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…

Outside of its size, the first thing you notice about Tristan is how quiet it is when it moves. I had always assumed before my first pilgrimage, when the news choppers would stalk it for us viewers at home, that each of its massive trunk- like legs would make the Earth quiver and shake. I couldn’t…

My client wakes at eight on Sunday, so that’s when I appear in his doorway. The schedule says he has two hours of Mr. Yazoo time before he needs to get to Mandarin lessons. We eat our usual breakfast of gluten-free, high-protein, extra-calcium cereal. Despite its professed lack of sugar, he’s doing his I’m-wired-and-want-to-play dance in…

DOCTOR’S OFFICE – DAY There are no windows. PATIENT, a 25-year-old woman, sits on an exam table, alone, clutching the end of the table and wincing. The room has one computer. On the screen is a patient file that is too far away and too oddly angled for the patient to see that it says…

I heard someone say there are no more ghosts in West Texas. That the oilmen drained them all from the ground when they built the derricks that dot the desert plains. I don’t think this is quite true. I see the edges of their bright plastic hats and leather-palmed gloves around every run-down corner in Odessa,…

We wear the mask that grins and lies . . .” — “We Wear the Mask,” Paul Laurence Dunbar Tysha Wilson adjusted the disposable face mask over her nose and walked faster down the cracked sidewalk outside her grandmother’s house. The braids bundled together at the crown of her head acted like a counterweight and…

He can see everything but her. The rest of the room exists clearly in his mind. The walls painted a sunshine yellow. The sturdy, handcrafted oak bedroom set with dovetail joints and darkly stained grain. The paper birch with the coin-shaped leaves seen out the second-story window. On the night table sits a clock, the red numbering of which reads 7:00 a.m. The digits blink as the alarm sounds. But he doesn’t reach out to silence it. He doesn’t open his eyes.

Next to the beeping clock is a framed portrait of his family. They show their teeth in smiles. They wear matching jeans and white-collared shirts. They stand in a flower-filled meadow. They lean and weave their arms together in such a way that they appear to be holding each other up. He can see his daughter. He can see himself. He cannot see his wife. She might as well have been scissored out of the photo, scrubbed out of his mind, a raw vacancy.

He wants this image to remain true, but it no longer is. He wants to roll over to face the opposite side of the bed, where Pamela ought to be sleeping, her body denting the mattress, but she is not there. Something else is.

The screeching of his alarm seems to grow louder. His veins throb in time with it.

If he looks, that would mean acknowledging what he has to do. A muscle in his jaw pulses. He barely breathes. Morning light warms the bed but he feels cold.

When he finally opens his eyes, he does not scream or even flinch away. He simply stares back with an ugly resignation.

The sheets and the comforter are as white and clean as soap. But the thing that shares the bed with him is not. It is dressed in filth, clotted with what might be dried blood and grave dirt. Sticks and dead leaves cling to it. The fabric of its wrappings might have been stitched out of the night itself and buried for a thousand years. Its face is hooded, so he cannot see the features hidden within, but the shadow there is so profound that he feels he is looking into a cave littered with bones that goes on for an unguessable distance.

The alarm continues to sound, but he no longer hears its noise in intervals, only as a single, uninterrupted, high-pitched scream.

The showerhead hisses and Sam stands under its needling spray. He splats shampoo into his hand and fingers it onto his scalp until bubbles froth up. He scrubs himself with a sponge.

Through the marbled glass, he can see the thing standing in the bathroom, watching him. Even when he doesn’t look directly, he can feel it, like a bruise at the edge of his vision.

The room swirls with steam. When he finishes rinsing off, he twists the knob and remains in the stall until the dripping stops.

He slides the door open and the cold air tightens his skin. He reaches for the towel on the bar, only a few inches from where the thing stands.

“Leave me alone,” he says.

While Sam dresses—pulling on khakis, buttoning a gingham shirt—he can hear his daughter downstairs making them breakfast.

