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The following excerpt from The Distance From Four Points by Margo Orlando Littell is used by permission of the University of New Orleans Press, 2020.

The Distance From Four Points – excerpt

There was only one voicemail. One single, unpromising voicemail in response to the ad Robin had placed for the empty apartment. A woman, who said, “Calling ’bout the listing,” and gave a phone number. No one answered when Robin returned the call, but she left a message inviting the woman to visit the property at four that afternoon. 

Unsure if anyone would show up, Robin arrived early to turn on the lights and wipe the new countertops. She waited anxiously by the front window. It didn’t matter who came—as long as they left a first month’s rent behind. She would not ask any questions. She needed this woman, whoever she was, to say yes. 

A beat-up Camry pulled to a stop in front of the duplex. Robin smoothed her hair, plucked a piece of brown leaf from the carpet. She stood and looked out the window once more. 

“Oh my God,” she said. The voice on the message had been so ordinary, a local woman making apartment-hunting calls. But it wasn’t just any local woman coming up the walk. It was Cindy Sweeney, more than twenty years a stranger. 

Cindy was on the porch, preparing to knock. She wore makeup that was too dark for her complexion. She had long, fried hair. Hair that would be just as sticky and stiff as it’d been all those years ago if Robin were to touch it. She was big—tall, big breasts, big bones—and she filled the space around her in a way that seemed to dare Robin to tell her to step aside. Cornered, Robin froze. She wanted to deadbolt the door and run out the back, but she couldn’t. Winter was a bad time to hunt for tenants, and the possibility of 1118 ½ sitting empty until spring was very real. Robin did what she had to. When Cindy knocked, Robin opened the door. 

There was a flash of surprise and immediate recognition. “Robin fucking Nowak,” Cindy said. 

“Besher now.” 

“Right. Ray Besher. Your moneybags husband. Heard about that.” 

“Ray’s dead.” 

She said it without thinking, the words rousing challenge, even triumph. You think you know me? You don’t know anything. 

Cindy squinted, appraising. “That why you’re back in Four Points?” 

“You think I’d be here if I had a choice?” 

Cindy dismissed the question with no more than a loud exhalation. “So this place is yours.” 

“I’m getting some things in order before going back to Mount Rynda.” 

“You too good for us?” 

Robin was freezing by the open door. “You still want to look around?” 

“I’m here, ain’t I?” 

Neither woman spoke as Robin led Cindy through the living room and into the kitchen. With new carpet, tiles, and counters, both downstairs rooms were nicer than most Four Points rentals, but Cindy made no comment. Upstairs, the two small bedrooms were in worse shape: stained beige shag carpet, crooked window blinds, bare bulbs. With three strides, they were in the bathroom at the end of the hall. Discolored bathtub, no shower. An old white porcelain sink over exposed plumbing. 

“This place is a shithole,” Cindy announced. 

Back downstairs, they stood under the harsh overhead in the living room. 

“It’ll be me and Amber moving in here,” Cindy said. “Keep to ourselves, pretty much. You won’t have a problem with us.” 

“Amber?” 

“My daughter. Thirteen. Eighth grade at Sacred Heart.” 

For weeks, Robin’s daughter, Haley, had suffered at school from a girl named Amber’s cruelty. Of course Haley’s tormenter was Cindy Sweeney’s daughter. Robin almost laughed out loud. 

“I really don’t think—” 

Cindy cut her off. “I’ll be straight with you,” she said. She draped her long ponytail over a shoulder and twisted the ends around her fingers. “I’m in a bad situation, okay? Trying to get out and start over. I don’t have a lot of choices here. You as my landlord? That’s bullshit. Fuck it. Fuck you too. This is what it is.” 

“Someone else came by already,” Robin said. She smelled cigarette smoke when Cindy scoffed. “And you’re a smoker. It’s a nonsmoking property.” 

For a long moment, Cindy looked at her, and Robin looked back. Mascara-clumped lashes, pockmarked cheeks, the skin across her collarbone wrinkled and limp, old before its time. The yinzes, the ain’ts, the fucks. If Robin closed her eyes, she’d see sixteen-year-old Cindy, the coin-flip side of this woman standing in the living room. Against all odds, she needed something from Cindy Sweeney: her money, what little there was, and her assurance that, under her watch, nothing calamitous would happen to this apartment. There were other people, surely. If Robin waited long enough, she’d find someone else. But she couldn’t wait. 

Cindy rustled through her purse. “Here’s the first month,” she said. “Four hundred. You want to count it?” She extended a secondhand envelope from a credit card bill, the jagged flap resealed with a piece of scotch tape. Robin shoved it into her pocket. 

“Cindy.” 

“Yeah?” 

“There’s a nun next door.” 

“She won’t bother me.” 

“She’ll know who’s coming and going.” 

“So?” 

“I don’t want her to be—uncomfortable.” 

Cindy took one step closer to Robin. “I work at Walmart,” she said. “Got it? That’s what I do. I work the fucking register. Sometimes I work all fucking night because we’re open twenty-four fucking hours. You want my nametag? A pay stub? My timesheet for the shifts I pull while you’re sleeping like a goddamn princess?” 

“I just had to say something.” 

“You just had to say something. Bet you’ve been waiting to say something for a long fucking time.” 

A moment passed. Robin asked quietly, “Do you know who lives in that house now?” Every memory she had of Cindy was wrapped in that basement. That hulking specter on Whistlestop Road. 

“Hell no,” Cindy said. “You should drive by now you’re back.” She turned to the door. “We’re the same, you and me,” she said over her shoulder. “I’m a ‘team member’ at Walmart, you’re a fucking slumlord. A fucking slumlady. Don’t worry about the nun. Nuns love people like us. They have to love the sinners the most.” 

The door was too hollow and cheap to properly slam. 

* * *

It was fully dark at 4:30 p.m. when Robin left Nettle Street. Even though Haley was waiting at home, Robin skipped the turn that led to their rental and wound toward the river, to the house on Whistlestop Road she used to share with Cindy Sweeney and Cindy’s mother, Rochelle. She turned onto the street as though under a spell. 

Past two boxy, unkempt houses and a prefab ranch with a collapsing side deck stood the house she sought, the last on the left. Three stories of dirty red brick, two windows sloppily boarded on the second floor, the attic windows missing entirely. A large, bowed picture window, a hole shot through the right-hand pane, overlooked a wraparound porch littered with broken bricks, cracked cement, and pieces of old wooden railings. The second-floor bedroom windows looked down onto train tracks. A turret bulged along the house’s right side. In the fall, the turret window revealed a sea of red and gold, the tracks and the Youghiogheny River winding through in ribbons of bronze and onyx. On the front door fluttered a white notice: CONDEMNED. 

Robin saw herself: sixteen, climbing out of her beat-up white Mazda, indigo-black hair loose to her waist, slouching up to the porch where Rochelle would push open the screen door and say, “Cindy’s in the basement. Go on down.” Twenty-seven years ago. As clear as yesterday. 

Robin remembered too well what went on in that basement. But she wasn’t willing to revisit what had happened in one of the rooms upstairs, the room where her infant son had slept. Memories of the sex work—when they arrived, unbidden—nauseated her. Thoughts of Trevor stopped her breathing. 

Wind gusted. A shingle from the roof cartwheeled to the ground. She tasted blood. She’d bitten through the skin behind her lower lip. It hurt, but she kept the broken bulb of chewed skin between her teeth. 

As she started the car and moved her hands to the steering wheel, her left elbow hit the lock button, firing a quick loud crack. The noise roused dogs in the house across the yard. Two tall black Dobermans threw themselves at the fence, jumping and barking, straining against the strips of blue tarp woven through the chain link. 

A light flickered in the kitchen window of the old house, weak as a candle flame. Nothing but a nervous illusion—the reflection of a star. Robin K-turned the car and left the house behind.

***

A week later, at two in the morning, Sister Eileen called about a commotion at 1118 ½. 

“I think you better come,” she said. “I don’t want to call the police.”

There was no way to know how long she would have to be gone. Robin shook Haley gently. 

“Haley. Haley, wake up.”

She wrapped a coat around Haley’s shoulders as they headed to the car. By the time they got to Nettle Street, Haley was more alert. 

“What happened?” she said.

“Not sure. Sister Eileen called.” 

They were silent as they made the turn, the heater blasting. 

Robin pulled to the curb. “Stay here. I’ll find out what’s going on.” 

Haley curled in her seat, trying to sleep again. Robin got out of the car and locked the doors. The lights were on throughout the duplex, clearly showing that the downstairs windows on Cindy’s side had been broken. Robin heard another splinter and crash from the back of the house, and Cindy’s shouting from inside. 

“Fucker! Get the fuck out of here, you asshole!” 

A scrawny man in jeans and a tank top ran around to the front, a belt in one hand and a beer in the other. When he saw Robin, he hurled the can at the front of the house, jumped into a pickup, and squealed away. For a long moment, Robin heard nothing but the fizzing puddle of beer on the porch. Then Cindy Sweeney yelled, “Fuuuuuccccckkkk!” 

Robin knocked on the door, nodded at Cindy when she answered wearing purple plaid boxers and a t-shirt. The living room was a jumble of piled furniture and boxes shoved against the wall. On the couch was Amber, wearing a Hello Kitty bathrobe, her arms around her knees. The living room and kitchen, where Robin had laid new carpet and tile, were full of broken glass. 

“Watch yourself,” she said, nodding at Cindy’s bare feet. “What happened?” 

“Finally got my stuff,” Cindy said. “Then Clyde came over and smashed the windows. Like I told you—a bad situation. Shit.” 

She didn’t blame, didn’t cry, didn’t apologize or excuse. Because of this, Robin didn’t feel angry. She didn’t point out the hundreds of dollars she’d have to spend on new windowpanes, new paint. She didn’t howl that these unforeseen expenses were destroying her hope of fixing up her other apartments as soon as possible. 

All she said was, “I have some duct tape in my car. You and Amber unpack those boxes. We’ll cover the windows with the cardboard. You’ll freeze tonight otherwise.” 

Outside, Sister Eileen was sopping up the beer with paper towels, a plain cotton bathrobe over an ankle-length nightgown and sneakers. 

“Sister Eileen,” Robin said. “I’m so sorry about this.” 

Sister Eileen rose. “Can I do anything inside?” 

“You’ve done enough.” 

“I want to help.” 

Robin sighed and said, “Alright. Let me get my daughter.” When she looked at the car, Haley was awake and gazing back. Robin retrieved the duct tape, and together they walked inside. 

Robin and Cindy fitted flattened cardboard boxes jigsaw-style over the windows, and Amber and Haley pressed long strips of duct tape along the edges, cutting the tape with a pair of dull kitchen scissors. Both girls were in their pajamas and robes, with tangled ponytails and tired faces, as though this were a sleepover. Sister Eileen swept the broken glass and vacuumed the floors again and again. 

The house was cold when they finished, smelling of damp cardboard. It was almost four in the morning. 

“Shouldn’t we call the police?” Sister Eileen asked. 

Cindy shook her head. “It’ll make it worse.” 

“I saw him take off his belt—his pants nearly fell down,” Sister Eileen said. “Not the sharpest knife in the drawer, is he?” 

“I should’ve known,” Cindy said. “Two fucking years. Story of my life.” 

“God has a plan,” Sister Eileen began. 

Cindy scoffed. 

“Even in this. Especially in this.” Sister Eileen bowed her head as she walked to the door. 

Once the nun was gone, Cindy ushered Amber to bed. When she came back downstairs, she seemed defeated, nothing at all like Cindy. 

“I’m sorry,” she said in a low voice. “Shit like this is why you didn’t want me here, and you’re thinking you got proved right. Same old fuck-up Cindy Sweeney. You’re wrong, but fuck that. We can be out by next week.” 

“You don’t have to leave,” Robin said. “This wasn’t your fault.” 

“It’s my fucking mistake. Like always.” 

“We’ll figure out the windows, somehow.” 

“How?” 

“Somehow.” Without anything else to offer, Robin turned to leave. 

“Robin.” 

“Yes?” 

“Amber’s taking this hard.” 

From behind her, Haley said, “I won’t talk about it at school. Amber doesn’t have to worry.” 

