I could try to bring you back. Your ghost I mean. Like the boy who conjured his father’s ghost in that scary little book Dad used to read us. Since you’re dead, and your memory’s all fucked up, you probably can’t picture it. Dad only pulled it out at night by the campfire. I’m pretty sure the cover said “THE WOMEN” in capital letters, and I know it was small enough to fit in his jacket pocket. There were lots of stories in there, for a skinny book. Each one started the same: “Not every Woman is a Witch, but every Witch is a Woman.”

You never liked to talk about growing up, but according to that book, “Remembering is the trick to Conjuring.” I’ve been blessed and cursed with a good memory, and now I’m going to use it, and the Spirit, whatever that is, to conjure you, Falk, big brother by six minutes, my one and only friend. TALK TO ME.

I’m not conjuring Dad. Never want to see or hear Henry again. Ever. Even if he did spend his life trying to save us. Even if he was right. I blame him for what happened to you, as much as I blame them. Stay away old man!

I bet you’re laughing. I must look pathetic—poking ghosts, tearing up Dad’s office with nothing but candles and kerosene for light. Still not used to life without lights, or a fridge that works, or AC. But I had to shut the power off. I couldn’t take the noise.

I know you were hearing it, months before I did, before Mina even showed up. For you, it was different. More gradual. It came on suddenly for me—wires in the walls buzzing, lights stuttering. Then Dad’s radio went satanic, and for a moment I thought it was Mina, and you two were back from New Mexico. But it was just me. The buzzing got loud. A swarm of buzz saws cutting, splintering. Sixty cycles per second, rippling my eardrums, my bones, my teeth. Chewed off my lips, almost. Christ, it got louder and louder ‘til it blocked out everything.

With no juice coming in, it’s a lot quieter. I hear things I never could before: ants in the backyard, current pulsing in the Markhams’ house down the road, cell tower signal hash. There’s an owl flying between the hickory trees out front. The witches in that book heard heartbeats through walls. They heard apples rotting, milk turning sour. Their eyes were shiny like mirrors, and they saw things invisible—dreams and secrets. They did a lot with mirrors. That’s how they changed shape, turning into owls and wildcats. They changed boys using mirrors too. They raised thunderstorms, made crops die and people sick. They made young men grow old.

Dad was scary when he did the witches’ voices. One night you asked him to stop, said the book was crazy. You made him real mad. He hated “that word.” Must be why he never told us the straight truth. He only spat out little clues, in his drunk, side-of-the-mouth, “you didn’t really hear that” way. Christ, those camping trips—five-hours from Delphi down to Ayahwasi Lake. He’d drive right through, wouldn’t stop to let us pee. One of us pissed our pants once. I want to think it was you, but it was probably me. You were always tougher, braver.

You asked Dad what happened to our mother. “They killed her,” he said. I started crying, but you shouted, “Who are THEY?” He whispered, “Hush. Or they’ll hear you. I’ll tell you when it’s time.” That time came too late. You were off with Mina, and I thought he was just being crazy old Dad, made crazier by a brain tumor.

Falk, I don’t want to believe he was right about them. He was wrong about everything else. Insanely wrong about girls. He must’ve read us that line, “Not every woman is a witch,” a thousand times, but he didn’t see a shiver of difference between “The Women” and just women. He thought all women were evil. Remember back in third grade, you brought Heather Felton over? She wanted to meet Cassius ‘cause she liked that picture of him you drew in art class. He was a real cute puppy. Cassius didn’t like Heather one bit. He barked and snapped, nearly took a chunk of her cheek. Dad hadn’t opened the place in town yet, so he heard her screaming. “You piece of trash!” he stormed. I was scared he was going to break off her little arm when he threw her out. “Don’t come near my boys again!”

Then Dad tore up your drawing, turned your backpack upside down, dumped your crayons everywhere. And he found the photo. Just a small sample print. You’re smiling, like some normal, happy kid. Dad shook it at us, like it was a bag of meth. “No goddamned photographs!” His ears went purple. “Do you want them to find you? Do to you what they did to your mother?” He cupped it in his big hand. Looked like he was going to shred it too, but he couldn’t tear apart your face.

You would’ve been that normal happy kid in the picture, if it wasn’t for Dad. Other kids liked you. Girls liked you a lot. It didn’t matter much for me. Girls thought I was weird, which was is true. Boys didn’t like me. No one but you and Cassius, and Dad, I guess. I want to believe Mina cares about me, and that she cared about you. Then I hear Dad—“Don’t trust her.” I hear that lawyer on the phone saying you’re dead.

When Dad was in the hospital, he said he wished he’d homeschooled us. But he couldn’t look at us all day, every day. We look too much like our mother. That’s why he sent us to Calvary after Heather and the photo. The tour answered his prayers (if Dad ever prayed, which I doubt)—girls in ankle-length skirts, boys in button-downs and khaki trousers. When Headmaster Hasselman said, “We don’t have any computers, not for the students,” I thought Dad was going to hug him.

We barely knew what a computer was, we were so deep in Dad’s bunker, living “the way men are supposed to.” All we knew about the rest of the world came from that portable radio he carried around, droning day and night. He kept it so low it was hard to make out what anybody was saying. Now I understand he wasn’t listening for the news. He was on alert for interference, breaks in the signal.

Unlike you, I wanted to go to Calvary. I thought I might make friends there. That didn’t happen. The teachers said I was “distracted and uncooperative.” Dad said my problem was I spent too much time reading in my room, not enough out in the sunshine. That was why I didn’t grow as tall as you, like we were trees or stalks of corn.

Dad stopped worrying about me after a few months. By then, you were making far more trouble. You were doing so well you stood out. Mrs. Gaither wanted you for the musical. Coach Finley begged you to try out for basketball and track. You pleaded with Dad to let you, you cried. It never mattered. Dad flushed so many permission slips we had to stop using the downstairs toilet. “No teams, no theatricals, no extracurriculars.” Later he added, “No goddamned parties!” That proscription only applied to you. No one invited me anywhere. Even during the summer, kids asked you to barbecues (and Dad said no). After he opened the office in town, you just told them you were too busy. Which was true. If we weren’t in school, we were working on the house—so Dad could show it off—or other people’s houses.

The only time we weren’t covered in sawdust was when we were down at Ayahwasi Lake. During that last trip, I sensed cracks in Dad’s bunker. You were real quiet, wouldn’t laugh at his jokes. I remember he was giving us his “old-man wisdom” by the fire—“Schoolgirls seem nice now, but soon they’ll be grown women. Women want one thing: power over men.”—you kept looking away, rolling your eyes. “There’s no trick they won’t pull to get it,” he went on. “A certain kind will do worse than trick you. She’ll destroy you. And this one won’t only be pretty. She’ll be the girl you’ve been dreaming of.” He drank a deep swig of Gosden’s bourbon and stared hard at you, and then me. “Just don’t look her in the eyes,” he said, still staring. “That’s how she’ll trap you.” The stare was weird. It was like he didn’t know us. Like we were strangers.

Then when we got home, and Dad bought the new truck, your attitude seemed to shift, like 180 degrees. We called it “the new truck,” but it was as old as the one we already had. I asked Dad why we needed another relic in the front yard. “You get something made after 1980, it’ll have all kinds of circuitry and computer systems. That’ll be a problem for you boys. This will last years and years. Anything goes wrong, you fix it yourselves.” He liked watching you work on it—polishing the trim, tapping smooth dents, cleaning the engine block. You put on a good show. Dad was convinced you were ready to live like he wanted. I can see him now, sitting in his wicker chair on the porch with Cassius at his feet. He’s looking over the Sunday paper at you bent under the hood, and a big smile is spreading across his face.

He was real happy. When you asked permission for that after-school shop class, he agreed instantly. Started talking about making us official partners—“Newell *and Sons* Quality Construction.” You were happy too and I knew why. You had a secret. Gabrielle. Remember her? You wouldn’t shut up about her soft skin and her cute nose. You said she called you “Angel Eyes” ‘cause of the gold rings—she called them “halos”—around your irises. My eyes have those same rings. Dad said we got them from our mother. Aside from Dad, no one ever noticed mine.

You and Gabrielle might’ve stayed together if you’d kept it under wraps ‘til we graduated. Dad promised we could make our own choices then. But she wanted to go to the prom. And since Dad was such an easy sell for the carpentry class, you thought he’d changed. You were wrong. Dad blew his stack. He wanted the name of the SLUT you were FUCKING. You told him to forget it. You should’ve known he wouldn’t forget it for one second. He called the school the next day and found out you weren’t in the shop. You’d never even signed up.

He exploded at me. I refused to tell him where you were, and he knocked me to the floor. I tried to yell, warn you when we pulled into the lot behind Crown Food. But my jaw was swollen shut. Dad walked right up to the truck, just as you and Gabrielle were really getting into it. He dragged you out. “You got yourself a big girl!” he shouted. Gabrielle tumbled from the passenger side—blouse open, face crunched, flinging tears. “I didn’t know you liked ‘em big, son. You want a brood of pups with that FAT BITCH? ‘Stead of the life I made for you?”

I think Dad realized he’d shaken the foundations more than he should’ve, but he did not understand he’d opened fissures that could never be sealed. He said he did it to help us. “You boys are men now, legally. I always wanted you to be pure, to be better than me. I’m just a man. You two are different. You might not see what I mean for some years. But if you marry one of these Delphi girls, she’ll see it.” He reached for you. “It’ll break her heart. Break yours too.”

You shook him off. “What the fuck made you hate women so much? Do you wish we were gay? Are you trying to make us gay?”

“Falk, you can’t make a man what he’s not, or a woman, or anybody. That’s where I went wrong. You’re boys, not angels. You can’t help it. You got half my nature in you, and I’m a very human man.”

“I wish you were a dead man,” you said. A loud stab blurted from the radio. I followed Dad’s eyes and saw the dial-light was dark. He hadn’t turned it on yet. Then a scream came through, the kitchen lights blazed, and I know Dad saw what I did when I looked at you—those halos around your irises were shining.

You tried to make up with Gabrielle, but she wouldn’t talk to you. Hisses of “Devil Eyes” followed you down the hall. It wasn’t just the end of your high-school Romeo career, it pretty much ended Dad’s contracting business. Gabrielle’s family were good church people, and they talked to other good folks. Suspicion had surrounded Dad since he first came to Delphi. No one had ever seen him at a Sunday service, or a food drive, or a town meeting. Whatever his reasons were for keeping to himself, for not letting his sons play basketball or socialize, they couldn’t be good ones. Soon, nobody wanted Henry Newell and his creepy boys fixing up their kitchens and bathrooms, building their decks, or repairing their roofs.

We graduated but didn’t go to the ceremony. We didn’t think about college. Dad needed us for the business, even though there was no business. He told us, “You boys got to work with your hands.” Seemed like our only choice. Beyond Delphi and Dad was a blank. We didn’t know anybody. We had limited skills. And sitting around Newell Quality Construction all day beat working fast food or retail.