Their kitchen is stainless steel and white quartz; he can imagine Ella down there, snapping on the stovetop burner. The gas flares in a blue ring that matches her dyed hair. She is seventeen and her fingers are busy with rings, including one of a horned skull. She bought it at a vintage shop, along with everything else she is wearing: the shredded jeans, the Korn T-shirt with the cutoff sleeves, the gray grandpa cardigan. That’s not how she looks in the family portrait. She has changed since then.

Everything has changed.

The window over the sink offers a view of the neighborhood—mostly neocolonials and Tudor Revivals set back on three-acre lots. Ella is likely looking out of it now. The sun won’t have burned off the mist yet, and the Land Cruisers and Teslas and Range Rovers will cut through the gray scarves of it as they roll off to work and school.

She will be cracking six eggs into a bowl. With a fork, she’ll stab and stir the yolks. She will drop a sizzling square of butter into the hot pan. The eggs will soon follow and she will let them sit a moment before roughing them with a wooden spatula.

The toast pops. She scoops the scrambled eggs onto two plates. And she carries it all to the round table tucked into the kitchenette—just as Sam pounds down the stairs and enters the kitchen with a leather messenger bag strapped to his shoulder.

“Hey,” she says.

“Hey.” He heads directly to the coffee maker. The carafe is burbling, nearly finished brewing. From the cabinet, he pulls down a mug and splashes it full. He blows the steam off it before taking a delicate sip.

Ella says, “You have to have breakfast.”

“I will.”

“Come sit.” She uses her foot to nudge out a chair for him to occupy.

“You’re the best, but…” His words trail off as he recognizes that his seat is occupied by the thing. It looms only a foot from his daughter.

She scrapes butter onto the toast. Her knife slows when she notes his widening gaze.

“No!” he says.

The scream startles his daughter. She drops her knife with a clatter. “What?” she says, standing up. “What’s wrong?”

He hurries to her fast enough that coffee splashes over the lip of the mug, burning his hand. He drags her from the table and puts his body between hers and its.

“Dad?” Ella says. “What are you doing?”

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I just… I wish I could sit down, but I have this stupid meeting. With the hospital board.”

Her face twists with confusion. “You can’t sit for five minutes?”

“Not today. No. But.” He scoops up the plate she made for him. “Thank you for this—I’ll eat it on the way.”

He rushes to the mudroom, trips over her skateboard and curses, and Ella calls after him, “Are you okay?”

“Fine. I’m fine.”

“What about tonight?”

“What about it?” He tucks his coffee into his elbow and rattles the knob and opens the door to the garage. “What?”

“Mom,” she says in a pleading voice. “We’re supposed to go see Mom.”

He pauses in the doorway, already halfway gone. “Right. Yes.”

“It’s her birthday.”

“I’ve got to… do some things first,” he says. “But we’re going to make that happen.” He nods to himself. “Of course we are.”

He pulls the door shut behind him so roughly the house shakes.

His eyes flit between the road and the rearview mirror. His house retreats into the distance. The neighborhood blurs past. He drives a Volvo station wagon. He bought it after Pamela’s accident—after her car plunged off the road and hit a tree, after her unrecognizable body was found mangled inside—because it had a steel frame and a top safety rating.

His breakfast plate is balanced on the dash and when he rounds a corner, it slides from one side of the car to the other. It is about to sail off, soon to flop onto the floor, when he catches it.

He slows now, easing the brake. The speedometer drops from sixty to twenty-five. He feels far enough away from home to settle his breathing.

In the backseat, the thing sits, blacking out most of the rear window.

“Not her,” he says. “Okay? Never her! Never!”

The thing does not respond. It is silent and watchful.

“You’re hungry?”

He pulls the plate down, balancing it on his lap. He picks up a piece of toast and chucks it into the backseat.

“Then eat!”

He hurls the rest of the plate over his shoulder. “Eat!”

