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The following is excerpted from An Ocean Without a Shore; Copyright © 2020 By Scott Spencer. Reprinted here with permission of Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers

Mornings Were Difficult

My name is Christopher Woods, but just about everyone calls me Kip. Soon, I’m going to be finding out what the judge has decided to “give me,” though it’s really what will be taken away, such as the right to sleep in my own bed, retire and rise on my own schedule, go to the movies, take walks, drink wine, and just about every other of life’s pleasures, heretofore taken for granted. It would have been less stressful if sentencing had come immediately on the heels of the verdict, but it might be a good sign that it wasn’t. Despite the encouraging words of counsel, I knew from the start that a not guilty verdict was a pipe dream, and, while the lawyers continue to be insistently, almost insanely optimistic, it’s quite likely there’s a lot more than a slap on the wrist in store for me.

I recently read a report written by an Israeli novelist about his six months in a coma following a head injury in the Six Days War, a dreamy, often phantasmagoric record of the visions he had while hovering between life and death. I am certainly not comatose, and instead of visions I am beset with piercing and exact memories, but I do feel as if I am hovering between two distinct states of being— my life in New York City and my impending incarceration. It must be said, however, that in the ways it matters most, I’ve been something of a prisoner my entire life.

But being a prisoner in a cell of your own design and acting as your own warden and parole board is at a considerable remove from a real penitentiary, and as I await my sentence I have decided my life took its first turn toward the present disaster on March 12, 1997. I had been out late the night before with a woman named Laurie Kaplan, whose father was a client at Adler Associates, the small investment firm where I worked. Laurie was an actress, currently in a Sam Shepard play, though in real life she was sunny, endlessly optimistic. She was my date for an AIDS benefit held at the St. Regis hotel, a dinner followed by an art auction. I spent $22,500 on a small Kiki Smith sculpture, after which the entire ballroom applauded, a sure sign I’d spent too much. I didn’t mind; it was a nice piece and a good cause—I wasn’t making huge amounts of money, but I gave regularly to that particular AIDS organization, tithing myself in accordance to the precepts of the only church to which I belonged, the Church of Not Acting Like a Selfish Jerk. I got Laurie home to her sublet on Ludlow Street about midnight and was back in my place on Charles shortly after that, read for a while, and was asleep by one thirty.

Only to be awakened four and a half hours later by a phone call. Mornings were difficult for me, increasingly so as I aged. Running out of time and all that. The rising sun a blow to the heart. Another night has passed, with kisses unkissed, confidences unspoken and left to wane, wilt, wither, and die. You do your best to perk yourself up. You remind yourself that things could be a great deal worse. You are living well, you enjoy your own company, still holding at your college weight, season tickets to the Met, so many consolations. But sadness can be sneaky, and sometimes upon waking you feel a certain degree of devastation. Wallflower’s lament, unrequited love, etcetera etcetera. You get used to it. It’s like living through a war. Or waking up every morning horribly overweight, which I’m not, or waking up homely, which I am, sort of. However, on the morning this story begins, I didn’t have time for my usual longing, and my rituals of unrequited love began to change, as if the Twelve Stations of the Cross had been suddenly supplemented with a thirteenth.

I should mention that a phone ringing in the dark did not come as a total shock to me. I was a good and grateful employee of Adler Associates, and part of what you agree to when you are overpaid by an investment firm is your boundless availability. It was wearing me out, the lack of proper rest. I was not alone in this. We were all of us old before our time. Not worn- out like lumberjacks or ironworkers. Our aging was subtler, the kind that goes with doing work that is essentially meaningless. Usually, upon waking and tending to my bodily needs, I gazed at myself curiously in the mirror over the sink, like a hypochondriac taking his own temperature or checking his blood pressure, feeling his pulse, listening to his heartbeat. I wondered if, as Orwell had warned, I had acquired the face I deserved.

My father was blessed with good looks, but I favor my grandfather—my eyes are too close together, and nothing about me is in quite the right proportion. No one has ever directly told me I was ugly, but I personally would never be attracted to someone who looks like me. Okay, we won’t call it ugliness. Lack of beauty. And it has had an effect, though I’ll never know how much of an effect, never know what my life would have been as a handsome man. I did the usual things to improve my appearance once I started making money. I ate well and kept thin. Exercised. What I couldn’t do was sleep eight hours a night, and I looked older than my years.

I picked up the phone. “Kip Woods here,” I said, as if I were on my third espresso, tracking the London Stock Exchange on my laptop.

“I figured you’d be awake,” Thaddeus said.

I checked my watch: 6:13 in New York, 11:13 London, 19:13 in Singapore.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

“No. No. I’m half out of my mind. I’m sorry. I know it’s early.”

“It’s fine. What’s going on?”

“It’s this house. I’m going to lose it.” His voice, usually so smooth, aged in the cask of his own nature, was this morning strident, harsh. “It’s what’s holding us together up here. I can’t cover the taxes and the place needs a ton of work. Roof, chimneys, fireplaces, grounds, you name it. This house is goddamned historic and when I bought it I assumed a responsibility. I was going to be the one to keep it up, not screw it up.”

I have known Thaddeus Kaufman since college in Michigan. I was the editor of a fairly nutty lit magazine called My Heart Belongs to Dada, which the University of Michigan’s English Department blindly and benevolently funded, and Thaddeus had submitted a couple of conventional short stories to me, stories that had no place in my magazine, which existed primarily to celebrate experimental writing. I was far more drawn to Thaddeus than to his stories and I took and published what-ever he gave me. He was tall, graceful, and casually seductive.

The University of Michigan is vast and most of the people you go to school with you never really get to know, but even there in overpopulated Ann Arbor, Thaddeus managed to give hundreds of people the impression that he held them in the very highest regard. Whether he did or didn’t actually feel that way remains a mystery to me, but one thing I am sure of is that Thaddeus courted approval and affection as if he were amassing it for some impending future of solitary confinement. You’d see him on campus with his arm around some woman, or draped over the shoulder of a male friend. With his floppy long hair and sly smile, you didn’t know what to make of him. He greeted people with kisses on the left cheek and the right, like some French general or a socialite. At any rate, I took his lousy stories and we’ve been friends ever since, though the friendship has never been played out on a level field. It would have been ridiculous of me to even dream he could ever give me as much thought as I give to him.

“Sell the house,” I said. “It’s just an asset. Dump it. Move to the city.” I was more than hasty. I was unkind. He didn’t really like the city, and his wife basically detested it. Add in children, dogs and cats, and the half million wild birds Thaddeus fed throughout the year. Some of the birds seemed to recognize him, landed on his shoulders, ate out of his hand. He thought they came to the windows and glared at him if the feeders were running low. Who doesn’t want to feel like St. Francis from time to time? That house had become the center of his life, and as his career faltered (to say the least) and his hold upon the house became more and more tenuous, his attachment to it became more intense, just as a lover will crank up the heat of his own ardor if he senses his partner’s passion beginning to cool.

