There’s no question that recent health trends, and indeed health trends from around the world since the beginning of time, have often focused on prolonging human life to its greatest extent. But, Suicide Club interjects, at what cost do we pursue this great extreme? And who wants to live forever, anyway? It’s a question that’s been contemplated by many, including 70s rock band Queen and Natalie Babbitt in Tuck Everlasting. And now, in her debut novel, Rachel Heng asks it just as well and offers a timely, futuristic setting and a kickass female protagonist to help provide an answer. By critiquing modern obsessions with dieting, exercising, and making “healthy” lifestyle choices that follow the most current scientific research, Heng explores what it really means to be alive.

No, this novel doesn’t suggest that it’s good to live the way your average college student does—by scarfing down instant ramen at three in the morning while staring with bloodshot eyes into the painful depths of a computer screen as your fingers shake over the keyboard from a seventh espresso shot—but it does consider the consequences of the pursuit of bodily perfection that will lead to eternal life.

Suicide Club is set in a world where there are two kinds of people: lifers and non-lifers. Lea Kirino happens to be one of the lifers: a human given the chance at birth to live forever—as long as she does everything right. And Lea has striven for this “right” all her life, subjecting herself to the dieting, juicing, checkups, and low-impact exercise required of her to reach immortal status. She hopes to fulfill her late mother’s dreams for her, a goal which is complicated by the weight of the tragic loss of her older brother early on in life. At over 100-years-old—an age reached by almost all lifers with little to no signs of aging past fifty—she’s nearly there.

But Suicide Club reminds us that this pursuit of eternal life, and the idea that human perfection can not only be achieved but sold as a product on the market, sucks the meaning out of life and makes some long for death. Lea must face this fact head on when her carefully hidden past collides with her present in the form of her long-lost father. “Anti-sanct” Kaito eats all the greasy hamburgers he wants and is involved with an organization known as the Suicide Club—a group of powerful individuals who are willing to commit suicide on camera as a form of protest. When Lea makes a dire mistake on her way to work after seeing Kaito on the street, she’s put under observation by the government—a move that threatens to unravel all of her hard work.

Is a beating heart all one needs to be alive? Underneath authoritative prose that builds an immense and fascinating world, Suicide Club contemplates these questions while emphasizing the relationships that make life worth living: the bonds between fathers and daughters, mothers and children, and female friends. It’s relieving and refreshing to read a novel that deemphasizes romantic relationships and celebrates platonic ones.

Relevant, powerful, and realistic, Suicide Club is a breath of fresh air with flawed, sympathetic characters and, at its center, important questions about what it means to be alive. “Forever is our today / Who lives forever anyway?” are the words Queen uses to conclude their song, “Who Wants to Live Forever?” The final moments of Suicide Club concur with and complicate this message through the actions of two women who have lived beyond their time.

The following piece is the flash fiction winner of F(r)iction’s Summer 2017 Literary Contest.

When I call my mother now, she only wants to talk about the Cat—his beautiful white fur, his green eyes. She tells me, “He’s sitting in the sun,” or, “He’s lying under his blanket.” At night the Cat reads books about WWII by the light of a silver lamp shaped like a cantaloupe. She brushes his fur, cleans his litter-box, and feeds him only the best wet food. They are still very much in love.

But I know the Cat.

Thirty years ago, he moved into my mother’s house. He meow’d by the door one night until she opened it and he slid in with his books and briefcase. Not long after, my mother said, “I love him. If I die, he will never be with another lady, and if he dies, I will never be with another cat.”

When I sat down to breakfast that first day, he squirted grapefruit in my eye. “You didn’t cut all the sections. It was hard to eat,” he hissed.

I said, “So what! So what. Cut it yourself then.” I was angry at my mother for loving the cat so much when the Cat wasn’t very nice to me at all. When I stood up to go, the Cat jumped up on the table, his whiskers fanned out like wings, and scratched me right across the cheek. Blood streaked along the underside of my chin, down my neck, and into my training bra. I didn’t expect him to apologize. That is what the Cat is like.

One day when he was very old and had been living with my mother for many years, the Cat had to go to the vet. He was very sick with a tiny hernia deep in his belly. He screeched and flailed in the car and on the stainless steel exam table.

“Does he have all his teeth?” the Vet asked. The Cat was moving too much for the vet to see into his mouth.

“Yes, I have all my teeth, goddamn it,” the Cat said.

When my mother told me this part later, she said the vet was pleased and complimented her on how well she took care of the Cat.

While the cat slowly recovered, I came to visit him.

“I’m sorry you’re hurting, but you’ll be okay,” I said to him.

“I have to get out of here. No one will let me get out of here. I don’t have money for the bus. If I ride it without paying I’ll get arrested,” the Cat said. He was delirious with pain pills. He put his paws up to my cheek. They were smaller and pinker than I remembered them. The skin of his arm bagged at the elbow.

“I’m sorry we never got along.” I said, “I don’t hate you. I hope you know that.”

But the Cat just hissed and fell back asleep.

There are lots of people you aren’t. In fact, there isn’t a single person out there who you are, aside from yourself. And all those billions of people out there who aren’t you have bodies and memories and romantic preferences and music tastes that are unknown to you. No matter how much you research or converse, you’ll never fully understand the infinitely nuanced existence of another person.

But still, we try. We study other cultures and ask our neighbors about their childhoods; we gather fun facts and shared experiences and use them to construct an entire person in our mind. These people, these fundamentally incomprehensible beings, are sometimes referred to as “the other.” Often, we want to write about the other. But before we can successfully write about the other, we need to figure out a whole hell of a lot about ourselves.

First, let’s make this distinction a little clearer: who is the other and who is the self? For our purposes, we’ll say that “the other” is anyone who hasn’t experienced life quite like you have. There are some obvious differences—race, religion, gender identity, class, ability, etc.—that cause someone’s culture to be different than your own. But by no means does someone need to differ from you in all of these aspects to be other. Even one or two seemingly minute differences can cause a person to exist within a culture that is foreign to you.

“The self,” on the other hand, is you. But it’s not just you. It’s those whose culture aligns with your own, whose life experiences you can comprehend based upon your own life. If you’re a white agnostic woman from California writing a fictional account of a white agnostic woman from Oregon, for example, you are probably writing the self, even though your character isn’t really you. If you write about a white Mormon woman on a mission in the Philippines, on the other hand, her culture and world ideals will likely be vastly different than your own. Even though you share a race and gender with your character, the differences in her culture cause her to be other.

There’s a lot of debate about whether people should write about the other or stick to the self. To me, this is a thought-provoking but misguided question; both are inevitable and interwoven. As we write about the self, we will likely encounter or create characters who have different backgrounds than us. And as we write about the other, every thought and moment will be filtered through the perspective of ourselves. When we write about others in this way, we are really illustrating our own perspectives and (mis)understandings. To write about the other with grace and awareness, remember that the self is inextricably involved. Below are eight self-considerations to keep in mind as you navigate writing the other.

1. You are connected to the other.
Cultures exist within an interconnected web of societies and peoples. They feed off and influence each other; elements of one culture may be apparent in another culture that is geographically and theologically distanced from it. Individual cultures, then, are less of a series of rooms with locked doors than a cluster of interconnected lakes. Especially with international transportation and worldwide media, aspects of different cultures are constantly drifting to others, causing them to become intertwined. Your own culture’s connection to the other inevitably affects your perception (and in turn portrayal) of it. The connection may overly romanticize—such as America’s obsession with Native American dreamcatchers and headdresses—or unfairly condemn—such as the portrayal of Middle Eastern people as terrorists. The aspects of the other that have drifted to your culture may be limited, and you likely have preconceived notions and stereotypical ideas about them—admit to and address these biases, then try to move beyond them.

2. Your privilege is different.
If you’re reading this on a computer, tablet, or smartphone, you are more privileged than many, regardless of whether you’re more or less privileged than the character you want to write about. More often than not, the other is underrepresented—which comes largely from the fact that the literary industry is and always has been dominated by white men. Every character has a relationship to privilege and power, and yours is different than your character’s. Privilege is not intrinsically a bad thing, but it can prevent us from fully understanding and empathizing with those who possess a different amount of privilege than we have. Don’t ignore this. Acknowledge your privilege and try to understand the challenges that your character faces in being a part of a different part of society than your own. Grapple with how that difference affects your perception of the other. Do you feel pity for them? Shame for your own privilege? Admiration? Figure out your feelings about your own privilege, and then think about theirs.

3. You are the other, too.
To most people, anyway. This is important to avoid depicting characters as stereotypes and caricatures of the group they belong to: You are extremely complex, so your characters should be, too. All of your individual traits in context are, in fact, what make you the other to many different groups of people. I, for example, am a woman. When you only consider that quality of otherness, I can be grouped with nearly 50 percent of the world’s population. But when you also consider that I am American, a writer, an aerialist, bisexual, of European descent, with acne, with a father who grew up in a village in the Ivory Coast, with a mother who spent her childhood running from her grandmother, with a penchant for oversleeping, who flosses regularly, I become much more than my original otherness. Every character should have as much in them as you do. They should never only be the other. Whatever qualities they contain should be part of a multifaceted whole.

4. There’s a reason you chose to write about this.
Some real-life thing has compelled you to tell a story through the eyes or experiences of another. How does this thing, this catalyst, influence what you think, feel, and write about the other? What strife is bubbling within you that makes you feel like you should write this story? Is it this character—do you need to share them with your readers? Do you love them, or hate them? Or is it the story itself—are you so engulfed in bringing a certain idea or message to life that you will do it all costs, including taking pains to write about someone who is not you? If your motivations have an agenda other than to tell a truthful story, you might want to reconsider your choice.

5. You can do good.
Writing about the other can increase empathy, both in yourself and in your reader. You can try to better understand those who aren’t being talked about or tell a different story about those who are. Even when the others about which you are writing have many of their own voices talking, your voice can contribute by providing a unique perspective. Of course, writing about the other isn’t about doing anyone a favor or being a savior to a less privileged culture. It’s about telling true stories and being authentic in your representation. So many stories are by white men about white men, which is not at all indicative of the diversity of people reading, writing, and existing in the world. Writing about a culture other than your own in a respectful, thorough way can reveal truths about both the other and the self.

7. You can do bad.
On the other hand, writing about the other can further ostracize marginalized groups and perpetuate stereotypes. Historically, the process of othering has been used to stereotype and emphasize differences of a certain group of people in a manner that makes them seem inferior. When Asian characters are consistently portrayed as nerdy, goofy sidekicks, or women characters are depicted as overly sensitive and bad at sports, for example, entire groups of people seem abnormal and different in inaccurate ways. As a writer, misrepresenting a group of people almost certainly is not your intention. But it’s possible to do this unintentionally, by generalizing and focusing primarily on the otherness of the character. Again, remember that your character is more than that—they are an individual, and it’s crucial to represent them as such.

It is also possible that you will, simply, screw up. Even if you do everything you can to embody someone else and paint a full, complex picture of their life, you may not get every detail correct. You may misrepresent something, or depict microaggressions that are unintentionally discriminatory or offensive. So many actions, statements, or incidents that seem innocent and acceptable to us can feel hurtful or ignorant to others, and something you write could inadvertently cause offense. That doesn’t mean you should stop writing about the other; instead, do everything you can to enter the mind and life of your character. Intention—coming from a place of sincere empathy—is crucial, but not enough. Research and strive to understand the cultures that you are writing about. When you mess up, challenge yourself to do it better next time.

