealing – padded, black sports bikini tops that fit like armor and come almost to the neckline, and tails to sheath everything from the belly button down – each night, dropping under, it’s the thing she notices first and the thing that still most amazes and pleases her: that for the next four hours, she can cease being herself. She can be this other sexualized unsexual mythical creature with no nether regions whatsoever, only a bewitching fishtail and a strip of bare midriff like a tractor beam to pull every pair of eyes in the bar after her. And if she turns her back to show them the glorious tattoo of the Pagan sun god disappearing into the waistline of her mermaid tail, she’ll know, facing them again, which of them noticed – which of them will go home with this piece of her stuck in their imaginations.

She drops after Belinda, and is instantly delighted – lightened – the world silent now save for the water gushing at her head and the sound of air bubbling through her nose as she exhales to turn a somersault and dives for the bottom of the tank. Water trickles in through one of her earplugs and stings her sinuses. She sweeps her arms open and kicks with her tailfin, going deeper. Through the distorted sidewalls of her goggles she glimpses Belinda doing her upside down spiraling wave trick, hair hanging around her like a kelp jungle, and just past her the half-lit barroom beyond. Always her feeling, first seeing that room full of patrons, is that maybe they’re the unreal ones – the ones in some ensorcelled, amber-lit, timeless space – not her. At the bottom of the tank she turns and looks up to the broken, shifting brilliance of reflected light on the water’s surface. Another magical, underwater effect she loves. She crouches a second, and before pushing back across the tank, notices a red plastic scimitar probably left on the tank bottom by one of the mermen from last night. She floats up brandishing it, pushing herself sideways along the viewing area, the pane of glass backing the bar. There they are, her people, her audience, all the usual customers for a Thursday night – couples and a table of girls-night-out friends who look vaguely familiar (but everyone’s familiar in this town), two guys in Griz football sweatshirts at the end of the bar returning her wave, tables of tourists and visitors with oversized drinks in colored glasses like goblets, an older couple who look so giddy it’s like they’re on a ride at the carnival. She slashes at the glass with the scimitar and blows kisses. If only she didn’t have to breathe. You could stay under forever. Just float around, blowing kisses in the blue, being not-Charlie. And as her air expires, floating up, always that feeling, like in her dreams, that she’s soaring above them in space to some transcendent perspective, lightheaded from the lack of oxygen, but more than that. Be right back, she thinks. Don’t go anywhere!

Her notion of water as transformative probably began somewhere in early high school or even junior high when she first realized she had underwater superpowers – that she could swim: that in fact, she had a body made for flying crazy distances underwater, crushing the yards with her arms and shoulders, kicking past everyone with a backstroke and a freestyle so wicked that sometimes, flipping and stroking her way back into her own wake, she was amazed at how far it went, like she was a turbo-charged motorboat. And then how the hours of practice began transforming her from a big-nosed nerd, popular in exactly no circles whatsoever and unnoticed in every regard, to one of those land-bound aquatic gods of the high school hallways with her green-tinged hair, too sleek and nimble for the air, the velveted underlayer of her muscles suggesting almost inconceivable grace and strength in her every movement. But you were sure the ugly duckling, her mother would say to her those days, shaking her head. Not anymore. Look at you now! None of which had felt like a sexual or erotic power until her first summer working at the Dip and Sip when she began seeing how that worked. Which is why she’s here again, she supposes – at home in Great Falls and going back over old ground: trying to reclaim some of that former power and glory. Where else can you get a paid gig playing at being a mermaid a few nights a week, and have the rest of the time to yourself?

Above water, there’s the cool air on her head and shoulders, the hum of the filtration system and the splash of Belinda diving down again. Two separate worlds, above and below she thinks, briefly flashing back to her mother’s second husband, step-dad number one, the zealot (stuck around just long enough to make her change out her entire sixth grade wardrobe) – on earth as it is in heaven. No, three separate worlds really, counting the bar on the other side of the glass. Actually, infinite worlds, considering all the impressions and misimpressions and mixed up histories of those people watching her swim and waiting for a slip-up, costume failure, whatever it was they most wished for, hoped to see embodied in her, sipping their drinks and talking…each of them wanting to forget something, probably. Or remember something? Or just longing to find a diversion from all the disappointment of a life in which mermaids don’t exist.

She goes for the far side of the tank this time, back beside the cash register, framing her hands around her eyes to really see through the glass, and when she’s sure she’s locked eyes with one of them – a mopey-looking red-headed guy at the bar, or maybe it’s a boyish girl in a feed cap and snap shirt, hard to say exactly, plate of fries in front of her, one dipped in ketchup and raised chin-level like a floppy baton – she mashes her lips to the glass. Waits until the patron meets her eyes again and waves, and then she pushes away, blowing bubble-rings to explode against the glass, erasing the patron’s face, turning it to a wavy impressionistic watercolor painting. She flips and dives a little deeper, turns and flipper-kicks up again with her ass to the glass, tattoo on display, arms upstretched. Avram, she thinks. Then, No, that person is so not Avram. He’d never wear a feed cap or snap shirt. Not in the past and certainly not now. And yet… And almost before she can identify this as the hope that taunts her at the start of nearly every shift – that somewhere in the crowd she’ll spot him, Avram in a ragged turtleneck, unshaven, decrepit shoes with the soles falling off (the look he favored when she first met him), or maybe his Captain Nemo costume from Halloweens past, come all the way from Seattle to find her, watch her swim, because he couldn’t go another day – she blocks and stuffs this thought down. Sure! Never! She thrashes her tail for the surface.

