The Ghost Ship

It’s not that we didn’t know. Your name, after all,
was the Ghost Ship, some kind of omen for what you’d become.

Ferrying somebody’s sister, somebody’s body, some bodies 
across that fiery water: elsewhere. I don’t believe

in elsewhere, an eternity of fire or sun. You were mannequin arms 
and a rug on a dance floor. Some kind of baroque, you

were built of pallets and tar paper, old couches, and terrycloth. 
Everything that burns. You were art, and art is always worth burning.

I don’t believe in fate. I believe in grief, what it does to us. 
Somewhere, somebody said: intergenerational trauma.

This isn’t my grief, not mine to carry, a chalky
fire-crisped piano, the twanging sound of each string popped

by heat. Everything can be a performance. The hand- 
lebars of a ’65 Panhead. Your dark mustache

and aviator shades. You didn’t die in this fire’s crush: 
a dream filled with opulence and hope.

Rents so high twenty-two people live and build
where they build beauty, too. This wasn’t how we lost you—

timbers crashed in char and singe, staircase crumbled 
in smoky crush—

The things we love to blame, the things we love 
end us. One fire or another, inheritance

of doors burned shut. I think of you with no escape 
I think of you                 how could I not

           my first ghost                  I wish I could
                        sail back to you                          I wish I could remember

[The italicized line “a dream filled with opulence and hope” is taken from Ghost Ship 
founder and master tenant Derick Ion Almena’s Facebook post the day after the fire.]

Muscle Test

They say it comes in waves, grief,
like the swell’s crush against
your small board in the ocean,
you learning to surf on such a vast sea, learning

like the boy so proud at the front of the class 
Coach quizzing him, the boy pointing
at his own body, moving
tibialis, gastrocnemius, latissimus

dorsi, the whole body
hurts, doesn’t it, after a day of surfing 
muscles you didn’t know you had 
muscles writing the next day,

sore, the neck turning to watch
for coming swells, for what you know 
will come, what you wait for, can’t 
avoid, pointing here, here,

trapezius, pectoral, the pull of your body 
and the hard board pushing back out 
against the waves coming and coming 
barely any relief in between.

My Mouth Tastes the Ocean When I Kiss My Love

She builds a causeway of her own skin : a road to the sea

She is all water                       hard-shelled crab, heart of fish, hidden sting
                                                                                                        of extinct scorpion

Her bruised nape, sore hip, skewed scapula       the intoxicating smell
                                                                                              of white flower oil and human touch

She is looking for a way back to herself : people, flesh, bone, spirit 
Can she call their names with her seaweed mouth?

She floats between meditation and sleep, body hovering like a frond blown onto calm seas

She is mathematics and perfect form : parabolic sand dune, eyelashes of grass, 
                                                                                 fingernails the empty shells of mollusks

Can I lie in the sun on the shore of myself?

            She built this landscape of what she loves
                                      salt-licked and kelp-strewn : let me rest

Let the swell of the tide carry my love                       her loss                     out to the deep

Dear lovely readers,

As regular readers of F(r)iction will know, this Editor’s Note is usually penned by our Editor-in-Chief, Dani Hedlund. This time around though, I’m popping in—Helen Maimaris here, at your service.

Why the change, you might ask? Well, before I get to the moment I hung suspended in the Pacific Ocean, tears filling my diving mask as I gazed upon my very first manta ray, let me introduce myself.

I started life at Brink—F(r)iction’s parent nonprofit—nine years ago as a wee publishing intern; by the time you’re reading this, I will have been one of Brink’s C-Suite Executives for seven years and F(r)iction’s Managing Editor for five. I live in the UK, and I’m a British-Cypriot mash-up (which mostly means that 1) I’ll likely accidentally slide the word “bloody” in here somewhere, and 2) I tan at the speed of light and think oregano and olive oil goes on everything). I’m an obsessive consumer of potatoes, love tropical heat, and am a confusing mix of simultaneously hyper-organized and pretty slapdash. But really, a vast proportion of my personality can be summarized by my two great passions: storytelling and the ocean.