8. You can do better.
It’s a process—writing the other, writing the self, all of it. You probably won’t get it right the first time. But with effort you can develop a deeper understanding of both yourself and the other, and consequently represent the world we all inhabit more realistically. Try this exercise: Write a scene between yourself and your “other” character, from their perspective. Make them the hero. What do they think of you? How do they feel about your writing this piece about them? What do they like about you? What do they hate about you? Let this come out—even if no part of it is included in your final piece. Allow yourself to move away from your own perception and into that of the other. You can write about the others regardless of your own background and experiences, but how you do it—and why—is everything.

The following piece is the flash fiction winner of F(r)iction’s Winter 2017 Literary Contest.

Ten. There are ten people at my bedside. Family, doctors, nurses, someone from The London-Tokyo Herald, and a smart fellow in a suit who keeps mentioning Guinness and records, but I don’t like stout, and aren’t records obsolete now?

Nine. Three nines. No . . . someone called 999. They said we had to leave. I’m sorry but I can’t, I said. I’m in the middle of something important. This letter to you!

Eight years it’s been since you emigrated. Good for you, I say. Travel the world while you’re young, my pet. It’s harder once little ones come along. My granddaughter, the adventurer . . . I’m so proud.

Seven shoeboxes, your letters have filled. So thoughtful. I’m delighted that you’re planning this amazing trip. Have courage and go!

Six letters on the chart on the wall—my name and three more: D.N.R., whatever that means . . . My life was once changed by a letter—no, a telegram. From the Queen of England! They do that here, you know, when you reach a hundred. Do you remember the party? All of the family came. Slow down now, they said. Take things easy. But not you, bless you. We only get one go on this ride, Gran, you said. Live life to the full. So I did! And so should you.

Five months, was it? Five months will pass like blossom in spring, and your handsome Hiroto will wait for you, kawaii. He is a good man. This trip is very important. Something you will always remember and be remembered for.

Four tubes are in my arms and face. I hope they don’t scare the little ones. I have so much to smile about, though—and I learned a new joke today, so they are giggling now.

Three generations of loved ones with me—I am very honoured.

Two last jobs to do—to send my love to you, and to urge you not to feel bad that the Mission Controller has kept you in quarantine. The last thing you need in space is an illness. I do hope this letter reaches you before launch. Letters are such beautiful records of love and history. Did I tell you about my telegram from the Queen of England? I still remember opening it . . .

. . . one evening, twenty years ago.

Forcing his chin down at a weird angle, Terrance can finally see his legs. The left looks pretty much the same as it did before surgery, but his right leg is wrapped in some sort of metal contraption—wires and bars come up and over like a medieval torture device and run down the length of his thigh, stopping just above his puffy ankle. Everything feels swollen, but his right leg looks it, and his brown skin still has the faint green tint of the last stage of bruising. He lets his head fall back against the pillow. He’s whole; that’s all that matters for now. Until he’s healed enough for rehab, the odds are just numbers. He’s better off against the house in Vegas than gambling with doctors.

“Look who’s awake.” A nurse walks into his room, clipboard in hand, and starts writing things down. She has a round face and wears her hair in a high pony tail, like the cheerleaders who stood over him crying while he lay on the field, waiting for the stretcher and praying for unconsciousness. She looks at his right leg and frowns, then wraps her fingers around his wrist. He reads the small nametag pinned above her right breast: Danielle.

“What’s the verdict, Danielle?” His voice is tight and scratchy, but it’s still him underneath and he knows it will work. It always works. Sweet devil tongue, his mama called it; he’s been able to get women and girls to do things for him since he was in diapers—homework, money, cooking meals. He never crosses the line and does something he’d be ashamed to admit in church, but he can’t help it if women want to take care of him.

Danielle pours water from a plastic pitcher and holds it to his mouth. “The verdict is you need some rest.” She reaches her free hand behind his head. “And you can call me Dani, Sugar.” She winks at him and tips the cup back.

Terrance parts his lips and lets the water trickle in. He hadn’t realized how thirsty he was. Or tired. Danielle—Dani—tips the cup further and he forces himself to swallow. His mouth, throat, jaw—everything loosens and stretches out like “Grow Me” toys dropped in water. He hears a beeping sound he doesn’t recognize and turns his head. Dani did something, pushed a button that made the sound.

“Get some sleep,” she says and pats his shoulder. His eyelids become heavy; he can’t fight it.

“No,” he says, maybe out loud or maybe just inside his head. Nobody answers him. Dani’s voice is far off, like she’s talking to someone else. He can’t quite make out the words in the fuzz. Something about a mix-up. Someone’s family is pissed—there’s talk they might sue, he thinks he hears the other woman’s voice say. He’s too out of it to know for sure. But he doesn’t want to sleep. Every time he closes his eyes, he’s back on the field at Carter-Finley Stadium. He hears the smack of the helmet against his leg, feels the weight of the body on top of his, and the angle of his leg under him. He knew it was wrong before he felt the snap and tear or saw the faces of the guys on the other team.

“Oh, damn,” one of them had said, and another one shook his helmeted head back and forth as if that could undo what happened. No, he doesn’t want to sleep and go back there. He wants to move forward. Forward is the only way through.

Coach picks him up at the hospital. Despite Terrance’s protests, Coach says he couldn’t leave his star player hanging, even off the field. Even though Terrance isn’t exactly a star anymore and he may never play again. There is an unspoken tension in the car, thick in the air between them. Neither wants to say what they are thinking. Talking about the “what ifs” won’t get him off his crutches any sooner, and generic phrases of comfort can’t hide the truth.

“Jimmy’s gonna get his Friday Night Lights moment,” Terrance says, then laughs as if this isn’t more sad than funny. Coach just grunts and looks ahead, at the road in front of them.

To fit in the front seat with his leg straight in its brace, Terrance must sit with the seat pushed all the way back. The window, chilled by the air conditioning and dew from outside, is cool on his face as he leans against the glass. It offers him an odd side-angle view of buildings, parked cars, and trees colored the bright green and deep red of early fall. He doesn’t see the world the way he did before the hit. The few people moving on the sidewalks are crooked and lean heavily to the left. There is enough open space so that they don’t have to maneuver around each other, but their shadows cross paths, mingle, dance.

Coach makes a sharp turn and they head further downtown, where there are smaller sidewalks, fewer people, and less space between the buildings. Then a wide expanse of land opens outside his window and everything in his body screams, Stop! Here!

Terrance puts his hand on the dashboard and his mouth joins his body. “Stop the car,” he says, with the same tone he uses to call plays on the field, the tone that declares, I am in charge. But Coach keeps driving—though he turns momentarily to look at Terrance, his eyes narrowing as if searching for the player he recruited out of high school, the man he knows on the field.

Terrance pulls his hand back and rests it on his good knee. “Please.” His voice rises at the end—a pleading that is new to him but reflects the bubbles in his chest and the tingle in his fingertips. His voice used to drip deep and slow like molasses from the jar, scoring phone numbers and favors from cheerleaders and teachers alike, but now it must resort to begging.

Coach moves slowly; he flicks on the blinker and checks over his shoulder twice, before finally bringing the car to a stop along the curb. He looks at Terrance again. That same look, like he doesn’t know who is in the car with him. “Is everything okay, son?” he asks.

“I don’t know,” Terrance says.

They are parked in front of a cemetery. A black iron gate held in place by two short brick columns, the words Raleigh Hebrew Cemetery in stone on one side and numbers on the other—probably the address. Something is pulling at him from the other side of the chain-link fence, but the only thing there are headstones of people he never knew. He wants to get out of the car and walk along the concrete path that divides the grass and graves in half; he wants to go deep, far from the road, and he has no idea why.

Coach starts the car and music fills the air between them. “This is morbid, son,” he says and pulls back out onto the road.

When the pain pills stop working as well, he switches to Benadryl and bourbon, his mama’s special mix during the divorce. He likes to sleep deep, too deep for dreams—or at least for dreams he can remember. He doesn’t want to know what happens when he closes his eyes. His head moves back and forth, arms tangled among the sheets, and the healthy leg twitches and kicks like he’s still on the field. He often wakes on the opposite side of the bed, his head hanging off the mattress and his feet on his pillow. Even the weight of the brace can’t keep him still.

The school assigns him a tutor, a skinny kid with stick-straight hair and a large vocabulary, who knows more about Terrance’s classes than he does. He also knows Terrance’s stats, the details of the accident, and about the surgery—his only chance of ever stepping back out on the field.

“It has a very high recovery rate,” the boy says. His name is Matt, but Terrance just thinks of him as the boy. His boy. “The technique is pretty standard, replacing the damaged tendons with those from a donor body, although now they’re working on new procedures that don’t involve cadaver tendons.”

The boy is small—petite—and his pale skin is sprinkled with light brown freckles. More of a Matty than a Matt, and Terrance tells him so. The boy just smiles. He looks like the kind of kid who’d wear glasses, but his vision is twenty-twenty. He claims he can see the details of every play on the field. “You couldn’t have done anything to prevent it,” he says.

Terrance’s isn’t used to being still. To compensate, his thoughts take up the exercise, and soon his mind is running on overdrive. He does the daily crossword puzzle from the back of the newspaper and gets so excited when Matty brings him a book of Sudoku puzzles that he almost kisses the boy on the forehead. The newfound mental energy transfers to his school work. He’d never had an easy time completing assignments before, but now his speed and accuracy on tests and papers rise at the same rate that his passing yards once had.

Matty loves to hear stories from the field; he listens while he corrects and collates Terrance’s work, a master multitasker. He knows runs, turnovers, and plays—more than Terrance had guessed from looking at him. The kid was in the stands that day. He saw the hit play out from a different point of view, high up in the student section. He had been looking through binoculars.

“I’d rather not talk about it,” Terrance says.

Matty closes the history book in front of him and leans his elbows onto the cover. “They say talking about it helps.”

“They’re wrong.”

“Then you’ll work hard to get back.” Matty shrugs his shoulders like it’s simple, like all Terrance has to do is put on the jersey and step out on the field and it will all be okay.

“I like talking to you, kid,” Terrance says. “You remind me of my son.”

“You have a son?”

“No.”

It isn’t the first strange slip he’s made since coming home from the hospital. He forgot about his lactose intolerance until he was halfway through a gallon of milk, and he called his mama to wish her a happy birthday three months too early. He talks to sales people on the phone as if they’re close friends, finds more comfort in a mystery novel than in watching his old game tapes, and has no interest in keeping up with the team. He was the alpha of the wolf pack—confident, in charge, always ready with a play. He can feel that part of him falling away like an old scab.

He’s puzzled by this memory he can’t shake: leaning over the side of a hospital bed and brushing the hair off a familiar forehead.