They didn’t speak on the dark ride home. Robin wanted to touch Haley’s cheek but instead kept her hands on the wheel. Robin felt a kind of peace, a kind of thankfulness. All those months of searching and now, here, grace.

**

Margo Orlando Littell grew up in a coal-mining town in southwestern Pennsylvania. Her first novel, Each Vagabond by Name, won the University of New Orleans Publishing Lab Prize and an IPPY Awards Gold Medal for Mid-Atlantic Fiction. Her second novel, The Distance from Four Points, comes out May 28, 2020. She lives in New Jersey with her family.

**

Music by Catlofe

The following is excerpt from The Resolutions by Brady Hammes, copyright © 2020 by Brady Hammes. Used by permission of Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

The Resolutions

Jonah

So far to go and so little light to guide him. The sun was almost down, the trail fading quickly. He was returning from town, slightly drunk, enjoying the high of human contact, his first in almost a week. He’d left camp early that morning to recharge the equipments’ batteries at a restaurant owned by his colleague, Laurent, but the drinking had interfered with the mission and he’d forgotten to grab the batteries before returning to camp. This just meant he’d have to go back tomorrow, which would be Thursday. Or would it be Friday? No idea. What are days anymore? he wondered. Long stretches of loneliness, he answered. He then counted the letters in loneliness: 10. One zero. One is the loneliest number, he sang to himself, then laughed because its loneliness was nothing compared to his. “What’s lonelier than a man living alone in the forest?” he asked aloud, but there was no one around to answer. Precisely, he thought.

Jonah had come to Gabon four months earlier to assist Marcus, his thesis advisor at Vanderbilt—a quiet man with tenure and no family, his lifestyle the kind that afforded six-week sojourns into the forests of West Africa. Marcus had spent the past decade studying the vocalization of forest elephants, planting ARUs—Autonomous Recording Units—in the trees to capture the elephants’ communication. As his research took shape, he convinced some of his behavioral ecology students—Jonah being one of the more eager—to help analyze the hours of recordings. Jonah spent countless days staring at spectrograms in the lab, extrapolating some very interesting things and relaying those things back to Marcus in the field. They linked the sounds they recorded with the behavior they witnessed, shedding light on the relatively unknown complexities of elephant communication. Jonah and his colleagues drafted what they referred to as The Elephant Dictionary, a compendium of their findings, a sonic key to the elephant dialogue. Their work began garnering attention—articles in scholarly journals, followed by an increase in funding—and Marcus offered Jonah a position as a field assistant, a welcome relief from the grinding tedium of lab work. But shortly after Jonah arrived in Gabon, Marcus contracted malaria and returned to the States, leaving Jonah to spearhead the research. There was talk of sending someone to assist him, but it was difficult to find anyone willing to abandon university life for one spent in the forests of Gabon.

He looked to the sky. Maybe rain? Rain might be nice once he was back at camp, settled in for the evening, drinking what was left of the duty-free scotch he’d picked up at the airport in Paris. He watched a wire-tailed swallow swoop past his head and land on a tree branch. He nodded at the bird, bid it good day. The bird chirped something that sounded like his name. “How can I help you?” Jonah asked, but the bird didn’t respond. He wondered if he misheard the bird. Or perhaps the bird misspoke. Better to pin it on the bird, he thought. Or maybe there was a third option. Maybe the bird just said Jaja, which would make more sense because Jaja wasn’t a word, just a bird sound. “Am I losing my mind?” he wondered aloud. “No,” he answered. “You’re just lonely.”

It was nearly dark when he finally returned to camp, which was nothing more than a two-person tent pitched in a small clearing. He had no electricity, no running water. What he had was a whole arsenal of electronics—laptop, DSLR camera, ARUs—all of which, without batteries, were essentially useless. He powered up the camera to find that he had three bars left, enough for an hour’s worth of shooting at most. He decided he’d get up early tomorrow, make the trip back to town, retrieve the batteries, email his sister. He’d arranged his flight home so that his layover in Paris might coincide with Sam’s, who had planned to fly from Moscow on the same day. They had discussed trying to arrive at Charles de Gaulle around the same time so they could wander around the city together, try to see as much as possible before the final leg back to Chicago.

He wasn’t particularly close with his sister, but he had hoped this impromptu rendezvous might change that. He attributed their distance to the five-year age difference, but the truth was that they didn’t have that much in common. 

But still, he thought, the idea of home stirring his heart. It’ll be nice to see them, my family.

* * *

Jonah fired up the butane camp stove and set water to boil. He emptied a package of noodles into the pot and watched the last bit of color drain from the sky. He had expected this extended bout of solitary living to result in some kind of enlightenment, but most of his thoughts were occupied by images of nude women doing dirty things. He’d kept a journal for the first month, but abandoned the idea when he finally got around to reading what he’d written. It was mostly a lot of uninspired musings about how distant everything seemed, how disconnected he felt. He was certainly no writer and looking back at those old entries made him cringe at the teenage drama and hyperbole. No shit, he thought, of course you feel disconnected, of course everything seems distant. You live alone in the forest.

His camp was six kilometers from Franceville, the closest thing to a proper town. The train ride from Franceville to Libreville, the capital and location of the only international airport, was somewhere between ten and sixteen hours, depending on the condition of the track and the mood of the conductor. To say that he lived in a remote part of Gabon was inaccurate. It was more like camping on the moon.

He removed the noodles from the heat and strained them into a small plastic bowl, then added soy sauce and settled in for the only dinner he knew. His diet had been reduced to that which didn’t perish: lots of pasta and oatmeal and dried fruit. On trips to town he’d sometimes treat himself to meat—smoked fish or Laurent’s famous poulet nyembwe—but the longer he lived without it, the harder it became to stomach. He’d grown up backpacking with his father and was used to living for days in the wild, subsisting on trail mix and protein bars, but life here was a prolonged version of that, without the daily change in scenery and the calming assurance that a warm shower was only a few days away. Now he bathed in the stream if he bathed at all. He worked alone, ate alone, slept alone. He’d always assumed he was built for a life of solitary scientific inquiry, but now he wasn’t so sure. 

At thirty-one years old, Jonah had spent the past twelve years in academia, rarely venturing outside the confines of campus. His time in Gabon was the longest he’d spent away from libraries and lecture halls, and though he was loathe to admit it, he was beginning to suspect this expedition was an effort to shirk the responsibilities of graduation. His dissertation — “The Grieving Patterns of West African Forest Elephants” — was due in two months and he had very little besides a title and fourteen hundred hours of raw data. For the past few months, he’d been observing an elephant calf named Kibo, whose mother, Jonah worried, had been killed by poachers, and he planned to compare the sounds Kibo made when alone to those he’d produced when accompanied by his mother. He suspected the elephant was mourning.

During his time in the forest, Jonah had become interested in the phenomenon known as emotional contagion, where a calf mimics the emotional state of a fellow distressed elephant. He’d witnessed instances of an elephant placing a trunk in another’s mouth, a soothing gesture that suggested they were capable of radical empathy. Demonstrations such as these were rare among animals — the behavior, until now, witnessed only in apes — and Jonah hoped to prove that elephants possessed similarly complex cognitive abilities. It was good, important work he was doing, but it was also lonely work, the kind that drove a man to drink more than he should and talk to birds and forget the batteries for his electronic devices. He’d arrived in Gabon with a clarity of purpose and, although he’d lost some of that focus in the past few weeks, his commitment to the elephants was steadfast. He resolved to do better in the new year.

After dinner, he grabbed his water purifier and walked to the stream to pump drinking water. The trail was well worn and even with only a splinter of moon, he made his way easily, as if walking half-asleep to the bathroom of his childhood home. With the sun down, the jungle orchestra began firing up: the hooting owls and burping frogs and the guttural, orgasmic moan of the tree hyraxes. It was a place where life was heard more than seen, a chorus of disembodied sounds raining down from the forest canopy. For all the discomfort of his lifestyle, he’d become rather attached to this small part of the forest and would miss it once he was gone. His plan was to return to Chicago for Christmas, treat himself to a couple weeks of easy American living, then return refreshed and ready for work. But with Marcus no longer in the field, the grant money was in question and there was the very real possibility that his departure would be permanent.

When he reached the stream, he pumped two bottles full of clean water and began hiking back to camp. As he approached his tent, he heard what sounded like footsteps. He stopped, set the water down, turned off his headlamp, and crouched in the leafy growth of a maidenhair fern. It was quiet for a moment, then he heard it again, unmistakably footsteps. He grabbed a stick and approached camp, unsure what kind of damage he could inflict but certain he would find a way if that’s what it came to. As he got closer, he heard the sound again, but the footsteps were quicker now, fading into the forest. He scanned the tent with his light and noticed that his camera was gone. “Motherfucker,” he muttered.

He circled the perimeter of the camp, but the thief had vanished. Poachers, he guessed. After discovering a battlefield’s worth of massacred elephants last year, the president of Gabon dispatched a military unit to make periodic sweeps through the parks, hoping their presence might slow what had recently become an epidemic. Jonah was skeptical. While the poaching in the forests around his camp did subside, he suspected they’d just been chased to other corners of the country. The ivory trade had been raging for years, and Jonah held no illusions about the government’s ability to eradicate it, so his goal was to protect, by whatever means necessary, his own small jurisdiction. Marcus had given him a Beretta 9mm before he’d left, but Jonah, thinking the danger had subsided, traded it for beer and groceries with a man in town, an exceptionally shortsighted decision he now regretted.

He crawled inside his tent, slid into his sleeping bag, and tried not to think about the possibility of the poachers returning to cut his throat. He tried not to think about what that would feel like, all that blood pouring forth, the days and weeks his corpse would lie undiscovered while jackals snacked on his decomposing body. He tried to think of more pleasant things, like single malt scotch and breakfast burritos, but his mind kept circling back to the image of his lifeless corpse seen from above, by a helicopter or a bird of prey or the eye of God. Realizing this was an unhealthy kind of thinking, he grabbed his notebook and headlamp and began drafting a letter that he hoped would shepherd his thoughts into sunnier pastures. 

He awoke the next morning grateful to be alive. He stepped outside and breathed in the new day, which, even at this early hour, was already choked with a suffocating heat. He ate a breakfast of oatmeal and bananas, then washed it down with a cup of instant coffee. Life here was lived in the singular. He had one bowl, one cup, one spoon. He had a three-foot length of rope that doubled as a clothesline and a belt. He had a dishrag that he sometimes used on his face. He owned twenty-three items, twenty-two now that his camera had been stolen.

He shouldered his backpack and set off for the bai, the forest clearing where the elephants gathered each day. A nest of clouds shielded him from the sun and the hiking was easy, almost enjoyable. When he arrived at the bai, he saw a few dozen elephants slurping water from puddles that had sprouted from last night’s rain. There were several familiar faces: Goldie and her youngest calf, an ornery, bowlegged runt Jonah had nicknamed Scooch; Rango and her two babies, neither more than a few weeks old; and Silver Ears, whose semi-translucent ears gave her an extraterrestrial appearance. Jonah climbed the stairs to the observation deck, a wooden treehouse perched thirty feet above the forest floor. Without his electronics, his work would be limited to what he could record with his eyes. He did a quick head count, twenty- three, and noted the attendance in his journal. The numbers had been slowly declining over the past few weeks— fifty- eight on November 27, forty- four on December 4— and he hoped this was a statistical anomaly rather than a fundamental change in visitation rates. Either way, it was an alarming trend and he would have to come up with a way to explain it to Marcus when he got back to the States.

When Jonah was eight, he attended Zoo Camp at the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago. He and three other second graders were assigned to a “creature-teacher” named Eric. Most of the creatures Eric taught them about were the kind Jonah had seen on his grandparents’ farm— goats, box turtles, barn owls. They were fine— all animals were special in their own way, Eric told them— but it wasn’t until they visited the elephant enclosure that Jonah felt he’d encountered something truly magnificent. It wasn’t just their size, which he’d learned about in books, but the grace with which they moved, the elegance of something so large.

