Last summer, I came off of my birth control. Had to. When I took it, I couldn’t stop thinking about asteroids. In particular, the lost 2007 FT3.

That summer we lived in the rancher with the really clean glass doors. My little sister Faith kept smacking into them. If we heard a thwack, it was either her or one of the meadowlarks that lived in the chokecherry outside. They were trying to get in. She was trying to get out. The heat was above 102 for four straight weeks. Everyone was on their last nerve.

Especially with me, because I wouldn’t shut up about the FT3.

To escape, I’d go over to my boyfriend Charlie’s house. We’d have sex in his parents' basement and then lie next to each other on the crusty shag carpet. That carpet was like the gunk in the corner of a ratty dog’s eye. But it felt good to lie on it, naked, watching the fan go in circles, feeling the heat just rising out of us.

Charlie wasn’t huge on me going off the pill. We spent a lot of time debriefing on the oppressive textures of latex condoms.

“Just imagine you had a blow-up balloon between your thighs while we did it.”

That was a talking point Charlie used a lot. I think he said it once, by accident, and liked the way it sounded.

I had no trouble imagining having sex with a blow-up balloon between my thighs, just as I had no trouble imagining the 54-million ton FT3 pummeling superheated chunks out of the North American continent. A thing about me is I find it easy to imagine things. How it would feel to have sex with a balloon. How it would feel to burn.

I could even imagine how it would feel to be Charlie, with his framed Little League pictures, striped boxer briefs, and small, wet humiliations. We all have those.

Also, I could imagine how he felt because I hadn’t gotten off for the past year. Every time I lay back and closed my eyes, there it was on the other side of my eyelids: searing a hole in my retinas; hanging over my head. They say the brain is our biggest sex organ, and mine was locked in combat with the always-approaching FT3. That year I failed all my exams and stopped saying things I hadn’t said before.

NASA lost the FT3 in 2007 when it briefly lit up their dashboards at 28.4 ± 1.5 million km from Earth. They call these objects lost asteroids but it’s more accurate to call the FT3 “The Incredibly Near-Earth Object We Never Knew About at All, Except Once, for 34 Minutes, in March 2007.”

When it hits, most of us will asphyxiate on debris. Death will be gray: gray in the back of the throat, gray behind the eye sockets, gray steaming the stomach lining.

Survivors will flee en mass into underground shelters. This is the worst way to go. I know because since starting the pill, I’ve watched over sixty-four hours of doomsday bunker simulation videos on Youtube. Fish can’t belong out of water. Humans can’t belong in a bunker.

And finally, in the direct impact zone, some people will be vaporized. No one who has experienced vaporization has lived to tell us about it, so I couldn’t watch Youtube to know.

People like to say that a quick death is painless, but that’s a story we tell ourselves to feel better about the dying thing. I imagine it is excruciating.

Fingers were pointed at my birth control the first week in July. That Tuesday I had my scheduled phone call with my grandad. I call him each week to make him feel better about being old. He’s got dementia, and I’ve got brain rot from being online, so we make sense to each other. I guess that day I was ranting more than usual, because afterward my mom came into my bedroom.

“I’m sending you to see a psychiatrist.” “I’m fine. What I need is an astrophysicist.”

“You upset your granddad so much that he called me. He hasn’t remembered my phone number for six years.”

My dad drove me to the psychiatrist. We weren’t on great terms those days. He seemed to consider my becoming a teenage girl to be some massive betrayal of our friendship.

“This is expensive.” is what he said about the psychiatrist. “We’re going to hit our coverage cap on the insurance.”

“I didn’t even want to go.”

When I was little, my dad would wait for me at the bus stop. Not my mom, or older brother. Just him, for me, in that way I knew he wanted to be out there. Even when it was 40 below freezing.

My psychiatrist’s name was Brynn, which I found strange because that is a young person’s name, and Brynn was old. She said she was born the same day Kennedy was shot.

“Do you believe in reincarnation?” I asked. Brynn said no. She’d probably guessed that next I would have asked her, “What was it like to be John Kennedy?”

Instead I asked, “Have you ever been employed by the Planetary Defense Coordination Office?”

Brynn wrote something on her notepad. She had the apathetically intelligent gaze of an insect. I imagined Brynn in an ant colony, with a thousand other Brynns, boring tunnels in people’s minds between their trauma and the name of a prescription medication.

“I understand you’re depressed,” she said. “I’m not.”

“No?”

“I’m probably repressed—sexually. But those are different.”

“Why are you sexually repressed?” I relayed my orgasming woes. There was no sense in playing coy; Brynn the Bug would soon be a pancake of ash. We all would.

“I may write you a Zoloft prescription, but for now I recommend that you come off of your birth control.”

“What if I get pregnant?”

“Well, you’ll want to try your best not to. Does your partner use protection?” “He’s sensationally opposed to latex.”

Brynn’s lips moved in a way that I knew she didn’t approve of Charlie and his latex aversion. I didn’t really care—there wasn’t enough time for me to explain, to lay Charlie and all his small hurts and idiotically large goodness in front of her sensible Fisherman sandals.

“You may find you are sensationally opposed to tearing your perineum,” Brynn said dryly.

This made me wince. I found it very easy to imagine what tearing a perineum might be like.

“You can always get an IUD.” She suggested, even though she wasn’t even a gynecologist.

Four weeks after I went off birth control, Charlie called me. Things were better then. I’d disabled impact alerts from SkyWatch.

“I just visited the doctor.” Charlie sounded breathless, like he was biking. “Turns out I’m allergic to latex!”

He said this like he was scoring a goal against me and I realized Brynn had been right to twist her lips in the way that she had.

“Huh.” I said, because it felt like there was nothing left to say. “I’ll pick you up. Let’s get burritos.”

I didn’t say anything on the drive to Albertano’s. I thought Charlie would notice and ask what’s wrong, but he didn’t, so I had to keep upping my performance that something was wrong, until my arms were crossed and I was hmphing at everything like a spoiled kid.

“What’s up? Are you hungry?” He finally said, after my sixth “hmmph.” I turned down the radio and cleared my throat.

“Hey,” I started, like I was having a brand new idea. “Hey, what are we gonna do about sex?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, we can’t have it now. You’re allergic to latex. I’m supposed to be off the pill.”

Charlie’s face went totally slack. I could almost hear the static fuzz buzzing out of his ear holes. I know it’s a fantasy to wish your boyfriend could read your mind. But off, in the universe where they forgot to make Charlie, if I could describe my soulmate, I think that’d be all I’d ask for. No muscles, no 10-inch dick, or whatever. Just someone who understood how I was feeling some of the time.

“Well…you can go back on the pill?” He suggested carefully, not taking his eyes off the road. I looked at the same spot.

“I can’t. It made me ‘dangerously fixated on extraterrestrial hazards.”’

“Who told you that?”

“A psychiatrist named Brynn.”

“Babe! Why are you going to a psychiatrist?” One of Charlie’s hang-ups was that he was very suspicious of mental health professionals.

I shrugged.

“My folks think it’s a good call. I freaked them out with all the asteroid stuff.” “Fuck the space rocks. That shit is scary. There’s nothing wrong with you.” “Yeah?”

“Yeah. We hang out all the time. I’d notice if you were spooked in the head. You’re just right the way that you are.”

What’s crazy is he meant it. At the next stoplight he kissed my head right above my ear and I imagined what it would be like to be like Charlie, and see love as a straight line.

We pulled into Albertano’s. It was one of those cantina places that serve goblet-sized margaritas and has deep booths that you could nap in.

Charlie got a red and green smothered burrito and I got the same. We chewed and he screwed up his face like he was trying to think of a solution, but just kept getting stumped.

“I guess,” I said, and he stopped chewing at once. “I could look into getting an IUD.” He brightened.

“That’s a great idea!”

But they’re supposed to be really painful.” And I told him about it. The humiliation of getting naked at a place of work. The anesthetic white walls. The pointy pieces of metal.

“Sounds like it sucks. I’m sorry.” he said.

But Charlie wasn’t really sorry, because imagining things didn’t come easy to him like it did to me. Even though I could imagine what it’s like to be vaporized by an asteroid or tear a perineum, he couldn’t picture being anyone except Charlie.

I talked it out with my mom—had to. Brynn emailed her all of our notes, which I thought was exactly the kind of duplicitous thing that JFK might do. My mom was forcibly pro-IUD.

“You don’t want to get pregnant. You’re going to college in the fall!”

College wasn’t anywhere special, just the nearby state school. But to my mom, who hadn’t gone to college, it was basically Harvard. She’d already bought all the kitschy bumper stickers and a sweatshirt for herself that said Mother of Bobcat.

God, my mom. Her love is boundless and terrifying.

She recommended a new provider, a woman’s health clinic in a squat little brick building at the edge of town. There was a diagram of breast tissue above the receptionist desk. I’d already filled out the forms online, but they made me fill them out again in the waiting room.

“We’ll need a urine sample,” the receptionist said cheerfully. “The bathroom is over there."

I peed in the plastic cup, like I’m supposed to, but then after I did, I noticed there was a sign that said I had to write my name and Patient ID on the cup. There weren’t any pens in the bathroom, and there wasn’t even that little door that you usually put your pee cup in. So I had to scuttle through the waiting room full of other woman patients, holding my hot cup of pee, and ask the desk lady for a pen.

“You need to put pens in the ladies room, for the pee cups.” Was the first thing I said to the doctor when he came in.

“Okay.” He said. “I’m Doctor ____.” but I don’t actually remember his last name, just that he said it, and then I forgot it. My brain has a lot of holes like that. It’s probably all of the Youtube.

“Sorry if this is a rude question, but shouldn’t you be a lady?” I asked him.

Doctor ____ raised his bushy eyebrows over his surgical mask. I don’t know why he was wearing a mask; I wasn’t getting surgery.

“Do you think that just because I work in a women’s sexual health clinic, I should be a woman?” He asked. From the way he said it, I could tell he thought I was one of those difficult little girls.

“Well, isn’t it a little like a person with no feet becoming a foot doctor? You can understand it in theory, but that’s nothing like having the real things.”

“Do you know many people without feet?” he asked. “No. But I know lots of people without vaginas.” He sighed through his nose.

“What are you in for, today?”

“I’m getting a consultation for an IUD.”

Doctor ____ lit up at once at those three magic letters. Of course he did.

“That’s a wonderful idea! Very proactive. I’m guessing you’re headed to college in the fall?” I nodded morosely. He even clapped his hands together, like a seal.

“Great, great, great. Very proactive. Wouldn’t want, well, you know.”

I scheduled my appointment with Doctor and left without ever having to take my underwear off. I considered this a pretty successful trip to the gyno, given that I got to stay in my clothes the whole time.

The day I went in for it, though, I did have to take my clothes off. So, I got on the examination table naked from the shirt down, bush-out, like Winnie-the-Pooh.

“How much acetaminophen did you say you took?” Asked the nurse while she snapped a glove on, one-handed. There were actually four nurses in the room, one of whom was a guy. He had big ears, and kept looking nervously at my Winnie-the-Pooh situation.

“Sorry?” I asked.

“Or did you say ibuprofen?”

“I didn’t take anything.” I said. The big-eared guy-nurse looked up from my vag and I knew right away I’d fucked up.

“Wait. Was I supposed to take something? We don’t keep pain pills in the house. My little sister took a bunch of Aleve a few years back…"

“Well, typically we recommend the patient take over-the-counter relief before the insertion. But it’s just precautionary; you might not need it at all. Unless you want to reschedule?”

The way she said it sounded like a dare. Like “you’re not really gonna wimp out on us now, not when we’ve all snapped our tight gloves on?"

“No…no,” I said. I could barely afford one IUD, much less 1.5. We’d hit the insurance coverage cap for sure. “No, let’s just do it.”

“Are you sure?” She asked, but she was already setting up her little stool. All of the medical staff gathered around her and vanished from view behind my bent, outstretched legs. Everyone in the room was staring at my vagina. If I’d been calmer I might have made a joke to cut the tension, like “Hey, my eyes are up here!” but I was really freaking out. In-out-breathing, heartbeat up my asshole.

“Okay, you’re going to feel a little pinch,” said a voice from between my legs. The scene felt like a horror movie. White walls. White coats. Sterile surfaces. Gleaming pieces of sharp metal. And in the center of it: me: a fleshy, twitchy, hairy, oozing vagina.

I screwed up my face and started doing “lion breaths,” where you breath out aggressively and make a “ha” sound.

“Hold still please,” the voice said. I quit my lion breaths. Then they shoved the metal up inside me.

A scourge of blinding light shot across the sky, bright, like pain. I thought I heard, or really, felt, a residual thud. Next to me, the little metal scalpels on the tray twitched and shivered like live rabbits. Water jostled out of a full glass and spilled on the floor. In the corner of the room, the blinking blue browser read, “THIS IS IT. THE THING YOU THOUGHT IT WAS.” A cacophony of car sirens went off at once. Behind it all rolled the deeper sound: a hair-raising, ear-splitting, everything-ending roar.

Something had gone off trajectory. A foreign object had made impact.

I would have screamed at the top of my lungs, but I didn’t want to make a scene. “Just a bit further! We want to get it in position.” There was a collision event. Dust and debris spun out refractionally, knocking mountains off their ranges like a set of pool balls, ripping a hole in my soft, organic center.

“I’m bleeding,” I said numbly.

“That’s typical. You can expect a little bleeding and cramping. Like a period.” But I was sweating like a pig.

“Um. I changed my mind! Take it out.” I said to the voices, as politely as I could.

“We’ve only just placed it.” Insisted the people flying the meteorite. “As we said, some cramping and bleeding is expected—”

A couplet of seismic activity hit me like a 14-wheeler. Except instead of flying across the room, I arched my lower back and screeched like I was experiencing demonic possession.

The nurse’s head appeared above me, looking at me like I was a bug she wanted to squish.

“Really. This is standard procedure. I’m going to have to ask you to tone down the dramatics, you’ll unsettle the other patients in this facility.”

“Yeah, okay, so sorry!” I whispered. I’d started crying. “It’s just, I’m in, like, pain.” “You may just be nervous. Try not to focus so much on how you feel.”

The fireball was burrowing, ripping a hole in my mantle. At the corner workstation, the blinking blue browser window now just read “!!!!!!!!!!!!!” I saw that Doctor had entered the room. He conferred with a few nurses and then knelt down so I was face to face with his mask.

“Hi Ella, how’s it going?” He asked. Tears were streaming down my cheeks. I gave him two thumbs-up. He continued, “It seems your body is rejecting the I-U-D. What you’re exhibiting is a miscarriage-like process, in which the I-U-D is being forcibly expelled, along with other biomass. Now, it’s important you listen. Are you listening?”

I nodded weakly.

“Very good. Typically, we would administer an aggressive dosage of misoprostol to speed the process along. But due to recent laws in our state around abortion access, we’ve ceased carrying misoprostol in this clinic. So the process may last a few hours, or a few days.”

“But…it’s just a piece of metal. It’s not a baby.”

“Even so, we’re unable to administer an abortion-like procedure without incurring legal risk.” Doctor ____ walked around the medical bed and took a cursory look at my free-bleeding vag. The nurses were shoving gauze into me like they were trying to block a burst pipe.

“Your bleeding will eventually slow. We’re fine to discharge you.” “What?”

“There’s 11 other girls waiting for their turn. We can’t hold up just because you weren’t a good candidate. Is there someone who can pick you up?”

I nodded again. Aftershock waves were ramming uterine lining. I breathed in-out-in-out. “... and call us if the bleeding intensifies.”

Doctor ____ and the nurses filed out of the room. On the counter, they had left me a single, enormous menstrual pad in a yellow wrapper, like some sort of consolation prize.

I stood up from the exam table. Blood ran down my legs and pooled in my favorite pair of white socks. It felt like I was urinating. I tore open the pad, and stuck it into my thong undies, balancing the notebook-sized pad on my narrow strap of underwear fabric like a tightrope walker. And then I had to do the jeans, which made me cry even harder. I’d blown half a month’s paychecks to buy those Levis new at the mall. And now they had uterus blood all over them.

I shuffled shamefacedly across the clinic floor, ignoring all the other woman patients. My face felt inflamed, my midsection was continuing to detonate, and there was already a little patch of blood soaking through my jeans.

“All set?” The desk lady said with a wide smile.

“My—uh—parents wanted me to ask you what kind of charge we could expect, with insurance?” I sniffled. The lady swallowed her smile.

“Oh, I’m not able to tell you that.” “Why—hic—why not?”

“There’s a variety of factors that influence what your insurance will cover. The price is very variable.”

“What’s the range?”

“It’s very variable. It could be $0!” “It could be?”

“It could be.”

I waddled outside, too scared to turn around and see the snail trail of blood I was leaving on the linoleum. Outside, the prairie air had reached a sweltering 103 degrees. In the shimmering heat of the parking lot, a coyote was eyeing me and licking its chops.

My mom picked me up and I cried the whole way home. We had to stop at a Meijer so she could run in and buy me incontinence diapers, the kind that my grandad wears.

I spent the next two days on the family living room couch, like some kind of leper, watching old Barbie movies with my sisters while blood clots fell out of my vag into a series of bulky diapers. On the third day, my dad got the bill for the non-IUD, and it was decidedly not $0, so I stocked up on pads and high-tailed it over to Charlie’s.

Typically, I biked to his place, but no chance my vag could handle a bike seat. Instead, I walked along the road and watched some kids dive-bombing their four-wheelers off a mountain biking path. They stopped and gaped as I shuffled by in my diaper-stuffed sweatpants. I wondered when I stopped being one of the dust-faced kids, and started being a lady with lady problems. I felt like I was going to puke by the time I rang Charlie’s doorbell.

“Hey, you’re better!” Charlie’s hair was wet from showering. He wrapped me in a bear hug and I just about melted. He smelled so clean. This is probably crazy, but I think most of love is in smell.

Charlie had been appropriately sympathetic over the past few days, sending all the right heart emojis, and swearing to pursue legal justice against “those fuckers that maimed you.” He’d even biked over to drop off Crumbl cookies, which my sisters ate.

“C’mon in! Wanna watch something?”

The TV in Charlie’s basement isn’t hooked up to the internet and has the last VCR player on the planet, but at least the basement was twenty degrees cooler than everywhere else in town. Charlie put on Alien and we collapsed on his couch. I felt like I was a shipwreck survivor finally washing up on a familiar shore.

But about twenty minutes into the movie, Charlie reached his hand across my lap and ever so suggestively started caressing my leg. Circles around my inner knee. Tracing a line up the thigh of my sweatpants.

“Hey!” I chided half-heartedly. As if that was clear messaging.

You have to be firm with your no. Yes. Well no. Not too firm. Too firm and there might be trouble. That’s what they taught us about withholding consent at the abstinence training in Sunday school.

Charlie ignored my “hey,” and shifted his hips a little bit, so he was more turned towards me, and running a line up my hips, and then leaning in and kissing my neck.

The trouble with me is that I hate hurting Charlie’s feelings. He’s big and puppy-eyed and knocks things over accidentally and swears when he’s nervous and wishes he had more friends at school and I know all these things and so I know what it means to him if I say “Charlie I don’t like that” or “Charlie for the love of God, I’m passing blood clots into a diaper, stop groping me.”

He cupped my face, which meant it was time to start kissing. I tried to kiss him with a genuine sense of fondness, while simultaneously pretending to be deeply engrossed in the movie.

Our tongues touched each other. He guided my hand to his sweatpants. I accidentally groaned aloud in irritation. He mistook it for a moan, and kissed me harder. I wanted to sink into the couch cushions. I wished I was the couch.

Charlie started trying to undo the ties of my sweatpants just as the on-screen alien popped out of the chest cavity. I finally pulled away.

“Heyyy—I’m, um, still bleeding. We can’t. Go down there.” “Oh.” Charlie’s face went slack. “I didn’t know you were still—”

“Well I am, so maybe we shouldn’t”, I said gently, and, pleased with my own tact, nuzzled my head back onto his chest. We watched the crew cower in fear at the bloody little chest-bursting, penis-looking alien.

“Hey.” Charlie whispered in the dark, “Hey, would you still blow me, though? I’m like, super horny.”

My brain scrambled. I could fake a headache. I could fake a seizure. I could find a way to tell him, “I’m not orally servicing you in my blood diaper, you whacky asshole”, but like, nicely.

But I kept coming up blank, so I did it.

In, out, I did it. On my knees, shoulders slumped, in my incontinence diaper, I did it.

People had been shoving stuff in me all week. What’s one more?

Afterward, we went back to watching Alien, and Charlie had his arm around me, and I felt like I’d just been stamped out by a giant eraser—like all my me-essence had been rubbed out into “wet mouth/girlfriend.” I got this premonition I didn’t know myself yet, that the real Ella was somewhere in the future, shaking her head at the stupid things she used to put up with.

“I didn’t like that,” I decided to say, because it’s what she would have said.

“What’s that?” He mumbled sleepily. He tended to fall asleep after sex acts. I grabbed the remote and pushed the mute button.

“I wish I hadn’t blown you. I wish you hadn’t asked me.”

Charlie’s eyes darted to the basement door, looking for an escape route. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, I’m nursing my maimed vagina. Why would you ask me to blow you right now?”

“I dunno. I was horny.” Charlie grinned hopefully, trying to charm me out of it. I stared ahead, analyzing each ringlet of Ellen Ripley’s hair and his smile faltered, and died. “But you did it!”

“I did it, but I didn’t want to. Didn’t you know I wouldn’t want to? Or did you just not care?”

“What do you mean? You’re acting like I’m some bad guy for asking my girlfriend to blow me!”

“Not your girlfriend. Ella. ELLA!” I said, like he’d forgotten my name. “I know your name!”

“Ella, who’s miscarrying a medical device! CONTEXT CLUES!”

“OKAY FINE! Next time I’m horny, I won’t ask! Is that what you WANT?” “NO!”

For a second, I saw his eyes get watery and I felt sucker-punched with guilt. I was a bad person; a fickle, finger-pointing girlfriend. Shouldn’t I be on his team?

“How about,” Charlie said, coldly, “next time you don’t want to do something, don’t, huh? Don’t blame it on me.”

That struck me as fair, so I didn’t answer.

“You’ve been acting so nuts lately,” Charlie muttered, which was ironic. Brynn had emailed my mom that I was “showing significant progress” that very morning.

There’s this story about a researcher after the Tunguska impact in 1908. A week after the blast, this surveyor was cataloguing the ripped, charred earth. Then he got on his knees and cried because he saw ants returning to the soil; one by one. Life hadn’t gone on. It had started up again, totally new.