He backs off his pain pills in hopes that the swampiness in his brain will dry up, or that the pain in his leg will overshadow whatever is happening in his head. It doesn’t help. The visions get stronger, deeper, clearer. He sees the lined face of a man he doesn’t know and feels a strange pull, a longing that feels a lot like heartache. The man smiles and steps toward him, his hand outstretched. If Terrance listens closely enough, he can hear music in the background, feel his own body ready to dance. It isn’t just a flash like a picture—it’s a living memory, but it’s not his. He squeezes his eyes shut and the man and the music drop away, but the feeling stays with him like a shadow lingering just outside of his periphery.

Everyone is worried about him. There is a new cautiousness in the way Coach and the guys interact with him, their voices quiet and slow, hands still at their sides, eyes looking everywhere but at him. Ignore and outrun: it’s the most basic play on the field. The calls and drop-ins start out strong—he can’t go more than a few hours without an interruption from someone on the team—but as the weeks of boredom and recovery drag out, so does the time between visits. The team has to focus on the rest of the season, make his backup feel like he belongs on the starting lineup. Terrance understands. He even begins to enjoy the silence, the solitude, the fact that there is no one counting on him for anything.

When the doorbell rings, he worries that guilt and honor have gotten to Coach. He straightens up the pillows on the sofa and brushes the crumbs off the front of his bathrobe. But it’s Matty at the door, and Terrance’s heart does a back flip. “Your Offensive Coordinator asked me to come by,” the boy says, and flops into the chair across from Terrance. “That may have been the most exciting phone call of my life.”

He pulls a spiral notebook out of the messenger bag by his feet and sets it in his lap. “I got two of your professors to agree to give you an incomplete for the term,” he says. “Because of the, you know, trouble you’re having.” He looks down at the notebook and taps his finger like he’s searching for something, a name or class title, but Terrance is pretty sure the page is blank. He is used to people being uncomfortable around him, although it’s not awe or the desire to ask for an autograph anymore. No one wants to admit that the surgery might not turn him back into the man and player he used to be, that his new knee might change who he is completely.

“Thanks, Matty,” Terrance says. “You’re a real mensch.”

“A what?”

“I’m not sure.”

The evening news and Jeopardy become his favorite shows, the part of the day he looks forward to most. Local stories make him feel connected in a way he hasn’t since he was carried off the field. Family restaurants with a touching background story, teachers working hard despite many cutbacks, the city council member caught in an online romance with an escort—these are his people now that he isn’t a part of the football team. He rallies around them and cheers their victories, his bathrobe gaping open and his fork jabbing the air. Dinner is cooked in the microwave and eaten in front of the TV, instead of at a restaurant with the team, accepting free drinks and desserts, phone numbers and winks from the waitresses.

Alex Trebek smiles at Terrance from the TV, his closest friend aside from Matty these days. Alex reads a list of topics: history, literature, politics, and current culture, things Terrance has never bothered to pay attention to. He failed history on his first try and barely passed the second time, even with tutoring and plenty of face time at office hours to build goodwill with the teaching assistant. But somehow he knows the answers tonight—most before any of the contestants, and some before Alex even finishes reading the cards. Economic causes of the French Revolution, The Bay of Pigs, Barbara Jordon’s speech at Nixon’s impeachment hearings—the words float to the top of his head and shoot off his tongue. And he is right, every time, even when the contestants aren’t. If he’d been on the show instead of in his living room, he’d have won over twenty-one thousand dollars—and the respect of an audience, something he hasn’t known since that moment on the field.

He wants to be independent, show himself that he can be the same man he was, with or without the jersey. But when Matty offers to drive him to and from physical therapy, he doesn’t say no. It’s the company he can’t turn down. Something about Matty’s presence calms his nerves and slows the thoughts ping-ponging around his brain, gives him a familiar feeling of home. Matty talks for the entire drive; he’s such a smart boy. He explains the details of global warming, the history of the stock market, and the rationale for medical research on people. “Your knee is a prime example of the progress in the field,” he says, and points to Terrance’s leg. That’s when Terrance realizes that he isn’t really missing football, even when they’re talking about the game.

His physical therapist says his knee is improving. Walking without crutches is far off, but he can lean weight onto his right leg and bend his knee when he’s on his back. “Those are big milestones in healing,” the therapist says, but the words bounce off Terrance’s chest. He is getting better, and may even be able to play football again, yet he is so sad he wants to lock himself in the patient changing room and cry. He smiles and nods at the therapist’s cheery words, gives the guy a thumbs up, and fights back the glob of emotion working its way up his throat.

The sadness doesn’t leave him on the ride home. Verklempt, he thinks. Although he’s never used that word before, it just feels right. He looks back at the empty seat behind them and feels a loss similar to that which he felt the first winter break, when he went home to Florida and longed for Raleigh. Terrance is in mourning, he is sure of it. He rests his hand on the cold door handle and watches the world blur by.

“Turn left up here,” he says, leaning toward Matty.

“Where to?” Matty asks. He moves into the left lane—no objections, just curiosity.

“I want to take a detour.”

He directs Matty as if led by an internal GPS. The new tendons in his knee twitch and tingle, sending a signal down his leg that makes his second toe wiggle in his sock. The car turns down a familiar street—he’s been here before, even if he doesn’t know where here is. Sidewalks thin out and trees tower higher, congregating closer together. It’s an older part of the city, where things have had more time to grow.

“Pull over,” he says when he sees the gates. The Jewish cemetery, again. His knee twitches like a jolt from jumper cables then settles against the seat. “I just want to sit here a minute,” he says. Matty twists his mouth up in the concerned way Terrance recognizes from people in the crowd during a close game, but he turns the engine off and leaves the air running. Such a sweet boy. Terrance resists the urge to muss his hair or pinch his cheek.

He traces an irregular circle around his knee cap and stares out the window like he’s waiting for someone who is late. The sidewalk is empty and nobody passes in or out through the gates. It must be lonely in there, cold. His mind tunnels underground, into the dark, dry dirt where he can picture coffins—metal and wood that shined before becoming dulled by time and rain and air. He squeezes his eyes shut, stopping himself before he can picture what’s inside the boxes. He doesn’t want to see. He doesn’t want to see any of it. A light breeze blows through the open window—more like summer than the end of autumn—and sunlight warms his arm through the glass. He scans wider, farther back, as though looking for an open receiver down the field, but the cemetery stands empty and solemn.

“Let’s go,” he says, disappointed.

The cemetery is a permanent part of his thoughts. He can’t let go. There is something there, he can feel it. He writes the street address at the top of a piece of paper in the unused spiral notebook he bought for biology—somewhere no one would think to look. Not that anyone other than Matty really remains in his life. He has changed, is still changing, so he can’t really blame anyone. He isn’t the same guy who was carried off the field. That guy loved barbeque, macaroni and cheese, and French fries in ketchup and mayonnaise, which made his mama turn up her nose. Now he eats beef brisket, roast beef, meatloaf, hamburgers without the bun, and he likes his potatoes plain.

The doctor assures him that some changes are bound to occur after a concussion, and are most likely temporary. “You’ll be eating pork chops again in no time,” he says and scribbles something on the clipboard. Then he offers Terrance another prescription for pain pills and muscle relaxers, to help with the transition, before he nods and walks out the door.

Terrance doesn’t need more pills. He isn’t in pain and he spends all day relaxing—there’s a new dip in the sofa to prove it. But the word transition feels right. Like he’s stuck in this place between who he used to be and whoever he’s going to become.

“That’s called life, hon,” the customer service woman at the cable company says when he tries to explain. “The only constant is change.”

He can’t fathom how he got to this place where he’s relying on advice from strangers on the phone. The pictures on the wall and the game videos show him who he was, but he can’t remember the feeling inside. His body isn’t the same.

School work is the only distraction that helps keep him focused on something outside himself. It holds the sadness at bay like a dam. If he isn’t thinking, he’s feeling, and he doesn’t like where that leads. The smiling man comes back to him, in pieces, whenever there is a space in his thoughts, and he is a constant in his dreams. The memories don’t remain with him in the morning, but that face and the accompanying feeling hover over him throughout the day. Sadness and a flash of desire from deep in his gut that he doesn’t understand. So he adopts new study habits, does the required and recommended reading, and adds in some background research of his own.

“You’re a machine, man,” Matty says when they meet for the third day in a row, and he doesn’t blink when Terrance calls it a study date.

“Maybe a machine would be an improvement.” Terrance shrugs, then leans toward Matty. He licks his thumb and wipes at the side of the boy’s face, near his ear. Matty just looks at him and blinks. “You had some schmutz,” Terrance says and slides a notebook across the table. “I’ve been writing things down, memories, to see if they make sense.”

Matty traces his finger over the numbers scrawled in apparent random order all over the page, in groups of ten, four, and six, mostly. “You do have part of a dead person inside you.” He taps the sketch in the middle—a face like a character from a children’s book, clownish and features out of proportion, but definitely a man. “Maybe this is him.”

“They won’t tell me the man’s name—privacy laws,” Terrance says.

Matty leans back and folds his arms over his thin chest. “How do you even know the donor was a man?”

“I don’t.”

The numbers won’t stop coming and they don’t add up to anything that makes sense. They could be years or birthdays—but none that mean anything to him. He checks the calendar and datebook to be sure. Nothing. The notebook lies on his lap, the numbers taunting him like an overconfident linebacker from an opposing team. He can almost see a smug expression in the lines of the paper. Then his phone vibrates on the coffee table in front of him. Unknown caller. He ignores it—that’s what voicemail is for—but as he watches the screen flash, it hits him.

Terrance clears the missed call notification and dials the numbers from the side of the page, the ones that float above the man’s large left ear. First there’s a clicking sound that makes his heart drop, then the ring picks up midstream. His heart moves back up to his chest and beats at double time. He has no idea what he’ll say if someone answers.

Someone does answer. A man. He sounds older than Terrance, but not what he’d classify as old or even middle aged. “Hello,” the man says—like a statement, not a question.

Terrance breathes into the phone, heavy enough to hear the echo off the mouthpiece, but no words come.

“Hello? Is anyone there?” The man asks, a definite question this time in the lilt of his voice.

Terrance is suddenly a conflicting storm of extreme emotions. He’s so happy he wants to jump up and dance around the room, yet he’s consumed by a sadness he’s never felt before, and it pours down over him like concrete mix. In a rush of wanting to cry and sing and scream, he blurts out something he never thought he’d say.

“My sweet boy.”

There is silence for what seems like minutes. Terrance’s words hang in the air like a Hail Mary pass.

“I’m hanging up,” the man says finally. There is a hint of hesitation in his voice. But then he does, he hangs up.

Terrance is left with the hollow hum of the open line and the heavy crackle of his breath in the room. He holds the phone to his ear until he hears the connection drop away and all he is left with is the silence.

Sleep evades him. His head spins with thoughts and questions; his insides quiver as if his blood is laced with lightning. He wants to make sense of what he’s feeling, wants to pull each individual emotion out, name it, and put it in a jar. He likes clear categories and everything in its place. He isn’t used to crying, whether or not he’s in physical pain, and he can’t let go of the voice on the phone. There was love in that voice. He pushes back the covers and scoots to the end of the bed. He glances over at the clock, but there is no point in lying awake.

Matty is tired, sleep still stuck in the corners of his mouth, but he shows up anyway. Friends don’t let friends take taxis to the cemetery in the middle of the night, he says with a croak in his voice.

