Our Honeymoon

was a strand of scenic overlooks. 
I first wrote strange

       —a strange of scenic overlooks—

my mistake, and strange enough 
was everything bathed in the red 
Mars dust of Sedona,
the iron in the rocks aligned 
with iron in our blood,
they say, so it tugs on us.
It tugged. Every night
on Airport Mesa, a crowd gathered 
and the Milky Way made a white mess 
of the sky. Was I the only one
who’d wanted to polish it
black again? Our honeymoon
was a scene of stranded overlooks.
We posed for panoramic
photographs minus the photographs. 
Behind us the canyon was banded 
red, copper, purple

       —millions of years
       of compressed sunsets—

where the river had gnawed 
down to bone, down
to its strange, scenic marrow.

Indiana Boys

The soybean fields flooded and froze over,
and the boys—not yet their father’s sons, not yet

worrying about crop stubble beneath the ice— 
skate, twilight settling in their hair,

until their mother, watching at the window, 
calls them in for supper. When it’s dark

they’ll sit elbow-to-elbow at the worn farm table 
each son will want when she’s gone,

ringing spoons against the sides of bowls,
that silver-on-ceramic note. But now they glide

across the ice, not yet worrying about surfaces 
that barely hold them, and there is nothing

between them and their mother but the clear
syrup of old glass. It moves so slowly, no one sees.

The Parable of the Bear

Beloveds, I keep picturing it
this way: we’re standing, all of us,

between the Bear and every creature 
the Bear calls prey, and half of us

step aside. Half of us aren’t enough
to hold the Bear. It lumbers,

then, in a blur of claws and mange, 
charges through. What did you think

would happen? The Bear would lose 
its appetite? The Bear might be tamed

with a tiny bicycle, a propeller hat,
a gold sphere to balance on its nose?

I don’t need to describe what happens 
next: the smell of blood, the surprise

of white femur. Ones I have called 
beloved, I keep picturing you

this way: sitting off to one side, 
watching the Bear work, waiting to see

if it leaves any meat on the bones.

The square clocktower stood in the center of town—short, but still the tallest building for fifty miles—and every time it struck noon, everyone who lived there was forcibly turned a full ninety degrees to the left. Not east or west, north or south, but simply to their left.

The town of Psalter, Tennessee didn’t see many visitors, so its residents forgot to think of the clocktower as alien and simply accepted it as yet another odd neighbor. They learned to pull their cars over just before noon— the only way to avoid traffic accidents—and to avoid visiting the restroom around that time, too. Some folks even went to the trouble of making sure they were in a position to see something beautiful when the noonturn overtook them, standing at the ready beside a window, a tree, or some work of art.

The noonturn kept its grip on people for a full minute, holding them fast wherever they were, and while the kids found it squirmy and frustrating, many of the older residents had come to cherish those still moments, finding a queer sort of peace and knowing there was nothing to be done, so why bother fighting it?

The clocktower was older than everyone else in Psalter, older even than the surrounding ash trees, and no one could say exactly when or why it’d been built. Not even its caretaker Ronald Scotch could name who’d actually laid the bricks and first set the whole thing in motion.

It had always been a Scotch who looked after the clock tower, and always, without fail, a male Scotch. Their family simply didn’t have any other children, only single sons; it was the way things were. Ron’s parents had tried getting pregnant again after him, but never with any luck. They even tried adopting, but couldn’t get approved. But when a sister of Ron’s mother passed during her labor, leaving her baby an orphan, the Scotches figured that maybe they’d finally broken whatever seal had been stamped on them. They would take in the little Left Behind as their own, as a daughter instead of a niece. They made plans, painted fresh stars and moons over their old nursery walls—only to end up empty-handed once more. The baby disappeared straight out of its hospital crib.

For a moment, there was an uproar. Missing child flyers were printed on neon-bright pages. Ron’s mother wept open-mouthed and his father shrank inward, unable to make any sound at all.

The doctors couldn’t account for it. They had no explanation. But the more they looked into it, the less they seemed able to remember. The more anyone looked into it, the less they seemed able to remember.

The child’s records and files were all gone, deleted—clerical errors, the doctors said, before scratching their elbows and cocking their heads, asking, Errors about what again? And suddenly neither of Ron’s parents could quite recall either. Standing in the middle of their painted nursery, they wondered at their own handiwork. Wasn’t Ron a bit old for stars and moons?

People in Psalter whispered that the Scotch legacy was haunted somehow by the clock tower, possessed by it, but Ron never let himself believe it. The clocktower might’ve had its oddities, but it wasn’t a god. Of course, he never did have any brothers or sisters, and when his girlfriend Regina had turned thirty a few months back, she’d broken the same news to him that his mother had long ago broken to his father: She was leaving, moving off to some sandy coast. It was just time, she’d said, and she wanted daughters, sons, a great big family. She wanted more than Ron could give her.

It was just time, Ron thought, time, and he knew that no one had ever hated the concept as intensely as himself. Why things should always turn in the same direction, why his family should only ever have sons, why a minute should always last a minute, he couldn’t figure. After all, even if that was the way things were in Psalter, he knew it wasn’t the same for other towns with other clock towers. In other towns where people didn’t have noonturns, where time was said to occasionally speed up—when you’re having fun, when you never want that day or night to end— and then just as often slow down—when you’re bored, when you’re staring at the clock, at a pot of yet-boiling water, at a loved one in the hospital.

In fact, there was only one instance Ron could think of where, just for a moment, a minute had seemed longer than itself, a too-long minute with Regina.

It was the morning he’d finally talked her into it, into trying something new, into trying something a little you know, into timing their sex to coincide exactly with the noonturn. Just to see what happens, he’d said, grinning. Just to see what it’s like.

They’d had to position themselves carefully so that, when the turn overtook them, they ended up face-to-face. She would be his tree, his work of art, his something-beautiful that the noonturn would hold him steady for. And there, for one weightless, absurd moment, Ron had felt himself twist atop her to his left and she twist beneath him to hers, their bodies held together like gears, Regina holding so still she was even holding her breath, holding, holding, holding— Ron had never felt so close to anyone in his life, holding, holding, holding, they’d gazed into each other’s eyes, she up into Ron’s brown ones and he down into her green ones, except he realize-remembered then that they weren’t exactly green, yellow actually, and actually he’d never seen their green before, being red-green colorblind as he was (yet another thing he’d inherited); yellow like the red clock tower’s yellow bricks; and the longer he stared into her yellow eyes the more keenly he felt a creeping sort of panic worm up inside of himself. Shit, he thought, furious and embarrassed as the panic had him deflating inside of her, and though he tried to think of something, anything else—her breasts, her wetness, her smile—all he could see was yellow and yellow and yellow that would never be green, a yellow he’d never signed on for, never agreed to, a yellow that, oh God, was slowly filling up with tears, and what did his own face look like then, horrified, awkward, uncomfortable, upset? The tears welled and welled until her eyes blurred, until they looked like twin balls of lemon Jell-O jiggling—until the noon-minute passed and the tears finally spilled and she turned her face away to press into the pillow, certain what they’d done was a sin. Certain they’d given themselves over to something ungodly. Something unseemly.

