# data[].attributes.body
You might find some of these not fully appropriate for L10: these are short stories I found vivid and well done, and easily accessible (though sometimes behind minor paywall). If nothing else, some of these might also be used by Roswall or other coaches for Forensics depending on the student, and there are worse things than having a short story general resource. :)

These also lean HEAVILY to the contemporary, because I am quite certain no one needs another recommendation of some of the standards (The Most Dangerous Game/Monkey's Paw, AGAIN? etc) , but I do have some older/more classic pieces linked here that are great, but not selected as often.

Please let me know if you might use the Padlet format! I am considering this as a paid subscription.

# data[].attributes.body
THE MOTH is a podcast where people share true short stories of their lives. This tale of pizza delivery identity theft and revenge is only one great option.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Tristan Jimerson | A Dish Best Served Cold | Minneapolis Moth Mainstage 2011

# data[].attributes.body
We have a number of very good short story collections - this one leaps to mind because I know Jason Reynolds' story "Eraser Tattoo" is often taught in ELA. This collection has some other strong entries, and I have a few others you could peruse.

# data[].attributes.body
Probably one of our greatest fantasy short story writers living, we own a number of her collections. I highly recommend "Stone Animals" in Magic For Beginners and "The Summer People" from Get In Trouble.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
It's morning. Maybe too early to have sprung it on her, when she was still shaking off her dreams. The sky arches over me high and sweet, and I can hear the sighing of mourning doves and the wind in the telephone wires.

# data[].attributes.body
This isn't one short piece -- it's many. Twelve seasons of top shelf short fiction read by Mr. Reading Rainbow himself. I particularly like "Open House on Haunted Hill" by John Wiswell and "The Paper Menagerie" by Ken Liu.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The best short fiction, handpicked by the best voice in podcasting and presented in 3D immersive audio. In every episode, host LeVar Burton (Roots, Reading Rainbow, Star Trek) invites you to take a break from your daily life, and dive into a great story. LeVar's narration blends with gorgeous soundscapes to bring stories by Stephen King, Toni Morrison, Nnedi Okorafor, Kurt Vonnegut, Ken Liu and more to life. So, if you're ready, let's take a deep breath...

Our immersive audio is best with headphones! If you'd prefer to listen without immersive audio, visit levarburtonpodcast.com/mono.

The best short fiction, handpicked by the best voice in podcasting and presented in 3D immersive audio. In every episode, host LeVar Burton (Roots, Reading Rainbow, Star Trek) invites you to take a break from your daily life, and dive into a great story. LeVar's narration blends with gorgeous soundscapes to bring stories by Stephen King, Toni Morrison, Nnedi Okorafor, Kurt Vonnegut, Ken Liu and more to life. So, if you're ready, let's take a deep breath...

Our immersive audio is best with headphones! If you'd prefer to listen without immersive audio, visit levarburtonpodcast.com/mono.

The centering of biopic characters and ideas is WHY I love your podcast as a white man

Lavar I have been a fan since "The Next Generation " and when I found your podcast it felt like such a treasure to me. I love the deeply emotional stories and your beautiful telling of them. Tonight I finished an episode and at the end you told of an experience with a listener that gave a 1 star review bc you "seemed to like only brown skinned characters" and maybe hated white people. I was offended for you!! Insecure, immature, scared, and ignorant that's what that particular white (man I assume) is. I embrace experiences where I can see things from another humans perspective and consider it a blessing to me. It adds to the context of the world and helps me more fully see all the beautiful shades of humanity all around me. Thank you for bringing these stories from authors I might never have had the opportunity to enjoy without your voice and talent (also discernment). I'm a lifelong fan sir and I do sincerely hope you find a way to continue to record more episodes!

5 stars of course!

From Reading Rainbow to this amazing podcast! Mr. LeVar Burton has been in my life for 40 year and like many, he has helped raise me. Thank you for continuing to bring us adults joy!

Fantastic. Lucky to have this podcast.

The stories chosen are varied and usually sublime, and Lavar is an excellent reader, which is everything. Since I started having trouble with my eyes, and can't read all the short stories I used to, audio versions have been a life saver. I had discovered Lightspeed & Clarkesworld podcasts, etc. but I assumed that Lavar's podcast was for kids (thinking of Reading Rainbow). I was mistaken. Although many of these stories would be great to listen to with your kids and then talk them over, these are definitely for adults.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The best short fiction, handpicked by the best voice in podcasting and presented in 3D immersive audio. In every episode, host LeVar Burton (Roots, Reading Rainbow, Star Trek) invites you to take a break from your daily life, and dive into a great story. LeVar's narration blends with gorgeous sounds...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
This story, which I've offered up as free online fiction, owes much of its inspiration to my actual grandmother and is faintly, ever so faintly, autobiographical.

The sound of the car wheels whispering along the road meshes with Grandmother's snores and the faint noise of my mother's humming as she drives. She prefers not to have the radio on during long trips.

Inside the car, itâ€™s cold as a mall midsummer. Cold as a clinic, a hospital, a morgue. I canâ€™t quite see my breath, but Iâ€™m wearing a sweater, while outside itâ€™s 97 degrees - according to the dashboard gauge. The air conditioner roars its displeasure as we roll down the highway.

We are traveling with my reluctant grandmother from Mullinville, Kiowa County, Kansas, where she has spent all her life, to a West Coast nursing home near the neighborhood where my mother and I both live. Behind us are: her house, now up for sale; her Chrysler, also listed in the local paper; and her possessions, which my mother and I will return to sort through in a week.

The landscape spreads out with the pancake flatness of Kansas around us. Cottonwoods trace the edges of a meandering creek and its unseen waters. Irrigation sprinklers spread out green circles only visible from above, where a ribboned contrail shows a planeâ€™s progress. Shimmers of summer heat prelude our arrival, as though we chase an oasis that never manifests.

My mother glances over at me. "Can't sleep?"

"I thought you might want company."

"I appreciate it. Though I can't say that the silence hasn't been welcome." She rolls her eyes expressively towards the back seat.

"I heard that," my grandmother says. It is unclear whether she is talking in her sleep or responding, so we wait. More faint snores come from the back seat, so we go back to talking quietly.

It is August, the worst possible month to be driving through Kansas. It is a cicada year as well, and every night at the motels we hear their music swelling. Last night we stayed in Garden City, Kansas, home of feedlot after feedlot; the room was full of flies. A cheap red flyswatter on top of the television said that this was not unexpected.

We all shared the same hotel room. Itâ€™s cheaper to do it that way, and my grandmother insisted on paying all the motel bills as part of her martyrdom. She sleeps alone in one bed, while my mother and I share the other.

Itâ€™s strange being with them on this trip. We all look alike â€" I can see myself twenty and forty years down the line, unless I take some drastic measure. We even smell the same, although my grandmotherâ€™s scent is masked by perfume and cigarette smoke.

Waking, my grandmother leans forward, patting my shoulder. Her eyes are uncertain behind her thick glasses. â€œShayla, you know whatâ€™s always bothered me?â€ she asks.

â€œNo, Grandma, what?â€

â€œWhen you were eight, we went to the K-Mart, and there was a toy there, a stuffed black kitty doll. You wanted it so badly! But I didnâ€™t want to buy it for you because it was a little shop worn. You cried and cried.â€

â€œI donâ€™t remember that,â€ I said. Itâ€™s the truth. I remember trips to the K-Mart as a child. I bought my first album there, Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brassâ€™s â€œTalk to the Animals.â€ I remember the bank of coin-operated vending machines dispensing gumballs, jawbreakers, and wonderful trinkets. I always asked my parents or, on occasion, my grandmother for nickels and dimes, knowing that theyâ€™d balk at a quarter. But this cat, somewhere in the shelves of toys K-Mart held, a magic section that expanded like an unfolding poinsettia blossom during the holidays, was not something I remembered at all.

â€œYou cried and cried.â€

Beside me, through the glass, row after row of wheat undulate, golden as Barbie doll hair.

â€œI really donâ€™t remember it, Grandma.â€

â€œWas that at Christmas?â€ my mother says.

â€œYes.â€

â€œI remember that. You cried all evening.â€

I shrug. â€œI still donâ€™t remember it.â€

But looking back at my grandmother, I see it for a moment in the rear window: a small stuffed black cat, made with real fur, the eyes luminous green marbles. The retreating roadway framed in the glass behind it shimmers; I blink and the toy is gone.

My grandmother lapses into silence, and my mother begins to hum again. At the sound, Grandmother speaks.

â€œWhat do you girls plan on doing for dinner?â€ she asks.

â€œI donâ€™t know, Mother. Is there something you would like?â€

â€œOh, I donâ€™t know.â€ She pauses. â€œMaybe some place we could all sit down and get a nice salad.â€

â€œHow about the Outback?â€ I suggest.

There is silence from both of them. I sigh in admiration at the way Iâ€™ve been drawn into this game.

â€œThereâ€™s a Roy Rogers just ahead,â€ my mother counters.

â€œOh, there,â€ my grandmother says.

â€œThey have salads.â€

â€œNot nice ones in bowls.â€

I watch the highway signs as we zip along. â€œThereâ€™s a Chinese restaurant coming up,â€ I cannot resist saying.

â€œThat would be nice,â€ my grandmother says, and I know, somehow that this has been her plan all along. She looks out the window. â€œDo you girls know, this is my first road trip? Itâ€™s like a movie, just the three of us.â€

I can tell sheâ€™s seriously jonesing for a cigarette.

We get in another hour of driving after dinner, but donâ€™t want to push on too long. Pulling in at a nondescript motel, $39.95 for a night with privileges to a faded blue swimming pool, we check in and conduct our evening rituals. My grandmother watches â€œSurvivorâ€ in her bathrobe and goes outside on the balcony to smoke during the commercials. My mother pages through a murder mystery, fingers flicking through it in a steady rhythm. She has a tote bag filled with paperbacks; sheâ€™ll work her way through them methodically, like a sugar fiend devouring candy bars. The two of them ignore each other for the most part. They have never gotten along, although my mother does not hold the same childhood grudges that my aunt does. My aunt has refused to have any part of this trip besides funding it.

I love my mother, but I feel a great deal of fondness towards my grandmother as well. She is stubborn, and manipulative, but sheâ€™s earned that right by living to a ripe 95. Even so, I had to agree, despite her protests, that a nursing home would be better for her than the solitary and sometimes fragile existence sheâ€™d been leading until then.

â€œShe drives to Wal-Mart, out on the highway,â€ my mother had said on the phone, recapping one argument. â€œI canâ€™t get her to see that itâ€™s dangerous. I canâ€™t imagine what the other drivers think.â€

â€œTheyâ€™re probably used to the occasional senior citizen,â€ I said. â€œCan someone be paid to take her to the store twice a week, or something like that?â€

â€œItâ€™s not just that,â€ my mother said. â€œIâ€™m worried sheâ€™ll slip in the bath. Or on her front steps, or the basement steps. Sheâ€™s getting very frail.â€

â€œBut she likes it there.â€

â€œI know.â€

â€œWhat does Aunt Rosie want to do?â€

â€œOh, sheâ€™d put her in a home tomorrow if she thought she could get away with it. Probably has one all picked out.â€

I would have laughed, but it was true.

â€œIâ€™ll come out and help you talk to her about it,â€ I said.

â€œThank you, that makes it bearable,â€ my mother said. â€œI donâ€™t think you want to get too much in the way of all the discussions, but I know I could use you for moral support.â€

Now, together, half a state away from her home, we say our goodnights and go to sleep. Both my mother and my grandmother snore. Outside I hear mourning doves lamenting, the sigh of wind through the telephone wires, and the whisper of tires, rolling down the darkened highway, moving through the pools of light that define the nightâ€™s blackness.

Iâ€™ve always been a little freaked out by bathrooms at night. For one, Iâ€™m nearsighted, but donâ€™t usually take my glasses with me when stumbling there out of bed. For another, a thought of someone or something reaching up from the toilet to grab my crotch haunts me, even though I know itâ€™s silly. But as soon as I sit down, I think about avoiding thinking it, and then Iâ€™m done and standing up while reaching for the toilet paper, not looking at the bowl.

Which doesnâ€™t explain why, blearily sitting on the pot, I see the cat again in front of me.

It is, unlike the rest of the world, perfectly clear in detail. It is covered with rabbit fur, dyed black, and eight inches long. Its legs are well delineated from its body, giving it a crouching appearance. The eyes gaze blankly at me. Neither of us move.

Yes, I would have wanted it as a child: the imitation of life, the softness of the fur, would have enchanted me. My allergies prevented us ever having pets, so I compensated with stuffed animals. I do not want it now, here in the bathroom, inexplicable and surreal.

I almost speak, but what would I ask this toy that sits here chilling me colder than any air conditioning?

Surely when I blink itâ€™ll vanish, but it remains, even when I stand and wipe and flush. My feet are cold, but a bead of sweat crawls its solitary way down my back. I step around it and to the door.

And this time, when I look behind me, it is indeed gone. But the hair on the nape of my neck keeps standing up, bristling hard and insistent.

I see it every night after that. Sometimes during the day. Once, sitting next to my grandmother in the back seat. She and my mother donâ€™t see it, but my grandmother keeps telling the same inconclusive story of her failure to buy it over and over. Most of the time I could laugh her off but this time I was near the boiling point, subjected to the toyâ€™s blank but menacing stare, and I could tell my mother knew it.

â€œDonâ€™t let her get to you,â€ she says as my grandmother moved off to the restaurant bathroom.

I sip from my coffee. â€œI think Iâ€™m stressed,â€ I say.

â€œAbout what?â€

I shrug, watching wisps of steam curl up from the surface of the drink.

I let her questions slide off me in that way that only a family member can and, as my grandmother returns to the table, she lets it go.

My mother and I try to infect each other with song memes. I start with Afternoon Delight, she counters with Benny and the Jets. I can feel my grandmother listening in the back, wanting to join in but unable to interject herself in the quick flow of banter.

It goes on and on. If I Had a Hammer. The Sesame Street Song. Silver Bells. The Wisconsin cheese jingle. YMCA. Itâ€™s a Small World After All. The Lion Sleeps Tonight. Copacabana. Yellow Submarine. Kokomo. I Will Survive. Piano Man.

Finally I pull out the biggest gun I know and begin singing Emily Dickinson poems to the tune of â€œThe Yellow Rose of Texasâ€.

â€œBecause I could not stop for Death, he kindly stopped for meâ€¦â€

â€œArgh,â€ my mother says. â€œYou can stop right there.â€

â€œThe Carriage held but just Ourselves - and Immortality.â€

â€œWe used to sing that in choir,â€ Grandmother said. â€œBut with different words.â€

And with that the game is stopped, dead. I can tell my motherâ€™s fighting back a smart-ass reply that will spark a fight to last us the next hundred miles. I sink further down into my seat, and rest my cheek against the cold glass. In my head, the words flicker past: â€œSince then â€" tis Centuries â€" and yet feels shorter than the Day, I first surmised the Horseâ€™s Heads were towards Eternity.â€

Without looking back, I know the stuffed cat is sitting on the seat behind me.

The nursing home brochures lie ignored on the backseat as my grandmother stares out the window, watching the sweep of wire from one telephone to the next and counting the road markers aloud. The home is on the outskirts of Seattle, in a small town that acts as a bedroom community for the city. Of all the choices, it offers the most freedom to its occupants: my grandmother can take advantage of daily bus trips to the mall and grocery store, and weekly ones to the library and church. Sheâ€™ll have a kitchenette and her own balcony.

Still, sheâ€™s outraged, and all through the trip she needles both my mother and I, looking for weak spots. When she tries it on me, I become amiably stupid, letting all double meanings slide right past. With my mother, she has better luck; by the time weâ€™re in Idaho, my mother, tired and cranky, is ready to explode when my grandmother refuses the third restaurant with her usual timid demurrals.

With a wild swing of the wheel, my mother pulls over onto the side of the road. The landscape here is spotted with red grass; hills of shale rise up on either side, and a black and white magpie sits on a wire fence, flicking its tail back and forth as it watches us.

â€œWeâ€™re doing this for you!â€ she shouts at my grandmother. â€œYou might cut us a little slack. Weâ€™re not serial killers carting you off to be cut up. Weâ€™re your family, trying to do the best we can.â€

My grandmother blinks at her in silence.

My mother leans her head on the wheel and takes a deep breath. I rub her shoulder.

â€œLong John Silverâ€™s would be fine then,â€ my grandmother says.

â€œOkay.â€

I see the cat as soon as we walk in; a child over by the condiments counter is carrying it around by one front leg. I ignore it.

Both my mother and my grandmother pat my back as we stand in line. I shift my weight forward and focus on the menu.

The cat lies in the aisle, discarded, while its owner stuffs his pockets with packets of tartar sauce. I give them a wide berth.

Before any of us have even unwrapped our food, my grandmother launches into a fresh barrage. â€œI have a lot of things I need to do, in my house,â€ she tells my mother.

â€œWeâ€™re selling your house.â€

â€œBefore we can sell it, there are things I need to do.â€

â€œLike what?â€

â€œPaint that front railing.â€

â€œIâ€™ll find someone to do it. What else? Shayla, write all this down.â€ She flaps a hand at me in command and I make a face at her. Grandmother sinks back into her seat, flummoxed by the mocking cooperation. She eats her fish burger in silence under the fluorescent glare.

The drone of the lights is echoed behind her eyes, painful and dry. Iâ€™m ready for this trip to be over.

Every night, in every motel we stop in, it comes.

I will not touch it, but its presence buzzes like angry electricity in my head. It looks up at me, dirty and a little shopworn, as my grandmother described it.

Every morning she tells us the reasons why she cannot go to the nursing home. Last night I caught my mother crying in the bathroom; she waved me away with a broad, frantic swoop of her hand.

My grandmother sits playing solitaire on the table by the window. I stand behind her, watching her play. She builds up stacks of cards to win, meticulous and precise.

â€œNot too shabby for an old woman,â€ she says, squinting at me.

â€œIâ€™m sorry, Grandma. If you can think of any alternative, Iâ€™m willing to listen to it, but I canâ€™t think of anything and neither can Mom. You canâ€™t live in your house by yourself any more. You almost burned it down and then fell on the steps, all in the space of a day.â€

â€œYouâ€™d have been a little shaky too with all those firemen tramping through your yard!â€

â€œI know.â€ I wait, looking at her, but she doesnâ€™t speak to me again.

We come in up I-5, heading into Seattle and the hospital district. Itâ€™s late evening, but there is still plenty of light in the sky, this Northwest endless summer day. The Space Needle is poised against the sky to our left.

â€œWe could go eat dinner first,â€ my grandmother says.

â€œLetâ€™s get you checked in, then we can worry about that.â€

â€œYou could pick the place,â€ my grandmother says, her voice pleading. A hard lump rises to the back of my throat, but my mother shakes her head, looking tired and old.

â€œNo.â€ My mother speaks gently, her hands firm on the steering wheel.

I see the cat on one side, then another. When I look in the back seat, my grandmother sits with it behind her. She catches my eye.

â€œDo you forgive me for the kitty?â€ she says.

I reach over the seat to take her hands. They are cold and brittle, so I rub them in mine.

â€œOf course I do,â€ I say. Looking at her, I ask, â€œDo you forgive us?â€

My mother stops humming as my grandmother releases my hands and leans back in the seat, looking out the window. The unanswered silence in the car is endless. It continues along Highway 520, and then our turn, and another turn.

â€œHere we are,â€ my mother says.

When we pull in and my mother gets out of the car to fetch the suitcase from the trunk, my grandmother leans forward. I see the cat on every side, like shimmers of heat. Through the haze she grips my face, a hand framing it on either side, a touch as light as a phantasm.

â€œI forgive you,â€ she says, her voice shaking. We lean our heads together, matching tears.

I do not know what I expected; it was not what happened. I did not expect to see the cat materialize under her feet, to see her trip, fall forward to lie crumpled like a sodden napkin. The cat vanishes as I scramble from the curb towards her, but she is on the ground. She grabs my wrist, and then my motherâ€™s as well as she leans down.

â€œI forgive you!â€ she says loudly.

The life goes out of her with the suddenness of a stone sinking into water, and she is gone, along with the cat, and now I remember wanting it. Wanting it more than anything else in the world.

Related Posts:

# data[].attributes.body
Another podcast option that I love, this invites modern authors (Ann Patchett, Tommy Orange, Margaret Atwood, to name a few) to read aloud someone else's short story and discuss it.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A Monthly Reading And Conversation With The New Yorker Fiction Editor Deborah Treisman.

# data[].attributes.body
Cathy Ulrich has a series of ultra-short stories on the Being the Murdered Lady theme, ranging from the Murdered Homecoming Queen and more. They're all very short and punchy.

# data[].attributes.body
I suspect this very short Amy Tan story is a lot like Chicken in an Airport - it certainly hits the themes.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
School coaches, department chairs, and curriculum & instruction administrators: Did you know your school can pilot CommonLit 360 with support from our team? Learn more. Dismiss Announcement

For full functionality of this site it is necessary to enable JavaScript. Click here for instructions on how to enable JavaScript in your web browser.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
CommonLit | Fish Cheeks by Amy Tan | CommonLit

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
How many people can say they were there the night the trick went wrong and the Magician died on stage? Certainly, that first morning on the strip-dazed gamblers blinking in the rising light, the ambulance come and gone, with the smell of gunpowder lingering in the air-everyone claimed they knew someone who heard the Magician's Assistant scream, saw the spray of blood, saw a man rush on stage and faint dead away.

Of course very few people making the claim, then or now, are telling the truth. Vegas is a city of illusion, and everyone likes feeling they're in on the secret, understand how the trick is done, but very few do.

The end came for the Magician, fittingly, during the Bullet-Catch-Death-Cheat, the trick that made him famous. A real gun is fired by a willing audience member. The Magician dies. The Magician reappears alive and at back of the theater. Presto, abracadabra, ta-da.

There are small variations. Sometimes the Magician's Assistant fires the gun, if the audience is squeamish, or especially drunk. She revels in these brief moments in the spotlight, dreaming of being a magician herself some day. Sometimes the Magician reappears in the balcony, waving, and sometimes by the exit doors. Once he reappeared as a vendor selling popcorn, his satin-lapeled jacket smelling of butter and heat and salt. Once, he came back as a waiter and spilled a drink on an audience member who was confidently whispering that they knew exactly how he pulled it off.

Just because Houdini flashed bullets in his smile years before the Magician was born, people think they have it nailed down. Variations on tricks of every kind are a grand tradition in the magic world, and everyone knows none of it is real. The world is rational; it obeys certain rules. They hold this truth like shield against the swoop in their bellies every time the Magician falls and gets back up again. None would dare admit out loud that deep down, a tiny part of them desperately wants to believe.

Here's the secret, and it's a simple one: dying is easy. All the Magician has to do is stand with teeth clenched, muscles tight, breath slowed, and wait. The real work is left to his Resurrectionist girlfriend, Angie, standing just off stage, night after night, doing the impossible, upsetting the natural order of the world. Her timing is always impeccable, her focus a razor's edge. Her entire will is trained on holding the bullet in place, coaxing the Magician's blood to flow and forbidding his heart from simply quitting out of shock. Death can be very startling, after all.

There is pain, of course, but by the time he died for good, it had become a habit for the Magician, and besides, the applause made it worthwhile. He never once allowed himself to think about the thousand huge and tiny things had to go right for the trick to work, or that only one had to go wrong.

After all, the Resurrectionist pulled it off night after night-how hard could it be? Inside the wash of the spotlight, he couldn't see her grit her teeth, how she sweated in the shadows while he flashed his smile and took his bows. Everything always went off, just like magic, and he always managed to vanish by the time her raging headache set in, forcing her to lie in a dark room with a cold cloth over her eyes.

But she never complained. The money was good, and much like dying had become a habit for the Magician, the Magician had become a habit for her.

Maybe they could have gone on like that forever if it hadn't been for the Magician's Assistant. Not the one who fired the gun, but the first one. Meg, who died and came back as a ghost.

The Assistant Takes Flight

Meg was young when she was the Magician's Assistant, but everyone was back then. She was also in love with the Magician, but everyone was that back then, too. Even Rory, the Magician's longtime stage manager, who was perhaps the most in love of all.

Rory thought of Meg as a little sister, and Meg thought of Rory as a dear friend, but neither of them ever spoke of their feelings for the Magician aloud. They worked side by side every day, believing themselves alone in their singular orbits of longing, both ashamed to have fallen so far and so hard for so long.

All of this was before the Magician's Resurrectionist girlfriend, before the Bullet-Catch-Death-Cheat was even a gleam in the Magician's eye. Back then, before coming back from the dead to thunderous applause supplanted it all, the Magician sawed women in half, plucked cards from thin air, nicked watches from sleeves, and pulled one very grumpy rabbit out of a hat night after night. Off stage and on, the Magician called the rabbit Gus, even though that wasn't his name, and assigned him motives and personality to make the audience laugh.

Whether it was the name or the hat, the rabbit only tolerated this for so long, and one fateful night, he bit the Magician hard enough to necessitate the tip of his left index finger being sewn back on. After the blood and the gauze, and the trip to the hospital, the Magician decided he was fed up too. He needed a new act, a new assistant, a fresh start.

He didn't consult or warn Meg, but directed her to an all-night diner as she drove him back from the emergency room. Up until the moment the words "I'm done," came from the Magician's mouth, Meg harbored the hope that this trauma would allow him to finally see her, and that he'd invited her to the diner at 1:47 a.m. to confess his love.

Instead, he broke her heart and put her out of a job in the same breath. And he didn't even have the decency to pay for her half of the meal.

Meg stared at the Magician. The Magician fidgeted with his gauze, and looked at the door and the neon and the cooling desert outside.

"I'm sure you'll land on your feet, kid," he said.

Meg blinked. She dug in her purse for tissues and money for the meal. When she looked up, the Magician was gone. Vanished into thin air.

Meg dropped coins and bills on the table without counting. Colt-wobbly legs carried her into the night. The air seared her lungs, and tears frosted her lashes. All up and down the strip, everything blurred into a river of light.

The Magician's Assistant-she wasn't even that anymore. Just Meg, and her parents had drilled into her young that that wasn't worth anything at all. Who was she, if she wasn't with the Magician? What could she possibly be?

Lacking evidence to the contrary, she chose to believe her parents. On stage with the Magician, she could pretend the glitter on her costume was a little bit of his glory rubbed off on her. Alone, she was nothing at all, and her ridiculous costume was just sequins, falling in her wake as she hailed a cab.

The car stopped at a location she must have given, though she didn't remember saying anything at all. The space between her shoulder blades itched. She climbed out. Wind tugged at her hair and she took a moment to breathe in awe at the lights illuminating the vast sweep of concrete, a marvel of engineering, a wonder of the new world.

Meg left her purse on the backseat. She slipped off her shoes. The itch between her shoulder blades grew. Feathers ached to push themselves out from inside her skin.

Instead of landing on her feet, Meg landed at the bottom of Hoover Dam. A 727 foot drop that should have been impossible with all the security, except that just for a moment, Meg borrowed a little bit of magic-real magic-for her own. As she jumped, feathers burst from her skin and all the sequins in her costume blazed like stars. For just one instant before she fell, the Magician's Assistant flew.

The Stage Manager Brings White Roses

Rory remembered Meg, and it seemed he was the only one.

Before she hit the ground, before he left the diner and Meg sitting stunned in the booth behind him, the Magician had already forgotten her name. If he ever knew it at all. While Meg flew, capturing a moment of real magic without an audience or applause, the Magician was at a bar forgetting what he'd never remembered in the first place, and so Rory was the one who got the call. He sat on the floor, put his head in his hands, and sobbed.

Even though the Magician paid her a pittance, Meg brought Rory coffee and pastry at least once a week. He taught her how to knit. She taught him how to throw a fastball. She invited him to her tiny apartment, and introduced him to her guinea pigs, Laurel and Hardy. They watched old movies, both having a fondness for Vincent Price, William Powell, and Myrna Loy, and popcorn with too much salt. They laughed at stupid things, and cried at sad ones, and never let each other know of their mutual ache for the Magician.

Now that it was too late, Rory saw that of course he was like Meg, she was like him, and they were both fools. He brought a massive spray of white roses to her funeral. He laid them gently atop her cheap coffin, and his heart broke all over again. There were only five other people in the tiny chapel, and the Magician wasn't one of them.

Rory hated him. Or, he meant to. Except when the Magician came to him three days later and told Rory he was putting together a new show and would Rory continue to stage manage him, Rory didn't hesitate half as long as he should have before answering. His heart stuttered, his breath caught. The word no shaped itself on his lips, and the word yes emerged instead.

He betrayed Meg's memory, and loathed himself for it, but he didn't change his mind. The best Rory could do was press a single white rose in his handkerchief, and tuck it in a pocket over his heart, listening to it crackle as he followed the Magician to start again.

Every night, under the lights, the Magician smiled. His teeth dazzled with a rainbow of gel colors Rory directed his way. Every time the gun fired, Rory felt the kick of it reverberate inside him. His blood thundered. His stomach swooped. He ached with the Magician and felt his pain as he watched him fall.

Every night as the Magician allowed himself to be shot, Rory held his breath. He clenched his teeth. His muscles went tight with hope and dread wondering if this time the Magician might finally stay down so he could be free.

The Resurrectionist and the Ghost

Angie is the first person to see Meg when she comes back from the dead. The Resurrectionist sits in the Magician's dressing room, applying concealer over the exhausted bags under her eyes. No one will see her in the wings, but that's precisely why she does it. The makeup is a little thing she can do for herself and no one else.

It's getting harder to hold everything together, to want to hold it together-tell the bullet to stop, to cease to be once it's inside the Magician's skin, and tell the Magician's blood to go. She sleeps eighteen hours a day, and it isn't enough. Angie's life has become an endless cycle-wake, eat, turn back death, applause that isn't for her, sleep, repeat ad infinitum.

She smoothes the sponge around the corner of her left eye, and the ghost appears. Angie starts, and feels something like recognition.

"I've been waiting for you." The words surprise Angie; she wonders what she means. A vague memory tugs at the back of her skull, of a night in a bar long ago, but before she can grab hold it fades away.

"Who are you?" the ghost asks.

"Who are you?" Angie counters.

"The Magician's Assistant," the ghost says.

"The Magician's girlfriend." The words leave a bitter, powdery, crushed aspirin taste on Angie's tongue.

Angie laughs; it's a brittle sound. How absurd, that they should define themselves solely in relation to the Magician. The ghost looks hurt until Angie speaks again.

"I'm Angie."

"Meg." The ghost gives her name reluctantly as if she isn't entirely sure.

"So, you were the Magician's Assistant," Angie says.

Memory nags at her again, and all at once, the pieces click into place. When she and the Magician first met, he'd worn sorrow like a coat two sizes too large, but one he wasn't even aware of wearing. Angie had sensed a hurt in him, and it had intrigued her, and now she knows-the hurt belonged to Meg all along.

There's a certain flavor to it, tingeing the air. Even with the glass between them, Angie tastes it-like pancakes drowned in syrup, and coffee with too much cream.

Looking at Meg, Angie sees herself in the mirror. The Magician pulled a trick on both of them, sleight of hand. They should have been looking one direction, but he'd convinced them to look elsewhere as he vanished their names like a card up his sleeve, tucked them into a cabinet painted with stars so they emerged transformed-a dove, a bouquet of flowers, a Resurrectionist, a ghost. If Angie squints just right, there's a blur framing Meg, a faint, smudgy glow sprouting from between her shoulder blades. It almost looks like wings, but when Angie blinks, it's gone.

Well, shit, Angie thinks, but doesn't say it aloud.

Behind Meg, sand blows. Or maybe it's snow. The image flickers, like two stations coming in on the TV at the same time, back when that was still a thing.

"Can I come through?" Angie asks.

"Can you?" Meg's eyes widen in surprise.

"I'm a Resurrectionist." Angie's mouth twists on the words, but she can't think of a better way to explain. "Death and I have an understanding."

Angie reaches through the glass. The mirror wavers, and Meg's fingers close on Angie's hand.

"Is there somewhere we can talk?" Angie asks.

Meg shrugs, embarrassed. This is her death, but it isn't under her control.

"Over there?" Angie points to the neon shining through the storm.

Meg shudders, but her expression remains perfectly blank. She looks to Angie like a person actively forgetting the worst moment in their world.

As they walk, Angie learns that for Meg, sometimes death looks like a desert with a lomo camera filter applied. Sometimes it's sand and sometimes snow, but it's always littered with bleached cow bones and skulls. It's a place where you're always walking toward the horizon, carrying your best party shoes, but you never arrive. Mostly, though, Meg's death looks like a diner at 1:47 a.m., right before your boss-the man you love-tells you you're out of a job and a future and good luck on the way down.

Inside the diner, laminated menus decorate each booth. The wind ticks sand against the glass as Meg and Angie slide onto cracked red faux-leather banquettes. In the corner, a silent jukebox glows.

"I don't mean to be indelicate, but you've been dead for a while. Why come back now?"

The air is scented with fry grease and coffee on the edge of burnt, old cooking smells trapped like ghosts.

"I don't know," Meg says. "I think something important is about to happen. Or it already happened. I can't tell."

She shreds her napkin into little squares, letting them fall like desert snow. Her nails are ragged, the skin around them chewed. This time when Angie squints, Meg goes translucent, and Angie sees her falling without end.

The first time Angie saw the Magician, he had gauze wrapped around his left index finger, spotted with dried blood. She'd just lost her job, or rather it had lost her. Donna, who sat in the next cubicle over, caught Angie uncurling the browned leaves of a plant, bringing them back from the brink of death to full glossy health. Angie's boss called Angie into her office at noon, and by 1 p.m. Angie was installed at a bar, getting slowly drunk.

The constant movement of the Magician's hands was what caught Angie's eye. She watched as he tried the same cheap card trick, only slightly clumsy with his injured hand, on almost every patron in the bar. No matter which card his mark chose, when the Magician asked, "Is this your card?" he revealed the Tarot card showing the Lovers, and smirked at the implications of flesh entwined. She watched until it worked, and someone left on the Magician's arm. Angie found herself simultaneously annoyed and amused, and the following night, she returned to the same bar, curious whether the Magician would as well.

The Magician did return, but there were no card tricks this time. She spotted him alone in a corner, his head resting on his folded arms. Angie slipped into his booth, holding her breath. If this was a performance, it was a good one. The Magician looked up, and Angie couldn't help the way her breath left in a huff. His face was stark with a grief, thick enough for her to touch.

"He's dead," the Magician said. "The little bastard bit me. He was my best friend, and now he's gone."

The Magician blinked at Angie as if she'd appeared out of thin air. Angie said nothing, and the Magician seemed to take it as encouragement to go on. He held up his gauze-wrapped finger, and poured out his pain.

"Maybe I left his cage open after he bit me because I was mad. Maybe I was distracted because I'd just fired my assistant and I forgot to latch it tight. Whatever happened, he got all the way outside, across the parking lot. I found him on the side of the road, flat as a swatted bug."

Tears glittered on the Magician's cheeks. They had to be real. If he'd been putting on a show, he would have made a point of letting Angie see him wipe them away.

"I put his body in a shoebox in my freezer. I'm going to bury him in the desert." The Magician laughed, an uneven sound. "Have you ever been to a rabbit funeral?"

The faint sheen at his cuffs spoke of wear. Despite the show he'd put on the night before-cheap card tricks to tumble marks into his bed-she saw a man down on his luck, wearing thin, a man whose deepest connection was with the rabbit who'd bit him then run away.

The Magician looked lost, baffled by grief-like a little boy just learning the world could hurt him. There was something pure in his sorrow, something Angie hadn't seen in Vegas in a long time. It looked like truth, and Angie wanted to gather it into her hands, a silk scarf endlessly pulled from a sleeve.

A shadow haloed the Magician. A death that wasn't the rabbit's clinging to his skin; he didn't even seem aware it was there. Angie caught her breath, deciding before she'd fully asked herself the question. That bigger death wasn't one she could touch, but the rabbit-that was a small thing she could heal.

"Do you want to see a magic trick?" she asked. "A real one?"

The Magician's eyes went wide, touched with something like wonder. Maybe it was his grief making him see clear, but for just a moment, he seemed to truly see her. He nodded, and held out his hand.

The Magician led Angie to his shitty apartment. As they climbed the stairs, her nerves sang-a cage, full of doves waiting to be released, a star-spangled box with a beautiful woman vanishing inside. Her skin tingled. She considered that she was about to make the biggest mistake of her life, and decided to make it anyway.

"His name was Gus." The Magician set a shoebox on his makeshift coffee table.

The rabbit lay on his side. Despite the Magician's description, he wasn't particularly flat. He might have been sleeping, if not for the cold. It seeped into Angie's fingers as she held her hands above the corpse. The Magician watched her, all curiosity and intensity, and Angie blushed. A rabbit was different than a houseplant-what if she failed? And what if she succeeded?

The rabbit twitched. His pulse jumped in her veins, a panicked scrabbling. Angie placed her hands directly on the rabbit's soft, cold fur. She meant to make a hushing sound, soothing the rabbit's fear, but the Magician's mouth covered hers. Salt laced his tongue; was she crying, or was he? She lifted her hands from the rabbit and pressed them against the Magician's back instead to still their shaking. Death clung to them, tacky and oddly sweet. She resisted the urge to wipe her palms against the Magician's shirt, pulling him closer.

She'd never brought back anything larger than a sparrow. Now she could feel the rabbit's life in her-hungry, wild, wanting to run in every direction at once. The other, larger death continued to nibble at her edges-feathers itching beneath her skin, wind blowing over lonely ground.

The rabbit's pink nose twitched; his red-tinged eyes blew galaxy-wide. He ran a circle around the Magician's apartment, and the Magician laughed, a joyous, bellowing sound. He lifted Angie by the shoulders, twirling her around.

"Do you know what this means?" His voice crashed off the cracked and water-stained apartment walls.

He scooped her up, carried her to rumpled sheets still smelling of last night's sex. Angie's teeth chattered; the rabbit was still freezing, and the Magician was warm. She dug her fingers into his back, and leaned into him.

The sex was some of the strangest Angie had ever had. The Magician touched her over and over again, amazed, as if searching for something beneath her skin. For her part, Angie kept getting distracted. She snapped in and out of her body, pulled to the corner of the room where the rabbit rubbed his paws obsessively across his face. She giggled inappropriately, her limbs twitching beyond her control. She developed an insatiable craving for carrots. The Magician, lost in his own wild galaxy of stars, never seemed to notice at all.

In the morning, she found the Magician at his cramped kitchen table. The sense she'd forgotten something nagged at the back of her mind-something sad, something with feathers-but the more she reached after it, the further it withdrew. She watched the Magician scribble on a napkin, coffee cooling beside him, burnt toast with one bite taken out of it sitting on a plate. He looked up at Angie with a wicked grin.

"How would you like to be part of a magic show?"

The bell over the door chimes, and Meg flinches, her shoulders rising like a shield. She and Angie both look to the entrance, but there's no one there.

"We should go." Angie might be about to make the second biggest mistake of her life, but she decides to do it anyway. "Would you like to see a magic show?"

"I did magic once." Meg's voice is dreamy. "I think, but..." She frowns, then shakes her head, a sharp motion knocking the dreaming out of her voice and eyes. "I don't remember."

Hunger flickers in Meg's eyes now, tiny silver fish darting through a deep pool of hurt. Will seeing the Magician help, or add one more scar? Angie holds out her hand. Meg's touch is insubstantial, but she takes it.

Here's the secret to what Angie does: dying is easy. Being dead is hard. And coming back hurts like hell. But it's easier if you're not alone, and Angie doesn't let go of Meg the entire time. She's come a long way since the rabbit, but it's an act of will, consciously holding space for Meg's hand, bringing her-not back to life, but back as a ghost. The act leaves Angie's vision bursting with grey and black stars. She has to steady herself against the dressing room table as she and Meg emerge.

"I've been looking all over for you." The Magician puts his head around the doorway, impatient, distracted. "We're about to start the show."

He barely looks at Angie; he doesn't see Meg at all. In Angie's peripheral vision, Meg's expression falls. She's braced, but nothing can truly prepare her for the Magician failing to see her one last time.

"I won't let go." Angie adjusts her grip, straightens, and Meg follows her to the wings off the stage.

Angie keeps Meg grounded throughout the show. The extra effort turns her skull into an echo chamber, her bones grinding like tectonic plates shifting through the eons. When the bullet kisses the Magician's flesh, Meg gasps. Once it's done, and the Magician reappears in the back of the theater-a combination of misdirection and Angie's resurrection magic-Meg finally releases her death grip on Angie's hand. Love is a hard habit to shed; Meg applauds. Angie is the only one to hear the sound, and each clap sounds like the cracking of ancient tombstones.

The Magician makes his way back to the stage, smiling and waving the whole way. Circles of rouge dot the Magician's cheeks. The lights spark off his teeth as Rory cycles through gel filters, making a rainbow of the Magician's smile. He takes his bows, gathering the flowers and panties and hotel keys thrown his way. Meg's features settle into something less than love, less than awe. She frowns, then all at once, her mouth forms a silent "o."

"I remember why I came back," she says.

"Come with me." Angie slips out of the theater, not that anyone is looking for her to notice.

She keeps a room in the hotel attached to the theater, and there, Angie collapses onto her bed. Meg hovers near the ceiling, turning tight, distraught circles like a goldfish in a too-small bowl.

"I don't know if it's happened yet, or if it's happening now." Meg stops her restless spiraling and sits cross-legged, upside down. Her hair hangs toward Angie; if Meg were solid, it would tickle Angie's nose.

"Can you show me?" Angie's skull is as fragile as a shattered egg, but Meg came back for a reason, and Angie wants to know.

Meg stretches. Their fingers touch. The room shifts and if Angie had eaten anything besides the ghost of bacon and coffee in the diner inside Meg's death, she'd be sick. Her body remains on the bed, but Angie's self stretches taffy-thin, anchored in a hotel room at one end, hovering above a swirl of music and laughter and brightness at the other. She isn't Angie; she isn't fully Meg either. They are two in one, Angie and Meg, Meg-in-Angie.

And below them is the Magician.

He burns like a beacon. A sour vinegar taste haunts the back of Angie's throat. Pickled cabbage and resentment, brine and regret. Angie can't sort out which feelings are Meg's and which are hers. She must have loved the Magician once upon a time. Didn't she?

The room is full of strangers, but another familiar face catches Angie-Meg's eye. Rory stands at the edge of a conversation where the Magician is the center. He sways, too much to drink, but also blown by the force of yearning, a tree with branches bent in the Magician's wind.

Angie and Meg watch as Rory orbits closer, his need fever-bright. The Magician turns. He stops, puzzled at seeing something familiar anew. After so many years of being careful in the Magician's presence, Rory's desire is raw. Something has changed, or perhaps nothing has, and Rory is simply tired, hungry, willing to take a chance. And after so many years of looking right past his stage manager, the Magician finally sees something he needs-admiration, want, fuel for his fire. He sees love, and opens his mouth to swallow it whole.

A flick of the hand, a palmed coin, a card shot from a sleeve-the first and easiest trick the Magician ever learned and the one that's served him best over the years. He turns on his thousand-watt smile, and Rory steps into that smile. Parallel orbits collide, and their kiss is a hammer blow, shattering Angie's heart.

She gasps, coming up for air from the bottom of a pool. Meg floats facedown above the bed, a faint outline haloing her in the shape of wings. Tears drip endlessly from her eyes, but never fall.

