Shoulders back. Hair combed. Tie straightened. Sit and wait for your sister. Don’t listen.

Wander. Turn on the radio, and confuse the radioman for God. Radioman tells you to get up and dance, so you do. Turn that off!

Listen this time, because if you don’t, Dad will come downstairs and make you. But don’t do it happily. Make a scene. Stomp your feet. Get mad, because your head is full of steam and it makes Ma worry because it seems so much like your father’s and at church today she’ll pray for both your tempers. Storm outside because you don’t want to be inside anymore. Stomp in the dirt to make Ma mad because she made you mad and it only seems fair.

Trample her flowers, feet stomping in a beat like the songs on the radio.

Penelope’s face appears in the window and before you can finish sticking out your tongue at her she’s run off to tattle. You consider hiding just in case it’s Dad. Ma comes out instead and your shoulders relax.

She straightens your tie. Combs your hair. Tsks at the mud on your shoes and the hem of your trousers and you’re sent inside to change. No more Sunday best. You don’t mind the scuffed, torn, too-small, too-old shoes because all the boys have mud on their shoes the way soldiers have medals on their chests, battle scars and symbols of pride and boyhood and mischief. It’s the jeans that bother you. Too old, too short. Two embarrassing inches of ankle show because you grew too fast and you can’t afford new ones and everyone knows that when they see that flash of skin.

Pull your socks as high as they go and look for a taller pair. Ma is hollering at you to leave even though she has been using her church voice all day, and Penelope is whining up the stairs and you run before they wake up Dad. Dad doesn’t go to church. You don’t know why. He is too loud, you think, always yelling and hollering, because you’re always shushed in church and Dad is louder than you are.

The church door has squeaky hinges. Ma jumps at the noise when someone late slips into the back pew. They dip their fingers in holy water and make the sign of the cross; forehead, belly button, shoulder, shoulder, and open their Bible to the daily hymn.

Swing your legs until Ma put a hand down to still your restless knees. Remember the flash of your ankles and tuck them beneath the pew. You wonder what she prays so hard for that she cries. You try to listen, you really do, but it doesn’t make sense.

Your mind wanders, and you wonder what the radioman is doing and what songs he’s playing, and if Tommy will be at the park today because he shoved you last week and you still want to get him back for it. You like it when the choir sings because it’s music and because that usually means it’s almost time to go. Ma only hums along because she doesn’t like to sing in public even though you think she has the prettiest voice you’ve ever heard, singing to you to the rat-a-tat-tat of the rain on the roof when thunderstorms scare you awake in the middle of the night.

Amen, the church says in one big voice.

Amen, you say quiet to yourself.

Forehead, belly button, shoulder, shoulder.

This morning’s mess is forgotten when Ma hugs you tight and takes her time getting home. You don’t know why she does this every Sunday, but you like the side trips to the department store where she doesn’t buy anything, only looks and tells you not to touch. The three of you go to the market next, where she buys milk and a treat for supper and Penelope makes eyes at the boy behind the counter.

Wonder if he’ll bring flowers like the other boy did. Dad didn’t like them and smashed them all up, and the house raged all night long.

Help set the table for supper. Ma makes chicken, and when Dad takes a big helping and doesn’t say anything, she sighs real big.

Another Sunday trickles by.

Climb reluctantly into a bath and wash the day off your skin. Scrub extra at your ankles. Let Ma kiss you on the forehead.

Apologize for stomping on her flowers.

Don’t worry about it, baby.

Say your evening prayers.

And then you listen real hard, even after you’re meant to be asleep. Sometimes, you can hear Ma crying late at night. It makes you sad, and sometimes you put your hand up against the wall, and hope she can feel you loving her. Dad always says he does, but sometimes, you don’t think he loves hard enough.

The wind outside the window sings you a lullaby.

Wake to the blessed quiet of the house. Eat your porridge while Ma drinks her morning coffee. Dad is still asleep. Radioman gives everyone the weather for the day. Thunderstorms, he says. Angels bowling up in the sky.

Brush your teeth. Comb your hair. Pull on your jeans for school and wonder how miraculously, almost like magic or maybe by the grace of God, two inches were added to the hem.

There are signs everywhere. Subtle, yet significant signs. Like buttons. All of my clothes are losing buttons. Coats, jean shorts, pants, button-up shirts. How do you have a button-up without buttons? My living space is speckled with buttons. I put them in pockets, cup holders, decorative ashtrays, and coin purses, trying to contain them. I try to keep things together—mostly my pants. I use safety pins, which prick my fingertips. A safety pin can be dangerous. Functioning buttons are safe.

Other necessities have also popped off. I had to take my car to the mechanic. The engine was on its way out. When I told my mother, she said I should use her car. The check-engine light has been on for years, but it’s still going. Just like her, I thought.

Soon after that, my computer was taken by virus. Internet porn doesn’t do it for me, but I’ve downloaded music in less-than-legal fashions. My camera shutter has also quit working, stuck between open and shut, frozen mid-blink. Now the back of my phone is breaking off and I can see its insides glowing where I shouldn’t be able to see at all.

These are just things, of course. Computer, car, camera. I can live without them.

But it isn’t just the technology.

The universe is doing all kinds of things on its own—with or without me or my mother or my buttons failing to hold shit together.

During the North American summer of 2009, new photographs of the Butterfly Nebula, a dying star 3,800 light-years away, were released from the Hubble Telescope. In the photo, bright lavender explodes and melts into brief edges of white and deep pink that drift into an orange gold. It’s a semi-symmetrical juxtaposition of colors, spreading out from a dark midpoint. Death at its finest—beautiful and very far away. I look through the images and think, This exists. This is real. It’s just the kind of thing that makes it difficult not to believe in God. And Photoshop.

My mother has been seeing signs too. Hers are from God. It was a sign that her lung scan was clear—just fluid in the lungs, nothing more. A sign from God. I wondered what the sign meant. An extension of suffering? Proof that she would drown? I tried to listen as she told me about the signs from God in Better Homes and Gardens. She handed me the pictures she’d cut out. One showed a patch of skin with a rash that looked a lot like the first stages of inflammatory breast cancer—splotchy reds and pinks with scabs. I correctly assumed this was a photo of shingles. So, her monster rash may not be spreading as fast as we think. Part of it could be shingles. All right, sign from God.

She tells me all of this because she wants to go to heaven. She wants to believe that I believe so I don’t go to hell and eternally separate us. I’ve told her not to worry.

My college roommate’s boyfriend told me you don’t have to wait until hell to be punished. After I explained why I went home on weekends, he explained that there must be a reason for my mother’s multiple illnesses. It may not even be that God is punishing her for her own sins, but those of others. She could be receiving punishment because of your sins, he said. Now I wonder if different parts of her illness were divvied out as punishment for different sins of kin. Ex-husband—sin: divorce. Punishment: muscular dystrophy. Weasely boyfriend—sin: selling insurance. Punishment: breast cancer. Was it my sister’s premarital sex or mine that caused the inflammatory breast cancer? What about the hypoglycemia? Whose sins caused the lymphedema? The shingles? Paget’s disease? Or maybe each sin was worth one cell deformity, one genetic malfunction, one open wound, one shingle. I still struggle to find the logic in this logic.

Others have also offered reasons for my mother’s health or lack thereof. The heating and cooling man came to fix our heater one winter. It didn’t take long for him to see the problem, come up with an estimate, and fix it. But he stayed longer. He had better news and a party trick—he could speak in tongues. He asked us to form a circle around my mother’s motorized recliner—he, my mother, the weasely boyfriend, and me.

