Category: Issue 40

Spaghettification

Ali Raz

Spaghettification is a scientific word. It refers to the vertical stretching and horizontal compression of objects into long thin shapes (i.e. spaghetti) in a very strong non-homogeneous gravitational field. A black hole would generate such a field, for instance—and not much else. This means that the phenomenon is purely imaginary. It is a hypothetical. Even the name suggests this.

            In 2018, researchers at the University of Turku claimed to have witnessed spaghettification. They wrote a paper about it. In this paper, they discussed having ‘seen,’ via high-frequency radio waves, the debris of a shattered star. The star had been shattered upon contact with the gravitational field of a black hole. The star had been spaghettified.

            In support of this, the researchers offered printed sheets of readings from their radio receivers.

            A character is spaghettified in High Life. It happens towards the end. After she is harvested, impregnated, soaked in breast milk, nearly raped, slapped around, and called an insulting name—she offs herself by leaping into a black hole. She doesn’t leap exactly. What she does is, she hijacks a space craft (a small craft which one drives like a go-kart). She cracks the pilot over the head with a spade (the pilot’s brains splay out like intestines) and then makes away with the go-kart spaceship. At first she’s laughing. After all, she is where no one else had been before—an explorer, an adventurer. Then her face begins to change. The mouth is pulled to one side. The cheek to another. She makes grunting noises, like one exposed to great tearing pressure. Then her head explodes.

            In the spaceship, they ate soft vegetable soups.

            What is space? By rights, there are times when I doubt that it exists.

            One gets lonely all alone. One gets lonelier than lymph, a vital fluid no one talks about.

            I had been talking to my grandmother. Our conversation was enabled by globe-spanning satellite networks and regimes of power decades (and more) in the making.

            Consider a song by Daft Punk. Put on their album RAM.

            A violent storm begins, full of lightning and wind.

            The visualizations of space in High Life are animated effects. Colored swirls and strobing lights stand in for things that can’t be said. These are cheap effects. They don’t connote (except to designate the unsaid). I much prefer an earlier move. There is a moment, very early in the film, when a character (a man named Monte, whom the others call a monk) drops a spanner from his perch atop the spaceship. He had been performing mechanical repairs, tightening lug nuts and such. Then he knocks, by mistake, a spanner off the side of the ship. He begins to lunge after it—then stops. The spanner falls an infinite fall. Slowly and steady, at one even rate, it falls into the unrelieved black. There is no depth to its fall. No background against which to sense it. It becomes, to the poor stricken character and also to us, as flat as a cardboard cutout, dimensionless as a video game. It is an effect of the mind to derealize what it can’t understand. And it can’t understand an object falling outside of time.

            Sensations of scale.

            The near-vertigo of scale.

            A storm in space would be an invisible, battering, particulate wind.

            I would eat an apple in it.

            Drop the core down your rotten throat.

            The girl I loved would not be here. She would not be anywhere at all.

            Not in the gaps of each synapse, virulent and spreading, more motile than bacterial fins.

            There are some people—some actors—who are, how should we say this, soaked in such charisma—such personal force—their aura is so reaching and strong—that the hand simply itches to photograph them. Even the camera wants it. The camera itself wants to film them.

            Buster Keaton for instance, have you seen him? Getting repeatedly hit on the head with the spinning handle of a well. He doesn’t look like much. He looks like another grain of sand from the desert behind him.

            Or Robin Williams. He is a better example. The flickering of that fluid, vital face.

            High Life is less frightening than Solaris and less infinite. In its center is a specter of sex; this specter inaugurates, inside the film, another film.

            The split of a schizo, hapless structure.

            Or the passage, unmarked, of fear between my breath.

            My teeth. Your hands.

            My teeth, carious. My hands, removed by your sparkling blade.

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Ali Raz is co-author, with Vi Khi Nao, of Human Tetris (2020, 11:11 Press), a kooky collection of sex ads. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the LA Review of Books, The Believer, 3:AM Magazine, Tupelo Quarterly, Firmament, and elsewhere. Her first novella Alien comes out in Spring 2022 from 11:11 Press.

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*image source: Krishnavedala via Wikipedia/CC

The Borders of Sleep

John Robinson

I have come to the borders of sleep
The unfathomable deep
Forest where all must lose
Their way, however straight
Or winding, soon or late;
They cannot choose.
“Lights Out”
— Edward Thomas

Owen Wolcott hanged himself on Ash Wednesday. His attempt at suicide, however, was thwarted when a young female model he knew unexpectedly arrived and cut him down. He was just thirty seconds from death. Wolcott was surprised not by the fact of this botched operation (everything he had attempted since coming to Paris a year ago fell short of the mark), but by the fact that the model, a southpaw, was able to cut the cord. After all, the rope was thick, and in the past he had witnessed her struggle to cut hard cheese. Any taxing exertion seemed beyond her strength, let alone rescuing a man weighing one hundred and eighty-five pounds hanging in a stairwell. As he lay barely conscious in her arms, he was surprised to see, in his other worldly state, tears in her eyes.

            He knew that for the rest of his life, he would remember this holy day for his failed suicide. Until then, his only memory of the day was from church: throwing excess ashes off his forehead and onto his childhood friend, Jimmy Roy—who instantly retaliated—while their grammar school nuns had their backs turned.

            The year of his suicide attempt was 1925. The place was Montparnasse, Paris.

            Though his building was filled with artists, painters mostly, there were a few rooms rented by models who were sometimes employed by the artists for nude portraits. Owen Wolcott, the only writer on the premises, rented a small atelier on the top floor.

            He was also the only renter who hadn’t sold anything he had created. So many failed artists in his district had ended their lives since the start of the century, and they had become, after a time, a humiliating cliché. But worse than those were the ones who failed at both the execution of their art and themselves. They achieved a kind of ignominy that created a permanent spiritual banishment from the neighborhood, if not the city itself. After all, what was the point of living in Paris if you were not present for a serious purpose—and what was more serious in this city than the creation of art? If not a successful artist, then at the very least you could aspire to become an unsuccessful dead one. Now Owen Wolcott belonged to the ignominious group. And for as long as he decided to remain alive, he needed the model who saved his life, Sandrine Aubert, to keep his secret.

            If things didn’t go well he would try again. He knew that. If he returned to his writing and things continued to go awry, he knew he would try again. He had the added incentive of selective memory: he only recalled how dying felt during the act, not the painful and frightening hours before his action. What he remembered was the incredible feeling of euphoria and liberation that suffused every second of the hanging. It was as if he had been drugged. Post-suicide, he told no one about that feeling. He kept that knowledge a secret, a kind of insurance policy in case he wanted to try again. He knew one thing: if he had to exit the world, that was how he wanted to feel in his final moments.

            In World War I, he drove Red Cross ambulances in France. A few years after the end of the war, he left America and returned to Paris seeking artistic freedom and literary fame. He wanted to write the definitive novel on the war, a book so profound that its wisdom would prevent future wars. He believed only this towering accomplishment would make his life worthy, and he would be remembered in perpetuity as a literary master. By this singular achievement, he believed, he would cheat death. But more importantly, he would settle the score on all those, including his father, who had sold him short or abandoned him.

            Since he arrived in Paris, his worth would be determined by the anticipated longevity of his creations, and he knew that could only occur if his writing were published in important places. And since his work wasn’t commercial enough to be published in prominent magazines (called the “glossies”) back in the States, he knew his best chance lay with the erudite literary journals, called “small magazines.” These were magazines that had small audiences and paid very little to their contributors, but they had considerable cachet in the literary world. But since he arrived in Paris in 1924 and submitted his work to the important places of the era—The Transatlantic Review, This Quarter, and The Little Review—he had no success. He couldn’t even get the smallest of the small magazines to publish his work.

            Owen Wolcott had issues involving his worth. When he was barely seven years old, his father threw him out of their home in Kansas City, Missouri, and placed him in an orphanage. Because of this, he spent the rest of his life seeking ways to obtain acceptance and self-respect. To achieve that, he believed he needed to leave his mark on the world, and the only thing in his young life that seemed possible to obtain such a lofty goal was writing. In high school, he had shown some talent. English was the only class in which he received a grade higher than a “C.” It was absurd to think that, on so little evidence to support it, he had chosen to launch a literary career in post-war Paris, but he saw there was no other way.

            He had spent some time in Paris. He was granted short leaves from the battlefields where he drove ambulances not far from the outskirts of the city. There was nowhere else to go, but he liked going there. He liked the cafés and the artists he had seen there; they represented a way of life that seemed both respectable and compatible to him. There was nothing like it in his homeland. Once the war was over and he returned to America, he spent his time in Kansas City taking tedious and degrading jobs in order to save enough money for his new life abroad. He tried writing during this time but was too exhausted at day’s end to advance his cause. He was patient, however. As soon as it was financially feasible, he traded Kansas City for Paris.

            The war unsettled him. He had witnessed some of the most gruesome images of dying, death, and destruction he would ever see or imagine. Because those images lodged in his head, he often had difficulty sleeping nights, but it wasn’t all for naught. He believed inside him was matchless material for a powerful novel on The Great War. He just had to devise how to organize all the ideas he conceived and the horrific scenes he had witnessed into a coherent and compelling drama. Since composing a big war novel seemed too large to navigate from the start, he stuck to writing short stories that would later become, he believed, chapters in his “novel-in-progress.” To stay alive in Paris, he would sell the stories and live off money he received from magazines.

            But the lack of interest in his stories sent him into despair. The war left him with disturbing images, and no financial gain. During the winter of 1925-26, as the rejection letters mounted on his desk, he ran out of rent money and was soon starving. He realized his plan had failed, and his father had been right all along about him. Quickly things became too painful to continue. He awoke one frigid Paris day from troubled sleep and decided to end his life.

            Six months after his bungled suicide, Wolcott gave a reading along with four other American expatriate fiction writers at Shakespeare & Company Bookstore. Like his fellow readers, he was unknown to the Left Bank literary scene. All, except himself, belonged to the Dadaist Movement, but in order to arrange a reading in such an esteemed place, he decided to lie and claim he was a recent but impassioned convert. All was not fraudulent. In the days before his reading, he attempted to create a style that seemed in concert with their philosophy. Or at least what he understood of it. He attempted to borrow the use of repetitions found in the work of two non-Dadaists: Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway. To not sound too beholden to their stylistic eccentricities, he took the repetitions to even more absurd heights: at the start of his reading, a paragraph would begin and end with the same sentence, but as the story progressed, so did the repetitions. Suddenly, the first and last two sentences of the next paragraph were identical, and this style overran the composition, continuing until entire paragraphs became nothing more than one long repetition of similar sounds.

            This bizarre scheme might have had disastrous consequences had it not been for one thing—the way Wolcott read his story. Never one to volunteer to read aloud in school or in the public square, he skipped every opportunity to speak behind a podium. Reading audibly was painful to him. His voice sounded strange, and he felt ridiculous. In the past, he tried to get off the stage by accelerating his performance, but if he read too quickly, he stammered. That night he couldn’t abandon his reading. He was too desperate.

            The reading at Shakespeare & Company changed everything. This time he tried a new approach: he read very, very slowly, trying to avoid stammering. But this new style of speaking made him overemphasize beginnings and endings of each sentence. His weakness became his strength. At first, there was a great silence in the room. The audience wasn’t bored; it was transfixed. They misinterpreted the original intention of every sentence, believing he was satirizing the characters—the men in power during the war—especially their antiquated, solipsistic thinking and behavior. Suddenly, someone broke into laughter. It slowly spread. The laughter would begin in small spurts, and then spread across the room in reverberative surges. If Dada was created to mock the status quo, then the movement had found its perfect representative in Owen Wolcott. After that night, readings featuring him were booked and sold out everywhere in the Paris. From that night onward, he became a serious literary figure in Montparnasse, and his reputation soon spread to the city’s other arrondissements.

            In the six months after his suicide attempt and his breakthrough moment at Shakespeare & Company, Wolcott lived with the woman who rescued him, Sandrine Aubert. She rented a two-room flat in the same building as Wolcott, and invited him to stay with her until he was healed and had found employment.

            He was instantly lucky on the second condition: a painter in the building knew a local restaurant owner who needed kitchen help—mostly dish washing—and Wolcott accepted the job immediately.

            The work was good therapy. At first, he worked long hours. It was what he wanted. He needed a mindless task to occupy his recovery time. And after a few weeks of uninterrupted and arduous labor, he got reduced hours. He used the extra time to start writing again. He took his sketch notebook to the local park and wrote. He started with poetry but soon switched back to prose. He also started drinking for the first time since the war. He began with wine, then switched to hard liquor.

            Although his writing wasn’t much better than what he had created before his crack-up, it felt good to be writing again. After a time, when the weather got colder, he started writing indoors at cafés. At first, in public, he wore ascots and scarves to cover his sore, bruised neck. He let his uncombed and disheveled hair grow down to his shoulders. Because of this new look he soon was known as “Medusa” by those who frequented the same café society. He took no offense at the sobriquet; rather, he saw it as part of the healing process. Slowly, he was merging into a new self, one without the self-doubts and cynicism of the past.

            It was during this time that Sandrine and Wolcott became lovers. They decided to make their living circumstances permanent.

            Even though Wolcott had finally broken through as a serious talent, he had no major publishing accomplishments to his credit. In the months following his famous reading at Shakespeare & Company, he had gotten some of his stories and poems published in minor Dadaist and avant-garde Left Bank magazines, but still none of the important magazines and periodicals of the day either solicited or accepted work from him. Those destinations built careers. Earlier this reality would have undone him, but because his initial entry into the literary world had been launched by a misunderstanding, he believed he didn’t deserve instant fame or fortune for his writing. It was all about luck. After the reading, he had gotten more invitations to read at other smaller venues around the city, and editors of magazines in France and the US slowly began to request work from him. Though the journals weren’t the most celebrated in the literary world, places that had earlier passed on his writing now gave him space on their pages.

            He adapted to his new situation. He intentionally created stories with a satiric edge. What was once melodramatic writing was now tinged with irony and humor. What he was reporting about the war contained neither gravitas nor revelation. Instead, he was recording on paper an attitude, an acerbic style at loggerheads with the reality he knew was true. He was violating the very thing he had witnessed and thereby cheapening his experience. Though his readings drew large standing-room-only crowds, he felt not like a serious witness of his time, but as an entertainer mocking anything that resembled the status quo or the quotidian. His “style” was much mentioned in articles and reviews of his work, even if he was uncertain of what his style was. Whatever his reservations, he knew his new style was firmly ensconced in the right place and time: the 1920s. The decade of style. The generation called “lost” hadn’t a clue about the circumstances that led to a world war, nor any remedies against its return. Undaunted by that deficiency, they proceeded to create art as if it didn’t matter. Style was all.