By fall, the future had shrunk to a slit. Felt like the walls and the ceiling were contracting. Dad started getting headaches that his usual remedy—aspirin and a shot of Gosden’s—couldn’t cure. His hands shook so bad, he’d smash his thumb whenever he tried to hammer a nail. His vision got weird too. “Darkness is closing in,” he’d say. One night, he was parking the truck and hit Cassius. I thanked Christ the old dog lived. And that Dad was scared enough to see an eye doctor.

Which brings us back to Mina.

Dad thought she’d been watching us for years, maybe from the day we were born, waiting for the right time to enter our lives. We were alone in the shop, feet on desks—you reading gearhead motor mags, me reading James M. Cain. We had Dad’s radio on, the college station he hated. When she came in, the signal flipped and shrieked. The lights flickered. Cassius, who’d been nothing more than a heap on the floor since the vet prescribed painkiller treats for his hip fracture, suddenly woke and started barking. I grabbed his collar before he could lunge. She took off her sunglasses and smiled.

At first, I thought her eyes were just brown. Then sunlight coming through the window hit them and they went amber, ringed with gold. I must’ve looked like an idiot, ‘cause I stood and stared while Cassius strained my hold. I was so amazed—the color’s different, but otherwise her eyes are so much like ours, so unlike anybody else’s. It’s the halo at the edge of the iris. It glimmers.

Cassius snarled and drooled. Jesus, he wanted to kill her. “Your dog doesn’t seem to like me,” she said. She was so cool, not a note of fear.

“He’s old, and he’s never liked anyone, other than us,” I said while I dragged him into the storeroom.

You walked up and asked what we could do for her.

“I’m converting the old mill on Minosa Creek, and my contractor has moved on,” she said.

“We know the place. Used to hike up there.”

“Most of the work is done. Only the floors need finishing.”

“We can do that.”

She wanted us to start immediately ‘cause her furniture was coming from New Mexico. You told her we just needed to drive out and have a look—so we could give her an estimate—and we’d be on the job in the morning.

I picked up the keys to the truck. “I’m ready.”

“Lev, I’ll go.” You took the keys from my hand. “You got to meet Dad at the doctor’s.”

When you said that, it felt like you’d slugged me in the gut. I admit, I’d envied you some, wished I was the tall, good-looking one. But I’d never really been jealous before. I’d never wanted the attention you got. I didn’t care about Gabrielle or any of those girls at Calvary. I was fine hooking up with Raymond Chandler and Henry Miller. Mina was different. I wanted her attention. Being with her—that was who I wanted to be.

The doctor said there was nothing wrong with Dad’s eyes. The problem might be in his brain. Back at the shop, Dad didn’t want to talk about it. He was too worried you weren’t there. I told him you were on-site with a client. He knew it was a woman. “I can smell her.”

“I can’t smell anything,” I said.

“There’s a charge in the air . . . like before a storm.”

He asked where the dog was. I’d forgotten about Cassius. I turned the knob to open the storeroom and felt a weight against the door. I pushed and looked in. My throat closed up. Cassius was dead. His fur swept the floor as I shoved him aside. Made me think of a dirty mop. I put him in a garbage bag and laid him in the back of Dad’s truck just as you were driving up. You didn’t notice my eyes were red, or that Dad was slumped in the passenger seat, covering his face. “We got a job!” You held up your hand to slap mine, then lowered it when you finally looked at me and saw the bag. “That Cassius?”

We dug a grave in the backyard, and Dad poured us each a shot of bourbon to say goodbye to our old friend. When we went inside, we didn’t talk about the dog, or Dad’s vision, just our new client. You tried not to show how excited you were, but Dad and I could see it. You beamed as you described how Mina had converted the old mill into a self-sufficient-home-slash-ceramics-studio. She’d knocked out walls, exposed rafters, installed a new high-tech waterwheel, built a wood-fire kiln that doubled as a hearth. We were lucky the former owner had poured concrete on the oak floors, so Mina could hire us to remove it.

Dad didn’t like the job. “Tell that woman she can find someone else.”

You said it was too late. She’d written out a check.

Dad said he’d return it, and it wasn’t up to you.

“It is up to me!” you shouted. “I don’t need your stupid business. If you send back the check, I’ll go right to her, offer my services on my own. Then I’ll get paid, get my own place, and get the fuck away from you!”

The kitchen lights burst. The floorboards heaved under our feet. I caught Dad before he fell. Watching you stomp into the hall, I realized Dad’s bunker had crumbled like rotten fiberboard.

“Lev, tell me what she looks like.” Dad gripped my arm as I walked him to bed.

“Tall. Dark hair.” I lowered him onto the mattress. “Nice clothes.”

“What about her eyes?”

“They’re brown.”

“Just brown?”

I wasn’t going to mention the halos, but that slug you gave me still ached. “At the edges, they’re gold.”

Dad breathed deep. “I know about this woman, and I’m telling you she could be the end.”

“Come on, Dad, you haven’t even seen her.”

“She’ll destroy us.”

“I’m tired. I got to get to sleep.”

“Falk won’t listen, but Lev, you got to hear me. Don’t trust her.”

Before we drove up to the mill, I thought you were stretching the truth. Last I saw, the waterwheel was missing half its spokes. The creek flowed through without a single turn. I never could’ve imagined cypress and steel, churning day and night, metal blades flashing. “Hydroelectricity. Provides all the energy she needs,” you said, like you knew what you were talking about. I asked why we had to rent a generator for the sander to do the floors if the wheel was running. “It’s a non-conventional current, and this place isn’t wired like a regular house.”

The mill’s no regular house, that’s for certain. When I think of the fancy homes we worked on before, they all seem graceless in comparison. I like how the shadow of the floating staircase spreads like fingers across the floor as the sun passes over the skylight. I like the sound of the wheel turning and the water rushing past the rocks.

Neither of us wanted the job to end. After we finished the floors, we helped move in her things. I put away books—pottery sherd studies, illustrations of herbs and roots, grammar-dictionaries for Hopi, Amharic, Occitan—and dusted off old gramophone records—“Danza De La Hoguera,” “Death Sting Me Blues.” I wanted to stay there forever. Study all those weird books. Play every record.

On our last day, she asked us to stay for dinner. While I was out picking mushrooms, peeling belvoirs off a poplar, she came up and touched my shoulder. You’d told me what it was like when you shook her hand, but it was different feeling it myself. Pinprick pulses rushed up my neck, flickered under my skin. I smelled salt and fire. I turned and saw her eyes were shining.

We roasted the mushrooms with brook trout fillets on hickory planks. She served them over rice with a spicy red sauce in those iridescent ceramic bowls she makes. We had wine that night too. We’d never had any before. The clean taste brought out the sweetness of the spices and didn’t burn my throat like Dad’s bourbon. Light quavered in the sconces on the walls, making bright hexagons dance on my arms. My head felt fizzy, but good. We were all laughing. Everything was funny. Even I was, in a good way. Through the skylight, I saw the stars were bright, beautiful. Mina saw it too. “Let’s go outside,” she said.

We walked out the glass doors onto the rock ledge over the creek. The night sky seemed close, a ceiling above the Earth. The blackness was substance, pecked with countless perforations. Like a madman had drilled a billion holes through tar paper to reveal the light beyond.

Mina went up to the edge. “The stars make me think about time.”

“‘Cause they don’t change?” you asked.

“Everything changes. But those lights are very old and very far away, so change happens very slowly.”

“I want my life to change fast,” you said.

She looked at you. “It has. Already.”

The next morning, I stretched out my arms, and it seemed like I could reach farther than ever. Then I clutched at my gut. I felt a sudden churning, an emptiness, like a hole burning inside. A sour taste came up. I knew I was going to be cut out.

The night of the severing started sweet. A chill had set in, and Mina built a hickory fire in the hearth with herbs between the logs. I stretched out on the pillows and watched the flames. There were strange colors . . . blues and pinks. Smoke curled into floating spirals. The wine she said was real old felt heavy on my tongue, like liquid silver. But it didn’t slide thick down my throat. Just heat, brightness, lifting me.

Scratchy old jazz beats cut the smoke curls into sickles. I turned and saw you and Mina standing in front of the antique mirror by the phonograph. Mina asked you what you saw. “I look different,” you said. I saw it too. In the mirror, you seemed older. Not a kid. A man. I heard a clarinet, then a fiddle and a slapping guitar. The music sounded skinny but strong, like spider silk. You two started dancing. I’d never seen you dance. She showed you steps. You spun her around. Laughter and smoke stirred in the air, chords spread like waves. You and Mina twirled, almost swimming, wound in a whirlpool.

I felt pressure building. Lightning burst. Rain pounded hammerheads on the skylight. Anger shot me to the doors. Jealousy threw them open. I fell, sprawling onto the ledge. Around my fingers, rain splintered crystal, faceted, each drop a thousand eyes.

Mina came to me, halos piercing bright. She pulled me up. “Take the storm. Feel it rise.” There was red in her black hair. She took my hand and yours. Your eyes burned like hers, like mine. We rose, a circle of fire, liquid shards shooting off our charged skin.

I smelled the bolt before it split the sky. It hovered, crackling, suspended. The light that fills all living things.

Then you and Mina severed the circle, cut me out, and pulled each other close.

I woke up by the hearth. There was knocking on the front door. I looked out the window and saw Dad. It paralyzed me for a moment. He was the last person I wanted to see, but I figured I’d better let him in. Before I could, Mina came downstairs, looking freshly showered, and opened the door.

Dad had on his senior-style orange sunglasses and was shivering in the bright sun. “I’m here for my boys, Falk and Lev.” He winced as he spoke, like the words were cutting his gums.

Mina looked sorry for him. “Please come in.”

“Henry Newell.” He held out a shaky hand.

She took it. “Mina Wallis.”

Dad flinched and snapped it back. “Would’ve called first. Couldn’t find a number.”

“There’s no phone here.”

I was about to say something when you yelled from the top of the stairs, “What the fuck, Dad? How’d you get here?”

“Cob Markham gave me a ride.”

“Why? It’s Saturday. What do you need us for?” You seemed so relaxed coming down, though you were only wearing a towel around your waist.

“I have to get to Fairfax in an hour and a half,” Dad creaked. “Can’t see well enough to drive myself anymore.”

I’d blanked on his MRI scan. “Sorry. I forgot. I’ll take you.”

While I buttoned my shirt, you went over to the phonograph. “You ever see one of these, Dad?”

Dad stepped closer and squinted as you fingered the silver crank on the side. “Been a long while,” he said. “That’s a Gharinique.”

Mina joined you. “Built to last.”

“You know this music?” You put on the record you’d danced to. “From back when you were young?”

“Long before my time. How old do you think I am?” He glared at Mina. “A hundred?”

On the way to Fairfax, he asked me if you were sleeping with her. I told him to drop it. He wouldn’t. “I felt her power, Lev, I saw it in her eyes . . . She’s one of them!”

“Dad, who are they?”

“The Women!” he shouted. “The women who murdered your mother! If we don’t get him away, she’ll kill him!”

When we got home that afternoon, you were coming downstairs with a duffle bag. “I’m moving to Mina’s,” you said. “I can’t stand it here anymore. Can’t hear myself think.”