Leaving the room felt too awkward and I didn’t want to be impolite. I joined the circle. We held hands and he prayed for healing and salvation both in English and in tongues. Afterward he explained that God had given him his own language so that he could pray about things he didn’t even know he wanted to pray about. He couldn’t understand what he was saying when he spoke in tongues, but the important thing was that God understood. God had given him a gift.

With this gift came brochures: The Healing Power of Jesus Christ!, The Art of Faith Healing. How to Fix Heating and Cooling Systems AND Cure Cancer and Illness on the Side! My mother seemed interested. The heating and cooling man said she was sick because she was possessed by demons. Oh, Jesus, I thought. He gave her a pamphlet. In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, be gone from my body! She was to repeat this every morning, seven times, until the demons left. She was also to repeat it seven times before she went to bed. It was something she could keep on her nightstand, faith healing at its most convenient. After what seemed like hours of tongues, prayer, and brochure teachings, the heating and cooling man looked at my mother and said, I love you Nancy. God bless.

Because I, too, love my mother, I wasn’t about to tell her that I felt like Christianity had abandoned us, so I abandoned it. I had spent my childhood attending Sunday school each week and obsessively praying before meals and spelling tests. As my mother’s cancer progressed, those beliefs seemed less credible than even the heating and cooling guy. At least he could keep us from freezing. What could I do?

I don’t know why my mother is sick. I don’t know why she falls in the 1-5% of breast cancer patients who have inflammatory breast cancer, the most aggressive form. I know that without technology and modern medicine she would already be in the ground. She takes at least twenty-five pills a day—4 brown, 1 yellow stripe, 3 purple, 1 bright yellow, 1 peach in the morning and 4 brown, 3 purple, 2 white, 2 small white, 1 knock out white, 2 bright yellow, 1 light pink at night. If there’s an infection or persistent pain, add a few more. We dish them out in dessert bowls and call them cocktails and nightcaps. But technology and medicine have limits. Nothing shows up on her CAT scans. Nothing shows up, but we can see with our own eyes the cancer eating her alive.

If the Hubble had human eyes, its photos would be a lot darker. To the naked eye, the sky on a clear night is dark, sprinkled with illuminated points. But there are invisible things. Beautiful, invisible things that sometimes, you can see.

Of course, Hubble’s eyes won’t last forever. Eventually, they, too, will decay until the telescope stops working, and all that remains is its outer shell, orbiting Earth, until it slowly spirals downward, finally falling back into our atmosphere before plunging into the ocean.

At school I started having headaches and wondered if drowning would make them stop. Or smashing my head into the desk. Maybe stabbing myself with a knife would relieve some tension. During class, it was hard not to think about knives and drowning, and I often caught myself imagining what life would be like if everyone I knew died, as if there might be a way to prepare for loss.

Before going to therapy, there was one thing I had to do. Paperwork. On one of the many pages, there was a section that contained a checklist of “problems” or “concerns.” I was supposed to mark the ones that brought me in: anxiety, depression, suicidal thoughts, post traumatic stress, academic stress, binge drinking, drug abuse, anorexia, bulimia, homosexuality, gender identity, sexual abuse, rape, physical abuse, verbal abuse, abortion, death in the family, health issues, and so on.

I checked several boxes—at least eight. After the counselor called me into her office, I sat across from her and watched her eyes move over my checked boxes. I waited patiently. Finally she asked, All of these things? I nodded politely. I thought, Shit lady. If you’re overwhelmed, how do you think I feel?

These checkboxes are more than checkboxes. Checkboxes are real people who are safety pins, rusted—buttons, strewn about in unknown places. They are unplanned growths. They are planned losses. They are watching death steal your mother away piece by piece by piece. They are knives coming after her, after you.

They are nightmares. They are demons. The checkboxes are real.

Some days, one of them is enough to make you drink a bottle of wine and put a check in the alcoholism box. Sometimes they all come and possess you while you sit in the parking lot of Walmart for thirty minutes, trying to keep it together until you unbuckle your seatbelt and go buy dye for your mother because her hair is growing back again. She’s always been blonde.

You could hang checkboxes in space. Pull your checkmark out of the box and throw the frame into the stars. Death is all over the sky, anyway. It’s easy to make squares out of dots. Just throw them away in the blackness of space. Out into the sky, far away.

In the recent days of decay, my mother woke me up at 3:30 in the morning because she was having nightmares. She asked me to come sleep with her because the devil kept chasing her. I scrunched up in her remote-controlled bed and we dreamed together until the devil was gone.

Every second of every day, the world is falling apart. The ground is close and closer still to my mother. It shakes us, but we are tired. And yet, we wake up. We open our eyes, sometimes after 2 p.m. but we open our eyes and move out from under the covers and enter the day. We will go running, sometimes because we are being chased, but we won’t run away. We will learn to sew or become great button collectors. We will see the world beautiful and crumbling, until we don’t.

I hate hospitals, the too-cold drafts of air conditioner, the bleach-laced smell of sickness, the hard plastic chairs, the constant hum of pain and worry. And somehow, you always seem to land yourself in one. Broken toes, intense abdominal pain, and two minor surgeries have lured you back into cratchy gowns every few years. Every time you sat in a waiting room or on a stiff steel bed, you would still smile. A grin that always made Mom suspicious of your silence.

I immediately want to turn around. There are toys—Legos and puzzles—in every corner. The walls ooze cheery yellow paint. Your room is close to the entrance, a small space the nurses say can only hold two visitors. You’re asleep, sprawled across the thin bed with your arms around your shoulders to keep warm. Mom smiles at me, the muscles in her cheeks too tense to hide the fear in her eyes. Rubbing her shoulder, I sit in the chair next to her and watch the small TV mounted on the wall.

“How long have y’all been waiting?” I ask, looking down at you, rolling over in your sleep. Normally, you kick and punch walls; you call my name. You scream. And I always long to wake you up, tell you it’s just a dream, that your nightmares don’t follow you into consciousness.

“We got here a little while after dropping you off at school. Seven hours.”

Upon waking up, you smile at me, stretching out your arms and legs. I swear your fingers look as small and round as they did when you were five. I lie on the bed next to you without being asked, opening my arms so you can rest your head on my chest. Your hair falls into my mouth a little bit, and you laugh when I spit it out. I hug you, kissing the top of your head.

Self-admittance into a mental ward is a process that lasts nine hours. The children’s hospital transported you here in an ambulance. No sirens needed, just guaranteed safe passage for you, a 14-year-old who only fears himself.

The ward’s fluorescent lights drench you, bleach your features shadowless. You have never been tan. Even after hours spent in Florida sun making mud pies and destroying ant piles, your skin never bronzed. Just freckles across your nose and cheeks, right under your square glasses and along the cue-ball shape of your shoulders. Even your freckles disappear as you stare at the wall. I hold your hand, our sweaty palms glued together, to keep you from dissipating into the ceiling.

Mom’s South Pole jacket billows from your shoulders, turning adolescent curves into unrecognizable folds. The scent of cigarettes clings to the fabric, wafting around us as you bounce your leg, silence drying our throats like secondhand smoke. The soles of your black canvas shoes clack against the floor. Mom glances between her Facebook feed and your pale expression. I don’t really see the waiting room walls, my mind too focused on the red curves of your fingernails digging into my skin.