No surprise, when she goes down again there he is – she? – the girl in the snap shirt, waving and beaming, cap off now so Charlie sees the crimped ring of its imprint going around her shiny copper-yellow hair. Even harder to tell, with the cap off – boy or girl? – until he gets up from his barstool, and then it’s clear: the swagger as he crosses the bar to the shelf where the mermaid tip jars sit. Something in his eyes. A kind of excitement, too much self-assuredness about whatever he imagines passed between them when she drew him in and blew him kisses, or when she swam away showing him the sun god on her back. He waves at her with a five dollar bill folded lengthwise, still beaming. Slips it meaningfully into the tip jar and bows like an old time courtier. Pulls another bill from his shirt pocket and holds it as high as he can, flat against the glass – looks like another five. Swimming away, she glimpses something written there, a name or number or message in raspberry pink hi-lighter, maybe for her, maybe not (guys are always passing them notes and jokes and suggestions on dollar bills – once even, if you could believe the mermaid-lore, a marriage proposal – hey what did the mermaid say to the sea lion…why do mermaids like music so much…loved watching you swim…do you ever do a junior league show…ever give any swim lessons…call me!). She blows him more kisses, bigger kisses, throwing her arms as wide as she can, this is a pretty generous tip after all, and sputters for the surface again. And for the next few dives, until he vanishes, she avoids all eye contact in that direction; keeps her attention focused anywhere else in the bar. The old couple. The girls-night-out table. Does a camera pose with the Griz guys throwing fake gang signs. She’s not worried. Not annoyed or angry exactly either. Something. Sad for him? Worn out? But this is why they wear such big, dorky wigs and leave through an unmarked exit when shifts are done, and why they only rarely sit around afterhours, drinking: all the stalkery, pushy, drunk dudes. Come on guys. It’s a job. I’m glad you liked the show, but seriously.

Break time, resting at the side of the tank with their arms out, Belinda pokes her lightly under the shoulder blade. “You’re looking a little rashy,” she says.

“What?”

“Just a few red bumps. Here and here. And here. Probably the chlorine. Does it itch?”

She remembers waking up, that other self alone at night, so heavy with dreams of swimming. The stink of chlorine everywhere and the itching skin that won’t leave her alone, won’t let her forget, the itching that makes her wish she could shed herself entirely. Seeing her dimly lit reflection in the bathroom mirror and smearing lotion everywhere she can reach, into her hair, the bottoms of her feet. Her sheets all damp and clammy with that vanilla scented lotion and chlorine. “Not really,” she says.

“You need a good vitamin C soak. Have I not told you?”

Charlie shakes her head no. “Told me?” The first time she saw Belinda out of the water, dressed and buying wine coolers and frozen pizzas at the Super One, she almost didn’t recognize her – the clothes, the makeup, the heels. So put together. Now, with her goggles up and her naked baby-bird eyelashes exposed, chlorine-reddened eyes, water clinging in the down outlining her cheeks and shining through all the folds and wrinkles on her chin and neck, here’s the real Belinda. The Belinda Charlie knows and has known since she was a kid. She reminds herself that this woman has been in the job long enough to remember when it catered mainly to airmen and engineers. Crewcut guys in fatigues who spent their days trekking back and forth across Montana and the Dakotas servicing Minuteman silos, checking and updating the latest launch technology in case of a nuclear attack, hardly speaking to anyone all day. The horniest men alive, she’s called them, and the most loyal…one guy I remember drove over three hundred miles just to see me swim, just because it was my night! Also, long enough to remember when a five dollar tip meant you showed your tits or you were done. Whatever wisdom she’s about to drop, Charlie’s sure it’s legit.

“Just plain vitamin C crystals, like a half cup or so, in the tub. Soak as long as you want. Add some Dead Sea salts or Epsom salts. Whatever floats your boat. Main thing is the C. Totally counteracts the chlorine. Don’t ask me how or why. It’s a scientific fact. A chemical fact. It works.”

Charlie nods and deadpans, trying not to give away how glad she is for this advice. “Really. C. I’ll have to try. If it turns into like a thing. Thanks!”

Belinda laughs. “Oh, it will.” She lowers her goggles, splashes her tail. “It’ll be a thing. Trust me. Good long soak. You’ll be all right. Ready for more mermaid fun?”

The first time she saw Avram in one of his padded gaffs, she knew it was over. She didn’t say so aloud. She watched in a way she hoped was supportive without being too specifically encouraging – A surprise for you! I’m so excited. You’ll love it, he said, steering her upstairs to their bedroom – a way that didn’t entirely reveal her shock, but which also might let him know that no, in fact, she didn’t love it at all.