The house was in Windsor County, about one hundred miles north of the city. Thaddeus and Grace had owned it since he’d sold a screenplay for a great deal of money back in 1980, when his ambition to write stories and novels was on life support, and he tried his hand on a movie script, a thriller about students in a made-up Middle Eastern country who take over the U.S. embassy. As luck would have it, by the time Thaddeus’s screenplay went out, Iranian students had occupied our embassy in Tehran, and four studios competed for the rights to Hostages. The occupation of the embassy went on for 444 days, but the auction of Thaddeus’s screenplay was concluded in a matter of hours.

That house! Houses like that are like dope habits—they only get more and more expensive. Thaddeus’s and Grace’s names were on the deed, but you’d have to say that the tables had turned and now the house owned them. I don’t think Grace cared as much as he did; she had different priorities, different secrets. I warned him from the beginning not to buy that place— for reasons that were both selfish and sensible. I didn’t want him to move out of the city, but I also believed that the house was a poor investment—150 years old, in lurching disrepair, fourteen rooms, a few inhabited by creatures ranging from the meekest mice to masked, marauding raccoons, plus seventy acres, where the mice and the raccoons summered, along with deer, coyotes, wily red foxes, and the occasional bobcat. The house had a name: Orkney. Out of Walter Scott. “Writers don’t live in houses that have names,” I warned him, but my tone was probably too casual, too jokey. And there was no changing his mind, no magic words, no stunning insight that would bring him to his senses. He was determined.

The New York City he and Grace had come to know was a city up for grabs, teetering on bankruptcy. But it was also a hell of a lot of fun for those willing to take risks. Which they were not. Whatever seductiveness and open-door policy Thaddeus had pursued in Ann Arbor was nowhere to be seen in New York. Tiny apartment, no view, no light, not even a color TV. He and Grace spent their lives in isolation. They could just as well have been living in a cabin in the woods, except they rode the subway to work every morning. It was love at its worst, in many ways. The city pulsated around them but their eyes were locked on each other. Oh, and what a little Crock-Pot of frustrated ambitions they kept at a steady simmer. No one liked his writing and no one liked her painting. Did I forget to mention Grace thought of herself as a painter? Well, I wasn’t the only one who failed to take that into account. Anyhow, there they were in their union of failure and resentment and suddenly Thaddeus had his weird success. I wondered if they moved out of the city so they could ignore the fact that he was on the rise and she was going nowhere.

When I learned that the name Orkney came from The Pirate, an all but forgotten novel by Walter Scott—oh, excuse me, Sir Walter Scott—I tried to use the ridiculousness of that to dissuade Thaddeus, but the Sir Walter Scott–ness of the old place was hardly a drawback for him. It was a plus. Could have been early imprinting. His parents owned a bookshop in Chicago, where a complete set of the Scott novels was perpetually for sale, somehow symbolizing culture and the finer things in life, with leather covers, marbleized endpapers, and gold leaf on the spines’ raised bands.

Orkney’s version of leather bindings and raised gold bands was Tudor roses and fleur-de-lis, a cavalcade of sconces, a minstrel’s gallery, and lancet windows, many with stained glass. Three staircases, one to the north bedrooms, one to the south, and the third to yet another staircase, this to the third floor, a mean little warren of cramped rooms, meant for domestic staff. Thaddeus, whose idea of happiness had once been to have a story accepted by The New Yorker, now sought joy in a house full of people he could feed and entertain. I realized that his avoidance of social life in Manhattan had come from his feelings of failure. But now, he could give more because he had more and he liked that more to be seen. A little tacky, perhaps, but as suspect motives go, quite easy to forgive. 

At Orkney, he could be a kind of upstate Gatsby without the terrible longing, a contented Gatsby who actually has married his Daisy. But there was something else— a vision of a new kind of life that Orkney would give them, the land, the fresh air, the Hudson River. They would have a spiritual life, some-thing deep and lasting. Nature would imbue their lives not only with beauty but with something deep and renewing, as if their souls could thrive on photosynthesis. He’d already abandoned literature—or perhaps he thought he was just putting it aside for the time being, while the money was coming in—and he thought: If I can’t write like Tolstoy, who’s to say I can’t take a stab at living like him? What an idea! Thaddeus would be like Levin on his many acres—but a new, hipper Levin, one with the exuberant appetites of Vronsky. How did he ever think that would work out?

Orkney didn’t have serfs, but the house had come with a caretaker, who had been living for fifty years in a yellow clap-board house on the property, hidden behind a swell in the land and thirty oak trees. The caretaker’s name was Phillip Stratton, but everybody called him Hat. That caretaker was Thaddeus’s undoing. When Stratton was injured preparing the grounds for one of Thaddeus’s parties by stringing up lights high in a tree, Thaddeus, compassionately, egomaniacally, sawed off a piece of his property and gave it to the old guy.

The gesture had its ludicrous side, but if you loved Thaddeus this would only make you love him more. Wanting to be liked can bring out the best in you. No? Now the caretaker was buried in a nearby cemetery, and Jennings Stratton, Hat Stratton’s son, lived in the yellow house with a wife and two children. Even if I were to convince Thaddeus that the best— the only!— thing for him to do was unload Orkney, it would not be as easy as it ought to have been. He had complicated it in a moment of stricken largesse, and now another family was living in the center of the property, sharing the driveway, having visitors of their own, and sometimes enormous parties that rumbled on for forty-eight hours, with tents pitched and bonfires lit, horseshoe tosses, pig roasts, sing-alongs, and dancing.

Grace often attended the caretaker’s parties, but Thaddeus never did. He’d stay at his desk, tucked into one of Orkney’s seldom used north-facing rooms, as far from the sounds of the festivities as he could get, working furiously on screenplays that suddenly no one wanted to pay for, trying his best not to think about Hemingway’s line about how people go broke, gradually and then suddenly.

**

Scott Spencer is the author of 12 novels, two of which were finalists for the National Book Award, including, most recently An Ocean Without a Shore, as well as Endless Love, Waking the Dead, A Ship Made of Paper, and Willing. He has taught at Columbia University, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Williams College, the University of Virginia, and at Eastern Correctional Facility as part of the Bard Prison Initiative. He lives in upstate New York.

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Music by Catlofe

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Scott Spencer Scott Spencer Scott Spencer Scott Spencer Scott Spencer Scott Spencer Scott Spencer Scott Spencer Scott Spencer Scott Spencer 

The following is excerpted from Shiner by Amy Jo Burns. Copyright © 2020 by Amy Jo Burns. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Shiner by Amy Jo Burns – excerpt

It started with a burn, just like the stories of Moses my father used to tell. Moses, he said, was nothing more than a shepherd hiding in the hills until he scaled a mountain and found a flaming bush. Then he was never the same. My father had a tale just as magical, a story of his own origins as a man of God. He loved to tell it as much as my mother wished she hadn’t ever believed it.

