Issue 37

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.

Other Moons

by Max Halper

Thus it amounts to the same thing
whether one gets drunk alone
or is the ruler of nations.
— Jean-Paul Sartre

I went to rehab with a guy named Mitch who had swastikas tattooed on his hands and neck. This was in Mississippi, about an hour outside Jackson. Mitch was a meth addict and is dead now, as far as I understand. The swastikas scared me at first, but after months of living with him I stopped seeing them. Mitch was just a guy whose life was as fucked as mine. We used to crack each other up. We even cried together once.

According to a 1984 article in The Journal of Social Psychology,^[i] the single strongest determinant of whether one person will see a UFO is that someone they know has seen a UFO and told them about it. I dated a woman years ago who saw UFOs every time she looked up. I always suspected there was something weird going on between her and her brother.

I found a cow skeleton ensnared in barbed wire at the edge of my family’s property when I was a kid. My friend and I collected the bones and stored them in the abandoned doghouse near the garage. I would check on the bones periodically over the next few years to see if anything about them had changed. I found a ball of baby snakes writhing near the doghouse once and took it as instructions to return the bones to where I’d found them, though I never followed through. Sometimes I think that was a terrible mistake. Mostly I don’t think about it at all.

The legend goes that as he lay bedridden in a sanatorium with tuberculosis, unable to eat or drink, every rattling breath an interminable nightmare, Franz Kafka grasped his doctor’s lapel, pleaded for an overdose of morphine, and said: “Kill me, or else you are a murderer.” Thereafter his throat swelled so tightly he could never speak again, and a week later, in the middle of the night, he died from his illness. Outside, the sky was black save the disc of sunlight gathered on the face of the moon.

Sometimes I feel paralyzed by the conviction that life is pointless and nothing matters. Other times I feel paralyzed by an overwhelming love for people and their ideas. Occasionally these two paralyses overlap. I have a hard time being productive.

I worry that I’ve never really gotten to know anyone. The same way a steak is not the cow, words are not the ideas they purport to signify. I feel like this is a good start.

I’ve been on and off anti-depressants my entire adult life. Right now I’m off, and I feel pretty good. But it’s only a matter of time.

In 2009, in the Alps, nearly thirty cows leapt from a cliff to their deaths over the course of three days. Occasionally, an otherwise healthy penguin will turn away from its colony and waddle alone into the dark, thundering cold to die. I’ve heard of dogs that drown themselves after their masters die or abandon them. A captive dolphin once suffocated itself in front of its trainer after years of forced performance. Some people argue that there are natural explanations for these incidents, but I don’t understand how that would make them something different than what they appear to be.

There’s another version in which Kafka is in his childhood bedroom surrounded by his friends and family. The gathering of friends and family recedes back into the gray corners of the room. Kafka is more belligerent in this version: at one point he seizes his sister by her hair and draws her close to his chapped lips and rasps something that only she can hear and that sends her reeling from the room, never to return. Another main difference is that in this version Kafka ultimately starves to death, the tuberculosis having clenched his throat shut, making it impossible for him to swallow food.

Sometimes I listen to pop music on the radio while I’m driving, to pretend that I’m like everyone else. Occasionally I’ll stop and get a candy bar and a soda. I even voted once, in 2008. In AA they say they can always spot a newcomer because he or she is the best dressed person in the room.

The phenomenon of alien abduction has been largely categorized in academia as a conflation and misconstruction of sleep paralysis and childhood sexual abuse.^[ii] I suppose it’s easier to live in a world in which the monsters have come from faraway than it is to live in a world in which the monsters come from down the street, or from down the hall, or from the paludal swales of our own brains. On the other hand, I’ve never seen or heard of anyone doing anything monstrous, or anything that wasn’t abjectly human. If there are monsters, they are entropy and the distance between things.

I’ve spent years cultivating an approach that I call “selective sociopathy.” This allows me to feel what I need to feel and shirk the rest. I know we all do this to some degree. You wouldn’t believe the chain of suffering ignited by putting gas in your car. Or by being born in America. It doesn’t matter how you look at it.

The happiest people I know tend also to be the horniest, and the laziest thinkers. This makes me nervous.

Occasionally I’ll pray for a terrorist attack or a natural disaster to get out of having to do something I don’t want to do. It’s worked a few times.

No one’s ever asked me if I believe in god.