Firstly, storytelling. As a child, I was most definitely a bookworm (so much so that interaction with other humans sometimes felt like an unnecessary hindrance, I mean honestly). No wonder really that I’ve spent my adult life working at a storytelling nonprofit. At Brink, I have the incredible privilege of overseeing our education programs that harness storytelling to transform the lives of our students, editing work with immensely talented authors, mentoring our senior staff team, and guiding our nonprofit’s vision and mission alongside one of the humans I most admire in the world. It’s not an exaggeration to say that every day, when I sit at my desk, I feel that same, intense pull that I get from reading, moments of joy akin to the breathless suspension of turning the first page in a book, the whole world falling away as your imagination lights up.

My love of the ocean plays out in seemingly less evident ways. It’s so core to me that I honestly don’t know when it began or why, but I like to think the spark was lit when I was just eight months old. My parents took me to Cyprus for the first time, ostensibly for my christening, but it was a baptism of a different kind that became pivotal. On that trip, I was dunked into the Mediterranean for the first time and that was that. Deep-Med blue is my favorite color, I’ve done volunteer scientific fieldwork in Ecuador with humpback whales during the mating season, I have been a professional-level scuba diver since my early twenties. I’ve dived with sea lions, manta rays, bull sharks, grey sharks, reef sharks, turtles; I know firsthand how the shifting mirror of the ocean opens up like a portal as soon as you drift past the surface and downwards, and that whether you’re exploring a shipwreck, gazing at the intense detail of a living, breathing coral reef, or drifting along in a current looking down into the deep deep blue, the ocean will never ever fail to awe.

So, when Dani suggested a couple of years ago that we curate an Oceans issue, I was ecstatic. Attentive readers may have noticed an odd trend in the artwork of previous issues—for years, the art direction team has been sneaking ocean details into F(r)iction illustrations, purely to hear my cries of delight when I spot them during our production meetings. Just one example: check out the space whales floating through the recent Dreams issue.

Then Dani proposed that I write this Editor’s Note and maybe mention her personal favorite ocean anecdote of mine. Share the magical moment when, on precisely my 194th dive, I first saw one of the most bizarre and beautiful animals imaginable after years of nurturing a, quite frankly, desperate longing to see one.

It was December 2019, and I was part of a small group diving a rocky site off the Pacific coast of Costa Rica. We were near the end of our dive and thinking about surfacing soon when, from the hazy blue off to our left, a single, female manta ray emerged. She was huge, several feet across, and her fins moved gracefully up and down as though flying. The visibility wasn’t the best, but I could clearly see the lobes at the top of her head curving down in front of her mouth as her right eye tracked us. She circled our group once with a vast slowness before disappearing back into the mineral gloom. I realized then that I was crying into my mask—which, if you were wondering, is not where water goes and complicated seeing the actual damn, gorgeous thing. I’ve had the privilege of diving with many manta rays since, had a pregnant female pass just a meter above me, even floated in the midst of a “train” of tens of mantas. But something about that first teary time has stayed with me ever since. As the well-known saying goes, you never forget your first manta.

This is all to say that once Dani suggested I be the one to write this note, I thought, hell yes, I can’t wait to share my obsession with our readers to help frame the amazing content in this issue.

In these pages, we move around the globe to bring you poetry from a tsunami survivor; a feature from the eminent marine biologist, Dr. Ocean, illuminating the power of sunlight in the sea’s ecosystems; and a story exploring the ancient Vietnamese Con Rồng, or water dragons. We bring you a future world flooded after the waters rise, sci-fi that tracks a probe as it lands in the ocean of one of Saturn’s moons, a story delving into a DNA process that allows us to keep the ghosts of extinct animals alive, and a comic reimagining mermaid folklore. There’s also a feature showcasing work from several amazing storytellers over at Ocean Culture Life, an incredible nonprofit that brings people together from around the world to create an ocean community.