I didn’t want to go back on birth control, so I didn’t. Charlie didn’t want to use condoms again, so he didn’t. Neither of us wanted to have unprotected sex, so we didn’t. We broke up a few months later, slumped against a dishwasher in some frat house after I yelled at him for not knowing what a warming oven is. It didn’t have anything to do with sex.

But of course, it had everything to do with sex. Everything always does.

The last time I saw Charlie was in a Caribou Coffee. He looked different. When he saw me, he pulled his gray Adidas hoodie over his head and laced the drawstrings like a tight shoe. His voice kept catching. I thought maybe he had a cold, but then I realized that was just how he sounded when he didn’t love me anymore.

I said I hoped he had a good year at school. Charlie rolled his eyes a little bit. “What?” I asked.

“Nothing, Ella.”

“You obviously have something you want to get off your chest. Do it. We’re broken up.” He sighed, big and dramatic, the way a dog sighs when absolutely nothing is wrong. “It’s just that you could have at least tried.”

In prison, this queen becomes known for her stitching. One queen to another, she embroiders a cat, because a cat can look at a queen, can it not? It will beseech her so prettily for help: An escape and an army and freedom, sweet cousin, before the two of us are nothing but claws scratching at history.

She strands her silk through the eye of a fishbone, then pricks it back into the canvas. Up one and over, down one and done. A fly fits itself in through the shutters and alights on her hand.

Beyond, a dark blue lake stretches to darker blue depths. How many times has she thought of leaving this way? She could jump from a window and let the lake rise to catch her. But the water’s rough wooing might break her legs, her spine; gouge her face with a secret stone and ruin her beauty. How would she make her way then, without her beautiful face?

On the far side of the lake sits another castle, now in ruins. At the laird’s behest, men once rowed its stones over to fashion this one. Boat after boat lipped low on the water, to raise a keep just tall enough to put a queen in her place.

Only one castle can thrive at a time. How many queens?

Two, she thinks hard. Then one. Because she has a claim to both thrones.

… … …

In a sea dark with squids’ ink, a diver plunges wrist-deep into the sand. She collects the painstaking oysters, the ones who refuse to stop tonguing their troubles till the luster is so black and deep that all it reflects appears virginal white.

To search too long would mean to be crushed under the weight of the water, unable to swim back up to air. But not to search is unthinkable; it would mean disappointing several queens.

Down one and done.

… … …

A queen ought to have subjects, not hobbies. Her cat does not look like a cat so much as a tiger-striped table.

In happier days, she was given a tiger. The pretty thing lolled like a drunk in its cage unless somebody gave it a goat. Then up it sprang, batted and scraped, before it grew bored, then fed up: No more goat.

To be sure her intentions are clear, she stitches the letters into a blue banner:  A CATTE.

Another needle breaks, this time into her fingertip. A bloody rosebud blooms under the paws of A CATTE.

In a pique, the queen threads one last thin bone. Out of the stain, she will give her cat a bloody mouse to play with. A cat may also be a queen, may it not? Allegorically. This one shall wear a crown upon its ginger head to help make her case, that she needs her crown back.

If one queen is A CATTE, the other must be the mouse. Which will be which?

She plots. Cats are sly.

… … …

Elsewhere in the imagination rises a city where the streets are not paved with stone but running with water. In such a street, a courtier rows his boat to the house of his lady, and he whistles her to the window.

Let down your favors, my beauty, he sings. Let down some sweet treasure.

Does the lady in the story go to her window, unlatch her shutters, welcome the light and the lover with the smell of the sewer? For sewage is the fate of all water that puddles around humans, and what lies fly-clouded just under this window too. Even a queen has to live where she’s at.

Let them down and I will come, sings the suitor, very close. He has left the story and is afloat on the lake. Not even a queen can resist the fairy tale. A CATTE falls to the floor, and she goes to see what she might.

The window’s recess has been her chapel, and now it has answered her prayers. For there, in the rippling blue water, a humbler boat awaits. It is poled by a man plain dressed and slender, dark, arrogant; one who may be floating among shite but is not part of it. Her rescuer. Kidnapper? Future. Darling.

He leans against the long pole propped in the hull and laughs up at her, heedless of the flies that alight on his flesh. His blue eyes are liquid and deep under the nacre of flies; his voice feels mellow and soft.

Let down your hair, my queen, he croons, as if he continues a song that everyone knows. Then let me in.

Would you choose the serenade or the CATTE?

She grips the window’s wood frame and leans out as far as she dares. The lake reflects her in wavelets, a woman in black whose white collar and veil have gone tatty. But the jet rosary gleams. The flies crawl over her cheeks and inside her gown with their tiny, ticklesome feet, till she thinks she will scream.

If she wants this lover, she has to make charm of the horror. She shall be a question, a danger, a conquest. (Let him think so.)

I am a thrice-married woman, she calls. I have twice given death birth.

He calls back, Then may the greatest be behind. Let me in, love!

It pleases her to hear the word said in such a way as to make her believe it.  (Love: that which closes a letter. Every letter, in every casket that arrives sans an army. Love.)

She unpins the veil from her rusty red hair.

… … …

In faraway years, in a faraway land, a young girl took scarcely a stitch. With hair flowing loose, chime through chime she danced, as she will soon dance again; she was the subject of poetry, and learned Latin, and prayed. She was a beauty folded inside a cockleshell name, with four pretty maids to share it. They passed Mary around the way three Greeks once divided an eye and a tooth. Rings on their fingers, bells on their toes, the name rang so often, she almost forgot it was tinkling for her. In this way, she was kept safe.

Her mother, also a Mary, gone seven years now, was the one who first said it: A true witch can never be caught. Except by the death that catches us all.

Mary Mary Mary Mary Mary … A song for summer. It is icumen in.

… … …

This past year, her braids have grown ropy and tangled, like the snakes of Medusa. When she flings their coils out the window, they will arrow to the ground, or almost. And then the man will leap from his boat, and he will grasp the hair and use it to drag himself to her window. The pain of the pull will be exquisite, like childbirth. Like bearing twin miscarriages.

Such is her vision, her plot to this point.

And so it happens, perfect to plan, every tug and scrape as her future approaches. Except that the thin boatman is heavier than he looks; the weight of him rips her hair from its roots. Her neck will surely snap; she will tumble down into the lake.

But she has been inside pain before, and she knows all its secrets. She breathes. Deep. She holds tight to the window frame and surrenders while she is still standing.

Every queen favors a paradox, and this one is hers: If you let the pain into yourself, it gets bored with the game and grants you release. This is the martyr’s trick, the Catholic’s delight; because the pleasure of pain is mere legend, but the absence of pain is sheer joy.

You have enchanted me, sings her suitor, climbing. I cannot resist you.

Good. She grinds that one word between her teeth. Good, because a true witch will never be caught by another.

… … …

This secret paradox is also hers: When a man cedes her his power, she turns helpless before him. The Queen of Hearts faces away from her Knave, only to spin slick on her back and try catching his eye.

The cards signal to be cautious. And the scry-stone, and the star maps, and the vial of liquid mercury that her advisor once poured into a bowl, to hint at the future as a poisonous reflection quivering under her breath.

… … …

On her first wedding night, her mother-in-law draped her in black pearls, a rope of the same that the old serpent brought from her own land as a dowry. In a bed wrapped in white linen, that girl slid her tongue against her young husband’s and he recoiled. By morning, nothing had stained the marital sheets, nor would it ever—the boy was as débile as if she’d been his mother herself. And then he died, of a poison that wicked into his ear and awoke him to agony.

Not her doing. But the pearls, at least, were hers to keep.

They’ve carried the chill of her grave ever since. Sent back to this cold land, where everything that once made her dazzle has remade her dark: She is too pretty, her clothes are too fine, she is a Catholic, her pearls are black. She took a second husband on impulse and then conspired to kill him while her belly filled with his child. Or so the lairds charged when they took her Marys (those blooming groundlings) and her crown and her treasures and her newlywed third, then locked her away.

She admits nothing. Except this: A true witch should never be caught.

Only by an idea.

… … …

They lie in the mare’s nest of her bed. Her hair is shedding in clumps; beauty, fleeting.

There is a word, she hints, and she traces the letters over his chest. A word in France, where I grew. It is spelled C-H-A-T-T-E.

I know that word, the boy says. He tears the sheet from her body with a growl, and the two of them laugh. He kisses and bites his way down the length of her, a trail of pink plague roses.

Ah (he says), here we are, little chatte. I am pleased to be meeting you. He speaks directly into the place. Is there something you would like? Oh yes, yes, you want me to pet you. You need to be petted, chatonne.

This … visitor, let us call him … is really just a lad, like her first husband or the youth that her infant son may become. He would do anything for her. He is doing it now. And yes—yes—he finds the one pearl she still carries with her.

… … …

Two other queens have put bids on the black pearls—out of affection, they say, for the captive. The winner will wear her esteem round the neck. Which neck will so be laced? Not that of the mouse.

Up, down, and over: the motion of a dead-header’s ax. Coming to one of these women someday.

… … …

After, he thinks it’s funny to pluck the cushion from under her body, then toss it out the window to a splash. He rests his head on her bosom and laughs at her dismay. It was, of course, A CATTE.

You will not be needing it, he says. Or needling.

A week’s very hard work, she protests. But she does not mind that her time here is floating off on the foul lake. Let that emissary swim to her cousin; let the news arrive soaked in the excreta of every last soul in this castle. By the time A CATTE reaches A QUEENE, this queen and her new love will be gone.

… … …

Alone, and with hope, she stitches A PHENIX. A golden bird with a fire and a halo, worked in her own fallen hair. A bird can vanquish a cat, if the bird be a goddess. A bird can fly through a fire and come out much stronger; a cat will take one quick look and run.

Lest anyone miss her message, she adds a tangle of M’s like the bars of a broken cage … MMMM and an R. Regina. Or are they W’s? V’s?

Virescit Vulnere Virtus, her mother’s motto. A wound makes the courage grow stronger. To keep a single rose sweet, prune the bush.

Upside-down and sideways, she remains Queen of Hearts.

… … …

Down at the tower’s foundation, the walls spread themselves wide. She orders wine and invites her jailors to drink in the pillared great hall.

These days, a queen must also, always, be a witch.

It is May Day; Sumer is icumen in. She sings the song while lairds and soldiers get themselves drunk, while she picks up her skirts and dances like the whore some say she is, while the noisome lake lap-laps its foul tongue at the stalk of the castle.

These men she hates. They were her third husband’s friends, until they weren’t. Then were, then weren’t again. They sent him to prison and let him escape; then they let him be caught and sentenced. He is now chained to a pillar against which he dashes his head all day long.

She knows a murder when she sees one.

Sumer is icumen in, Sumer is icumen.

And with it the flies. Flies everywhere if the flesh stops for a second. They cling to her black dress; they hover like fate.

So she whirls. She sheds those maddening flies till the black overdress is gone and the red petticoat flares, and the red sleeves, and the bodice with its PHENIX badge. Then she claps her hands and hops. Whirls and claps and hops: up, down, over. She dances like women of the South and the East and the as yet unseen West. She fascinates; she smiles. She pours some more wine for the men.

Flies hang thick in the air, drop into the lap like a fruit. They roam the merry lairds’ brows, their eyes, their flies. They are all (flies and men) dozy from spices and drink. She pulls a silk square from her bosom, wisps it over the old ruddy noses to make sure, then drops it into the oldest one’s lap. Right over his—why, right over his key ring. But it is her lover who fishes them out of that lap. Her Abbot of Unreason, her keeper of keys, her prison master’s son, her partner.

Could anyone expect this plot to end without a wedding? This time, as she lays it, entirely for love.

Sumer is icumen in, but only one boat is going out. A dozen more have been pegged to the mucky strip of shoreline, with poles thrust through their bows like fish strung up for a cat’s dinner. So she and her youth lock the doors, the gates, the latches, the padlocks; they step over the larvae twisting in shallows, to climb into their boat and pole their way from this castle …

… toward the other castle. That is, they pole from the one that stands to the one that was destroyed in order to heighten her prison. Other words, the first castle’s corpse.

The air swirls with pollen; the water makes music. The flies grow much thinner, the farther they go.

This time it is he who says, A true witch cannot be caught.

Nor can a rightful queen, dearest love.

We will win you a crown.

Aye, that we will.

She can reward him later. When the crown and the pearls are her own once again, she will put them on—nothing else—and have him come to her. Run those gleaming drops along flesh that still bears the stripes of her teeth … Wrap them around his—yes, around his pole. He will like that.

The flies gather on rosebuds, for Sumer is icumen in. And on the shore, amid the ruins, a brace of Marys flit and hop, for Sumer is icumen in. They await her with a crown made of strawflowers. They beckon with promises. With love. They are laughing and singing and there.

She fluffs the red skirts and points her long nose into the wind. She always knew the people wanted her too.

Mary, my lady, the boy grunts, struggling to move, are you taking on weight as you’re freed?

But it is not her doing. Or it is, but it also isn’t, like the rest of her life. For when he hauls his pole up, what do you suppose she spies on its tip?

A CATTE.

Sodden, swollen, her tapestry drags the boat down. With its evil cat grin and its golden cat crown. With the mouse a-wriggle under its paws, because her bloodstain is now blooming leeches. The wet black tongues of them uncurl in the air.

What is this? she cries. Throw it right away!

But it is hers. When he tries to shake it off, it comes flying toward her.

And it is not-hers—for she has always belonged to A CATTE, not the other way around. The foul wet threads are spreading, icumen in with needle-sharp claws.

After all, she is not on her way to a wedding. The ruins are not dancing with friends; the boy is not setting her free. Her lairds and judges, ces chats fourrés, have lined up on shore with her cousin’s army, pikes pointed toward her. They are solemn and broad and unimpressed, for her own springtime is gone and summer brings nothing but flies. There at the shore, it is icumen in. It has icumen for her as A CATTE, which let her escape to prove that she wanted to do it. Now it sets its clawed paw back down on her lap.

Her lover, her traitor, poles silently forward. The image in the blue wavelets shatters, and wind rattles the crown, because the thing is all needles. The new Marys extend it to arm’s length, dripping red from pricked fingers.

This Mary, quite contrary to herself, bows her head. You have created the end to all my troubles, she says into the place where A CATTE has spread heavy and wet. The leeches stretch blindly, groping for new blood. Already their ends are shiny with flies.

Foolish witch, to shape with her own hands that which has trapped her! To be both oyster and pearl, the means and the prize.

… … …

A week’s ride to the south, a different queen listens to a long lay on the lute. A very young man is playing it to her; enough said about that. Except that his voice is warm and it jellies her marrow; his eyes are liquid and if her heart weren’t so hollow, she might drown in them.

Let down your sweetness, my lady, he sings. Lady, be gentle, and show me your charms.

She decides she will show him. She lifts off her wig to reveal hair shorn short over a balding pate. She drags a fresh towel over her face and the paint scrapes away, to pimples and scabbings beneath. Quickly covered by flies, which explore every raw place.

Show me your graces, My Grace, pleads the lute. Let me but look on your beauty.

What makes you believe, she replies, that I owe you a thing?

Her lips, black. Her soul, blacker. And proud of it. Once the dark pearls are hers, she will fashion new teeth to reflect nothing but light. For now, she gums a ragged smile that is also a roar and a roundelay, glorianously loud.

She holds out a hand for the young man to grasp. Do you think he will take it?

She pulls music inside her as sourire swallows souris. Even an old witch has to muse with her CHATTE.

Up, down, and over.

PROLOGUE

The stars meet in the sky one night over fair Verona, where we lay our scene.

One star muses, as stars are wont to do, “Why can’t humans get this love thing right? We’re trying to help them, actually.”

The other star says, “They think we’re conspiring against them. I guess it was all the bards—not our best PR moment, to let that one get away from us.”

The first star says, “We definitely need better PR. A celebrity—a Lord Byron, a Taylor Swift. They have no idea how much we’re trying.”

The second star says. “Really, it’s a miracle that any two people ever get together.”

“Maybe we should create an app,” the first star says.

“Absolutely not,” the second star says. “Then they would really mistrust us. Besides, Romeo already has one. That’s how he met Rosaline.”

When stars roll their eyes, they look like spiral galaxies.

ACT I: MARRIAGE ADVICE FROM FRIAR LAWRENCE

Though he has never been married, Friar Lawrence gives marital advice to the secretly united pair of Romeo and Juliet, the so-called star-crossed lovers who met at a party Romeo crashed. It will come down to the friar to make sense of love, which Romeo once dismissed as a “smoke made from a fume of sighs”—that was Rosaline—but now, as he gazes at his Juliet, he calls her his dawn and troths that she teaches the torches to burn bright.

Where are they getting all this nonsense, Friar Lawrence wonders, but he catches a glimpse of their cellphones. By my head, Shakespeare in Your Pocket app, teen edition. How did he not see that one coming, he thinks as Romeo’s phone missiles off an overheated “fire sparkling,” then a “sea nourished” followed by a “madness most discreet” even though Juliet is sitting right next to him tenderly tapping his knee and he could just whisper it in her ear. From the friar’s own memory and not an app, he recalls a line from Shakespeare’s star-crossed chorus, “But passion lends them power, time means, to meet,” and silently curses the future inventors of SMS messaging.

Madness this, that tonight’s furtive meeting has fallen to him, but that’s what it actually says here on his priestly counseling scroll, that it is his duty to give the lovers a plan for their lives. Little does he know, this moment will make him the father of premarital counseling. Nay, grandfather. That sounds better. Nay, love guru. Why not? Even better. Friar Lawrence begins to hope for such glory, though he hasn’t names for the modality he’s about to invent.

“We need your succor, dear Friar,” Juliet says. “We’re in a bit of a spot. I’m so worried, that I wonder if, to be free to be together, we’ll have to fake our own deaths.”

When Juliet implores him with her earnest eyes, asking him to make this right, it occurs to him he can fix the long-standing feud between the Montagues and the Capulets. It delights him that the answer may be the utterly captivating idea that has just now come into his field of vision, as a devout and celibate man of the cloth: true, passionate and authentic love that knows no bounds.

In an inspired moment, to newly wed Romeo, Friar Lawrence’s advice is to use “I” statements early and often. He instructs the doe-eyed pair that “I” statements will help you communicate your concerns, feelings and needs without blaming others or sounding threatening. “‘Thou’ statements come across as accusatory,” he explains. “When you make absolutist ‘thou’ statements, they carry a lot of weight because, you know, patriarchy.”

Here, he catches Romeo’s confusion. He pauses to explain the patriarchy to young Romeo. For a moment he puzzles about how to explain it’s the matrix we’re all living in, have been for centuries. He must get it down to practicalities Romeo can understand. For another brief, private moment of reflection, he considers how patriarchy has benefited him, given that he does not have to compete with women to be a leader of the flock. They are too pure of heart—they are spiritual naturals, truth be troth—too intent on beatific service. By God, to a one, they are Mary-like. Now that is some fierce competition.

At last, the friar finds his way in.“You can’t see it, my dear Romeo, because as much as you object to the order of things when it comes to the feuds of older men, you are under its sway.” Here, he explains that as much as Romeo finds Juliet sparkling with vitality—after all, she is the sun—and certainly a fully expressed autonomous woman, societal structures are intent on keeping her voiceless. “So that’s what patriarchy is. It’s not about the swords. Or the horses.”

To Romeo’s furrowed brow, he adds, in what he considers a brilliant bolt of insight, “Patriarchy is where Juliet’s father tells her she must marry Count Paris.”

Friar Lawrence thinks with glorious satisfaction, that landed.

The “I” statements will help you get your point across without shutting Juliet’s mind to you, he soliloquizes, and goes on to sequel his soliloquy. “All you need to say is, ‘This is how it looks from my side of things.’”

Friar Lawrence adjusts his burlap robe as he turns to Juliet. “Only remember this one line: ‘You may be right about that, honey.’ Say it early and often. This gives him room to feel right and consider if he is wrong. He’ll feel supported. And if there is something for him to work out, he’ll work it out for himself. Repeat after me, ‘You may be right about that, honey.’”

Juliet whispers the words, but her eyes remain on the Friar with a look that speaks that she is obedient but not yet trusting.

“No, no, no, you must look at him, look him in the eye, and say it,” the Friar says. “Say it until it feels natural, ‘You may be right about that, honey.’”

Clasping Romeo’s hand, Juliet whispers, “You may be right about that, honey.”

These words prove to be a chilling foreboding, as the fate ahead for the star-crossed lovers includes a moment when Romeo is wrong, wrong, wrong, very wrong. Juliet will not be dead—she will be sleeping. Too stubborn and too clever to die is our Juliet, wherefore does it not occur to our Romeo that she would have a better plan than that?

Yet this moment fleets. The two young lovers are eager for Friar Lawrence to conclude his love lessons for the day so they may return to the bedchamber. The balcony bit will prove to be an important component of their fantasy foreplay, possibly for years to come.

So will the tomcatting. So besotted is Romeo that as he came to Juliet, he sang to the empty streets a serenade. He will keep singing, long after it is sensible, should he live into middle age. This yearning consumes him. The stars already know this about him. He does not. Moments ago, he was in love with Rosaline. Just like that, he’s in love with Juliet and he marries her in secret. He is certain Juliet is his soul mate. He knows because—he is certain of this—he came up with the “lips, two blushing pilgrims” line on his own, without the Shakespeare in Your Pocket app. (Though he had to just roll with it when Juliet dropped the “holy palmers’ kiss” line …all he could hear was “kiss.”) Only true love could produce this kind of eloquence. That is how he knows Juliet is The One. A soul mate, someone who improves your vocabulary.

As the Friar drones on, Romeo is reliving the balcony bit and hoping to repeat it early and often. Before leaving the Montague mansion that fateful evening, Romeo had hastily collected love sonnets from the Shakespeare in Your Pocket app. By the tender light of dusk, he inked them out with a fountain pen and tucked ink-stained scrolls in his pockets. Our lovestruck Romeo had stored up all his better words for Juliet—he had received a notification from The Daily Scroll that words were her love language—but when he arrived beneath her balcony all he could manage was a rumbling tiger growl of sorts, “You and me, babe, how ‘bout it?”

For a heart-stopping moment, he allowed that this could be the biggest technological failure of the 14th century, right up there with lances and longbows. He watched the candlelight glimmer on the curtains. At last, he saw Juliet’s shadow move in the creamy light and then with her lift of her bosom (that surely was in the sonnet section of the app, something about that bosom-lifting, how they make an art of it), the curtains part and she’s standing above him, breathless. “Hey, Romeo, you nearly gave me a heart attack!”

In that instant, he learns girls who are flirting with you say the opposite of what they mean. Heart attack = bad. Romeo here = good.

“Enough.” Friar Lawrence stands to his feet, yanking Romeo’s thoughts back to this dank stone chamber. “We’ll resume in the morn.” He escorts the two young lovers to the door.