Dad collapsed on the couch. “Falk, give me a minute, please.”

“You got one second.”

“I see why you like her. She’s real pretty, sophisticated. Reminds me of your mother some. But, do you ever wonder why she’s here? Why come to Delphi? She doesn’t have family here. Doesn’t go to church—”

“She got sick of living in a desert. Thought she’d try somewhere green.”

“Son, you don’t know many secular young folks with their phones and their hookups, but think of yourself. If you had the money and freedom this young lady does, would you choose to live single in the backwoods of Virginia?”

“I would if I knew I’d meet her.”

“How did she know she’d meet you?”

“She didn’t!”

“Think, Falk! What’s a woman like her doing with a simple boy like you?”

“I’ve thought a lot. I know it doesn’t make sense. Mina could have anyone. I don’t know shit. You sent me to a school that wouldn’t allow computers. You wouldn’t let me play sports. I got no future worth anything, thank you very much. Despite that, for whatever reason, she likes me. We’re happy. And this time YOU CAN’T TAKE IT AWAY!”

A day or two later, the MRI results came back and they weren’t good. The images showed a ghostly corona in the right lobe of Dad’s cerebral cortex. He had a malignant brain tumor. If he wanted to fight, he was looking at multiple surgeries, immunotherapy, radiation, chemo. I didn’t think fighting was worth it. But I couldn’t sway him. He went in for surgery, which did more harm than good. Most of the growth couldn’t be removed without killing him, and in recovery, he contracted an intracranial staph infection. Spent his final weeks shuttling between the ICU and a rehab center that stank of piss.

I saw him every day. Sometimes he was angry, ranting—Mina was “evil to the core,” they had planted the tumor in his head. Other times he was calm, simply happy I was there. Near the end, he’d forget where he was, what year it was. He’d squint and ask, “How’d you get so big?”

You never showed up. It broke his heart. “Where’s Falk?” he kept asking. “Why isn’t he back from school?” I had to lie. “He’ll be here real soon.” The only visitor besides me was the pastor from Calvary, and Dad wouldn’t let him in the room. “Never liked preachers. You boys are what I believe in.”

He just wanted you and me by his side when he left this world. Right before his last seizure, he gripped my hand. “I know I made mistakes. But everything I did, I did to protect you.”

You and I never talked about it. That’s when the walls rose between us. We scattered Dad’s ashes in silence—half over Cassius’s grave in the backyard, the rest in the Shenandoah.

Then we got a surprise. We’d inherited money. Dad was from an old, rich family—the Gosdens of Kentucky (like the bourbon). He’d changed our last name to Newell back when we were infants. On the petition he filed, we saw our mother listed as “Barbara Saylor, Deceased.” Dad had never told us her name. Don’t know why, but from the moment I read it, “Barbara Saylor” didn’t seem genuine.

I went out and bought everything Dad forbade—cell phone, laptop, ultra-high-def TV, game console. I bought a phone for you too, since Mina didn’t have one, and you wanted to “stay in touch.” The old you would’ve really liked all that stuff. We would’ve watched movies and shows together, played games for hours and days. You would’ve helped me figure out dating apps. But while you packed one last load to take to Mina’s, I played Grimoire Assassin alone.

Mina drove over that night in her 1966 Gharinique coupe. (I think you were as hot for that old sportscar as you were for her.) I’d left Dad’s radio by the front door and before she even knocked, it was screaming. “Why’d you bring that piece of junk back from the hospital?” you shouted.

“Might want to hear the news!” I shouted back. The radio had been making little bleeps all morning (every time you walked past), but now sawed up, spiraling shrieks were coming through.

“Turn it off!”

“It is off!” I took it down to the cellar and yanked out the batteries, but it hollered on. So I muted it as best I could—wrapped it in a blanket, shut it deep in the cedar chest.

Back upstairs, the ceiling lamps were strobing. I heard stabs ripping through the TV speakers. You and Mina were in the living room, looking at Grimoire Assassin. The visuals and the sounds were all distorted—bands warped the screen, shredded howls echoed off the walls. Mina turned away. “I don’t like video games.”

Games or Mina. Though I would’ve made the same choice, it still made me mad. Playing with strangers online was fun, but I wanted to play with you. You tried to make up for it some, invited me to the mill a few times. Neither you nor Mina liked coming here. Too much noise. I regret that I kept to myself. I was trying to get my bearings. Everything had changed so much, so fast. I felt like I was falling, even when I was standing still.

I should’ve gone with you to New Mexico when you asked. Maybe I could’ve stopped you from going to the desert. There just didn’t seem to be room for a third in Mina’s coupe. “I got to stay and watch the shop,” I said. We both knew it wasn’t true.

“We’ll talk when Mina and I get back. I really want to talk to you, Lev.”

That was the last thing I heard you say.

It was a little over a month after you left that I woke up in the wrong house. I was here, this place I know better than anywhere, only it was wrong. The walls and the lights throbbed. Silver wrinkles broke when I touched them, then reformed—ripples, arcing around my fingers. Grimoire Assassin was all fucked up, just weird fractal patterns. Then shrieks came up from the cellar. It was Dad’s radio. I checked outside for Mina, for you, and saw nothing. I ran downstairs, pulled the radio from the chest, tore off the back. The batteries were gone, of course. But the thing kept blaring. I took it outside and grabbed the ax. Had to hack it to bits to make it stop.

I didn’t understand what was happening. I needed to talk to you. So I texted, I called. Got nothing ‘cept your voicemail. I started thinking I’d drive out West, surprise you and Mina. But I had no idea where in New Mexico you were going. I tried searching for “Mina Wallis” on the laptop, but the internet died and the keyboard got hot and the screen went black. Never came on again. My cell crashed before I got through to tech support.

It seemed the only way to find Mina, and you, was to break into the mill. So I drove there late at night. Just past the old rail bridge over Minosa Creek, the dashboard lights in the truck flickered out, the engine cut, and the wheels slowed to a stop. I got out and walked up the gravel road in darkness. Hot, heavy air stuck like syrup to my skin. Reminded me how long it’d been since you left. The nights were still cool then.

I grasped the handle to the front door, felt the lock catch and the bolt resist. But I wasn’t going to give up. I had to get in there. I thought of all the doors we’d installed, saw the lock mechanism in my mind. A bright coil whirled inside me, the hair on my arms rose, heat welled up ‘til my brain burned. Then the lock sprung, the bolt shunted back and the door swung open.

Inside, the air was cool. I smelled hickory ash, clay, dried herbs, old books. There were no buzzing wires or shrieking radios, just the soft lull of the creek and the waterwheel. I understood what you and Mina meant about our place being loud. I went over to the wall sconces, and before I could wonder how to turn them on, the filaments flickered up by themselves. Curving letters limned by the light spelled “Gharinique”—same as the phonograph, and the coupe, and I’m guessing, a whole other world of stuff.

Glinting hexagons scaled the walls and rafters as I searched closets, shelves, drawers, her desk. I found tins of tree sap, drawings of scary, spiky plants, but no IDs, address books, or letters. Not a single photograph. Aside from her pottery and some winter clothes, nobody would know who lived there. Just as I figured there was no point in staying any longer and was heading for the door, I heard a voice, whispering.

You don’t have to go.

It sounded like Mina.

This is your home, too.

Then it sounded like you.

I knuckled tears from my eyes as I slipped out. Felt like rising from the cool waters of Ayahwasi Lake into a steaming mosquito cloud. By the time I got back to the truck, any tears had boiled away. I was white-hot angry. How could you abandon me? Disappear for weeks when you knew what I was going to go through?

The truck started right up the moment I turned the key, as if my rage had jolted it back to life. On Route 50, I stomped on the gas. The headlights flared as I sped past 80 mph. Then I pulled into the Winchester police station. I was thinking they could get the New Mexico State Police to put out an APB or something. There were bright lights inside, though it must’ve been 4 a.m. Before I got out, I sensed the current. It was huge, saw-toothed, pulsing. Vomit filled my throat. I knew I couldn’t stand it in there for thirty seconds. And what was I going to tell them? You took off with your girlfriend and wouldn’t call me? I’d have to say I thought you’d been kidnapped, or worse. And they wouldn’t believe me. They’d think I was high and lock me up. I’d be raking my skull under those lights, losing it ‘fore they’d buy a word.

I drove home, went behind the house and shut down the main electric breaker. It was nasty hot without the air-conditioning, but it was much quieter. I slept in my sweat for eight hours. First decent sleep in days. When I got up, I tried using my cell to call you again. It was fried, no use. The landline still worked (I guess old phones don’t need current coming in), though the connection was bad. Your voicemail sounded crackly, like a recording from a hundred years ago. I left message after message. You never called back.

I hate that old land phone now. It’s cursed. If I just look at it, I hear hiss, crunched-up-words. A lawyer calling from Santa Fe regrets to inform me you are deceased. You had a cardiac arrest way out in the desert. Your body was medevacked to a hospital, but you didn’t make it. Though no known substances were found in your blood, an autopsy convinced the coroner that use of stimulants combined with a congenital heart defect caused your death. “Mina Wallis requests your permission to transport the cremains.”

I should’ve told that man his story didn’t make sense. I never saw you take any stimulants. If you did take drugs, why weren’t there traces in your blood? And how the fucking hell could you have been such a good athlete with a defective heart? Coach Finley said you were the best he’d ever seen.

It happened so fast. I heard myself say, “I grant permission,” before I knew what I was doing. If I hadn’t shut down the breaker, and the wires were still buzzing, I would’ve loaded the shotgun and sprayed my brains on the couch. Instead, I mourned the way Dad taught us. I went through the bottle of Gosden’s in the pantry in a day. Then I moved on to the case in the cellar. I slowed down by day four ‘cause it wasn’t helping me feel better. And I got freaked when I took off my shirt and it smelled like Dad had been wearing it. He was drunk a lot, I guess. But after that call from Santa Fe, his ideas about Mina and the Women didn’t seem crazy anymore.

Yesterday, I was sober enough to think. I started thinking about finding that book. Dad never allowed us in his office, so I figured it was the most likely place. When I opened the door, it was like he just left it. An insulation catalog lay open on the desk, next to a sticky shot glass. Not much inside the desk, only dried-up pens and an empty Gosden’s bottle. The filing cabinets had the real hoard. Dad kept our finger paintings, macaroni art, reports, even that third-grade photo of you that made him so mad. The rest was just old invoices and contracts, and porn. By sunset, I was going to give up. It’s hard to search in the dark. Then, in the far corner bottom drawer, under a stack of roofing brochures, I discovered some fascinating material—research papers on old religious sects, like the Shakers and Millennialists, plus a few describing Native American beliefs. All of them written by guess who?

Dad.

In the 1990s, he was Henry Gosden, graduate student of Cultural Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Shocking, right? I got out the storm lamp and some candles and thumbed through a couple papers. I read in this one, “Spirit Transference: Breaking Boundaries Between the Living and the Dead,” that a ghost world exists just beneath our feet.

