Andrea gets out of bed without waking Scott.The kitchen is dark and quiet.She puts on an apron as though it were the nineteen-fifties and she is a homemaker.She starts to make him breakfast.She will let the sounds and smells of her cooking wake him.These things are all part of it.What she makes is not, though;…

By the time John Surly Whittaker lumbered onto the stage, he was already missing his fingers and toes. The audience didn’t realize he had been vanishing since 1885. Nor did they realize that parts of him were missing under his gloves, shoes, and custom-made suit. Still, they all turned wide-eyed when they saw him, for…

“You’re going to love it here, Dad,” the stranger says. She has blond hair, thick eyebrows, and a sharp chin. My chin. My daughter? My sweet little . . . Abigail? Rachel?

“I’m sure I will, sweetie.”

Her eyes green like my wife’s. Always wet, like drowned emeralds. “I know it doesn’t look like much, but the doctors here seem really nice. They’re going to take good care of you until you feel better.”

“Better?” I say, dumbly.

She laughs though the smile doesn’t reach her eyes. “Better,” she says, as if the word were a talisman. “Then we can bring you home.”

“Home,” I mouth the word, loving the way its roundness fills my mouth. “That sounds really nice, Abby.”

Her eyes well up and she squeezes my hand. “It’s Victoria, Dad.”

I smile through the heartache. “Right.”

I blink and I am sitting alone, the light through the window now the soft gold of evening.

“Vic?” I cry for my daughter, eyes darting to the corners of the empty room.

My new home is a ten-foot by ten-foot box with a window overlooking the yard. My bed is a twin, topped with a king-sized comforter. There is one photo on the wall. In it, an unfamiliar man in a tuxedo has his arms wrapped around a woman in a white gown, his hands resting on the luminous curve of her pregnant belly. They both smile at me.

“That’s me?” I say aloud, standing and hobbling closer, my knees aching. Why do they ache? That’s right, I’m old! The man in the picture is handsome and young though, his eyes full of life.

Excited, I take the picture from the wall and move to the bathroom mirror.

I am fatter than the man in the photo, a rounded gut hanging over my waist. Gray hairs poke out from my ears, and my face looks like a melted wax caricature of the man in the photo. I touch the stubble on my chin and the loose gizzard flesh that hangs beneath.

“I’m old,” I say aloud, though the delight is gone.

I put the picture back on the wall.

I begin to weep.

“Think of it like getting lost in a fog,” a woman tells me. She is middle aged, with a thick jaw and a snake’s nest of curls atop her head. She is sitting in a chair in front of me, jotting notes on a clipboard.

I am sitting on the edge of my bed, and I am wearing a different robe than I was a moment before. My face is dry.

“How long have I been here?” I ask.

“You were checked in four days ago,” the woman responds. “Henry, are you here with me?”

Four days? My God, I lost four days?

“Yeah,” I croak, throat dry. “I’m sorry, what were you saying?”

The woman studies me over the edge of her cat-eye glasses. “The fog metaphor. We’ve found it eases the transition into and out of the fugue state. The jumps, the missing time, those will only get worse. But with the right attitude, we can make the process as comfortable as possible.”

“Fugue state?”

She nods tiredly. “Imagine an entire world covered in a deep, impenetrable mist—you’re lost in it, but you can see a mountain. We’ll call it Mount Clarity. Every day, your brain tries to climb that mountain. Some days, you won’t succeed. And some days you will climb all the way to the top and be your old self again. The important thing to remember is that it won’t happen every day—it’s okay when you don’t make it to that peak. We’ll be here to take care of you until you’re back with us.”

I open my mouth to thank her; only a groan comes out.

When I dream, I am in that fog. It is colder than I imagined, a thousand icy fingers worming their way into my skin.

I see Mount Clarity in the distance, and I run towards it, eyes fixed on that sharp spire rising above the white blanket. There are others here too—shadows racing, scrambling up the slick sides of the mountain.

There is something in their faces that I don’t like, a mindless terror in the way they look over their shoulders. They screech like animals, growling and crying. Their fingernails scrape against stone until they crack off in bloody splinters.

“The fog isn’t empty,” a voice whispers in my ear. “You need to run, Henry.”

I try to catalog what I know. I have the vague memory of writing in a leather journal. A woman with green eyes always insisted on it, even on the bad days, pushing it towards me along with a glass of orange juice. In the absence of it, I catalog aloud.

“My name is Henry,” I say. “I am old.” I reach for more and am delighted when I find it. “I was a soldier, like my father. After that, I built roads and married a beautiful woman.” At the mention of her, my eyes are drawn to the photo on the wall. “She took care of me, until she went away.”

I reach for more; there is only fog.

My stomach rumbles. The world beyond my door is a mystery, but my nose still works, and I smell bacon.

I stand on creaky legs, thankfully remembering to put my pants on before exiting into the hallway. The walls beyond, painted a chipped yellow the same shade as piss, are lined with old pine doors.

I step over a muddy bootprint outside my door and follow the scent down the hall, stopping only when I notice two men in scrubs working in a nearby room. They are collecting bedding and shoving it into a laundry cart. A trash can sits in the hall just outside the door, a receptacle for the prior occupant’s worldly possessions. On top, there is a photo—a white-haired woman with her arms wrapped tight around the chest of a little girl. The glass is cracked, a dark line splitting the woman’s face in two.

“Who was she?” I ask. The men pretend they don’t hear me. A shred of a memory rises from the fog. Victoria’s gap-toothed smile radiating up at me, her blue eyes bright.

No, I think, that can’t be right. My Victoria’s eyes are green, not blue. Yet, I cannot abandon this girl to the garbage. Someone should remember that she existed, that she loved the old woman in the photo, and that for at least one moment, she had the same smile as my Victoria.

I slide the photo from its frame, fold it, and place it in my pocket.

The rec room is large, six battered hardwood tables positioned across its width, centered on a pair of well-worn couches. On the TV, John Wayne is pointing his trusty Mare’s Leg at a couple of scoundrels, and I think I know the movie, the thrill of memory drawing me close. But, before John can waste the bad guys, someone calls my name.

“Henry! Earth to Henry!”

I turn, dumbfounded. It’s a woman, her black hair standing out amid a sea of blue and gray heads. She is wearing a bathrobe, has a narrow face, dusky eyes, and a wry smile. I suck in my gut.

A man sits next to her, hunched over a crossword puzzle, a pair of round-framed glasses

perched on the tip of his withered nose, bald head covered in dark liver spots. He holds a shaky pen above the paper but doesn’t write.

“How do you know my—” Then the revelation hits. “Berta!”

“That’s me! George, he knew me today!” she slaps the man beside her. “Come Henry, sit with us.” I join them, my memory chugging to life like an old diesel engine. She is Berta, a widow from the war. She is the youngest person here, only sixty-one, but insane.

“I got a head full of ghosts,” she told me once. The other is George, a lifelong bachelor, an

accountant, and an expert on WWII. One day, fairly recently, George and I sat in the garden while he explained to me how Joseph Goebbels had turned a nation of normal, loving people into Nazis.

I settle into the chair opposite them. “How are you today?”

Berta’s smile, all white teeth and crow’s feet, is infectious. “Still crazy. And you? Are the boots still keeping you awake?”

“Boots?” I ask, brow furrowed. “I don’t remember, what do you—”

George grumbles something, cutting me off. Berta shoots him a worried glance. “He isn’t doing too well today. Hasn’t said much.”

George is like me, I recall. Just further along into the brain rot. I crane my neck to see his puzzle. He has only written one word, four letters in a row made for eight.

HELP.

“You hungry?” Berta asks conspiratorially, grabbing my forgotten stomach’s attention. “Breakfast is already over, but I saved a couple slices of toast.”

She produces a paper plate from under the table. The toast is cold, covered with a red jelly that tastes like summer. I wolf it down, eyes watching George, ears listening to Berta as she regales us with stories about her summer spent in Venice, and the lovers whose hearts she broke there.

George continues to work on his puzzle. By the time he’s done, the light outside has turned red, and he has written the same answer for every question.

I am lying awake in bed; the clock on my nightstand reads 3:00 a.m. I draw the comforter up to my face and breathe in the scent of home, warmth, and a woman’s lingering perfume.

There is a sound out in the hallway. That’s right, I remember, that’s what woke me, those heavy boots invading my foggy dreams. I listen to them move down the hallway, passing right outside my door. Then, a moment later, they return, going the other way.

A chill sweeps over me; I can smell blood. Unconsciously my hand drifts to the edge of the mattress and reaches underneath, running my fingers along the crinkled edge of the photo I stole from the trash bin.

As a short scream echoes down the hall outside, I bury my face in the comforter and let memories of better days drown it out.

The next morning, another room is being emptied by men in scrubs. I am intent on passing right by them. I woke with a clear memory of Berta and George, and I cannot wait to tell them.

Yet, when I near the room, something stops me. I stare, watching the two men empty the former resident’s trashcan into the larger bin in the hall. Receipts, an empty pack of cigarettes, a couple of empty whiskey shooters.

“What happened to him?” I ask the young orderly as he steps outside to toss a pile of birthday cards into the bin.

The boy shrugs. “He died.”

I stare down at the cigarette pack. Marlboro, like my father used to smoke.

“How?” I ask.

The boy glances back at me, clear annoyance on his face. “Got old, I guess.”

I don’t bother to tell the boy that I, too, am old. Something in the way he looks at me tells me that he already knows.

Once his back is turned, I pick up the Marlboro pack. The lingering smell of tobacco inside tickles a memory, silver smoke curling around a dark mustache.

“What was his name?” I ask.

The kid sighs. “Beats me. Look, man, I got a lot of work to do. Head on down to the rec room. I hear they got musicals on the TV today.”

That night, I am a child, sitting atop my father’s workbench, watching him rub varnish into the side of the oak canoe we have spent all summer building. The muscles in his arms ripple as he spreads sealant on the hull, his rugged afternoon shadow making him look every bit the war hero I believe him to be. This is years before I learn that

he spent the war getting shit-faced on a patrol boat off the coast of Brazil. He impregnated a woman there. She sent him letters, dozens, first swearing her love, then begging for money, then cursing his name, and finally pleading for him to come back. I will find these letters on the day of his wake, and I will weep while others toast his name.

But at this moment, it is summer, I am a child, and my father is perfect.

“How fast will it go? Can we take it down the Mississippi?” We had just read Huck Finn in school. “Maybe not the whole Mississippi,” my father says, puffing his cigarette, silver smoke curling over his mustache. “She’ll take on the pond out back just fine.”

“Can I name her?”

He arches an eyebrow. “Naming a boat is a serious business. Give a boat a bad luck name, bad luck is all she’s going to give you. You sure you’re up for it?”

I nod, gravely.

He looks at the canoe again, then at me. “Well, then she’s all yours. What’s her name, cadet?”

I deliberate silently, head bowed until the perfect name comes to me. I open my mouth and the word breaks apart on my tongue. I try once more to say it, but only a dry hiss leaves my throat.

It’s hard to think. Someone is walking behind me now, heavy boot falls scattering my thoughts like clouds of gnats. I look to my father and his face is gone. In its place, a circular window has been cut into his head, through which white fog falls in billowing sheets.

“What’s your name, cadet?” he asks. “Gotta hold onto that.”

I wake, covered in cold sweat. The boots are in the hall again.

I go over what I know. It isn’t much.

Except for the dream. It’s my only clear memory, a lighthouse in the fog.

“Do you believe in the afterlife, Henry?” George asks me. It has been a time since the dream, days, maybe weeks. Long enough for the flowers in the yard to bloom.

We are sitting in a pair of battered chairs on the back lawn, watching Berta as she sketches the butterflies on the begonias. She works in crayon, all they’ll let her have.

I consider the question, searching my brain for anything that might tell me how I feel. “Maybe,” I say with a shrug. “I hope my wife is there.” Loreen, her name swims to mind. The name tastes like tears, and my heart twists.

“Me too,” George says. “Except the wife. Between you and me, I never saw the appeal.” He runs a leathery tongue over his thin lips. “What do you think it looks like for people like us?”

“People like us?”

George rolls his eyes and taps a finger to his wrinkled temple. “Ya know, people with the Mad Cow, the brain rot, the Forget-Me-Nows.”

“Same as everyone, I guess? Maybe we get it all back.” I try to think about what that might feel like. The few memories I have are so precious to me now, each a beacon of light radiating in the lonely dark.

“Maybe. But… what if we don’t?” His eyes are distant, his hands clasped in a white knuckled grip.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, what is a memory if not a piece of us? And when it’s all gone, what happens? Our souls won’t know where to go? Or worse, what if we can’t go anywhere. Like, without the things we did, neither side knows where we belong. No heaven, no hell, just…”

“The fog,” I finish, thinking of the hole where my father’s face had been. We both fall silent for a moment, staring at Berta, at the butterflies, at nothing at all.

“Way I figure it,” George says glumly, “we are going to find out one way or another. And chances are we’ll both be drooling idiots by the time that happens.” He falls silent for a moment, his eyes set and hard, lips drawn back in a skeletal grimace.