ACT II: THAT MAKES PERFECT SENSE

“I don’t see why Romeo can’t just renounce his father.” Juliet leads with this in their second session. “Deny him, refuse his name. I’ll do the same. I won’t be a Capulet.”

Has he shuddered? Friar Lawrence checks himself. Juliet is right, of course. But this must be done with a gentle hand, lest it have violent ends.

Juliet won’t relent. “Your parents give you a name. But that is not your name.” She stands and turns to Romeo, and she dances through the line so naturally Friar Lawrence isn’t sure that all the future Shakespeare scholars who will bluster that the true author was Sir Francis Bacon … Edward de Vere … Christopher Marlowe … William Stanley … had surely overlooked the literary prowess of an authentically expressed teenage girl in love. “‘Thou art thyself, though not a Montague/What’s Montague? It is nor hand, nor foot/Nor arm, nor face/O, be some other name. Belonging to a man/What’s in a name? That which we call a rose/By any other word would smell as sweet.”

Juliet is so utterly poetic that this frees Friar Lawrence to mastermind like a spy. He veritably tingles at the thought that there will be potions and catacombs and secret messengers. He clears his throat. “I have something for you. It’s the ‘that makes perfect sense’ response. Use it early and often.”

Oh, wait—they are rolling their eyes. He must remember to not get carried away with his own bardic wit. 

Another “early and often”? Juliet sinks to her seat next to Romeo. If we’re saying it all early—and often—are we not taking up time and space that could be devoted to something more fruitful than relationship maintenance? She stills her thoughts. Perhaps if her family and his family had spent a little more time on the front end with relationship maintenance, they wouldn’t be here today, talking with Friar Lawrence about a secret marriage and a plot to fake their own deaths.

Juliet squeezes Romeo’s hand, which rests on his muscular blue-tighted thigh, and adds a sensual stroke with firm pressure in the flat of her thumb, moving up his leg. She feels Romeo respond. We’ll have to sit through this, I suppose, she has just said to him, but there is something to look forward to later.

Uncannily, Friar Lawrence continued on, believing the two young lovers must need more explanation. “Remember, with the ‘perfect sense response,’ you do not need to feel the same depth of despair the other is feeling, to think in terms of dire acts of solidarity and such. You only need to say, ‘Given what you have been going through and the state of the world today, I can see why that makes perfect sense.’”

(Later, before Juliet stabs herself and falls upon the lifeless body of her lover as he turns cold and stiff with self-induced poison, she will try to get these words out, but they will come out in the wrong order, a “Perfect!” that drips with sarcasm, a wail that, “This fucking makes no sense!” Then she will die with him.)

Right, Romeo thinks, listening to Friar Lawrence as the bells for vespers ring deep within the stone walls, right. The state of the world is pretty fucked, a thought the young man immediately regrets, turning rose red as he flushes. Juliet’s eyes flutter at this, mistaking Romeo’s discomfort for desire.

A poor word choice, Romeo thinks, to call the world fucked. That would never pass muster with Friar Lawrence—it’s not a holy word choice, though accurate. Juliet, if she knew he’d entertained this thought, would likely find him pretty gloomy and not very poetic. (Romeo doesn’t yet know that all poets are alluring, dark and moody. Byron hasn’t happened yet. There isn’t an app for that.) Instead, Romeo corrects, the state of the cosmos is star-crossed, and this causes him to ponder why the stars cannot get their act together. Particularly if Friar Lawrence’s God put them there. Shouldn’t this work out better than that?

Still, the burlap-robed man talks. He talks and talks and talks. For how long has he been talking? Wherefore is he talking? All Romeo can think of right in this eternal moment is Juliet’s velvet skin and luminous eyes. Yet here is this man, who has never been married himself going on. Now he has arrived at talking about St. Francis. This could be a while.

“Seek first to understand, then to be understood,” Friar Lawrence is saying. “Be open, be curious about each other.”

Romeo notices Juliet’s face is filled with angelic light, and her eyes gleam. She has lifted her chin and nodded to Friar Lawrence, when all he wants to do is lose himself in the folds of her gown that was the color of a field of Tuscan sunflowers where he wanted to take her now.

Why, she was encouraging Friar Lawrence! She was taking every word in. She was betrothing herself to understanding him—Romeo!—when he barely understood himself. Who is this radiant creature who fixes her eyes on the fairest stars in heaven, who would take me, as imperfect and beastly as I am. But soft, this light in the east window. Juliet was now his sun. In this instant, he knew he didn’t want the light of the next breaking dawn or the next—he wanted to cherish all the dawns with her.

“Yet I should kill thee with much cherishing,” he imagines she will whisper in his ear later, and he wants it to be later now. These will be the words that imprint themselves in his mind, words that will pain him to the point of poison later.

“So, what, then, is your plan, Friar Lawrence?” Romeo blurts out.

ACT III: SHALL WE KILL OURSELVES NOW?

Friar Lawrence has difficulty concealing his impatience with the young lovers. Juliet catches that. With a sigh, he sinks into an explanation of a complex concept he is trying to work out for the TEDx Talk he now has been invited to in Venice, learning of this news by an overnight messenger who got to Verona despite the plague lockdown. The friar resigns himself to thinking of this conversation as a bestowal of great fortune, just the kind of luck he deserves. At last, he will stand on the legendary red dot in Piazza San Marco. He launches in.

They are going to be here for another hour, at least. Romeo and Juliet bestow upon one another their gaze. They have been wed a mere forty-eight hours but they are already accustomed to the telegraphing of messages that can only come from long hours of intimate touch. Juliet knows Romeo is passionately finding this a waste of time. Romeo knows Juliet would suffer no fools, and this thought turns him on; besides, all he can think about is when she said, “Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer,” and all he wants is to undress her. At this juncture, Friar Lawrence seems to be hectoring them about understanding that love doesn’t mean being able to read each other’s minds. Yet, Romeo thinks, we have been so deeply intimate. He has discovered there is so much more to the feminine than he ever knew. He is consumed with the intricate folds of Juliet and all of her stars. The Friar cannot know these pleasures. So why is he here, talking to them now?

At the same instant, the two young lovers swivel to each other, eyes ablaze. Their celestial orbs transmit an unmistakable message, each to the other. “Shall we just kill ourselves now?”

ACT IV: TROUBLE COMES TO THE YOUNG LOVERS

Too bad for Romeo—by his head, he cannot explain how he did not see this coming—but after killing the killer of Mercutio, he is in a spot of trouble. He must escape to Mantua. “We need a plan,” he texts to Juliet, hoping it reaches her in time. Because of the plague lockdown, all the cellphone towers are about to shut down.

Maybe he can get a message to Juliet through the Shakespeare in Love app, but then he remembers, Juliet was never on that. He met her the natural way. The algorithm would have disallowed them to meet, given that the Montagues and the Capulets were at odds with one another. The algorithm would have said this was folly, stop now. The algorithm does not really believe in love, no matter that it troths such things. Romeo starts to nurse a worry that he is a pawn in the game of a marketing algorithm targeting his age group, which is so ripe for the on-ramp of consumerism. And what else is there to be consumed by, but love?

ACT IV: THE ACID TRIP OF LIFE

On some level, Juliet understands that the teen years are the acid trip of life. She is fully feeling everything now. That’s what Romeo has done to her. She is now open to every point of the compass.

What all the adults are worried about is that she will make a Montague-Capulet baby, and that will meld the feuding lines together forever, but she is making more than that. She’s making all new questions. Why do we not choose our own names, if we are the ones to bear them? Why do I not decide whom I will marry and when? Why cannot I wield a sword? Have a horse, even. She is pregnant with it all.

For these reasons, she knows she must make a careful choice. This means their plan to avert her marriage to Count Paris and now, to get Romeo swiftly to safety, given his murder of Tybalt, must be airtight. Together with Friar Lawrence, she can see all the off-ramps where this plan could fail.

“We need to build in redundancy,” she tells him. “What if Romeo thinks I’m dead?”

Friar Lawrence is in a hurry to get to Venice to rehearse his TED talk today. This is the first day they will be doing rehearsals on the red dot in Piazza San Marco, and he wants to make an impression. If he does, he can earn the sweetest spot in the lineup, and with that, perhaps the illuminated manuscript deal he has long coveted.

Yet this young woman and her logic offer him another dazzling opportunity. Should he manage to reconcile the seemingly irreconcilable—a centuries-old feud between the Montagues and the Capulets that is legendary—that would seal his brand, if you will, as the Dr. Phil of couples counseling, though no one of course has yet heard of Dr. Phil or Oprah, for that matter. Somehow Friar Lawrence can see it coming, and if he can be first, his name will be inscribed on this forever.

“Right,” Friar Lawrence says.

That resistance again, Juliet thinks. Are all the patriarchs like this? Believing they have a thousand years of right-thinking on their side when, truth be troth, they haven’t seen any of this with fresh eyes for decades. No wonder her father was insisting she marry Count Paris. So misguided. But so a product of his generation. When was the last time any of these people were in love?

It is said that “love is a smoke made with a fume of sighs,” (and Juliet notes here that at last, Romeo gets proper attribution and not the Bard—after all, Romeo spoke it!). But that sounds so star-crossed, a little messed up. If it were true, what Romeo and his new Bard App were saying about her, she “doth teach the torches to burn bright,” then she is the light yonder to the east. She is to be the sun. If this plan is to be right, she will need to insist as the sun does.

Friar Lawrence must read determination on her countenance, because the next thing he says is, “It is agreed that we need to get a message to him. I will send Friar John to him. That will be assured.”

“By scroll?” she asks. “On foot?”

Maybe a text, she is thinking. Does the Friar not text? What if Romeo has his own messenger, whom she knows to be more fleet? What if Balthasar arrives first and has it all wrong? Is this where she must say, “You may be right about that, Friar”? She is unwilling to put her faith in the friar without his answering her scroll of questions. He may, uncannily, know the intricate dynamics of the male-female conundrum, celibate though he is. But he may not know the pitfalls of modern Veronan communication technology in the plague era. Juliet ponders that she may not have a signal in the catacombs. Plus, she’ll be losing consciousness.

“So,” Friar Lawrence runs through it again. “You pretend to die. You don’t have to marry Paris. Romeo gets word that you are in the catacombs and you are very much alive. He arrives. You escape. You live happily ever after in Venice.”

“Ever so right,” Juliet says. “I die, but I don’t. I live. Romeo lives. We live somewhere else.”

“That’s right,” Friar Lawrence says. “My messenger will reach Romeo. He will know the plan.”

“Shall I trust you with my heart?” Juliet says, needing the vow.

“As a man of God, I see what the stars say,” the friar assures her.

“You’ll pardon me, Friar, but it’s hard to take that in,” Juliet says. “That sounds so patriarchal. Like because you are a man you know exactly how events will go. But men like you are not ordained to know—they are ordained to follow.”

“Juliet, you’re a wild one,” Friar Lawrence says, not with annoyance but with a hint of delight. He is reminded of a woman he once knew in Venice, which he will always insist was before he took his vows. The two young lovers have asked how he knows what he knows. He knows. “Juliet,” he says, “I believe in your love.”

ACT V: AS JULIET IS LOSING CONSCIOUSNESS

As the sleeping potion overcomes her, Juliet begins to think this might be real. She may die here, loving Romeo with all her heart, and he may come to her and find her gone. She may die here, loving Romeo with all her heart, and he may not make it to her. Which thought is worse? No thought changes that she has loved. And that is the thought she cherishes. It is a privilege to have loved this much. Does not everyone open their heart this way?

EPILOGUE

One week after the tragic events, Friar Lawrence does make it over to Venice, not for the TED talk rehearsals, but for a secret rendezvous. Over cakes and ale, he tells Portia the story of the star-crossed lovers. “The first duty of love is listening, I say,” he offers. “Unconditional positive regard. I think I’m onto something.”

Portia tugs away his burlap robe, pulls him down next to her on the linen sheets. She takes him into her arms and says, “You may be right about that, honey.”

I do not like geese.

They remind me of the day my brother died.

I suppose I should be grateful to them given the circumstances, but I am not, I am not.

There are mysteries the solutions to which are more awful than the suspense of ignorance.

The day my brother died there were so many leaves in the pool, brown ones mostly, but some red and yellow ones too.

It was on account of the leaves in the pool that I did not see my brother cross the road in front of the house.

It is a very busy road, lots of delivery trucks coming to and fro.

The house is not far from the doll factory.

For my eighth birthday, my parents took me to the doll factory for a tour.

That was twenty years ago, nearly.

It can take quite a long time to make sense of things, especially in a place like this.

We got to see the molds and the melted-down materials churning in giant vats.

I did not like the doll factory, seeing all those arms and legs on conveyor belts yet to be attached to bodies.

There were caution signs everywhere warning about getting sucked into the machines.

My brother did not get hit by a truck on the road like one might expect.

In fact, we do not know the exact day my brother died, though we have a pretty good idea, coroners having almost perfected their science.

Associating geese with the day my brother died might be misguided, it turns out.

The doctor tells me a big part of my recovery is distinguishing between the lies and the truths I’ve told myself for years and years.

Given the number and breadth of things we know these days, it is almost comforting when something is inexplicable.

I was on my belly scooping leaves out of the pool when my brother crossed the road.

The trucks headed towards the doll factory are full of unmolded plastics and rubber. The trucks headed away from the doll factory are full of dolls, obviously.

There are smokestacks over the doll factory, constantly belching out smoke.

My mother did not think an eight-year-old would associate the smoke with the dolls we saw in production, but I did, I did.

There’s a room at the doll factory piled high with dolls our guide told us didn’t pass the test.

The property values around here are very low on account of the doll factory. This is how my father, a postman, and my mother, a middle school band teacher, can afford a house with a pool.

The leaves here die in August, when it is still warm. It is the smoke from the doll factory that brings fall early.

At least that’s what folks around here say.

The property values around here are low, as I’ve mentioned. My point being our neighbors aren’t exactly expert scientists.

My parents were at a township meeting protesting the sign a local psychic put up in her yard advertising her profession.

My brother wouldn’t go in the pool if there were leaves in it.

He never was able to talk. We don’t know why. For years, the doctors were full of conjecture and different types of therapy. For a while he screamed all the time as if in frustration about being unable to express himself, but he ruined his vocal cords doing that. They just gave up on him.

You can be as weird as you want as long as you keep it to yourself, is my parents’ philosophy.

Actually, being a government employee, my father gets paid pretty well. My parents might’ve been able to afford a house with a pool in a nicer neighborhood if it wasn’t for all my brother’s therapy.

My parents didn’t like the phase I was in at the time—black lipstick and eye shadow. My mother had a lot to say about corrupting influences.

The geese congregate nearby at the reservoir. So many of them.

The reservoir supplies the doll factory with water to cool down its ever-working machines.

The township put a walking path around the reservoir, but no one walks on it because it’s always covered in goose shit.

The water itself is stagnant and greasy with feathers.

The noises he made you couldn’t hear anymore unless you were right up next to him. He’d screamed his already meaningless voice into oblivion.

After the doll factory tour on my eighth birthday, I threw all my dolls in the trash. I told my mother they weren’t real. She said, Well of course they aren’t, but that’s no reason to throw them away.

I think with my lipstick and eyeshadow my parents were secretly pleased to have something to talk about that wasn’t my brother.

They were constantly thinking what they could’ve done differently that would’ve made my brother normal, you could see that.

My brother was always doing things he couldn’t reverse. Climbing a tree. Climbing the roof.

I’ll bet he crossed that road no problem and then couldn’t figure out how to get back because the trucks were so many.

My mother took all my dolls out of the trash and put them in the attic, in case I ever changed my mind.

My father used to date the lady who turned out to be a psychic back when they were in high school.

My mother told me never to let him out of my sight.

The sign welcoming people to our town mentions the doll factory. That’s our claim to fame around here.

Folks probably think it’s a happy-go-lucky place, the doll factory. The doll factory town.

Sometimes you get an idea in your head, and it doesn’t leave you despite all the evidence.

It is not something one thinks of, a room full of dolls that haven’t passed the test.

My parents are the only people on the street that don’t work at the doll factory. They’re the lucky ones according to our neighbors. The big shots. The uppity-uppities.

I’ll bet at least one person thought we had it coming when my brother fell in that hole.

More precisely, when we found out he fell in that hole. Which wasn’t for three days.

Two of which it rained so hard the reservoir flooded.

The hole was part of an underground system designed to accommodate flooding when the reservoir got too high.

It was supposed to have a metal grate over it, but some kids from my high school pried it off one night with a crowbar from one of their dads’ garages when they went exploring and didn’t put it back.

The kids my mother thought I hung out with who convinced me to wear black lipstick and eyeshadow.

For my sixteenth birthday, my mother gave me a trip to the salon. When I told her I wouldn’t feel like myself, she said, You might not feel better, honey, but at least you’ll be presentable.

If anyone could’ve explained why fall comes early here, it was my brother. But as I’ve said, he couldn’t talk.

He had a real brain on him. Was always building things, fixing things.

He never wanted to throw anything away.

My father says the lady who’s the psychic never showed any signs of what was to come back when he knew her.

But he had to go to the township meeting to show my mother he was loyal.

The doctor says associations sometimes help his patients make distinctions between the things that are real and the things that they’ve told themselves.

Sometimes I dream there is smoke issuing from this place, the place where they are making me presentable.

I didn’t like the attic already, too dark and closed in, but now that my dolls were up there I had nightmares.

I can’t imagine what it must’ve been like to be stuck in that hole with no one to hear you.

And then the flooding with all the runoff from the reservoir clogged with goose feathers.

I can’t imagine what that was like for my brother who wouldn’t swim if there were leaves in the pool.

You never can know exactly what is happening to you if you can’t see what’s around you.

He never could’ve said even if we did find him before it was too late.

Imagine carrying all that around inside of you for years and years, the things you want to say but can’t.

Actually, I think I have a good idea what that’s like. The doctor seems to think so too.

For a year after my eighth birthday, I had a recurring dream about being locked in the doll factory. Getting sucked into the machines. Getting melted down and becoming doll matter.

My parents came home, and I said I didn’t know where my brother was and my mother slapped me and my father said he was probably just up another tree.

He figured it would be easy enough to locate him since all the leaves were down.

Soon, the neighbors were looking too. They might’ve thought we were uppity, but they kept it to themselves.

This is a quiet place, generally.

The only noise coming from the trucks headed to and from the doll factory.

And the geese in flight when they take off from the reservoir.

The police stopped every outbound truck from the doll factory in case my brother had been kidnapped by a malevolent driver.

Of course, I didn’t mention it, but I thought maybe they should check the inbound trucks too.

The doll factory makes dolls that talk, dolls that eat, dolls that use the bathroom.

Are humans the only animals that feel compelled to hold onto things that are broken?

The neighbors looking for him went around calling his name. They’d forgotten he couldn’t talk back, no matter how many times we told them.

Or maybe they figured he’d hear them and come towards their voices if he was able.

They forgot his tendency not to come back from where he went.

There’s a logic to every insanity.

My mother asked me over and over what I’d been doing when he disappeared.

Cleaning out leaves from the pool, I said.

We never should’ve gotten the house with the pool, she told my father, resurfacing some old quarrel.

She told me my lipstick and eyeshadow made me look unreliable.

The doctor says when you feel guilty about something for years and years you start to lose track of chronology.

It was the geese that found him.

The geese having arrived sometime after he died, presumably.

They swarmed over the leaking hole and someone went to investigate.

He was half-submerged, leaves and goose feathers plastered to his pale cheeks.

Scientifically speaking, I do not know that it was my brother’s presence that drew them, geese hardly being the types of birds to feast on carrion. Probably it was just a new water source that got them in a frenzy.

Even so, the circumstantial often reveals the hidden fact.

I suppose I should be grateful to the geese but all I can think of is how effortlessly they honk and cry.

The doctor says I can leave here as soon as I pass a few more tests.

I stare out the window at the geese flying, honking easily.

I hate them. I hate them.

Pressed against the passenger door, March can’t escape her Uber driver’s stare, heavier than a physical touch. Can’t escape her own body, betraying her in increments. How can this small deviation in routine throw March so off-kilter? She’s only riling herself up. But people don’t sit in the front seat of an Uber. It isn’t right.

She tucks her hands up into her hoodie sleeves, skin prickling. Cardboard boxes wrestle in the back seat, ramming into one another as the car rattles down the highway. “I’m helping a buddy move,” the driver—Owen explains, jerking his chin towards the back seat. “But I saw how close you were on the app and thought, hey, why not?”

March flattens her lips in a not-quite smile. “That’s nice,” she says.

Her grocery bags crowd around her feet, her carton of eggs clutched in her lap. There’s a whole mackerel in one of those bags, wafting brine into the dead air of the car, and March closes her eyes, counting each pin bone and imagining how they will pull clean from flesh. March enjoys cooking. There’s a casual violence to it that feels—right. Natural. The image steadies her, but it also serves as a reminder. There’s work to be done. Only three hours until her best friend Thomasin arrives, only three hours until their bi-weekly dinner: the promise they’d made to each other when March left their hometown. Only three hours until it’s all over.

They hadn’t spoken since the bonfire. Thomasin didn't text or call in those two weeks, and March thought they might exist in that limbo forever, not confronting anything, not changing. Thomasin’s text this morning punctured that hope: We should talk. Dinner as usual.

The reminder makes March’s chest constrict, like her body’s forcing itself smaller, more compact. Anxiety wells her cheeks with acid, lemony and sharp.

“Maybe I can set some of that in the back,” Owen says, but March pins her bags between her knees like he might try and take them from her.

“It’s no problem,” she says.

Owen drives with one hand on the wheel, the other resting on the center console between them. That palm is open, face-up and wanting, with his thumb grazing past her personal space. It’s like he expects March to lace their fingers together or something. He’s too close, and March’s toes clench in her boots. A hot feeling tightens her lungs the same way meat sizzles and shrinks in high heat.

Just then, Owen’s eyes cut March’s way. “Y’know ... Violet. That’s a pretty name.”

She hasn’t gone by Violet since there were two Violets in the same fourth grade class. Not even her own mama calls her Violet anymore, despite the mixed feelings Maggie Kincaid née March holds for her maiden name and its history.

Violet March Kincaid, Mama used to say. God forgive you, you’re all my blood.

“Do you mind if I roll the window down?” March asks, though she doesn’t wait for permission. She grabs the window crank and unwinds. It’s that perfect winter air, cold enough it’s almost sweet. March sucks it in between her teeth until the roof of her mouth stings with it. As the stop light bleeds into the sky, the car jerks to a halt.

The window’s only a quarter of the way down when she feels Owen’s fingers in her hair.