Pulling out, soft and ashamed, Ron tried telling her that she couldn’t even imagine unseemly, but she hadn’t stuck around long enough to listen, rushing up to get dressed, get back to work, pretend the entire unseemly thing had never happened.

Unseemly, he would’ve told her, wasn’t what they’d done, but what he’d done. Unseemly was a man who couldn’t hold out. Unseemly was a man who couldn’t put the truth into words. Unseemly was a man who deceived—a man like his father, who hadn’t told his Texan fiancée about the noonturns until they’d already married, until she was already pregnant, a woman for whom abortions weren’t an option, a woman who would never have another child for as long as she lived thanks to that clock tower’s curse. Unseemly was a man who couldn’t control himself, his body, his mind.

Unseemly was what Ron had caught Rudy Blume doing out on the last full moon.

Ron had taken Rudy’s call, listened as the old man sloshed and slurred his way through the words, claiming the clocktower was making an unholy grab for his soul, that the red of its brick was getting redder and redder. Ron figured it was just Rudy’s booze getting the better of him again. But when he went to check on things, armed with a flashlight and his dog Baboon, Ron was shocked to find a zombie-eyed Rudy weeping as he pissed and rubbed himself all over the clock tower’s eastern wall.

Can’t you feel it? Rudy said, tanked out of his mind. Can’t you feel it, Ronny? The belfry— Its bricks—Their red is redder at night. Their red is redder—

Barking her ever-loving head off, Baboon scared the old drunk away before Ron could reach him. Even for Rudy, it was a new low.

Shining his light over the wall, Ron felt gooseflesh flare across his arms. The slick, wet way the bricks gleamed, he thought they looked more like dragon scales. He thought maybe their red did look redder than it had before, but then, of course, he couldn’t see the color red. If the bricks indeed looked redder, to him they looked yellower, muddier, like grime off rotten teeth.

Sometimes Ron wondered if he wasn’t seeing the clocktower colorblind, but simply for what it truly was. Sometimes he wondered if he might be the only one who could.

Joe, Ron’s father, had died three months previous falling from the top of the clock tower. He’d broken his back and both of his legs, but hadn’t died right away. He’d died slowly in the county hospital, suffering from one cognitive disorder or another, something because of how he’d hit his head.

Their conversations went like this: Ron asks Joe how he’s feeling; Joe tells Ron, them, them, them, their happy arms, that preacher, you know, that red Sunday preacher, say howdy my boy, them, them. Ron asks Joe what he wants to look at during the noonturn; Joe tells Ron, lunch noon, it’s time dancing, we’ll dance with them, dance them red, red, red. Ron asks Joe about the missing child flyers he found stacked in the hall closet; Joe tells Ron, them, them, dancing red, my boy, Ronny my boy, boy-them, boy-them, that’s what they say. Ron tells Joe he misses him, please come back, I love you, Dad, you were always my best friend, even when you weren’t; Joe tells Ron, the sun is happy, that’s what they say, the skirt, the sun, the red, red, red, she’s calling, my boy, them, them, my happy yellow sun. The doctor said it was tragically normal for people in Joe’s condition to struggle for the right words, to not even realize that they’d used

entirely irrelevant or made-up words, instead. It can be very scary for them, she explained. It’s an unsettling thing to realize you can’t make yourself understood.

Ron shook his head. The tears made him look so young. The way his broad shoulders slumped. The way he held his Chattanooga Lookouts cap tight against his heart. But the doctor didn’t live in Psalter, so he knew she wouldn’t understand. It wasn’t any damage or disease that’d made his father spout words that didn’t fit or exist. It was the clock tower. It’d knocked his brain in a permanent left turn.

People whispered about how exactly Joe had managed such a fall. About his relationship with all those lovely bottles, just like his father and his father’s father. About how clock towers weren’t the only problems running through the Scotch family line. People said it was a crying shame, no matter the how’s and why’s, and of course it wasn’t their place to judge, but could anyone remember the last time Joe had been to church? People baked brownies and casseroles and wrapped them in tinfoil and brought them by Joe’s-now-Ron’s house. The house Ron’s father had left him, full of leaks and holes and creaking boards. Just dropping by, just checking in, just extending our condolences, and by the way, did you know the lawn around the belfry was sprouting up with dandelions? Did you know the clock tower’s weathervane got itself bent in the last storm? People said Ron wasn’t the same after his father’s death. Said he wasn’t keeping the clocktower as clean and orderly as Joe had. Said he was slower to call the brick mason for repairs or to chase away teenagers with their spray-paint. Said they caught him crying in his driver’s seat. Said his lights were on at all hours, his entire house falling apart, blazing yellow against the night.

Ron wasn’t the only one who felt differently about the tower since Joe’s fall. Suddenly the kids in town were struggling even harder against the noonturns, as if in some kind of revolt against the belfry and all it’d saddled them with. None of them ever managed to break the hold, of course, all inevitably turning left as that big hand found its way unerringly back to twelve. Even when Louie Edson, the football coach’s boy, tried shackling himself in place, mounting metal cuffs tight to his basement wall, it was no use; all he ended up with come noon was a broken leg, a broken arm, and two hairline fractures to his collarbone. It cost Louie his place on the team that season, and his father was so steamed, he couldn’t even look at him for three weeks straight, never mind sign his casts.

Not long after the Louie incident, the clock’s chiming started growing louder, more constant, as if it feared it wasn’t being understood. Ron understood it perfectly, saw its dark yellow bricks exactly as they were—but he turned away. The clocktower could bellow to eternity for all he cared. Just because Ron could hear it, didn’t mean he ever planned on listening again. Because what could be worse than all that had already happened? There was no one left for the clocktower to steal from him. The Edson boy’s bones would heal; he’d play football again. What more could the clocktower possibly do?

Birds began avoiding the tower, refusing to land on its witch-hat roof. Some wondered if it wasn’t because Joe’s ghost was roaming around up there, ever the caretaker, chasing them away. And then, before you knew it, for a solid mile around the tower, all cell phones—no matter your provider—suddenly lost their bars, all cameras lost their focus, and all GPS lost its signal.

It was then that people started leaving offerings for the tower, perhaps hoping to appease or quiet it. Perhaps just hoping to keep things from getting any worse. They laid out all manner of things: cantaloupes and watermelons, bouquets of fresh flowers, antiques and heirlooms. The schoolmarm Sarah Skye even gave up her own faded wedding gown, the one that’d once been her mother’s and grandmother’s, clasping her wrinkled hands together over its yellowing lace as in prayer.

Some residents started debating the merits of leaving Psalter altogether—as was normal from time to time—but they knew that this too was pointless. The clock tower’s effects followed them wherever they went. Ron knew it still had his mother in its grip, wherever she was, just as it still had Regina. And though Ron wouldn’t admit it, he often wondered if even his father wasn’t helplessly turning over in his coffin each noon, the tower rolling his tuxedoed body left and left and left like a rest-stop hotdog.

Not one week later, the history teacher Howie Rays went streaking around the tower, shouting nonsense—The books are all the same! or Rutabaga, rutabaga, rutabaga! or Napoleon’s white fucking horse!—and then shot himself for all to see.