“Preston P_____?” a nurse asks, her voice flat. Your name freezes in the air. My heart drops as you follow the nurse to be weighed and measured like meat at a butcher shop.

I stretch my hearing through the cinderblock walls of the children’s ward. I know that somewhere children scream and cry and drool and laugh. Somewhere children tear out their hair, chew more than just their fingernails, carve “fuck you” into the tacky paint.

I hear nothing. So I clean the dirt from my fingernails, then pick the lint off my shirt, then retie my shoes, then take a deep breath.

Mom’s face comes around the corner first, eyebrows furrowed. A familiar wrinkle puckers on her forehead, one we always pair with the sound of our full names, Cassidy Nicole! Preston Lee! Dinner, now!, with racing to the door, paper blades of grass tickling our ankles and teasing our mosquito bites as we smother our giggles with earth-stained hands.

You don’t giggle now. Instead, you sway in the middle of the room like the oak tree outside my window, caught in a thunderstorm. You stare at the floor as if the cracks will swallow you. The nurse hands us a list of contraband. The paper shivers in your white-knuckled grip as you sit next to me. Our shoulders press together, allowing me to see the list.

“He can’t have any of these items,” the nurse says, her shadowed eyes pointing directly at Mom. “You can bring him a bag of toiletries and clothes tomorrow. Visiting hours are listed at the bottom.”

My lips press into a thin line as she speaks, Mom nodding as she examines the sheet. You can’t have jackets with strings or zippers. You can’t have shoe laces. You can’t have the hair tie holding up the brown knot at the nape of your neck. You can’t have your phone, MP3 player, or Brian, the teddy bear half your size that still smells of your friend’s Taylor Swift perfume.

We wait, listening to the frigid ticking of the clock. Another male nurse appears, his bushy eyebrows slumped on his forehead.

“Take off your shoes and jacket, we have your bed ready,” he says, voice low.

You frown, a pout I recognize from our fights over the TV remote. My fingers twitch to pet your hair as you shrug out of your shroud of comfort.

The black and white sweatshirt with its broken zipper sags off your shoulders. Taking it from you, Mom folds the protective layer over her arm. You bite your lip as you tug out the black band tangled in your hair. It stretches, then snaps. You hand the broken elastic to Mom, who puts it in her pocket.

I cringe when you take off your shoes. You had clammy feet as a baby, so bad that Mom told horror stories of how she wrung out your socks like wet rags. We always gagged when you took off your shoes in the car on road trips, the rotten-apple musk present even with the windows down. The sour scent doesn’t permeate the room now. It still smells of disinfectant.

The male nurse announces the time to say goodbye.

“Family members over the age of 18 can come Wednesday afternoons to visit.”

My fists clench. I suck in my breath through gritted teeth, swallowing my seventeen years as you hug Mom. She gently pulls you close to her chest like she did when she breastfed you. Your eyes meet my gaze. I joke in my usual way, “You’re so full of crap your eyes are brown.”

Smiling, you reach out for me. I bite the inside of my cheek to keep the heat behind my eyes from staining your shirt.

Arms wrapped around your small waist, I hunch down to rest my forehead against your shoulder. Your fists bunch up the back of my shirt, knuckles pressing into the middle of my spine. I sigh, all the oxygen leaving my chest until it feels empty, like our room at home will be.

“I’ll be okay, Cas,” you say, and I hear your smile crumble like a sandcastle.

I wonder if this is the last time I’ll get to hug you for a while, if our nap at the hospital is the last one before I leave for college. I wonder when I’ll get to watch Frozen again with you, if I’ll hear you sing “Love is an Open Door” at the top of your lungs again. I can’t help but remember the times you came to my princess-themed room when our parents fought. Their yells boomed throughout the house, and we rocked on my bed, your small frame cradled in my lap. I don’t remember if I ever cried back then, if the dirty tissues and snot stains on our blankets were yours or mine.

But I know I don’t cry in the waiting room of a children’s mental ward. I don’t cry when I tell you I love you and that it’d be nice to have the room to myself for once. I don’t cry when Mom hugs you again.

Barefoot, hair a tumbleweed around your shoulders, glasses slipping down your button nose, pale under the glare of unfiltered light, you are a ghost of my little brother. I don’t cry until I leave you behind the glass door, the automatic lock clicking so loud it echoes in the empty waiting room.

Day 1

A man is driving a full-size luxury sedan on the I-15. He attempts to pass me. I speed up. His car is faster than mine. I gun it, but he pulls ahead of me and cuts me off. I could have pushed my car to keep up, but I chicken out because I’m afraid of either damaging my engine or getting a ticket. This thought upsets me. I’m not a chicken, and I want to prove it.

I follow him to his exit. At the off-ramp, I draw my gun and begin shooting at the man.

He has a gun. He returns fire.

A bullet hits me in the shoulder.

It’s painful, but I survive, and I learn a valuable lesson: In a world where everyone has a gun, you can’t expect to shoot at anyone without being shot in return.

Day 2

I’m in line at the Department of Motor Vehicles. An older woman accuses me of cutting. I did not intentionally cut. She does not believe me. I refuse to apologize, and she accuses me of being entitled. This pisses me off because I am the furthest thing from entitled. I am down-to-earth and considerate to a fault.

I go to my car to get my gun. When I return, I find that she’s also retrieved her gun, as have several of the other people at the DMV—including a 15-year-old girl getting her learner’s permit and the man who takes our driver’s license pictures. I realize I’ll be shot if I try to shoot the older woman, so I decide to put my gun back in my car.

When I return, the older woman offers to let me cut in front of her. I accept. We’re now dating.

Day 3

I sit down to eat my dinner, which consists of three chili cheese dogs and a large order of chili cheese fries. I am very hungry and have a vague concern that I will still be hungry even after I eat it all.

My sister takes one of the fries from the basket. She has not asked permission. She’s been doing stuff like this since we were kids. She’s greedy and selfish and should not be allowed to get away with it.

I draw my gun and shoot at her. I miss, but I tell her it’s a warning shot. She runs to her bedroom and returns with her gun. She asks me to put my gun down. I carefully weigh my options and decide that it’s better if I put my gun down, and I do.

We then share the food. It turns out that there is more than enough for the both of us. Once I’m full, I’m no longer angry. We have a good laugh about the whole thing.

In a moment of seriousness, I make a toast.

I say, “Thank God you had a gun. Otherwise I might not have a sister anymore.”

She hugs me, and I cry tears of joy.

When she sees that I’m crying, she starts crying too.

Day 4

I like to collect pinecones along my local hiking trail. There is a sign that says, “Do Not Remove Pinecones from Trail.”

A park ranger tells me to stop.

I tell her, “I will not stop.”

She says, “If you don’t stop, I’ll have to write you a ticket.”

I say, “This is outrageous. I pay my taxes, which we all know are far too high, and therefore I am a co-owner of this trail and these pinecones.”

The park ranger ignores my argument and writes the ticket.

As the park ranger turns to leave, I decide I’m going to shoot her in the back. As I take aim, I notice that she has a gun tucked into the waistband of her pants. It’s not worth the trouble of shooting her, since I’ll be shot in retaliation.

Additionally, when I realize that the park rangers have guns, I stop collecting pinecones.

