They do put the hand back together. It takes all night. We start in the plastic waiting room chairs and as it grows later, we sprawl on the carpet, sneak sips of Spotted Cow, and try to stay awake. Mel offers the receptionist a beer, which sends her into a very vowel-forward “Oh no I…

I was twenty-two the first time it happened. My father slapped me so hard that I bit my cheek open and a thin trickle of blood spilled over my tongue while he stood there, jaw locked, holding the pearl in his hand. He looked at it, not me, his eyes only for the smear of light…

I

A monster grew out there in the tobacco. 

Delmae had seen it. Shapeless as night. Well, heard it. A howl like a coyote—no, a screech like a bobcat. Or was that the feral tabby who liked to hang around out back for the chicken heads Mama unzipped from their bodies, for supper? 

Well, no matter. Delmae sensed it. Knew it was there. It lived in small touches against the earth, and when it reached out, the universe touched back. The sway of the tobacco leaves when there was no wind. The sudden flight of crows when there were no men in the fields. The patchy death of rotting grass underfoot when there was no drought.  

When her Mama thought she was asleep along with her brothers and sisters, Delmae would tuck her small frame into the sill of their bedroom window and stare out at the endless rows of shivering tobacco. A whole farmhouse between her and that monster. Still she sensed it. 

Its eyes would not be sparks of fire, she decided. They would be blue, like hers. Like those’n on the doll she wanted from the general store in town but that her Mama said they were too poor to afford. Blue was a fierce color, and one day, Delmae was determined to find a pair of blue eyes that could stare back as hard as she stared out. 

She asked her Pa one morning, when dawn was just a whisper over the fields. This was their ritual. Or rather, hers. As the eldest girl, she’d wake up early enough to pack sandwiches for Pa and Mama and her siblings. Shuffling white bread like playing cards didn’t take long, but she knew if she came alive before everyone else, she’d get a moment with Pa, just the two of them, before he left for work. Before his limbs were heavy, before his back was hunched, before his skin was sweat. Before his temper was short. 

“Pa,” she’d start, little fingers curling back the tin lid on the S.P.A.M. can like she was pulling the covers off of Mama, who did not like to rise early at all. (She never understood why—if Mama never got up early enough, she never got to kiss Pa goodbye for the day.) “Did you know there’s a monster living out there? In the fields?” 

Her Pa was doing up the laces on his work boots, the big ones he used to crush monsters in the house, mostly fiddlebacks. “Is that the truth?” he grunted. Somedays he worked in the fields, somedays with the gas-n-electric company, somedays with the mines. The more hours he worked, the fewer hours he spent in the house with Delmae and Mama. The mines were the worst. On those days, her Pa came home looking something scary.

“Uh huh. I know it. And it knows I know. It waits out there, watching us. I think it was here before us and we just gone and moved in on it. It ate the chickens last Christmas—”

“That was a fox,” her Pa shot, voice gruff. “They get hungry in the cold.” 

Delmae peered at him over the kitchen counter, which was almost too tall for her. She didn’t tell anyone, but she hid a small crate in the cabinets; she’d pull it out to stand on whenever folks was on the other side of the kitchen, unable to see. 

“No, it’s a monster! A big one, too. Not ugly, though. Like a shadow, you know. Or a big dog. Like the Jeffersons’ dog down the way, Bullet, I’d bet they be friends—”

“A fox, Delmae,” her Pa said, voice sterner this time. No room for arguing.

“But Mama said when we close our eyes at night, all sorts of things come out of the dark and that’s why we gotta stay in bed, why we gotta go to bed early, sometimes even before you come home at night—”

“Don’t listen to your Mama. She doesn’t know what she’s talking about. Lets her mind get away from her, is all.” His eyes—blue, like Delmae’s, but darker, or maybe, she thought, washed with the wrong color somehow, like a poisonous sock in the laundry bin—studied his work shirt where Mama had stitched up a hole. Not well enough, apparently. His brow grew low and wrinkly over his eyes and Delmae knew she had only a little more time. 

“It’s real though. I’m not just making things up, I’m too big for that now. I’m not the baby, no matter what the boys say. I bet I could even help you start planting next season. Then I’ll show you. It’ll be out there, I swear it.”

Her Pa only shook his head. He already seemed worn out today, or maybe that was just her imagination. Her brothers were always teasing her for an imagination. Said they didn’t know where she got it from on account of they couldn’t much afford any books. 

“Oh!” Delmae explained. “Maybe it’s waiting out there cause it’s hungry!” The revelation sung through her veins stronger than the church choir on Sundays. That had to be it. “Hey Pa,” she said, unfolding newsprint to wrap the sandwiches in. “How come we can have fields and animals but we can’t buy a doll?”

Her Pa stood then, towering in the room like a statue that had been sized all wrong for its garden. Silent as concrete, he stalked toward her and grabbed two newsprint-wrapped S.P.A.M. sandwiches off the counter without a word. 

Then he was gone.  

Delmae looked down at the remains of her sandwich operation, cheeks singing with warmth but not any kind of warmth that reminded her of a pleasing choir.