After high school, he studied conservation biology at Boston University. The summer after his junior year, he took his first trip to Africa, volunteering at an elephant sanctuary in Kenya. The organization’s mission was to rehabilitate orphaned elephant calves to the point where they could be reintegrated back into the wild. Jonah was initially tasked with menial jobs like shoveling manure, but in time he learned the basics of animal husbandry and was eventually assigned to the nursery, where the youngest, most fragile calves were nursed back to health. Most of the elephants that arrived had been orphaned after their mothers were killed by poachers. They were usually found half-starved and wandering alone through the savannah, and it was the job of people like Jonah to help them through this intense period of mourning. Toward the end of his time in Kenya, he was assigned to a three- month-old female calf named Laki. She’d been found standing next to the decomposing body of her mother, dehydrated and on the verge of death. Jonah spent that first night lying alongside Laki, rubbing his hand along her back, waking every few hours to feed her from a bottle, trying to impress upon her the understanding that she was safe now, that she was loved. It was the closest he’d ever felt to any kind of paternal instinct, and during the long dark hours that he watched the animal sleep, he imagined finding the man responsible for Laki’s grief and smashing a rock against his head.

The sun was nearly gone when Jonah heard the trumpet call and saw a family of elephants emerging from the forest. He spotted the matriarch first, but something about her slow, halting movements seemed strange. She stopped every few feet as if she’d smelled some-thing offensive, then continued carefully, like a soldier navigating a minefield. It seemed like she was trying to camouflage herself in the forest growth, but when Jonah grabbed his binoculars and looked closer, he noticed that it wasn’t her massive body she was trying to conceal but her tusks. It was both shocking and heartbreaking. Not only did she associate the human scent with poaching, but she seemed to be cognizant of the reason someone would want to kill her. He’d never witnessed such behavior, and it was a stark reminder of the intelligence of his subjects, as well as how dispiriting their situation had become.

The matriarch led the others to a shallow pool, where they slurped mineral water percolating from the ground. He grabbed his notebook and jotted down some observations, the names and faces that were familiar to him, as well as those that were not. He was relieved to discover Kibo standing beneath his mother, whom Jonah had assumed was dead. A dozen more soon filtered in, and now there were close to forty, an encouraging increase from the morning’s count. A few of the younger ones locked tusks, roughhousing, while the adults congregated in little subsets, drinking and socializing in the manner of good-natured suburbanites. It was a festive scene, full of bonhomie and goodwill, one that reminded Jonah of a spirited forest block party. As he unfurled his sleeping bag and settled into bed, he paused to savor the moment, how fortunate he was to spend an evening with such noble and sentient creatures.

* * *

Jonah awoke with a butterfly on his face, which he interpreted as a good start to the day, though a moment later he saw it swallowed by a toad and was forced to reexamine the omen. He put together a quick breakfast, then collected the ARUs from the trees, which required some elementary ropework he’d learned during an introduction to rock climbing class back at Vanderbilt. He had two hundred hours of new media to decipher during his time in Chicago, and he hoped there might be something in there that would jumpstart his thesis.

He packed up his equipment and started back to camp. His flight left in a little over a week, and his plan was to spend the intervening days collecting data before heading back to town, where he would catch the train to Libreville. It was a lot of traveling, but he knew it would be worth it once he was back in Chicago, surrounded by deep-dish pizza, cold beer, and the familiar faces of his family.

He found her in a dry riverbed, bathing in a pool of her own blood, surrounded by Kibo and four other grief-stricken elephants. They paced circles around her, laying their trunks on her collapsed body in the style of a funeral procession. Though he was a good twenty yards away, there was no question it was Kibo’s mother. Once the elephants had disappeared into the forest, Jonah approached the corpse. Her face had been removed by crude machete work and the rest of her body lay rotting in the sun, sizzling with flies, emitting an odor that made Jonah’s stomach buck. He considered trying to conceal the corpse with palm fronds, but the vultures were hovering overhead, and he knew it was only a matter of time before there would be nothing left but clean, white bones. He snapped a few photos for evidence and then, fighting back tears, continued back to camp.

**

Brady Hammes is a writer and documentary film editor. The Resolutions is his first book. His short stories have appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, Guernica, The Rattling Wall, andBeecher’s. He lives in Los Angeles by way of Colorado and Iowa.

**

Music by Catlofe

The following excerpt is from the book Valentine by Elizabeth Wetmore. Copyright © 2020 by Elizabeth Wetmore. Reprinted courtesy of Harper Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

Valentine

SUNDAY MORNING, FEBRUARY 15

It will be cold comfort, knowing she is not alone. Plenty of other women have gone before her. By the time she pulls into the fire lane at Sam Houston Elementary, two suitcases and a shoebox of family pictures hidden in the trunk, Ginny Pierce knows plenty of stories about those other women, the ones who ran off. But Ginny is not the running-off kind. She will be back in a year, two at the most. As soon as she has a job, an apartment, a little money in the bank—she is coming back for her daughter.

Mama, why are you crying? Debra Ann asks, and Ginny tells her, It’s just my allergies, honey, and D. A. shakes her head in the same manner she does everything, fiercely—It’s February, too early for allergies—as if that settles it. And Ginny swallows the stone in her throat. Could you scoot over here for a minute, honey? Let me see your face?

Her daughter is nearly ten. She is going to remember this day—the two of them sitting together in the front seat of the getaway car, a shaky and capricious Pontiac Ginny has been driving since high school. D. A. will remember her mother reaching out suddenly and pulling her across the front seat until they are sitting with their shoulders pressed together.

Ginny will remember pushing her daughter’s fine brown hair out of her eyes, the smell of oatmeal and Ivory soap, the chocolate on her chin from the Valentine’s candy she’s been eating all morning, and the shine on her cheeks from the suntan lotion Ginny swiped across her face before they left the house. When she reaches for her daughter to rub in a smudge of lotion on her chin, Ginny’s hand trembles and she thinks, Take her. Make it work somehow. But Debra Ann scoots away, saying, Quit it! Because to her, this is still like any other Sun- day morning and her mother might be nagging her about any of the usual things. To her, even Ginny’s tears have become old hat.

The car door, when it slams closed, nearly catches Ginny’s finger. A backpack slung over one shoulder, D. A.’s basketball striking the concrete and rolling onto the dusty playground, a hand thrown casually in the air, her daughter walking away from the car. Bye, Mama. Bye, Debra Ann.

Ginny’s grandma never much cared to talk about the women who made it out alive, but the stories about the ones who died trying? They are bright and enduring, as if somebody took a branding iron and seared them into Ginny’s memory.

In the spring of 1935 a cattleman’s wife served lunch to a dozen ranch hands and then hanged herself on the front porch. She didn’t even wash the dishes, Grandma said, just set them in the sink, took off her apron, and walked upstairs to change into her favorite shirtwaister. As if that were the story, the sink full of dishes. Later that afternoon a cowherd came up to the house to fill a water barrel and found her—a kitchen chair knocked over on the front porch, the wind slowly turning her round and round, back and forth, one bare foot peeking from beneath her skirt. It took them two days to find that missing shoe, her grandma said, and Ginny imagined a brown leather slipper, kicked far out into the yard and covered over with sand.

Another woman left a note saying that she had to see something green, anything at all, a dogwood, a magnolia, a little St. Augustine grass. She saddled up her husband’s best mare and dug in her heels, and they were flying fast across the desert when they ran into a barbed-wire fence just this side of Midland. It’s easy to get turned around out there, Grandma said, if you don’t know where you’re going.

Even those women who toed the line couldn’t escape Grandma’s stories. They got lost in sleet storms on their way home from church. They ran out of food and firewood in the middle of a blizzard. They buried babies that had been picked up and flung against the earth by a twister, and children who wandered into the yard during a dust storm and suffocated on the dirt from their own front yards. Sometimes Ginny thought her grandma didn’t know how to tell a story with a happy ending.

On the other side of Ginny’s windshield, the I-20 lies stretched out like a dead body. Up above, the sky is bland and unblinking. Nothing out here but that open road she’s been dreaming about, though at the moment she can barely see it. She turns on the junior college radio station, and Joni Mitchell’s voice fills the car, achingly beautiful, clear and certain as a church bell, or a plainsong, and it is unbearable. Ginny cannot turn it off fast enough. Now there is only the persistent thrum of road noise, and a worrisome little screak under the hood. When she presses down on the accelerator and the noise grows louder, she holds her breath and crosses her fingers.

At the turnoff to Mary Rose Whitehead’s house, Ginny switches on the blinker, takes her foot off the gas, and considers the turn. She imagines herself driving up the dirt road and knocking on the door of the woman she once stood outside the high school with, both of them waiting, Mary Rose for her mother and Ginny for her grandma, to pick them up and take them home for good.

The final bell had not yet rung, and they stood alone in the parking lot, their purses stuffed with gym suits and the con- tents of their school lockers, both of their noses red and sore from crying in the nurse’s office. Mary Rose was turning a small metal padlock over and over in her hand. She was seven- teen years old and as of thirty minutes ago, pregnant enough that somebody took notice. I thought my life was taking for- ever to get started, Mary Rose said, but not now. Do you know what I mean? Ginny, barely past her fifteenth birthday, shook her head and stared at the ground. She tried to imagine what her grandmother was going to say about this, Ginny making the same mistake as the daughter she had lost to a car accident a decade earlier.

Mary Rose leaned down and scratched her ankle. She stood back up, reared back, and hurled the lock against the side of a pickup truck. The girls watched it bounce off the door without leaving a mark. Well, Mary Rose said, I guess we’re in it now.

Yes we were, Ginny thinks, and she pushes the accelerator to the floor.

Still, when all the shouting and tears and threats were done, the baby was perfect. Ginny and Jim Pierce could hardly believe it. Look what they did. They made a person. A daughter! So they dug their King James out of a moving box and hunted up a fine, strong name. Deborah, Awake, awake, utter a song! But the county clerk spelled it Debra and they didn’t have the three bucks to resubmit the paperwork, so Debra it is—and Jim went to work in the oil patch while Ginny played house.

Afternoons while her daughter napped, Ginny liked to sit quietly and look at magazines with photographs of places she had never even heard of. She thumbed through art books that she found at the bookmobile, filled with photographs of murals and paintings and sculptures. She turned the pages slowly, marveling that somebody thought to make these things in the first place, wondering if the artists ever imagined some- one like her looking at their work. Ginny loves her daughter, but she feels like she’s sitting in the bottom of a rain barrel, and there’s a steady drizzle filling it up.

And it is for this reason—more than the men on the street who holler every time she steps out of her car to gas up, or the unceasing wind and relentless stench of natural gas and crude oil, even more than the loneliness that is briefly staved off, sometimes, when Jim comes home from work, or Debra Ann climbs into her lap even though she is too big to stay for more than a minute—that Ginny takes five hundred dollars from their joint account and one of the road atlases from the family bookcase, and drives out of West Texas as if her life depends upon it.

There was a man who ran a cow-calf operation on the same piece of land where he lived with his wife and three children. During the 1934 drought, the price of cattle fell to twelve dollars a head, not even worth the cost of moving them to the stockyards in Fort Worth. They shot them in the forehead, Grandma said, sometimes the government men who came to make sure the ranchers had thinned their herds out, but more often, the ranchers themselves, who didn’t feel it was right to ask a stranger to do their dirty work. The men stood over the bodies with kerosene-soaked rags in their hands, pausing awkwardly, as if everything might change if only they waited a few more minutes, days, weeks. Sighing, they lit the rags and then stood back and shook their heads. But there was always one old bull that wouldn’t die, who bawled and staggered as shot after shot struck his tough old skin, his flank, his heart girth. There was always one old cow everybody thought was dead, but then she rose up and wandered off across the field, smoke rising from her flanks, the stench of singed hair drifting behind her. All this, Grandma said, and the wind blew all day, every day.

Some men down from Austin arrived one morning to find a pile of cattle still smoldering in an open field. The rancher was dead in the barn. His wife lay a few feet away, fingers still curled around the pistol, and the front door of the main house was standing wide open, the wind slamming it madly against the frame. The men found the children locked in an upstairs bedroom, where the oldest, a boy of seven, handed the men an envelope with train fare and a scrap of catalog paper. A brief note was scribbled underneath the name and address of a sister in Ohio: I love my children. Please send them home.

Ginny’s grandma was a toothy old woman, a believer in hellfire and hard work and punishment that fit the crime. If the devil comes knocking on your front door in the middle of the night, she liked to say, chances are you flirted with him at the dance. When she delivered the punch line, she clapped her hands twice sharply, just to make sure Ginny was paying attention.