When I reflected on all these pieces, considering how they each explore the ocean through a different lens—whether fearful of its power, intoxicated by its vibrance, or turning to it as a beacon of hope—I realized that this diversity of experience was interwoven with one clear similarity: all these pieces surge with a deep, inexorable pull, a creative expression of the profound connection and undeniable fascination we humans have with the intense, shifting blue that surrounds us.

Safe to say, not only am I bloody proud of this issue, I’m also so excited to share it with you all that I can practically hear you oooing at the gorgeous art as you flip through these pages, despite the fact that I can safely assume, for the vast majority of you, we’re separated by a least a channel, or perhaps a sea, or most likely, a vast vast ocean.

And when I say separated, I mean connected. And when I say connected, I invite you into a moment of collective imagination: here we all are, wetsuitted up, tanks on our backs, hanging weightless in the blue, with the busy metropolis of a coral reef just below us, or perhaps the long fronds of a kelp forest surrounding us. We look up to see the wavering glow of the sun hanging above the surface, beams of sunlight cascading through the water like chandeliers. And in this moment, just like turning the very first page of a book you can’t wait to read, giddy with the joy of diving into the worlds within, everything is perfect.

Cheers,

Helen Maimaris
Managing Editor

The knell at the door tolls. 

I turn. A black paw swipes mercilessly at my face—claws sharp, bloody, and vicious. I snap my fingers. He freezes mid-snarl. I hum indifferently.

He is sleek, his coat gleaming under the club’s cold neon. This panther will drink Death in the Afternoon. 

“Welcome to the Nightclub for the Newly Departed,” I say. “Denial, yearning, and violence are not permitted here.” I nod to one of the many signs plastered around the club:

RULES—Once you step into the premises . . . “What will you have today?”

It’s a meaningless, ritualistic question; I’m already retrieving a coupe glass. The panther drops to his haunches, growling. His eyes are the color of a split lime. 

Perfect, I muse as I work. The right absinthe, topped with champagne, creates a heavy cocktail as green as his gaze. 

“You look like one of them.” He hisses. 

Lemon twist on the rim. I slide the coupe glass over to him and press my fingers together. Snap,and the glass is replaced with a broad glass dish. “I was born millennia before your poachers. I did not know them.”

“Why did they kill me?”

Arrogance. Money. Boredom. Desperation. “Drink,” I say. “Be at peace.”

The panther growls. “My life was unfairly ripped from me. Peace?”

I can see his fury; it coils off him like smoke and hisses like a lit fuse. 

Murder victims are all the same. Rage blankets helplessness, but never extinguishes it.

They are not my favorite customers.

“Drink,” I repeat.

“No.”

“What do you want? Revenge?”

His tail lashes. “I want them to burn in the wildfires they set to my home. To feel their own bullets tear through their hearts.”

I spin into the usual rhetoric. “Revenge is a fantasy. We are on an entirely different plane from reality. You will never see them again. Will you let that anger consume you? Drink.”

The panther does not consider my words; his unwavering gaze does not break. “You,” he hisses, prowling the table. “You are worse than them.”

“I told you I never associated with your poachers.”

“No. You. You, with your monotone voice and your indifferent gaze. I would rather see hate, or the pride in my killers’ eyes. Have you spent your millennia holding yourself above the pain of others? Have you been so devoid of life that you have lost your heart?”

My fingers falter on the counter. 

“This job calls for no empathy,” I say, after a beat too long. “I serve and endure.”

He studies me, head tilted, tail curling in silent question. Then, finally, he dips his head and laps at the cocktail. The dish is empty in seconds.

“Acceptance,” I say, my voice thinner than I intend. “To drink is to accept.”

The panther looks at me one last time, searching for something I cannot name. Then he leaps off the counter, vanishing into the scattered crowd. I watch him go, tasting absinthe on my tongue.

It is bitter, sharp, and green.

I.

You can’t remember when the rash first appeared. The little buds, poppyseed size, have barely faded since making your forearm their homestead. They were flush, defiant little things, untouchable by creams.