Then, he slaps me on the shoulder and stands, knees cracking in protest. “Suppose all we have are the good days, and Lord knows neither of us got a lot of those on the horizon. Come on old man, I’ll whoop your ass at some checkers.”

We play most of the afternoon. Neither of us remember the rules, so we make them up as we go, working around our Swiss cheese brains. By the time Berta joins us, the board is cluttered with checkers, markers, a black pawn from a chess set, and forty-seven dollars in Monopoly money. We are both red-faced and sick with laughter.

That night, feeling more myself than I have in a long time, I pray to God that my Loreen is at peace. I pray that she is watching me as I inhale her scent from the comforter.

The boots are in the hall again.

It is close to 3:00 a.m., the only sounds are the constant hum of the air conditioner and the soft squelches of the boots’ wet rubber soles against the linoleum.

I look around the room. The same nightstand, the same clock, the same photo on the wall. Only, the couple in it is no longer smiling. Her eyes are filled with pity, his with horror.

The boots draw closer, the smell of blood announcing their arrival, a choking coppery scent that seems to fill my throat. I gag, pressing myself down into the bedding as if the ghost of Loreen’s perfume could kill the slaughterhouse stench and drive the thing away. It doesn’t. The boots come to a stop outside my door.

“What do you remember?” a voice asks and for a moment I think I recognize it. It’s a man’s voice, deep and sure. But wrong too, as if a dozen other voices whisper softly just beneath it.

I look at the door. Surely I didn’t hear that? I have a bad brain, the Mad Cow, the Forget-Me-Nows. It was some fragment of a dream, dragged into the waking world. Yet, I find my hand snaking under the lip of my mattress, touching the photo, then the cigarette pack.

It speaks again, this time louder, as if smelling my doubt. “Do you remember me?

I do not dare to respond. I lie there, frozen, eyes on the door until I hear the sound of the bootsteps retreating down the hall.

When I next emerge, a woman is at my door, a plastic gold tiara set into her wild tangle of black hair and a tray of blue frosted cupcakes in her hands.

“Good morning, Henry! And before you ask, no, we are not lovers. Good thing, too. Lovers get the door; friends get to share my birthday cupcakes.”

I smile. “I’m sorry, darling, have we met?”

“We most certainly have. And now, you’re going to spend the day worshipping me.”

Sitting at our table in the rec room, three of us eat until the frosting has dyed our lips and tongues blue, prompting the Queen’s bald friend to remark, “It looks like we just blew half of Smurf Village.”

Her laugh is like a cannon, blowing through the room, leveling all in its path. We laugh with her. She manages to convince an orderly to put on her favorite movie, an old black and white film where people dance their problems away. Halfway through, watching Fred Astaire foxtrot with a red-headed beauty under a crystal chandelier, the Queen gets swept away by the music and begins to dance herself.

She pulls the bald man to his feet despite his protests. “No! No! I couldn’t, my knees! Berta! Berta!”

“Up!” she commands. “Respect the crown and rise, serf!”

He rises, to my surprise, and seizes her around the waist. He leads her in a fast waltz around the room to the delight of other patients, creaky knees be damned. By the end, he is smiling and red-faced. He gives a flourished flip of his wrists as he bows to the crowd.

“Thank you,” he says, “thank you. Please stick around for the after-show and enjoy the buffet. I’ll be here ‘til I die.”

The Queen comes for me next, and I don’t fight her. I try to lead her, as the bald man did, but succeed only in smashing her toes with the first step.

“No worries, my dear,” she whispers, “I know the way.”

She leads me into the dance and before long the music takes us. The bald man claps his hands in rhythm with our steps, the entire room spinning around us. Then, she deposits me in a chair and takes to the tabletop.

Her skirts billow about her as she kicks and spins, the orderlies rushing to pull her down, only for her to dance away, leaping to the next table. She blows a kiss to one of the orderlies.

Each time they get near she jumps again, her eyes wild with delight.

“Do you think she is going to be lonely, when we’re gone?” The bald man asks, voice hushed.

I blink at him, placid as a cow. “I think she’ll be fine. She’s a charmer. Besides, I’m not planning to go anywhere. Are you?”

He looks at me a moment, then sighs. “Do you have any idea who I am?”

“No,” I admit, “but I think we’re friends.”

“That we are,” he says, looking back to where the Queen is balancing atop the couch, teal-scrubbed men closing in on all sides. Just before they pull her to the ground and jab a long needle into her neck, she takes a bow to raucous applause.

They drag her back to her room. Just as she leaves our sight, the bald man stands, and I smile up at him, unburdened with even the simplest of thoughts.

He stares at the hallway to the residential rooms, where the Queen has just vanished. “Do you ever hear the boots outside your door?”

“No,” I tell him, “I don’t think so.” Yet, for some reason, my stomach churns and my breath catches in my throat. I feel cold. I smell blood.

He nods, bright eyes set knowingly on me. “That’s good. Take care of her.”

George is gone. I know it before I open my eyes, the thought repeating like a pounding drum, summoning me back from the emptiness. I sit up in bed and stare at my closed door. Outside, other residents shuffle by on their way to the rec room, their slippered feet whispering on the tile.

George is gone.

How long ago was Berta’s birthday? I can’t be sure, but I think no more than a week, maybe two. George was bright that day, brighter than me. He couldn’t be gone. Most of the people who died of the Forget-Me-Nows were broken things by the end, barely able to move, let alone dance. George, by contrast, was alert, strong. Some days, it’s almost like he isn’t sick at all.

I’m just being paranoid, I reason. I stand, shave, and brush my teeth, the familiar routine easing the dread in my stomach. Then, I step out into the hall and turn, intending to walk down to the rec room like any other day.

George’s door is open, a trash bin in the hall outside.

A sharp, cold blade slides into my heart. Inside, two orderlies are stripping the room of everything that made it his.

“Where is George?” I ask.

“He died,” says one of the orderlies.

I don’t ask how. I already know the answer.

I grab one of George’s half-filled-out crossword puzzles from the trash can in the hall. Every question has the same answer.

HELP.

That night, I slide the crossword beneath my mattress to join my other meager treasures in the dark.

I spend a day with Berta in the yard, sitting on a bench near the small flower garden. It has been a time since George died, though to me, it feels like earlier that afternoon.

Berta tells me that she once seduced a prince who gave up his crown to be with her. She spent a long summer with him, hunting tigers in India before running off with the captain of a whaling ship and breaking the prince’s heart. I sit on her words with rapt attention, believing every one of them.

“Do you think George knew he was going to die?” I ask when she is done, the question loosed before I know I want to ask it.

Berta watches a butterfly, a Painted Lady, crawl over the top of a lily. She sucks in a breath, puffs out her cheeks, and lets it out slow. “He did. He said the boots were going to get him.”

“The boots?” I ask, unable to hide the quiver in my voice. I expect Berta to say George was delusional at the end of his life. I expect comfort.

Instead, her face goes pale, voice a haunted whisper. “You must have heard them. Everyone does around here, eventually.”

“Who is it?” I ask.

“More like what.”

“What is it then?”

The butterfly takes flight, rising slowly into the air above us. “I don’t know,” she whispers. “Maybe it’s death. Maybe we can hear it coming, when we’re close. Or maybe it’s a ghost; people die here all the time.” She leans back, eyes unfocused and set on the chipped wooden fencing where a horizon ought to be. “I think it’s a hungry thing, though. I can hear it salivating.”

“Hungry for what?”

“Who knows? Does it matter how it gets you? Result is the same.”

The finality in her voice twists the dagger that has been in my heart since George died, and I choke, fighting back tears. It’s real, God help me, it’s real. “It spoke to me.”

I don’t notice my hands are shaking until she takes one in hers, folding her fingers over my hand and pulling it to her chest. “What did it say?”

“It asked if I remembered it.” The memory is clear in my mind, without the faintest shred of fog. “I don’t. Or I don’t think I do. But its voice—I think I know it, but I don’t remember where from. It’s driving me crazy.”

She doesn’t reply for a long time. We sit, watching the sky turn gold then the purplish-green of a bruise. Finally, she lifts my hand to her lips and kisses me on the knuckle.

“You can stay in my bed tonight. I’ll sneak you in,” she says. “No funny business, mister. You shouldn’t be alone right now. Not with the boots after you.”

“Do you really think it’s after me?”

“Yes. But not tonight. Tonight, you’re mine.” Despite what she says, there is funny business that night. It is sweet, and gentle, and kind. I call her Loreen. She doesn’t correct me.

“I miss you,” the woman with drowned emerald eyes tells me. She is sitting beside my bed, one hand extended and folded over mine. We are alone, but we are not in the hospital. My bed sits in the middle of a clearing in the fog, its billowing walls stretching up out of sight on all sides.

“Do I know you?” I ask.

She laughs, then chokes. “Yeah, I should think you do.”

I study her for a moment. Her face is familiar but her hair is short, and unnaturally dark, dyed.

“I— I’m sorry—I don’t—”

She squeezes my hand tighter, “It’s ok, Dad. You don’t have to stress yourself, I’m right here.”

“Victoria?” I blink. “You changed your hair.”

The smile she gives me is a summer sun, its warmth penetrating every part of me. “Dad! I’m sorry, that must have confused you,” she runs a hand through her dyed locks. “I didn’t think, I—”

I give her hand a return squeeze, “No, it looks good.”

She laughs again, and then, inexplicably, begins to sob. Operating on some ancient instinct I cannot name, I pull her towards me and she curls against my side. In a flash, she is a child again, her arms stretched wide over my belly, her face pressed against my chest. In one moment, a thousand forgotten nights drift through my mind, nights spent holding my little girl as she quaked in fear of thunder or the terrors that lived in her closet.

“I wanted to see you again,” she says into my chest. “The doctors called. Said it wouldn’t be long now.”

“Long till what?”

She doesn’t respond for a long time and when she does it is in a small whisper, the kind reserved for words too painful for daylight. “I wanted to tell you that I’m sorry. When Mom died, I knew you needed help. I should have brought you home, I should have cared for you. This place, it is all I can afford but you shouldn’t have to die here.”

“Hush,” I whisper, running a hand through her hair. “There, here, all about the same to me now. It will have me soon.”

“I could take you home?” she says.

I shake my head, “Not enough left of me to take.”

“I don’t want my daddy to die.”

I point to the wedding photo that floats over the end of my bed. The man and the woman are smiling, their hands pressed flush against the woman’s belly.

She lifts her head and sniffles. “That was our beginning. All three of us.”

“Then remember them,” I say. “Remember us.”

We lie like that for an eternity, just me and my little girl in the fog. I know what is coming next, can hear it echoing across the emptiness, the sound reverberating in the icy air until it seems to surround us, enclose us.

It’s coming.

Berta is gone. Her room is bare and empty. I ask an orderly if she was moved. He tells me he doesn’t know. I have to find out from one of the nurses that she suffered an aneurism in her sleep a month ago. I sit on the bench in the garden, where she and I had once shared a long afternoon, and touch the sun-warmed stone where she sat.

I try to remember the way she smelled, but the only scent that comes to mind is blood. I weep. I am still weeping when I see the butterfly, the Painted Lady. It is dead, lying on its side in front of the bench, and I lift it as if cradling a child.

“I miss you,” I whisper.

A passing wind flutters the Lady’s dead wings.

“I’ll remember you, as long as I can.”

The boots are coming, the soft squelch of rubber on linoleum dragging me inch by inch back into myself. I make myself small, comforter drawn up over my head, eyes peeking out of a thin slit to stare at the door.

The smell is worse this time, rotten, like offal left under a summer sun. Then, to my horror, they stop at my door.

“Do you remember me?” it asks from the other side.

“No,” I blurt out, heart slamming in my chest. “No, go away!”

The thing in the boots doesn’t reply, but already I can hear something else, the soft click of metal sliding against metal. The brass handle begins to turn. I bolt to my feet and press my back to the wall. My mind races, thoughts melting together into a panicked, animal scream.

I need a weapon and, as if drawn by some strange gravity, I find myself reaching for my mattress. I grab the edge of it and flip it up. The photo of the little girl is there and the empty pack of Marlboros, but that isn’t all. An empty tube of lipstick, a crusted band aid, a peach pit, and more. Where had it all come from? And more importantly, how the hell can it help me? I push the trash aside, hoping for a knife, or a rock, but there is nothing. My hand falls to the photo of the little girl, my little girl. I grab the photo and remember the way Victoria pressed against me, and the atom bomb radiance of her smile.

Maybe we can feed it?

Berta’s words flash across my mind. Feed it? Feed it what? I have nothing but these trinkets, these—

“Memories,” I whisper, my voice cracking, eyes wide on the photo in my hand. I think to grab a different one, anything other than my Victoria, but the brass handle has almost turned enough to open. I hurl myself against the door in panic, and the thing on the other side pushes back with a terrible, inexorable, strength.

“Give it,” the thing on the other side of the door moans.