Angie is angrier than she's ever been.

It's not the Magician's infidelity. Like the Magician himself, she's grown used to that. The Magician could kiss hundreds, flirt with thousands, fuck every person he meets, and Angie wouldn't care. The kiss means nothing to the Magician, and to Rory it means the world. That, Angie can't abide.

Rage widens cracks in Angie she hadn't even known were there. She can see what will happen next, Rory fluttering to the ground in the Magician's wake like a forgotten card. There's already forgetting in the Magician's eyes, his mind running ahead to the next show, the next trick, the thunder of applause.

Angie makes fists of her hands. She wanted better for Rory. She wanted him to be better. She wants to have been better herself. Smart enough to never have fallen for the Magician's tricks, clever enough to see through the illusion and sleight of hand. Angie meets Meg's eyes.

"We have to let the Magician die."

"Shit, shit, shit." Heat from the asphalt soaked through Angie's jeans where she knelt in the Magician's parking lot, the shoebox by her side.

Tears dripped from the point of Angie's nose and onto the rabbit's fur. She'd woken in the Magician's rumpled sheets, wondering if she was the first to see them twice, even three mornings in a row, and she'd found the rabbit curled next to the defunct radiator, empty as though he'd never contained life at all. Nothing she could do, no amount of power she could summon, would unravel his death again.

"Are you okay?" A shadow fell over her, sharp-edged in the light, and Angie looked up, startled.

"Yes. No. Shit. No. Sorry." She wiped frantically at her face, leaving it smeared and blotchy.

The sun behind the man turned him into a scrap of darkness. Angie wished she'd brought sunglasses.

"I'm fine." She stood and lifted her chin.

"You don't look fine." The man's gaze drifted to the box.

Exhaustion wanted Angie to drop back to her knees, but she turned it into a deliberate motion, scooping the box against her chest and holding it close.

"I know that rabbit," the man said. "The Magician-"

"The Magician. The fucking Magician." Angie couldn't help it-a broken laugh escaped her. She held the box out. "Do you know his name? It's not Gus."

"No." The man looked genuinely regretful, and it made Angie like him instantly, and study him more closely.

The air smudged dark around his shoulders, curling them inward. A shadow haunted him, like the one clinging to the Magician, with the same flavor, but unlike the Magician, this man felt its weight.

"I'm Rory." The man frowned at the box. "I'm the stage manager, I was looking for the Magician."

"He's out. I don't know when he'll be back. He doesn't even know yet." She indicated the box again.

Guilt tugged at her briefly, recalling the Magician's grief at the bar, but Angie doubted she'd see such a display again. The Magician had already moved on, his head too full of plans for his own death and return, overfull with confidence not in her abilities, but that he was too important to properly die.

She caught disappointment in the stage manager's eyes. Angie recognized it; Rory was as big a fool as she was, maybe bigger still. Like a compass point finding North, Rory's gaze went to the Magician's window. He didn't have to count or search, pinpointing it immediately. Love was written plain on his skin, letters inches high that the Magician was too stupid to read.

"Will you help me bury him?" Angie held up the box, drawing Rory's attention back, his expression smoothed into one of weary pain.

"I'm-" Angie stopped. She'd been about the say the Magician's girlfriend. But they'd only just met; they'd fucked a few times. She'd brought his rabbit back from the dead, and that was the most intimate thing they'd shared.

"Angie." She coughed.

Her name felt awkward, a ball of cactus thorns she wanted to spit out. Now it was her turn to glance at the building, though she had no idea which window belonged to the Magician. Dread prickled along her spine.

"I have a car." Rory gestured. "We could bury him in the desert."

Angie followed Rory across the parking lot. She climbed into the passenger seat, and set the box containing the dead rabbit in her lap. The car smelled faintly of cigarettes-old smoke, like Rory had quit long ago. Angie found it oddly comforting.

"I'm a Resurrectionist." Angie tested the word. The Magician had suggested it last night, bathed in the after-sex glow. She tried it on for size. "I bring things back from the dead."

She expected Rory to slam on the brakes, swerve to the side of the road and demand she get out. He did neither. She kept talking.

"Simple things fall apart more easily-mice, sparrows, rabbits." She tapped the box, finger-drumming a sound like rain. Telling Rory her secret felt necessary, an act of defiance. The Magician didn't own her or her truths, not yet.

"Small things know the natural order of the world. Only humans are arrogant enough to believe they deserve a second chance at life."

Angie let her gaze flick to the side, finding Rory's eyes for a brief moment before he turned back to the road.

"How about here?" Rory parked and they got out.

Desert wind tugged at Angie's hair. She held the box close, sand and scrub grass crunching under her feet. Rory kept a small, collapsible shovel in the trunk of his car for emergencies, a habit held over from when he lived in a climate with much more snow. He also kept a Sharpie in his glove box, and once they'd dug a hole, and laid the rabbit inside, Angie chose a flat, sun-warmed rock and uncapped the pen.

"What should we write, since we don't know his name?"

"He was a good rabbit. His name was his own."

Angie scribed the words. The moment felt like a pact, and when Angie stood, she took Rory's hand. The sun dragged their shadows into long ribbons, and at the same moment, they turned to look behind them, as if they'd heard their names called. The city glowed in the gathering dusk. The Magician was waiting for them.

This is how it goes: Meg protests; she blushes translucent. She is dead, but she is afraid.

Angie points out how many people the Magician has hurt, how many more he will hurt still. Meg comes around to Angie's point of view.

They tell Rory together, a united front. With Angie holding Meg's hand, amplifying her form, Rory can see her. His eyes go wide, and his face becomes a glacier calving under its own weight. After his initial moment of shock, something like wonder takes over Rory's face as he looks at Meg.

"You have wings."

She blinks, spinning in place to try to see over her shoulder. The wonder on her face mirrors Rory's, but the melancholy in her voice breaks Angie's heart.

"I remember," Meg says. "I think, once, I knew how to fly."

"I should have..." Rory says, but he lets the rest of the sentence trail. Meg offers him a sad smile, telling him over and over again that her death is not his fault. Angie tells him that kissing the Magician was not a crime. Rory looks doubtful, but in the end, like Meg, he agrees. They need to let the Magician die.

Angie tells herself they are doing this for the dozens of lost souls, blown in like leaves from the strip, looking for magic, and instead finding the Magician. She tells herself it is not revenge. That he failed them more than they failed themselves. She thinks of late-night coffee, and early-morning champagne. All the opportunities she had to tell Rory that she knew he was in love with the Magician, to tell him to run. She savors her guilt, and pushes it down.

The one person they do not tell is the Magician's Assistant, his current one. It is unfair, but she needs to be the one to fire the gun. Magic, true magic, requires a sacrifice, and none of them have anything left to give.

On the night the Magician dies, he asks for a volunteer from the audience. A hand rises, but the woman raising it feels a terrible chill, ghost fingers brushing her spine. She takes it as a premonition, and lets her hand fall. Rory trains the spotlight on the woman, on Meg behind her, and its brightness washes Meg away.

No other hands rise; the Magician's Assistant accepts the gun with a smile, and Angie's heart cracks for her. There is brightness in her eyes, curiosity. She believes. Not in the Magician specifically, but in the possibility of magic. She's the Assistant for now, but her faith in the world tells her that she could be the Magician herself someday.

Rory shifts the spotlight to the stage. Bright white gleams off the Magician's lapels, the Assistant's costume sparks and shines. Angie watches the Magician preen.

There is a flourish, a musical cue. The Magician's Assistant fires the gun. Angie holds her arms tight by her side. The bullet strikes home. A constellation of red scatters, raining like stars on the stunned front row. The Resurrectionist grits her teeth and trains her will to do nothing at all.

The Magician's eyes widen. His mouth forms a silent "o." He falls.

Dread blooms in the Magician's Assistant's stomach. The gun smokes in her hand.

Angie sweats in the wings. The Magician's death tugs at her, demanding to be undone. It's harder than she imagined not to knit the Magician back together. He is a hard habit to break, and she's been turning back his death for so long.

She considers-is she the villain in this story? The Magician is callous, stupid maybe, and arrogant for sure. Angie is not a hapless victim. She made a choice; it just happened to be the wrong one. Rory and Meg, they are innocent. All they are guilty of is falling in love.

Angie does not tell the bullet to stop, or the Magician's blood to go. She lets it run and pool and drip over the edge of the stage and onto the floor. All Angie can hope is to turn her regret into a useful thing.

Rory lets out a broken sob. His will breaks, and he runs onto the stage, folding to his knees to cradle the Magician's head in his lap. Meg hovers above them. She spreads her wings, and their translucence filters the spotlight, lending the Magician's death a blue-green glow.

Angie walks onto the stage. In the corner of her vision, the lights are blinding. The theater holds a collective breath. She thinks of a lonely grave in the desert, and a rabbit without a name. She thinks of Meg, falling endlessly. She thinks of Rory, his lips bruised with regret. Angie kneels, and looks the Magician in the eye. She knows death intimately, his most of all, and she knows he can still hear her.

"Dying is easy," she says. "Being dead is hard. Coming back is the hardest part of all. See if you can figure out how the trick is done, this time all on your own."

She leans back. It isn't much, but it assuages her guilt to think he might figure out the secret, the catch, the concealed hinge. He might learn true magic, bend it to his will, and figure out how to bring himself back to life one day.

The Magician blinks. The spotlight erases Angie and Rory's features; they blaze at the edges, surrounded by halos of light. Between them, a blurred figure occludes the lights. It reminds the Magician of someone he used to know, only he can't remember her name.

"Is this..." The Magician's fingertips grope at the stage as if searching for a card to reveal. Those are his final words.

Angie lets a month pass before she tracks down the Magician's Assistant, his most recent one. They meet in an all-night diner, and Angie offers to pay.

The woman's name is Becca, and she reminds Angie of a mouse. She starts easily, all shattered nerves. A dropped fork, bells jangling over the diner door-they all sound like gunshots to her, and her hands shake with guilt.

"It's not your fault," Angie says. "You did your job."

Maybe one day Angie will admit the whole truth; maybe she'll simply let it gnaw at her for the rest of her days, until she finds herself completely hollow inside.

"This is going to sound strange," Angie says once they've finished their meals, "but how would you like your very own magic show?"

It isn't enough, certainly not after what Angie has done, but it makes her feel slightly better to think she is offering Becca the chance to live her dream. The pain is still there in Becca's eyes, but Angie sees a spark of curiosity and something like hope.

"Tell me," Becca says; by her voice, she is hungry to learn.

The act that replaces the Bullet-Catch-Death-Cheat looks like something old, as all the best tricks do, building on what came before and paying homage, while being something completely new. Every night, the Magician summons a ghost onto the stage. It must be an illusion, audiences say. Smoke and angled mirrors, just like Pepper back in the day. Only, the ghost knows answers to questions she couldn't possibly know. She finds lost things, things their owner didn't even know were gone. Sometimes she leaves the spotlight and flies over the audience, casting the shadow of wings, and creating a wind that ruffles their hair. Sometimes she reaches out and touches one of them, and in that instant, they know without a doubt that she is absolutely real.

The ghost looks familiar, and so does the Magician. The audience can't place either woman, but something about them calls to mind spangly leotards and pasted-on smiles. They look like people who used to be slightly out of focus, standing just on the edge of the spotlight, out of range of the applause. Now they've moved center stage, and their smiles are real, and they positively glow.

Angie no longer watches from the wings as the show goes on. Meg is strong enough now that she no longer needs Angie to ground her, and Becca and Rory are just fine on their own. Perhaps one day, Angie will slip away from the theater altogether, though she isn't sure where she'll go.

For now though, she sits backstage in front of the mirror and looks the old magician in the eye.

As she does, she learns what death looks like for him, and thinks about what it will look like for her when her own time comes. Sometimes it looks like the darkest depths of a top hat, endlessly waiting for the arrival of a rescuing hand. Sometimes it looks like a party where everyone is a stranger, and no one ever looks your way. Every now and then, it looks like a diner at 1:47 a.m. and a heart waiting to be broken.

But most of all, it looks like a brightly-lit stage in a theater packed with people, utterly empty of applause.

(Editors' Note: "How the Trick is Done" is ready by Erika Ensign and A.C. Wise is interviewed by Lynne M. Thomas on the Uncanny Magazine Podcast Episode 29B.)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How the Trick Is Done - Uncanny Magazine

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Magician Takes a Bow How many people can say they were there the night the trick went wrong and the Magician died on stage? Certainly, that first morning on the strip-dazed gamblers blinking in the rising light, the ambulance come and gone, with the smell of gunpowder lingering in the air-everyone claimed they knew [...]

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
We swoosh toward church on wet roads under a sky with no feelings. You won't speak to me. That's typically true but more so on Sundays. You are thirteen so, of course, I am convinced I still have some say over you. As we merge into the jughandle that dumps us out onto the church's road, you shout.

I glance upward and see nothing.

You hit the window with both hands.

"Stop!" you say.

There's no safe place to stop, so I keep driving.

"There's a baby hawk back there," you say. "It's hurt."

I pull into the church parking lot because it's the best place to turn the car around. Driving past tight rows of vehicles spattered with salted snow, I make the left and then another so we can exit.

"You're going back?"

You sound genuinely surprised, and I admit to myself that your surprise leaves a little bruise. You've convinced yourself I'm hard. Your assumption that I would ignore an injured animal shows me how hard.

"Of course," I say. "A baby hawk is hurt."

Church has been the sorest point between us. You hate it. I don't love it either, to be honest. It doesn't give me the feeling it did when I was a kid. There isn't an army of ajummas dishing up amazing food at picnics or ajusshis in white gloves and fluorescent vests directing traffic in the parking lot. There's no glee from seeing all your Korean friends after a week of being "the only" at school. This church, to be honest, feels a lot like a work conference, down to the slide decks on the big screens and the white men in khakis and blue dress shirts with gelled hair who propound from the stage. But I love God, and I wish you did too. I am having a hard time admitting to myself that your Dad and I just aren't going to be able to make this particular ritual meaningful for you. It barely feels meaningful for us. Maybe that's what we're in denial about.

You sound genuinely surprised, and I admit to myself that your surprise leaves a little bruise.

Why don't you join a Korean church? my mother says on the phone from time to time. Maybe she would like that better, she says. "She" meaning you.

I'm not even sure how to respond. Her question presumes I have somehow missed an obvious and simple solution to your loneliness. I could try to explain that a church like the one your Dad and I grew up in, the kind your grandparents' generation established and ran, doesn't really exist anymore. The children of that community have moved on, scattered. Or I could say that we've tried a couple of Korean churches, but they felt like an uncomfortable throwback. Or I could even say that although our current church has some troubling messages about who God does or doesn't accept that can make my stomach turn, those messages were there in the Korean churches too.
You know what people think and what God thinks are two different things, right?
I've said some version of this to you several times, thinking it will give you strength. I haven't said it lately, though, because you get angry. You don't want to talk about religious stuff. You don't believe any of it, you say. None of it.
How can I explain to my mother that we, my family, have found neither a church nor a community where we feel we fit? Wherever we go, we feel like heretics. I can't explain it to her, or I don't know how, or I'm too tired at the prospect, so I just say yes, she has a point, I will think about it.
Our minivan is reaching the part of the road where you saw the hawk. I slow down.

"There," you say, pressing your fingertip into the window. "You passed it!"

I don't see anything, but I believe you. Pulling onto the shoulder and turning on the hazards, I'm not even sure what you're about to do. But I have complete faith. You're übercompetent and always have been. You built your own flat-pack dresser, bed, and bookshelves when you were nine. You start the nightly fire on family camping trips with lint from our dryer-something you learned from the internet. You bake both your sisters' birthday cakes every year from scratch. I never have to say anything to you about schoolwork because you-distressingly-berate yourself for scores like 98 percent.

For the last year, you've been inexplicably angry, sometimes explosive. All the books say this is normal, but your anger seems like something else, something vast and dense, something I must heed. The more I treat you like my darling girl, the more you revolt, so I pull back from babying you as much as I can, knowing that you might resent me for this too, not just now but someday. What you will think about me someday haunts me.
I made her, I think. I smile, knowing my blasphemy is forgivable.
You get out of the car and walk the hundred feet to the snowbank with such purpose. Your stride reminds me of your Dad's. The weather is misting and there is no traffic. You remove your orange puffer as you go. Except for the gentle click of the hazards, the world has fallen silent. In the mirrors, I see you crouch down, and a few moments later, you're back at the car with something bundled against you. I stretch and open the passenger side.

You climb in, curled around your parcel, and close the door. The fierce gold eyes of the fledgling make me want to laugh. Their intensity defies us to call it helpless. I take in the sight of you holding the hawk so tenderly. Large beads of moisture stud your sweater. Your cheeks are flushed. I feel a flash of vanity when I see how pretty you are.

"It didn't move," you say. "Not even when I laid my jacket over it."
The hawk is real.
You balance the swaddled hawk on your lap with one hand and pull out your phone. Your long hair is tied back, but the loose strands in front hang damp and black as algae. As you tap away on the screen with your thumb, I feel a vague pang, something to do with how I can still see your baby face even though you colt further away from me each day.

What you will think about me someday haunts me.

The hawk's head juts from the spool of your jacket. It looks like a stuffed toy swaddled in a tiny duvet, a toy so realistic it bends the brain. And then my brain snaps to:
The hawk twists her neck. She looks here and there. It's funny because we never sexed her, but I use she and her as the default. For all we know, the hawk is a boy, but the idea of three girls in the car together charms me.
I offer to hold her so you can search more easily. Gently, you pass the raptor. We move and breathe slowly. We speak softly and almost not at all, using only necessary words. The fledgling has stunned us into reverence. I hold her encircled in my hands and poised on my lap like a delicate football. She is still but her amber eyes dart, taking in the inside of our minivan. The brown and cream markings on her head remind me of sun-dappled water. I am so tempted to pet her but I resist. She is wild and worthy of respect.

I stare at her hooked beak and actually think about running my finger along the cutting edge to see how sharp it is-I'm not even scared at the thought of slicing my finger open-but of course, I don't. I even fantasize about unfurling the jacket to see if she'll unfold her wings. I want to see their full span, to see if she'll flap them and swoop around, screeching. But of course, I don't.

Darkness is something we share, but you don't know that. I repress the thought of the scars on your arm, which we have only recently discovered through the school. The revelation has cracked the world, has brought me to the daunting knowledge that we are only at the beginning of a long and treacherous journey. I see the parallels to my adolescence and wonder if I should tell you about my own struggles to become myself, but I don't want to implicate your grandparents, whom you adore. There is a constant circling in my mind, a treading and retreading of the same territory as I try to figure out how much of myself to share, how much I need to protect you, how much of an adult I have to be, and what that even means. I wonder how-or if-I can help with whatever the brawl inside you is. Sometimes it feels the only thing I can do is be nearby.

You put your phone away, and although you don't ask, I pass her back. You found her. You should be with her as long as possible.

You tell me what you've learned:

"It says we should have left it where it was because the mother is probably around somewhere. Oops."

You bring a palm to your forehead and then rake your loose hair back with your lovely fingers. Guilt spills over your face. The way you're so hard on yourself, is that my fault?

"We didn't know," I say. "And I'm sure we're not the first not to know."
You hold your jacket as you watch over the fledgling, who keeps up her gawky movements. I text you: The mother won't come back if we stay. You know I'm right and return to the car.
A screech. We look up through the windshield. A large hawk circles. The feathers at the tips of her massive wings flare like eyelashes.

"Junior!" I say in cawing tones. "Where are you?"

You laugh. My playacting the mom-hawk has actually made you laugh. You join me in the improv.

"I thought I told you to stay in your room."

It's been so long since we laughed. For a few seconds, it feels like old times.

I start the car. Time to loop around and put the hawk back where we found her. You're holding her lightly as a bomb. I drive at a crawl so we don't scare her but also to draw out time.

I pull over, and you get out. You take the baby hawk back to the same spot, place her on the snow, and unwrap her. She unfolds her outsize wings and takes a step, but she's wobbly. You look up to see if the mother is still circling. I look too. She's gone.

You're even wetter from the mist when you get back inside. As you yank your seatbelt on, I notice that you are holding your jacket in your lap. I don't mention it though. I just turn the heat up. How could I possibly say something motherly, something like "It's cold, you should put that on." It would feel profane.

"So I guess we're going to church now." Your voice sounds flat and gray.

"Let's just get lunch."

A stream of light splits the sky. I can tell you see it and feel it too, though I know by now you'll forget you did.

"Yes. Really."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
You are thirteen so, of course, I am convinced I still have some say over you.

# data[].attributes.headline
The Deer-Vehicle Collision Survivors Support Group 

# data[].attributes.subject
The Deer-Vehicle Collision Survivors Support Group 

# data[].attributes.body
CW: I know this one has an f-bomb. But it's such a great story.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Deer-Vehicle Collision Survivors Support Group

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This is the storm right before the calm, she is letting it all out now, because she knows it’s coming. She wants to go home, even if it is what she used to call hell sweet hell.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The janitor makes her way through the hallway with purpose, suctioning space dust and human debris from crevices of the space station. She is good at her job. She can push off from the walls in a steady trajectory without even looking; her eyes are always on the windows and the impossibly bright stars beyond.

The astronauts are good but unclean, thinks the space janitor. Like the astronaut who left liquid salt floating in little globs all over the kitchen today. Like the lady astronauts who leave bloody tampons unsecured and spill bits of powder into the air. Like the male astronauts who leave their dirty underwear drifting around their cabin modules, their worn-through tube socks smelling of cheese and old syrup. And the dead skin flakes-so many flakes she wonders how any skin could be left to wrap all that muscle and bone. Of course she rarely sees the astronauts, so while she assumes they still have skin, it is entirely possible they have shed their skin entirely, that they have, like strange insects, exchanged their soft, outside layers for hard, black, shining exoskeletons instead.

She almost never sees anyone except the night watchman, who is an elderly mute and who spends most of the night watching porn in the security office. She wouldn't say anything, though. She wouldn't even know who to say it to. She supposes the astronauts watch porn, too. Or maybe not; good people don't watch such things, she remembers from her time on earth.

The janitor knows that being good is not the same as being clean. She, for instance, is very clean, but she is not very good. She is still traveling on her way toward that. She told her pastor that she was coming up here to be closer to God, but really she just wanted to get away from Earth. She was tired of waiting to be recognized, waiting for someone to hear her name and turn, eyes too big, full of questions and sideshow curiosity.

People will think you're prideful, wanting to go up in space, her only friend said. He worked in the state-owned liquor store where she bought a case of Miller Lite every Tuesday morning after her shift at the hospital ended. She always worked nights; fewer waking bodies around, less human chaos. She never much liked talking, and after the close crowds of the jail, she liked to be far from the hum and buzz.

The space station staff liked her when they interviewed her - she seemed polite and quiet and incurious. That was important. One of the astronauts, a bearded Russian with kind eyes, asked her a question: Will you be lonely in space? She looked at the faint lines scrawled around his eyes and forehead, and she supposed he had a family somewhere, maybe small children. Yes, she said, but I have always been lonely. The astronaut nodded, and she could see he understood. She could see his aquiline profile as he turned to someone off screen, and she knew she would get the job.

The astronauts occasionally get up during the night, and the janitor tries then to be a shadow, a grey bird. She ducks out of sight, floats to the ceiling in rooms where they wander, terrified they will appear different during the artificial night of space; sure she, too, will be different. Sure that starlight will strip away the years, will fall upon a thirteen-year-old girl alone on a dirt road, a bruise on her face and the mop clenched painfully in her broken fist. The things, the nightmare things fear could claim you for. The dark hurts in the veins, the heart-deep hurts in the buried parts of the body. The faces that chase her, even now, even in the farthest fields of space where nothing grows, nothing whispers, nothing lives or dies but the first things that ever got made in the universe. She isn't sure whether she believes in God or not, though she always told her pastor she did. She isn't sure any woman ought to believe in God.

In the lockup, most of the women didn't. They were on her side, they said. They said the name of God and the name of certain men and spat, teeth pressed together in a kind of crooked, inward anger. She learned to push a mop and broom in prison, learned to be useful. It was a good thing to be of some use in this world. Or, she revised, in this universe. It was hard sometimes, to get used to this new way of thinking, to bobbling round the earth like a second moon. She felt free, free of all the accumulated debris of a lifetime in sin and sacrifice, free of the burden of people for the first time in her whole flat life. She felt small and bright and diamond hard, a little star in the firmament.

The light was so bright here, always, despite the darkness of the spaces in between. The fluorescents scattered throughout the station, the milky white light of the nebulae. The twinkling reds and greens and yellows of the instrument panels. The soft blue glow of the earth over her shoulder. It was comforting, like a street on earth at Christmastime: a sleepy rainbow glow over these travelers straying so far from home.

Light of my life, he sang to her while he had her on his knee. She was just a baby, broad-faced and raw. And if nobody ever loved you, it was easy for somebody to tell you such pretty things. It was easy for you to sit by while they did such un-pretty things. She suctions up drops of urine and thinks about how it felt to hold a gun, how that boy and girl never even looked at her face while she held it. She dropped it like a snake; it felt like a dishonest thing, something so solid but, really, a dirty hollow pair of barrels. He laughed at her and picked it up, like he was made to hold it. His hands slid all over that steel and wood just like they did all over her.

She scrubs the fingerprints from the instrument panels, watches the lights flicker and dim. She wonders how many rags she'll go through, how many surfaces have to get clean before she can finally empty herself of the past. She doesn't know about metaphors but she knows that even the smallest human vessel has boundless storage for sorrow. Was there a right way to take in so much sorrow it burned clean through the lungs and heart? Was there a right way to atone?

There is, she thinks, a good kind of atonement in hard, honest work. And so each night she suctions, sweeps, mops, waxes, shakes out rugs, cleans and stocks the bathrooms, launders and changes the bedding, collects and disposes of trash, replaces lights, polishes the smooth metal, and washes the walls and ceilings. She cleans lint, dust, oil, and grease from their machines, cleans the glassware and lab equipment, soaps down sinks and sterilizes microscopes. She refills and labels tubes and bottles in her careful, neat handwriting. She keeps the station clean and shiny as the future.

She feels at home beyond the skies. She lied and said she came here to be close to God, but she feels further away from Him than ever. God was everywhere in the fields and farms of her childhood; God was on everybody's lips and in their books and on their walls. God was the fire and the twisted face and the crippled-up preacher. God rose from the steam off the fields, crystallized in the oil puddles at the service station, was the cold stones in the neighbor's pond after his boy died of polio. God was the iron lung around those family farms, squeezing, squeezing, and everybody dying inside.

She feels happiest near the deep green shadows pooled in the corners of the station, listening to the low hum against the endless silence of the stars. This feels safer than God. It feels honest. It feels removed from any human notion of heaven.

One night, she and the watchman are playing Blackjack on his laptop when the bearded Russian comes floating around the corner, pajama bottoms trailing and sleep-crusted eyes nearly shut. She and the watchman push back into the shadows, close the computer, try hard to be invisible. But the Russian doesn't even look their way; he glides past them to the wide wall of windows and puts his face to the glass like a child. Gde vy, he murmurs, and she doesn't know what the words mean, but she understands. The pastor once said death was the gift of a wise god-and she wondered whether he really believed that. To her death seems the opposite of wisdom, the opposite of mystery, the opposite of being out here in this vast wondrous place. Death is the opposite of lonely, and lonely is the only thing the janitor owns. It is the only thing that's hers. And that makes it beautiful, out here among the cold and bright beginnings.

Amber Sparks is the author of the short story collection May We Shed These Human Bodies, and the co-author (with Robert Kloss and illustrator Matt Kish) of the hybrid novel The Desert Places. You can find her most days @ambernoelle and some days at ambernoellesparks.com.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The janitor makes her way through the hallway with purpose, suctioning space dust and human debris from crevices of the space station. She is good at her job. She can push off from the walls in a steady trajectory without even looking; her eyes are always on the windows and the impossibly bright stars beyond.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Signs Your Son May Not Get into Harvard

"Chance Me" by Caitlin Horrocks

"Just," his son corrected him at the airport. "Just 'Just.' "

Bond, James Bond, Harry thought. Like they were starring in a rip-off action flick and not the road-trip buddy comedy he'd been hoping for. "Harry, Harry Krier," he said, holding out his palm for an ironic handshake.

"I know," Just said, horrified. "I know your name."

"I know! I know you know. It was a joke." Harry had insisted on meeting his son at baggage claim rather than at the curb outside, but now he was dismayed at all the witnesses. Also, Just didn't have any luggage. Only a ratty backpack slung over one shoulder. Harry went in for a hug instead of the handshake. Just raised his arms, awkwardly returning the embrace, and Harry caught a whiff of body odor. His son had grown tall enough that Harry's nose was armpit height. Willow had been tall, Harry remembered. Willow had been an Amazon. Maybe she still was.

After fifteen years without seeing Just, Harry had steeled himself for almost any physical manifestation of his son, for Just to look exactly like his mother, Willow, or exactly like Harry himself. He was ready to be bludgeoned with memory, or guilt, or joy. But Just was a nearly blank slate - brown hair and eyes, a body that gave no hint of what its occupant used it for, no swimmer's shoulders or runner's wiriness. Jeans and sneakers and a plain black T-shirt. Such an ordinary boy, Harry thought, and the words seemed heartless, but not the emotion. Whole and healthy and ordinary. He could deserve no better fortune. He didn't even deserve that.

"Sorry," Just said, breaking the hug. "I probably need to shower."

"You're fine," Harry said. "You're perfect."

Commentary on the flight (okay), the autumn weather (chilly, gray), and the traffic (heavy) got them out of Logan and onto I-90 heading toward Brookline.

"There are a lot of Dunkin' Donuts here," Just observed, looking out the car window.

"Do you want to stop for anything?" "No. I was just saying. There's a lot."

"I thought we'd have dinner at home, if that's okay.

Miriam's picking something up."

"That's fine," Just said, and he asked Harry how he and Miriam had met.

"I sold her a condo." After closing, they'd gone out for a celebratory drink. Six months later he'd moved into the condo with her. There was no stipulation against this in the National Association of Realtors bylaws. Second marriage for her. First for him, technically.

"Do I want to know what technically means?" Miriam had asked.

"I was very young," he'd said, and the truth of this had hit him with unexpected force - a load of bricks, a piano out a window. He'd been very young when he was living in Arcosanti with Willow, and he wasn't any longer, and he never would be again. Wherever else his life might take him, it would not take him back there, to the red desert hills and the bleached sheet of sky snapped open every morning above them, their baby squalling in a hand-painted card-board box. Now that baby was sitting in his Lexus, six feet tall and applying to Harvard.

On the phone, Willow had rattled off names like she was reading an online list of Boston-area colleges, not just Harvard, MIT, Tufts, but the off-brand schools out-of-staters never applied to, like Lesley, Suffolk, Simmons. "I thought Simmons was a girls' school," Harry had said. "I mean, women's. A women's college." Was his son transgender and no one had bothered to mention it to him?

"He's still narrowing down the list," Willow had said. "There's a school counselor who helps."

Harry hadn't realized that tiny Jerome, Arizona, even had a high school. After Arcosanti, Willow had ended up in a mining town turned vertiginous ghost town turned artist colony / tourist trap. She'd bought a house and a metalworking studio for almost nothing because it was at geologic risk of sliding off the mountain. Uninsurable, but she hadn't cared. She'd sent photographs of Just posed with the lawn ornaments she made and sold; birdhouses on sticks were popular.

"He buses to Cottonwood," Willow said, like she could hear what Harry was thinking. "It's a good school. Pretty good, I guess."

"It'll have to be if he's applying to Harvard," Harry said, pointlessly.

"Look, everyone understands how competitive it is. Can he stay with you or not?"

Harry hadn't wanted the conversation to go this way. He felt like no conversation he'd ever had with Willow had gone the way he'd meant it to. "Of course he can stay."

"He just needs a place to sleep. He can get himself to the campus visits on the subway. Right? I think that's right." Her voice was suddenly uncertain.

She'd never lived in a town with more than five hundred people, he remembered. Neither had their son. "I'll show him around," Harry said. "I'll take time off work." "You don't have to." Willow never told him he had to do anything. She hadn't made him the bad guy. He was the no- guy. Not the villain, just written out of the script entirely, and he'd let her do it. Miriam had rented that movie with Daniel Day-Lewis, the one where his character screams, "I abandoned my child! I abandoned my boy!" At least that guy abandoned the little deaf boy to become an oil baron, Harry thought. I abandoned my boy to become a real estate agent. The saddest movie never made. Or maybe it was a road-trip buddy movie after all, now that Just was finally here, and the real movie of Harry's life had simply had a very, very long setup.

Harry had first encountered Arcosanti as a single slide in a darkened college classroom. The freshman course was a year

long and quixotic, lectures three times a week on subjects like "the urban consciousness." Paolo Soleri's work came after images of Babylon and Alexandria, Levittown and Detroit, and immediately after a slide with a big question mark on it, symbolizing, the professor felt the need to explain, how no one knew what the future of cities would hold. The next image was an architectural drawing of insane complexity, a palace of tunnels and arches, pencil lines so fine and densely clustered, the city looked woven. Harry felt an immediate sense of loss when the instructor clicked it away. The drawing felt like the maps that appeared on the frontispieces of all his favorite novels, a key to an alternate world, its promise of transport. He used interlibrary loan to get hold of all Soleri's books, even The Omega Seed: An Eschatological Hypothesis and The Bridge Between Matter and Spirit Is Matter Becoming Spirit. At a copy shop, he had the drawing made into a poster, blown up until the lines bled, the city an unraveling skein of wool. No, not a city - an arcology, a system that functions so perfectly with and for its inhabitants that the place and people become a single living organism. "Like a snail in its shell," an acolyte explained on the first day of the summer workshop Harry signed up for at Arcosanti, an experimental arcology being built in the desert north of Phoenix.

Soleri lived south in Paradise Valley, coming to Arcosanti only for master classes, which sometimes felt like the only class; most of the workshop turned out to be manual labor, digging foundations or pouring concrete or repairing the buildings that had already stood long enough to start crumbling. Arcosanti had been founded in 1970, and a quarter century later the future had not materialized. The towering

arches from Harry's drawing were covered in peeling paint. The round, porthole-style windows, a Soleri trademark, made the buildings look like concrete ships, a fleet that had set sail for the future and run aground in rough weather. The nicest building was the cafeteria, where tourists could join the residents for communal meals. Upstairs was the gift shop, where tourists could buy metal wind chimes forged on-site. This income, plus workshoppers' tuition fees, financed the city.

"But isn't arcology also about humans taking responsibility for our own relationship to the natural world?" a girl asked that first day of the workshop. She did not bother to raise her hand. "I feel like a snail's not the best metaphor. I mean, a snail's got no agency."

She was white with blond hair braided into cornrows that left pale furrows of scalp exposed and rapidly reddening in the sun. Despite this, Harry thought she was beautiful. She was wearing steel-toed boots, overalls, and a sports bra, her body underneath rangy and tan. She was sexy, although this was a word Harry's brain gained the confidence to use only after they'd actually had sex, after the miracle of Willow choosing him out of all the architecture students and career-changers and spiritual seekers in the workshop.

Miriam had picked up sushi on her way home from work. Harry knew it was meant to be a treat - it was from the best place in the neighborhood - but seeing how carefully Just observed them mixing wasabi into soy sauce, Harry guessed that Just had never had sushi before.

"If you don't like it, we'll get something else," he assured Just.

"It's fine," Just said and gamely thrust a raw shrimp in his mouth.

Harry felt proud, then ashamed - nothing his son did was anything Harry could take credit for.

"So why Harvard?" Miriam asked.

"That's the one school nobody ever asks that about," Just said. "It's Harvard."

"But what makes it somewhere you want to go?" "It's Harvard?"

Miriam gave him a confused look. "You need an answer to that before your interview."

"It's a group thing. Like, an informational presentation.

Individual interviews are with alumni in your region." "There's a Harvard alum living in Jerome?" "Prescott. About an hour."

"Still. They're everywhere."

"Like roaches," Harry contributed.

"Preparing Earth for the alien invasion," Miriam said, "when they'll team up with our new extraterrestrial overlords."

Just looked at them as if this conversation were causing him physical pain. Harry supposed it might be. He tried to remember being eighteen.

"You should have a question ready to ask," Miriam said. "If there's time for Q and A."

She was really throwing herself into this college-counseling thing, Harry thought. He wondered if she were wishing she had her own child to go through this. But no

kid of theirs would be anywhere near college age. If she'd gotten pregnant the very first time they'd ever had sex, the kid would still be learning to read. And Miriam had talked about it that very first time in her direct way - not just pills or condoms but how she didn't want children, then or ever. "Me neither," he'd said. He'd omitted mentioning that he already had one.

"What majors are you interested in?"

"Miriam. Leave the grilling to the admissions people." "I wasn't grilling, I was making conversation." Making it, manufacturing it, because it wasn't happening naturally. "Not everyone's born knowing what they want to do. Just you."

"What do you do?" Just asked her, making conversation, except that now Miriam would think Harry had never bothered to tell Just one single thing about her.

"I've told you that," Harry protested.

"I'm a lawyer," Miriam said, and Harry knew the fact she didn't specify what kind meant she didn't think Just was savvy enough to understand or care.

"That was what you always wanted to do?"

"My parents watched a lot of TV-lawyer shows. I thought I'd get to make lots of speeches."

"So you're in litigation?" Just asked. Miriam nodded, surprised, and Harry wanted to cheer.

"Knowing what you want out of life, it's a superpower," Harry joked. "Rarer than radioactive-spider bites."

"So in the absence of spider bites, you joined a cult?" Miriam sniped.

"You were in a cult?" Just asked with sudden interest, not understanding that Miriam was talking about the place his parents had met, the town he'd been born in.

"It wasn't a cult," Harry said. But it had been, a little. The least effective cult in the world, making you dig holes and eat generic peanut butter until all your illusions were crushed. He'd been looking for the jobs that weren't on television, he thought. He'd been looking for the secret options he was sure existed. But there weren't options, not really. TV had it pretty well covered. He didn't want to think the world was like that for everybody, but it had been like that for him.

"I don't see how he's competitive for Harvard," Miriam whispered that night in bed.

Harry flicked the sheets aside before he got in, to see what she was wearing. Nothing, as usual. She wasn't going to let Just's presence in the guest room change that. Hopefully, Just wouldn't change anything else between them either. Harry stripped off his own pajama pants.

"It's cold," Miriam complained and pulled the covers back up as he climbed in.

"You've only known him for four hours," Harry protested.

"Four long, monosyllabic hours."

"He's a teenager. They're all like that," Harry said with false authority.

"Not the ones who get into Harvard or MIT."

"Look, I can't say whether his mom's had a realistic conversation with him about it, but there's no way to ask without making everything worse. I'm not proud that I don't know enough about my own son to tell whether this whole college-visit trip is deluded, but I don't."

"Okay," Miriam said. They were both still whispering or her voice might've lowered with surrender. With tenderness, Harry thought as she brushed his hair off his forehead. He reached for her hip under the covers. She was bony in a deliberate way, sleek as a greyhound. They didn't even try to work out together because he couldn't keep pace with her on her runs. He wasn't soft, exactly, but he was softer than her.

He'd been softer than Willow too. Even after his summer of hard labor, she'd looked like she could break him. Willow was his first, and it took him years to understand that much of what he thought he'd been learning about sex, or about women, were things unique to that summer: the layer of concrete dust their sweat lacquered to their unshaved bodies; the calluses over her hip bones where her tool belt rubbed; the challenge of fitting themselves onto the bunk beds in the plywood dormitories or behind the shelves at the wind-chime foundry; lying on a blanket in the desert at night, stars flickering above them as the temperature dropped and they both pretended they weren't cold. Maybe Willow hadn't been. She'd seemed superhuman, impervious to discomfort or doubt. This was why he hadn't believed her when she'd told him she was pregnant. It seemed like a mistake her body wouldn't make. He'd thought she was joking.

"Are we naming it Paolo? Or Soleri?"

"Fuck you. This isn't fucking funny."

"Oh. No, it wouldn't be."

"Wouldn't?"

If it were happening to someone else, he was thinking. Which it must be, because surely it wasn't happening to them. But her face convinced him that maybe it was. He was still groping for the right way to ask whether she planned to keep it when she answered his question. "We'll stay," she said. "We'll raise the baby here."

"What do you think of the costume?" Just asked in the morning over bagels and cream cheese, gesturing to his clothes. Miriam had already left for work. Just was wearing slip-on brown shoes, khakis, and a red polo shirt. "Do I look right?"

Costume? That implied Harry knew what Just dressed like normally, which he didn't. "Honestly?" Harry said. "You look like you work at Target."

Just looked down at himself, then got up from the table without a word. Poor kid, Harry thought, alone with his mom out there in the desert, has barely seen a Target. Maybe he isn't allowed to shop there, at the big-box stores. Maybe it's all thrift shops and farmers' markets. Just returned in a forest green polo. "Is this the uniform for anything?"

"Dick's Sporting Goods? Bennigan's, maybe? But I don't think there are any more Bennigan's. I think they all went out of business."

"So the shirt's safe?"

"I'd say so."

Compared with the other prospective students' outfits in the MIT admissions office, Just's costume turned out to be marginal. He wasn't painfully underdressed, but most of the others wore button-downs. There were almost no backpacks, and none as ratty as Just's. He'd unpacked since the airport, and the deflated bag sagged off his shoulder.

"Do you want me to take that?" Harry asked. "Leave it in the car?"

Just declined, clutching the strap like a security blanket.

One poor child had a sweater vest and puffy insulated lunch bag. Harry felt a flutter of relief-he was doing better than that kid's father, at least. There were more girls than Harry had expected, wearing shorter skirts than he'd expected, and he felt creepy watching all the teenage legs.

"I'm doing the shadow-a-student program after the info session," Just reminded him. "You can still meet me after lunch?"

"I've got a showing scheduled nearby, but I'll be back in time."

"Great. I've got your number in my phone," Just said. "I should go get a seat."

Harry could tell he was being dismissed. The reception area was emptying as students filed into a nearby room. But it wasn't just students. "There are parents going too," Harry said. He'd meant it to come out as a disinterested observation, but he could hear his own neediness.

From the look on Just's face, his son heard it too. "Sorry. I didn't realize other people could come. And now you've got that showing scheduled."

Other people. That's how far they were from Just ever calling him "Dad"; he wouldn't even use the word parents.

The possibility of living year-round in Arcosanti had dogged the workshoppers all session as both promise and threat. Workshoppers had to be officially invited to become residents, but none of them knew who made the decision or by what criteria. At first, Harry had thought perhaps Soleri took notes during the weekly classes, peering into their souls. By the end of the summer, he suspected one of the beady-eyed foundation reps was looking through their financial declarations to see whose families might donate the most. By then, most of the acolytes were tired of the labor, of the food, of one another. They wanted to go home and feel, from a safe distance, like they'd contributed something, like they'd watered a pale green shoot so tender that it was nobody's fault if it failed to thrive. Soleri was just too far ahead of his time. The foundation couldn't build Arcosanti any faster without big donors, and big donors did not line up to support revolution. Actually taking up residence in Arcosanti seemed to Harry like believing in something that had already been lost, like pledging oneself to the Temple of Apollo while knowing the Christians were coming to raze it.

He wanted to look at Arcosanti and see what she saw, not the ruin of something, but its beginning.

