A cellophane membrane frames the glossy box
That reads like the tail of an airplane at LAX;
The miniature menu of instructions flutters
From the scissored cardboard edges to my lap.

Fourteen applications is the dental plan
That offers Heisenberg-blue upper strips
Like 17th Century quatrains for some sonnet
And their smaller lowers the ending couplet.

The rhyme is the goal in this form poem
While it’s white I want in this home gel kit,
Whose accentual-syllabic dentin is darkened.
Unlike ancient Romans with their urine

And goat potions, my muse in peroxide lies
From the A3 to the A1 on VITA color shade guides.

Housesitting

Who’d build a solar house in this dense wood.
Faint light can barely penetrate the pines
and wickerwork of deciduous branches.

It is so cold I welcome how your Chow
clambers into the bed where I shiver
in my winter coat beneath a quilt

thin as skim milk. How did you stand it
when he ran off to Yellow Springs
leaving you this project

of insufficiency. I’m grinding
coffee beans with vanilla, my fingers blue
as Dutch tiles of the backsplash

watching a few early crocuses perk
along the riverbank as sleety rain
starts to fall.

I’m not turned on by women,
I have to tell you, taking the couch
the night before you leave

for the low-res program at Goddard.
We kiss goodbye, your little car vanishing
as I watch from an upstairs window.

I read the journal you’ve left bedside
like an invitation. How the crepey skin
on the neck of your older lover

excites you with its prurient
decay. Droopy breasts, small kettle
of the belly, fine wrinkles of her upper lip.

It’s like a paean to departures
of jotted memories: detassling corn
like every rural kid, that man you married

had babies with, the words all wrong
zigzagging in your head as you stood ironing
and thought What am I doing.

These small rooms ordered
exactly as you designed. Books alphabetized
upon the shelves. A library of capture.

I still the impulse to disengage
titles into chaos, and sweep the floor,
spritz the windows, smooth your narrow bed.

Eve of the Day

In the far north, in the darkened hours
when the light is snuffed
like a candle

and you gather near the hearth
of the storyteller and listen
so intently your heart

blazes up
in a celebration of sparks,
it is then

you learn to hope beyond the cold stars
the runes foretold. So new stories
replace old stories. Gods disembark

from dragonships as the child of peace
walks barefoot through the snow.
Does it matter what you believe

if the light returns, if the days
stretch out their little hands
with bouquets of everlasting.

Burn the great log by the sea
and fit the new words
to the old warsongs.

How people have always stood
together while neon skies rave
counting on some promise

made ages ago,
improvised and polished like the touchstone,
like the torches dipped in oil,

the child swaddled on the cradleboard.

12.
You’re nobody’s fool. When you get home, you flick back through your text messages from Andy, intending to delete them. They’re all there—the photos, too. But before you delete them, you decide there’s only one way to stop the springy-smiley intern from becoming nobody’s fool. So you call the hospital operator, and find out the new intern’s cell number, and then you forward a photo of Andy, clothes off. The accompanying message is simple: Don’t be a fool.

11.
You’re nobody’s. After the abortion, and after three weeks of crying non-stop, and after four weeks of antidepressants, and after five weeks of zero communication from the embryo’s father—after that—you start back on the wards as a second year doctor. But when you suck up the courage to go to the cardiology lab, you feel as though it is day one all over again. Because there’s a blonde intern, all smiley and springy, and she could be you. The intern is staring wide-eyed at the images of the coronary arteries on the screen, and Prof is staring bug-eyed at the intern.

10.
The first day you throw up after breakfast, you think you’ve caught the Norovirus that’s been going around the geriatric ward. But by day three you know you need to pee on a stick, right now. This is what happens when you screw the Professor of Cardiology. When you visit him in the lab after hours and tell him you’re pregnant, he barely even looks at you. He doesn’t even ask what you want to do. He just tells you he’ll pay for the procedure, and then he turns his back on you, because he doesn’t suffer fools. And that’s when you know you’re a fool.

09.
You lose five kilograms over that first year. Andy likes that you’ve lost your baby-fat. You hate that word, baby-fat, but he doesn’t say that anymore because you’re svelte, and you’re hot. You know, because he tells you all the time. You wear your hair just the way he likes it, and you get a Brazilian even though it hurts like hell and you can’t sit down for the rest of the day. When he texts to ask you to come over, you cancel all your other plans. He texts you photos of himself, clothes on, clothes off, and asks you to do the same, but you never do.

08.
You know the cardiology nurses are talking about you. But you’re shit-hot, because you’re an intern and you’re putting stents in coronary arteries already. You’re the crème de la crème, the pick of the bunch, Andy’s choice. They’ll have to swallow their tongues when you become the youngest cardiologist in the hospital. Professor Tania Jackson, yeah, you like the sound of that.

07.
Raisin-woman is found dead, but she doesn’t die because of the melanoma. She dies because she falls down the spiral staircase in her crooked little house, and she lies on the floor for three days in a twisted heap. She’s still alive when the paramedics bring her in, but dies when they’re pinning her fractured hip in theatre. When you are called to declare Raisin-woman dead, you see that the naevus-mountain is even bigger, swollen like a blowfly on her lip. That night you dream the melanoma-bug crawled off the woman’s lip and is buzzing around you, trying to fly up your nose. You wake with a scream dying in the back of your throat. Andy says, maybe you shouldn’t stay over if you’re going to wake me up like that.

06.
Six months an intern, and you’re surfing the waves, coasting to ever-greater heights. You stay after hours in the cardiology lab, under the attentive gaze of Prof Daniells (call me Andy). Sometimes he lets you inflate the balloons in the arteries, and once he lets you insert a stent, and that’s it, you’ve saved someone’s life. It’s such a rush. So it’s a small price to pay, if he wants to sit and talk into the small hours of the morning, or if his fingers linger on your thigh while he does it, or if he wants to kiss you goodbye. You haven’t done anything wrong.

05.
When you return to the cardiology lab, the last patient has been dispatched to the coronary care unit. Prof Daniells is sitting at the computer in the doctor’s office, running his hand over his stubbly chin. You linger in the doorway, waiting to be acknowledged, expecting to be slapped with his words again. So when he says, sorry, you blink, surprised.

– Sorry, he repeats, blinking back at you, and for the first time you note that he’s kind of good looking, with his floppy blond hair and his chocolate-brown eyes.

– I was out of line. Can I make you a coffee?

You’re tired. You want to go to bed. You don’t want a coffee.
You want to be a cardiologist. You say,

– A coffee. Okay.

04.
Australia has the highest rate of melanoma in the world. You admit an elderly woman, all skinny and wrinkly, and she holds her handkerchief over her upper lip the whole time you are examining her. But when Raisin-woman falls asleep the hanky falls away, and you see a mountainous naevus erupting from her upper lip. Admit medical, refer to dermatology, and now there’s another chest pain to see—ah, great—now you’ll have to talk to prima donna Prof Daniells again.