My legs are already burning, my neck painfully taut. I’m not strong enough, I realize with a growing dread. The rest of the treasures are safely tucked across the room from me, though they might as well have been on the moon, for all the good they could do me now. I stare at the photo crumbled in my hand and begin to sob.

“I’m sorry,” I choke. “Please, forgive me.” Then, shoulder still braced against it, I slide the photo under the door, my fingers tracing the little girl’s face right up until it vanishes from sight.

The shaking stops and I hold my breath.

I hear the crinkle as the photo is lifted off the ground. All falls quiet—too quiet. I strain to hear.

“Good enough,” the voice eventually says. A memory comes to me, so clear and sharp it seems to be happening right now.

“To the moon!” Victoria demands. It is a sunlit day, and I am young and whole. I take her in my arms and thrust her toward the sky, making rocket ship noises with my lips.

“Mission control, this is Houston. We have a problem!” I dive her headfirst toward the ground, stopping her fall at the last second and carrying her at a jog, her face hovering inches above the grass, her arms spread wide.

“Faster!” she screams. “We gotta reach the moon!”

I release her and she glides forward on the wind, before breaking apart into fog, one bit at a time.

It is almost dawn before I manage to remember how to stand and open the door.

The photo is gone.

“Who are you?” I ask the stranger.

She squeezes my hand and says a name, but the sound comes out like a dry wind.

“Do I know you?”

Her tears are hot when they drop from her face onto my palm. “I wanted to stay in town, till it was over.”

“Till what was over?” I ask. “Am I going home?”

I give it the lipstick tube the next night, the memory of a girl I loved and lost in college. Then the night after that, the peach pit goes and along with it a soldier I fought beside in another life.

As my last thought of him fades, I can almost see him standing in the room with me, dressed in combat fatigues, a foggy hole where his face should be.

“What’s the exit plan here, Hoss? You don’t got a lot of ammo to spare.”

I give it the crusted band aid, a pink sock, a shiny pebble, one step at a time, marching dutifully towards perdition. As I give it the pebble it speaks again, voice so familiar but so wrong, alien.

“These memories are weak,” it says. “I know you got something better. Feed me, Henry.”

I feel thinned out, my thoughts growing wispy and ephemeral. My body aches down to the bones, and my eyes feel like lead balls sinking into my skull. It isn’t leaving. Must still be hungry. So, I go back to my hoard, snatch up the empty Marlboro pack and begin to shove it under the door.

Then, with a violent tug, the pack is pulled the rest of the way through to the other side. There is a dismissive snort, and a chuckle that sounds as alien as it is hauntingly familiar, distorted and wet. I imagine a throat filled with blood, spilling endlessly out of a twisted mouth.

“Do you think this will satisfy me forever?” it asks.

“Will it satisfy you tonight?”

“You know what I want.”

“Just go away, please. Don’t take them too.”

It does not respond. As its heavy footsteps fade, I remember my father, sitting tall in a canoe as he glides silently down the river into a bank of icy fog.

I stare down at the space beneath my mattress, crippled with an impossible decision. Only the crossword puzzle and the dead butterfly remain.

The boots come slow tonight, one methodical step after another.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper, hands hovering over the two objects before finally lifting George’s crossword. I read his final words one last time, trying to hold his reddened, laughing face in my mind.

Then, with a stone in my stomach, I slide it under the door. Yet I can’t let go of it, my fingers pinched on the corner. The boots come to a stop and yank at the puzzle.

“No,” I plead, tears in my eyes. If it takes the paper, George will be gone; nobody else is left here to remember him. I try to pull the puzzle back, but it’s too strong, ripping it from my hands.

It laughs, not with one voice but hundreds, thousands, so loud it hurts. I scream and weep, begging it to go away or to just kill me.

It leaves, eventually, but not before speaking in George’s voice.

“Help me, Henry,” it says. “For the love of God, help me.”

George dances in my head. He takes a bow and becomes fog.

In the morning, I ask for a sheet of paper and a pen from one of the staff. Sitting alone in my room, using the nightstand as a table, I write a letter to Loreen.

I tell her I miss her, and that I can’t wait to see her when I get back from the war. I tell her that I think we should finally have children, and that a couple as good looking as us have a civic responsibility to procreate. I tell her that I think I could be a good father, if given the chance.

Then I remember that she is dead, and my tears make a black smudge of my signature.

I blink and I am sitting in front of my door, cradling the dried-out corpse of a butterfly. I hold its gossamer wings apart, pinched delicately in calloused fingertips.

I almost drop it in surprise, looking around my darkened room, eyes wide. How did I get here? I was just thinking of—of who?

“Do you remember me?” the thing asks from beyond the door, and my heart freezes in my chest. That’s right, that’s why I’m sitting here, holding my only friend.

“Please,” I whisper, “not her. Please.”

“You have to remember me,” it says.

“I don’t!”

The door shakes in its frame. “You have to!” it shouts, its shout twisting into an inhuman metallic whine. “You have to remember me, Henry!”

I scream and shove the butterfly’s corpse beneath the door.

“I’m sorry! I’m so sorry Berta!”

The door shakes, the thing echoing back my scream in my own voice. I scramble under the bed, dragging the comforter with me and screeching like an animal, my entire body rigid, my muscles cramped in terror. I scream and scream, until two orderlies burst in and drag me into the light.

They press something sharp into my arm. A warm darkness envelops me.

Berta walks into a foggy jungle and vanishes.

When I wake, I know I have always been alone here.

“How are you feeling today?” The doctor in the cat-eye glasses asks me.

I moan in terror.

“Non-verbal,” she says, scratching on her notepad. “Are you in any pain?”

My words are but a groan.

“Just try to relax,” she says, already standing to move along to the next room. “It won’t be long now.”

I take the photo off the wall and hold it up to the thin light from the yard.

I wonder if this is how those faceless others felt, before the end. I wonder if they found peace in the afterlife, or if they became hungry things.

The boots are in the hall, walking at a leisurely pace, a victor’s march.

The man in the photo is a stranger to me. I trace his narrow jaw and bushy eyebrows with my fingers. Distantly, I think I remember the feeling of holding my wife close as we danced at our wedding. Did we make love that night? Was I a good man? Does it even matter anymore?

The boots come to a stop outside my door and I brace myself.

“Do you remember me?” it asks.

I look at the photo, then at the door, and for the first time I realize I do know that voice, have heard it before, but never like this, never outside my own head.

The door swings open.

A figure stands in the shadows, with a clean jawline and dark, piercing eyes. It is dressed in a tuxedo, standing tall and strong. Where its face should be there is a hole, from which fog falls in freezing sheets. I look to the photo, the man is smiling wickedly up at me, the woman dead in his arms.

“You know who I am?” And I do. I see it all, reflected in this thing with my voice. I see myself holding my wife’s hand as cancer devours her, I see the love in my daughter’s eyes, I hear guns firing, a jackhammer screaming, the sound of George’s knees creaking as he and Berta dance, all the moments that make a life. Every bit of me, stolen and glued back together until this thing is more me than I am. All but one piece, all I have left. I feel something tug inside my head, a thread pulled taut.

“Henry,” I whisper.

I press my face into the comforter and breathe deep Loreen’s perfume, basking in my last mote of light. The thing steps forward. George’s face appears in the window in its head, leering maliciously down at me. Then Berta’s, and Loreen’s, and a dozen more, a slideshow of familiar strangers that ends exactly where I know it will. With a man’s face, my face.

“I’m so hungry.”

The thread snaps.

My name is Henry. I am old. I was a soldier. After that I built roads and married a beautiful woman.

My name is Henry. I am old. I was a soldier. I was a road. I married a beautiful woman.

My name is Henry. I am. I was.

My name is Henry.

My name is—

It took them several years to realize they were all dreaming the same dream. Why does one really report a dream, after all? Over the breakfast table, pulling on non-slip shoes for work, sitting in the passenger seat of a tired minivan on the way to school—only unusual dreams are the topic of conversation. If it’s…

A crowd gathered the day before Sushi Maekawa closed.

So Ayami wanted to say. In reality, only four people lingered outside the glass storefront. If Sushi Maekawa still drew crowds, they would have soldiered on instead of closing.

She glanced at the tank on the counter and met the gaze of one of the fugu. Its round dark eyes seemed accusatory, though whether it wished to say Why would you eat me? or Why won’t you eat me? Ayami couldn’t tell. Considering the number of fugu they still had in the back, this one was unlikely to be consumed today.

She rubbed her right hand—beginning to show wrinkles—against her forehead. Had she become as sentimental as her mother? Twenty-six years a fugu chef, and never before had she assigned thoughts to her fish.

Toshi, his uniform starched and spotless, flipped the sign from Closed to Open. He unlocked the front door, but not one among the four-member crowd entered.

Ayami glanced at the clock. Were they opening already? 10:00 a.m. So, it was opening time. More and more, time had become the domain of digital clocks and flashing numbers rather than the world outside, where nights were starless and days endlessly smoggy. During Sushi Maekawa’s last major renovation, they had changed the dark cherry wood tables for a lighter finish to give some illusion of light.

All three fugu turned away from Ayami. They were torafugu, with black blotches on their sandy yellow backs and some of the deadliest poison to go with their exquisite taste. One of them nuzzled the glass, round eyes directed at somewhere beyond Ayami.

Ayami followed its gaze to the man seated behind the counter. Maekawa Gen, proprietor of Sushi Maekawa. Arms crossed, eyes hidden behind ever-present sunglasses, bald patch gleaming beneath the LED lights—another concession from their last renovation and one Ayami had suggested. Most would mistake the sunglasses for some outdated fashion statement, but Gen had confessed to her that even indoor lights hurt his eyes these days.

Ayami reached out and tapped Gen on the shoulder. “Sit there brooding for too long and you’ll scare off all our customers.”

Gen turned. Ayami knew him well enough to read his expression behind the sunglasses: annoyance, mild. “Look at them,” he said, gesturing at the gawkers outside.

“I know. Milling around the door, not coming in when it’s their last chance.” She forced a smile. “They don’t know what they’re missing.”

“No. Look at him.”

It took Ayami a moment to figure out who Gen was talking about. A young man in an oversized t-shirt leaned against the storefront glass, unzipped backpack at his feet, Quickscape helmet in his hands. The helmets didn’t offer the full Dreamscape experience—their nodes weren’t that powerful—but they were immersive enough if you wanted a quick break from reality.

The man slipped the helmet over his head and sat down on the sidewalk. He fell still, reacting no more to the people around him than the glass did.

“Can’t he read?” Gen growled. “‘No Dreamscaping.’ Says right there on the window.”

“He’s not inside the restaurant yet,” Ayami pointed out. Nor will he ever be, like the millions of others lost to the Dreamscape.

Gen snorted and turned away. No matter how Ayami felt today, he must’ve felt worse. Sushi Maekawa—once Fugu Maekawa, before changing its name in a futile attempt to attract tourists—had been in Gen’s family for generations.

The bell—an old-fashioned one, for this Gen had refused to give up—rang. Two people Ayami recognized pushed past the three gawkers and one Dreamscaper to enter. Uehara Reiko was around Ayami’s age, her grey-streaked hair knotted in a bun. Her son Minoru was in his twenties and updated his hair like other people updated their multi-tabs. Today it was cerulean blue and spikey. Over forty years ago, when Ayami was in second grade, her older brother had returned home sporting a similar hairstyle. Their mother had chased him around the house with a razor. Nowadays, Minoru’s peers would consider him a dinosaur; who bothered with flesh-world styling when it was easier to make a cool avatar in the Dreamscape?

Reiko’s eyes fell on the fugu tank as Toshi led them to their usual seats by the window. Ayami couldn’t remember them sitting anywhere else recently since their table was hardly ever taken. Gen had offered them private rooms at no extra charge, but Reiko had turned down the offer, saying she preferred the window even if the sun rarely broke through.

“What are you going to do with those guys?” Reiko asked, gesturing at the fugu. Toshi shrugged and muttered something noncommittal. Ayami could’ve answered. The fugu would be sealed in locked containers and disposed, like their poisonous parts were. A waste, but at this point shrinkage was the last thing Sushi Maekawa cared about.

Reiko waved away Toshi’s attempts at handing her the menu. “We’ll get the torafugu five-course meal. I’d get the eight-course one, but all my invitees refused to come.”

Toshi nodded and made his way to the curtain. Ayami had heard the order, but she listened as he repeated it. After, as she turned to walk deeper into the kitchen, she heard Reiko say, “I admit, I expected more of a fight to get in. That’s why I said to come early. Not that I have much else to do with my mornings now.”

Ayami’s hands curled into fists. Reiko had worked at a local onsen for nearly three decades, only to be dismissed at age fifty, as the resort ran out of reasons to exist. Reiko had accepted an early retirement. She was one of the lucky ones, with savings and a son who supported her.

Ayami forced her fists to unclench as she turned to the tank. Nine torafugu swam within. It had been ten yesterday. More shrinkage. Despite their best efforts, fish sometimes died before they could be served.