"I didn't realize you could just turn it on and off like that," Willow said. "Belief." She'd grown up in the Pacific Northwest on a succession of live-off-the-land efforts that all went sour: goats, organic tomatoes, mushrooms cultivated with a secondhand marijuana-grow setup. Then her parents gave up on the mushrooms and started growing marijuana - the kind of thing no one gets in real trouble for, they assured her, until they did, and she lived with a grandfather in Olympia until her mother got paroled. By the time Willow came to Arcosanti, her parents were living in a clothing-optional eco-village outside Bellingham.

"They're in it for the long haul," Willow told him once. He hadn't been quite sure what she meant, but he'd liked that she thought he was the kind of person who would know. He was flattered and in love. Maybe he loved her in the way only a nineteen-year-old loves somebody, but most nineteen-year-olds don't know there are other ways to love. And he still wanted to love their city. He wanted to look at Arcosanti and see what she saw, not the ruin of something, but its beginning.

At the residential interview the foundation rep asked about the tenets of arcology, then whether Harry and Willow understood that they would be classified as volunteers and paid only a modest stipend beyond room and board.

"We're in this," Harry said, "for the long haul."

Miriam called to check in. Harry answered his phone in his car, waiting in front of a property he could already tell the buyer wasn't going to want. He knew before he shared it that a description of the morning would rile Miriam, but as soon as she started in - "Does he know the difference between MIT and ITT Tech? Did he see the TV ads and get confused?" - he felt disloyal for having said anything. "Lay off him," he told Miriam. "Please."

"Okay, sorry. But I had an idea this morning: What if it's all a pretext? Maybe he knows perfectly well that he won't get into these schools, but he needed an excuse to come see you."

"He didn't need an excuse for that."

"But maybe he felt like he did. To tell Willow, maybe." "She would have let him come."

"Would she?" No, not when Just was younger. She would have been too worried that Harry wouldn't send him back. And neither of them had had the money for travel. But more recently? Just could simply have asked. He didn't need to playact an entire college trip. It was both flattering and ugly - that Just might have invented a pretext to see him; that Just thought he needed one. It inflated Harry's heart and cracked it all at once. Like having children, Harry thought. This was what it felt like from the moment they were born. He'd forgotten how it was, the light and the shadow. Still there, after all these years, his capacity to be destroyed.

"I thought you were named Justin, officially," he told his son at a café in Kendall Square. Turkey sandwich and a Coke for Harry, coffee for Just, since he'd already eaten in the MIT dining hall. "For almost three years I believed that. Your mother and I had agreed on Justin. She never told me she changed her mind."

They'd invented a last name, a combination of their family names. They'd agreed to pair it with Justin, and Harry didn't mind Willow calling the boy Just, though it could be confusing: Just, go to sleep. Just go to sleep. But later, on the birth certificate, he saw that she'd actually named their son Justice. No middle name at all, although that was the place, he'd suggested, that you were supposed to put the risky, potentially embarrassing part of the name. "You think it's okay for a child's name to be embarrassing?" she'd said when he'd tried to explain this, about middle names. " You named him Justice," Harry retorted. "Without telling me." But Willow said she thought Justice was beautiful, not embarrassing. She had a way of making every argument into one he couldn't win.

"How'd you find out?" Just asked.

Harry told him he'd finally seen his birth certificate. What he didn't tell Just was that his parents, who were encouraging him to file suit for sole custody, had told him to make a copy. Harry hadn't filed the suit after he and his parents were counseled by lawyers that the Arizona courts were never going to side against the mother.

Just asked him if he'd been mad, and Harry said that he had, but not about the name. "Justice is fine," he said. "I just thought we'd settled on something different."

"I like them both," Just said diplomatically. "I would have been fine with either."

He'd taken his coffee black, and Harry couldn't tell from the way he was drinking it if he actually liked it or if he thought it was what he ought to want. Harry was tempted to offer something different. Root beer? Hot chocolate? Kid drinks.

"The info session," Just said. "It would have made me nervous, having you there. That's all."

"You don't have to explain."

"I didn't want it to be, like, something hurtful."

"You didn't hurt me," Harry lied. "I mean, I wish I didn't make you nervous, but I get that we don't know each other that well."

"It's not that," Just said, then opened his mouth like he was going to add that they knew each other fine. Then he shut it.

An honest boy, Harry thought. He might not get into MIT, but he was honest.

The long haul - two years in, Harry thought he'd figured out what it meant. The only diapers they could afford were old dish towels from the cafeteria, which had given Just an intractable rash. The foundation refused to advance Harry the money he needed to take his son to a doctor. Harry was supposed to be grateful that they'd been moved out of the plywood dorm into a family apartment with leaky windows. The long haul - a lifetime of pretending you didn't want or need the things other people wanted, not just TVs or fancy shoes but shampoo and diaper cream, a lifetime spent paying the price of pushing back against what your life was supposed to look like. Maybe Willow's parents had moved to the nudist colony because after decades of the long haul, they didn't have the money to buy clothes.

Willow kept the faith, kept it years beyond his ability to understand her. Did he understand how rare Arcosanti was, she asked, a place that really meant something? And he could hear how long she'd watched her parents look for such a place, how miserable they'd made her, trying. Arcosanti was supposed to be the city of the future, but he could see every single day of his future there and they all looked the same, dusty and exhausted and poor. The only other child living in Arcosanti was a four-year-old so grubby that tourists stuck money into the chest pocket of her overalls. Not Justin, Harry was determined. That would not be his son's life.

Just had scheduled visits to Emerson College and Tufts the next day, nearly back to back. If he had more time that week, Harry offered, they could visit Northeastern. Or UMass Boston. Or even Roxbury, which, Miriam said, was a really solid community college. "You know, if you wanted to get some Gen Eds out of the way before transferring to a four-year school." Harry kept his eyes on the road, but he was aware of his son turning to give him an inscrutable look.

Last night Harry had been unable to sleep, imagining Just receiving an endless stream of rejection letters, growing frustrated and angry at the whole Northeast, at his father. What if he didn't return for another fifteen years? Harry had ended up insomniacly reading online message boards full of panicky teenagers posting their grades, test scores, desired schools, asking other anxious teens to estimate their odds of acceptance. All the subject lines read Chance me?
Chance me for Harvard? Chance me for MIT? I got a B+ once and I think I'm doomed.
This morning he'd followed Miriam into the bathroom, asking her to strategize where else Just could apply, how he might be lured back to Boston, where Harry could start to learn things like what his son liked to eat or drink, what he liked to study, what he wanted his life to be.

"Of course you can use our address for the in-state tuition," Harry rattled on now. "I mean, more than that - you know you're welcome to stay with us for as long as you like."

"Is Miriam okay with that?"

Miriam had not been asked about that. Harry imagined she wouldn't be okay with it. Not for an entire semester or year. But she would understand why he'd had to offer. She would understand that this was Harry's last, best chance. "Emerson is mostly an arts school," Harry finally said.

"I know," Just said and, after a long silence, added, "It costs, like, thirty-six thousand per year. That's not even including room and board. That's, like, another fifteen thousand."

"Well, it's in downtown Boston," Harry said, as if he thought those numbers were reasonable, which he didn't.

"If I used your address, I'd have to list your income," Just said patiently. "For the financial-aid forms."

Willow had been vehemently refusing Harry's money for the past fifteen years. Harry hadn't realized that the federal government wouldn't care - he'd be automatically expected to contribute. "We're keeping you out of the picture," Just assured him. "If I apply to any of the really expensive ones, Mom and I are going to say my father's unknown. Or that he died. You'll be protected either way."

"They're going to declare me dead," Harry told Miriam that night in bed, but he'd made the tactical mistake of mentioning the cost of every school's tuition first, so she expressed more relief than shared indignation. "It'll be like I never existed."

"Just on a financial-aid form. Not in real life."

"You still think he's here to see me?"

Miriam had no response. She put her hand on his head in sympathy, but it felt awkward, like he was a little kid she was checking for fever. He reached up and pushed her hand onto the pillow.

"I'm sorry," she said.

If he could do it again, he thought, surely it would all go better? Where was his second chance, to get this right?

"Any of this making you reconsider your no-children stance? You too could have a teenager planning to pretend you never existed."

"Ha," Miriam said. "No. Holding firm on that one."

But as she spoke Harry felt something crumple inside of him, heard a small voice protest. If he could do it again, he thought, surely it would all go better? Where was his second chance to get this right?

He wasn't sure what he was waiting for, by the end. His parents had twice set up elaborate itineraries with paid-for taxis and plane tickets. The nearest scheduled bus service was thirty miles away. Twice he'd crouched at the edge of the Arcosanti parking lot in the predawn dark until he heard the cab crunching down the dirt road. Then he'd grabbed his backpack and run in the opposite direction, back to his and Willow's room. His parents had called Arcosanti's main office both times in a panic after he failed to get off the plane in Newark. They were sure he was being held against his will. No one had taken his ID, he told them, and no one was holding him prisoner. "I just couldn't do it. I couldn't leave them." His parents sent cash then, paper-clipped to a phone number for a company in Phoenix that had agreed to send a car up, "for whenever you're ready to leave."

But when he finally left, he didn't call the number or take the cash. He put it in an envelope on his pillow with a letter for Willow and a series of flip-book drawings for Just. Harry couldn't really draw, but there was a big stick figure and a little stick figure and if you flipped through quickly enough, they hugged. He hadn't wanted to sneak away in the dark, hadn't wanted to feel like he was doing something that required sneaking, but he knew he'd never make it in daylight. He wouldn't survive the goodbyes, would cave again, convince himself that maybe the next day, or the next, Willow would either agree to leave with him or let him take Just or, conceivably, his belief in arcology might reawaken strongly enough for him to make it through another year or five or ten. In the dark, though, he knew none of this would happen.

That night he pressed his cheek against Just's and inhaled. His boy's face was impossibly soft and smelled like the silt beds in the foundry. Harry left on foot, the road shining white under a full moon, and hiked out to Cordes Junction. The town wasn't more than a truck stop huddled against I-17, but he found a trucker willing to take him south to Phoenix. He called his parents collect from the airport, and they arranged a ticket for a flight home. During takeoff he watched the desert drop away beneath him and felt no relief, just a gutting pain. They were at cruising altitude, Arizona gone already, when he had two thoughts: that he'd stayed so long because he'd wanted his son to at least remember him and that he hadn't stayed long enough for that to be true.

At Harvard's Agassiz House, Just didn't even want him in the foyer and still refused to surrender the ugly backpack. Harry said he'd find a café to answer some e-mails and sift through new listings. He walked back toward Harvard Square, peering in all the independent cafés for an available table, and paused outside a Panera Bread on Mass. Ave. Panera; he imagined Willow shaking her head, his own younger self wincing. He kept walking. Maybe he could work under a tree. Or at a library, at least until a security guard chased him out. Could he pass for a graduate student? Probably not at Harvard, where he imagined they all finished their PhDs by twenty-seven.

He crossed the street and went back through the brick and iron gates. The campus was shamelessly beautiful, a stately parody of itself. He wondered if Just was falling in love right this moment with something he was never going to have.

Harry's last year in Arizona, he'd thought a lot about college. Not just the parties - late-night pizza and red plastic cups - but those darkened rooms full of ideas. Every idea Arcosanti ever contained felt bleached and flattened by the desert sun. Harry had been in his early twenties. He could sit in a classroom and look just like everybody else. No one would ever know he had a son. They would never even know he'd left college. He'd wanted to believe that Arcosanti was like Narnia, that you could step out of the wardrobe and back into the very afternoon you'd found it. But of course you couldn't.

Students started to stream out of the buildings, changing classes. They wore nice sweaters and had clean backpacks. Harry tried to picture Just among them. He couldn't. Until he could, because there was Just, walking straight by him, holding a video camera in front of his face. He was walking alone, without a tour guide or admissions host. He hadn't made it twenty feet past Harry before a campus security guard stopped him. They were close enough for Harry to hear when the security guard said, "No filming." Just was trying and failing to convince the guard he had a video permit from Public Affairs when Harry walked up behind them.

"I'm sorry, Officer," he said. "My son's a prospective student. He didn't know about the filming rules." My son. Harry could taste the words in his mouth long after he'd said them.

"Can I see some ID?"

"I don't have one," Just said too quickly, and the guard bristled.

There was so much, Harry thought, that his son needed to learn about the world. "Here's mine," he said, pulling out his wallet, and he watched the guard write down the name.

After being escorted to the nearest campus entrance, they were left courteously enough on the sidewalk outside.

"Different last names," Harry said. "This won't hurt you if you decide to apply." Just was raising the video camera to film the guard's retreating back. Harry swatted it down. "What are you doing? What were you doing?"

"We're on city property," Just said. "They can't stop you filming from here."

"You researched this?"

"Sure. But someone from Tufts had tipped Harvard off. They asked me to leave admissions before I got much of anything."

"What did you do at Tufts?"

"It's for a documentary. I'm not just screwing around. Mom's been dating this Italian video artist. He gave me this," Just said, holding up the camera. "I've been recording audio from the info sessions on my phone, but he said I should try for some quality footage too. He's going to help me edit everything together. You know college in Italy is, like, completely free? Harvard costs sixty thousand a year. It's so fucked up."

"You're making some kind of exposé?"

"Mom said not to tell you. She said she wasn't sure you'd be cool with it."

"What else did your mom say about me?" It was a huge question, ridiculous, too big for the rest of their lives, let alone for a sidewalk outside of Harvard Yard with students pushing past them.

Harry led them across the street to the nearest café's outdoor tables. They sat, and Just returned the camera to the backpack, wrapping it carefully in the red polo shirt. It took him a long time to answer.

"Honestly?" he said. "Not a ton. You two were on a summer workshop together, and then you went back to school."

"Four years. I was there four years." Harry tried to meet Just's eyes, but his son was staring at the perforated black metal tabletop. "I didn't want to leave you."

He just hadn't seen how they could love the boy as much as they did and still raise him in Arcosanti. Willow hadn't seen how he could love the boy as much as he said he did and still threaten to leave. There'd been no possible compromise, not one Harry had been able to see then and not one he was able to see even now. Which meant that in the great forking of his youth, he had ended up with nothing but bad choices. The painless road must have split off earlier, before he'd fallen in love with Willow, before he'd fallen in love with arcology. But that meant Just would never have existed.

"If you finish the movie - what do you do with a film like this? Submit it to festivals?"

"Put it on YouTube, probably. Higher education in this country is out of control."

It sounded so rehearsed that Harry wondered who Just was imitating. Willow? The Italian filmmaker? Or maybe the words were really Just's. Maybe this was what his son sounded like. At sixty thousand a year for tuition, he wasn't wrong. Harry wondered what he'd sounded like as a teenager, parroting Paolo Soleri. Soleri had died last year, ninety-three years old. There'd been a memorial celebration at Arcosanti, a reunion of past residents and workshoppers. Harry hadn't attended, but he'd been invited. He still got all the mailings, the pleas for donations. He still read them before he put them in the recycling bin.

"You should have told me," Harry said. "What you were doing."

"Mom said - "

"Whatever she said. You were lying to me, and you were using me and Miriam. That wasn't fair."

Just took a moment to think about it, and when he said, "I'm sorry," even though he said it to the sidewalk, it sounded sincere.

"Do you still want to visit Boston College this afternoon?"

Just's head jerked up, his expression hopeful but suspicious.

"For footage," Harry said. "I'm assuming you don't actually plan to apply."

"You'd do that?"

Was this a desperate ploy for his son's affection? And did he believe this documentary would ever get made or that if it did, it would say anything that hadn't already been said better by somebody else? Probably not. But maybe. This was his son, would always be his son. Didn't you have to hope, totally and shamelessly, for "maybe"?

"I would. Although, for the record, I really liked college. I learned a lot. You should go. It doesn't have to cost sixty thousand dollars." Harry thought of himself scribbling notes in a dark room, desperate for someone to show him a picture of the future. That there wasn't one was perhaps the best fatherly advice he had. Every possible arcology, they were all shipwrecked and insufficient. There was no city of the future, only the lecture slide before it, blank except for a question mark. But uncertainty could be a superpower. It could even be a love story, if you looked at it from a certain angle.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Signs Your Son May Not Get into Harvard - Electric Literature

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
"Chance Me" by Caitlin Horrocks "Just," his son corrected him at the airport. "Just 'Just.' " Bond, James Bond, Harry thought. Like they were starring in a rip-off action flick and not the road-trip buddy comedy he'd been hoping for. "Harry, Harry Krier," he said, holding out his palm for an ironic handshake.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
It was December-a bright frozen day in the early morning. Far out in the country there was an old Negro woman with her head tied in a red rag, coming along a path through the pinewoods. Her name was Phoenix Jackson. She was very old and small and she walked slowly in the dark pine shadows, moving a little from side to side in her steps, with the balanced heaviness and lightness of a pendulum in a grandfather clock. She carried a thin, small cane made from an umbrella, and with this she kept tapping the frozen earth in front of her. This made a grave and persistent noise in the still air that seemed meditative, like the chirping of a solitary little bird.

She wore a dark striped dress reaching down to her shoe tops, and an equally long apron of bleached sugar sacks, with a full pocket: all neat and tidy, but every time she took a step she might have fallen over her shoelaces, which dragged from her unlaced shoes. She looked straight ahead. Her eyes were blue with age. Her skin had a pattern all its own of numberless branching wrinkles and as though a whole little tree stood in the middle of her forehead, but a golden color ran underneath, and the two knobs of her cheeks were illumined by a yellow burning under the dark. Under the red rag her hair came down on her neck in the frailest of ringlets, still black, and with an odor like copper.

Now and then there was a quivering in the thicket. Old Phoenix said, 'Out of my way, all you foxes, owls, beetles, jack rabbits, coons and wild animals! ... Keep out from under these feet, little bob-whites ... Keep the big wild hogs out of my path. Don't let none of those come running my direction. I got a long way.' Under her small black-freckled hand her cane, limber as a buggy whip, would switch at the brush as if to rouse up any hiding things.

On she went. The woods were deep and still. The sun made the pine needles almost too bright to look at, up where the wind rocked. The cones dropped as light as feathers. Down in the hollow was the mourning dove-it was not too late for him.

The path ran up a hill. 'Seem like there is chains about my feet, time I get this far,' she said, in the voice of argument old people keep to use with themselves. 'Something always take a hold of me on this hill-pleads I should stay.'

After she got to the top, she turned and gave a full, severe look behind her where she had come. 'Up through pines,' she said at length. 'Now down through oaks.'

Her eyes opened their widest, and she started down gently. But before she got to the bottom of the hill a bush caught her dress.

Her fingers were busy and intent, but her skirts were full and long, so that before she could pull them free in one place they were caught in another. It was not possible to allow the dress to tear. 'I in the thorny bush,' she said. 'Thorns, you doing your appointed work. Never want to let folks pass-no, sir. Old eyes thought you was a pretty little green bush.'

Finally, trembling all over, she stood free, and after a moment dared to stoop for her cane.

'Sun so high!' she cried, leaning back and looking, while the thick tears went over her eyes. 'The time getting all gone here.'

At the foot of this hill was a place where a log was laid across the creek.

'Now comes the trial,' said Phoenix. Putting her right foot out, she mounted the log and shut her eyes. Lifting her skirt, leveling her cane fiercely before her like a festival figure in some parade, she began to march across. Then she opened her eyes and she was safe on the other side.

'I wasn't as old as I thought,' she said.

But she sat down to rest. She spread her skirts on the bank around her and folded her hands over her knees. Up above her was a tree in a pearly cloud of mistletoe. She did not dare to close her eyes, and when a little boy brought her a plate with a slice of marble-cake on it she spoke to him. 'That would be acceptable,' she said. But when she went to take it there was just her own hand in the air.

So she left that tree, and had to go through a barbed-wire fence. There she had to creep and crawl, spreading her knees and stretching her fingers like a baby trying to climb the steps. But she talked loudly to herself: she could not let her dress be torn now, so late in the day, and she could not pay for having her arm or her leg sawed off if she got caught fast where she was.

At last she was safe through the fence and risen up out in the clearing. Big dead trees, like black men with one arm, were standing in the purple stalks of the withered cotton field. There sat a buzzard.

'Who you watching?'

In the furrow she made her way along.

'Glad this not the season for bulls,' she said, looking sideways, 'and the good Lord made his snakes to curl up and sleep in the winter. A pleasure I don't see no two-headed snake coming around that tree, where it come once. It took a while to get by him, back in the summer.'

She passed through the old cotton and went into a field of dead corn. It whispered and shook, and was taller than her head. 'Through the maze now,' she said, for there was no path.

Then there was something tall, black, and skinny there, moving before her.

At first she took it for a man. It could have been a man dancing in the field. But she stood still and listened, and it did not make a sound. It was as silent as a ghost.

'Ghost,' she said sharply, 'who be you the ghost of? For I have heard of nary death close by.'

But there was no answer, only the ragged dancing in the wind.

She shut her eyes, reached out her hand, and touched a sleeve. She found a coat and inside that an emptiness, cold as ice.

'You scarecrow,' she said. Her face lighted. 'I ought to be shut up for good,' she said with laughter. 'My senses is gone. I too old. I the oldest people I ever know. Dance, old scarecrow,' she said, 'while I dancing with you.'

She kicked her foot over the furrow, and with mouth drawn down shook her head once or twice in a little strutting way. Some husks blew down and whirled in streamers about her skirts.

Then she went on, parting her way from side to side with the cane, through the whispering field. At last she came to the end, to a wagon track where the silver grass blew between the red ruts. The quail were walking around like pullets, seeming all dainty and unseen.

'Walk pretty,' she said. 'This the easy place. This the easy going.' She followed the track, swaying through the quiet bare fields, through the little strings of trees silver in their dead leaves, past cabins silver from weather, with the doors and windows boarded shut, all like old women under a spell sitting there. 'I walking in their sleep,' she said, nodding her head vigorously.

In a ravine she went where a spring was silently flowing through a hollow log. Old Phoenix bent and drank. 'Sweet gum makes the water sweet,' she said, and drank more. 'Nobody know who made this well, for it was here when I was born.'

The track crossed a swampy part where the moss hung as white as lace from every limb. 'Sleep on, alligators, and blow your bubbles.' Then the cypress trees went into the road. Deep, deep it went down between the high green-colored banks. Overhead the live oaks met, and it was as dark as a cave.

A big black dog with a lolling tongue came up out of the weeds by the ditch. She was meditating, and not ready, and when he came at her she only hit him a little with her cane. Over she went in the ditch, like a little puff of milkweed.

Down there, her senses drifted away. A dream visited her, and she reached her hand up, but nothing reached down and gave her a pull. So she lay there and presently went to talking. 'Old woman,' she said to herself, 'that black dog come up out of the weeds to stall you off, and now there he sitting on his fine tail, smiling at you.'

A white man finally came along and found her-a hunter, a young man, with his dog on a chain.

'Well, Granny!' he laughed. 'What are you doing there?'

'Lying on my back like a June bug waiting to be turned over, mister,' she said, reaching up her hand.

He lifted her up, gave her a swing in the air, and set her down. 'Anything broken, Granny?'

'No sir, them old dead weeds is springy enough,' said Phoenix, when she had got her breath. 'I thank you for your trouble.'

'Where do you live, Granny?' he asked, while the two dogs were growling at each other.

'Away back yonder, sir, behind the ridge. You can't even see it from here.'

'On your way home?'

'No sir, I going to town.'

'Why, that's too far! That's as far as I walk when I come out myself, and I get something for my trouble.' He patted the stuffed bag he carried, and there hung down a little closed claw. It was one of the bobwhites, with its beak hooked bitterly to show it was dead. 'Now you go on home, Granny!'

'I bound to go to town, mister,' said Phoenix. 'The time come around.'

He gave another laugh, filling the whole landscape. 'I know you old colored people! Wouldn't miss going to town to see Santa Claus!'

But something held Old Phoenix very still. The deep lines in her face went into a fierce and different radiation. Without warning, she had seen with her own eyes a flashing nickel fall out of the man's pocket onto the ground.

'How old are you, Granny?' he was saying.

'There is no telling, mister,' she said, 'no telling.'

Then she gave a little cry and clapped her hands and said, 'Git on away from here, dog! Look! Look at that dog!' She laughed as if in admiration. 'He ain't scared of nobody. He a big black dog.' She whispered, 'Sic him!'

'Watch me get rid of that cur,' said the man. 'Sic him, Pete! Sic him!'

Phoenix heard the dogs fighting, and heard the man running and throwing sticks. She even heard a gunshot. But she was slowly bending forward by that time, further and further forward, the lids stretched down over her eyes, as if she were doing this in her sleep. Her chin was lowered almost to her knees. The yellow palm of her hand came out from the fold of her apron. Her fingers slid down and along the ground under the piece of money with the grace and care they would have in lifting an egg from under a setting hen. Then she slowly straightened up; she stood erect, and the nickel was in her apron pocket. A bird flew by. Her lips moved. 'God watching me the whole time. I come to stealing.'

The man came back, and his own dog panted about them. 'Well, I scared him off that time,' he said, and then he laughed and lifted his gun and pointed it at Phoenix.

She stood straight and faced him.

'Doesn't the gun scare you?' he said, still pointing it.

'No, sir, I seen plenty go off closer by, in my day, and for less than what I done,' she said, holding utterly still.

He smiled, and shouldered the gun. 'Well, Granny,' he said, 'you must be a hundred years old, and scared of nothing. I'd give you a dime if I had any money with me. But you take my advice and stay home, and nothing will happen to you.'

'I bound to go on my way, mister,' said Phoenix. She inclined her head in the red rag. Then they went in different directions, but she could hear the gun shooting again and again over the hill.

She walked on. The shadows hung from the oak trees to the road like curtains. Then she smelled wood smoke, and smelled the river, and she saw a steeple and the cabins on their steep steps. Dozens of little black children whirled around her. There ahead was Natchez shining. Bells were ringing. She walked on.

In the paved city it was Christmas time. There were red and green electric lights strung and crisscrossed everywhere, and all turned on in the daytime. Old Phoenix would have been lost if she had not distrusted her eyesight and depended on her feet to know where to take her.

She paused quietly on the sidewalk, where people were passing by. A lady came along in the crowd, carrying an armful of red, green, and silver-wrapped presents; she gave off perfume like the red roses in hot summer, and Phoenix stopped her.

'Please, missy, will you lace up my shoe?' She held up her foot.

'What do you want, Grandma?'

'See my shoe,' said Phoenix. 'Do all right for out in the country, but wouldn't look right to go in a big building.'

'Stand still then, Grandma,' said the lady. She put her packages down on the sidewalk beside her and laced and tied both shoes tightly.

'Can't lace 'em with a cane,' said Phoenix. 'Thank you, missy. I doesn't mind asking a nice lady to tie up my shoe, when I gets out on the street.'

Moving slowly and from side to side, she went into the big building, and into a tower of steps, where she walked up and around and around until her feet knew to stop.

She entered a door, and there she saw nailed up on the wall the document that had been stamped with the gold seal and framed in the gold frame, which matched the dream that was hung up in her head.

'Here I be,' she said. There was a fixed and ceremonial stiffness over her body.

'A charity case, I suppose,' said an attendant who sat at the desk before her.

But Phoenix only looked above her head. There was sweat on her face, the wrinkles in her skin shone like a bright net.

'Speak up, Grandma,' the woman said. 'What's your name? We must have your history, you know. Have you been here before? What seems to be the trouble with you?'

Old Phoenix only gave a twitch to her face as if a fly were bothering her.

'Are you deaf?' cried the attendant.

But then the nurse came in.

'Oh, that's just old Aunt Phoenix,' she said. 'She doesn't come for herself-she has a little grandson. She makes these trips just as regular as clockwork. She lives away back off the Old Natchez Trace.' She bent down. 'Well, Aunt Phoenix, why don't you just take a seat? We won't keep you standing after your long trip.' She pointed.

The old woman sat down, bolt upright in the chair.

'Now, how is the boy?' asked the nurse.

Old Phoenix did not speak.

'I said, how is the boy?'

But Phoenix only waited and stared straight ahead, her face very solemn and withdrawn into rigidity.

'Is his throat any better?' asked the nurse. 'Aunt Phoenix, don't you hear me? Is your grandson's throat any better since the last time you came for the medicine?'

With her hands on her knees, the old woman waited, silent, erect and motionless, just as if she were in armor.

'You mustn't take up our time this way, Aunt Phoenix,' the nurse said. 'Tell us quickly about your grandson, and get it over. He isn't dead, is he?'

At last there came a flicker and then a flame of comprehension across her face, and she spoke.

'My grandson. It was my memory had left me. There I sat and forgot why I made my long trip.'

'Forgot?' The nurse frowned. 'After you came so far?'

Then Phoenix was like an old woman begging a dignified forgiveness for waking up frightened in the night. 'I never did go to school-I was too old at the Surrender,' she said in a soft voice. 'I'm an old woman without an education. It was my memory fail me. My little grandson, he is just the same, and I forgot it in the coming.'

'Throat never heals, does it?' said the nurse, speaking in a loud, sure voice to Old Phoenix. By now she had a card with something written on it, a little list. 'Yes. Swallowed lye. When was it?-January-two-three years ago-'

Phoenix spoke unasked now. 'No, missy, he not dead, he just the same. Every little while his throat begin to close up again, and he not able to swallow. He not get his breath. He not able to help himself. So the time come around, and I go on another trip for the soothing-medicine.'

'All right. The doctor said as long as you came to get it, you could have it,' said the nurse. 'But it's an obstinate case.'

'My little grandson, he sit up there in the house all wrapped up, waiting by himself,' Phoenix went on. 'We is the only two left in the world. He suffer and it don't seem to put him back at all. He got a sweet look. He going to last. He wear a little patch-quilt and peep out, holding his mouth open like a little bird. I remembers so plain now. I not going to forget him again, no, the whole enduring time. I could tell him from all the others in creation.'

'All right.' The nurse was trying to hush her now. She brought her a bottle of medicine. 'Charity,' she said, making a check mark in a book.

Old Phoenix held the bottle close to her eyes, and then carefully put it into her pocket.

'I thank you,' she said.

'It's Christmas time, Grandma,' said the attendant. 'Could I give you a few pennies out of my purse?'

'Five pennies is a nickel,' said Phoenix stiffly.

'Here's a nickel,' said the attendant.

Phoenix rose carefully and held out her hand. She received the nickel and then fished the other nickel out of her pocket and laid it beside the new one. She stared at her palm closely, with her head on one side.

Then she gave a tap with her cane on the floor. 'This is what come to me to do,' she said. 'I going to the store and buy my child a little windmill they sells, made out of paper. He going to find it hard to believe there such a thing in the world. I'll march myself back where he waiting, holding it straight up in this hand.'

She lifted her free hand, gave a little nod, turned around, and walked out of the doctor's office. Then her slow step began on the stairs, going down.

# data[].attributes.body
Super-short (500 words) on teen mental illness.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
I need to make myself smaller. I need to not take up so much room. I suck the oxygen out of the house, this family. I'm busy shrinking myself when she comes into the only room in the house with empty hinges.

​Mom has those eyes, and I know she's about to say again ( and again, and again ) "Did you take your meds?"

I swallow the pills every morning, round like a buoy. I do what I'm supposed to do even though nothing keeps me afloat.. It's always

​ Those eyes walk away, but they've rent my skin, and I seep, the blood rising. I try to unfurl my wings to fly away because the window still works, but my wings are sticky, and I can't rise. A single feather falls. More will follow unless I'm very still, so I fold in on myself and try not to look up.

I need to make myself smaller. I need to not take up so much room. There's not enough space, enough air for me in this house, in this family. Mom walks through the doorway to the open portal to where I live, the only room without a door.

Her eyes swallow me, and she digests me at a glance; I'm getting better at being small.

​"Did you take your meds?" she asks. I nod because I need to take away the sadness, a darkness over the hope and the love. If I'm smaller, I won't cast a shadow.​

​Besides, it's always yes. I swallow the pills every morning, but I'm still the heaviest thing in the house, in the world. I will sink us all, and Mom's eyes say she knows that, but she will always reach out her hand and let me drown her.

​Mom's eyes walk away, and I look at my window. I will be able to fly away, far, far, far, and Mom's eyes won't see me. I imagine I have wings, but I'm not a bird. I'm an anchor. My only view is the bottom, and I will sink down, down, down.

I need to make myself smaller. I need to not take up so much room. I am a vacuum that takes every breath meant for others. Mom pauses where my door used to be. They all stop when they pass, but Mom is the one whose eyes hurt. She asks me in the only language we now speak, "Did you take your meds?" The pills are round like a seashell, but I can't hear my own voice no matter what I press my ear to.

. It's always

​Mom walks away, and I'm tired. So, so tired. I think of sun. The beach. A single gull that circles the sky. I want to find that child who collected shells, holding them out to her mother who put them in a bucket like treasure. It's too far away to see clearly, but I keep looking out the window.
​
​

Andrea Rinard is a native Floridian who wears shoes against her will and has mastered the art of hurricane preparation. She has work in Cease, Cows; The Jellyfish Review; Lost Balloon, and Spelk among others and has been nominated for Best Small Fictions and Best of the Net. Her first novel, a YA manuscript that won the Key West Literary Society's 2020 Marianne Russo Award for a novel-in-progress, is currently on submission. Andrea lives in Tampa with her three adult kids and her 1988 Prom date. You can find her at www.writerinard.com.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
I need to make myself smaller. I need to not take up so much room. I suck the oxygen out of the house, this family. I'm busy shrinking myself when she comes into the only room in the house with...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Three days shy of her fifteenth birthday, Alison Pope paused at the top of the stairs.

Say the staircase was marble. Say she descended and all heads turned. Where was {special one}? Approaching now, bowing slightly, he exclaimed, How can so much grace be contained in one small package? Oops. Had he said small package? And just stood there? Broad princelike face totally bland of expression? Poor thing! Sorry, no way, down he went, he was definitely not {special one}.

What about this guy, behind Mr. Small Package, standing near the home entertainment center? With a thick neck of farmer integrity yet tender ample lips, who, placing one hand on the small of her back, whispered, Dreadfully sorry you had to endure that bit about the small package just now. Let us go stand on the moon. Or, uh, in the moon. In the moonlight.

Had he said, Let us go stand on the moon? If so, she would have to be like, {eyebrows up}. And if no wry acknowledgment was forthcoming, be like, Uh, I am not exactly dressed for standing on the moon, which, as I understand it, is super-cold?

Come on, guys, she couldn't keep treading gracefully on this marble staircase in her mind forever! That dear old white-hair in the tiara was getting all like, Why are those supposed princes making that darling girl march in place ad nausea? Plus she had a recital tonight and had to go fetch her tights from the dryer.

Egads! One found oneself still standing at the top of the stairs.

Do the thing where, facing upstairs, hand on railing, you hop down the stairs one at a time, which was getting a lot harder lately, due to, someone's feet were getting longer every day, seemed like.

Pas de chat, pas de chat.

Changement, changement.

Hop over thin metal thingie separating hallway tile from living-room rug.

Curtsy to self in entryway mirror.

Come on, Mom, get here. We do not wish to be castrigated by Ms. Callow again in the wings.

Although actually she loved Ms. C. So strict! Also loved the other girls in class. And the girls from school. Loved them. Everyone was so nice. Plus the boys at her school. Plus the teachers at her school. All of them were doing their best. Actually, she loved her whole town. That adorable grocer, spraying his lettuce! Pastor Carol, with her large comfortable butt! The chubby postman, gesticulating with his padded envelopes! It had once been a mill town. Wasn't that crazy? What did that even mean?

Also she loved her house. Across the creek was the Russian church. So ethnic! That onion dome had loomed in her window since her Pooh footie days. Also loved Gladsong Drive. Every house on Gladsong was a Corona del Mar. That was amazing! If you had a friend on Gladsong, you already knew where everything was in his or her home.

Jeté, jeté, rond de jambe.
Pas de bourrée.
On a happy whim, do front roll, hop to your feet, kiss the picture of Mom and Dad taken at Penney's back in the Stone Ages, when you were that little cutie right there {kiss} with a hair bow bigger than all outdoors.

Sometimes, feeling happy like this, she imagined a baby deer trembling in the woods.

Where's your mama, little guy?

I don't know, the deer said in the voice of Heather's little sister Becca.

Are you afraid? she asked it. Are you hungry? Do you want me to hold you?

O.K., the baby deer said.

Here came the hunter now, dragging the deer's mother by the antlers. Her guts were completely splayed. Jeez, that was nice! She covered the baby's eyes and was like, Don't you have anything better to do, dank hunter, than kill this baby's mom? You seem like a nice enough guy.

Is my mom killed? the baby said in Becca's voice.

No, no, she said. This gentleman was just leaving.

The hunter, captivated by her beauty, toffed or doffed his cap, and, going down on one knee, said, If I could will life back into this fawn, I would do so, in hopes you might defer one tender kiss upon our elderly forehead.

Go, she said. Only, for your task of penance do not eat her. Lay her out in a field of clover, with roses strewn about her. And bestow a choir, to softly sing of her foul end.

Lay who out? the baby deer said.

No one, she said. Never mind. Stop asking so many questions.

Pas de chat, pas de chat.

Changement, changement.

She felt hopeful that {special one} would hail from far away. The local boys possessed a certain je ne sais quoi, which, tell the truth, she was not très crazy about, such as: actually named their own nuts. She had overheard that! And aspired to work for County Power because the work shirts were awesome and you got them free.

So ixnay on the local boys. A special ixnay on Matt Drey, owner of the largest mouth in the land. Kissing him last night at the pep rally had been like kissing an underpass. Scary! Kissing Matt was like suddenly this cow in a sweater is bearing down on you, who will not take no for an answer, and his huge cow head is being flooded by chemicals that are drowning out what little powers of reason Matt actually did have.

What she liked was being in charge of her. Her body, her mind. Her thoughts, her career, her future.

That was what she liked.

So be it.

We might have a slight snack.

Un petit repas.

Was she special? Did she consider herself special? Oh, gosh, she didn't know. In the history of the world many had been more special than her. Helen Keller had been awesome; Mother Teresa was amazing; Mrs. Roosevelt was quite chipper in spite of her husband, who was handicapped, which, in addition, she had been gay, with those big old teeth, long before such time as being gay and First Lady was even conceptual. She, Alison, could not hope to compete in the category of those ladies. Not yet, anyway!

There was so much she didn't know! Like how to change the oil. Or even check the oil. How to open the hood. How to bake brownies. That was embarrassing, actually, being a girl and all. And what was a mortgage? Did it come with the house? When you breast-fed, did you have to like push the milk out?

Egads. Who was this wan figure, visible through the living-room window, trotting up Gladsong Drive? Kyle Boot, palest kid in all the land? Still dressed in his weird cross-country-running toggles?

Poor thing. He looked like a skeleton with a mullet. Were those cross-country shorts from the like "Charlie's Angels" days or quoi? How could he run so well when he seemed to have literally no muscles? Every day he ran home like this, shirtless with his backpack on, then hit the remote from down by the Fungs' and scooted into his garage without breaking stride.

You almost had to admire the poor goof.

They'd grown up together, been little beaners in that mutual sandbox down by the creek. Hadn't they bathed together when wee or some such crud? She hoped that never got out. Because in terms of friends Kyle was basically down to Tasso Slavko, who walked leaning way backward and was always retrieving things from between his teeth, announcing the name of the retrieved thing in Greek, then re-eating it. Kyle's mom and dad didn't let him do squat. He had to call home if the movie in World Culture might show bare boobs. Each of the items in his lunch box was clearly labelled.

Pas de bourrée.
And curtsy.

Pour quantity of Cheez Doodles into compartmentalized old-school Tupperware dealie.

Thanks, Mom, thanks, Dad. Your kitchen rocks.

Shake Tupperware dealie back and forth like panning for gold, then offer to some imaginary poor gathered round.

Please enjoy. Is there anything else I can do for you folks?

You have already done enough, Alison, by even deigning to speak to us.

That is so not true! Don't you understand, all people deserve respect? Each of us is a rainbow.

Uh, really? Look at this big open sore on my poor shrivelled flank.

Allow me to fetch you some Vaseline.

That would be much appreciated. This thing kills.

But as far as that rainbow idea? She believed that. People were amazing. Mom was awesome, Dad was awesome, her teachers worked so hard and had kids of their own, and some were even getting divorced, such as Mrs. Dees, but still always took time for their students. What she found especially inspiring about Mrs. Dees was that, even though Mr. Dees was cheating on Mrs. Dees with the lady who ran the bowling alley, Mrs. Dees was still teaching the best course ever in Ethics, posing such questions as: Can goodness win? Or do good people always get shafted, evil being more reckless? That last bit seemed to be Mrs. Dees taking a shot at the bowling-alley gal. But seriously! Is life fun or scary? Are people good or bad? On the one hand, that clip of those gauntish pale bodies being steamrolled while fat German ladies looked on chomping gum. On the other hand, sometimes rural folks, even if their particular farms were on hills, stayed up late filling sandbags.

In their straw poll she had voted for people being good and life being fun, with Mrs. Dees giving her a pitying glance as she stated her views: To do good, you just have to decide to do good. You have to be brave. You have to stand up for what's right. At that last, Mrs. Dees had made this kind of groan. Which was fine. Mrs. Dees had a lot of pain in her life, yet, interestingly? Still obviously found something fun about life and good about people, because otherwise why sometimes stay up so late grading you come in the next day all exhausted, blouse on backward, having messed it up in the early-morning dark, you dear discombobulated thing?

Here came a knock on the door. Back door. In-ter-est-ing. Who could it be? Father Dmitri from across the way? UPS? FedEx? With un petit check pour Papa?

Jeté, jeté, rond de jambe.
Pas de bourrée.
Open door, and-

Here was a man she did not know. Quite huge fellow, in one of those meter-reader vests.

Something told her to step back in, slam the door. But that seemed rude.

Instead she froze, smiled, did {eyebrow-raise} to indicate: May I help you?

Kyle Boot dashed through the garage, into the living area, where the big clocklike wooden indicator was set at All Out. Other choices included: Mom & Dad Out; Mom Out; Dad Out; Kyle Out; Mom & Kyle Out; Dad & Kyle Out; and All In.

Why did they even need All In? Wouldn't they know it when they were All In? Would he like to ask Dad that? Who, in his excellent, totally silent downstairs woodshop, had designed and built the Family Status Indicator?

Ha.

Ha ha.

On the kitchen island was a Work Notice.

Scout: New geode on deck. Place in yard per included drawing. No goofing. Rake area first, put down plastic as I have shown you. Then lay in white rock. THIS GEODE EXPENSIVE. Pls take seriously. No reason this should not be done by time I get home. This = five (5) Work Points.

Gar, Dad, do you honestly feel it fair that I should have to slave in the yard until dark, after a rigorous cross-country practice that included sixteen 440s, eight 880s, a mile-for-time, a kajillion Drake sprints, and a five-mile Indian relay?

Shoes off, mister.

Yoinks, too late. He was already at the TV. And had left an incriminating trail of micro-clods. Way verboten. Could the micro-clods be hand-plucked? Although, problem: if he went back to hand-pluck the micro-clods, he'd leave an incriminating new trail of micro-clods.

He took off his shoes and stood mentally rehearsing a little show he liked to call " WHAT IF . . . RIGHT NOW?"

WHAT IF they came home RIGHT NOW?

It's a funny story, Dad! I came in thoughtlessly! Then realized what I'd done! I guess, when I think about it, what I'm happy about? Is how quickly I self-corrected! The reason I came in so thoughtlessly was, I wanted to get right to work, Dad, per your note!