03.
Prof Daniells doesn’t suffer fools. Still, when you arrive in the cardiology lab to tell him his patient is ready for his pacemaker, you don’t expect to be told to fuck off. Blink. What?

– Fuck off. I don’t have your energy. I’ll get there in good time.

– You walk back to the Emergency Department, your eyelids prickling.

– Did I do something wrong? I must have done something wrong.

02.
Veins like wires, like spaghetti, like cannelloni tubes. Paging Dr. Tania Jackson to the ward. Patient needs an IV. Patient needs bloods. Patient needs a urinary catheter. Patient needs, patient needs. You need. You need to learn how to put in a sodding IV; how are you ever going to be a cardiologist if you can’t put in a sodding IV?

01.
It’s your first day. You’ve got an ID badge that says Dr. Tania Jackson, and a stethoscope around your neck, and a spring in your step. You’re the best of the best, the crème de la crème. You’ve wanted to be a cardiologist before you even knew what the word meant. So when you’re introduced to Professor Daniells, eminent cardiologist, and told he doesn’t suffer fools, you know that’s okay. Because you’re nobody’s fool.

Dr. Rudy Fleck, a scavenger in the academic job market, had spent the last several years in dire need of a holiday, so much so that he had begun on a daily basis to black out, but only for a few seconds each time, not enough to call an emergency or warrant any assistance from anybody.

The pressure placed upon him by the forces of administration were such that when offered work he was ever likely to say yes, no matter how much it struck him as absurd. His doctorate in Film, although real, was used for unreal purposes. He had taught everything from anthropology (a stretch) to veterinary specialities (insane); the various departments and institutes across which he spread himself at the university rarely checked his qualifications. His campus was a satellite of a famous European university that reaped revenue from having franchised its name. The more checks they collected, the less the home campus checked up on their courses. He had even once taught Business, where he had spent all semester describing in lectures a practice he only much later discovered already had a name—Ponzi scheme.

So it was that bizarre flexibility and preposterous resourcefulness had long since been stamped into the shape of his being. Once, because of an overlarge teaching load, he had had to be in two places at the same appointed hour. Short of unlocking his second self, he had achieved the required dual appearance by using a simple trick. Before lectures, he visited his rooms. In one he put the wall clock forward by half an hour and in the other he put it back by half an hour. He then ruthlessly adhered to wall clock authority in front of the students, the first group of whom were accused of being half an hour late, the second of whom were praised for punctuality, although in fact they had been waiting half an hour and were exhausted and getting ready to leave. And so, a version of a prank he had seen used way back in high school against his teachers, by students he assumed to be far worse and more desperate than himself, he had used against his own students.

On the day that this story begins, his hands were heavy like bricks. He replied by email to the Institute of Dramatic Arts agreeing to deliver a course they had just now offered him, on the eve of the first week of semester. He had just forty-eight hours to prepare to teach a course on a subject about which he knew practically nothing. The commitment to teach in forty-eight hours meant cramming in a new field of specialisation and included sneaking materials developed in earlier semesters and a bit of poaching from other courses; he did this without regret. His attitude was that lacklustre administration or not, he had a responsibility to his students, so he endeavoured to give them their money’s worth.

By dinnertime, although Dr. Fleck had no dinner plans, he had spent hours reading up on Stanislavsky. He had learnt a bit on the actor’s biography, historical contextualisation, outlines of basic problems and theories. But it all left him in a state of confusion and panic. Success had struck, at long last, after his fifth or sixth snack. In fact, he had dug up gold. He was so pleased with his prospecting that he tossed the primer aside, put his feet up on the desk, and spent the next few minutes celebrating with a sixth or seventh snack. There would be no need to design PowerPoint slides, prescribe readings, mark papers, or commit acts of temporality fraud this semester. He had figured out how to give himself the holiday that the administration had never condescended to give him.

On the first day of semester he looked out at the room of students. They were an earnest-looking bunch, and none too stylish, which was a good thing, as the stylish tended to be less impressionable. Impressionability, and a bit of intimidation, was required for the successful delivery of his golden idea. Having finished his survey of their collective appearance, he launched into the only lecture he would give all semester, which also had the distinction of being extremely short.

He said, “Students of DRAM302: Method Acting. What do you expect from a metaphysical teaching studio? You have one assignment for this course: render yourselves unrecognisable. Right now you look like an obvious bunch of students. Go away and don’t come back until week thirteen. If you are the same person you are now when you come back, that’s an unacceptable performance, you fail. If you are a qualitatively different person, properly and completely reconfigured from inside out, you get an A for outstanding, exceptional performance.”

The students blinked and looked at each other. Eventually, one by one, like an infection going around the room, they got the message.

“Now, scoot,” he said at last, and surprised himself.

They put away their notebooks and texts and pencils, picked up their bags and phones, and left Dr. Rudy Fleck alone in the teaching studio. He checked his watch and clicked his tongue approvingly; it had taken five minutes, and it was the first time in a long while he had enjoyed doing his job. He would have to live with the risk of being reported for radically unconventional, and potentially harmful, teaching practices. There was no way out of that. But the wheels of the Institute’s administration were grindingly slow, therefore even if he was reported, he doubted if it would amount to an investigation until the course was over.

And so, like that, he had the rest of semester off; he would catch up on movies.

Outside the building he walked past one of the students, who had no plans in life, who was sitting on the steps. He watched his instructor, Dr. Rudy Fleck, enter the street and then disappear into the train station. This student, who was Smith Ward, one of the Institute’s newest recruits, grabbed his things and tailed the instructor. Underground in the station, his instructor was easy to find. He was conspicuously snacking on a cookie from a vending machine. Smith Ward waited in the crowd, studying his instructor’s movements. The two males were about the same height, of similar build, a bit relaxed around the waist, and they kind of had the same hair, despite the twenty-year age gap.

The instructor got on the next train and Smith Ward followed, and got on the same carriage. He stayed on the train, one eye on his instructor at all times, as it went to the outskirts of town. Then on foot he followed his instructor all the way to the large multi-dwelling brick estate in which he lived. He watched his instructor from the street and observed him entering his terrace from the back of the estate. Smith Ward waited a moment and then pursued the same trajectory, except when he got to the rear gate, which was on elevated ground behind the terrace, he jumped a nearby fence. From this vantage he had a direct view into almost the entire length of the flat. Dr. Rudy Fleck left the rear sliding glass doors open, for airiness presumably, which generalised and purified Smith Ward’s vision into his instructor’s domestic landscape.

The flat was not large and everywhere it was piled with junk; as expected, his instructor was personally disorganised. Smith Ward knelt on the grass and watched his instructor through the timber slats in the fence. He saw subject and environment. His instructor in his private home doing private things. On this first day it mostly involved organising old DVDs. He lost sight of him when he went behind a funky pillar of waste, or upstairs, and then had to rely on a window, at which his subject simply became a shadow. He disappeared from view when he got into bed. It was when Dr. Rudy Fleck retired for the night, after dark, that Smith Ward also went home, to where he lived across town in the privileged habitat of his parents, his trouser knee damp from kneeling on the grass.