Ayami washed her hands and laid out her equipment: the cutting board, the knives reserved for cleaning fugu, the tray marked with “Dispose” for the parts she would cut away. She scooped the largest torafugu from the tank. It wiggled as she lifted it from the net, but before it could even attempt to inflate, Ayami inserted her knife into the top of its head.

The fugu stilled. Decades ago, when Ayami first started her training, many had questioned why. She should’ve felt as out of place as this fugu did, lying lifeless on a wooden cutting board. She hadn’t been born in a family of chefs, had never even eaten fugu in her childhood. She’d been an excellent student, had gone to university at age sixteen. Only to wind up in one of those glass-and-concrete offices: answering calls, filing documents, bringing tea to company execs.

She’d watched her fellow women shatter themselves on the shores of ambition. Passed up for promotion or settling for singledom. Bombarded with Japan’s declining birth rate and how it was their fault. Get married, have a child, find yourself bound by the shackles of motherhood. Unable to return to work, or returning to slashed pay, confused peers, and the label of an inadequate mother.

Ayami had said, No more. Not me.

She raised her knife. Now came the part she’d trained three years for. The part that required an examination where two-thirds of examinees failed, the part for which she was the last practicing chef in Shimonoseki—and indeed, the world.

Chop off the fins. Split the skin, peel it away. Remove the insides—liver, intestines, all filled with tetrodotoxin. She placed them on the “Dispose” tray. She worked quickly, with practiced ease. No part of fugu preparation surprised her now, not even those pollution-mutated fugu with their organs in the wrong places.

Perhaps it was good she had been born then, and not now. In that world of restriction, she had rejected corporate life and found the fugu.

She’d remade herself into something no one expected from her; in all her years growing up, she’d never heard of a female fugu chef—though now she knew they’d been there all along, and she wouldn’t label herself any sort of innovator, no matter what the magazines said. She’d drawn more than a few odd looks during her apprenticeship, sometimes studying alongside youths who’d worked in their parents’ kitchens their whole lives. But in the end: a license, a test. Standards that didn’t depend on drinking or socializing or singledom.

She’d passed the exam. She’d been that one third.

Ayami glanced down at the pale fugu flesh. Removing poison was just the first step. She had fugu-chiri to stew. Milt to grill and season. Sashimi to cut and arrange in the shape of a chrysanthemum. During Fugu Maekawa’s height, Ayami had three, four assistant chefs, though none of them were allowed to touch the fugu. Now she had just Keisuke, and he wouldn’t be in until noon.

Ayami smiled as she parted the torafugu flesh into thin, translucent sashimi slices. There had been golden years. Every table in Fugu Maekawa filled come dinner time. No one could get through the door except by reserving days in advance. Interviews with Ayami received full-page spreads in Shimonoseki Life, the city’s leading magazine at the time (now folded, not even digital). Gen, not so grumpy then, gave Japan Profile writers access to Fugu Maekawa’s kitchens and bragged about Ayami and the restaurant.

Eventually, the golden years ended. First came the non-toxic fugu, made by isolating the fish from tetrodotoxin-laden bacteria. Ayami closed the lid over the simmering stew and sighed. And we thought that would be the worst we’d face. Lobbyists asked the government to relax the ban on fugu liver, to relax the fugu preparation test itself. Shimonoseki sniffed in disdain, then raged, then panicked.

Ayami sprinkled seasoning over the milt. No, the problem had come with Synthfood, then Dreamscape. The former gave you the day’s nutrients in an easy-to-swallow packet, and the latter lets you enjoy the world’s delights in a virtual space. No calories, no accidents, no expensive plane tickets. The real world became obsolete. Virtual treks up Mount Fuji outnumbered real climbs many times over. Osaka Castle, built and rebuilt over centuries, stood empty in the height of summer, its continued maintenance a subject of budgetary debates. Shimonoseki’s aquarium closed last year, shipping as many fish as possible off to Okinawa.

Restaurants shut their doors. Some chefs jumped ship, worked with Dreamscape developers, opened virtual restaurants. Ayami, too, had offers, but she had no wish to leave Sushi Maekawa, and Gen had refused to even contemplate a virtual branch. “It’s not the same,” he’d said. “The Dreamscape, no matter how much it improves, can’t rival real life.”

But for most people, it seemed, the Dreamscape was better. And who could blame them, with the real world polluted and stifling and sunless? The falling demand made fugu—both traditional and non-poisonous— unprofitable to farm. The pollution in the seas made them difficult to catch. Ayami felt a prickle of pride knowing she’d outlasted them all, those safe-farmed fugu and their under- trained chefs.

There would always be people like Reiko and Minoru. The question was, would there be enough of them to support chefs like Ayami? The answer, ultimately, was no.

The first reporter—the first flesh-and-blood reporter, as drones had been buzzing around the building since morning—showed up at 1:30 p.m. Ayami allowed Keisuke to grill the shrimp while she sat down for her final interview.

He was a foreigner. Ayami wasn’t surprised. Since the restaurant’s golden years, western reporters had loved her, the office worker who became a fugu chef—a female fugu chef. She’d felt a vague unease when reading through machine translations of those articles; some of them seemed to treat her as a symbol more than a person. But today Ayami reserved her annoyance for those Japanese reporters who hadn’t come, who’d sent drones for the closing of the last fugu house.

“Do you mind if I turn on full Dreamscape recording?” the reporter asked. His Japanese was excellent, with only a hint of an accent.

“No,” Ayami said. She had little love for Dreamscape formats and interactive news, where viewers would be able to poke her virtually rendered skin, smell traces of cooking oil on her uniform. But if she refused, he’d create his report solely through memory reconstruction and that would be even more inaccurate.

He picked up a piece of fugu sashi with chopsticks, dipped it into the sauce, plopped it into his mouth, and chewed. A line of English text crawled across his multi-tab’s holographic screen. Notes to enhance his interactive video, probably. Maybe some stupid comment saying “tastes like chicken” or “doesn’t taste like anything at all, just the sauce” on the little opinion sidebar. How could a thirty-something foreigner understand things like texture and subtlety? At least he handled chopsticks well and didn’t drop the sashimi in the stew like one reporter had long ago.

Moments after the thoughts surfaced, Ayami pushed them down. She was not being fair to him. She didn’t know what he’d written, and he hadn’t done anything to earn her disdain— except to show up on this day when she was losing everything.

He ate more sashimi and drank a gulp of fugu-chiri. Then he said, “There is no tingling.”

Ayami raised an eyebrow. “What do you mean?”

He leaned closer as if to share a secret. “I’ve eaten fugu in the Dreamscape. It causes a tingling sensation to the lips. The virtual server said it’s to imitate the remaining traces of poison, and the tingling is part of fugu’s charm.” He frowned at his sashimi chrysanthemum and the petals he’d plucked away. “There’s no tingling in this one.”

Ayami chuckled. “No, no. Fugu—properly prepared fugu—isn’t supposed to cause obvious tingling. Some chefs add spice to the sauce which can create that effect, but as my old teacher used to say, too much tingle and you better run to the hospital.”

The reporter didn’t seem perturbed by this. Just drank more stew, moved on to the next question. “It must’ve hurt Maekawa Gen greatly,” he said, “to sell the building to a DreamHub developer.”

Ayami frowned, then tried her best approximation of a nonchalant shrug. “You’ll have to ask him about that.”

“He refused to speak to me and said I should direct all questions to you.”

In truth, Gen had wavered for weeks about the DreamHub developer’s offer. It felt like selling to the enemy. But Gen needed the money to care for his ailing father, and the restaurant had spent its last years losing money rather than making it.

Ayami said, “Gen accepted the best offer. That is all.”

The reporter tapped something on his screen. “There were many reports of your restaurant receiving offers to collaborate on a virtual branch. But Maekawa Gen turned them down. Is this something you wish had gone differently?”

Ayami mulled over what to share, then decided the truth would be fine. This was her final interview, the final record of her as Sushi Maekawa’s fugu chef. “It was Gen’s decision. But I… do agree with him.”

The reporter raised an eyebrow. “Oh? Are you distrustful of technology as well?”

“No. Not technology. It’s just… with Dreamscape…” She waved a hand, trying to explain, hoping she did not come across as outlandish to him as Gen sometimes seemed to the rest of them. “It’s not real. I’m not sure how I feel about it replacing the real world—and leaving people who haven’t given up on the real world with nowhere to go.” She thought of Reiko and Minoru, and of herself.

The reporter made another note. She expected him to probe further, but he moved on to a different topic, and for that she was grateful.

The interview continued until the reporter was about halfway through the carefully prepared meal. Then he told her he wouldn’t keep her any longer, and surely she had other customers to cook for.

“Thank you,” he said, rising to his feet and bowing, “for agreeing to this interview. I know this must be a hard day for you.”

Ayami returned his bow. “Thank you for coming. For… for being the only reporter who came.”

She’d turned away, about to walk back to the kitchen, when he said, “Please, don’t think too badly of my fellow reporters. The JAXA conference is running through the week. That’s probably why they couldn’t show up in person today.”

Ayami paused in her steps, contemplated what to say, managed to find nothing suitable. She resumed walking. She had to get back to the kitchen. She trusted Keisuke, but she didn’t want to spend another minute out in the dining area.

Toshi was gone when Ayami returned to the kitchen. Left at 2:00 p.m. sharp after Sumire arrived for her shift. “He said it looked like we didn’t need him,” Gen explained. “Of course, I offered to pay him for the whole day, but he would have none of it.”

Ayami didn’t reply, just continued turning over the grilled eel. Gen lingered for a moment, then stepped through the partition back into the dining area.

“He didn’t even say goodbye to you,” Keisuke said as he stretched a shrimp for tempura, voicing Ayami’s thoughts.

“It’s alright,” Ayami said. “It’s… characteristic of Toshi. Professional until the end.”

“More like ice-cold and heartless.”

Ayami’s mouth quirked into a smile. “Well, at least we won’t have to worry about Toshi surviving this cold and heartless world. The rest of us will have only Dreamscape to fall back on.”

“Dreamscape? Ha. If any of us gets lost in there, Gen will hunt us down and give us a good beating.”

He glanced at the partition as if wondering whether Gen would return to do just that, then said more softly, “That’s for the rest of us, of course. You’ve earned a break, and even Gen can’t dispute that.”

The partition flapped open, but it was Sumire who stepped through, not Gen. Ayami passed the completed eel dish to her, then said to Keisuke, “I’m not sure I’m ready to… to retire. To live only in Dreamscape.” She didn’t want her last memory of her working life to be failure, to be her restaurant shutting down.

As Sumire left, Keisuke said, “Gen has a point, and I completely understand why he feels that way. But sometimes… I wonder if they might have a point too.”

“They?”

He glanced at her. “I was reading some articles this morning. About this place, and how we’re about to close. Most of them were the usual—lamenting the loss, rehashing your story, talking about the sale to a DreamHub developer. But there was one that said… it said we were part of the problem.”

Ayami had an inkling about what he was talking about, but still she said, “Please explain.”

“Part of what caused that.” He waved a hand at the window behind him. “The poison in the air, the poison in the seas. The fishing industry was at least partially responsible.” He sighed and dipped the shrimp into batter. “It got me thinking, maybe Dreamscape is the way out. If we did all that to the real world, then we should get out of it.”

He’d forgotten to pre-heat the oil. Ayami had half a mind to point that out but stopped herself. “But will hiding in Dreamscape really help? If we want to fix this, don’t we need to be, well, here?”

Keisuke shook his head. “Probably. I don’t know. My point is, it might be worth looking at from another angle. The Dreamscape isn’t your enemy. You’ve been working hard all your life. Sometimes it’s okay to just stop.”

Just stop. Step into an early retirement, like the one forced upon Reiko. Except unlike Reiko, Ayami had no one. No family to rely on, no close friends unless she counted Gen. She had poured her life into her work, only to find herself standing at the pinnacle of a dying profession.

During the three o’clock lull, Sumire walked over to Ayami as she was inspecting the knives. “I sent something to you,” Sumire said. “Check your multi-tab.”

Ayami tapped the mailbox on the hologram and found a pamphlet from JAXA, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency. It listed training programs for mechanics, navigators, onboard nutritionists . . .

“And?” Ayami said. Then regretted it, when Sumire’s face fell.

“I thought . . . I thought you’d be interested.” Ayami frowned. “Interested? As in . . . ?”

“To apply. You understand cooking and nutrition, and you’re good with your hands. I figured, even JAXA could use someone like you.”

Ayami wanted to laugh—but at the same time, felt something close to tears pricking the back of her eyes. She didn’t know whether to read this as a joke or to be touched Sumire genuinely thought so highly of her. “I’m old. Even if JAXA needed someone, they’d want someone young. Someone like you.”

Sumire bit her lip. “I heard you earlier, when you said you weren’t ready to retire. I heard your interview with the reporter too. You said you wished there was still room for people who haven’t given up on the real world. Isn’t that what JAXA is trying to do? To carve new roads for us, not in Dreamscape but in space? I’m probably not smart enough to help, but you—”

“Don’t say that,” Ayami cut in. “You’re plenty smart. If you think whatever JAXA is doing could work, then you should apply.”