People had plenty to say about this, and never mind what Howie’s widow Gloria tried telling them, tried explaining. It was probably schizophrenia, they all said. (Hadn’t his father had it? Or was that his aunt?) Or maybe it was a psychotic break. That can happen sometimes, especially if you’ve already got something rolling around loose upstairs. (Hadn’t he and Gloria been seeing a therapist together?) Something like anxiety maybe, or depression. That was probably it, they said, they all agreed. His mother had definitely been depressed. Runs in the family, they said. Runs in the blood.

What was Howie to you? Ron wanted to yell at the clock tower. What was Gloria? What did anyone matter, anyone who wasn’t a Scotch, who didn’t have the ability to give the tower what it needed? It made him feel like a child, this desire to scream and scream and scream.

Ron had to borrow one of the firefighters’ hoses to get all the splatter off. Watching the blood rinse down into the dirt, yellow blood into yellow dirt, he wondered if Howie had realized that he, a natural right-hander, had shot himself in the left temple.

It turned into something of a controversy that Ron had cleared up Howie’s remains. Some folks thought the clocktower ought to have been left its blood—Howie’s final offering, they said. His final sacrifice. But it hadn’t sat right with Ron or Gloria that his remains be left out dripping like that, exposed.

He was a human being! Gloria shouted. He was Howie! She hurled the words at them, but the belfry’s erratic chiming drowned her out. Only the tower heard her clearly.

Ron felt for her. Because maybe it was his fault that her husband was dead, if he’d just given the clocktower what it’d wanted. Because he’d since learned that his father had likely jumped instead of fallen. Because now he and Gloria both knew what it was like to be abandoned by the ones they loved.

It turns out Joe would’ve died soon anyway, the doctor had told Ron, uncertain if this was good news or bad. Apparently he was seeing a specialist over in Baltimore. Prostate cancer, she said. Stage four. His body was riddled with it. You’ll want to make an appointment for yourself while you’re here, get checked out. It can be hereditary, you know.

Why didn’t he tell me? Ron asked. The question broke out of him letter by letter.

The doctor frowned. Maybe he didn’t want to, she said. Or maybe he didn’t know how.

Even after Howie’s death, most weren’t actively afraid of the clocktower until it began running slow.

What the hell are you thinking? they all demanded of Ron, knowing instinctively that something was very, very wrong. This is your job! Your one job! Now do it!

But what they didn’t know was that Ron was doing his job. The job his father hadn’t been able to do. What they didn’t know was, though the clocktower needed Ron, he never needed the clocktower in return. What they didn’t know was that Ron wanted the clock to run down. If he was going to keep being left behind, if he was going to die alone, then he figured it might as well happen for a reason. And if the clocktower wanted to go out screaming, chiming its bell off, why not let it? After all, it wasn’t as if he could simply go up and get winding. Because there was something else, something very basic, his neighbors didn’t know.

The clock doesn’t need winding, Joe had told him, back when Ron was still waist-high and freckled.

It doesn’t? Then how does it run?

Even as young as he was then, Ron knew clocks needed winding and that a clock the belfry’s size would need weekly attention. Since before Ron could remember, he’d been fascinated by clocks, their pull on his family, the way they ticked, their gears and pulleys all working together with such a simple elegance. Like watching a beautiful woman walk by.

Come on, his father said, smiling a sad smile. I’ll show you.

It was the first time Joe had ever let his son inside the belfry. A narrow, shadowy place with air that tucked in around them like breath, as if they’d climbed into the breast pocket of some massive, stony giant. Wooden ladders zig- zagged the prism’s interior and dust fell into Ron’s eyes as he climbed up and up and up.

It was dark at the top platform, dark everywhere. Joe reached for the flashlight in his back pocket. Ron wanted to cling to the man’s arm, but forced his hands to keep tight to his sides. He wasn’t a baby anymore.

Aren’t there any lights in here? Ron asked. He’d studied pictures and blueprints of other clock towers. He knew what was normal and what wasn’t. Like lights. Like the ropes and the hand-crank for winding, the massive hanging weights that would need adding in wintertime and subtracting in summer.

His father grinned. Lights? he said, chuckling, resting a large hand on his son’s thin shoulder. Ronny, you ever wonder if your food asks the same thing about you?

He clicked on his flashlight.

Ron’s hands fell limp at his sides. Dad… what is it?

It’s the clock tower, he said. That’s all it is, Ron. That’s everything.

Everything, Ron said, gaping. What does it want?

Want? You can’t listen to folks around town, Ron. The clocktower doesn’t want anything. Not trouble or pain or even you or me. It’s a creature of needs. And it doesn’t need winding.

A creature… Ron whispered. Then what does it… need?

Feeding, Joe said. Complacency. He spat the word. Something only we can give it. Joe gave his son’s shoulder another tight squeeze. I’m sorry, he said. He was so quiet, Ron almost couldn’t hear him. I’m so sorry.

But even as a boy, on some level, Ron knew. Ron understood. You don’t have to be sorry, Dad. It isn’t your fault.

Joe stared ahead vacantly. This didn’t have to be your lot, Ron. I never needed to have children, did I? It’s not as if I ever needed—He wavered, his voice, his legs, his arms, losing his grip. Could’ve stopped myself, he whispered. Could’ve just dusted off alone. Could’ve just taken all this mess to the ground with me. Could’ve looked harder for a way to stop it. Could’ve bothered to look at all. He laughed then, a sound so sharp it made Ron wince. Because she went missing, didn’t she? All those fucking flyers. Even after everything, even after doing everything it wanted… Should’ve looked. Why didn’t anyone look? Your aunt died and then—your mother was crying… I can’t remember. I can’t remember.

Ron stared up at him, confused and wide- eyed, his chest, his throat going tight. His hand stretched out, slowly, slowly, and clasped his father’s. And though it took a long time—at least, a long time for a boy holding his breath— he eventually felt his father’s fingers come alive around his, gripping them gently, large over small.

It’s true, Joe said, stronger this time. You weren’t needed, Ronny. I never needed you. But holy God, boy, were you wanted.

Gloria’s face was red from crying and her eyes looked massive and bleak. She was still in her funeral black, hadn’t managed to take any of it off all day. The kids were over with their grandparents. She hadn’t seen her girls since the ceremony that morning; she couldn’t face the Howie in them. All the things she’d never bargained for.

Make love with me, she said to Ron, sniffling, worrying a blackened tissue. Make love with me. In the clock tower. Please…Her chin trembled. The tower needs this. I need this—I need it all to stop.

Ron thought about how his mother had left him to find whatever it was she’d needed. About how climbing up the clocktower felt like climbing down a throat. About how the red had gotten redder. About how he was still his father’s boy. About how Regina had never once confided in him about needing anything.

Gloria had always just been Gloria to him before. The CPA. The Sunday School teacher.

Yet he realized then that he was jealous of Dead Howie with the lovely, loving wife. He was jealous of Dead Howie with the pretty pair of little girls and the way they’d all looked together on Halloween, a king escorting his princesses. Ron shook his head.

You miss Howie, he said. That’s all. You’d regret it later.