“It doesn’t hurt,” he assured her, hopping foot to foot and tugging the gaff panties higher. “At least, it didn’t before. When I tried them at Alyssa’s.” Alyssa was a friend from the theater where Avram helped with lighting and tech part time; she’d announced her decision to transition not quite a year ago and changed her name from Brad to Alyssa. And once, before all that, before the padded bras and hormone replacement therapy, one very drunken night Alyssa tried to talk both of them, her and Avram, into a threesome. She couldn’t remember who declined more emphatically, her or Avram, but there’d been a moment, a slippery drunken gap like standing outside of time, wherein she hadn’t been able to read the look in Avram’s eyes or to understand his intentions and had felt suddenly, weirdly unsure of everything in the world. Drunk, she thought then, and whenever the moment resurfaced in her memory. We were so drunk.

There were grooves or indentations of some kind in the gel-foam of the gaff underwear to accommodate Avram’s testicles. “To help push them back into the sockets that would be my ovaries, if I had any,” he said, helpfully, by way of instruction, as he pressed and wiggled – the idea being total erasure: pull the junk in, tuck it back, make it vanish. She tried not to wince or show anything too overt in her expression seeing this, the tugging and snapping, but it hurt to watch. The purplish tip of his penis peeped at her a second like some forlorn pet, old friend, a little aggrieved and apologetic for the fact of its existence maybe, tired of being so manhandled but still willing, balls sliding one way and the other and then all of it was gone, folded over itself and pressed back between his legs. Why she wanted to yell. Why are you doing this? Why on earth do you think I’d like it? But she knew. The time to have said something more direct was weeks ago now. Months ago, when he first slid a pair of her underwear around his too-skinny hips in the middle of lovemaking, and said, Just pretend, just this once. Humor me. Come on! And then the next time, and the next, and more recently, karaoke nights together, Avram always in drag… Now he faced her, grinning fondly, in what she realized was an attempt to mimic some exaggerated (and very male) notion of femininity, cocked his hips and spun in a circle like an old time dancehall girl. He hadn’t shaved his legs or belly yet, so the effect was fairly bizarre: man-woman in a partial body stocking with padding – padded ass and hips and “vulva.” No penis. Maybe the tiniest bit sexy in a way that twisted something in her gut if it wasn’t also so fake and strange and a little bit like a football uniform gone awry.

“What do you think?” he asked. And before she could answer he was sliding a plaid miniskirt of hers around his waist and wriggling a favorite camisole over his head.

What did she think? Now she was numb from somewhere in the pit of her stomach to the base of her larynx, blinking to keep the tears back, and also on the verge of giddy laughter. She wasn’t sure she knew how to use words anymore.

“What?” he asked. “Am I hot or what? Smoking.” He touched a finger to his hip and made a sizzling sound. “Right?” And before she could stop herself or correct course, before realizing that all of his bravado and teasing self-assuredness was only a cover for profoundest insecurity; before understanding that it was not just blindness or self-absorption but total trust in her that had led him to share this most intimate moment; before any of this had occurred to her, or the shift in his eyes and the immediate downward tumble into despair and self-debasement had quite registered, she’d said it: “Are you fucking kidding me?”

That was one turning point. She doesn’t much like to remember what came next, how it blew up, how bitter and petty she became, the rest of what she said, and then the dissembling apologies and tears as she tried to unsay it all, talk her way back from calling him a freak and a crazy person for having misread her. No I never said I liked it! No I never said I wished you were a girl! Never! How can we be standing here after all these years – seven years! – and understand so little about each other? What happened? Or how he convinced her that he could keep his whole transition out of their bedroom, manage it alone, keep it to one side of the relationship, for now – give her the space to process and prepare. To grow with him. She could hardly believe they were saying these things to each other. She tried to remember who she’d been an hour ago, earlier that day at work in the bookstore, even minutes ago heading up the stairs with a bottle of their favorite zin and a container of chocolate gelato, nothing in mind but an evening alone with him binge-watching Netflix. So long as you realize, though, that this is me now, he concluded. The real me, right here. To which she could only say, I can’t. I really can’t! I mean, intellectually, of course. I’ll try. I will. It’s the best I can say, and it’s not because I don’t love you! I will always love you. I can’t stop that. I just…I need time to get my mind around it. Please try to understand.