Terrance knows what he wants and he won’t let anyone stop him; he’s following his body’s lead. He is an expert with crutches, his movements quick and light, as if he were still on the field with a football in his hands. The quivering inside separates and moves down to his leg and up to his heart. His knee vibrates, the skin almost bouncing in the open center of the brace like some sort of instrument tracking the movement of the car. His body knows they are getting closer.

The cemetery is deserted, as are the sidewalks outside, and the lights are on throughout the grounds as if to keep the departed safe and secure. The gates are closed, a giant lock in the center, but the space between the final bar of the gate and the brick column is larger than the rest. Terrance turns sideways and the damaged half of his body fits—leg brace and all. Matty slides through easily at the other column. He tosses Matty a crutch then leans on the other while he brings his strong half through. His heart beats loud in his chest and his knee seems to pull him onto the path. He is in the right place.

It’s an easy stroll with the crutches; the cement path is flat and lined with lights, his body knows when to turn and which way. He has been here before. The din of crickets and bullfrogs like a stadium crowd just after the ball has sailed from his hands and into those of a receiver down the field. Matty remains silent at his side. Terrance’s breath is warm in his body. The night is the reason he’s always loved fall—second to football season; the air is cool, only a hint of humidity left from the day. He thinks he could stay here all night.

Finally, he reaches a sort of cul-de-sac, a section of burial sites in a U shape with a bench to the side of the path. Moving to the edge of the concrete, he uses the bench as leverage to transfer his weight to the grass. At the end of the row, he sees it—the large headstone he remembers as if from a dream. It stands tall, casting a shadow over the new grave beside it. It’s connected to him. He understands that now. He hobbles to the headstone, moving slow over the grass until he is standing directly in front of it. The smooth square border almost shines, but it is the name that his eyes settle on: Benjamin Cohen. He rests on his crutches and leans toward the stone, running his hand over the name. Benjamin. Beloved Husband and Father.

Husband. The face in the notepad, the man in the memories that aren’t his. Terrance uses the crutches to lower himself to the ground then lets them crash awkwardly next to him. He stretches out between the graves. The grass tickles the backs of his bare calves and forearms, and he turns his head to look at the plot on his left—the dirt still fresh, the headstone a missing piece not yet arrived from the engraver. He grabs a handful of dirt and rubs it between his fingers. He spreads his arms wide, so that one hand is touching each grave. The tingling in his knee stops and his whole body calms. He stays that way for a while before noticing Matty standing above him with his arms folded. Terrance reaches a hand up to him and smiles.

“Let’s get out of here.”

The first time you fucked Alex for the last time, you were nineteen. Afterward, you pulled the cool sheet up around your breasts and lit a Camel cigarette to buy yourself a few more minutes in his bed. He was already up. When he reached for the cigarette, you let him take a drag, and as he passed it back his eyes sparkled with a smile that you had come to understand meant this has been fun, but you should put your clothes on.

So you did.

A few hours later, you made sure to run into him at a graduation party. Alex wouldn’t be walking in the ceremony. He would be back in the fall to finish up a few credits. He would be back. That was all that mattered.

You made a place for yourself in the corner and struck up a conversation with a boy from your intro bio class. Holding a red plastic cup of PBR, you leaned back against the wall and glanced up every few minutes to see if Alex had noticed you talking to another guy. He hadn’t.

You sipped and smiled because next year would be different. You would be a sophomore, no longer a child. He would pay more attention.

When Mahvish found you at the end of the night to tell you it was time to go, you were drunk enough to approach Alex where he stood in front of the house with a circle of other guys. You smelled the pot before you saw the joint.

You wondered if any of his friends knew about you, if they knew how sweet he was when he kissed your fingertips in the morning and got you high before class, if they knew the way he called out your name when his hands were buried in your hair and his hips jerked against your face. You doubted it.

You tapped him on the shoulder, trying with all your might to be flirtatious. He turned. His eyes were bloodshot and his sleepy grin said what’s up. The other boys fell quiet.

“I’m leaving,” you said, gesturing to Mahvish, who was loading her blotto boyfriend into the passenger seat of her Civic.

“Okay,” he said. You hugged him, feeling foolish when his arms stayed slack, and said something like see you next year.

“Yeah,” he said, and turned away.

You spent the last night in your freshman dorm room listening to Mahvish and her boyfriend grope at each other and you cried, just a little, in the dark.

The second time you and Alex fucked for the last time was the summer before your junior year. He would be a senior again. He visited you at your parents’ home in Sonoma and shopped with you for the things you’d need on your semester abroad. You bought the money belt he recommended and ignored him when he insisted that you could buy shampoo once you got there.

You drank red zinfandel on the porch swing overlooking the sleepy neighborhood of your youth and watched the sun go down. Then you took each other’s clothes off slowly in the comfort of your full-sized bed, surrounded by the forest-green walls you had painted yourself years before.

He held you in his arms afterward and you thought he would tell you how much he was going to miss you. Instead he told you that you should feel free to sleep with other guys while you were gone. He didn’t want you to feel obligated.

Your vision of romantic, trans-Atlantic emails evaporated. Instead of professing your love and swearing to be true while you were gone, you opted for a quiet shrug and a whatever, and spent the semester fucking a beautiful, long-haired Spaniard with oil paint under his fingernails.

The third time, your ass was balanced on a metal handrail in the rooftop bathroom of the Viceroy. His belt jingled around his ankles. The sequins on your dress scratched your waist and the tiny blue hydrangea in his boutonniere had come loose. It bounced against his suit jacket. The soft petals fell to the checkered tile floor.

You eyed him as you straightened your panties and he buckled his pants. He had fine lines around his eyes that made him look older than he was, and the way his hair fell in his face looked messy. You told him to fix it before he left the bathroom, and joined your date on the terrace overlooking Los Angeles.

The last time you and Alex slept together for the last time, you could hear water lapping at the black rocks of the river. Late morning light filtered through the pines and landed on the fabric walls of the tent, turning everything puke green and making the air unbearably humid. Your head throbbed and your mouth tasted of stale beer.

He peeled off the layers that had kept you warm in the night, and coaxed you back into sober consciousness. You let his kisses fall on you and thought back over the seven years you spent wanting nothing else.

You had accumulated so many heartaches by then. You could tell by the way he touched you that morning that he wanted to fix them, to find every wound and kiss it until it healed.

He lay grunting and heavy on top of you. He had gained weight. You both had, but you took pleasure in the fact that you had gained less. His sweat dripped onto your face and when you turned your head you noticed that a fly had died entangled in the mesh screen of the tent door.

Afterward, lying there swollen and sweaty on the sleeping bag, he made no move to get dressed.

The slippery fabric of the sleeping bag twisted beneath you as you lifted it and bent to pull your clothes on in the cramped tent.

He looked at you and smiled in a way you had come to understand meant please don’t leave me.

But you did.

The girls in Troop 17 found the dead baby while hunting mushrooms for their Outdoor Edibles badge. It lay at the base of a cottonwood tree, naked and perfectly white, they told us over a lunch of hotdogs and pudding cups. One eye half-open. We couldn’t help but picture the groggy-looking blinds in the bunkhouse restroom.

Local police closed off the Camp Chapawee trails with yellow tape to search for clues, but they did not practice what our Scout Handbook called “The Way of the Woods.” We were taught to tread softly upon the forest floor, heel-to-toe, like our Native American sisters, to crouch beneath branches instead of breaking them, to communicate with hand signals and whistles. That afternoon when we tried to earn our Bird Call badges, there was nothing to hear but the whine of ATVs and the static chirp of walkie talkies.

Scuba divers came to scour the lake bed. We worked on our Insect Classification badges as they dredged up bikini bottoms and fishing poles and piled unmatched swim flippers upon the shore like a stack of catfish.

The Camp Mothers told us not to dwell on the infant, but we were obsessed. We used our Sign Language skills, folding our arms into a cradle to say baby. We hadn’t yet learned the sign for dead, so we dragged our fingers across our necks and lolled our tongues out the side of our mouths. We finger spelled the name we’d given her—K-A-T-E—after a fashion model we all longed to be, the one with jutting cow-bone hips and sloe eyes.

The paper mache maracas we made for Music Appreciation became baby rattles. Our woven pot holders for Pioneer Art were her blankets. We longed to offer them up, to honor dead baby K-A-T-E with Camp Chapawee respect. We wanted to build her a ceremonial fire, to chant the songs from the back pages of our Scout Handbook.

For our Constellation Identification badges we slept beneath the stars. We dreamt of willow bark papooses, dead fish, and fashion models. And when a terrible scream woke us with a start—our hearts beating furiously beneath breasts, flat and taut as deer hide drums—the Camp Mothers soothed us back to sleep, telling us not to worry. We’d soon learn for our Nocturnal Creatures badge that the wail of mating bobcats sounds just like the cry of a newborn babe.

Stop the car, Tulika thought to herself, but in her silence, Rajdeep drove on.

“Stop the car,” she said, out loud at the next turn, and Rajdeep drove on. She felt sick: a dizziness in her head and a painful jolt in her stomach. She needed to throw up.

The girl on Tulika’s lap seemed unaffected by Rajdeep’s reckless speeding, unbothered by the rise in altitude. In four years, their daughter had never seen the world outside of the city, yet she didn’t blink at the blind spots as the Toyota zipped around the bend; she showed no fear of the deepening valleys of the Himalayan Mountains. Tulika pulled out an AirMask from the tank under her seat and offered it to her daughter. The girl refused.

Around another sharp bend, Rajdeep sped up to overtake a car in front of them. Tulika wrapped her arms around the girl and clutched her tight.

“Stop the car,” Tulika said, gulping.

“What happened?”

“She’ll get sick.”

Rajdeep turned to Tulika. His eyes were opaque and his eyelids always drooped a little too low for Tulika to read him. When he glanced down at the girl, Tulika wondered if he had hesitated, if he had lingered a little too long.

“She’s fine,” he said. “She’s always fine.”

“No, Raju. I’ll be sick.”

Rajdeep groaned and pressed his hands around the wheel. He always held the steering wheel too tight, like he was squeezing and choking it, until his hands began to sweat, until the leather upholstery left red marks of strain on his palms. He had large, powerful hands. He used to grab her wrist playfully, she remembered, and yank too hard, hurting her.

He slowed the car at the next large clearing by the roadside.

“Go,” he commanded.

Tulika unclamped the seatbelt. With the girl still cradled in her arms, she stepped outside.

The pahadi morning air. It came to her first as a memory of past breaths; it had been a half dozen years since she had travelled to such heights. The air was light, thin, almost completely scentless, without the heavy weight of lead and smoke characteristic of Faridabad. Tulika looked down at the girl for her reaction, but her expression—passive and uninterested behind those large, brown eyes—did not change.

It was quieter, too, almost silent. There was little rush of traffic now and no panic of the WarConch to halt them from moving ahead. There was a crackle of branches echoing from the forest below, a sigh from the girl in her arms, the slamming of the car’s door as Rajdeep stepped out behind them.

But then that sickly feeling in her stomach returned, that weight in her throat, that spinning whirlpool of pain in her head. Tulika rushed to the side of the road and peeked down from the low concrete barrier at the welcoming depth of the mountain, the infinite canyon which ended with the plains far below. Closer up to her, just below the barrier, were brown shrubs and green grass and a khud-full of plastic food wrappers. Tulika moved the girl from her front to her side, now holding her between her hand and her left shoulder. The girl put her arms around Tulika’s neck to shift her weight and find balance.