It gave me the idea to take the whole file drawer out of the cabinet. Underneath, I found a snapshot of a young woman and a theater program. The photo’s scratched up and scorched around the edges. Can’t make out the face very well—her eyes are scratched out—but her hair’s reddish-brown, same as ours. The program is for a performance of “The Women,” a play by Clare Boothe Luce. Dad was the director. Didn’t see a Barbara Saylor in the cast or crew, and the one picture is no help—a black-and-white beauty parlor scene with everybody in helmet-hairdryers. Still, I believe our mother was one of the actors, or worked backstage. That’s how they met.

Back at Calvary, Mrs. Gaither never wanted me for her productions, but I remember the Drama Shelf in her classroom. I picked up a play called HARVEY once. I’d never read it, yet it looked familiar—thin paper cover, title in all caps, just like THE WOMEN. Dad didn’t read us scenes from a play though. There were no stage directions, or talk about hair salons, or much dialogue at all. He must’ve made up those witch stories, and used the play like a prop, to make us believe them more.

I was still searching this morning when I sensed a pressure change. The air smelled like salt and smoke. I looked out the front window and there was Mina, sitting on the porch in Dad’s wicker chair. I wanted to hit her. Crack her pretty skull. But I just opened the door.

“It’s quiet now,” she said, getting up.

“I shut off the power.”

Her fingers brushed my face. “The Spirit grows inside you.” Shocks went through my jaw. “I’m sorry about Falk.” She hugged me. I wanted to pull away, but the light was flowing between us. I needed to feel that.

She set your ashes on the counter in the kitchen and said, “No thanks,” when I offered Gosden’s. I poured a shot for myself. “Tell me what happened,” I said, staring out at Cassius’s grave in the backyard.

“I can’t.”

That’s when I swung.

She caught my fist before I knew I’d thrown it. My knuckles shimmered in her grip. Current raced up my arm, shot through my chest. Freezing, burning . . . I couldn’t move.

Her eyes shone like they did that night on the ledge in the rain. “I can’t tell you because I wasn’t there.” Then the halos dimmed. She let me go.

“How can you do that?” I was shaking.

She took my wrist and pressed. “Do you know why my finger doesn’t go right through your skin?” Sparks popped as she traced the inside of my arm. “It’s energy that separates us. Electrons winking on and off, binding molecules, lighting galaxies. There and not there.”

My blood turned hot fire. Light poured from my eyes.

“This is the Spirit. Everywhere and nowhere.” Her voice broke into harmonies, a song beneath her words. “All creatures have a spark, but in us, she is alive, bright and strong. Too strong for some . . .”

I jerked away. “You want to melt my brain too? Fry my heart? Like Falk?”

“No. I loved him.”

I held my arm. “Then why did you let him die?”

“It was his choice.”

“To do what?”

“To learn who he was! To face his legacy, our legacy, yours. It has been so for millennia, from mothers to daughters—”

“What about sons?”

“Sons are very rare.” She clasped my shoulder. The light curled and pulsed. “Lev, it’s time for you to learn who you are.”

“Don’t you mean what I am? What are we, Mina?”

She let go and stepped back. “I’ll return tomorrow morning. If you want the truth, you’ll come with me. Someone has been waiting to meet you. She’ll answer all your questions.”

I think “someone” is our mother. She’s alive. Maybe Dad lied to protect us, or ‘cause the truth was too strange, too painful. I guess it’s possible he didn’t know. She made him believe she was dead. Was she there in New Mexico when the Spirit cooked your heart? How the fuck am I going to make it, if you’re dust?

WHAT SHOULD I DO, FALK?

Sunshine’s coming in. I’m out of time. I hear Mina’s Gharinique on the main road. Think you hear that engine whirring too. You tuned it ‘til it sang to you.

You’re here. I feel it. No more walls between us.

Go with her. Face what you are. Then find your own way.

So that’s your answer. Risk everything, face the truth. You think, if I do it, and survive, they will let me find my own way to live? Not Dad’s way or theirs? If I die . . . That might be okay. We’ll both be ghosts.

I really wish I could find that book. Those words—“Every Witch is a Woman”—keep winding ‘round my head. I think I understand now why Dad wanted us to believe that. It was hard for him to accept his boys were what we are, and he didn’t want to leave it up to the Women whether we live to become men.

I tell him I’m dating a man.He asks if I’m lonelyand need him to moveacross the country.He reminds me I amhis only son. Himself oneof seven; half his familydied in migration.On a trip to Vietnam, we foundhis sister’s photo in a templeand the monk refused usthe copy, said her spiritwas home. My dadnever says if…

I love my son. No one can tell me otherwise. If I am hard on my boy, it’s only to let him know that I am his Baba. In short, I am not his friend. This is because I only ever want the best for him, and because my son doesn’t know better, it falls upon my broader shoulders to show him the way. I emigrated from Taipei. I went to Florida State in Tallahassee. I learned to appreciate the delights of football. I once worked the night shift at a Dunkin’ Donuts, which is why I know firsthand, that one should always avoid the Bavarian Crème.

I am a food chemist. I work in Amityville, Long Island. Once a year, I’ll attend the company picnic. It’ll usually be held in a park, in the middle of the woods, and during the summer. Think frisbees and baseball under a bright, blinding sunshine. Think short-sleeved shirts and Bermuda shorts, a buffet of hotdogs and burgers. Almost always, there is a company raffle. Everyone in the company participates. It is supposed to be a bonding experience. The prize last year was a car. But I am a reasonable man. What I mean is that I know the raffle’s been rigged so that guys like me in mid-management won’t win. It’ll usually go to someone on the supply line. The raffle gives off the illusion of equal opportunity and something like the undoing of an injustice. But the real winners are those who are at the top.

Still, everyone leaves the picnic feeling good. The point is that I get to be there and that I get to bring my son for all the burgers and potato salad that he can eat. It’s so he can see me at my finest hour—so that he might gain a better sense of all that I’ve done for him, all that I’ve provided. When the time comes to think of his own future, here are the footsteps he might want to follow. Here is the person who he might want to emulate. Perhaps he might thank me, though I wouldn’t need him to. And for me, such things will be winning enough.

And yet, my son tells me that the fathers of his classmates take them to the museum. They attend their music recitals. They test their kids on spelling. In such cases, I have to remind my boy that I put food on the table and a roof over his head. Otherwise, he’d be out in the streets. Otherwise, come the winter, he’d freeze to death. Knowing my son, his chances of survival are next to naught. And the fact that I have to remind him is problematic. For one, he’s developed too much of an appetite for the comforts of life. He already gets piano lessons. He already takes taekwondo. He has a pet hamster. He’s named it Cody.

Furthermore, I have to remind my son that when I come home from work, I do not need to hear him tinkering away at the piano. Or see him out of the corner of my eye practicing his taekwondo movements. I would like to read the Chinese newspaper. I would like to watch the evening news. It’s not like he’s very good anyway, and I am not afraid to tell him so.

“It’s called practice,” my son tries to rationalize to me.

I wave my hand. I remind him that if he doesn’t shut his mouth, I can easily do so for him.

“Is that a threat?”

Okay, my son doesn’t actually say this. Of course, he doesn’t have to. But I imagine that one day, he’ll ask me outright and I’d better have my answer prepared: “Is that a threat? Well, if you want your Baba to show you, I will. After all, I’ve been showing you everything else, haven’t I?”

In Taiwan, I was in the army. Back then, everyone was obligated to do their two years of service. It was a hangover from the Chinese Civil War. I had been sent to the mountains where it was cold and damp. I was made to stay there for months. At night, I could barely sleep. There were dark days that I never thought would end. The point is, such an experience made me a man. I had to train, hard. I had to know what to do in case of any emergency. I put out fake fires with a long hose. I had to go through the motions of saving the injured, of saving lives. My own Baba was a colonel. During the Communist Revolution, he had served on the side of the Nationalists, the Kuomintang under Chiang Kai-shek. It was the side that lost. My mother and father were forced to flee Shanghai on the mainland. We left behind a home, our relatives, so many of our belongings. But that was how we ended up in Taiwan. My mother was already pregnant with me. The year was 1949. It was the year I was born—the year of the ox. There used to be a running joke in the family. I was already in my mother’s belly in China, but I was born in Taiwan. When my Baba told it, no one really laughed. But we understood that it was supposed to be funny.

I myself am the eldest of four ambitious brothers. When we were kids, my brothers looked up to me. I was the first, so I made the mistakes in order so that they could fare better. What I mean is, where I made errors, my brothers only improved. This was why they were able to advance further. It was the sacrifice I made for being the first. Eventually, my brothers thought that they were better than me. And that was their mistake. My own Baba called me “stupid.” He’d call me “stupid” before my brothers at the dinner table. We didn’t say what it was then, but the man was depressed. He knew that he would never see his home again in Shanghai, nor would he ever see his family in Henan. He would never see his own siblings. But my father felt that he was on the right side of history, and in the end, that was what mattered most, for a time. I, however, knew that it was a punishment from the Heavens, and another part of me believed that he deserved it.

And yet, there are instances when I find myself moved by self-reflection. I’ll finally come to understand my own father a bit more. I don’t call my son “stupid” at the dinner table, even though admittedly, there are times when I think that he should hear it. In return, I expect my son to sit there, to eat the food that his mother has so carefully prepared, and to listen to me talk about my day at the lab. I might tell him about my discoveries—or more often than not, what I don’t discover but hope one day that I will. If I’m in a foul mood, I might not speak altogether. Nevertheless, I still require my son’s presence, his utmost attention. I’d rather not allow him to excuse himself. For if he does it once, I know that he’ll think he can do it again, and one never knows what such diversions might lead to. If he goes to his room to watch TV, or to listen to music from his stereo, it will fill me with such a blinding rage, and I know that ultimately such things will only prove to be counterproductive.

But when I watch him eat, it’s almost as if he’s eating from my very hand. At the age of thirteen, he is a growing boy. Still, I know that he will not be taller than me. Not yet.

My son is of a sensitive disposition. It is another problem that I foresee. He likes the art museum in the city. He likes the music of Beethoven. When he is bullied in school, he doesn’t fight back. He’d rather get punched one day and hold out hope that later on he still might be able to form a friendship with his bullies. In short, I know that there will be other lessons that I will have to impart on the boy. Some of these lessons, I will have to wait on. I have to pick my battles.

But I do drive my son to the park by the bay. When we get there, I shove a basketball into his hands. We find a near-empty court. There, I make him shoot two-pointers for an hour or so. One hundred points. Two hundred. I tell him about my brothers. “This is what we used to do back in Taiwan.” “This was how we bonded when we used to bond.” “We loved it. We loved each other too.”

On this day, my son and I go on for another hour. A dreaded dusk descends. I try to ignore the fact that other boys would love the chance to play against their fathers, but not my son. I can see that he is afraid of a little competition. My hunch is that he hates to lose. Only it’s worse. He’s willing to give up before we even end the game. And on this day, my son decides to be difficult. He wants to go home, he says. It’s cold, he says. He looks up at me with his dark eyes, full of daggers, as they say.

It’s okay, I tell him. I can be difficult too.