“This is pretty, too,” Owen says, syrupy and slow. Owen wraps one of those curls around his finger, tugging it towards him, but March won’t turn her head. He can’t make her, even as the promise of pain skitters across her scalp. And this is when she should be afraid, March knows. She should cower, should fawn, shedding all semblance of her nineteen years for the nonthreatening, sticky-fingered sweetness of a girl.

Meanwhile, the light flickers green again, and the car jolts into motion.

“C’mon,” Owen says, so casual, his voice lilting pleasantly. His free hand trails down from her hair to the seam of her neck. At least he keeps his eyes on the road. “You’re not being very nice. I paid you a compliment.”

“Don’t be scared,” Owen says, but March isn’t afraid.

In fact, she’s excited. March is dizzy with how much she wants to hurt him. She wants it more than almost anything. And any fear she might’ve felt, it only feeds that want; it condenses into a rage thick and sticky and stubborn. With anger like that, she could grab Owen by the hair—let’s see how he likes it—and bash his nose into the wheel. She knows, now, how fast the blood would run, like water from a spigot.

But ultimately, it’s the wanting that Mach fears most.

Because she knows other things. She knows that animals don’t distinguish between fear and rage, nerves and thrills. The instinct is all the same. Fight—or flight. March’s body is an animal. Rarely has it ever listened to her, and never for long. As March’s chest heaves, her mouth waters, her body takes these reactions as permission.

The change starts with her fingertips. Quills push out from beneath her nailbeds, each pricking through the skin like a thorn. Her palms itch wildly, down fuzzing the delicate skin there, lining every crease, and March is out of time. If she’s not careful, she could find herself disrobing from her human skin, right here, and transforming from girl to bird in front of her Uber driver—in front of God or whoever else on the lamplit highway.

With a nod of resolution, March clicks off her seatbelt—“Whoa,” Owen says, grin audible—and reaches for the door handle. The door swings open, hinges groaning.

“Whoa, no,” Owen says, very young, now, and perfect in his terror. His grip loosening, the car swerving—but there is no time for relishing in his fear. March coils up tight, leaps. Her eggs spill from their carton, cracks spidering outward as they dive and shatter.

March tumbles into the dark. She never hits the ground.

*   *   *

March didn’t realize until she was older that her least favorite bedtime story was, in fact, both a birthright and a warning. The Butcherbird, Mama called it: the myth of why March women turned into shrikes, the only songbird known for its bloodlust. The story of the March-girl who lost her skin.

The March-girl was a girl like any other. One evening, the March-girl visited the river, where the sunset kissed the water into molten gold. There, at the mouth of the river, the March-girl shrugged off her skin to bathe.

Her skin? Little March balked the first time she heard.

Imagining the itchy pull of her worst sunburns, she did not wish to lose her skin any time soon. But Mama explained that it was only a story. Sometimes skin doesn't mean skin. Sometimes stories are lies that still manage to tell the truth.

And so, the March-girl stripped deftly as one might deglove a peach from its skin and submerged herself in the water. Soon, a local boy stumbled upon the girl, upon her skin limp like silk over the river stones. He, too, was a boy like any other. He thought to take the skin—take it and hide it nearby, like a game only one could play, so that the girl might sweetly beg him for its return. A girl, after all, couldn’t go wandering the land without her skin. It was improper.

This is where Mama always had to stop the tale, no matter how many times she told it. March couldn’t stomach it: the March-girl made aware of the nakedness of her body, the vulnerability of her position, the boy looming over her in the dark. How she would have to beg for what always belonged to her.

It’s all right, Mama would soothe, let’s skip to the end. Then, you’ll see.

*   *   *

Perching on the windowsill of her apartment, the rain sluicing from her feathers, March can’t escape the gnawing in her belly. The violence she felt before dulls to a teething, but it doesn’t slow the pitter-patter of her peach pit heart. The adrenaline of escape never lasts; never satiates.

The window is still cracked open—she always leaves it this way, just in case—and she ducks beneath the windowpane and into the muted warmth of her apartment. March glides down onto the shag rug, ignoring the clothes on the floor, the rumpled sheets of her unmade bed. She burrows into its stored heat until her muscles unwind.

Soon, in a herald of shed feathers, March is a girl again, hunched over on her hands and knees. Clothed only in her skin. Panting into the emptiness of her living room, she hooks her fingers into the carpet and holds on. March relearns her body in pieces.

Her mama taught her that transformation is an ugly thing—but necessary. It’s a matter of self-preservation. Survival. If she can fly away, she can find herself again. The sooner March shakes out of her feathered form, the better.

The shrike is something that happens to you, her mama always says.

A woman is what you are.

Still, it’s always a process, reacclimating to her humanness in all its awkward edges, its small discomforts. Yet, her very human problems catch up at a running pace. Human problems like the phone she’d sacrificed in her fleeing, the wallet she’d abandoned. Planning is peace, Mama promises, but March can only plan for so much. She hides a house key under the potted plant and buys only shitty Blackberries from the secondhand tech shop. She even keeps a second copy of her license, just in case, but God. She needs to call the fucking bank. And it’s stupid, but her punch card for a free coffee was in that wallet, a long string of coupons in a grocery bag.

A chill drips down the back of March’s neck. The groceries. The dinner.

Just then, March hears her bathroom door creak open.

Thomasin walks out from the hallway, scrubbing her wet hands against her thighs. For a stretch, the two only stare at one another: March, bare-assed, hot and cold all over. Thomasin, never where she ought to be. “The potted plant,” Thomasin explains.

March says, “Sure,” though she’d rather run. She’s unsure where. Maybe anywhere.

Thomasin’s dark, curious eyes flick towards the nest’s worth of feathers on the floor, the down like dandelion fluff caught in the snarls of March’s hair. Thomasin has seen March like this only once before, the night of the bonfire. After they’d beat the shit out of Davey—a total jockstrap, all in your face and no sense for manners—and left his body broken on the ground. By the end, he was less of a victim and more of a crime scene: a landscape they’d altered in bruises and blood.

They were giddy with adrenaline that night, grinning like the girls they were. Hand-in-hand, Thomasin led March back to the car, pressing her up against it. Thomasin kissed her, then, tasting like a sun-stretch of warm metal and skin. There was a door handle hard at March’s back. Blood shotgunned between their mouths like an oath. They’d never kissed before, not since they were kids and could say it didn’t count. Yet, this came as naturally as any touch between them.

It was the pleasure that scared March, as it always did. She can never let a moment be. The feathers crept in. March could accept that she’d hurt Davey; she could even believe that he’d deserved it. But letting herself be seen—that was unforgiveable. Body betraying her, March could only pull away.

She feels herself pulling away, still.

That first transformation, March didn’t have the time to study her best friend’s reaction, lost in the panic of discovery, where the colors are too loud but the particulars are blurry. Though, afterwards, March imagined it plenty. Her imagination is never kind, but now, with Thomasin’s mind tucked away and just as inaccessible, barely a furrow between those perfect brows, March thinks reality might be worse.

Meanwhile, her own head feels clouded, fingers clumsy as she pushes up off the floor. She knows this numbness won’t last. The dread is already creeping into everything, reminding her of the stretched-thin skin of her thighs, the heft of her hips on display. The humid smell of wet feathers clinging to her. But March can't give into it, not yet. She needs to get through the night. It’s not a choice. It’s necessity. March’s bones crack and pop as she stands, snagging a hoodie with her foot.

Thomasin frowns. “Does it hurt?”  Her eyes rove March’s face.

March sucks in a breath, caught-out. She feels the urge to protect her belly.

“Let me get dressed,” she says, hoodie in hand. She stops. “Close your eyes.”

*   *   *

The March-girl reclaimed her skin.

When the boy refused to return what he’d stolen, the March-girl turned to the sky. Face upturned in grief, she cried. She cried for her lost skin, for the fear that she would never return home again, for the rage at her own impotence, at the red, squalling state of her body, infantile and girlish in its wretchedness. The first March-girl’s cries turned into wails, into screams, into great but terrible song, and the sky heard. The sky listened and was reminded of another song: the music of its own songbird daughters. It thought of its wrens, its larks, its sparrows, but most of all, it recalled a creature small but righteous, bloodied but true. And so, the sky bestowed the March-girl a pair of shrike’s wings.

When the March-girl rose from the water, she was no girl any longer. She was the Butcherbird, and her wings helped her find her stolen skin.

But what about the boy? March asked. Did he hurt? Did he bleed?

Something flashed in Mama’s eyes, too quick to catch. I don’t know, she said. It’s not that kind of story. We’re not that kind of people.

Then I don’t wanna be people, March said.

Mama stroked March’s cheek with a finger. You will.

*   *   *

Sliced green peppers simmer on the stovetop alongside some garlic—the shit kind pre-minced and packed in water. Still, it perfumes the tiny stall that makes up March’s kitchen. A pot of salted water gurgles on the stove, spaghetti undulating within. Perfectly cooked shrimp, the color of sunburnt skin, sit on a plate, ready to be tossed into the finished sauce. They might not have a feast, but they’ll eat well enough.

“I thought you might run,” Thomasin says, lightly. Her voice lilts like March is a joke only Thomasin is in on. “You’re good at that.”

“Well,” March says. She experiences the sensation of being flayed, despite her clothes and the itchy awareness of her own skin. “I’m right here.”

Thomasin sits on the countertop, kicking her socked feet. She’s wearing one of March’s old shirts, and March flushes, pleased despite herself. They used to get mistaken for one another in high school: Thomasin Sharp and March Kincaid, a two-in-one (one-in-two?) deal. Probably because they shared clothes even back then, swapping threadbare jeans and baggy flannels that still smelled of the other’s fabric softener.

But it was always Thomasin who could start a fight, and finish it, too. The one who spit gum in a girl’s hair after she called March a “lezzie” in the fifth grade. The one who once burned a boy with a cigarette for his badmouthing. March had admired Thomasin’s grit as much as she feared it. Whenever March thought of getting even, getting mean, she could see her mama’s face. She could feel her mama stroke her cheek with a finger, the gesture as much a warning as a comfort. She could hear her mama’s words: Stay human. Stay safe.

We must be more than our bodies, if we want to be free.

But no matter how alike Thomasin and March were or weren’t, they were treated as extensions of one another: girl stitched to girl in one tapestry of adolescent codependency.

As Thomasin tucks an errant curl behind one ear, the rest of her hair tumbling down her back like a stream over rocks, the shirt’s stretched-out collar exposes the freckled skin of her shoulder, her clavicle. With a jolt low in her belly, March only says, “Don’t get your hair in the food.”

Thomasin rolls her pretty brown eyes. She bends her head over the stovetop and gives a delicate sniff. “Smells good.” Then, without pausing, she adds, “I researched shrikes, you know.” March’s shoulders lock up. Thomasin scoffs. “What, we really not gonna talk about it?”

March should’ve known better. Of course they would talk about it. But her entire life, the March women’s ability to turn into birds has been talked around, not about. Their ability was spoken of in myth or metaphor, like it wasn’t real if they didn’t make it real. As a kid, after March learned to control her emotions enough that a mere spider wouldn’t scare her into a feathery frenzy, she and her mama decided on a mutual language of silence.

March adds a pat of butter to the pan. It swirls away into nothing. Curls of steam obscure Thomasin’s face and looking at her creates an echo of another night. It sends March back to two weeks ago, now, when the firepit’s smoke had turned Thomasin’s face hazy, like a dream, and frizzed her hair until the flyaways lit up into licks of flame.

“We can talk about it,” March finally says. She stirs the thickened sauce; a bubble pops and stings her hand. The inside of her cheek is mincemeat—she must’ve gnawed it raw at some point, but she can’t remember when. She can’t taste any blood. “I want to talk about it.”

“You’re such a liar.” Thomasin smiles as she says it.

You’re such a liar, she’d laughed when March insisted the beer wasn’t so bad, really. Thomasin clutched the bottle by the neck in one hand, held a cigarette aloft in the other. The smoke coiled around her arm like a serpent, its tongue a long train of ash. Figures weaved in and out, like bodies bobbing along water. Laughter traveled through the smoke, but the music traveled faster, the bass jarring March’s bones. Despite the weather, Thomasin wore a short-sleeved dress, and March wrapped an arm around Thomasin’s shoulders without thinking. She snuggled in close.

Such a gentleman, Thomasin said in a low, low voice that made March burn all over. And of course, that’s when Davey fucking Marshall had grabbed March by the hair—why do they always go for the hair?—and stuck his tongue down her throat.

With a muffled thump, Thomasin shimmies off the countertop. March jumps at the sound. But Thomasin presses close, too close, and when Thomasin reaches out, their inner wrists slide against one another, pulse to pulse. It’s so intimate March shudders.

“Shrikes are brutal little things, huh?” Thomasin plucks the wooden spoon from March’s slackening fingers and begins to stir. “Pretty but mean. I watched videos of them hunting.”

Thomasin wets her bottom lip. She asks, “You ever mount a body like that?”

Loggerhead shrikes—March's shrikes—possess a beak ending in a cruel hook. It’s what makes them such effective killers. Shrikes dive straight for the back of the neck, paralyzing their prey with that beak, whether it’s small as a mouse or large as a fellow bird. They impale their meal on thorns or barbed wire. A butcherbird, shrikes carve up their prey; they savor their violence, the puncture and pop of skin and organs, the same way people enjoy pigs on a spit.

It’s one of the first instincts March has ever known, felt deep in the very furrows of her being: the mounting of a body for a feast. “No,” she says, voice fraying, “never.”

But after the bonfire, after Davey, March knows that isn’t quite true.

“Talk to me,” Thomasin says. “What’s going on in your head?”

But March doesn’t want Thomasin in her head. She’s afraid of what her best friend might find there. There's the itch of feathers beneath March’s nails, but she can’t tell if the sensation is real or not. She feels the same way as she did that night, body buzzing, suspended on a wire.

That night, when Davey had gripped her by a fistful of curls and drooled into her slack mouth. He always got too touchy when he was drunk, and his friends just egged him on, saying things like give her a taste, man or let the dyke have it. Still, he’d never tried it with March, before. Wasn’t exactly his type. She felt Thomasin go rigid at her side. March thought about biting off his tongue, soaked in liquor, tensile and chewy. She’d really have to grind her teeth in. Grip him by the shoulders so he wouldn’t run and ruin it.

But by then, Davey had backed away. He kept laughing, even as his hand came away with loose strands of March’s hair looped around his fingers.

Now you, right? he asked Thomasin. You’re some freaky package deal?

March watched Thomasin from the corner of her eye, body shaking, too furious to be afraid but unsure what to do with all that anger. But Thomasin smiled. March remembers that smile more than anything, the way her teeth flashed, sharp in the gold-tinged dark. She flicked her cigarette into the fire, and it sputtered as it caught white hot flame. Thomasin’s voice unspooled like a song, wrapping around March and Davey both.

Okay, Thomasin said, but March has to come, too.

Thomasin tossed March a wink. Trust me, she’d mouthed, and damn her, March did. She followed Thomasin and Davey into the night. Yet now, cornered in her own kitchen, March can’t follow even these simple instructions: Talk to me.

March says, “I don’t know, Tom. It’s all too much.”

Thomasin scoffs. “Don’t be nice,” she says. Her words crack out like a blow. March rocks back on her heels, but she can’t move far, not with Thomasin still right there, their shoulders overlapping, her mouth level with March’s ear. “Say it. I’m too much.”

Stung, March says, “Don’t put words in my mouth.”

“Then actually fucking say something,” Thomasin says, “instead of hoping I’ll go away.”

They lock eyes, and for a moment, March thinks Thomasin might cry. But instead, she sucks in a breath, taking the tears back with it, and exhales with a tsk. “You can get it over with, okay? Tell me you regret what we did. Tell me I freaked you out and you’re done with me.”

“You freaked me out? I turned into a fucking bird, Tom.”

It’s true, March had been freaked out that night, but she only had herself to blame. After bringing Davey and March to the side of the house, Thomasin let him press her up against it, let him hitch the velvety dress above her hips. It was only the three of them and the blackberry bushes. They bore no fruit, but March could taste them anyhow, could feel the thorns nipping her fingertips like a wary animal.

Frozen, hand wound into claws, March watched Thomasin and Davey. Be easy, Thomasin said, laughing, and Davey kissed her hard enough to split the chapped skin of her bottom lip. When Thomasin pulled away for air, she wasn’t smiling any longer. A drop of blood wept from her lip, but she didn’t wipe it away. She looked beyond Davey’s shoulder, right at March, eyes impossibly dark.

It unraveled from there, almost unreal, their silhouettes a shadow play against the siding. Thomasin grabbed Davey by the nape of his neck, oddly tender, and as he went in for another kiss, she bit him on the mouth so hard he screamed.

March could only watch the elastic pull of Davey’s lip between Thomasin’s teeth. When Davey screamed, blood running down his chin, the music drowned him out entirely. Maybe that’s why Thomasin reared back her fist and nailed Davey right in the jaw. No one could stop her. As Davey staggered, Thomasin shook out her hand. Spat blood onto the grass.

She said to Davey, I told you—be easy.

As Davey lunged at Thomasin, March didn’t have time for fear. In fact, she was calm. Focused. The blood soothed her, familiar as a friend. Pushing him was only instinct. March pushed, and Davey collapsed into one of the bushes, the descent so swift something swooped in March’s chest. It was his clothes that first caught onto the blackberry brambles; they latched on tight. And as Davey whimpered, high and pained, struggling and squirming, he only hooked himself further, mounted on the brambles like prey. He couldn’t pull away without taking his skin off with it.

March’s body warms just with the memory of it: the way Davey yowled, all-animal, as he impacted the blackberry bush. The way he could only flail about, helpless. It had been the easiest thing in the world to start kicking. The natural thing. Later, March’s fears would take over again, the night ending in a fury of feathers, but just then, as Thomasin joined in—kicking and kicking, the scent of blood in the air—nothing could’ve been more right.

Back in the kitchen, the righteous look in Thomasin’s eyes is almost the same as then, bright as a guiding star. March feels mesmerized. Thomasin pays no attention, her voice exasperated, “I know you turned into a bird. I was there. It was a bit of a surprise, I guess, but not near as much as you seem to think.”

“What the fuck are you talking about.”

Thomasin drops the spoon and throws up her hands. “I’m saying I know you. I’ve known you all my life, Mar. All the feathers around your house in weird places, your hoarding, your secrecy—it just clicked. Like I’ve always known it.”

March says, “You can’t mean that.” Unable to look at Thomasin any longer, March turns towards the stovetop. The sauce is burning.

Thomasin follows March’s stare. “Jesus Christ, Mar.”

Elbowing March out of the way, Thomasin grips each knob to the burners. Her knuckles are white; there’s a crescent scar, maybe from where her fist impacted Davey’s stupid angular jaw and the skin broke through. She turns the burners all the way up, one-by-one, and then spins around to face March again.

March asks, “What are you—?”

“Forget the food,” Thomasin begs, “and listen to me. I know you.”

“I don’t want you to know me.” Maybe I don’t know myself. Finally, March says, “We should break up.”

Thomasin spits out, “You’d have to date me first.”

“I can’t date you,” March says, wavering. “You make me mean.”

The water boils over, great big bubbles roiling above the lip of the pot and spewing from the sides. The sauce pops and sputters. Her nose stings. Thomasin leans back against the stove, ignoring the heat. “You’ve always been mean.” She covers her eyes with a palm.

“It’s when I like you best,” she says, “when I know you’re real.”

There’s something confessional in the way Thomasin hides her face. It makes March want to touch. To take the hand covering Thomasin’s face and hold it to her own instead, to touch and be touched in return. And yet.

The burners are neon, warning signs of electric orange. The saucepan’s gone black with char. Her lungs fill with smoke. “What if what I want is ugly?” March asks. “What if I’m—”

Thomasin looks at her, eyes going soft. Her shoulders slump. She laughs.

“Good,” Thomasin says. “Whatever it is, whatever you are. Give it to me—I want it.”

March feels fork tender. Like she might pull apart. “Because we’re the same?”

Thomasin smiles. She asks, “We feed each other, don’t we?”

Mama's bedtime story was wrong. The March-girl was not a girl. Or not just a girl, nor only a shrike. She became a being of two skins, and denying one flesh would be as painless as being cleaved in two. Meanwhile, the boy was just a boy, blood black in the moonlight. That’s where his significance to the story stopped—with his blood on the grass and a hunger finally fed—and the Butcherbird’s began. But let’s skip to the end, March thinks. The end is where she might finally begin.

When Thomasin grabs March by the hand, March grips back. There’s no pulling away, not now. And as the fire alarm goes off, smoke waltzing above their heads, they only pass the laughter back and forth between their open mouths, indulging in each other as they did that night, with its crunch of cartilage and bone, its animal screams.

You watch grimly as the City is destroyed, the Night Witch Azura’s veiny tentacles engulfing apartment blocks, snake-tongue tendrils lashing out at news helicopters trying to document the scene. You can’t see their faces, but the screams of terrified citizens reach your ears above the din of crunching rock and the crackly screeches of Azura’s pumpkin constructs.

“Shrink, mortals!” Azura screeches, towering above the City in fifty-foot relief, projecting her snarl-fanged lips, her glittering purple witch hat, and her perfectly applied reverse cat-eye makeup with the power of her Halloween magic. “This City will soon be mine! I will bring a new Age of Spookiness to this worthless dimension! Surrender and die!”

Your hair blows back in the gust of a collapsing building, a stray strand falling across your face. You turn to {Superior Vampire Boy} beside you, his eyes lit with fury. His Magic Wand of Destiny of the Four Spectres hangs loosely at his side, its rubellite tip sparkling in the glow of Azura’s flames. “We’ve got to fight,” you say.

“I’m not sure we can win this one.”

You take his hand in yours and squeeze. “We stand together. Like always.”

{Superior Vampire Boy} looks at you, his irises blood-red. He brings his wand to his lips as you raise your own, a smoky quartz, and speak. “In the name of Fearful Halloween, we’ll punish you!” the two of you ejaculate and a dazzling gleam erupts from your bodies, penetrating the Night Witch’s darkness. 

Your clothes disappear in an orange flash. 

Sparkles slither up your arms and legs.

A bow appears at your tailbone, your tunic manifesting in a twinkling flash.

A mane of fur billows into existence around your head as your ears lengthen into points.

Your eyes flash, your teeth blaze.

You have become {Handsome Werewolf Boy}.

A week after Azura’s attack, Oren shows up at your rental, a pumpkin under each arm. He follows you downstairs into the shabby suite you call home.

“Where did you get pumpkins this early in the year?” you ask him. 

He sets them on your coffee table and searches for knives amongst the assortment of loose cutlery in your kitchenette. “I called in a favour with a cousin’s girlfriend. I think they’ll go over really well with the fans.”