Smith Ward assigned himself to observe Dr. Rudy Fleck in his home over the next several weeks. Rain or shine, he would adjust to the conditions. He knew this wasn’t entirely the way to go about his research but it satisfied him deeply, and he got to think about what it is that makes a life a life. There was a bit of planning involved, but not much, depending on the weather; on the whole, he found a comfort in watching he had never really experienced before. He brought in a deck chair and little foot stool, and an umbrella for inclement days. He often packed a thermos and cup. He didn’t take notes—he watched.

Dr. Rudy Fleck’s life was measured out in movies, in the flickering light of the large screen’s electrically charged ionized gases. Over the weeks his hair grew long and he became bearded. He was a serialised man. He got up between eight and nine every day, showered for five minutes, dressed for work, but then simply went to the couch, shoes on. He rarely left the flat. He watched movies—subtitled, mostly—through the day, and drank cups of tea. Between screenings he stood up and stretched like an idiot, to keep the blood circulating, twisting his body all the way around on the floor, and then standing up and trying to touch the ceiling with his fingertips. In the afternoon he usually abandoned his shoes, and watched more movies, and slumped further into the couch. He rarely used his phone, which was an old model, practically ancient. He occasionally met someone later in the day, always an academic-looking type, not unlike Dr. Rudy Fleck himself, with whom he swapped discs. Or he picked up items at the shops, in which case he would put his shoes back on if he had taken them off. But he never strolled very far from where he lived to do these things, and never for more than an hour or so.

The thing that got to Smith Ward the most was that Dr. Rudy Fleck ate snacks rather than meals. On one occasion he had tailed Dr. Rudy Fleck on foot for several blocks, until he had arrived at a supermarket. Inside, Dr. Rudy Fleck had gone up and down the aisles reading everything on the shelves seemingly at a loss for what to put in his plastic basket. He had eventually authored an apparently random assemblage of pre-packaged snack foods, simple foods that required no preparation or knowledge of even the most minor of kitchen skills.

Then one day Dr. Rudy Fleck was absorbed into the screen watching a black and white, subtitled movie. His tea steeped on a nearby table. He suddenly looked up. His gaze soared through the flat, through the slats in the fence towards Smith Ward. A fixed, animal meeting of the eyes. I see you. Smith Ward, torn from his comfort, shook involuntarily and spilt his own warm milky tea all over his legs. The returned gaze had an enormous physicality to it. Chilled to the core, Smith Ward broke it off and pretended to go about his business—which was what, exactly?

In a short while, Smith Ward got up and jumped the fence and left. He did not pick up his things, which could remain on the patch of grass till kingdom come, as far as he was concerned. He went home and went online and unenrolled himself from DRAM302, just like that.

Smith Ward was not the first of the students, of those who had actually commenced, to abandon his self-transfiguration project. In week thirteen, Dr. Rudy Fleck cut his hair and shaved. Then showed up to evaluate the student performances. But he found a dreary studio of empty chairs. The chairs were haphazardly organised into what looked like small formations, as if invisible students were workshopping in groups. He went home, hoping against hope, that the student fees had already been deposited into the university’s account. That alone would determine the administration’s decision to fire Dr. Rudy Fleck, or hire him for one more semester.

Dear reader

now that we’re friends I will tell you about the buttercup,
China, the dragon and the fire eater. My glass of lemonade.
Why are you standing at the traffic light when the light is green?
Confused or worse, let’s stay friends. Come, I want to play you
the beautiful jazz of the sea. The orphans asleep under pink rain—
destiny—do not wake the new world until the new world is ready.
I want to plant the orange seeds so they become orange trees.
I want to raise a palace of fragile hearts, hearts that are ours
but not ours. Parents, guardians, sailors: don’t ask for us—
we’re dancing on the breeze on which the butterflies were born.

Such great heights

The air around me is heavy, not sure
if my leg can pass through cloud, not sure
of the colors above me.

I’m sure
I can’t come down.

I feel your ribbon tighten on my thigh. Follow me
until daybreak
I feel your breath on my back of my neck. Lick
the perfume from my lips

The mist clears. I paint my finger down your spine.
This is my poem. Keep me together
in the empire of your arms

I am whatever I am.
Marble boy, tower of girl.
Marigolds spill from my mouth.

Soft light brushes over the mercury world,
a hand pushes the needle off.

The snow on the mountain recedes, cross
the ocean
blindfolded, until I reach the shore.

Stones

For Leticia Egea

Purple blossom star-fall over Sierra Nevada
tropical storms, elephants coated with glitter
Leticia Egea, your uncle, companion of shadows

left in the black sky’s loom over black sand
there’s a rainbow in my raincoat, anxious texts
cars dreaming of crashing, the world downloads

itself in a file, a helicopter hovers low over the mountains
and I think of your bubble in the sunset’s delicate red.

Painting a picture I have yet to see: the cosmos of your body
spreading out like a melody under the moon.

The waves all seem so close, foaming fairy thrones
but I hate the weather here, the way you hate my poetry.

I have a handful of stones. Red wine in my throat.
Leticia Egea, all my vowels hang from a cherry tree.
When I think of you the spring turns blue.

It is like this,
he says.
Although I think he’d rather not say.

They protect us                    from

everything
woman
curses, man jealousy

mean fun, mischief
of spirit-ghosts.

His words, like old eyes
skilled in silence,
bend against the light. I wait.

But there is only this
and him, fingering rainbow curls,
and me, plaiting confetti ones,
and, outside, the voices of those who’ve gathered

in this one vacant violent vastness.

:

It has been like this,
for ten minutes at a time
for years,
staring into a brass mirror,
waiting:

no calling
no creation

just a full-blown assault
of what does not exist.

Ten minutes later,
I look again.

:

We call          into existence

                                                                             things

                                              that do not

                                                                                                  exist,

he says much later,
indulgently,
like I’ve been caught admiring his
good-looking naked parts,
and he’s decided to be kind.

Out of nothing, there can be something.

I see, I say,
but I do not see.

:

Besides I don’t believe him.          (Have you ever been to the Valley of the

                                                        Weeping?)

It has to come from somewhere. (Everyone knows it was a wasteland. Some

                                                        holy man in the Bible said it was a wasteland.
                                                        It was a Wasteland.)

I don’t like what’s here to work with.     (But they got there, and found it
                                                                        flowing with springs.)

I want a different nothing.

EMILY AS A NEW, LARGE EMOTION

We could have
softly repeated
our dedications,

but we chose
to embrace
the singing

& the madness
that tickled us
into an ecstatic

healing that moves
too much
to ever be whole.

EMILY AS A QUESTION OF A SINNING

I braced for Lucille Clifton
to knock on my door
& applaud our choice

to become reckless voices
for love, at all times love,
a devious, searching love

& since she never showed,
some of the things Emily
& I do to each other

feel like they might be
done with an authority
we were never given.