Another turning point was dinner with his mother a week or two after that first night with the padded gaff – ham and potato latkes with blintzes and bacon at his mom’s annual anti-Passover Passover Seder, a running family joke and semi-ritualistic tradition Charlie had been to every spring for the past few years – and the voice echoing over and over in her head throughout the dinner, no matter how hard she tried to switch it off. Mrs. Sherrey. He thinks he’s Mrs. Sherrey! He’s another Mrs. Sherrey! Look at that. Mrs. Sherrey and Mrs. Sherrey the second…that’s what he thinks! “Thank you, Mrs. Sherrey. I’d love some more,” she said, heaping her plate with tzimmes and peppery spiced cabbage, ham, latkes, dal, looking back and forth between Avram and his mom to see if either of them noticed that they both were being addressed. The woman across the table from Charlie – Avram’s mom’s latest project or special friend from some dance class, Anaya, in a pink sari and silk wraps, black dot on her forehead – continued in her entrancingly accented east Indian lilt about birth and re-birth and life’s only transformative force: “Love! It is love! Always love. And birth and death too, yes, but these we can never know directly whereas we can know about love every minute of every day if we just open ourselves. And it is the same! Its power. All connected through birth and death like the goddess Parvati, and also part of your tradition’s wonderful celebration of life and renewal today.” Still, every time she looked back at Avram or his mom, there it was again. The voice reducing it all, saying, Mrs. Sherrey. He’s Mrs. Sherrey too. He’s Mrs. Sherrey II! The bright pink haze high on his mom’s cheeks, florid eye makeup, black hair dye in her feathered curls, claw-like red fingernails. So this was where Avram got his ideas about femininity and how to be a woman – from his fat, privileged, liberal, white mother. No, it couldn’t possibly be that stupid and simple, and yet, for minutes at a time it really seemed like it was. He wanted to become his mom. As much as possible, she tried to keep all of her attention on Avram’s younger brother Dillon in his yarmulke, trading funny looks and eye-rolls, trying to make him laugh.

“Sure, but I don’t know about the mom part. I mean… Anyway, it’s Ms. Sherrey,” Avram said, later, on the drive back to their apartment. He seemed happy about this – more misreading – happy to hear that Charlie identified him so strongly with his mother. It was what she later learned he thought of as an affirmation. “But don’t be dissing my mom!” This he said in a half-joking ironic-serious way. “She’s a good person. In fact, she’s pretty rad and cool. You know she hung out with Bernie back in the day.” Never said she wasn’t, Charlie thought. But the thing is, even if I liked girls – which I mostly don’t – but even if I did, your mom would be about dead last among choices for a romantic partner. I mean dead last, like over my dead body.

If the end of their relationship were a movie montage, she thinks – if things had progressed that neatly and efficiently with some semi-poignant background music to smooth over the passage of time as freeze-frame images streamed by – those would be some of the closing scenes she’d zoom in on, followed with a goodbye note in her own scrawl and maybe a scene or two of her in her packed car, driving away, north and east, skis and bike on the roof, over the Cascades. The high desert of eastern and central Washington in late summer, the Rockies, further east, halogen floor lamp and rolled carpet on top of crates of books and clothes in the rear seat. Back home again. But it wasn’t a movie and she knows that the impulse to imagine it one, try to imagine it anyway, is really only a way of looking for closure. A way of wishing to speed past all the confusion and hurt and mess to a nice neat finish and fresh start. Because of course, between the cutaway montage snapshots were fights and more fights. Two that ended with him holding her wrists together, to keep her from hitting him or clawing her own face to shreds, his grip on her so fierce that later bruises in the exact shape of his fingers encircled her wrists, clustered like little black-red blossoms under the skin, an incontrovertible reminder and signifier of everything wrong between them and an embarrassment to hide at the bookstore and Yoga. But you’re still you, she’d yell. You’re not a lie! How can you be a lie? If you’re a lie then I am too, I mean everything about me, about us, is a lie…so what am I even supposed to do with that. How am I supposed to think about it? I don’t accept it! And even as she heard herself, the words, the insupportable, horrible braying tone in her voice, the treachery and villainy, being opposed to this change, the one thing he wanted above all else, still, she couldn’t stop. I know it’s small-minded, I know, I know, and it’s unaccepting. But I can’t help it. Attraction is like a real thing for me. In a relationship anyway, it’s real. It’s important. Maybe it’s not the most important thing. So I’m shallow. But the thing is, I don’t really like girls. I mean, once or twice, whatever, but even if I did, I just…so what am I supposed to do now? What would you even have me do? She didn’t say anything about their being engaged to be engaged or all the stuff they’d accumulated together over the years – toaster oven, fish tank, vintage sewing machine, oriental rug, kitchen table – all fallen by the wayside with that imaginary future wherein she’d always been “Charlie” and he “Avram.” Mermaid, she began thinking in the middle of fights, and more and more often the closer she came to leaving. A lifeline of sorts, she supposed; her own brand of transition, or just a way out. I want to be a mermaid again.