But the thing does not respond, even as the toast bounces off its shoulder, as the clumps of eggs ooze down its chest.

The recovery ward has a particular smell—an ammoniac tang—that Sam has come to associate with fear. Everyone here is close to death. The lights are always dimmed to a twilight glow. The nurses speak in hushed tones. The orderlies try not to rattle their carts or squeak their shoes. You don’t hear much in the way of laughter. Music or even the mutter of a television is rare.

The few hours a day that patients are awake, their eyes appear filled with mist. Sam wears a bleach-white lab coat and sometimes patients will rise out of their anesthetic blur and say, for a second there, they thought he was an angel. “No,” he says. “That, I am not.”

The boy is named Luke. He has dark, hollowed eyes and a naked head that is yellow- skinned where it isn’t bandaged. Some blood stains through the gauze. He lies in a bed with plastic guardrails. Fluids drain in and out of him.

His mother sits next to him, holding the boy’s hand with both of hers.

Sam approaches with a gentle smile. “Hi there.” He checks the dry-erase board and sees her name listed there. “Tina. How are you holding up?”

She gives him an ugly laugh. “Not great.”

“I understand.” He picks up the chart from its plastic sleeve on the wall and consults the nurse’s notes. Then he rolls a stool close to the bed. “What can you tell me about Luke?”

“He was awake for a little while. He had some ice chips.” She picks up a Styrofoam cup that now sloshes with water. “Maybe an hour ago.”

“Did he say anything?”

“He said mom. That was all he said. Just . . . mom.”

“That’s good. This early out of surgery, that’s kind of remarkable, actually.” He scratches down a few notes on the chart.

“I did this to him.”

Sam gives her a double take before his forehead wrinkles with concern. “I know this is hard. Don’t make it harder by saying things like that.”

Her voice cracks in ten places when she says, “It’s in my family. It’s in my blood. I had it too.”

Sam tucks his pen into his breast pocket and gives her a steady look. “And you’re still here. Just like he’s still here.”

She nods, trying to convince herself. “It just . . . feels like death is so close. I don’t know how to feel? Should I feel happy that he’s alive? Or sad that he almost died? He feels like he’s in-between, and I don’t want to believe in something if it’s going to get taken away.”

Sam’s gaze rises, taking in the black ragged thing now looming behind her. “Death is always close,” he says in a hushed voice. “To every one of us.”

The thing lifts an arm—and a long, rotten, gray-fingered hand appears from beneath its sleeve. It is reaching for the boy. There is a creaking, as if of old ropes on a ship.

Sam raises his voice when he says, “But your son isn’t going to die today. I can promise you that. Not today.”

Slowly, the hand of the thing withdraws.

Sam shouldn’t be walking so fast. When he walks fast, he makes people nervous, because it means that something is wrong. But he doesn’t have much time. He moves down the corridor of the recovery ward. The walls are the color of spoiled milk. The fluorescent lights pale every complexion.

He glances into one room—and sees the thing. It is in the next room as well.

And the next.

And the next after that.

It stands beside the beds of the patients, but it watches Sam. Because it wants him to choose.

A voice calls out to him—“Dr. Volk?”—and he nearly shrieks in response.

A woman named Carolyn—with purple braids and matching fingernails—stands from the desk at the nurse’s station. She has a stack of papers in her hand.

“Sorry,” Sam says. “Yes—what is it?”

She gestures with the papers. “Need you to sign off on a dozen or so scrips. And there seems to be an issue with a DNR. Also, Room 13’s daughter called and—”

“Can I check back in with you? In, like, five minutes?” He holds out a splayed hand for emphasis. “Five.”

“Sure. Yeah. Everything okay?”

He waves back at her apologetically when he continues down the hall.

“It will be. Soon.”

On the first floor of the hospital, Sam pushes open a door a crack and peers out the stairwell. The hallway is empty, except for an orderly who carries an armful of blankets and hums a nonsense song. Sam waits for him to vanish around a corner and then he enters the corridor fully and creeps toward the OR.