I won’t, she said. Take me up there—please. Can’t you see what it’s doing? The noonturns are lasting longer, the chimes are everywhere all the time—

It’s starving, Ron thought.

It’s angry, Gloria said. It’s angry with us. It wants us. It wants love, not all those ridiculous tithes. Please, she said, and kissed him flat on the mouth before he could stop her.

There was no feeling in it. She really did miss Howie. Most women in Psalter knew better than to ever get involved with a Scotch, knowing their history. Their ghosts. She only needed him now because he was the way in, just another of the belfry’s cogs. Ron had known it, but it still hurt to feel it pressed on his body that way. To know for certain he would always, always be alone.

Ron stepped back, out of her grip, out of kissing reach. He narrowed his eyes at her. Dead Howie’s pretty wife. The woman he’d made a widow. The kind of woman who wasn’t afraid to shout to make herself heard. Ron thought of her daughters without a father, princesses without their king. He thought of the way his own parents had once smiled and laughed together, painting over his old nursery walls with moons and stars for…someone. Hadn’t it been for someone?

What if they really could be mine? he wondered. Would the clocktower let me keep them? Howie’s little Left Behinds. Something other than all this forever-lonely. After all, sometimes things did change. (Didn’t they?) Things could skip a generation. Things could be different, just for once—

No, he said. He didn’t recognize his own voice. No, I’m sorry, Gloria. No.

Because he could be stronger than his father. Because he could say no to those things he merely wanted. Because wanting wasn’t enough. It couldn’t be.

It was the first call he’d gotten from Regina since her move some five months ago. The first call he’d gotten since the clocktower had finally given up its incessant chiming, had begun running smoothly and timely once more, its alarmed citrine blush settling back to its old relaxed hue. Something had happened to reassure the belfry, to comfort it after Joe’s death and Ron’s decision. Something Ron couldn’t place. Then, crying with those yellow eyes, Regina told him:

It’s a boy, Ron. I didn’t want to tell you before. I didn’t want to believe it. But it’s a boy. I’m pregnant and it’s a boy.

The words were right there inside of him:

Whatever you need to do, I’ll support you. I’ll go to the clinic with you, hold your hand. Put it up for adoption. Give it any name you like, so long as it isn’t mine. I’ll send you money. I’ll work for you my entire life. Just stay away. Just don’t come here. Just don’t let him be like me. The words were clear and neat in his head, but he couldn’t get them out. They crumpled like train cars against the back of his teeth. Because why did he deserve to be alone? Because why did it have to be his responsibility to change things? Because, after all, even if she could never love him, never forgive him, perhaps a baby could. Perhaps this baby, his son, might be stronger than him. Perhaps his son would finally figure out how to stop time.

White noise and more crying. She couldn’t give it up. She was her parents’ daughter and she couldn’t give it up, no matter how badly she might want to. She was coming back. A baby needs its father, she said.

Ron turned, a window at his left. The clocktower chimed a crisp, eternal noon.

Gripping the phone tight, letting the world work on him, Ron wondered if he’d ever learn to find the peace in these still moments, knowing the turn was already in motion, knowing there was nothing to be done, so why bother fighting it.

Dear lovely reader,Two years ago, we did something stupid.As editors and readers, we’d grown disenchanted with mainstream literary journals, with their black and white pages and boring designs. We’d grown weary of the same old stories: always safe, always circling tired and cliché themes.We began to dream about doing things differently.This idea started small: just…

Part I: For the ninth of his twelve famous labors, Heracles must cross the Libyan Desert and steal a herd of magic cattle whose crimson hide matches Heracles’ wine-red blood. The beasts are guarded by a monster named Geryon, the spawn of god-killing titans, a living horror formed from three warriors’ bodies joined as one.

Linda returned from the salad bar with three radishes on her plate.

Henry thought it strange that she didn’t notice the splotch of decomposing foliage clinging to the largest radish. But then again, maybe it didn’t bother her. Or maybe she liked it? It was difficult to tell because this was their first date.

“I hated radishes when I was a little girl,” she said. “But now that I’m a woman”—she chewed a radish as she spoke—“eating one is like standing in a secret garden pelted by September rain. As you swallow? A hint of musty basement. It’s a subtle flavor, but if you concentrate on your radish, it opens up to you, and the taste climbs up your throat, slithers over your tongue, and escapes with your breath. It’s sexy and it’s wrong, like a liver-spotted, yellow- eyed uncle who gets drunk at a family party and tickles your lower back in a way that feels a little lovely.” She put another radish in her mouth. “And that’s only one of the reasons I love the goddamned Country Pride Buffet.”

She crushed the radish between her molars and picked up her fork.

Henry gulped his chocolate milk. “I like mashed potatoes,” he said. “But I prefer real ones.” He forked the reconstituted mashed potatoes on his plate. “These ones come from flakes.”

Linda’s face tightened into an expression of bemusement. “You’re a magnificent creature,” she said. “If I had qualms about your qualifications for this position, they are now absolved.”

“About this ‘position’ you’re talking about…”

“I was worried that someone with your expertise would get bored with the job. But now that we’ve met? I’m sure I’ve found my man.”

“I thought this was a date.”

“You thought right! You’re on a date with a girl whose family has been brainwashed by a cult-leader. They’re living in a commune far west of here. I’ll pay you to bring them back.”

“You’re offering me a job?”

Linda ignored his question. “My family is made up of red people,” she mused. “Red- headed, yes, some of them. But they are red complexioned as well. And red in a more profound way than that. Hot-blooded, you can say. Thus, finding them won’t be difficult. But herding them back to this town? That will be an ordeal. You’ll do it, right?”

Henry set down his fork. The restaurant became silent. He drummed his fingers on the table. He fussed with his napkin.

“Did we not discuss this on the phone?” asked Linda. “I mean, I wasn’t direct, of course. I used what people call ‘tact.’ But was I not clear?”

“I don’t remember any of this.”

“Then let’s just have our date.”

“And maybe I don’t need a job.”

“I know you’re confused and probably annoyed,” she said. “But be careful not to say something you’ll regret.”

Two weeks earlier, Henry had received an email from a dating service called “Heartland Singles.” It explained that Linda had viewed his profile and wanted him to contact her. The email contained Linda’s phone number. He called her that same night.

“Are you employed?” she had asked.

Henry explained that he had been out of work for the past eight years. He claimed that, before then, he had served as a security guard at a tree farm where, each night, he’d park his van at the farm’s back entrance. Behind his van, in an endless stretch of dark, thousands of saplings grew in silence. Who would want to steal them when a thousand-acre forest preserve was three miles away? What real value could they have? What use? He told Linda that he was always surprised when, from midnight until sunrise, thieves filled flatbed trucks with beeches and crab-apples and elms while Henry pretended to sleep.

He claimed that, in the eight years since he was fired from the tree farm, he’d been considering going to college for a degree in botany, criminal justice, or some other major that might help him get his old job back.

“Shush,” she had said. “What.”

“Is there anyone else in your home? Who might be eavesdropping on another line?”

“I’m on a cell phone.”

“That’s even worse,” she said.

“What do you do for a living?” he’d heard himself ask.