You carve your pumpkin with subtle slices, a bat’s wings taking shape beneath your blade. You’re careful not to over-cut, exercising restraint at the down-swoop of each wing flap, picking at stringy pumpkin guts with a kebab skewer. The head you carve separate from the body, a hole resting on the bat’s outspread shoulders, then two huge almond-shaped ears above that. When you’re finished, you turn your handiwork around for Oren to see.

“Nice,” he says, looking up from his phone. Pauses. “Wait, did you carve that for me?”

You nod. “Goes along with your brand, doesn’t it?”

“I thought we were carving our own, sorry.” He turns his pumpkin around. He’s carved a singular hole that’s, apparently, now for you.

Mecha-Pharaoh Kahfet spiderwebs his bandages at you, but you slide beneath them so that they only barely graze your wolfish ears. “Hyah!” you cry and hurl your sceptre, boomeranging it between two of his mummy minions, knocking the skulls from both their heads, empty flesh collapsing to dust.

The Mecha-Pharaoh’s robotic suit has a pyramid-shaped hole near its waist, a ventilation shaft, its weak point; you’ve exploited this in previous battles. “Handsome Werewolf Boy, lend me your wolf power!” {Superior Vampire Boy} cries to you, and you abandon the fight to your allies, {Unbeatable Devil Boy} and {Fashionable Zombie Girl}. The two of them slice through the mech bandages with their devil claws and zombie teeth, respectively. {Fashionable Zombie Girl} gives you a wink as you slide past her, or maybe it’s just that her one eye hangs down onto her cheek, who knows.

“Throw me!” says {Superior Vampire Boy} and you seize him around the waist, feel the taut muscles of his torso beneath your hairy paws, fling him into the air so that he spirals, his fingers extending into bat wings, cutting through the Mecha-Pharaoh’s scarab missiles, through the mummy minions and the crocodile cannons and the power suit pyramid, slitting the pyramid like paper and sending Khafet into spasms of electricity and ruin. 

It was Oren’s idea to start the OnlyFans account, years ago now. You were both 16 at the time, but you’d recently come into your magical destiny so you had a mask to hide behind. 

“We aren’t paid to save people,” Oren had said, “and I don’t know about you, but I have no interest in burger flipping. I have time for school and heroics and sex. Might as well make money from one of them.”

“Could be fun,” you said. “What do you think, Mystic Trick R’ Treat Guardian?”

But Mystic Trick R’ Treat Guardian had simply floated in midair in the middle of your bedroom, candy wrappers leaking from their jaws, as always. Every once in a while, they spoke something destiny-related, but mostly they just pulsed with spectral energy.

“I’m in,” you said. “What do you want to do first?”

The sound of splintering metal accompanies {Unbeatable Devil Boy} smashing through the pillar beside you, hurled by Simon Carnalacrum, an alluring homunculus and your current foe. {Devil Boy} pinwheels backwards, one of his curved ram’s horns sticking in the ground, snapping cleanly in half. 

Simon Carnalacrum laughs and flexes his muscles. He’s stitched together from a collection of the hottest body parts his maker, Victoire, could dig up. “Surrender, uglies. You’re no match for my superior muscles.” Around you in the stands of the high school football stadium, his cheerleader manikin minions jeer.

You go to assist {Devil Boy} from his groaning position on the ground, but {Superior Vampire Boy} stops you with a hand on your furry chest. He nods his head towards Simon Carnalucrum. “Do you think he might be interested in a collab?”

“Is now really the time?” you ask, just as Simon spirals a football in your direction so hard it bends the field goal post next to your head.

“I don’t know. Fans might like it. Redemption arc?”

“Just because you show hole on camera doesn’t mean you’re redeemed, SV,” you say. You help {Unbeatable Devil Boy} to his feet. His broken horn is already starting to regenerate, manifesting via globules of crimson light. 

“Dis dickhead is going down,” {Unbeatable Devil Boy} snarls. 

A camera flash lights up the area as {Superior Vampire Boy} snaps a selfie of the three of you, catching {Fashionable Zombie Girl}’s spiraling pirouette slam into Simon Carnalacrum’s jaw. The cheerleaders boo.

“Sorry. Fan content.” {Vampire Boy}’s chalk-white fingers quickly tap out a post.

You jerk a thumb towards Simon Carnalacrum who hurls a sloshing Gatorade jug at {Zombie Girl} with muscled ease. “He’s brawny, but he’s not very bright. Aim for his nards, UD. I’m going to try a Howling Fist of Fangs.”

{Devil Boy} nods. For a moment, his face flushes and he looks like he may lean in and kiss you. Your heart thuds in your hairy chest. However, the moment ends abruptly as the stadium lights come on, illuminating Simon Carnalacrum’s creator, Victoire Bastion of the Free Thinkers, descending upon you on the back of a simula-crow. 

“Fear my powerful brain!” she cries.

The cheerleaders shriek. The crow croaks with both its beaks.

{Superior Vampire Boy} snaps a picture.

Dmitry and Sadie have their own couples’ account, though they sometimes collaborate with you. At least, Dmitry does. Sadie says she has no interest in being a fourth wheel and usually takes the afternoon to go for matcha at the teahouse she works at.

Dmitry isn’t bisexual, you don’t think, though neither you nor Oren has ever asked (as far as you know). However, he does strongly care about fan engagement and the comments on your collaborative videos are always positively spicy.

{gourdlord} says <spanked my salami to this love the energy fellas>

{tremendousfinished) says <Unbeatable Devil Boy looks pretty ‘beatable’ to me haha>

{jockstraprubbery} says <sexy Russian accent on Devil Boy love>

{wampyr__476} says <any chance of Fashionable Zombie Girl getting in on this? Would like some bisexual representation>

{t33nroughly} says <Devil Boy was flaccid for the first part but once Handsome Werewolf Boy started on him, he seemed a lot more engaged. Think the fans would like to see more content between those two specifically with less talk as well. Great job overall, guys!>

Dmitry never sticks around long after shooting, just showers and gives you a thumbs-up on his way out the door. He enjoyed himself, you hope. The sounds coming from Oren’s laptop as he edits would seem to confirm.

“Do you want to have Dmitry and Sadie over for a movie night tomorrow?”

Oren looks up from his phone. “Sure. What movie?”

“I don’t know. Thought we might just vibe it out,” you say.

Oren nods and goes back to his phone. 

“Hey, Oren … can you hold me?”

He looks up again, his eyes glassy and far away. “You want to cuddle?”

“Yeah.”

Oren puts his phone in his pocket, positions himself to spoon you on your basement couch. You relax into the crook of his body. It feels good.

The four of you burst into the abandoned glassworks, wands glittering in the near-darkness. “Oh great,” says {Fashionable Zombie Girl}. “He’ll be even harder to find in here.”

From within the building’s echoing hallways, you can hear Mr. No-Body laugh, sending a chill up your spine despite the fur sprouting all over you. 

“Not necessarily.” {Superior Vampire Boy} dips a hand into a nearby barrel and pulls up a handful of fine silica dust, almost invisible against the paleness of his skin. “If we get this over his body, we’ll be able to spot him just fine. Let’s split up: UD, you’re with me. HW and FZ, you search the south side. We’ll handle the north.”

{Fashionable Zombie Girl} rolls her eye, but before she can say anything, you use your hairy paw to guide her away. Not quick enough that you don’t catch the pink blush in {Superior Vampire Boy’s} chalky face though. You and {Fashionable Zombie Girl} creep through the glassworks past goose-necked vases and shards of discarded cups and bowls. Silica dust coats the ground in shimmering waves. 

“Keep an eye out for Mr. No-Body’s footprints,” you say.

“I don’t know why we let Vampire Boy call the shots,” {Fashionable Zombie Girl} responds. “You know what they’re going to do, right? He’s going to blow Unbeatable Devil Boy in a different part of the factory and film while we’re doing actual hero work. Fuck, I’m so sick of his ‘on-the-job’ video bullshit. And his trying to get me out of the way all the time.”

You don’t look at her, and not just because her hanging eye makes you a little sick if you stare too long. “Maybe we should focus on the mission.”

“Absolutely. Vampire Boy would love if we did that.”

“It’s just for the fans. It doesn’t mean anything.”

“Mean anything?” {Fashionable Zombie Girl} halts, and you have to stop and face her. Her expression is stony as ever behind her patches of rotten skin. “Who cares about it meaning something? I care about the fact that we’re going to have to fight without half the team. That’s dangerous. Handsome Werewolf Boy, get your head screwed on straight.”

You don’t sweat when you’re in werewolf form, but your tongue sneaks out of your mouth as you start to pant. “I didn’t … I just meant …”

{Fashionable Zombie Girl} suddenly doubles over with a grunt. You watch as she lashes out with chipped nails, makes contact with nothing, her chin jerking violently upward before she’s knocked aside, crashing down onto a menagerie of malformed glass animals. You reach into the nearest silica barrel and whip dust in her direction, but the glittering arc lands on nothing. Your pointed ears prick up at the sound of Mr. No-Body’s laughter, but you have no idea where it’s coming from.

“What do you want?” Sadie asks you. She chugs a quarter of her iced coffee forcefully, deliberately, as she does everything. The two of you are seated inside Sadie’s teahouse in the City’s downtown, the second part-time job she works to afford her apartment. She’s dressed in all black, her hair tied into a ponytail. 

You peel your hand from your chin, tuck it in your lap beneath the table. “I’m not sure.”

Sadie fixes you with a blank stare. You know her to rarely blink. “Stop. You’re worrying about nothing.”

“I guess.” You watch as she downs another quarter of her coffee. You and her don’t normally hang out alone outside of work, but things are weird with Dmitry, Oren’s dealing with his own magical destiny side quest, and Mystic Trick R’ Treat Guardian just vomited up Mars Bars when you tried to talk to them. “Sadie, do you ever feel really lonely?”

“No,” she says. “I do important work. You do important work. There’s more to life than your relationship hang-ups.”

“… I know that.”

“Werewolf Boy, you save people. Get over yourself.” She slams back the rest of the coffee and gives a half-hearted goodbye as she fast-walks away from you behind the counter. The line-up isn’t even that long, but you guess her break-time must be over. You waver in your seat, wondering whether you should stay, where you would even go.

Hello Mary escaped from a cursed mirror in the Trick R’ Treat dimension only a few hours ago, but in that time, she’s wreaked utter havoc on the City’s population. You race past the shades of possessed citizens, each of them missing their eyes. That’s what Hello Mary goes for, the eyes.

“Handsome Werewolf Boy,” says a voice and you turn to see the ghost of {Superior Vampire Boy} floating towards you. He’s in costume, but his eyes are missing, replaced with pools of red. “Surrender. Mother Mary will be merciful.”

You ignore him. You can turn him back, just need to retrieve Hello Mary’s mirror first. She’s made herself appear everywhere, her soulless eyes watching you from the reflections of every window you pass, every car mirror, every oil puddle in the street. “Give up, Handsome Werewolf Boy,” her many mouths say in unison. “I have control.”

Dmitry and {Fashionable Zombie Girl} lurch towards you at the opposite end of the street, their eyes missing as well. Dmitry is only partially in costume; from the look of his jockstrap, he was in the process of shooting a solo video on his and Sadie’s account. You wonder what the fans will make of his sudden transformation.

“Surrender,” your friends tell you. 

Behind you, {Superior Vampire Boy} laces pale arms around your waist. “Surrender,” he says. “It’s easier if you do. Let Mother Mary in.”

The coolness of {Vampire Boy’s} touch brings your thoughts into focus. Hello Mary stares solemnly down at you, her face reflecting off the full moon. You know where she must be, really, know where Hello Mary always appears to attack. You spin around, face-to-face, nose-to-nose, with {Superior Vampire Boy} and kiss him, but you don’t close your eyes. Over his shoulder, you can see Hello Mary, the real her, feet hovering over the pavement, twin streaks of blood running down her face. You loosen one hairy paw from {Vampire Boy’s} waist and aim a Howling Fist of Fangs directly at her head.

Dmitry has left the City. The fans saw his mask slip, know who he is now.

{twinkthrasher9} says <pretty sure this guy has a kin class with me>

{pipe__bright} says <his name is Dmitri makes sense with the accent>

{dinosaursaysrawr} says <hes sexier without the mask on imo>

Sadie has been distant and cold since Dmitry left. She came over to talk to Mystic Trick R’ Treat Guardian, locked you out of your living room, but you could still overhear some of what she said. “You have to say something,” she said, desperation in her normally cool voice. “There has to be more. Something we can do. I don’t know what to do.”

Mystical Trick R’ Treat Guardian stayed silent. Sadie left, her eyes the colour of rocks, and you ventured into the chamber to see that the Guardian had vomited Starbursts up all over the floor. You picked up a pink one and popped it into your mouth.

Oren crouches outside your bedroom’s half-window. “I think we should talk.”

You let him inside, and he sits at the edge of your bed. Mystic Trick R’ Treat Guardian hovers outside your bedroom doorway, eyes glowing lavender in the dim light of your room. You used to be wigged out by the pumpkin spirit’s presence, but now it’s a comfort, almost like a night light.

“What are we going to do now that Dmitry is gone?” Oren asks.

“I don’t know. Maybe we can see if Sadie wants to collab with us? I highly doubt it, but she needs a new hook-up as well.”

“I don’t mean the OnlyFans,” Oren says slowly. “I mean our magic destiny team. Our Unbeatable Devil Boy is gone.”

“Oh. Right.”

“I mean, we should be thinking about the account as well. But Devil Boy’s departure makes things more difficult. What if Hello Mary attacks again? Or Night Witch Azura? Maybe we should recruit.”

“What say you, Mystic Trick R’ Treat Guardian?” you ask, but Oren violently shakes his head, holds a finger up to your lips.

“No,” he says. “I’m tired of listening to the pumpkin. We can find somebody ourselves, right? Make a new friend?”

“For which team?”

Oren sighs. “I don’t know.” He picks at a hole in your blanket, stretches the fabric until the threads tear, just a little, leans forward and kisses you softly on the lips.

You pull away. “Am I your friend?”

“Of course, you’re my friend.”

“Okay. Sometimes I don’t know what to call you.”

Oren’s eyes grow sad. “You can always call me a friend. No matter what we’re doing, who we are. I’m your friend, man.”

You look down at your lap, your face radiating heat. You feel like you should say something, but the thoughts that swirl in your head are knocked aside by more pressing thoughts. By the time you look up to say sorry for no other reason than to fill the silence, Oren is gone. {Superior Vampire Boy} can do that when he wants, slip away without a sound.

You turn off your light and lie on your bed, fall asleep to the gentle crinkle of Kit-Kats roiling in Mystic Trick R’ Treat Guardian’s maw.

{faraway_obsolete} says <getting a little bored of all the solo videos tbh>

{c0ckym0m} says <I think Dmitry must have had a falling-out with them, miss him>

{cheezburgerbussy__) says <I agree. Can we see the two of you kiss each other at least?>

{fetchingXOXO} says <can you give us more?>

{werewlfUltimateYearn69} says <can you act like you care???>

Lagoona screeches and swipes at you with webbed claws. You distract him with a wand flourish and uppercut his fishy maw with a furry fist. “Superior Vampire Boy!” you shout, dodging a blow from Lagoona’s fishtail that shatters concrete. “Aim for the throat! Vampire Blood Bite! Now!”

{Superior Vampire Boy} lunges from the shadows, sinks his teeth into Lagoona’s neck. Red light pulses between his fangs and the fish-monster’s throat, siphoning down into the creature’s chest and creating a hot red bubble beneath his scaled skin. Lagoona burbles and bursts, blue-green blood belching out from a bite-mark circular ring in his chest. He collapses, twitching.

{Superior Vampire Boy} wipes his mouth with the back of his sleeve.

The two of you stand over Lagoona’s body in the middle of the quiet street. {Fashionable Zombie Girl} is nowhere in sight, hasn’t shown up for the last two monster invasions. {Superior Vampire Boy} has darker circles under his eyes than normal.

“Is that it?” you ask him.

He looks up at you, blue-black staining his pale chin. “What more do you want?” he asks. “We saved the City again. Woo-hoo.” Half-heartedly, he twirls his wand and you’re suddenly looking at an unvampiric Oren. His chin looks as though he bit a pen, exploded ink all over himself.

“You’ve got something there,” you say, point to your own furry maw.

Oren shrugs. “Who gives a shit?” He walks away, fading into Lagoona’s conjured mist.

You shift Lagoona’s corpse with your hairy toe, look around for a crowd of people to gather and celebrate another victory, praise you for your efforts, but there’s no one except you and the dead fish-creature in the mist. You wave your wand and become you again, which makes you feel a little less alone. You and {Handsome Werewolf Boy}; you’ll always have yourself at least. You go to follow Oren along the silent street. The mist is already dissipating. Soon, you’ll be able to see one another again. At least, that’s what you hope.

Go on a reality competition called Imitation of Love—in which you and eleven of your exact doppelgängers vie for the amorous attentions of a sparklingly attractive, age-appropriate bachelorette. Each of your replicas shares your precise age, height, and hair (what’s left of it). Each wears your same outfit, carefully plucked from a closet the size of Cincinnati by a whimsical wardrobe coordinator in pearls and bucket hat: the striped-shirt plaid-tie combo she’s dressed you in isn’t something you’d have the slightest clue how to pull off in actual life. Your sense of style is more faded jeans, a nice clean or clean-ish t-shirt. Polos, more often, as you’ve gotten older, golf chic. You’re starting to look like your dad, you think. You can see it more clearly, staring into this multiverse of mirror-yous. Imagine them with phone holsters, bum backs. The girl—the woman, you’d better say—is sizing you all up, too. There’s a scanning process happening that feels coldly digital, as if you and your near-twins are all QR codes, instead of unemployed actors cosplaying lonely bachelors. Why would this singular, spectacular woman choose you? Well, because you’re the real thing, and the others are just copies, or copies of copies. But because they’re such good copies, she can’t tell the difference. Hell, you can barely tell the difference. Maybe this cluster of clones, this posse of phonies, leaves you wondering who you really are underneath it all. Which doesn’t exactly radiate the kind of confidence you want to project to a woman looking for a romantic partner. Even if that’s not what she’s really doing here, even if she has other motivations, perhaps the same professional goals as you. So “unsure” is not how you’re going to play it, when it comes time for your “one-on-one” date: instead, sit with her on the back porch of your TV house, Old Fashioneds (virgin, due to FCC regs) in hand. Ignore the cameras just out of view, camouflaged behind a wall of succulents. Tell her that every one of these guys are fakes, like most men, but that you’re the real deal. Believe it when you say it, otherwise she never will. Make eye contact, gaze deep into her baby blues, and don’t pull away until she does. Insist you’re the only one who can make her happy, because with any of the others, she’ll always wonder if she settled for a pale imitation of love (queue the show logo on the bottom right corner of the home viewer’s screen). When you sense the moment is right, lean in for the kiss. This is when the host of the competition—a washed-up game show emcee and veteran of the daytime soaps—will interrupt your date to introduce a new twist to the game: eleven more doppelgängers, this time of the woman you were attempting to lock lips with. The only way you’ll end up together, the host announces, is if the “real” you and the “real” her can correctly identify each other. Otherwise, there will be no winner, no love match. Nothing will have been achieved except proof of concept that a TV network can construct an intriguing premise out of the latest in cloning technology. Start to protest this diabolical new wrinkle to the game. Walk into the house and head for the control room. Look for the mastermind—the original showrunner who devised this mockery of mock romance in the first place, and sold it to a fledgling streaming upstart. Prepare to strangle him with your bare hands. But before you do, before you grab him by the scruff of his unkempt, doughy neck, ask yourself this simple question: how can I know it’s really him?

Mother is mildewing. She has been for a while now. Ever since I can remember, really. White-gray splotches sliding up her hands like gloves.

It’s hot, be careful. I set down her tea tray. She lies languid on the sofa, arms loose like tentacles.

At first it was just her fingers. She’d keep them folded in her lap. Said it was a reaction to a new perfume. But it spread, and the other daughters fled to Grandmother’s. They had allergies, started wheezing, didn’t want to wheeze away their lives. Only I stayed.

Mother’s eyelids rise like the sun.

Good afternoon Mother, I stroke her mildew. It’s not contagious––not even a little. I nuzzle against her, wrap around her, inhale her odors. Nothing catches. I’ll never know her. Never know much of anything. Perhaps mothers mildew, all of them, every single one.

Mother sips tea, rumbles, then spouts liquid. This, she says. Is not chamomile.

Go back to the garden, she says, tea dribbling down her chin, and fetch chamomile.

Yes, Mother.

What she neglects to mention is that the garden does not belong to us. It belongs to our neighbor. He is blind and so we steal from him. Mother says it isn’t stealing. Says consumption is the greatest form of appreciation.

When Mother is all mildew, I’m going to bury her in that garden, beneath the tea leaves.

I enter at the tomato patch, veer through basil, then cabbage. The bulbs are blossoming. I wonder if I shall ever blossom. A leaf crunches in the distance, and I see a figure by the arugula, a figure who is not our neighbor.

Who are you? she shouts.

Who, me?

Her sun hat shadows her face. What are you doing here?

Harvesting tea for Mr. Spitzer, I say, herbs scratching my ankles. He’s blind, you know.

Yes, she says. I know. She plunges a shovel into the dirt, twists it in deep.

Well don’t mind me, I say, walking past her.

I return to Mother, leaves poking out of my pockets. Perhaps the girl is also a thief. She’s older than my sisters, certainly, but younger than me. Taller than me.

Finally, Mother says from the sofa.

The mildew has progressed to her shoulders, in only an hour’s time. Faster than ever before. It’s clear: I can't leave the house anymore. She’s not safe when I leave.

Scrub me, she says, letting her eyelids sink.

I scrubbed you this morning.

Nonsense! Her arms flail.

I scrub daily, but the mildew remains.

Perched on the sofa, I stroke her hair, weaving around flecks of fungus. There was a girl in the garden, I say.

Rubbish! she says, half-asleep. Mildew fevers make her hazy.

It would be nice to have a friend.

Nice to have dinner, she says. Pasta, make the puttanesca. Don’t disappoint your father.

My father seldom leaves his study. I’m not sure he’s still in there. I saw him several weeks ago, on his way to the bathroom. Had a mustache and thick eyebags. I hardly recognized him. Mother hopes, each night, that he will sit with us for dinner. I can’t imagine who feeds him otherwise. When I knock on his study door, I hear grumbling, like it’s only an empty stomach in there.

Puttanesca? I try to pull a fungus clump from her hair. It doesn’t yield.

What did I say!

But Father doesn’t like olives.

Your father, Mother’s eyes snap open, adores olives.