EMILY AS THE GOLD WAS WAITING FOR US ON THE RIVERBANK

There is no undertow
in Ohio. We, most of us,
are ankle-wet

& whole next to the river.
Emily, she is in the river
& that makes her

part of everything now.
I am ankle-wet,
as I am Ohio

& I am letting her
move through me
without any questions.

The price of gasoline has gone up 200% because of those damn Opec-kers, the Yom Kippur war is raging, bombings in London are rampant, and now Watergate! How can Joyce have faith in anything if she can’t even trust Ronald Reagan, the president of the United States?

She is a fretter, has always been a fretter, and now that the world is truly—this time, for real—falling apart, she isn’t quite sure what to do. She has—for the most part—already begun to disengage.

No more going out to lunch with the girls who work in the offices around her, which means no more four-finger hot dogs at the tiny hut down on Mission Street, no more Italian subs with extra vinegar from Itchy Foot, no more tostadas at Ernie’s.

At first the lunch buddies beg her to go, goad, tease, shame, and eventually ignore her. Nothing changes her mind. Linda—who has a station wagon—is a terrible driver so Joyce worries about her speeding through red lights, swerving over the yellow line into traffic, fiddling with her lipstick because she has a crush on the cook at Ernie’s and must look her best. Betty tells her she worries too much. The big Chevy wagon can survive any smash-up, but Joyce shakes her head, brings her lunch, and sits alone in the corner of the break room.

She doesn’t like what’s happening to her, the cattle-prod anxiety from skull to toes. Not just the jumpiness, but the loneliness as well. Mixing with others, waiting for them to announce the next bad thing to happen, makes her swallow over and over, makes her sweat. Now, if she hears an anxious voice, a scream from down the hall, a car backfiring, any loud noise whips her around in her chair, screeching, “What’s that?”

Joyce is one of three women who record sales in big fat books for the buyer of women’s budget clothing at Bailey’s Department store. Each dress, each pantsuit, each polyester outfit, is ticked off on its own page by size and store. She ticks off the buyer too, who yells from her office, “Can’t you take a Seconal or something?” Finally, when one of Joyce’s piercing screams causes her boss to pee her pants, Joyce finds herself fired.

What does it matter anyway, thinks Joyce, with the world coming to an end? She’s safe, isn’t she, inside her apartment with her jigsaw puzzles, her Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, and Anthony Trollope so she cancels her newspaper, disconnects her telephone, tosses her radio into the trash, puts her TV on the street with a hand-written “FREE” sign. She leaves mail in the box so the mailman dumps the fliers, the magazines, the mounting bills on the cement in the breezeway.

Eventually, the apartment manager pounds on Joyce’s door. Joyce doesn’t answer. Just slips a check through a crack in the window for her rent.

Her brother, who lives in Boston, flies out when the apartment manager calls him about his sister’s distressing behavior.

He takes a cab straight from the airport to Joyce’s front door. He shouts, “Open up. It’s me, Joe.”

She doesn’t answer.

When they were kids, he called her a Nervous Nelly, used to say she’d be the death of herself if she didn’t calm down. Gave her a brother’s worth of shit.

Now he calls her a handwringer, a worrywart, a nail-biter. Cajoles her with memories of fireflies on hot summer nights, tag, hide-and-go seek. He wheedles and begs, then swears he’ll break down the door.

After forty minutes of unrelenting harassment—he is really angry—he stomps down to the manager’s apartment for a key. They climb the stairs together, the woman unlocks Joyce’s door, and they storm in, shouting Joyce’s name. They peer under the bed, into the closets, behind the curtains. Shudder at the mess in the kitchen. They check the windows, but all are locked. No back door. No Joyce anywhere.

It’s a mystery. He notifies the police. Files a report.

“Her car was in the carport,” he tells his wife when he arrives back home.

“She must’ve run away,” muses his wife, “but where would she go?”

“I don’t know. The apartment manager said she cut herself off from everyone. She couldn’t take any kind of disturbance. She quit her job. She was afraid to go to the grocery store.”

“How did she eat?” His wife sinks down onto the sofa, her brows beetled with concern.

“Had them delivered, I guess.” He considers a moment. “The oddest thing though, was that her apartment was immaculate.”

“That’s not odd. She was a germophobe.”

“But,” he says. “When we went into the kitchen, we discovered a blob of quivering jelly on one of the chairs.”

“Jelly? What kind of jelly?”

“Strawberry, I think. And there sure was a lot of it.”

Ted lived in Blandville where everybody was so bland and inconsequential they left no impact on anything or anyone. He and his wife, Belinda, had two children, Kid A and Kid B, who, like all Blandville children, were part of an endless procession of stupefied expressions and bland tastes repeated infinitely. They all ate the same sugary breakfast cereal, packed the same sack lunch, went to the same brainless movies made by talentless hacks who prided themselves on churning out garbage, watched the same reality TV shows that were secretly scripted and edited to infuse false drama into the bland proceedings, and listened to the same bland pop songs set to the same bland prefabricated beat.

Belinda drove Kid A and Kid B to school. She sometimes wondered if she should have drowned them in the bathtub when they were little. That solution was off the menu now. Kid A was a brown belt. Kid B could lift a block of cement over his head. Belinda sat in the car and watched them enter the building, then realized her eyes had locked onto somebody else’s kids dressed in the same clothes, the same backpacks slung over the same shoulder, the same trudge toward oblivion written in every tortured step.

Nobody in Blandville was left handed. Those who exhibited signs of left handedness were turned over to the Blandville Commandant for reeducation. The program was simple and effective. They tied the left hand behind their back and made them do everything right handed. In time, the kid learned to be right handed while also learning to hate their parents and plot their destruction, although subversive thoughts never manifested in Blandville given the inherent blandness of the plotters.

Murders were rampant, however, because guns were in ample supply. Murderers, when confronted with their crime, offered up the same bland excuses. I was upset. It was just an accident. I didn’t realize it was my wife/husband returning from a jog. A toddler found it, and it just went off.

The Blandville Police killed people for nothing. Jaywalking. Traffic violations. Looking funny. The citizens of Blandville tolerated it because they were taught to obey and worship authority figures.

Kid A and Kid B were murdered by the BPD for walking on the right-of-way, and something inside Belinda shouted for joy. They were monsters, she thought. I’m a monster for celebrating their death.

Ted didn’t know what to say to his wife. He was too wrapped up fighting back his own inner demons, telling him to get his gun and end her then end himself. End all the blandness, see it burn in a hail of spitting lead, sparks and fiery doom. Bathe the bland world in a crucible of cleansing fire. Start anew. A brave new world of bland souls blandly rocketing through the void in bland concert.

Safety off, Ted put the gun in the middle of the front yard. It was his singular hope that a random child, mistaking it for a toy, might pick it up and discharge a round or two that would do the job Ted was too cowardly to execute. Outsourcing your demise was the Blandville way of doing things.