There’s a ritual you do that helps, though. Fifteen minutes soaking in Epsom salt water. Lit candles scented like sugared almonds. You don’t need it, not anymore, but it relaxes you. Soothes the itch.

Your eyes drift to your arm as it rests below the surface. The clotted blooms stare back at you. Blood-red, you think, like your favorite going-out lipstick—the color you’d wear each night to Club Eden, a crimson offering to God in the hopes He’d send “the one.”

Moonlight slivers through your moth-eaten curtain, and in its glow, you watch as paper wings flutter and dance.

II.

The rash spreads to your collarbone. It slinks between your breasts like crawling ivy. In some sick, slightly Freudian way, they remind you of flowers; you want to nourish them, water them, tell them it’s okay.

You inspect the growth at your vanity. The little red clusters have swollen into being, almost pulsing with life. Your hands ghost over the fields, stopping right below the abdomen.

You’re beginning to think this is your fault.

How careless you’d been that night. You barely remember his name—but you remember how his hands snaked around your waist, how far he led you from Eden. The test read positive a week later, and in four more, you lost it. You couldn’t even bring yourself to see a doctor.

Beautiful Flora, your mama once called you. She’d roll in her grave if she saw you now.

III.

The moment you felt the itch on your face, you knew that nothing could be done. Every bump has become a slick, milky pustule. The swelling smothers your body like a strangler fig. You can no longer look at yourself.

You’ve confined yourself to the mattress. It’s the only way to reach Heaven, now. A thick white sheet covers your vanity,  your curtains, a veil from the outside world. You wonder, again, if this is His punishment for that night. As if losing the child was not enough. As if every second spent repenting since the blood came was not enough. Your hands clasp together in a desperate, trembling litany.

But a sudden, sharp pain stifles all thoughts of devotion. Your whole body tightens, tightens, tightens, until you’re grasping at your sheets, pathetic and shameful and writhing. It hurts, you think, it hurts, it hurts—

but this, in the end, will be your salvation.

IV.

It takes hours for the pain to finally subside. Your breathing slows to a deadened rhythm. A white-heat haze clouds your vision, and just barely, you make out the fruits of your labor.

Newborn larvae, departing from the petalled remains of your skin. Little crescent angels. A swarming, holy Primavera.

You watch them dance, the way you once did, as you sink into His restful arms.

I was still wearing the same pajamas I had on when they stole from me. 

Just a t-shirt and bottoms. 

Nothing special.

The neon pink light of the club beckoned me, whispering promises of a haven, where the fallen could finally be laid to rest. 

Inside, women clustered into small orbits, their voices hushed like a child’s lullaby. It wasn’t like the usual nightclubs I frequented—you know, the ones where pulsing blue strobe lights illuminated intoxicated bodies, illuminating the wild, the wicked, the darkest parts of man. 

Here, no one danced. No one laughed. The air was thick with screams unheard.

I made my way to the bar and leaned in.

“Sorry,” the bartender murmured under her breath. “Non-alcoholic drinks only.”

Her eyes roamed my face, sweeping over me before settling on the dried blood staining my sleeve.

“This your first?” she asked in a low voice. 

I nodded imperceptibly, glancing around to make sure the shadows weren’t listening.  

I tilted my chin towards her. “You?”

Her mouth was drawn into a tight line, and for a moment, she said nothing. Then softly, bitterly, “Second. But this time he finally went through with it.”

Her words seeped into my bones, rattling the cage that once held my soul. 

And then, from somewhere behind me—

“He spiked my drink.”

A pause.

“—left me on the side of the road.”

A whisper, barely more than a breath.

“I didn’t even know him.”

We gathered closer, stories slipping between us like a secret language, binding our fates together.

And then the door opened. A child entered the room. She couldn’t have been more than four or five, her Ariel dress trailing behind her, the pink sequins catching the neon light.

She was too young for this place. 

But innocence had never protected any of us. 

The people who stayed took it harder than the people who left. Those going could always return: if things didn’t work out in Float, they could have a fresh start on Earth. Wait half a year, and it would be a whole new planet—about a decade passed for every month gone. For those who stayed, the departure was just another death.