For as long as she was alive, she never told me her own story. I used to hear her whisper to her best friend, Ivy, that she wished she’d been known as anything other than Briar Bird’s wife. I hated this about our life in the hills—mountain men steered their own stories, and women were their oars. I asked once if my mother had seen what lay beyond the bluffs, and she led me to the peak of our fields that overlooked the ravine behind my father’s snake shed. In the distance I could see two razorback stone ridges rise from the trees. All my life these mountains had watched over me. My mother knelt beside me, put her arm around my waist.

“There are two ways to see a mountain,” she said as she shielded her hazel eyes from the sun. “The view from the top and the view of the top.”

Ivy came behind her, three of her boys at her back. “From the top of our mountain, the hills of West Virginia bow at your feet,” she said. “But from the bottom, you bow at theirs.”

My mother caught a wisp of her dark hair as it danced in the wind. Her braid fell past the waistband of her skirt, where she tucked the pearl‑handled switchblade that Ivy had given her long before I was born. Ivy pressed a hand to my mother’s shoulder. Their accord was unspoken, haunted by promises they’d sworn to keep.

*

Everything changed when Ivy caught fire. That morning, not long after my fifteenth birthday, I had spied my first summer fox from my bedroom window. The fox pranced in the morning sun as I waited for Ivy’s scowl to appear on the horizon, her blond hair trembling against her shoulder. Ivy was the only woman who knew how to reach my father’s hideaway beyond the pines. We lived on the mountain’s western ridge, just below the razorbacks and the highest knolls for miles, a stretch of meadow called Violet’s Run. Ivy hiked the snarled hill to our cabin every day, because she and my mother could not survive without each other.

It had been that way since they were girls. Theirs was the same life lived twice over, though Ivy had four boys and a husband, Ricky—who was whiskey‑sick and dope‑drunk, my father liked to say. Ivy and my mother had grown up together, gone to school together, fallen in love together. This bond was the only thing my mother had that I envied. I wanted an Ivy of my own. My father envied it, too.

“Bread and Ivy,” he said with his preacher’s smile. “That’s all your mama needs to survive.”

My father buried himself in the things he loved—his snakes, his woods, his wife. Every time Ivy visited with her boys, he retreated to his snake shed by the cliff. He couldn’t bear to share my mother with anyone—not with Ivy, not even with me.

*

Ivy came early enough the morning of the burning that she had to walk by faith to find the cabin through the fog. We lived at the top of a slick dirt path, and our gray roof faded into the dying trees above it. No outsider had ever found our road, hidden behind a swamp and a stand of balsams. My father liked it that way—being half there, half not. The cabin tilted on its beams, ready to be raptured. Even without a breeze, the house’s bones moaned.

It was June, and I waited for Ivy at the window as I always did. When she and her three youngest boys crested the hill, I ran outside to greet them. Yesterday they hadn’t come. My mother and I waited all morning before we ate the corn bread and molasses we’d prepared and folded up the picnic quilts we’d laid for the six of us to sit on in the tall grass. I wanted to know why they’d left us alone, but Ivy looked in no mood to be asked. Her skin glistened with sweat, and she made no sound as she headed toward the back of the house, where my mother stirred a drum of soap.

My mother liked to keep her hands busy. She made soap, made dresses, made waves in the creek water. Those hands calmed only at dawn, when she’d stand in our field and stare at the horizon as if she expected Jesus himself to cross it. My mother was restless, and Ivy was the only person who could still her.

At the front of the cabin, Ivy’s boys stared at me.

“Where did you go yesterday?” I asked. “We waited till noon.” Henry, Ivy’s second‑oldest, shrugged.

“Nowhere,” he answered as he looked past the house toward the lean‑to my father had built at the edge of the ravine. “Can we go in the snake shed today?”

“They ain’t playthings,” I said. “You know that.” 

“You’ve taken one up, haven’t you?”

I shook my head. “Not once.”

Ivy’s third son, Job, turned toward me. “You scared?” 

“I don’t get scared.”

“Liar.” Henry touched the rattail at the back of his neck. “You’re scared of gettin’ bit.”

“Henry.” I straightened his collar as Pony, Ivy’s youngest, toyed with the end of my braid. “If you’re so brave, go knock on that snake shed and look my father in the eye.”

Folks hated looking at my father. A bad storm during his boyhood had blighted one of his blue irises. He’d gone legally blind in his left eye, but folks still believed he could see. He didn’t care what other people thought. He kept his serpents in boxes. They stank and needed to eat the living in order to survive. We had five of them.

“People at school down the mountain say you’re strange,” Job said. “That your daddy keeps you locked up with the snakes.”

“I ain’t so strange,” I said, even though I was.

On the first Monday of the month, my mother and I went to town for groceries with the tithe money my father earned from preaching. Our shopping list never changed—flour and cornmeal for bread, beans, milk, and canned oranges and peaches. Chicken legs and sugar when we could afford it.

Every trip into Trap was a catapult through time. My father obeyed the rituals of snake‑handling law, which meant he pretended we still lived in the 1940s instead of the age of the internet and all the things people did on their cell phones that I couldn’t understand. Back then, George Went Hensley had convinced mountain folk that taking up serpents was the one true way to worship God. Daily, my father lifted his serpents to the sky and uttered a prayer in tongues that no one could interpret. His face looked euphoric and eerie as he babbled. He did it at Sunday gatherings with twenty people watching, and he did it alone in his shed, where I spied him from the scant window. He didn’t need an audience with money to worship his God, but we did need that money to live. More than a half century had passed since snake‑handling fever had swept through our hills, and now fewer than a hundred snake handlers remained across the country. No one believed in the power of taking up serpents anymore. Bitterly, my father claimed they believed in the power of prescription pills instead. The offering he collected on Sundays amounted to a fistful of quarters and a bare spread of dollar bills. It was never enough.

Once a month Ivy drove us to Trap in her old Pontiac. I sat in the back with Pony on my lap for forty minutes of twists and turns.

The stares began as soon as we spilled out of the car into the Shop ’n Save parking lot. Mothers, children, loggers, cashiers. They squinted at the pleats in the skirts my mother had hand‑sewn for me from her old dresses. Their eyes tripped over the length of the French braid running down my back.

“It’s sad, keeping her locked away on that mountain,” I once heard a woman whisper to her grown son as he stifled a laugh and took a picture of me with his phone. I didn’t even know that a cell phone could take a photograph until I flinched at the flash.

Now, in front of our cabin, we heard Ivy scream. Pony let the tail of my braid slip through his fingers, and I sprinted toward the sound. Until then the groans I knew were spirit‑filled and Sunday‑strong as men and women called out to God. But this was the sound of real affliction. It was pure, and there was no God in it.

When I rounded the house, I saw my mother’s best friend kneeling at the fire. Smoke twirled above her as the flames caught her dress and hair. My mother’s soap pot had spilled hot lye and grease down the front of her. Ivy swayed in the still air. Her braid transformed from blond to flaring orange to black.

“Briar!” my mother called out for my father.

I ran to the spigot. I filled a pail of water and doused Ivy’s back. Her whole body hissed. Her scream limped to a sob as the flame surged. My mother tore her skirt and pressed it against Ivy’s front. Her face contorted, but she made no sound. Ivy fell backward, and my mother looked up. Her brown hair fell from her bun as Ivy writhed beneath her.