She imagines a sizzle as she slips into the murky tub water. A tingle through her pores with it, sliding down, working the spigot for “hot” with one foot and then stirring with the other to disperse the heat more evenly before closing the spout again. She lies back and listens to the drip from the faucet, water on water, point, point, point, overlaying bass notes from a TV or CD player somewhere in a neighboring unit thumping like a heartbeat. The distant whistle of a train. Driving home, tunneling through the dark and snow, bumping over fresh snow ruts in the road and stopping at the all-night pharmacy for a bottle of citric acid (they were out of regular C crystals and the exhausted night pharmacist assured her it was pretty much the same thing, though she was mum on its magical properties with regard to over-chlorination – Could be. I’ve never heard of that particular application. Anyway, shouldn’t hurt anything. You work at the Dip and Sip? Really? I’ve always wondered what that job’s like!) and a carton of Epsom salts, Charlie’s sense of imminent relief anticipating just this – the freshly scrubbed tub in her step-dad’s apartment, lights lowered, heat cranked, snow blowing hard against the exterior wall of the apartment and wind whistling in the window casement up there where her shampoos and conditioners and razor sit in a soapy film of their own residue, her skin drinking this brew, this factually, chemically proven anodyne, longest night of the year alone, no one to bother her, no one to explain anything for her or correct her perceptions, the earth beginning its elliptical trip back into the light starting now – it had given her an almost embarrassing, intoxicating pleasure. A giddy, delirious pleasure precisely because there is no one with whom she’d even think of sharing it. Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble, she thinks and then says it aloud, sliding lower so the water covers her chin and touches the corners of her eyes stingingly. There’s a smell to it – the citric acid – its astringent properties kind of mineral and acrid, maybe almost sulfuric. This is pleasing because it gives a palpable assurance, a tangible measure of efficacy. Already she can feel how her skin is becoming slipperier, renewed, itself again, stinging through every pore and especially in the itchiest, abraded spots on her back and shoulders and legs and spots she didn’t even know were abraded. She closes her eyes against the burn and goes under. Scrubs fingers through her damaged hair. Raises herself on her elbows and again submerges, eyes really burning now until she can find a towel from beside the tub and scrub her eyelids dry.

Blinking them open the world seems remade somehow. Clearer. Closer. C-burned. The metal transition bar between the bathroom’s linoleum and the rest of the apartment’s dull brown shag, its bronze polished to silver in the middle from so many years being stepped on; soapy, dusty grime on the crooked baseboard, some of it hers, some of it probably not… Anyway. Not permanent. Nothing here is. She’s not staying.

She straightens her legs and flexes her feet, all the muscles tensed, imagining them fused to a fish’s tail. The thing people never understand about being a mermaid is how difficult it is, swimming without the use of your legs. All arms and shoulders. All core muscles. And yet the end of each shift is also accompanied by this weird stiffness and tension through her calves and thighs – like she’s been really working out with her legs, which makes no sense. Another mystery. She slides her hands along her hips imagining the transition from skin to fish scales, the sleek smoothness that would be her tail, if it were a tail, the fins at either side to pluck at and tweak and the dorsal fin crushed into the small of her back. Again she submerges and this time when she raises herself on her elbows the world is indeed remade because the lights have gone out. With them the hum of the furnace and the fridge are gone. The bass notes from downstairs and pretty much all sound except the rat-tat-tat of wind in the bathroom vent and a distant police siren and the hollow scrubbing of her skin against the tub bottom as she pulls herself up a little higher. Also wind in the trees and thudding against the side of the building, like the sea’s come ashore and blown over mountains, desert, prairies, all for the sake of grabbing a piece of awning somewhere out there and whacking it repeatedly against the bricks. A power outage. How this used to excite her when she was a kid! Special time set apart from normal time by candlelight and quiet, sleeping by the fire, extra blankets for everyone. She splashes a hand in and out of water and flexes her imaginary tail. “Well,” she says, but the fun’s gone, she’s not a kid, she has no tail, and in a distant way she’s sort of worried about freezing to death. Not right away of course. There’s at least a little insulation in these walls. Anyway, she’s half-pickled and sick to death of being in water.

She feels for her towel in the dark. Steps out of the tub and turns back to pull the drain plug, and as her eyes adjust to the darkness she catches her reflection in the mirror. In its ancient, scarred foil backing she’s like some ghost or antique daguerreotype, the hollows around her eyes accentuated by a shadowy discoloration that makes a double T from her chin to her forehead and across her cheeks. “Well that’s weird,” she says, leaning closer until she begins seeing that, no, it’s not just the dark and it’s not some weird shadow effect. She’s actually burned herself. Either the water was too hot or she was a little too enthusiastic with that citric acid, or she’s having some kind of allergic reaction. Or Belinda was wrong, or the pharmacist was and vitamin C and citric acid are not entirely the same. She leans closer. Or Belinda was having fun and pulling some kind of mermaid practical joke. She follows the outline with her fingertips, up the bridge of her nose, under her eyes, across her brow, back again. So she’s like a skunk now, a raccoon! Not funny, Belinda! She touches fingertips along her forearm. The skin here is puffy and tenderized too, raised feeling—stinging, everywhere stinging—like when she used to get hives or that time she was attacked by a ground nest of wasps. She runs for her phone, for a light, to find out how bad it is.