Day 5

My husband and I are fighting. We aren’t sure what exactly we’re fighting about, but we are furious in the way that couples with a long history can be. In a general sense, he is resentful that I don’t seem to find him sexually attractive anymore. I’m annoyed that I’ve dutifully gone along with his questionable financial decisions, which have now caused moderate cash flow problems.

At the pinnacle of our fight, we both grab our guns. We are about to shoot each other when our young daughter comes into the room with her small caliber target pistol. We both know that her gun is unlikely to kill either of us, and that we can easily overtake her with our guns (not to mention our superior tactical skills), but the sight of her pointing her gun at us makes us swell with pride.

We drop our guns.

We hug her and kiss her all over her face and tell her that we love her and that she is our hero and a true patriot.

Day 6

I’ve been expelled from my Ph.D. program. I believe this was done for political reasons (read: The Patriarchy). I am very intelligent, but I happen to be a woman in a field dominated by men. Despite the injustice of my expulsion, I swallow my pride and try to plead my case to my [former] advisor. She will not listen. She says that I was fired for ethical violations. I provide ample evidence to the contrary, which she refuses to consider.

I go home. For several days, I obsess about the bad treatment I tolerated at my [former] school, even while going out of my way to be an efficient, conscientious, and rule-abiding student. I feel like a dupe as I think about how I’ve followed the rules for so long. I get very angry. I write angry letters to my [former] advisor and the department chair and the university president. I don’t send these letters.

Instead, I go back to school. I intend to shoot my former advisor and anyone who gets in my way. As I begin shooting, several of my former colleagues draw their guns and return fire. Due to either residual loyalty on their part or dumb luck, I am only shot in my legs and arms.

I survive, but my arms and legs are amputated.

After a brief stay in the hospital, I’m sent to prison for two years. In prison, I learn how to do things without my arms and legs. I can now write, paint, and even drive a car. But I’m no longer able to fire a gun, which I regret because I worry that someday a madman with a gun will try to hurt someone I care about, and I will be unable to step in and prevent it.

Day 7

I’m at home, cleaning my gun. I unintentionally fire a bullet. The bullet goes through my hand, through my dad’s television set, through the wall, through my neighbor’s wall and into my neighbor’s house. In that house a baby is nursing in her mother’s arms. As the bullet makes its way to the baby, the baby draws her gun and fires twice at my bullet.

One of the baby’s bullets hits my bullet and knocks it off its path.

Her other bullet travels through the wall and back into my house, striking my other hand. I look at my hands, which now have matching bullet holes in them.

I think that this must have religious significance.

I tell my dad to call the Vatican.

He calls an ambulance instead.

Day 8

My stepson is jumping on his bed.

I tell him to stop.

He doesn’t stop.

I shoot him dead.

He is unable to defend himself. His mother will not allow him to have a gun.

Day 9

The Government has decided to take all our property from us so that they can subsidize programs that have no direct benefit to most of the population. In order to do this, they mobilize their military. They start on the West Coast because they assume that the West Coast people will not be properly armed and thus will be unable to protect themselves from the Government’s unlawful and immoral seizure.

They are mistaken.

The people of the West Coast are all armed. Even the ones that claim to be Gun Abolitionists have guns. The Abolitionists, it turns out, have the biggest guns of all.

I watch on television as the military confronts the people of the West Coast.

The Government decides to call off their plans because they figure, “If the West Coast is this well-armed, can you imagine what we’ll find in the South?”

Day 10

I have not had any food for three days, but I do have a gun. I shoot a small animal and eat it.

I walk in an unfamiliar neighborhood. Two men attack me. They have guns. But I have two guns.

I go to shoot my wife and the person she is sleeping with. They both have guns. We end up having a threesome.

I am a serial killer. I don’t have a gun, but it doesn’t matter because I use a knife.

I am a teacher. I store a gun in my classroom. It suits me well, rounding out my role as instructor, nurturer, and protector.

I am a marriage counselor. I keep several spare guns in my office. On the rare occasion when one member of a couple is unarmed, I give that person a gun. This usually solves the couple’s dispute.

I am a child. I have several guns. I am trained in military tactics. I spend a lot of time outdoors and have no use for video games.

I am a cop. I spend most of my workday watching Game Theory videos on my phone because guns have made crime either non-existent or self-policing.

Day 11

The man I love decides to leave me. When he tells me this, I am immediately taken with the desire to shoot him, but I know that he always carries a gun, so it’s pointless to shoot him unless I also want to die.

But then I realize that I do also want to die.

I draw my gun and point it at him.

He draws his gun and points it at me.

I wait for him to fire first, but he doesn’t.

I say, “You shoot first.”

He says, “No, you shoot first.”

I say, “No, you.”

He says, “You.”

We both fire at the same time.

October Children are moonmilk
veins and a thirst for fire.
Amber eyes by a flashlight’s beam,
fossilized resin seaming
opaque shards with murky light
yellow beneath layers of crust.
Theirs is a paleontology
revealed through the scar
and scrape of long nails
scavenging lost symbols, forgotten
rites, written in rock and flesh.

Their souls are arthropods
scurrying along unmapped trails
that dip, dingy, into sedimentary places
where pulse muffles
and subterranean capillaries are dammed.

October Children: a queer alloy
of pagan chants and harvest nights.
Wedged between solstices, cast
by the rot of vegetation and the sweet
clot of sap, polished by coarse wool and crisp
northerlies— in that bronze age of the year,
amidst craggy moors, they raise their crucibles,
drink broth from the bones of masters’ feasts.
Their alchemy is a fifth, unforgiving element:
unnamed, whose density rivals
the core of stars gone cold.

It was the first letter she’d ever gotten. Nothing came by mail anymore. Everything was digital.

Across the room Mallory rifled through pages on the coloring table. Her mother watched, hoping the others would take her place. The female to her left with curly red hair and perky breasts. The leggy blond sitting by the block tower on the floor. The woman with placid skin trying to feed her toddler sauce from a squeeze pack.

Let it be theirs. Let their lives be chosen. Let them hog the sorrow.

It was a horrible wish. The mother chastised herself for thinking it. But she didn’t deny it’s what she wanted.

None of them belonged in that waiting room in the first place. They were still young, still fertile, with entire lives ahead of them. And yet they had come. If you received a notice, you had no other choice.

The lands to the north had followed through on their promises. After their steel wall went up three years ago, no one from the Republic could cross the border anymore. No one could switch sides. Republic schools were stopped for the war in order to protect the children. International travelers were summoned home. If you were a monk or a pacifist the Republic brought you along for good measure to fight the north.

After the last uprising the Republic believed they’d finally gotten it right. This time the infantry would be dynamic and obedient. As females, compliance was embedded in their DNA. It was their nature to obey.

In every possible scenario the mother could imagine, they all still ended up in that very same room together. Naptime or daycare didn’t change things—she’d tried. Bring the toddlers. Bring the strollers. Bring the Tupperware distractions, if you must.

If you didn’t come, the Republic had ways of finding you.

The mother braided her silky fingers together. Her hands showed no signs of wrinkles yet. Mallory was only three.

Mallory reached across the table for a marker. The mother imagined a gun in her hands. She pictured crawling like a child along a gnarled dirt floor. She swallowed back the need to cry. Then the television screen rebooted.

The acrylic seascapes on the wall were fading.

“Patient one-nine-five-five, please. Patient one-nine-five-five.” The numbers appeared on the screen. The automated voice was heartless. Cold and metallic.