My mother’s head snapped toward me. “Wren!” she yelled. “The boys!”

It was too late to shield their eyes. Pony hung on my skirt, and I felt Job’s hand on my back. His chest whistled as he tried to catch his breath.

Ivy started to convulse.

“Run as fast as you can to the snake shed,” I told Henry. “Knock, but don’t open the door. Tell my daddy to come quick.”

He stood, petrified. He was just as afraid of the shed as anyone else was.

“Take your brothers inside the house and wait for me.” I touched his arm. “Stay away from the window.”

I took off for the shed, about fifty paces from the cabin. On its far side, a patch of rocks guarded the ground before it pitched off the cliff. The shed presided like a dark lighthouse over the rippled hills beneath it.

“Daddy!” I screamed.

When I reached the lean‑to, I kicked the door with my foot. “Daddy!”

I hefted the latch and flung open the door before stooping to get inside. My father was fast asleep against the far wall, his legs sticking straight out in front of him. A patch of golden hair had fallen in his eyes, and it sparkled in a shaft of sunlight.

I crouched and clapped my hands in front of his face. Startled, he came to. His bad eye was a disk of white in the dark.

“What is it?”

“It’s Ivy,” I said. “She’s burning.”

**

Amy Jo Burns is the author of the memoir Cinderland and Shiner, a novel. Her writing has appeared in The Paris Review Daily, Tin House, Ploughshares, Gay Magazine, Electric Literature, Literary Hub, and the anthology Not That Bad.

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Music by Catlofe

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The following is excerpted, with permission, from The Prettiest Star by Carter Sickels, published by Hub City Press on May 19, 2020.

The Prettiest Star by Carter Sickels – Excerpt

SHARON

On Sunday we go to church, like we do every Sunday. Like every Sunday, my husband sits beside me. We’re in our usual spot—five rows back, center aisle. Our daughter Jess sits in the row behind us next to my mother-in-law Lettie, who never misses a service. 

The church is small and old. Behind the pulpit and on either side of the building, stained glass windows fracture the morning sun into shards across the dark walnut pews and the maroon carpet, reflecting in the gold plates where we drop checks and dollar bills.

“Look around! God’s light shines.” Reverend Clay reads his part from the bulletin. He stands in the same place where my father used to.

We dutifully respond: “The darkness disappears and gives way to light.” 

The congregation is sparse, glaring gaps of emptiness. This is how it will be through spring and summer. Now that Easter’s over, people have absorbed enough religion to carry them through to Christmas. Birth, death, resurrection. Those are the days people remember. 

Reverend Clay lifts his arms and we rise as one. The old widow Anita Brewer plays the opening chords to “How Great Thou Art” with great passion, her eyes squeezed shut like she’s in pain. It’s one of Lettie’s favorite hymns, and I hear her from behind us, drowning out everyone within a three-row radius. She is off-key, practically shouting, Then sings my soul, my Savior God to thee. Travis glances over, the edges of his bristled mustache curling up, his eyes saying, That’s just how my mother is, what can you do? I try returning his smile, but my mouth feels stiff, like my jaw is wired shut. A son’s first love is always for his mother, that’s what they say isn’t it? 

Travis rests his hand in the middle of my back. He smells clean and minty like mouthwash. Sundays are the only days I see him dressed up. For him, this is just like any other Sunday. He doesn’t know about the letter from our son. Back at the house, folded up in my jewelry box, it is my secret, my cross to bear. 

When the hymn ends we stay standing, except for Anita, who remains seated at the organ, her twiggy fingers now still. Someone coughs, then the crinkling of a wrapper. The reverend holds out his cupped hands in supplication and looks up: Let us go forth in peace, may God be with you. He sounds muffled and far away, like I’m sinking underwater. The letter came on Friday. After I read it, I wept. I prayed to God to give me an answer. 

We bow our heads. I keep my eyes open. The faded, thinning carpet. My navy flats, Travis’s dress shoes with the tassels. His hand still on my back. He stands close to me, breathes easily. A soft, sad silence thumps in my head. I will have to tell him. When? There will never be a right time. Reverend Clay says, Amen.

“Well, it’s about time,” Lettie says. “Get you something to eat.”

She’s set out cold cuts, potato salad, and a cherry pie. 

Travis and Jess act like they’re starving and pile up their plates, then go out to the backyard to join the others. I linger in the kitchen, and Lettie studies me. 

“You okay?”

“Yeah, why?”

“You look a little peaked.” 

“I’m fine,” I say.

She makes a dismissive clucking sound, meaning she doesn’t believe me, and lights a menthol. Lettie’s a stout, strong woman who raised three sons mostly on her own, and now she’s a grandmother and great-grandmother. Her bouffant black hair and dark, penciled eyebrows make her blue eyes look even more striking, but the caked-on makeup gives her the look of a washed-up Grand Ole Opry star. She’s traded her church dress for knit slacks and a short-sleeved pink blouse that shows off her pale freckled arms. Gaudy fake rubies—clip-ons—sparkle from her ears, and her thick fingers are studded with rings.  

“Last night I had a dream about him,” she says in a low, secretive voice, and every receptor in my skin rises like a thousand candlewicks suddenly alight and burning. Nobody else in the family ever mentions Brian, only Lettie—and whenever she says his name, a thin, delicate fissure cracks my chest, bones splintering like dry wood. 

For a second, I wonder if Brian also sent Lettie a letter, but, no, she would have told me—Lettie can’t keep a secret. She’s described her dreams to me before, the signs that tell her Brian’s okay and he’ll be coming home. I’ve always ignored her premonitions, but now I want to know. 

“What happened?” I ask.

“It’s fuzzy.” She draws on the cigarette. “He was a little boy, and he was telling me some story, you know the way he used to do, laughing and his hands flying around.” She stops. “Well, I don’t remember. Sometimes he just comes into my mind.” 

“I know,” I say.

“It’s been so long since we heard anything.”

I pinch the insides of my crossed arms so hard I wanted to cry out. “I’m sure he’s fine,” I say. “He just lives a busy life.” 

My voice sounds strange and hollow like someone else is speaking through me. Lettie takes another drag and sets the cigarette down on a glass ashtray. 

“I better go on out there. You coming?”

“In a minute.”

After the screen door swings shut, I pick up the burning cigarette and taste the sourness of Lettie’s lipstick, probably one of the many tubes leftover from her Avon days. When Brian was little, she used to take him along with her to sell makeup and creams and perfumes. Maybe he spent too much time with her. She was too soft with him, Travis said, loved on him too much.

The backyard buzzes with conversation and laughter. I settle into a green and white striped lawn chair between Liz and Carol, my sisters-in-law, and as we catch up, Jess, who is much younger than her cousins, plants herself on a quilt, cooing over Allie, Gus and Pam’s six-month-old. Travis talks to Paul and Wayne about work, and my nephews Matthew and Kyle toss a green foam football with their sons, while their wives, Sherri and Lisa, also Chester natives, smoke cigarettes and complain. I always thought Kyle in particular would end up dead or in jail by twenty-five, as wild as he used to be, but here he is: a father and husband, alive and healthy.