The next day, my son brings home an additional hamster. I can’t help but take this as one more example of how oblivious my boy has become to all that I’ve done for him. As I’ve already mentioned, he had begged me to get him the first hamster from the basement of Woolworths. And as I have already mentioned, he had named it “Cody.” I had bought the pet for him in a moment of weakness. I thought that having a hamster might teach my son something about responsibility, and even appreciation. In the end, I’m the one who feeds it and cleans its cage. Cody is golden and bright-eyed. It is energetic and bites the bars on the cage. One can even hear the metallic rattle all throughout the night, and more often than not, it keeps me up into the early morning hours.

The new hamster isn’t golden, nor is it bright-eyed. It is actually quite ugly with its messy gray fur and its pink snout like a pig’s. My son explains. It was given to him by a classmate from school, or so he says.

I refuse to shell out the money for another cage. But my son says that it’s okay; he’s already saved up enough for another. It doesn’t matter that I tell him that it’s a waste of money. The next day, he will take the bus to the Petland on Main Street. Stock up on supplies. It isn’t exactly music to my ears. For now, the rodent lives in a shoebox.

At the dinner table, I tell my son about my day at the lab, about the experiment that went nowhere so we have to try again. And how I’m willing to try again and again until I get it right. He holds up a finger and stops me mid-sentence.

“Excuse me,” he says. Before I can oblige, he adds, “I should go check on Teddy.”

“Who’s Teddy?”

Later that night, Teddy escapes from the shoebox. It somehow finds its way to my room, down the hall. Then it is in my bed. Now I wake with a start. My senses clarify. Moments later, I find my fingers dripping with blood. I must have startled the rodent and so it bit me. In retaliation, I fling it across the room. It hits the wall, plops to the floor. But as I am trying to wipe the blood from my fingers, I see the little thing make its uneven way back toward my bed like a winded beggar. I consider killing it right then and there. In the army, we used to kill rats. We used to shoot birds for target practice. Still, I think to bring the hamster back to my son’s room.

The commotion wakes him. I see my son through the darkness as he rubs his eyes. At first, he’s too groggy to understand, no matter how much I try to tell him. But when he sees me with the hamster, pressed facedown against the floor, he gets the message. Then I watch my son cry.

“No, don’t do it,” he whimpers. “Please, Baba, don’t.”

Now I am no monster. But the fact that my son thinks me capable of such an act only upsets me further, and I am already upset. So I say to him, “Calm down.” I feel the thing squirm beneath me. “It’s alive and well.”

And yet, my son cannot stop his tears. I can hear him plead and plead, but for what? I’m the one who’s still bleeding. I’m the one who’s still in pain. But does my son care?

I leave the hamster be. A bit stunned, it doesn’t go very far. No doubt my blood is still on its teeth.

And then I hear my son say it, “I hate you.” Somehow his voice is even higher than ever. “I really hate you,” he says again.

“Don’t be stupid, boy. Go back to sleep.” Outside the window, I can just make out the beginnings of a twilight.

“No, actually,” my son then says. “You’re the stupid one.”

At the door, I pause. “Oh, really?”

In the morning, the neighbors ring the bell. They come with concerned faces. They want to know what happened. “Is everything okay?” one neighbor asks. She is a woman in her mid-sixties. Her name is Minnie. Indeed, she’s been our neighbor for close to ten years, and she’s never once come to the house. Now she’s shaking her head at me.

I smile the best I can. It’s the smile that I reserve for white people. “Of course. Everything’s okay. Nothing to worry about.”

“But I heard yelling last night. I heard crying.” Then, “I was about to call the police.”

“Everything’s all right. Don’t you worry.” I want to add that she should mind her own business. But instead, I wave. I nod. I smile some more. I smile harder.

Then I close the door on Minnie. I look out the window. She is a full-figured woman in a pink muumuu and slippers. I watch as she makes her way up her driveway and then back inside her house and through the side door. I take in the quietude around me. I realize that I don’t know where my son is. But I know he’s gone out. For once, he had been up before me. I don’t think he slept a wink.

It doesn’t matter if my boy doesn’t speak to me for a week. I will not call after him. He will have to learn that I can hold my breath for just as long as he can, even longer. He’s mistaken if he thinks he knows me at all. I can hold it until it hurts, until I’m black and blue.

Then, of course, there is the trip to New Orleans. In fact, I’ve not been to the city since my days at Florida State. I had once gone by myself, as a little getaway. It was a big deal for me, as I’m not one to take trips. But my son and I are there for the Chemistry Food Expo at the convention center. We sample the food at the different booths. We try tuna fish ice cream and pigeon stir fry and dragon fruit cake. It is crowded. People are making connections left and right, exchanging business cards. I pass out a few myself and collect handfuls. In the evenings, we dine at restaurants that we normally wouldn’t have the chance to go to. I’m no fan of eating out. Too much oil, and not to mention, too expensive. But here, we will have no other choice. I don’t even know how we can eat anymore after a day of sampling food at the Expo, but we do. Oysters, muffulettas, gumbo, beignets for dessert and the chicory flavored café au lait at Café du Monde. I like beans and rice because it reminds me of the food from Taiwan. But my favorite is the crawfish because it also feels most like I’m getting my money’s worth when I eat it, and I swear, it only enhances the flavor. As a food chemist, I can say that there is no chemical formula that can do it any better.

The next afternoon, I go to the Food Expo myself. I have to say that it isn’t the same without my son. Still, I try some samples. Still, I dole out business cards and collect even more. But when I return to the hotel, I find a bag of crawfish sitting on the air conditioner. Our room doesn’t have a refrigerator. I know that my son had had to walk from our hotel to the French Quarter in order to get it from the fish market. He might even have had to ride the streetcar. My heart swells with pride. “My boy,” I say. After a day of sampling food, I shouldn’t be hungry. But I devour the bag. My son doesn’t eat any of the crawfish. He doesn’t want to eat something with eyes, he says. He doesn’t want to eat something with so many legs. But it doesn’t bother me, not in the least.

It’s the first trip that we’ve taken together. And we actually talk. I get to see another side of the boy. He doesn’t say a lot to me, but it’s in his actions. Like the crawfish. Like our evening walks through the French Quarter after the Food Expo. He likes it. I like it, too. I think that this is what it can be. In fact, this is what it should be.

My son’s favorite street is Royal Street. He likes to look at the paintings and the antiques in the shop windows, and the crystal chandeliers and hand-carved wood furniture and silverware. My favorite street is Bourbon Street. I like the bright lights and the vividness of it all, a feast for the senses. Everyone seems happy. But also, I like to walk along the riverfront and gaze upon the Mississippi River and see the steamboats and listen to the jazz music that seems to flow from them and carry over the water in the still of the night. It’s there that I get to tell my son about how I couldn’t compete with my brothers in Taiwan. Not at school. Not even in the army. Eventually, they were even able to outplay me in basketball. Instead of food chemistry, they all went into computer programming. It was the 1990s. It was the rise before the fall. For a time, my brothers lived it up. Houses in the suburbs. Fancy cars. A Gateway 2000 computer in practically every room. They already had the advantage of confidence, which counted for a lot. And yet, like Icarus, they flew too close to the sun. I only know of Icarus from my studies in high school. This was back in Taipei. My teacher then, Lim Tai Tai, had had a passion for Greek mythology. And because we were in Taiwan and not the mainland where the Cultural Revolution raged, we could read such things like The Odyssey. The point is, there is always more to the story.

“That was how they lost their fortunes,” I add. “I’m not saying I’m happy about it. I’m saying that they wanted too much. The Chinese word for it is ‘tan xin.’ It means ‘greedy heart.’ They thought they could be like white people. So you see? Greedy heart.” Then I say, “So who is the stupid one now?”

My son doesn’t like the hotel we are staying at. The bed is too hard, he says. The TV doesn’t work. So we move a little further down the street to another hotel. We check in. The bellboy takes our bags. The room is far better than I expect and almost worth the price. There is a living area with a couch. There is a bathtub. The TV has HBO.

The next afternoon, I decide to leave the expo early. Enough free samples, enough business cards. My son and I visit a swamp in the bayou. We buy tickets for the tour. On it, the guide tells us about his family. He has two daughters. He even passes around a photo album. “This is my old man,” he says. He points to a photograph of a wrinkled man in a red cap and wearing jeans, smoking a long pipe. Then he takes us to see the alligators. He feeds them whole chickens, and the gators devour the raw meat. The guide gives my son one of the baby alligators to hold. At first, I think that my son will be too afraid. But he isn’t. Outside the boat, the air is muggy. There is not a single cloud in the blue sky. After the tour, I leave the guide a twenty, even though I know he’s been angling the whole time for tips.

Later still, my son and I are back in the city. There is the jostling of tourists. We push our way through to see a brass band play. We are on Frenchmen Street. There is something in the air, something like cinnamon. We’re drawn to an outdoor market. At a stand, a woman sells us homemade soaps. They smell of jasmine. I end up buying two, which I already know I’ll never use.

Okay, none of this has actually happened. Not the swamp tour, nor the Food Expo. Not the splurge on the jasmine soaps. At least, not yet. But I can already see it all in my mind’s eye as if it’s yesterday. I know that it is only a matter of time. And there’s nothing wrong with having high hopes.

The warmest of evenings, a sky filled with stars. The sun-filled days that almost never end. Light so bright that it sparkles over the Mississippi River.

At this year’s company picnic, it rains like hell. It is the middle of July. We all have to crowd under several tents in order to hide from the downpour. It’s a pain. There are barely any seats left at the long wooden tables. We’re packed like what some might say are sardines. Despite all this, the festivities are in full swing. Children can be heard laughing around us. There is music and even dancing. For a moment I think of how it says something about the power of the human spirit—its unrelenting ability to persevere. Once again, there is the lottery. The prize this time is an all-expenses-paid trip to Tahiti at a five-star resort.

As expected, I lose.

But I am here with my son. We are in line for the buffet. When we get to the trays of food, I grab a paper plate. Have a burger, I urge. Have a hotdog. “Don’t have just one, have two. Have three.”

It’s then that my son tells me the news: he’s now a vegetarian. I can’t help but scoff.

When we find a seat at the corner of a table, I tell him that being a vegetarian is nothing short of wasteful. I tell him to think of all the people who are starving around the world. I tell him that when I was growing up in Taiwan, my brothers and I didn’t get a chance to pick and choose what we wanted to eat. There were always shortages, not to mention inflation, which made it all the more difficult to get what was already not enough.

“Baba, why do you hate me?” my son then says.

“What do you mean? I don’t hate you.”

“Then how come you never say that you love me?”

“Why do I have to say it?”

“I guess you don’t.”

I see my boss. I wave to him. He waves back. I see several of my colleagues in mid-management. I say hello to them too. I shake their hands. I introduce them to my son. My son says hello. Me and the rest of mid-management talk of how we still have to get that beer and watch football. We’ve been saying it for years now, but I still like to keep the door open, just in case. After all, I am one of the few Chinese people here, and among all the faces that aren’t like mine, it somehow feels like an accomplishment. My son is having his potato salad. He’s having coleslaw. I am on my fourth burger, and I am already thinking of getting another.