To fill the void left by the absence of Kid A and Kid B, Belinda and Ted went to a bland movie. The theme was focused on the human condition. They left thirty minutes in, for they knew what it was like to be human and feel unmoored from humanity, to feel disassociated from each other.

They were strangers on a train headed for a mass grave.

Locked in a cattle car, they stared at filthy walls smeared in the fears of the last load of disposable tools.

All I want is a way out, Ted thought, and Belinda looked at him with a flutter of tears in her eyes, the tears of mortality streaking down from the rafters of uncharted ruin. Ted pounded on the cattle car door stained with regret and rejection. “All I want,” he said, heaving his next breath as though it were his last, “is to have a drink beside a pool and watch the sun set like an orange tablet sinking in cosmic blue paradise.”

Belinda said, “Can I come?”

“No,” he said, palms spread against the pebbly surface of emotional extremes, noting regret had encompassed rejection in a continuous plane of unabated anxiety that infected his bones, softened them to loam. “This is a solo journey.” Ted leaned around to look at Belinda. “They all are.”

“All right,” she said and crushed her expectations into a little corn kernel dancing in hot oil, on the cusp of fulfilling its utmost purpose. “Why are we like this, Ted?”

“We are as we were made, Belinda.”

“I don’t believe that, and neither do you.”

“Don’t tell me what I believe.”

“Too late for that,” she said. “Your mama and papa beat me to it. Mine too. They rode this train before us.”

“But we couldn’t see the train.”

“You can’t see it until you’re old enough.”

“I’ve always been old enough.”

“It’s all relative, Ted. What should I do after you depart?”

“Do what you think is right.” Ted slid open the door and leaped into folds of darkness.

Belinda whispered, “There’s no right about it,” and shut the door.

The Blandville Gazette ran a bland obit heralding the demise of Ted Donasso. He was born on month/day/year, died month/day/year of complications due to extreme blandness. Ted is survived by his wife, Belinda Donasso. The Donassos request that in lieu of sending floral arrangements please make a donation to the Foundation for the Cure of E.B. Thank you.

The turnout for the funeral was average.

The preacher stood before the body lying in state and said, “Here lies a good man who went too soon. He was the epitome of everything Blandville stands for. Truth, justice and the Blandville way. Excuse me if you’ve heard that before. Fresh, original eulogies are rarer than virgin births.”

Belinda commissioned a gargantuan monument carved into Ted’s likeness, to serve as his grave marker. The tallest in Blandville Cemetery, it stood six inches taller than the monolith dedicated to Tony Blank, Blandville High School football star who died tragically in the final game of a season in which the hapless Blandville Vanillas posted a record of one and ten. The one win came about when crosstown rivals, the Blandville Pastepuddings, were forced to forfeit after the team came down with a case of the trots from eating at the Blandville Smorgasbord. The culprit was a chafing dish of bile and recriminations. Tony Blank’s premature demise constituted front page news in Blandville. Rocket attacks in the Gaza strip were relegated to the entertainment section. Affairs of state were conspicuously watered down to small hunks of easily digestible information that conformed to the malnourished constitutions of Blandville’s sickly citizens.

“Bland news and weather on the ones,” Blandville radio station, BLND, boasted, and the radio blared patternless bleating shrieks of static the citizens interpreted as secret messages from dead relatives.

Belinda listened and heard Ted instructing her to build a rocket ship to Mars cobbled together from miscellaneous flotsam strewn about the garage, plywood scraps, rusty nails, split bricks, holiday lawn ornaments, and warped boxes full of battered toys Kid A and Kid B stopped playing with once they were old enough to set fires and bully elderly citizens into emptying their purses or endure a quick shove over the railing of the small footbridge, which overlooked a cold muddy stream teaming with mutated fish capable of chewing off limbs and gobbling out eyeballs.

“Look there,” Kid A would say and nod downstream at the morbid scene they’d staged, a clutter of derelict walkers clogging the shallows along a muddy bank, and without protestation the elderly victim would hand over the last dregs of their dwindling pension, and Kid B would bark his satisfaction and miscount the haul to deprive Kid A of his fair share of their ill-gotten gains.

“Why Mars?” Belinda asked, and from the steady barrage of static Ted responded, “Mars is a gulag for the dead. I’ve been locked in solitary confinement for a million years.”

“You’ve only been dead a year,” she said, waiting for the light to change from impassive to petulant.

“Time moves differently for the dead,” Ted explained above the electric hiss. “A second can move as slowly as a decade. A year can flit by as rapidly as a second. In the end it adds up.”

“How else are they treating you?”

The light changed and Belinda gunned it. Tired squealed and metal crunched as death was dealt to random strangers in the rearview world. Kid C and Kid D, orphans she agreed to foster, were in the back seat playing with a loaded, masterless instrument of doom with a hair-trigger.

After the commotion allayed, Ted elaborated his situation.

“Once per day a man stands outside my cell, teases a key into the lock, and tells me if I answer one question to his satisfaction he’ll release me. The question is invariable. ‘In life were you a good person?’ If I say ‘yes,’ he replies, ‘If you were so good, how come you wound up in there?’ and he leaves. If I say ‘no,’ he replies, ‘Then you are where you belong,’ and he leaves. If I answer ‘I don’t know,’ he replies, ‘I do,’ and he leaves. If I say anything else or nothing, he leaves.”

“Does the man have a name?”

“Ted Donasso. I have always been the man and I always will be the man. I must die so I can live again. Come to Mars and kill me so I can rediscover myself and rise from the red dust, triumphant.”

Belinda shut off the radio and stared threateningly in the rearview mirror. “Kid C, put down the gun this instant. Don’t you look at me like that, you’re gonna get it! It’s Kid D’s turn to twirl the gun.”

“Why can’t we each have one?” Kid C lamented.

Belinda aimed the car for the heart of a traffic snarl. “We can’t afford it,” she said and mashed the accelerator, merged with the congested intersection in a symphony of shorn metal and fiendish screams, for it was all coming to its predetermined end, the final chapter written boldly upon the pages of her life, that she, in the tradition of all Blandville residence, would self-destroy….

Red.

So much red it sears Belinda’s eyes to squinting grommets through which she soaks up the implication of her surroundings in scribbles of pervasive panic. The question “where am I?” rises from the vacuum of confusion, then is instantly dissolved in stark realization. She’s in a prison cell on Mars where a woman (she, it is herself, Belinda Donasso) will come to the door every second, every million years, every increment of time imaginable and ask her the same question in infinitely unwavering, monotonous iterations. She waits for her first foray into this diabolical excursion, ticking off the moments inside her head, picturing a clock face, the thin red hand sweeping the cheeks, first left then right, every thirty seconds until the dry snick of metal violating metal jars her from her trance.