Dead-naming. Of all the new words and terms she’d learned in the months before she fled Seattle, and then in the first several weeks of her time in Great Falls, on line and on the phone, which was both easier and in some ways more damaging to her sanity than seeing him every day because his voice was exactly the same as ever, unchanged really, and so the temptation to slip back into old ways together and forget was strong, dead-naming was the one she disliked most. Dead-name. Dead man’s float. Deadhead. Dead-in-the-water. She understood, of course. It wasn’t his name or who he was anymore. Avram. He was Linda. He wanted every aspect of his identity associated with Avram to be changed or erased. But calling himself dead while his voice went on the same as ever, and their shared past and the jokes they’d told each other, food they liked together, cooked together, associations, while all of this continued in her dreaming and waking life daily and in some of their conversations…still she was supposed to consider him and everything they’d shared dead. It was more than she could handle. Their last phone conversation she messed up enough times that he had to ask her to stop. Please, he said. It’s Linda. Don’t dead-name me anymore. It’s the least you can do. And later, when she saw the status update on his Facebook profile, those blunt words to all their mutual friends and family and acquaintances and school contacts underneath the picture of him in a wig and mascara, about how there’s nothing worse in the universe than an ex who won’t stop dead-naming you, and the strings of comments and comments on comments righteously supporting him…she’d totally cut off. Unfriended, stopped calling him, stopped texting or returning texts, and deleted him from her contacts. You want to see dead? she thought. I’ll show you dead.

That had been just over a month ago now.

All of which has played its part in how she comes to be standing outside her apartment building in nothing but a bathrobe and a pair of foamy slippers, wet hair in freezing hanks stuck to her cheeks, watching the snow blown up in gusts and swirls through the dark, like it has some power to defy gravity or as if she’s entered an alternate world where gravity no longer has any practical application. She’d thought the text was from Avram: Outside here! Where are you. And because she was still apparently that hopeful or hooked on him or because her eyes were that blurred and burned from the citric acid and because she’d deleted all their previous conversation threads along with his contact info, so there was no context for it, or because of residual guilt about her choice to leave him, she didn’t fully register the number. Seattle area code and just a few digits flipped around from Avram’s, a 5 and two 2’s transposed. This, she didn’t notice until later.

Heart racing, she’d texted back, Outside where? coming to find u, and gone out and down the dimly lit hallways, all the way to the front door where she stood a few minutes enjoying how the cool drafts from around the front door soothed her overheated, acid-burned skin – practicing in her mind her, her, she, she, Linda, not-Avram, she, Linda, no dead-names – before peeking around the open door and finally stepping right out for a good full body chill and to see if maybe she was stuck at the end of the drive, and then realizing, too late, as the door clicked shut behind her, that the weight in her bathrobe pocket was her phone only and not her phone and keys together because, of course, she’d left her goddamned keys on the goddamned table upstairs. The transposed phone number is not one she recognizes. Could be anyone. Maybe the red-haired guy from the bar earlier. Sure. Maybe he came back after her shift was done and pried her contact info from the bartender with tips, or found out just enough, possibly only her name, to realize that he knows someone who knows her, put two and two together.

There are no lights on anywhere as far as she can see. Only a dull amber from the one lamppost in the middle of the tenant parking lot down two flights of snow topped stairs where her car is parked, already fully scabbed over in icy snow; it must be on another city circuit or else wired to the same emergency backup generator as the interior halls of the apartment building with their flickering, apocalyptic spotlights shining down from ceiling-mounted brackets every fifty feet or so. She turns and again pounds a hand on the locked metal door. Grabs and pushes down on the lever to open it and pulls back. Nothing. Looks hatefully at the piece of awning flapping against the side of the building and waits for the moment between gusts when it will stop clanging so someone inside might differentiate from it the sound of her frozen fist beating on the door. Pounds and pounds with all her might. The exterior door is always locked, she remembers her step-dad telling her when he helped move her in. A little added security for you. But there’s no intercom. So people come by, you gotta know enough in advance, or just have them call on the cell phone.

She’s tried her step-dad and her mom a few times by now but neither of them is answering. 2:15 in the morning. They’ll be sound asleep. Every night, they put on their CPAP machines and vanish from the earth. She’s seen it and heard it from the guest room down the hall any number of times. Can picture it exactly. She tries again. No answer. You’ve reached the mailbox…

Well, she thinks. Shit. She goes out and down the front steps thinking she’ll break into her car maybe, try to sleep there. But as the snow touches her around the bare ankles, icy at first and then numbing, blown snow and ice stinging against her face and bare calves, she thinks better of this plan. No, instead she’ll head down the two blocks from here to the closest arterial where she hears a snowplow scraping along – that, or the silence is causing the siren song of snowplows everywhere around the city to carry on the wind to her, tricking her ears, because now she doesn’t hear it anymore – anyway, a road. A main road where she’ll more likely encounter someone, anyone. As she walks, she touches open her phone screen and lets her fingers hover momentarily over the keypad, bringing back Avram’s number in her head and trying to key in the digits, but her fingers are too frozen or wet now to work the screen – and anyway, what would she say? Instead she dials back the person who’d texted. Tries to hear through the wind buffeting around her as the ring tones swell in and out of audibility. Looks at the screen again to be sure she actually dialed. “Hello!” she yells. “Hello? Who is this? You sent me a message?” Wrong number. Did he really say that, wrong number? But she can’t make out anything else the person is saying, only the wind, so she stuffs the phone back in her robe pocket, keeps walking, and on third thought ditches her plan to head out to the main road. This is ridiculous. Too far, too cold. Instead she turns back and with the wind behind her now, makes her way around the apartment building toward where she remembers her step-dad once told her he keeps a spare key to the outside storage locker where her bike and skis are already stowed. That’s the plan. If she can get out of the wind and snow for a minute, anywhere at all sheltered, she’ll be able to think clearly. Make another call or two and figure something out. Worst case, dial 9-1-1. This is so completely stupid and embarrassing and ridiculous. Never again! she thinks. Never again will I make such stupid idiotic choices. She imagines in the fury and finality of her thoughts that she might somehow undo all the wrong turns that have gotten her to where she is right now.