Minnie was a rare case: traveling alone. Few boarded the shuttle to Float without someone acting as a witness to who they’d been before. She savored the relative solitude of the trip, knowing on arrival she’d be installed in one of the living-housing communities. She’d chosen the Single Moms Clan, thinking some extra help would be welcomed, even if she didn’t quite match the Ideal Candidate description.

Her first look at Float was disappointing. The town mimicked Earth exactly, and Minnie felt like her Earth self exactly. Still, she smiled at Frida, her Clan Representative, who hugged her over the baby strapped to her chest. The sight made Minnie worry about dribbling milk, even though she’d dried up long before during the weeks on the shuttle. Frida acquainted Minnie with her Float responsibilities, only one of which caused Minnie chagrin: Dating-Pool Party Attendance. It was mandatory for unpartnered Floaters, but Frida assured her they were almost fun.

The DPP Organization Committee, ostensibly to increase the chance of population growth, threw themed parties, retrofitting the storage unit assigned to them into a new sort of date night each month. A seedy bar, complete with a sticky floor. A movie theater, minus the movie, popcorn inexplicably pressed into the recliner cushions. A downtown rave, with lights clipping every which way and too-loud music meant to draw people closer, into pheromone-range, if they wanted to be heard.

There, she met Nick, who had a mustache, who could somehow make a black t-shirt and jeans look pretentious. They would get drinks together. They developed a teasing sort of rapport, and their hours together would slip by, as quickly as Earth-time.

One day, they were laughing and joking and singing song lyrics at each other as a discotheque mirror ball orbited above them. Other single Floaters tried out the supplied rollerblades as pinks and blues strobed across Nick’s face. He belted out an old Earth song from their youth. “Hey-ey-ey baby, won’t you have my bay-ay-ay-ayby.” A strange sense of de ja vu: She’d somehow swirled back to the very moment that always undid her, where she would forget high risk had anything to do with her, where she’d misbelieve one more try would be enough to get it right—just one more try, and she’d show the little stone there was more to this world than sinking. Except this time, even the hope had turned rancid. Her old fashion tasted only of its bitters. The party was over.

Minnie boarded the next shuttle for Earth without telling a single soul.

“Excuse me,” Ted said as he squeezed through yet another pair of conjoined twins on his path toward the burly bouncer. It was slightly unnerving how many conjoined twins stood in line for the nightclub.

Unfortunately for him, this pair wasn’t as congenial as the others he passed.

“Hey, we were here first,” the lankier twin spat at him, moving to close the gap between Ted and the next person ahead. His brother nodded in support.

Ted couldn’t risk starting an argument. He was about ten people away from reaching the entrance of the pulsing nightclub. He could clearly spot the velvet rope and the six-foot, hooded bouncer who barely let a single soul into the club.

Ted glanced over the twins’ shoulders. Millions of heads glared back at him. Just twenty-million more heads down was his spot in line.

When Ted first found out that he was dead, his initial thought was: at least this is better than being stuck in that bed.

Ted’s body had been rotting in the same hospital bed for the past month. He had first arrived able-bodied with a mild fever. Now, his human body was trapped in a coma, and his only options were either waiting in the back of a line to what appeared to be a nightclub heaven or waiting in a hospital bed of hell. It was laughable how slim his options were. The first thing Ted was going to do when he got into that nightclub was ask for the manager. He had a few questions, concerns, and complaints about Mr. G-O-D.

Ted  held a finger up to the lanky twin. “Hang on to that thought for just a sec.” Ted didn’t bother waiting for their reply as he quickly slipped around them.

The nightclub’s looming doorway and echoing music welcomed him as he neared the entrance. On his way up, Ted had pondered what this moment would be like and what he would finally say to this emblematic bouncer. But when Ted finally approached, all his words left him.

“Um. Hi,” He finally said. “Can I…go in?”

For a long time, there was silence. Ted was sure he was going to be manhandled back down to the end of the line.