I’m not going, the oldest boy told the cowhands. I’m staying right here in Texas. Well, all righty, one of the men said. You can come home with me, then.

So there’s your happy ending, Virginia

She is less than thirty miles from Odessa when the whine under the hood of her car sharpens and grows louder, a steady keen that does not abate even when she slows to fifty, then forty-five, then forty. Eighteen-wheelers blow their horns and pass on the right, the wind shaking her car and nudging it toward the median. And then the sound stops. The car shudders once, as if shaking off its troubles, and she drives on, fifty, fifty-five, sixty miles per hour.

The sun stares down on her, flat-faced and bland. By now, Debra Ann has probably beaten every girl in the neighbor- hood at basketball. Or she is sitting on the bleachers, looking through her backpack for the sandwich that Ginny packed. Or she is walking home, the basketball a steady heartbeat against the sidewalk. D. A. is going to be fine for a couple of years. She is the best part of each parent—the boy who was a second-string quarterback and the girl who loved Joni Mitchell, two kids who hardly knew each other when they drank too much Jack Daniel’s at the homecoming dance and took a drive through the oil patch during the worst sleet storm of 1966, a story as common as dust on a windowpane.

What kind of woman runs out on her husband and her daughter? The kind who understands that the man who shares her bed is, and will always be, just the boy who got her pregnant. The kind who can’t stand thinking that she might someday tell her own daughter: All this ought to be good enough for you. The kind who believes she is coming back, just as soon as she finds someplace where she can settle down.

Come to think of it, country and western singers, those purveyors of sad songs and murder ballads where a good woman gone bad gets her just desserts? They’ve got nothing on Grandma—or Ginny, as it turns out.

It was 1958, and Ginny’s parents had been dead for less than a year. The boom had finally begun to level off, and there were fewer strange men around town, fewer roughnecks and roustabouts driving in to spend their paychecks and raise hell, but Ginny was still young enough to hold her grandma’s hand for no particular reason, just because. The two of them were making their way to the drugstore, cutting across the lawn at City Hall on their weekly sojourn to pick up her granddaddy’s pills and maybe a licorice whip for Ginny. It was early summer and the wind held still for a few minutes, here and there, the sun bestowing just the right amount of warmth on their faces when they stopped to watch the light shine through the diaphanous, narrow leaves of the town’s pecan trees. Until they nearly tripped over her, they did not see the woman curled up in the grass, sleeping like an old copperhead.

Ginny remembers it like this: She had sniffed at the air, recognizing the scent of piss and whiskey. She stared at the lady’s naked feet. Bright red polish flaked off her toenails, and her skirt hem rested above two skinned knees. Her bony clavicle rose and fell, and a thin scar on her neck reminded Ginny of the state map hanging on the wall in her first-grade classroom. Something about that long mark made Ginny want to wake her up and tell her, Lady, you got a scar in the shape of the Sabine River on your neck. It’s wonderful. But Ginny’s grandma squeezed her hand tight and jerked her away from the woman, her lips rucked up and pressed tightly together. Well, she said, that one’s been rode hard and put up wet one too many times.

For days, Ginny worked hard to figure out the meaning of those words. Sometimes she liked to imagine the lady saddled and thirsty, her skirt wrinkling beneath a wool blanket, a bit clenched in her teeth, and sweat streaming between her eyes as some old rancher rode her across the oil patch. Other times, Ginny thought about the way the woman had lain curled beneath the pecan tree, her toenails painted the exact red of the little wagon that Ginny hauled around the yard. The quickness with which her grandma had jerked her away from the woman was not so different from the way she yanked Ginny out of her granddaddy’s barn when a bull started climbing up on one of the cows.

And if Grandma’s hands hadn’t been so full, if she hadn’t had it up to here most days, with Ginny and dust and scrubbing the crude oil out of her husband’s shirts, Ginny might have asked her why she said that. But she stayed quiet about it, and she sometimes thought about those two skinned knees, the scar that looked like the Sabine River, its meandering path across the woman’s throat as she slept in the shade of a pecan tree. The woman had been beautiful to Ginny. She still is.

A few miles past the Slaughter Field, the derricks and pumpjacks give way to empty desert. On the other side of Pecos, the road begins to rise and fall. The horizon goes jagged, and the land turns ruddy and uneven. How lonely it is out there. How lovely.

Ginny keeps both hands on the wheel, her eyes shifting back and forth between the temperature gauge and the road ahead. She stops for gas in Van Horn, sitting in her car with her fingers wrapped around the steering wheel while the attendant fills the tank and washes the windows. Cigarette dangling from his lips, he checks the tire pressure and asks if she needs anything more. His coveralls are the same gray as Debra Ann’s eyes, and there is a small oval Gulf Oil patch on his breast pocket. No thank you, she says and hands him five dollars.

He points to her back seat. You forgot to return your library book before you left town. Ginny twists around to see Art in America surrounded by candy bar wrappers and one of Debra Ann’s graded spelling tests, the first two words canceled and trespassing, both misspelled.

At the stockyards outside of El Paso, she rolls the window up tight, her eyes and skin burning when the stench of methane gas seeps through the vents. She is ten miles from the New Mexico border, the farthest she has ever been from home.

Beauty! Beauty is not for people like us, her grandma said when Ginny tried to explain why she liked to sit and look at pictures in the afternoons. You’d do better paying attention to what’s right in front of you, the old woman said. If you wanted to spend your life thinking about such things, you should have thought of that before—or been born someplace else. And maybe that’s true, but it seems like a high price to pay, and maybe Ginny’s not willing to make the trade—the world or her daughter—because it’s clear she can’t have both.

When the fan belt finally snaps on the other side of Las Cruces, Ginny’s car shudders to the highway shoulder. She gets out of the car and watches the moon rise over the desert like a broken carnelian, and such has been her fear and grief and longing that, for many years, she will not remember the man who pulled up behind her car, his truck wheels grinding against the caliche-covered highway shoulder. She will not remember the words on the side of his truck—Garza & O’Brien, Tow & Repair—or that he fetched his toolbox from his truck and replaced the belt on the spot while she leaned against the trunk and looked at the stars, and wept without making a sound. And she will not remember what he said, when Ginny tried to give him a few dollars. Young lady, I can’t take your money. Pues, good luck.

She will have seen a thousand miles of sky before she is finally able to stop moving. Flagstaff, Reno, one short and sorry stint in Albuquerque that she tries hard to forget. Weeks and months sleeping in her car after a day spent cleaning houses, or a night waiting tables. She will drive through the Sonoran Desert, its washes and ravines disappearing into box canyons, she will sit at the edge of a meadow just above the Mogollon Rim, newly covered with snow. The road that leads away is full of switchbacks so tight Ginny has to stop and back up, and hope that no one comes around the corner before she can make the curve.

There will be a bar in Reno, where the same old lady shows up every night at nine o’clock and stays until close, her lips creased with lipstick, fingernails the color of blood, her smile as fierce and hard and true as the face Ginny sees in the mirror, most mornings. All of this is beautiful to her—the sky and sea, addicts and old ladies, musicians playing in subway stations, museums at the end of the line. She will see bridges over- come by fog, and sylvan forests teeming and dark and full of hidden water. Every place has a different kind of sky, it turns out, and much of this earth is not nearly as brown and flat as Odessa, Texas. All this wild, green beauty and still, always, a hole in her heart the size of a little girl’s fist. Ginny will drive that Pontiac into the ground and grieve for it when it’s gone. Never, she thinks, will I love a man the way I loved that car. And when people she meets along the way wonder about her, when they try to know her—some of them will love her, and she will love some of them, but never as much as the daughter who grows taller every day, without her—when they ask what’s your story or where are you from, Ginny never knows quite what to say. Each time, she just packs up her car and drives away.

**

Elizabeth Wetmore is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her fiction has appeared in Epoch, Kenyon Review, Colorado Review, Baltimore Review, Crab Orchard Review, Iowa Review, and other literary journals. She is the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and two fellowships from the Illinois Arts Council, as well as a grant from the Barbara Deming Foundation. She was also a Rona Jaffe Scholar in Fiction at Bread Loaf and a Fellow at the MacDowell Colony, and one of six Writers in Residence at Hedgebrook. A native of West Texas, she lives and works in Chicago. Valentine is her first novel.

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Music by Catlofe

Excerpt from In Our Other Lives by Theodore Wheeler

Elisabeth Holland sensed there was bad news the same as she had at other times—she woke early, started coffee, set out her scrubs, waited for the phone to ring—but this morning something was different in the way her internal organs were arranged. The world had shifted underneath her while she was asleep. Elisabeth felt it on the horizon. The sun rising, yes, but also that something vital had changed inside her and out.

This time it was her mother who called to tell the news.

—Did you see?

—See what?

—He’s alive. They found him.

Elisabeth continued fitting the sleeve into the percolator and added three spoons of dry grounds from the canister. The phone was on speaker, on the counter, while her mother rushed to tell what had happened. The call was something Elisabeth must have dreamed about dozens of times, hundreds of times; and it was, she admitted this freely to a woman she worked with at the hospital, that she daydreamed all the time that someone she’d lost would return to her. And in this moment—her mother rambling, repeating the same words, they found him, and Elisabeth unsure who was found and who had done the finding—she questioned if she was woman enough to handle the news she’d so long hoped to hear, or if the news would overwhelm her.

—Is it going to be okay?

—Oh, honey. I don’t know. Sometimes things happen for reasons we can’t understand.

—Don’t say it’s God’s plan. I’ll hang up if you say that.

Elisabeth forgot about the coffee to rush across her apartment and turn on the TV, then she saw. Tyler in a glitching, wavy video, a ten-second clip looped on cable news. The title read: “Missing American Found; Turncoat?” The cable-news anchor verified that the man’s identity had only just then been confirmed by the government and that the man in the video was Tyler Ahls. Elisabeth knew the man in the video was Tyler Ahls. Her kid brother, missing in Pakistan nine months by then, supposedly on a missionary trip. Under a doppa cap and patchy beard, Tyler: the block shape of his head, his stringy ginger hair falling long down the sides of his skull. His gray eyes, his gaze slightly diverted, always, because he was timid.

—It’s Tyler.

—Yes! Tyler!

There would be thousands of questions to ask and answer because of that video of Tyler Ahls in an Afghani cave. But Elisabeth didn’t worry about all that. In this moment of simultaneous joy and dread, Elisabeth felt sorry for herself. She hung up the phone and returned to brewing coffee as the weight of her mysteries puzzled in new design on her shoulders. That she married and lost love young. That she only briefly was a mother before that too escaped her, that her son died, two months old, and she’d lived alone since then. That her brother, her parents—she’d never known what exactly to think about them. She watched the drips drop into the pot, trying to grasp what that video was going to mean for her family, for her parents and for Tyler. If Tyler really was alive, for one thing, and if he could ever come home; and if it would have, in fact, been better if he died hiking, like they believed he had while evangelizing in Pakistan, instead of being in the hands of terrorists; or if he was one of them. (She hadn’t yet seen the ransom video of Tyler, the curious demands he made, so she didn’t understand why the newscasters wondered if he was a turncoat.) Elisabeth struggled to keep her mind on anything. She thought of her husband. Maybe it was wrong of her, but when her mother called and said they found him, Elisabeth thought, she’d hoped, it was her husband who’d been found. Her husband (Nick Holland) who was also missing, for three years by then. Nick ran off on his own volition and nobody was looking for him. Elisabeth didn’t know this at the time (how could she?) but Nick would show up in Omaha not long after this morning.

Once the pot was brewed, she poured herself a cup, stirred in two spoons of sugar, but didn’t sip. The aroma made her gag. She poured the entire pot into the sink, unthinking, washed it away with clean water from the tap, then took a Coke from the fridge because she needed something sweet. She sat at the table and tried to put herself in the right frame of mind to go into the hospital where she was a nurse. She emptied the can in a few swallows. The taste, the sugar, was what she was thirsty for, so she opened a second can.