“That’s funny,” she said. “For a living? That’s very weird.” There was an echo on the line, as if Linda was addressing him from the opposite side of a large and empty room.

“I don’t see how it’s weird.”

“Two weeks from tonight, when we meet at the Country Pride Buffet for our date? It’ll become as plain as day.”

Henry agreed to the date, partly because he liked the Country Pride Buffet. He’d often wake sweating and hungover on his futon in the afternoon with his TV blaring, his apartment’s front door ajar, his keys dangling from the lock. His mouth would be sludgy with alcohol, tobacco, and Hot Pockets, and though he wouldn’t be hungry, he would be overcome by the urge to fill himself with food. If there were no pizzas in his freezer, Henry would drag himself to the Country Pride Buffet’s salad bar and taco bar, to its sundae bar and its obscene variety of beverages, to its Salisbury steaks like dish sponges braised in heavy gravy, and to its stainless steel vats of corn chowder topped by wrinkled layers of cadaverous skin.

Linda pushed her plate aside and lowered her voice to a whisper. “As a security guard, I imagine you stalking thieves through the dark.

Tackling them and threatening to bring a shovel down upon their skulls. I imagine late-night car chases down a dark highway, the bumper of your patrol car one inch away from the escape vehicle of some desperate kidnapper of trees.”

“Hey,” said Henry. He shoveled a forkful of pasta salad into his mouth. “What’s in this pasta salad?”

Linda looked at Henry’s plate. “Macaroni. Mayonnaise. Peas. Sugar.”

“What’s funny is that I don’t even know if mayonnaise comes from an animal or from a plant. Is it, like, whipped cream without sugar?”

Linda described the differences between homemade and commercial mayonnaise, and Henry silently congratulated himself for shifting the conversation away from the tree farm; the more they talked about his security guard experience, the more uncomfortable he grew.

Henry regretted lying to Linda about his past, but in truth, he could remember very little of his life. The details were there, buried deep inside, but indistinguishable from sitcom scenes, infomercials, comic books, video games, and endless streams of internet porn.

For example, Henry sometimes remembered growing up as the son of the CEO of a successful toy company. (Did he have the Pac-Man arcade game in his childhood home? Did he ride around the mansion on a scale-model train?) At the same time, he also remembered being the foster son of a widowed police chief who hired a sassy African American housekeeper to serve as surrogate mother to Henry and his two step- sisters. On still other occasions, he remembered his earliest years living with his mother in a rusted van that had a stuck-shut door, a missing backseat, and a broken sunroof that his mother had fixed with bubble wrap and tape. (The tape, Henry sometimes remembered, was sensitive to heat and moisture and thus demanded nearly continuous maintenance.)

He could sometimes remember his eighth birthday, when he and his mother were vagabonding through a dull corner of the Midwest, and they stopped on a black road that ran alongside a cemetery. In his memories, it was a clear September night and they reclined on the road’s soft gravel and looked up at the stars.

Henry seemed to remember that his mother had pointed out the Heracles constellation.

“That constellation was very prominent on the night you were born,” he could remember her saying. “Did I want to name you Heracles? Of course I did. But your father wouldn’t hear of it.” Sometimes, Henry could remember receiving a birthday present on that night, when he was barely awake in the dark next to the cemetery’s crumbling headstones and sunken graves.

“This is for you,” she said, cupping a small figurine into his palm. It was a piece of ivory carved into the shape of a cow. It had long horns and a thick, bent neck. “Your father gave it to me long before you were born.”

That night, Henry rested his head on his mother’s large, soft belly while she hummed the happy birthday song. He could feel the notes vibrate through his mother’s heavy bones. Her humming blended with the locusts’ drone. A tender wind slipped through dense clumps of buckthorn and ox-eyed daisies. The air was tinged with the smell of burning leaves. Henry strained to record the moment with all of his senses at once. Bats sliced through the air above their heads. He made a fist around the ivory cow. He felt the beating of his mother’s heart. The cow’s horns dug into his palm. His mother ran her heavy hands up and down his back, trying to soothe him as he wept.

The next morning, Henry’s mother showed the first symptoms of her remarkable shrinking disease; her ears itched. Her teeth felt somewhat loose. By the time they got to a town, she could barely reach the van’s pedals with her feet. They stopped for breakfast, and, while Henry finished his Mickey Mouse pancakes, his mother had to stand on tiptoes to reach the register counter and pay the bill. The locals must have noticed, because, later that afternoon, when Henry and his mother reached the next town, they were greeted at the outskirts by a roadblock staffed by what looked like Sunday school teachers wearing asbestos removal gear: suits and smiles and white hooded coveralls made from swooshing plastic, double-filtered respirator masks, sky blue paper bags over their shoes.

They were escorted to a neighborhood strewn with wet piles of garbage. They were shown into the only house on the street with glass in its windows and a front door attached to its hinges. All of its rooms were covered in carpet that reminded Henry of the hair that grows between the pads of an old dog’s paws.

“Welcome home!” said a lady through the filter on her mask. She backed toward the door as she spoke.

“What is happening to us?” asked Henry’s mom.

“We’re helping you,” said a bullhorn held by someone standing on the lawn.

A tow truck pulled their van onto the house’s driveway. Inspectors descended upon it, searching for some sign of the contagion that caused Henry’s mother’s disease.

“Do not leave the property of your nice new home,” the bullhorn voice warned. “And do not obstruct the admittance of doctors, or general members of the public.”

Henry’s mother closed the door. She rested her back against it. She let herself slide to the ground. Henry sat down beside her and took her into his arms.

The bullhorn continued. “All revenue from tours will be used for good causes right here in town, such as our schools, roads, and those types of things.”

During their first few days in their new home, Henry and his mother found garbage bags stuffed with homemade dresses and a pair of sturdy overalls with flowers embroidered onto the back pockets. They found small, bright- colored jumpers, and baby onesies, and tiny rain boots with cartoon goldfish on them.

They found romance novels and a Bible. They found off-brand Barbie dolls, a train whistle and a conductor’s hat, and a dollhouse with hinged walls that allowed it to stand in three dimensions or be folded flat.

Henry and his mother established a comfortable rhythm for their new lives. During the day, Henry watched reruns while his mother read romance novels. In the evening, they made a nest of pillows on the patio and watched the darkening sky. Henry’s mother identified the major constellations and astrologically significant stars. Deneb, nestled in Cygnus’ tail. Tarazed, the plundering falcon. Dabih, the slaughterer, the butcher, eye of the goat, peering down from 328 light years away.

After stargazing, Henry’s mom would tuck him into bed, where he’d listen to cricket songs mingle with the unintelligible murmur of a distant television until he fell asleep.

The pleasures of those precious, gently passing days far outweighed the inconveniences

of their confinement. The lack of access to the outside world. The nearly constant medical attention. The tedious collection of urine and stool. The crowds of tourists that shuffled through the house, photographing Henry and his mother from behind a curtain of thick, transparent plastic.

At first, Henry and his mother didn’t mind the shrinking. They were convinced that the condition would be reversed, even when Henry’s mother started wearing little pastel-colored jumpers. Even when she had to switch to the milk-stained baby clothes, their optimism endured.