He raced in his socks to the garage, threw his shoes into the garage, ran for the vacuum, vacuumed up the micro-clods, then realized, holy golly, he had thrown his shoes into the garage rather than placing them on the Shoe Sheet as required, toes facing away from the door for ease of donnage later.

He stepped into the garage, placed his shoes on the Shoe Sheet, stepped back inside.

Scout, Dad said in his head, has anyone ever told you that even the most neatly maintained garage is going to have some oil on its floor, which is now on your socks, being tracked all over the tan Berber?

Oh gar, his ass was grass.

But no-_celebrate good times, come on-_no oil stain on rug.

He tore off his socks. It was absolutely verboten for him to be in the main living area barefoot. Mom and Dad coming home to find him Tarzaning around like some sort of white-trasher would not be the least fucking bit-

Swearing in your head? Dad said in his head. Step up, Scout, be a man. If you want to swear, swear aloud.

I don't want to swear aloud.

Then don't swear in your head.

Mom and Dad would be heartsick if they could hear the swearing he sometimes did in his head, such as crap-cunt shit-turd dick-in-the-ear butt-creamery. Why couldn't he stop doing that? They thought so highly of him, sending weekly braggy e-mails to both sets of grandparents, such as: Kyle's been super-busy keeping up his grades while running varsity cross-country though still a sophomore, while setting aside a little time each day to manufacture such humdingers as cunt-swoggle rear-fuck-

What was wrong with him? Why couldn't he be grateful for all that Mom and Dad did for him, instead of-

Cornhole the ear-cunt.

Flake-fuck the pale vestige with a proddering dick-knee.

You could always clear the mind with a hard pinch on your own minimal love handle.

Ouch.

Hey, today was Tuesday, a Major Treat day. The five (5) new Work Points for placing the geode, plus his existing two (2) Work Points, totalled seven (7) Work Points, which, added to his eight (8) accrued Usual Chore Points, made fifteen (15) Total Treat Points, which could garner him a Major Treat (for example, two handfuls of yogurt-covered raisins), plus twenty free-choice TV minutes, although the particular show would have to be negotiated with Dad at time of cash-in.

One thing you will not be watching, Scout, is "America's Most Outspoken Dirt Bikers."

Whatever.

Whatever, Dad.

Really, Scout? "Whatever"? Will it be "whatever" when I take away all your Treat Points and force you to quit cross-country, as I have several times threatened to do if a little more cheerful obedience wasn't forthcoming?

No, no, no. I don't want to quit, Dad. Please. I'm good at it. You'll see, first meet. Even Matt Drey said-

Who is Matt Drey? Some ape on the football team?

Yes.

Is his word law?

No.

What did he say?

Little shit can run.

Nice talk, Scout. Ape talk. Anyway, you may not make it to the first meet. Your ego seems to be overflowing its banks. And why? Because you can jog? Anyone can jog. Beasts of the field can jog.

I'm not quitting! Anal-cock shitbird rectum-fritz! Please, I'm begging you, it's the only thing I'm decent at! Mom, if he makes me quit I swear to God I'll-

Drama doesn't suit you, Beloved Only.

If you want the privilege of competing in a team sport, Scout, show us that you can live within our perfectly reasonable system of directives designed to benefit you.

Hello.

A van had just pulled up in the St. Mikhail's parking lot.

Kyle walked in a controlled, gentlemanly manner to the kitchen counter. On the counter was Kyle's Traffic Log, which served the dual purpose of (1) buttressing Dad's argument that Father Dmitri should build a soundproof retaining wall and (2) constituting a data set for a possible Science Fair project for him, Kyle, entitled, by Dad, "Correlation of Church Parking Lot Volume vs. Day of Week, with Ancillary Investigation of Sunday Volume Throughout Year."

Smiling agreeably as if he enjoyed filling out the Log, Kyle very legibly filled out the Log:

Vehicle: VAN.

Color: GRAY.

Make: CHEVY.

Year: UNKNOWN.

A guy got out of the van. One of the usual Rooskies. "Rooskie" was an allowed slang. Also "dang it." Also "holy golly." Also "crapper." The Rooskie was wearing a jean jacket over a hoodie, which, in Kyle's experience, was not unusual church-wear for the Rooskies, who sometimes came directly over from Jiffy Lube still wearing coveralls.

Under "Vehicle Driver" he wrote, PROBABLE PARISHIONER.

That sucked. Stank, rather. The guy being a stranger, he, Kyle, now had to stay inside until the stranger left the neighborhood. Which totally futzed up his geode placing. He'd be out there until midnight. What a detriment!

The guy put on a DayGlo vest. Ah, dude was a meter reader.

The meter reader looked left, then right, leaped across the creek, entered the Pope back yard, passed between the soccer-ball rebounder and the in-ground pool, then knocked on the Pope door.

Good leap there, Boris.

The door swung open.

Alison.

Kyle's heart was singing. He'd always thought that was just a phrase. Alison was like a national treasure. In the dictionary under "beauty" there should be a picture of her in that jean skort. Although lately she didn't seem to like him all that much.

Now she stepped across her deck so the meter reader could show her something. Something electrical wrong on the roof? The guy seemed eager to show her. Actually, he had her by the wrist. And was like tugging.

That was weird. Wasn't it? Nothing had ever been weird around here before. So probably it was fine. Probably the guy was just a really new meter reader?

Somehow Kyle felt like stepping out onto the deck. He stepped out. The guy froze. Alison's eyes were scared-horse eyes. The guy cleared his throat, turned slightly to let Kyle see something.

A knife.

The meter reader had a knife.

Here's what you're doing, the guy said. Standing right there until we leave. Move a muscle, I knife her in the heart. Swear to God. Got it?

Kyle's mouth was so spitless all he could do was make his mouth do the shape it normally did when saying Yes.

Now they were crossing the yard. Alison threw herself to the ground. The guy hauled her up. She threw herself down. He hauled her up. It was odd seeing Alison tossed like a rag doll in the sanctuary of the perfect yard her dad had made for her. She threw herself down.

The guy hissed something and she rose, suddenly docile.

In his chest Kyle felt the many directives, Major and Minor, he was right now violating. He was on the deck shoeless, on the deck shirtless, was outside when a stranger was near, had engaged with that stranger.

Last week Sean Ball had brought a wig to school to more effectively mimic the way Bev Mirren chewed her hair when nervous. Kyle had briefly considered intervening. At Evening Meeting, Mom had said that she considered Kyle's decision not to intervene judicious. Dad had said, That was none of your business. You could have been badly hurt. Mom had said, Think of all the resources we've invested in you, Beloved Only. Dad had said, I know we sometimes strike you as strict but you are literally all we have.

They were at the soccer-ball rebounder now, Alison's arm up behind her back. She was making a low repetitive sound of denial, like she was trying to invent a noise that would adequately communicate her feelings about what she'd just this instant realized was going to happen to her.

He was a kid. There was nothing he could do. In his chest he felt the lush release of pressure that always resulted when he submitted to a directive. There at his feet was the geode. He should just look at that until they were gone. It was a great one. Maybe the greatest one ever. The crystals at the cutaway glistened in the sun. It would look nice in the yard. Once he'd placed it. He'd place it once they were gone. Dad would be impressed that even after what had occurred he'd remembered to place the geode.

That's the ticket, Scout.

We are well pleased, Beloved Only.

Super job, Scout.

Holy crap. It was happening. She was marching along all meek like the trooper he'd known she'd be. He'd had her in mind since the baptism of what's-his-name. Sergei's kid. At the Russian church. She'd been standing in her yard, her dad or some such taking her picture.

He'd been like, Hello, Betty.

Kenny had been like, Little young, bro.

He'd been like, For you, grandpa.

When you studied history, the history of cultures, you saw your own individual time as hidebound. There were various theories of acquiescence. In Bible days a king might ride through a field and go: That one. And she would be brought unto him. And they would duly be betrothed and if she gave birth unto a son, super, bring out the streamers, she was a keeper. Was she, that first night, digging it? Probably not. Was she shaking like a leaf? Didn't matter. What mattered was offspring and the furtherance of the lineage. Plus the exaltation of the king, which resulted in righteous kingly power.

Here was the creek.

He marched her right through.

The following bullet points remained in the decision matrix: take to side van door, shove in, follow in, tape wrists/mouth, hook to chain, make speech. He had the speech down cold. Had practiced it both in his head and on the recorder: Calm your heart, darling, I know you're scared because you don't know me yet and didn't expect this today but give me a chance and you will see we will fly high. See I am putting the knife right over here and I don't expect I'll have to use it, right?

If she wouldn't get in the van, punch hard in gut. Then pick up, carry to side van door, throw in, tape wrists/mouth, hook to chain, make speech, etc., etc.

Stop, pause, he said.

Gal stopped.

Fucksake. Side door of the van was locked. How undisciplined was that. Insuring that the van door was unlocked was clearly indicated on the pre-mission matrix. Melvin appeared in his mind. On Melvin's face was the look of hot disappointment that had always preceded an ass-whooping, which had always preceded the other thing. Put up your hands, Melvin said, defend yourself.

True, true. Little error there. Should have double-checked the pre-mission matrix.

No biggie.

Joy not fear.

Melvin was dead fifteen years. Mom dead twelve.

Little bitch was turned around now, looking back at the house. That willfulness wouldn't stand. That was going to get nipped in the bud. He'd have to remember to hurt her early, establish a baseline.

Turn the fuck around, he said.

She turned around.

He unlocked the door, swung it open. Moment of truth. If she got in and let him use the tape, they were home free. He'd picked out a place in Sackett, big-ass cornfield, dirt road leading in. If fuckwise it went good they'd pick up the freeway from there. Basically steal the van. It was Kenny's van. He'd borrowed it for the day. Screw Kenny. Kenny had once called him stupid. Too bad, Kenny, that remark just cost you one van. If fuckwise it went bad and she didn't properly arouse him he'd abort the activity, truncate the subject, heave the thing out, clean van as necessary, go buy corn, return van to Kenny, say, Hey, bro, here's a shitload of corn, thanks for the van, I never could've bought a suitable quantity of corn in my car. Then lay low, watch the papers like he'd done with the non-arousing redhead out in-

Gal gave him an imploring look, like, Please don't.

Was this a good time? To give her one in the gut, knock the wind out of her sails?

It was.

He did.

The geode was beautiful. What a beautiful geode. What made it beautiful? What were the principal characteristics of a beautiful geode? Come on, think. Come on, concentrate.

She'll recover in time, Beloved Only.

None of our affair, Scout.

We're amazed by your good judgment, Beloved Only.

Dimly he noted that Alison had been punched. Eyes on the geode, he heard the little oof.

His heart dropped at the thought of what he was letting happen. They'd used goldfish snacks as coins. They'd made bridges out of rocks. Down by the creek. Back in the day. Oh God. He should've never stepped outside. Once they were gone he'd just go back inside, pretend he'd never stepped out, make the model-railroad town, still be making it when Mom and Dad got home. When eventually someone told him about it? He'd make a certain face. Already on his face he could feel the face he would make, like, What? Alison? Raped? Killed? Oh God. Raped and killed while I innocently made my railroad town, sitting cross-legged and unaware on the floor like a tiny little-

No. No, no, no. They'd be gone soon. Then he could go inside. Call 911. Although then everyone would know he'd done nothing. All his future life would be bad. Forever he'd be the guy who'd done nothing. Besides, calling wouldn't do any good. They'd be long gone. The Parkway was just across Featherstone, with like a million arteries and cloverleafs or whatever sprouting out of it. So that was that. In he'd go. As soon as they left. Leave, leave, leave, he thought, so I can go inside, forget this ever-

Then he was running. Across the lawn. Oh God! What was he doing, what was he doing? Jesus, shit, the directives he was violating! Running in the yard (bad for the sod); transporting a geode without its protective wrapping; hopping the fence, which stressed the fence, which had cost a pretty penny; leaving the yard; leaving the yard barefoot; entering the Secondary Area without permission; entering the creek barefoot (broken glass, dangerous microorganisms), and, not only that, oh God, suddenly he saw what this giddy part of himself intended, which was to violate a directive so Major and absolute that it wasn't even a directive, since you didn't need a directive to know how totally verboten it was to-

He burst out of the creek, the guy still not turning, and let the geode fly into his head, which seemed to emit a weird edge-seep of blood even before the skull visibly indented and the guy sat right on his ass.

Yes! Score! It was fun! Fun dominating a grownup! Fun using the most dazzling gazelle-like leg speed ever seen in the history of mankind to dash soundlessly across space and master this huge galoot, who otherwise, right now, would be-

What if he hadn't?

God, what if he hadn't?

He imagined the guy bending Alison in two like a pale garment bag while pulling her hair and thrusting bluntly, as he, Kyle, sat cowed and obedient, tiny railroad viaduct grasped in his pathetic babyish-

Jesus! He skipped over and hurled the geode through the windshield of the van, which imploded, producing an inward rain of glass shards that made the sound of thousands of tiny bamboo wind chimes.

He scrambled up the hood of the van, retrieved the geode.

Really? Really? You were going to ruin her life, ruin my life, you cunt-probe dick-munch ass-gashing Animal? Who's bossing who now? Gash-ass, jiz-lips, turd-munch-

He'd never felt so strong/angry/wild. Who's the man? Who's your daddy? What else must he do? To insure that Animal did no further harm? You still moving, freak? Got a plan, stroke-dick? Want a skull gash on top of your existing skull gash, big man? You think I won't? You think I-

Easy, Scout, you're out of control.

Slow your motor down, Beloved Only.

Quiet. I'm the boss of me.

F UCK!

What the hell? What was he doing on the ground? Had he tripped? Did someone wonk him? Did a branch fall? God damn. He touched his head. His hand came away bloody.

The beanpole kid was bending. To pick something up. A rock. Why was that kid off his porch? Where was the knife?

Where was the gal?

Crab-crawling toward the creek.

Flying across her yard.

Going into her house.

Fuck it, everything was fucked. Better hit the road. With what, his good looks? He had eight bucks total.

Ah Christ! The kid had smashed the windshield! With the rock! Kenny was not going to like that one bit.

He tried to stand but couldn't. The blood was just pouring out. He was not going to jail again. No way. He'd slit his wrists. Where was the knife? He'd stab himself in the chest. That had nobility. Then the people would know his name. Which of them had the balls to samurai themselves with a knife in the chest?

None.

Nobody.

Go ahead, pussy. Do it.

No. The king does not take his own life. The superior man silently accepts the mindless rebuke of the rabble. Waits to rise and fight anew. Plus he had no idea where the knife was. Well, he didn't need it. He'd crawl into the woods, kill something with his bare hands. Or make a trap from some grass. Ugh. Was he going to barf? There, he had. Right on his lap.

Figures you'd blow the simplest thing, Melvin said.

Melvin, God, can't you see my head is bleeding so bad?

A kid did it to you. You're a joke. You got fucked by a kid.

Oh, sirens, perfect.

Well, it was a sad day for the cops. He'd fight them hand to hand. He'd sit until the last moment, watching them draw near, doing a silent death mantra that would centralize all his life power in his fists.

He sat thinking about his fists. They were huge granite boulders. They were a pit bull each. He tried to get up. Somehow his legs weren't working. He hoped the cops would get here soon. His head really hurt. When he touched up there, things moved. It was like he was wearing a gore-cap. He was going to need a bunch of stitches. He hoped it wouldn't hurt too much. Probably it would, though.

Where was that beanpole kid?

Oh, here he was.

Looming over him, blocking out the sun, rock held high, yelling something, but he couldn't tell what, because of the ringing in his ears.

Then he saw that the kid was going to bring the rock down. He closed his eyes and waited and was not at peace at all but instead felt the beginnings of a terrible dread welling up inside him, and if that dread kept growing at the current rate, he realized in a flash of insight, there was a name for the place he would be then, and it was Hell.

Alison stood at the kitchen window. She'd peed herself. Which was fine. People did that. When super-scared. She'd noticed it while making the call. Her hands had been shaking so bad. They still were. One leg was doing the Thumper thing. God, the things he'd said to her. He'd punched her. He'd pinched her. The mark on her arm was black. How could Kyle still be out there? But there he was, in those comical shorts, so confident he was goofing around, hands clenched over his head like a boxer from some cute alt universe where a kid that skinny could actually win a fight against a guy with a knife.

Wait.

His hands weren't clenched. He was holding the rock, shouting something down at the guy, who was on his knees, like the blindfolded Chinese fellow in that video they'd seen in History, about to get sword-killed by a formal dude in a helmet.

Kyle, don't, she whispered.

For months afterward she had nightmares in which Kyle brought the rock down. She was on the deck trying to scream his name but nothing was coming out. Down came the rock. Then the guy had no head. The blow just literally dissolved his head. Then his body tumped over and Kyle turned to her with this heartbroken look of, My life is over. I have killed a guy.

Why was it, she sometimes wondered, that in dreams we can't do the simplest things? Like a crying puppy is standing on some broken glass and you want to pick it up and brush the shards off its pads but you can't because you're balancing a ball on your head. Or you're driving and there's this old guy on crutches, and you go, to Mr. Feder, your Driver's Ed teacher, Should I swerve? And he's like, Uh, probably. But then you hear this big clunk and Feder makes a negative mark in his book.

Sometimes she'd wake up crying from the dream about Kyle. The last time, Mom and Dad were already there, going, That's not how it was. Remember, Allie? How did it happen? Say it. Say it out loud. Allie, can you tell Mommy and Daddy how it really happened?

I ran outside, she said. I shouted.

That's right, Dad said. You shouted. Shouted like a champ.

And what did Kyle do? Mom said.

Put down the rock, she said.

A bad thing happened to you kids, Dad said. But it could have been worse.

So much worse, Mom said.

But because of you kids, Dad said, it wasn't.

You did so good, Mom said.

Did beautiful, Dad said. ♦

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Three days shy of her fifteenth birthday, Alison Pope paused at the top of the stairs. Say the staircase was marble. Say she descended and all heads turned. Where was {special one}? Approaching now, bowing slightly, he exclaimed, How can so much grace be contained in one small package? Oops.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The entire ride would take eleven minutes. That was what the boy had promised us, the boy who never showed.

To be honest, I hadn't expected to find the chairlift. Not through the maze of old-growth firs and not in the dwindling light. Not without our escort. A minute earlier, I'd been on the brink of suggesting that we give up and hike back to the logging road. But at the peak of our despondency we saw it: the lift, rising like a mirage out of the timber woods, its four dark cables striping the red sunset. Chairs were floating up the mountainside, forty feet above our heads. Empty chairs, upholstered in ice, swaying lightly in the wind. Sailing beside them, just as swiftly and serenely, a hundred chairs came down the mountain. As if a mirror were malfunctioning, each chair separating from a buckle-bright double. Nobody was manning the loading station; if we wanted to take the lift we'd have to do it alone. I squeezed Clara's hand.

A party awaited us at the peak. Or so we'd been told by Mr. No-Show, Mr. Nowhere, a French boy named Eugene de La Rochefoucauld.

"I bet his real name is Burt," Clara said angrily. We had never been stood up before. "I bet he's actually from Tennessee."

Well, he had certainly seemed European, when we met him coming down the mountain road on horseback, one week ago this night. He'd had that hat! Such a convincingly stupid goatee! He'd pronounced his name as if he were coughing up a jewel. Eugene de La Rochefoucauld had proffered a nasally invitation: would we be his guests next Saturday night, at the gala opening of the Evergreen Lodge? We'd ride the new chairlift with him to the top of the mountain, and be among the first visitors to the marvellous new ski resort. The President himself might be in attendance.

Clara, unintimidated, had flirted back. "Two dates-is that not being a little greedy, Eugene?"

"No less would be acceptable," he'd said, smiling, "for a man of my stature." (Eugene was five feet four; we'd assumed he meant education, wealth.) The party was to be held seven thousand feet above Lucerne, Oregon, the mountain town where we had marooned ourselves, at nineteen and twenty-two; still pretty (Clara was beautiful), still young enough to attract notice, but penniless, living week to week in a "historic" boarding house. "Historic" had turned out to be the landlady's synonym for "haunted." "Turn-of-the-century sash windows," we'd discovered, meant "pneumonia holes."

We'd waited for Eugene for close to an hour, while Time went slinking around the forest, slyly rearranging its shadows; now a red glow clung to the huge branches of the Douglas firs. When I finally spoke, the bony snap in my voice startled us both.

"We don't need him, Clara."

"We don't?"

"No. We can get there on our own."

Clara turned to me with blue lips and flakes daggering her lashes. I felt a pang: I could see both that she was afraid of my proposal and that she could be persuaded. This is a terrible knowledge to possess about a friend. Nervously, I counted my silver and gold bracelets, meting out reasons for making the journey. If we did not make the trip, I would have to pawn them. I argued that it was riskier not to take this risk. (For me, at least; Clara had her wealthy parents waiting back in Florida. As much as we dared together, we never risked our friendship by bringing up that gulf.) I touched the fake red flower pinned to my black bun. What had we gone to all this effort for? We owed our landlady twelve dollars for January's rent. Did Clara prefer to wait in the drifts for our prince, that fake frog, Eugene, to arrive?

For months, all anybody in Lucerne had been able to talk about was this lodge, the centerpiece of a new ski resort on Mt. Joy. Another New Deal miracle. In his Fireside Chats, Roosevelt had promised us that these construction projects would lift us out of the Depression. Sometimes I caught myself squinting hungrily at the peak, as if the government money might be visible, falling from the actual clouds. Out-of-work artisans had flocked to northern Oregon: carpenters, masons, weavers, engineers. The Evergreen Lodge, we'd heard, had original stonework, carved from five thousand pounds of native granite. Its doors were cathedral huge, made of hand-cut ponderosa pine. Murals had been commissioned from local artists: scenes of mountain wildflowers, rearing bears. Quilts covered the beds, hand-crocheted by the New Deal men. I loved to picture their callused black thumbs on the bridally white muslin. Architecturally, what was said to stun every visitor was the main hall: a huge hexagonal chamber, with a band platform and "acres for dancing, at the top of the world!"

W.P.A. workers cut trails into the side of Mt. Joy, assisted by the Civilian Conservation Corps boys from Camp Thistle and Camp Bountiful. I'd seen these young men around town, on leave from the woods, in their mud-caked boots and khaki shirts with the government logo. Their greasy faces clumped together like olives in a jar. They were the young mechanics who had wrenched the lift out of a snowy void and into skeletal, functioning existence. To raise bodies from the base of the mountain to the summit in eleven minutes! It sounded like one of Jules Verne's visions.

"See that platform?" I said to Clara. "Stand there, and fall back into the next chair. I'll be right behind you."

At first, the climb was beautiful. An evergreen army held its position in the whipping winds. Soon, the woods were replaced by fields of white. Icy outcroppings rose like fangs out of a pink-rimmed sky. We rose, too, our voices swallowed by the cables' groaning. Clara was singing something that I strained to hear, and failed to comprehend.

Clara and I called ourselves the Prospectors. Our fathers, two very different kinds of gambler, had been obsessed with the Gold Rush, and we grew up hearing stories about Yukon fever and the Klondike stampeders. We knew the legend of the farmer who had panned out a hundred and thirty thousand dollars, the clerk who dug up eighty-five thousand, the blacksmith who discovered a haul of the magic metal on Rabbit Creek and made himself a hundred grand richer in a single hour. This period of American history held a special appeal for Clara's father, Mr. Finisterre, a bony-faced Portuguese immigrant to southwestern Florida who had wrung his modest fortune out of the sea-damp wallets of tourists. My own father had killed himself outside the dog track in the spring of 1931, and I'd been fortunate to find a job as a maid at the Hotel Finisterre.

Clara Finisterre was the only other maid on staff-a summer job. Her parents were strict and oblivious people. Their thousand rules went unenforced. They were very busy with their guests. A sea serpent, it was rumored, haunted the coastline beside the hotel, and ninety per cent of our tourism was serpent-driven. Amateur teratologists in Panama hats read the newspaper on the veranda, drinking orange juice and idly scanning the horizon for fins.

"Thank you," Mr. Finisterre whispered to me once, too sozzled to remember my name, "for keeping the secret that there is no secret." The black Atlantic rippled emptily in his eyeglasses.

Every night, Mrs. Finisterre hosted a cocktail hour: cubing green and orange melon, cranking songs out of the ivory gramophone, pouring bright malice into the fruit punch in the form of a mentally deranging Portuguese rum. She'd apprenticed her three beautiful daughters in the Light Arts, the Party Arts. Clara was her eldest. Together, the Finisterre women smoothed arguments and linens. They concocted banter, gab, palaver, patter-every sugary variety of small talk that dissolves into the night. I hated the cocktail hour, and, whenever I could, I escaped to beat rugs and sweep leaves on the hotel roof. One Monday, however, I heard footsteps ringing on the ladder. It was Clara. She saw me and froze.

Bruises were thickening all over her arms. They were that brilliant pansy-blue, the beautiful color that belies its origins. Automatically, I crossed the roof to her. We clacked skeletons; to call it an "embrace" would misrepresent the violence of our first collision. To soothe her, I heard myself making stupid jokes, babbling inanities about the weather, asking in my vague and meandering way what could be done to help her; I could not bring myself to say, plainly, Who did this to you? Choking on my only real question, I offered her my cardigan-the way you'd hand a sick person a tissue. She put it on. She buttoned all the buttons. You couldn't tell that anything was wrong now. This amazed me, that a covering so thin could erase her bruises. I'd half-expected them to bore holes through the wool.

"Don't worry, O.K.?" she said. "I promise, it's nothing."

"I won't tell," I blurted out-although of course I had nothing to tell beyond what I'd glimpsed. Night fell, and I was shivering now, so Clara held me. Something subtle and real shifted inside our embrace-nothing detectable to an observer, but a change I registered in my bones. For the duration of our friendship, we'd trade off roles like this: anchor and boat, beholder and beheld. We must have looked like some Janus-faced statue, our chins pointing east and west. An unembarrassed silence seemed to be on loan to us from the distant future, where we were already friends. Then I heard her say, staring over my shoulder at the darkening sea: "What would you be, Aubby, if you lived somewhere else?"

"I'd be a prospector," I told her, without batting an eye. "I'd be a prospector of the prospectors. I'd wait for luck to strike them, and then I'd take their gold."

Clara laughed and I joined in, amazed-until this moment, I hadn't considered that my days at the hotel might be eclipsing other sorts of lives. Clara Finisterre was someone whom I thought of as having a fate to escape, but I wouldn't have dignified my own prospects that way, by calling them "a fate."

A week later, Clara took me to a débutante ball at a tacky mansion that looked rabid to me, frothy with white marble balconies. She introduced me as "my best friend, Aubergine." Thus began our secret life. We sifted through the closets and the jewelry boxes of our hosts. Clara tutored me in the social graces, and I taught Clara what to take, and how to get away with it.

One night, Clara came to find me on the roof. She was blinking muddily out of two black eyes. Who was doing this-Mr. Finisterre? Someone from the hotel? She refused to say. I made a deal with Clara: she never had to tell me who, but we had to leave Florida.

The next day, we found ourselves at the train station, with all our clothes and savings.

Those first weeks alone were an education. The West was very poor at that moment, owing to the Depression. But it was still home to many aspiring and expiring millionaires, and we made it our job to make their acquaintance. One aging oil speculator paid for our meals and our transit and required only that we absorb his memories; Clara nicknamed him the "allegedly legendary wit." He had three genres of tale: business victories; sporting adventures that ended in the death of mammals; and eulogies for his former virility.

We met mining captains and fishing captains, whose whiskers quivered like those of orphaned seals. The freckled heirs to timber fortunes. Glazy baronial types, with portentous and misguided names: Romulus and Creon, who were pleased to invite us to gala dinners, and to use us as their gloating mirrors. In exchange for this service, Clara and I helped ourselves to many fine items from their houses. Clara had a magic satchel that seemed to expand with our greed, and we stole everything it could swallow. Dessert spoons, candlesticks, a poodle's jewelled collar. We strode out of parties wearing our hostess's two-toned heels, woozy with adrenaline. Crutched along by Clara's sturdy charm, I was swung through doors that led to marmoreal courtyards and curtained salons and, in many cases, master bedrooms, where my skin glowed under the warm reefs of artificial lighting.

But winter hit, and our mining prospects dimmed considerably. The Oregon coastline was laced with ghost towns; two paper mills had closed, and whole counties had gone bankrupt. Men were flocking inland to the mountains, where the rumor was that the W.P.A. had work for construction teams. I told Clara that we needed to follow them. So we thumbed a ride with a group of work-starved Astoria teen-agers who had heard about the Evergreen Lodge. Gold dust had drawn the first prospectors to these mountains; those boys were after the weekly three-dollar salary. But if government money was snowing onto Mt. Joy, it had yet to reach the town below. I'd made a bad miscalculation, suggesting Lucerne. Our first night in town, Clara and I stared at our faces superimposed over the dark storefront windows. In the boarding house, we lay awake in the dark, pretending to believe in each other's theatrical sleep; only our bellies were honest, growling at each other. Why did you bring us here? Clara never dreamed of asking me. With her generous amnesia, she seemed already to have forgotten that leaving home had been my idea.

Day after day, I told Clara not to worry: "We just need one good night." We kept lying to each other, pretending that our hunger was part of the game. Social graces get you meagre results in a shuttered town. We started haunting the bars around the C.C.C. camps. The gaunt men there had next to nothing, and I felt a pang lifting anything from them. Back in the boarding house, our fingers spidering through wallets, we barely spoke to each other. Clara and I began to disappear into adjacent rooms with strangers. She was better off before, my mind whispered. For the first time since we'd left Florida, it occurred to me that our expedition might fail.

The chairlift ascended seven thousand two hundred and fifty feet-I remembered this figure from the newspapers. It had meant very little to me in the abstract. But now I felt our height in the soles of my feet. For whole minutes, we lost sight of the mountain in an onrush of mist. Finally, hands were waiting to catch us. They shot out of the darkness, gripping me under the arms, swinging me free of the lift. Our empty chairs were whipped around by the huge bull wheel before starting the long flight downhill. Hands, wonderfully warm hands, were supporting my back.

"Eugene?" I called, my lips numb.

"Who's You-Jean?" a strange voice chuckled.

The man who was not Eugene turned out to be an ursine mountaineer. With his lantern held high, he peered into our faces. I recognized the drab green C.C.C. uniform. He looked about our age to me, although his face kept blurring in the snow. The lantern, battery powered, turned us all jaundiced shades of gold. He had no clue, he said, about any Eugene. But he'd been stationed here to escort guests to the lodge.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw tears freezing onto Clara's cheeks. Already she was fluffing her hair, asking this government employee how he'd gotten the enviable job of escorting beautiful women across the snows. How quickly she was able to snap back into character! I could barely move my frozen tongue, and I trudged along behind them.

"How old are you girls?" the C.C.C. man asked, and "Where are you from?," and every lie that we told him made me feel safer in his company.

The lodge was a true palace. Its shadow alone seemed to cover fifty acres of snow. Electricity raised a yellowish aura around it, so that the resort loomed like a bubble pitched against the mountain sky. Its A-frame reared out of the woods with the insensate authority of any redwood tree. Lights blazed in every window. As we drew closer, we saw faces peering down at us from several of these.

The terror was still with us. The speed of the ascent. My blood felt carbonated. Six feet ahead of us, Not-Eugene, whose name we'd failed to catch, swung the battery-powered lamp above his head and guided us through a whale-gray tunnel made of ice. "Quite the runway to a party, eh?"

Two enormous polished doors blew inward, and we found ourselves in a rustic ballroom, with fireplaces in each corner shooting heat at us. Amethyst chandeliers sent lakes of light rippling across the dance floor; the stone chimneys looked like indoor caves. Over the bar, a mounted boar grinned tuskily down at us. Men mobbed us, handing us fizzing drinks, taking our coats. Deluged by introductions, we started giggling, handing our hands around: "Nilson, Pauley, Villanueva, Obadiah, Acker . . ." Proudly, each identified himself to us as one of the C.C.C. "tree soldiers" who had built this fantasy resort: masons and blacksmiths and painters and foresters. They were boys, I couldn't help but think, boys our age. More faces rose out of the shadows, beaming hard. I guessed that, like us, they'd been waiting for this night to come for some time. Someone lit two cigarettes, passed them our way.

I shivered now with expectation. Clara threaded her hand through mine and squeezed down hard-time to dive into the sea. We'd plunged into stranger waters, socially. How many nights had we spent together, listening to tourists speak in tongues, relieved of their senses by Mrs. Finisterre's rum punch? Most of the boys were already drunk-I could smell that. Some rocked on their heels, desperate to start dancing.

They led us toward the bar. Feeling came flooding back into my skin, and I kept laughing at everything these young men were saying, elated to be indoors with them. Clara had to pinch me through the puffed sleeve of my dress:

"Aubby? Are we the only girls here?"

Clara was right: where were the socialites we'd expected to see? The Oregon state forester, with his sullen red-lipped wife? The governor, the bank presidents? The ski experts from the Swiss Alps? Fifty-two paying guests, selected by lottery, had rooms waiting for them-we'd seen the list of names in Sunday's Oregon Gazette.

I turned to a man with wise amber eyes. He had unlined skin and a wispy blond mustache, but he smiled at us with the mellow despair of an old goat.

"Excuse me, sir. When does the celebration start?"

Clara flanked him on the left, smiling just as politely.

"Are we the first guests to arrive?"

But now the goat's eyes flamed: "Whadda you talkin' about? This party is under way, lady. You got twenty-six dancing partners to choose from out there-that ain't enough?"

The strength of his fury surprised us; backing up, I bumped my hip against a bannister. My hand closed on what turned out to be a tiny beaver, a carved ornament. Each cedar newel post had one.

"The woodwork is beautiful."

He grinned, soothed by the compliment.

"My supervisor is none other than O. B. Dawson."

"And your name?"

The thought appeared unbidden: Later, you'll want to know what to scream.

"Mickey Loatch. Got a wife, girls, I'm chagrined to say. Got three kids already, back in Osprey. I'm here so they can eat." Casually, he explained to us the intensity of his loneliness, the loneliness of the entire corps. They'd been driven by truck, eight miles each day, from Camp Thistle to the deep woods. For months at a time, they lived away from their families. Drinking water came from Lister bags; the latrines were saddle trenches. Everyone was glad, glad, glad, he said, to have the work. "There wasn't anything for us, until the Emerald Lodge project came along."

Mr. Loatch, I'd been noticing, had the strangest eyes I'd ever seen. They were a brilliant dark yellow, the color of that magic metal, gold.

Swallowing, I asked the man, "Excuse me, but I'm a bit confused. Isn't this the Evergreen Lodge?"

"The Evergreen Lodge?" the man said, exposing a mouthful of chewed pink sausage. "Where's dat, gurrls?" He laughed at his own cartoony voice.

A suspicion was coming into focus, a dreadful theory; I tried to talk it away, but the harder I looked, the keener it became. A quick scan of the room confirmed what I must have registered and ignored when I first walked through those doors. Were all of the boys' eyes this same hue? Trying to stay calm, I gripped Clara's hand and spun her around like a weathervane: gold, gold, gold, gold.

"Oh my God, Clara."

"Aubby? What's wrong with you?"

"Clara," I murmured, "I think we may have taken the wrong lift."

Two lodges existed on Mt. Joy. There was the Evergreen Lodge, which would be unveiled tonight, in a ceremony of extraordinary opulence, attended by the state forester and the President. Where Eugene was likely standing, on the balcony level, raising a flute for the champagne toast. There had once been, however, on the southeastern side of this same mountain, a second structure. This place lived on in local memory as demolished hope, as unconsummated blueprint. It was the failed original, crushed by an avalanche two years earlier, the graveyard of twenty-six workers from Company 609 of the Oregon Civilian Conservation Corps.

"Unwittingly," our landlady, who loved a bloody and unjust story, had told us over a pancake breakfast, "those workers were building their own casket." With tobogganing runs and a movie theatre, and more windows than Versailles, it was to have been even more impressive than the Evergreen Lodge. But the unfinished lodge had been completely covered in the collapse.

Mickey Loatch was still steering us around, showing off the stonework.

"Have you gals been to the Cloud Cap Inn? That's hitched to the mountain with wire cables. See, what we done is-"

"Mr. Loatch?" Swilling a drink, I steadied my voice. "How late does the chairlift run?"

"Oh dear." He pursed his lips. "You girls gotta be somewhere? I'm afraid you're stuck with us, at least until morning. You're the last we let up. They shut that lift down until dawn."

Next to me, I heard Clara in my ear: "Are you crazy? We just got here, and you're talking about leaving? Do you know how rude you sound?"

"They're dead."

"What are you talking about? Who's dead?"

"Everyone. Everyone but us."

Clara turned from me, her jaw tensing. At a nearby table, five green-clad boys were watching our conversation play out with detached interest, as if it were a sport they rarely followed. Clara wet her lips and smiled down at them, drumming her red nails on their table's glossy surface.

"This is so beautiful!" she cooed.

All five of the dead boys blushed.

"Excuse us," she fluttered. "Is there a powder room? My friend here is just a mess!"

"The Ladies Room" read a bronzed sign posted on an otherwise undistinguished door. At other parties, this room had always been our sanctuary. Once the door was shut, we stared at each other in the mirror, transferring knowledge across the glass. Her eyes were still brown, I noted with relief, and mine were blue. I worried that I might start screaming, but I bit back my panic, and I watched Clara do the same for me. "Your nose," I finally murmured. Blood poured in bright bars down her upper lip.

"I guess we must be really high up," she said, and started to cry.

"Shh, shh, shh . . . "

I wiped at the blood with a tissue.

"See?" I showed it to her. "At least we are, ah, at least we can still . . ."

Clara sneezed violently, and we stared at the reddish globules on the glass, which stood out with terrifying lucidity against the flat, unreal world of the mirror.

"What are we going to do, Aubby?"

I shook my head; a horror flooded through me until I could barely breathe.

Ordinarily, I would have handled the logistics of our escape-picked locks, counterfeited tickets. Clara would have corrected my lipstick and my posture, encouraging me to look more like a willowy seductress and less like a baseball umpire. But tonight it was Clara who formulated the plan. We had to tiptoe around the Emerald Lodge. We had to dim our own lights. And, most critical to our survival here, according to Clara: We had to persuade our dead hosts that we believed they were alive.

At first, I objected; I thought these workers deserved to know the truth about themselves.

"Oh?" Clara said. "How principled of you."

And what did I think was going to happen, she asked, if we told the men what we knew?

"I don't know. They'll let us go?"

Clara shook her head.

"Think about it, Aubby-what's keeping this place together?"

We had to be very cautious, very amenable, she argued. We couldn't challenge our hosts on any of their convictions. The Emerald Lodge was a real place, and they were breathing safely inside it. We had to admire their handiwork, she said. Continue to exclaim over the lintel arches and the wrought-iron grates, the beams and posts. As if they were real, as if they were solid. Clara begged me to do this. Who knew what might happen if we roused them from their dreaming? The C.C.C. workers' ghosts had built this place, Clara said; we were at their mercy. If the men discovered they were dead, we'd die with them. We needed to believe in their rooms until dawn-just long enough to escape them.

"Same plan as ever," Clara said. "How many hundreds of nights have we staked a claim at a party like this?"

Zero, I told her. On no occasion had we been the only living people.

"We'll charm them. We'll drink a little, dance a little. And then, come dawn, we'll escape down the mountain."

Somebody started pounding on the door: "Hey! What's the holdup, huh? Somebody fall in? You girls wanna dance or what?"

"Almost ready!" Clara shouted brightly.

On the dance floor, the amber-eyed ghosts were as awkward and as touching, as unconvincingly brash as any boys in history on the threshold of a party. Innocent hopefuls with their hats pressed to their chests.

"I feel sorry for them, Clara! They have no idea."

"Yes. It's terribly sad."

Her face hardened into a stony expression I'd seen on her only a handful of times in our career as prospectors.

"When we get back down the mountain, we can feel sad," she said. "Right now, we are going to laugh at all their jokes. We are going to celebrate this stupendous American landmark, the Emerald Lodge."

Clara's mother owned an etiquette book for women, the first chapter of which advises, Make Your Date Feel Like He Is the Life of the Party! People often mistake laughing girls for foolish creatures. They mistake our merriment for nerves or weakness, or the hysterical looning of desire. Sometimes, it is that. But not tonight. We could hold our wardens hostage, too, in this careful way. Everybody needs an audience.

At other parties, our hosts had always been very willing to believe us when we feigned interest in their endless rehearsals of the past. They used our black pupils to polish up their antique triumphs. Even an ogreish salmon-boat captain, a bachelor again at eighty-seven, was convinced that we were both in love with him. Nobody ever invited Clara and me to a gala to hear our honest opinions.

At the bar, a calliope of tiny glasses was waiting for me: honey and cherry and lemon. Flavored liquors, imported from Italy, the bartender smiled shyly. "Delicious!" I exclaimed, touching each to my lips. Clara, meanwhile, had been swept onto the dance floor. With her mauve lipstick in place and her glossy hair smoothed, she was shooting colors all around the room. Could you scare a dead boy with the vibrancy of your life? "Be careful," I mouthed, motioning her into the shadows. Boys in green beanies kept sidling up to her, vying for her attention. It hurt my heart to see them trying. Of course, news of their own death had not reached them-how could that news get up the mountain, to where the workers were buried under snow?

Perched on the barstool, I plaited my hair. I tried to think up some good jokes.

"Hullo. Care if I join you?"

This dead boy introduced himself as Lee Covey. Black bangs flopped onto his brow. He had the small, recessed, comically despondent face of a pug dog. I liked him immediately. And he was so funny that I did not have to theatricalize my laughter. Lee's voluble eyes made conversation feel almost unnecessary; his conviction that he was alive was contagious.

"I'm not much of a dancer," Lee apologized abruptly. As if to prove his point, he sent a glass crashing off the bar.

"Oh, that's O.K. I'm not, either. See my friend out there?" I asked. "In the green dress? She's the graceful one."

But Lee kept his golden eyes fixed on me, and soon it became difficult to say who was the mesmerist and who was succumbing to hypnosis. His Camp Thistle stories made me laugh so hard that I worried about falling off the barstool. Lee had a rippling laugh, like summer thunder; by this point I was very drunk. Lee started in on his family's sorry history: "Daddy the Dwindler, he spent it all, he lost everything we had, he turned me out of the house. It fell to me to support the family . . . "

I nodded, recognizing his story's contours. How had the other workers washed up here? I wondered. Did they remember their childhoods, their lives before the avalanche? Or had those memories been buried inside them?

It was the loneliest feeling, to watch the group of dead boys dancing. Coupled off, they held on to each other's shoulders. "For practice," Lee explained. They steered each other uncertainly around the hexagonal floor, swaying on currents of song.

"Say, how about it?" Lee said suddenly. "Let's give it a whirl-you only live once."

Seconds later, we were on the floor, jitterbugging in the center of the hall.

"Oh, oh, oh," he crooned.

When Lee and I kissed, it felt no different from kissing a living mouth. We sank into the rhythms of horns and strings and harmonicas, performed by a live band of five dead mountain brothers. With the naïve joy of all these ghosts, they tootled their glittery instruments at us.

A hand grabbed my shoulder.

"May I cut in?"

Clara dragged me off the floor.