He pushes through the double doors into the observatory. He can hear the surgeon chatting in the next room, getting prepped, and he can see through a window an old man lying on a stainless steel table. He is naked except for a strip of tissue paper covering his groin. Lights blaze down on him. His mouth hangs open, revealing a serrated line of teeth. He is thin with loose papery skin.

A nurse in a floral smock smears iodine across the old man’s abdomen. Some lines have been stenciled there, indicating the site of the surgery, likely a gallbladder removal.

The nurse finishes his work and departs the room.

Sam can sense the thing beside him. Its fabric shifts like the rustling of dry leaves.

“Him,” Sam says, tapping at the window. “I choose him.”

Minutes later, after the surgeon washes her hands and fits on her scrubs cap and snaps on her latex gloves, she backs through the door that leads to the OR. Here, she almost slips. Because the floor is wet. So are the walls, and the ceiling, everything splattered with blood. The surgical lamp drips like a molten chandelier and burns with a bordello-red light.

There isn’t much left of the old man on the operating table. Some broken ribs and what might be a femur spike out of torn meat. A damp yarny mound of intestines unwinds and plops onto the floor.

Back in his recovery ward, Sam keeps looking behind him. Here is a robed patient exercising with a walker. Here is a custodian pulling a trash bag out of a can.

He tries one room—and observes a man sleeping soundly. He checks in another room and finds a woman sitting by the window, staring out at the parking lot. He pokes his head into Luke’s room next. The boy is awake, and his mother is spooning applesauce into his mouth. He eats greedily and some of it sludges down his chin.

Sam feels his muscles loosen. He takes a deep, cleansing breath. The thing is gone. For now.

He heads toward the nurse’s station. Carolyn pops her eyebrows as he approaches. “Everything good now? Ready to talk?”

“Yes,” he says. “Everything’s great.”

At Valley Grove Cemetery, the grass is mown in tidy stripes and shadows lean and pool between the old oaks. Sam and his daughter stand over a grave. The stone reads “Pamela Volk.”

Sam holds a bouquet of wildflowers. Ella has her skateboard tucked under her arm.

“I can’t believe it’s been a year,” she says. “It feels like no time.”

“It feels like forever for me,” he says.

“I remember how she hated lilies. She said lilies smelled like funerals. So…”

“So.” Sam makes a kind of toast with the bouquet before laying it down.

“So no lilies, Mom,” she says. “Happy birthday.”

Cicadas wheeze. A breeze rises and ripples through the leaves, curling up their silvery undersides. A cardinal wings by in a red flash.

“I,” Sam says, clearing his throat. “I remember how she used to call for us. ‘Sam and Ella,’ she’d say. But fast, like: ‘Salmonella.’ People would always look at her funny when she did that.”

A beat of silence passes before Ella says, “I remember how she would always make you split your order at the restaurant. So she got to try two things.”

“I remember,” Sam says, “how she used to put her feet on me when she got into bed. Her feet were always freezing cold, even in the summer.”

“I remember how she would quiz me constantly on math facts. Nine times seven, twelve times eleven; that kind of thing.”

“I remember how she loved to sing along to the radio but always got the lyrics wrong.”

“I remember how she tried to ride my skateboard in the driveway and broke her wrist.”

Sam says, “Then she made everybody sign her cast, so she looked like a twelve-year-old.”

Ella looks up at him. “Dad?”

It takes a long time for him to meet her eyes. “Do you ever wonder if she…” Her face flinches.

“Do you ever wonder if she killed…”

He can’t hide the sharpness in his voice when he says, “What?”

“If she killed herself? Do you wonder that?”

“Oh,” he says. “I thought you meant—no. No, I don’t think that. Why would you say that? She died in a car accident.”

“But what if—”

“No.”

“She would get so sad sometimes. And scared. Don’t pretend like you don’t remember. She would go be alone, sometimes for days, before coming back.”