Then, the bouncer finally spoke. “Once you’re in, you ain’t coming back out.”

As Ted stared at the long arched doors and golden lights seeping through the cracks, he felt an incredible warmth. An inviting embrace that whispered Come on in, Ted. You don’t have to wait any longer.

It was both scary and comforting. But Ted was ready.

Then, a sharp pull at his spirit yanked Ted into a white tunnel.

Piercing fluorescent lights invaded his vision, and as he blinked and gathered his surroundings, he could barely discern the face in his peripheral vision. But Ted didn’t need a clear vision to sense he was back to square zero.

“He’s alive!” Someone shouted.

Goddamnit.

We didn’t feel it. I asked around, and everyone said the same thing: “I was alive until I wasn’t.” 

No one knows what happened. Before it was lights-out, there was talk of war, the oceans were getting too acidic, and all kinds of sea creatures were washing onto shores. Most said it had something to do with war, others global warming—and some said the Apocalypse, like in Revelations. I guess that means we got left behind.  

I don’t think it was a nuke or acidic oceans or the coming of Christ. I think someone stole the sun.  

I saw a pair of eyes in the sky. Have you ever looked into a fish bowl as a kid? That’s what it felt like, except I was the fish. And I had just died suddenly in my tank. Sometimes, I think we’re in a fishbowl or marble or something small and vulnerable, somewhere big and curious, where giant eyes belong to giant bodies with giant hands that can steal the sun just because they feel like it.  

Everything is a ghost now, even cockroaches. The plants are all dead, too, but they don’t seem to have ghosts. Some people are in denial, refusing to believe what’s right in front of them. They still try to go through life as it was before. As ghosts, we can’t move anything in the physical world. 

I haunt the beaches, far away from the cities and towns, with Dirk and Ginny Russo. They were married before all this, but marriage doesn’t matter at the end of the world. They agree something stole the sun. It’s the most obvious conclusion because when we all… well… died, we didn’t see the sun again. We haunt the planet in an eternal night. I am surprised no one else has thought about it. I guess they’re too concerned with the politics of life after death: who gets to haunt what, and who’s right about how the world ended, and is there a God?  

Ginny thought it would be a good idea to meet more lost souls and show them the pair of eyes. Here, the endless sea meets the endless sky, with no distractions or politics.  

“It’ll be like a party! Oh! Remember nightclubs? We’ll have a beach club!” She had said.  

I was never a fan of clubs or people. But there was a part of me that wanted everyone to know the eyes that watched us in our tank. 

When our beach filled up with ghosts and it got quiet, I said, “Look up.” Their translucent heads rose to view the stars and the moon and the faint shadow of a pair of eyes.  

I heard voices murmur things like “God.” Most pretended it wasn’t there. Others claimed they had explanations. Some started religions because of it.  

I didn’t pretend to know what the eyes were, but I still think they’re responsible for stealing the sun. 

Marlene stands with her back to the bar because her miniskirt won’t zip. She can feel the place just below her waist where the metal teeth split into a y, the clasp digging. Dead, and still trying to suck it in. Dead, and still caring what size she is. Well, maybe the real question is: Why is she any size at all now? She takes a sip from the amber-colored liquid in her glass–Paper Plane–maybe the last thing she drank before she…? Maybe the first? Briefly panics that she can’t remember and wonders if she’s already losing herself, a losing that happens slow and then all at once. But then, it comes to her.

Amaretto sour.

Takes another sip and frowns, the taste of rye shifting to the taste of almond. Strange place, the afterlife.

 Makes her uneasy. Makes her distrustful.

The dance floor looks like it’s bathed in navy velvet from the moonlight, white folds and fuzzed shadow sheen. Bodies sway. A disco ball descends and then it’s all Donna Summers and Madonna, and she wonders if they pick the music based on which generation is in the majority. It does not make her want to dance, so she drinks instead.

There’s another woman at the bar, much older, with gray ringlets. Her dress, Marlene notices, is zipped up to mid back.