Every morning, she cut a single can of S.P.A.M. into eleven slices for eleven lunches: Two sandwiches each to the three boys and Pa for their long school and work days; one each to Delmae and her little sister; and one to her Mama, but Mama always ended up giving hers away to their crotchety neighbor down in the holler, Ms. Lacey, even though that tough old woman always said she didn’t want one but took it anyway. Delmae’s brothers always joked that their Pa and Mama stopped having kids when they got two girls in a row because Pa didn’t want the boys to be equally matched. Equally matched was too much the same as outnumbered. 

Every morning, she cut the slimy chunk of S.P.A.M., jiggly and as lifeless as an un-beating heart, into eleven slices, each slice so thin that if she held it up to the window, she could see the sun rise over the fields through it. She’d slice, layer the meat gently into a pocket of white bread eleven times, and play her favorite game: Imagining what the S.P.A.M. letters really stood for. Sunlight Paraded All Morning. Supper Probably Ain’t Much. 

Someday Pa Answers Me. 

This morning, she looked at the chunk of S.P.A.M. and thought for a minute. And instead of cutting the rest into the remaining nine veiny slices, she made ten, twelve slices total. 

One extra slice for the monster growing in the tobacco. 

He was probably starving. 

II

A monster grew in the air that summer. 

Delmae could smell it. Something fowl baked in the air quicker than cornbread batter crusted in a hot oiled skillet. 

A little after noon, every time she came back from delivering a S.P.A.M. sandwich to the monster in the tobacco (her new favorite habit), she caught a whiff of something sour decaying in the humid June air. 

Her three older brothers left for school in the mornings, after Pa left for work. She was old enough for learning, too, and had even gone a spell in the school house in town. But then her baby sister’d cried her way into life and her Mama had needed more help than her own two hands from God could provide. So Delmae’d left school; after all, whatever husband she ended up fetching would have gone to enough school for the both of them. Maybe even to high school. Delmae liked to imagine what it might be like to rifle through an entire room of books she’d have in her future big house with her future husband who would spend so much time off at work in town that he’d never bother her while she spent all day reading. 

Delmae had been right, of course. Not that her older brothers or Pa listened to her long enough to even entertain the ideas she was spewing. Sometimes Mama would give her an ear, but only in the golden hour of the afternoons, when Pa and the boys were gone and the littlest girl was deep in her nap. Only when Mama’d slept her full twelve hours and had a cup of coffee in her, maybe coffee with a little splash of something else stronger and more sour than whatever Delmae was smelling outside. Those afternoon hours were Delmae’s and Mama’s, their own special time when it felt like the entire earth could spin around two tiny lives. 

Anyway. Delmae was always right. There was most certainly a beast in the tobacco and he was most certainly hungry. 

As usual that morning, she upturned a can of S.P.A.M. and let the pink stuff drop onto a plate with a sound that reminded her of Pa’s boots sticking in the mud by the creek. And as usual in the early morning quiet and empty of the kitchen, she bullied that S.P.A.M. into twelve slices. She was particularly proud of them this morning, even though the only taste that ever came through was the white bread; they were so thin, they reminded her of the fragile pages of the Bibles in church. 

They didn’t go to church much anymore; that was one thing she noticed her folks agreed on. Pa didn’t seem to have the time or energy when Sunday was the only rest day he got, and even then, he spent it out on the farm. Mama didn’t have the patience. Whenever someone approached them on one of the rare occasions Mama took Delmae into town for an errand, they’d always wonder when Mama was gonna bring the children back to services. They were missed. 

Mama would just stare at them, the plow lines on her face getting deeper as her features sunk into the same look she often threw Pa when she thought no one was looking, like when he tracked mud through the house or when he came home late and decided to sleep on the sofa. Delmae saw everything, of course. 

Delmae didn’t like the soft-spoken preacher much, anyway. No one did. If folks were either S.P.A.M. or white bread, that man was definitely the whitest and blandest of breads. Awful lot of folks caught up on their napping, especially on summer Sundays when the church was hot and the preacher man was prisoner to one of his mumbling, droning sermons. 

Eight slices for the boys. 

Sir Preacher Always Mutters.

Three slices for the girls. 

An extra slice. 

No one saw Delmae slip out of the kitchen and into the tobacco fields around lunchtime. 

The tobacco was much taller than she. She wasn’t positive why just yet, but this lunchtime charity of hers was best kept secret. There wasn’t much left to be personal in a small farmhouse with seven people. And that didn’t even include the chickens! This was hers. No one else’s. Besides, the boys wouldn’t like knowing their sandwiches were thinner, and Mama told her to never wander out into the fields, especially alone. 

You’ll get lost. 

Will not! Pa doesn’t get lost.

Your Pa’s never not lost, sugar. But Mama usually murmured that last part like the preacher mumbled. There are monsters out there, Mama’d try again. 

Ha! Delmae giggled to herself as she stalked through the tobacco, small hands gripping a small plate with a small sandwich. Silly Mama. That kind of reasoning was like butter on crusty cornbread to Delmae; the more someone slathered it around, the more she wanted. Truth was, her stuffy school teacher was probably glad he didn’t have to handle her curiosity anymore. She had approximately fourteen phenomenal questions in her brain every hour. Monsters, for sure. If only Mama knew.  

So when the tobacco leaves enveloped her small frame in a cocoon of smells that reminded her of Pa, letting her disappear from the outside world for a moment, it was for sure a sign from the universe. She was meant to be out here; the forces at work would keep her from being spotted and getting in trouble. She loved learning about the universe and the planets and what lurked in the shadows of the oceans. She’d spend hours at the library in town when she could, but it was only ever open when cranky old Ms. Lacey felt well enough to make the trek in from deep in the holler and open it up. 