It was strange to have Nick Holland drop into her mind—when her mother said they found him. What Elisabeth thought of, that moment, was Nick holding their baby. The look on his face, that sly, almost unwitting smile, Nick so pleased with whatever joke he was keeping to himself—because her mother had put his son in a silk baptismal gown, what he’d called a dress. She and Nick lived in a one-bedroom ground-floor in Chicago then. Her dad poking around, an armchair flipped over on its top so he could fix where a spindle unglued out from its joint. Her mom practically pacing, manic, trying to explain the historical significance, the family lore, trying to explain the three generations of the pretty white gown she brought to put on Caleb.

Nick was the one who dressed the baby in the gown, who slid white silk over newborn head and tightened the pleats with a sash. All with Deb Ahls trying to interfere over his shoulder, all without the baby crying.

Elisabeth’s parents, her mother especially, weren’t comfortable with the fact that Nick had no religion. That he was godless, as they called it. Elisabeth even concealed how Nick was never baptized. Of course he was, Elisabeth lied, on the phone to her parents when she called to tell them she’d married Nick. Everybody in Nebraska is baptized, which is where Nick came from. This had to be the reason the Ahls rushed down to Chicago the instant Caleb was born, Elisabeth’s mother clutching the paperboard box that held the silk gown like it was a religious artifact, like it was the Shroud of Turin she dug out of their attic in Wisconsin. Already the Ahls didn’t like Nick—he was eight years older than their daughter; she was only twenty-three when she married him—and his godlessness made this gap harder to stomach. Still, couldn’t they have left that gown in the car?

Nick’s bemusement at the situation delighted Elisabeth. He was quietly perplexed as he listened to Deb Ahls go on about sacraments—baptism, reconciliation, etc., etc. Nick strolled to the window with the baby to look where a guy was trying to tip a Chevy Metro over a snowbank without getting high-centered. City plows had barricaded in all the cars on the block, so Nick watched the sedan rock and its tires sink into the snow as he fingered the pleats and bleached lace that brocaded Caleb’s chest. This was the Nick Holland that Elisabeth loved. Cowboy Nick, tall and lean, with a scuzzy beard. Exhaustion bowed his shoulders, his back, because he returned to the warehouse where he worked only a day after the baby was born. He didn’t have to do that, but that’s how he was—how I was raised, he’d say, to remind Elisabeth that he came from hard workers, farmers, that he’d risen before the sun most every day as a teenager, or so he claimed. Nick, who that day, unbathed in blue jeans and plain white tee, barefoot, at half past noon on a Thursday, woke only because company was at the door. Of course, the baby had disordered his hours—why shouldn’t he sleep when he had the chance?—and in Chicago he always worked nights.

It wasn’t clear to Elisabeth why she remembered Nick this way. His glancing over his shoulder at her, Caleb asleep in his arms all of a sudden. “Well,” he said, looking at Elisabeth but speaking to her mother, “we’re not running out the door right this minute to dunk him in holy water, if that’s what you expect.”

With the same sure hand, Nick slipped Caleb out of the gown and swaddled him in swaddling and set the baby in the bassinet without waking him.

How did a guy like him know how to do a thing like that? Nick claimed he never even held a baby until the OB put Caleb in his arms in the delivery room. Elisabeth’s legs still spread in the stirrups and there’s Nick with his son in his arms; Nick joyous, laughing, hair in his eyes, an infant cradled in his elbow. Was that a natural component of the cogs that made Nick Holland tick? Dusty good looks, a strong mind for trivial knowledge, a soft and assured touch with infants? And if this was so, this last component, then why did Nick run off and leave her and the baby so soon after that day?

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Theodore Wheeler is author of the novels In Our Other Lives (Little A, 2020) and Kings of Broken Things (Little A, 2017). Winner of a 2020 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, he covers a civil-law and politics beat for a national news service, co-directs Omaha Lit Fest, and sidelines as a bookseller for the Dundee Book Company roving book cart, one of the world’s smallest bookstores.

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Music by Catlofe

The following excerpt is from Days of Distraction © 2020 by Alexandra Chang, used with permission by Ecco/HarperCollins.

Days of Distraction

The China I remember most is like this:

The apartment in Pudong. The tadpoles had sprouted legs, which meant they needed to be tossed. My sister and I poured them into the alley gutter, crying for the lost swimmers. There were too many. They drained away with the waste.

A woman held her baby, her arms outstretched, pleading and repeating to those who passed: Please take her. My mother watched from the window five stories up. She petted my brother’s head and said, Would you like a little sister today?

In summer, the air was thick and heavy, the dragonflies flew low by our thighs. It was enough to smother the wails of our losses. The alley was empty of people at night.

**

Back then, I didn’t understand the reasons for either—our departure or his staying put. For years, my mom said it was because she missed home and family. My dad said it was because he had to take care of things and to work. When we returned, he no longer had a car repair shop and we no longer had a house. They took us to an unknown town, Davis, and said here’s where we’ll live. We accepted because we had no choice. The explanations and stories shifted based on time and speaker. Money. Business mistakes. Greedy relatives. Lawsuits. Separation. Stress. Her mistakes. His mistakes. I still don’t know what truly happened, but at this point, does the truth really matter.

**

As for Davis, the beginning was not great. The sixth grade teacher introduced me as an immigrant from China. Though it was not entirely true, neither was it entirely false. I didn’t correct her. My sister and brother were placed into ESL classes until they could distinguish between “a stove” and “an oven,” though our mom never used the latter. The teachers made them name never-eaten dishes on a cartoon Thanksgiving table. I seemed to escape the classes out of age and luck, but none of us could escape Davis. It reminded me of the movie Pleasantville, of that 1950s TV town Tobey Maguire’s character escapes to. A made-up place in a made-up movie, far removed from my experience. I cried often in the first weeks; I wanted to go back—to San Francisco, or even China seemed like a better option at times. I fell asleep fantasizing about what life would have been like somewhere else.

**

One of my junior high teachers once said in class, Davis is full of the kind of liberals who claim they want to make the world a better place, but who will fight to the death to prevent a homeless shelter from being built in their neighborhood.

**

Davis, too, was the place of my family’s tectonic shifts. Divorce. Poverty. Domestic disputes. Charged, simple terms I hated, still hate, to use to describe those days. But I’m getting used to them. Both their ability to quickly summarize and their inability to cap- ture beyond a shallow essence.

**

But Davis is where I met and found J, who is listening intently to this story of his. Fear is primal. Fear sells. That was my mantra. “Fear sells.”

I hit pause on the phone. “What’s this guy talking about? What’s happening now in the book?”

“He’s selling a vaccine,” he says.

“For what?”

“For—wait, do you really want to know? Should I explain everything you’ve missed? Are you going to listen now?”

“Uh . . .” I think for a while. “No, I guess not. It only sounded interesting for a second.”

“It is interesting! I wish you’d stay awake and listen to it with me.”

“No, no, it’s okay. I don’t want to.” I press play again and go back to staring out the window or sleeping.

**

In Montana there are big mountains and fast-driving semis. I remember something a friend who grew up in the countryside once told me: If you want to fit in with rural people, wear camo. So much of it in Montana. At a highway rest stop we see a family of close to a dozen, various ages, each wearing at least one piece of camo. A teenage girl with her ponytail looped out the back of a camo baseball cap. A little boy in camo shorts. One man in a camo T-shirt, another in a camo button-up. A woman in a camo zip-up jacket. An old man and woman—grandparents—in matching camo sweatpants, and so on.

There are two opposing reasons animals in the wild have camouflaging abilities, a pop-science article tells me. One is to go unnoticed while hunting. The other is to hide in order to avoid being caught. When a tawny frogmouth senses danger, it fluffs out its feathers, freezes, and looks like a broken tree branch. Aristotle long ago noticed that the octopus “seeks its prey by changing its colour as to render it like the colour of the stones adjacent to it.”

**

As we travel deeper into the country, how best to hide myself? Will J’s presence provide a sufficient cloak? Where and when and how will who or what come out to attack?

**

He turns twenty-six. We celebrate at what looks like the fanciest restaurant in Butte. A group of men in suits sit at the table behind us, talking about regulations and meetings and numbers. There is thin green carpeting throughout. The candles on the table are fake.

J says he has a fantasy about us one day retiring to the Montana mountains. He grew to love the area after his family’s vacations here during his childhood. All day they hiked, swam, and fished. All activities I am not wholly against. But I can’t imagine living in Montana, at all, ever. Or, rather, I strongly dislike my imagination of living in Montana.

“I want to say nice things because it’s your birthday, but I’m never living in Montana.”

“Why not?”

“How many Asians do you think there are? Like none?”

He looks it up on his phone. “Says here that Asians make up zero-point-six percent of the population. So no, I guess it wouldn’t be that fun for you.”

“Zero. Point. Six.” I glance over at the men eating behind us. “And you don’t like the outdoors much, either.”

“It’s not the outdoors that are the main problem, although yes. I’m not in love with this whole camping, living-on-the-ground thing—but it’s cheaper for the trip, so whatever.”

**

Another drawback: tent sex needs to be very quiet so as not to disturb neighboring tent sleepers. But all of these camping materials— what were they thinking?—with the smallest of movements, the stuff produces the loudest, scratchiest noises.

**

I know this much about driving: It is not okay to close your eyes while on the highway, or under any circumstance, really, but I’m not behind the wheel, so the rule need not apply.

**

We don’t only date white men and women. But we are only dating white men and women right now. My sister is with a tall man with fluffy brown hair and a significant nose. My brother is “talking to” a rock climber with cropped blond hair. They are both young, so I think maybe they might not actually end up with a white person. Me, on the other hand, I have been with J for my entire adult life, and here I am in this car, so it seems that I will end up with him, a white man. J does not like that, again, I’m pointing this out.

“It’s as if being white is the one thing that defines me,” he says. “Well, it’s definitely a big part of what defines you,” I say.

**

He used to wear a shirt that had a stylized logo of the words stop racism! printed on the chest. I told him to stop wearing it. It made me very uncomfortable to be seen with him when he was wearing the shirt, and even if I was not with him, the thought of him being seen in that shirt at all made me uneasy. I couldn’t explain why and I still can’t quite explain it. Maybe I was worried that people would think he was with me because he was trying to stop racism? Maybe I was worried he was actually dating me to stop racism? Maybe it had to do with me knowing he would never stop racism by wearing a shirt that said stop racism!? Anyway, he can’t wear the shirt anymore because I threw it out when we moved in together. The act was a relief at the time. Now I feel mildly guilty for tossing something he liked, and with not at all a bad message.

**

It’s not that I didn’t think of our races when we first got together. Or haven’t thought of our races since. Of course I did and have. At first they were ghostly thoughts. Really, he wants me? How could this be? Why not her or her or her? Or is it because I’m—so ghostly was that thought it could not be completed. Those weren’t our problems. He wasn’t like that. We fell in love like young people do for the first time—fast, reckless, absolutely, and hard. But unlike most, we remained in love. In college, I made a list of all the couples we knew who believed they would stay together. I crossed each one off after they broke up. We are the last ones left.

When we talked about race, we did so mostly from a distance or as a joke, like something that could not touch the depths of this combined entity that was “us.” But I know we do not and cannot exist outside of it. I know I am guilty of avoiding, or not complet- ing, the conversations. That might still be our problem.

**

From an OkCupid FAQ:

Q: Are you saying that because I prefer to date [whatever race], I’m a racist?

On an individual level, a person can’t really control who turns them on—and almost everyone has a “type,” one way or another. But I do think the trend—that fact that race is a sexual factor for so many individuals, and in such a consistent way—says something about race’s role in our society. . . .

. . . you can actually look at people who’ve combined “white” with another racial description. Adding “whiteness” always helps your rating!

**

My sister once dated a ginger. A real serious ginger, bright orange hair and skin a landscape of freckles. J’s mom saw her and her boy- friend walking downtown together in our hometown when they’d come back for a winter break. After spotting them, she called J and said, “Those girls love gingers!” When he told me this, I responded, “You’re not a ginger, are you? You’re just very pale.”

**

Alexandra Chang is from Northern California. She currently lives in upstate New York with her husband and their dog and cat. Days of Distraction is her first book. 

**

Music by CatLofe

The following is excerpted from Starling Days by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, published April 2020 by The Overlook Press/ABRAMS. Copyright © 2020 Rowan Hisayo Buchanan. All rights reserved.