“I hear it doesn’t count when you’re dead,” this mystery woman says.

“What doesn’t?”

She raises her eyebrows, nods at someone young, probably one of the 27s in his wide-legged pants, lurking at the edge of the dance floor. He doesn’t know how to move to the music and instead of endearing, it just makes Marlene feel old. Sad.

“Not for me,” Marlene says, and the woman shimmies off.

She looks down at her glass, thick and beveled with rounded lumps. At her hand wrapped around it. There’s a ring there and she remembers when Dave gave it to her, on the pier in Santa Monica. Hears the waves crash and a seagull and there’s something close to a keening in her chest, something she can’t verbalize. She looks for the exit.

“Who makes a nightclub without exits?” she says to herself.

The claustrophobia sets into her bones, the back of her molars. She notices the rising temperature escaping in steam off the not-yet-cold bodies, pressed together.

Thinks that even now, especially now, her ideal night out would be rotting on the couch, Dave’s feet set on her lap, or his head pressed against her arm. She presses it then against the bar but it’s too hard, too cold, too solid. Remembers, briefly, a fairytale about shoes danced to pieces. The music switches to something older, something Cohen. It’s brief, his croon, because then an alarm sounds, rain prickling across her skin.

The sprinklers, she thinks.

Health and safety, she thinks.

Water streams over her eyelids, blurring vision, and she wonders,

Where can we even go from here?

She stands by the bleachers in an auditorium that had been demolished years ago—a vision in a pale blue taffeta dress she’d worn to our high school prom. I stare at her, afraid to blink.

“Am I dead?” I ask.

She laughs, and the sound washes over me. Her cheeks flush as she smiles. “No, you aren’t dead. Just—elsewhere. For a moment.”

Pink balloons scatter across the old wood floor as she steps toward me, the edges of her dress whispering against her bare calves. Freckles dance like stars across her cheekbones and the bridge of her nose. I love her freckles.

“Are you gonna stare at me all night or are you gonna ask me to dance?” she asks.

I hold out my hand and realize I’m seventeen again, wearing the same ill-fitting suit I had mowed thirty-seven lawns to buy. Her hand slides into mine, and I feel my pulse pound everywhere our skin touches.

Heart in my throat, I lead her to the center of a makeshift dance floor blanketed in low draping lights. She raises my arm above her head so she can spin underneath it and winks at me over her shoulder. A smile breaks across my face, one that turns into a laugh when she tries to spin me under her arm.

She always knew how to do that. How to crack me open when I hardened, to bring warmth to my bones when I froze.

My hands shake as I pull her close, as she leans into me. “I Only Have Eyes for You” plays through the hazy speakers. The song she sang in the car, in the shower, in her studio as she painted. She wraps her arms around my shoulders, and she smells like summer flowers and sunshine, like soft rainfall on a Saturday morning, like cold nights curled under warm blankets, like love and laughter and all the dreams of the life we would have together. The life we built.

Tears fall down my face. She kisses them away.

I clutch her dress, blue taffeta wrinkling under desperate fingers, fearing she would disappear into old music and dusty memories.

“Save another dance for me?”

Smiling, she says, “Always.”

But we both knew I couldn’t stay.

I hold her close until the song fades to nothing.

***

I bring her old CD player to the funeral. I play our song.

My smile, sagging behind wrinkles of age and time and wear, wets with tears. But I can still feel the warmth of her palm on my chest, on my heart, as we danced among twinkling lights and pink balloons.

I don’t know where she went when she walked through the auditorium doors. But I knew that I would find her again. Someday.

And I knew that—wherever she was—she was saving me a dance.

An Interview with Lev Grossman Lev Grossman is the author of eight novels, including the bestselling The Bright Sword, an epic retelling of the story of King Arthur. He’s also the author of the #1 New York Times bestselling The Magicians trilogy which has been published in thirty countries and was adapted as a TV show. He has degrees from Harvard…

Daytona Beach Babies

Ladies’ Night was Wednesday night.
I was a teen wearing the heat like charmeuse;

my rhinestone decolletage not far removed from 
games of Pretty Pretty Princess and Ring Pop richness.