Sumire’s smile was brighter than the overhead lights, brighter than the sun in Ayami’s memory. “Thank you. Maybe I should be more confident. But in turn, I think you should also be more positive. It’s never too late. Please think about it.”

They’d meant to shut down at 10:00 p.m., but the last customer lingered, drinking sake and eating his fifth tuna temaki. Ayami, Gen, Sumire, and Keisuke let him be. Ayami scooped out the last torafugu in the back and started preparing it. The three in the front swam on, uneaten.

“Making this one for you,” Ayami said to the three remaining employees. “At this rate, we’ll be done before the customer out front is. You want me to grab the fugu from the front tank too?”

A chorus of no’s echoed around the kitchen. “Just one piece is enough for me,” Sumire said.

“I’ve had enough fugu to last a lifetime,” Gen said. “And you still don’t make it good as Father did.” Ayami rolled her eyes, and he chuckled.

“Not sure if I should trust you, Ayami,” Keisuke said. “Maybe you’re going to poison me for the time I burned the calamari.”

They all laughed, and chatted, and promised to keep in touch, though Ayami had no idea how many of those promises would be kept. She liked them all, even Toshi, but memories of Sushi Maekawa would become a wound now, and keeping in touch with her co-workers would feel like scraping at the scabs. However, for tonight they were a family, complimenting her on the fugu meal with vocabulary the reporter would never have, cleaning up together on their last night, Gen himself sweeping and taking out garbage.

Gen would return. There were still inspectors to meet, deals to sign, further clean- up to oversee. But for the rest of them, this was the last time.

The last customer left with a ring of the old metal bell. Ayami leaned against one of the wood tables and stared at the tank on the counter.

Gen walked up to her and slowly removed his sunglasses. He blinked as if trying to clear away dust or tears.

“Maybe . . .” Ayami began.

“Hmm?”

Ayami bit her tongue. Maybe you should see someone about your eyes, she wanted to say. But she’d already voiced those concerns a dozen times, and Gen always brushed her off.

Instead, she gestured at the three remaining torafugu. “Such a shame to throw them out.”

“What do you propose?”

She couldn’t keep them. She still lived in the single-room flat she’d had since her office worker days; she didn’t need anything bigger since she spent most of her life in Sushi Maekawa. She wouldn’t be able to keep torafugu alive for long. And she didn’t want to stare at them all day, didn’t want to be reminded of the life she’d lost.

“I’ll need a container,” she said. “And rope.”

They found a clear plastic container with a lid and a length of yellow rope. Ayami scooped water and fugu from the tank to the container, and Gen poked holes in the lid to allow air to pass through. Ayami bound the rope around the container and tied a handle at the top.

At the door, Ayami bowed to Gen. “Thank you for everything.”

He shook his head. “No, I should thank you. I have barely a quarter of my father’s culinary talent. It’s thanks to you that Fugu Maekawa survived so long.”

Ayami didn’t miss how he’d used the restaurant’s former name. “It’s thanks to you, too. A restaurant is more than its chef.”

The corners of Gen’s mouth curled upward. “We outlasted all of them, didn’t we? Take care, Ayami. You were the best there was.”

She hefted her backpack and the container of fugu. “Take care, Gen.”

The walk to the bus stop seemed to take twice as long as usual. Her multi-tab said the next bus would arrive in twenty minutes— decent, considering how late it was and how much public transport had downsized. The bus arrived, carrying only two other passengers: a woman and a man sitting side by side. They gawked at Ayami and the fugu visible through the container. The woman whispered a string of words to her companion and gesticulated so fervently that Ayami wondered if she recognized her. The woman looked old enough to have read Shimonoseki Life back in the day.

Ayami got off at the Kanmon Wharf. It was a short walk to the harbor, the container in her right hand, the fugu staring out into the night, as uncertain as Ayami herself. Even if the city lights blinked out, the skies were no longer clear enough for anyone to see stars. Her steps tapped a steady rhythm on the wooden walkway. She could see the abandoned aquarium building. Once she could’ve asked them to take the torafugu, but now that wasn’t possible.

Ayami knelt on the empty pier, placed the container beside her, and after a moment’s hesitation, released the fugu into the Kanmon Straits.

They would probably die out there. Most things did these days, out on the tainted waters. But maybe they’d survive. They’d survived this long, from their trip to the restaurant and now back to the sea.

Ayami returned to the bus stop and flicked on her multi-tab. She tapped the mailbox icon and opened the JAXA pamphlet.

The land and sea these days were not made for her any more than they were made for the fugu. But maybe she too could find livable waters. She read and reread the registration dates, locking them away in her mind. She’d made change work before, when her life and career had been tumbling toward dead ends. Sumire was right. Maybe it wasn’t too late.

The line is long for a medicine show. It is headlined by a switch of a man who, according to his placard, is called Hanrahan and whose chief ware is a milky green solution by the name of “Doctor Hanrahan’s Clairvoyance Balsam and Vermifuge.”“Can we go? Can we go?” cry Conrad and Lizzie from the end…

My husband didn’t return to me as an animal or ghost. He didn’t send messages in code or possess other people to reach me. My dreams of him were just dreams, subconscious flotsam and jetsam. I’d stopped searching for signs of him. But a part of me was still waiting for him, and waiting was just searching in reverse.

Sometimes, late at night, I snuck off to my neighbor’s place to consort with the living.

There was another man, a divorce lawyer, I sometimes saw too. The twenty-year-old I was trying to be loved to indulge her warped sense of time: What day is it? What year? My disorientation was real, but I embraced it. But the part of me that knew exactly what she was doing also knew, exactly to the day, when six months since my husband’s death had passed. And on that day, that part of me said it was time to grow the fuck up.

That night, my eyelids popped open like some horror-movie doll’s and the time blazed blue across the room: 3:01. The clock practically spoke, its phantom voice insinuating, insistent: neither my own nor my husband’s. But maybe death had changed him. What was he trying to say?

These were precisely the kinds of thoughts I could no longer abide. I flipped on the light, grabbed the nearest book, and pretended to read until I pretended to sleep.

The next night it happened again: the sudden opening of eyes greeted by a bright 3:01. I sat up and almost reached out to clutch the handle of the three. Then I remembered: Just numbers.

But why those numbers? My husband had died in the afternoon: one-something, no threes. And why not an even hour? Why that pointer finger of an extra minute? To what did it point?

Perhaps at me, at my compulsive need to look for answers where there were none. Or maybe it was just scolding me for not looking hard enough. Maybe the very grief that had driven me to seek my husband had clouded my seeing, as it had clouded everything else, and he inhabited myriad mysterious forms I couldn’t discern.

So be it. I was determined to now grieve like a good Anglo-American, or better yet, a made-for-TV upper-class Brit. Like the very best citizen, I would work and work to refill our emptying coffers and cram my mind with useful thoughts. Most importantly, I would focus my efforts on parenting: I would not flee to my room to protect my daughters from my madness and misery or, worse yet, to protect myself from theirs.

Still, every night I awoke at 3:01. With every new wake-up, the numbers grew—larger, closer, breaking free from the clock. Soon, they broke free from the dark. One afternoon, the electricity fritzed out. When I checked my phone to reset the clock, it was 3:01. I ran to the store to get groceries: the timestamp on my receipt said 3:01. A self-help book I was proofreading used, as a negative example, someone who stayed up each night until 3:01. “Typo?” I wrote in the margins. Maybe it was a typo, but it wasn’t, I knew, a mistake.

When my oldest called home from school with a migraine, I barely glanced at the time. I already knew what it would say: I was right. In the car on our way home, I couldn’t help quizzing her about the circumstances of her headache: Had it come on gradually or suddenly? How much time had passed between its onset and her phone call? Did she feel a sense of urgency when she called me or was she listless?

“I don’t know,” she said. “Why are you asking me all these weird questions?”

I couldn’t tell her that I hoped her father was somehow communicating with me through her.

I wanted to believe, but didn’t believe it enough to risk her believing it, too. When we got home, I fed her ibuprofen and fled to my room.

My husband and I used to read to the girls before bed, but by each day’s end, I could barely function. My oldest now played phone games long into the night and my youngest raced around the house in circles. I understood that the distress I forced myself to feel about this came from a rarified set of values based on culture and class, one in which my children were supposedly in training to become both masters of the universe and responsible citizens who were to “better” the world while collecting on their advantages. On the other hand, I knew the importance of self-discipline and sleep for basic well-being from my own chronic lack of both. I also knew I was allowing their behavior not out of a revolutionary spirit but because it was easier to ignore it.

One night, after my youngest had supposedly gone to sleep, her feet once more quaked the house. I loved her thumps, the micro and macro rhythms, the jackhammer and the pause. Still, I wrenched myself out of my bed.

“Hey there,” I chirped. My youngest glanced at me and kept moving, her beige hair flapping wildly. I tried again. “It’s late. You should be in bed.”

“I can’t,” she said, still running. “Liv kicked me out.”

“Kicked you out?” I barged into their shared bedroom. “Did you kick out your sister? From her own room?”

“If I had my own room,” she said, “I wouldn’t have to.”

“We’ve been over this,” I said, my jaw clamping to staunch my fury. “I’m still trying to figure out how we can keep this house, so you can forget getting a bigger one. You know there are whole giant families that share one room apartments, right? Count your blessings.” When she blinked her disdain at my platitudes, I yelled: “This is what you care about now, of all things? This?”

She turtled her head. “I’m sorry.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, but it came out snappish. I tried again. “I’m sorry.” In the rest of our little house, my youngest continued to thump around. “I’m going to get Ava now.”

“But Ava won’t stop talking,” she said, clutching her hands as if around a little neck.

“Ava’s just sad. We all are. It’s okay.”

“But that doesn’t make sense. How can everyone being sad be okay? That’s, like, the opposite of okay.”

“I don’t know,” I said, my answer to everything.

Before she could respond, I slipped out of the room and tried to stop my youngest. But she made a game of it. She hopped on the couch, pouncing on the arm that had already caved in from her previous pouncing, then climbed the top of the couch that had already split open from her climbing. The more she hopped around, the younger she seemed, as if she were traveling back to the lost time, when she was five or three instead of nine, before her father got sick and died. She found her own antics hilarious and started narrating her moves, using her chosen regression persona, “the doggo.”

“The doggo is running away from the mommo!” she cried. “The doggo is jumping on the doggo couch.”

“It’s late, sweetie,” I said. “That’s enough.”

“The doggo needs exercise.”

“The doggo needs sleep.”

“The doggo needs to chase a squirrel.”

I tried to intercept her and missed. She shrieked with delight. Then I grabbed at her again and she tripped and went crashing, headfirst, into the wall, the frenzied glee knocked so completely out of her that I longed for its instant return.

She palmed the top of her head. I was already seeing stretchers, hospital beds, the hidden hematoma that fatally burst. At the same time, I refused to believe anything could be wrong.

“I’m okay,” she said, before I could ask. “I just need a little ice.” She went to the freezer and pulled out the cold pack my husband had long ago purchased for such occasions. Even now, I expected him to rush ahead and grab it for her himself.

Now my oldest was up, asking questions and holding the ice pack to my youngest’s head. I so loved them both and I wanted to sleep forever. How could such impulses coexist? When I finally got my girls to bed, I set my alarm, to check on my youngest, for 2:58 a.m.: enough time to fully wake up before 3:01 and not enough to fall asleep again then arise at the fateful time. I would break the pattern, whatever it augured. When the inevitable display of numbers appeared, I would stare them down and bid them farewell.

But I awoke as I usually did, disturbed by nothing but my own brain, at 3:01.

I smiled. I suppose I was thrilled. Not so long ago, I would have spoken to my dead husband about 3:01 and imagined his response. But in that moment, I found that I couldn’t do it anymore. His silence had grown too loud for me to talk over.

In the soft black of my daughters’ room, I sat on the edge of my youngest’s bed and inhaled her warm sugary scent. I wanted to tuck myself behind her, glue myself to her folds, the way I used to, sometimes, with my husband when I couldn’t sleep. Above, my oldest nested beneath her comforter, her thumb, I knew, poised nostalgically against her mouth.

I began the careful climb over my youngest. Her eyes flew open, the whites piercing the night. “Mom?” she said, gazing up at me. It seemed like a big question, all the hope and need and trust packed inside that small, dull word.

“Yes,” I said. “It’s just me.”

Gemini Burns pressed a fingertip into the soil around her bonsai tree to check its moisture levels. She got as close to the plant as she could, pretending to stand beneath it, imagining the staggering heights a tree used to be able to reach. The daily ritual of inspecting its tiny leaves for signs of…

I had a dream about you after everything happened. We were five again, playing in the schoolyard. I was aware of your body even then, how sinuous it was compared to mine. In my dream, recess came to an end and you were behind me in line. You weren’t talking because you were starting to…

Have you ever wished there was a device able to encode all languages in your brain so you could read stories from around the world? Same here. Although there is no such tech (yet!), don’t let it stop you from cracking open a book originally written in another language. With such a wide literary community writing in English, stories in other languages often get overlooked. And these stories have so much to offer—unique perspectives, different topics, and fresh writing styles. These six short story collections are the ideal companion for a quick read at breakfast or before bed, so take a look—there is sure to be something written (and translated) just right for you. 