            Wolcott knew that, like the others of his generation, he wasn’t in possession of any real solutions to the violent nature of his species. Though he was alive when it happened, he had no idea of the causes—and certainly had no remedies. Therefore, though he internally denied it to himself, he knew that he had nothing to say. He was like the Dadaists who applauded him: full of mockery for the conventional, but bereft of solutions. If another world war was on the way—and Wolcott believed it was—there was nothing to do but mock the purveyors of the conventional beliefs on ethnicity, class, and race—who were dragging the world once again into massive conflict. His Grand Guignol view of civilization prevented him from seeing anything but inevitable cataclysm. So why attempt to interrupt the inevitable?

            One of the most important sirens that attracted Wolcott to his chosen profession was the belief, held by some in his field, that a writing career was the best way to cheat death. Long after one’s corporeal presence had vacated the earth’s surface—the belief went—a writer would be remembered for his thoughts expressed by the printed words he carefully composed in books and periodicals. Taken as an article of faith, the belief was that—even if civilization should fall—somehow people would continue to read and to cherish his writing.

            Wolcott had a vision of a catastrophic future where most—if not all—of civilization had been destroyed but not all hope lost. Once mighty buildings toppled by angry bombs would still retain, beneath their hard and broken surfaces, the magical stuff needed to restart an enlightened society. In his vision, lying beneath the rubble were some of the books he had composed, and once retrieved and read, a new age of enlightenment would be underway. The courageous reader who discovered them got not only a glimpse of the tempestuous time in which the author lived, but was also vouchsafed the boundless possibilities of the human mind. Revealed to the New Reader were the most noble attributes—despite past epochal failures—of the poor monkey race in which he once celebrated and belonged. His work would achieve a kind of timelessness, and eventually liberate millions yet unborn who were not just beneficiaries of a wrecked planet, but of a new optimism.

            The problem with this flattering scenario, lay in the quality of what his pen had left behind. As the current hero of an eccentric movement, he knew his time was already slipping away. After all, what was the relevance and sustainability of an artistic movement whose worship of weirdness and anomie was at its core? As crowds packed cafés and bookstores each week to hear another audacious and provocative reading from his work, he couldn’t help think how ephemeral it all was. In a short time, he would be discovered as the fraud he knew he was all along, and nobody was going to believe his work was destined for eternal grace or applause. Though his writing was now selling briskly in Paris, he knew he was no more than a brief Left Bank fancy. He was not someone whose work would last much beyond the grave, if at all. His moment on stage would be brief and all he possessed.

            And if he were to die the next day, at the height of his fame, how long and how intense would be the memory of his achievement? Would it last till the end of the decade? The end of the year? Or the end of the day? Certainly, it wouldn’t last a century or more and at least a century was needed to clearly qualify as monumental as “cheating death.” Only two writers in Paris in the current year seemed destined for that distinction: Marcel Proust and James Joyce. In a few years, maybe others would emerge, such as the new guy from America, Hemingway. But the writers who were destined to achieve immortality were few, and if their work was the standard for legendary status, then it was not a realistic goal for anyone attempting to attain timelessness in the creation of art. .

            Though filled again with doubt, he continued to devote all his energy to writing, which he believed was his purpose for living in Paris. Once success finally came, he should have been happy, but he was not. Sandrine saw the change and was waiting for him at home when he returned from drinking at Café de la Rotonde.

             “You know,” he began, with slightly slurred speech, “I think I finally saw Hemingway today.”

             “Really,“ Sandrine said.

             “Yes,” he said. “He was crossing the street and looked like he was coming toward my table, but then got distracted by some drunks across the street at the Dôme.”

             “Really.”

             “Yeah,” Wolcott said. “He got dragged over to their table. It was quite a scene. Too bad. I was going to introduce myself. Strike up a friendship. Maybe share writing.”

             “I’m glad you did not,” she told him. “It would have made you unhappy.”

             Wolcott felt his face flush.

             “Why unhappy?” he asked. “My writing has gotten attention. I can pay the rent.”

             “But you don’t believe in what you are doing,” she said, looking straight at him.

             “What has made you popular has no meaning. It has made you sad.”

             “OK,” he said. “What am I supposed to be doing to get this so-called meaning?”

             Sandrine was prepared for more than this question. Again, for the third time, she came to his rescue. She arranged a job for him with a friend of her Parisian family. Where once he drove ambulances to the trenches on the outskirts of Paris, he would now drive abandoned camions filled with refugees, survivors from the last war, mostly children, to country houses on large estates converted into orphanages. It was believed the outdoors would be healthy for them, and Sandrine thought it was also the perfect job for Wolcott. She believed he needed to leave the Left Bank literary scene while he could still walk away.

            He also needed to stop drinking, and she thought the fresh countryside air might be helpful.

            When the children arrived at the train station they all looked the same, though many came from divergent European countries and wore different clothes. Wolcott instantly recognized the fear and exhaustion in their eyes. Ranging in age from seven to twelve, they looked suspiciously at the adults who suddenly had dominion over them as if some new horror would, at any moment, spring forth and terrorize them again. Their clothes and bodies were dirty, and most hadn’t eaten in a spell.

            Wolcott, as a former childhood occupant of an orphanage, instantly identified with the passengers in his truck. He had felt the same fear of abandonment and lack of worth. So much so that he did more than just transport starving and homeless children to their new homes; he made subsequent inquiries about their health—mental and physical—making sure that they were properly bathed, fed, and groomed in their new environment.

            Existence took place in that narrow space between life and death, a place one poet of the time called “the borders of sleep.”

            And what finally mattered on the borders of sleep was not how long you were remembered but why, in this short life, you were recalled at all. For almost all who existed, it was the memories of simple kindnesses that lasted as long as consciousness lasted. That was cheating death. Those memories had a greater staying power than any book, unless that book reminded its readers of those who had been kind to them. And, by extension, cherished them. Without a memory of a cherished life, all literature was empty and sterile and meaningless, the kind of stuff that Wolcott had been creating with great success for others’ shallow amusement.

            When he tried to take his own life, he now saw, it was because he believed he didn’t matter enough to be held dear by anyone, and he would rather enter that deep forest of oblivion than live with that.

            After leaving the countryside, he returned to Paris and stopped at the Rotonde for a drink. When he was done, he stood at the corner of Boulevards Raspail and Montparnasse, the very center of the artistic cafés of the Latin Quarter where he spent time writing like his life depended on it, and finally admitted to himself, for the first time, that he hated writing. Ever since the war ended, he had wanted to stop, but since he had no other options, he continued down a painful—even with his brief successes as a minor celebrity—journey toward oblivion. Now he knew how, and with whom, he wanted to spend his life.

            He would go home to Sandrine and tell her the news.

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John Robinson is a novelist, playwright, essayist, memoirist, and short story writer, who lives in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. His novels include January’s Dream and Legends of the Lost, and his work has appeared in Ploughshares, Sewanee Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, Green Mountains Review, Cimarron Review, Tampa Review, and epiphany, and has been translated into thirty-two languages. He has contributed political commentary, created award-winning drama, appeared in various anthologies, and written and lived in three countries: Scotland, Spain, and the United States. 

Fiddler’s Green

Dennis McFadden

Richie phoned on Saturday night, needing money, needing food, needing his guitar strings and allergy meds, wondering if Cathy could drive them up to the camp tomorrow. The camp, if you could call it that, was off a backwoods road deep in the Adirondacks—Richie’d had to drive twenty-one miles to the nearest town to call.

            “Why don’t you come down and get them yourself?”

            “I don’t want to take the chance,” he said, the words edged with a tiny, tell-tale slur.

            “What chance? Are you all right?”

            “Sure. Fine. I just need to keep a low profile for a while.”

            “Why? What’s going on?”

            “Life. Life’s going on. Can you bring up my stuff?”

            “I’m worried about you. How much have you been drinking?”

            “Oh, yeah—could you bring me up a bottle of vodka too? Maybe two?”

            “Richie, you have to get your act together. You can’t keep this up.”

            “I’m only drinking for inspiration. I’m writing songs. Me and Doggy.”

            “You’re pickling your brain.”

            “Want to hear one? It’s dedicated to you—The Lie Detector Smoke Detector Blues.”

            Three weeks ago, on her only visit after he’d gone up to the camp, she’d brought him a smoke detector. The place was half trailer, half shack, wholly dilapidated, buried deep in the mountains—Fiddler’s Green, their father had christened it. He’d had grand plans for the place, but, like all his plans, they’d fallen through. Richie was puzzled when he saw the smoke detector. “What’s this for?” he said, grinning, holding it up as though it were a box of tampons.

            “You can never be too safe,” Cathy said.

            Richie laughed. Doggy walked over to Richie’s guitar on the ground beside a washed-out yellow lawn chair, and strummed it with his nose. “Good Doggy,” he said. “Doggy wants to join the band.”

            Three weeks later, he sang, sort of, into the phone: “Been detected and inspected / Been neglected all night long / Been erected and infected / I been working on this song…”

            “Still needs some work,” Cathy said.

            “That’s ’cause I don’t have my guitar strings. Gotta have my guitar strings.”

            “I don’t know about tomorrow. Dillard and I are supposed to go to a chili cook-off. Over in Greenwich.”

            “You and Dillard? You’re going out with him?”

            “Yes. I told you that already.”

            “You did?” Richie said. “I don’t remember. I must have been drunk.”

            “What are the odds?” Cathy said.

            “Dillard’s a funny dude,” Richie said, still slurring. “Stay away from him.”

            “Stay away from him? Why? I thought he was a funny dude.”

            “I don’t trust him is all.”

            “Really. Who do you trust? Do you trust anybody?

            “No.”

            “How about me?”

            A laugh, of sorts. “Sometimes I’m not so sure.”

            Cathy was no psychologist, but if it looked like paranoia, smelled like paranoia, and quacked like paranoia, she suspected that’s what it was. She was worried. Very worried, and yet her first inclination, for a change, was not to drop everything and rush to him—up until now, it might well have been. Why? She liked to think her ex-husband’s, Philip’s, warnings over the years had finally sunk in—the misgivings, for that matter, of her sisters and parents, of family and friends, of just about everybody else, that she was only enabling Richie, not helping him, and that as long as she did, her big brother would never grow up.

            What she didn’t like to think was that it was because she’d been so much looking forward to going to the chili cook-off with Dillard.

            Despite the chili. She hated chili.

Two months earlier, before he went up to camp, Richie had introduced her—reintroduced her—to Dillard. Dillard and Richie had been friends before Richie’d been drafted, and afterwards too, until they lost touch. Dillard had sated a travel lust, living for a while near Boston, then Denver, substitute-teaching mostly (as he’d explained it to Cathy), whatever it took to get by, till he’d landed back home to undertake other adventures. Many of which seemed to involve partying with Richie, a long-standing tradition. Dillard had been there the night Richie’d come home from Viet Nam, they told her. In fact, Dillard insisted, Cathy had knocked over his beer that night. A Utica Club, the last Utica Club, and he’d never quite been able to forgive her.

            She remembered the spilt beer, though not Dillard specifically. Just a host of grown-up, partying people. When he’d come home, Cathy was only eight, and during the tumult of the celebration, she accidentally kicked over a beer, a clearly unforgiveable sin. She began to cry. Richie picked her up, held her on his lap. “It’s only a beer,” he said, rocking her, “just somebody’s stupid beer,” and he laughed and hugged her, aware that she was crying not only because of the stupid beer, but because her big brother was home at last from the war. For much of the party she stayed there, safe in his lap, the center of attention with Richie, her big brother, drunk on Heineken, high on pot, everybody’s hero. Cathy just as drunk, on joy.

            Now, twenty-five years later, she couldn’t remember the last time she’d been drunk on joy. Twenty-five years later, Richie had somehow become her little brother, even though he was still twelve years older, still drunk on Heineken and high on pot (when he wasn’t drunk and high on other, more formidable substances), still her hero. Not so much anyone else’s. When Philip had asked her why she kept bailing him out, kept letting him crash on their couch, kept lending him money he never repaid, she looked at him as though he had socks on his ears. “He’s my brother,” she said.

            This was when Philip pointed out that Richie was also Phyllis’s brother, and Mary’s brother, and the son of their parents, yet none of them could be seen to be standing by their black sheep with such stubbornness. He would bring up the two interventions, involving the whole family, that had failed, and after which the others had essentially thrown up their hands. Cathy simply shrugged. “He’s my brother,” she said again. She couldn’t explain to Philip how or why everybody else was wrong. She couldn’t explain to him that the bond that had taken root the night Richie had come home was inseverable, that there was another kind of love which she could only conclude that Philip and the others knew nothing about.

Every Sunday, Philip picked up the boys, spent the day with them. Cathy was fretting in the breakfast nook with her coffee, fussing with the fringe on the placemats, thinking about Richie, about meeting Dillard later and the chili cook-off, when she heard Philip drive up. The boys were still getting ready. She called up, then went out to the top of the sloping driveway. The air was damp, the sky overcast and threatening. Last summer, just after he’d left her, Philip had bought a Mustang convertible. Cathy knew how he hated to drive it anytime in summer with the top up—sure enough, it was down. Philip stood beside his sky-blue Mustang, tall and narrow-shouldered, light eyes beneath heavy eyebrows, looking more like a professor than the first assistant chef at The Ginger Tree Restaurant. When his smile went away—as it did when he looked up at the glowering sky over Londonderry Circle—it looked as though his mouth was melting into his neat brown beard. “Damn,” he said. “We’d better get this top back up.”

             We? Then Cathy saw the woman in the passenger seat.

            “Cathy,” Philip said, “do you know Heather?”

            “I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure,” Cathy said. Philip glanced a warning at her. Heather, sleek and smooth with a grim little smile, got out of the car and nodded at Cathy, sunglasses despite the gloom, short blue sundress, lovely dark hair like the hair of a college track star. Cathy found herself smoothing her skirt over her thighs. She was wearing a skirt Philip had given her a few years before, a clunky pleated skirt, olive with a floral pattern, and a plain white blouse: a uniform, a girl scout uniform. She felt like a girl scout, a plain, dull, pudgy girl scout in a silly, bland uniform.

            The boys came out with their golf clubs as the first raindrops began to fall, looked at the sky, stood beside their mother under the garage overhang and rested their clubs on the blacktop with a sigh—all very much in unison. Scotty was wearing his New York Mets jersey, Josh his Chicago Bulls.