The woman with the flawless skin raised her head. Then she screwed the cap back on the uneaten squeeze pack. Holding her child against her hip, she stood. A pocket door slid open before her. She disappeared inside.

On the left side of the room, tucked behind a protruding corner of wall, another door opened. An even younger woman emerged. She wore thick-banded trousers and walked like she was in pain. Her hand pinched her lower back. Her belly button protruded through the front of her shirt. Nevertheless, she was smiling. Smiling like she’d won the lottery.

She was safe.

One in, one out. After the exchange, the room grew quiet. The monitors buzzed softly. The sound filled the room with an uncomfortable ache. Soft enough, yet unrelenting. Steady. Constant. It was almost like being pregnant again. The mother untangled her fingers. Mallory took Purple Mountain Majesty to a tri-folded page.

Mallory put the crayon in her mouth. The mother let her chew on the purple wax. When Mallory uncapped a scented marker, she let her probe its cherry tip with her tongue. If she was selected to go, who would protect Mallory? The child added a black licorice pen to the cocktail. After a taste, she wrinkled her nose and spat it back out.

The plant in the corner of the room was wilting.

Outside in the car was a clear container filled with wheat cereal. The kind from the yellow box that Mallory liked. She’d have to remember to buy extra in case they ran out while she was gone. She’d have to tell someone Mallory’s favorite bedtime story—the one about the boy whose drawings came to life. She’d have to remind Mallory to wash her hands and look both ways before crossing the street. The television screen rebooted.

“Patient two-zero-two-one, please. Patient two-zero-two-one.”

As the mother stood up to go, the side door flew open and the flawless-skinned woman walked out. Red blotches covered her face. The makeup had been removed, wiped clean off. The eyelashes were plucked bare. Without its paint, the face looked ugly. Raw. The nerves were visible through her translucent skin. As she walked across the room, she attempted to regain her composure. A frazzled hand shoved registration papers into her shoulder bag. The child riding on her hip rifled through the bag, looking for a new plaything.

The squeeze pack was empty. It had been sucked dry.

The buzzing. Mallory looked up as her mother approached. She removed a graphite pencil from her mouth and gathered up her drawings. When her mother reached out, Mallory stood obediently and took her hand.

The sliding panel withdrew to let them pass.

On the other side, frosted-glass doors lined the hallway. Arrows lit up along the floor as they walked, directing Mallory and her mother to the exam room. When they arrived, the door itself glowed.

After she changed into her gown, the two of them sat side by side on the pleather recliner. The mother moved over so there would be enough room for Mallory. The parchment, roused by this motion, crinkled under her bare butt. The mother squeezed her daughter’s hand. The room looked like this: Pea-green paper gown. Pale, porcelain skin. Stirrups. Thick, black tubes.

The inner ear diagram on the wall curled yellow at the corners.

“Hello there. I apologize for the wait.” The door clicked shut. The doctor was in her late fifties. She wore her slate gray slacks belted high above the navel. Loose curls, unrestrained by the bun at the nape of her neck, framed the edges of her face. “I believe a congratulations is in order, my dear,” the doctor announced, flipping her chart closed. She looked up at them with joyful eyes. “You’ve been approved to serve.”

The needles on the countertop were rusting

“We’ll check your vitals first. And your intelligence. Then we’ll get you fitted for a gun.” A washing of hands. “Is there any reason patient two-zero-two-one should not serve?” Two pumps of foam. A dry paper towel. There was only the faintest trace of humanity left in the doctor’s voice. Patriotic conditioning, mandatory for all Republic staff, had tamped out the rest. Resistance obliterated.

The mother’s head began to spin. There was no chance of escape. She would be deployed with the rest of them. She would be dropped in who-knows-where with a loaded gun. She’d be hurt. She’d get lost. She might die.

The parchment paper crinkled. There was a prolonged silence.

“No,” she answered. Mallory looked up at her mother. Her eyes were wet with fear.

“Splendid. Now lay back, patient two-zero-two-one, and we’ll get started.”

Mallory slowly reclined. Then the doctor parted the paper gown and pressed a stethoscope to the child’s naked chest.

This poem was a F(r)iction Fall Literary Competition finalist.

Here’s one,
tiny wings stilled,
tip-toeing on a
rose of sharon twig
as dusk drapes us
in a humid breeze.
               I suck in my breath.

Elsewhere my mother,
bound by a breathing
tube, rocks her tiny
bones while outside
a rose of sharon
turns its blue face
to evening.

On her television
               the center fielder
               drifts back and back,
               leaps off the warning track,
               secures the fly ball.

The seasonal ritual
bound to memory
since Crosley Park
with her dad.

Meanwhile, my hummingbird
               copters off the branch,
               streaks a line to the flaming
               bottlebrush bush,
               suckles there,

migratory preparation
encoded in sinew,
bone, and memory.

Alone,
I remember,
               and breathe.

This poem was a F(r)iction Fall Literary Competition finalist.

A drought hit the county
the day we met and stretched into July.
They told me about you, babe;
said we’d have heat.

Heat leached the green from the cornfields
& drained the Wabash. Herons stalked
the cracked bed caked in clay
with nowhere to bathe.
We overlooked them, high
on your balcony.
I made lemonade
& we smoked all summer.
Bourbon soaked into the air, leaving
syrup in our glasses.
We slept naked under open
windows, woke up wet
with sweat & thought it might have rained,
but we were wrong.

The study was easy until now.

The scents in the amber colored vials were so distinct, Thomas couldn’t help but know whom they belonged to. It was whatever stayed on the sheets after they’d gone, whatever lingered. If he knew anything about these women, he knew that at least.

“By name? Do you want me to tell you by name?” he asked, stalling. Next, they were on to skin, and he was nervous about continuing.

“If that’s how you want to describe them,” the researcher said, tugging the length of her lab coat past the hemline of her skirt.

Thomas shielded his eyes from the lights and tried to look at her. The room was lit in an unfamiliar brightness, entirely without shadow. He ran his hand over the top of his hair, trying his best to hide the thinning spots. Everything in the room possessed that feeling, too exposed. It made him want to run for cover, like someone young and naked in front of another for the first time. He was better in the dark— less obvious.

“Is there a time limit?”

“Not today,” she said.

He forgot her name already, and wished it were sewn on the pocket of her lab coat, instead of the cursive letters SRC— the Sensory Research Center. He’d never heard of this company before, but wasn’t surprised that it existed—the world and its science seemed particularly susceptible to ridiculousness. He never did anything like this. He never gave blood, donated sperm, wasn’t ever part of a focus group. He didn’t like the idea of coming into money. It was too violent, brought with it too much change.

The room wasn’t what he’d anticipated. It seemed more academic than scientific, white walls, white tables, white hard plastic chairs arranged two at each table. There were privacy dividers separating certain stations, others were open. He sat at a table near the front, no chair next to him, nothing to obstruct his view or anyone else’s. He imagined more laboratory, more equipment, more bubbling Pyrex beakers, all those gurgling sounds and warning signs.

Thomas picked up one of the four vials and shook its contents, waiting for a disapproving look from her, but it never came. “What’s this research used for?”

“It’s undirected. We’re never exactly sure what we’ll find.”