But the girl’s face was too close. Her legs dangled over Tulika’s stomach when Tulika bent lower over the concrete. She shifted the girl’s weight from one shoulder to another, and looking around without another option, decided to sit her down on the slim breadth of the barrier.

“Let me hold her,” Rajdeep called out from behind them.

Tulika froze. She remembered the girl’s hat. She had left the hat in the car.

Rajdeep’s eyes had now risen up to unaccustomed attention. He rushed closer to them.

Before the trip, Tulika had bought a new green fedora to cover the girl’s head. The fedora’s wide brim fit over the girl’s stretched, oblong skull. But the hat was inside the car, and the girl was out here, her head on full display.

Rajdeep walked over and grabbed the girl from Tulika. Immediately, Tulika turned back to face the mountain, opened her mouth wide, and vomited—boiled egg and soggy pieces of bread and cucumber. She held her hair back and let it all belch out. Her head buzzed.

She paused for a breath, looking up in front of her at the fog, at the sunlight streaming through the clouds above, the hazy valley on the horizon. Behind her, she could hear the hush of the mountains. A light wind. A crackle on the branches. Nothing from Rajdeep. Nothing from the girl.

When she finally turned, she saw that Rajdeep was holding the girl up in front of him, one hand cupping her below her little legs, the other hand wrapped around her waist. His bearded face—with the feral musk of sweat she loved, the same face she once rubbed against until it chafed her own cheeks—seemed foreign and unfamiliar so close to their daughter. In nearly four years, it was the first time he had held her.

And yet, he had grabbed her like he grabbed the steering wheel: with a cold exertion of strength. The girl was casually swinging her legs now, kicking her white tennis shoes against her father’s chest.

Tulika wiped the brim of her mouth with her sleeve. “Put her down, Raju,” she said.

He loosened his grip.

“She will stand by herself, Rajdeep. Put her down.”

Rajdeep lowered her on her feet and backed away. Tulika ran up to the girl and clutched her hand.

“Are you okay?” Rajdeep’s voice was low and raspy, familiar again for Tulika. Now at a safe distance from the girl, he looked at the oval egg of her head with renewed fascination. Tulika knew that expression. A little curious, a little afraid.

“I’m fine, Papa,” the girl answered with a nod.

“I’m fine,” Tulika answered with a deep breath.

The girl then pulled on Tulika’s arm and pointed at her sneakers: the laces on both her shoes had come untied. Tulika crouched down on one knee.

“Watch,” Tulika said. “Lift both, say lift both. Cross over, say cross over. Watch.” She pulled both ends down. “Blue bunny ears, blue bunny, then into the gap, into the gap. And done. Now do it over the other foot.”

The girl shook her head. “You do it,” she commanded.

Tulika sighed. “Look again.” She repeated the entire exercise on the other shoe.

“Let’s go now,” Rajdeep ordered.

He must be hungry. Tulika worried she was wasting their time. She got back in the car with the girl and strapped on the seatbelt. Tulika found the girl’s fedora and placed it over her head. Rajdeep looked at both of them one more time with the same hollow expression in his eyes and started the car.

She had seen that expression before. There she was, half conscious under a heavy dose of morphine, stitches binding the incisions in her abdomen, needles plunged into her veins, and tubes drip-drip-dripping behind her bed.

Your daughter. She could hear a woman’s voice. Your daughter.

Tulika awoke on the surgery bed, under a glaring light that revealed the life below her. She remembered the frantic voices from her subconscious. There, there. The shape. Placenta. More oxygen, nurse! The head. She remembered the pain. The screeches.

“Is she…?” Tulika murmured to the blurs in the room.

“Your daughter is fine, Mrs. Sinha,” came the woman’s voice again. Firm and comforting. Dr Joshi. “We had complications, but it’s all fine now. Do you want to hold her?”

A pair of blurry hands carried the baby and Tulika found herself reaching out to grab her, to hold her. Her daughter. She found herself instantly comfortable with the first touch. She knew where to put her arm below the baby’s body. The girl was wrapped inside a clean, white cotton sheet. Tulika wrapped the cloth shut over the baby’s chest when she felt a slight waft of air in the room. She let the girl’s little toes peek out from below. She flicked her finger against the sole of her naked feet and felt the girl shudder with a soft, irritated moan. The girl turned her head into the warm pocket of Tulika’s breast, right over her heart.

Her head.

Tulika took a deep breath and finally let her eyes wander over the girl’s head. She had Rajdeep’s eyes, larger in proportion to the rest of her face, and her eyelids drooped low in lazy reluctance to open up to the world. She had Tulika’s nose, small and flat. Like a porky piggy, Rajdeep had joked when he met Tulika for the first time. The girl’s skin was creamy brown, like Tulika, but a much lighter shade, like Rajdeep looked on the one day of the month he shaved his beard.

But that’s where the similarities stopped. Her skull was nothing like Tulika had ever seen before. It was an oval, elongated strangely on the sides of her head, a smooth egg lying horizontally over the girl’s neck. Tulika remembered the ultrasounds clearly now. She had seen this. This shape. This head. A vessel much larger than the brain it carried.

“Raju…” Tulika muttered.

Dr. Joshi’s frame became clearer. She was standing in a white coat at the foot of Tulika’s bed, a facemask hanging low underneath her chin, a smile on her face. “Your husband is outside Mrs. Sinha. We can let him in when you’re ready.”

“Raju…”

She saw Rajdeep walk in the door. In his large hands, he carried a small soft toy, a blue bunny rabbit he had bought for the baby before Tulika went into labor. His bearded cheeks lifted when he smiled.

Tulika shifted the baby between both of her nestling arms and held her up. The cloth unraveled to reveal her head.

Tulika watched his eyes. The sparkle made way for shock. Rajdeep looked a little curious, a little afraid. He took a step backward, away from Tulika’s bed, back toward the door.

This was their child, both of theirs, and all of her own. Tulika wanted the girl to cry more—shouldn’t babies cry more?—but instead, she felt her own eyes well up. Somewhere in the background, she could hear Dr. Joshi’s voice: 2:43 p.m., 2.8 kgs, we’ve taken a blood sample, first feeding…

Dr. Joshi was at the foot of Tulika’s bed, now clicking a pen in her hand, cradling a clipboard. “Do you have a name for the baby?”

Tulika brought the girl back into her full embrace, close to her heart. And when she turned to Rajdeep, she saw him standing uneasily by the door, jittering his feet. He squeezed the blue bunny with his large fingers until its cotton head disappeared completely inside his hand.

Within a year of the girl’s birth, the manufacturers in Shenzhen cut trade ties with Rajdeep. War broke out with China over Arunachal Pradesh and with Pakistan over water, or with Pakistan over Kashmir and China over air regulations, or both, Tulika couldn’t remember. Rajdeep was slower to react than his competitors, who had found new sources in Indonesia and Vietnam. When Supremo Bikes called him to ask about new imports of motorcycle parts, he had nothing to report anymore. Instead, he went on the road, back on search. New clients, new suppliers. “Same business, Tulika,” he said. “There are many, many fish in the ocean.”

She held the girl in her arms, but kept her skull sheltered from him under a robe. “Same fish?”

“Smaller fish.”

He turned away. He never looked directly at the girl, never spoke to her, or spoke of her, or ever came close to any physical contact.

Is that how they were now, these fathers? When the Chawlas next door invited Tulika for their son’s sixth birthday party, she sat with the girl alone in a corner of their dining room, eating eggless white cake and watching the fathers. Some were close to their children, holding up the girls’ hands as they balanced on their feet, allowing the boys to straddle behind their shoulders like backpacks. Some fathers reminded Tulika of her Papa in Jaipur, who left the children alone with the mothers for most of the evening, but came back to check up on a regular basis and give the kids a scruffy kiss on the cheek before returning to the company of other men.

Rajdeep didn’t come to the party and Tulika was comfortable without his presence around the girl. She didn’t ask him to be the father who carried children in his arms, or even be like Papa, who drifted in and out of her life as his whims commanded. Instead, she compartmentalized parental obligations like the rest of the young mothers in the neighborhood had after the wars began. Home for the mothers and road for the fathers. When she got pregnant and Rajdeep asked her to quit her job with Tooni Graphics, Tulika did what her own mother had done at her birth: she quit.

The girl was her duty now. Home for the mothers.

When they first brought the girl home from the hospital, Tulika slept with her in the bedroom and Rajdeep took the sofa in the living room. They lived in his flat in Faridabad’s Sector-87, where there were two more bedrooms, one each for Mummyji, Rajdeep’s mother, and Gitu, his sister. The three women raised the baby together. They patted her on the back to make her cough, sang old bhajans to soothe her crying, and opened their arms wide to let the girl crawl up to them. They pressed down the hair over her skull to cover the shape and celebrated when the girl jiggled in recognition of the music from Mummyji’s television.

Rajdeep stayed away, avoiding the girl as she grew up, keeping out of her path as she wheeled around the house on her plastic walker toy. But when the girl closed her eyes, rolled inside the safety of her blankets, or pressed against Tulika’s breast, Tulika saw Rajdeep study her carefully from his peripheries, watching her skull continue to grow sideways with morbid fascination. Tulika watched it, too, but what was one shape from the other for the child, she thought? When the head stretched longer, Tulika bought her a wider hat.

Before the girl turned one, Gitu died of lung cancer. Mummyji was diagnosed soon after.

“Those new AirMasks, Raju,” said Tulika, “I saw them in the mall.”

“Made in China,” Rajdeep coughed.

“We need them, Raju. Gitu’s gone, Mummyji has the disease, and the girl…”

“She will be fine, Tulika.”

“Raju, please.”

So he drove down to the mall and returned with oxygen filters, tanks, and AirMasks. He set up the filters around the house and installed the O-Tanks in their Toyota. But he warned Tulika about overusing them with the girl. “She’ll become too sensitive, okay? She needs to breathe real air and make her lungs stronger.”

Tulika waited for Rajdeep to leave home before she forced the mask on the girl. “Go now. Breathe normally. Normally.” The girl shook her head and scampered away to the open windows, to the door outside, to the air that was killing them.

Tulika and Mummyji coughed all night, and Tulika worried that their sleeplessness was keeping the girl awake. But the girl slept through it all. She inhaled deeply on the smoggiest winter nights in Faridabad and cried for Tulika in the mornings without losing a breath.

“This is not the first case. As a matter of fact, if our tests are correct, your daughter is one of the first few ‘Proto-Forward’ babies.”

Tulika trusted Dr. Joshi, who owned a small, private clinic and treated both the pregnant mother and the perplexing child. Tulika had returned to see the doctor every three months since the girl’s birth, taking brain scans, blood tests, lung exams, urine tests, and cognitive development analyses. The results were always the same. Your daughter is normal, she would say. But when Dr. Joshi called them in to share international news about the girl’s condition, Tulika insisted that Rajdeep come along too.

The doctor’s office was comforting to Tulika, with its bright, lime-green curtains and walls adorned with photographs of smiling babies and their proud parents. Among those photographs was Dr. Joshi’s own, with her own husband, a tall, darker-skinned man in a fishing hat and a baby in his arms. She leaned next to him in a T-shirt and shorts. Both of them smiled widely on a wooden plank somewhere with blue seas behind them.