            The rain fell harder. Philip and Heather secured the top and scurried up the drive to stand under the overhang with Cathy and the boys.

            “Not so sure you’ll be needing those,” said Philip, nodding toward the clubs.

            “Poop,” Josh said.

            “Josh,” said Cathy, scolding, a habit. She was on auto-pilot. Philip had never brought a girlfriend around before. From under the overhang, they watched the raindrops pelt the driveway, staring glumly at the rain.

            “Okay, here’s the plan,” Philip said. “We’ll head up to the Adirondack Museum. We’ll put the clubs in the trunk in case it dries up.”

            Josh said, “Daddy and Heather are roommates now.”

            “We are not!” said Philip, as Heather tossed her head and rolled her eyes, smile a bit tighter. “What made you think that?” she said, ruffling Josh’s hair.

            “I don’t know,” Josh said, clamming up.

            “You dork,” Scotty said to his little brother.

            Cathy said, “If you’re going up that way, do you mind dropping some stuff off to Richie? He called last night. He needs his allergy meds, his—”

            “No,” Philip said, sounding like whoa! “We’ve got a busy day ahead of us.” Then, “He’s still up there? I can’t believe he’s still up there.”

            “Neither can I,” Cathy said. “It’s been over a month. Him and Doggy.”

            “I thought that place was uninhabitable. What’s he doing up there?”

            Cathy sighed. “I don’t know. ‘Keeping a low profile.’”

            She didn’t mention paranoia. Philip didn’t need to know—nor did the boys. She was afraid the drinking and drugs had finally caught up to her big brother. He was in hiding, and her best guess was that all he was hiding from was his own demons and delusions. It was finally overtaking him, poor, goofy, faithful Richie.

            “Whatever,” Philip said, shrugging his narrow shoulders. “Ready, boys?”

            They moved quickly through the rain, stowing the clubs in the trunk, clambering into the car. Cathy stood in a trance, watching them back away. The driveway, broad and bowed, sloped down to the street, and she suddenly had the odd notion it was a tongue. She was standing watching a sky-blue Mustang roll down through the raindrops and drip off her house’s tongue, as though her house were a mouth-breather, a drooler. How could she live in such a stupid house? Her house seemed incredibly stupid, just as stupid as her plain white blouse and olive skirt.

            She couldn’t wait to see Dillard. With Dillard she was witty and wise, attractive and fun. It was obvious from the way he looked at her: He saw her as his Heather.

She quickly shed her girl scout uniform. She didn’t hang them back up, neither the olive skirt nor the dull white blouse. Wearing only her underwear, she carried them downstairs to throw in the garbage. She hovered for an instant over the garbage can, reluctant to commit, for there were coffee grounds in it, and milk-sodden Cheerios, and there would be no turning back, no changing her mind, as soon as she dropped them in. Of course she didn’t care. She’d certainly never wear them again. To drop or not to drop? Standing in her underwear in the kitchen, clothes in hand, an odd sensation crept up from her ankles to her thighs. Once she and Philip had made love on the kitchen floor, home from dinner and a movie, some sexy movie involving adultery and plenty of it, the sitter just gone, Scotty asleep upstairs in his crib. They’d done it in a frenzy, just over there, where a Cheerio had fallen on the floor, one lonely, stupid Cheerio. There was a fly buzzing around the garbage can, and the kitchen was dark and gloomy.

            She carried her clothes back upstairs, throwing them onto the chair in the bedroom. Maybe give them to Good Will. She was, after all, a sensible woman. In the mirror, she evaded her eyes, her forehead too wide and shiny, her brown hair rising up frizzy against the humidity. So, feeling so sensible, why did she walk back downstairs, still in only bra and panties, instead of going into her bedroom to dress? Why did she walk from room to room through the quiet house, into the living room where the curtain opened wide over Londonderry Circle? The rain was still pelting the street, the neighboring roofs, the lush green lawns, shrubbery and trees, leaves roiling gently. When was the last time she and Philip had made love on the sofa? Two years ago? Five? Probably more. For a while, they’d been adventurous, impetuous, trying different places, different rooms, different positions.

            Where did that leave Cathy? A little sad, certainly; lonely too, but, for some reason, possibly more than anything else right now, at this moment, here in her living room, wearing next to nothing with the curtain wide open, her naked feet cushioned in carpet—aroused.

            Dillard? She hadn’t had sex with him, not yet—she was biding her time, and he wasn’t pressuring. She was not a promiscuous person, and this would be only their third actual date. She’d made a couple of stabs at dating over the winter, before Dillard, once letting Sheila, her friend and co-worker from the Chamber of Commerce, fix her up with her cousin. Sheldon was big, quiet, affable, with sloping shoulders, large, soft ears and the odd, undazzling flash of wit. He worked for Social Services. His hair and the collar of his shirt were both plastered flat. They’d gone to dinner at Barney’s, and Cathy had been a bit disquieted watching Sheldon cut everything on his plate—chicken, spaghetti, parsley and all—into small bits before he took a single bite. Not necessarily a deal-breaker—she was used to eating with an eight- and twelve-year-old, and she’d managed a cheerful banter. She’d been surprised in fact that Sheldon hadn’t called again, and even more surprised when she’d learned later from Sheila it was because he considered her a sloppy eater. Another date—her only other date—hadn’t gone well when Barry, a wiry carpenter from Halfmoon with hair like black licorice, a member of the Chamber, had announced upon arriving that he was sporting an erection. Cathy shut the door in his face. Barry hadn’t been to another Chamber mixer since.

            Now, sitting on the sofa nearly naked watching the rain-washed street through the wide open window, the image of Barry’s imagined erection elbowed its way into her mind, where it morphed into an all-encompassing, shivering sensation, and she thought: What if Dillard got hit by a truck?

            What was she waiting for? A rainy day? Carpe diem.

Afterwards, after the rain ended and the sky was trying to clear, Dillard arrived unscathed. Part clown, part hippie, long brown curly hair flecked with gray, unshaven stubble bordering on beard. He wore his baseball cap backwards, despite the fact that he was in his forties. A big man in blue jeans and a red plaid shirt—half tucked in, half out—his expression was that of a mischievous boy at the cookie jar. She met him at the door, led him up the half-flight of stairs to the living room where they sat on the sofa, the same sofa, the same curtain opened wide over the same Londonderry Circle.

            “I have a dilemma,” she said.

            “I been meaning to get me one of those,” he said. “I saw a nice one in the Dilemma Shop window down on Broadway, slightly used, only one owner, this little old lady who only took it out on Sundays when she was trying to decide whether to go to church or the bullfights. They wanted six-ninety-nine for it, but they had an installment plan—I could go on.”

            “Not necessary,” said Cathy with her little smile.

            “Okay then. What’s your dilemma? I can’t afford my own anyhow.”

            She sighed, aware of how it made her breasts lift. She’d changed into her white pleated culottes that were too short, and her sleeveless red top that was too snug, but she’d changed into them utterly aware of the shortness and snugness. Her dilemma was this: She’d decided she wanted to go to bed with Dillard. She wanted to spend the afternoon there with him, instead of going to Greenwich to watch him eat chili, but she wasn’t sure of how to go about it. So far, he’d been anything but insistent, which she attributed to his being a gentleman, to his respecting her, and to his history with the family. But now, after she’d made the decision, she began to wonder if it was something else, if he was not anxious to get her into bed for some other reason—such as, did he not find her attractive? Did he want only to be friends? Did he consider them more like brother and sister, given his friendship with Richie, his history with the family? Would he think less of her if she were too aggressive, too suggestive? Worst of all, might he reject the notion out of hand? She was in no mood for more rejection.

            This was not, however, the dilemma she presented. “Richie called last night,” she said. “He needs some stuff up at camp, and wanted me to bring it up this afternoon.”

            “Why doesn’t he come down and get it himself? He’s a big boy now.”

            A noncommittal shrug. She didn’t feel like going into it again. Didn’t feel like discussing her brother’s wackiness, again. “I don’t know. He said he needs it today.”

            “I kind of had my mouth set on chili,” said Dillard. “But hey. If he needs his stuff today, I guess he needs it today.”

            “I didn’t say I would,” she said, “but I didn’t say I wouldn’t. Why don’t I make us some lunch first and we can think about it?”

            “A little lunch before a chili fest—that’s so wild and so crazy, it might just work.”

            “Aren’t they just these little, tiny bowls?” she said.

            “Yes. But after the first twenty or thirty, you don’t mind missing lunch so much.”

            “Thirty tiny bowls of chili?”

            “So what do you have for lunch? Got any chili?”

            She made three tuna sandwiches, figuring a half should be more than enough for her. She was at the counter when Dillard came in. “Talk about schizophrenic,” he said.

            She paused, knife poised: Richie? She’d considered paranoia, but hadn’t yet gotten around to schizophrenia.

            “Look at that,” he said, walking to the window above the sink, parting the curtains. “Hardly a cloud in the sky—two hours ago it was raining cats and dogs—see, look, there’s still a big poodle over there. A perfect day for a chili fest. Or for a ride up to Fiddler’s Green—if Richie really needs his stuff that bad.”

            “Richie told you the name of it? Our dad had some grandiose ideas.”

            “Oh, he told me all about it. Never told me where it was, though, exactly.”

            “Even if you knew where it was, you still wouldn’t know where it was. I have to look at the directions every time. It’s way up north.”

            “Well I’m game if you’re game. Matter of fact, I’m a little gamey, too.” He gave his shirt a quick sniff, crinkling his nose.

            Cathy smiled, though not so much at his antic. All was not lost. A new possibility had emerged in her mind, the possibility offered by thousands of square miles of Adirondack wilderness, isolated woods and back roads in the summer sunshine, and a blanket—she’d have to bring a blanket. “Why don’t I wrap these up then? We can have a picnic on the way.”

            “Ahhh,” he said, bobbing his eyebrows suggestively. “Au naturel! ”

Spit and Spat were statues of two strapping young men hunkering forward at either end of an oblong pool in Congress Park, forever spitting streams of water at one another through conch shells. Cathy watched for a moment, mesmerized by the endless arcs of the streams, the rhythm of the splashes and ripples, the sunshine burning the rain from the grass, the fresh smell of water and greenery. She’d always admired the musculature of the twin figures, albeit from a more esthetic point of view than she felt now. Now she admired something else she hadn’t considered before: the raw sensuousness.

            Dillard wiped off a nearby bench—they would eat in the park, barely on the way, but he was too hungry to wait. Then she noticed the frog.

            In a corner of the pool by the base of one statue—Spit or Spat, she wasn’t sure which was which—he was floating motionless, submerged up to his nose. He was in trouble, a foot below the edge, in three feet of water. How could he escape? There was nothing from which he could leap, no way to climb. Cathy stepped to the edge, peering down for a closer look.

            “I don’t think he can get out,” she said.

            “Who?” said Dillard, coming over. “Son of a gun. Guess he didn’t see the No Swimmingsign. Either that, or he’s a blatant scofflaw. I hate that in a frog.”

            “I don’t think I can touch him. My boys could.”

            “Me neither. Not before they’re cooked.”

            “We can’t just let him die.”

            “We can’t?” She looked at him with a frown and saw the hinted grin, the big, brown, playful eyes. In one motion—graceful for a big man—he took off his hat, stooped and dipped, scooping the frog neatly out of the water. He stood, holding the dripping hat in his hands, the frog spread low and quiet in the middle.

            “There!” she said.

            “There,” he said, easing the thing onto the grass by the pool. The frog took a weak hop, then crouched in a cautionary squat. Dillard wrung out his hat, mostly for comic effect, then placed it back on his head, wet and backwards. “Have you met Jeremiah?”

            “Jeremiah the bull frog?”

            “He was a good friend of mine,” Dillard said.

            “Did you ever understand a single word he said?”

            “Well, no, but I helped him drink his wine. As a matter of fact, he always had some mighty fine wine—I could go on.”

            “Not necessary,” she said with a laugh. They lingered, staring down at the small damaged creature. Her big brother, Richie, came to mind.

            “I don’t know if he’s going to make it or not,” said Dillard. “Frog legs, anyone?”

            “Ewee, no.” The frog didn’t budge. “They don’t go very well with tuna.”

            “That’s okay. I don’t like to eat ’em anyway. I keep thinking of all those poor little frogs hobbling around on crutches.”

            “I admire a man with a conscience.”

            “Truth be told,” he said, solemnly, “it can be a mighty heavy burden.”

They drove to Richie’s place to pick up his things, Cathy high with anticipation. The door to Richie’s apartment, a shabby duplex on Nelson Avenue, was unlocked, and they walked into the quiet dark, all the shades down. The place was a shambles: books on the floor, drawers pulled open, bedclothes in a heap by the side of the bed. Richie had always been a terrible housekeeper, and since Duffy, his second wife, had moved out, he was even worse. Still, it was even more of a mess than Cathy remembered.

            “Do you believe this place?” she said.

            “Of course. Do you know Richie?”

            “It looks like it’s been ransacked.”

            “Of course. Do you know Richie?”

            They quickly found his guitar strings and allergy meds amidst the clutter, and left. The quiet chaos was depressing, foreign to the jubilation that had been building inside her.

            They headed up the Northway toward Fiddler’s Green beneath a glorious blue sky, the rolling green hills around them swelling into mountains, the white line undulating along beside her like a long, sleek snake. The storm was far behind. The perfect tonic. She felt content, a perfect day to be high, sailing, flying. The radio was turned up high against the wind through the windows. Joy to the World came on: “Jeremiah was a bullfrog—”

            “Oh my God!” said Cathy.

            Dillard sang along, “Was a good friend of mine!”

            She grabbed his arm. “We were just singing this. Saying this. Something this.”

            “I never understood a single word he said,” Dillard sang, “but I helped him drink his wine!” They both sang: “He always had some mighty fine wine!”

            She squeezed his arm. “Do you believe it?”

            “Joy to the world!” they sang, “all the boys and girls! Joy to the fishes in the deep blue sea—joy to you and me!”

            “Wait,” she said. “Did you say fishes or vicious?”

            “I thought it was vicious the first time I heard it. Didn’t make a lick of sense, but that’s what I thought it was for years and years.” He looked over and cocked his head, stubbled jaw jutting. “Actually,” he said, “I still think it is.”

            Cathy laughed. They sang. When the song was over, Dillard turned down the radio. “I have a problem with oldies.”

            “What kind of a problem?”

            “You know how they take you back to the time when it was popular, to what you were doing then, usually some exact moment? Kind of like a time machine?”

            “ Yes,” Cathy said. “I remember me and Marsha—my girlfriend—singing Joy to the World at the top of our lungs in her rumpus room. We must have been about eight. We were playing with her sister’s Barbies.”