It was the bigness of the Jacksons that drew me to them. They took me in without hesitation, sweeping me in as easily as a river would a leaf or a twig. Everything about their way of living was new to me. I grew up in a house of quiet. Mother in her room or at the kitchen table, reading historical novels. Father busy at church, writing sermons or ministering to his wife. At the Jackson house, the TV or record player or radio was always on, sometimes all three at once. Lettie raised her three sons on her own, after her husband died in a car accident when Travis was three years old. Lettie doesn’t say much about him, just that he was a good man. She never remarried, never even dated again, as far as I know. 

Everyone in the family lives nearby. Carol and Wayne in a little brick ranch on the outskirts of town, and Paul and Liz in a double-wide. Travis and his brothers, and his brothers’ sons, all work at P.T. Gas & Electric, the same place where their father once worked. After their father died, Wayne and Paul helped take care of Travis, and he credits them for teaching him how to be a man. 

After a while, Wayne’s voice dominates, as usual, demanding everyone’s undivided attention. My neck stiffens, preparing myself for his vulgarities—Travis is always quick to defend him, says he doesn’t know any better—but today Wayne just tells a tedious story about a boss who gave him trouble (he claims) because Wayne knew more than he did, one we’ve all heard before. 

“Yes, he treated you bad,” Lettie says. “I remember.”

Lettie is one of the kindest souls I know, but when someone does her or her family wrong, she doesn’t hold back. Even a minor slight by a store clerk can set her off. She doesn’t yell or throw a fit, but she’ll say what’s on her mind. She holds grudges. 

“Told that son-of-a-bitch to stick that pipe where the sun don’t shine.” Wayne smiles in his surprisingly charming way. The oldest brother, he has black hair and deep-set dark eyes that make him look like he’s always a little bit hungry. He’s strong with wiry muscles, and rides a motorcycle, and, like most of the men around Chester, he’s rough around the edges. 

Carol smiles at Wayne, bored—she’s heard the story a hundred times. Back in high school, Carol used to be wild: cutting classes, smoking in the bathroom, nipping whiskey out of a flask. But over the years as a mother and now a grandmother, the wildness has disappeared like muscles lost under the folds of flesh. She’s put on at least twenty pounds in the last two years. 

“I remember him, he wasn’t from around here,” Paul says. “Didn’t stay either.” The middle son, chubby, with shaggy hair and thick eyeglasses, Paul is the most easygoing of the three. He reaches into the cooler and hands Liz a beer. “Here you go you, baby,” he says. After all these years, they still hold hands. 

Travis pulls down his baseball hat to shade his eyes. My husband was different from his big brothers, had ambition. While they skipped classes and smoked cigarettes and drank too much, Travis made good grades, and played baseball and basketball. He was a clean-cut, all-American kid. But after the war, he stopped talking about going to college or trying to work his way up to foreman. He didn’t say much about Vietnam, except, It’s hell over there. I used to watch the nightly news with Lettie, both of us quietly terrified as Walter Cronkite gave his report. The number of the dead rising and rising, and no end in sight. 

“Sharon, we ought to go on a girls’ shopping trip soon,” Liz says. “Lettie, you want to come with us?”

“You know me,” she says. “Shop till you drop.” 

Conversations float in and out like too many different radio stations playing at once. The sun is beginning to set, and I feel chilled. From the center of town, a passing coal train blasts its horn.  

Lettie mentions Wayne’s upcoming birthday, and the attention swerves back to him. “Fifty,” Paul says. “Brother, you’re getting old.”

“Hell, I’m still not as gray as Travis,” Wayne says. 

“I don’t know about that,” Travis says. “Mom, you think you ought to take him to the beauty shop with you?”

“Well, Annette sure knows how to hide the gray,” Lettie says. 

“Should I get a perm too?” Wayne pretends to fluff his hair. “Won’t that look good?” he says in a falsetto.

Everyone laughs, and, encouraged, Wayne keeps going, talking about getting his nails done, looking pretty. His pretend lisp gets louder, as if he’s shouting into my ear, and everything turns too bright—the green lawn, the black of Lettie’s hair. Jess doubles over with laughter. 

“Wayne, you seem a little too comfortable, if you know what I mean,” Travis jokes. 

I don’t know if I’m angrier at Wayne or at my son for putting me in this situation. The flash of brightness fades and the voices start to sound normal again. But my heart races, my mouth tastes strangely of blood. This wasn’t supposed to happen. They were the ones with the troubled kids: teen pregnancy, jail, school suspension. Travis and I were different from his brothers and their families, and so were our children, who we believed would go to college and find good jobs, get married and give us grandchildren, and live close by. They’d live happy lives like the kind you see on television. We felt protected from tragedy and looked forward to the future, a glistening river of possibilities. 

**

Once you know something, you can’t un-know it.

I first heard about the disease two or three years ago, mentioned on the news, and I remember seeing it come up on a TV show, some hospital drama that Lettie had on. I still remember how I felt when they said the character was gay: everything in me went still and I started chattering, it didn’t matter what came out of my mouth, I just needed to talk over the TV, block it out, cover it up. Since then, of course, you can’t escape hearing about the gays or the disease, especially after Rock Hudson died last year. The preachers say it’s a punishment from God.

Now I have this letter, a half page written on yellow legal pad paper. He said in the first line, There is something I need to tell you. The word AIDS printed carefully in capital letters. He’s been in the hospital already. Didn’t want to worry us. He’s doing all right, he says, he feels stronger. The letter was shockingly direct, but also vague. It’s been a while, and I was thinking maybe I’d come home to see everyone. I’d like to see the family. How is Sadie doing? I wonder if she’ll remember me. His phone number was written below his signature. He was waiting for us to call.  

A few years ago, Brian sent a picture of himself with a man. They had their arms around each other. Brian looked healthy, handsome, strong. Hair curled around his ears, crooked teeth, blue eyes. Head tilted to the side. His smile was big. Then, this man. Older than him. Tall, muscular. Black. Later, Brian told me that his friend was dead. Didn’t tell me how he died, but now I know. It was him. He infected my son. 

Alone in the kitchen, I hear my husband and daughter upstairs, the creaking of the floorboards. I’ll tell Travis about the letter tomorrow. Let us have one more night where nothing is changed.

But when I walk in the bedroom and close the door behind me, I can’t hold onto it any longer. Travis pulls on a pair of blue plaid pajama pants, his T-shirt crumpled in a ball on the floor. 

“I have to tell you something.”

He raises his eyebrows. Pants on, no shirt. His chest hair curly and thick, silver as pencil shavings. “What’s wrong?”