“Someone should make a movie of this,” Henry’s mother said as her hair fell out. She smiled at the pile of pale curls in her lap. “Somebody should write a book,” she smiled. “They’d get rich.”

Despite their efforts to stay upbeat, however, the stress of the disease took its toll. Sometimes, when Henry was awake in bed, he could hear his mother plop softly onto the carpet (by this time, she was no larger than an oversized caterpillar). She’d squirm into the living room. Through his bedroom walls, he’d hear her pray in a soft voice—a low, deep, unintelligible murmur that would bleed through the walls of his bedroom until he fell asleep. And this continued each night until one day, Henry’s mother said, “Do you know what I sometimes think? I think about how you never do anything that doesn’t directly involve me. It’s like you’re obsessed with your own mother? It’s abnormal and to be honest a little creepy and gross.”

She then blushed and apologized and said that she’d only been joking. But it was not long before his mother began sighing whenever he entered the room.

Later, she stopped addressing Henry directly. She stopped looking him in the eye. She whispered insults at his back in a loud, hissing volume that she fully intended him to hear.

Henry was sixteen years old when he last saw his mother. It was in the middle of a bright September day and Henry walked into the house after raking leaves. By this point, his mother’s body had flattened to the thickness of a postage stamp. Her limbs had blackened and detached, and the end of her torso frayed. She’d become aquatic, as well, and when Henry entered the house that day, she was bobbing in three inches of lukewarm water in the kitchen sink. She was a perforated manta ray. She was a ball of bone-white kelp floating in an airtight jar of bleach. “I’m done with the lawn,” he said. He poured a glass of water, careful not to splash her in the process.

“My hero,” she said, her sarcasm undisguised.

“Yard looks good,” he said.

“Trying to love you is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do.”

“Sorry,” he repeated.

“This is all your fault.”

Henry put down his glass of water. He sank into a kitchen chair and looked at his grass-stained tennis shoes.

“You don’t deserve me,” said his mother.

Henry approached the sink. He eyed the garbage disposal’s switch.

“Say that again,” he said.

“You don’t deserve me.”

“Say it again.”

“You don’t deserve me.”

“Again.”

“You don’t deserve me!” his mother squealed, real joy burning in her voice.

Later that night, as Henry drove their van down an empty road lit only by stars, the ivory cow, strung on a shoelace and hanging around his neck, thumped against his chest in a rhythm that reminded him of a beating human heart.

“You’re not too cute,” said Linda. She chewed her third and final radish. “But when I first saw you? I imagined us in a cabin, looking out at a dark and frozen lake. In my imagination, I complain about being cold, so you go outside to chop firewood. You accidentally chop through your boot, cutting off a tiny scrap of your own toe, and you storm back inside, wailing like a child, and I wrap your bleeding foot in a towel. We drink bourbon and chat. The sun comes up, and we drive to town. I help you limp from the car and into some greasy spoon for breakfast, and then we go back to the cabin and make love on a bearskin rug and fall asleep, waking the next evening to watch the sun sink into the lake, setting the ice aflame.”

“Thanks,” said Henry. “I think you’re attractive.”

Linda wore a homemade pinafore over a billowing red blouse. She’d stuffed the cuffs of her pajama pants into a pair of fur-lined snow-boots. Her hair was white as a bleached cow skull and was pulled back by a knotted cloth headband and an ornate arrangement of clips. Her vast forehead was heavily pimpled, and her tiny eyes were at the corners of her head, reminding Henry of a catfish and suggesting poor vision, a suggestion reinforced by her struggles with cutlery. Her lips and fingernails were the red of those radishes, and the flesh around her mouth was paler than the rest of her face, as if she’d been in a tanning bed wearing nothing but a surgical mask.

“Have you heard of a person waking up to be overwhelmed by the feeling that an intruder has just left their bedroom?”

“Like a ghost?”

“Like a ghost he says!” she laughed. “Do you believe in ghosts?”

Henry said he did.

“There’s nothing wrong with a fear of ghosts.”

“I said I believe in ghosts,” said Henry. “I didn’t say I’m afraid of them.”

Linda looked down at her plate as if betrayed. In the silence that followed, Henry discreetly observed a mother who sat at a neighboring table with her two small children. “Eat your chicken,” she said to a red-haired boy who wore a red baseball cap with a patch depicting a tortoise holding a helium balloon shaped like a heart. His little sister wore sweatpants and a red T-shirt with a picture of a disembodied smile. “Eat your noodles,” said the mom. “Eat your seafood salad.” A pack of non-menthol Newports. A purse as big as a seeing eye dog. Keys attached to a rabbit’s foot. “Eat your Chicken à la King.” The little girl wore swim goggles around her neck, like a necklace. “Eat your food or I’ll take you home and spank you and if you cry, Santa Claus will hear it and he’ll come to the house to rescue you and I’ll put a fucking bullet between his eyes and there will never be Christmas again.”’

The Country Pride Buffet’s meat-carving station had a sign made to look like crumpled butcher paper. It said “Grandpaw Jackson’s Old Southern Smokehouse.” At first, Henry thought that the woman behind the counter wore many tiny earrings. Upon further inspection, he realized they were small barnacle-like growths climbing up her neck and collecting around her ears.

“That lady you’re with?” she asked. “What’s she calling herself? Barb? Paul? Clementine? Mary? Tiny? Linda?”

Henry said she was calling herself Linda.

“She always comes here with a different man who always looks just like you. Spittin’ image. They sit at that table while he picks at his food, just like you’ve been doing, and then they always leave together lovey-dovey.”

“Sounds like she’s going on dates,” said Henry.

“But what happens to these men she dates?” Henry said he couldn’t guess.

“These men who look just like you,” she continued, “always come back a few days later, but they look twenty years older. They got beards draping down their chests and lines radiating from their eye-sockets. They look like little meteors struck them in the face. They got wide-open bathrobes with their crusty little dicks flopping out, and the breeze from the air conditioning blows the hair off their heads in clumps. And they go from table to table, mumbling, ‘You seen Wilhelmina? Seen Celm? Seen Barb? Seen Linda?’ The manager always finds their corpses in a bathroom stall. God knows how they sneak into the bathroom and die, but they always do.”

She piled ham, beef, and turkey onto Henry’s plate.

Part II: In his pursuit of the blood-red cattle, Heracles travels to Erythia, a place hidden at the Western edge of reality, where sunsets unfurl across the sky like the sails of burning ships. Upon his arrival, the hero slays Geryon’s two-headed guard-hound with one swing of his club.

Sometimes Henry remembered his sixteenth birthday as the night the van broke down, stranding him on an endless, ink-black road that ran alongside what he at first thought to be a cemetery but after some exploration learned was a poorly tended orchard.

Several hundred muddy acres of wind- mutilated trees, their limbs split and sagging, their trunks sizzling with termites and weevils, their roots choked by a thrumming frenzy of emerald ash borers and bollworms. The boozy smell of millions of pounds of fruit left to rot where it fell.

Sometimes, in Henry’s memory, he abandoned his van and explored that orchard. After spending eight years in quarantine, it was exhilarating to take twenty steps in the same direction. Suddenly, clouds covered the moon. Henry was drenched by a curtain of rain.