Back in the powder room, Clara's eyes looked shiny, raccoon-beady. She was exhausted, I realized. Some grins are only reflexes, but others are courageous acts-Clara's was the latter. The clock had just chimed ten-thirty. The party showed no signs of slowing. At least the clock is moving, I pointed out. We tried to conjure a picture of the risen sun, piercing the thousand windows of the Emerald Lodge.

"You doing O.K.?"

"I have certainly been better."

"We're going to make it down the mountain."

"Of course we are."

Near the western staircase, Lee waited with a drink in hand. Shadows pooled unnaturally around his feet; they reminded me of peeling paint. If you stared too long, they seemed to curl slightly up from the floorboards.

"Jean! There you are!"

At the sound of my real name, I felt electrified-hadn't I introduced myself by a pseudonym? Clara and I had a telephone book of false names. It was how we dressed for parties. We chose alter egos for each other, like jewelry.

"It's Candy, actually." I smiled politely. "Short for Candace."

"Whatever you say, Jean," Lee said, playing lightly with my bracelet.

"Who told you that? Did my friend tell you that?"

"You did."

I blinked slowly at Lee, watching his grinning face come in and out of focus.

I'd had plenty more to drink, and I realized that I didn't remember half the things we'd talked about. What else, I wondered, had I let slip?

"How did you get that name, huh? It's a really pretty name, Jeannie."

I was unused to being asked personal questions. Lee put his arms around me, and then, unbelievably, I heard my voice in the darkness, telling the ghost a true story.

Jean, I told him, is what I prefer to go by. In Florida, most everybody called me Aubby.

My parents named me Aubergine. They wanted me to have a glamorous name. It was a luxury they could afford to give me, a spell of protection. "Aubergine" was a word that my father had learned during his wartime service, the French word for "dawn," he said. A name like that, they felt, would envelop me in an aura of mystery, from swaddling to shroud. One night, on a rare trip to a restaurant, we learned the truth from a fellow-diner, a bald, genteel eavesdropper.

"Aubergine," he said thoughtfully. "What an interesting name."

We beamed at him eagerly, my whole family.

"It is, of course, the French word for 'eggplant.' "

"Oh, darn!" my mother said, unable to contain her sorrow.

"Of course!" roared old dad.

But we were a family long accustomed to reversals of fortune; in fact, my father had gone bankrupt misapprehending various facts about the dog track and his own competencies.

"It suits you," the bald diner said, smiling and turning the pages of his newspaper. "You are a little fat, yes? Like an eggplant!"

"We call her Jean for short," my mother had smoothly replied.

Clara was always teasing me. "Don't fall in love with anybody," she'd say, and then we'd laugh for longer than the joke really warranted, because this scenario struck us both as so unlikely. But as I leaned against this ghost I felt my life falling into place. It was the spotlight of his eyes, those radiant beams, that gently drew motes from the past out of me-and I loved this. He had got me talking, and now I didn't want to shut up. His eyes grew wider and wider, golden nets woven with golden fibers. I told him about my father's suicide, my mother's death. At the last second, I bit my tongue, but I'd been on the verge of telling him about Clara's bruises, those mute blue coördinates. Not to solicit Lee's help-what could this phantom do? No, merely to keep him looking at me.

Hush, Aubby, I heard in Clara's tiny, moth-fluttery voice, which was immediately incinerated by the hot pleasure of Lee's gaze.

We kissed a second time. I felt our teeth click together; two warm hands cupped my cheeks. But when he lifted his face, his anguish leapt out at me. His wild eyes were like bees trapped on the wrong side of a window, bouncing along the glass. "You . . . " he began. He stroked at my cheek. "You feel . . . " Very delicately, he tried kissing me again. "You taste . . . " Some bewildered comment trailed off into silence. One hand smoothed over my dress, while the other rose to claw at his pale throat.

"How's that?" he whispered hoarsely in my ear. "Does that feel all right?"

Lee was so much in the dark. I had no idea how to help him. I wondered how honest I would have wanted Lee to be with me, if he were in my shoes. Put him out of his misery, country people say of sick dogs. But Lee looked very happy. Excited, even, about the future.

"Should we go upstairs, Jean?"

"But where did Clara go?" I kept murmuring.

It took great effort to remember her name.

"Did she disappear on you?" Lee said, and winked. "Do you think she's found her way upstairs, too?"

Crossing the room, we spotted her. Her hands were clasped around the hog stubble of a large boy's neck, and they were swaying in the center of the hexagon. I waved at her, trying to get her attention, and she stared right through me. A smile played on her face, while the chandeliers plucked up the red in her hair, strumming even the subtlest colors out of her.

Grinning, Lee lifted a hand to his black eyebrow in a mock salute. His bloodless hand looked thin as paper. I had a sharp memory of standing at a bay window, in Florida, and feeling the night sky change direction on me-no longer lapping at the horizon but rolling inland. Something was pouring toward me now, a nothingness exhaled through the floury membrane of the boy. If Lee could see the difference in the transparency of our splayed hands, he wasn't letting on.

Now Clara was kissing her boy's plush lips. Her fingers were still knitted around his tawny neck. Clara, Clara, we have abandoned our posts. We shouldn't have kissed them; we shouldn't have taken that black water onboard. Lee may not have known that he was dead, but my body did; it seemed to be having some kind of stupefied reaction to the kiss. I felt myself sinking fast, sinking far below thought. The two boys swept us toward the stairs with a courtly synchronicity, their uniformed bodies tugging us into the shadows, where our hair and our skin and our purple and emerald party dresses turned suddenly blue, like two candles blown out.

And now I watched as Clara flowed up the stairs after her stocky dancing partner, laughing with genuine abandon, her neck flung back and her throat exposed. I followed right behind her, but I could not close the gap. I watched her ascent, just as I had on the lift. Groggily, I saw them moving down a posy-wallpapered corridor. Even squinting, I could not make out the watery digits on the doors. All these doors were, of course, identical. One swung open, then shut, swallowing Clara. I doubted we would find each other again. By now, however, I felt very calm. I let Lee lead me by the wrist, like a child, only my bracelets shaking.

Room 409 had natural wood walls, glowing with a piney shine in the low light. Lee sat down on a chair and tugged off his work boots, flushed with the yellow avarice of 4 A. M. Darkness flooded steadily out of him, and I absorbed it. "Jean," he kept saying, a word that sounded so familiar, although its meaning now escaped me. I covered his mouth with my mouth. I sat on the ghost boy's lap, kissing his neck, pretending to feel a pulse. Eventually, grumbling an apology, Lee stood and disappeared into the bathroom. I heard a faucet turn on; Lord knows what came pouring out of it. The room had a queen bed, and I pulled back a corner of the soft cotton quilt. It was so beautiful, edelweiss white. I slid in with my dress still pinned to me. I could not stop yawning; seconds from now, I'd drop off. I never wanted to go back out there, I decided. Why lie about this? There was no longer any chairlift waiting to carry us home, was there? No mountain, no fool's-gold moon. The Earth we'd left felt like a photograph. And was it such a terrible thing, to live at the lodge?

Something was descending slowly, like a heavy theatre curtain, inside my body; I felt my will to know the truth ebbing into a happy, warm insanity. We could all be dead-why not? We could be in love, me and a dead boy. We could be sisters here, Clara and I, equally poor and equally beautiful.

Lee had come back and was stroking my hair onto the pillow. "Want to take a little nap?" he asked.

I had never wanted anything more. But then I looked down at my red fingernails and noticed a tiny chip in the polish, exposing the translucent blue enamel. Clara had painted them for me yesterday morning, before the party-eons ago. Clara, I remembered. What was happening to Clara? I dug out of the heavy coverlet, struggling up. At precisely that moment, the door began to rattle in its frame; outside, a man was calling for Lee.

"He's here! He's here! He's here!" a baritone voice growled happily. "Goddammit, Lee, button up and get downstairs!"

Lee rubbed his golden eyes and palmed his curls. I stared at him uncomprehendingly.

"I regret the interruption, my dear. But this we cannot miss." He grinned at me, exposing a mouthful of holes. "You wanna have your picture taken, don'tcha?"

Clara and I found each other on the staircase. What had happened to her, in her room? That's a lock I can't pick. Even on ordinary nights, we often split up, and afterward we never discussed those unreal intervals in the boarding house. On our prospecting expeditions, whatever doors we closed stayed shut. Clara had her arm around her date, who looked doughier than I recalled, his round face almost featureless, his eyebrows vanished; even the point of his green toothpick seemed blurred. Lee ran up to greet him, and we hung back while the two men continued downstairs, racing each other to reach the photographer. This time we did not try to disguise our relief.

"I was falling asleep!" Clara said. "And I wanted to sleep so badly, Aubby, but then I remembered you were here somewhere, too."

"I was falling asleep," I said, "but then I remembered your face."

Clara redid my bun, and I straightened her hem. We were fine, we promised each other.

"I didn't get anything," Clara said. "But I'm not leaving empty-handed."

I gaped at her. Was she still talking about prospecting?

"You can't steal from this place."

Clara had turned to inspect a sculpted flower blooming from an iron railing; she tugged at it experimentally, as if she thought she might free it from the bannister.

"Clara, wake up. That's not-"

"No? That's not why you brought me here?"

She flicked her eyes up at me, her gaze limpid and accusatory. And I felt I'd become fluent in the language of eyes; now I saw what she'd known all along. What she'd been swallowing back on our prospecting trips, what she'd never once screamed at me, in the freezing boarding house: You use me. Every party, you bait the hook, and I dangle. I let them, I am eaten, and what do I get? Some scrap metal?

"I'm sorry, Clara . . . "

My apology opened outward, a blossoming horror. I'd used her bruises to justify leaving Florida. I'd used her face to open doors. Greed had convinced me I could take care of her up here, and then I'd disappeared on her. How long had Clara known what I was doing? I'd barely known myself.

But Clara, still holding my hand, pointed at the clock. It was 5 A.M.

"Dawn is coming." She gave me a wide, genuine smile. "We are going to get home."

Downstairs, the C.C.C. boys were shuffling around the dance floor, positioning themselves in a triangular arrangement. The tallest men knelt down, and the shorter men filed behind them. When they saw us watching from the staircase, they waved.

"Where you girls been? The photographer is here."

The fires were still burning, the huge logs unconsumed. Even the walls, it seemed, were trembling in anticipation. This place wanted to go on shining in our living eyes, was that it? The dead boys feasted on our attention, but so did the entire structure.

Several of the dead boys grabbed us and hustled us toward the posed and grinning rows of uniformed workers. We spotted a tripod in the corner of the lodge, a man doubled over, his head swallowed by the black cover. He was wearing a flamboyant costume: a ragged black cape, made from the same smocky material as the camera cover, and bright-red satin trousers.

"Picture time!" his voice boomed.

Now the true light of the Emerald Lodge began to erupt in rhythmic bursts. We winced at the metallic flash, the sun above his neck. The workers stiffened, their lean faces plumped by grins. It was an inversion of the standard firing squad: two dozen men hunched before the photographer and his mounted cannon. " Cheese! " the C.C.C. boys cried.

We squinted against the radiant detonations. These blasts were much brighter and louder than any shutter click on Earth.

With each flash, the men grew more definite: their chins sharpening, cheeks ripening around their smiles. Dim brows darkened to black arcs; the gold of their eyes deepened, as if each face were receiving a generous pour of whiskey. Was it life that these ghosts were drawing from the camera's light? No, these flashes-they imbued the ghosts with something else.

"Do not let him shoot you," I hissed, grabbing Clara by the elbow. We ran for cover. Every time the flashbulb illuminated the room, I flinched. "Did he get you? Did he get me?"

With an animal instinct, we knew to avoid that light. We could not let the photographer fix us in the frame, we could not let him capture us on whatever film still held them here, dancing jerkily on the hexagonal floor. If that happens, we are done for, I thought. We are here forever.

With his unlidded eye, the photographer spotted us where we had crouched behind the piano. Bent at the waist, his head cloaked by the wrinkling purple-black cover, he rotated the camera. Then he waggled his fingers at us, motioning us into the frame.

"Smile, ladies," Mickey Loatch ordered, as we darted around the cedar tables.

We never saw his face, but he was hunting us. This devil-excuse me, let us continue to call him "the party photographer," as I do not want to frighten anyone unduly-spun the tripod on its rolling wheels, his hairy hands gripping its sides, the cover flapping onto his shoulders like a strange pleated wig. His single blue lens kept fixing on our bodies. Clara dove low behind the wicker chairs and pulled me after her.

The C.C.C. boys who were assembled on the dance floor, meanwhile, stayed glacially frozen. Smiles floated muzzily around their faces. A droning rose from the room, a sound like dragonflies in summer, and I realized that we were hearing the men's groaning effort to stay in focus: to flood their faces with ersatz blood, to hold still, hold still, and smile.

Then the chair tipped; one of our pursuers had lifted Clara up, kicking and screaming, and began to carry her back to the dance floor, where men were shifting to make a place for her.

"Front and center, ladies," the company Captain called urgently. "Fix your dress, dear. The straps have gotten all twisted."

I had a terrible vision of Clara caught inside the shot with them, her eyes turning from brown to umber to the deathlessly sparkling gold.

"Stop!" I yelled. "Let her go! She-"

She's alive, I did not risk telling them.

"She does not photograph well!"

With aqueous indifference, the camera lifted its eye.

"Listen, forgive us, but we cannot be in your photograph!"

"Let go! " Clara said, cinched inside an octopus of restraining arms, every one of them pretending that this was still a game.

We used to pledge, with great passion, always to defend each other. We meant it, too. These were easy promises to make, when we were safely at the boarding house; but on this mountain even breathing felt dangerous.

But Clara pushed back. Clara saved us.

She directed her voice at every object in the lodge, screaming at the very rafters. Gloriously, her speech gurgling with saliva and blood and everything wet, everything living, she began to howl at them, the dead ones. She foamed red, my best friend, forming the words we had been stifling all night, the spell-bursting ones:

"It's done, gentlemen. It's over. Your song ended. You are news font; you are characters. I could read you each your own obituary. None of this-"

"Shut her up," a man growled.

"Shut up, shut up!" several others screamed.

She was chanting, one hand at her throbbing temple: "None of this, none of this, none of this is! "

Some men were thumbing their ears shut. Some had braced themselves in the doorframes, as they teach the children of the West to do during earthquakes. I resisted the urge to cover my own ears as she bansheed back at the shocked ghosts:

"Two years ago, there was an avalanche at your construction site. It was terrible, a tragedy. We were all so sorry . . . "

She took a breath.

"You are dead."

Her voice grew gentle, almost maternal-it was like watching the wind drop out of the world, flattening a full sail. Her shoulders fell, her palms turned out.

"You were all buried with this lodge."

Their eyes turned to us, incredulous. Hard and yellow, dozens of spiny armadillos. After a second, the C.C.C. company burst out laughing. Some men cried tears, they were howling so hard at Clara. Lee was among them, and he looked much changed, his face as smooth and flexibly white as an eel's belly.

These men-they didn't believe her!

And why should we ever have expected them to believe us, two female nobodies, two intruders? For these were the master carpenters, the master stonemasons and weavers, the master self-deceivers, the ghosts.

"Dead," one sad man said, as if testing the word out.

"Dead. Dead. Dead," his friends repeated, quizzically.

But the sound was a shallow production, as if each man were scratching at topsoil with the point of a shovel. Aware, perhaps, that if he dug with a little more dedication he would find his body lying breathless under this world's surface.

"Dead." "Dead."

"Dead."

"Dead."

"Dead."

"Dead."

They croaked like pond frogs, all across the ballroom. "Dead" was a foreign word which the boys could pronounce perfectly, soberly and matter-of-factly, without comprehending its meaning.

One or two of them, however, exchanged a glance; I saw a burly blacksmith cut eyes at the ruby-cheeked trumpet player. It was a guileful look, a what-can-be-done look.

So they knew; or they almost knew; or they'd buried the knowledge of their deaths, and we had exhumed it. Who can say what the dead do or do not know? Perhaps the knowledge of one's death, ceaselessly swallowed, is the very food you need to become a ghost. They burned that knowledge up like whale fat, and continued to shine on.

But then a quaking began to ripple across the ballroom floor. A chandelier, in its handsome zigzag frame, burst into a spray of glass above us. One of the pillars, three feet wide, cracked in two. Outside, from all corners, we heard a rumbling, as if the world were gathering its breath.

"Oh, God," I heard one of them groan. "It's happening again."

My eyes met Clara's, as they always do at parties. She did not have to tell me: Run.

On our race through the lodge, in all that chaos and din, Clara somehow heard another sound. A bright chirping. A sound like gold coins being tossed up, caught, and fisted. It stopped her cold. The entire building was shaking on its foundations, but through the tremors she spotted a domed cage, hanging in the foyer. On a tiny stirrup, a yellow bird was swinging. The cage was a wrought-iron skeleton, the handiwork of phantoms, but the bird, we both knew instantly, was real. It was agitating its wings in the polar air, as alive as we were. Its shadow was denser than anything in that ice palace. Its song split our eardrums. Its feathers burned into our retinas, rich with solar color, and its small body was stuffed with life.

At the Evergreen Lodge, on the opposite side of the mountain, two twelve-foot doors, designed and built by the C.C.C., stand sentry against the outside air-seven hundred pounds of hand-cut ponderosa pine, from Oregon's primeval woods. Inside the Emerald Lodge, we found their phantom twins, the dream originals. Those doors still worked, thank God. We pushed them open. Bright light, real daylight, shot onto our faces.

The sun was rising. The chairlift, visible across a pillowcase of fresh snow, was running.

We sprinted for it. Golden sunlight painted the steel cables. We raced across the platform, jumping for the chairs, and I will never know how fast or how far we flew to get back to Earth. In all our years of prospecting in the West, this was our greatest heist. Clara opened her satchel and lifted the yellow bird onto her lap, and I heard it shrieking the whole way down the mountain. ♦

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
New fiction by Karen Russell: "Perhaps the knowledge of one's death, ceaselessly swallowed, is the very food you need to become a ghost."

# data[].attributes.body
I know I mentioned this one in the LeVar Burton Reads post, but it's so good I'm putting it on twice.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Ken Liu's incredible story "Paper Menagerie" just became the first work of fiction to win all three of SF's major awards: the Hugo, the Nebula and the World Fantasy Award. And we're proud to be able to reprint the whole story, right here at io9. Here's your chance to find out what all the excitement is about, and discover one of science fiction's fastest rising stars.

"Paper Menagerie"

by Ken Liu

One of my earliest memories starts with me sobbing. I refused to be soothed no matter what Mom and Dad tried.

Dad gave up and left the bedroom, but Mom took me into the kitchen and sat me down at the breakfast table.

" Kan, kan," she said, as she pulled a sheet of wrapping paper from on top of the fridge. For years, Mom carefully sliced open the wrappings around Christmas gifts and saved them on top of the fridge in a thick stack.

She set the paper down, plain side facing up, and began to fold it. I stopped crying and watched her, curious.

She turned the paper over and folded it again. She pleated, packed, tucked, rolled, and twisted until the paper disappeared between her cupped hands. Then she lifted the folded-up paper packet to her mouth and blew into it, like a balloon.

" Kan," she said. " Laohu." She put her hands down on the table and let go.

A little paper tiger stood on the table, the size of two fists placed together. The skin of the tiger was the pattern on the wrapping paper, white background with red candy canes and green Christmas trees.

I reached out to Mom's creation. Its tail twitched, and it pounced playfully at my finger. " Rawrr-sa," it growled, the sound somewhere between a cat and rustling newspapers.

I laughed, startled, and stroked its back with an index finger. The paper tiger vibrated under my finger, purring.

" Zhe jiao zhezhi," Mom said. This is called origami.

I didn't know this at the time, but Mom's kind was special. She breathed into them so that they shared her breath, and thus moved with her life. This was her magic.

#

Dad had picked Mom out of a catalog.

One time, when I was in high school, I asked Dad about the details. He was trying to get me to speak to Mom again.

He had signed up for the introduction service back in the spring of 1973. Flipping through the pages steadily, he had spent no more than a few seconds on each page until he saw the picture of Mom.

I've never seen this picture. Dad described it: Mom was sitting in a chair, her side to the camera, wearing a tight green silk cheongsam. Her head was turned to the camera so that her long black hair was draped artfully over her chest and shoulder. She looked out at him with the eyes of a calm child.

"That was the last page of the catalog I saw," he said.

The catalog said she was eighteen, loved to dance, and spoke good English because she was from Hong Kong. None of these facts turned out to be true.

He wrote to her, and the company passed their messages back and forth. Finally, he flew to Hong Kong to meet her.

"The people at the company had been writing her responses. She didn't know any English other than 'hello' and 'goodbye.'"

What kind of woman puts herself into a catalog so that she can be bought? The high school me thought I knew so much about everything. Contempt felt good, like wine.

Instead of storming into the office to demand his money back, he paid a waitress at the hotel restaurant to translate for them.

"She would look at me, her eyes halfway between scared and hopeful, while I spoke. And when the girl began translating what I said, she'd start to smile slowly."

He flew back to Connecticut and began to apply for the papers for her to come to him. I was born a year later, in the Year of the Tiger.

#

At my request, Mom also made a goat, a deer, and a water buffalo out of wrapping paper. They would run around the living room while Laohu chased after them, growling. When he caught them he would press down until the air went out of them and they became just flat, folded-up pieces of paper. I would then have to blow into them to re-inflate them so they could run around some more.

Sometimes, the animals got into trouble. Once, the water buffalo jumped into a dish of soy sauce on the table at dinner. (He wanted to wallow, like a real water buffalo.) I picked him out quickly but the capillary action had already pulled the dark liquid high up into his legs. The sauce-softened legs would not hold him up, and he collapsed onto the table. I dried him out in the sun, but his legs became crooked after that, and he ran around with a limp. Mom eventually wrapped his legs in saran wrap so that he could wallow to his heart's content (just not in soy sauce).

Also, Laohu liked to pounce at sparrows when he and I played in the backyard. But one time, a cornered bird struck back in desperation and tore his ear. He whimpered and winced as I held him and Mom patched his ear together with tape. He avoided birds after that.

And then one day, I saw a TV documentary about sharks and asked Mom for one of my own. She made the shark, but he flapped about on the table unhappily. I filled the sink with water, and put him in. He swam around and around happily. However, after a while he became soggy and translucent, and slowly sank to the bottom, the folds coming undone. I reached in to rescue him, and all I ended up with was a wet piece of paper.

Laohu put his front paws together at the edge of the sink and rested his head on them. Ears drooping, he made a low growl in his throat that made me feel guilty.

Mom made a new shark for me, this time out of tin foil. The shark lived happily in a large goldfish bowl. Laohu and I liked to sit next to the bowl to watch the tin foil shark chasing the goldfish, Laohu sticking his face up against the bowl on the other side so that I saw his eyes, magnified to the size of coffee cups, staring at me from across the bowl.

#

When I was ten, we moved to a new house across town. Two of the women neighbors came by to welcome us. Dad served them drinks and then apologized for having to run off to the utility company to straighten out the prior owner's bills. "Make yourselves at home. My wife doesn't speak much English, so don't think she's being rude for not talking to you."

While I read in the dining room, Mom unpacked in the kitchen. The neighbors conversed in the living room, not trying to be particularly quiet.

"He seems like a normal enough man. Why did he do that?"

"Something about the mixing never seems right. The child looks unfinished. Slanty eyes, white face. A little monster."

"Do you think he can speak English?"

The women hushed. After a while they came into the dining room.

"Hello there! What's your name?"

"Jack," I said.

"That doesn't sound very Chinesey."

Mom came into the dining room then. She smiled at the women. The three of them stood in a triangle around me, smiling and nodding at each other, with nothing to say, until Dad came back.

#

Mark, one of the neighborhood boys, came over with his Star Wars action figures. Obi-Wan Kenobi's lightsaber lit up and he could swing his arms and say, in a tinny voice, "Use the Force!" I didn't think the figure looked much like the real Obi-Wan at all.

Together, we watched him repeat this performance five times on the coffee table. "Can he do anything else?" I asked.

Mark was annoyed by my question. "Look at all the details," he said.

I looked at the details. I wasn't sure what I was supposed to say.

Mark was disappointed by my response. "Show me your toys."

I didn't have any toys except my paper menagerie. I brought Laohu out from my bedroom. By then he was very worn, patched all over with tape and glue, evidence of the years of repairs Mom and I had done on him. He was no longer as nimble and sure-footed as before. I sat him down on the coffee table. I could hear the skittering steps of the other animals behind in the hallway, timidly peeking into the living room.

" Xiao laohu," I said, and stopped. I switched to English. "This is Tiger." Cautiously, Laohu strode up and purred at Mark, sniffing his hands.

Mark examined the Christmas-wrap pattern of Laohu's skin. "That doesn't look like a tiger at all. Your Mom makes toys for you from trash?"

I had never thought of Laohu as trash. But looking at him now, he was really just a piece of wrapping paper.

Mark pushed Obi-Wan's head again. The lightsaber flashed; he moved his arms up and down. "Use the Force!"

Laohu turned and pounced, knocking the plastic figure off the table. It hit the floor and broke, and Obi-Wan's head rolled under the couch. " Rawwww," Laohu laughed. I joined him.

Mark punched me, hard. "This was very expensive! You can't even find it in the stores now. It probably cost more than what your dad paid for your mom!"

I stumbled and fell to the floor. Laohu growled and leapt at Mark's face.

Mark screamed, more out of fear and surprise than pain. Laohu was only made of paper, after all.

Mark grabbed Laohu and his snarl was choked off as Mark crumpled him in his hand and tore him in half. He balled up the two pieces of paper and threw them at me. "Here's your stupid cheap Chinese garbage."

After Mark left, I spent a long time trying, without success, to tape together the pieces, smooth out the paper, and follow the creases to refold Laohu. Slowly, the other animals came into the living room and gathered around us, me and the torn wrapping paper that used to be Laohu.

#

My fight with Mark didn't end there. Mark was popular at school. I never want to think again about the two weeks that followed.

I came home that Friday at the end of the two weeks. " Xuexiao hao ma?" Mom asked. I said nothing and went to the bathroom. I looked into the mirror. I look nothing like her, nothing.

At dinner I asked Dad, "Do I have a chink face?"

Dad put down his chopsticks. Even though I had never told him what happened in school, he seemed to understand. He closed his eyes and rubbed the bridge of his nose. "No, you don't."

Mom looked at Dad, not understanding. She looked back at me. " Sha jiao chink?"

"English," I said. "Speak English."

She tried. "What happen?"

I pushed the chopsticks and the bowl before me away: stir-fried green peppers with five-spice beef. "We should eat American food."

Dad tried to reason. "A lot of families cook Chinese sometimes."

"We are not other families." I looked at him. Other families don't have moms who don't belong.

He looked away. And then he put a hand on Mom's shoulder. "I'll get you a cookbook."

Mom turned to me. " Bu haochi?"

"English," I said, raising my voice. "Speak English."

Mom reached out to touch my forehead, feeling for my temperature. " Fashao la?"

I brushed her hand away. "I'm fine. Speak English!" I was shouting.

"Speak English to him," Dad said to Mom. "You knew this was going to happen some day. What did you expect?"

Mom dropped her hands to her side. She sat, looking from Dad to me, and back to Dad again. She tried to speak, stopped, and tried again, and stopped again.

"You have to," Dad said. "I've been too easy on you. Jack needs to fit in."

Mom looked at him. "If I say 'love,' I feel here." She pointed to her lips. "If I say ' ai,' I feel here." She put her hand over her heart.

Dad shook his head. "You are in America."

Mom hunched down in her seat, looking like the water buffalo when Laohu used to pounce on him and squeeze the air of life out of him.

"And I want some real toys."

#

Dad bought me a full set of Star Wars action figures. I gave the Obi-Wan Kenobi to Mark.

I packed the paper menagerie in a large shoebox and put it under the bed.

The next morning, the animals had escaped and took over their old favorite spots in my room. I caught them all and put them back into the shoebox, taping the lid shut. But the animals made so much noise in the box that I finally shoved it into the corner of the attic as far away from my room as possible.

If Mom spoke to me in Chinese, I refused to answer her. After a while, she tried to use more English. But her accent and broken sentences embarrassed me. I tried to correct her. Eventually, she stopped speaking altogether if I were around.

Mom began to mime things if she needed to let me know something. She tried to hug me the way she saw American mothers did on TV. I thought her movements exaggerated, uncertain, ridiculous, graceless. She saw that I was annoyed, and stopped.

"You shouldn't treat your mother that way," Dad said. But he couldn't look me in the eyes as he said it. Deep in his heart, he must have realized that it was a mistake to have tried to take a Chinese peasant girl and expect her to fit in the suburbs of Connecticut.

Mom learned to cook American style. I played video games and studied French.

Every once in a while, I would see her at the kitchen table studying the plain side of a sheet of wrapping paper. Later a new paper animal would appear on my nightstand and try to cuddle up to me. I caught them, squeezed them until the air went out of them, and then stuffed them away in the box in the attic.

Mom finally stopped making the animals when I was in high school. By then her English was much better, but I was already at that age when I wasn't interested in what she had to say whatever language she used.

Sometimes, when I came home and saw her tiny body busily moving about in the kitchen, singing a song in Chinese to herself, it was hard for me to believe that she gave birth to me. We had nothing in common. She might as well be from the moon. I would hurry on to my room, where I could continue my all-American pursuit of happiness.

#

Dad and I stood, one on each side of Mom, lying on the hospital bed. She was not yet even forty, but she looked much older.

For years she had refused to go to the doctor for the pain inside her that she said was no big deal. By the time an ambulance finally carried her in, the cancer had spread far beyond the limits of surgery.

My mind was not in the room. It was the middle of the on-campus recruiting season, and I was focused on resumes, transcripts, and strategically constructed interview schedules. I schemed about how to lie to the corporate recruiters most effectively so that they'll offer to buy me. I understood intellectually that it was terrible to think about this while your mother lay dying. But that understanding didn't mean I could change how I felt.

She was conscious. Dad held her left hand with both of his own. He leaned down to kiss her forehead. He seemed weak and old in a way that startled me. I realized that I knew almost as little about Dad as I did about Mom.

Mom smiled at him. "I'm fine."

She turned to me, still smiling. "I know you have to go back to school." Her voice was very weak and it was difficult to hear her over the hum of the machines hooked up to her. "Go. Don't worry about me. This is not a big deal. Just do well in school."

I reached out to touch her hand, because I thought that was what I was supposed to do. I was relieved. I was already thinking about the flight back, and the bright California sunshine.

She whispered something to Dad. He nodded and left the room.

"Jack, if - " she was caught up in a fit of coughing, and could not speak for some time. "If I don't make it, don't be too sad and hurt your health. Focus on your life. Just keep that box you have in the attic with you, and every year, at Qingming, just take it out and think about me. I'll be with you always."

Qingming was the Chinese Festival for the Dead. When I was very young, Mom used to write a letter on Qingming to her dead parents back in China, telling them the good news about the past year of her life in America. She would read the letter out loud to me, and if I made a comment about something, she would write it down in the letter too. Then she would fold the letter into a paper crane, and release it, facing west. We would then watch, as the crane flapped its crisp wings on its long journey west, towards the Pacific, towards China, towards the graves of Mom's family.

It had been many years since I last did that with her.

"I don't know anything about the Chinese calendar," I said. "Just rest, Mom. "

"Just keep the box with you and open it once in a while. Just open - " she began to cough again.

"It's okay, Mom." I stroked her arm awkwardly.

" Haizi, mama ai ni - " Her cough took over again. An image from years ago flashed into my memory: Mom saying ai and then putting her hand over her heart.

"Alright, Mom. Stop talking."

Dad came back, and I said that I needed to get to the airport early because I didn't want to miss my flight.

She died when my plane was somewhere over Nevada.

#

Dad aged rapidly after Mom died. The house was too big for him and had to be sold. My girlfriend Susan and I went to help him pack and clean the place.

Susan found the shoebox in the attic. The paper menagerie, hidden in the uninsulated darkness of the attic for so long, had become brittle and the bright wrapping paper patterns had faded.

"I've never seen origami like this," Susan said. "Your Mom was an amazing artist."

The paper animals did not move. Perhaps whatever magic had animated them stopped when Mom died. Or perhaps I had only imagined that these paper constructions were once alive. The memory of children could not be trusted.

#

It was the first weekend in April, two years after Mom's death. Susan was out of town on one of her endless trips as a management consultant and I was home, lazily flipping through the TV channels.

I paused at a documentary about sharks. Suddenly I saw, in my mind, Mom's hands, as they folded and refolded tin foil to make a shark for me, while Laohu and I watched.

A rustle. I looked up and saw that a ball of wrapping paper and torn tape was on the floor next to the bookshelf. I walked over to pick it up for the trash.

The ball of paper shifted, unfurled itself, and I saw that it was Laohu, who I hadn't thought about in a very long time. " Rawrr-sa." Mom must have put him back together after I had given up.

He was smaller than I remembered. Or maybe it was just that back then my fists were smaller.

Susan had put the paper animals around our apartment as decoration. She probably left Laohu in a pretty hidden corner because he looked so shabby.

I sat down on the floor, and reached out a finger. Laohu's tail twitched, and he pounced playfully. I laughed, stroking his back. Laohu purred under my hand.

"How've you been, old buddy?"

Laohu stopped playing. He got up, jumped with feline grace into my lap, and proceeded to unfold himself.

In my lap was a square of creased wrapping paper, the plain side up. It was filled with dense Chinese characters. I had never learned to read Chinese, but I knew the characters for son, and they were at the top, where you'd expect them in a letter addressed to you, written in Mom's awkward, childish handwriting.

I went to the computer to check the Internet. Today was Qingming.

#

I took the letter with me downtown, where I knew the Chinese tour buses stopped. I stopped every tourist, asking, " Nin hui du zhongwen ma?" Can you read Chinese? I hadn't spoken Chinese in so long that I wasn't sure if they understood.

A young woman agreed to help. We sat down on a bench together, and she read the letter to me aloud. The language that I had tried to forget for years came back, and I felt the words sinking into me, through my skin, through my bones, until they squeezed tight around my heart.

#
We haven't talked in a long time. You are so angry when I try to touch you that I'm afraid. And I think maybe this pain I feel all the time now is something serious. So I decided to write to you. I'm going to write in the paper animals I made for you that you used to like so much.
The animals will stop moving when I stop breathing. But if I write to you with all my heart, I'll leave a little of myself behind on this paper, in these words. Then, if you think of me on Qingming, when the spirits of the departed are allowed to visit their families, you'll make the parts of myself I leave behind come alive too. The creatures I made for you will again leap and run and pounce, and maybe you'll get to see these words then.
Because I have to write with all my heart, I need to write to you in Chinese. All this time I still haven't told you the story of my life. When you were little, I always thought I'd tell you the story when you were older, so you could understand. But somehow that chance never came up.
I was born in 1957, in Sigulu Village, Hebei Province. Your grandparents were both from very poor peasant families with few relatives. Only a few years after I was born, the Great Famines struck China, during which thirty million people died. The first memory I have was waking up to see my mother eating dirt so that she could fill her belly and leave the last bit of flour for me.

Things got better after that. Sigulu is famous for its zhezhi papercraft, and my mother taught me how to make paper animals and give them life. This was practical magic in the life of the village. We made paper birds to chase grasshoppers away from the fields, and paper tigers to keep away the mice. For Chinese New Year my friends and I made red paper dragons. I'll never forget the sight of all those little dragons zooming across the sky overhead, holding up strings of exploding firecrackers to scare away all the bad memories of the past year. You would have loved it.
Then came the Cultural Revolution in 1966. Neighbor turned on neighbor, and brother against brother. Someone remembered that my mother's brother, my uncle, had left for Hong Kong back in 1946, and became a merchant there. Having a relative in Hong Kong meant we were spies and enemies of the people, and we had to be struggled against in every way. Your poor grandmother - she couldn't take the abuse and threw herself down a well. Then some boys with hunting muskets dragged your grandfather away one day into the woods, and he never came back. There I was, a ten-year-old orphan. The only relative I had in the world was my uncle in Hong Kong. I snuck away one night and climbed onto a freight train going south. Down in Guangdong Province a few days later, some men caught me stealing food from a field. When they heard that I was trying to get to Hong Kong, they laughed. "It's your lucky day. Our trade is to bring girls to Hong Kong." They hid me in the bottom of a truck along with other girls, and smuggled us across the border. We were taken to a basement and told to stand up and look healthy and intelligent for the buyers. Families paid the warehouse a fee and came by to look us over and select one of us to "adopt." The Chin family picked me to take care of their two boys. I got up every morning at four to prepare breakfast. I fed and bathed the boys. I shopped for food. I did the laundry and swept the floors. I followed the boys around and did their bidding. At night I was locked into a cupboard in the kitchen to sleep. If I was slow or did anything wrong I was beaten. If the boys did anything wrong I was beaten. If I was caught trying to learn English I was beaten. "Why do you want to learn English?" Mr. Chin asked. "You want to go to the police? We'll tell the police that you are a mainlander illegally in Hong Kong. They'd love to have you in their prison." Six years I lived like this. One day, an old woman who sold fish to me in the morning market pulled me aside. "I know girls like you. How old are you now, sixteen? One day, the man who owns you will get drunk, and he'll look at you and pull you to him and you can't stop him. The wife will find out, and then you will think you really have gone to hell. You have to get out of this life. I know someone who can help." She told me about American men who wanted Asian wives. If I can cook, clean, and take care of my American husband, he'll give me a good life. It was the only hope I had. And that was how I got into the catalog with all those lies and met your father. It is not a very romantic story, but it is my story. In the suburbs of Connecticut, I was lonely. Your father was kind and gentle with me, and I was very grateful to him. But no one understood me, and I understood nothing. But then you were born! I was so happy when I looked into your face and saw shades of my mother, my father, and myself. I had lost my entire family, all of Sigulu, everything I ever knew and loved. But there you were, and your face was proof that they were real. I hadn't made them up.
Now I had someone to talk to. I would teach you my language, and we could together remake a small piece of everything that I loved and lost. When you said your first words to me, in Chinese that had the same accent as my mother and me, I cried for hours. When I made the first zhezhi animals for you, and you laughed, I felt there were no worries in the world.
You grew up a little, and now you could even help your father and I talk to each other. I was really at home now. I finally found a good life. I wished my parents could be here, so that I could cook for them, and give them a good life too. But my parents were no longer around. You know what the Chinese think is the saddest feeling in the world? It's for a child to finally grow the desire to take care of his parents, only to realize that they were long gone. Son, I know that you do not like your Chinese eyes, which are my eyes. I know that you do not like your Chinese hair, which is my hair. But can you understand how much joy your very existence brought to me? And can you understand how it felt when you stopped talking to me and won't let me talk to you in Chinese? I felt I was losing everything all over again. Why won't you talk to me, son? The pain makes it hard to write.
#

The young woman handed the paper back to me. I could not bear to look into her face.

Without looking up, I asked for her help in tracing out the character for ai on the paper below Mom's letter. I wrote the character again and again on the paper, intertwining my pen strokes with her words.

The young woman reached out and put a hand on my shoulder. Then she got up and left, leaving me alone with my mother.

Following the creases, I refolded the paper back into Laohu. I cradled him in the crook of my arm, and as he purred, we began the walk home.
Copyright (c) 2011 Ken Liu, first published in THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION, Mar/Apr. 2011.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Read Ken Liu's amazing story that swept the Hugo, Nebula and World Fantasy Awards

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Ken Liu's incredible story "Paper Menagerie" just became the first work of fiction to win all three of SF's major awards: the Hugo, the Nebula and the World Fantasy Award. And we're proud to be able to reprint the whole story, right here at io9.

# data[].attributes.headline
When the Tide of Misfortune Hits, Even Jelly Will Break Your Teeth

# data[].attributes.subject
When the Tide of Misfortune Hits, Even Jelly Will Break Your Teeth

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
When the Tide of Misfortune Hits, Even Jelly Will Break Your Teeth

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Bad things were happening, he had started to think, more than usual. It had occurred to him that he was cursed for a long time at that point. In his first few decades on this planet so much had gone wrong. In his brain, it all ran like a list, all the…

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Before and After She Fell Down the Stairs - Electric Literature

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
“Moments Earlier”by Kate Doyle Kelly lands in a heap when she falls down the stairs—she falls half a flight at least, hits the entryway tile. Daniel says he can’t remember screaming. Owen tells him that he did scream, a shout that echoed in the stairwell. Owen, for his part, keeps his cool. He alw…

# data[].attributes.headline
Welcome to your Authentic Indian Experience

# data[].attributes.subject
Welcome to your Authentic Indian Experience

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
When Niovi tried to smuggle her mother's ghost into the new country, she found herself being passed from one security officer to another, detailing her mother's place and date of death over and over again.

"Are you carrying a ghost with you, ma'am?" asked the woman in the security vest. Her nametag read Stella. Her lips were pressed in a tight line as she pointed at the ghost during the screening, tucked inside a necklace. She took away Niovi's necklace and left only her phone.

"If she didn't die here, I am afraid she cannot follow you," the woman said. Her voice was even, a sign she had done this many times before. Niovi resented the woman at that moment. She still had a ghost waiting for her to come home, comforting her when she felt sad, giving advice when needed. But she was still taking Niovi's ghost away.

Stella paused. She gave Niovi a moment to think, to decide. She could turn around and go back to her home taking the necklace with her. Back to her unemployment benefits and a future she could no longer bring herself to imagine, or she could move down the long stretch of aisles, past the dimming lights and into the night, alone, her mother's ghost left behind-where do ghosts return to in times like this? Niovi would be a new person in a new country, wiped clean of her past.

Foreign ghosts were considered unnecessary. The only things they had to offer were stories and memories.

Niovi had prepared herself for this, and yet she had hoped she wouldn't have to leave her mother behind.

She gave the necklace to the impassive woman and let herself drift down the aisle as if a forceful gust of air ushered her away.

Her mother's ghost waved goodbye behind the detector and Niovi's thoughts was of the Saturday of Souls. It was a prayer, an invocation as she put more and more distance between her and the security woman, her and the necklace. Without her mother's ghost she would start to forget soon. But this she had to remember. She needed to hang on to something now that her mother had been pried from her hands.

The Saturday of Souls.

When the ghost finally disappeared, Niovi's legs felt like lead. Her arms felt like lead. Everything felt like lead and she could barely move.

"Welcome!" Niovi heard the driver say as she boarded the airport shuttle.

The first thing Niovi faced when she stepped out of the shuttle was the cold. It was only October. Snow would start at the end of November. But even now the cold was so utter, so complete, it seemed like a wall, an extra line of defense between herself and these people who had too many ghosts and her who had none. A final warning that foreign ghosts were a nuisance, a waste of space.

"Don't worry," she whispered to the frost. "You are too late."

She started her new life in a small apartment in a badly-lit part of a street that led to a cul-de-sac.

In the mornings, as she waited for the days to pass so she could start her new job, she would walk around the city, counting ghosts.

Every time she went out the people of the city would notice her, look at her, and scrutinize her. No, not her. The absence of her ghost. She was an oddity among people cloaked in spirits that followed their every step. Some of them looked at her with concern and others with outright curiosity.

There were others without ghosts, of course. They were usually huddled together in small groups, shielding themselves against the unwelcome stares or, perhaps, against their own loss. Niovi couldn't bring herself to even glance at them. Instead she gravitated towards the other ones. The ones who still had ghosts. Despite their looks of curiosity and sometimes pity. Most of them didn't even notice their presence, the ghosts' affections were natural, ordinary. Niovi found this nonchalance fascinating.