I open the jewelry box, which used to belong to my mother. It sits on top of the dresser like a white cake. I open the lid. Inside, pink silk lining, the faint scent of stale perfume. There are two layers, and the letter rests on the bottom, folded in thirds. I take it out. Hand it to him. His face wrinkles with confusion. He opens it, barely glances at the writing, and closes it. Doesn’t read it, doesn’t want to know. There is a tremor in his voice. 

“What is this?”

He holds up the folded letter away from him, a piece of evidence he doesn’t want to see. But I want him to read it: why do I have to explain? As I glance away, I catch sight of our reflections in the mirror, our drawn, worried faces, how naked and vulnerable they look, and I quickly turn, don’t want to see. The light is low in the room, a dull yellow, and everything seems old and worn: the pale blue carpet, the beige bedspread with peach and blue flowers. I hear Jess, opening the bathroom door, closing it. 

“It’s from Brian,” I say. 

Travis holds the letter towards me, wanting me to take it back, but I don’t. 

“He’s sick,” I say, and as soon as the words leave my mouth, as soon as I let them go, my bones turn to mush, I have to sit. My legs fold, the mattress holds me up. “He has AIDS.”

Travis is standing in front of me, so I have to look up to see his face. The skin around his eyes crinkles, as if he is staring into the sun. His eyes are light blue, like glass canning jars. He cocks his head like he misheard.

“He has what?”

 His tone is incredulous and sharp, like he thinks I have everything wrong, and a rush of anger spreads through me like a fever, gives me the strength to stand back up. 

“AIDS,” I say, then say it again, louder, getting myself used to the word. “He has AIDS.”

Travis doesn’t understand. Staring blankly. Of course, he knows about it—he’s heard Wayne’s jokes, he’s read the newspaper articles, heard the preachers and politicians. But, like me, he has ignored, deflected, refused. He drops the letter on the bed. Still, disbelieving. An accusatory tone of voice: “What does that mean?”

His pajama pants hang low on his hips and he is wearing white tube socks, and now I wish I told him before he started getting dressed for bed. The anger dissipates from my body like a dying light. He looks old and childish at the same time. He looks scared.

“Brian’s sick,” I say. “He could die.”

Could die, would die. The words swell inside me like a bruise. A disease of the blood, a disease that people catch. People die from it. People, what kind of people. He doesn’t ask, I don’t say. It is quiet except for the ticking of the alarm clock, but outside these walls, the noise is normal and good. Jess running water. Jess brushing her teeth. The lid of the toilet. Bathroom door, bedroom door. Jess climbing into bed, pulling up the covers, closing her eyes. Her heart beating. Healthy, alive. 

“He wants to come home,” I say.

For a moment, a band of light, hope, twitches across Travis’s face: his son is coming home. The son he loves, the son he carried in his arms. Then he remembers. Shaking his head, he takes a step back, further away from me, in the shadows, the way he used to disappear after he came back from Vietnam. He was the same man, a good man, except quieter—sometimes he vanished from conversation, eyes fevered with memories he wouldn’t share.

“Is that even safe?” he asks. “For him to be here?”

He crosses his arms over his chest, letting go of nothing, making me do all the work. 

“It’s not contagious,” I say. “Not by touching.” Stop. Don’t want to think about the ways it is spread. 

Travis rubs his jaw, thinking. His eyes hooded, protected, downcast. He is studying his socks. How clean, how white. 

“They don’t know for sure,” he says. “There’s a lot about this they don’t know.”

He wants me to agree with him, to take everything back, to apologize, to keep things from changing. I am close enough to touch him, but I don’t. I hold my arms at my sides, heavy and dense like they’ve been packed with mud. My legs still feel rubbery, and my feet are weak, useless things.

“He wants to come home,” I say.

The pause of silence that follows is not quiet but hot and panting. Travis looks up. “So he only wants to come home when something’s wrong,” he says, his voice swollen with anger and hurt and guilt and accusation. All of the same feelings in me. He is hurting, I am hurting. 

Travis goes over to his side of the bed. Him on one side, me on the other. The bed a mountain between us. 

“How sick is he? Does he just want to come here for a little bit, or stay here until…” He trails off. 

“I don’t know.” My voice is sharp and prickly. But I understand: we’ve already been through so much. Travis, sighing, sits heavily on the bed, his back to me. I return the letter to the jewelry box, close the lid. I don’t know how to fix any of this.

I change into my nightgown, and get into bed. Travis lies on his back, staring at the ceiling. His chest is wide and strong, and I remember when we were young, how easy it was to sleep with my head right there, to curl into him, holding on until we grew into a single body. But now to slide up beside him like that feels awkward and forced. I stay on my side. Why is it up to me to do the talking? 

“We need to tell him something,” I finally say.

He turns toward me, his face sad and scared and pale, and I feel sorry for him, sorry for us. When Brian left, Travis said it was his choice—we were not the guilty ones, it wasn’t our fault. He was strong then, maybe too strong. He made me believe everything would be okay, and I want that again, for Travis to take charge, to do the right thing: I will stand by him. 

“I don’t know what to do,” he says.

I hold my breath as he reaches over and turns out the light. He rolls on his side, away from me. In the dark, where he now feels safe to tell me his fears, his voice sounds husky, strange.

“If he comes back,” he starts, and I stay as still as possible, hollowness thudding through me. “What will people—”

I force myself to speak, just to stop him from talking. “He’s our son,” I say. It is the right thing, but even as I say the words, they sound easy, rehearsed, false. 

Travis says nothing else. Neither do I. But the decision has been made. We have to let him come back home and I must bury the unspeakable thought: I wish I’d never even opened the letter. I lie next to Travis for what seems like hours, until finally his body softens, his breathing slows. He’s been awake all this time. Both of us staring into the dark, not touching, not talking. When his breaths turn to snores, quietly, I get out of bed, go downstairs. I shuffle my feet into my tennis shoes, dig the cigarettes out of my purse. I’m a smoker again.

I walk into the backyard. The wet grass brushes against my bare ankles like pieces of velvet and soaks through my tennis shoes. The Dennisons’ hound is quiet, but the night insects sing and hum, calling each other. The moon is almost full and the sky is clear and everything glows under the silver light: the towers of trees, protecting our still house. 

Travis’s words, spoken in the dark, ring in my head as I strike the match. He asked the same question six years ago when Brian left this family and all he knew. This isn’t supposed to happen, we raised our kids right, we weren’t perfect but we were good, and now here I am sneaking out in the middle of the night and our son, five hundred miles away, is dying from what is in his blood, dying because of what he did, dying because of what he calls himself, and what if he comes back here and what if people find out the truth, then what will happen to us? What will people think? 

**

Carter Sickels is the author of the novels The Evening Hour and The Prettiest Star, which was recently released in May 2020. He is the recipient of the 2013 Lambda Literary Emerging Writer Award, and has been awarded scholarships to Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, VCCA, and the MacDowell Colony. His essays and fiction have appeared in various publications, including Guernica, Bellevue Literary Review, and BuzzFeed, and he is the editor of Untangling the Knot: Queer Voices on Marriage, Relationships & Identity. Carter is Assistant Professor of English at Eastern Kentucky University, where  he teaches in the Bluegrass Writers Studio Low-Residency MFA program.