“Ella. Please.”

“The last time I saw her, when she grabbed her keys and left, she looked like that. I called out to her. I said, ‘Mom, wait!’ but she wouldn’t even look at me.”

“Your mother loved us, and we loved her. That’s what we should be focusing on. The good parts.”

“But she had bad parts.”

“Everybody has bad parts, and when you love someone, you accept that as part of the deal.”

Ella takes in the gathering shadows of the woods. “It’s just… sometimes I get this feeling… this feeling like something dark is close. And I know… I know sometimes that stuff is inherited and…”

“Ella,” he says and pulls her into a hug. “Come here.” Her body trembles in his arms.

“You know what I used to say to your mom?”

Her tears dampen his shirt at the shoulder. “What?” she says in a quiet voice.

“When things got dark, I’d say, ‘I want you to put all of that poison in me. I’ll soak it up. I’ll eat it for you. Because I can take it. I can take it.’ I’d hold her just like this, until she calmed down. Until she felt better.”

Ella sniffs. “Did it work?”

“You tell me. Whatever pain you’ve got, just give it to me. I can take it. I promise.”

She pulls away from him and roughs some tears from her eyes. “Thanks, Dad.”

“Did it help?”

“It helped.”

He pushes back her bangs and kisses her forehead. “That’s what family is for. We carry each other.”

She motions to the grave. “I feel like we should—I don’t know—bake a cake or something.”

“Your mom loved Dairy Queen Blizzards. Should we go get one? I kind of feel like one.”

“Yeah.” She tips her head into a nod. “Yeah, that sounds good.”

Then she drops her skateboard onto the asphalt path and jumps onto it. “Race you!” she says. “Loser buys the ice cream.” She pumps her leg once, twice, rolling swiftly away.

He gives chase, yelling, “Oh, it’s on!”

And with that, they leave behind the cold stone and the bright flowers and the steadily darkening woods.

At Dairy Queen, on the outdoor patio, they eat cheeseburgers and dip their French fries in ketchup. Ella turns her chocolate Snickers Blizzard upside down, as a test, before spooning into it with a laugh. When a crow hops close, she tosses it a fry and asks it to come home as her pet.

Sam talks to her but feels as if he is only half tuned-in to the conversation. He pokes at the salty crumbs in his basket without remembering having eaten a single bite. He keeps looking over his shoulder, hunting for something that isn’t there. The sun is dying on the horizon.

At one point, Ella has to say, “Dad,” three times before he says, “Sorry. What?”

“I was asking if we can look at photos when we get home.”

“Yeah. That sounds nice.”

A half an hour later, they’re in the living room, digging through cardboard boxes and stacking albums and scrapbooks on the coffee table. Ella curls up on the couch, and Sam finds his recliner.

She says, “I used to think it was weird, how Mom insisted on printing up all our photos at Walgreens, but now I’m glad. There’s something more real about them this way.”

They flip through baptisms and camps and soccer games and picnics and vacations.

“Look at this one,” she says and rotates the album to show off a photo from Yellowstone. The three of them stand before a steaming mud pot, pinching their noses. Pamela had a smile that seemed to reach all the way to her ears. Her hair was the color of sunlight. She complained constantly about the lack of pockets in women’s clothing, so she bought men’s shorts and shirts and tailored them to fit her. That’s what she was wearing in this photo: pockets. So many pockets. She hid so much in them.

Sam says, “You wouldn’t stop complaining about the rotten egg smell. So we made a game of it. It was our goal to find the stinkiest attraction in the park.”

“Mom was convinced I was going to get eaten by a bear.”

At the bottom of a box, Sam finds a black book that appears more like a journal. The spine has the ribbing of vertebrae. He flips it open randomly— somewhere toward the back—and finds a photo of Pamela.

She is a teenager with a perm that looks like it weighs twenty pounds. She holds a volleyball and wears a jersey that advertises her favorite number: seventeen. But—and here’s the thing that makes him lean forward—there is a black figure roughly Sharpie-d into the background.