Thomas was sure his girlfriend April was implicated in this somehow. Seven months earlier, he was laid off from work, and as his savings dwindled, he found it harder and harder to pay his share of the rent. When the woman called to ask him about participating, he asked the question outright. “Did April put you up to this?” Her response: “I don’t know anyone named April. Like I said, sir, your name came from a list. These opportunities are limited. It’s easy money. Painless, I promise.” Still, he was suspicious. That morning, April tried everything she could to wake him up, to make sure he wouldn’t be late. She was good at trying, letting too much light in before leaving, cracking the blinds angrily to check the weather. He was better at sleeping. She never understood.

For the second time in the last few minutes he watched the researcher acquaint herself with the small silver stud on her nostril. He touched the bend in the bridge of his own nose. There was an eight-year-old baseball game in that break, a line drive that sent him to the emergency room. April couldn’t feel it, no matter how many times he took her fingers and tried. I don’t feel anything, she would say, which to him was tantamount to suggesting it never happened.

The researcher noticed him noticing her, and turned her head toward the bank of windows at the far end of the room.

“Is it new?” He asked.

“What?” She said, still looking away.

He touched the side of his nose. “It must be new. Don’t worry, it won’t go anywhere. You’ll get used to it”

“I’m already used to it, I just….We should continue.”

There was no clock in the room, but he could tell she knew the time. Thomas wondered how long he could sit here without her giving up on him. There was always a threshold. Not wanting to discover what theirs was, yet, he went back to the work in front of him. Lettered from A-D, he opened each vial once more, inhaling the cigarette smoke in A, the lavender in B, the cinnamon vanilla soap in C, the pear lotion in D, and placed them down in order. This was the one who left. This was the one who died. This was the one who wanted me to stay. This was the one I wanted, who didn’t want me, until she did, and then I didn’t.

She recorded his answers without any indication of his accuracy. It didn’t matter. He knew. These were his last ten years. The ones he paid most attention to.

Leaning over him, the researcher collected the vials in a single hand. There was no scent he could detect on her, just the vacancy of smell. It went with the series of warnings they sent in the confirmation letter: No cologne or aftershave of any kind. For the morning of, keep fingers away from open flames or hot surfaces. Any burning could lead to inaccuracies. He wanted to do well, so he was careful. He bought unscented soap and spared his face the cooling burn of aftershave. His skin smelled innocent, new. At breakfast, the dog licked his hand for first time without the promise of food.

“There’s going to be a short rest period between each round.” The researcher said, stabbing her cheap pen at the end of a sentence she was writing.

“I want to keep going. The longer I wait, the more I’ll forget.”

“I’m sure you’ll be fine. Either way, it’s required. We don’t want to fatigue your senses.”

“They’re not tired.”

“Good. We want to keep it that way.” She continued her practiced way of looking at him without making eye contact. “I’ll be back in a moment.”

He watched her leave, taking small confident steps in modest heels, lengthening her stride as she got closer to the door at the back of the room.

Alone, he searched the walls for signs of the cameras that must have been planted to observe these unattended moments. It was a used and familiar feeling, not ever being alone. He yawned and smiled and tried to look serious and not uncomfortable waiting alone. The same request that the receptionist read to him was written on the wall in the waiting area. “Please turn off all cell phones, pagers, telepathic freeways, and other platforms of communication.”

“Telepathy?” he asked.

“If you have access,” she said.

He didn’t, but he’d dated someone who claimed to. He didn’t believe her. She insisted that she knew what the people around her were thinking. She would randomly point and say, “That man is cheating on his wife with her mother…that boy keeps sewer gators in his sink as pets and no one knows. He’s worried cause they’re getting big and taking an interest in the family cat. He doesn’t like the cat much, and is afraid he’ll be less inclined to prevent an incident.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“It’s true. It doesn’t matter. Ask them.” But by the time she confessed to knowing, those whose thoughts she described were long gone. With him, it didn’t work as well. He’d ask, “What am I thinking?” She’d say, “Not now, I’m tired, my head hurts.” It made him paranoid, her not wanting to. Not wanting him in some way, or knowing without him saying, that he didn’t love her.

The researcher walked back in, same heels, same steps, same sounds. What was her name? No combination of consonant or vowel came to mind that could help him. She carried a tray with five small Petri dishes, placed one down in front of him, and took tweezers from the pocket of her coat, opening the lid and lifting out a small pale rectangle the size of a sugar packet.

“This next exercise is in two parts,” she said. “I am going to present you with samples and I want you to identify them and place them in order of coarseness.”

“What is it?”

“This is your warm-up. Use this to acclimate yourself to the sensation.”

There was no avoiding it now. He shook slightly from the cold as he placed the rectangle in his palm. “This is kind of gross.”

“Why?”

“Maybe not gross. Maybe creepy.”

“It’s just skin.” She made a face she quickly corrected.

“Just?” Thomas raised an eyebrow in her direction. “I never liked that word, it’s so reductive.”

“Why, it’s just a word?” She peered down at him.

She wore no makeup, which, under the lights, should have made her face look washed and ethereal, but instead her features held their form. She had dark eyes, dark hair, and was now looking at him finally, but he didn’t know how to keep her there.

“I thought you weren’t suppose to say much.”

“Sometimes it gets boring standing here waiting for someone to finish.” Again, she raised the tip of one finger to her nose, tapping the stud.

He thought of something clever and tried to say it, but held himself back.

The rectangle in his hand was freckled with slight traces of hair. Thomas held the sample gingerly in his palm and surfed his index finger over it. It felt sandy, aging. He didn’t know it or know of it. It was the same with the warm up for scent. These were the most foreign, the most frightening in their strangeness. He wanted to ask if he should know them, if they, like the others, were meant to be familiar. But he lacked a full understanding of the rules and even though she said this was meant for practice, she never stopped studying him.

Wanting it as far away as possible, he placed the sample back in the dish and flicked it to signal he was ready to move on. The dish skipped to the end of the table but wouldn’t commit to falling. She saved it from the edge and placed it back on the tray.

“We’re going to change the lights before we continue.”

She walked over to a bank of switches near the door. With the first click everything went dark—with the next, red light. His eyes blinked to adjust. The exaggerated brightness was replaced by a dim tint barely light enough to see by. The colored gel of the fixtures beamed with the intensity of brake lights over all the white; the floors, the tables, the chairs, even his hands appeared dyed.

“Spooky,” Thomas said, looking at his palm. “Is this supposed to help me channel my sensory spirits? Are we going to hold hands and chant?”

“Why, do you think that would help you?” It wasn’t the same person. She was harder to see, her expressions softer or softened by the light. The stud on her nose sparkled. He could feel himself staring and not saying anything. It wasn’t the seduction that surprised him, but the romance. This must be how April wanted to be seen by him again. One more time, at least, if not forever, to have eyes as her audience in any room. It was why she threw the curtain open every morning.

“Don’t get any ideas,” Thomas said. “People know I’m here. You’ll never get away with it.”

She smiled for the first time. Clearly she wasn’t good at it or not used to it here, and her lips and cheeks, moments after they raised, fell back to their comfortable indifference.

The air in the room turned over. He shivered. “The instructions never said anything about wearing thermals.”

“The recruiter never said anything about you complaining so much.”

She was back from wherever she had gone before the lights changed. With the tweezers again she removed four samples from the dishes and placed them in front of him, each separated by an equal distance and resting along an imaginary straight line. She pointed to the ceiling. “Those are masking lights. They will help you concentrate only on the texture.”

He felt anxious again, losing control.

Was any of this worth a hundred dollars?