People from My Neighborhood by Hiromi Kawakami

Translated from Japanese by Ted Goossen

There’s a hell, the old man said, for people who are mean to chickens. If you get sent there, a giant chicken comes and spits fire on you, and pecks you, and tramples you with its claws. And that goes on forever.

The government is overthrown by two students. A small child-creature moves into someone’s home, uninvited, and stays for thirty years. The Lord of the Flies takes over a gambling joint. The whole town moves underground after a visit from a mysterious diplomat.

People from My Neighborhood follows the perspective of one main character, a young girl, and the people around her as they experience strange events in their everyday lives. The stories are not chronological, so you get to see the unexpected trajectory each character’s life takes. Kawakami’s stories in this collection span only a few pages, but the pure imagination of her magical realism allows each story to stretch out and feel so much bigger. From the magic of the word “oops” to a no-gravity alert from the Disaster Preparedness Office, each story is a surprise and a delight.

If you want a short story collection that will haunt you in a good way, this is for you.

The Houseguest and Other Stories by Amparo Dávila

Translated from Spanish by Audrey Harris and Matthew Gleeson

When I hear the rain beating against the windows, their screams return to me once more—those screams that would stick to my skin like leeches. They would rise in pitch as the pot heated and the water came to a boil.

A man grieving the death of his brother finds solace in the two weeping, fickle creatures he left behind. A presence referred to only as “he” invades the house of an unhappy housewife, until she can’t take it anymore. A man sees himself walk by on the street, arm-in-arm with a woman who is not his wife.

In this collection, Amparo Dávila takes painfully human situations and characters and twists an element of the strange and magical into their stories. Each short story follows a different character as they face something new in their lives and are forced to decide about how they will move on. Sometimes the answer is murder. Sometimes the answer is to submit to the monster hiding in the bedroom. Dávila’s attention to detail in these characters’ ordinary lives allows the magic to feel even more like reality, until even you might find it hard to distinguish the two.

If you like stories with a slightly darker tone but all the fun of asking “what if?” this is the collection for you.

Cursed Bunny by Bora Chung

Translated from Korean by Anton Hur

Grandfather used to say, “When we make our cursed fetishes, it’s important that they’re pretty.” And the lamp, shaped like a bunny rabbit sitting beneath a tree, is truly pretty.

A man finds a fox caught in a snare and notices the golden blood that soaks the snow around her. A lump of a head appears in a woman’s toilet and calls her “mother.” A ghost walks the same straight line across a plaza as a woman meets her lover for the first time.

Cursed Bunny takes a different turn as each story finds something new to offer with a range of characters and genres. There are body horrors, unsettling love stories, fantastical tragedies, and even futuristic androids! Regardless of what the story is about, each one will make you feel something more than you expected. Something I really enjoyed about this collection is how it goes to places I don’t see often in fiction. Chung is not afraid to write stories about women’s bodies and their functions without any of the vulgarity or wariness you might expect from the exploration of these subjects.

If you want a short story collection that temporarily makes you forget your position in space and time as your brain is occupied solely with characters on the page, this is one to consider.

The Dangers of Smoking in Bed by Mariana Enriquez

Translated from Spanish by Megan McDowell

Was it a nocturnal butterfly or a moth? She had never been able to tell the difference. But one thing was for sure: nighttime butterflies turned to dust in your fingers, as if they had no organs or blood…

A baby’s bones cry from the corner of the yard where she was buried. A hotel ghost searches for a replacement. Memories of a childhood trip to The Woman’s house reveal the roots of a woman’s debilitating anxiety.

If I had to choose one word to describe these stories, it would be “disturbing.” This is not the sort of collection that lets you put it down and walk away—it follows you wherever you go. Will I ever forget the story of the rockstar who flayed himself alive, and what it inspired two fangirls to plan afterwards? (It’s not what you think—this collection is not predictable!) The easy answer is no. The stories in this collection turn the bad things in our lives into monstrosities. It revisits broken girls, lost children, mental illness, anxieties, and ghosts. You traverse these stories as if you were a visitor in a haunted realm.

It’s not for the light-hearted, but if you don’t mind the smell of ghost-children roaming the streets of Barcelona, you will be heavily rewarded through the can’t-stop-reading tension and morally ambiguous characters. 

Evil Flowers: Stories by Gunnhild Øyehaug

Translated from Norwegian by Kari Dickson

We herewith protest that the previous text had such an unhappy ending. Unhappy endings drive us nuts, and we think that people who are let out a back door, without even knowing they’re being shown to the back door, should be given a prize.

A dove turns into a crow and flies off, leaving the person to see it baffled at what they should do next. A short story protests the unhappy ending of the previous one. A woman loses part of her brain when it falls into the toilet. An old woman lies in bed and wonders why you can read her thoughts.

There’s nothing quite like reading a short story that suddenly becomes self-aware and asks how you’re reading it. Or reading a short story whose sole purpose is to complain about the page just before it, where a man’s photo solemnly stares out. This is a book that asks silly questions and answers them seriously. What do you do when you’ve died and come back to life? Visit the White Cliffs of Dover, of course. If everything around a person turned to eels, what then? Well, she would find solace in bird watching. What if everyone’s cell phone was also a gun? I don’t want to spoil this one, so I won’t tell you.

If you are an appreciator of wit and clever humor and don’t mind when a story starts with a miracle and ends with a broken ankle, this is not a collection you should miss.

Flowers of Mold by Ha Seong-nan

Translated from Korean by Janet Hong

The drunken words spewed by a regular of Good Chicken were to blame. The meeting was supposed to take place at the Hanbit Academy of Mental Calculations at exactly seven o’clock. The academy director wrote the words Taewang Tenants Emergency Meeting and waited.

A small girl wants to fly, and so she becomes a gymnast—until her own growing body makes that dream impossible. A man digs through his neighbor’s trash as he thinks of what could have been. The threat of eviction gives way to sinister schemes as everyone thinks about who they would be better off without.

Ha’s stories are rooted in reality yet veiled by a thin shroud of strangeness that doesn’t feel of this world. Is the woman just forgetful, or is the woman next door trying to replace her? What about the clothes hung to dry at the top of a utility pole? When someone climbed into her room at night, was it really a dream? The lines between what is right and wrong, what did and didn’t happen, begin to blur. You cannot help but follow each character faithfully and hope for the best as they make unwise choices and struggle with their obsessions. These stories are intricately developed and always lead to a satisfying (though not always happy) ending.

If you enjoy longer short stories that completely immerse you in a world slightly off kilter, add Flowers of Mold to your TBR list, ASAP. 

Whether you crave horror, absurdity, mystery, fantasy, or everything in between, these translated short story collections do it with a grace and wit sure to capture you from the first page to the last. This list is only a sampling of the incredible books being published in languages other than English. This might mark the beginning of your journey with translated works of fiction. Otherwise, overlooking translated works might cause you to start experiencing FOMOOF (fear of missing out on fun). 

Short Story winner of the Spring 2023 F(r)iction Literary Contest.

His stage name was Sommersby the Great, and he put on shows out of a battered theater in the north of Newton, close to the Watertown border. He liked to read the paper over a cup of Sanka instant coffee, and typically he wore mahogany-colored Florsheim shoes with fat tassels and silk ties dotted with pictures of pinecones, candy canes and children. In the afternoons he also wore a large gold watch with a stretching golden linked band, and when he talked, his watch clunked on his wrists, though he always took it off for a show. His hats tended to match his suits, often an unvariegated conifer green. His teeth were a perfectly ordered array of corn kernels–I only subsequently realized that they were dentures.

That summer, I was with him daily, Wednesday through Sunday. Wednesday and Thursday were for practicing his act; the remaining days were for his performances. I would ride my bicycle to his theater in the early afternoon and enter through a disused loading dock, and I would wait for him by sitting discreetly next to a window in the foyer, meditating over a book by windowlight. That was also the summer I took to reading Thus Spake Zarathustra, among others, which mostly just baffled me. I had been drawn to Nietzsche by a circuitous path strewn with comic books, odd fortune cookie predictions, and collections of aphorisms, and when I arrived at him at last, I was an adolescent eager for the instruction that I, too, might find it within myself to become a kind of Superman. Such grandiosity and misery–the siren songs of a young man’s life. Stare too long into the abyss and it begins to stares back, I read–and I tried–I really tried. “Abyss!” I begged. “Stare back into me! Be my shaggy beast!” But during those early summer afternoons alone at the window of Sommersby’s magic theater, I met only the pallor of my own boredom.

After my first two weeks, the routine was the same. I filled the concessionaire with Raisinettes, then swept the foyer clean, then restocked the toilet paper in the bathroom. Afterwards, I puddled by the foyer window with an early afternoon view of the street. There were few passersby to distract me. I assumed that the magician was working secretively on his new illusion, but no: Sommersby snuck up behind me and caught me unawares. He sat across from and offered me a mint lifesaver from his pocket, and I took it because it gave me a reprieve from the Sanka smell wafting from his clothes.

“It’s really time for me to ask,” he said in an amiable and fatherly way. “Is there anything you would like to learn from me?”

I shrugged. What could I put into words for him that I wanted? Every such fatherless adolescent meets every such grown man with the same desire: show me how to be.

“I want to learn the arts of enchantment,” I said.

He mused on this with a practiced grimace, his upper lip protruding duck-like. “Because you’re fascinated by the mystery.” He theatrically glanced at the cover of my book. “Because you have a will to power!”

I nodded again.

“I don’t know about Nietzsche,” he said to me excitedly, “but let me tell you about magic: the mystery’s a sham!”

I was disappointed because of course I already knew this. “Next you’re going to tell me that the earth orbits the sun?”

He stood up on his tiptoes and made a grand flourish. “Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you a teenager!” He sat back down. “But what I want to convey to you is that all artists are manipulators. And that is great power. And with great power, comes great responsibility.”

I perked up, because I felt that with this talk of power he was embarking on original ground. It was not so much an answer to the core question, but it was still a passable application of what I’d uncovered in the pages of Nietzsche. Perhaps I did have a will to power.

“I know what you’re thinking,” he said mystically.

“You do?”

“And yes. The answer is yes.” He gazed fondly upon his own inward memory. “In the years before my marriage, I used magic to seduce a great many women. And to be honest, sometimes I paid women, and I’m not ashamed to say it. And sometimes I was just good, and they waited for me in the back of the theater after the show. The most enchanting words in the world? Make me pregnant.”

I closed my book and put it in my lap. It was the early eighties, and this is what passed for being instructed by a man on the byways of adulthood.

“And then you met–”

“The woman who changed everything,” he said sadly. “God rest her soul. And once I worked with a monkey!”

Wednesdays were short days. After I helped Sommersby the Great hook up various apparatus, after I watched him pace through several stages of his act–hampered in those first few weeks by the absence of his stage assistant–he released me early to my own devices. I was back on the streets, riding my bike through a late afternoon in June, twenty dollars in my pocket and no obligation to anyone. A Newton June could be temperate, cool enough for blue jeans and long sleeves, a season where people could stroll out of doors and birds could feather their nests free of terror.

Sometimes that summer I rode my bike to Strymish’s New England Mobile Bookfair. I wandered among its stacks, into its overstock and remainder section, past the side room devoted to history, around the bend beyond the infrequently haunted area devoted to poetry, and through what was a little-known door, perhaps only about two feet wide, into a more distant room that I had discovered one day labelled Health and Wellness. The books there were dusty, and the stock looked to have been tended perhaps only once a month by Fletcher Strymish himself. Therein I sat sponge-like in the dim sunlight provided by an overhead glass canopy, browsing among the remaindered books on herbal remedies, talking cures and other arcana in search of secrets that were otherwise jealously guarded by the cognoscenti in the days when information was neither accessible nor free.

And this afternoon, behold: a remaindered copy of Selections From the Kamasutra of Vatsyayana, with commentary by Porticia Shakespeare. Salubrious, athletic, gesturing toward prurience, it sat off in a corner, its cover tattered. Who could resist? At the discovery of its interior, of the full-frontal depictions of female nudes, I squirmed with embarrassment, the heat rising in my throat. Furtively, jealously, endeavoring to be a good student, up until closing I read achingly of the mysteries of the “Thousand Petal Lotus Blossom.”

***

I reproach myself now for the reading materials of that summer. Some greater part of me wishes that I had instead been reading The Feminine Mystique, or better yet Jane Austen, either of which would have prepared me for the world in which I actually dwell. The Thousand Petal Lotus Blossom was a promise of a technique that never, to this day, solved any mysteries. Yet the overstock and remainder section of the New England Mobile Bookfair, with its scuffed titillations dressed in the accoutrement of hippy age eastern mysticism, was what was available to a boy raised in the shadow of the seventies. We opened the floodgates of ourselves, and those were the books that rushed in to greet us.