On your last birthday, he spat them on the table and lined them up like soldiers.

You little idiot, Mother says. Don’t condescend me.

Yes Mother, I say, giving her hair one final stroke, then a yank.

No one taught me to cook. No one teaches me anything. I put the pot over fire, watching flames singe the bottom. I place tomatoes on the floor and stomp on them––shoes off. I stomp until they’re mush. Then I gather the mush with my apron and let it splash into the pot. I garnish with excess shrubbery from the garden. Taste varies wildly, dish by dish. I can’t say the meals are to my liking. Mother complains, but no more than usual. Her senses have dimmed. She doesn’t smell what I smell, see what I see, the flakes of her skin swirling around the house, clinging to furniture, to me.

As I cook, she summons me back to the sofa. Back and forth and back and forth. I fluff her pillow, lay a cold cloth on her face, tell her how well she looks. Or if she desires truth, how dreadful.

I do wish Mother would stand on her own, leave the living room once in a while, go to her bedroom, but she says the mildew renders her immobile. Though I’ve seen her at the window, and at night upstairs, banging on Father’s study doors. Regardless, the bedpan is a gruesome development.

But I comply, because I am a good daughter. Salt and pepper in the puttanesca. A good daughter, if nothing else in this world. Shrubs, shredded by my teeth and sprinkled into the pot. When Mother is all mildew, I don’t know what I will be.

I set up the coffee table with bowls of pasta and utensils and glassware. Mother is on the sofa, torso shifted upright, me on a chair across from her, and an empty chair beside me, reserved for Father.

Have I told you how your father courted me? She sucks a noodle through the gap between her teeth.

No Mother, I lie.

We were in the park, she begins.

I watch the mildew on her elbow, bubbling like a cauldron.

He handed me a flower, she says. A daisy. No, daffodil.

I watch the stairs, waiting for a father to creak down them.

No––dandelion!

Mother goes through flower species, and I watch my puttanesca. The noodles seem to move on their own, slinking and stretching like worms. I eat a forkful.

He put a lily in my hair, she says. Behind my ear, she clarifies. Told me I was positively blooming. Mother smiles, her teeth ashen, yellow. Then her lips droop, and her eyes narrow. She takes her pasta bowl and throws it at the wall.

Now look at me! Puttanesca slides down the wallpaper, tomato mush trailing behind. I’m decaying! Her body flaps back onto the sofa. He doesn’t want me anymore, and so I’m decaying!

Mother, I tell her prostrate body. The mold is an addition, not a subtraction.

She squints at me, nostrils flaring.

You aren’t decaying, I say. You’re growing.

Oh, shut up.

A sound across the room, and my eyes dart toward it. Not Father. Someone at the door, but they aren’t knocking.

You again. Who are you? I step out onto the porch, closing the door behind me.

She clears her throat and shakes wisps of hair out of her eyes. Spitzer is my uncle, she says. I moved in with him. And I won’t have you stealing from us anymore.

Oh, I say. But this morning you didn’t say anything.

Because. She folds her arms against her frock. I thought you’d come to your senses.

Mother made me, I say without thinking.

Your mother? Her eyebrows inch upwards.

Mother is mildewing, I tell her. The tea leaves, I improvise, they soothe her ailments, creating a, a shield, yes a shield, for the rot, a protective barrier actually.

The girl hovers in front of me, scratches her nose, adjusts her shirt sleeves. Can I come in?

My uncle is not great company, she tells me, seated on my father’s chair, eating his bowl of pasta. I’m supposed to care for him, she swallows, but really, I don’t care at all.

Mother’s body twitches, snores leaving her nose like smoke.

Why does she look like that? the girl asks. What’s wrong with her?

I look at Mother, face scrunched like a fist, hair tendrils wandering in different directions. I try to think of her before the mildew, but it’s hard to remember.

She’s ill, I say.

The girl nods, picks food from her teeth. My mom was sick, too.

Like this? I ask. Is this how it always goes? I want to ask.

Sort of, she says. Not really. Do you have anything sweet? My uncle doesn’t believe in indulgence.

Shush! Mother covers her ears.

I migrate us to the kitchen.

Chocolate? she asks, pointing to a pile of dirt on the counter.

No.

Where’s your dad?

Upstairs, I say. Where’s yours?

Dead, she says, propping herself up on the kitchen table. Or alive. Not sure.

Mine too. I prop myself up beside her. This is not something I do, sit on tables. I don’t know why I am doing it now.

Why’s there so much stuff? She looks around, at letters on the counter, packages lining the floor, loose tomatoes rolling around, pots and pans and plates and ladles littering the surfaces.

Mother is mildewing, I say again.

Right, she says.

And I don’t like to clean.

What do you like?

Stealing, I say, then wonder if it’s true.

She leans back on the table, sprawling like making a snow angel. I look at her arms, smooth and freckled and so unlike Mother’s. I grab onto one.

Hey! she says, flailing it.

I haven’t seen another arm in ages. A clean one, that is.

My arms aren’t clean, she says. I never bathe.

I can scrub it, I tell her, feeling the goosepimples prickling her forearm.

You’re strange, she says.

Oh. I release her arm, and hop off the table. I go to the ground and collect tomatoes one by one. She joins me, puts a handful in her mouth, crunches them.

Are these from my uncle’s garden?

Possibly. I avoid her gaze.

Then her eyes burst open like the tomatoes, wide, so very wide, I think they might roll out of the sockets. If they did, I’d catch them. Place them above the fireplace, look into them when I’m lonely, when Mother won’t stop screaming and my eardrums want to shrivel. I’d stare into the eyeballs and they’d remind me, someone is watching, someone is seeing what I’m seeing.

They taste bad, she says. Sour.

A scream emanates from the sofa.

I should get home. The girl stands up, smooths out her skirt.

I stand up beside her, level with her clavicle. Then I walk the girl to the door and release her, though I desperately want to keep her.

Door shut, I forget who I am for a moment, then return to the sofa, to Mother. Mildew has crept down her torso and up her neck. It hovers at her jaw like a winter sweater.

Mother! I fall to my knees.

Sleeping, she says.

But Mother!––

She thrashes her arms. One of them whips me across the face. The smell of rot floods my nose and I take in her body, as it is now. What I thought were stockings, are more of the same, more mold. Only her face is exposed.

I was just in the kitchen, I say, melting into myself, holding my knees against my chest. How did this happen?

I’ll scrub you, I tell her, I’ll scrub harder.

Nitwit, she mutters.

I scramble to the telephone on the wall. Dial Grandmother’s.

Hello?

Grandma, I sob into the receiver.

How are you, dear? says the old woman.

Get my sisters. Come fast. Mother’s mildew all over! I’m panting, hyperventilating, words are not coming out as I want them to.

Dear, Grandmother says, voice cutting out. We’re about to leave for church.

Christ can wait!

Christ, my dear, went up in flames for you. Have some respect.

But, Mother is––

Dead. The line goes dead.

Mother, the word slips from my lips like a crumb. I look to the sofa. It’s on her ears now, sealed them shut. Can she hear me? M O T H E R, I say slowly. MOTHER MOTHER MOTHER.

Don’t go any further, I tell the mildew. I’ll be RIGHT back.

Then I’m like Mother, banging on the study doors.

If you’re in there, I tell Father. Come out. We NEED you.

I bang and I bang, and then I do the unthinkable, the thing that is forbidden. Twist the knob. It turns effortlessly.

I go in and there’s nothing. Not a father, not a paper, not a scent. Only a naked desk and a shuttered window. There is no proof, none at all, that he was ever really there.

I walk back down the stairs, each step absorbing a Father memory. Soon he is just a man, in the distance, with my same eyes.

My eyes return to the sofa, to the mildew. It has persisted, crept over her lips. Those thin slivers now sprout white-gray speckles. I sit at her side, fold my hand into hers, then my whole body.

Mother? I whisper.

Mother, we shouldn’t steal anymore. I nuzzle my face into her scratchy stinking shoulder.

The study’s empty, I say.

Did you know all along?

Did you know Mr. Spitzer has a niece, and she’s tall, and hungry?

Oh Mother, I say. This is all my fault.

I open my eyes and hers are gone.

The shovel’s there when I arrive. I spend the night digging. When the sun rises, the dirt’s packed tight, Mother beneath it.

How’d you know she was dead-dead? The girl saunters through the garden, as I finish the grave.

Just knew.

My mom’s dead too, she offers.

I know. I let my body fall to the ground.

She sits beside me, muddying her nightgown. We interlace elbows and sleep, sleep on Mother, the sunrise behind us, the sky tomato red.

Don’t know who I am anymore, I sleep-talk to the girl.

Tell me your name, then, she says.

Don’t remember.

Liar.

Mother is mildewing, I mouth the words, no sound coming out.

The girl traces my arm with her fingers, dragging dirt along my skin. Her fingernails are stubby, chewed up.

Anything growing on my arm? I ask her.

Nope, she says. Smooth as pancakes.

Nothing at all?

There is this…

I roll onto my stomach, dirt clinging to me.

Behold, she says, fingers curling around a small mushroom, like it’s a rose.

I stare at the fungus, the fungus sprouting from Mother. The last of her. It’s ugly. Crooked, wilting, barely alive. I want it crushed, I want it torn to pieces.

Stop staring at me, I tell the mushroom.

Surely it’s staring at me, the girl says.

It’s foul.

SHHHH, the girl says. It’s talking.

No it isn’t.

Quiet, she says, jamming her palm against my mouth. It wants us to––no! It can’t be serious.

What? I say. What does it want?

First we have to pluck it, she says, pulling on the mushroom. It separates from its soil like a bone snapping. I shiver.

The girl splits the mushroom in two, peeling it like string cheese. We have to eat it, she says.

She hands a half to me. I cradle it in my palm like a newborn baby. My mother, so small, so vulnerable. Yes, I agree. She must be eaten.

We count to three, eyes locked, before sliding the halves down our throats. No chewing, just slivers slithering down to our stomachs.

Then we lie back on the dirt, on Mother. Time speeds up, and we lie for an eternity. I am a daughter, a mother, a grandmother, then dirt, then nothing.

Did you feel that? I ask the girl.

The soil jolts our bodies upward. We’re growing, like vines, like tea leaves. The girl plucks me and I pluck her, and we walk back to my house, hand in hand.

I want the wind to work for me for once. Being small I am not subject to its whims as the long-limbed are. Because of my size when the storm call came they sent me underground, into the steam tunnels underneath the college or into the awkward spaces beneath the buildings downtown first built to support the work of mines before they closed some years ago. They aren’t coming back. The others took the downed lines aboveground first. I could have done that work but I prefer being underneath. They know this so when there’s work down under I am the first to go.

The university had a break in tunnel nine, and the power’s out in Electrical Engineering II, a joke that amused only me. For some reason the university built its lines low, below waist-height for most adults. I’m just under five foot, not short enough to be a dwarf, but small enough for people to notice and not be sure what word they should use to call me. I say buddy is just fine. Or AI if they prefer. AI is what I go by when I go by anything. AI like artificial intelligence? they ask, and I say yes, that’s me, artificially intelligent. Wind me up and watch me go.

Q had that stalagmite thing today, that underground thing today, so he wasn't there. His voice is out and has been for the year. It’s weird working with him like this. He was a colossal talker before he lost it, before the surgery he got to correct some error in it that I could never hear: his voice was always gold to me. What error, I would ask; a uvular flaw or something, he said. It would come back, he said—he wrote—he typed—he had this clicker thing that would direct a robotic voice to say whatever needed saying, which wasn’t much, really. Clear the line, reroute the wire, tonight I’m on fire, it’s time to go. He was a chatterer before but having to click it out with the dongle was too much work, he said, so he kept it to the important communications. It had this autocorrect function so sometimes he’d say things he didn’t mean to say, like a clumsy texter.

Because the university built the lines so low animals get into them with regularity. They’re not supposed to even be down here; the school has grates and spikes and live traps and traps that kill and electrified cables to keep them out, and poison gas to finish off those few that make it in and start an infestation. But they make it in. That’s one thing you learn: they always make it in. Not all of them are killed. I think the gas is a disproportionate response: isn’t the university concerned that it might get out into the systems up above and asphyxiate a coed? I guess that’s never happened. I asked Q and he explained how the systems were separate so you didn’t have to worry. That’s what they always say, I said. Still, I said, why not just introduce some big, pissed-off cats or something? It was raccoons as often as anything else, and they ate cats, Q said, and I supposed that must be true. We see them down here, a ring-tail sneaking around a corner, eyes reflecting back in the darkness as we come down here with our lights.

When we show up they let us know that we are interlopers in their world, not they in ours. But we built these cities, I exclaim. We carved these tunnels out of the rock with our intuition and our engineering chops. If it weren’t for us and for our kind you would not be here at all. Of course they don’t respond. Sometimes you hear a little squeal or a scrabble or some clicks and nips. It’s hard to tell how far away they are. Sound echoes long down in a tunnel. What eats raccoons aside from bears or wolves or opportunistic country people?

Wouldn’t it just be better to raise the lines? Why do the animals want to chew them anyhow? The charge kills them once they get through the piping and the insulation. Almost always when we’re called down we see a charred something cold and blurred and dead in the act of chewing or of screaming where the break is. It takes some time for them to gnaw through the insulation. They must want it bad. What draws them to the lines? Is it just because they’re there? You’d think that they would learn.

Q said they don’t learn because they die. It’s not like a kid. They’re not that smart. But what about evolution, I asked. Evolution takes longer than you think, he said. Or he used to say. Now the machine would say it on his behalf. But today he’s doing some spelunking thing so he’s not here and I’m alone. As if we don’t spend enough time underground!

Normally they would have sent another tech with me in his stead, but we were understaffed on account of the storm, the snow was going hard upstairs, and the power was out in most of the building just above. So first I walked tunnel nine and then tunnels ten and twelve until I found the break or burnout and hopefully not electrocuting myself alone.

Q sang karaoke avidly before the surgery. He didn’t really have the voice, but you could tell that he had belief, that he could be possessed by song, could be filled with it, and so he was. That he inhabited and so became lament: Backstreet Boys, “Mandy, You’re a Fine Girl,” “Bleeding Love.” That in his heart he knew instead of crawling through tunnels underneath the city he could have been huge and nationwide, his name ricocheting through the press in lights, caught in flagrante with an underage fan, and have to check himself into rehab and find a way to resurrect his stalled career.

Even after he got the chop, he still wanted to go out to lend support; that was part of what you did, he said: it wasn’t just the singing. It was citizenship. After the first few weeks of people asking, you could see he didn’t have as much fun if he was not the one on display. It’s like the night barely had meaning if he couldn’t lose himself inside a song. Eventually we stayed home instead and drank and watched the weirdest shit we could find on television, which is pretty weird up here since we mostly get the public access channels. There’s this show we found: some kid, I guess maybe technically an adult, but he looks like he’s about sixteen, constellations of pimples, basement-hardened mannerisms, lame jokes, the whole bit, and his show is this: he goes around in basements and mines and crawlspaces under houses searching for ghosts, ghouls, ghasts, and phantasms. He explained the differences between these things, but I don’t remember what they are.

Most of the show is shaky footage of the darkness, passageway after passageway, with heavy breathing and the sound of a wet mouth chatting up a microphone. What kinds of ghosts does he expect to find, I want to ask him, but usually we’re drunk and when I sober up I don’t care enough to ask. It’s called Let’s Go Check it Out. Maybe that’s where Q got the idea to go spelunking.

The kid talks to somebody who has a story about a ghost in some mine, or the Paulding Light, or something haunting a widow’s walk up by the abandoned theatre that’s hosted tragedies for a century and a half and probably remembers too many of them too well, and then he goes to investigate. People know him around here for it. After all, this is a haunted country. Like any place with mines, it’s filled with deaths, explained and unexplained. Stories curl up around each one. That girl who we found hanging from the water tower: she was cursed. Her whole family carried it from long ago on account of breaking the strike in 1929. No matter what they did they couldn’t get free of it, etc.

Our people are not by nature talkative, but they talk to him. This is in part because he’s one of them. His family’s lived here for a century or more. His enthusiasm for crawlspaces is weirdly winning. And because they too—the dislocated Finns who mostly populate this place—believe in ghosts. They’ve seen enough to know some places hold their darknesses. They suspect that even death is no release from the long winter or their loneliness. They don’t say as much, but you can tell what it is they feel by watching them on camera. Their faces conceal more than they reveal, even as they speak to him.

It’s pretty great. The kid gets pumped up and heads into the darkness once a week with his architectural drawings, his EMF meter, an iPad with some digital filters on its camera, about twenty varieties of flashlights and glow sticks, a bag of fireworks just in case he needs a distraction to escape, as he explains, and a refusal to settle for a ghostless world.

This is, I fear, a ghostless world. Q and I spend a lot of time underground and I haven’t ever seen anything I could call a ghost. Not now, not when I was young. So I can’t believe in anything after or beyond this world. The motion detector lights in tunnel nine lit up one by one as I get further in. Soon enough I came across a burger smell and I knew exactly what that meant. I turned a corner and there was the smell of grill, like the chemical haze the Kingburger on main pumps out to compel people to come and consume their meat. This would be the break.

When I got up to it, I saw that I was correct. I saw a sparking up. Something had gotten deep into the cable, and it was shorted out, surrounded by a mess of feathers and a scorch mark the size of a deflated beach ball. I hung a light and marked the wall with chalk around the scorch; I measured its size with tape. I made a note about the spark.

I went on. A hundred meters further in I found the thing, what I thought was a swan, a big one, charred pretty bad. Probably it was dead. I gave it a prod with my shears. Didn't know how you’d get a swan down here. Didn't know how it’d get into the cable either.

It didn't move. I gave it another whack just to be sure. It still didn't move. So I crouched down beside it. It was dead. I had never been this close to one, a swan. It used to be beautiful; it had grace. You could tell that. But dead it was just another thing.

I marked it down in the logbook that we share, a record of our adventures. I looked down the passageway. There was nothing else in sight. Cleaning it up is not my job, but I bring a couple bags each time just in case. These wouldn't be big enough. I got one only halfway around the thing. It was big and hard and splayed in ways that emphasized just how wide a wingspan a swan has. I’d had to break it to get it in the bag.

I looked more closely at the beak. It was as hard as you’d expect and had these little barbs. Maybe it could've gotten through the sheathing on the line. But why? I got another bag around its other half. I said a little prayer for death. I said it under my breath even if no one is watching.

I identified the line and saw where it connected into the junction box. The whole passageway stunk of dead, of swan kabob. My job is a boring one, particularly when you’re alone, but it is haunted by the possibility of death. They hit you with that all the time in certification, how All It Takes Is Inattention. One Slip Up and You’re Toast. There are other even less memorable slogans. In class we’d use electric lines to burn our names in big hunks of bread to demonstrate the point: you too can die.

It had the opposite effect: we loved burning the bread with electricity. It would move so fast it would set the piece afire, and we’d take it with the insulated tongs and throw it down into a trash can filled with paper and light that up too. This was Q’s idea. The instructor did not approve but—you could see—he didn’t know how to get the classroom back. After that we burned a Quiznos sandwich next and after that a letter jacket in the lost and found. I watched the instructor’s face as Q canvassed the students for other things to burn. We burned bags of raisins, the golden kind, that a woman had. She had to take them out of the house after her dog had almost died by eating a whole can of them. When they burned they smelled fantastic. Some frozen fish which someone inexplicably had in a backpack. We didn’t ask. We burned a couple books. The old bicycle outside that had never been used. By this point the whole room was filled with smoke.

I looked at Q through the smaze. This was a word of his; he was proud of it; he didn’t get to say it often but when he did he’d explain that it meant “a smoky haze.” He had read it in a book of short stories somewhere and that was all from the book that he remembered. In the smaze he had a look of wizardry. His face was alight with possibility. It was hard not to be in love with Q. Even the instructor was. You could tell by the marks on his papers when they were returned, and by the fact that he just sat there at the desk at the front of the auditorium and watched, his face a halo, as Q performed. He too would follow Q if he had the chance. Perhaps this was his chance, he might have thought. If it got big enough he might be forced out of this job and onto something else, something meaningful that didn’t involve corralling clowns like us. He could be a disciple of whatever Q was selling. Or eventually, he probably hoped, Q would acquire and burn something so spectacular as to force the instructor to stop everything and gather the class back up and say thank you Q, now, well, that proved the point: anything can burn.

And he did. When Q burned the lectern, the current arced into the metal chair and into the light switch panel and then the lights went out and then a cheer went up from the dearly beloved gathered here today. For a second it still glowed, like a rainbow in the dark, and its light illuminated Q, and in that moment I thought maybe instead he was the devil, here to assess our sins and invite us into the fire, and then, as if to admit we had gone too far or I had thought too much about it, someone flipped the breaker switch, and the lights came back, and there was an operatic pause, and in it the instructor became an instructor again and said okay, see, everyone, it just takes a slip, slipping back into the discussion, which was more like an auction at this point, and I couldn’t tell if Q had burned himself out maybe or maybe was a little overcome on account of the fumes and had to go get some air he said, and so we all took a little break and opened up the windows for the air to clear even though it was cold and when I found him outside he was sitting down and folded up inside himself saying nothing at all to anyone like he had proved some point about his undying spiritual disappointment with the world.

One point he did prove was that the smoke alarms in the classrooms at the university did not work. When he received an email from the instructor’s supervisor informing him that he would be removed from the class on account of this stunt he told them this and threatened to sue the school. No one believed he would get far with the suit, but his letter was on legal letterhead that he had acquired some years before in trade for some favor or another, and they backed down and agreed to let him finish out the class as long as nothing else was set on fire—by anyone, they specified, weirdly, not just by him. There would be no more fires. He said he didn’t start the fire, the first one anyway, it was always burning, but by this time he was just provoking them with Billy Joel. I could tell he really didn’t care, and so the subject dropped and we finished up the class and got our certification.

Where Q went, normally I would follow a little ways behind. I was a little bit transfixed. I think that’s fair to say. He had procured an office there. He was a student but he had an office. It was larger than the instructor’s, which was just a desk in a nest of desks. Q’s was huge and all for him. He had befriended one of the janitors the year before and so had got the key to an abandoned office in the building that overlooks the power plant, the one ringed by power lines, so most people don’t want to office there on account of their fears of EMF. Mostly it’s just storage. Sometimes we would bring the chairs outside and listen to the lines hum away the darkness.

Up here there is a lot of darkness. The light is the thing that holds it back. I can’t imagine what it would have been like before the gas lamp and electric light, when you’d have to buy your candles and bring them into the mine to see where you were going. It’s blackout dark for months. I don’t think I could bear to live in it. The work I do keeps me busy and alive, lets me negate the creeping dark, lets me feel like I do my part to keep it at bay. It keeps Q alive too. It keeps you alive. There’s only so far the human mind can take the dark before being driven mad.