Delmae stopped in a specific clearing in the tobacco, the plants stamped down under tiny footprints here. Noontime sunlight streaked through the leaves, but it still felt cooler this deep in. It was nice to be small sometimes. No one would be able to see her from the farmhouse, and this far out in the fields, the noises of the world calmed just a little bit. No chicken squawks, no dogs panting, no static radio nonsense blaring from Mama’s bedroom. Quiet. 

She set the plate on the ground, like she had many times before. 

“This batch turned out real nice,” she said into the silence. The tobacco swayed in front of her as the wind whispered through. Silence. Delmae noticed there weren’t any little critters running around in the underbrush out here anymore, not since she’d discovered the monster. No field mice or rabbits. Not even a barn snake. Like they all knew they’d shifted from animals to prey right quick. 

Not for the first time, Delmae pondered one of her favorite questions. Did this monster like little girls? 

“We even had some jarred onions I forgot Mama pickled a while back. I threw a couple of those on there, too.” 

Silence. 

This is usually how it went. Delmae would talk, offer the sandwich, talk some more, and then leave. The sandwich would always be gone when she came back for the plate in the late afternoon. She pondered what kind of monster this one might be, but as she never saw the creature, that was hard. If not a monster, then what? She swore she saw flashes of lightning bug-yellow eyes at night when she stared out from the bedroom window, but he was no dog or bear or coyote. This monster was…new. 

Delmae dared to ask a question she’d never be able to in church. “Are you a god?” 

The stillness answered back. Then a low rumble sounded. A growl? A hungry stomach? She very much wanted to know more about this monster. Where had he come from? Grown up? Did he have a Pa and a Mama and siblings and absolutely no time and space to do things on his own so he’d run off and now here he was…More importantly, would he be good at her game? 

Saints Ponder Ancient Meaning. 

Yes, this monster out in the tobacco felt ancient.  

Seeing they were done for the day and knowing he wouldn’t eat the sandwich until she left, she gave a small wave and made her way back to the house. 

At the bottom of the back porch steps, Delmae immediately knew something was wrong. 

She took a few steps into the house and let the answer claim her senses. The sour smell wasn’t from her monster, or from the fields. Not the outside world. The foul odor was coming from inside the house. 

It was then she realized there was still untouched coffee burning on the stovetop. Mama had not come down to the kitchen today. 

III

A monster grew in Pa. 

At least, that’s what Delmae guessed, because Mama spent more and more time in bed on account of not wanting to deal with your Pa today, sugar. 

The days got hotter, the nights grew longer, and Pa came back later. He got home in entirely new days sometimes; Delmae heard midnight chime on the old grandfather clock in the den about the same time the front screen door banged open and closed. She was usually up, sitting at her bedroom window sill, watching for her monster. Monsters liked to come out in the spooks’ hour, of course. She knew this from books in the library. They loved the time between midnight and three in the morning, so she learned to love it, too. Hoping she’d spot the dark mass of a creature brushing sandwich crumbs from his fur…

Tonight, another late night, Pa did what he always did when he finally stumbled home from work or town or wherever he had been: Pa wound the grandfather clock in the den. Delmae knew it; heard it. He loved that thing more than Mama’s biscuits (ridiculous), more than his children (shameful), and certainly more than Jesus and church (understandable). He’d wind it and wind it only to fiddle with it some more, his calloused hands, dirt caked under the fingernails, for once gentle. 

She started to understand why Mama always got a twisted-up lemon look on her face when she caught Pa doing that, caressing the clock’s hands and pieces with such love and care it was like he’d married them. But what was the point of a gosh dang clock that couldn’t keep time? A clock that went bad every single day and had to be made un-bad? A more preposterous idea than the idea of a monster living out in the tobacco, if you asked her.  

From her place in the kitchen one morning, Delmae watched her Pa wind the grandfather clock. He’d actually come home early enough yesterday to go to bed before it needed to be wound, even had supper with her and the boys (Mama was asleep), although it was just corn soup and stale bread croutons. Slice after slice of S.P.A.M. fell to the plate as her Pa busied himself with the clock; she was ready to stash the slices and bread into the breadbox in case he turned around and saw how many sandwiches she was making. 

But she lost count of her slices when a ghost floated down the steps, the floorboards creaking even beneath a willowy frame. Mama was up. Out of bed. In the morning. Delmae almost shaved off her thumb as her eyes followed her Mama as best they could from the kitchen. She was in her dressing robe, hair not done, but still. She was alive in a whole new part of the day. Her Mama approached Pa at the clock. Delmae didn’t know what was wrong, but she knew something was off between them, like they had pasty clumps in their buttermilk. Were they getting back to being friends again?

Her Mama and Pa sunk into a terse, whispered conversation. That didn’t sound like being friends again.  

Signs Point Against Maybe. 

“Why didn’t you come down to supper last night?” 

Delmae couldn’t quite see their faces, but that was Pa. Pa always started with questions. 

“Why did you make it to supper last night?” Definitely Mama. Silence. “What happened, Charles?” 

“What was always going to happen. They’ve lost too many men in the mines this season so they sent us home. Folks is starting to pay too much attention. That mine’ll close. The money’ll move to anothern, a smaller town further away with better mountains and poorer men. Men ever more desperate than us.”