**

Music by Catlofe

The following excerpt is from Empire City: A Novel by Matt Gallagher. Reprinted by permission of Atria, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Copyright © 2020 by Matt Gallagher.

Empire City – Excerpt

Mia Tucker remained blindfolded. Someone to her left moaned and said they felt dizzy. A charging handle of a rifle was drawn, metal tonguing off against metal. A voice spoke to the moaner and to the group at once. “No. Noise.”

Like most pilots, the military had sent Mia to SERE school. Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape. She’d learned how to live off the land in any environment, from the Siberian tundra to the Amazon. She’d built smokeless fire pits from scratch. She’d killed a bunny with a trap made from sticks, gutted it with a belt clip, and turned it into kebab. She’d been waterboarded. None of that would help in a New York City ballroom seized by a militia of disaffected war veterans.

But the school had also included a sitting session on persuasion and influence. Most of the class slept through it, delirious at the chance to be off their feet for fifty minutes. But not Mia. She’d fought off the siren song and listened, because if there was anything worse than being a prisoner of war, it was being a woman prisoner of war. She’d wanted to know it all.

Two guards began speaking to each other. They talked low, wary of the ballroom’s acoustics, but not low enough. Mia bowed her head and homed in, like she was lost in benediction.

“This place is nice.”

“Rich people, man.”

“Yeah, I know. But still. See those chandeliers? All gold.”

“Think of how many of our people could be helped with just one of ’em. Keep focused.”

“Yeah.” A minute or so passed. “Ever seen anything like it before, though?”

The other voice considered. “Assad’s sun palace in Syria. Before the wogs blew it up.”

“Damn, you was over there then!” The veteran laughed. “You’re even older than I thought.”

“We were winning when I left. Then you trigger-happy bastards came along. The Found Generation, shit. You all messed up everything.”

They went back and forth like that, arguing about who had screwed up the Mediterranean Wars worse, when, and where. Thirty years of everlong war meant a lot of different iterations of it. They’d mentioned the sun palace. Mia racked her mind. The high palace had been in the hills surrounding Aleppo. The crescent palace lay in the center of Raqqa, near restaurant row. The state palace dominated what remained of Homs. The water palace floated alongside the island of Arwad. The sun palace, though . . .

“Idlib,” she said out loud, surprising herself. No turning back now, she thought. This is the right approach. For me. For them. For her.

Jesse hadn’t said so out loud, but Mia knew he wanted a girl.

“What was that?” The militants had heard her.

“Idlib,” Mia repeated. “The sun palace. I walked through the rubble there during my tour. Must’ve been amazing before the truck bomb.”

Through the threadbare of her blindfold, Mia saw the two men approach. What kind of group plans out something this complex, she wondered, but skimps on blindfold costs? 

“You a vet?”

She nodded. “Army. Helo pilot out of Fort Sam Damon.”

“Chinooks?”

Mia sniffed. They thought she flew cargo. “Black Hawks. Mostly ripping through the Morning Isles, hunting down the last of the Greek radicals.”

That impressed them enough for her blindfold to be removed. The Morning Isles campaign had a reputation. She looked up to find two men of average stature and slung rifles, bafflement splayed across their clay faces. If they shaved their face stubble, they still could’ve been posting guard at any American outpost across the world.

“Bosses didn’t say anything about other vets being here,” the one who’d been admiring the chandeliers said. He looked like he should’ve been delivering Mormon pamphlets house-to-house, Mia thought, not committing terror. “Only rich people and generals.”

“How do we know you’re speaking truth?” the other guard asked. He was older, and wore the sad, dumpy face of someone who joined the military only to find the same assholes who’d made up his small town were everywhere. A short, barbed mustache would’ve framed his face had it been even.

“Tap my right leg,” Mia said. “Think a citizen has one of these?”

The leg clinked.

The older militant crossed his arms, and nodded. He’d figured her out, finally. “Officer,” he said.

Mia thought about lying, but quickly decided not to. Soldiers smelled out lies like hounds.

“Don’t hold it against me,” she said, offering just a hint of a smile. “You two worked for a living, I’m sure.”

The old joke landed. The militants asked about her deployments and units, she asked about theirs. They asked if she knew their old officers, and she did, a couple of them. She asked about the war tattoos covering their forearms, where they got them, what they meant. They told her. She asked if they’d had a hard time since getting out. They had. She asked if they’d loosen the cable ties around her wrists. They did. The younger one asked if she had a boyfriend. She said that she did, a husband, but left out the pregnant part. Babies scared boys. The older one asked why she’d come to the event tonight.

“Because I believe our government would benefit from having more people with military experience in it,” she said. “Who have skin in the game. We used to behave like a republic. I think we should get back to that.”

“What do you do now, ma’am?” he asked, dumpy face creasing out into corners. He was probing, still. Probably made a good barracks lawyer, Mia thought, explaining to his fellow joes how leadership was plotting against the regular soldier.

“Finance,” she said. “Middle management.” If she didn’t get control of the conversation again soon, they’d find her name and look her up, and then this little gambit of hers would backfire entirely. They’d believe a Tucker granddaughter would fetch a fortune. They wouldn’t be wrong.

There was a short cry to her left. Someone tipped forward and landed on their shoulders and forehead, forming a body caret. The two militants looked at each other, then at Mia.

“See if she’s okay,” Mia said. “I think that’s an older person.”

They helped the woman up, taking off her blindfold and binding her wrists in her lap, so she could lean back against the wall. Mia thought she recognized her—a college professor and civil rights activist who’d written a book about ethics, citizenship, and the International Legion.

In the midst of chaos, Mia thought, there is also opportunity. Some famous dead person had said that. 

“You should get her water,” she said, loud enough for the two militants but also for the other hostages. The woman was aware but disoriented. “And maybe a wet towel? It’s really hot.”

The younger one took a step toward the bar but the older one stopped him. “Hey, officer. You’re not in charge here.”

Some of the other hostages were stirring and began grumbling; through their pantyhose blindfolds they could see the two armed guards looming over the professor, either feeling bad for her or feeling jealous that she’d been able to set her back against the wall.

“You’re in charge, absolutely,” Mia said, recalling from the SERE class the importance of projecting deference. “Just trying to help.”

“Uh huh.”

“Given how this could look. Like, media-wise.”

The older veteran’s nostrils flared. “Explain.”

“You have been very professional. But say this turns out to be serious, heatstroke, a concussion or something. Older black woman, mostly white vets . . . you know how reporters are. They might make it – well, racial.”

“We’re trying to recruit more people of color.” The younger militant looked upset. “It’s hard, though.”

“I’m a doctor.” One of the bound hostages spoke up. “I can check on her!”

The hostage next to him said, “Stop. You’re a dentist.”

“Everyone calm down!” the older militant shouted, pointing his rifle into the air. “We got this.” He looked back at Mia. “The Mayday Front supports people of all colors, creeds, and orientations. We work for the good of all warfighters. For anyone who’s done their part.”