            “See, now that’s the trouble. If you only listen to oldies, twenty years from now, what’s going to bring you back to now? Nothing. It’ll all be gone. These’ll be the missing years. When you hear Joy to the World twenty years from now, you’ll still think about playing with those Barbies when you were little—you won’t think about this ride up north to get Richie on a sunny afternoon. It’ll be gone. There’ll be nothing to remind you of it. It’s what I call an existential quandary. I’m not sure exactly why I call it that, but I do anyhow.”

            “You’re right—today’s songs will be the oldies then.”

            “Yeah, and see, we’re not listening to today’s songs.”

            Cathy didn’t say anything. She was watching the scintillating sky and the mountains, and something was trying to bring her back down to earth, but the sky and the mountains wouldn’t let it. Something Dillard said had snagged in her mind for an instant before it washed away—what was it?—and it was gone, quickly, and she was trying to consider where today was going, where it would be twenty years from now, certain it would not be among the missing years. How could it be? Warm air gushing through the open windows, Dillard cranked it up when Me and Bobby McGee came on, and Cathy and Jeremy Staat were behind the bushes along the splintery fence in Jeremy’s front yard on Jefferson Street, peeking down each other’s underwear.

            They left the Northway at Exit 29 above Schroon Lake, headed west on Route 2B. Cathy took the directions out of her purse, unfolding them in her lap. “2B,” Dillard asked, “or not 2B?” She looked up to see his naughty grin.

            “That is the question,” she said. “As a matter of fact, that is the question Philip asked every, single, doggone time we came up here.”

            “Oh,” Dillard said. “Sorry.” He glanced at her with elevated eyebrows. “Do I remind you a lot of Philip?”

            Both hands on the wheel, he looked over again, waiting for an answer, his naughty boy eyebrows still raised in an expectant arch. Cathy turned in her seat to face him. “Your hair is a lot curlier,” she said.

            “Is that the only difference?”

            “You’re quite a bit bigger.”

            “Yeah, well. I don’t like to brag. It’s just something I was born with.”

            Cathy checked her smile, allowing the innuendo to free-float in the air. She checked her breathing, which was coming more deeply. Dillard stared ahead through the windshield, less animated now, more quiet. More serious. Beside the road, boulders littered a creek bed that was nearly dry, a sheer rock face soaring up behind it. She remembered this spot, was relieved they were still going the right way—Cathy was terrible at directions, even those written down. For a few more miles, it was quiet. Lay Down Sally came on and Dillard nodded slightly, though whether or not it was because of the song, the fresh innuendo, whether or not he was even listening, she couldn’t tell. The song stayed soft, unsung along to, fading here and there—they were losing the station. Cathy fidgeted with the directions, folding and creasing, pressing them in her lap. Soon they would be leaving the beaten track for lonely dirt roads with dozens of shady spots to pull over, and the blanket was waiting on the backseat of the car, right where she’d put it. She wondered if Dillard was growing quieter for the same reason as was she—if he was also trying to plot the best excuse to plausibly pull over by the side of the road before they got to Fiddler’s Green. To stop, take the blanket and spread it on the soft grass by the roadside in a way that was not awkward and rough and not without romance.

            Finally, by a little turn in the road beside a brook, she said, “I think we’re almost there.”

            He pulled over, just past the narrow plank bridge. According to the directions, they were 3.1 miles from the camp. Her heartbeat made its way to the back of her jaw. The trees were thick and tall, sunlight filtering down, dappling the packed brown dirt of the road. Bird songs filled the air, shattered by the call of a crow.

            He looked over. “The call of nature,” he said. “The call of the wild.”

             Which call? But of course she knew. As graceful an excuse as any. Well done!

            He excused himself to step behind a tree, and she realized she should go as well—it had been a long ride. She picked her way into the woods, the sodden carpet of dead leaves concealing a phalanx of sharp things—shoots and twigs, rocks and branches—lying in ambush, waiting to attack her feet that were sheathed only in skimpy sandals. The woods were teeming. Brambles clawed at her bare calves and thighs. Sounds of wild things scurrying and burrowing and birds chittering loudly, distressed by the invasion. She found a spot behind a bush, and stopped, heart racing. Pulling down her culottes and underpants, she squatted to pee, then waited, dripping. Gnats began to seek her out, mosquitoes. Her breath was quick and shallow. She stood, considering for a brief, foolish, brave moment walking back out to him sans panties. She was wondering, trembling, deciding, desiring, when she heard the cough of the car engine starting.

            Then the engine raced and the gravel spit as the car pulled away, as crows and other black things scurried across the sky.

Richie had named him Venture ten years before, but everyone thought that was a dumb name, and it never stuck. No one named him Doggy either; it just took. He was big and brown and grinned quite a lot. Doggy loved to lie on his back, hoping for a belly scratch, pumping his paws in circles. The wheels on the bus go round and round, Cathy used to sing, round and round. She’d sung it to her boys, Scotty and Josh, pumping their small legs around, and Doggy’d always reminded her of that.

            He was lying in the ruts and weeds of the yard by the guitar that was face-down in the dirt. The washed-out yellow lawn chair lay on its back, arms reaching for the sky, a beer bottle lying spilled, kicked over by a different foot. Doggy didn’t pump his paws in circles, didn’t jump up to greet her, didn’t dance on his hind legs. He didn’t move, the side of his head matted with dark blood, a fly on his lip.

            The place was deserted. In the kitchen, a shaft of dusty sunlight through a smeared window fell across a sliced tomato and a bunch of scallions on a cutting board, a still life. Richie’s ancient VW bug sat hidden behind the camp, keys nowhere to be found. Cathy sat gingerly on the splintery plank that passed for a front step.

             Jeremiah was a bull frog! Was a good friend of mine!

            The song had been running roughshod through her mind for 3.1 eternal miles, all the way to Fiddler’s Green, frantically at first, with a manic beat, then slowly, like a funeral march. Dillard was right. She was in a vacuum. Someday, it would all be missing. I never understood a single word he said, but I helped him drink his wine! Splinters from the plank pricked the back of her legs, and she felt as though she were drowning beneath twenty thousand fathoms of sunshine.

            Lonely is the least of it. What she would give if loneliness was all that she felt. He always had some mighty fine wine! Through the prism of the moisture, she watched Doggy’s fur soaking up all the sunlight.

            But she isn’t there. She is not a speck in a vast forest teeming with life and decay. She is not stranded, alone, not without love or hope. Richie is not lost. Joy to the world! All the boys and girls! Joy to the vicious— She is playing with Barbie dolls, with her best friend Marsha, and they’re singing, joyfully, as loud as they can, and sure enough, today is nowhere to be found.

---

Dennis McFadden, a retired project manager, lives and writes in a cedar-shingled cottage called Summerhill in the woods of upstate New York. His collection Jimtown Road won the 2016 Press 53 Award for Short Fiction, and his first collection Hart’s Grove was published by Colgate University Press in 2010; his third collection The Signal Tower was a finalist for the 2020 Brighthorse Prize for Short Fiction. His stories have appeared in dozens of publications, includingThe Missouri Review, New England Review, The Sewanee Review, Crazyhorse, The Massachusetts Review, The Saturday Evening Post, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, The Best American Mystery Stories,and in the inaugural volume of the new series The Best Mystery Stories the Year 2021, edited by Lee Child. In 2018 he was awarded a fellowship at the MacDowell Colony. A Pushcart Prize nominee, he is currently guest short fiction editor for Prime Number Magazine.

Blood Covenant

Alice Hatcher

The morning she first saw the boy, the wind was blowing from the east, driving eddies of litter down the highway, past rutted fields and fence posts connected by strands of sagging barbed wire. She considered a distant pillar of dust bending in the atmosphere, casting shadow across the barren plain, shifted on the porch step, and touched the slight swell of her belly. As ghostly forms emerged from circling dust, she gathered a piece of baling wire from the dirt, looped it around her fingers, and observed a line of people trudging down the road, refugees, she guessed, in search of sanctuary or work. She was squinting at the procession when the screen door behind her opened. She slipped her fingers from the wire and hunched her shoulders.

            “Get me that pipe wrench,” her stepfather said. “I’m not asking again.”

            “Was about to get it,” the girl mumbled, without drawing her eyes from the road.

            “Don’t look like it.” He stepped up to the railing. “Any of these people stop and ask for something, you tell them to move on. I don’t care if it’s a goddamn glass of water.”

            The girl slipped the wire into her pocket and started toward the shed, turning around twice to make sure her stepfather had gone back inside. She quickened her pace past heaps of salvaged metal whittled by blowing dust and a fire pit glutted with charred garbage, and crossed a yard befouled by dung and the carrion dropped by circling crows. In the shed, she paused beside a workbench and considered a tattered magazine splayed open to a photograph of a naked woman lying on a bare mattress. The girl wondered how many times her stepfather had touched himself looking at the photograph, and why, with his magazines and her mother, he had never left her alone. She felt her own breasts, tender to the touch, and hated the woman for being pretty enough to make her feel ugly, but not enough to prevent her stepfather from seeking her out as often as he did.

            She swept the magazine to the floor, grabbed a wrench and left the shed, at first dazed and then mesmerized by the drone of a hymn rising on the wind. Near the porch, she paused to observe the stooped forms of men and women borne of swirling dust and detritus, and before them, a man wheeling a large wooden cross over cracked asphalt. She set the wrench on a railing, wandered to the road, and braced herself against a fence post, transfixed by the sweat darkening the man’s shirtsleeves, the sun scars covering his corded neck, and the worn plastic wheels at the base of the cross resting upon his shoulder. Behind the man, a flaxen-haired woman in a faded dress was pulling a wagon loaded with water jugs. Beside him, a young man walked deliberately, with a book pressed to his chest.

            When the procession reached the girl, the young man leapt over a ditch to meet her. The girl considered his smooth brown skin and his dark eyes with thick lashes that made her think of a deer.

            “Would you know how far it is to town?” he asked.

            “Two miles,” the girl said.

            He cradled his book in one arm and placed a hand on the post. “That isn’t so far.”

            “Maybe a little farther if you cross to the far side of town, but it isn’t so big,” she said. “What are you looking for?”

            “Souls. People seeking the Lord’s path. We’re setting up for a tent revival.”

            “You been walking long?”

            “We came from Texas. No so long. In God’s scheme.”

            “I’ve never been to Texas. Never been anywhere. Just here.”

            “It’s no matter. It’s what’s in your soul.”

            “Still, it’s a long way to walk.”

            “Only by suffering can we understand the sacrifices our Lord made to save us.” The boy fingered a tree ring visible in the post’s rough grain. “Are you a believer?”

            The girl looked into the boy’s eyes, and in that moment, she believed, would have believed anything, and nodded.

            “We’ll be in town tomorrow,” he said. “If you want to pray with us.”

            She felt her face grow warm. “It isn’t so far to walk. To town.”

            “I’ll look for you,” the boy said. “Won’t be hard to find you. There’s a special light around you. Like the Lord’s looking down on you.”

            When he started down the road, she strained to see over the heads of pilgrims passing in ragged dresses, dirty shirts, and worn shoes, and carrying bed rolls and pans, sagging tent poles, and canvas sacks filled with cans. After he vanished from her sight, she withdrew to the porch and twisted the baling wire around her finger like a tourniquet to stanch her longing.

            She was committing the boy’s eyes to memory when her stepfather emerged from the house. “What the hell you doing?” He looked at the dust roiling in the procession’s wake. “Just tent revival trash making a spectacle of themselves. Nothing to be wasting your time with.”

            That night, she lay on her mattress, listening to muffled voices beyond the wall.

            “If she’s going to disrespect me, she can move out of this house,” her stepfather said. “Problem is you spared the rod. That’s the only thing those religious freaks get right.”

            “She’s just tired,” her mother said. “Sick with something going around.”

            “Lazy, more like. Fifteen’s old enough to be doing more around the house.”

            “I can deal with her.”

            “Don’t seem like it. I hear her at night, sneaking out by herself.”

            “Who else would she be sneaking out with but herself?”

            She heard the creak of bedsprings and her mother crying and rested her hand on her belly. Soon, it would be impossible to hide a truth too monstrous for her mother to bear. Her mother would blame her—say that, at some point, a girl should be old enough to understand the difference between right and wrong, to stop certain things from happening and make herself ugly if that’s what it took. She would never be able to explain to her mother that, at that very point, understanding had given birth to shame, and silence. The girl clawed her neck until welts rose upon her skin and then drifted into dreams of the boy touching her face and sheltering her body with arms opened like splayed angel’s wings.

When she awoke the next morning, she found the house empty and her stepfather’s truck gone. She stood in the kitchen, listening to windows rattling in their frames and wind whistling beneath the eaves. Then she felt a breath moving like feathers across her neck and left the house, walking and then running down the highway, past empty cisterns, rusted windmills, and dead cell towers. In town, she made her way past shuttered thrift shops and bars with bricked-up windows, down a crumbling street to a withered fairground, where a small crowd was gathered beneath a circus tent. The preacher was standing on a small stage made of wooden risers, bearing a Bible aloft and gesticulating. The woman with flaxen hair stood behind him, holding the cross upright. When the girl reached the tent, she edged past sweaty bodies until she could see the beaded perspiration on the preacher’s brow.

            “We are all sinners, wretched and helpless,” the preacher shouted above the rattle of tambourines and the wind rippling the tent’s flaps. “Years ago, I trembled at the edge of a fiery gulf, stalked by drink and the ghastly forms of fallen women. But one night, Christ spoke to me and offered forgiveness.” He paused. “I wept in relief, but too soon. I had not yet wrestled with the temptations that bind the sinner’s heart.” The preacher set down the Bible and unbuttoned his shirt. “In the agony of a long night, the Enemy raged within me and sweat poured from my body until I lay on the floor, spent. I expected death, but at dawn, a voice commanded me to cast away my sins and accept the covenant sealed by Christ’s blood. I recognized the Lord’s voice and knew the transforming power of the cross.”

            The preacher stripped off his shirt and to reveal a patchwork of bruises on his shoulders. She touched the welts on her neck, and her breath caught in her throat.

            “I took up the cross to know how our Lord suffered,” the preacher continued. “To know the extent of his love. Once I knew his grace, I feared no evil.”

            She rose on her toes to better see and stumbled before a press of sweaty bodies, until the preacher was looking at her. Sickened and stirred, she took in the preacher’s prominent ribs, and the lesions and bruises on his shoulders.