How do fifteen years look,
all dressed up in patent anticipation?

Rappelling from windows like Rapunzel’s lust, two girls 
escaped plain homes to walk toward a sequined strip.

We waited outside Razzle’s, whispering 
Can I have your bracelet? to passersby,

pilfered paper wristbands to vouch for legal age. 
Men said yes, smiles laced with knowing.

We fixed our wrists in paper cuffs
sealed with bubble gum. Tits up for the bouncer.

Sheer surprise at entry. Flash of wrist to the bartender: 
I’ll have a Sex on the Beach, sunset-colored drink

with the naughty name that felt like power on my lips. 
We sat steps from the ocean. Shimmying silky pony hair

and laughing like chimps. Imping the cool girls,
the college girls, even them, barely skirting twenty-one.

Together we danced on go-go stages, hanging, 
small cages for the display of pretty birds like us.

We already knew how to move, how to grind 
our diamond belt buckles against the bars.

When we descended to the dancefloor, a ballroom if ever 
we’d known one, the men materialized in Marlboro clouds.

Our lips tied in bows, we ribboned together for safety.
But each hip thrust, each sip of ether, pulled us a little looser

until we hung askance, stringy and stupid. We imagined 
it was us, holding the keys to the castles between our ears.

We didn’t know better, couldn’t yet grasp 
the jeweled boxes of women

whose hinges and clasps were broken and forced open. 
Force: hadn’t occurred to us yet,

children plumped on American Dreams, 
tender foie gras goslings.

When they crushed their dicks against us
and corseted us in touch; squeezing and rubbing,

churning and shoving, we wondered:
Is this love?

Married on the Eve of Destruction

The roses here are like pomegranate seeds,
ruthlessly carnal and hopelessly tinged

with the scent of the dead.
The soil they grow in is leaden, fungicide

paints each head. The flower smell is bred out 
in a hedge for longevity.

How did this bloom that wreaths collective 
memory in sparking thorn and throbbing petal

become mostly poison? Our apples 
have met a similar fate,

vitamins and minerals bolting
at downshot rates, revolting from the flush.

Calcium, Iron, Phosphate: 
Bone, Blood, Soft Tissue—

What greater issue? If the blocks are lost, 
how will our bodies build?

After my vitals succumb, I will be spirit 
only, a scythe of the new moon.

So much has already been cut away
from my crooning fingers, which reach to grasp

a meager scrap of fragrance, flavor, feeling.
To hold those things like a yawn before thick sleep.

When I go under, my wraith will rake the leaves 
of you, unearth the time we ate apple crumble

hiding in the thicket of my grandmother’s rose 
bushes, that walled-up garden where the thorns

cut my back and your knees and nothing bloomed 
but us, despite the stoniest winter.

Sufficient to Destroy a Man

Behind the Manna of St. Nicholas 
she veiled a means of escape
brought by belladonna,
a clear champion of beautiful women 
(and aren’t we all beautiful)
pressed into a bottle, for ugly skin 
(and aren’t we all ugly).

For their cheeks that bloomed with 
bruises, nebulae forewarning the birth 
and death of stars, rouged with an 
atmosphere of long-waves and shaking 
with volcanic activity, molten in rivers 
and canyons cracked between their ribs.

These women knew the different
kinds of burn: spark, rage, smolder, rain. 
Degrees of damage done by ravaging, 
ravishing lips in red, their words lined in 
the color of blood. The head bleeds so 
much, the mouth heals so fast. The throat 
is always covered when in public. The back 
of the neck exposed when in the home.

Guiliana T. made a pretty bottle, named
for her sake, Aqua Tofana (Storm Water). 
Would it soothe the skin and disappear
the damage? Or could it make the water rise, 
take them to that deep and sleeping place, 
the foam lapping their lips, the sky’s
eyes closing—finally offering the rest— 
with which the moondrunk night is blessed.