Starling Days

August

She wasn’t expecting the bridge to shudder. It was too big for trembling. Cars hissed from New York to New Jersey over its wide back. That August had been hot, 96° Fahrenheit hot. Heat softened the dollar bills and clung to the quarters and dimes that passed from sticky hand to sticky hand.

It was night and the air had cooled but humidity still hung in a red fog in Mina’s lungs. Wind galloped over the Hudson, pummeling the city with airy hooves. The bridge shifted, the pylons swayed, and Mina closed her eyes to better feel her bones judder. Even her teeth shook. The day’s sweat shivered between her bare shoulder blades. The tank top felt too thin, and the down on her arms rose. She took a step forward along the bridge. The tender spots between her big and index toes were sore from too many days in flip-flops. She took the sandals off. They swung from her fingers as she walked. Under her feet, the rough cement was warm. She wondered about the people driving their shadowy cars. Were they leaving over-air-conditioned offices, or bars cooled by the thwack of ceiling fans? Were they going home to empty condos,

or daughters tucked under dinosaur quilts?

The bridge was decked out in blue lights, like a Christmas tree, like those monochrome ones shopping malls put up. Still, it was beautiful. Mina readied her phone to take a picture. She watched the granulated night appear onscreen. Perhaps her hands wobbled, because the photo was a blur. It was nothing she could send Oscar. But she wasn’t sure it was a good idea to send him pictures. Not tonight.

She stopped in the middle of the bridge. Hello, Manhattan. Downriver, apartment blocks spiked upwards. She couldn’t see Queens and the walk-up apartment building she’d grown up inside. Nor could she see the Park Slope apartment, in which Oscar was working late. He’d have a mug on his desk, the coffee gone cold hours ago. The photo of her would be propped up behind his computer. The sparkly stress ball she’d bought him years ago as a joke gift would rest at his wrist. Every hour or so he’d roll it between his palms. When he was working, he didn’t notice time. She was sure he wouldn’t yet be worried. She’d said she was meeting some friends after the tutoring gig. He didn’t know she’d texted the group that she was feeling unwell and would miss movie night. He wouldn’t expect her for at least two hours. No one was expecting her. She was unwitnessed. She lifted her face to the breeze.

The river was as dark as poured tarmac. They said that when a body fell onto water from this height, it was like hitting the sidewalk. The Golden Gate had nets to stop jumpers. She imag- ined the feeling of a rope cutting into arms and legs. Your body would flop, like a fish. How long did they have to lie there before someone scooped them out? There was nothing like that here. People said that drowning was a good death, that the tiny alveoli of the lungs filled like a thousand water balloons.

She lifted one purple flip-flop and dropped it over the water. She didn’t hear it hit. The shape simply vanished into the black shadow.

That was when the lights got brighter and the voice, male and certain, lobbed into her ears. 

“Ma’am, step away from the rail.”

The police car’s lights flashed blue and white and red. Once she’d had an ice-pop those colors and the sugary water had pooled behind her teeth.

“Ma’am, step away from the rail.”

“Good evening, Officer. Have I done something wrong?” Mina asked.

“Please get into the car,” he said. There were two of them. The other was younger and he was speaking into a radio. It was hard to make out his words over the wind and traffic. Was he talking about her?

“This is a public walkway,” Mina said. “It was open. I haven’t done anything wrong.”

“Ma’am, get into the car.”

“I don’t want to get into the car. Look, I was just getting some air. I was thinking. I’ll go home now.”

“Ma’am, don’t make me come over there.”

Mina had never been in a police car. She’d read once that the back doors only open from the outside. Who knew what would happen if she got into the car?

The window was rolled down and the cop stuck his head out.

There was a lump on his upper lip, a pimple perhaps. “Where are your shoes?”

“It’s hot out,” she said. “Where are your shoes?”

“I don’t want to tell you about my shoes,” she said. “I haven’t done anything wrong. I’m an American citizen.”

“Ma’am, where are your shoes?”

She lifted up the single flip-flop she had left. “The other one broke,” she said.

Behind him, other cars continued into the night. Did they even notice her standing in the dark, a small woman with bare legs and feet? She was aware of the bluing bruise she’d caught banging her knee on the subway door. In the shower that morning, she’d skipped shaving her legs. In the beam of his headlamps, could he see hairs standing up in splinters?

“Ma’am, I really need you to get into the car. I can’t leave you here. What if something happened to you?” In his voice, she heard the insinuation that normal women, innocent women, didn’t walk alone on bridges at night.

“I’m fine,” she said.

Mina knew her stubby ponytail was frizzy. Bleaching black to Marilyn Monroe–blonde had taken four rounds of peroxide. Now it stood up in breaking strands. If she’d conditioned it, would this cop think she was sane? If she’d blow-dried it, would he have let her go home? And, of course, there were the tattoos twining up her arms.

“We can talk about it in the car,” he said. His shadowed friend was bent over the radio, lips to the black box.

Mina was tired. It was the heat, or perhaps the wind. So she got into the car. The seat was smooth. Someone must’ve chosen the fabric specially. This must be wipeable and disinfectable. People probably spat on this seat. They probably pissed on purpose and by mistake. Between the front and back seats was a grille. She would not be able to reach out to touch the curve of the cop’s ear or straighten his blue collar. The flip-flop lay across her knees.

The cops wanted to know her name, address, phone number and Social Security. She gave them.

“We’re taking you to Mount Sinai,” said the cop.

“I was just going for a walk, clearing my head. I don’t need to be in a hospital. I was just clearing my head.”

Damn. Repeating yourself was a habit of the guilty. Mina tried to slow her breath.

“See it from my point of view,” he said. “You’re walking alone on the bridge at night. I can’t let you out. I don’t know what would happen.”

Only then did she understand that they must do this every night, drive back and forth across the bridge looking for people like her.

“I have to go to work tomorrow,” she said. “My husband will want to know where I am. Please, please, just let me go to the subway.”

“We can’t do that, ma’am.”

The car left the bridge and fell back into Manhattan. She kept telling them she wasn’t trying to cause trouble. She said it so many times that the word “trouble” began to sound like “burble” or “bubble.” Heat rose in her eyes. She pushed the water off her face.

Finally, they agreed that she could call her husband, and they would go to the paramedics parked near the bridge. If the para- medics said she was okay, she could go home.

“Oscar,” she said. “Oscar, I need you to come get me. They won’t let me leave until you come get me.”

**

Rowan Hisayo Buchanan is the author of Harmless Like You—the winner of The Authors’ Club First Novel Award and a Betty Trask Award. It was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and an NPR 2017 Great Read. Her second novel, Starling Days, was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award. She is the editor of the Go Home! anthology. Her short work has appeared in Granta, The Atlantic, and The Rumpus, among other places.

The following excerpt from Lakewood by Megan Giddings is reprinted courtesy of HarperOne/Amistad Books:

Lakewood

Lena’s grandmother’s final instructions were that the funeral should be scheduled for 11 a.m. but would start at 11:17 when everyone would be there and seated. Deziree, if she was well, would give one of the eulogies, and at the luncheon, Lena would give presents and letters to Miss Toni’s closest friends and tell them one last time how special they were to her. Anyone who was still alive and didn’t attend, Lena would send letters to them within a week. And by 8 p.m., Deziree and Lena should be at the casino across town, the one with the good buffet.

Still in her black dress and high heels, Lena listened to the slot machine’s’ songs, their rhythms and chimes, the excited harmony of multiple machines loudly announcing a winner. Her mother, Deziree, was talking to a few of the bouncers and waitresses, accepting their condolences, nodding as one said, “I still can’t believe it. Miss Toni. Jesus. I’m thirty and she was in better shape than me.” And a year ago, that had been true. “She was more alive than most people I know.” Lena nodded.

The day before she’d died, the three of them were in the hospital room, and her grandmother had said, “What I wouldn’t give for one more June day.” She wanted to talk with her friends on the porch, eat a bowl of raspberries with whipped cream on top, grill out, and stay up late playing cards with the two of them. And the weather would be warm, not hot. Big cloud, blue sky weather. Lena had excused herself, went to get tea, and hoped that at the end of her own life, she would only want one more good, but not special, day. 

“Y’all are in my prayers.”

“Thank you,” Lena and Deziree said in unison. The two of them were so used to hearing variations of that, the response was now automatic.

Inside the casino, they sowed coins into Cleopatra slot machines. After losing five times in a row, Lena stopped and cashed out. Deziree kept going. Her face was illuminated pink and blue by the machine and it made the tear stains on her cheeks visible again.

“Stop being so rude,” Deziree muttered to the machine after losing a second time.

Lena shut her eyes. It was the first time all day the two of them had been alone, where she didn’t feel like she had to look brave or grateful or think about anyone else’s feelings. She was saturated with the day. Her grandmother’s face in the casket, so still—Lena could only look at it for a few seconds before having to look instead at the pink carpet of the church floor, the white flowers, or her own manicure, gray. Her mother’s voice, so steady, as she spoke about Miss Toni. Watching her and trying to focus on the speech, the goodbyes, rather than worrying every time her mom’s hands shook, every time she stumbled a little bit on a word, that another flare-up was about to start. The mixture of flowers, mildew, and heavy perfume that only really smelled like perfume—not vanilla or lilies like the bottles probably said—and roast chicken in the church basement.

“I’m exhausted,” Lena said. 

“Feelings? Or do you need to change your shoes? Or?”

“Everything.”

“We promised her this.”

“I know.”

Lena watched as Deziree went up 10, down 20, up 30. She liked the color blue they used for the scarabs. The dopey cats wearing hats. How the game designers had thrown in some fancy English letters rather than try to do all hieroglyphics. How there was no way for her to understand how to win the game—it seemed to be all great robotic whims.

A pack of Miss Toni’s friends turned the corner and descended on them. They were in casual clothes, silky pants and tracksuits, but still stunk of the thick perfumes they probably spritzed on every time they dressed up. “Here you girls are.”

“Did she tell you all to come here too?” 

One squeezed Lena’s left shoulder. The other flicked something off her right arm. Another asked Deziree how she was feeling, did she need anything? And Lena, how was she keeping up with classes? College alone is a lot. I can’t imagine being so young.

“Everything is going good at school. All of the professors were really nice and understanding—”

“Do you all have things to eat?”

The kindness was suffocating. So many casseroles, so many cards, so many people dropping by, so many thinking-of-yous. Lena wanted to be good and kind. And she was grateful that so many people loved her grandma. But it was also exhausting to have so many people looking into her face, looking at the parts of it and trying to find Miss Toni in it. 

A waitress carrying a tray squeezed in among them and cleared her throat. “Courtesy of Miss Toni.” She passed two Dark & Stormys to Lena and Deziree. The waitress paused, her face crumpled, and she fled.

“Was she at the funeral?” Lena asked.

“Maybe? In the back?” Deziree held her Dark & Stormy up, clinked it against Lena’s. “Cheers.”

The women stayed around them, chitchatting about how Toni had done such a great job raising them both, as if Deziree wasn’t going to turn 43 that year. Lena turned back to Deziree’s screen: She was up 65 dollars now. 

“I’ll be right back,” Lena said. She walked to the nearest bathroom, taking her drink with her. She sat in the stall farthest from the door. Took the deepest breath she could, then let it out slowly. Contorted her face into different expressions—happy, anguished, I’m-going-to-get-you-bitch—and took a long drink. There were two extra lime slices in it like her grandmother always ordered. How many Dark & Stormys do I have to have, she wondered, to feel like you’re here with us? A song about being so much in desire for someone that you felt like you had burst into flames was leaking through the speakers in the ceiling.

“Lena?” Her mother screamed loudly.

She finished her drink, set the glass on the floor, and went out to Deziree. 

“Everything okay?” Lena asked. The mirror gave a full view of the back of her mother’s head—it looked as if she had been pulling on her hair. Her black bra straps poked out. Her eyes were bloodshot, her fingers trembling. It was hard to tell whether it was because of the poor bathroom lighting or because of illness, but Deziree’s skin was now sallow. 

“We can go home.” Lena said, smoothing her mother’s hair and adjusting the straps back into place. She watched her hands and mouth for tremors, but they were still. Deziree’s dark lipstick was smudged, but still looked pretty good.