“There are no poorer men. We’re it—”

“Is that the truth?” A hacking cough out of Pa. Delmae’s oldest brother told her it was the mines. Apparently, mine monsters were mostly made of coal dust and crawled into your lungs so they could hitch a ride out of their caves since they were trapped down there, sometimes for centuries. She didn’t believe that nonsense. Not really. It was silly. Mostly. Honestly, why would a monster ever have to get un-trapped? A monster was the trap. 

Her Pa was speaking again, and Delmae’s ears went hot when she heard her name. 

“Del’s old enough to work now. And I don’t just mean around the house. She can join the boys in the field maybe, or go in town—” 

“Honestly, Charles. Del ain’t even got proper clothes to leave the house. You’d know that if you spent any time with her. She needs new shoes.” 

“She can wear the one’s she’s got for now just fine.”

Delmae wiggled her free toes on the cold kitchen title. Thank goodness she didn’t have to wear shoes in the house. Her middle toes were longer than the others, and were starting to permanently curl in and under in her worn Mary Janes. They didn’t hurt. Much. She couldn’t run in them, mind you. And sometimes her ankles started to smart because she kept walking on her heels to keep her toes lifted off the ground and free of the pressure—

Did her monster out in the tobacco have shoes? What if his feet were cold? Bruised and broken? If her Pa couldn’t even get his baby girl new shoes, who was taking care of her monster? 

Just then, her stomach rumbled. She was pretty used to the feeling by now, but for some reason, her gut grumbled louder than her folks’ argument this time. If she was hungry, then surely her monster was, too. She sliced faster, only half paying attention now.  

“She cannot wear those old things anymore. They’re gonna cripple her feet. You think she’ll dance well enough to get any attention from boys with those feet?”

Boys! Delmae wanted to snort. What boys? Pure trouble. She didn’t have time for boys, not for their silliness. Not that she saw many boys anymore since Mama took her out of school. Slice. The boys in class had stared too long at her dusty shoes and crooked teeth, and not nearly long enough at her blue eyes or the tiny bow of twine she braided her hair with. Slice. It was twine she secretly clipped from her Mama’s best and only hat one day, with her older brother’s knife. That hat lived at the back of the closet, anyway. Boys were stupid. Slice. 

Stupid People Anger Me. 

“That just means she’s growing, which means she’s old enough to start some real work. It’d be good for her.” 

“It ain’t good for you, why would it be good for her—” Her Mama’s voice caught in a strange gurgle of a sound then, strangled and short, the way the barn dogs choked on the bones of the chicken scraps they got a hold of after supper. 

Then Delmae heard a wheezing gasp, like her Mama’d come up for air after swimming through a deep, dark well.  

In the next instant, erratic boot-stomping echoed toward the kitchen. “Better than wasting away around here, learning your example, sleeping all hours of the day—”

Delmae didn’t look up in time. Her Pa and Mama barreled around the corner into the kitchen and she didn’t even have half a second to squirrel away the evidence of the extra sandwich. There were twelve slivers of delicate heart-pink S.P.A.M. in front of her, twenty-four pieces of white bread. 

Her parents halted in surprise. Pa’s face was flushed with red anger. Mama’s eyes were sunken in pools of purple, baggy exhaustion, and a red patchy painting was forming around her neck. Silly Mama. Her neck always got like that when she insisted on sleeping with her goose-feather pillow. (Delmae didn’t know why her Mama didn’t just get rid of that pillow when it gave her so much trouble.)

Her folks were silent, staring. At the fact that Delmae was up this early making sandwiches and had likely overheard them, or at the extra sandwich? Oh lord, she hoped the first. Worst case, she’d just say Mama was bringing an extra sandwich to Ms. Lacey, who was only ever not so cranky when she had a little something to eat, and she needed something to snack on after all if she was going to make the trek to keep the library open for Delmae—

Mama’s eyes went to Pa and then followed his gaze, which was fixated on Delmae’s small hands hovering above smaller sandwiches. Her folks glowered at the slices of S.P.A.M., thinner than a top layer of delicate skin. Delmae’d read once that their outside layer of skin was already dead anyway, always dying and replenishing. 

Pa turned and fumed out, stomps echoing to the front door.

Mama stayed a moment longer, the sadness in her eyes losing the fight to tiredness. Her Mama never seemed to be able to win the fight against her enemy of exhaustion. Without a word, she left her daughter alone again in the kitchen. 

Delmae brought the rest of the sandwiches to life. She gave extra care to the twelfth. Even spread a little bit of the mustard they had left in the jar on top of the S.P.A.M. 

Were they really that poor, she thought, as she left a sandwich out in the tobacco fields that day. How could she be poor if she still had something to share? 

Sure enough, supper was quiet that night. As she and her siblings came to the table, Delmae stared at the food Mama placed in front of them when it was clear Pa wasn’t making it home. 

Soggy Peas and Macaroni. 

Yes, she thought. Oh yes. The monster outside might have been hungry, but the heartbeats inside the house were poor in all the wrong ways.   

IV

A monster was not an easy thing to hide, as it turned out. 

Delmae made a mistake. As with all mistakes, this one started with a storm. 

One August night, late summer heat and a lonely front of cool air mixed worse than old skillet grease and the chilly water from the kitchen faucet. And soon, when the moon was high but shadowed behind the clouds, the atmosphere gave birth to a locomotive. 