Then, there were the untethered ghosts. The ones conjured by the collective memory of the people. They did not belong to anyone in particular. They belonged to everyone. Niovi liked to think they belonged to her too, especially here.

There was the ghost of the old general. He stood right next to his own statue along with the ghost of his horse and offered a spectacle for the little kids. A stubborn man, as Niovi found out; he had been trotting the same square for two hundred years. He had died in a battle that few remembered. He stood there with his medals of honor, speaking in an antiquated manner that nobody understood and riding his ghost horse, saluting the tourists.

Niovi liked the General. He was old, really old and came from a time when ghosts could move around following their loved ones without borders tearing one from the other. Niovi thought of the necklace she tried to bring her mother in. They had sent it to her a few days later, cold, empty. She kept it anyway. It was her mother's after all.

She sat on a bench, a bag of chips in her lap, and let her mind wander back home. To her empty house. Her mother's house. Did her mother's ghost stay there or had she moved on? Maybe she had followed someone else in the family like she did when she was alive and Niovi ignored her calls. Become their ghost.

The edges of her mother's face were already beginning to blur in her mind. They became fuzzy. She looked at her mother's pictures on her phone but they were lifeless and flat. They did little to bring her mother's image back.

So she sat at the square looking at the children scream in a language she was still learning and heard them laugh and laugh.

Niovi's first job was at a Greek restaurant next to the Southern Harbor. She wanted to cook. In fact, she needed it. Not just so she could justify her staying in the country. Cooking was what her mother had done best when she was alive, and when they were still together in Athens, daughter and ghost, cooking could help her not forget the things she desperately needed to hold on to.

The sullen ghostless man at the restaurant inspected Niovi's resume and asked her a series of questions, dubious that she could do what she claimed. He told her that many people claimed to do things they couldn't just to get a job here, but Niovi wasn't sure that was true at all. Maybe they could do those things but, if they were ghostless like her, and like her sullen to-be-boss, at some point they had started to forget the details. Niovi tried to drown a small voice whispering that she might be next.

"All right," the man said in the end. "You'll start with the dishes and you'll move up to prep."

Her heart dropped at that, but it was a door-or perhaps a half-open window-to the job she wanted, so she agreed to work the morning shifts.

Niovi conjured her mother's image stirring a pot of stewed okra, the ghost of her mother's aunt whispering something to her as she cooked. She conjured the smells of spices and the tomato and the sweat gathering on her mother's brow like this could bring her ghost back. Or at least help her keep those precious details.

She found herself in that scene too. At the table her young self looked down at her plate and scrunched her face in disgust. Her father nodded in a conspiratorial way from the other side of the table, much to his own ghost's disapproval. He made up a chore to excuse her from the table. Her grandmother-her father's ghost-shook her head but said nothing. Niovi slid from her chair and ran outside, because back then she hated okra. How stupid.

In the end she was not sure this helped at all. Instead what she found when her break was over and she was back in her post was a whiff of similar scents drifting from the restaurant's kitchen wrapped in a blanket of hot air. It wasn't okra they were cooking. But the spices, the slow murmuring of pots, the noises, were all achingly intimate.

She couldn't help but leave the water running and follow the scent to the kitchen. She expected familiar scents here but not that familiar.

There was a man hunched over bigger and smaller pots. His moves calculated in a quiet choreography as he assembled the dishes. Locks of ashen blond hair peered from under his head wrap. Niovi knew that the staff was mostly made up by non-Greeks but still, this man's ghost caught her off guard. Not because he had a ghost to begin with. Almost all the waiters she had met had one; this was their country after all. But this ghost was everything he wasn't and everything familiar to her.

It was the ghost of an old woman, older than her mother was when she died. Her hair was dark with grey streaks, curly and unruly, and her face at odds with the cook's. She hovered over him and when his hands twitched or when his breath quickened she would rest a hand on his shoulder and he would calm down again, his moves becoming more precise and deliberate. When he would finish assembling a dish the ghost would smile and nod. His back was turned away from the ghost but Niovi knew he felt her approval.

"Niovi!" Her boss's voice came from the back. And just like the man looked up, and so did the ghost that reminded her so much of her mother, and the Saturday of Souls snapped back in her mind like a wound that had just reopened.

Before the man, who had a smile that took up half his face, had a chance to utter a word, she realized she had been standing there for far too long. So she gave him a faint nod and left to finish her shift, turning her head on him a little too fast, desperate to hide her tears.

Niovi asked about him the very next day. She talked to Matilda who always spoke slowly enough for her to understand, but her attention drifted as soon as Niovi had a hard time finishing a sentence. Or perhaps without a ghost Matilda had nowhere to rest her eyes on. Perhaps this absence made her uneasy.

The cook's name was Remi and he was born here, though his maternal grandparents came from Greece some fifty years ago. They died here too, never having a chance to really retire. That's why he could still have his grandmother's ghost, who seemed to fit in this place as much as Niovi did, which was not very much.

Niovi felt the stabbing of jealousy. Remi could have it all. He could speak like a native and have a ghost which carried the kind of knowledge Niovi had to fight to keep with her. As soon as she thought this she felt ashamed.

"You know," Matilda said. The ghost of a young man stood always by her side. From the similarities Niovi could guess it was a close family member. A brother maybe. Matilda seemed at ease with it and didn't even give it a second glance. Niovi looked Matilda in the eyes to avoid looking at the ghost. "You could come with us one night out. Just some people from work. Talking more to us would help you practice."

"What about Remi?" Niovi dared to ask.

Matilda smirked a little, which made Niovi's face flush. But before Niovi had the chance to say anything Matilda gave her a half-shrug. "He prefers to hang out with the ghostless. That's not going to help you integrate."

All Niovi could hear behind the concern was, our ghosts are enough. We are enough. But their ghosts were too different and living people were harder to be around. She had spent so much time with her mother's ghost, her quiet sighs and her calm stare engulfing her every move, that when she was asked to join her coworkers after a shift she would always decline.

"Too tired," she said, because she did not want to say too sad.

In this city, like in any other, Niovi would find ghosts everywhere. They peered out from behind curtained windows, waved at her from old swing sets, or stood in grocery store aisles staring thoughtfully at a shelf that wasn't there anymore. But most of all-if they were the tethered kind-they were discreetly following their person.

Ghosts were made of stories. It was the way they chose to tell them that was different. In this country ghosts seemed more like shadows to her. They were calm, less opinionated. Their stories were made of stares and slight nods, sometimes a pat on the back.

In Greece the ghosts were louder, their disapproval mattered, their whispers were sought out and their stories carried memories her people would not have remembered otherwise. Not in the same vividness of smells, tastes and textures. Sometimes, when listening to one of her mother's stories, Niovi could catch herself reliving an event that never happened to her. Something that had happened to her mother or her grandmother decades ago carried the feeling and the weight of the present. It made her happy, sad or angry, in what here would be considered a disproportionate amount.

Despite her efforts to conjure the memories, she couldn't do it in quite the same way. She was beginning to forget. It started with the holidays, then the right words took longer to reach her lips and later the proper way her family spiced the dishes.

When her mother's swift hands stuffed the cheese filling in the pie on Sundays before the sun had risen, was it mint or basil she used? When she cooked the tender beef in casserole with fresh tomatoes, was it cinnamon that made its flesh so sweet and aromatic or was it allspice?

Even as a ghost her mother never failed to remind her of those things, of who she was and why she was, especially when she felt sad and lonely. Her mother was really good at picking up on that. Without her mother or her ghost around, she was losing parts of herself she did not know how to get back.

None of the ghosts she met here spoke her tongue or at all. She knew there must have been people like her who died in this country. As much as this thought made her stomach churn, she knew this might happen to her in the future. But up until now she thought they had chosen to return home rather than stay here. Follow their roots back to where they came from and haunt a relative or simply move on.

But then she saw Remi's grandmother and nothing was quite the same after that.

It was a strange day at work.

Her ever-surly boss told her that she would be moving up to preparations next week. Her stomach twisted into a bundle of fear and nerves.

"You've made it." Remi patted her on the back, smiling. His ghost ever so slightly touched the boundaries of her perception, made her recoil.

She whispered a thank you and swallowed. The world was closing in around her.

Niovi's new place would be next to Remi in the kitchen. Seeing him-seeing his grandmother's ghost too-for as long as she worked here. Asking for another shift would be too soon, quitting would be unthinkable. She had nowhere to go.

She started drifting in and out of a past she could barely piece together. The Saturday of Souls was just around the corner and she had spent the previous nights talking with relatives on the phone, trying desperately to recreate her memories vicariously. Longing for that connection to her mother again.

What ingredients did her mother use for the offering of koliva? What were the words she would say in her prayers? Niovi tried to invoke the particulars that made her mother's ritual unique. Not the ones she could ask other people about, the ones she could read about, but the ones she could once taste and hear in her mother's distinct voice. A one-person culture among her people's collective one.

She could not. Yet her family offered to help.

"There are nine ingredients in koliva. How could you forget?"

"When will you visit us?"

"Light a candle for her soul."

"Is there a Church to take the offering? Where will you go?"

Where would she go?

Where did the ghostless people go? The ones she met on the street always looked lost to her, directionless, the way they squeezed against each other. But maybe it was just what she felt, a projection of her own aimlessness.

She finally gave in.

It wasn't so much the pressure of her coworkers that did the trick as much as Remi and his ghost. It hurt to linger in the kitchen when Remi was working. When they had to talk during their shift (which was not very often) she felt the stare of the woman following her.

So one day, after her shift, she let herself be carried away by the people with the ghosts that did not hurt her, whose stares she could not read as easily. The ghosts who could teach her a few things about this place to replace the ones she had forgotten.

She let the crowd of five talk over her, through her, as if she were one of their ghosts. Once in a while she would offer a half-formed sentence or she would ask a question that seemed too fundamental to them, but completely vital for her understanding of their discussions. They spoke too fast for her to follow anyway.

After a while she gave up, or maybe they did.

She got up to leave, more lost than ever. As if she were the anchor, the reason all this was happening-she wasn't-the others cut their conversations short and paid the bill in haste.

They all walked, half-drunken and languid, down the stone-paved street. The pubs, arranged on either side, were luring the people inside, away from the biting wind, but the street musicians had other plans. The restaurant where Niovi worked was right around the corner, on one of the busiest streets.

It was Matilda who told her then about the ghost of a street musician, a couple blocks down. She was untethered like the General and only appeared on Sunday nights at the same place she performed when she was still alive, strumming her ghost guitar.

"What kinds of songs does she sing?"

"Oh, the same sad songs. Some of them foreign." Matilda rested an arm over Niovi's shoulder to fix the strap of her slingback shoe. Niovi tolerated the jab of the woman's elbow against the hollow of her neck. She wanted to be accommodating. "She's really popular with the couples."

Niovi nodded. She imagined what song her mother would sing if she were here. Probably none. She would make the pots clutter and shuffle around the table in a harmonious frenzy. That was her mother's music.

They were getting closer to the spot where the ghost of the singer performed. Withered flower petals carpeted the concrete slabs.

When she heard the music she instantly knew the song was Greek. The ghost was a woman in her fifties, the hippie type, with kind eyes. She strummed the guitar while playing a tune on a harmonica set on a neck rack. She didn't look Greek from afar, but Niovi had been fooled before.

As if he manifested from her most hidden thoughts, the ones she was trying to keep silent with a night like this one, Remi stood there, a few feet away from the ghost of the musician but fully enveloped in his own.

It felt like too much and like nothing at all. Like one of those moments where a decision must be made. Niovi looked behind her. The company of five had stopped in front of another street musician, a living one, or perhaps a pub-she couldn't say for sure-debating something Niovi was too tired to decipher.

So instead Niovi took her place besides Remi who was mouthing the words of the song, absent-minded. His grandmother's ghost-her curly hair worn in an old-fashioned updo-radiated calmness. Niovi felt her body permeating the outline of her, the warmth of familiarity against her skin sharper than the coldest of days here.

She did not move an inch, just stood very still listening to the song, feeling a sweet misplacement.

"How does she know the words?" Niovi was convinced now the musician's ghost was a local. The words came out without the depth and the nuance they were supposed to. But they did come with an emotion Niovi admired.

Remi turned around immediately as if a current of electricity had run through him. His grandmother's lips curled into a smile.

"From her husband," he answered, still stunned by her boldness, perhaps, her change of attitude. "He came here in the late 80's. She was the first person he talked to in this country when he walked down this street, wide-eyed and lonely."

Much like you, Niovi imagined him saying the words, but she was certain they were there.

Niovi's body shivered as she took a few more steps towards him. Towards his ghost that had haunted her in the most complete sense.

"You know," he said after he had reclaimed some of his composure. "We are not alone here. There are parts of us everywhere you look. We have a past here too."

You have a past, she did not say to him. He must have known he was different already. Instead a small hope flickered into existence. A promise remembered.

"Do you celebrate the Saturday of Souls here then?"

He smiled a faint smile. In his eyes there was openness and she was ready to listen.

He showed her a small engraved handkerchief. This was how he carried his grandmother.

Something loosened inside of her.

He had no other family, no siblings-unlike her-and no parents. The ghost was of his grandmother who had raised him since he was ten. When she died she stayed with him.

"I came back home from the funeral," he said. "And there she was, standing over her handkerchief, waiting for me." He took a small sip from his coffee, his voice unsteady like his hand.

The ghost's eyes were compassionate as she stroked her grandson's head.

"She is the only connection I have with the past. My past." He smiled. His smile had a bitter tint. Niovi understood more than he let on. She blinked back tears, for him, for her, for envying him all this time, for not reaching out to him earlier.

If her longing for her mother was a string, that string had somehow grown into a rope within days, hours. Ever since Remi had told her he would help her see her ghost again. There was a reason ghostless people huddled together. To share memories and stories and pool their resources. There were even untethered ghosts formed by the memories of big enough families. There was a way to bring her mother's ghost into this country. If even for a little while.

"You cannot do this alone," he said. "But you can do it." There was a promise in his words and for the first time since she came here she believed it.

On Saturday she met Remi. He took her to a place in the city she had never been before, but she had not been to most places anyway. They walked around, shoulder bumping against shoulder. His grandmother's ghost followed them timidly.

In those streets almost no one looked at her-at the emptiness above and around her-with sorrow or alarm. Even the locals strolling the alleyways with their ghosts did not give her a second glance. The ghostless people met her eyes unfazed. Many of them walked in groups but now her perception had shifted. Now she saw the enjoyment as well as the need to share stories, jokes, company. To give as well as take.

The ghostless held candles and plates of koliva and offerings for the dead. There was excitement in the air. It was a celebration.

"This is how ghosts are conjured here," Remi told her. "It doesn't have to be sad."

No, it didn't.

She was daunted and restless about this newfound freedom. The ease of knowing that the person she came from-because people came from people more than they came from places-could be revisited like a place could. Back in Greece she had never had to think of lineage before. She had taken her mother's ghost for granted and she realized now that this was a privilege.

If her longing for her mother was a rope, that rope had branched out to Remi, to his grandmother's ghost, to the ghostless people around her. Niovi let the rope guide her. She followed the crowd rushing inside the red bricked, corner building, wedged between offices downtown.

Whispers and laughter hang in the air when she came in. Niovi took a careful look around for familiar ghosts, her breath caught in her chest. Her anticipation deflated a sliver, when she found nothing had changed. She scolded herself for hoping too much when Remi guided her to the far side of the wall.

There was a long table there, covered in white embroidered tablecloths. Plates of all shapes, sizes and colors were left on the linen but held only one thing: koliva, food for the dead.

She left her own plate there. Niovi had made them herself, taking extra care to not forget any ingredient, afraid that if she did, then all this, all the strength she had gathered inside of her during the days leading up to Saturday, all would be for nothing.

Niovi lit a candle, steadied it inside the heap of koliva, and left the necklace on the table. Remi stood right there next to her, his shoulder brushing hers. She took a deep breath and took in the smell of each of the ingredients. Nine like the ranks of Angels:

Wheat, for the Earth and the souls of those who lie buried under.

Bread crumbs, for the dirt-may it be light upon their grave.

White, candied almonds, for the blanched bones of the dead.

Pomegranate seeds, for Persephone and Hades, but also the promise of Heaven.

Cinnamon, for all the smells and tastes of this world.

Parsley, for the green, green grass of the resting place.

Raisins, for the vines of Dionysus and the sweetness that is this life.

Sugar, for the sweetness of the Afterlife.

Nuts and seeds, for fertility and life that laughs in the face of death.

There was a change in the atmosphere, a mixing of scents. Niovi heard Remi draw in air and opened her eyes. For a few moments she stared at the necklace on the table. She didn't dare look up.

When she did look up her mother's ghost was not as she remembered. The ghost was made of memories that all lit up at once like a beacon inside her, her voice was a mixture of spices and familiar tastes. It all descended on her, draping her like a veil.

She saw her mother's eyes for the briefest of moments. And then what there was of her mother's ghost scattered all around her and soaked this new country so she could finally call it her own.
(Editors' Note: Eugenia Triantafyllou is interviewed by Caroline M. Yoachim in this issue.)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
My Country Is a Ghost - Uncanny Magazine

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
When Niovi tried to smuggle her mother's ghost into the new country, she found herself being passed from one security officer to another, detailing her mother's place and date of death over and over again. "Are you carrying a ghost with you, ma'am?" asked the woman in the security vest.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Division by Zero

Ted Chiang

1

Dividing a number by zero doesn't produce an infinitely large number as an answer. The reason is that division is defined as the inverse of multiplication; if you divide by zero, and then multiply by zero, you should regain the number you started with. However, multiplying infinity by zero produces only zero, not any other number. There is nothing which can be multiplied by zero to produce a nonzero result; therefore, the result of a division by zero is literally "undefined."

1a

Renee was looking out the window when Mrs. Rivas approached.

"Leaving after only a week? Hardly a real stay at all. Lord knows I won't be leaving for a long time."

Renee forced a polite smile. "I'm sure it won't be long for you." Mrs. Rivas was the manipulator in the ward; everyone knew that her attempts were merely gestures, but the aides wearily paid attention to her lest she succeed accidentally.

"Ha. They wish I'd leave. You know what kind of liability they face if you die while you're on status?"

"Yes, I know."

"That's all they're worried about, you can tell. Always their liability-"

Renee tuned out and returned her attention to the window, watching a contrail extrude itself across the sky.

"Mrs. Norwood?" a nurse called. "Your husband's here."

Renee gave Mrs. Rivas another polite smile and left.

1b

Carl signed his name yet another time, and finally the nurses took away the forms for processing.

He remembered when he had brought Renee in to be admitted, and thought of all the stock questions at the first interview. He had answered them all stoically.

"Yes, she's a professor of mathematics. You can find her in Who's Who."

"No, I'm in biology."

And:

"I had left behind a box of slides that I needed."

"No, she couldn't have known."

And, just as expected:

"Yes, I have. It was about twenty years ago, when I was a grad student."

"No, I tried jumping."

"No, Renee and I didn't know each other then."

And on and on.

Now they were convinced that he was competent and supportive, and were ready to release Renee into an outpatient treatment program.

Looking back, Carl was surprised in an abstracted way. Except for one moment, there hadn't been any sense of deja vu at any time during the entire ordeal. All the time he was dealing with the hospital, the doctors, the nurses: the only accompanying sensation was one of numbness, of sheer tedious rote.

2

There is a well-known "proof" that demonstrates that one equals two. It begins with some definitions: "Let a = 1; let b = 1." It ends with the conclusion "a = 2a," that is, one equals two. Hidden inconspicuously in the middle is a division by zero, and at that point the proof has stepped off the brink, making all rules null and void. Permitting division by zero allows one to prove not only that one and two are equal, but that any two numbers at all-real or imaginary, rational or irrational-are equal.

2a

As soon as she and Carl got home, Renee went to the desk in her study and began turning all the papers facedown, blindly sweeping them together into a pile; she winced whenever a corner of a page faced up during her shuffling. She considered burning the pages, but that would be merely symbolic now. She'd accomplish as much by simply never glancing at them.

The doctors would probably describe it as obsessive behavior. Renee frowned, reminded of the indignity of being a patient under such fools. She remembered being on suicide status, in the locked ward, under the supposedly round-the-clock observation of the aides. And the interviews with the doctors, who were so condescending, so obvious. She was no manipulator like Mrs. Rivas, but it really was easy. Simply say "I realize I'm not well yet, but I do feel better," and you'd be considered almost ready for release.

2b

Carl watched Renee from the doorway for a moment, before he passed down the hallway. He remembered the day, fully two decades past, when he himself had been released. His parents had picked him up, and on the trip back his mother had made some inane comment about how glad everyone would be to see him, and he was just barely able to restrain himself from shaking her arm off his shoulders.

He had done for Renee what he would have appreciated during his period under observation. He had come to visit every day, even though she refused to see him at first, so that he wouldn't be absent when she did want to see him. Sometimes they talked, and sometimes they simply walked around the grounds. He could find nothing wrong in what he did, and he knew that she appreciated it.

Yet, despite all his efforts, he felt no more than a sense of duty towards her.

3

In the Principia Mathematica, Bertrand Russell and Alfred Whitehead attempted to give a rigorous foundation to mathematics using formal logic as their basis. They began with what they considered to be axioms, and used those to derive theorems of increasing complexity. By page 362, they had established enough to prove "1 + 1 = 2."

3a

As a child of seven, while investigating the house of a relative, Renee had been spellbound at discovering the perfect squares in the smooth marble tiles of the floor. A single one, two rows of two, three rows of three, four rows of four: the tiles fit together in a square. Of course. No matter which side you looked at it from, it came out the same. And more than that, each square was bigger than the last by an odd number of tiles. It was an epiphany. The conclusion was necessary: it had a rightness to it, confirmed by the smooth, cool feel of the tiles. And the way the tiles were fitted together, with such incredibly fine lines where they met; she had shivered at the precision.

Later on there came other realizations, other achievements. The astonishing doctoral dissertation at twenty-three, the series of acclaimed papers; people compared her to Von Neumann, universities wooed her. She had never paid any of it much attention. What she did pay attention to was that same sense of rightness, possessed by every theorem she learned, as insistent as the tiles' physicality, and as exact as their fit.

3b

Carl felt that the person he was today was born after his attempt, when he met Laura. After being released from the hospital, he was in no mood to see anyone, but a friend of his had managed to introduce him to Laura. He had pushed her away initially, but she had known better. She had loved him while he was hurting, and let him go once he was healed. Through knowing her Carl had learned about empathy, and he was remade.

Laura had moved on after getting her own master's degree, while he stayed at the university for his doctorate in biology. He suffered various crises and heartbreaks later on in life, but never again despair.

Carl marveled when he thought about what kind of person she was. He hadn't spoken to her since grad school; what had her life been like over the years? He wondered whom else she had loved. Early on he had recognized what kind of love it was, and what kind it wasn't, and he valued it immensely.

4

In the early nineteenth century, mathematicians began exploring geometries that differed from Euclidean geometry; these alternate geometries produced results that seemed utterly absurd, but they didn't produce logical contradictions. It was later shown that these non-Euclidean geometries were consistent relative to Euclidean geometry: they were logically consistent, as long as one assumed that Euclidean geometry was consistent.

The proof of Euclidean geometry's consistency eluded mathematicians. By the end of the nineteenth century, the best that was achieved was a proof that Euclidean geometry was consistent as long as arithmetic was consistent.

4a

At the time, when it all began, Renee had thought it little more than an annoyance. She had walked down the hall and knocked on the open door of Peter Fabrisi's office. "Pete, got a minute?"

Fabrisi pushed his chair back from his desk. "Sure, Renee, what's up?"

Renee came in, knowing what his reaction would be. She had never asked anyone in the department for advice on a problem before; it had always been the reverse. No matter. "I was wondering if you could do me a favor. You remember what I was telling you about a couple weeks back, about the formalism I was developing?"

He nodded. "The one you were rewriting axiom systems with."

"Right. Well, a few days ago I started coming up with really ridiculous conclusions, and now my formalism is contradicting itself. Could you take a look at it?"

Fabrisi's expression was as expected. "You want- sure, I'd be glad to."

"Great. The examples on the first few pages are where the problem is; the rest is just for your reference." She handed Fabrisi a thin sheaf of papers. "I thought if I talked you through it, you'd just see the same things I do."

"You're probably right." Fabrisi looked at the first couple pages. "I don't know how long this'll take."

"No hurry. When you get a chance, just see whether any of my assumptions seem a little dubious, anything like that. I'll still be going at it, so I'll tell you if I come up with anything. Okay?"

Fabrisi smiled. "You're just going to come in this afternoon and tell me you've found the problem."

"I doubt it: this calls for a fresh eye."

He spread his hands. "I'll give it a shot."

"Thanks." It was unlikely that Fabrisi would fully grasp her formalism, but all she needed was someone who could check its more mechanical aspects.

4b

Carl had met Renee at a party given by a colleague of his. He had been taken with her face. Hers was a remarkably plain face, and it appeared quite somber most of the time, but during the party he saw her smile twice and frown once; at those moments, her entire countenance assumed the expression as if it had never known another. Carl had been caught by surprise: he could recognize a face that smiled regularly, or a face that frowned regularly, even if it were unlined. He was curious as to how her face had developed such a close familiarity with so many expressions, and yet normally revealed nothing.

It took a long time for him to understand Renee, to read her expressions. But it had definitely been worthwhile.

Now Carl sat in his easy chair in his study, a copy of the latest issue of Marine Biology in his lap, and listened to the sound of Renee crumpling paper in her study across the hall. She'd been working all evening, with audibly increasing frustration, though she'd been wearing her customary poker face when last he'd looked in.

He put the journal aside, got up from the chair, and walked over to the entrance of her study. She had a volume opened on her desk; the pages were filled with the usual hieroglyphic equations, interspersed with commentary in Russian.

She scanned some of the material, dismissed it with a barely perceptible frown, and slammed the volume closed. Carl heard her mutter the word "useless," and she returned the tome to the bookcase.

"You're gonna give yourself high blood pressure if you keep up like this," Carl jested.

"Don't patronize me."

Carl was startled. "I wasn't."

Renee turned to look at him and glared. "I know when I'm capable of working productively and when I'm not."

Chilled. "Then I won't bother you." He retreated.

"Thank you." She returned her attention to the bookshelves. Carl left, trying to decipher that glare.

5

At the Second International Congress of Mathematics in 1900, David Hilbert listed what he considered to be the twenty-three most important unsolved problems of mathematics. The second item on his list was a request for a proof of the consistency of arithmetic. Such a proof would ensure the consistency of a great deal of higher mathematics. What this proof had to guarantee was, in essence, that one could never prove one equals two. Few mathematicians regarded this as a matter of much import.

5a

Renee had known what Fabrisi would say before he opened his mouth.

"That was the damnedest thing I've ever seen. You know that toy for toddlers where you fit blocks with different cross sections into the differently shaped slots? Reading your formal system is like watching someone take one block and sliding it into every single hole on the board, and making it a perfect fit every time."

"So you can't find the error?"

He shook his head. "Not me. I've slipped into the same rut as you. I can only think about it one way."

Renee was no longer in a rut: she had come up with a totally different approach to the question, but it only confirmed the original contradiction. "Well, thanks for trying."

"You going to have someone else take a look at it?"

"Yes, I think I'll send it to Callahan over at Berkeley. We've been corresponding since the conference last spring."

Fabrisi nodded. "I was really impressed by his last paper. Let me know if he can find it: I'm curious."

Renee would have used a stronger word than "curious" for herself.

5b

Was Renee just frustrated with her work? Carl knew that she had never considered mathematics really difficult, just intellectually challenging. Could it be that for the first time she was running into problems that she could make no headway against? Or did mathematics work that way at all? Carl himself was strictly an experimentalist; he really didn't know how Renee made new math. It sounded silly, but perhaps she was running out of ideas?

Renee was too old to be suffering from the disillusionment of a child prodigy becoming an average adult. On the other hand, many mathematicians did their best work before the age of thirty, and she might be growing anxious over whether that statistic was catching up to her, albeit several years behind schedule.

It seemed unlikely. He gave a few other possibilities cursory consideration. Could she be growing cynical about academia? Dismayed that her research had become overspecialized? Or simply weary of her work?

Carl didn't believe that such anxieties were the cause of Renee's behavior; he could imagine the impressions that he would pick up if that were the case, and they didn't mesh with what he was receiving. Whatever was bothering Renee, it was something he couldn't fathom, and that disturbed him.

6

In 1931, Kurt Godel demonstrated two theorems. The first one shows, in effect, that mathematics contains statements that may be true, but are inherently unprovable. Even a formal system as simple as arithmetic permits statements that are precise, meaningful, and seem certainly true, and yet cannot be proven true by formal means.

His second theorem shows that a claim of the consistency of arithmetic is just such a statement; it cannot be proven true by any means using the axioms of arithmetic. That is, arithmetic as a formal system cannot guarantee that it will not produce results such as

"1 = 2"; such contradictions may never have been encountered, but it is impossible to prove that they never will be.

6a

Once again, he had come into her study. Renee looked up from her desk at Carl; he began resolutely, "Renee, it's obvious that-"

She cut him off. "You want to know what's bothering me? Okay, I'll tell you." Renee got out a blank sheet of paper and sat down at her desk. "Hang on; this'll take a minute." Carl opened his mouth again, but Renee waved him silent. She took a deep breath and began writing.

She drew a line down the center of the page, dividing it into two columns. At the head of one column she wrote the numeral "1" and for the other she wrote "2". Below them she rapidly scrawled out some symbols, and in the lines below those she expanded them into strings of other symbols. She gritted her teeth as she wrote: forming the characters felt like dragging her fingernails across a chalkboard.

About two thirds of the way down the page, Renee began reducing the long strings of symbols into successively shorter strings. And now for the masterstroke, she thought. She realized she was pressing hard on the paper; she consciously relaxed her grip on the pencil. On the next line that she put down, the strings became identical. She wrote an emphatic "=" across the center line at the bottom of the page.

She handed the sheet to Carl. He looked at her, indicating incomprehension. "Look at the top." He did so. "Now look at the bottom."

He frowned. "I don't understand."

"I've discovered a formalism that lets you equate any number with any other number. That page there proves that one and two are equal. Pick any two numbers you like; I can prove those equal as well."

Carl seemed to be trying to remember something. "It's a division by zero, right?"

"No. There are no illegal operations, no poorly defined terms, no independent axioms that are implicitly assumed, nothing. The proof employs absolutely nothing that's forbidden."

Carl shook his head. "Wait a minute. Obviously one and two aren't the same."

"But formally they are: the proof's in your hand. Everything I've used is within what's accepted as absolutely indisputable."

"But you've got a contradiction here."

"That's right. Arithmetic as a formal system is inconsistent."

6b

"You can't find your mistake, is that what you mean?"

" No, you're not listening. You think I'm just frustrated because of something like that? There is no mistake in the proof."

"You're saying there's something wrong within what's accepted?"

"Exactly."

"Are you-" He stopped, but too late. She glared at him. Of course she was sure. He thought about what she was implying.

"Do you see?" asked Renee. "I've just disproved most of mathematics: it's all meaningless now."

She was getting agitated, almost distraught; Carl chose his words carefully. "How can you say that? Math still works. The scientific and economic worlds aren't suddenly going to collapse from this realization."

"That's because the mathematics they're using is just a gimmick. It's a mnemonic trick, like counting on your knuckles to figure out which months have thirty-one days."

"That's not the same."

"Why isn't it? Now mathematics has absolutely nothing to do with reality. Never mind concepts like imaginaries or infinitesimals. Now goddamn integer addition has nothing to do with counting on your fingers. One and one will always get you two on your fingers, but on paper I can give you an infinite number of answers, and they're all equally valid, which means they're all equally invalid. I can write the most elegant theorem you've ever seen, and it won't mean any more than a nonsense equation." She gave a bitter laugh. "The positivists used to say all mathematics is a tautology. They had it all wrong: it's a contradiction."

Carl tried a different approach. "Hold on. You just mentioned imaginary numbers. Why is this any worse than what went on with those? Mathematicians once believed they were meaningless, but now they're accepted as basic. This is the same situation."

"It's not the same. The solution there was to simply expand the context, and that won't do any good here. Imaginary numbers added something new to mathematics, but my formalism is redefining what's already there."

"But if you change the context, put it in a different light-"

She rolled her eyes. "No! This follows from the axioms as surely as addition does; there's no way around it. You can take my word for it."

7

In 1936, Gerhard Gentzen provided a proof of the consistency of arithmetic, but to do it he needed to use a controversial technique known as transfinite induction. This technique is not among the usual methods of proof, and it hardly seemed appropriate for guaranteeing the consistency of arithmetic. What Gentzen had done was prove the obvious by assuming the doubtful.

7a

Callahan had called from Berkeley, but could offer no rescue. He said he would continue to examine her work, but it seemed that she had hit upon something fundamental and disturbing. He wanted to know about her plans for publication of her formalism, because if it did contain an error that neither of them could find, others in the mathematics community would surely be able to.

Renee had barely been able to hear him speaking, and mumbled that she would get back to him. Lately she had been having difficulty talking to people, especially since the argument with Carl; the other members of the department had taken to avoiding her. Her concentration was gone, and last night she had had a nightmare about discovering a formalism that let her translate arbitrary concepts into mathematical expressions: then she had proven that life and death were equivalent.

That was something that frightened her: the possibility that she was losing her mind. She was certainly losing her clarity of thought, and that came pretty close.

What a ridiculous woman you are, she chided herself. Was Godel suicidal after he demonstrated his incompleteness theorem?

But that was beautiful, numinous, one of the most elegant theorems Renee had ever seen.

Her own proof taunted her, ridiculed her. Like a brainteaser in a puzzle book, it said gotcha, you skipped right over the mistake, see if you can find where you screwed up; only to turn around and say, gotcha again.

She imagined Callahan would be pondering the implications that her discovery held for mathematics. So much of mathematics had no practical application; it existed solely as a formal theory, studied for its intellectual beauty. But that couldn't last; a self-contradictory theory was so pointless that most mathematicians would drop it in disgust.

What truly infuriated Renee was the way her own intuition had betrayed her. The damned theorem made sense; in its own perverted way, it felt right. She understood it, knew why it was true, believed it.

7b

Carl smiled when he thought of her birthday.

"I can't believe you! How could you possibly have known?" She had run down the stairs, holding a sweater in her hands.

Last summer they had been in Scotland on vacation, and in one store in Edinburgh there had been a sweater that Renee had been eyeing but didn't buy. He had ordered it, and placed it in her dresser drawer for her to find that morning.

"You're just so transparent," he had teased her. They both knew that wasn't true, but he liked to tell her that.

That was two months ago. A scant two months.

Now the situation called for a change of pace. Carl went into her study, and found Renee sitting in her chair, staring out the window. "Guess what I got for us."

She looked up. "What?"

"Reservations for the weekend. A suite at the Biltmore. We can relax and do absolutely nothing-"

"Please stop," Renee said. "I know what you're trying to do, Carl. You want us to do something pleasant and distracting to take my mind off this formalism. But it won't work. You don't know what kind of hold this has on me."

"Come on, come on." He tugged at her hands to get her off the chair, but she pulled away. Carl stood there for a moment, when suddenly she turned and locked eyes with him.

"You know I've been tempted to take barbiturates? I almost wish I were an idiot, so I wouldn't have to think about it."

He was taken aback. Uncertain of his bearings, he said, "Why won't you at least try to get away for a while? It couldn't hurt, and maybe it'll take your mind off this."

"It's not anything I can take my mind off of. You just don't understand."

"So explain it to me."

Renee exhaled and turned away to think for a moment. "It's like everything I see is shouting the contradiction at me," she said. "I'm equating numbers all the time now."

Carl was silent. Then, with sudden comprehension, he said, "Like the classical physicists facing quantum mechanics. As if a theory you've always believed has been superseded, and the new one makes no sense, but somehow all the evidence supports it."

"No, it's not like that at all." Her dismissal was almost contemptuous. "This has nothing to do with evidence; it's all a priori."

"How is that different? Isn't it just the evidence of your reasoning then?"

"Christ, are you joking? It's the difference between my measuring one and two to have the same value, and my intuiting it. I can't maintain the concept of distinct quantities in my mind anymore; they all feel the same to me."

"You don't mean that," he said. "No one could actually experience such a thing; it's like believing six impossible things before breakfast."

"How would you know what I can experience?"

"I'm trying to understand."

"Don't bother."

Carl's patience was gone. "All right then." He walked out of the room and canceled their reservations.

They scarcely spoke after that, talking only when necessary. It was three days later that Carl forgot the box of slides he needed, and drove back to the house, and found her note on the table.

Carl intuited two things in the moments following. The first came to him as he was racing through the house, wondering if she had gotten some cyanide from the chemistry department: it was the realization that, because he couldn't understand what had brought her to such an action, he couldn't feel anything for her.

The second intuition came to him as he was pounding on the bedroom door, yelling at her inside: he experienced deja vu. It was the only time the situation would feel familiar, and yet it was grotesquely reversed. He remembered being on the other side of a locked door, on the roof of a building, hearing a friend pounding on the door and yelling for him not to do it. And as he stood there outside the bedroom door, he could hear her sobbing, on the floor paralyzed with shame, exactly the same as he had been when it was him on the other side.

8

Hilbert once said, "If mathematical thinking is defective, where are we to find truth and certitude?"

8a

Would her suicide attempt brand her for the rest of her life? Renee wondered. She aligned the corners of the papers on her desk. Would people henceforth regard her, perhaps unconsciously, as flighty or unstable? She had never asked Carl if he had ever felt such anxieties, perhaps because she never held his attempt against him. It had happened many years ago, and anyone seeing him now would immediately recognize him as a whole person.

But Renee could not say the same for herself. Right now she was unable to discuss mathematics intelligibly, and she was unsure whether she ever could again. Were her colleagues to see her now, they would simply say, She's lost the knack.

Finished at her desk, Renee left her study and walked into the living room. After her formalism circulated through the academic community, it would require an overhaul of established mathematical foundations, but it would affect only a few as it had her. Most would be like Fabrisi; they would follow the proof mechanically, and be convinced by it, but no more. The only persons who would feel it nearly as keenly as she had were those who could actually grasp the contradiction, who could intuit it. Callahan was one of those; she wondered how he was handling it as the days wore on.

Renee traced a curly pattern in the dust on an end table. Before, she might have idly parameterized the curve, examined some of its characteristics. Now there seemed no point. All of her visualizations simply collapsed.

She, like many, had always thought that mathematics did not derive its meaning from the universe, but rather imposed some meaning onto the universe. Physical entities were not greater or less than one another, not similar or dissimilar; they simply were, they existed. Mathematics was totally independent, but it virtually provided a semantic meaning for those entities, supplying categories and relationships. It didn't describe any intrinsic quality, merely a possible interpretation.

But no more. Mathematics was inconsistent once it was removed from physical entities, and a formal theory was nothing if not consistent. Math was empirical, no more than that, and it held no interest for her.

What would she turn to, now? Renee had known someone who gave up academia to sell handmade leather goods. She would have to take some time, regain her bearings. And that was just what Carl had been trying to help her do, throughout it all.

8b

Among Carl's friends were a pair of women who were each other's best friend, Marlene and Anne. Years ago, when Marlene had considered suicide, she hadn't turned to Anne for support: she had turned to Carl. He and Marlene had sat up all night on a few occasions, talking or sharing silence. Carl knew that Anne had always harbored a bit of envy for what he had shared with Marlene, that she had always wondered what advantage he held that allowed him to get so close to her. The answer was simple. It was the difference between sympathy and empathy.

Carl had offered comfort in similar situations more than once in his lifetime. He had been glad he could help, certainly, but more than that, it had felt right to sit in the other seat, and play the other part.

He had always had reason to consider compassion a basic part of his character, until now. He had valued that, felt that he was nothing if not empathic. But now he'd run up against something he'd never encountered before, and it rendered all his usual instincts null and void.

If someone had told him on Renee's birthday that he would feel this way in two months' time, he would have dismissed the idea instantly. Certainly such a thing could happen over years; Carl knew what time could do. But two months?

After six years of marriage, he had fallen out of love with her. Carl detested himself for the thought, but the fact was that she had changed, and now he neither understood her nor knew how to feel for her. Renee's intellectual and emotional lives were inextricably linked, so that the latter had moved beyond his reach.

His reflex reaction of forgiveness cut in, reasoning that you couldn't ask a person to remain supportive through any crisis. If a man's wife were suddenly afflicted with mental illness, it would be a sin for him to leave her, but a forgivable one. To stay would mean accepting a different kind of relationship, something which not everyone was cut out for, and Carl never condemned a person in such a situation. But there was always the unspoken question: What would I do? And his answer had always been, I would stay.

Hypocrite.

Worst of all, he had been there. He had been absorbed in his own pain, he had tried the endurance of others, and someone had nursed him through it all. His leaving Renee was inevitable, but it would be a sin he couldn't forgive.

9

Albert Einstein once said, "Insofar as the propositions of mathematics give an account of reality they are not certain; and insofar as they are certain they do not describe reality."

9a = 9b

Carl was in the kitchen, stringing snow pea pods for dinner, when Renee came in. "Can I talk to you for a minute?"

"Sure." They sat down at the table. She looked studiedly out the window: her habit when beginning a serious conversation. He suddenly dreaded what she was about to say. He hadn't planned to tell her that he was leaving until she'd fully recovered, after a couple of months. Now was too soon.

"I know it hasn't been obvious-"

No, he prayed, don't say it. Please don't.

"-but I'm really grateful to have you here with me."

Pierced, Carl closed his eyes, but thankfully Renee was still looking out the window. It was going to be so, so difficult.

She was still talking. "The things that have been going on in my head-" She paused. "It was like nothing I'd ever imagined. If it had been any normal kind of depression, I know you would have understood, and we could have handled it."

Carl nodded.

"But what happened, it was almost as if I were a theologian proving that there was no God. Not just fearing it, but knowing it for a fact. Does that sound absurd?"

"No."

"It's a feeling I can't convey to you. It was something that I believed deeply, implicitly, and it's not true, and I'm the one who demonstrated it."

"Division by Zero" was first published in Full Spectrum 3 (Bantam Spectra, 1991). It can be found, along with seven other great stories, in Ted Chiang's recent collection Stories of Your Life and Others affiliate link (Tor, 2002).

He opened his mouth to say that he knew exactly what she meant, that he had felt the same things as she. But he stopped himself: for this was an empathy that separated rather than united them, and he couldn't tell her that.

Copyright © 1991 by Ted Chiang.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Dividing a number by zero doesn't produce an infinitely large number as an answer. The reason is that division is defined as the inverse of multiplication; if you divide by zero, and then multiply by zero, you should regain the number you started with. However, multiplying infinity by zero produces only zero, not any other number.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
When I went downstairs this morning and found Cookie missing, I knew that official emergency procedure called for me to phone all the information in to the Bureau of Disappearances. At the prompting of the prerecorded voice, I would enter my social security number and zip code. I would press "2" to report the sudden absence of an animal, "3" for "domestic animal," and then at the sound of the tone I would speak the word "cat" clearly and audibly into the telephone receiver. The woman's voice would then give a short parametric definition of a cat, and if this definition matched my missing item, I could press the pound sign to record a fifteen-second description. A three-note melody would let me know that my claim had been filed, and then that lovely prerecorded voice would read out my assigned case number, along with some instructions on how to update or cancel my claim.