I look at us now, men my age, and I realize that for so many of us it was the same, fed on a daily stew of sitcom pablum and benevolent paternalism and off-hand sexploitation. In our dreams we were astronauts, or annihilating mercenaries or baseball stars, and then on television our action heroes were spasmodic gigolos. At night all of it would sift down into our bodies, so that over years we learned that this was the world we should anticipate, that we should take and demand and disrespect, that we should all of us carry ourselves as swaggering tinpot tyrants. And I look at us now, and I think: really, how far we’ve all come.

The day after my discovery of the Kamasutra, I was back again in the foyer, reading Nietzsche in the theater windows. What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger, he wrote, and I thrilled to read this because in my ignorance I thought that what I wanted from life was to be tested in extremis.

Sommersby ignored me the early part of the afternoon while he hammered, sawed, and welded scraps of wood and metal and line into a contraption that, from my limited experience, looked like a piece of junk. In the late afternoon, he summoned me while he took a Sanka break. His brow was sweaty, and he frequently wiped himself with a large beach towel draped across a hat stand beside him, his white hair matted against his scalp.

He was working on his major illusion, he told me. One that would astonish the audiences beyond all puzzlement, one that would forever immortalize his name. He would implement it in a month or so, once his actual, long-time assistant returned from her trip to San Francisco. “Now, for instance, I could without trouble make a car disappear from the stage,” he said.

“That’s amazing,” I said.

He nodded appreciatively, a flick of sweat popping from his forehead to the stage. “But it’s not enough,” he said. He paused for another sip from his oversized SAM mug. “And I could make a disembodied head prophesize,” he added. “Perhaps you’ll do that with me before the summer is out?”

“Also amazing,” I said.

“It’s nothing,” he said. “Not compared to this. This will be true magic.”

I waited for the reveal. He lapsed into silence.

“So what is it?”

He nodded quickly. “You ready?”

“I’m ready.”

“But are you really listening?”

“I’m really listening.”

He considered. “But are you really, really –” and I frowned, and he continued: “Anyway – what I want . . . is to make a woman disappear.”

I was disappointed in Sommersby. He winced at my skepticism.

“You people never understand,” he said dismissively. “It’s not the effect. It’s the technique!”

***

That following Wednesday when I reported to work, she was already there, on stage, rehearsing a new trick with Sommersby. It was his actual assistant. She was a medium-sized girl, almost sixteen years old, with a widow’s peak of chestnut brown hair and glowing brown eyes and thick brown eyebrows shaped like gables. She dressed in a slimming ballerina outfit and little brown shoes, and she wore about her neck a pendant of a rabbit carved from the heart of an old redwood tree. She was animated, and she carried herself with a jaunty spring, which I later realized was a result of years of dance classes, but was also a sincere expression of her own enthusiasm. She was a year older than me, at an age when that year was a chasm.

Jessica had been working with Sommersby since girlhood. I owed my job that summer to the fortuity of the custody arrangement that had long ago been ironed out between her parents. Every June, immediately upon finishing school, she was sent to live with her father for three weeks in San Francisco. Her parental visit had now run its course, and she had returned to Newton, and to the theater, to resume helping Sommersby mount his bigger and more entertaining illusions.

That first day they worked on an illusion in which Sommersby the Great sawed Jessica in half. It was a bloodless illusion, simple and horrifying, requiring Jessica to lay on a table, to enter a trance, and to remain motionless while a blade impossibly passed through her entire body, cutting a carrot in two. At the trick’s conclusion, Sommersby revived her, allowing her to dismount the table and saunter across the stage, poised and lucid, with nary a drop of blood staining her bare torso.  I watched them practice a dozen times. The last time was like the first, except that by Sommersby’s calculation, through diligent effort, he was able to shave some ten seconds off their performance.

They had worked together long enough that they spoke in a kind of shorthand. He chided her. “This last time around you walked off like a drag queen,” he said. “You’ve picked up bad habits in San Francisco.”

“No, I picked up Dad habits in San Francisco,” she said. “It’s all about the Haight.”

“It’s actually all about the Castro, dear one. I never understood your father.”

“He has always been true to himself,” she said flatly.

“To each his own,” said Sommersby, grudgingly. “Did he at least persuade you to dump your boyfriend?”

“Don’t speak that way about Denny,” she said.

“He isn’t Jesus and I’m not taking his name in vain. But did your father try?”

“He gave me a very stern lecture and I told him that I would very sternly ignore it.”

“Perhaps you should trust the voices you’re hearing.”

“I trust my own voice,” she retorted.

With that, the matter dropped. In my imagination I conjured a beefy and insensitive upperclassman wearing a letter jacket. I learned the truth that afternoon when, carrying my bicycle, I passed by Jessica in the foyer. She was waiting for a ride from her boyfriend.

“That’s nice of him,” I said.

“It is,” she said. She scowled in the direction of the theater. “And I wish some people would butt out of other people’s business.”

“It’s cool that he has a license,” I said.

“Of course he does,” she said. “He’s twenty seven.”

***

She was that sort of person: she might show up one day in a crass t-shirt featuring two rolls of toilet paper on her chest, Don’t Squeeze the Charmin, and then the next day in bowling shoes and tights, as if she were on the set of Grease, and then the day thereafter in a hoop skirt, her hair done up into a French aristocratic tower, her skin patted with white powder so that she resembled the ghost of Marie Antoinette. She liked to keep us guessing.

Sommersby’s illusions all involved the impossible manipulation of Jessica’s body. Over the next many days of practice, and on into the weekend performances, I beheld Sommersby the Great serially impale, transect, squish, and re-produce his assistant from a series of ornately colored tables, boxes, cabinets and chests. Behind every great illusionist is a great woman he has dismembered. Jessica’s job was to appear as if she were a pliant, mildly disinterested participant, for whom such physical trauma was mere distraction, while under the curtain and behind the arras she had to contort herself to render the magic flawlessly. Now and then, however, she would smile broadly, to signal that she was at once alive and amused, and such momentary flashes of exuberance only added to the mystery of the illusions.

Among the most remarked tricks of that decade was a Robert Harbin effect first unveiled in the sixties. Sommersby the Great had bought his way into an inner circle authorized to perform the Zig Zag Girl, by which Jessica stepped into a large upright box and proceeded to have her midsection displaced from the rest of her body. It required her to exhale and hold her breath. The first time I saw them practice it, he became enraged.

“You need to eat less,” said Sommersby. “You don’t want to get fat.”

“I’m trying,” she said.

“You need to try harder.” He held his head as if he were swooning. “It’s not just about the Zig Zag Girl. If you swell up like a whale, no one will marry you and then you will lead a pathetic lonely life.”

“That’s bullshit and you know it,” she said, and she herself was angry now. “I’m going to have men eating out of my hand.”

“It’s only half bullshit and I’m worried that you don’t know it,” retorted the magician. “We men are both more and less complicated than you think, whatever it may be your stupid pedophile boyfriend may be telling you in his parent’s basement apartment.”

“He has his own apartment,” she said proudly.

“Oh, 27 and his very own apartment?” said the magician. “I apologize. I got it so wrong. He’s a screaming success. Just you wait, he’ll be the mayor of Boston.”

The magician cut short our practice. At his insistence, I went with Jessica to the Newton Creamery across the street, under the express instruction that she was to have either a black coffee or another diet coke. The Newton Creamery was an ice cream delicatessen, with pink vaulted ceilings and waitresses in magenta plaid skirts with pencils behind their ears and Elvis songs on a juke box. We seated ourselves and ordered chocolate frappes.

“I’m sorry about all that,” I said.

“About what?”

“I think Sommersby gets carried away.”

“Please,” she said, and she produced a Certs from her pocket. “I’m not just going to dissolve in a puddle of weepy.”

“I know that much.”

“Then at least you know something,” she said. “The way to rise above it all is to shut it off. You have to cauterize it. You close your eyes and you think of a faraway place with a funny name. For me, it’s Peoria.  I’ve never been, but the name sounds delicious. Denny and I will drive there someday.” I was about to interject, but she looked at me reproachfully. “Don’t spoil it with the truth.”

The waitress brought us our frappes. Jessica took a sip and closed her eyes.

“When you’ve loved like this, it reduces every other emotion to frump. After sex with him, I feel like I’ve communed with God.”

I was eager to impress her. “There is no God,” I hazarded. “Thus spake Zarathustra.”

She tapped my arm. “I told Denny about your Nietzsche fantasies and Denny said that Hitler used to read Nietzsche while masturbating into a sock because he didn’t like women.”

I flushed, indignant. “And how does Denny know?”

“Denny just knows,” she said balefully. “He says that if you’re an intellectual, you should read Vladimir Nabokov and watch Roman Polanski, because they’re blazing a trail toward the future where children are allowed the same autonomy as adults.”

“Don’t you ever think it’s strange? You and Denny?”

She eyed me as if betrayed. “Now you’re getting started?”

“I’m just asking.”

“You’re still a boy,” she said bluntly. “I get it. You don’t understand some things.” She drank her frappe near to the bottom. “So then, boy, what will you be when you grow up?”

I had pondered this quite often. If I were to be a magician, it would be only through metaphor. “I’ll be a father,” I said.

“It sounds so simple,” she said. “But it really can’t be that simple, or more people would stick with it.” She reached into her pocket and extracted another Certs. “I’ll be a magician,” she said. “And I’ll make an array of handsome boys sit in a bevy of tight boxes. That’s simple.”

Afterwards we walked back to the theater. Sommersby was in the bowels of the building, tinkering with his revolutionary new disappearance device. Jessica sat in the foyer, waiting for her ride, and I sat with her. She took my tattered copy of Thus Spake Zarathustra and paged through it, and then handed it back solemnly, in deference to its sway.

Soon enough a battered orange Volkswagen Beetle drove up to the entrance and idled by the curb. The window was open, and an unsmiling man leaned out of it, his cheeks lightly scarred by acne. He had a great bushy mustache that formed a helmet for his upper lip, and he wore dark sunglasses which concealed his identity and enhanced his air of mystery. His nose was a beaten clump of cauliflower. His shirt was unbuttoned, and he had chest hair. He seemed like someone’s father – for all I knew, he already was.

Jessica left the theater then, sauntering toward the car and around to the passenger’s seat with an exaggerated stride, a sort of long-legged catwalk. She was vamping again. Denny ignored it imperiously, seemingly oblivious to the contrivance that she unleashed for his benefit alone. His face was washed out by the July sunshine. He raised the window as she got in his car, and just before driving off, he bent toward her to put his tongue inside her mouth.

***

You talk to me about feminism in the eighties, and of course there was feminism. We saw articles about it on the cover of Glamour, of Cosmopolitan, of Tiger Beat, all the various rags available at the grocery store check out counter. But the facts on the ground? We were still aspiring to a single career household, paying lip service to equality. Boys were smelly, rude and adventurous; girls were candy, demur, separate but equal. To say otherwise was to aspire.

Don’t ask me to defend it. It was simply my childhood. And hers.

***

The clouds pushed into Newton one early Saturday and it began to rain, sometimes desultorily and sometimes fiercely, but steadily enough to complicate my bicycle commute to the magic theater. So it was that Jessica called me at home and offered her boyfriend’s services. Around noon the dented orange Volkswagen Beetle pulled up across the street from my house and sat idling. The rain was falling like metal ball bearings, and the air above us was the color of mold.

I ran across the street, and Jessica scrunched herself up to allow me to hop into the backseat. The car started to move just as she closed the door, kicking up puddles in the intensifying rain, its windshield wipers squeaking across the glass.

That was the first time I’d gotten a close look at Denny. He wore a musky cologne and a fat gold chain about his neck with a little golden cross at the end of it. In the murky pallor of the storm, he’d taken off his sunglasses and put them on the dash. He blinked relentlessly, and his face took on the paunchy caste I associated with people in their late twenties, with dark grooves under his eyes and plenty of stubble. In the humidity, he was sweating.

I thanked him for picking me up.

“It’s no trouble,” he said. “Jessica says you’re like a brother to her.”

This was the first I’d heard it, and it came as a compliment.

“Are you a hockey fan?” he asked. “I’m a hockey fan.”

“Cam Neely is going to be dreamy,” said Jessica.

“We’ll see about that,” said Denny.

“I like to help out at the magic theater.”

He guffawed. “O.k. Sure. And what else?”

“I like to ride my bike. “

“Got it,” he said. “Do you read the funnies?”

“Sometimes,” I admitted.

“Good kid,” he said. “After my own heart.”

Jessica smirked at him. He smiled back at her. The car pulled to a stop at an intersection in Newton Center, where a rivulet of water sliced at the sidewalk, and he let the conversation falter. It was incumbent upon me to restart it. “What do you like besides hockey?”

“I like to bone your sister,” he said.

She rolled her eyes. “Why are you so crude?” she asked.

“I’m honest,” he said, and he reached over and squeezed her thigh. “The older you get, the less time you have for pretense. But in all seriousness, I like to see live music, and now and then relax with a good chianti and a steak, medium rare. You know. The good life.”

“It sounds great,” I said.