“I lost it all,” Deziree said. They paused for a moment, and both laughed.

Lena coughed when she was finished. She couldn’t help asking, “You took your medicine today, right?”

“I wouldn’t have been able to do anything today without it.”

They left the bathroom and headed to Miss Toni’s favorite blackjack dealer. When he noticed them, he signaled a waitress, who brought over two more Dark & Stormys. “May you have Toni’s luck tonight,” he said. Then, with a laugh, “Please don’t have her luck. I need a job.”

They smiled at each other, then did what they always did—snapped their fingers for luck and clasped hands. One of the first things Lena could remember her grandma teaching her was blackjack. The game’s rules, but also things like remembering—as with most individual sports—that it was also a game you mostly played against yourself. You had to be confident, engaged, patient. Don’t allow yourself to be polluted by the dealer’s silence or the chitchat of the people around you.

Lena leaned forward a little. Focused on counting and paying attention to everyone’s cards, watching the dealer’s hands and eyes, looking for tells. She sipped her drink slowly, at a rate fast enough to make her feet ache a little less, but not enough to feel too bold. And when she hit blackjack for the first time, she automatically turned to the right, where her grandmother might be, before quickly turning and squeezing Deziree’s hands with delight. 

An hour later and two hundred dollars richer—an amount Miss Toni would have called “fine”—they shimmied and danced their way over to the buffet to eat blueberry-bacon gelato and lobster and scrambled eggs. As they waited to get severed coffee, Deziree kept putting one hand over her forehead and rubbing the spot between her eyebrows. “Don’t worry,” she kept saying. 

Deziree sagged down, her head and forearms resting on the table. She didn’t notice the purple gelato drip pattern that she was creating on the front of her dress.

Lena asked the waitress for a double Americano. 

“She drunk?” the waitress asked. She was young, probably a college student. Hair dyed purple, a nose ring. She had also been at the funeral, Lena realized. 

“Nah. She good.” 

“This is the best I’ve felt in days.” Deziree was crumpling into illness, grief, exhaustion. Her voice came out slurred. 

“She gonna need a chair?”

Lena took off her own left shoe beneath the table and rubbed her toes hard. “We’ll be out of here in ten, I promise. She’s fine.”

***

Stumbling into their living room, Deziree dumped the contents of her purse on the floor. Dollars, credit cards, lipstick, a mint that looked as if it had already been sucked on and then put back in the cellophane wrap, coins scattered across the wood floors. Deziree looked at the mess for a moment, then fell. 

Lena rushed to her side. Her mom propped herself up.

“Smile at me,” Lena said. “I’m fine.”

“Come on. We both know you didn’t drink that much.”

Deziree gritted her teeth. Lena raised her eyebrows. Deziree rolled her eyes and did a big fake grin.

Lena had her mother lift her arms and repeat the phrase, “Pancakes are better with bananas in them.” 

“They said we had to do this every time you fall.” 

“You sound just like her.”

Deziree sat up and went to her bedroom. When she returned, she was holding a large envelope that was stuffed to the limits. She tossed it onto Lena’s stomach.

“Can we do this later today?”

But her mother was already in the kitchen, opening drawers and rifling through cabinets as if she had stored secrets among the plates and glasses. Inside the envelope were bills. Insurance statements that looked as if they were all disagreeing with each other about the amount of coverage. Folded-over invoices from the cemetery, the funeral home. Electric and water bills. Some receipts. Deziree came back holding more bills.

“Have any of these been paid?”

“I don’t know.”

Deziree stooped over the coffee table. She pulled more bills between the magazines. It felt like an absurd magic trick. 

Lena rubbed her eyes and the remnants of her mascara stained her fingertips. She made herself sit up straight. 

“There’s more bills I can pull up on my phone.”

Lena felt all the aftershocks of no sleep, the stress of the past months, and now this. She wanted to go to bed and sleep for three days. Instead, she went to the kitchen, found the least green banana she could, poured a glass of water, and pulled out her mom’s pillbox. There were only enough pills in the box until Saturday.

“I’m sorry, Biscuit—” her mom began. Lena handed everything over. “Take these.” Her mom’s eyes were watering. Lena made her mouth soft, adjusted her posture. “I’m not mad, I’m just tired.”

“But—” 

“This day has been too long for us to have this conversation right now.” She watched her mother carefully, making sure she swallowed her pills, ate at least half of the banana, drank all the water. Lena squeezed her mother’s hands when they were free, hoping the gesture was reassuring. “Get some sleep and we’ll talk about this in the afternoon.”

Deziree stood up and went to her room. Lena picked up the bills and carried them out to the kitchen table. She organized them into categories: house, medical-Mom, funeral, medical-Grandma. Then she pulled out a pen and her notebook from her backpack and flipped to her current to-do list: an astronomy test the next day that she still hadn’t studied enough for, a three-hour shift at her work-study job that night, Spanish conversation lunch about going shopping where she was supposed to lead a conversation entirely in Spanish. Thank-you letters to write. Coordinating with Miss Shaunté about Deziree’s home health care schedule. She needed to understand the math to calculate a star’s gravity and its effect on everything around it while it was still living. Figure out summer work.

Lena tapped the pile of bills with her pen, flipped the page, and started a brand-new list.

**

Megan Giddings is a fiction editor at The Offing, a winner of the Whiting Literary Magazine Prize, and a features editor at The Rumpus. She is the recipient of a Barbara Deming Memorial Fund grant for feminist fiction. Her short stories have been published in Black Warrior Review, Gulf Coast, and The Iowa Review. Megan holds degrees from the University of Michigan and Indiana University. She lives in Indiana. Lakewood is her first novel.

**

Music by Catlofe

The following excerpt from The Everlasting, Copyright © 2020, by Katy Simpson Smith, is reprinted here with permission of Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers:

Felix

Behind the stairs to the crypt Felix had placed a three-legged stool on which he could sit when the abbot was chastising monks above, and he was settled here now, listening to the muted maledictions while he looked fondly on Brother Bernardo, so recently his friend. Bernardo sat politely in his nook, hands folded in his lap, head drifting slightly to one side. If it drooped any more tomorrow, Felix would prop it up. When he’d peeled back Bernardo’s eyelid a few days ago and stared deeply within—his sister once told him heaven’s reflection could be glimpsed there—he’d accidentally squeezed it to get a better view, and the pupil had changed shape, become some sort of devilish triangle. He quickly closed the lid and crossed himself. God wouldn’t let Brother Bernardo wander around paradise with one goat eye. 

Faith was a cure for curiosity. So Felix didn’t wonder how Bernardo would find the other monks up there, or if distance even existed, or whether friendship meant anything where there was no such thing as non-friendship, likewise happiness. He was caught in a little limbo of his own, between the mild promise of heaven and the bustle of men: the ones upstairs, doddering around in their brown wool robes, and the ones busying through streets, the city, the misty fields of home—not misty; there’d been a terrible drought the summer he left, was asked to leave, forty years ago, and the grasses had crackled like fish bones. Now his hours were spent with these remnants. Lonely was too grand a word. 

Felix’s stomach made a petulant noise. His friend was beginning to smell like Monday stew. Soon his face would be as dried and hollowed as Brother Giuseppe to his left, and his chest would collapse like Brother Timothy to his right, but for now Bernardo was the most robust of all the corpses perched on their thrones in this poor stone church on the hill where Remus once set up his challenge to Romulus, and lost.  

*

“You coming to dinner?” The voice traveled down the stone steps. 

Felix switched his head from one propped hand to the other. 

“He’ll still be there in an hour,” the voice said. 

Felix slapped his old knees and hoisted himself toward the stairs. “You’re right. Too much self-denial and one slips into pride. Beef today?” 

Brother Sixtus laughed and reached out a damp hand to pull him the rest of the way. “Roasted cow,” he said. “Is that what they call it?” They hadn’t had red meat since they’d joined the monastery, but this was a pleasant joke to make. “Only four hoofs, so some of us will have to go without.”

“You haven’t heard of the six-hoofed steer out of Briton?” 

“That many, and I’d wager it’s a swimming cow.” 

Oh, and when a joke got rolling! “Back and forth across the straits to France all day; leanest meat you’ll ever eat.” 

“Gave birth to a calf with two more, I heard, and then no one could tell it from an octopus.” 

“In that case, give it to Brother Henry to fry up after all, because you’re talking about a fish.” 

Past the nave—dark and cold, candles by the altar shivering like orphans—the cloisters rang with spoons on bowls, half-sung songs, and Henry with the pot of stew and his iron ladle, the rust flakes from which he called seasoning. 

The newest brother sat next to Felix, his thin hands peeping out of his sleeves; he couldn’t have been past fifteen. The rest of the brotherhood must have looked like wizards to him. 

“How does Brother Bernardo?” The boy’s hair so blonde it was almost white, thinly brushed over the tops of his ears. 

“Oh, doing well.” 

“He has a stink?”

“He was a good man, but he was no saint. Bless him, and all of us.” 

“Bless us all.” The boy still wouldn’t look at Felix, but had now taken his spoon and was stirring wanly. 

“You’d care to see him?”

“My mam died in winter. Couldn’t put her in the ground some time, so I seen her well enough.” 

Felix lifted the bowl to his lips to catch the last of the broth, thinking of the passage of soup from his throat down to his twisty innards, soaking through his stomach to his muscles and his bones, each of them slurping in turn, building their mass with salt and herb and maybe a hint of mackerel, so that the outside world became his inside self. When he was younger, he’d felt such a wall around his person: a wall delightful to be breached, but the more treasured for its fixity. Now everything was just floating recombinant particles. Who could say what was Felix and what was not?

“Do you have dreams then?” the boy asked. 

He meant did Bernardo’s corpse come sneaking into Felix’s nighttime memories—of the farm, of his fair sister, of her friends lined up on a bench plaiting each other’s hair. He once dreamed some boys outside had kicked a ball into the cloisters and before returning it, Bernardo had prodded Felix into a game, the arch into the transept serving as goal, and Felix had scored triumphantly, flapping his arms above his head. And the boys were somehow inside the cloisters then and set up a great cheer. 

“Have you confessed this week?” he asked the boy. 

“Oh, nothing troubles me either,” said the boy, rather quickly. “But things tend to pop up, don’t they, the worrying things, or the things we seen when we was small. I just think all that awful flesh and maybe—you know.” 

“I remember seeing a goat slaughtered when I was young. Did you see something like that?” 

“A goat, no,” the boy said. “Not a goat.” And with his eyes on his shoes, he took his bowl back for a second helping and went to sit by the abbot, Father Peter, who never laughed. 

*

After dinner the brotherhood divided into cleaners and singers, and Felix, as he often did, chose the former task, finding relief in busy hands. Stack the bowls, wipe the tables, sweep the floor, scrub the pots, toss the dirty water on the cabbages, chuck the oily sand in the outhouse, gather the carrot tops and wilted chard and gristle in a basket and visit them upon the happy chickens, who bump their hips in a scramble to the door, their heads leading their legs by a seemingly dangerous margin. And all this to the singing brothers’ tune, a quiet chant if the weather was wet and cold, or a full-throated foot-stomper, their more restful chore never begrudged, for Felix found the greater pleasure in listening. And anyway, his own warble wasn’t pleasing, as his mother was careful to tell him on his first attempt to join the chorus of voices in the country church. He must have been six. “Ohh, my love,” she’d said, and put a hand over his mouth. “Let’s allow the angels to have their turn.” 

It was too dark to see the broom now, so Felix affixed a new candle in his holder, a small brass cup with a ring for his thumb, and took it to the outhouse to sit for half an hour with his begrudging bowels. When he crossed back to the church, Brother Benedictus was kneeling closer to the altar than was customary, and when Felix raised a hand in greeting, he shuffled back. No harm in wanting to touch God. And yet neither Benedictus, nor the newest novitiate, nor most of the brothers had any interest in traveling to the subterranean reaches of this holy space to watch God at his most visible. The last keeper of the putridarium had died two years before, and Father Peter scrambled to find someone willing to tend the corpse of the tender. Felix’s singing was poor, his manuscript illumination haphazard, his understanding of the chemistry involved in baking perilously inexact. But he was not squeamish, and he believed as his mother had told him, that the body was a manifestation of God’s love for us. (This had been included in her list of reasons why young boys should refrain from abusing their most special parts. The penis also belonged to God, and should never be handled with more than sober devotion, as one would hold a ewer of holy water. This image proved very peaceful to young Felix when he masturbated.) So the Father had blessed Felix—some said punished him—with the crypt key. 