The sky screamed at midnight, and suddenly the world was awake. Still half dazed with sleep and barely out of a dream, Delmae sprinted after her older brothers through the house. The walls shrieked around them as the old farmhouse bent and shook and swayed in the gathering winds. Picture frames fell and cracked. The few pieces of china they had shivered from the cabinets and shattered. Delmae’s sister, the little one, was crying up a storm of her own but then the baby was in their Mama’s arms and Mama was trying to sing a lullaby over the sound of the train coming right down from heaven—

“The cellar, out back!” 

Delmae saw Pa shout the words before she ever heard them, and suddenly hands and elbows met ribs and everyone was shoving and clawing their way out of the house, speeding like the devil for the cellar out back. Near the tobacco fields. Her ears rung and her head felt like it was overflowing with cotton, and she could barely think straight. The fields! Her Monster—he was out there alone and he must be confused and frightened and lord he was probably so hungry, late-night storms always made her crave milk and some sweet cinnamon dumplings—

Outside, a mass of black hovered on the horizon, spinning in some kind of odd, slow-tempo dance. The tobacco wouldn’t be any kind of shield for her monster. 

Mama shouted over the horn section of winds, at their eldest. “Go check on Ms. Lacey!” 

Pa whirled on their Mama, the lose skin of his face catching and slipping around on his cheek bones like an old sheet. “Are you insane? Don’t send him out there—”

But Delmae’s big brother went sprinting in the opposite direction, toward the road, without even his shoes on. 

Pa was so distracted he didn’t see Delmae slip back into the house.

The foundation of the house shook and nails popped and she was sure her world was vibrating but maybe that was just her brain knocking against her skull. She made it to the kitchen, to the stack of sandwiches she’d already made last night ahead of time, when she knew folks was asleep and she wouldn’t run into Pa. 

But Pa found her this time, a newspaper-wrapped sandwich in her armpit, her feet pointed toward the back kitchen door where he was now standing.

“What the hell’re you doing, girl? Get your ass out into the cellar.” 

Her eyes went wide with what she knew had to be guilt, hair swirling all around her head and looking mighty tangled and pitiful. She didn’t move. In fact, she did him one better. She shook her head. 

Her Pa broke for a moment, his record scratching. “What?” A pause. The locomotive screamed closer. “Did you just tell me no, girl?” 

“I have to feed the monster,” she finally shouted. “The monster, the one in the field. The one I told you about.”

“The monster—” His head tilted and he suddenly looked like he might vomit. “Stop being silly and put your goddamn shoes on.” It was only then that she noticed her Pa had carried her shoes out with him, from the house, like he’d actually been thinking about her. 

“But my monster—”

“There’s no monster! You’re spewing nonsense and we don’t got time for this bullshit so put your goddamn shoes on—” 

The back screen door cracked right off his hinges. Something cracked in Pa, too. Understanding passed over his face as he fully heard what she’d said. Delmae had read about the calm in the eye of tropical storms. She just didn’t think she’d ever live long enough or go far enough to see one up close. 

“You’re leaving our food out there in the fields? For what, the animals? Teaching all them wild creatures to come back and make a mess…You’re just leaving it out there.” Pa always started with questions but now none of his questions sounded like questions anymore. 

She gave the smallest of nods. 

“You’re leaving our food, my goddamn food that I goddamn paid for, out there for the vermin of the world?”

She thought it was the house at first, but no, it was her own bones trembling under her skin this time as her Pa approached her. It happened too fast for her to see it coming. One of her shoes hit her in the side of the face. Pa’s left hand was empty, her right shoe in his other. 

“Answer me, girl!” 

She didn’t budge. Just clutched the sandwich tighter, squished that single slice of S.P.A.M. into an even thinner version of itself. 

“Fuckin rat—” 

Her right shoe smacked into her temple and for a breath her world flashed white in the overwhelming darkness. 

“If you can waste my money, my food, Jesus Christ knows you don’t need any goddamn new shoes, you spoiled bitch.”

She blinked, thinking of her monster, who survived all alone out there in the tobacco fields, who’d probably survived a long time before she ever came along. 

Soon Pa Apologizes More.

She said, “Those didn’t even fit right anyhow.” 

That did it. 

Her Pa lunged after her, murder in his blue eyes that were not really blue anymore, but dark as the mass of air and earth and debris and chaos churning out there in the midnight. 

Delmae was already in motion. She fled into the living room, heart pounding in time with the thunder outside. Her Pa’s heavy boots plowed behind her and when she hopped over a fallen coatrack, she finally had an idea, not for her Mama or her siblings or even for her monster but for herself. She did the only thing could think of. 

Pa raced behind her. She got to that ancient grandfather clock in the den, that ghost of a thing that’d somehow managed to stay upright through all this hell.

And she got behind it and pushed. 

It crashed to the floor in such a cacophony of sound that she almost forgot about the storm outside. Then her Pa tripped over it where she’d pushed it into his path and crushed whatever of the precious thing was left. His face hit the floorboards, nose first, and she heard crunching and cursing before she tore the hell out of the house and into the backyard. 

She didn’t have much time. Her Pa would come after her. But she didn’t run toward the cellar, where her Mama and her brothers were waiting. 