How did she manage this, then? In this time of war, with her job and that baby and that holiday with the family crammed closely into the frame of a small photograph? Tulika hadn’t left Faridabad since the pregnancy, since she had quit her job. She could work from home, she had thought; she could design on her own computer. Once, she had even offered to help Dr. Joshi with a logo for her clinic, but then the girl had begun to cry, and Mummyji needed her to call the cable company, and Tulika’s computer caught some malware, and she never got started.

She knew she would go back to it one day. One day, yes, when the girl was old enough. When she could leave her with Mummyji. The clinic could use a logo. Something nurturing, a seed blooming into a flower. Tall trees. The nurturing shade of a green forest? Or a more literal representation? A stethoscope around a baby. A baby crawling to her mother. A mother petting a child’s head? A father pressing a child’s skull.

“Proto-forward babies?” Tulika asked.

She was sitting between the girl and Rajdeep, who was silent, listening with his head bowed low

“Yes, that’s it,” Dr. Joshi answered. “There was a boy out in Peru, born about five years ago. He had your daughter’s condition. And he is growing up with no problems. Then three more in China, out of which two survived. Both are healthy, normal, children.”

“What happened to the other Chinese child?”

“That was—what can I say?” She waved her hand with easy dismissal. “Just an unfortunate family accident. You know, family problems? Nothing to do with the condition.”

“But I searched online about this. Cranio Synth To…”

“Craniosynostosis. No, no, your baby doesn’t have that. Let me explain.”

Dr. Joshi flipped open her prescription notepad, and with a black pen, drew two oval shapes, vertically and horizontally, in jagged, uneven strokes. “The first,” she explained, “where the head is long to the back, that is Sagittal Craniosynostosis. Only dangerous in rare cases. But this,” she pointed to the other oval, “where the skull is long side to side. That is your daughter.” She clicked her pen down and let it drop on the notepad. Now Dr. Joshi’s voice sped up as she spoke. “It really is exciting news. Scientists in America are calling it a natural evolution. A reaction to the environmental changes.”

Tulika didn’t understand, but the girl was healthy, wasn’t she? That was all that mattered, wasn’t it? She turned to see Rajdeep’s reaction, but he was distracted, staring at his phone.

Later that afternoon, they were in the Toyota, about to drive back home, when the WarConch began to blow out from the street speakers. Tulika hoisted the girl into her arms and all three of them rushed back up to Dr. Joshi’s clinic. From the third-floor window, they saw hundreds of people leave their vehicles on the street to rush indoors: into coffee shops, O-Bars, and down to the metro station. The WarConch continued, its one high note urgently trumpeting out of every Public Announcement speaker and mobile phone in the vicinity until there was no one outdoors anymore. Tulika crouched to the ground on all fours and pulled the girl down beside her. Rajdeep and the rest of the patients and doctors around them did the same.

The conch kept blowing with merciless consistency, the same loud blare without a flinch or change in tone, for five minutes.

And then it stopped.

“Just a drill,” Rajdeep muttered. “Let’s go home.”

The girl had her own room now, Gitu’s old room, which Tulika had decorated with an array of different soft-toy critter creatures—squirrels and bears and rabbits—in pink and blue. During the day, the girl sat on the carpet playing with plastic building blocks; at night, Tulika tucked her into bed and slept on the floor next to her. Rajdeep—when he was home—drank whiskey alone and camped out on the living room couch.

When she was eleven months old and rolling around on the carpet next to Tulika one afternoon, the girl said “Pa, Pa-Pa.” “Muh-uhm” came a few days later. On her first birthday, Rajdeep scheduled his final trip to Shenzhen. On her second birthday, he found suppliers for new manufacturers of chain sprockets in Ranchi and took the day-long train journey for the meeting. When the girl turned three, the Haryana Small and Medium Enterprises Association organized a convention in Panipat; Tulika didn’t throw a party for the girl and the girl didn’t ask for Papa.

Rajdeep was back home by the time the girl began to emulate Tulika. In front of the mirror, under the yellow light of the sun slanting into the bathroom through glass-paneled windows, Tulika and the girl wet their toothbrushes with a few careful drops from the mug and brushed in parallel: Tulika leaned sideways against the tiled wall and moved in monotone angles over her teeth; the girl swayed in front of her, dancing to faint sounds of music from the television in Mummyji’s room.

On one of those mornings, the girl accidentally swayed into the mug. It tumbled from the washbasin, spilling onto the bathroom floor. Rajdeep heard the thud and hurried into the bathroom. A thin stream of water snaked its way from the girl, bypassed Tulika, and meandered in Rajdeep’s direction. Tulika froze against the wall, holding the toothbrush inside her frothy mouth. Rajdeep pointed a finger at the girl’s oval head but looked to Tulika instead. You, he said with his eyes.

He slammed the door shut behind him, causing a crash that stirred a bar of soap off its dish and made Tulika flinch. The girl spat paste and froth into the basin and wiped her mouth clean.

The trip to Shimla was Tulika’s idea. The girl was old enough to start kindergarten, and Tulika convinced Rajdeep that they needed a holiday—just the three of them—before school began. It was scheduled to be the hottest summer in North India ever recorded, hotter even than the last year when Mrs. Chawla’s son from next door threw an egg on Sector-87’s driveway to watch it sizzle. The mountains would be cooler, she had said. It was where she and Rajdeep had spent their honeymoon, before the wars, before the girl.

But as soon as Rajdeep drove the Toyota out onto the highway, Tulika felt that she had left something behind. They had extra sweaters, phone chargers, AirMasks, and O-Tanks. They had building blocks for the girl and her second pair of sneakers. What was left?

She couldn’t figure it out, and she remained unsatisfied, unsettled. The headache and the altitude sickness distracted her on the drive up, but soon after she vomited, the worry consumed her again.

He had held her, she thought. For the first time, he had held her. Rajdeep listened to the radio and drove fast around the blind corners. Tulika looked out the window in silence. She needed to know. What did she forget? They were going to be alone, together. Just her and the girl and him. Why were they going?

For lunch, they stopped at Sunny’s Full Stop in Kandaghat, the dhaba where—almost six years ago—Tulika’s wedding ring had slipped off her buttery finger while she ate aloo-paratha for lunch. Unaccustomed to bearing a heavier weight, Tulika didn’t raise an alarm until they had already driven an hour further. Then she screamed and cried and apologized, and Rajdeep, laughing in a way he never laughed anymore, drove her back to Sunny’s to find the ring. That night Tulika and Rajdeep had finished a bottle of whiskey in celebration and didn’t leave their hotel room. “Don’t worry,” he had slurred. “This will be a very funny story for the future. The funniest.”

She was more accustomed to the weight of the ring on her finger now, and back at Sunny’s Full Stop, that incident seemed like an anecdote from someone else’s life; a scene from a TV serial where every marriage problem was resolved with comedy and nobody went for their monthly lung scans. The parathas didn’t taste as good as they used to, either, and Rajdeep kept complaining as he licked achar off his thumbs.

“Do you want something else?” Tulika asked. She always knew when he was unsatisfied. There was a restlessness to his motion: below the table, where he was sitting with one leg crossed over the other, she could feel him jittering his foot side to side. The jittering had gotten worse lately, more impatient, as if he was in constant need of escape. From the inside breast pocket of his jacket, he reached for his steel silver flask of whiskey and took a sip.

“Something else?” Rajdeep repeated. “We have spent a hundred and forty each on our parathas, ninety-five on her egg thing, and we still need to save for the petrol pump. How much do you think…?”

He stopped himself from finishing the sentence. His foot shook faster, more violently now. Tulika was sitting beside the girl, both of them opposite Rajdeep at the table. The girl wore the green hat over her head and ate her parathas without complaint. Below the table, Tulika saw that the girl was swinging her tennis shoes, marching one leg after another in the empty air. When her feet came precariously close to kicking against Rajdeep, Tulika placed a hand on the girl’s knee to make her stop.

The girl looked up questioningly, and in the sudden movement, the fedora flew off her head.

Rajdeep stopped moving. Tulika scrambled to fix the hat back over her skull. Had anyone seen it? Tulika shot a glance around their table. The staff was by the cashier’s table and there was no one else in the dhaba. Rajdeep shifted his seat back from the table in an instinctive reaction. Tulika needed him to calm down. She needed order. Just breathe, one, two breaths.

“Relax, Raju,” Tulika suggested in a softer voice. “Do you want one more paratha?”

“One more paratha?” Rajdeep shook his head and sighed. “You don’t understand anything. Those days of Supremo Bikes are gone, okay? We can barely afford to keep spending on O-Tanks for her. Should I really repeat how much we have spent today?”

“Don’t get angry Rajdeep, I’m just offering…”

“I’m not angry, okay? I’m just talking louder.” Rajdeep leaned away from the table and grunted. He swirled open the top of his flask and took another sip. “I’m not angry.”

“Yes, you are. Be calm, Rajdeep.”

“I am calm,” he slammed a heavy hand on the table, making it wobble under his strength. Then he corrected himself, his voice suddenly becoming mellow and soft. “Okay, not right now, Tulika,” Rajdeep turned the pointy angle of his nose at the girl. He lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Not in front of her.”

In silence, they waited for the girl to finish eating. Tulika wiped off crumbs that had dropped down the girl’s chin and Rajdeep sipped from his flask. Before he was ready to go, Rajdeep purchased another bottle of whiskey from the theka next door.

They had enough in the O-Tank for the holiday, but as she waited alone with the girl, Tulika wondered if Rajdeep was right, if they truly had been spending too much on the girl. He was old-fashioned and believed people would adjust, that their bodies would become immune, that even the poison in the atmosphere would eventually become breathable. No, no, he was wrong. He had to be wrong. What about Mummyji? What about Gitu? They couldn’t simply surrender their lungs this way, no, no. She would fight. If the O-Tanks were expensive, she would go back to work. She could design again, maybe, just like before the marriage. What could he even say? Anything for the girl.

Unless…unless he wanted her to get sick. Like Gitu and Mummyji. Did he want her to get sick? Was that his plan? Tulika saw him return from the theka with a black plastic bag carrying more whiskey, and she was sure that she saw him trip over his feet as he motioned for her to get back into the car. He took the driver’s seat and she and the girl went around from the other side of the Toyota to sit beside him. In the pungent odor of his beard and the whiskey, she again wondered about what she had forgotten, why they were out here together.

It had been her idea, all of this. Tulika reached for the AirMask and forced it over the girl’s face, and it seemed that the girl protested a little bit, but Tulika kept it on until the girl began to breathe more peacefully. Breathe, just breathe.

Tulika walked into the hotel room carrying the girl and one O-Tank. Rajdeep, who had stumbled drunkenly up the stairs, followed behind her with the rest of their luggage.

It was what the small hotel called a Deluxe Two-Person Room. Tulika remembered jokes with Rajdeep from their past, of rooms sounding more lavish than they actually looked, of a double bed only large enough for one-and-a-half people—or just one person, your mother, Tulika had once said—of bathrooms with no space for a bath, of that ever-numbing smell of mold. This was a room like that, Tulika thought, their Deluxe Room, where Tulika and Rajdeep would have no other place to roll up to, so they simply rolled on each other.