I have relatives who’ve gone mad and live out the remainders of their lives out on the lakes. There are a lot of lakes. A lot of cabins on dark lakes, burning into the night of this place. They’ve gone paranoid. One never speaks or goes outside. She only types—on a typewriter, no less—and sends notes through the ailing US Mail. She talks about how the NSA underwrites the work of the monastery up by the lighthouse, how they keep tabs on her from afar. She is hazy on the details of the surveillance. She sends me weird-ass letters all the time. Sometimes they rhyme. Periodically she publishes poetry. I buy her publications since who else will?

She tells me that she has started to hear voices—even when everything in the house is off, no lights, no telephone, appliances unplugged, nothing else awake or alive as far as she can see. What do they say? I ask. She doesn't share. She says it’s like listening to the radio except there is no radio. I have doubts. Listen to nothing long enough and you start to hear something in its place. That is, the human mind creates its company.

A half an hour away and on another very similar lake, an uncle fears the light, or the EMF that the lights put out. He gave me an EMF meter for the last Christmas I spent with him and told me to try it out around the house. See where the hotspots were. No one wants to talk about it, he said. You got to stay away from the high voltage lines especially, like down by the university. Cell phones hatch a cancer in the brain. Beware of them! Extremely low frequency communications from out by the military airfield that they claim they decommissioned. Microwaves, too. Did you know the microwave was invented by a military company in Tucson, Arizona?

Tucson, Arizona, is a life away from here. I looked it up. He was right, about the microwave at least. A company there called Raytheon developed it accidentally. They make weapons, avionics. Now they’re mostly known for guidance systems that fit on missiles and can strike a target halfway across the world. I imagine them, in their white complexes in the desert, ringed by security fence after security fence, running simulations, detonating things underground, firing weaponry at other desert complexes in the Middle East. How much sun do they get down there? Q asked when I was telling him all of this. Arizona or the Middle East? I asked. And then I continued, since it was about the same: over 300 days a year of sunshine is what they get. Tucson gets 350. There’s no darkness there. Or if there is it doesn’t last as long. Only fifteen days of it. It wouldn’t have the same effect. I bet it’s more like a rest, a breath, and then it lifts.

Before he moved into the space, Q’s office was filled with racks of uniforms. There must have been a hundred chairs of five or six different sorts, successive generations of industrial furniture bought and shelved by the university. It was bigger than an office has any right to be. We shoved everything to the sides and made a passage through. Q installed a putting green. He set up soda machines that hadn’t seen use since the '80s and still sold cans for a quarter—brands they didn’t even make anymore. We bought them and filled our hearts with saccharine and aspartame and used the cans to build model power towers that receded into the distance, repeating. He fed phalanxes of cats who barely looked at us as they came to begrudge their food and slink away.

Q got someone at IT to set up one of the old machines there; it must have been fifteen years old, with a monochrome screen, even. He wanted it connected to the internet. The IT guy laughed when they came in to take a look. He said no way. He took the machine away and gave him a newer one in its stead. What department did you say you were with? he asked. Q said English, he was ABD, working on annotating an edition of Erasmus Darwin’s letters about electricity, even though his adviser had retired and abandoned him, and now he had been banished here, to this office, it was like no one would even look at him, like he didn’t even exist, the amber-screened machine was a metaphor for his predicament and with a new one he was saved (with this he gestured to the heavens), and with that last flourish it was like Q found the key to unlock IT.

As a result Q would let the janitor download and do his thing to porn every night between one and four when we weren’t there. The janitor—a guy who Q called Rousseau—was pretty cool. He had a beaten look. He didn’t talk a lot but when he was with Q he did. He said he’d seen some things when he was in the Navy. He had worked on submarines. There were whole days when they didn’t speak, when they had to wait for instructions beamed, he said, from somewhere halfway across the world. He responded to Q’s text to speech machine in ways that said he knew what it meant to be silenced and to get to speak again.

Sometimes Rousseau would watch Let’s Go Check It Out with us when we showed up and he was finished with a floor and we could wonder about the electric apparitions that you could see some nights in the sky after the storms had come and gone. More often than not I bet what people see when they think they see a ghost is electricity. Current is a funny thing. We don’t always have it tamed.

For all I knew Rousseau might be the one to get called to take out the dead bird. So I did what I could to make it easier for him. I cinched the thing inside the second bag and tagged it Dead/for Trash/Potential Biohazard/Hey Rousseau. I marked it down in the log. We’ve never had a bird in there before. We were supposed to estimate the weight. What would a thing like that weigh? I gave it a heft. Maybe thirty-five pounds, I figured; birds are light for their size on account of they have to fly. Thirty-five pounds seems like a lot of bird, like double a big Thanksgiving. I wasn’t actually even sure I’d ever seen a swan alive before. Did they live up here? How do they tolerate the snow and dark? Do they fly out through it or hunker down? How do they react to poison gas?

As I isolated the line and clipped it off, I heard what I was sure was a voice, a whisper, a lady whispering, a mother’s shush, a hairbrush rustling on bare skin. I looked around then at the ground. I was still in the feather ring. I wasn’t going to bother to clean that up. There were too many feathers to count. Yet somehow the bird didn’t seem to be missing any. No one else was here. Maybe it was because I was unaccustomed to doing this alone. Maybe it was just a bit of escaping gas.

These tunnels were filled with other pipes that had no relevance to my task. Hot water in and out, three varieties of gas. Fiber optics and other data wires labeled critical with yellow stripes. The electrics, sure, and then the telecom, and there were others that were unlabeled. Steam came through a few of them to heat the place when the electricity went out. One time I was down here—not here but in a different here, another tunnel to another building, but part of the same network—they all connected—I’m surprised the students don’t know about it, or maybe because they are all connected all the time via the Internet they just don’t care—and found a breach in one that turned out to be the line that connected all the clocks in all the classrooms and the offices manually to the central time server. Time had stopped, I was told, in every classroom throughout the campus. Students would glance at the clocks repeatedly and visibly get pissed, and this was such a distraction that it had to be fixed.

It was important, we were told, that it all connected, that the clocks struck four o’clock in tandem, and this was how it was always done. Never mind we were in the age of WiFi everywhere: you couldn’t disconnect or reset the classroom clocks except in the server room. They all read the same, all the time? Q asked. Except when there was a breach. They weren’t well insulated. This was one of those times when I could see Q performing calculations in his head. What? I said. It was like throwing rocks down into a mine: sometimes you’d get something back from him and sometimes you would not.

Q and I weren’t always here, below the university. Sometimes we would be called into a mine tunnel that went a couple miles into the earth. We went on those calls because we were the only ones at the company certified for mines. Working in a mine meant you had to know how to use the Self-Rescuer if things went bad. They never did, but still the thought of it, of being trapped by cave-in or gas, kept recurring. The Self-Rescuer is an apparatus with oxygen and a transmitter and light that you can use when all else fails, if you are alone and cut off from access to the surface. You don’t want to use the Self-Rescuer if you can avoid it. You don’t need one down here, because these tunnels are reinforced. Because they have at least two access points, the threat is mitigated. Unlike a mine, there is always another way out.

Then there are the pneumatic tubes. In the last century the university thought that pneumatic tubes would be the way we all communicated in the future. How could you think differently? You just load the cartridge in the tube and with a whoosh the compressed air would fire it off to central dispatching. It was fast, but not immediate. They installed them in all the university tunnels. Skin samples, vials of strange reagents, and diagrams of new machines shot back and forth underneath the students’ feet. It must have been glorious to be surrounded by so much constant motion, even if you couldn’t see or hear it. Then there was the revolution of digital and you can see why no one uses tubes anymore. Even so the air remains and from time to time it shifts. I swear I’ve heard something moving through them in the past but don’t know what it could be.

And what was that? I could swear I just heard that word—mitigated—the same one I had thought, or had I said that out loud?—repeated in the passageway. I looked around. There was no way it could be the case. I gave out a yell, a who the hell is here? I could hear it move down the tunnel and away. That was it. Nothing else came back. Not a quack or honk or compressed air rush or raccoon sound.

I sealed up the line with foam and tape and made a note of how much I used.

Just in case that was not the only breach I kept walking further down. I left the dead bird half-bagged where it was.

A half mile past the intersection with tunnel ten I found an open door. I could have swore it wasn’t here the last time we were here but I guessed I wasn’t sure. You don’t always pay attention. It’s like the EMF. Once my uncle told me about the EMF I did start testing everything and taking readings. It got addictive, watching the needle flicker and the light light up. He told me about the additives to the water. He told me about what the government did to his daughter. I hadn’t seen my cousin in many years. I understood she had just moved away. She got out, she told me last time I heard from her. Her father didn’t get it. He just bivouacked himself in his cabin and stockpiled guns to keep the world away. That was true, I knew. He wasn’t the most reasonable man to begin with, and his isolation didn’t help.

What did the government do to Shelley? I asked him, afterward. He told me about how they “nudged” her: they do these subtle behavioral modifications to you when you’re away at college, he explained; they tested her and they photographed her and benchmarked her responses, and when she came back she just wasn’t the same; she felt differently about this place, said she had no place in it; what was there here for a woman like her? she asked. He had no answer. She didn’t want to make her life here anymore. She didn’t believe in what her family did anymore. The government nudged her to reject her former life and they gave her a new one in the city, and after that she did not return, and with that my uncle had retreated to his loneliness and gloom and drink and theories about his persecution.

Well, if I got out I wouldn’t return here either. I had tried to burn my life before. This was before I got this job, before I met Q, before I turned my life around. I had burned a couple barns and a house or two in the new development. I was then in love with fire. I saw it as a kind of answer to my malaise. I wasn’t very smart. I loved the word malaise. I liked to trot it out and parade it around the yard like I was a gentleman. My father looked doubtfully at me when I brought it out: like my cousin, maybe I had been nudged myself; I was no gentleman, I could see him thinking: when you’re sixteen you do not have malaise. This time he wasn’t wrong. As they say, even a broken clock is right two times a day, or once if it’s a twenty-four-hour clock. I had always meant to leave but I never had. It’s weird how a place can hold you where you are.

The open door was well beyond where the breach might have been. We were way out past the electrical engineering building moving toward the power plant and its humming mouths opening outward toward the lake. Still I had to check it out. Rarely there was a second break, and in that case I’d have to head back down, which would piss my supervisor off. If there was a second one, better to find it now, and besides I knew the storm would be going outside for a good long time. It was the long storm time of year.

So first I followed the passage out to the power plant and didn’t find a breach, and then I returned for that open door. The seam between the door and frame was very fine. It was unmarked. When it was closed it would be easy to miss. Only two tubes—the old pneumatic ones, judging from the size—led down this way. They went through the wall on either side. I placed my hand on them, but they were cold. What had I expected?

What I noticed first when I went through the door was how the air slightly shifted, got more acrid. A hundred feet in and it was obvious that everything was colder, wetter. Darker too. There weren’t any lights. I had to flick my headlamp on. This wasn’t up to code.

Then I heard that whispering again. There were a couple vents down along the floor: like little slits or gills, almost. I don’t know why I thought gills. I was closer to the ground than most, so I noticed things like this. Like a child I saw things that others missed, that Q had missed before. I’d saved him once, noticing an open wire just before he picked up a loop of cable that we did not know was live. He said thanks. Just think: I could have been toast, a lesson for professors. I said don’t mention it. He didn’t mention it again, but you could tell he took me a little bit more seriously than he had before.

I got down on my knees and put my ear up to the slits. A little air flowed through. I couldn’t hear anything. What would Q do about this? I wondered. He was doing the stalagmite thing right now I knew. He hadn’t invited me. Well, I had work. He took personal time to do it. His text-to-speech corrected it to personnel so I didn’t understand at first.

He was there with a girl we both knew. Of course she was beautiful. And silent. I couldn’t imagine a conversation between them. They were going to start out in an established research cave and sneak through a series of passages into the Chandelier Room, which wasn’t open to the public at the moment. You could tour the cave, of course. We all had done it when we were younger: it’s what there was to do up here: tour the cave, explore the mine, fish, get drunk, go camping out by the lake, see what there is to burn, go mad, get nudged, become someone else and move away.

The cave was pretty cool. Normally you could tour the Chandelier, too, except this whole year it was closed for renovation. What kind of renovation could they do inside a cave? Still, it was accessible through a back passage, Q had said Rousseau had told him, and he was going to take Wendy in on the downlow. She had never been. She used to be a Mormon until they excommunicated her for reasons I did not understand.

Another half mile in and this looked even less like a passageway. Now it was more like a tunnel inside a cave, like something out of Let’s Go Check It Out. The ceiling lowered so even I had to stoop some to get through. I could still hear whispering. The wall glistened when I touched it. It was wet and dripping down on either side. Its trickle sound reassured me for some reason. It meant we were going somewhere. We had to have left the university by now. My headlamp revealed a little door up ahead. Water pooled and leaked underneath it. I pressed my hand to it. It was wood. It wasn’t hard to open. Where were we? Where were we going? Why was I saying we, when Q wasn’t even here? Just a habit, I guessed, like talking to myself out loud, or compulsive masturbation.

There was this mud inside the Chandelier Room that was over a thousand years old. You could see the footprints left there by our distant ancestors, the tour guides said. By ancestors they meant the ancestors of the natives who were here before we showed up and slaughtered them and took their land and took their cave, not the ancient Finns who probably lived as we did, slowly going mad in the dark around their Finnish lakes. The mud hadn’t been disturbed since. Obviously you weren’t allowed to touch the mud. Very occasionally the cave techs would have to do some work, shore up a wall or whatever, and when they had to walk through that mud pool they were extremely careful. Only those with the smallest feet got to go, and they had to step precisely in the footprints that were there. I couldn’t imagine the stress of it. What if they wobbled and overcorrected and fell over and faceplanted into the mud? Was it still soft? How could it be after a thousand years? I asked these questions of the guide. She said yes it was soft. It stayed soft because the humidity and acidity down here prevented hardening. But how did she know if she couldn’t touch it? I asked her. Well, she said, she had been told. She had touched some other mud. She said when you followed in the ancestral footsteps they installed a line that you would hold so you wouldn’t fall.

I could feel it in my blood. Q would take Wendy there and they would touch the mud. I wanted to touch it bad. I wanted to know how it would feel to put my hands in something that old and so long untouched and yet still soft and still alive, to put my fingers in it and feel its electricity course right through me and go on to whatever I might be connected to.

Maybe I would feel better about my past like this, I said aloud. The whisper whispered back and then it paused. I had cause to touch the mud. I should have been the one to go. How else would I know if I had been nudged? Maybe on account of the medication the doctors had me on after that rash of burnings I had become someone else without my realizing it? If I could only touch the originality it held I could compare myself to it and see.

Well. Instead of there with them I was here surrounded by some weird whispering and walking slightly down toward what I was increasingly sure was the border of the lake. I had heard there were caverns underneath. There are always caverns underneath. What we think is solid is in fact not. They mine salt from underneath the lake down south below the bridge. As a result there are miles of open space under the lake down there. They drove trucks through the passages. Someone staged an exhibition baseball game there as a stunt.

Here the air was slightly stale. The whispering seemed to have stopped. I turned and saw a dozen eyes in the dark behind me. My headlamp lit them up like marbles or little mirrors. I stood and watched. They didn’t make any sound. It was a lot of eyes. They were pretty small but still. Had I gone too far?

I didn’t want to stop and deal with the raccoons. Here the passage took a turn. When I followed it around, it opened into a room with what looked at first like the ruins from the mine, the old steam hoist in particular. It was huge, maybe sixty feet across, and silent. As I got closer I could see it was a machine, an old one, powered down. My headlamp lit it up only partly. I couldn’t tell what it was at first. I thought it was just a metal wall. I had no context for it so I stood and stared blankly at it. To say it was a room with a machine understated it: the machine was almost all the room. It was tech from forty years before with vacuum tubes and hoses snaking everywhere and what looked like a thousand dormant glass bulb lights. The tubes disappeared into it. And it disappeared into the ceiling. It looked like the ceiling had maybe been installed around it, so surely it was even bigger above or below. What I saw was only a part.

I was so astounded by this find I forgot to mark it in the log. How could I describe this thing to the company or justify it to Q? I got up closer and placed my hand on it just to be sure that it was real. To my surprise it was a little warm. Everything was silent. Here too were those little gills a few inches above the ground. I knelt to put my ear to them.

What did I expect to hear? Some news of the old world, maybe, everything that happened before this one was built on top of it. A dispatch from the past. What did the university know that I did not so that they had built this thing down here? What was it meant to do? Was it even theirs? Did they even remember it? I thought I knew this place.

As I sat back and contemplated the machine I heard a sound like something shooting quickly through the tube, a shoomp, and the thing whirred to life. First a light lit up and then another and another, and soon the whole thing was humming and clicking. The sudden confluence of lights blew out my vision. It took a minute to adjust. Then the whispering began: it was the same sound I had heard before but louder, and in more voices. They were overlapping female voices, I was pretty sure. I thought I could make out a word here and there from the mash of them: you, believe, without, a barrier: not much of a sentence, that. Maybe courier or hurrier or harrier instead of barrier. And then another mitigate, just like the one I heard before. I thought to record a couple minutes of it with my phone just to prove I had been here so I sat in silence as they spoke in bits.

I would have to play this for Q and see what he’d make of it. Maybe when I got back we’d show it to Rousseau or send the footage to Let’s Go Check It Out. I knew the kid would want to know about a secret like this hidden down in the dark. Or maybe he knew already. Maybe everyone knew about this place already. Maybe this was what kept them alive through the winter months, the thought of coming here or just knowing it was here, this huge machine, lighting up, whispering, whirring. Maybe Q and Wendy knew. Even Rousseau. Was this what he wouldn’t say? Maybe the instructor knew and that’s why he let us set fire to more than our share. Maybe even my uncle knew, and this was why he had hermited himself and why my cousin had left and wasn’t coming back? I was seized with this possibility: that I would be, like I feared, the last to know. Well. If he didn’t know already, the kid could interview me about what I thought I saw and go down there to see what he could find. And he could break it open, and everyone would know.

I wrote on the wall in chalk what is this place? and signed it AI. I wrote Rousseau, what do you know about this machine? I wrote I was here; where were you, Q? I wrote I’ve been lonely so long I’ve become a light. I felt I should write something else to prove that I was here, that I had something interesting to say in response to a little miracle such as this, but nothing came to mind.

Just a moment after that, the lights suddenly doubled in brightness and I heard a catch, like an intake of breath, and then they all went out at once. The voices slowly trickled off until just one was left. Its softness startled. It seemed to speak specifically to me. It told me something true about my life. What are you? What do you do? I asked. One light lit back up. There was a pause. It told me it processed messages from the dead and transcribed them in human voices, voices that had been recorded on tape loops many years ago. They were taped at mime performances and silent films and used to laugh-track television shows. It said the dead were faded but not entirely gone. It said through it they could reach into the world a little ways, a phrase at a time, perhaps a sentence if it meant enough, if their desire was particularly strong, if the speaker had kept silent for long enough.

It said you should speak as often as you can, as long as you can, while you can. It got quieter. The whole room was electric now. I could feel my hair rising in the field the thing was putting out. It said nothing ever really goes away. It said it had a message for me from someone I hadn’t known I loved until it was too late. I listened as it spoke. I won’t tell you what it said.

Ninety-five cents in 1976, number 26 in the Laser Books series, a series lost to time or at least to me, it’s Robert Coulton’s To Renew the Ages bought for its extremely batshit cover (a theme you’ll note recurring) which I’m going to have to now describe so I guess saddle up. First this one’s got the illustrator’s name on the cover, Kelly Freas, in a hard-to-miss spot, and s/he/they really brings it. Where to begin. You can barely read the author’s name because it’s in some trees, screened way back, and the whole palette is pretty dark. In the foreground there is half a dashing guy, half I mean because the left half of his face is melted off. Or something. Behind his disembodied, melting, floating kind of sexy head is a skeleton collapsed in what is, I guess, grass. The skeleton looks picked clean. Behind that is a humanoid form being blasted to shit by some kind of space helicopter with a laser. He looks like he was trying to shoot the laser helicopter with a bow and arrow, which didn’t go well and as a result is now being lasered to component parts; the lasering looks extremely cool. Behind that is maybe a hazy dappled outline of a city in the distance, I can’t quite tell and you can’t either, and you’ll also notice the highway sign on the left of the cover right by the spine reading U.S. 60 because this is postapocalyptic America, I think. The whole thing is pretty intense visually, and it's no surprise when I learn that Freas is a very well-known sci-fi illustrator, which is probably why he gets the name on the front page. This isn’t my world so I get excited when I figure these things out for myself. The name of the General Editor for the series, Roger Elwood, is nigh unreadable on the cover, black and disappearing into the image, and I’m not sure it’s actually Elwood. It might be Roger L. Wood or something else. That’s how little it matters. It’s got to be a slap in the face. No one loves a series editor. It’s sad, I know, the disrespect. I’m with you, Elwood, and I’m sorry for your erasure. The only two text things that pop at all are the title (which is fine) and the name of Kelly Freas, who is not the author of this book. Of the options given on this cover, I’d rather be the laser copter, which is pretty stupid, like are we still flying copters if we have disintegrating fire lasers?, or the floating head, even with half a face since he at least looks cool: the other half is kind of dashing, or probably maybe was when he was younger. Nice head of black, curly hair, the kind of gentleman that would have been seen as appropriately romancing a woman at least thirty years his junior in black and white films for instance. A student told me today that fifty-five was basically old age, which is exactly six years and six days away so also there’s that. Actually hot, floating half-a-guy is a little wizened really, showing his age on closer examination, as we do, probably it’s tough out there after the nuclear holocaust, all that fighting barbaric savages and ferocious wild animals and searching for extremely hot girls like “Tamara Bush, the most beautiful woman he has ever seen,” who may be even more beautiful because he only has one eye to see with and I have to guess that the range of hot postapocalyptic ladies is less than he had maybe dreamed of before he was just a half-faced floating man with, I’m just noticing, a red eye and I don’t know what is up with his teeth, hard to find a dentist in the wasteland or one that isn’t getting blasted by laser copters, even in America. U.S. 60 dead-ends in Arizona, Apache Junction actually, just a little past where I stayed in an Airbnb after the Renaissance Faire a week and change ago with some friends, where the Airbnb hosts left us a really low rating for reasons, as far as we could tell, related to leaving some of the VAST numbers of useless decorative pillows that covered every bed to the point of pathology, honestly, a note I didn’t leave in my review, on the floor or maybe not being Trumpy or Mormon enough for Apache Junction, which was at least a little bit postapocalyptic in feeling though we survived it, and in its defense we did find a kind of great bar with a dumb name that my kid wouldn’t eat at because the name was so dumb, and she is very stubborn but the food was way better than you’d think and the bar had an absolutely incredible showpiece of glass four-way absinthe server, which obviously I had to order, and the absinthe was oddly colored (chartreuse?) but tasted good and was very reasonably priced, so I guess it’s all a wash after the first bomb drops anyway.