And then salvation itself. The lights of her step-dad’s truck tunneling into view from the end of the drive. She waves with her arms. Yells his name. “Drew! Drew!” So he heard her phone calls after all! Or the power went out at their place too and he’s come to check on her, make sure everything’s OK. Or…wait. Is it him? She leans with her hands on her knees a second and straightens up, waving again, shouting. But the lights have swiveled away to illuminate the whitewashed brick of the apartment building and some evergreen shrubs and rhododendrons whipped and battered in the wind, shiny with ice and bright as if the sun were on them. He’s backing up. Turning around. He’s not here for her. There’s the sound of his muffler and the rich red of his brake lights on snow as his backup lights go off and then the tail lights fading to pink as he gears forward and starts pulling away. “Hey!” she yells and begins to run, waving her arms. “Hey! Drew! Stop! Over here!” The brakes light up again and she can almost see him in silhouette behind the glass – the ball cap and the collar of his Carhartt coat pulled up, cigarette cherry illuminating the hollows of his cheeks – and then she knows it’s not him at all. Not her step-dad. Wrong truck, wrong license plate, wrong guy. And she knows too that it doesn’t make any difference who he is so long as he can take her to her mom’s house or anywhere warm, a gas station or convenience store, doesn’t matter, and keeps running after him.

In the days that follow, she’s surprised, though she knows she shouldn’t be, that the one to come to her aid most is Belinda. Every afternoon she’s at Charlie’s apartment with poultices and skin masks, creams and herbal infusions for inflammation, an African stew of root vegetables and Ayurvedic spices she insists will help boost energy to Charlie’s core.

“Honey,” she says, “you’re not the first one to lose her mind over a little tail. You can tell me all about it.” Charlie pictures Avram’s padded gaff and the plasticky, chlorinated cloth of her tailfin (not even hers really) hanging in the locker at work. A little tail, she thinks. The word is so much more accurate and inadequate than Belinda can possibly know, Charlie’s first impulse is to laugh. And then like flip-turning, feet against the wall of the swimming pool, the lock through your feet and calves as you exhale and push off, she gets a kind of confidence and buoyancy she hasn’t felt for long enough she didn’t even realize she’d been missing it. “The main point here is you didn’t freeze to death, right?” Belinda asks. Not the main point at all, Charlie thinks. “So what was his name? Tell.”

“Linda,” she says. She shrugs. “Not a guy.”

They’re on the couch in her step-dad’s apartment when she says this, Charlie with her feet in a tub of hot water and some kind of skin softening blend of salts and chemicals that smells like bad weed and mold. More ensorcellment, she thinks, breathing the fumes. Or maybe it’s an un-ensorcellment. She meets and holds Belinda’s eyes, but of course this information hasn’t fazed her in the least.

“Nice name,” Belinda says, winking. “Two letters off being a really great name. Close but no cigar. Anyhoo, takes all types as I always say. Not that I had you pegged for a lezbo, but that’s OK too.”

In response to which Charlie surprisingly finds herself siding with Avram and their various friends who were neither one thing or another. “I’m not. I’m not anything. It was just the once. For now. I don’t really like putting labels on love…putting love in a binary, if you know what I mean. I don’t think you should do that.” And from here she finds herself making up an entire fake history for her and Linda that is, in its way, not very fake at all. The plans to get married, grow a big garden, raise chickens. Linda’s work at the theater and Charlie’s bookstore job. The marine biology class where they met and the trips together to BC, camping, and the gulf islands – the morning they woke up together for the sunrise on Lopez and swore they’d never be apart for the rest of their lives. She allows herself a little license picturing Avram as Linda, mixing together some of her own and Avram’s better features with a character from a show they both liked – the actress’s eyes and freckles, Charlie’s wide shoulders, Avram’s smile – and gives the composite a way cooler attitude about breaking up than either she or Avram ever had. “We grew up, we grew away from each other,” she concludes. “Nothing all that weird. Just…I wasn’t ready is all.” She rips skin from the ends of her fingers and bites her nails and eats another few spoons of Belinda’s amazing stew.

“To each his own,” Belinda says.

“Or her own.”

“Or her. Exactly.” She pats Charlie on the leg. “You’ll be all right.”