He flips back one page, and then another, and another after that, and finds the same. The thing is with her. At the county fair, when she won a blue ribbon for her sheep. At Christmas, when she showed off a new sweater beneath the tree. At a birthday party, where she puffs her cheeks to blow out the candles. There are words scratched onto the pages too: “Choose,” “Choose,” “Choose,” “How can I choose?” “I can’t choose.”

And: “Will it stop?”

And: “What if I give myself to it?”

There are also newspaper clippings—of car accidents, farm accidents, a string of homeless murders. Here are ten obituaries, nine of them in hospice, one of them a seemingly healthy teacher.

And then—Sam keeps flipping back, back, back—on the very first page of the album, there is a photo of her in a church. She stands with her mother. They both wear black. Their faces are dour. On the altar is a coffin with lilies all around it. A large photograph of a middle-aged man is placed on a pedestal nearby. The thing is Sharpie-d into the background here. “Dad left,” she has written in the margins. “And it chose me.”

He realizes that he’s been sucking his breath in and out of his teeth when Ella says, “What’s wrong?”

Sam slaps the book shut and blinks at her rapid-fire. “Nothing. Just getting tired.” He rises, taking the book with him. “Think I’m ready to say good night.”

He startles briefly because his reflection ghosts the glass of the nighttime window, and he pulls together the curtains, blocking out the night.

When the red numbers on the bedside clock turn over to 7:00 a.m., his alarm sounds and his eyes snap open. The family portrait on the night table stares back at him. The three of them, in matching outfits, smiling in the sunlight. It’s almost disgustingly wholesome. He’s known for a year that it was no longer true. But now he recognizes that maybe it never was. There might as well be a black wraith scribbled into the background, a fourth member of their family.

He punches off the alarm. In the hush, he rolls over to check the other side of the bed. He finds it empty. A sigh filters through his nose.

He throws aside the comforter and climbs out of bed—only to find the thing standing between him and the bathroom.

“No.” He retreats until the backs of his legs strike the mattress. “No, I gave you what you wanted.”

The thing continues to observe him with its dead abyss of a gaze.

“It’s too soon. Leave me alone, goddamn it.” The thing waits.

“Is it because he was old? Did that not . . . satisfy you or something?”

The thing watches.

Sam shoves his fists against his eyes. “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus—I can’t keep doing this.”

When he pulls his hands away, his vision is blurred red, and it takes him a moment to find his focus again. The thing is now even closer, swallowing up most of his vision, as if night has returned suddenly to his bedroom.

“Get away!” Sam bashes into his night table, knocking over the framed photo, shattering the glass. The thing speaks in its rusty wheeze of a voice: “Choose.”

Sam dresses in a rush. He doesn’t bother combing his hair. His unbrushed mouth tastes a little like the ammoniac air in the recovery ward. He chases his way down the stairs and peers around the corner of the kitchen and says, “Thank God.”

Because his daughter is gone. She has left him a bagel with cream cheese and raspberry jam on it, along with a burbling carafe of coffee. Next to his mug is a note—written in her spidery script—that reads, “SAT prep before school. Had to go. Eat your breakfast or else! Love, Ella.”

He feels a cold trace in the air. To his right is a shadow where one wasn’t before. Every part of his body stiffens except the note shivering in his hand. “Come on then.”

Sam normally pays little attention to his neighborhood. It is a place he drives through on the way to someplace else. Now he swings his head back and forth, intensely studying lawns and garages, looking for someone who might be a suitable candidate.

The thing waits in the backseat. He tries not to look at it, but in the same way that staring at a light can stain your vision, so does its darkness. He sees it even when it is out of his range of vision; its contamination is always with him.

A man walks down his driveway to fetch a newspaper. His bathrobe hangs open and his belly swells out of it. He has a ruddy face, appears to be in his late forties, and might be sixty pounds overweight. Sam looks at him the way he would a patient and decides he likely has some combination of diabetes, high cholesterol, and hypertension—a prime candidate for a stroke or heart attack.