I think I think about Kafka’s death as a piece of writing in and of itself, as if having produced a body of work so grotesquely organic there was no longer a boundary between his language and his bodily operations.

I told Mitch about my Jewish heritage and he didn’t seem to care and he certainly didn’t hate me. He claims he got the swastika tattoos in jail. I asked him once if he’d ever read any Kafka, but I can’t remember his answer. Probably no. I think he would have liked Kafka. They had a similar sense of humor.

I saw a segment of a Japanese prank show where they put a PULL sign on the door of a department store that required pushing, and filmed people as they approached and yanked on this fucking door and yanked and yanked and then gave up and walked away. The whole thing felt like something else. I’m not sure how else to explain what I mean. I think about it all the time.

I used to start drinking in the morning. Towards the end it was not unusual that I would pass out by noon, wake up at four or five, and continue drinking until I passed out again. I used to joke that I was getting two days for the price of one. I also frequently blacked out. I once came out of a blackout at a table in some apartment with four or five men I didn’t know. One of them had a gun in my face. “What do you have to say now?” he asked. I told him I wanted to leave. He allowed me to leave, and I started opening doors, not knowing which one was the exit. Behind one of the doors there were some children on a mattress on the floor doing homework. The men at the table laughed at me. I found my way outside and started walking. I don’t remember getting home, and I can’t remember what any of the men looked like. Nowadays, every time I see a man I don’t recognize, I worry it’s one of the men from the apartment. I wonder what I said to upset him so much. I’ll bet it was pretty funny.

Here’s a joke Mitch told me about a fisherman who, fishing from his boat in a lake, feels a tug on the line and, reeling in the catch, finds an arm on the hook. He sets the arm in the boat’s hull and recasts. Soon after he feels another tug, and finds a second arm, which he sets beside the first. Next comes a leg, and then a second leg, and then a torso, and, finally, a head—all of which he piles in the hull. The parts roll together and fasten to each other, and a tall body sits up and blinks around. Its eyes are black. It opens its mouth, and from the mouth floats a ball, dripping with slime. The ball hovers in the air. The slime drips away to reveal a white orb. The orb thrums. When the fisherman looks into it he sees the entire universe suspended amid a fathomless emptiness, completely alone in the dark. Terrified, he leaps from the boat and swims ashore. He rushes through the woods to the village, caroms up the street, scrambles into his house and collapses against the door. His wife, feeding the baby, looks up. “How was the fishing?” she asks. The fisherman, finally finding his breath, shrugs. “Meh,” he says.

I had a therapist who had a Rothko print on the wall in his office. I’m not sure if the implication was to strive toward the quiet compartmentalization of Rothko’s art, or to strive away from the crass over-simplification of Rothko’s art. I suggested, half joking, that he consider replacing it with one of those inspirational panda posters. As is my experience with most therapists, he was too forgiving of my deflective impulse to philosophize generally about life, and often indulged in that impulse with me so that I rarely if ever spoke about myself. Plus he was very expensive.

Sometimes I’ll do this thing when I see a pretty girl where I’ll imagine starting a conversation and asking her out and her saying yes and so going to dinner and hitting it off and we start dating and we fall in love and we move in together and we get married and we have a kid and name her Lily and things are good and we have another kid and name him Jack or Soren or something and we go on vacation to the Caribbean and then return home and carry on with our lives and over time things start to get boring and we start to fight a bit and it’s tiring and then there’s some infidelity and we get separated but we miss each other so we try again but it’s stressful for the kids and so we get divorced and it’s relatively amicable and she starts dating a friend of mine and I pretend to be fine with it though in truth I’m lonely and the kids are grown up and eventually I meet a woman but she’s much younger than me and me and my ex have a long conversation about how dating one of my grad students is not good for me and I agree and end the inappropriate relationship and focus on my work and the years pass and my ex remarries and moves to the Berkshires and I get sick and die somewhat too young on account of the years of drugs and alcohol and all the smoking and she attends my funeral with her husband, who’s the headmaster of a private school or something, and then they return to the bed and breakfast they’re staying at while in town for the funeral and they have brunch and she basically never thinks about me again unless one of the kids brings me up which is rarely because I was always distant and difficult and they feel freer without me in their lives.