            “One night,” the preacher said, “I met Satan on a dark road. I recognized him by his skin, black like charcoal, and his hair, twisted like snakes. When I rent my shirt and showed him my wounds, he saw the power of Christ and fled in terror. Dawn broke, and my eyes beheld a New Kingdom on Earth, a walled city where the faithful will multiply and God’s design will be made manifest.” The preacher looked up at the sagging canvas ceiling. “Once I groaned beneath the burden of sin. I now rejoice beneath the weight of the cross, knowing the Lord is guiding us to a land where Evil will never touch us, and we will drink the waters of everlasting life.”

            Trembling, the girl began to hum along with the voices rising around her and might have wept if a hand hadn’t brushed her shoulder. She turned to find the boy standing beside her, with glistening eyes and wisps of hair clinging to his damp brow.

            “I don’t know if I should be here,” she said. “I haven’t ever read the Bible.”

            “People come to the light in different ways. You been baptized?”

            “My mother never said one way or the other.”

            “We’re having a baptism in the river. Some people are being baptized their second time. To rededicate themselves.”

            “River’s high right now,” she said. “The rains came early. Flooded part of town.”

            “God always provides for his children. Provides signs. That’s what Preacher says.”

            As members of the congregation fell to their knees, the boy took her hand and drew her to the ground. One by one, penitents moved to the front of the crowd on dirty hands and bleeding knees, moaning and weeping and pleading as the preacher placed his hands upon their heads. Surrounded by prostrate bodies, she listened to shouted confessions and groans of submission and cries of supplication. Her lips grew parched, and sweat streamed down her face until she grew dizzy and her limbs grew light. She felt the heat building inside the tent and dreamed of rain cooling her face. Then she saw a heart engorged and aflame, and visions of angels crowded her mind. To the sound of fevered singing, she rose to her feet and walked unsteadily to the stage. The preacher took her in his arms, buried his face in her hair, and wept. When he released her, she stumbled backwards into the rising congregation and let herself be swept by a swell of bodies to the river beyond the fairgrounds.

            On a muddy bank, the preacher addressed the congregation. “We come here to be cleansed, to embrace Christ, who gave his blood so that we might escape the scourge of original sin.” He waded into the river until its sluggish current broke around his waist, nodded at the girl, and held out his arms.

            She slipped off her shoes and slid into the river. With water flowing around her hips, she gripped the preacher’s arm and let her gaze soften in the sunlight playing on his hair. He cradled her lower back and pressed his palm to her forehead, and with a firm hand, pushed her beneath the water. She let herself go limp, felt her body unfolding and growing light in his arms, and allowed the current to draw her limbs into fluid ribbons and ease streams of air from her nostrils until her last breath left her lungs. She felt grace washing over her and flowing between her legs, and then a cold sink drawing her into darkness. She clawed at the preacher and kicked the jagged edge of a can nestled in muck, broke through the water’s surface and into blinding sunlight, and crawled from the river, gasping, with her dress clinging to her body and blood seeping from her ankle.

            The woman with flaxen hair was waiting for her on the bank. She studied the slight swell of the girl’s belly and cupped the girl’s face in her palms. “You’re a child of God, and the fruit of your womb is his blessing.”

            The girl looked at the blood trailing from her foot and the mud oozing between her toes, and for the first time in her life, she felt clean.

            That evening, she stood beside the boy, watching the sun set. In the distance, congregants were pitching wooden tent poles into the river.

            “This was the last stop on our mission,” the boy said. “A friend of Preacher’s dedicated a parcel of land beyond Paxton. We’re building a church. Preacher wants to start a farm. We’ll call it New Canaan. It’s what’s been prophesied.”

            “A church,” she repeated, envisioning vaulted ceilings and walls painted white.

            “You could join us. We’re leaving at dawn.”

            She studied the boy’s face. “You don’t look like anyone else here. They your family?”

            “Preacher and his wife took me in fifteen years ago. When I was two.”

            “What happened to your parents?”

            “My mother was in prison. They wouldn’t ever tell me what she did. Then she got deported.” The boy twisted a piece of buffalo grass between his fingers. “Never knew a dad except Preacher.”

            “You ever try to find your mother?”

            “Preacher said it was best not to know her.”

            “I’m pregnant,” the girl stated.

            “It’s no matter,” the boy said, shrugging. “You’ve been baptized. Had your sins washed away. We’re all God’s children.”

            The boy brushed her palm with his fingertips, and when darkness settled, she knew she would see him again at dawn.

            That night, she knelt beside her mattress and prayed, and in moments of doubt, clawed at her skin and raged against the demons crowding her mother’s house. Then she touched her ankle, conjured the boy’s face, and felt the working of grace, a word and sensation as sweet and sustaining as honey dissolving on a tongue. The moon was still out when she started down the highway, carrying a backpack stuffed with clothing and a fold of bills her stepfather had kept hidden in the shed. She ran until her ankle throbbed and her ribs ached, thinking all the while about the wound in Christ’s side and weeping stigmata, about the kind of love sanctified by suffering.

Dawn was breaking when she arrived at the fairgrounds. She wound between indistinct forms folding blankets and loading water jugs onto wagons until she found the boy. Before she could speak, the preacher stepped onto a crate to address the congregation.

            “To build a new Jerusalem,” the preacher cried, “We will need the faith of Abraham, a man so obedient he was willing to sacrifice his own son at God’s bidding, just as God sacrificed his only son to redeem sinners.”

            She beheld the fiery sunrise behind the preacher and felt alive, and afraid.

            “As he provided for Moses in the desert, God will provide for his children and reward the faithful with everlasting life,” the preacher continued. “This was the covenant sealed by blood in Abraham’s time and renewed by Christ’s sacrifice. Let us now cast all doubt from our hearts.”

            The preacher stepped off the crate, assumed his cross, and started across the fairgrounds. Slowly, congregants fell in behind him, leaving empty soup cans and plastic bottles in their wake. The girl closed her eyes, remembered a house moaning in the wind, and sensed the movements of people brushing past. When she opened her eyes, the boy was standing beside her.

            “The Lord is with you,” he said.

            “I’m scared,” she answered.

            “I’ll be with you,” the boy said, and with newfound faith, the girl took her first steps.

            All morning, the boy walked beside her. When she confessed that she had never been more than a few miles from home, he pointed out gullies and the bleached skeletons of uprooted trees where levees had long ago broken, related the histories of towns memorialized on faded signs, and told her none of those histories mattered, for a new life was at hand. Still, when the congregation stopped to fill jugs with water from a gas station hose, she considered the vast plain behind her with a haunted expression.

            “I keep wondering how she felt waking up and finding me gone. I keep telling myself it would have broken her to know the way I’m in.”

            “God told Lot to never look back or he’d turn to salt,” the boy said. “That life’s behind you, now.”

            That night, the congregation camped in a field beside the highway. The boy sat beside her, just beyond the light of scattered fires and kerosene stoves. He brushed her cheek with his thumb when she cried, overcome by the alien landscape and the soreness of her breasts and feet. He held her hand and promised her flowering pastures and flowing waters.

            “We’ll have five-hundred acres, Preacher says.” He drew his knees to his chest and looked up at the stars. “There’s a creek, too. In two years, we’ll have a working farm.”

            She tried to envision a farm and saw only rutted earth and blowing dust. “What will we grow?”

            “Pecans. Dates, maybe. We’ll herd sheep. Have cows and bee hives.”

            “You ever raised bees?”

            “Preacher says we’ll learn how to do new things. Have allotted tasks.”

            “All the ranches were dead by the time I was born,” she said. “The ground got poisoned. The cattle got sick.”

            “God led his people out of Egypt. He sent plagues, but then he parted the sea. He tested his people before he saved them.” The boy unrolled a woolen blanket and draped it over her shoulders. “Preacher’s wife says what God knit together in your womb has been ordained. That your baby will be the first child born in New Canaan.”

            That night, the boy lay down beside her, and when the last campfires died, he ran his fingers through her hair, and she felt God’s love moving through his hands.

            In the days that followed, they wound into the desert. The sun ignited the air and covered the land in a molten glare. She grew disoriented, tormented by thirst, the twisted forms of stunted trees, and the unbroken expanse of the cloudless sky. She became unsettled by roadside memorials to the dead—plastic flowers warping in the heat and painted white crosses peeling—and the pink enamel chipping from the downcast face of the grieving virgin enshrined in cement grottos. When blisters formed on her feet, she counted each of her steps as an act of contrition. She berated herself each time she wavered and focused her thoughts on Christ’s flesh riven by nails, and the virgin’s delicate foot, as she had seen it, resting on the head of a snake straining to strike an exposed ankle. Every night, when she shivered with exhaustion, she imagined herself cloaked in celestial blue and crowned by stars, ascending to Heaven on a yellow crescent moon.

            “Preacher said we’re leaving the highway,” the boy said on the seventh day, gazing at a distant range of mountains. “There’s a pass, and Paxton’s on the other side.”

            “Looks like nothing’s ahead,” she said, running her fingertips over her cracked lips. “Just a dead valley.”

            “This is the trial Preacher talked about. And it isn’t so far to walk,” the boy said, wiping his brow.

            Placing her faith in the boy, she started down a trail littered with discarded cans and candy wrappers, following the tiny ruts of two plastic wheels marking a path through stunted scrub and into open country, and leading ever closer to the promised land.

Two days later, they beheld the wall, a rusted steel plane cutting through parched hills and spanning jagged clefts left by ancient rivers. Plagued by plumes of smoke rising from behind the wall and the stench of burning tires and trash, they covered their noses with bandanas, rubbed their stinging eyes, and prayed for salvation. That night, they camped in the long shadows cast by a burning landfill and buried their faces in blankets.

            With the moon rising behind him, the preacher climbed onto a flat rock and gestured at the tongues of flame twisting into the sky. “The Bible tells of those who defiled Gehenna by building pyres and sacrificing their children to false gods. The Lord punished them by making a wasteland of their valley and dragging the bones of their ancestors from their tombs.” The preacher coughed into his sleeve. “There are those who would place obstacles in our path. But the faithful do not weaken in face of adversity. Remember those who followed Moses through the sea, only to grow impatient in the desert and invite God’s wrath by embracing profane ways.”

            When the preacher sat down on the rock and lowered his head, the boy left the girl’s side, made his way past huddled forms, and took his place at the preacher’s feet. Alone, the girl curled up on the ground, drew a blanket over her face, and dreamed of waking beside the boy and dawn breaking in a clear sky. When she awoke, the wind had died, and smoke had settled upon the valley. The preacher was still sitting on the rock, and the boy was still sitting at his feet.

            At noon, the preacher guided the congregation to a line of cottonwoods along a dry riverbed to wait out the heat of the day. She sat beside the boy and considered traces of people who had passed before them—a shirt ground with dirt, flattened cans, and empty plastic bottles.

            The girl picked a laminated card off the ground and studied the photograph of a young woman, and the words beneath a heart encircled by thorny branches. “I can’t read it. Must be Mexican.”

            The boy considered the photograph. “It’s a prayer card. Can’t read it, either.”

            Without another word, he stood up and started down the riverbed. When he disappeared behind a line of creosote, the girl drew her foot from her sandal and examined her ankle. She looked up when a shadow passed over her leg to find the preacher’s wife standing above her.

            “God put a thorn in Paul’s flesh to torment him. To save him from conceit,” the preacher’s wife said. “Hardship is God’s gift, for it demands faith.”

            “I think it’s infected,” the girl said.

            “If you walk in faith, you will not grow faint,” the preacher’s wife said, before continuing along the riverbed.

            Chastened, the girl forced her swollen foot back into her sandal and went in search of the boy, following a path of trampled brush until she saw him standing beneath a tree, looking down at a small wooden cross. At his feet, shredded fabric surrounded a shallow pit containing a hollow rib cage half-buried in sand.

            “Animals got to it,” the boy said. “Coyotes, probably.”

            “We should say a prayer,” she whispered.

            “We don’t know what kind of person it was. And somebody probably prayed, already. In whatever way they do,” the boy said, turning from the grave and brushing past her.

            All afternoon, she walked several paces behind the boy, stalked by visions of disinterred bones, parched land soaking up blood, and sinkholes swallowing blistered flesh. That night, she curled up on her side, wracked by chills and thoughts of a desecrated grave.

            “I can’t stop thinking about it.” She rolled onto her back and looked up at the sky, terrified by its enormity. “There wasn’t even a name on the cross.”

            The boy propped himself on his elbow. “You afraid?”

            “What if I died?” She drew her blanket to her chin.

            “We would pray for your soul,” the boy said. “And you would be at the Lord’s side.”

            “I did things. And things happened. Things I didn’t know how to stop.”

            “You’re baptized, now. Washed clean,” the boy said. “And the Lord watches over his children.”

            He brushed her forehead with his lips, and when she drew his mouth to hers, he reached beneath the blanket and slid his hand between her legs. She pulled her dress above her hips, and when he moved inside her, whispering about redemption and God’s forgiveness, she shuddered with gratitude and something akin to grace.

At dawn, the boy left her and took his place beside the preacher. In her shame and confusion, she walked with her head down until the sky no longer existed, oblivious to the smell of smoke fading and the wall receding behind her, and indifferent to her dwindling water supply. She noticed the empty plastic jugs lying on the ground, rocking in the wind, only when the woman beside her spoke.

            “Border militia shot them.” The woman nodded at a gallon jug riddled with holes. “We could have used that water.”

            She considered the pink tinge to the whites of the woman’s eyes. “What are they?”

            “Was water somebody left for illegals,” the woman said, fingering a salt stain on her shirt. “Supposed to be natural springs out here. Cisterns in the rock, Preacher said. He must be heading us that way.”

            Nodding, the girl used her teeth to scrape saliva from her inner cheek. As hours passed, she felt herself growing unsteady and falling forward with each step, and thought about sitting on the ground and letting darkness wash over her. Then she heard a voice calling her name and saw a flaming heart materialize in the air and a trickle of blood seep from slit skin. She let the wind lift a prayer from her lips and guide her into a sea of tall grass that parted, just before noon, at the edge of a shimmering salt flat.

            She looked at the preacher, dragging his cross in the distance and dissolving in waves of heat convection. The valley’s distant rim blazed with white heat, and beyond, mountains seethed. She considered a palimpsest of footprints on the ground, drank the last water in her jug, and stepped onto a puzzle of crusted salt. Soon, her tongue swelled, and fire filled her lungs. Angels appeared and vanished behind veils of haze, and devils assumed their place. Black shapes massed in her mind, and her legs began to give way, and then the boy was walking unsteadily beside her, staring at the ruts of plastic wheels and using the cross as his compass.