Thomas picked up the first one. It slid out of his hand and back to the table. There were better ways to begin. Impatient, he grabbed at the sample in frustration, and again it drifted away. He picked up the tweezers and gently lifted the sample to his outstretched palm, then slowly closed his hand halfway round. Its slick surface needed, he knew, room to breathe. It could only belong to Olivia, the one who left. Her body was the most resistant to being held, no matter the amount of tension or friction applied to any embrace. He always thought it a condition of her skin, the result of all the oils and soaps and lotions she applied. Then it seemed an excess, but now he understood how it helped her escape, how she could slide away from him the way she did, late at night, slipping out from under his arm, without waking him. He put her down again and knew he wouldn’t have to go back a second time. He spent enough time missing her. By now, he knew better than to forget so quickly how she felt.

The next one was easier to manage, but harder to place. It felt polished and warm, something born under so much sun. For a second or two he just sat holding it in his palm, allowing it to blaze parts of him still raw and cold and woken too early. That’s what he knew of Linda, how her body forever felt like sex. Nights moving toward her, winters most of all, her body held that slow-burning beginning. Too much to bear for extended periods of time, inevitably they’d end up separated during the night, him sleeping in far corners away from her, completely uncovered, trying to moderate his body back to cooler temperatures. She was the telepath, the one who said she knew, without him saying, when he was going to leave.

None of this could be April’s doing—he knew that now. She worked too hard to keep him present, with her. Knowing anything about what came before meant knowing too much. Someone died, someone left, someone he left; none of it mattered. Infidelity was in the details. The fourth sample in the row was hers without question. The rectangle felt more muscle than flesh. That taut athleticism, how she drill-sergeanted every atom in her body to a state of constant motion. There was no give to it. None. No matter how hard he pressed into it, or pressed up against it.

He shuffled the samples around, still avoiding the third one, which he banished far off to the right. Coarseness, what did she mean? None of it made sense. These weren’t grades of sandpaper, were they? He rearranged the order: Olivia before April, April before Linda. It felt right that way. The last could go anywhere in the line. It held the most history.

“Can I have some water?” Thomas asked.

The researcher raised an eyebrow, but nodded and walked back out of the room. Thomas liked watching her walk away, if only because he knew she’d return. These days, whenever April left a room, he was never sure if she’d walk back in. There was not much more he could do to hide, and he knew that a particular transparency was setting in: he could no longer convince her that what they wanted was the same. After she had found him, sad and grieving for Serena, he was a poor investment and said so all along. It was the type of honesty he hoped would be ignored for the duration, only to be invoked later as evidence in his defense. I told you…I said I wasn’t capable of more.

Alone again, he did his best not to look down. Thomas didn’t need to touch the one that remained—the one the red lights couldn’t hide—to know. He had already seen traces of Serena’s tattoo—that butterfly, a blooming, blossoming thing, spreading out across the small of her back. How many times had he laid his head there? How often after sex did he trace its outline with his lips? He was afraid to know it again, the sensation of being close to her. The memory was ghost enough. He poked at it with a single finger, the way he did when he thought she was asleep, only asleep. There was no response from the sample, no waking.

“We started over several times with that one,” the researcher said, walking back in, “but every time we grew the culture, it appeared.” She placed a small paper cup with an inch or two of water in it down next to him. She smiled as though having brought a bucket.

“I guess the lights don’t mask everything.”

“I told them we should have blindfolded you, but there were some who thought it crossed a line.”

“I think I would have known anyway,” Thomas said.

“I can’t say.”

“Is this meant to be cruel?” His skin felt flush, crawling away from him.

“It’s just research. Nothing more than knowing more,” she said, relaxing her pose, holding her pad down in front of her.

“Were they very willing?”

“I wouldn’t say they were unwilling.”

He held it in his hand. It was all he could do. This was a dream, wasn’t it? He was still home sleeping. He’d had this dream before. Three years of them. Serena gone. In the best dreams, they were merely separated and he searched but never found her. The worst was her body beside him the night before the aneurysm, that small detonation in the mind, with no cause or reason he could understand.

Any morning could be that morning.

He shuffled the order again, placing Serena’s sample at the end of the row and then moving it to the beginning. He couldn’t decide and didn’t want to. Placing it anywhere was too public an admission of his anger or his affection. The middle was a lie and probably wrong, but safest and less damaging. He slid it in after Olivia, before Linda, pushing April to the end.

“In order of coarseness,” Thomas said, pushing all four forward with the force of a large bluffing bet. He took a shallow sip from the cup, saving whatever he could for later. She collected the samples on a tray and headed once more for the door at the back of the room. The lights stayed red.

Thomas got up and looked around for the cameras again. He walked toward the door he had entered, trying to stretch out a stiffness that settled into his joints. The blinds were pulled tight, no sunlight, no distractions. He started to flip switches on the wall. The gels went from green to yellow to blue, dizzying strobes of primary colors, before finding their way back to the blinding, lurid, white.

The researcher returned, pushing a cart loaded with five large red boxes. “Patience is a virtue,” she said.

“I always thought patience with virtues was a virtue.”

She smiled again. “You shouldn’t touch something without knowing how it works.”

“The red was hurting my eyes…it was fatiguing my senses.” As evidence, Thomas rubbed his eyes.

“We’re almost through. This is the last one.” She placed the boxes across a long table.

“And then what?”

“You’ll go outside, get paid, and then you’ll be free to do whatever it is that you do.” She held her smile longer this time.

Thomas walked closer to her. She stood on one side of the table, he on the other. They were nearly the same height, though he held an inch or two in his favor. Still, he felt lacking in leverage. He could never tell how he’d stand next to someone, how his body might occupy space next to theirs. There was more trouble in her eyes than he saw sitting down. Insomniac symptoms creased deep into skin.

“For this part, you’ll place your hands through the flap and identify what’s inside the box.”

“They have things like these in children’s museums, don’t they?”

“Do they? I don’t remember.” She picked up the very last box and brought it to the end of the table. “Use this as your warm-up.”

“This is the part I don’t like.”

“You’ll survive,” she said.

“Why do people say that? Of course I will. That’s just so beside the point.”

“Just?” she said, without smiling. Her fingers went back to the stud in her nose. “I’m sorry. That wasn’t necessary.” She looked up. They were standing eye to eye, directly across from one another. She took one step to her left.

Thomas placed his left hand on top of the box, took a breath, and pushed his right hand through the black fabric. First there was nothing, a grab at air. He reached farther in until he felt the tip of something smooth and cold, vaguely ceramic. He spread out his fingers and detected the plaster cast of thin lips closed together. A mannequin head, perhaps? But it lacked the perfection, the symmetry of something manufactured. Blind, he moved his hand upward, pressing nostrils and nose, eyes and forehead. Thomas’s hand held the face. It seemed unnatural. Would someone let you linger this long without pulling away? People weren’t still, not ever.

No matter how hard he tried, the warm-ups were equations he could not solve. He began to move his hand down and out. Skiing his index and middle finger straight down the bridge of the nose, sensing how it sloped to the left, slightly to the left. A childhood break long healed. An eight-year old backyard baseball game. What Serena discovered without prompting, what April could never feel, no matter how detailed the direction or the map.

Feeling sick, electrocuted, he retracted his hand from the box.

“I don’t understand,” Thomas said, touching his nose. “Have they all been—”

He wanted to put his hand back in, but couldn’t bring himself to do it. How could nothing before feel familiar? For the first time he wondered how—how it happened? Was it those comatose nights? Asleep, searching for Serena, nothing could wake him. It would have been easy to steal a little skin. His understanding of modern science was limited, but he knew they could do a lot with a little. A pinprick, a cotton swab, a drop of saliva. He wouldn’t have felt anything.