Charlie’s first summer as a mermaid, almost ten years ago now, ended with Belinda organizing a mermaid strike against management for shorter shifts (four hours instead of six), higher pay, and a saline purification system rather than chlorine. Not that the mermaids were part of any organized labor union or even informally allied or affiliated, but the job was just difficult and weird enough that finding replacements for them was next to impossible. If they joined forces they could usually get what they wanted. In this case, the pay raise and shorter hours, and the promise of a saline purification system that never materialized. None of which Charlie had been around to benefit from since she’d had to leave for her first year of college mid-strike, minus her last two weeks of pay. In some way, she supposes she’s never forgiven Belinda for this and also for her whole bullshit mermaid-solidarity-for-life tenacity. You break ranks, she’d threatened Charlie at the time, You swim without us, you’ll never swim here again. We’ll cut your feet off. Now she thinks maybe it isn’t such a bad trait, this solidarity.

“You’ll be all right,” Belinda says again, nodding, and Charlie agrees with her.

“I will,” she says.

The third night after the storm, she’s back at work. A solo, Sunday shift, early so the kids can come – her favorite – plus, no one to split tips with. She tries Belinda’s upside down spinning wave and her spiraling human drill to the bottom of the tank. The first move leaves her with a burning weight of chlorinated water in her sinuses that she has to spend a minute or two snorting and horking out onto the tile beside the tank. The second, she aborts midway, turning it into a lame half-cartwheel and a dead-man flop to the bottom of the tank where she lies just long enough to make the kids get really excited before rising again, smiling and waving and blowing them all kisses. There they all are on the other side of the glass: her crowd, her people, her friends, her fans and family, right where she left them, all so happy to see her decked out in her tailfin and wig! The fake mermaid lives again! She waves and bows and does a somersault before turning to the side and showing them her tattoo as she heads for the surface.

She hasn’t thought much about the actual fact of being saved or any of the details surrounding how it happened. Too embarrassed, she supposes. Too much in the throes of exhaustion or hypothermia to really register it. But when she sees him there at the far side of the barroom, crewcut guy about the same age as her step-dad Drew and driver of a nearly identical F-250, wife in a blue sweatshirt with a decal of a cartoon cat on it beside him, both of them sharing a basket of pretzels and pitcher of pale ale, it all comes back. He looks up to wave and smile and raises his glass in a toast, nudging his wife with an elbow to do likewise, and Charlie remembers: the heat of his truck cab so dense and cottony with cigarette smoke, blower on full, radio playing softly; the percussive rasp of exhaust in his tailpipe, the engine noise and also her own amusement at how her fingers wouldn’t work, too numb to grab onto the door handle or open the door at all, the weird hard weight of her frozen hair around her face and neck, melting under her collar and making her cheeks sting. In the end he’d had to get out, come around, yank the door open, let her in. Some of their conversation, too, she remembers – his bewilderment and concern, the good fortune that he was there at all, took a wrong turn on his way home from a shift plowing, got turned around in the weather, no street lights. Here, have a little coffee. Let’s get you someplace warm. Jesus god you’re soaked. Say you lost your keys? You live here? Let’s figure out what we can do. Where’d you say your folks were at…hey stay with me now! Don’t go to sleep yet. Looks like you got a little touch of the hypothermia. Maybe more than a little touch. Where’d you say again? Drink some more of that coffee. Get you warmed up. Hey, wait, you’re one of them mermaid gals from over the bar! I recognize you now! The one with the sun tattoo. Goddam. How do you like that. Saving a mermaid on a winter night. On the winter solstice! Come on, keep drinking that coffee, OK? Here, use this to cover up. Tell me again? What’s the address? You’re all right there? Stay with me a little longer…and finally dozing off against the window of the truck door, waking at the end of her mom’s driveway what felt like seconds later. All of this comes back to her as she sees him. Water rushes through her tail, binding the fabric against her, and seeps under the elastic of her wig, soothing all those places she knows later will itch like crazy. Whatever is next for her, post-Avram, who can say. Now she is a mermaid. She rolls onto her back and flipper kicks closer, arms upstretched, turns a somersault and waves until they wave back again. Thank you so much, she mouths at him. She flings kisses at the glass. And you! And you! And you!

Gregory Spatz’s short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, New England Review, Kenyon Review, Santa Monica Review, Glimmer Train Stories, Epoch, and in many other publications. His most recent book is a collection of connected stories and novellas What Could Be Saved. He’s the recipient of a Washington State Book Award and a 2012 Literature Fellowship from the NEA. For more info: www.gregoryspatz.com.

Frugality

Mark Halliday

Safe Despair it is that raves –

I who am apt to get tearful about any instance,
fictional or real, of loyal love that defies time
or defies prudent self-interest or defies embarrassment
or the pressure of social convention, I am probably
one sort of person whose visible emotion made Dickinson
narrow her fathoming eyes – Dickinson who knew
that what matters is severely apt to be secret and private.
A noisy despair is not despair, she says,
and she implies that my wet eyes are actually
wet with relief at not living in the heart of crisis;

and I intend to be educated by Emily – and by life – though
not too fast, not too soon.

Mark Halliday teaches at Ohio University. His seventh book of poems, Losers Dream On, appeared in 2018 from the University of Chicago Press.