He sought shelter beneath a tree. His stomach grumbled. He gazed into the branches. His eyes strained to identify the shape of an apple in the dark. He reached up. Two Doberman Pinschers descended upon him.

He collapsed beneath their weight and tried to scream and realized that his mouth was stuffed with half-chewed apple and rain water. He closed his eyes and felt jaws on his limbs. He waited for the flesh to tear, for his blood to gush, for his organs to ignite with pain.

Instead, the dogs licked him with such affectionate gusto that their rough tongues scrubbed the roof of his mouth.

Henry stood. The Dobermans wagged their stumps.

“My hero,” said the tall, red-headed, perfectly dry woman standing five feet away. “I thought those dogs would be the death of me.”

“Really?”

“But if my husband caught you eating his apples, he’d blow your head off your shoulders.”

“For real?”

She folded her arms across her chest in a way that to Henry seemed rehearsed. “What’s your name?”

“Henry Streator.”

“Henry, between these dogs and my husband, barely a day goes by when I’m not scared for my own life.”

“I’m sorry,” said Henry.

“Will you stay here? For a long time? I’ll take care of you, and you’ll protect me, and someday we’ll inherit this place and bring these dying trees back to life.” She took his hand in hers.

Henry tried to answer, but it was too late. The warmth of her thin, heart-shaped hand had already spread from her palm into his, into his wrist, up his arm, through his brain, and into his soul.

Henry’s plate of ham, turkey, and beef landed on their table.

Linda said, “In this castrated point in history when every man in the civilized world is eating organic kale braised in almond milk, when every man is eating gluten-free whole-grain muffins, there’s something sexy about a man who knows his way around a plate of processed meat.”

“What is happening to me?”

Linda reached across the table and cupped her hand over Henry’s. Her palm was swampy, and Henry’s hand tingled; the tingling spread through his wrist, up his arm, into his body, and settled in his heart.

“What is happening to me?” Henry demanded again.

Linda’s face tightened. Her brow furrowed. She inhaled, leaned forward, and exhaled. Henry was awash in the smell of radishes. It was air escaping from a box of old photographs. It was a secret garden pelted by September rain.

“Will you get my family back?”

“Fine.”

“Fine what?”

“I’ll rescue your family.”

Linda stood and walked to where Henry sat. She kissed him, and he kissed her back. He was amazed by how much another person’s tongue could taste like his own.

“Excuse me,” said Henry. He patted the corners of his mouth with a napkin and stood.

Henry’s memory illogically compressed eight years at the orchard into a single September evening spent beneath one of the few thriving trees on the property, his head resting on the lap of the orchard keeper’s wife. In his memory, it was the evening of his twenty-fourth birthday.

“Our love caused life within me,” she said. “This happened eight years ago, but I withheld it because I was concerned you would be displeased.”

“I’m so sorry,” he said. “I am certain that’s impossible.”

“Two red-headed miracles, a boy and girl. On the night they were born they writhed in my hands, smooth and silent as snakes. My husband took them from me. They have now grown and I need your help to get them back. I will nurture them and you will protect them just as you have protected me.”

“When do we do this?”

“As soon as I return from my journey.”

“You’re going somewhere?”

“For the love of our children, you must not leave this spot until I return.”

Henry smothered her hands with kisses. He took the ivory cow from around his neck and offered it as a token of his love, and as a talisman of protection for her journey. She accepted the item without comment, depositing it in a pocket hidden in the lining of her dress.

Part III: Heracles vanquishes the triple-bodied Geryon with a single arrow. He steals the red cattle. However, the herd is unruly, the route back to Greece is obscure, and his mind is muddled by the lies of the gods.

The man behind the counter calling “Far East Favorites!” was seven feet tall. His hands were like stop signs. His knuckles were larger than Henry’s fists. His neck was load-bearing.

“This rangoon is on the house,” said the man. He plopped a rangoon on Henry’s plate.

“It’s all you can eat,” said Henry. “That’s the purpose of the Country Pride Buffet.”

“I know,” said the man. “That was just a joke, but it went over your head, which says nothing about your sense of humor, and everything about the excitement you must feel about the situation. You accepted the job, right?”

“I did. But I need to tell her I changed my mind.”

“Why would you do such a thing?”

“I’m busy enough as it is. Also, your co- worker over at Grandpaw’s Smokehouse said I’ll end up dead.”

The man behind the counter rolled his eyes. “Was she lying?” Henry asked.

“Susan is the most honest person you’ll meet. But here at Far East Favorites we recognize that life isn’t as simple as some would like it to be.”

Henry said sure.

“Your partner Linda? She usually comes here with a date. And her boyfriends always show up a few days later, and they pay for their meal with platinum credit cards, and they sit with their smiling kids and their wives who smell like coconuts and who have big tits, and they raise a toast to Linda, or whatever she’s calling herself. Their eyes are pebbles baking in the sun, and, after they leave, our manager always goes to the bathroom and opens a toilet tank and finds a big ziplock bag containing a cash-stuffed envelope and a little note with instructions to split the money amongst the staff.”

“Honestly?”

“I wouldn’t have my new teeth if it wasn’t for those envelopes.”

The man smiled, revealing a set of ill-fitting, unnaturally white dentures. The bulky artificial teeth gave Henry an impression of profound dishonesty.

When he got back to the table, Linda was hunched over a small mirror, carefully applying whitening strips to her teeth.

“Every time I stand up in this place,” said Henry, “People tell me funny things.”

“That’s another reason why I love the goddamned Country Pride Buffet,” she said. “Everyone who eats at this place is a lunatic. I used to believe that there was some chemical in the food, or some fungus creeping through the HVAC system. But I’ve realized that we’re dealing with a pathogen that has an external origin. I’m speaking in exobiological terms. Some toxicological factor is at large in this world that infects human beings, and those of us with a genetic disposition vulnerable to the infection are driven here. Do you know that my family and I used to eat here every Sunday, after church?”

“I am not a lunatic,” said Henry.

“When you said you wanted to go to college? That was the sanest thing a person could ever say.”

“I’m not going to college.”

“It was botany, if I remember correctly?”

“Or criminal justice.”

“I’m an amateur botanist myself.”

“No shit.”

“And though I’ve limited my efforts to a few small plants in pots, I’ve consulted many volumes on the subject of botany. And I’ve spent many hours on the web. Reading websites and engaging in discussions and debates on botany-themed message boards. Because of my endless studying, botanical terms sometimes float out of my head and into reality. They hover in front of my eyes like billboards that only I can see. The phrase I see now is ‘dead at functional maturity.’ Do you know what that means?”

Henry bit the tip off an egg roll and shrugged.

“The term ‘dead at functional maturity’ refers to a plant that grows until it produces a single generation of seeds. Once it disperses those seeds, it dies. As if willingly. You see?”

“I see.”