I get my fifth burger. When I return to the table, I say to my son, “Eat something more, I’m begging you, please.”

“I can’t.”

I then point to all the food on display, cakes and strudels too. I know most of it will soon be thrown away, which is a shame. “Literally everything you could ever want to eat at your fingertips, and all you can say is no.”

“Well, what else can I say? I’m full.”

“What about dessert?”

“Dessert? No more dessert.”

And then I know what to say. In fact, I’ve prepared for it. “New Orleans.”

“New Orleans?” my son reiterates.

I tell him about the Chemistry Food Expo later that summer. I tell him that I am willing to splurge on the decent hotel. I tell him about the French Quarter and the swamp tour. A stroll along the Mississippi River. I tell him about the first time I was there as a student at Florida State.

But he shakes his head. “No way.”

“What do you mean no way?”

“I can’t go with you to New Orleans.”

“And why not?”

“Because I’m not going to have any fun.”

“But it’s not about having fun. It’s about spending time with your Baba.” When my son is quiet, I feel the need to add, “Do you think that I ever needed your grandfather to say that he loved me? No, and do you know why? Because I listened to him. Because I read between the lines. Because he was a colonel during World War II. Because he had served under Chiang Kai-shek, and therefore he had to leave everything behind in order to save our lives. Because you wouldn’t even be here if it weren’t for him. Because he could barely provide enough milk and eggs for me and my brothers. But still, we were able to survive. We were able to make something out of nothing and more importantly, make something of ourselves. So don’t speak to me of love, because you don’t even know the half of it.”

“I’m still not going to New Orleans.”

“You’re going and that’s final.” Then I say, “Because I’ve already bought the plane tickets.”

My son looks up, flabbergasted. He knows me well enough to know that there’s no chance that I’ll make the effort for a refund. In short, what’s done is done.

“Well? What do you say? A ‘thank you’ would be nice for a change.” And then, “Don’t make me make you go.”

“Is that a threat?”

“Yes. It is.”

At first, I think that my son is speechless, too much emotion, too much to wrap his head around. I sit back. I wipe my mouth with a paper napkin. I brace myself for possible tears. Then he says, “I know why none of your brothers talk to you anymore.”

My son and I don’t talk on the ride home. I pretend not to mind. Outside, I present a cool and calm exterior. Inside, I fume with a rage and angst that doesn’t seem to dilute itself in the solution of time and space. I play music in the car, turn up the oldies station. I look out the window. On the highway, I speed by other cars as if it’s a race—and I’m the one who’s winning. It is no longer raining, though the sky is still overcast. There is still a pervasive sense of gloom.

We don’t go home yet. By this time, my son has fallen asleep. But when he wakes, he looks out the window and he says to me, “What are we doing here?”

“Get out of the car,” I reply. In the trunk, I get out the basketball. I lead him to the court. There are puddles of rainwater everywhere; neither of us are dressed properly in polos and khaki pants, but I don’t care. I say to him, “You’re going to shoot two-pointers until you reach a thousand.”

I shove the basketball in his hands. “Start counting,” I say.

He dribbles. He begins to shoot. I watch him miss, again and again.

By the time we get home, it is already late. I can see that my son is exhausted. But I am too. He says that it’s his arms and legs; they hurt. He says that his head hurts. I tell him good. I tell him it’s how one builds stamina, and not to mention muscle, and not to mention character, and not to mention . . .

Before I can even finish, my son manages to stomp up the stairs. Then I hear him slam the door to his room. I think of how it isn’t the first time that he’s done this. And then I think once again how one has to pick their battles, and this is another that I’ll have to keep in mind for later. Only I hear the door to his room open. And then I hear him make his way across the hall. He can’t even obscure the tiptoeing. When he’s in the bathroom, he closes the door. I hear it lock. I wait fifteen minutes. When it’s half an hour, I knock on the door. “What’s going on in there?”

I grow impatient. I then say that I need to use the bathroom, and if this is some attempt at revenge, I’m not afraid to take apart the door.

“Well?” I say.

When the door unlocks, I open it. I see my son. He is on the floor. Beside him, the tiny body—golden brown, Cody. The hamster is laying on its back over the carpet, paws against its belly. There are bits of green bedding clinging to its fur.

“Not that you care,” my son says. “But he’s dying.”

I watch my son. He looks gutted. He looks absolutely miserable.

“Move aside,” I say as I kick off my slippers.

“What are you doing! No freakin’ way!”

And it’s then that I feel it, smack right across the face. In fact, my son hits me so hard, he knocks off my glasses.

“What the hell are you doing?” I say. “I’m trying to help. Don’t be stupid.”

I rub my cheek, pick up my glasses off the floor. I actually feel pain. I know that I’ll need an ice pack later on. I can’t help but be surprised by the boy though. Maybe he’s like his Baba after all—stronger than he looks. Maybe there’s some hope for him yet. And maybe by the time this bruise heals, my son will have a better sense of what it means to be like his Baba. He’s standing there before me, fists raised as if he’s about to do it again. This time, I move gingerly towards him, my palms, open. It’s not quite surrender, but it is a compromise. “Let me see what I can do, okay?”

As I watch my son relent, I try to tap back into my army training from Taiwan. I kneel before the hamster. Its eyes are closed. Its little teeth, protruding from its mouth. Its breaths are deep, and they are slow in between. I use my index finger, touch its stomach. I try to feel its little heartbeat. Then I try something that resembles CPR. Behind me, I can hear my son saying, “please, please, please,” to no one in particular. And then I hear him actually praying. I wonder where he even learned how to pray like that.

In an effort to revive Cody, I pet its body a little more. I feel its fur, still soft, still warm. Only none of what I do seems to work. And soon enough, the inevitable becomes the inevitable.

“Is there anything else that you can do?” I hear my son say. His voice, high. We wait for the miracle that doesn’t come. I watch the thing take its last bit of breath, and see its life leave the small body like an evaporation of the spirit. Then I shake my head. I don’t know what else to say. Neither of us do. For a while, we can only stare at the body. Eventually, my son picks it up. Now it looks like a rag doll, limp, lifeless. Still, he cradles the creature in his arm as if it’s a newborn baby.

I can’t bear to watch though. I know that I’ve disappointed the boy, failed him again somehow. In the years after, it’ll be another thing that he’ll come to hold against me. I find myself saying, “Tomorrow we go to Woolworths. I’ll buy you another one. We can buy two. We can even buy three. We’ll buy them young so they can live the longest.”

“It doesn’t work like that,” my son says. I see him wipe the tears from his face with the back of one hand. “It’s all right, okay? You did the best that you could.”

I shake my head. “Look son, we both did.”

Taiwan, dawn in Taipei. We are already at the park, on the basketball court. The court is empty; it’s as if we have the entire place to ourselves. I am there with my three brothers. We dribble the ball, pass it between us, back and forth. One at a time, we take shots at the hoop, play for what feels like hours. I can hear the scuff of our sneakers, the panting of our breaths. Naturally, I score more points than the three of my brothers combined. It’s a single-handed feat. They are amazed. I think that I can luxuriate a little longer in such victories. But I don’t. Instead, I cave, I fold. One by one, I teach each brother my trick. I show them how to shoot at the backboard so that the ball bounces into the net. I watch as my brothers try it. They each give it their best shot. They try until they get it perfect. I can’t help but think that we will be the greatest team ever, undefeatable, and that it can’t get any better than this.

Only it does. Because there, at the fence, I spot the familiar tall and dark figure. We all see it—our Baba. He’s come to watch us. He’s come to spend some time. It’s like our hopes being heard and felt all at once. How long has the man been standing there? It doesn’t matter. We show off what we can do. We shoot hard. We dribble fast. We run faster.

All of us do so with the hope that our Baba will join us for just one game. But of course, he doesn’t.

From short fiction to long form, Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s work wins awards, bends genres, and subverts expectations. She is the bestselling author of the novels Mexican Gothic, Gods of Jade and Shadow, Certain Dark Things, Untamed Shore, and several other books. She has also edited multiple anthologies, including the World Fantasy Award-winning She Walks in Shadows (a.k.a. Cthulhu’s Daughters).

She began writing short stories to feed her family and now her latest novel has been optioned to appear as a limited series for Hulu. For most writers, these awards and notoriety would be reason enough to slow down and enjoy—but not Silvia Moreno-Garcia. She has new novels slated for release this year and next. We at F(r)iction are elated to bring you an excerpt from her novel, Velvet Was the Night, due out later this year.

An Interview with Silvia Moreno-Garcia

by Dani Hedlund

“It is well established that the Hawks are an officially financed, organized, trained and armed repressive group, the main purpose of which since its founding in September 1968 has been the control of leftist and anti-government students.”

—USA Department of State, confidential telegram, June 1971

June 10, 1971
Chapter 1

He didn’t like beating people.

El Elvis realized this was ironic considering his line of work. Imagine that: a thug who wanted to hold his punches. Then again, life is full of such ironies. Consider Richie Valens, who was afraid of flying and died the first time he set foot on an airplane. Damn, shame that and the other dudes who died, Buddy Holly and “The Big Bopper” Richardson; they weren’t half-bad either. Or, there was that playwright Aeschylus. He was afraid of being killed inside his house and then he steps outside and wham, an eagle tosses a turtle at him, cracking his head open. Murdered, right there in the most stupid way possible.

Often life doesn’t make sense and if Elvis had a motto it was that: life’s a mess. That’s probably why he loved music and factoids. They helped him construct a more organized world. When he wasn’t listening to his records, he was pouring over the dictionary, trying to memorize a new word, or plowing through one of those almanacs full of stats.

No, sir. Elvis wasn’t like some of the perverts he worked with, who got excited smashing a dude’s kidneys. He would have been happy solving crosswords and sipping coffee like their boss, El Mago, and maybe one day he would be an accomplished man of that sort but for now there was work to be done and this time Elvis was actually eager to beat a few motherfuckers up.

He hadn’t developed a sudden taste for blood and cracking bones, no, but El Güero had been at him again.

El Güero was a policeman before he joined up with Elvis’s group and that made him cocky, made him want to throw his weight around. In practice, being a poli meant shit because El Mago was the egalitarian sort, who didn’t care where his recruits came from—ex-cops, ex-military, porros, and juvenile delinquents were welcome as long as they were young and worked right. But the thing was El Güero was twenty-five and he was getting long in the tooth, and that was making him anxious. Soon enough he’d have to move on.

The chief requirement of a Hawk was he needed to look like a student so he could inform on the activities of the annoying reds infesting the universities—Trotskos, Maoists, moscovites, there were so many flavors of dissidents, Elvis could barely keep track of all their names and organizations—and also, if necessary, fuck up a few of them. Sure, there were important fossils, like El Fish, who was twenty-seven. But El Fish had been in one political shenanigan or another since he was a wee first-year Chemistry student; he was as professional as porros got. El Güero was twenty-five and he hadn’t achieved nearly as much and he was anxious. Elvis had just turned twenty-one and El Güero felt the weight of his age and eyed the younger man with distrust, suspecting El Mago was going to pick El Elvis for a plum position.