He feathers the brake, slowing the car.

The man snatches up the newspaper, unfolds it, and reads the headline. But he soon senses the Volvo and a stare seals between them.

Sam licks his lips. “Okay. Okay, how about—”

Just then the front door of the house opens and a boy and a girl run down the driveway. They wear backpacks and carry lunchboxes and might be in first or second grade. They grab hold of each of his legs and he ruffles their hair while giving Sam a hard look.

Sam stomps the gas and speeds off.

An ambulance is parked in the middle of an intersection, its light bar flashing.

Two squad cars are also present and the officers redirect traffic. Flares burn. Their brightness draws Sam’s gaze from three blocks away. “Give me something. Please, please, please,” he says, and the Volvo picks up speed.

At the same time, the thing leans forward, and places its rotten hand on the headrest. Its nails tear the leather with a squelch.

Sam leans forward, whimpering, trying to avoid its touch.

“Choose,” it says.

“Just be patient. Just give me a goddamn minute.” His words come out as nearly a scream.

Some sort of accident has taken place, as a sedan is parked crookedly. The windshield is shattered and bloodied, and the asphalt is littered with sparkling jewels of glass. He can’t see much, in his hurry, but the EMTs are rolling a stretcher, a stretcher with someone belted to it, toward the rear of the ambulance.

“There!” Sam says. “There! Go! Just leave me alone. Leave my family alone.”

The Volvo comes to a rocking halt. He jams the gearshift into park and rushes out of the car without even killing the engine or shutting the door.

When he looks back, he finds the backseat empty.

He chokes out a laugh and spins in a dizzy circle and runs a hand across his face. And then pauses. His hand begins to tremble and falls to his side. “No.” He walks—and then jogs—and then sprints forward. “No!”

One of the officers tries to stop him, holding up his hands. “Sir, please step back!”

“I’m a doctor,” Sam says, dodging past him. “I’m a doctor!” He nearly falls, sliding on some broken glass, and then he is upon it. The skateboard. His daughter’s skateboard, with the pink wheels, its bottom plastered in stickers. It’s been splintered beneath the sedan.

“Not her! Anyone but her!” He keeps running, breathless, toward the rear of the ambulance, where the EMTs heft the stretcher. “Take me! Take me instead! Take me!”

In the rear of the ambulance, Ella lies on a stretcher. Her arm and cheek are speckled with glass. Her hairline is split open, revealing a slick gray stripe of skull. One of her legs bends crookedly in the wrong direction. The EMTs hover over her ruined body, checking her vitals. Her breath is shallow and her pulse is elevated. She won’t respond to their voices as they call out to her.

But they are soon interrupted.

Outside there is a sudden screaming. Of one voice, then two, then three, four. They make the agonized music of those who have witnessed something horrible.

One of the officers rushes to the rear of the ambulance. His face and uniform are freckled with blood and he gasps as if he has run a long distance. “Get out here! You’ve got to get out here!”

When Ella finally wakes up, she doesn’t know how much time has passed or where she is or what’s happened. Her thoughts are muddied from pain and medication. She is in bed. She knows that. She is in bed and her leg is hanging from an elevated harness with screws burrowing into her skin. One of her eyes is half-lidded, crusted and bruised. Her head is mummied with bandages and when she looks one way, then the other, it takes her vision a second to catch up.

A heart monitor beeps with the regularity of a slow alarm. There are cards and flowers and stuffed animals on a nearby table. A hospital—the word comes to her gradually—she is in a hospital.

She searches the room further and notes a figure standing in the corner. “Dad?” And then she realizes it is not a person, but a manifestation of shadows, like the night incarnate. “Hello?”

The thing approaches, not walking, but gliding.

“Who are you? What do you want?”

Its voice gasps out a single word: “Choose.”

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