            They were halfway across the flat when she heard the sounds of engines and saw a convoy of jeeps and pickup trucks on the horizon. As the convoy approached, several trucks veered from their course to circle the congregation, kicking up salt and closing in until she could see the features of camouflaged men clinging to roll bars and cradling rifles. She folded her face in her hands until she heard engines idling, and then beheld men in body armor standing beside a line of parked trucks, studying the congregation through mirrored glasses, and black dogs sniffing the ground. The boy had left the front of the line and was standing beside her.

            “Border vigilantes,” the boy whispered.

            One of the men adjusted a rifle slung across his back and approached the preacher. The preacher slid his cross from his shoulder and stood it upright, and, for several minutes, gestured at the jeeps. When he lowered his head, his wife started down the line of congregants, pausing while people searched their backpacks, the inner folds of bed rolls, and the insides of boots.

            “They said they’ll take us across the flat,” the preacher’s wife said, when she reached the boy. “Give us water. If we pay them.” Her face was drawn and her eyes were unfocused.

            The boy looked at the ground. “What about me?”

            “Preacher will tell them you’re his son.” The preacher’s wife turned to the girl. “How much money do you have?”

            The girl looked at the boy and drew the fold of bills from her backpack. “It’s all I got.”

            “I was never formally adopted,” the boy whispered, as they started walking toward the convoy. “I don’t have a birth certificate. Not that anyone saved. Or identification.”

            As they neared a pickup, the vigilante standing beside the preacher glanced at the boy. “What’s with the dark one?” he asked. “Thought you said you were all Americans.”

            “He’s my son,” the preacher said.

            “Don’t look like your son.”

            “He’s adopted.”

            “What’s going to happen if I ask for his identification?”

            “I raised him.”

            “He mute or something?”

            “We paid you what’s reasonable,” the preacher said.

            The vigilante spit on the ground. The girl placed her hand on her belly, and a moment later, sat down beside the boy in the bed of the truck. The preacher and his wife sat on opposite wheel wells with the cross wedged between their knees.

            Before climbing into the cab, the vigilante placed a jug of water at the preacher’s feet. “Lucky for you, we saved some. Was going to give it to the dogs.”

            When the truck’s engine roared to life, the preacher lifted the jug and unscrewed its cap. “The Lord never abandons his children.”

            He took a series of small sips and passed the jug to his wife. The girl rested her head against the cab’s window and waited. As crusted salt gave way to fissured clay and twisted creosote, the preacher’s wife handed her the jug. She lifted the jug to her blistered lips and felt her throat loosening, thinking even as it washed over her tongue, that the water tasted stolen.

In the days that followed, the boy walked beside her, told her their faith had been tested, and that they had proven themselves worthy of the Lord’s bounty. He pointed to the land’s slow softening, the purple sage sprouting from cracked granite where the ground rose to meet the mountains, and the cloudburst that drenched the earth one afternoon. They bathed in sunlit puddles, and when the water evaporated, they rested in the shade of mesquite. She felt her breasts and welcomed their soreness as a blessing, cradled her foot and felt its radiant heat. She tasted blood on her blistered lips and savored the pain that promised salvation. She imagined a steepled church rising at the edge of the desert and herself bearing the first child in New Canaan. That night, she told the boy she had envisioned herself standing on an altar, beneath a wall of stained glass, and bathing her child in a font of cool waters. When he touched her face, her fever rose beneath his fingers, and she felt healed by the balm of his semen and sweat.

            Before dawn, she awoke to a series of sharp spasms in her back. She placed her hand on her belly and watched stars grow faint with the coming of dawn. “I don’t feel good,” she finally said.

            The boy sat up and rubbed his eyes. “You sick?”

            “My back hurts. Like I was kicked,” she said. “Maybe from walking.”

            The boy considered the purple sky. “It’s not so far to go, now.” He stretched out again and drew his blanket over his shoulders. “Try to sleep some.”

            To the sound of the boy’s steady breathing, she drifted into dreams of sparkling streams, overripe fruit splitting in the sun, and worms burrowing into sweet flesh. An hour later, she stirred. The boy was crouched beside her, folding his blanket.

            “You ever eaten a date?” she asked.

            The boy shook his head and tied his blanket into a roll.

            “I haven’t,” the girl continued. “I wouldn’t know one if I saw it.”

            “They’re in the Bible,” the boy said. “They’re what the Lord intended us to eat.”

            They set off at sunrise, carving a trail over stony ridges bristling with cholla. As they gained elevation, she focused on the sound of the boy’s labored breathing to distract herself from her cramping back muscles. When her ankle throbbed, she imagined thorns piercing flesh, and a veiled woman pressing a delicate foot to the head of a snake; she prayed she might be as strong as the woman, and that no snake would ever strike her flesh and infect her with evil.

            At mid-morning, a cramp stopped her in her tracks. Cold sweat beaded on her face, and when it evaporated, she started walking again. When the pain grew too insistent to ignore, she pressed her hand to her back and lifted her face to the sky. The sun seemed to be orbiting the earth, leaving a fiery wake, and the world spinning too quickly in the opposite direction. She looked over her shoulder, across the valley, to regain her bearings and once again started walking, counting her steps and imagining pale stars circled in an airy crown.

            At noon, she pressed her hands to her belly, cried out, and staggered into a patch of shade beneath a mesquite. She collapsed on dirt and felt the warmth of viscous fluid trailing between her thighs and the pressure of hands on her knees. She heard voices rising in prayer and terror, drifted in and out of consciousness, and let herself drown in darkness. When she stirred again, a cloth bundle was lying on the ground before her. The preacher and his wife were standing above her, considering the bundle with dull expressions traced with sweat and streaks of dirt. The boy was crouched nearby, with his arms wrapped around his legs and his head lowered.

            “A seed can’t grow in polluted ground,” the preacher’s wife said. “Nurtured by pride. It was our failing not to see it. And his failing not to say anything before this. To join her in sin.”

            The girl slowly sat up, gathered the bundle in her arms, and stroked a fold of cloth until the preacher’s wife bent down and stayed her hand. “I want her baptized,” the girl said, pressing the bundle to her chest.

            “It’s dead.” The preacher wiped his brow. “It would be an abomination.”

            “You need to accept God’s will,” the preacher’s wife said.

            The girl shook her head. “This isn’t God’s will, unless God hates us.”

            The preacher’s wife stiffened. “Your heart has been hardened against God. This is your punishment.”

            As the preacher’s wife turned away, the girl lifted a fold of cloth and howled. The boy pressed his fists to his ears and rocked back and forth on his heels.

            She started digging late in the afternoon. She worked alone, breaking hard clay with the edge of a stone and loosening earth with her fists until her hands bled. When she had dug a hole, she pressed the bundle to her chest, whispered a name, and rocked back and forth on her knees for an hour. Finally, she lowered the bundle into the ground, covered it with earth, and lay down and wept. Moments later, the boy approached her.

            “Put a rock over it,” he said hollowly. “So it doesn’t get disturbed.”

            She sat up and looked at the boy. “It won’t get disturbed. I’m not leaving her.”

            The boy averted his gaze from the blood crusted on her legs “You need to clean yourself. They won’t wait any longer.” He set a jug of water on the ground. “You have to accept God’s will.”

            “We don’t know what God wanted. We don’t know anything about God.”

            The boy touched his face, as if he had been struck. “These are the trials that test our faith.”

            “My daughter didn’t do anything wrong. God could have left her out of it.”

            “It’s dead,” he whispered. “Preacher said it was too early to know what it was, even.”

            “He didn’t carry her,” she said. “He doesn’t know anything.”

            The boy’s features twisted in fear. He looked over his shoulder, at congregants falling into line behind the cross, and turned back to the girl. “I need to go with him. He’s my father.” He took a step backward. “You can’t stay here. Alone.”

            “You told me we’re never alone.” She raked the earth with her fingertips and fixed the boy in a hard stare until he started after the cross, leaving her to gather stones to place around her daughter’s grave.

The sun was setting when she drained the last water from the jug. Soon, her tongue swelled and dust settled in her lungs. When darkness fell, she leaned against the mesquite tree and watched clouds scudding across the moon and shadows shapeshifting upon the stones around her daughter’s grave. She considered her solitude with indifference, and then despair, as a falling star arced toward the desert.

            She touched her chapped lips, imagined the burned faces of angels cast from Heaven, and felt her fever as a tongue of flame licking at her rib cage, rising from her throat, and scorching the inside of her mouth. She imagined her heart blackened by ash, tore at her clothes to bare her neck and shoulders to the night air, and collapsed against the tree with her palms to the sky. The wind died, and in the quiet, her mind compassed a kingdom of reviled beasts condemned to burrow in dirt and slither across stony ground. She heard tarantulas padding across stones, lizards winding through scrub, and insects carving out subterranean nests; she watched, in wonder, a ministry of snakes slither from a bank of grass and, in slow succession, slide across her lap and caress her upturned palms, stretching and tensing in a shed of lucent skin. She stroked their scales, mesmerized by their graceful molt until dry lightning split the sky and drove them back into the grass. She fingered an envelope of brittle skin caught on her finger, stretched across the ground, and felt her bones sinking into the earth.

            She was curled into herself, nearly unconscious, when a gust of wind stirred her. Beyond the fetor of blood and urine, she smelled the delicate scent of the boy’s skin. She sat up, and the boy appeared to her, first as a flame, and then as flesh, as she had first seen him, untouched by the elements and almost angelic. He knelt before her, and with his tongue spun moonlight into silver threads and wound her heart in promises of everlasting love, but when she reached out to touch his face, his flesh and bones turned to dust and snaked away in the wind, leaving a darkness and deep more ancient than desert sands. A chill replaced her fever, and to the sound of distant coyotes, she stretched out beside the grave and waited to die.

            She woke at dawn, to the sound of a man’s voice, and thought the boy had returned, but when she lifted her head, she saw five men with small packs slung across their backs standing in the grass at the edge of the clearing. With her cheek to the ground, she watched the tentative approach of a young man in gym shoes and a baseball cap. When the man reached her, he crouched down and considered the dried blood on her legs, the disturbed earth encircled by stones, and the empty jug at her side. She took in the acne studding his cheeks and the downy hairs edging his upper lip. She saw the fear in his eyes.

            He pushed his cap back and settled on his haunches as an older man crouched beside him and uncapped a plastic jug. She turned to the old man and slowly registered the drape of a grey mustache and the creases in a face carved by the sun.

            Without a word—for there was no Word in his mind, or in her memory, that had ever driven out the consuming hunger ravaging the land and haunting them both—the old man touched her wrist, slid a hand beneath her arm and helped her sit upright. When he lifted the jug to her lips, she wrapped her hands around his wrists to steady herself and tasted her own blood in the water on her tongue. When she started to choke, the man rubbed her back and wiped her face with a bandana. When she could breathe again, he held the jug to her lips again until she pushed against his arm. Then he drew a bundle of wax paper from his backpack, fed her bits of sweet dough from his fingertips, and beckoned his companions.

            She looked across the valley and saw, at its far edge, the salt flat in the first light of day. She dug her fingers into the dirt and began to weep, and the older man placed his hand upon her shoulder. She looked into his face and became aware of her own smell, and the strained expressions of men looking anxiously at dissipating clouds and waiting for her. Slowly, she drew her fingertips from the earth and collapsed the circle of stones into a small pile on top of the grave.

            Wisps of cloud were burning off in the morning heat by the time she rose to her feet. The old man cupped her elbow to steady her, and for some time, they stood in silence, staring at the stones. She whispered a name that dissolved too quickly on her tongue and, at the old man’s urging, turned from the grave and into the wind, and in the company of strangers, took her first steps along the winding path leading ever closer to the promised land.

---

Alice Hatcher is the author of The Wonder That Was Ours (Dzanc Books, 2018), which appeared on the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Award long list. She has published short fiction and essays in numerous journals, including Alaska Quarterly Review, Pleiades, The Masters Review, Fourth Genre, The Bellevue Literary Review, and Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. She lives in Tucson, Arizona. More about Alice Hatcher can be found at www.alice-hatcher.com. 

The Story of “The Story of the Two Sisters”

Daniel David Froid

That the little girl answered the door seemed the first sign that something was off. I don’t know: she was so small, and her checkered pinafore and carefully curled, mouse-colored hair made her seem smaller still, doll-like, but also deliberately so, an effect that somebody (not she herself?) had planned. It surprised me how husky her voice was when she said, “Hello. Are you the investigator?” I nodded. Another surprise was how familiar she looked. She seemed like somebody I had met before, but where this child and I might have come across each other was an utter mystery. I have no children and do not associate with them except through my work, and that happens rarely.

            She made a small motion, a curtsy that didn’t quite land, for perhaps she didn’t fully grasp how or was simply unable to do it, and so she awkwardly bobbed, tilting a few centimeters too far forward—she lost her balance and hastened to thwart a fall, which she did with a snap in the opposite direction—and I watched, dazzled, as this complexity of motion unfolded in the space of just a few seconds, and then she gestured inward with her tiny hand and proffered an enigmatic smile. “Please come in.”

            And so I did, I came in, smiling in return and nodding in thanks, and that the house was so spotless inside seemed somehow another sign or alarm. Nobody’s house is this clean—nobody’s house who has children. Vinegar’s sharp bright odor flooded my nose. The room I had entered was an entryway, giving way to the kitchen on one side and, on the other, a closed door: the basement? This must be the back door; yes, I had entered through the back of the house. She said, “It is only my sister and I who are home.” Careful diction, prim and proper: who was this unworldly child? I decided to ask directly. I sank to my knees, in order to join her on her level, and asked, summoning up my most honeyed tone of voice, “What is your name?”

            She said, “Ernestine.” I thought I detected some hint of coolness. Did she sense condescension in my efforts at warmth? I don’t know how to modulate. I don’t know how to act around children, a daunting admission given my line of work and the fact that it is sometimes one of my duties to comfort or soothe them, and yet it is true. Somebody once said I should act like they’re people, like anyone else I might meet, and somehow that advice has always stuck in my head but I have never applied it. When faced with a child, I feel unstuck and overcome; they who have just begun to grasp the social contract can so easily see through the terms of agreement; they see how I struggle to meet them. Their ignorance grants them too great a share of perception, which one might call wisdom, though I would stop short of it. All this rushed through my head as I swayed on creaking knees, and I said, “How old are you, Ernestine?”

            She turned away and said, “Would you like coffee or tea?” Such an off-putting child, who imbued too great a density of meaning in her every move and word. I thought she must be the strangest child I’d ever met. I stood up unsteadily, placing one hand on a nearby stool to balance my weight, and said, “I would love some coffee. Thank you.”