Instead, I picked up the phone and pushed your number into it. I was always telling you about problems you couldn't fix, as though multiplying badness could dilute it.

"Cookie's gone," I said, and waited for your response.

There was a pause on the other end of the line.

"Have you phoned it in?" you asked. Your voice was casual, like it was someone else's pet entirely, a pet from a faraway land owned by people we'd never meet.

"I didn't," I said. "I'm kind of depressed," I added. I was often depressed, but now we all had better reasons to be.

"I'm sorry," you said back.

"Cookie loved to chew on wires," I said.

"I know," you said. You didn't say you wished you could be here. I didn't say it either.

There was nothing more to say. I hung up the phone. Sometimes I dialed you back right away just to hear you pick up and know that your hands were, at that very moment, resting on a chunk of plastic that threaded its way delicately to me over hundreds of miles of wire and cord. To know that even though your voice had disappeared, you had not yet. But recently I hadn't been allowing myself any callbacks. I was getting more afraid of the day when you wouldn't pick up.

The apocalypse was quiet. It had a way about it, a certain charm. It could be called graceful. It was taking a long time.

People prepared for an apocalypse that they could take up arms against, bunker down with. People hoarded filtered water, canned corn, dry milk, batteries. They published books on how to get things done in the new post-world, a world that they always imagined as being much like our own, only missing one or two key things. They might imagine, for example, that survivors would reemerge onto a planet stripped of all vegetable and plant life. First, the animals would grow vicious and then starve. It would be important to hoard as many of these animals as possible, pack them in salt and hide them away to keep. You'd want to have a supply of emergency seed to grow in a secure location, maybe using sterilized soil that you had already hoarded. Then you'd want to gather a crew. One muscleman with a heart of gold, a scientist type, an engineer, a child, and somebody that you thought maybe you could love, if you survived long enough to love them.

Nobody thought the apocalypse would be so polite and quirky. Things just popped out of existence, like they had forgotten all about themselves. Now when you misplaced your keys, you didn't go looking for them. Maybe you went to your landlord and asked for the spare set, took them to the hardware store and made two copies this time, an extra in case the disappearing wasn't a one-off but part of a trend. Or maybe you took this as a sign and decided to leave instead, walked out directionless into the world to find your own vanishing point, which meant moving to Chicago to stay with your brother, who still had the keys to his house and a spare set to give to you.

It was cute the way this apocalypse zapped things out of existence, one by one. It was so clean and easy, like clicking on a little box to close an Internet browser window. It had a sense of humor: a fat man walking down the street lined with small abandoned shops would look down and find that his trousers had vanished, baring his out-of-season Halloween boxers to the public. That kind of humor.

Videos of things like this used to show up all the time on the Internet, until the Internet went.

I thought I would visit the Ferris wheel at the pier before it vanished. I didn't know when it would go. I had the idea that I could try to be the last person ever to visit it, but that would require a lot of work, a lot of waiting around and watching, and there were things to do even in the time of last things. I put two apples in a plastic bag and headed out the door, which I didn't lock even though it would have been easy to do. I took the elevator down to the first floor and walked on East Jackson Drive to the edge of the water, then up along the highway holding onto the handrail with one gloved hand. A sedan full of teenagers drove by, and one of them shouted a blurry word at me that sounded like it had once been a taunt. It was winter, but it wasn't so cold. There was less weather, the same way there was less of everything. This day resembled the day before: sleepy air and wan blue sky, no clouds but a vague foggy white that might just have been a thinning of the atmosphere.

At the pier I saw the seagulls huddling together on the boardwalk, pressing their dirty white bodies up against each other. They seemed able to eat anything-crusts, rinds, paper napkins. They were made to survive, even in a fading world that was unthinking itself faster than we could fill it back up with our trash. One seagull worked to swallow a little plastic toy lion, snapping its beak down on it with blunt patience. The Ferris wheel loomed up big behind them at the end of the pier, though it wasn't as big as it had seemed the first time I saw it. The wheel was missing spokes at random, and some of the red seating cars had gone. It looked like the mouth of someone who had been punched over and over again in the face.

I didn't want to be around you when you forgot me. I didn't want to watch it fall out of your head so easily, I was hoping to forget you first.

I walked over to it, right out in the open, but nobody saw me. When I reached the base the controls were all locked up. It had a big goofy lever that you could set to different speeds, like in a cartoon. I ducked the chain and climbed into the ground-level car, the one in starting position, and staggered from one side of the car to the other to try to make it swing, but it wasn't any fun. Then I sat facing the water and put down the guardrail. The lake licked at the shore the way it used to. When water disappears, other water rushes in right away to take its place, you never see any kind of hole or gap. Then when I reached into my plastic bag, I only had one apple.

This apocalypse disappears objects of all kinds, and it swallows memories whole too. I didn't want to be around you when you forgot me. I didn't want to watch it fall out of your head so easily, I was hoping to forget you first. But sometimes I second-guessed that. Then I called you and tried to be angry, as though you were the one who had been so afraid of being forgotten that you needed to move out of the apartment, out of the city and into another city where nothing had any familiarity to start with, or any familiarity to lose. I thought you might have forgotten who did what to whom, but you haven't yet.

When the first things began to disappear it had looked funny, like a continuity slip-up in a bad movie. You and I would make sound effects for them, shouting "poof!" or "boink!" as some flowers blinked themselves out of existence. This was how we'd make each other laugh. In those days the world still looked full, even though it was emptying fast. Then too many things vanished to keep making the sounds: we saw it was sad that anything in the world had gone and could not return. You joked around, saying there'd be fewer chores, our lives would clean up after themselves for a change, but still you went on doing the dishes, vacuuming the little spaces around and under the furniture, putting on a fresh shirt every day, making the bed. You folded cups out of paper for us to drink from when the glasses went away, and when the paper went you used the nice cloth napkins, which worked badly. You were the sort of person that keeps it all going, and I was the other kind.

This became clear two weeks after the first vanishings, when the news stations named it "The Disappocalypse." On the day they called it irreversible, I walked out of the office just before lunch. I didn't tell anyone where I was going, I didn't reply to the e-mails asking whether we wanted to cancel our health insurance and cash out retirement plans. I knew I wouldn't be coming back. The subway was shut down so I walked all the way to our apartment on Myrtle Avenue, across the Brooklyn Bridge to the Flatbush Extension. On that day the world still felt crowded. The sky above was pure undiluted blue, thick enough to mask how much emptiness lay behind it, out past the atmosphere. Cars were lined up on the bridge, bumper to bumper. Drivers honked sporadically, without aggression, like migrating geese.

When I got home it was late afternoon and you'd be back by six-thirty. I tried reading the newspaper but I'd read all I could stand about the vanishing, and the other sections had been thinning out, some with blank patches nobody bothered to fill where the color of the paper showed through grayish and soft. Then it was seven-thirty, and eight, and still you weren't around. I gave Cookie her dry food and refilled her water. I started crying and stopped again and then dragged eyeliner back over my lids so that I looked the way I had before. When you showed up it was close to nine, and you smelled normal: no sweat, no cigarettes, no liquor. Where had you been? You had been working late. Hadn't you heard? They said "irreversible," "imminent," "end of days." They used those words.

I looked at you looking at me. I heard that we were saying the same thing, though I didn't understand how it was possible for us to mean it so differently.

I put wet marks into your shirt as you held me. Then when I pulled away your chest looked back at me with two blurry eyes.

"Why did you do that?" I asked. "Why were you away so long?"

"I was working," you said. "A lot of people have left, you know that. Toby and Marianne and all of the interns. We're understaffed. I'm on two new building projects." Your back was warm and real under my hands.

"There's nothing to build," I said. "The world is going."

"I know that," you replied. "But there isn't anything we can do about it."

"That's what I'm saying," I said.

I looked at you looking at me. I heard that we were saying the same thing, though I didn't understand how it was possible for us to mean it so differently. Later that night I asked you to quit your job too, stay home with me during the days. We could get survival-ready, rent a garden-level apartment with barricadeable windows. We could walk around all day getting to know the things that wouldn't be there for much longer. But you wouldn't. You liked being an architect. You said it would make you happy to have added even one thing to a world now headed for total subtraction.

The walking path next to the highway passed under a bridge. In the cool dark beneath was a bench facing onto some empty lot full of broken glass from bottles that people had thrown, just because. When sunlight hit the broken pieces, the ground lit up like a reverse chandelier, a glittering patch of green and white. Now there was less each time I walked by. Also, no bench. I stood there facing the glass, eating my last apple.

There had been times when I thought I might be with you indefinitely, something approaching an entire life. But then when there was only a finite amount of time, a thing we could see the limit of, I wasn't so sure. I didn't know how to use a unit of time like this, too long for a game of chess or a movie but so much shorter than we had imagined. It felt like one of those days when we woke up too late for breakfast and lay in bed until it was too late for lunch. Those days made me nervous. On those days we fought about how to use our time. You didn't want to live your life under pressure, as though we'd run out, as though it were the last days. I'm not ill, you said. We aren't dying, we don't have cancer, you said. So I don't want to live like we do, you said. There are two kinds of people, and one of them will give up first.

When we fought, you got over it first. I'd watch you from the kitchen, through a rectangular space cut into the wall, and I could see you studying the newspaper, ducking your head down to read small details in the photographs. I saw how gracefully you fell back into whatever article you had been reading before. Even then I knew: whatever hollow I made in you if I left would heal up like a hole sunk into water, quick as water rushing to fill some passing wound.

This far from the pier I could still hear the seagulls fighting over scraps, crying out with their harsh voices. Sounds carried further these days, tearing through the thin air like a stone thrown as hard as you can toward the sea. The bitten-down apple core wettened my right-hand glove, while with the other hand I pressed on the bridge of my nose. There are two kinds of people: one will only weep when the possibility exists, however remote, that someone will hear them. I put the core of the apple down on the ground and looked at it. Poof, I said. I waited for something to happen. Then I went and walked back up the path toward the high-rise.

When I got home I collected all of Cookie's toys, her food bowl and water bowl, the little purple ball with a bell in it, the stuffed squeaking duck that was almost her size. I lined them all up on the mantle in the living room so that I could watch them disappear, one after the other.

Was the disappearing growing faster every day? No. Was it moving geographically from west to east, or east to west? Was it vanishing the world alphabetically, taxonomically, or in chronological order? It wasn't. As hard as we tried to understand it, there didn't seem to be much order to the disappearing at all. A week would go by with everything pretty much in its proper place, and then all of a sudden there was no such thing as magazines, not in your home or anyone else's, and nobody to bother making new ones. Did it work its way down from the biggest things to the smallest? Was there a plan? When you were in the right mood, when you were too tired to care much, it was beautiful-like watching the house across the street as someone walked through it turning each of the lights off in order, one by one, for the night.

I had already called you once today, but I was working on a reason to call you again.

I sat on the floor of my brother's empty living room and ate four chocolate-chip granola bars in a row. I had already called you once today, but I was working on a reason to call you again. Experts suggested that the things disappearing most quickly now might be intangible, metaphysical: concepts, memories, and modes of thought were just as vulnerable to erasure, they said, though they couldn't give any concrete examples. I thought I'd better call you to see if you still remembered that Cookie had gone.

I pushed the buttons in order. It rang twice, and then I heard you.

"Hello?" you said.

"It's me," I said.

"It's you," you said back to me.

"I just wanted to call to see if you still remembered Cookie," I said.

"Of course I still remember Cookie," you said.

There was silence on both our ends, a blur of static on the line between us.

"What do you remember?" I asked.

"I remember that you picked her because she bit you," you said, "and you decided it was important that you win this one animal over. I remember you didn't know how to hold a cat at the beginning so you grabbed her just anywhere. You grabbed her in the middle and tried to pick her up that way. You got bit a lot," you added.

"I have your number memorized," I said.

"That's good," you said.

And I said I should let you go, and you said goodnight, and we hung up on each other.

I missed you more now than I had when I lost you. I was forgetting the bad things faster than I forgot the good, and the changing ratio felt a little bit like falling in love even though I was actually speaking to you less and less. I used to play a game I called "Are We Going To Make It?" You were playing too, whether you knew it or not. It worked like this: you'd forget that we were going to see the movie together and you'd go by yourself instead or with a friend, while I waited at home. Or you'd stay at work until four in the morning and forget to charge your phone, and you'd wake me up on the couch where I had fallen asleep trying to stay up for you. Then I would ask myself: Are We Going To Make It? And the next thing, whatever thing you did next, would become the answer, a murky thing that I'd study until I was too tired to think about it anymore.

An "independent physicist" living in Arizona had become famous for his theories on how the Disappearing might be a sort of existential illusion, analogous to an optical illusion. He said the fact that we still remember what's been taken and can picture it in our minds is proof that it still exists. It's like how you only see the duck or the bunny at a given moment, never both, he said. Only imagine that instead of knowing the bunny exists alongside your experience of the duck, you believe that it's been irrevocably lost. It's all about vantage point, he said, temporal vantage point: the way you might lose sight of your house when you drive away from it, but find it again when you look for it from the top of a hill. To think your house was lost, he said, would be loony. Disappeared things were like this, he said, coexistent but obscured in time. This was his theory of spatiotemporal obstruction. Those who believed in it believed that there was one special place that offered temporal "higher ground." They made pilgrimages to a particular beach in Normandy where the cliffs were chalky white, the color of doves, and where it was rumored that recently disappeared things sometimes reappeared, soft-edged and worn and looking thirty or forty years older. In 1759, a twelve-year-old girl was said to have drowned herself there to avoid marriage to a much older man.

I sat on the floor and put the granola bar wrappers in a plastic bag. I put the plastic bag inside another plastic bag. Plastic bags were disappearing too, but my brother had had so many of them to begin with. Then I picked up the phone to call you back. I put your number in from memory.

Instead of you, I heard an error song and a recorded voice telling me my call could not be completed.

I dialed the Bureau of Disappearances. At the prompt, I pressed "1" for "person," then "1" again for "male." I pressed "3" to indicate "age twenty-one to thirty." Then I was supposed to press "3" for "friend," but instead I pressed "2" for "lover or significant other." I hoped you wouldn't mind. The beautiful female voice declared you a "male lover between the ages of twenty-one and thirty" and asked if that was correct. I pressed the pound key and then I described you.

I remember it was a bright morning in the fall and I woke onto your face looking in on mine. Some mornings when we woke together we pretended that one of us had forgotten who the other was. One of us had become an amnesiac. That one would ask: Who are you? Where am I? and it was the other's job to make up a new story. A good story was long, and the best stories could make me feel like I had gotten a whole second life, a bonus one. Yellow leaves outside the window threw yellowish light on the sheets as you told me not to worry. I was safe, I was with you. We had been living together since grad school, we met on the hottest day of the year, near the gondolas in the middle of the park. We were sitting on benches facing the pond and eating the same kind of sandwich, turkey and swiss in a spinach wrap.

"But that's what actually happened," I said.

"I know," you said, making a fake guilty face.

In the fall afternoon, leaves fell off whenever they fell off: it didn't depend on their color or weight or the force of the wind outdoors.

You added: "I just couldn't think of anything."

The disappearing when it started happening was everywhere, subtly, it hung on our days the way a specific hour does on a moment, dragging it down and reminding you of how much time you've let pass. It was a flavor you woke up with in your mouth, like the taste of blood on a dry winter morning. This made leaving easier in the moments before I had realized what I was planning to do. I stood outside of our building with no keys and I was calling you over and over on the cell phone even though I knew you were at work. Each time I got your voicemail I imagined that you had vanished, until one time I imagined that you had vanished and I didn't feel any way about it. It was like I had disappeared. I saw the things continuing without me, and I didn't mind. I went to the ATM on the corner and pulled everything out of my checking account. Checking accounts were still around then, existing invisibly somewhere. Possibly they exist still, even though the banks went. I took the cash and our car and got on the highway, driving on I-80 west toward Chicago. If it hadn't been the End of Days would we still be together? The most difficult thing about leaving you was discovering that I went on: that I had to be there sixteen hours a day watching myself live my own life, that I had to stay near myself all the time as I asked myself question after question, that I had to sit there in my body and watch the phone ring over and over next to me that night, after you had gotten home.

We poked at the dirt and then fell asleep feeling that we should have done more or maybe less.

After the announcement, people did one of two things. Either they tried to care more, or they tried caring less. They decided to survive, to collect and hide and ration, or they decided to let the amount of time left in their lives work away at them. They tried to grow vegetables in their small backyards or they let the yard get overgrown, falling asleep drunk in the afternoon on a lawn chair encircled by weeds. For a while we did whatever we had chosen with dedication. But it was difficult to stay dedicated for more than a few weeks and eventually we middled, caring about things sloppily and in spurts. We poked at the dirt and then fell asleep feeling that we should have done more or maybe less. In the end, there was only one kind of person.

In the master bedroom I turned down the sheets. My brother wouldn't be back again, but I made the bed every day to be a good guest. I made it the hotel way, everything tucked in, the sheets stretched tight across the mattress and leaving no room to shift or wrinkle. Sleeping in it meant that you had to tear it apart. I yanked the pillows out from underneath the blankets, pulled the sheets down to the foot of the bed, let the comforter fall to the floor. Then I climbed in.

I have one of the last working phones, I said aloud.

I had started sleeping with the lights on: I wanted more minutes of seeing, more things I could see if I happened to open my eyes. Outside the window there was snow falling, falling like movie snow, all the dreamy fluffy bits drifting around in the light of a single streetlamp. I wished that I loved the woman on the Disappearance hotline so that I could call and hear her voice anytime I wanted, and feel that feeling that it didn't seem I'd be feeling again. Whoever loved her was lucky, if they were still around. I watched the snow slow down, thin out. Then it was two or three pieces at a time, falling reversibly, wavering up and down and up again like they didn't know where to go.

The light stayed on for a few minutes. I saw my reflection in the window. Then the bulb blanked out overhead. In the dark I could hear the cord swinging empty above, but I saw nothing. I knew from the mounting silence that other things were vanishing too. They say everything in the world vibrates at its own specific frequency, each thing releases a tiny bit of sound. But nothing, nothing doesn't vibrate at all. I felt the heat radiating from my body with no place to go. Dots of darkness that weren't really there drifted past my eyes. How would I know I was vanishing if there were nobody around to see me? What would tell me that I wasn't just falling asleep? In the darkness I couldn't see the disappearing any longer but I knew it was all going, going far, far away. Until gradually I didn't even know that anymore.

There was a woman in Lincoln, Nebraska, who claimed to be able to communicate with the disappeared. You could call her on the telephone and tell her who you were looking for, their full name, how old, how tall, how heavy. She would go out to the old well behind her house, a well that her grandfather had built decades earlier, and shout that information deep down into it. In the echo that came back they said you could hear whispers from the other side, your loved ones grabbing and molding the shouted words, distorting them to say what they needed said. You had to pay her in real gold, jewelry or bullion: it had to gleam. She wished we could hear their voices as she did, how happy they are, how they miss us. She said that everything that disappeared from our side went over to theirs, where they kept living normal lives waiting for the things still lingering with us to join them, and make the world whole once more.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The apocalypse was quiet. It had a way about it, a certain charm. It could be called graceful. It was taking a long time.

# data[].attributes.headline
A Witch's Guide to Escape: A Practical Compendium of Portal Fantasies

# data[].attributes.subject
A Witch's Guide to Escape: A Practical Compendium of Portal Fantasies

# data[].attributes.headline
The Secret Lives of the Nine Negro Teeth of George Washington

# data[].attributes.subject
The Secret Lives of the Nine Negro Teeth of George Washington

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
"By Cash pd Negroes for 9 Teeth on Acct of Dr. Lemoire" -Lund Washington, Mount Vernon plantation, Account Book dated 1784.

The first Negro tooth purchased for George Washington came from a blacksmith, who died that very year at Mount Vernon of the flux. The art of the blacksmith had been in his blood-passed down from ancestral spirits who had come seeking their descendants across the sea. Back in what the elder slaves called Africy, he had heard, blacksmiths were revered men who drew iron from the earth and worked it with fire and magic: crafting spears so wondrous they could pierce the sky and swords with beauty enough to rend mountains. Here, in this Colony of Virginia, he had been set to shape crueler things: collars to fasten about bowed necks, shackles to ensnare tired limbs, and muzzles to silence men like beasts. But blacksmiths know the secret language of iron, and he beseeched his creations to bind the spirits of their wielders-as surely as they bound flesh. For the blacksmith understood what masters had chosen to forget: when you make a man or woman a slave you enslave yourself in turn. And the souls of those who made thralls of others would never know rest-in this life, or the next.

When he wore that tooth, George Washington complained of hearing the heavy fall of a hammer on an anvil day and night. He ordered all iron making stopped at Mount Vernon. But the sound of the blacksmith's hammer rang out in his head all the same.

The second Negro tooth belonging to George Washington came from a slave from the Kingdom of Ibani, what the English with their inarticulate tongues call Bonny Land, and (much to his annoyance) hence him, a Bonny man. The Bonny man journeyed from Africa on a ship called the Jesus, which, as he understood, was named for an ancient sorcerer who defied death. Unlike the other slaves bound on that ship who came from the hinterlands beyond his kingdom, he knew the fate that awaited him-though he would never know what law or sacred edict he had broken that sent him to this fate. He found himself in that fetid hull chained beside a merman, with scales that sparkled like green jewels and eyes as round as black coins. The Bonny man had seen mermen before out among the waves, and stories said some of them swam into rivers to find wives among local fisher women. But he hadn't known the whites made slaves of them too. As he would later learn, mermen were prized by thaumturgical inclined aristocrats who dressed them in fine livery to display to guests; most, however, were destined for Spanish holdings, where they were forced to dive for giant pearls off the shores of New Granada. The two survived the horrors of the passage by relying on each other. The Bonny man shared tales of his kingdom, of his wife and children and family, forever lost. The merman in turn told of his underwater home, of its queen and many curiosities. He also taught the Bonny man a song: a plea to old and terrible things that dwelled in the deep, dark, hidden parts of the sea-great beings with gaping mouths that opened up whirlpools or tentacles that could drag ships beneath the depths. They would one day rise to wreak vengeance, he promised, for all those who had been chained to suffer in these floating coffins. The Bonny man never saw the merman after they made land on the English isle of Barbados. But he carried the song with him, as far as the Colony of Virginia, and on the Mount Vernon plantation, he sang it as he looked across fields of wheat to an ocean he couldn't see-and waited.

When George Washington wore the Bonny man's tooth, he found himself humming an unknown song, that sounded (strange to his thinking) like the tongue of the savage mermen. And in the dark hidden parts of the sea, old and terrible things, stirred.

The third Negro tooth of George Washington was bought from a slave who later ran from Mount Vernon, of which an account was posted in the Virginia Gazette in 1785:

Advertiſement: Runaway from the plantation of the Subſcriber, in Fairfax County, fome Time in October laſt, on All-Hallows Eve, a Mulatto Fellow, 5 Feet 8 Inches high of Tawney Complexion named Tom, about 25 Years of Age, miſſing a front tooth. He is ſenſible for a Slave and ſelf-taught in foul necromancy. He lived for ſome Years previous as a ſervant at a ſchool of learned ſorcery near Williamsburg, and was removed on Account of inciting the dead ſlaves there to riſe up in inſurrection. It is ſuppoſed he returned to the ſchool to raiſe up a young Negro Wench, named Anne, a former ſervant who died of the pox and was buried on the campus grounds, his Siſter. He ſold away a tooth and with that ſmall money was able to purchase a ſpell used to call upon powers potent on All-Hallows Eve to ſpirit themſelves away to parts now unknown. Whoever will ſecure the ſaid Tom, living, and Anne, dead, ſo that they be delivered to the plantation of the Subſcriber in Fairfax County aforefaid, ſhall have Twenty Shillings Reward, besides what the Law allows.

To George Washington's frustration, Tom's tooth frequently fell out of his dentures, no matter how he tried to secure it. Most bizarre of all, he would find it often in the unlikeliest of places-as if the vexsome thing was deliberately concealing itself. Then one day the tooth was gone altogether, never to be seen again.

George Washington's fourth Negro tooth was from a woman named Henrietta. (Contrary to widespread belief, there is no difference of significance between the dentition of men and women-as any trained dentist, odontomancer, or the Fay folk, who require human teeth as currency, will well attest.) Henrietta's father had been John Indian, whose father had been a Yamassee warrior captured and sold into bondage in Virginia. Her mother's mother had come to the mainland from Jamaica, sold away for taking part in Queen Nanny's War. As slaves, both were reputed to be unruly and impossible to control. Henrietta inherited that defiant blood, and more than one owner learned the hard way she wasn't to be trifled with. After holding down and whipping her last mistress soundly, she was sold to work fields at Mount Vernon-because, as her former master advertised, strong legs and a broad back weren't to be wasted. Henrietta often dreamed of her grandparents. She often dreamed she was her grandparents. Sometimes she was a Yamassee warrior, charging a fort with flintlock musket drawn, eyes fixed on the soldier she intended to kill-as from the ramparts English mages hurled volleys of emerald fireballs that could melt through iron. Other times she was a young woman, barely fifteen, who chanted Asante war songs as she drove a long sabre, the blade blazing bright with obeah, into the belly of a slave master (this one had been a pallid blood drinker) and watched as he blackened and crumbled away to ash.

When George Washington wore Henrietta's tooth he sometimes woke screaming from night terrors. He told Martha they were memories from the war, and would never speak of the faces he saw coming for him in those dreams: a fierce Indian man with long black hair and death in his eyes, and a laughing slave girl with a curiously innocent face, who plunged scorching steel into his belly.

The fifth Negro tooth belonging to George Washington came by unexplained means from a conjure man who was not listed among Mount Vernon's slaves. He had been born before independence, in what was then the Province of New Jersey, and learned his trade from his mother-a root woman of some renown (among local slaves at any rate), having been brought to the region from the southern territories of New France. The conjure man used his magics mostly in the treatment of maladies affecting his fellow bondsmen, of the mundane or paranormal varieties. He had been one of the tens of thousands of slaves during the war who answered the call put out by the Earl of Dunmore, Royal Governor of Virginia in November 1775:

And I hereby declare all indentured servants, Negroes, hedge witches and wizards, occultists, lycanthropes, giants, non-cannibal ogres and any ſentient magical creatures or others (appertaining to Rebels) free and relieved of ſupernatural ſanction that are able and willing to bear Arms, they joining His MAJESTY'S Troops as ſoon as may be, for the more ſpeedily reducing this Colony to a proper Senſe of their Duty, to His MAJESTY'S Crown and Dignity. This edict excludes Daemonic beasts who ſhould not take ſaid proclamation as a ſummons who, in doing so, will be exorcized from His MAJESTY'S realm with all deliberate ſpeed.

The conjure man was first put in the service of Hessian mercenaries, to care for their frightening midnight black steeds that breathed flames and with hooves of fire. Following, he'd been set to performing menial domestic spells for Scottish warlocks, treated no better there than a servant. It was fortune (aided by some skillful stone casting) that placed him in Colonel Tye's regiment. Like the conjure man, Tye had been a slave in New Jersey who fled to the British, working his way to becoming a respected guerilla commander. Tye led the infamous Black Brigade-a motley crew of fugitive slaves, outlaw juju men, and even a Spanish mulata werewolf-who worked alongside the elite Queen's Rangers. Aided by the conjure man's gris-gris, the Black Brigade carried out raids on militiamen: launching attacks on their homes, destroying their weapons, stealing supplies, burning spells and striking fear into the hearts of patriots. The conjure man's brightest moment had come the day he captured his own master and bound him in the same shackles he'd once been forced to wear. The Brigade stirred such hysteria that the patriot governor of New Jersey declared martial law, putting up protective wards around the province-and General George Washington himself was forced to send his best mage hunters against them. In a running skirmish with those patriot huntsmen, Tye was fatally struck by a cursed ball from a long rifle-cutting through his gris-gris. The conjure man stood guard over his fallen commander, performing a final rite that would disallow their enemies from reanimating the man or binding his soul. Of the five mage hunters he killed three, but was felled in the attempt. With his final breath, he whispered his own curse on any that would desecrate his corpse.

One of the surviving mage hunters pulled the conjure man's teeth as a souvenir of the battle, and a few days hence tumbled to land awkwardly from his horse and broke his neck. The tooth passed to a second man, who choked to death on an improbably lodged bit of turtle soup in his windpipe. And, so it went, bringing dire misfortune to each of its owners. The conjure man's tooth has now, by some twist of fate, made its way to Mount Vernon and into George Washington's collection. He has not worn it, yet.

The sixth Negro tooth of George Washington belonged to a slave who had tumbled here from another world. The startled English sorcerer who witnessed this remarkable event had been set to deliver a speech on conjurations at the Royal Society of London for Improving Supernatural Knowledge. Alas, before the sorcerer could tell the world of his discovery, he was quietly killed by agents of the Second Royal African Company, working in a rare alliance with their Dutch rivals. As they saw it, if Negroes could simply be pulled out of thin air the lucrative trade in human cargo that made such mercantilists wealthy could be irrevocably harmed. The conjured Negro, however, was allowed to live-bundled up and shipped from London to a Virginia slave market. Good property, after all, was not to be wasted. She ended up at Mount Vernon, and was given the name Esther. The other slaves, however, called her Solomon-on account of her wisdom.

Solomon claimed not to know anything about magic, which didn't exist in her native home. But how could that be, the other slaves wondered, when she could mix together powders to cure their sicknesses better than any physician; when she could make predictions of the weather that always came true; when she could construct all manner of wondrous contraptions from the simplest of objects? Even the plantation manager claimed she was "a Negro of curious intellect," and listened to her suggestions on crop rotations and field systems. The slaves well knew the many agricultural reforms at Mount Vernon, for which their master took credit, was actually Solomon's genius. They often asked why she didn't use her remarkable wit to get hired out and make money? Certainly, that'd be enough to buy her freedom.

Solomon always shook her head, saying that though she was from another land, she felt tied to them by "the consanguinity of bondage." She would work to free them all, or, falling short of that, at the least bring some measure of ease to their lives. But at night, after she'd finished her mysterious "experiments" (which she kept secret from all) she could be found gazing up at the stars, and it was hard not to see the longing held deep in her eyes. When George Washington wore Solomon's tooth, he dreamed of a place of golden spires and colorful glass domes, where Negroes flew through the sky on metal wings like birds and sprawling cities that glowed bright at night were run by machines who thought faster than men. It both awed and frightened him at once.

The seventh Negro tooth purchased for George Washington had come from a Negro from Africa who himself had once been a trader in slaves. He had not gone out with the raids or the wars between kingdoms to procure them, but had been an instrumental middleman-a translator who spoke the languages of both the coastal slavers and their European buyers. He was instrumental in keeping the enchanted rifles and rum jugs flowing and assuring his benefactors a good value for the human merchandise. It was thus ironic that his downfall came from making a bad deal. The local ruler, a distant relative to a king, felt cheated and (much to the trader's shock) announced his translator put up for sale. The English merchant gladly accepted the offer. And just like that, the trader went from a man of position to a commodity.

He went half mad of despair when they'd chained him in the hold of the slave ship. Twice he tried to rip out his throat with his fingernails, preferring death to captivity. But each time he died, he returned to life-without sign of injury. He'd jumped into the sea to drown, only to be hauled back in without a drop of water in his lungs. He'd managed to get hold a sailor's knife, driven it into his chest, and watched in shock as his body pushed the blade out and healed the wound. It was then he understood the extent of his downfall: he had been cursed. Perhaps by the gods. Perhaps by spirits of the vengeful dead. Or by some witch or conjurer for whom he'd haggled out a good price. He would never know. But they had cursed him to suffer this turn of fate, to become what he'd made of others. And there would be no escape.

The Negro slave trader's tooth was George Washington's favorite. No matter how much he used it, the tooth showed no signs of wear. Sometimes he could have sworn he'd broken it. But when inspected, it didn't show as much as a fracture-as if it mended itself. He put that tooth to work hardest of all, and gave it not a bit of rest.

The eighth Negro tooth belonging to George Washington came from his cook, who was called Ulysses. He had become a favorite in the Mount Vernon household, known for his culinary arts and the meticulous care he gave to his kitchen. The dinners and parties held at the mansion were always catered by Ulysses, and visitors praised his skill at devising new dishes to tingle the tongue and salivate the senses. Those within the higher social circles frequented by the Washingtons familiarly called him "Uncle Lysses" and showered him with such gifts that local papers remarked: "the Negro cook had become something of a celebrated puffed-up dandy."

Ulysses took his work seriously, as much as he took his name. He used the monies gained from those gifts, as well as his habit of selling leftovers (people paid good money to sup on the Washingtons' fare) to purchase translated works by Homer. In those pages, he learned about the fascinating travels of his namesake, and was particularly taken by the figure Circe-an enchantress famed for her vast knowledge of potions and herbs, who through a fine feast laced with a potent elixir had turned men into swine. Ulysses amassed other books as well: eastern texts on Chinese herbology, banned manuscripts of Mussulman alchemy, even rare ancient Egyptian papyri on shape-shifting.

His first tests at transmogrification had merely increased the appetite of Washington's guests, who turned so ravenous they relieved themselves of knife or spoon and shoveled fistfuls of food into their mouths like beasts. A second test had set them all to loud high-pitched squealing-which was blamed on an over-imbibing of cherubimical spirits. Success came, at last, when he heard some days after a summer dining party that a Virginia plantation owner and close friend of the Washingtons had gone missing-the very same day his wife had found a great fat spotted hog rummaging noisily through their parlor. She had her slaves round up the horrid beast, which was summarily butchered and served for dinner.

Over the years, Ulysses was judicious in his selections for the transfiguring brew: several slave owners or overseers known to be particularly cruel; a shipping merchant from Rhode Island whose substantial wealth came from the slave trade; a visiting French physiognomist and naturalist who prattled on about the inherent "lower mental capabilities" to be found among Negroes, whose skulls he compared to "near-human creatures" such as the apes of inner Africa and the fierce woodland goblins of Bavaria. Then, one day in early 1797, Ulysses disappeared.

The Washingtons were upset and hunted everywhere for their absconded cook, putting out to all who would listen the kindness they'd shown to the ungrateful servant. He was never found, but the Mount Vernon slaves whispered that on the day Ulysses vanished a black crow with a mischievous glint in its eye was found standing in a pile of the man's abandoned clothes. It cawed once, and then flapped away.

When George Washington wore the tooth of his runaway cook, it was strangely at dinner parties. Slaves would watch as he wandered into the kitchen, eyes glazed over in a seeming trance, and placed drops of some strange liquid into the food and drink of his guests. His servants never touched those leftovers. But that summer many Virginians took note of a bizarre rash of wild pigs infesting the streets and countryside of Fairfax County.

The ninth, and final, Negro tooth purchased for George Washington came from a slave woman named Emma. She had been among Mount Vernon's earliest slaves, born there just a decade after Augustine Washington had moved in with his family. Had anyone recorded Emma's life for posterity, they would have learned of a girl who came of age in the shadows of one of Virginia's most powerful families. A girl who had fast learned that she was included among the Washington's possessions-treasured like a chair cut from exotic Jamaican mahogany or a bit of fine Canton porcelain. A young woman who had watched the Washington children go on to attend school and learn the ways of the gentry, while she was trained to wait on their whims. They had the entire world to explore and discover. Her world was Mount Vernon, and her aspirations could grow no further than the wants and needs of her owners.

That was not to say Emma did not have her own life, for slaves learned early how to carve out spaces separate from their masters. She had befriended, loved, married, cried, fought, and found succor in a community as vibrant as the Washingtons'-perhaps even more so, if only because they understood how precious it was to live. Yet she still dreamed for more. To be unbound from this place. To live a life where she had not seen friends and family put under the lash; a life where the children she bore were not the property of others; a place where she might draw a free breath and taste its sweetness. Emma didn't know any particular sorcery. She was no root woman or conjurer, nor had she been trained like the Washington women in simple domestic enchantments. But her dreams worked their own magic. A strong and potent magic that she clung to, that grew up and blossomed inside her-where not even her owners could touch, or take it away.

When George Washington wore Emma's tooth, some of that magic worked its way into him and perhaps troubled some small bit of his soul. In July 1799, six months before he died, Washington stipulated in his will that the 123 slaves belonging to himself, among them Emma, be freed upon his wife's death. No such stipulations were made for the Negro teeth still in his possession.

About the author

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Secret Lives of the Nine Negro Teeth of George Washington

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
"By Cash pd Negroes for 9 Teeth on Acct of Dr. Lemoire" -Lund Washington, Mount Vernon plantation, Account Book dated 1784.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Mia Alvar is the winner of the 2016 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction for In the Country: Stories. Her debut collection sheds light on the Filipino diaspora, with each story following the various journeys of men, women, and their families as they leave their homes in search of a new, but not always better, life abroad. The heart of these stories can be found in their exploration of universal themes such as displacement, the desire for human connection, loss, and, ultimately, hope. The following is a story from the collection.

When I was in high school, long ago, my brother Andoy used to drop me off and pick me up from campus in a Cadillac. It wasn't his, of course, any more than the rented uniform I wore was mine. And certainly we weren't fooling anyone: not the neighbors in our barangay​, not the nuns who'd given me a scholarship to their convent school in San Lorenzo. The car belonged to the family my brother worked for, as a live-in chauffeur. Each morning, Andoy woke before they did, put on his gloves and trousers in the dark, and drove from the suburbs to the slums to collect me. He'd already be muddling through traffic on EDSA Boulevard by the time I rose and got into my own X-shaped necktie and school girl pleats.

Our mother was the one who washed and starched and pressed my uniform each night, as if that would fool the sugar heiresses and Senate daughters at my school into mistaking me for one of their own. Andoy knew better. Every morning, in the car, he gave me money for the school canteen and ate the bag lunch our mother had packed. He paid the dentist who filled my cavities and the orthodontist who straightened my teeth. On weekends we saw movies or played records on our father's old phonograph, so when my classmates squealed over Leif Garrett or the Osmond Brothers, I'd know enough to squeal along.

I graduated in 1976, the same year that Andoy was fired from his driving job. His employer's daughter, Ligaya, had just turned eighteen, and she and Andoy had been caught "celebrating" her birthday in the backseat of her father's car. With Andoy unemployed and my mother scraping to feed us, I couldn't go straight to college, even with a scholarship. We both spent the next twelve months mopping floors and stocking shelves to scare up rent and some tuition. I didn't see an end in sight till Andoy told me, in May of 1977, that he'd found a better job.

"This time I want an Eldorado convertible," I said. We'd just stepped off the jeepney on Salapi Road, whose pavement ended half a mile or so before our barangay began. Along with his old job, of course, we'd lost our access to the Cadillac. It depressed me to be riding jeepneys again, sardined thigh to thigh with strangers in a steel caravan painted up in circus colors, sometimes so crowded that brave young boys sat on the roof or hung on to the jeepney's sides, the plastic-tarp "windows" flapping against them. After air-conditioning and leather seats, music from a cassette player, and my brother for a white-gloved chauffeur, it felt uncivilized to me to pass warm coins and damp bills forward to the driver, who even when we shouted para! sometimes barely slowed enough to let us jump from the doorless rear exit.

So I was thrilled to hear another family had hired him. "Where?" I asked, imagining another garage, another suburb of Manila. The aftermud of a typhoon sucked at our shoes as we walked home.

He said, "Saudi Arabia."

I took this as a joke. "Now that's a uniform," I said. Peter O'Toole on a camel, in white robes and a head rope, was pretty much my whole idea of the Middle East.

"I'm serious." He slowed his steps along the creek that flowed through our barangay. We called it that: the Creek. In fact it was an open sewage canal, wide enough to fit a pedicab and five or so feet deep, bringing the runoff from our houses through the next village and into the San Juan River. We threw our garbage in the Creek. We joked about what else wound up in there: unlikely cats lured by the fish-bone smell, tainted syringes, worse. No threat could crush a child's tantrum faster than holding a toy-or, better yet, the squalling brat herself-above the Creek. After a flood, eggshells and beer-can tabs and bottle shards clung to the Creek's banks, as if even trash hoped to escape. But the Creek did serve a purpose, outside of waste disposal: with everyone holding their breath and hustling past the stench as fast as they could, it was the one place in the barangay to have a private conversation.

"You're gonna be a college girl," said Andoy. "The textbooks will be heavier, and so will the tuition." Driving taxis and limousines in Riyadh, he said, would pay him six times what he earned in Manila. He'd recoup his airfare and work visa fees in time, with some left over to send us, and save up for the driving school for rich expats he'd open when he returned home for good.

"But I'll apply for scholarships," I said, panicking at the thought of Manila without my brother in it. "A year from now, I'll have enough to start part-time. If I can find a job in the library and cafeteria-and tutor, too, at night-"

"And study when?" He laughed, exposing a hole near the back of his mouth that still startled me. Years before, Andoy's two right upper molars had rotted and fallen out. "Promise me you'll take just one job, and save the wages for pocket money. Bus fare, if you want."

We didn't talk about his other reasons. Along with my textbooks and tuition, Andoy's girlfriend, Ligaya, would be growing heavier too. She was already nineteen weeks heavier, to be exact, with Andoy's twins.

"What exactly will you do in Saudi?" I asked.

"I told you-same as here," said Andoy, "but for Arabs. Rich ones."

"But what will you do," I said, pointing at him, "in a place like Saudi?" This was still a few years before everybody's father, uncle, nephew, son began to leave the Philippines for the Middle East, but already we'd heard stories, from the earliest recruits: men who'd gone to jail for looking at a woman the wrong way, unmarried sweethearts who couldn't walk side by side in public, secret sex rooms that charged by the hour and were routinely raided by the police. Here in Manila, the decade of halter tops and hot pants suited Andoy just fine. The night before, he'd nuzzled up to Ligaya and caught her shoulder straps between his teeth. "Spaghetti for dinner," Andoy said, "my favorite." How would he get by in a country where women veiled themselves from head to toe in black?

"I'm going to be a father now," he said. "Saudi's the best place for me."

Before Ligaya, there was Rose; before Rose, there were Vangie, Monica, and Teresita. "She's the one," Andoy would declare each time, clutching his chest as if Cupid had hit the bull's-eye. He knelt at their windows with our father's guitar, crooning till the neighbors complained. I offer you no wealth or high ambition, went one of his favorite Tagalog ballads, beyond the promise of my everlasting love.

"You sang that to Rose," I said, after one serenade. "And to Vangie, and Aurora, and Belen."

Andoy laughed, flashing that gap behind his teeth-the one flaw, people said, in his otherwise good looks. Looks he'd reportedly inherited from our father, along with the musical gift that had him strumming those kundiman by ear. "You'll understand," he told me, "when you fall in love."

That closed the discussion. Love was unknown territory to me: I couldn't challenge him on it any more than I could question what he said about our father, who had taken off for good before my birth; or what our mother told us of life in Manila during the war. I had to take them at their word.

"She puts the sun to shame," he'd say. "I looked at her and every part of me was ringing."

Even more than beauty, what really made my brother weak was danger, obstacles-the chance to break a rule or cross a line or overcome some hideous odds for love. Vangie had a boyfriend. Aurora was engaged. His best friend already had an eye on Rose. Teresita was a decade and a half his senior; Belen lived in another province.

"I can't have her and I have to have her," he'd said most recently, after falling for the boss's daughter.

I said, "You've been listening to too many radionovelas with Ma."