But now, with the girl in her arms, the same space felt more claustrophobic than cozy. The girl was a wedge between them, a sharp piece of plastic building block that had no fit. The mold made Tulika feel sick in her head again, dizzy and desperate for another long breath from the O-Tank. Rajdeep fished out the new bottle of whiskey and began to pour it carefully into the mouth of the flask. The sound of the gushing liquid made Tulika feel thirsty, too.

The girl had seen the playground behind the hotel from the window and was suddenly desperate to ride the swings. “I’m going out now, Mumma,” she said, and Tulika knew by her affirmative voice that her mind was made up. Tulika wanted to leave with her, leave the congestion, step into the air outside. She grabbed the girl’s hand and nodded.

Rajdeep closed the flask top and rose quickly to his feet. “I’ll come, too.”

In the yellow tinge of late afternoon sun, the tiny playground was filled with a dozen children, laughing and screaming, jumping and falling. Two of them were on the seesaw with two more in queue for their turn. Three boys hung on the monkey bars and kicked each other mid-air. A girl sat on a swing. Another ran circles around the wooden table and benches where some of the parents rested. There was a deodar tree behind the benches keeping them in shade, and Rajdeep dropped into a seat.

The girl wrung her hand free and ran to the empty swing. She fixed herself on the seat, shifting left and right to find a perfect balance, then fixed the fedora over her head and pushed her sneaker down on the gravel to give herself a start.

Tulika walked over to Rajdeep. “Do you want something? Tea or water or something?”

Behind his tired, drunken eyelids, Tulika could only see a shadow of a response. He waved his flask full of whiskey and shrugged.

“Well,” she said. “I think I want some chai.”

“Go find a waiter, then.”

Tulika looked between Rajdeep and the swing. The girl swung back and forth, oblivious, humming softly to herself.

“Go,” Rajdeep repeated. “I’ll watch her.”

“You…”

“I’ll watch her, Tulika.”

Could she leave? Tulika counted five other adults out on the playground. She could leave, she thought. It would be fine—why wouldn’t it be fine?

She decided to go. She left the playground and walked back through the glass doors into the hotel’s main building.

She was looking for a waiter to order chai, or perhaps something stronger. Was there a bar in this hotel? Maybe she would get some whiskey—like him—too.

No, she preferred, vodka. That’s what she used to drink before her marriage, after work with her friends outside the Tooni Graphics office in Sector 16. She would mix vodka and lemon water. Before the wars.

The main lobby was empty except for the old lady at reception, who sat with her back turned, watching a TV serial on the television mounted on the wall behind her. Her chubby arms billowed out of the sleeves of her salwar kameez and her chins sagged down below her neck. Tulika went up to the desk to ask for a waiter, but before the lady could turn around Tulika changed her mind and walked away.

Outside, through the lobby of the hotel’s main entrance, she crossed the parking area and went out the front gate.

She reveled in the fresher mountain air. It felt light going into her lungs—devoid of the metallic weight of the city. She saw that both sides of the road were flanked with deodar trees, and when she heard a stray crackle of wood on her left, she strayed from her path and walked into the forest. Her feet crunched the dry leaves, and she liked the sound so much that she kept walking deeper.

It became considerably colder as the evening settled in and the tree branches overhead filtered the weak sun beams. Tulika heard the rustling of new creatures, leaping from branch to branch, scurrying through the grass, carrying on with their lives. She wondered how long she could keep walking before someone came out to look for her. Two hours? Three?

More crunched leaves. More cool air. Why couldn’t she keep walking, she wondered? Walk until she came out the other side of the forest, maybe the other side of the mountain? Where did this stony trek even lead? She could breathe clearly, too—that was good. There was no need for her to stop, was there? Wasn’t she free to do as she pleased? There was no war in the wild. There was the scent of grass and bark and a faint hint of chlorine and it all hypnotized her. She was alone.

She saw how the deodars shaded and protected the forest underneath them and she knew that she could design a logo for Dr. Joshi now. A forest. This forest. She could keep walking to the other side, yes, to the next town, and find a computer somewhere to work on it. Yes, she would do it. Why stop now? How deep in the jungle could she end up before someone yanked her back to the duties of her life, back to the girl, to Rajdeep, to the flat in Faridabad, to the world of fathers and mothers?

The girl would start school soon, and Mummyji didn’t have much longer to live, and there was more poison in the air, and Rajdeep would keep traveling to sell more motorcycle parts, and she would cough in bed on Monday night, and the WarConch would blow again and halt everything, and it would blow and it would…

It was blowing. The WarConch was blowing. She could hear it. Even in the safety of the cold forest, she could hear it. The rustling and cackling and swinging all stopped. So did she.

She needed to get back. Back out of the forest. Which way had she come? Back to the main road, to that gate, to the hotel, to the playground, to the girl. Rajdeep was there with the girl. The WarConch kept blowing, loud and consistent, propelling Tulika to instinctive urgency. Her breathing became heavy, more labored. She turned around and ran.

The hotel lobby was crowded with residents and staff, all now crouched on the floor with their hands over their heads. The old lady by the reception desk was on the floor, too, and her TV serial had been interrupted by striped saffron, white, and green bands across the screen. The conch kept blowing.

All the children and parents from the playground were back inside, but not Rajdeep, not the girl.

Tulika raced across the lobby. When she got to the glass doors, she saw them.

The girl had jumped off the swing now and stood next to Rajdeep. He was propped on one knee on the ground, close to her, undisturbed by the buzzing chaos of the conch.

Tulika watched him reach over to their daughter with those large, tense hands. With a flick of his fingers, he untied the laces of the white tennis shoe on one of her feet.

The girl bent down after him, balanced the hat over her head, and with slow deliberation, began to tie the laces back together. Stretch, loop, bunnies, pull. The girl lifted her head up to Rajdeep questioningly. He nodded, took a sip of his whiskey, and then untied her other shoe.

Stretch, loop, bunnies, pull, Tulika whispered to herself. The girl followed her father’s directions. Rajdeep nodded again.

Tulika could feel her breathing start to relax. She reached for the glass doors—intent on joining them—and then turned back toward reception. She found a spot beside the desk, not far from the old lady, next to a waiter in a uniform black vest and trousers.

The WarConch kept blowing. And as she crouched down on all fours, Tulika reminded herself to ask the waiter for chai when this was all over. Or maybe even a vodka.

You step out onto the street, the bottle tucked under your arm. Even over the din you can hear its contents sloshing, feel the liquid careen inside the glass. You take a deep breath to steady your nerves. Bodies push past you, each face different—some laughing, some angry—but none that you recognize on this thick-aired morning.

The longer you walk the warmer you get, even though the sun has yet to peek over the buildings that flank the street. Dampness comes to your armpits and your back while your throat grows drier, and still you can hear the sloshing of the cool liquid in the jar. For an instant you imagine twisting off the cap and taking a swig, then shudder. No, after, after, you will slake your thirst.

You turn down a side street, thinking it will be cooler and less crowded. Thankfully it is, and you take a moment to stop and check your reflection in a grubby shop window. With one hand you smooth your beard, noticing a small pimple hidden in the crease between your nose and cheek. Using a ragged nail, you lance it, then wince in pain. You rub at the raw spot until it stops weeping, the pinkness now bright against your skin.

Rivulets of sweat drip down your chest. You pull at the collar of your shirt, smoothing the blue fabric. You’re pleased with your decision to wear the same shirt you proposed in. Running a hand through your thick hair, you are satisfied with what you see, and walk on.

The side street is much quieter and it helps to clear your mind. From a window up high you can hear the warbling laughter of a young woman. A memory snags at your heart but you will it away. After, after you will shed your tears.

You walk faster now, eager to finish your business. At the end of the side street, you turn again so you can cross the foot bridge. On both sides of the bridge, men and boys congregate with fishing poles and buckets, casting their shimmering lines into the murky river. You slow to watch one boy, maybe half your age, stand on his tiptoes to look over the railings, his eyes wide. He pulls a piece of bread out of his pocket, and you expect him to eat it, but he rips it apart and tosses it high in the air where eager birds swoop to catch the unexpected meal. Something rumbles inside you, and you remember that you didn’t eat breakfast. Your hand squeezes your belly into submission. After, after you will feed your hunger.

You slow down as you approach her house. Your feet feel heavier than at the start of your journey, and this heaviness seeps up your legs to your torso and to your soul, so that by the time you reach the green-painted door you know so well, you are leaden. Closing your eyes, you exhale a great breath. You are ready. You are ready.

You raise your hand and knock. The wood is hard against your knuckles. You wait, the heaviness now dissipating. You feel lighter and roll onto the balls of your feet, pushing your shoulders back. You are expansive. You are true. You are ready.

Finally, you hear her voice behind the door, her soft giggle. With a click, she unlocks it and pulls it open, her dark eyes down, her pink mouth smiling. She looks up, and her smile disappears.

You unscrew the lid of the jar and let the acid fly.

Beman wheeled Millie into their garden and lifted the oxygen mask from her face. The perennials stirred and shimmered in anticipation of the toiling clouds overhead.

Purple. Blue. Yellow.

Daisies. Foxgloves. Asters.

The leaves turned upward and their color deepened as if the flowers had pulled back their heads and opened their mouths to drink the sky.

Ten years ago, Millie and Beman healed the scars left on the lawn by swing sets and sandboxes. The garden was something to nurture after their children no longer required tending. In the cool mornings, they meticulously trimmed and weeded the overgrowth, then rested in the afternoon heat. Millie liked to close her eyes in the sun and listen to the purring of hummingbirds and droning bees. In a deep, resonant breath she would bring the warm honeyed scent of fresh pollen through her nose, let the saccharine smell of dew fall on her tongue and grow sour from the balm of damp soil, rich and woody like a hidden sanctuary. “I think, if I could have one wish, I would wish for this,” Millie would say. Beman would pull her close and rest his head on her shoulder.

When the cancer startled their routine, Millie could no longer sustain the garden, and Beman, instead, sustained her. The chemotherapy burnt its way through her veins like a lit fuse. She was falling to ash. Outside, the flowers of the garden had never grown so vigorously. They became tangled and dense. Thick vines of morning glory wound up the top-heavy asters, and sharp thistles towered in clusters.

Each day, Beman wheeled her into the garden, down the path. The air soothed Millie’s exhausted, now paper thin, lungs. She imagined the air of the garden like an ambrosia, rejuvenating what the cancer had eaten.

Today, she said, “Beman, will you help me out of this chair? I want to lie in the flowers.”

“We should go inside. It will be raining soon.”

Millie nodded patiently and inhaled the humid air with defiance. “I would like to lie with the flowers.”

Beman avoided her eyes, “You are too weak. I worry.”

Soon her body would touch the earth forever. When the cancer was satiated, she would pass into the soil from which the greenery would grow. “Indulge a sick woman. I just want to feel what it is to be a flower.”

Beman searched the sky, then dropped his eyes to Millie. She sat perfectly straight, her hands neatly folded in her lap, eyes focused on a cone of purple foxglove hanging like tolling bells. He held out his hand. “Can you stand?” She nodded and held him to steady herself.