Belinda hears the question, “In life were you a good person?” as clearly as though the woman, herself, were in the cell with her, breathing its poison into her ear in ugly ringing huffs of resplendent accusation, and she thinks on it for a second, a million years, then answers, “Yes and no. As we are ambiguous beings, neither wholly good or evil, this is a fair reply to your inquiry.”

The snick of metal uncoupling from its counterpart resounds in the cell, and the woman, herself, leaves.

When my toes curled outward, away from center; when the corn silk that gave us rope burns lopped over in the haze heat and spread out like hare heat (Dutch Lop-Eared and Old English Red). Fat rabbit and flat rabbit on chicken wire cage bottom. Back when twenty-five cents bought a soda but twenty-five cents was hard to come by; that was when he rolled his bed into a sack and said,

“I will write you.”

When we smoked until the wallpaper disappeared.

“I will write you.”

When his arm went over his head, with his gun in his hands, with his belly below water:

“I will write you.”

When his corn-hair, all ropes and silk of it, lopped off at the point of exit:

“I will write you,” he said, “Every time I think of you.”

His letters arrived. Carbon and wood and carcinogens mingled with apple pie seasoning and cardamom. The river ran high and in three speeds. Sandbars below trusses, covered by still water. Rip currents eager for the Gulf of Mexico. That was when his letters arrived. I said:

“I will remember.”

But I didn’t remember. When his letters arrived, I thought about the rabbit: stretched wide over thin wire, boxed in her own heat. I wrote to him that it was only a matter of time until she was cooked, or dead.

Kim killed herself. She thought about that—the implications of it—and knew there was a saying to describe what she felt. It took her a moment to remember what it was. When she did, it struck her as strange—both more alien and more starkly literal than it had ever felt before. The saying was this: she couldn’t wrap her head around it. She stood there, in the kitchen, looking down at her own body on the floor and felt her head try to wrap itself around a fact that was too big and too shapeless to be surrounded.

She was afraid that if she touched the body—the body that was certainly her own—something bad would happen, so she just looked at it. She was still holding the heavy iron frying pan she’d used and she lifted it to have a look. There was a black smear on one side that she knew was blood and she was tempted to taste it to be sure but decided against it. She was pretty sure the frying pan was real, which meant the blood was real which meant, in turn, the body on the floor was probably real too. That meant Kim had killed herself. She thought about that. She thought about it a long time but she never could wrap her head around it.

This wasn’t the first strange thing to happen. The first had been a phone call she’d received maybe a week prior. She wasn’t sure about the timeframe. She had been huffing paint at the time. This was something she did. She had just taken in a big wet snozzlefull, the kind that settled in behind the eyes, hot and itchy and cooking her brain like cheese on a hotplate when the phone rang. It took her a long time to realize what was happening, but when she finally answered she heard her own voice coming out of her even before she was aware of speaking. “Hello,” she said.

“Um, hello?” said the voice on the other end of the line. It was her voice too. They both were. It was confusing.

“I’m calling you from…are you…alright?” the voice said.

Kim was standing in the kitchen but her legs felt like they were dangling off the edge of a very steep drop. She wasn’t sure how to answer.

The voice continued. “I didn’t think you would pick up.”

“I did pick up,” Kim slurred.

“I’m calling because I think I killed you.” The voice sounded unsure. “Or maybe I haven’t yet. Maybe I’m in the future.” There was a lot of feeling in that voice and Kim wanted to tell it that things would be okay, but just then she felt like her eyes were turning into soft-boiled eggs and that seemed more important.

“Anyway you should be dead,” said the uncertain voice.

“Oh,” said Kim.

“I’m sorry about that I guess.”

“Why would you call to tell me that?” Kim asked. She wondered if her voice was really coming out as slowly as it felt like it was.

“It seemed like the right thing to do,” said the other voice.

“Oh,” said Kim. “Thanks.” She hung up.

At the time she hadn’t thought much about the call because, a moment later, she felt a comfortable little bubble burst in her brain and it distracted her for a long while. Now she remembered it. She looked at the phone on the wall and then she looked down at the body. It still seemed very real, so she went into the living room and looked around.

She was dimly aware that the room looked disgusting. There might have been bugs crawling around in the food on the table. There was a can of computer cleaner with a little straw attachment and a paper bag crumpled up beside it. These things she picked up very deliberately, feeling sure this would help her get a handle on the situation. She shook the can and sprayed it for a long time into the bag and then held the bag over her mouth to breathe in the fumes. She could feel her brain start cooking again and she felt the jittery rush of things start to settle out of her stomach and down into her feet.

It was a very nice day and everything seemed to be just about as it always was. That was good. She looked at the houses. They all looked the same—had the same red stucco tiles on the roofs that made them look like those little straw Japanese hats she saw sometimes in movies. She put her hands on herself. She was wearing the red sweater with the hole over her hip on the left. The hole was very familiar and she looked at it and felt reassured by it. She felt the pen she always kept in her back pocket. It was just as it should have been. That was good too.

Kim headed to Ronnie’s down the street. He was her drug-dealer. Sometimes he was her boyfriend too, but she didn’t like to think of him that way. She was much more comfortable with drug-dealer. It was Ronnie who had tried to clean her up once, six months or so ago. He’d even stopped dealing so he wouldn’t have anything in the house. But when she started up again, so did he. For weeks at a time he would be the only person she talked to, and sometimes he said they were friends, but she knew what they were.

The two Kims had stood there for a moment, each one trying to understand the other; each looking at the other’s face, at the swoop of blonde hair over the other’s forehead and the way the light seemed to nest there like a bird at home, and the black eyes thrust deep into the high cheeks and the little murmur of awe upon the lips. Each had the unique experience of seeing herself for the first time as others had always seen her. Then Kim had felt a rush of overwhelming terror and revulsion. It came out of her stomach and shot upward and, instinctively, she grabbed the heavy iron frying pan from off the stove and swung it at the other Kim’s head so that it sank satisfyingly into the other Kim’s brain.

Ronnie was on the couch when she went in. He was wearing that t-shirt with the two little kittens on it and was stretched out in such a way as to take in the sun that came through the window onto his belly. Seeing him, Kim felt overcome with a kind of free-floating remorse. She wasn’t sure what she felt so sorry about, only that she did feel sorry.

“Kimmy,” Ronnie said, craning his neck to look at her.

She didn’t speak. She felt hot tears welling up in the reservoir behind her eyes and suddenly felt for Ronnie both tenderness and shame.

“You alright?” he asked. He was going through the motions of standing up now. She wanted to tell him not to but she couldn’t speak. Then he was hugging her with his big soft arms and she felt her throat close up. She wanted to shrink, to become so very small that she could escape his grasp, maybe even small enough to disappear. It had been awful looking at herself in the kitchen. How must she have looked now?

“What happened?” he asked.

She pushed him back a bit to face him. She felt her voice start up like the engine to a lawnmower. “I’m having a bad day,” she struggled to say.

“Talk to me,” said Ronnie. “What’s going on?”