In convent school I'd known a few girls like Ligaya, girls whose parents had some money but didn't quite play golf in Forbes Park. (Her father owned some fancy cars, as Andoy put it, but his wife was always on his case to sell one.) Ligaya was stunning, even by my brother's standards: rosy and pouty, long and slim but round where it counted, with skin like a steamed pork bun. Pregnancy seemed only to exaggerate those looks. Her hair had grown, with mermaid luster, to her waist. Even her growing belly didn't so much mar her figure as match it, curve for curve. This new look, of course, appalled Ligaya's parents, who had thought that firing Andoy would put an end to the affair. Seeing, in the flesh, how much she'd disobeyed them left no choice but to kick her out.

So Ligaya came to live with us. When she arrived, with her matching crocodile trunk and train case, she burst into tears. "It's a swamp," she sobbed. "I'm going to live in a swamp."

It was a swamp; we didn't need Ligaya to tell us that. Every day my mother washed what clothes we owned and hung them from the banister to dry. Water trickling from the sleeves and hems kept the floor wet. Steam issued from the iron my mother used on the dried clothes, and from the rice she cooked at lunch and dinner, and from the pots of water that we boiled when it flowed brown or orange from our faucets. All that moisture gave the house a smell, so constant we'd forgotten it, of mold.

Nine years before, a "slum upgrade" had turned the scrap shacks of our barangay into two-story homes, one room below and one above. We had electricity and plumbing now, concrete blocks instead of tin-and-plywood walls, furniture and some appliances, a bathroom with a faucet and a flush toilet at the foot of the stairs. Since then the First Lady, who'd led this initiative herself, had moved on to concert halls and galleries. The crown jewel of the planned upgrade-a concrete promenade to cover up the open Creek-never materialized. And like all the neighbors' houses, ours deteriorated faster than it had improved. Rust had spread its scabs over the bathroom floor and walls. The vent built into the wall above the kitchenette to air out cooking smells became a nest for rats, who chewed through the wire mesh and made a racket with their shrieking every night.

We did feel sorry enough to give Ligaya the upstairs room. Having shared the bed there for nine years, my mother and I moved to the sofa and a straw mat on the ground floor. After she had settled in, Ligaya told us "too much up-and-down" could harm the twins. This meant that someone had to bring her meals upstairs to her and bus the dishes after. And someone was my mother. Ligaya saw her as a slave, which enraged me. (I must have felt I was the only one who had the right to treat my mother like a slave.) Ligaya couldn't quite adjust to life without a gardener, a housemaid, or a nanny (not to mention a chauffeur). Of course, she didn't feel that climbing up and down the stairs to walk outside, take the jeepeny to Makati, and visit all the shops she could no longer afford to patronize, like a mourner visiting a grave, would harm the twins.

As for my mother, she was too used to taking orders to push back, at least not right away. For six years now, ever since the trouser factory where she once worked had closed, she'd been calling herself a traveling seamstress, making "house calls" after church each morning in some nearby, nicer towns. But most houses there had help already. If she didn't happen on a garden party or a child-care crisis that could use an extra hand right then and there, the best she could hope for was a guilt-plagued housewife who could give her pity money. When I was thirteen, still accompanying her on these rounds, I saw people draw their shades as we approached, my mother's sewing basket of no more use to them than a bundle on some hobo's stick.

After that, I had a terror of becoming her, the multipurpose servant a few lucky scraps away from living on the street. I refused to serve Ligaya hand and foot. At the same time, I remembered enough from the jungle kingdom of high school not to fight with someone like Ligaya and insist she pull her weight. Instead, watching them both while I did homework on the sofa, I pretended they were strangers, who had little to do with me. I imagined I was a reporter on assignment, paid to watch and cover subjects in a house that wasn't mine. Servant work has turned, I scribbled in a notebook, looking at my mother, from what she once did for a living to who she is for life. I had no doubt that both my living and my life would be different. She holds a grudge against the world, I wrote of Ligaya, for defaulting on its promises to beautiful women. It didn't occur to me that I'd been counting on similar promises, made to smart girls who studied hard.

In Riyadh, my brother shared a flat with nine men-Filipino gardeners or servants or drivers like him, or men helping to build the pipeline from Saudi's oil wells to refineries offshore. The desert sun tanned him in no time, as it had his friends. We all could pass for Moros now, he wrote home, on an aerogram as thin as onionskin.

When he called for the first time, from a pay phone in a downtown hotel, I told him I liked having a sister for a change. "Why didn't we think of replacing you sooner?" I'd never lied this way for anybody's sake before. I must have wanted him to feel, five thousand miles away, that he was working toward a good cause. School, I wrote, because I knew he'd eat it up, has it all over the real world.

I'd started college that June. When I arrived on campus, among freshmen who had come at sixteen and would leave by twenty, I felt of a different species altogether: discipula laboranda plebeia, the ancient, part-time scholarship girl. I was only one year older, but would age faster than them still, paying tingi or "retail"-style for a few credits each semester, the way my mother bought garlic by the clove or shampoo by the foil sachet. My classmates didn't look down on me so much as fail to see me altogether, as I stamped their books and served their lunches, as constant and inconsequential to their landscape as the statue in front of their student union.

This life-size, concrete man on a pedestal was supposed to be a Katipunero, or rebel from the 1896 uprising against Spain. He held a red flag in his right hand and a bolo knife in his left, his open mouth a cry to arms. But I saw him more as a security guard: watching for intruders, waving his bolo to keep girls like me out of the student union, that exclusive realm of monthly club dues and "activities" that didn't earn a grade or paycheck.

My partial scholarship was in journalism. I'd never cared for newspapers, but I disliked children and sick people even more. (Teaching and nursing were my other scholarship options.) It had been five years since the President declared martial law, and rules had been cemented about who could print what, and where. One famous editor had said that finding decent Filipino reporters was easier in prison or abroad than in a newsroom in Manila. (No one heard from him again.) But I cared less about press freedom than I cared about myself. If media posts kept opening whatever "real" journalists offended Marcos, that left more for me. I would have followed any marching orders that led out of the barangay.

Of course, I knew enough to keep these bleak and bitter motives to myself.

Two months after my brother left, a man came to our door in denim (not just jeans, but a vest and jacket too) and gold-framed aviator glasses. His hair was like a soldier's: short, cropped close enough to show his scalp; his tennis shoes and T-shirt so white they hurt my eyes.

"Your carabao," he called himself: our water buffalo, our beast of burden. His skin was not quite carabao-dark, but close. And rather than a plow or produce cart, he'd brought a woven straw box full of envelopes from men he knew in Saudi. "Something smells delicious, Tita," he told my mother. She plated up some rice and fish for him.

He told us his name and parents' province, what job had brought him to Saudi and how long ago. My mother fixed her eyes on him, as if by staring deep enough she'd locate Andoy there. "We have good times, considering," he said. His shared flat in Riyadh, for instance, overlooked the public plaza known as Chop Chop Square. "Who needs TV when you've got ringside tickets to that?" He raised his arms to show us how the executioner would wield his sword over the accused. We must have cringed; he cut the demonstration short. He cleared his throat and left it at "You know Pinoys. Easily entertained." He reached into his neckband to reveal a gold cross on a chain, purchased in secret from an Indian dealer. "It's a crime to wear it there," he said, stroking his neck as if thinking of Chop Chop Square again. "But I feel safer with it on than not." He tucked it back into his shirt.

Ligaya glowed around him, a sudden charming hostess. "I'd offer you some San Miguel," she said, "if we had any. You miss the taste, I bet." His visit was the most time I had seen her spend downstairs with us. She even smiled and thanked my mother for the food. I puffed up too, made jokes to get my own kind of attention. "Make sure my brother knows that beer is all she meant," I said, "when she offered you what you can't get in Saudi." He laughed.

Before leaving, the carabao gave us Andoy's envelope. He didn't blink when I turned from the table to count what was inside it. He must have hoped, when it was his turn to send money home, that his own wife or sister would do the same. Standing from the meal, he rubbed his stomach. "I'll need two seats on my flight back to Saudi," he joked, "if everyone I see today feeds me like this."

After that, they came every two months, on leave between their own contracts. They worked with Andoy or lived with him; they had socialized at parties in the workers' village or worshipped together at a secret Mass held in a basement. Each time, my mother set a place at the table; Ligaya glowed and flirted; I joked around and counted money; the carabao ate and told stories and complained, before leaving, about needing two plane seats for his return to Saudi. Each time they wore the uniform I came to call the Saudi suit: the aviators, the white T-shirt and spotless sneakers, the gull-shaped Levi's stitch on their back pockets as they turned toward their next delivery. Ray-Ban, Adidas, Jockey-"Stateside" brands, about as far from Peter O'Toole's thob and head rope as I could have imagined. They even smelled the same: like cigarette smoke and crumpled cash. Through them, Andoy remitted half his pay to us, while he lived on a quarter and saved the rest for his return.

Ligaya gave birth in September. Standing in for my brother, I stared at her flushed and puffy face; her plastic cap and sweat-soaked gown; her swollen ankles as they thrashed against steel stirrups that, in my eyes, might as well have had a ball and chain and gang of fellow prisoners attached. I pitied her, and every woman in the ward that day-not just the wailing ones in labor but the nurses at their service and the twin girls who emerged, all smeared in blood and fury, from between Ligaya's legs.

My mother's hope-that babies would smooth out Ligaya's nature; that nursing, cradling, bathing, and swaddling them would calm their mother, too-turned out to be in vain. Ligaya had a new and longer catalog of gripes now. "They refuse to drink," she sobbed, jamming the bottles to their infant mouths. She mourned the changes they had wreaked upon her figure. "They're here to stay," she wailed, in underwear, tracing the stretch marks on her waist and hips.

The twins inherited Ligaya's lungs and her talent for misery. They screamed whether we put them down or picked them up, whether we spoke to or sang to or ignored them. Illness and infections plagued them: thrush, clogged noses, pinkeye, diarrhea. I chased their mucus and secretions, wiping noses, backsides; wetting washcloths to dislodge dried crusts. "This is Sisyphean," I said, kneeling to scrub the floor or furniture. As if anyone understood. As if my fancy new college-speak could elevate me from the muck.

In May, another carabao with dark skin, military hair, aviators, and denim came to our door. Our mother was boiling rice at the stove. "Save some for me," the carabao called through the screen; and there was no mistaking Andoy's voice.

I ran to him, the textbook falling from my lap, and Andoy dropped his suitcases. "You reek like a carabao, too," I said, my cheek against the smoke-and-money smell of his shoulder.

Our mother couldn't speak. She touched his face, confirming him the way a blind man would. "It's gone," she finally said, when her fingers reached his hair.

Ligaya played indifferent, unlidding the rice and cooing to her babies. When she turned, she held them out like puppets. " We're not supposed to talk to strangers," she squeaked for them. " Who are you? "

Andoy grinned. His daughters, who had fussed and squirmed all day, blinked silently at him, docile as dolls. "I'll show you who I am," he said, taking them into his right arm and winging his left around Ligaya. With a dip, he planted the kind of kiss on her I'd seen in pictures of American victory parades after the war.

"Idiot!" Ligaya yelped, smiling.

He'd brought gifts home from Saudi: gold earrings for Ligaya and the twins, a rug for the upstairs room, a brass coffeepot with a swan-shaped spout. But more came after. From the electronic bazaar in Quiapo, he bought me a digital wristwatch and a typewriter with its own carrying case. Between deliveries to other families of carabao, he found my mother an electric cooker that could steam rice without her supervision. By the weekend, we had a color TV set. Neighbors came to watch John and Marsha on our sofa. Our mother made adobo and pineapple ham, while Ligaya served up the San Miguel and Johnnie Walker Black she'd always wanted to offer the other carabao.

Afterward, Andoy and I walked out to dump the chicken bones and paper plates into the Creek. "Do all the carabao party like this when they come home?" I said. "What will you have left?"

"Left for what? What am I working for if not my girls?" He put an arm around my shoulder and lowered his voice. "Actually, I've been meaning to tell you something."

The last time I'd heard him whisper, in this keyed-up and conspiring way, it was to tell me he had fallen for Ligaya. "You can't be serious. In Saudi?" I groaned. "You're a father now, you said yourself!"

"Not that!" He laughed. "Although you could say I got lucky."

He'd driven, many times, a man named Abdul Ghaffar Al-Thunayan from the airport to his palace in Al Nasiriyah. When his limousine broke down one day, with Al-Thunayan in the back, Andoy was worried. Al-Thunayan, who sat on the Ministry of Oil and had ties to the royal House of Saud, was an important customer. Displeasing him would not go over well with Andoy's boss. But Andoy peeked under the limo's hood, tightened the battery cables, and fiddled with the spark plugs till the engine purred again.

His passenger took notice. "I have great passion for cars," Al-Thunayan said, as Andoy dropped him off. "I like my Corniche convertible, but Maserati is also excellent."

A week later Andoy's boss told him he was free. Al-Thunayan had bought him out of his driving contract and moved him west, into the servants' wing of his mansion in Jeddah. My brother took over for a retiring Indian chauffeur, but he would also occupy a new post, as personal custodian of Al-Thunayan's luxury car collection.

Needless to say, he would be earning more. "Enough for you to go full-time," said Andoy. "No more tingi-style education. Have fun, be a college kid, get involved in some campus life, all right? That's my order."

How my brother knew from full-time student and campus life -things I'd barely dreamed about myself-I had no clue.

When we got back inside, he chased Ligaya up the stairs. She giggled as they closed the door, and then the phonograph drowned out their voices. The twin I carried stopped her gurgling long enough to smile at me. Her sister fell asleep in my mother's lap. This kind of peace seemed possible in our house, the month Andoy was home.

In June, I quit my cafeteria job and gave up all but two shifts at the library. These were the new terms of what my brother called the Abdul Ghaffar Al-Thunayan Scholarship. I flailed, that first day of the semester, at doing as the campus natives did: their slow and easy amble through the grass was harder than it looked, and sitting on the quad, against a tree, made my spine ache. I went and studied them from a bench instead. A boy, reading the campus daily newspaper on the other end of the bench, reached across to clamp his hand on my knee. I froze in fear. This must be flirting, I thought, despairing that only "college kids" who lived the "campus life" knew how to handle it.

The boy just smiled, pointing his chin at my knee. My leg had been bouncing nervously against the bench since I'd sat down. "Sorry," I said. He nodded and went back to reading. I was too embarrassed to move again till after he stood, leaving his paper behind.

I picked it up, scanning headlines about an Independence Day earthquake, the ongoing trial of former Senator Aquino, a teenage housemaid named Rosy Lacaba. The second page contained instructions, below the masthead, for the prospective student reporters.

Why hadn't I thought of it before? The perfect solution-a necessary notch on my résumé that still fulfilled Andoy's mandate for Life Outside the Classroom.

The next day, per instructions, I brought a steno notebook and ballpoint pen to the campus daily's headquarters, on the fourth floor of the student union. Don't blame me, I thought, looking up as I passed the Katipunero on his pedestal. This wasn't my idea.

But Room 401 was locked. I checked the paper again, not knowing yet what I'd later find out: that its editors and reporters no longer met in the student union, that they had gone underground after running afoul of both the university chancellor and the national Office of the Press Secretary too many times. I didn't know the paper met in secret now, in the off-campus apartments of its alumni, who believed that any savvy would-be journalist should easily sniff out as much.

I did hear voices, though, and followed them to the other end of the hall. There, under a cloud of smoke, twelve boys were sitting on the floor, around a braided rug. They seemed dressed for some other time and climate, in plaid wool pants, velvet jackets with large buttons and thick piping, floppy printed cravats. A podium in the corner held a plaster bust of José Rizal; in the opposite corner, a second podium held a thick unabridged dictionary, open to the middle.

"If I wanted to eat chop suey, I'd go to Señor Woo's," said one boy in a top hat, flinging a typed manuscript onto the floor. "It'd be more satisfying, too. Is this a story? Is it enough to take old sermons and pop songs, comic books and teaching manuals, and call it a story?"

Another boy held up his hand, in its fraying fingerless glove. "What other way is there to write about this country?" he replied. "Three hundred years under Spain, via Acapulco. Thirty years under the Americans and three under the Japanese. A history of fragments and confusion-'chop suey' is the only style that captures it."

A third boy argued one could write about confusion without actually confusing the reader. A fourth insisted that old standards of clarity in prose no longer had relevance to how we live today. "Is that what fiction's after, then-real life today?" said a fifth. "That's not why I read stories. If I just wanted facts shoved in my face, I'd go and read the campus paper."

By now I knew I'd come to the wrong place and backed away. A shrill bell rang, and a sixth boy pulled a brass chain from the pocket of his tweed jacket. "We're out of time," he said.

They were still split down the middle: six of them for publishing the story, six against. A rolled-up manuscript was tossed in my direction, and all twelve faces turned. "What do you think?" asked the timekeeper, looking at me as he shut off the alarm and wound the dial.

Now that they had seen me, I was too proud to retreat. As far out of my depth as I was, I stopped to skim the first few pages at my feet, which took me on a kind of romp-through artifacts and documents that stood, it seemed, for the history of the Philippines. Lines translated from a Spanish zarzuela. Menu items, such as stewed prunes and "college pudding," served on the 1901 USS Thomas voyage from San Francisco to Manila Bay. I couldn't tell if these fragments were real or fabricated, or some combination of both. The author, whose name was blacked out in the top-left corner with a marker, had what I could only call a casual relationship with grammar, chronology, punctuation, historical accuracy, and most other courtesies a reader might expect.

I didn't care much for the story, but I had the urge to mimic them, these boys, adopt their earnest style of arguing the way I'd tried to sit and walk the campus like a full-timer. "It is a mess," I told them, "but what's wrong with that? Whoever wrote this took away the narrator and left some room for me. I'm not a child. Why hand the story to me on a platter? Why shouldn't it be up to us to piece together our own history?"

With that, somehow, I passed. The tie was broken, and the boys moved aside to make space for me. We spent a half hour on each of three remaining stories, the seconds tickling like a toy heart in the tweed pocket of the boy to my left. I sat and watched and chimed in now and then, feeling like an interloper at some mad tea party. Even when I told them I had landed there by accident, from the journalism department, they just congratulated and welcomed me to what they called the dark side.

And that was how I joined the campus fiction journal: as a sort of challenge to myself, a game. The magazine was called The Katipunero, like the statue outside. I'd seen it before in the library, where every three months I would bring its newest issue out onto the periodicals shelf. The heavy, lead-gray cover, textured to resemble slate. The loopy calligraphy of its letterpress title. The Katipunero was like that: all preciousness and pretense. Those Victorian getups; those boys, who also called themselves Katipuneros and wrote fiction of their own in their spare time, though everyone knew that, after graduating, they would forsake such things to join their fathers' banks and firms. Outside of class they didn't need to work for money; instead they spent their spare time analyzing paragraph breaks and "pee oh vee" as if the cure for cancer depended on it. A kind of smirking fascination brought me back to the student union every week, to pick up new submissions from the tray next to José Rizal and read them on the jeepney home, at lunch, even on the grass; to type rejection slips and bring them to the campus post office; to bring pieces I liked to the editors' attention; to offer my two cents at the weekly meeting.

The Katipuneros stayed up late to pull off an issue each quarter. Afterward they spent the university's money and some of their own to throw a launch party. I passed out flyers that most students threw away behind my back, hung posters that would disappear beneath other posters the next day, sound-tested microphones in the cafés where student authors read their work aloud. I drank a lot and smoked a little at these parties, feeling as the only girl that I had to keep up. ("Most girls prefer poetry or journalism to us," one of the Katipuneros told me, when I asked if there'd ever been a Katipunera before.) After the cafés closed, they spilled into the dormitories to prolong such life-and-death debates as whether literature had social duties, as Salvador Lopez believed, or whether art's only obligation was to art itself, as Jose Garcia Villa did. I even lost my virginity to one of the editors, behind the common-room sofa in his dorm, after the others had gone home or fallen asleep.

Faking my way among the Katipuneros also gave me an escape from the barangay. At home my mother, sick of slaving for Ligaya, had started to stick up for herself. But Ligaya wouldn't go down without a fight, and every day after Andoy's visit from Saudi, I witnessed one.

"You should have thought of that before," my mother said, hearing Ligaya complain of morning sickness.

"Before what?"

My mother eyed Ligaya's belly. "Andoy's had a million girlfriends. You think you're the first? You're just the first to get yourself in trouble."

" Myself in trouble!" Ligaya almost choked. "Of course. I did this to myself. So I could get my hooks into the son of an unemployed seamstress."

Another time, Ligaya alleged our home was unsafe for children. "We live in a death trap," she said once the twins were crawling. They were always slipping on the wet floor, or picking up dust bunnies and trying to eat them.

"Nothing's wrong with this place, if you watch your kids," said my mother. "I brought two children up here."

"I wouldn't brag about your children's upbringing if I were you."

"Now my children weren't brought up right? A girl in college, and a son, who'll go as far as Saudi to support his wife and kids?"

"His wife! His wife!" Ligaya howled, as if she'd heard a punch line, holding her still-ringless hand against her ribs.

They bickered in that same style about money, about Andoy, about child rearing and housekeeping. Eventually my mother would turn on the TV to drown out Ligaya's voice. At full volume, the soap operas bled into their arguments, so that sometimes I could hardly tell whether a plate had shattered in my own house or an actress on the screen had flung it. The noise would set the babies wailing. Ligaya stormed upstairs and slammed the door (or had the evil landlord on TV slammed it?). Music blared from the phonograph, angering the babies even more.

I feared catching their rages, like the infections that bounced back and forth between my nieces. When Ligaya gave birth to a third daughter, in February, I nearly moved into the student union. "Off to work," I'd say and make tracks as soon as the bickering began. Each time I passed the Katipunero, he looked less like a hostile guard and more like my redeemer. The brass plaque beneath him contained an old Tagalog word for freedom, and he stood for mine.

By March most students cleared the campus for vacation-except the Katipuneros, who insisted on a summer issue; and me, who still had credits to make up from my part-time days. With fewer writers around to contribute, we had to lift our policy against publishing staff work. The managing editor wrote a story called "McKinley Road," in which a wealthy businessman left his wife, children, and mansion for a secretary. In the copy editor's story, "Keys to the City," evil typewriters rose up against and killed the leading lights of Philippine literature, one by one. An associate editor wrote about a seventeenth-century Colettine nun with supernatural powers. And one of my fellow readers wrote about a colony of fruit bats fleeing the destruction of their home forest for a new place to live.

These were good stories, and reading them, I had to admit that the Katipuneros were more than spoiled blowhards. The literary magazines and novels they read instead of studying for class; their half-hour critiques; their drunken post-midnight debates about whether, for instance, the English language, as a souvenir of American imperialism, could ever be the basis of a truly national literary tradition or whether Filipino literature had a future only in the local vernacular-all of that had added up to something, which was their own art, or the not-unpromising beginnings of it. The Katipuneros exceeded their own standard for student work. And their devotion to a magazine that turned no profit, whose readership nobody measured, their passionate arguments over what belonged in it, was not a game. They'd given themselves over to exactly what Andoy had wished on me: an enterprise without a practical end. They were amateurs, in the classic sense of the word: they did it all for love.

It came to me that next to them I was the dilettante. I didn't sit around in a top hat or a velvet jacket, but I drank their whiskey and passed judgment on their craft, all the while never trying to make something of my own.

But if I were to write myself, then what about? I knew nothing about businessmen and secretaries, evil typewriters or supernatural nuns or fruit bats in the forest-and those were just the ideas that were taken. Pausing before the plaster Katipunero outside the student union again, I felt gloomy, as unwelcome in his world as ever. But for the first time, I looked at his face and fist and bare feet up close. Till then I'd had him sewn up with ideas about wealthy full-time students; I'd never taken stock of his disheveled, common clothes. The Katipunero, I realized, was poor. The muscles showing through his torn camisa de chino belonged not to some fop who sat in classrooms and cafés all day but to a peasant "son of sweat," who'd plowed and planted, dug and hoed since he could stand.

Of course he rose above those circumstances to become a founding hero of the nation. Anyone who'd taken grade-school civics or read the plaque at his feet could tell you that. But now I wondered about others like him-the majority of sons of sweat, who didn't end up making history. I couldn't write their stories-not exactly, having never seen a farm or country field in all my life. But I knew something about city peasants-Manila sons of sweat like Andoy, whose experiences came to me in letters and cassette tapes, conversations on the phone or with the carabao. Before I knew what I was doing, I had found a bench beside the student union and started writing in my notebook:
In Riyadh he shared a flat with nine men-gardeners, servants, or drivers like him, or construction workers on the pipeline being built from Saudi's oil wells to refineries offshore. I could pass for a Moro now, he wrote on an aerogram as thin as onionskin, about the way the desert sun had darkened him.
I skipped my afternoon classes, gliding through campus, landing on a grassy quad here and a flight of stone steps there to add a paragraph or sentence. At home, my mother begged me to consider the electric bill as I wrote by the kitchenette bulb through the night. I barely ate or slept for two days. If someone had predicted, a year earlier, that my brother would inspire me one day to write fiction, for fun, I would not have believed them. Now it felt both new and fated to me, a thing I didn't know I'd always meant to do.

The words came easily, at first. It made me happier than I'd ever been to sketch out scenes in my notebook and type them up. "Aren't you in a good mood," said Ligaya, and then: "Did a man finally notice you, by some miracle?"

And then I read my draft again, stacking the masterwork in my head up against the mess I'd made on the page, and sank into despair. "Whoever he is, he's not worth it," said my mother, as I moaned and wallowed facedown on the sofa. That night the same pages I had filled in a manic fever were torn into shreds, floating in the Creek.

The summer passed like this. From the clouds of inspiration to the gutters of dejection and self-loathing and back again, over and over. My grades, meanwhile, slipped in only one direction. By the time I failed a term paper in psychology, after ditching class to write the day it was assigned, I decided that my problem was I hadn't read enough. And the hole in my apprenticeship was too wide to close in my free time. I resolved, like a determined suitor, to get serious. In the middle of my sixth semester in college, I dropped my journalism major and took up English literature with a special focus on creative writing.

"Shifty?" asked my mother.

"Shiftee," I said, the registrar's term for students who switched majors. "It happens all the time. The average student changes twice or more before graduation." I admitted that the switch would set me back a few semesters.

"How much longer?" said my mother.

"How much more money is the question," said Ligaya.

I couldn't blame them. What would I want next? A room on campus? A semester abroad?

Rather than sell Andoy on my craziness, I released him. I'm going part-time again, I wrote to Jeddah. I'll pay my own way, take another decade to finish if I have to.

He called as soon as he received my letter. "It says here it just hit you," he said. "One day you knew."

"It's true." I knew how cracked this made me sound.

"Now it keeps you up at night. You feel awake for the first time. Like you'd been sleepwalking through life before."

Instead of answering, I pictured him in Al-Thunayan's servant quarters, standing by the phone, untangling the cord. Everything appeared to be a shade of desert sand-the walls, the carpet, and the telephone; a yellow pencil, dented by the different teeth; a yellow notepad filled with scribbled messages. Squares of yellow light checkered the hall from the doorways of the shared bedrooms off it. There'd be a smell of instant noodles and dirty laundry, as in boys' dormitories I had visited; and from opposite ends of the hallway, the sounds of a communal TV and a running toilet.

"Congratulations!" he said.

" Congratulations? "

"Now you know what it's like."

"To change my major?"

"To fall in love." Andoy laughed. "I always wondered who it would be. What boy could keep up with the toughest girl I know? I should have guessed: it wouldn't be someone for you. At least not a living someone. It would be Shakespeare, and José Rizal, and the Katipunero outside the student union."

I cringed. "It sounds ridiculous," I said. "Forget it."

"No!" said Andoy. "Listen. I'm no scholar, but love I know about. That's my major."

"I'll never get a decent job." His optimism had me arguing against myself.

"Relax! Love's a miracle, not a disaster. Who said it would be easy, or convenient? But if you can't sacrifice everything for love, what else is there?"

"It'll take more time."

"And money-yes, love does." He laughed again. "You'll learn that quick."

He did have one condition. "I want to meet this new love of yours," said Andoy. Anything I wrote, he said, I was to send him a copy.

In Jeddah, Andoy told me, every Filipino line cook and janitor seemed to know about Abdul Ghaffar Al-Thunayan. Some saw him as an almost mythical creature: the fair, generous master, rare as a genie or an oasis in the Rub' al-Khali desert. Al-Thunayan fed his servants well, paid them on time, let them hang on to their own passports and work permits. And for all his wealth, Al-Thunayan chose to have just one wife, Alia, and treated her like the princess that she, by blood, actually was.

At his new job, when he wasn't driving Al-Thunayan's family, my brother washed and waxed the cars, dusted and vacuumed their insides, balmed the leather seats with oil. Privately, he christened each one with a Filipino name. He called this BMW Dolphy; that Jaguar, Imelda. He kept the keys to every car and the code to the garage's security alarm. Family or friends who wished to borrow cars from Al-Thunayan-from oil associate to minor prince-went through Andoy first.

Best of all, Al-Thunayan let him "exercise" each car as he saw fit. My brother drove to the coast at dusk to watch the sky change colors over the Red Sea. Or he took the other servants downtown on their days off, to eat fast food and hear the Filipino waiters hoot in admiration. "A Rolls-Royce with anaconda-skin seats!" he said. "My friends can't pick their jaws up off the floor."

I drank these details in, writing one Andoy-inspired character after another. When I mailed him all my drafts, as promised, Andoy was tickled by the attention. "I guess I'm going to be famous after all," he said. That year he answered more of my questions about his life in Saudi Arabia than would fit onto the page.

Other readers (I took my first fiction workshop that semester) were more critical. I couldn't just record Andoy's experiences, my classmates said. Good fortune like my brother's did not make for a story. Where was the conflict? The danger? Fiction needs trouble, or else it's just description, wrote my professor in the margin of one draft, underlining "trouble" twice.

"Does Al-Thunayan have a temper?" I asked my brother.

"Not that I've seen."

"But every prince has got his warts," I insisted, quoting that same professor. "What does Al-Thunayan do if a servant makes a mistake?"

"I want to help you," Andoy said. "But he's a good man, and he hires good people. You'll have to make up your own trouble. It is fiction isn't it?"

I tried. I wrote about what might happen to my fictional chauffeur if vandals keyed a Bentley under his watch, or stole the stereo. I wrote about the chauffeur's friends nicking the gold-flecked paint by accident, or staining the anaconda leather with their jars of black-market siddique. Goofy scenarios, but they did give me some confidence in my own imagination. I began to see that Andoy's luck could last in real life while I embellished it with fictional disasters. I stopped searching for the hidden dangers in his tapes and letters home.

So when his troubles really started, I missed it. I didn't notice the shift, as he continued to invoke her in his letters, from Al-Thunayan's wife to Madame to Alia. If I thought of her at all, I thought of a black veil, nothing more. He'd praised too many legs and lips over the years for me to recognize, in this case, desire for what he couldn't see. By the time I reopened the letters and replayed the tapes, by the time I realized the warts I should have looked out for were his, not Al-Thunayan's, it was much too late.
The eyes of Al-Thunayan's wife are hard to describe. I know Madame is nearby from the clinking sound of jewelry on her wrists and ankles. When I drive Alia into town, the car afterwards smells like honey and roses.
My twin nieces could identify a pair of jeans and aviator glasses before their second birthday. "Cow!" they cried from their playpen that May, pointing to our screen door. Their infant pronunciation of carabao had stuck.

It was Andoy, their own father, at the door. They held their palms out to him, a trick we'd taught them to amuse the carabao.

"How is my brother, Cow?" I said, as he met his baby daughter. The twins, who recognized his uniform more than his face, kept saying "Cow" and play-begging to him, a sight that gave me such sad visions of a litter suckling at some giant teat that I had to joke around to keep from crying. "We hear they're treating him like dirt out there. He must be wasting away."

In fact, Andoy had put on weight. His cheeks looked fuller, with a flush to them, like he'd been jogging in the sun. "He's miserable," said Andoy, grinning. "The one thing keeping him alive is his kid sister, who he swears will be a famous writer someday. He'll retire rich, off her."

Andoy wanted to make his deliveries first thing in the morning. By the time I woke up, he'd already come back from the bank, dressed in his denim and white shoes. He beckoned me to help. At the kitchen table, he went down a list of names and royal contributions, converting them on a calculator into pesos, which I doled into envelopes. We matched cassette tapes, photographs, and cards to the amounts and put them in a straw tampipi box. Then we took the jeepney: from Antipolo to Santa Rosa; from Marikina to Laguna; from tin shantytowns to houses with clay roofs and living room pianos in neighborhoods so tiny I could hardly believe the people there relied, as we did, on a son or brother overseas. Aging mothers squinted hard at Andoy, as if they could blur their own sons into being. Wives and girlfriends perked up in his presence. Children gaped at the stranger they were told to kiss because "he knows your father," and I even recognized myself, in teens who surfaced from their textbooks long enough to crack a joke and count the money. Like all the carabao I'd met, my brother sat and ate more than he wanted, fed them Saudi trivia they'd likely heard before. I saw what an essential trade was taking place. My brother's health and cheerfulness told them their own beloved boys were well. And he would bring their rosy performances of family life back to his friends in Jeddah. Walking through each barangay with him, into the swarm of children shouting Carabao!; seeing people through each screen door rise when he appeared, in hope and recognition; I finally understood the purpose of the Saudi suit. I'd always thought it heavy for Manila, not to mention a billboard for thieves. But men so silent and invisible overseas must have loved this guarantee of being seen at home.

After our final stop, Andoy wanted to buy presents for the children. We picked up roller skates and tricycles in Quiapo, toys for children older than his own. "You know the twins don't even know how to use a spoon and fork yet," I protested.

"I miss a lot of firsts," he said. "At least this way I'll leave them with the right equipment." His ideas for his girls, their childhood-much like campus life and full-time course load for me-seemed to have originated somewhere far outside the lives of anyone we knew. The movies, maybe.

I fell asleep on our way home. Andoy held my hand as I dismounted, woozy, from the jeepney. Then he helped the women after me, standing like a footman in the road. I couldn't stop myself thinking that he'd turned, the way our mother had years ago, into servant for life.

"We need a Cadillac next time to get to all those houses," I said, remembering the days he used to chauffeur me to convent school. "Being a carabao is more exhausting than it looks."

"It's not so bad." My brother slowed his steps along the Creek, our old signal to talk in private, where the others wouldn't hear.

"Make it quick," I said. "The Creek smells extra ripe tonight." I was so used to his good news by then that I added, "Let me guess. Al-Thunayan adopted you? Or bought you a Cadillac of your own?"

Andoy laughed and shook his head. Then he said, "What I told you about love is true. It's never easy or convenient." His smile faded. He closed his eyes and inhaled deeply, as if the dust and garbage smells of our neighborhood, the mud and sewage, were precious memories he wanted to preserve.

He and Alia, the wife of his Saudi employer, hadn't planned it. And when they felt it, they tried to suppress it. "But it took over us," my brother said. A fragile conspiracy among the other house servants gave them time alone together. "Not that it ever feels like enough."

"You're in love?" I said stupidly, my voice and hands shaking.

"I'll still provide for all my girls," said Andoy. "I'll still come home to see you every chance I get. This won't change anything."

But I couldn't believe that. Not after all the carabao stories I'd heard over the years. My brother's love affair broke more Saudi laws than I could count.

"You said yourself how lucky you've been there," I said. "Your amo treats you well. And now you want to test that luck? For what?"

"If you knew her, you wouldn't need to ask."

"Why don't you introduce us, then? Invite her to the barangay for tea. I'll tour her along the Creek. Show her where we keep our pet rats." I had an urge to smack him, but didn't. "What were you thinking?"

He shook his head again. "I had to stop thinking." He'd lain awake too many nights, he said, thinking: about the religious police, about the lashings men he knew endured in prison, about the public plaza with its granite tiles and chessboard-size drain. Risks he chose to take, for love.

When we got home I didn't breathe a word of Andoy's trouble to my mother, who was chopping onions by the stove; or to Ligaya, who was folding washcloths while her babies cooed and gurgled in their pen. I didn't speak of it that night or the rest of the month, even to Andoy. As long as I didn't mention his dalliance aloud, even after he left Manila for the third time, I believed I could contain his story, leave it unfinished at the point where he had told me he was in love and reassured me everything would be all right. I could just will this craziness with Alia to run its course, like all his love affairs.

For months, it worked. The envelopes arrived, on schedule, through the carabao. Andoy called home and wrote, made plans for the future with us while carrying on five thousand miles away with Alia, like any man who had a ship in more than one port.

We kept hearing from him until November. Then a month passed without word from him. At Christmas, we received no phone call or black-market greeting card, the kind he used to buy from an Indian grocer who kept a secret stash under the register. We didn't hear from him on New Year's Eve, the start of a new decade, when the children, as they did each year after using up their store-bought firecrackers, hurled matches into the Creek until a bright hedge of fire blazed through the barangay. I'd done this as a child myself, never once considering the danger. Even the youngest of us, I think, got the symbolism: new beginnings, our village cauterizing itself clean of all the past year's garbage.

But that year, the year Andoy went silent, the flames only looked like hell to me, and smelled like what they were: a gutter of filthy gases burning.

By late January, Ligaya and my mother were frantic, and I was channeling my fears into the only place I could. In my stories, Andoy had injured his hand or voice or mouth; he'd argued with a carabao who got revenge by "losing" his balikbayan envelope; Al-Thunayan had assigned him, as his most trusted servant, to an emergency top secret project in the desert where contact with the outside world wasn't possible. I made up one fat chance after another to explain his silence. I'd written my brother so often into danger, willing his real life to look more like fiction; the least I could do was try to write him out of it.

I was at home alone, typing away at one such story, when I heard knocking at our door and saw a pair of jeans and aviator glasses through the screen.

Andoy used to dream aloud of turning our mother into the kind of woman who watched game shows and soap operas all day, lifting her fingers only to sip cocktails or eat cake. "She'll get too lazy to talk," he said. "We'll have to hang a whistle from her neck to call the servants with."

We stretched the joke out. "Her hands will fatten up," I said. "We'll have to cut off all the rings you bought her. Melt them down into one ring, that barely fits her pinkie." It tickled us to even think of her, our servant mother, at rest.

And yet, in a perverse way, in that first year of a new decade, Andoy's dream came true. My mother did retire to the sofa. Clutching one of Andoy's old bandannas, she watched TV for hours, bursting into tears at times I least expected: scenes where estranged soap-opera lovers reunited, moments when game-show contestants hit the jackpot.

In that same year Ligaya's parents called, offering forgiveness and a place for her and the three children to live. But she surprised me too, by staying with my mother in our barangay. I thought their bickering would flare up again in no time, but it never really did. Instead, leaving the twins with a neighbor, Ligaya strapped the baby to her back and traced my mother's daily route: to church, then house to house with a sewing basket and an offer to work at almost anything.

As far as they knew, Andoy was a victim, pure and simple. I told them (when they raised the inevitable questions, and asked me how much I knew) a tale of treachery and blackmail, with details lifted out of Genesis. I cast my brother as the decent Joseph, his lover as the wife of Potiphar, tugging at his clothes. I told them Andoy fled her advances, but not before she'd seized a work glove and the sooty rag he used to clean the cars. Your servant has insulted me, this Alia told her husband, waving the false evidence like a pair of flags.

And I, holding the truth inside me, returned to the dutiful path of the old scholarship girl. Around the time the envelopes stopped coming, I asked for my old jobs back at the library and cafeteria. "We miss you," said one Katipunero as I stamped his book. He'd read some of my stories months before, shy as I still was about sharing them, and encouraged me to keep at it. "Come join us when your shift is done," said another, as I served him lunch. He'd once promised to make room in the fall issue for me, if I had something good. I made all sorts of plans to see them, but got too busy. Most of them graduated later that year, replaced by younger boys I didn't know. Whenever I walked past the student union, I avoided my old statue's eyes. Everybody has to grow up sometime, I told him. Soon I was majoring in journalism again. A professor offered meals, a room, and fieldwork credits in exchange for my transcribing shelves of interviews she'd taped with politicians since the sixties. So I moved my books and clothes and typewriter to her town house close to campus. Once a week I still took the jeepney home to Salapi Road to stock the fridge and pay some bills. This started as my private penance for deceiving them, Ligaya and my mother. But over time it just felt like a load that someone had to carry. They were "my" girls now.

Rejoining the ranks of the older, part-time scholar-early to class and early to work, always bypassing the student union-didn't leave spare time for much, least of all something as frivolous as fiction. Except, of course, that I couldn't sleep. At night, after class and work and studying, I lay awake, while my landlady professor snored next door. The guilt of lying to my family, and the grief of missing Andoy, did not exactly add up to a good night's rest. And so I passed the time by writing.

It was always Andoy, or a version of him, that I wrote about. The same imagined brother that sustained me once we stopped hearing from the real one. This fictional Andoy called me from a pay phone in Bahrain, where friendly Filipino workers sheltered him and Alia after a bold, elaborate escape from Saudi. She left her cousins at the Suq and met our van on an unmarked road. This Andoy sent a tape from Abu Dhabi, saying he and Alia had bought new passports and work visas from an expert forger. Expensive, but love always is. This Andoy wrote home on an aerogram postmarked from Dubai, where he'd secured janitorial work at a hotel. If you work hard-and cheap enough, I've found-most bosses will keep any secret. Things didn't always end well for this Andoy, either. In one draft, the strain of all that hiding broke him. In another, Alia Al-Thunayan saw love wasn't much to live on after all, and grew to hate the man who'd plucked her from the comfort of her husband's palace. I even had Andoy arrested, sent to prison, and deported by a Saudi judge back to Manila, never to see Alia again.

These Andoys went by other names, or none at all; but they had one thing, their survival, in common. At times I thought so long and deeply about other ways it might have gone for my brother that I almost sensed him, present in the room, with me. I never could get used to the "withdrawal," as some Katipunero staffers called it: the rude comedown from having lived so thoroughly inside a story it felt real. But these stories weren't. I could spend my whole life writing, version upon version, none of which would turn the man in jeans and aviators at our door into Andoy. That carabao would still arrive, not two months into 1980, prop the glasses on his head, and tell me, "You look like him." This man would still open his palms to me, to show he had no envelope on him. What he had brought was news: that Andoy's body had been found, alongside Alia's, inside a destroyed Porsche that belonged to her husband, his employer. He'd lost control of the car after swerving off the road to avoid a collision. An accident-on a routine, if secret, drive between lovers, ending in a fate not far from what they might have suffered anyway, if anyone had found out what they were up to. Fiction didn't have a prayer over facts like that. And yet, I felt it would have pleased Andoy to know that I still wrote. I could picture him, reading my words somewhere, chuckling at my attempts to save some version of his life. Who could say, then, that I had an altogether lousy or inadequate imagination? My brother got to live forever, in a sense.

Excerpted from In the Country: Stories by Mia Alvar. Copyright © 2015 by Mia Alvar. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf. All rights reserved.

Read more from the finalists of the 2016 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction
Read other excerpts from the 2016 PEN Literary Award winners and finalists here.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
With Andoy unemployed and my mother scraping to feed us, I couldn't go straight to college, even with a scholarship. We both spent the next twelve months mopping floors

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
When I came into the kitchen, Ward was using a knife to help his wife, Irene, peel the skin from two buffalo tongues. The skin was discarded in a small heap along with the glutinous veins cut from the undersides, then Ward left it to Irene to cut the meat into cubes. He pulled out a chair opposite m…