“Now,” she said, “let me down.” She bent her body, as if to sit, and leaned back. He held onto her, a safety rope on a mountainside, until she rested on the ground. “Let go,” she said.

She spread her arms and fell backward, her eyes closed with deliberation. The flowers seemed to catch and ease her down. The plants were warm, as if blood flowed through them. The earth, cool and moist: a wet towel on a fevered head.

Millie lay still. A breeze rippled over her as it fell from the trees—a cold front. She pulled one of the long foxglove stems down to her face and drank the verdant smell of a living death.

The wind thundered. The clouds broke into thick drops that bit at her skin.

“We should get you up,” said Beman, “Before you catch a chill.”

Millie was not ready yet. She needed to understand. She would be earth longer than she had been woman, and she wanted to know how it felt before she was washed into it forever.

For months my brother complained that his body ached all over. We thought it was from lack of sleep because he liked to stay up late, watching television until his eyelids couldn’t hold themselves open any longer. But then one morning he woke to find several freckle-sized holes in his chest. They didn’t bleed, but he would later describe the pain as searing, as if the holes were being burned into his flesh with invisible matches.

When I got to the hospital that morning, a doctor was already examining my brother. My parents sat in chairs pulled close, their hands folded in their laps. This was the first time I’d seen them in a room together since they’d gotten divorced.

The doctors and nurses had wide eyes and cheerful smiles that took up most of their faces. Their oversized canines and incisors—bright white and shining with saliva—made them seem hungry for us. They told us there was nothing my brother could have done to prevent it, but I felt like they were letting him off the hook too easily. Surely there had to be consequences for having lived so dangerously.

When we were kids, it seemed as though my brother always needed stitches. He would chase me around the house with his eyes closed, pretending to be a zombie, running into walls. One time he ran into a wall so hard that he split his forehead open and fell backward. I screamed for Mom when I saw the white of his skull peeking at me through flaps of loose skin.

I could see the small scar, a horizontal indent where his skin was tightly folded, on the right side of his forehead as he sat up in his hospital bed to greet me. The rest of his face was so adult now. He had messy facial hair and frown lines, but that crease in his forehead held on from childhood.

That night, I stayed with my brother at the hospital. Mom and Dad were uneasy about leaving, but ultimately exhaustion and phone calls from their new spouses won out. With our parents and the doctors gone, we both felt calm—almost normal.

I said, “A skeleton walks into a bar and says, ‘Give me a beer and a mop.’”

My brother knew my jokes already, but he still laughed like it was the first time he’d heard it. I laughed too, but shakily, and then fell silent for a while. Eventually I asked him, “Aren’t you afraid?”

“I’m just relieved, you know, to know it wasn’t all in my head.” I could hear an ease in his voice that I hadn’t heard since the pain started, half a year earlier.

The small wounds had spread since his arrival at the hospital. The holes scattered and expanded so slowly that we didn’t notice them until they were bigger. They had been so small at first. Who knows—perhaps they had been there all along. Perhaps they were just widening. There was so little that anyone knew. The doctors hid their confusion with lists of tests. They’d already scheduled him for x-rays, blood and urine samples, physical exams, and questionnaires the following day—we were both tired just thinking about it.

When exhaustion overcame my worry, I slept in the chair next to my brother’s bed, waking up every time he stirred. Somehow I still managed to dream. I dreamt that his skin began to grow back over the wounds like webs. The new skin made my brother powerful, like a superhero. But not Spiderman—that name was already taken. Skin Graft Man, maybe?

When we were children, I told my brother that there was a portal to another dimension in my closet and all we had to do to get there was dig. Later that day, our parents were horrified to find a small hole where my brother had managed to knock through the wall, trying to find that magic place I’d promised. I pretended to have no idea why he’d done it.

In my dream, my brother’s new skin cells gave him the power to punch holes in walls that led to those other dimensions, new places for him to discover and explore, to stumble into other kinds of adventures—dangers more thrilling than running into walls.

I woke up from the dream around five in the morning. The room was dimly lit from the red glow of the machines connected to my brother’s body. The holes were the size of marbles now.

I don’t know what possessed me to touch them. They were the right size for my fingertips, like matching puzzle pieces.

My brother awoke to find me sliding my fingers into the grooves of his right arm. He started and tried to pull away, but the skin from my fingertips had fused to his body, closing the gaps in his arms.

It didn’t hurt, but I cried all the same—fearing the consequences of what I’d just done.

“I wish you had more fingers,” he said. “I feel so much better.”

I was relieved—however irrationally—that there seemed to be something I could do to help.

Our parents returned that morning and found us that way, my skin acting as a bandage for his skin. Dad brought us breakfast, but my hands were otherwise engaged, so my parents had to feed me ripped-up bites of bagel.

When the doctors came in, they asked me what would happen if I tried to let go.

I felt choked just thinking about it and shook my head vehemently. “I’m scared to find out,” I told them. “Please don’t make me.”

But doctors don’t listen to people. They ripped my hands away, and both my brother and I winced like mirror images of each other.

My hands felt full and heavy. My bones ached. My brother screamed as the wounds tore open.

The doctors made marks on their notepads and exchanged looks.

“What does it mean?” My mother asked them.

The head doctor stepped forward to address my family. He pushed his eyeglasses up his nose until they knocked against his bushy black eyebrows. “I’m afraid that your daughter will need to return her fingers to the fissures.”

I held onto him again, and the wounds slowly began to heal. I was afraid that if I didn’t remain in the hospital, positioned fingertip-to-torso, the holes might take over his entire body. He’d become one giant empty space. So I stayed.

My brother and I were anxious and angry, but to keep from feeling these things we played board games, my brother moving the pieces for both of us. We watched pirated camera versions of movies—the ones we couldn’t go see in theaters—on my brother’s laptop. You’d think something like this would bring us closer together, but you quickly run out of things to say to a person when you’re sharing the same skin. I too began to feel tired all the time.

We stayed that way—attached to one another—for one hundred days while doctors and scientists from around the world came to test the properties of the wounds and to analyze what gave my fingertips the power to heal. One doctor even asked us if we were sure we weren’t actually the same person. I didn’t know how to answer that or if it was a real question.

On the one-hundredth day, the doctors ran out of tests and my brother and I were pale, tired, and fragile from months of remaining at rest indoors. After leaning forward to reach the holes for so long, my back had become permanently curved. It appeared my brother had forgotten how to use his legs. But he was alive.

The doctors said they could no longer keep us in the hospital. They said they were sorry, but they all looked more tired than remorseful. It was easy for them to let go of something they never came close to understanding. Soon they would forget about us. In a week, I would call the hospital to ask if I had left a sweater behind, and the nurses wouldn’t be able to recall that we’d been there at all.

We would have to leave the hospital, but neither of us could begin to fathom how to live in the world attached to one another like this. I wanted to go back to school, I wanted to get a normal job, I wanted someone to hold me and love me one day. Just me. By myself. I know my brother wanted those things for himself too.

After a while of sitting in silence, my brother sighed heavily. “You can let go of me now.”

I opened my mouth to protest, but the words wouldn’t come. I remembered the pain I felt the last time I’d pulled away from him, and I remembered the way he cried out. There was power in holding him this way. I was in control. I was the one who could make it all stop. He needed me. But I couldn’t remember what it felt like to be whole without holding on, and I couldn’t remember what it felt like not to worry. I was so tired of worrying.

My fingers tensed underneath his skin. I realized I’d forgotten what it felt like to have fingertips. But the more I concentrated, the more I could feel the edges of myself, how my fingers curved inward like hooks. My brother and I locked eyes. For a moment, I thought I could hear him talking in my head, but maybe what I heard were my own thoughts, waking up inside of me again. I’d forgotten what that felt like too.

And so I let go.

When the beeper buzzes on his hip, the chaplain rises from his bed in the on-call room. He’d been dreaming about his girlfriend, Shelly, and the walk they’d taken the day before. His hands caressed the soft flesh of her thighs, the decade-old scar on her left kneecap. There is no denying that he wants to make love to Shelly—something he has not yet done. But he tells himself to forget about that for now. His beeper continues to buzz, meaning someone needs comforting.

In the ER, the doctor says, We got a mess here, Chappy—one ugly stinking mess. A couple teenagers drove into a tree at two in the morning. The chaplain scribbles their names—Alan and Sue—in his note pad, wishing he had coffee, something to make what he has to do a little easier. But he doesn’t stop in the staff lounge because there are people waiting for him.

He takes a box of tissues from the counter, tries to push the image of Shelly in that yellow dress—her arms, ankles, thin wrists—from his mind, and heads to the consultation room.

Twelve hours earlier, he spent the afternoon with Shelly walking around his neighborhood, passing houses and cars he’d passed hundreds of times before. But this time the colors were brighter, the grass a soft sweet scent in his nose, and the sky a shade of pure blue he’d never seen before. Silly perhaps: the grass is the grass, the sky is the sky—but it felt different.

Ninety days together and, yesterday, the closest they’d ever come to making love. She squeezed his hand so hard it hurt. While he didn’t realize it then, he knows now as he heads toward the parents of Alan and Sue and their grief, she was telling him she was ready. It was time to take her into the bedroom of his apartment: to remove her sundress, her tennis shoes, her socks.

He is not the sort of man who is consumed by sex or sexual fantasies. He has not been with a woman in six years, but Shelly and that yellow dress have shifted something in him.

The chaplain steadies his hands on the consultation room door. It is cold, the anti-Shelly. He knows, once he goes through that door, his thoughts of her will be gone, and so he stands there in the patient-filled hall, amidst the cries of those in need, stretching this moment out as long as he can, imagining her dress sliding up and over her head, her hair—my God—her blond hair on her naked, freckled shoulders.

Inside the consultation room, the two sets of parents ask questions: how does this happen to good, college-bound kids, in the middle of the night? Were they drinking? Was there a deer—maybe a possum—in the middle of the road?

The chaplain does his best to get the names of the mothers and fathers. He listens to their questions, knowing he can’t answer them. All he can offer are the simple, tangible things of life: an ear, a shoulder, two strong arms, and some tissues.

After walking them to the trauma room so they can see what is left of their children before they are taken to the morgue, he leads the parents back to the consultation room. By then, other members of their families have arrived. They have cell phones out and are calling the people that need to be called and arrangements are starting to be made. The chaplain hugs both mothers once again, gives them his business card, and walks out the door.

He never knows if what he offers these people does any good. He never sees them again, but he understands that is how this job works. He is there to guide them toward help in those first moments when they are crippled with grief.

He heads back to his room to try to find sleep, to finish his dream. But yesterday and Shelly seem so far away from him now. What is in front of him is another night of broken sleep, of crushed souls he will somehow try to comfort.

As he lies down again in the on-call room bed, he wonders for a moment if this—death and pain and grief in a hospital—are the only real things in life, if Shelly is only a fantasy. If he’d imagined the walk yesterday. If he’d even imagined Shelly. But he can see the dress’s blue bow in the center of her back. He smells jasmine in the air, feels the soft ridge of her scar, her hand in his.

The beeper buzzes on his hip again; but this time when he looks down, there is no number, only the blank gray rectangle of the beeper’s screen. For this, he is grateful. He closes his eyes once again. That yellow dress, that soft skin.