Lately, El Güero had been making snide remarks about how Elvis was a marshmallow, how he never went on any of the heavy assignments, and instead he was picking locks and taking pictures. Elvis did what El Mago asked and if El Mago wanted him to pick the locks and snap photos, who was Elvis to protest? But that didn’t sway El Güero, who had taken to impugning Elvis’s masculinity in veiled and irritating ways.

“A man who spends so much time running a comb through his hair isn’t a man at all,” El Güero would say. “The real Elvis Presley is a hip-shaking girlie-man.”

“What you getting at?” Elvis asked and El Güero smiled. “What you saying ’bout me now?”

“Didn’t mean you, of course.”

“Who’d you mean, then?”

“Presley, like I said. The fucking weirdo you like so much.”

“Presley’s the King. Ain’t nothin’ wrong in liking him.”

“Yankee garbage,” El Güero said smugly.

And then, when it wasn’t that, El Güero decided to use an assortment of nicknames to refer to Elvis, none of which were his code name. He had a fondness for calling him La Cucaracha, but also Tribilín, on account of his teeth.

In short, Elvis was in dire need of asserting himself, of showing his teammates that he wasn’t no fucking marshmallow. He wanted to get dirty, to put all those fighting techniques El Mago made them learn to good use, to show he was as capable as any of the other guys, especially as capable as El Güero who looked like a fucking extra in a Nazi movie and Elvis had no doubts that his dear papa had been saying “heil” real merrily until he boarded a boat and moved his stupid family to Mexico. Yeah, El Güero looked like a Nazi and not any Nazi but a fucking gigantic, beefy motherfucking Nazi and that’s probably why he was so pissed off, because when you look like blond Frankenstein, it’s not that easy to blend in with no one and it’s much better to be a shorter, slimmer little dark-haired fucker like Elvis. That’s why El Mago kept El Güero for kidney-smashing and he left the lock picking, the infiltrating, the tailing, to Elvis or El Gazpacho.

El Gazpacho was a guy who’d come from Spain when he was six and still spoke with a little bit of an accent, and it goes to show that you can be all European and pretty much fine because that dude was as nice as could be, while El Güero was a sadist and a bully with an inferiority complex a mile wide.

Fucking son of an Irma Grese and a Heinrich Himmler! Fucker.

But facts were facts and Elvis, only two years with this group, knew that as the most junior of the lot he had to assert himself somehow or risk being sidelined. One thing was clear: there was no fucking way he was headed back to Tepito.

Therefore, it’s no surprise that Elvis was a bit nervous. They’d gone over the plan and the instructions were clear: his little unit was to focus on snatching cameras from journalists who would be covering the demonstration. Elvis wasn’t sure how many Hawks would be coming in and he wasn’t quite sure what the other units would be doing and really it wasn’t like he was supposed to ask questions, but he figured this was a big deal.

Students were heading towards El Monumento a la Revolución, chanting slogans and holding up signs. From the apartment where Elvis and his group were sitting, they could see them streaming towards them. It was a holy day, the feast of Corpus Christi, and he wondered if he shouldn’t go get communion after his work was over. He was a lapsed Catholic, but sometimes he had bouts of piousness.

Elvis smoked a cigarette and checked his watch. It was still early, not even five o’clock. He went over the word of the day. He did that to keep his mind sharp. They’d kicked him out of school when he was thirteen, but Elvis hadn’t lost his appreciation for certain types of learning, his finger sliding down the pages of the Illustrated Larousse.

The word of the day was “gladius.” He’d picked it because it was fitting. After all, the Hawks were organized in groups of one hundred and they called the leaders of those groups “the centurions.” But there were smaller units. More specialized subgroups. Elvis belonged to one of those; a little goon squad of a dozen men headed by El Mago, further subdivided into three smaller groups with four men each.

Gladius, then. A little sword. Elvis wished he had a sword. Guns seemed less impressive now, even if he’d felt like a cowboy back when he first held one. He tried to picture himself as one of those samurais in the movies, swinging their katanas. Now wasn’t that something!

Elvis hadn’t known anything about katanas until he joined the Hawks and met El Gazpacho. El Gazpacho was all over the Japanese stuff. He introduced Elvis to Zatoichi, a superfighter who looked like a harmless blind man but who could defeat dozens of enemies with his expert moves. Elvis thought maybe he was a bit like Zatoichi because he wasn’t quite what he appeared to be and also because Zatoichi had spent some time hanging out with the yakuza, who were these crazy dangerous Japanese criminals.

Gladius. Elvis mouthed the word.

“What’re you learning today?” El Gazpacho asked. He had his binoculars around his neck and he was wedged by an open window and he didn’t look nervous at all.

“Roman shit. Hey, you know any decent flicks with Romans?”

“Spartacus is pretty okay. The director filmed 2001: A Space Odyssey. It’s cool, takes place aboard a spaceship. Also sprach Zarathustra.”

Elvis had no idea what El Gazpacho had said, but he nodded and held out his cigarette. El Gazpacho grinned and took a drag before returning it to him. El Gazpacho grabbed his binoculars and looked out the window, then he checked his watch.

The students were singing the Mexican anthem and The Antelope was mocking them by singing it with them. In a corner, El Güero looked bored as he cleaned his teeth with a toothpick. The others—members of their sister unit, another little group of four—looked tense. Tito Farolito in particular had resorted to telling bad jokes to lighten up because the word was it was ten thousand protesters and that was no small amount. Ten thousand is the kind of number that makes a man think twice about this whole line of work, even if he’s drawing one hundred pesos a day and twice as much if he’s with El Mago. Again, Elvis wondered how many Hawks would be at the demonstration.

The Hawks began to stream into the rally, carrying signs with the face of Che Guevara plastered on them and chanting slogans like “Freedom for the political prisoners!” It was a ruse, a way to allow them to get close to the protesters.

It worked.

Just when the students were walking in front of The Cosmos movie theater, there came the first shots. It was time to rock and roll. Elvis put out his cigarette. His unit hurried down the stairs and exited the apartment building.

Some of the Hawks carried kendo sticks, others shot into the air, hoping to scare the students that way, but Elvis used his fists. El Mago had been clear about the basics: grab any journalists, take their cameras, rough them up if they got stubborn. People with cameras and journalists only. They weren’t to waste their time and energy beating any random nobody who didn’t have no film with him. No killing, either, though they could rough ’em up nicely.

Elvis had to give it to the protesters because in the beginning, when the fighting started, they weren’t doing half bad, but then the shooting was no longer bullets in the air and the students began to panic, began to lose it, and the Hawks were prepared, streaming in from different sides.

“It’s blanks!” a young man yelled. “It’s not real bullets, it’s just blanks. Don’t run away, comrades!”

Elvis shook his head, wondering what kind of stupid dumbfuck you had to be to think those were blanks. Did they assume this was an episode of Bonanza? That a sheriff with a tin star pinned to his vest was going to ride in before commercials and it would be fine?

Others were clearly not as optimistic as that guy urging everyone to stay put. Doors and windows were slamming closed along the avenue and the nearby streets, and shopkeepers pulled down their rolling steel shutters.

Meanwhile, the granaderos and the cops were sitting pretty. There were plenty of men with thick anti-bullet vests and heavy helmets on their heads and shields in their hands, but they were forming a sort of perimeter around the area and none of them intervened in one way or the other.

Elvis grabbed a journalist who had an ID clipped to his vest and when the journalist squirmed and tried to hold on to his camera, Elvis told him if he didn’t let go he was going to break his teeth and the journalist relented. He could see El Güero wasn’t being so polite. El Güero had another photographer on the ground and he was kicking him in the ribs.

Tough shit, Elvis thought, and he exposed the film of the camera he’d grabbed and then tossed the camera away.

People with cameras were easy to spot, but El Mago had also told them to give all journalists in general a scare, not only the photographers—’cause all journalists could use a lesson about who was boss, these days—and it was a bit harder to figure out who the print and radio journalists were. But The Antelope knew all their faces and names and he pointed them out when he saw them; that was his role. The other thing to keep in mind was that they couldn’t let themselves be photographed, so Elvis spent half his time trying to spot cameras, trying to watch out for a flash, lest some eager little fucker get a good picture of him.

Nevertheless, it was all going pretty much as expected until the sound of a machine gun blasted the air and Elvis turned to look around.

What the fuck? Bullets were one thing, but were the Hawks now shooting with machine guns? Was it even their own people? Maybe a clever student had brought firepower. Elvis raised his head and looked at the rooftops, at the apartment buildings, trying to figure out where the hail of bullets was coming from. It was hard to tell, with all the people running to and fro, and the screaming, and someone on a loudspeaker saying that people should retire to their homes. Retire to your homes, now!

The ambulances were coming, he could hear them wailing, heading down Amado Nervo. They were pressing forward and the machine gun had ceased, but bullets were still flying and Elvis hoped no trigger-happy idiot hit the wrong target. All the Hawks had their hair cut short and they wore white shirts and sneakers to help identify them, but Elvis’s group also sported denim jackets and red bandanas because they were part of one of the elite teams; because this was the dress code for El Mago’s boys.

“Grab that son of a bitch,” El Gazpacho said, pointing to a dude who held a tape recorder in his hands.

“Got it,” Elvis said.

The dude looked old, but he was surprisingly nimble and managed to run a few blocks before Elvis caught up with him. He was screaming outside the back door of an apartment building, begging to be let in, when Elvis yanked him back and told him to hand over his cassette recorder. The man looked down at his hands as though he didn’t remember he had been lugging that around and maybe he didn’t. Elvis took the recorder.

“Get lost,” he ordered the man.

Elvis turned around, ready to go find his teammates, when El Gazpacho stumbled into the side street where Elvis was standing. Blood dripped down his chin and he stared at Elvis and raised his arms in the air and he tried to speak, but the only sound was the bubbling of blood.

Elvis rushed forward and caught him before he tripped and fell. A minute later, El Güero and The Antelope rounded the corner.

“What the fuck happened?” Elvis asked.

“No idea,” The Antelope said. “Maybe one of those students, maybe—”

“We gotta drive him to the doctor.”

“Fuck no,” El Güero said, shaking his head. “You know the rules: we wait until one of the cars swings by and then we load him into that. No driving him ourselves. We still have work to do. There’s a cameraman from NBC hiding in a taco shop and we’ve got to grab that prick.”

El Gazpacho was gurgling like a baby, spitting more blood. Elvis tried to prop him up and glared at his teammates. “Fuck that, help me get him to the car.”

“The car’s too far. Wait for an ambulance or one of the vans to swing by.”

Yeah, yeah. But the problem was Elvis didn’t see no ambulance or no van swinging by right then and everyone was busy as fuck. It could take nothing for El Gazpacho to be rolled into a vehicle or it could take a while.

“Motherfucker, it’ll be five minutes and then you can go figure out what’s up with the cameraman.”

El Güero and The Antelope didn’t look very convinced and Elvis couldn’t hold poor Gazpacho forever and he couldn’t carry him nowhere. He wasn’t that strong, he was quick and wily and could kick and punch courtesy of the personal defense lessons El Mago gave them. The strong one, that was El Güero, a fucking Samson who could probably lift an elephant in his arms.