On his first visit below, he’d vomited. They looked like a seated council of ghouls, mouths hanging, flesh distended, waiting for someone to speak. His tasks were to defend the bodies from desecration in case of heathen raid and to mark carefully the progress of the bodies’ purgatorial decay so he might converse with monks who had fears about mortality. In practice, the Father discouraged him from loose corpse talk; he said it made the brothers ill.  

Now his predecessor was third in line, a tumbly haystack of bones in a stained old habit, and Bernardo was his new treasure. As he let his supper digest, Felix peered again with wonder at the dead man’s eyes. Where did they sink, and on what timeline? Did the fluid leach out first, and the filmy sack collapse like a popped balloon? Or was there some solid core, an olive pit, that the eye would eventually shrink to? Would blue irises turn red as veins dissolved and blood ran wild? There was no running wild. Just a steady seeping—an occasional audible drip—as Bernardo’s fluids left the openings gently made in his bottom and passed through the hole in his stone seat, his toilet throne, and fell to the packed dirt below, sunless and cold. 

His former friend had been what a kind man would call plumpish, and his arms had funneled that weight like pastry cream into the bags of his hands, leaving a crease at the wrist. He’d been tenderly packed, Bernardo, his limbs as clearly jointed as a doll’s. But the fat was draining. Perhaps Felix shouldn’t keep lifting aside the habit to observe the changes in the decomposing form, but he had to know when the ankles needed a well-aimed lancing. Exploding feet were frowned upon. Bernardo, lucky man to be blind to his mortification. Felix would be the keeper of his honor, and would never cringe, only chuckle. For there is also great humor in our embarrassments, humor in thinking we are anything more than a collection of fluids, of gases that find ways to noisily escape, of bile and pus and goo. 

The wick in his candle had inched down to its nub, and the wax puddled in his brass saucer. He carried it gingerly up the stairs so it would last through the darkness, but it guttered at the top step. Benedictus was gone, and the nave was a void. He knocked into a table and banged his knee, that pucker in the knee to which banging causes a debilitating shock, the funny bone of the leg. He staggered. There was an echoing flutter in the back of the church, and Felix turned to catch a shadow moving. Another truant child snuck in, perhaps, or a woman who’d lost her means. Felix didn’t hear the creak of the big wooden door; the shadow must have been a bat, or a fancy, or a ghost. 

This church was a cake of corpses, the current stone sanctuary built where a clumsy brick one once was, which in turn stole the site from a Mithraic temple, which claimed the sanctity of the original dirt because some lustful god once tricked a virgin here, one or both in the shape of a heron, or was it a stoat. So while elsewhere in this stackable city people came and went, moving unpredictably through homes and shops and streets, here at Santa Prisca they appeared with the bells, confessing their most perverse sins while their dead piled up, knowing just where to find them. 

Once Brother Lucius claimed a spirit kept him up at night sucking his toes, and swore this was because his cell was above the crypt. Father Peter told him all the cells were above the crypt, and any other room he entered in this city was above some other crypt, and no other monk had complained of wet toes. 

“It’s not a sucking so much,” Lucius had said, now alert to the eroticism, “but a licking, as of a friendly dog.” 

“Do you giggle?” Father asked. 

“I am in too much fear.” 

With a prickle on his neck, Felix returned to the cloisters with his saucer of wax. This time of year, his cell’s small window didn’t afford enough light to cut the room’s chill. Stone walls lead to stone bones, that’s what his father said, who built his first house from wood and two years later shook his head as he watched it burn. Cursed family; Felix had brought them no ease. Even up on the bed and wrapped in wool, Felix believed the pine legs soaked up the cold from the floor and conducted it to his aging joints. It was a reminder. He crawled back down and kneeled on a cushion his sister had made and began his count of sins. First always was his secret, which he never named but passed over with an encompassing I am sorry for myself, and then the daily litany of slights, cowardice, impure thoughts, haste. He would repeat all these to a confessor, but forgiveness is a private creature, born at home. 

Once the sins were named, the gratitudes began, and this was almost his happiest time of day, to think back. Brother Vitalis losing a tooth in his soup; the goose that landed in the courtyard and pattered around in circles until someone realized it couldn’t fly out, and Brother Leo wrapping it in his pudgy arms and carrying it outside, tossing it in the air like a gift back to God; the mysterious settling of fluids that led dead Brother Bernardo’s pinky finger to suddenly crook, making Felix feel as if he were being summoned, or offered a private promise; the salt on the bread at lunch, rougher ground than usual, its sharp edges jolting his tongue. 

The final formal prayers were accompanied by Felix’s ragged whip, a careful homemade thing that beat the time on his back, the knots serving as emphasis, as Amen. He was careful not to treasure this, not to harbor pride for his bloody devotion, but merely to keep time, to remind himself with a red drumbeat that his body was not his own, and to offer its impermanence with humility to his Lord. The only lasting thing about Felix was his soul, and this no one on this earth could see or judge. Amen. 

*

The brothers were in a flurry: the collection box had been stolen. The abbot asked each monk to consider which of the parishioners from the previous day might be called squirrelly. 

“There was the one who was gnawing on a chicken bone,” Lucius said. 

“I saw that,” said Marco, “and I had another ask me to pray for his departed wife, and when I asked when she’d deceased, he said tomorrow.” 

“What about the child hiding under the font who wasn’t a child at all but a very small man?” 

“I gave him a roll of bread,” said the youngest brother, Mino. “He looked hungry.”

“If only we’d taken the chicken from the first and given it to the small one.” 

Father bowed his head in defeat. He must have been a poor kind of noble to have wound up at Santa Prisca. 

“I saw a shadow,” Felix said. “It was after I’d come up from the crypt, just before last prayer. It moved along the back wall, and I thought it was a ghost.”

“We’ve gone over this,” Father said. 

“If it wasn’t a ghost, it was either a very large bat or a medium-sized man.” 

“Either of which could’ve carried off the box,” added Marco. 

“But it didn’t have a handle for a bat to grip with its claws.” 

“I imagine it would wrap its wings around the box and then scuttle off on foot.”

“Have you ever seen a walking bat?”

“Brothers,” Father said. His upper lip carried a habitual twist, as if he were bitter, or trying not to sneeze. No one minded that the abbot was cold and told no jokes and sometimes had noisy visitors at night who could not have been monks because they were women. An abbot was like a statue with a pointing finger: there to remind you of duty, not to be judged by human laws. “Brothers, the box is lost. Dominic, you have permission to find us another. I would request you all take turns watching the new box when it has been installed.” 

“Ought we to lock it to its post?”

“There’s an idea!”

“Then someone would take the post.”

“And we’d be out a post.” 

“A new post costs less than a new collection box.” 

“And brothers,” Father said. “Try to remember the value of silence.” 

Felix carried the slops out to the chickens, who didn’t understand the morning’s delay. The day was foggy and cool, and the farm of his childhood seemed painfully far. A rusty-crowned chicken chuckled as he bent to offer a crust. You couldn’t pet a chicken the way you could a cat. Oh, that soft spot at the base of old Johanna’s ears, all silk, undisturbed by the fleas that burrowed in the fur beneath her chin or between her shoulder blades or in the open plain of her lower belly. He brushed the chicken’s tail feathers with the back of his hand; the sensation wasn’t the same. If he’d been a farmer, he could’ve kept all the cats—traveled the country looking for crones dangling sacks off bridges and saved the writhing kittens within—but he couldn’t be a farmer. 

The day he left, his sister had handed him a wrapped cheese and said something to the effect of “We’ll always love you,” or “Behave,” or “I’ll love you if you behave”—he wished he could remember the wording—and it wasn’t until the donkey cart had rounded the bend, the curve of the road obliterating the village of Fara in Sabina, that he thought of how he should’ve answered, but then to leap off the back of the cart and go dashing home, hay flying from his bottom, seemed too absurd, even for him. So he’d sat placidly for most of the day as they tumbled down the evenly terraced Lazian hills, past women in smocks leaning on fences, through loose herds of goats that barked at the driver’s whip. Felix had left the figs in the bucket by the back stoop. There were at least four people he hadn’t bid farewell to. He wanted to learn to draw, but never had. Nor had he fashioned for his parents any sincere apology, and now, barring Methuselah, they were surely dead. He could’ve jumped from the cart in a tumble of courage—at this moment, or at that moment, or, wait for it, this moment—but he sat there, watching the road pass under the back wheels until he became queasy and turned around. The driver, son of some other language, never spoke. 

Rome appeared on the horizon like a vast looted quarry—the city of devils, of scam, of holy Peter the fisherman. Behind one of those hills was the basilical bulk of St. John Lateran, golden. Why wasn’t he bound there? The cart left him at the Porta Flaminia and he picked his way through streets that twisted left when you thought they were going right and down alleys that ended in a wall of blue flowers. He pushed at them with both hands, searching for the door, touching only vines.  

A cobbler was sitting outside his shop with a boot and a last and a mug of beer. Felix only stopped because he mistook the last for a real human foot. 

“Don’t like you how one makes it?”

 Felix squinted. He’d met Romans he could mostly understand, but this man came from somewhere south, where the garble only sounded halfway to his own tongue. “I’m looking for the church of Santa Prisca?” 

“South keeping,” the cobbler said. “Hill the Aventinus.” 

The summer was hotter here without nature’s interference—no drooping branches or clouds of gnats or lone hawk eclipsing the sun in its lazy swoop. Just buildings with angles and more people than he’d ever seen. He was conscious of his clothes, mother-made from wool so rough it seemed to have part of the sheep still in it. A young man passed on the street, shielding his eyes with his hand, and Felix imagined he was looking into a mirror of himself, his Roman self: handsomer, with proper garb, with a stride that disregarded the pace of others, with a hand blocking the sun in a way that said, I have no need of trees, or your poor hawk. I am my own engine.

“You monksing?” The cobbler’s hand licked in and out of the leather boot like a snake. “Close door, talk all the God?” He gestured toward the sky. What an expressive hand; now it looked like he was playing an upside-down lute. 

“My father sent me,” Felix said, though it was more accurately his mother, or rather it was a family decision that arose from a lengthy private confabulation that was eventually reported back to him by his sister. “I’ve no dowry, though, so they might not have me.” 

“Money in the Christians.” The cobbler shook his head. “A story telling themselves, all’s that. A story just. My prayers?”

Felix stayed out of politeness, not because he was afraid of the monastery. 

The cobbler put his left hand, his free hand, up to touch his eye, then slowly moved it to his heart, then dropped it to his stomach, and finally used it to pat his groin. He smiled at Felix. 

“You mustn’t forget also to pray for others.” 

“No needing comes when death.” And having lost the smile, he turned his attention back to the shoe, which he slipped onto the last and pinched around the edges, his brown fingers looking little different from the hide.  

Felix passed the bricks and stone alike with equal awe, the triumph of the Forum in its exhausted collapse as impressive as the crowded apartments, dingy and rich with foreign smells: African spice and fruits he’d never seen. A garden appeared through the rungs of a gate like a prize, and the greenery struck him, only gone from his home a day, as exotic. The trees were not lush but spare—faded pines, dusty and bunched at the top—and the river was not blue but brownish-green, the color water should be at its very bottom. The Circus Maximus was less a field than an abandoned cemetery of broken benches, pierced by obelisks. It was as if the countryside had been fed poison. Climbing the final hill brought him to fresher air, and when he saw the vine galloping out of the cracked cloisters abutting the church—his church—he took it as a white flag from God. He was nineteen years old and believed his spirit was being pulled on a lead by a benevolent hand, saved from his worse self. 

**

Katy Simpson Smith was born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi. She is the author of We Have Raised All of You: Motherhood in the South, 1750-1835, and the novels The Story of Land and Sea and Free Men. Her newest novel, The Everlasting, is out now.  She lives in New Orleans, and currently serves as the Eudora Welty Chair for Southern Literature at Millsaps College.

**

Music by CatLofe