            She turned toward the kitchen, and I followed. The kitchen was old, the age of its faded and scuffed wooden floor greater by far than my own three decades. She bustled around the narrow room; to reach the countertops, she used a little stool that she moved around and stood upon. Yes, there were stools everywhere in this house. Beyond her slight figure, I could see where the wooden floor ended and a burgundy carpet began, which indicated the threshold of the living room. I watched as she clutched a kettle in one small hand and moved toward the counter next to the sink. From a pitcher made of glass she filled the kettle and placed it on the stove, and then she began to fill the French press with coffee grounds, measuring inexactly with a spoon. Then again, it only seemed inexact to me; I cannot speak for her and any innate capacity to measure that she may have possessed. Next to the press were two delicate cups on matching saucers: floral print, green vines stretching across expanses of white.

            I took a seat at the table, on a chair adorned with a frilly pink cushion. It took me a moment to summon up the fortitude to speak once more. I said, “Ernestine, is your mother home?” She paused in her motion, spoon held aloft. “My mother hasn’t been home for a long, long time.” She laughed, a fairy tinkle that seemed at odds with the rasp of her voice, and said, “My mother is dead.”

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

            “She’s been dead for ages.” She had filled the press; now she placed the spoon in the sink. The sun shone through the window behind the sink and let in the most radiant light. The sky was a rich imperial blue. I wanted to be there, in it.

            “Did you say your sister was here? Is that—is that Millicent?”

            “I did say that, and she is my sister,” Ernestine said. She approached me now at the table, but she didn’t sit down. “Millicent is outside in the garden.” We remained in silence for several minutes. When the kettle wailed, Ernestine moved to pour its water into the French press. “It is very important,” she said as she poured, “to get the temperature right and to let the grounds steep for the correct amount of time.” Despite her comment, she did not set a timer, and no clocks in the room seemed at the ready for her watchful eye. Instead she clasped her hands in front of her and stared at the French press in silence. Several minutes passed until, according to the guidance of some internal clock, she deemed it ready. She poured the coffee into the cups and brought one to me. She took the other for herself and, at last, sat down. It occurred to me to wonder whether a child should have ready access to coffee.

            She held the coffee before her but did not drink; wisely, she chose to wait until it cooled. Unlike her, but like myself in the sense that I am not wise, I immediately sipped the coffee and scalded my tongue. It was far too hot but extraordinarily good. I said so, praised it, and Ernestine smiled. Then she said, “I was aware that you would come. But can you tell me why you’re here today?”

            I smiled and set down my cup. I spoke slowly, taking care to choose my words with precision: “I am an investigator, and one of your neighbors has let us know that Millicent, your sister, is missing. It seems that nobody has seen her for several weeks.”

            Ernestine sipped her coffee and looked at me, meeting my gaze. Then she repeated what she had said a few minutes ago: “My sister is outside in the garden.”

            “May I see her?”

            “Wouldn’t you like to finish your coffee?”

            “Sure. Yes. Of course.” We continued to sit in silence. It took only a few minutes for me to empty the cup, after which Ernestine glanced at it and said, “Let’s go to the garden.”

            Ernestine moved out of her chair and through the kitchen. I followed her into the living room with its plush burgundy carpet and heavy old furniture—armchairs, end tables, overflowing bookcase—and then into a short hallway, at the end of which loomed a door with inset glass, covered by a muslin curtain. Without a word, she opened the door into the garden.

            It was very small, less a garden than a tidy square with scant rows of flowers, tomato plants, some herbs. In the corner opposite the door stood a statue of the most exquisite marble. The statue was taller by far than Ernestine, the size of an adult human woman, and though the features resembled hers, they belonged to an older girl. My disquiet was obvious to Ernestine, who met my gaze with a kind of smirk and said, “This is my sister. I’m afraid she’s been frozen in place.”

            The statue was now only inches away. I reached out and touched it; the marble felt cold despite the warmth of the sun. “Your sister . . .” I began, but my words trailed off.

            “This is my sister,” she said again. All that Ernestine said was delivered in a solemn tone, even funereal. “It happened not long ago, and not far from here, when she came across another garden where there grew a certain herb that is prized above all others, which is said to grant eternal life. She saw the herb, which is unmistakable, for it grows in a spiral, and once she saw it was determined to have it for herself. And so she stepped into the garden and grabbed a fistful, tucking it into a pocket of her apron. But the woman to whom the garden belonged soon came out and saw my sister and cried, ‘Thief!’ Though my sister fled, the woman followed in pursuit, and soon she found her here, at home, where she froze her in marble. And now that is her you see here before you.”

            I stood amazed before the girl and the statue. The words that came out of my mouth seemed foolish as soon as uttered, utterly inept and inadequate: “And that’s why your neighbors thought she was missing . . .”

            “That is exactly why. And though the woman has promised to free my sister if I complete certain tasks for her, she made the tasks more difficult as well, having cast a spell on me, as Millicent’s abettor, to turn me into a child. I am unable to do these tasks myself, and so my sister will remain trapped, just like this, until I can find someone to help me.”

            At that moment I breathed in deeply. A rearrangement of the order of my life was in the air and highly palpable. I knew I would offer my help; why else would I be here? That I had stumbled into the story of these two strange girls was as clear to me as that the statue was made of cold white marble. We exchanged a glance that indicated she knew I would help her. Her face bloomed into a radiant smile.

            “What are these tasks you must do?”

            “The first is to find the world’s loveliest and most delicate flower and trap it in a gilded cage. The second is to weave the finest and softest silk from a certain silkworm that makes its home on a very rare tree. The third is to find the most beautiful and agreeable child in the world and cook it in a stew for the old woman’s delectation. After all, as many of us know already, the old woman is in fact an ogress who enjoys the meat of children. It is her wont and her pleasure to capture and destroy all the beautiful living beings who make their home in this world.” She stopped speaking and tilted her head, watching for my reaction. I met her gaze and said, “And after that the old woman will reverse the effects of her spells?”

            Ernestine nodded. She said, “Are you prepared to help me?”

            With a heavy heart, I nodded. It is not that I wanted to do these things, but, rather, that I saw my fate unfurl before me. It unfurled quickly. As she spoke, I could see it: this was my future. I do not wish to call it my destiny or fate. But I recognized the truth of it all, and the surety of my subsequent participation, with a force unlike anything I had ever known. It was simply, intuitively, unambiguously true, as the marble was ice-cold to my touch and the sky was free and clear.

            The child—though in fact, of course, no child at all—laughed her fairy laugh and said, “That’s good. Because we aren’t going to do any of those things. We’re going to kill the witch.”

            At that point Ernestine led me back into the house. She poured me more coffee and promised to cook us some eggs. As she went about the kitchen and gathered the requisite materials—pan, eggs, butter, plates—she continued to talk. I sat and listened. Ernestine described her plan and explained my role in her conspiracy. The plan was very simple, to the extent that I wondered whether the old woman had already anticipated something like it. Ernestine was going to supply the old woman with a series of fraudulent gifts: a regular flower of no remarkable beauty in a cage gilded by artificial means; fine and soft silk derived from an ordinary origin, an ordinary silkworm; and another meat—pork—cooked in a stew. She explained that, while the plan did seem altogether too simple, what the old woman wouldn’t expect was such a flagrant violation of narrative law. “You see,” she said, clutching the coffee cup in her delicate hands, “the old woman follows certain rules to the letter and expects us to follow suit. She is certain that she will find all thieving young girls whose curious eyes stray toward her garden and turn them to stone and that her requests will never be fulfilled. Or she must be less meticulously tricked, the tables turned in a different way. I believe that, if the requests were met, she would gladly do as she says. If things were to unfold another way—well, Solveig Nilsen would be shocked.”

            At this point I spoke in a low voice, leaning forward in my seat. “Solveig Nilsen,” I said. “Is that the old woman’s name?”

            “No,” Ernestine said. “It’s not.”

            “Have you considered meeting the requests?”

            “Well, of course I have, but I ask you to consider this. If they were met, she would simply be reborn the next time a hungry girl wandered too near to an old witch’s garden. I believe that you do not quite grasp the scope of our work. By surprising the woman, and killing her prematurely, we therefore destroy the cycle.”

            “The cycle,” I repeated.

            “Yes. It’s a story I’ve lived through many times. And you have, too. Does all of this not feel very familiar to you: my home, my childlike appearance, my missing sister? Do you not feel that you’ve encountered all of this before?”

            I agreed. She was right. It felt familiar. But it seemed to me that whatever mental picture I possessed of the situation remained clouded, fuzzy around the edges—the entire picture unclear.

            “Do you not even find it a little strange that you lack a name of your own? You are simply, after all, a conduit through whom the story is told. Our author hasn’t bequeathed you with very much more than that, I’m afraid.” At this point she stood up. She walked toward the sink and began to clean the dishes.

            It’s true; I have no name. When she said it, I recognized that she was right. What was my name? Had I ever had one? What was I doing here, really?

            Ernestine continued, “I am grateful, you know, that the story continues to be updated now and then. I appreciate these modern conveniences.” She held up the French press and gestured to her stainless-steel sink. “It doesn’t seem that long ago that we were drinking nettle tea in a wretched wooden hut.” She laughed. “I suppose I’ve had not a little practice in making fine coffee and eggs as we mull over our plans to save my poor sister—my poor sister who is always trapped in marble. That has been one constant from the beginning.”

            At the table, where I remained, I was silent.

            Then I spoke. “What am I doing here, really?”

            Now the girl sighed. “‘The Story of the Two Sisters,’ by Solveig Nilsen. That is the name of the story and its author.” Soon she’d returned to the table, the dishes clean. “You are simply a narrative device. You are not even, to tell the truth, a genuine a character—or, I’m afraid, not much of one. But to return to my plan: I wish to show Mrs. Nilsen that we are rather more than wooden pieces on a game board of her own design. If we break the cycle, what a surprise she will have! There will be no more story at all then, and my sister and I can at last live in peace.”

            At some point, she noticed my silence. She said, “Well? Can you speak? Can you tell me what you think of my plans?”

            I could not speak. I could not tell her, for I did not know. I knew she was right, and yet some reserve within me, of fear or self-preservation, if that was what it was, prevented response. The problem lay in my failure to understand the problem. No. The problem lay in my complete and total failure to gather resources both external and internal, resources that could conceivably aid or advance or improve my understanding. Understanding what. The problem lay in not knowing: what questions to ask, where to start, anything. The problem was the lack—yes, that’s right. The lack, the absence, the nothing. But these were not intractable problems, lacks and gaps and absences. All these many voids could be filled.

            But what if I did not want to leave the contours of this story, which, I had forgotten, did in fact form the borders of my life? What if I wanted things to remain as they are—to remain in place? Could I refuse now to rebel?

            I didn’t know. Remaining at the table, I didn’t say anything for a long, long time.

            *

            Ernestine Boggs chuckled to herself and then cursed. Her writing made her chuckle, and her cursing was her response to one finger’s inadvertent tap, which caused a growing length of ash to fall from her cigarette and spray onto her keyboard. “Isn’t that nice,” she muttered. She would clean it up later. Now, she stood up from her desk, let loose a hacking cough, and began to pace, cigarette in hand. Part of her wished to end the story there; she felt it had reached its conclusion, that she’d tied a neat enough bow—maybe a little bit crooked, she thought—on the narrator’s predicament. And yet another part of her wondered whether she should keep going, should go through with the little girl’s plan and develop a confrontation of some kind with Mrs. Solveig Nilsen. Ernestine Boggs told herself that that would be tedious and decided to make some lunch. After pulling on her favorite housecoat—pink leopard-print polyester—she opened the door and left the room.

            She had been having trouble with the story. She wanted to write a little bit about herself, her own life and experiences, and, in the process of writing, she found that she came out with a cockeyed fairy tale with no resolution and no moral: not at all what she had intended. And as she wrote she could not decide which of the characters were, in fact, herself, though she suspected that each of them might be: the girl, whose name she shared; the deeply perplexed and vacuous narrator, or the unseen old woman. A trio, sacred number. It occurred to her that there was another trio as well: statue, narrator, and author. The narrator remained in the center of both, the nexus, the point where the lines of the X converge. “I’m so full of shit,” Ernestine Boggs said out loud then, and once more she made herself laugh.

            All of these things jangled in her head as she left her office and descended the stairs to her kitchen. As she took one step and another, she absentmindedly patted her hair, a grey permed helmet that she regarded with inordinate and unreasonable vanity.

            Fiction was her latest challenge, and she did find it a challenge. She thought about the days on the set of Eagle’s Nest when she and Serafina Nicolls had screamed at each other for hours, debating the likelihood of this or that plot point. Those days had been easier, and more fun, than this morning. Over decades she had spent her time not just writing scripts but sparring with all those—other writers, producers, actors—who dared to question a melodramatic plot twist or a faulty line of dialogue. She preferred to get her own way at all costs, no matter that she was a writer, not an actor; she would revise only with spite and resentment. Yet now that all obstacles had vanished—rather, now that she had removed them, giving herself what she thought of as a gift of this new pursuit—she found that everything proved much harder than she’d imagined or desired. Her talent was for provocation, in her verbal spats and the endless streams of melodrama that she held deep within her like a volcano. Who would approach that rocky ledge and feel the scald? More to the point: now she was dormant, and however would she activate those deep reserves of magma again? She wanted to feel as if the top of her head were taken off. But she wanted to do it to herself, and so, unskilled in the art of trepanning, she fumbled with a blunted knife.

            In the kitchen, she was staring into space. She was lost in thought and dwelling on the nexus. It was not her first attempt at autobiography, yet somehow all of them seemed to turn out this way. She would announce to her empty rooms, “Now I will write a little something about myself,” and then she would sit down and come up with something utterly other. “No discipline,” she would tut. “No focus.”

            Now she startled herself out of reverie, grinding her cigarette into the enamel ash tray on her kitchen table and then moving toward the sink to wash her hands. She liked to watch as the gummy liquid soap turned to suds in her hands as she rubbed them together.