“El Mago ain’t going to be happy if his right-hand man bites the dust,” Elvis said and at last that seemed to rattle The Antelope enough, because The Antelope was deadly afraid of El Mago and El Güero was a subservient snake when El Mago was around, sliding on his belly for crumbs, and some preservation instinct must have activated inside his dull brain.

“Let’s get him to the car,” El Güero said and he lifted El Gazpacho, who was no small man, as though he was a baby, and they ran the few blocks necessary to reach the alleyway to find that someone had torched their car.

“Who the fuck!” yelled Elvis, and he spun around, furious. He couldn’t believe it! Those little fuckers! It must have been one of the protesters who’d singled out the vehicle due to its lack of plates.

“Well, your plan’s fucked now,” El Güero told him and the sadistic motherfucker looked a bit giddy, and Elvis didn’t know if it was because things weren’t going well for Elvis or because he hated El Gazpacho.

Elvis looked around at the lonely alleyway strewn with garbage. The smoke made his eyes water and the scent of gunpowder clogged his nostrils. He pointed to the other end of the alleyway.

“Come on,” he said.

“I’m heading back. We got work to do,” El Güero said and he was putting El Gazpacho down. Just dumping him down on the ground like a sack of flour, leaving him there atop a damn pile of rotten lettuce. “We gotta get that cameraman.”

“Don’t you fucking dare, you son of a bitch,” Elvis said. “El Mago, he’ll have your balls if you don’t help us.”

“Up your ass. He’ll be pissed we were a bunch of pussies and didn’t finish the job. If you want to play nurse, do it alone.”

That was that. El Güero was walking away and The Antelope didn’t seem to have made up his mind about what to do. Elvis couldn’t believe this crap. He wasn’t no softie, but you didn’t leave one of your teammates to bleed out in a stinking alleyway like that. It wasn’t right. And this was El Gazpacho! Elvis would rather have a foot amputated than leave El Gazpacho behind.

“Come on, help me here. What? You lost your dick?” Elvis asked.

“What the fuck’s my dick—”

“Only a limp, dickless shit would be standing there rubbing his hands. Grab him by the shoulders.”

The Antelope grunted and complained, but he obeyed. The three of them made it to the end of the alleyway and down the street. There was a blue Volkswagen parked there and Elvis shattered the glass of the passenger’s seat with a bottle which he found on the ground. He slid into the car.

“What you gonna do?” The Antelope asked.

“What’s it look like?” Elvis replied as he frantically looked inside his backpack until he fished out the screwdriver. Handy thing, that. It was an old habit of his to carry it from back in the day when he’d been a juvenile delinquent. The cops would give you a massive beating if they found you carrying a knife and then arrest you for having concealed weapons, but a screwdriver was no knife. The other thing he liked to carry were two little pieces of metal that he used to pick locks when he didn’t have his full kit.

“You can’t hot-wire it like that,” The Antelope said, but The Antelope liked to complain about everything.

Elvis jammed the screwdriver in place, but it wouldn’t go. He bit his lip, trying to calm the fuck down. You can’t pick a lock if you’re shivering, same with starting a car. Gladius.

“Man, can’t you hurry it?”

Gladius, gladius, gladius. Finally! He got the motor running and motioned for The Antelope to get in the car and The Antelope started protesting.

“The mission still needs to be completed and what about El Güero and the others and that cameraman from the American network?” he asked, sounding a little breathless.

“Jump in,” Elvis ordered. He couldn’t afford to have a panicked operative and he kept his voice level.

“We can’t take off.”

“He’s gonna bleed to death if you don’t press against his wound,” Elvis continued in that same level tone he’d learnt from El Mago. “You gotta get in the car and press hard.”

The Antelope relented and pushed El Gazpacho into the car and climbed in next to him. Elvis took off his denim jacket and handed it to The Antelope. “Use that.”

“I think he’s gonna die anyway,” The Antelope said, but fortunately he did press the jacket against El Gazpacho’s chest as instructed.

Elvis’s hands were slick with El Gazpacho’s blood as he took the steering wheel. The gunshots had started again.

By the time you have finished in your father’s study, it is almost 4 p.m. in the afternoon. Texas is experiencing an unseasonably cold snap this November, and you are shivering while you tie up old newspapers and water-rippled editions of Time Magazine and National Geographic for the recycling bins outside. You have been wearing…

My father died from a gunshot when I was in second grade. My first day back at school after the funeral, my classmates shot rubber bands from finger guns and I vomited behind the soccer net.

When my mother came and picked me up at lunch, she was in her blue sporty car instead of the gray family minivan with the car seat for the baby that was supposed to come before Christmas. If a baby did come someday and my mother put it in the car seat in the gray family minivan, that baby would be half my mother and half someone I did not know yet, and I would only have half a sibling when I really wanted a whole one.

“Still feel sick?” she asked when I slid into the front seat. She didn’t roll her eyes like usual or say, okay, just this once, and I figured it was because my father was underground and so I was an adult and could do adult things such as sitting in the front seat.

“No,” I said and picked at the nail on my thumb. “I feel better now.”

“What’d I tell you about doing that?” She often said that if I kept picking my nails, soon I would have nothing left there except wrinkled, red skin and that the kids at school would say I was gross or strange, and I didn’t want to be gross or strange, now did I? I wanted to tell her that I had lost a toenail on the playground once—picked it right out from the nail bed in two separate pieces like I was playing Operation—and that all the boys in my class had wanted to touch the place where it had been. I didn’t tell her, though, and instead I put my hands between my thighs and pressed them together so tightly that I felt something like television static in my fingertips. She turned up the stereo and I asked her to play the song where the man sang my name, but she said she had left that CD in the minivan.

When we arrived home, there was a bird on the front porch. It was black and the feathers on its face were wet and standing straight up as if it had been licked by a cat. My mother was still in the driveway with the car running, so I stood on my toes and knocked on her window with the side of my fist. She rolled it down and I could see that even behind her sunglasses her face was puffed up and ugly pink, like it was made of gum.

“There’s a bird on the porch,” I said. “He looks cold.”

She breathed in and blew air out between her teeth. She said, “I need to go back to work.”

“Can I bring him inside?”

“No. Don’t touch it,” she said. “You can put a towel around it. A little one from the laundry room. But that’s it.”

When she left the driveway, I stood in the car smoke left behind because it felt warm and a little wet. Then I went to the laundry room through the garage and picked out one of my mother’s paint towels from the pile on top of the machine. It was rough with dry paint and stained the same purple as my bedroom walls. I went through the house and opened the front door.

The bird puffed its chest out when I sat down next to him. Even though I wasn’t supposed to touch, I put my fingers up against his beak because that’s what my father told me to do when meeting a dog. Something like: let it smell your hand until its tail wags, and then you can touch him on top of the head. I knew birds’ tails didn’t wag, so I waited until my fingers grew stiff and rubbery and I could feel the frost melting wet into the back of my jeans. Then I put the towel over him, but it slid down his rounded back.

When I scooped the bird and the towel up, he felt like a cold rock in my palm. I was thinking that he could be mine. That my mother couldn’t be mad if I brought the bird inside and warmed him and took care of him on my own. She wouldn’t have to know. I’d keep him in my bedroom. Let him fly in the mosquito net around my bed that my father had called a “princess canopy.”

And if she found out that I had touched him when she had said not to and that I was keeping him in my room, I would tell her that I’d rather have a bird than a new father or half of a sibling because I knew that I could love a bird, and that this bird would have to love me back because I saved him with my own hands and let him fly in my room.

I brought the bird to my room and put him under my winter comforter, which was yellow fabric with white stitching that matched the yellow house with white shutters that my mother had painted on my purple wall. I laid him down on the pillow and pulled my comforter over him until only his shiny, black beak stuck out.

I turned off the lights and said, “Goodnight, darling,” which is what my father would’ve said to me if I was the bird and he was me.

When I checked on my bird when my mother started making dinner, his beak was still sticking out. I touched it with the tip of my finger, but he didn’t move. Under the comforter, his body had grown longer, and his toes curled tight together like thorny weeds. His beak was open like he had been screaming.

I brought him to my mother, and she threw the bird and the towel into the garbage can at the end of the driveway.

The day before she left Hayward, California, Gina studied the checklist from Georgetown University. It was August, 1977, and she was leaving home for the first time, terrified of arriving at college unprepared. Or maybe she was terrified by her mother’s loud, stinging voice as she approached Gina’s bedroom door. “You won’t return,” her mother…

Julie has never had any friends, so when the popular girls in the debate club dare her to sneak into Old Man Miller’s farmhouse, she accepts. The girls persuade Julie to steal the old butcher’s slaughtering knife, or maybe the ashes of his dead wife, or possibly a lock of his hair—cut fresh while he…

The Octavia Project Summer Institute is a free program that uses speculative fiction as a lens through which to envision new futures and greater possibilities for our world. Bringing together young women, and trans, gender non-conforming, or non-binary youth ages 14–18, teens explore how the world around them is a series of choices that can be remade or replaced. By blending creative writing, art, science, and technology, our programming increases confidence and skills in a myriad of subjects while fostering leadership and community. As our inspiration and namesake is Octavia E. Butler, who broke barriers in writing and science fiction, we hope to encourage young people to imagine the realities and futures they would like to see.

They speak to me
All those left behind
My Grandmother’s pearls
My Father’s purple heart
My Great Aunt’s camera

They whisper in my ears
The stories they hold
They tell me their words

Their value
Their secrets
In my mind they play a movie
They show me my origins
They show me their lives
Cause from their blood I came
I am their legacy

The empty feeling in my chest deems the light
The light leads me to destiny
Where my chest weighs lighter than a thin feather that glides recklessly
My eyes sprinkle sparkling stars I have borrowed from the sky
My hands tremble softly just to reach out to the blue sky that lies above
The smell of nature invites me to stay in the world where I am—Happy

Yet I keep losing the light
Keep wandering around every corner just to find it
But my strained chest crumbles down whenever I move farther
My eyes let out the tears that swallow my pain
My hands feel numb without the sweet warmth of love
And an unfamiliar smell creeps in to remind me—I am alone.

Still, I wake up to greet the sun that shies away
Pretending not to see me
I gaze at it with weary eyes to search for what is lost
But the departed bliss never spares its light
So I continue to run through the arena of pain that darkens as I surge deeper
Endlessly rushing not knowing apparent destiny dwells elsewhere
Had I known before that living would be this hard?
I would’ve never fallen from the radiant sky that breathes along with the sun.

With these floating nightmares
Perishing my existence
I wake up again to greet the sun
I run again into the tunnel of darkness
I crawl again through the field of thorns
My trembling legs beg for comfort
Yet my scarred heart thrives to walk a little more
A little more until it catches the light that dwells so far away.

I have a complicated relationship with crying.As a kid growing up in the 80s and 90s, my exposure to pop culture consisted of a heavy dose of Schwarzenegger, Metallica, and Pro Wrestling. Which meant that amongst my friends, if you expressed any sort of emotion or thought that was less than macho, you became a…