No, Delmae didn’t desert her monster. She dove into the tobacco fields, sandwich tucked in her arm like she might have cradled that doll from the general store in town. Sprinting through the thick stalks, she thought only of her monster, of feeding him, making sure he stayed alive. A minute later, when she heard Pa follow her into the tobacco, his loud cursing an angry battle cry, she smiled. Just as he was supposed to do. 

She was doing this for her family, she told herself. For her sister and her brothers and her monster out here. Most especially for her Mama. The winds spun and the locomotive chugged faster and the world went dark as the inside of a coffin. Most especially for Mama, who deserved all the peace and quiet Delmae could find for her, who probably never got to have a monster all her own to look after, her own private little thing she could nurture until it either grew scary enough to not have to hide from anything anymore, or happy enough that it didn’t want to. 

A sandwich for her monster, a single slice of something to keep it fighting. The world cracked open above and around her. A man’s strangled cry tore across the back of her mind. 

Save Pa and Mama. 

She plunged to her knees, sandwich in the dirt, wrapped her arms over her head. 

Save Pa and Mama. 

She stayed small, unseen, something she’d practiced for a long, long time. 

Save Pa and Mama. 

Then Delmae’s head went quiet. The air pressure lifted like the heavens were taking a much-needed breath. The humid air of August cocooned around her again. A bird whistled a tune. She stood, knees shaking, eyes jumping from a felled tree to their overturned truck to the farmhouse which was leaning into the ground like it was drunk. And the fields—

The tobacco fields were completely flattered around her, and not just where she stood. For as far as they reached, as far as she could see. The sandwich was gone. Her monster was gone, too, his hiding place no longer a dark spot in the world. 

And so was her Pa. Vanished where she had no doubt he had just been before, behind her, ready to put his hands around her neck.

Her Mama surfaced from the cellar then, a daisy fighting its way out of the earth. She looked around just once, just long enough to see her daughter standing there alone in the leveled field. Only Delmae. No one else. A question appeared on her Mama’s face, the littlest girl clutched to her Mama’s breast so she didn’t get sucked away. 

Delmae answered the question with a smile. 

A proud smile, really. After all, she was good at some things. Had a lot to be proud of, most certainly. 

A monster grew in her. 

Don’t trust the Egyptian priestess, with her gloopy dollar store mascara, pewter ankh, and vaguely Egyptian eyeliner, when she tells you your wife has communicated from the Great Beyond and has requested—no, demanded— mummification. Instead, laugh. You two have been communicating just fine through levitating chairs and flying chinaware. Likewise, don’t be swindled by your Catholic priest who tries to sell you an expensive plot in the church graveyard. You’ve already had her body cremated, the ashes baked into bread then fed to the ducks at Mulberry Park, where you had your wedding photos taken. In fact, tell your priest that she is more alive than she’s ever been and that you don’t appreciate the threats of excommunication.

Your wife spends her time rattling her kitchen equipment and jingling the unpolished silverware in the dining room drawers. She has yet to speak, and you imagine that if she did, she would say words like honey and hubby and help, extending each ‘h’ into a spine-tingling hiss. Wish out loud for her to charge the stand mixer with psychic energy and take possession of dough so that it might knead itself into award-winning loafs. You miss waking up in the morning and filling your lungs with that honey-dripped, yeasty aroma and walking into the kitchen through a cloud of bacon grease. But most of all—you think—you long for a way to monetize your wife’s newfound powers.

Once bedridden and shackled by tubes, your wife now floats lazily through the kitchen or stomps, child-like, up and down the basement stairs. Talk to her during the witching hour as she wanders the hallways, creaking floorboards and running her yellowed nails along the grooves she’s made in the floral wallpaper. Tell her you’re glad to have her back. You were an absolute wreck on your own.

Say, “I was so alone without you.”

She stares blankly past you, moaning, so imagine what she might say: They use ovens as iceboxes here; or, I love what you’ve done with the place. Brown box chic. Promise her you’ll figure out a way to make things more intimate. Lie in bed and stare into her eyes. Ask, “What’s the other side like?” as she hangs from the ceiling, dripping the pus that once flooded her lungs onto your new satin comforter. The first time she does this will be disturbing, but learn to love her in spite of it. Become an expert at washing pus out of satin. She responds to your question with wheezing. Her head flies off like a spinning top and comes to rest in your lap; admire the pale weightlessness of it. Reach out to stroke her cheek, only to have your hand pass right through.

In a moment of weakness, countless nights later, reach, not to the wife that crawls along your ceiling leaving hand and foot prints of blood, but to the wife in the photos on your nightstand. The wife you want is feeding ducks with botched bread, shooting down your design for her new website. The wife you want is in bed next to you, not hanging from the ceiling fan.

Ask, “Why are you doing this to me?”

Drip, drip, drip, she says. Translate it into, Because it’s what you wanted.

Tell her you love her. Don’t begin to deconstruct the meaning of the word “love” and the phrase, “‘Til death do us part.” You are blessed.