I put the orange in the freezer, because I didn’t know what else to do. The rest of her school lunch I threw away, but it seemed important somehow to hold on to the orange. People filtered in and out of the house for days to ask us questions. I stacked shepherd’s pie and lasagna in the freezer; the orange poked its head out from a corner. I felt cold for it, wanted that kind of cold, wanted my fibers to go ice-sharp with crystals, wanted all the sweetness to stay put, wanted to play dead.

1. Flaxen #EEDC82

Because it wouldn’t be too different from the color it is now. Cigarette smudge lingering on the white. The shade is equal parts gray and yellow. Sunlight muted by blinds. Long, corn husk hair. Brittle mane. Something dead and something alive blending into almost.

When there are particularly bad days, and quiet holds my mother and I like cling film, I imagine the house peopled by someone other than us: a woman with lemur-ed eyes smoking Native Spirits while combing mascara into her eyelashes,  best friends stretched across bedroom carpet, pinked from stolen gin and each other’s breath and whisper-cloaked secrets, healthy parents who were mostly good and two sticky toddlers with plastic boats in the bathtub. When you moved in with my mother and I, you were dampened by the senility of it. The slowness. Bread molding on the counter. Floral couch with decade-old coffee stains. Picture frames furred with dust. My wrinkled, dying mother. The imprint of her body on the bed when she slumbered into the living room for The Price is Right. You once buzzed like a bee, never still, even for a moment: you danced while cooking, swished your hips back and forth at the stove, twirled to retrieve oregano or turmeric or cumin, you tapped your feet while watching movies, switched how you were sitting every five minutes—criss-crossed, knees to chest, legs spread across my lap, floor sitting, head leaned on armrest, head leaned on my shoulder—you listened to podcasts while curling your hair into tiny, springy ringlets, sprinted through TV series while working, you made your life noisy, made it full. Then, when you moved out, a hush.

2. Butterscotch #FABD02

Because I know you would hate it. That feeble almost brown that tastes too much like your Aunt’s house in middle-of-nowhere Texas. The shade of bruises and small candies. The moment where something bright ebbs into darkness. Caramel. Bread crust. Vomit.

I hold the swatch to the bathroom wall—there’s a few cracks and a small golden stain from dying my hair when I was young— and my mother calls me from her room. My mother’s life: a warm childhood on a farm outside Hatch Valley, plucking the light green peppers with her brothers, eating them raw to watch each other wince, church on Sundays and chocolate malts at Dairy Queen after, the death of her father, the cold of his funeral, many lovers, some beautiful, some shiny, some mean, some violent, studying in Paris, bleeding me out of her womb, raising me in a lonely apartment in Albuquerque, traveling to White Sands, Laguna Beach, Orlando, Grand Canyon, listening to crackling audio books on the drive, snapping photos of my graduation, me in a long silky robe, the death of her brothers, slowly, one after the other. I go to my mother. We play a game of Scrabble most days. When you were here, you’d sit and watch. Your politeness couldn’t fully veil your horror. Her yellowed nails, her patches of baldness, her wheelchair in the hall, the way she slid her pills from the table into her palms—it all gave you that lemon-sucking wince. Today, my mother giggles like a child when she places the word “farts.” She smiles as I tell her about new movies and the news and my day. And later, when I bring her soup, she cries. She spits the hot salty broth in my face, she yells and pulls her hair, she throws the bowl, watches it shatter and drip. I leave. Listen to her sobs from the living room. Sometimes, when we were wrapped around each other in bed you would ask me if I was scared of life.

3. Honey #FFC30B

Because sometimes I miss you. The golden sweet of us. The sticky saccharine connecting our fizzing forms. You called me “honey” when you were happy, when you were sad, when you were angry, when you were bored. Honey. Honey. Honey. Honey.

Before I met you, I drifted from one place to another. Unconcerned. Slow. I was okay with living like that. I would spend the day crocheting, reading worn romance novels from Goodwill, making bread and jams, watching hours of Netflix. Our relationship: jogs through the park at 6am, stopping to pet every dog we see, holding each other on the park bench, panting, pineapple and kale juiced into mason jars, mimosas and fried eggs with your friends, dates to the bowling alley, sharing cheese fries under the purple glow, picking the heaviest ball and dropping it on your foot, the emergency room, drawing hearts on your cast, hiking, shopping for athleisure in stores I couldn’t afford, bringing me chocolates in a gold box when I got sad, clubs with loud music and salt-rimmed margaritas, kissing the salt off your lips. We fought sometimes, screamed at each other on my mother’s porch, in your car, over text in the dark, but, after, you’d buy me roses or ask about my night or make dinner with glasses of pinot grigio and expensive sun-colored candles. We never spoke of the future. No kids or careers or weddings or savings accounts. We didn’t worry about how we might divorce or what could run us bankrupt. We didn’t imagine ourselves old and happy, sitting on the porch with hands interlocked. The breakup happened in the way that a flower loses its petals. You would leave for a weekend trip or a night at a friend's house. Your absence grew until, one day, you never came back.

4. Oyster #DCD7A0

Because it’s the ugliest shade of yellow I’ve seen—a muted beige nothing—and oysters, your favorite food, are disgusting. This shade would remind me of your tilted throat and pursed lips as you sucked down the rubbery flesh. How the smell stuck inside me and I’d gag it out later in the shower.

The truth is, sometimes I more than miss you. Even if I don’t want to. Once, you found me curled on the kitchen floor, sweat-stained shirt and babbling thick-tongued nonsense from the gummy banana edible I’d taken to calm down. My mother had a hospital visit that day and I’d spent the afternoon panicking. Binge ate a whole bag of Lay’s and a tub of vanilla ice cream. Flipped through our old scrapbooks as if staring at photos of my healthy mother would make her magically revert back to that state. Bills and death and acid clawing around my esophagus. I worried that you’d glare at me. Say see what she does to you. Say we have to move out. Say this isn’t healthy. Instead, you gathered me in your arms and kissed the top of my head. You half-carried me outside into the sunlight and gentle fall breeze. Let me exist in a bubbling state of mucus and rolling tears and hideous, sniffling heaves while we walked the block, light blue sky blanketing us. Once we returned home, you held me between your knees on the couch, rubbing circles into me while I listened to your heart beat. You made it easier to take care of her. After every hissing fight, you drug a million fleece blankets and caramel-covered popcorn and Lost DVD sets into the living room for a marathon where you’d fuck me under dim lamplight and make me forget it all with kissed bruises and drifting giggles about 2005 fashion and “island etiquette,” what to do when thrust in new inhospitable terrain. When we received bad news, you were there to squeeze my hand and whisper I’m sorry. I was her caretaker and you were mine. Who was taking care of you?

5. Sandcastle #DAC17C

Because I know my mother is dying and it reminds me of Laguna Beach. There, sand stuck to our thighs. We made a castle. She held her hands on top of mine, shaped the grit into something stable, even if it would only last until the next person tumbled through like a hurricane.

When my mother has bad days, she doesn’t call me to her room for a day or two. She lets the frustration fizzle out of her like butter on a hot pan. Embarrassed by her anger, ashamed. I think these were secretly your favorite days. The ones where you didn’t have to think about her. Today, I come to her room without permission, a bowl of chicken noodle soup steaming from atop the Scrabble box. The room smells of books and perfume, and by the time I sit down, her green eyes have already become glassy. Tears spill quietly onto the dark circles under them. I take the spoon and bring it to her lips. She quivers as she swallows and takes my hand. She’s cold. But she is also gentle, brushes her thumb back and forth across my hand. I remember when she held me in the ocean, my arms circling her neck, and pretending to be mermaids in the waves after. I remember when I crashed my car into the garage door, and she screamed about recklessness but took me for value menu milkshakes when I couldn’t stop crying. I remember when she and I went to the movies before a doctor’s appointment, filled ourselves with popcorn and played fifty rounds of Pac-Man. Then they told us she was dying. I squeeze my mother’s hand. She’s pale and her veins ripple bright blue across her skin. I ask her if she’s sad. She says, sometimes. I feed her the rest of the soup and wait until her eyes close, until I can hear the unhurried breath of sleep.

After, I walk into our bathroom. Sit on the toilet seat and stare at the wall. It’s slightly yellowed and white and gray. Like dried grass, like teeth. You hated the stains, the smudges, the cracks, all of the marks that someone had been here. I don’t blame you. Everything looks better new. I sit for hours, run my hand over every mark, press my cheek to the wall and feel its texture. Then, I throw all the swatches away. Think of some other hue. Think of the ocean. Think of autumn skies. Think of veins under the skin. How they pulse.

Jess’s room makes me miss hooking up with femmes. She lives with three other water polo girls, so the apartment’s only a touch more elevated than your average frat house. Dirty clothes strewn across the floor, only some of which are masculine enough to be hers. Crushed Bud Lites around the trash can, more valuable empties lining the windowsill. Fireball. Malibus. She is very proud of these collegiate conquests, has them displayed for all to see. I’m uncomfortably lucid. I consider rummaging through the trash, looking for leftover dregs.

I peel her hand off my right tit and slide out of the bed. Find my clothes on the floor. My foot lands on a half-empty bag of chips, Jess sleeping soundly through the resulting crunch. My last girlfriend, Sarah, was crazy about cleaning. She’d vacuum every couple days, a full sweep-n-mop every week. A pink shag rug surrounded her bed, which had a frame and a headboard. Always a soft place to land.

I brush Dorito dust off my heel as I wander into the hallway, which I vaguely remember from last night. I pass a list of rules written on the top of a pizza box. There’s still a grease stain. Looks kind of like Michigan. NO VIRGINS ALLOWED! NO DRINK LEFT UNDRANK!! 

The fridge is well stocked with Coors and eggs. Three cartons of eggs. I grab a can and down half of it. It tastes like orange juice, almost. I’m thirsty, but not hungover. Don’t think I ever have been. Maybe headaches and irritability are just my baseline. Maybe if I ever experience a consequence, I’ll switch it up. 

Eight-thirty, says a voice. That’s hardcore.

There’s a girl standing in the doorway in boxers and a sports bra. Sometimes I think this level of masculinity has got to be performative. There’s no way it’s comfortable. Like, a big t-shirt isn’t gonna kill you. You can own nice pajamas and still top.

Hey, I respond. I don’t try to hide the beer. The walls are thin; she knows I’ve earned it. Looks a little familiar, though I can’t place her. Can’t make any promises, with how I’ve been acting this month. Maybe we’ve slept together. Maybe we’ve run away to Vegas and gotten hitched.

You’re Sarah’s ex, right?

I look at her, wary. Yeah.

Me too.

Jesus. 

It’s true, what they say about lesbians. I could draw a map of all the queers on this campus, connect us with dotted lines. It’s a tangled web. Nobody’s safe. 

I watch the girl as she moves to the fridge, withdraws a carton of eggs. She doesn’t look as upset as she should be, being Sarah’s ex instead of her lover. She cracks the eggs with one hand, chucks a pile of shells towards the trash. They smack against the wall and land on the floor. 

Aren’t you supposed to be coordinated?

She grins, coaxes the stove into lighting. Just gotta drown your opponent before the bitch drowns you. 

Water polo players talk like cartoon characters. Sometimes fights break out at their parties, whether it’s between teams or a why-I-oughtta brawl over someone’s girlfriend. They all compete with the rugby girls for the soccer girls. I’m unaffiliated. Just like to watch it all unfold. Comfort the losers. 

I’m May, I tell her.

Rachel. She fist bumps my open hand. Hey, you want to stick around a little? Help us clean up?

Hell no. I toss the can, grab a second for the road. 

She laughs. Was Jess that bad?

I gotta get to church.

Fuck off. She laughs, but I don’t. Displeased with her fried eggs’ aesthetics, she begins to scramble them. Are you serious?

Yeah.

Were you raised in it?

No. I just started.

She pauses her assault on the eggs. You just started?

That’s what I said. I’m patting down my pockets. Phone, dead. Wallet, empty. Rachel, accusing me of something from the corner.

Like, after Sarah, she says.

Yeah. 

She stares at me. I find a rubber band on my wrist and tie my hair up, run my thumbs under my eyes in hopes of catching any misplaced night-old mascara. Better change, she says, finally. You look like a dyke. 

Everyone knew Sarah was gay, with the noted exception of her mother. Eve Davis, deacon. Eve Davis, who would never have committed her namesake’s sin. She remained diligently, defiantly engaged in Sarah’s life, often showing up to drop off baked goods. We sighed every time there came a knock on the door, sliding away from each other and retreating to our own beds. I performed as Friend May for half an hour, laughing at Sarah’s jokes like I didn’t love her. We recounted family-appropriate stories, entertained endless questions about our studies. There were always pastries at the end. Rewards for our platonic performances. 

Despite Eve’s prejudices, she was a kind woman. She had a smooth Southern accent, the type that makes you go all fuzzy. She’d bring us to dinner and buy enough to have leftovers. It devastated me, her love’s unspoken conditions, Sarah’s insistence that we keep her in the dark. 

I started going to Eve’s church after Sarah died. She thought it was some happy coincidence. The first time she saw me in the pews, she climbed over several seated parishioners to pull me into her arms. 

This is good news, May, she said. I hope this can bring you some peace.

I hope so, too.

She swallowed, sad eyes watching me. Sometimes, the Lord uses tragedy to call us back to him. 

I nodded, anger pooling at my fingertips. What good news. What good fucking news.

This morning, Eve waves at me from across the pew, squinting a bit in concern. Undoubtedly, I look a mess. From how the churchgoers shrink away from me, I’m certain my quick shower did nothing to dispel the smell of alcohol and Jess’s cologne. I wave back, then run my hand through my hair, splitting the tangles with my fingers.

My phone buzzes halfway through the hymns, and I know it’s Rachel finding my wallet on her kitchen counter. I like her, even if she thinks I’m the Benedict Arnold of the lesbian community. Even if I’m here Bible bumping when I ought to be in mourning.

We turn to shake hands with our neighbors. An old woman tells me how nice it is to see young people in the church. What brought you back? she asks.

I beam at her. I’m still a little drunk, my usual bullshit about the Spirit calling my name not as accessible. Well, I say. I guess I’m looking for someone to blame.  

I meet Rachel in the driveway and let her finger me in her car. She sucks on my ear like Sarah used to do.

Fucking church girl dress, she mutters. Who do you think you’re fooling? Did Jess fuck you like this? Did Sarah?

She wouldn’t like the answer, so I pull her mouth onto mine to shut her up. She shouldn’t have mentioned Sarah. I’ve gone through half the fucking school. Haven’t found anyone as sweet as her. As soft.

I lean my head back as she curls her fingers, and she laughs into my mouth when my head hits the button to roll down the window. I close my eyes, and it’s almost good—it’s almost Sarah, and I’m threading her hair through my fingers, and Rachel’s crying.

I’m sorry, she says. I’m sorry.

She sits back in the seat and gently drapes my skirt back over my legs. It’s kind of sweet, actually, and I wish this moment could be about us. Two girls in a car, no guilt or grief or other bullshit. And I’m sorry, but we were together for a year. The last year. Rachel and Sarah were basically a hookup. One time isn’t enough to hurt. I mean, she fucking loved me. I should be fucking crying.

Rachel drags the heels of her hands over her eyes. I haven’t been with anyone since—

It’s fine. I get it.

I really miss her.

It’s fine.

She chokes out a laugh, clearly remembering her valued position as stoic top. God, she says, this is so fucking lame. Do you want me to walk you home?

No. I live pretty far.

I can give you a ride—

It’s fine. I slip out of the car and close the door. She does the same, looking at me from over the roof. She’s short, just barely gets her head over the car. I’d think it was cute if she hadn’t just wept into my pussy.

I got sober for Sarah. Swiftly ended the three-year bender known as my community college experience, where I’d completed eighteen of my seventy-six attempted credits and one of the twelve steps. I knew I had a problem. Just didn’t have the energy to solve it. 

We moved in together at the start of senior year. Desperation and a Facebook ad. She was a fresh transfer, and I had effectively burned every bridge in my student body. Didn’t see her for the first few weeks. I was nocturnal; she had a planner. I’d fall asleep on the couch and find myself tucked under a blanket, a cool glass of water sitting on the table. I woke up one day to find her looking at me, crying. That’s how we met. Me: smelling like liquor, barely remembering I had a roommate. Her: already weeping for my sins. 

I really hate you, you know, she said.

I blinked. I mean, I’d never met the woman.

I don’t have any fucking friends. And you—you’re supposed to be my friend. Like, we live together. What are the odds, right? That I end up with a genuine collegiate alcoholic. I mean, we’re twenty-two. Get your ass up and take a goddamn shower. Christ almighty, you’re stinking up the place.

Gen-yoo-wine. That’s how she pronounced it. I almost laughed. I was planning on organ failure within the calendar year, and now this pint-sized Dolly Parton was cussing me out in my own living room. 

I would’ve done anything for her. I got my ass up and took a goddamn shower.

Slowly, I turned into someone I recognized, someone she liked. We walked to class together, recounted the day’s events at night. The first time she fell asleep in my bed, I laid awake all night, too scared to breathe too heavy. When she woke up, I ripped my eyes away. She laughed.

You can cut the crap, May. 

What?

Well, kiss me, since you’ve been thinking about it all night.

I kissed her. Soft. Holding the moment like water in my hands. I nearly cried when I pulled back to find her still there, still smiling all smug. How long have you known? I asked.

Since the day we met. You were staring at me with those puppy-dog eyes. Just didn’t deserve it yet.

I shrunk away from her, from the shame. I don’t know how to make it up to you, I said.

She shushed me. Her thumb on my bottom lip. Mayflower? I got a couple great ideas.

It worked. For a year, it worked. We came out to our friends, lied to her mother. When I relapsed, she locked me out of her room, wouldn’t speak until I was sober. I missed you, she said when it was over, and I wept. 

We got a new couch, used the second bed for storage. We fucked in every room and shrugged off the neighbors’ noise complaints. She graduated with honors. I officially became a sophomore. She cooked, I cleaned. She made the budget. I talked on the phone. I loved her. I loved her so much, I thought constantly about the end. She wavered. I tried to stave it off.

Some nights, I’d open my eyes to find her wide awake beside me, staring at the ceiling like something awful was staring back at her. Nothing I could do but pull her closer.

Whatever you have, I told her, I’ll hold it for you. 

I meant it. She’d saved my life. 

She tried to smile, kissed the tip of my nose. Honey, you don’t have a spare hand.

I’m in a stall in the club bathroom, my dress hiked around my hips. I’m so drunk, I’ve forgotten how to piss. I’ve had a month to practice—I know just how to keep myself on the precipice of throwing up. I have not thought about Sarah in hours. I want to stay here forever. 

When I leave the stall, barely pulling my dress over my ass in time, Rachel is standing at the sink. She looks good. Better than I remember. Her hair is slicked back, her shirt is unbuttoned. She sees me in the mirror, and her eyes go dark. She pushes me back into the stall, whispers Hi, baby, as I laugh into her mouth, and then I remember.

No, I say. We already did this.

Come on. Give me a second chance.

We’re not a thing. We can’t be a thing, I tell her, but my tongue catches on the th in that way it does when my brain slows and my pulse quickens.

We don’t have to be a thing.

I only, I tell her, trying to catch my breath as her fingers play at my waist, fuck people once. Better that way.

She slides a strap off my shoulder and lands a kiss on my collarbone, sliding one of her legs between mine. She is significantly more suave when drunk. Significantly less emotional. 

I like you, I whisper.

I like you, too.

I’m trying not to like anybody this time.

She leans in, her breath hot on my ear. What if I promise not to kill myself? 

I push her away, startled. She backs into the stall, suddenly sober, the lock rattling in protest. May, she starts, I didn’t mean—

Her spit is smeared across the side of my neck. I rub it off and push past her, back through the door into the crowd of bodies, the bass pulsing through the floor and up my thighs, slick with sweat, and my stomach, where an eddy of alcohol threatens to rise up my throat, and I have sympathy for Sarah—I know how one moment can make you feel hopeless—but why didn’t she tell me? I would’ve loved her through anything. God, why didn’t she say something? 

On Sunday morning, I find her office and push through the door. She’s sitting at the desk, underlining verses. Framed photos surround her. I see Sarah’s face, smiling, and I ask her to forgive me.

Eve looks up at me, surprised. May, she says.

Sarah and I were together, I say.

She looks at me, thoughtful. Her face is so kind, even now. She sits back down, folds her hands in her lap. I thought you might have been, she says.

I shake my head. She doesn’t understand. No fire or brimstones spill from her mouth, no blame or damnation. She was gay, I tell her. Sarah was gay.

I know.

Sarah stares at me from the picture frame, her gaze darker, accusatory. I must have made a mistake. Looked at her for too long, let my hand linger where it shouldn’t have. How? I ask.

She told me, years ago. 

She couldn’t have told you. You would’ve judged her, would’ve—

She shakes her head, perfect brows coming together in concern. No, May. I knew.

I replay the first day in my mind, the first time Eve knocked on her door. We were tangled together on her bed, a window open to let the sex seep out. Sarah smiled at me, sheepish. Can we not tell her yet? Is that okay? 

Of course, I said, gracious, understanding. I knew of her mother, knew she worked for the church. I was in love. I jumped to conclusions. Jesus, can you blame me? 

She never told you about me, I say.

Eve bookmarks the Bible, sips tea from a mug on her desk. I hate her poise, her composure. Honey, she says, softly. Maybe you just weren’t the one.

I don’t know what to do with my hands. My face grows warm. 

It was easier for her to call us friends. What else could she tell her mother? This is May, the alcoholic I’m fucking. This is May: not marriage material, but I like how she uses her hands. Of course, she never told her. Of course, you don’t discuss these things with your mother.

And now I don’t know where to put all this weight. 

It was so easy before, with Eve as my absolution, assurance that I did nothing wrong. How simple, blaming the mother’s judgement.

Did she leave a note? I ask.

Eve’s eyes are shining. No, she says.

Why did she do it?

I don’t know, May. 

I chew the inside of my cheek, the sharp taste of blood grounding me. At least you believe in God, right? 

This is too much for her. She covers her mouth as the tears spill onto her cheeks. 

She loved me, Eve. I swear she did.

Would you go, May, please?

I swear, she did. I swear.