“You actually don’t, but you will see, because in a few minutes, I’ll invite you back to my apartment, but we won’t even get out of the parking lot of the goddamned Country Pride Buffet. I’ll straddle you in the passenger seat of my truck and when we finally do end up back at my apartment, I’ll put on old films while we make love again, and we’ll pass out in front of the television while the movie plays. Tomorrow morning, I’ll show you pictures of my family and professional sketches of what they might look like today. When that’s done, I’ll give you a briefcase containing a GPS device programmed with many dozens of exotic locations and maybe a small but incalculably powerful weapon to use only as a last resort, and, after a few months or years, you’ll bring my family back to me.”

“I guess that sounds fine,” said Henry.

“Fine,” she said. “That’s a funny way to put it.”

Henry felt like an ancient seed suspended in the center of a gradually thawing iceberg, destined, on some distant day, to sink to the frigid ocean floor.

Part IV: A fire-breathing giant steals two cows while Heracles sleeps. The giant- thief retreats to a mountain cave and drags an immovable stone over the cave’s mouth. Upon finding the entrance sealed, Heracles rips the peak off the mountain, leaps down into the pitch-black belly of the cave, strangles the giant to death, and retrieves his stolen property.

Henry remembered watching the orchard keeper’s wife leave the clearing to embark on her mysterious journey. He remembered tracking her to the edge of the property, where she climbed into his van, still parked on the side of the road eight years after he’d left it there.

He waited until the darkness erased the shadows. He waited until his limbs grew numb from standing. He waited until he heard the sound of his children from inside the van.

The vehicle’s doors were locked. He scrambled to the top of the van and tore the plastic covering from the sunroof. He peered down inside. There was the orchard keeper’s wife, gazing up at him with scorn and disgust. There were the children—blood-red, eyeless, sharp-fanged, pig-like creatures that huffed like bears.

“Get out of here!” barked the orchard keeper’s wife.

“The children!” stammered Henry.

“You don’t deserve these children!” she laughed. “You don’t deserve me!”

Henry leapt through the small sunroof opening, deep into the pitch-black belly of the van. The children discharged a high-pitched, tortured scream. Henry scooped them into his arms. Their skin was a translucent membrane stretched over the red meat of their bodies. They reminded Henry of peeled oranges, and he couldn’t determine which ends were their heads.

Suddenly, they disgusted him, and he let them fall from his embrace. One of them coiled its body around Henry’s ankle and drove red-hot quills into his skin. Henry bellowed. He stumbled onto the body of the other child; injured, it twitched and fizzed, chattering spasmodically on the floor. He peeled the child off his ankle and it oozed between his fingers. It screamed, and then the other child screamed, and, later that night, as Henry drove alone down nameless roads under a sun-purpled sky, after the pounding in his chest subsided and the musty smell of the children had mostly disappeared, when the orchard and everything that happened there seemed a million miles away he finally realized what their inhuman screams had meant; he understood that, with whatever crude, monstrous organs they had instead of throats, they were trying to say his name.

The mom in nurses’ scrubs gripped her daughter’s wrist and dragged her toward the Country Pride Buffet’s bathrooms. The girl dug her heels into the carpet, one arm whipping through the air in her mother’s grasp, the other clawing at the legs of her chair, looking like a stubborn animal forced to work. Her older brother put his hands over his face and wept.

The mother released the girl’s wrist. The girl curled up on the ground like a dead spider.

“Fine,” said the mom. “But I’ll be goddamned if we drive all the way to grandma’s house and you get out of the car wearing pants full of piss. Understand?”

The girl and her brother nodded. Their cheeks burned bright red.

“And when we get there, there’s going to be no bullshit stories about me leaving last night because one of my good friends needed a favor and then me coming home in the morning to an apartment stinking of stove gas and all the fish dead in the tank and you and your brother hiding in the fucking laundry room. Right?”

“Right,” said all the employees and customers in the Country Pride Buffet.

She stomped into the women’s washroom. Henry apologized to Linda and said goodbye.

“I knew it,” she said. She rested her forehead on the table and began to cry.

Henry gently patted the back of her head. “It’s OK,” he said. “You didn’t want me to work for you.”

“No,” she sniffed.

“You knew I’d never find your family.”

“I knew it.”

“You might have been lying about the whole thing.”

“Maybe,” she cried. “I can’t tell anymore.”

“It’s OK,” said Henry. “It’s the same way for all of us.”

He stood from the table and approached the brother and sister, who were huddled together on the carpet near their table. He gently lifted the girl and boy into his arms. He carried them to the Country Pride Buffet’s parking lot and put them in his van and kidnapped them.

There were no stars that night. The van moved through the darkness like a submarine across the deepest ocean floor. The children pressed their hands against the windows; they breathed against the glass to create pools of fog and then they used their fingertips to draw smiling faces and hearts. Henry pressed the gas and thought about enrolling in college. He thought about getting his old job back at the tree farm, finding a spouse, having children of his own. He followed an on-ramp and got on the highway. The ivory cow hung around his neck. It pressed against his body, leaking its coldness and silence into his chest. The frantic lights of a dozen police cars danced in his rearview mirror. Sirens screamed. The children laughed. And Henry barreled hopelessly down the highway’s only open lane, straight into the heart of the churning, pitch-black, god-sized cloud that had fallen upon that land.

Part V: Finally, Heracles returns to Greece with his precious herd intact.

“…And I should love you the more because I mangled you And because you were no longer beautiful To anyone but me.” – The Love Song of St. Sebastian T.S. Eliot Lining each path, each road stop and roadway we traverse here, wake-robins exhibit folds thick with lashes of redemption. Coarse flint beneath supports our beatific…

Garth Greenwell’s debut novel, What Belongs to You, opens with a four-line sentence containing five separate clauses. The sentences that follow, shockingly, become more complex and esoteric, words—coterminous, ubiquitous, autumnal—littering the first paragraph, sentences rarely shorter than three or four lines.After the first page, I had the distinct feeling that this book was either going to be…

His friends called him Jay, because he worked up with the birds. Jay rode skyscraper skeletons, where New York was flickering itself sullenly into being. A taste of steel lived in Jay’s mouth, scars on his arms, and no room anywhere. His world was girders, lines, oil.“Frosty,” they called him. He didn’t understand what love felt…

Andreas was certain that when it first began, it wasn’t like this.“Andreas, please, a strategy,” Maggie said.“For a game of the lowest chance?”Everything Andreas and Maggie said carried the weight of all the other things they had said and the weight of all they knew about each other and all they knew about the others.“Numbers in…

The red light had lasted so long snow was starting to stick on the hood of David’s car and the aging defrost struggled to keep the windshield clear. He was mentally cursing a motorcyclist who was trying to skip ahead of the line of cars by zipping down the bike lane on the right shoulder.What an…

We were neurophobic and perfect the day that we lost our souls Maybe we weren’t so humanBut If we cry we will rustAnd I was a hand grenadeThat never stopped explodingYou were automatic and as hollow as the “o” in god—“Mechanical Animals,” Marilyn MansonNo, no notice arrived in the mail. No, we did not convene…

Pearl Dagnall doesn’t need somebody to love, and she’d tell you—if she ever talked to people offline—but interfacing is a problem for her. She has a limited tolerance for people in general, which is why she telecommutes. She has zero interestin romance with any of Facebook’s fabulous fifty-eight genders, and that’s the tip of the iceberg…