“Also I like traveling to distant places. Bermuda, for instance. Ever been?” He didn’t wait for my reaction. “I think it’s important to expand your horizons. In Bermuda, they drive on the left side of the road. Think about that for a minute. It’s a different world view altogether. Just a different way of thinking.”

“I’ll be psyched to drive,” I said.

“Of course you will. Sometimes you need to open your mind to other possibilities. Look at me and my lady love. She’s a Taurus and I’m a mother-fucking Cancer. You might think they’d never go together.  But they do.”

“Like chocolate and peanut butter,” she said.

“Like gin and tonic, my love.”

After that he drove in silence, concentrating past the rain plinking off the hood of the car. We pulled up to the magic theater. I thanked him, and he waved me away impatiently. “Just take good care of your sister for me,” he quipped. We ran from the car to the entrance, the rain deafeningly loud, and when we got there, we were soaked.

“I’m so glad that you finally got to meet him,” she said.

“He’s all grown up,” I said.

“He’s a man,” she said. “Someday you’ll understand.”

***

I remember well on a Sunday, stuffing my dress shirt and slacks into a backpack and biking into the heat of the afternoon, a mid-summer day in Newton, and the cars taking the road slowly, glistening in the distance with the heat rising up around them. I was wet by the time I arrived. Sommersby was already there, and with him Jessica, her brown hair blown out over her brown top and black tights, looking sleepier than usual, which I hardly remarked on at the time, and before long we opened the doors and I took my place at the booth to greet the people, who steadily came.

Through the shimmering air, the audience, too, was shimmering, people’s bare arms dappled, their shirts sticking to their backs, and condensation fogging up people’s glasses, and everyone asking for cans of soda, which began to sweat as soon as I put them on the concession counter. People drifted down the aisles into their seats, bumped into one another, apologized languidly upon falling across one another’s legs. It was a typical audience for a late Sunday afternoon magic show, a potpourri of Newton before it had gentrified, a mixture of professors and plumbers and taxi men and petty mafioso, and I wondered at it, where these people came from, how they found us, except that Sommersby had been performing in the same theater for well past a decade, and before that internationally for decades more, and he had become a well-regarded if middling celebrity in that time, someone for whom people simply showed up. And his act did not disappoint.

These were the days when live theater was a purveyor of nostalgia, when the audience still contained people, advanced in years, who had themselves patronized vaudeville in their youth. Some of these people had seen Thurston and Laurant, Raymond and Okito in their heydays, and they came to the theater expecting profusions of silks, and bouquets of flowers popping from Sommersby’s lapels, and perhaps a dove, or two, or three emerging flappingly from out of Sommersby’s closed fist. Sommersby could do it all, and keep a lively ingenuous patter, as well – and then go beyond the early twentieth century staples to newer and more puzzling demonstrations that left people gaping. He understood well that an audience was composed of several individual atomies – a good performer will quickly ascertain its components, know whom to flatter and whom to snub, so that in a matter of moments, the audience is transformed into a hive mind, thrumming synchronously.

But at the ten-minute intermission, he was fatigued. Jessica summoned me from the concessionaire, and I closed the cash register abruptly and hurried backstage to find him slumped into his chair, his suit rumpling around him, a cake collapsing at its middle. He asked Jessica to find his bottle of pills from the dressing room in the basement. She clambered down the steps while the audience waited behind the curtain, and I sat beside him, watching for signs of emergent distress, at a loss for what to do.

He fixed his weary gaze on me pointedly. “She’s pretty today, isn’t she?”

“I don’t know.”

“She’s always pretty,” he said exhaustedly. “Tell me you don’t have a woody. Tell me.”

I was embarrassed by him, and I reflexively looked to make sure my fly was zipped. “I wish you wouldn’t be like that.”

“You’re a sensitive soul,” whispered the magician. “I respect that.” He coughed. “I respect your noble wishes, which will neither feed you nor clothe you nor deliver you so much as an atomy of your so-called power. Admit at least that she’s pretty, though.”

“She’s pretty,” I said.

He breathed heavily and seemed to grow even more pallid. “She won’t waste herself forever on the pedophile.”

“Why are you like this?” I asked.

“Because there is no other way,” he said, scowling. He understood now that I wasn’t with him, that I was young and outraged, that whatever lesson he’d meant to teach me had failed. He convulsed, a descent into weakness, a fit of coughing, and the blood left his face. “If you want to create a different future, you’ll do so over my dead body.”

Jessica appeared with a bottle of pills. He bolted them with a glass of water and sank further into the chair.

“I think you’ll need to cancel the rest of the show,” he said to us both. “And I think you’ll need to get me to my car.”

“Who’s going to drive?” asked Jessica.

“We can’t drive,” I said.

“You can’t drive,” he said to me. “That’s only because you’re ineffectual. Jessica’s a girl, but she can drive.”

“I don’t have a license,” she said.

“That doesn’t matter.” Sommersby handed his jangling car keys over.

“Let’s help you up,” she said.  

We each took one of his arms. We each of us stumbled in our efforts, because Sommersby proved heavier than we anticipated, and he fell back again into the chair. Only by scrambling behind him did I prevent him from falling over onto the floor.

He became wild-eyed then, his hair askew like an ocean wave crashing on the shore. “There’s no way out,” he said.

“We’ll get you up,” I said.

“Jesus, I hate medical bills.”

Jessica went out into the theater and, after a bit of by-play, informed that audience that the show was over for the day. The ambulance came five minutes later.

It is only in retrospect that transitions announce themselves. The paramedics moved like ninjas, with stealth and minimal words and blue efficiency. In the moment, it is a matter of logistics, of prying a man whose coronary artery has narrowed its flow out of a chair and onto a gurney and hurtling through the early evening toward a waiting surgeon. In the wake of such leave-taking, a silence descends, and it is only a minor matter of walking through the theater locking up the doors and checking the bathrooms and tying one’s own shoes. I did a cursory sweep of the floor to gather up the loose programs and ticket stubs and cans and discarded candies. I turned out the lights.

I found her in the foyer, leaning against the concession counter, munching on loose popcorn and drinking a can of ginger ale. She took two steps – and then she herself became ashen. She slapped the can on the table and ran to the bathroom.

The door was flung wide. I found her huddled over the sink, throwing up. She wiped her mouth on a tissue. She flushed the tissue down the toilet.

“The popcorn’s not that bad,” I said.

“It has nothing to do with the popcorn,” she said. “I’m just so goddam sleepy these days.”

“It’s been hot lately.”

“It has nothing to do with the heat,” she said. She wiped her mouth again and gathered herself together.

“Can I call–”

“Denny doesn’t know,” she said.

“Know what?”

She shook her head at me and we walked through the auditorium one last time.

As was our custom on performance nights, we exited out the back alley on the left side of the theater, from an entrance unfamiliar and unknown to the public. I walked my bike beside her, and the alley took us around the back of a bookstore to a side street, and from there I walked her through the early dusk as far as the main road, where the cab was waiting for her. I helped her open the door and get in. From the window she faced me sadly, and as the taxi pulled away, she blew me a kiss.

***

Sommersby the Great called me from the hospital to apologize a week thereafter, and delivered the news with a polite but enervated formality. The remainder of the summer was cancelled.

“Next year?” I asked.

“Next year,” he croaked, though neither of us believed it. He thanked me for all my help, and told me, unconvincingly, that I had a fine future ahead of me in stage management.  “And you’ll want to check in on Jessica,” he said. “Perhaps you’ll get something out of it after all.” And he hung up the phone.

We were in the middle ofAugust when I finally collected the courage to call her. I didn’t know what to expect.

“Come over,” she said, in a voice that mingled pep with boredom.

I doused myself in deodorant and got on my bike. She lived a few miles away, in a small house on the ragged edge of a nature preserve. The yard was fenced in and modest, and the white paint was peeling from the front of the house, revealing rot around the windows. I leaned my bike against the side of the house, well away from the street. When I came around the front door, she was waiting for me in the door frame, holding a sweating pitcher of iced tea.

She was herself, though more luminous, and a bit puffier in the cheeks. Her hair was combed carefully, and she was wearing a new purple dress with a brown sash about the middle. Her chest had grown bigger. There was dried toothpaste at the corner of her mouth.

“The back porch is nice this time of year,” she said, and she led me through the narrow hallway, through the kitchen, out the back door to a small deck overlooking a rotting wooden fence close up against the woods. There were two aluminum lawn chairs with rust stains running down their sides. She gestured and we sat together, staring up at the trees and a pair of squirrels chasing each other scattershot along a limb.

I sat beside her. “So it feels like I haven’t seen you in a while,” I said.

“Yes, sorry about that,” she said absently, and I couldn’t understand why she should be apologizing. “Aside from being tired all the time, I’m fine,” she said. “And aside from the vertigo. There’s that, too.”

“What’s wrong?”

“I have to spell it out for you?”

I shrugged. I understood nothing.

She stared at me blankly. “Speaking of which, I haven’t seen Denny in a while,” she said, and her leg began to jump nervously. She bit her lip. “And I don’t like it,” she said. “I mean, I can’t.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “If there’s anything at all I can do for you–”

“Thank you, but that’s nonsense.” She swallowed, and her arms were tensed. “I won’t be long. It won’t be another week.”

Still I didn’t understand. “You’ll see him in a week?”

Her face drew down upon itself. “I just mean I’ll be fine in a week,” she said. Her hand started shaking. “I’ll be over it. Do you want your lemonade or not?”

I nodded and she poured me a glass. Then she poured herself a glass.

“I’m sorry about Denny,” I said. It felt right to say such a thing, and it helped her to relax. “He’s a fool.”

“You don’t know,” she said curtly. “You’re still a kid.”

“You’re still a kid,” I said.

“Fuck no. I stopped being a kid when I was four,” she said.

We finished our lemonade, and then she poured us each another glass. The mid-August heat was baking into my legs. Small beads of sweat were pricking out below her ears.

“Tell me,” she asked abruptly. “What did you take out of Nietzsche?”

I put my lemonade aside. I had not considered it before in this way, because no one had yet asked me to summarize. I spoke deliberately, in a voice that has since become my own. “To gain power you need to be callous to the feelings of others.”

“True,” she said, nodding thoughtfully.

“And if you’re a man, you need to treat women like shit.”

She looked at me with a funny little smile, though she was inspecting me carefully. “You’re funnier than I thought,” she said.

“Do you want to take a bike ride,” I asked.

“I haven’t done that in years.”

“Not everyone can drive yet.”

“I’m still a few months away,” she said. “Denny drove me everywhere I wanted to go, because everywhere I wanted to go was with him.”

We left the lemonade behind and walked over to the garage. I wheeled out her mother’s bike, which was colored a deep ochre. It hadn’t been used in years. I pumped up the tires, and with several squirts of oil I got the gears operating smoothly. The bike was a bit large for her, but not overly so. “That’s funny,” she said, as she got on the seat. It wobbled only briefly when she started to peddle.

***

It started out as a short jaunt. We rode past the high school, and cut through the field, which some decades past had been farmland edged with marsh, and emerged from the field past the junior high school buildings into familiar roads, meandering through the plots of greenery and well-built post-war housing. We labored up an incline, and then coasted along a plateau, and then pedaled up another incline and then another still, at the edge of the Oak Hill neighborhood, so that Jessica, who was heavier than she had been all summer, was now panting. I waited for her on the sidewalk. From there we hit a busy thoroughfare that veered past Memorial Spaulding, until we came to my favorite hill.

To look at that hill was to look at one’s grave. It was one of those impossible drops that promised you could coast incredibly fast, get a good breeze through your hair, feel yourself on the precipice of dying. She was pedaling slowly when we got there, her color a high pink, but she looked happy. “I thought they only had these hills in San Francisco,” she said.

“I’ve never been,” I said. I watched her catch her breath.

“I’ll race you,” she said.

“Try it,” I said.

I pushed off and pumped, so that I was speeding down the incline, just on the edge of fear. And in a moment she was right there, ripping up beside me.

“This is nuts!” she yelled.

“Watch the pothole!” I shouted.

Our wheels made a high-pitched whir.

“Fucking awesome!” she yelled.

Half way down, at the point of terminal velocity, she closed her eyes. She kept them closed. Even in my darkest moments, I have never been capable of such bravado. I have never yet wanted to die.

“What are you doing?” I screamed.

We approached, fast, a curve and a cross street.

“Veer left,” I called out to her. “We’re almost there! We’re almost there!”

Listlessly, she opened her eyes again. She veered left, just a little too late, and at full speed, she hopped the curve, and she turned into the embankment of someone’s lawn, went briefly airborne, sailed over the sidewalk, and popped back out again onto the street.

And then we were at the bottom, pulled to a stop. She was laughing a little, and there were tears on her cheeks.

“Magic,” she said.

The third time M sees an ad for The Shirt drift by on her feed, she buys it. Everyone’s been wearing it, or at least everyone that matters: the blonde swimsuit model who just got back from Mallorca, the brunette always posing with her pair of teacup dogs, even the redhead perpetually running in kaleidoscopic wildflower…