Take her out to dinner Friday night. Not to that run-down hole-in-the-wall diner that has the waitress with the piercings and the short, colorful hair, and not dressed like the slob she always used to say you were. Take her somewhere fancy, where the servers dress better than your old Sunday congregation, where the table never runs out of fresh artisan bread and you drink ice water out of wine glasses. Rub the tablecloth between yourfingers and stare through the eyes of your wife to a table behind her, where a fully fleshed couple is laughing and drinking expensive wine (All the wine here is expensive. Order iced tea.). Watch the two interlock arms and drink from each other’s glass and wish you had done that with your wife before she was rendered ethereal. Wish that she would at least wear something nice to date night and not the threadbare, soiled hospital gown she died in. Wonder if it’s too late for your wife but not too late for you. Maybe she’s holding you back. Maybe you’re holding her back.

Order the calamari appetizer and the New York strip with a side salad. You can’t afford it, but what’s another hundred dollars? A drop—a speck—in an ocean, a universe, of debt.

Ask your wife what she’s having. You used to admire her for her decision-making and take- charge attitude, how she’d see to the awful task of calling to make appointments or inquiring toward business hours. But now she’s shy. You had to call to make reservations tonight, rehearsing the speech in your head a dozen times over. Your wife hides from the world and the server ignores her. Tell him she needs a few more minutes to decide. Even on this date in this candlelit restaurant, she won’t reveal herself entirely despite all your efforts. Instead, she turns the candle flames a pale, banshee blue.

“Ungh,” she says.

Take it to mean she’s hungry. Offer her some artisan bread, its crust a pale imitation of what she used to make. Imagine that if she could use words, she would tell you more than you ever wanted to know about the bread: its hydration level, its baking temperature, the variety of wheat used in the flour. Suggest the French onion soup.

“Ungh.”

Suggest the wedge salad with blue cheese dressing.

“Ungh!”

Slam your palms onto the table. The muffled shock rattles the ice in your glass, causes the candle flames to return to a soft orange. “Well, what do you want?”

She looks at you like a child staring at a television.

“What do you want?”

The server comes by, asks if everything is alright.

Grind your teeth. Cancel your order. Ask for the check. The server tells you the iced tea is on the house. The bread, as always, is free.

Scrubbing ghostly handprints off walls has become habit. Clean the ceiling, re-hinge the cabinet doors, then watch the first five minutes of The Tonight Show before your wife crawls out of the television screen. When you catch yourself in the hallway mirror, observe how you’ve lost weight, how you’ve developed the look of an obsessed artist. Compliment yourself, meekly. Watch in the mirror as your wife wraps her translucent, marshmallow baker’s arms around you and exhales unintelligible whispers into your ear. Imagine her asking, Where did we go wrong?

Say, “For starters, you died.”

Her arms tighten around your neck. Reach up to tear them off, though your hands will pass through like they always do. Remember the nights you spent curled in your corner of the bed with your own blanket because when you shared, she stole them in her sleep. Remember the frustration, the fatigue, the threats of separation, all for the sake of a good night’s sleep. Remember the make-up sex, anger turned to lust turned to exhaustion, and how the both of you slept like babies afterward, the idea of separation as distant as death. Realize that you’d rather have those arguments, tangible in steaming breath, spittle, and thrown pillows, than the current cold nights wondering which piece of furniture her head was going to pop out of next. Desire a warm body. Not a person with a face, but rather a heart pumping blood through arteries and veins, supported by bone, encased in flesh. Most of all, you want to get laid. Suggest an opening of the marriage as she reaches a pale claw out from the mirror. You’re a modern couple, and, after all, monogamy is for the living, isn’t it?

She moans and gurgles, black tar spilling out of her mouth. Imagine that this is her way of saying she’s all for it—she was dropping hints and hoping you’d bring it up.

Fabio’s ghost was coming onto me earlier, invited me to a party. I didn’t know how to answer.

Think, But Fabio isn’t dead. And isn’t he gay? Or maybe just a 5 on the Kinsey scale.

Is this really the hill you want to die on?

Say, “Just one date. It’ll be good for us.” Feel her raspy, bone-cold breath against your neck. Shudder as you inhale and try to shake the feeling of wisp- like fingers constricting around your heart. You have become a master at communication. You can make your dentist appointments all on your own now.

Fill your online profile with phrases like “down-to-earth” and “fun-loving.” Write that you enjoy hiking even though you haven’t been on a trail since you were in high school, and that you spend your Friday nights going out with “the guys.” There are no guys on Friday nights, just you and a bucket of ice cream watching your wife crawl out of the television during commercials. Leave the income field blank.

Your wife is there, playing with the computer monitor, making it flicker and produce face-like images, when, miraculously, you receive a message.The woman seems interested, says her name is Tammy. She makes a bad joke about how so many men are down to earth she’s beginning to think they’re all mole people.

Type, “LOL” anyway. She thinks you’re cute: that counts for something. Ask Tammy—who sings karaoke with her friends on Fridays and who has never seen the movie Donnie Darko because it seems too scary—out on a date.

Meet in a coffee shop that charges five dollars for a cup of coffee. Your wife has come along because she is concerned or jealous or curious. She hisses and wraps herself around the espresso machine, contorting her body and sliding around the machine’s levers and metal fixtures like an octopus tentacle. Tammy greets you with a hug. Take a moment to savor it—the weight of her thin arms around your shoulders, the warmth they give off, the slight compression in your chest—but not too long. Recall that hugs must be long enough to show interest, but not so long as to turn a person off. Wonder which kind you just gave Tammy. She has weathered and tanned skin, but her blue eyes are bright and she smiles between sips of her latte, foam sticking to her teeth. Take a sip of your fair trade, eco friendly, single origin coffee and sigh. Feel an unwinding of your heart, as if someone has released the turnkey and only now can the springs and gears inside finally begin their motions anew. Your wife is clinging to the male barista, ruining his latte art and splashing microfoam into his face. Turn coffee into dinner. Go to neither a hole-in- the-wall diner nor a cloth napkin place. Pretend to be young with disposable income. Eat at the food trucks downtown, run through the park and feed garbage to the park’s mechanical goat. Do not act your age and do not act like a widower.