The researcher said nothing. She looked at him curiously.

Thomas eyed the other four boxes. “Is it okay to stop here?”

“We’re almost done.” She said.

“What if I don’t want to go on?”

She moved out from behind the table.

“Well, all of your time would have been wasted. We won’t be able to use any of your data and you won’t get paid.”

“Why?”

“Because the study is incomplete. We’d have to treat it like you weren’t here.”

The researcher stood with her hands at her side. She bent her head down, raised her eyebrow. Her lips tightened together. Her disappointment was hypnotic.

“What’s it going to be?” she asked, patience draining from her face. “These boxes are all that’s left.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of.”

“Then you should go,” she said.

He started toward the door, but couldn’t seem to move.

She carefully placed four of the boxes on the cart, in order, one at a time. She rolled the cart toward the door, leaving the warm-up behind.

There was a goodbye in it all over again, watching them go.

“Wait,” Thomas said. “Please.”

With her back facing him, she said, “Look, we have other work to get ready for.”

“I thought you said there was no time limit.”

“Within reason, but if you’re not going to finish…”

“Will you do something for me?”

She turned around. Her face held a particular surprise. Maybe it was the question, the idea that there was anything he could ask that she would be willing to do.

“If you do this, I’ll finish.”

“What?”

He moved back toward the box. “It will be painless, I promise.”

He held his hand out toward hers.

“Unlikely.” She stepped next to him.

He took her right hand and gently guided it through the fabric. Her arm tensed to a stop, and then relaxed into the opening. He led her toward the bridge of the nose. Her fingers trembled slightly, waiting to come to rest.

“Do you feel that?” He whispered.

“What?”

He took her left hand and brought two fingers to the bridge of his own nose. He moved her right hand in the box, and then her left outside.

“Do you feel that?”

She twisted her hand, wanting to separate, but he kept her there.

There was nothing. No recognition. Drawing away, she pulled her fingers down his face with pressure. And then she stopped. A small detonation. A smile. Lips and cheeks raised slightly before correcting back to their familiar flat line. She put the boxes back onto the table.

Together they went back to work.

This poem was a F(r)iction Fall Literary Competition finalist.

I call Ellen to panic. We whisper risk factors, transmittable,
outbreak, open sore. (I am searching for an empty
aisle, some privacy. Also, for tonight’s dinner.)
He will cook me tilapia in a scallion butter sauce.
I will drink Riesling from a mason jar. I don’t want you
to be worried, he’ll say. I will kiss between
his shoulder blades. I will carry
onion peels to the trash. I will crack open
the kitchen window.

I am not mad at him. I am mad at this salad dressing.
I am mad at everything in Aisle 5: fifteen types
of Tabasco sauce, three kinds of Grey Poupon, cheap
mayo, fancy mayo, mayo with olive oil, olive oil with vinegar,
vinegar with red wine, everything mixed, bottled
together, dirty with too many flavors. How can I savor any
if they tumble, vinaigrette after vinaigrette, vying
to taste better than the last? How I wish
to have been there for the first marriage
of honey and mustard. Imagine: nothing
would ever taste better. Imagine: I have discovered
sweetness. Imagine: enough, this is enough.

This poem was a F(r)iction Fall Literary Competition finalist.

My grandmother believes
in los fantasmas.
She says they dance free
of their bones
& into the wind.
These spirits laugh
& howl
as they look over us
from street lights
& old books.
She says the dead
have a strange way
of telling us things.
My grandfather died
on his birthday,
the eightieth anniversary
of his becoming flesh,
a wailing storm of limbs.
He left his body
like an exhale
or a song that bleeds
into the sky.
At the funeral,
my uncle says
my grandfather would have
hated the ceremony.
He hated anything that
made the music stop,
that made the body go limp.
Before he died,
my grandfather said
he wanted a mariachi band
to play
“When the Saints Go Marching in”
& expect him to come
marching in.
The dead have a strange way
of telling us things.
This was my grandfather’s
way of saying
‘there must always be
a reason to dance,’
to shake free of your bones
& let the dead live.

This flash fiction story was a F(r)iction Fall Literary Competition finalist.

Daffodil was transparently honest from the relationship’s beginning. S/he lifted her yellow chiffon tutu to show the Sun s/he was a hermaphrodite. The Sun said he didn’t mind and courted s/he/r for three months. It was a tumultuous relationship witnessed by Russet, the potato—the only eye witness to the tragics. His optic nerves ran fast as white roots dragging the dirt, eyeballs blinking underground, bearing witness to afterlives of the radish and necrophilia of the backhoe—but mainly to Daffodil’s decomposition.

The Sun: two-timing swindler, narcissistic tease, passive aggressively borderline disordered, a sociopathic abandoner. He’d leave Daffodil at 5:45 p.m. dressed immaculately in ochre and burgundy, spreading mauve cologne from room to room. He’d not return sometimes for days or many, many mornings after. When he did remember s/he/r, he stumbled home, drunken red over pastures of Campari stench.

The Sun inebriated, his rays and beams tangled like defunct Slinkys. He screamed cymbal clashes at Daffodil, demanding s/he strip her polyester petals as he pulled out his luminesce. It flopped down to the shagged soil floor. Russet heard these earthquakes, saw the soil above quiver and watched a viscous mustard-like moistness gloop its way through mud. It coated grub worms and glued together legs of centipedes. The Sun was too rough. He made love like an electric fence. Clumps of Daffodil’s hair winded away. The Sun loved s/he/r bald.

Russet witnessed Daffodil’s roots whittle, the stem splinter, s/he/r disposition molting green to brown. Daffodil told Russet these tragics in pollen—a flower’s telegram. All eyes, no mouth, Russet truly listened. Daffodil pollenated that the Sun spilled his sheen elsewhere: that ladybug, orgying leaves again, more roofs, thistle this time, some cat’s fur, too many pockets. Russet blinked rapidly to keep earth from dripping out his eyes. S/he/r stories made Russet cry compost.

One day, after eight straight hours of the Sun’s pitch-lit copulation, Daffodil’s back broke. S/he was nothing but a stem that leaked spinal fluid for Carpenter ants to drink. The Sun knocked s/he/r up. Daffodil filled with yellow sparks of semen. In the process of photosynthesis, spermatozoa convert to sugar. Pregnant with chlorophyll, s/he birthed a bouquet of rowdy bulbs. Children suckletted breast yolk from the stamen. Come nights now, Daffodil didn’t wait for s/he/r Shine. The Sun was last seen dropping luggage on a jukebox floor.

There is everything to tell in s/he/r body language of s/he. Daffodil’s wrinkled wilt, sagged posture loosening from roped chicken wire just to live. The gardener understood. He touched s/he/r gently with cashmere gloves, sprayed Daffodil with jasmine tea, stuck s/he/r firmly in an organic mattress of eggshells and coffee grounds. Daffodil knew the gardener’s hands: tender as mist, soft breezes rippling into flesh that cupped, touched, plucked, and rooted.

Ultimately, Cumulus handcuffed the Sun to be detained in a 5×5 windowless cell. Who read the Sun its Miranda rights? If an eloquent potato articulated, it’d say “to destroy what you most love. This is the tragedy of light.”