Kafka actually published The Metamorphosis during his lifetime, despite popular misconceptions. Before printing, he was approached by his publishers with some cover design options they’d had drawn up, all of which showed a monstrous insect strewn on a bed. Kafka was aghast, and demanded that under no circumstances should they portray the insect; it was precisely the insect’s ambiguity, the shifting and often contradictory descriptions, that drove the novella’s subtext. To portray the insect would harden its image in readers’ minds, and hobble the profound power of the text to manifest uncertainty. His publishers of course nodded and rolled their eyes, then proceeded to print the book with an insect on its cover. I prefer the version where Kafka dies in his bedroom. This feels both less likely and yet more organic.

The world rarely moves for me the way I want it to. I understand this is just THE world and not MY world and that some people feel this stuckness—feel everything I feel—even more profoundly than I do. This does not make it easier. In fact it makes me jealous, which makes it worse.

One of my first sponsors taught me about “radical empathy” as a strategy through which to alleviate some of the “chronic uniqueness” that addicts tend to suffer from. It turns out it has other applications, especially insofar as stoking creativity. If you don’t feel bad for everyone, then you can’t be a good artist. I like to start building all my characters from the same critical conjecture that some day they are going to shit their pants and die, just like everybody else. And that no one asked to be born as far as I know.

It’s not unusual in cattle mutilation cases to find a notable absence of footprints within the proximity of the carcass—including even those of the mutilated animal itself. Another common factor is the absence of blood, as well as certain organs including genitals and rectum. The predominant explanation for cattle mutilation—which has been reported on six continents—is natural predation. Some believe it is the work of cults or lone psychopaths. Of course there is the extraterrestrial hypothesis. I’ll also note that I recognize there’s a stark incongruence between “radical empathy” and “selective sociopathy,” and while both are personal tenets both are also outclassed by my central tenet: ambivalence.

It’s weird that the word “fiction” is the genesis for the word “nonfiction” whereas “nonfiction” refers to the truth and “fiction” to a lie. It feels like it should be the other way around. Though there is something more living about fiction, something less rigid and more full of blood. Something that needs to eat and drink to survive. Something that dies in different ways. In regards to Kafka, Susan Sontag wrote that “…the greatest art seems secreted, not constructed.”^[iii] It’s bizarre to me that he didn’t kill himself.

There are lengthy memory gaps from my early twenties, due to the drinking. I’ve patched these in as best I can with a combination of other peoples’ testimonies and a little imagination. When I was in the psych ward from DTs after trying to cut my own throat with a steak knife, hallucinating gruesome visions of gore and fiery cataclysm, I became convinced that I had succeeded, that I was dead, and that I was in hell. This despite my carefully curated atheism. Even now with years of sobriety and less suicidal ideation I still sometimes wonder.

They say that in every carton of milk is the milk from over a thousand cows. This is the world. The only people who say they’re glad they botched their suicides are the ones around to talk about it. I enjoy a splash of milk in my coffee, and a glass of milk with my cookies. I’ll bet there’s someone alive right now who will live forever.

I had a dream in which Mitch led me into the woods off the shoulder of a cracked road. There was sky then no sky and damp outcrops pullulating with what I suspect was poison ivy and through which Mitch led me directly and hands of raggy fungus upgroping from the plinths of the oaks and beeches and pines and sinews of web draped expressly at face-level and too-authentic birdsong and Mitch’s deodorant in his path which hemmed west and down along a swollen gulch and a trellis of rotting logs and a cape of ferns thrumming in occasional stains of sunlight. Something all very sad about it. I was short of breath and didn’t own the right shoes, dusting at my mouth and ears and slipping up a knurl in the ground on which Mitch stopped and gestured down at the bed of a swale enclosed in corridors of rigid white birches, everything crackling and dripping as I grinded a heel in the balding grass of the knurl and tried to understand what it was he wanted me to see.

^[i] Zimmer, Troy A. “Social Psychological Correlates of Possible UFO Sightings.” The Journal of Social Psychology, 123(2), 199-206, 1984.

^[ii] McNally, Richard J. and Susan A. Clancy. “Sleep Paralysis, Sexual Abuse, and Space Alien Abduction,” Transcultural Psychiatry, Harvard University Press, 2005.

^[iii] Sontag, Susan. “On Style.” Against Interpretation and Other Essays, Picador, 1966.

Max Halper’s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in The Southampton Review, North Dakota Quarterly and elsewhere. He lives in upstate New York.