            As she scrubbed, she found that she’d boarded a new train of thought: time means becoming meat. What was she doing here—smoking her cigarettes, weakly attempting her fiction, cooking her lunch—except hurtling toward an end that would be both swift and decisive, as all ends are, the final transformation to a lump of dead flesh, metamorphosis that crazed and scared her. All that she wrote disappeared into ether. Here it was: one day, she would follow it there. That her consciousness would simply dissolve, having nowhere to go, was appalling. She couldn’t believe it. She did not believe in God but thought at times that something must wait beyond the dissolution, the wreck of the body and the vanishing of the spirit. Law of conservation of matter: it has an intuitive rightness and elegance and so, she thought, there must be a law of conservation of spirit. Her consciousness was not a tangible entity, but still it lived and flourished. It was, she was—I am Ernestine Boggs, for chrissake! It, she, I was there, here, alive and well. Her spirit had to go somewhere. Would she be reborn? Always, she thought, reincarnation seemed as dubious, perplexing, and annoying as anything else. I will not be an insect, she thought. Ego! She clung to a sense of conviction. No longer washing her hands, she had taken a seat at the small round kitchen table and begun to look listlessly fridge-ward. She was putting off the task of cooking her meal.

            It seemed to her that a human being had too great a share of vivacity, or vitality, or whatever it meant to be something—sentience—and to become something else, yet, at the same time, she thought, it was not just humans, and animals, too, had their own unique share of whatever-it-was. Right? Her old dear dead dog—Cheryl—had not been cursed with Ernestine’s churning self-consciousness, but hadn’t she had her own life? She did; she’d had thoughts, Cheryl had, and wishes and all the things she loved and despised. And where did she go when she died? Where did silkworms go once they had spun out of themselves the very shelters that would serve as the cause of their destruction? Vitality cannot be wasted.

            She thought, lost in thought, wouldn’t Mrs. Solveig Nilsen be surprised if I turned the tables on her? Where is my Solveig Nilsen? Now “fuck” she said aloud and approached the fridge, which, open, gave off a dim yellow light. She grabbed the eggs and a loaf of bread and transferred them from fridge to counter.

            The stove released its rich stink of gasoline and blue plume of fire. She slapped her pan on the burner grate and reached for the eggs. Clutching one in her hands, somehow she squeezed too tightly and cracked its shell. Startled, she dropped it on the floor.

            She paused for some seconds. And then, lowering herself to her knees, she inspected the floor, not clean, with a new covering of bits of shell and a thin layer of albumen. And the yolk, punctured in the fall, was now seeping across the albumen and shell and dirty tile. Ernestine Boggs put her hands on the floor and drew closer to the egg. Then she stuck one finger into the mess and swirled it around, feeling the egg-slime and prickle of shell-shards.

            What is the egg? Shell is host or vessel, and the egg the sacred body that the vessel receives and gently shelters. Or the vessel is an inextricable part of its being, vessel and body identical. And the thinnest skin that shelters the yolk—that invisible membrane that allows it to remain suspended, still, round, and whole. That the vessel itself had shattered, seeping its liquid across the floor, seemed like an instance of the great and only crime: the dissolution of life. There it goes!

            Her destiny could be atmospheric. When her own spirit fades away into that unknown wherever, her particles will be captured by air, sucked one day into lungs; she will be lived and breathed. Or her destiny could be interstellar. When her spirit goes at last, it will seep into the stars and puddle atop, alongside, within the black pool of space, one viscous fluid that cannot quite dissolve into another. It will resemble this wreck of egg on the floor, to be cleaned up by someone. She plunged a finger into the yolk now and smeared it around on the tile, picking up the dust and grime of months. The gasoline smell, thick, wafted to her nostrils. Above eye level, the flame continued to burn, ever-blue. It was scorching her little pan. To the empty kitchen and the egg and the gas and the flame, she said, “Where is my own Solveig Nilsen? How do I turn the tables on her?”

            With an abrupt and smooth motion that surprised her, even in the act of doing it, she stood up, switched off the gas, and set about cleaning floor and oven. The pan might be ruined. She placed it in the sink. Scrubbing it hard until it shone, she rubbed and rubbed the tile. She thought about going back upstairs now, to her office, about getting back to work and fixing the story.

            Instead she exchanged her housecoat for a gold lamé windbreaker, and, having first slipped an apple in its pocket, stepped outside into the cold bright day. She was heading for the woods behind her house. She passed her garden, identical in nearly every detail to that of the little girl in the story. She stopped by the statue and gazed at it with a longing that felt ever renewed. This was no statue of a sister, for Ernestine had no sister she wished to memorialize, but of Cheryl the dog. Ernestine said her name aloud and patted the marble head.

            She removed the apple and brought it to her teeth. Incisors punctured its thick red skin. Its liquid sprayed her face and stickied her hands and dribbled down her chin. She munched and walked into the forest. Eventually, the core of the apple fell from her hand to the ground; later, ants would throw themselves across its juicy crags and celebrate this gift of life.

            The light in the forest was several shades darker than the day. Trees huddled close, and Ernestine Boggs could see but little. She was thinking of waste and where her vitality would go. And what about the characters whom she imbued with traces of herself, her own vigor or essence or whatever she gave them? She inflated them with the breath of life, said: Live! and they listened. She could think something else into sentience; at times she really thought she could, and the capacity to be surprised by a character’s actions was a novel occurrence that was not unique to her. More energy that, it seemed, was not ultimately conserved. Energy she poured into dead ends that might cause some few minutes’ amusement or diversion but not much more than that. Is that how it worked? She thought: there ought to be a magistrate who passes judgment on the law’s transgression.

            The train of thought stopped in its tracks, hurtled to a halt. She saw something near her feet, the only spot of color that was not dingy green, dark brown, grey. It was a flower of stunning beauty. Its color neither pink nor purple but a luscious intermediate shade, it stood upright, shooting out of the ground in greeting. It looked like an orchid, despite the fact that, she thought, orchids don’t, can’t, grow in this region of the world.

            A thought resounded in her mind. She laughed aloud. Looking down at her shining jacket, she wondered if it could serve as a gilded cage. Then she knelt and tore the flower from the earth, slipping it into a pocket that, zipped, enclosed it.

            On she went. Of course she harbored some guilt about her previous action. She had snatched the flower’s vitality away, following a remorseless impulse to hoard its beauty for herself. It was true. But, if she were the narrator of the story she had tried to write, she would feel quite pleased that she’d gathered one of the materials that would, in theory, effect the rescue of the stolen sister. The thought made her vision sharper. She looked around to see what she could see. And so, there, of course, on some variety of mulberry tree—which she could only assume made its home here because of some unknown law, if not the laws of ecology that seemed to have been somehow suspended, the dictate of some unknown creator to whom she must one day offer her thanks—with its low stump and plump bouquet of leaves, she espied white writhing hordes of silkworms. Unskilled in the art of sericulture, she would not know how to cultivate cocoons that would have to be despoiled. And yet she collected a fistful of worms, and she slipped that fist into her other pocket and let them go. She zipped the pocket shut.

            And now she knew what was coming, what was left. She did not know who it was or what to call that unknown master—driver at the wheel, arbiter of the law, author of the story—but it did seem to her that someone was in charge and it was not and never would be her.

            She thought, I was trying to finish my story. I would write a little about myself. It turned out a different way, went askew or awry, as things in her experience tended to do. She didn’t know where she was anymore. But she could see, ahead of her, in a space that was too small to be a clearing, a rupture in the ceiling of the woods through which shone the moon’s soft light—no matter that the dark had not yet fallen when she left, unless time had passed too quickly, far beyond her capacity to measure its continual ticking—a child curled up on dirt and leaves.

            She glanced up at that pinprick rupture. The gibbous moon resembled an egg. She thought: damn the moon. She would like to crack its shell and watch the albumen and yolk gush out on that endless surface that was no surface. She would like to see whether it would be absorbed or suspended. This child may lose the vitality that Ernestine Boggs held so sacred. It would diminish or be consumed. It could be her who would breathe some miniscule particles of matter into her own lungs. She thought again of the gibbous egg that she would love to smash, whose insides would seep into night’s dark coverlet, to dampen or stain it. Take it! she thought. She wanted it gone. She wanted the child gone, too.

            Perhaps if she did it—claimed the child as part of her quest, did what it now seemed she might be fated to do—she would turn around and retrace her path and find, when she returned, a different house with someone else waiting in its garden. And perhaps that one would know what to do with her, though she doubted it. And perhaps that one would know where all that vitality or vivacity or whatever it was would flow in its own good time, though she didn’t think she could believe it. She was walking toward the child.

            From the clarity and brightness of the gibbous egg’s light, she saw the child and she knew who it was. It was the narrator of her story, that one to whom she had not bothered to give a face, much less a name, the narrator who was only a nexus, a plot point in some grander scheme.

            Born into a world that could never grant recognition, because there was nothing to recognize, because, once born, nothing was granted but confusion of mind and spirit, the narrator lies curled and sleeping on the floor of the forest. Ernestine Boggs approaches and gently rests her hands on a nondescript back. Her nails are tapping on flesh that is warm. She is playing a tattoo, calling you to action. She takes off her jacket and covers the body of this eternal unknown. She thinks: Who would eat you? Who would grant you your fate, and, having consigned you to its dark intentions, swell with the pleasure of a gratifying meal? And whatever you have of a soul would scamper—somewhere. The question whose asking I cannot stop; the future whose coming I can neither see nor bear. A deer in the woods, a babe in the woods, are you. In a dream I watched one beast eviscerate another for the simple pleasure of it. Neither hunger nor safety were at issue; it was merely the delectation of a perverse and beastly impulse obeyed and embraced. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t do it to you. I have shorn myself of such impulses in the interest of life, the vitality I worship and refuse to consume.

            She stands up, walks further into the forest, shorn of her jacket, shorn of her treasures, surrendering to a narrative law she did not design, whose sudden arrival she couldn’t have seen, shorn of self and life but, still, becoming.

---

Daniel David Froid is a scholar, educator, and writer of strange stories who lives in Indiana. His scholarly research focuses on devils in eighteenth-century British literature, and his fiction appears in Lightspeed and Weird Horror, among others. He teaches at Purdue University.

Walking + The Ladder

Nathan Dragon

Walking

I walk a lot. I like walking.

            I took a walk today just to get out of the apartment. Came back with a six-pack that I didn’t really need or want. Then I walked from the door to the fridge to the living room to the bathroom to the living room, sat for a second, then walked back to the kitchen for a beer, and back to the living room. That’s one lap. There will be five more and each one gets faster.

            I’ve got blue pants on with a single dot of pink from a bleach drop, white socks, brown shoes. I change into the black shoes when I leave the apartment. This is how my grandfather dressed, plus he’d stuffed his breast pocket with smokes, lottery tickets, a lighter, and a little pencil.

            A kind of uniform, complete with pink bleach drops. He was a cleaner.

            I think I should get some scratch tickets next time I’m at the store if I remember.

*

            Walking earlier, I threw a couple shadowboxed punches. Had to stop and put the six-pack down for a sec. Looked at my reflection in some storefront window. I was thinking about a move, so I made the move, because I wanted to feel myself go through the motions and see myself make those motions. Felt self-conscious that someone on the other side of the window was looking at me like I was performing for them.

            This comes from the same part of my brain that allows me to talk to myself out loud in public: What should someone do when they over-squirt the appropriate amount of mustard onto the plate for the corn dog? What is their responsibility? Should the extra mustard, if clean and crumb free, be siphoned back into the mustard bottle?

*

            It’s kind of a boring place to walk. So I have boring thoughts. There’s nothing for me to connect with.

            Like a right hook connecting after a parry.

            At the grocery store late one night two weeks ago, I thought I was going to have to fight someone whose name seemed like it would be Timoly. Timoly said, “My bad,” so I said back to Timoly, “Definitely is,” and Timoly called me a pussy. I was just mad because it’s really not hard to be a person who goes unnoticed peacefully, but Timoly couldn’t and kept cutting me off, waving around a bag of whole wheat tortillas.

            After the exchange, I kept walking up the aisle towards the seltzer water, laughing, and I kept thinking,

            What?

            What?

            Imagine how dumb that would’ve been.

            Good to be safe walking around. Bundle up, hide most of your face. Hat and shades.

            Floating right through.

            The grass will be greener there. If this could hurry up and be over with.

            Go there or go back.

            I was walking up Main Street, with these sharp sneezes going on.

            Remembered getting my nose cauterized a dozen times. I’d be covered in my own blood after two or three rounds. Wipe it from my face and wipe it on my shirt with my red glove. Could never tell how much there was till after, cooling off and finding form in the mirror.

            I remember being covered in flour, breathing it in, sneezing, after dumping the 50lb bag into the dough machine. Don’t turn it on yet. Step back for a sec, let it settle, that thing will take your arm off repeating in my head years later.

            Fishing, it’s the same feeling as getting caught with the hook in the crook of my arm, trying to get it unstuck from the weeds.

            I want to want nothing.

            I want to take a nap. But I never do.

            Do you think it will turn out?

            Is this real or not? Frame it. Hang it up. Please tell me what this is.

            What am I doing?

            I’m trying to engage with myself. ?

            Walking. Talking. Thinking.

            Today I did wake up. I got out of bed and put the uniform on.

            Being good this month but not quite yet.

            I like to keep walking. Take a few laps.

            I’ve been adding some paprika to my breakfast. I keep forgetting to get the thing of Cavender’s and a lemon. I’m not sure if I like Cavender’s, but it’s been awhile, and it would be something to do to get some and try it again. Cavender’s and scratch tickets.

The Ladder

When I was maybe twenty-seven, twenty-eight, I was driving north with my panting dog in the back. At some point we moved over from 95 to some local street. But before that, with marshes below us, the highway elevated, my mind was blown. We drove by a ladder sticking up from below, just peeking up above the highway guardrail.

            “The top of the ladder, Vic,” I yelled, “would you look at that!”

            I’d gotten hired onto a roofing crew earlier in the season. I liked the work. I’d had an eye for ladders. My mind said: Stairway to Heaven. It wasn’t, though. It was I-95 North into New Hampshire.

            It was cloudless and hot that week, easy to remember that. It was always cloudless and hot, and I always felt wet and heavy.

            The ladder’d caught light in a way it shouldn’t have. It blinded me. Heaven. I was in heaven with my dog, so dogs do go there. I’d wanted to close my eyes and keep them closed but I opened them because I wanted to and because I wanted to live and I wanted my dog to live.

            I’d never told anyone about that ladder because it seemed, at the time, melodramatic and embarrassing.

            But years later when I thought of it, it made me feel hopeful. Someone who needed to escape, did. Climbed up to the highway. Lived. Keep living. I kept driving.

            I opened my eyes because my dog barked.

            There was a song I used to listen to every morning on the way to work about long hair and walking everywhere. I remember one time, listening to it, driving north with my panting dog Vic in the back. I had to bring Vic with me this time—I don’t remember why.

Nathan Dragon‘s work has been in NOON, Hotel, Fence, and New York Tyrant. Dragon is from Salem, MA. His collection, The Champ is Here, will be published by Cash4Gold Books in the Fall of 2024.