She didn’t want to talk to him. She didn’t want to talk to him ever again. This wasn’t the first time she’d felt this way. She never wanted to talk to him. The thing—the unexplainable weirdness—only made the feeling more pronounced.

He nodded, understanding. “I’ll get some,” he said. “Sit down.” He kissed her eye where it was wet and then he headed off. She watched him go and felt a little disgusted by him. He was always so nice to her and, for whatever reason, she could only respond with coldness. He didn’t even make her pay most of the time.

She waited and listened for Ronnie and felt herself vibrating slightly, like the atoms in her body were moving around in a way that might be dangerous. She started to worry she would come apart right there on the spot and she decided, for no reason at all, that she didn’t want to stay. She went back to the door and fished in the little bowl that was always there by the radiator. It was full of loose change and rubber bands and, under all that, she found the keys to Ronnie’s car. She picked up the keys in time to see Ronnie come waddling down the hall toward her. He looked soft and half-asleep in that t-shirt with the three little kittens on it and he smiled a little and waved a plastic bag at her.

“I have to go,” she said gravely.

Ronnie’s car was a rusty orange rib on two temporary spares, but it looked about as it was supposed to look so she got in and started the ignition. She could see her street in the mirror. It was familiar but seemed, somehow, to be closing in behind her, so she drove faster through the intersection. At the light she saw the wreck of a car. It was a burnt out metal rind crawling with gears and springs from the seating, like the remnant guts of some kind of synthetic life now fled. As she looked, there came a sudden, awful scream of metal on metal and she felt herself tossed around side to side. When she opened her eyes a moment later, though, there was nothing. Just the road ahead of her.

She turned on the radio and made it loud enough so that she wouldn’t be able to hear herself think. Power lines traced the road overhead and Kim let her eyes follow them drowsily. It was dark and the lines were vaguely illuminated by the orange street lamps, foggy bubbles of rust-colored light in which she could see a haze of summer insects. When she was a teenager, she used to go for long drives with her friends that lasted hours and promised no destination. They would smoke and laugh and feel important in that way young people have of feeling important. It felt good and the time never seemed too late until one of them would suggest they turn around and then they’d feel a kind of grief rising in them with the gray dawn.

She went to the diner where she liked to eat lunch sometimes. The windows were frosted with the irregular fringes of precipitate morning and she could see her own reflection warped and misconstrued in the glass partition beside her. It was still early so there were only a few others there. The waitress leaned against the counter typing something into her phone. When the door shut, a little bell rang and everyone in the place looked to see who it was.

She wasn’t surprised to see her there, alone and waiting at the booth in the corner, but she wasn’t prepared for it either. She looked at her—at the other Kim and felt an immeasurable, unprecedented despairing compassion come over her that was somehow coupled with a kind of condescending hatred for the pathetic little, worn-out figure she saw. The other Kim noticed her and raised her hand a bit and Kim walked over.

“Hi,” said Kim.

“Hi,” Kim said.

They watched each other. Kim didn’t like the look of the other Kim. She was somehow much smaller than she thought she should have been and her sweater with the little hole on her right hip looked terrible, like the coat of a dog in from the rain. She’d always felt all wrong—like she didn’t fit. Now she could see what that looked like and she didn’t like it. The other Kim didn’t seem very pleased by what she saw either.

“I guess it’s my turn to tell you what’s going on,” said the other Kim.

Kim nodded meekly.

“I’m not sure I can.”

“Please,” said Kim. The way she said it was really pitiful.

The other Kim started to explain. She did so haltingly, struggling to communicate something that didn’t seem communicable. “Do you…” she started, “If I say…” It didn’t seem right. She settled herself. “I’m going to talk to you like you understand this. If you don’t then just say so but I already know you don’t.”

“How do you know that?”

“Well,” the other Kim made a little reciprocal gesture with her hand.

“Oh,” said Kim.

“So if you have a long list of random numbers, an infinitely long list, eventually some of those numbers repeat, right?”

“Right,” said Kim. She didn’t seem confident in her answer.

“Well I guess everything is like that.”

“Everything?”

“Like outer space and time and all that. Realities.”

“Oh.”

“Right. So if it’s infinitely long…I guess stuff repeats.”

“Like people?”

“Like people. Like…everything.”

“What would that be like?”

“Like this.”

“I don’t understand this at all.” Kim’s eyes were very black and the other Kim suspected that if she could look behind them she’d see little aerosol bubbles still bursting. The other Kim pulled the napkin out from under the knife and fork and said, “Give me your pen.”

Kim reached into her pocket and produced the pen and handed it over. The other Kim started to write on the napkin. She wrote her name over and over again in neat cursive lines. Kim recoiled a little at seeing her own handwriting. Then the other Kim turned the napkin and started writing again so that the new lines intersected with the first, crosswise. She did this until the napkin was nearly black with ink and scrawl. Then she slid it across the table and put the pen in her own pocket.

“What’s this?” asked Kim.

“It’s called a palim…palmpiset? Palma…” The other Kim was struggling with the word in her mouth. It was an uncomfortable word and she didn’t know it very well. “Palimpsest,” she said. She looked pleased with herself. “Anyway, that’s what’s happening. The napkin’s getting full up with Kims.”

“What happens when it’s full?”

“Oh,” said the other Kim. She said it excitedly, like a girl in class, glad to know the answer.

“Oh,” she said. “It’s um…convergence.”

“What’s that?”

“When the napkin’s all black.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It just repeats until it’s all just one thing.”

“What?”

“I think things will just repeat with little differences until everything becomes one thing.”

“Because the universes are…are converging?”

“The realities. It’s all in the same universe. But yes. I think so. At least that’s what the other one told me.”

“Who told you?”

“The last time I had this conversation, I was the one asking the questions.”

“Oh,” said Kim.

They got quiet. They didn’t want to look at each other anymore so they just looked at the sun outside the window, at the way it made all the sky white and creamy.

Kim grabbed the napkin then and brought it to her eyes. She was crying.

“What’s wrong?” asked the other Kim.

“You already know, don’t you?”

“Yes,” said the other Kim “but it seemed like the right thing to say.”

“You’re not even high.”

“I’ve been sitting here a while I think.”

“Are we different?” Kim asked hopefully.

“I’m not sure,” said the other Kim, considering the question. “I think we might be at different times in the same place.”

“I don’t like this,” said Kim, sniffling.

“That’s not why you’re upset though,” said the other Kim.

“No,” said Kim.

“You wish I was better.”

Kim nodded her head.

“I wish I was better too,” said the other Kim. “I wonder if there’s a Kim who’s better out there.”

“There could be. Eventually. Couldn’t there?”

“Maybe if things repeat enough with those little changes. I’m sorry I guess.”

“Because you aren’t better?”

The other Kim nodded.

“Me too.”

“That thing that happened. Will it happen to me?”

“Does it matter? If our lives are all the same?”

“It’s still mine,” said the other Kim.

“Yeah.”