Return home to find your wife sitting in the living room, her face a pale, blank slate. Her hands rest in her lap and hold the features that have fallen off: two brown eyes, a flat, wide nose, a thick pair of lips, a set of natural bushy eyebrows. Tell her about your date, about Tammy. Tell her she should have been there to run through the fountain and eat greasy food truck meals.

I was there. I saw the whole thing.

Say, “I’ve never felt so alive.”

I’ve never felt so dead.

“I’m sorry.”

Your wife rises from her seat, letting her facial features tumble to the ground, where they turn into mealworms and wiggle into the floorboards. Get the feeling she’s become a different person. Tell her so. You want her to be happy but wonder if she wants the same for you. She loved you, but does she still love you? Ask her while she hangs out of the medicine cabinet, pressing her forehead to yours as you brush your teeth.

Think about Tammy before you drift to sleep.

Restructure your debt and continue to date Tammy. Your wife, once the awkward third wheel, spends her time haunting other people. On the news, you see construction accidents, homicides in meth houses, police brutality. She has been broadening her horizons and spending fewer nights at home. Enjoy your newfound freedom from housekeeping chores and sleepless nights. Your nights now are sleepless in a good way. When you lie in bed with Tammy, wonder where your wife is and if she’s safe. It’s natural to be concerned for loved ones. Tammy loves you, but you are unsure if you love her, if you will haunt her when you die. You still love your wife, but you are unsure if she loves you now, wonder where has she gone. Long for a ghastly pile of ethereal fingers to turn up in the vegetable crisper or for a figure to stalk you down the hallway at two in the morning. Take pleasure in the pleasures of Tammy’s flesh and let your mind wander to ducks and bread and funerals. See your wife in every minor kitchen accident and settling of the house. Stop Tammy in the middle of sex because you could swear, swear, you heard your wife moan from down the hall. But your wife’s dead. She’s been dead. She’s moved on. It was just the wind.

Say, “It was just the wind.”

We fly from Hawaii to Japan in order to meet the submarine. Once we get on base to check in, our Officer in Charge receives a message from the Fleet Commander that says ‘Due to inclement weather, the submarine will not be able to pull into port for at least one more week.’ He turns and says,…

Bunny has a gun and she’s off her meds again. She hovers around table #6 because she’s sweet on Spanish Pete, who always eats alone on All-You- Can-Eat Taco Night at Fiesta Cantina. From the kitchen, we watch them flirt. They are old, married to other people, and unhappy most of the time.Shelby, my girlfriend, flicks my ear for no…

They say that there is a city in every lady. My woman is superlative. She is a universe of her own and I have been fortunate enough to exist in her orbit. I trace the constellations on her neck for a pattern to her chaos, but her science remains undefined. I run my fingers through her…

Stagnant air hangs over the beach. Dancers defy the oppressive heat and flock by the video wall, while Shareef, glazed purple from the lights, lies back on the white leather couch in his fine Italian suit. I lean over so my hair falls—a curtain to hide us as I approach his lips. He’s tempted, but pulls away….

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It doesn’t? Then how does it run?

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

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

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

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

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

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

He clicked on his flashlight.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s starving, Ron thought.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The words were right there inside of him:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I thought this was a date.”

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

“You’re offering me a job?”

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

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

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

“I don’t remember any of this.”

“Then let’s just have our date.”

“And maybe I don’t need a job.”

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

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

“Are you employed?” she had asked.

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

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

“Shush,” she had said. “What.”

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

“I’m on a cell phone.”

“That’s even worse,” she said.

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

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

“I don’t see how it’s weird.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yard looks good,” he said.

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

“Sorry,” he repeated.

“This is all your fault.”

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

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

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

“Say that again,” he said.

“You don’t deserve me.”

“Say it again.”

“You don’t deserve me.”

“Again.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Like a ghost?”

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

Henry said he did.

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

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

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

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

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

Henry said she was calling herself Linda.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Henry stood. The Dobermans wagged their stumps.

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

“Really?”

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

“For real?”

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

“Henry Streator.”

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

“I’m sorry,” said Henry.

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

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

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

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

“What is happening to me?”

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

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

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

“Will you get my family back?”

“Fine.”

“Fine what?”

“I’ll rescue your family.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“When do we do this?”

“As soon as I return from my journey.”

“You’re going somewhere?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Why would you do such a thing?”

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

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

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

Henry said sure.

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

“Honestly?”

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

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

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

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

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

“I am not a lunatic,” said Henry.

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

“I’m not going to college.”

“It was botany, if I remember correctly?”

“Or criminal justice.”

“I’m an amateur botanist myself.”

“No shit.”

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

Henry bit the tip off an egg roll and shrugged.

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

“I see.”

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

“I guess that sounds fine,” said Henry.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The children!” stammered Henry.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No,” she sniffed.

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

“I knew it.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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