Kim tried to think of her whole life and it was not an easy thing to do. She tried to visualize it as a strip of film with all the moments of her life in little frames all unspooled before her. It was overwhelming and made her feel like she was going to cry again.

The other Kim spoke up. “Listen” she said, “I don’t want to talk to you anymore. I’m going to leave. But you stay here a while. I think it helps if you relax.”

Kim nodded through her soft tears. She wanted to leave too. She always wanted to leave.

“Goodbye,” said Kim.

“Goodbye,” Kim said, “can I have your coffee?”

“I guess.”

Kim reached out. The coffee in the cup had gotten cold and when she took a sip, it went down like wet cement, and she spilled a little on the table. She reached out for a napkin and found a stack of them. They were all soggy with tears and black with writing. Her name, again and again, Kim.

The other Kim stood at the door, looking back at herself. She wished she hadn’t spent so long in the diner because it was hard to think straight now that she’d sobered up. She would need something to get her head right. She went out to the car, started it, and pulled out of the lot.

The day was murky and wet. There was fog all over and the sky was a gray film full of diffuse sunlight. She came to an intersection and waited for the light to turn. She saw the stars reflecting on the dashboard through the glass and it distracted her for a moment, and when she looked up she saw Ronnie’s car coming toward her down the road.

Suddenly it felt like the world had cracked open and she was tumbling over and over again sideways in the car. She could see the road and the earth spinning around outside the windshield and felt the thud of metal slamming into her bones. There was an awful screeching sound in her ears and she felt she might be screaming out but she wasn’t sure. It was like she was in the gut of some animal rolling over and dying and making a big fuss about it.

She felt her breath come quickly, irregularly, and waited for it to slow down. When it did, she looked at her hands. They were still on the steering wheel. She was worried they might not let go, but she told them to and they did as instructed. That was good. They were her hands after all. She fell out of the car and looked around. There was nobody else on the foggy road.

Her legs felt very heavy and slow as she passed Ronnie’s house. She was as tired as she’d ever been and she thought about going in to get her head full of something to take the edge off but, looking at the house with the green stucco roof like a Japanese hat, and the car like a rusted orange rib, she felt suddenly very sick and very ashamed of herself and decided to go in for a different reason. She wanted to be around Ronnie. She wanted to talk to him. This was unusual.

The house was dark so she called out his name. After a minute she heard his voice from upstairs. “I’ll be down in a minute,” he said.

She stood there in the dark wanting to be near Ronnie, wanting to be near anybody. But, as she waited, she remembered what her face had looked like across the table in the diner and a different feeling crept in to replace the good one. She went to the couch and picked up the phone from the floor where Ronnie kept it. She dialed her own number, hoping no one would answer. Eventually, though, she heard a voice on the other end of the line.

“Hello,” it said. It was definitely Kim’s voice but it was slurring and sounded like it was coming in from far away.

“Um…” she felt the air slip out of her and thought she would cry or scream. “Hello,” she said. “I’m calling you from…” it dawned on her that she was talking to someone who should, at that moment be dead on the floor. “Are you…” she wasn’t quite sure how to put it nicely, “alright?” She heard the voice on the other end of the line murmuring in search of an answer. This conversation was familiar somehow. “I didn’t think you would pick up,” she said.

“I did pick up,” the other voice said.

Kim tried to sound certain. It seemed very important to get through to the other Kim and explain things but as she spoke, all the conviction drained from her voice. “I’m calling because I think I killed you.” She thought about what the Kim in the diner had said and continued, “Or maybe I haven’t yet. Maybe I’m in the future.” She waited but the other Kim didn’t answer. “Anyway you should be dead,” Kim announced.

“Oh,” said the other Kim.

“I’m sorry about that I guess.” That seemed the wrong thing to say to someone you’d killed.

“Why would you call to tell me that?” said the other voice.

“It seemed like the right thing to do,” Kim answered.

“Oh,” said the other Kim. “Thanks.” She hung up.

Kim felt very alone then but when she heard Ronnie stirring upstairs she got up and ran to leave. She thought of what her own face had looked like and didn’t want to be seen by anybody ever again.

She opened the door to her own house very carefully and slowly and called out. “Hello,” she said. “I hope you’re not holding any pots and pans.” Nobody answered. She looked around, relieved to find nobody there. The house was as she’d left it and she was glad she had cleaned the place up before going out.

Tentatively she went to the kitchen and turned on the light. She winced, expecting to see the body on the floor but was happy to discover that it was gone. Or maybe it was never there, she thought. That was possible too. In the living room, she climbed onto the wheezing couch and hugged her knees close to her chest. She felt like a little girl and thought about herself as a child. She tried to imagine what it would be like if things had gone differently. She wondered if it was true what the other Kim had said—about tiny changes. Maybe there was a better Kim out there, she thought, or maybe there could be, but she couldn’t imagine what she’d be like. She closed her eyes and tried to imagine something else: she imagined what it would be like not to exist at all. It was less than death; it was nothing, the real meaning of the word. It wasn’t cold or empty because it didn’t have any feeling or aspect whatsoever. It felt right. It felt reassuring.

She stood up then and turned around and went inside. She closed the door behind her and made her way to the kitchen but stopped suddenly. The two Kims stood face to face. Looking at her, Kim felt all that awful sorrowful nothingness come creeping over her and she tried to open her mouth to speak.

But Kim picked up the heavy iron frying pan from the stove and swung it hard so that it sank satisfyingly into the other Kim’s brain. As the body slumped to the ground, Kim watched it and experienced a kind of confused horror. It was Kim and Kim had killed it. Kim had killed herself. Panicking, she felt a jittery rush shoot up from her feet and into her stomach. She looked down at the body and didn’t understand. Kim killed herself. She thought about that—the implications of it—and knew there was a saying to describe what she felt. It took her a moment to remember what it was. When she did, it struck her as strange—both more alien and more starkly literal than it had ever felt before. The saying was this: she couldn’t wrap her head around it. She stood there, in the kitchen, looking down at her own body on the floor and felt her head try to wrap itself around a fact that was too big and too shapeless to be surrounded.

She was afraid if she touched the body—the body that was certainly her own—something bad would happen so she just looked at it. She was still holding the heavy iron frying pan she’d used and she lifted it to have a look. There was a black smear on one side that she knew was blood and she was tempted to taste it to be sure but decided against it. She was pretty sure the frying pan was real, which meant the blood was real which meant, in turn, the body on the floor was probably real too. That meant Kim had killed herself. She thought about that. She thought about it a long time but she never could wrap her head around it.

It’s fitting that I sit
in the dark. I think this
and it’s true, though it’s too much

like being alone.
I should be with my wife
with the lights on

watching her fall
asleep. That’s when she thinks
she can smell my intent.

After we make love
she reaches over in the darkness
and touches the corner of my eye

to see if I’m sad,
then my mouth
to see if I’m angry. Her finger

a roaming candle
lighting the lost participants’
secret features.