“I know that,” Mia said. “But will citizens unfamiliar with your movement?”

Choice passed through the militants like wildfire. Soldiers loved to complain about the decision making of their sergeants and officers. It was a proud tradition, one ancient as battle itself. But Mia had seen this quizzical look before, many times. They either rose to the moment or they didn’t.

“We should let someone check her out,” the younger one said, putting his hand on the other’s shoulder. “The ma’am, she’s right. This could go bad.”

“We should’ve brought walkie-talkies,” the older one said, mostly to himself. “No one ever listens to me.” Then he said he was going to find their medic to treat the professor, which really meant asking someone else for guidance.

“Watch them close,” he told the other militant. “Back in ten.”

And just like that, Mia Tucker cut down the enemy force by half. 

**

Former U.S. Army captain Matt Gallagher is the author of the novel Youngblood, published in February 2016 by Atria and a finalist for the 2016 Dayton Literary Peace Prize. He’s also the author of the Iraq memoir Kaboom and coeditor of, and contributor to, the short fiction collection Fire & Forget: Short Stories from the Long War. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Esquire, The Paris Review Daily and Wired, among other places. A graduate of Wake Forest University, Matt also holds an MFA in fiction from Columbia University. He lives with his wife and son in Brooklyn and works as a writing instructor at Words After War, a literary nonprofit devoted to bringing veterans and civilians together to study conflict literature. Empire City, his second novel, was published in April by Atria.

**

Music by Catlofe

The following is excerpted from Vanishing Monuments by John Elizabeth Stintzi, published by Arsenal Pulp.

Vanishing Monuments – excerpt

I wake up in my car in the parking lot outside the home, Mother’s Leica still around my neck, its old Summar lens folded into the body and capped, gut filled with the roll of film I’d been failing to fill for the last two months. Film that’s empty because nothing of note came my way. No idea. No image. No body or variation in my psyche that needed to be pasted onto the reactive plastic. Nothing came to me but the old, thick fog of dissociation, the feeling that I was not myself, and if I were, I’d rather be dead.

My neck itches from the weight of the old leather strap. My packer and binder and clothes sit tangled beside me on the passenger seat. When I parked here last night, I didn’t make a pillow out of anything; I just leaned my seat back and closed my eyes and eventually opened them to today rising into the grey sky.

Morning in this new place, clutched by the same old place.

It isn’t raining right now, but it will. I open the door and stand beside the car, stretching, breathing out my popping muscles, shaking out my stiff legs, straightening the dress that feels wrong.

Exhausted. Terrified.

All I want to do is give up, get back into my car, and drive away. Turn on my phone and text Genny: just kidding! be back soon. But I know that I won’t be able to make it. I’ll just slow down and turn around again, get back here and turn around again, again and again. Slowly making it through the labyrinth of back and forth before my inertia surrenders to here. To her.

As I walk toward the home, the time between myself and Mother shrinks. Her camera hangs at my belly like a pit. The door opens and there’s a nurse at a desk, in scrubs that are not supposed to look like scrubs, in the same way this home is not supposed to look like a hospital.

“I’m here to see my mother? Hedwig Baum?”

“Oh, of course,” she says, standing up behind the desk and handing me a clipboard where visitors sign in. She’s short, a good foot shorter than me, hardly taller now than she was sitting down. “She woke up a little early, but she’s usually sharpest soon after waking,” she says, while I finish writing a name that doesn’t quite fit over me—Allie Baum—and put the clipboard down. I follow her down the hall. She walks so slowly.

“How long has it been since you visited again?” she asks.

“Sometime around Christmas,” I say, because it’s a shorter sentence than: Never.

“Well,” she says, quiet, as we inch along a hallway of closed doors and cold tiles. “She’s changed some since then, as you know. She has more difficulty hearing, especially lately, so you will want to talk a little louder than last time. But you will want to make sure to use a conversational tone. She responds better to tone. We also cut her hair, so don’t be alarmed. She was having trouble with it being so long— getting it tangled up in things, tying it up in knots, trying to braid it. Things like that.” She stops, looks up at me, smiles in a way that is supposed to feel warm. I don’t tell her that Mother had never once braided her hair. “It’s a lot more manageable now.”

The door is open a crack, and beside it is an aging piece of card stock printed with Mother’s name.

“Thank you,” I say, trying to place a smile between us as I stare over her to the door. I start to move around her toward it.

“Would you like me to come in with you? Help you? I’ve worked with Hedwig a long time, and I know all the little tricks to get her to notice me.”

I grab the door handle before that girl starts to panic, tries to tell my body to run away. “I’m fine,” I say, forgiving her duty with a half wave of my free hand. “I still remember all the tricks.”

I push the door in.

***

When I think about Mother, the first thing I remember is her body. Small chested, a dim scar on her belly from where I blew through her. Tall. Her long bright hair—brighter than mine. As much as I try not to, I can see her in my height in the mirror. Which is why I don’t own a full-length mirror. Which is why I avoid them. Why I rarely try on clothes in a store.

When I think of her in motion, I imagine her body doing yoga. I imagine it through the bars of the vent between her studio and my bedroom.

After her body, I remember the feeling of her presence, the gravity she held in our creaky house. The gravity of the noise and the silence both, depending on the year, the month, the day. I remember being pulled back to that house after those long expeditions at night with Tom. Every time—every time but one—finding her there. Waiting up for me. And every time, not a single word between us.

What I don’t remember is the sound of her voice. I’ve been trying not to. It’s easier to believe she never said a word, that she was mute, than to think of her falling in and out of her muteness. First, because of the electric storm of depression. Now, because her brain has lost so much of its charge.

But as I’ve driven closer to her, I’ve heard her a little. Not the words themselves but her voice stacking upon itself in an unintelligible cacophony. Into static.

***

I walk into Mother’s room, and there she is: a silhouette against the grey light of the window. She’s sitting in a chair in a baby-blue blouse, and her hair is very short—manageable. Her back is to me. I don’t know if she’s actually looking out the window, and if she is, if anything is registering. I’ve never seen her stare out a window from behind before; I only ever saw her staring out a window toward me, at night, waiting for me to come home.

My eyes adjust from the dimness of the hall. I squint, try to make a distinction between her skin and the light. The door behind me closes with a click.

I approach, slowly, counting down the tiles between us. As I get closer, my memory of her body minimizes to meet reality. She’s so small. Her shoulders are like wire clothes hangers, her wrists like thumbs wrapped in wrinkled pink leather. Her scarred hands are two collections of raw, bubbled webs. They’re wriggling on her lap, the only part of her that’s moving. When I stand over her, I can see that she’s wearing a restraining belt that keeps her from getting out of the chair.

I stand over her for a while, taking her in, fascinated and hurt. Time has brittled her. Twenty-seven years gone, turning her long hair blank white, letting it be chopped off for convenience, to make her seem more put together. Letting it all be thrown away. No strand of hair on her head was there ten years ago. I imagine the nurse from the front desk, armed with scissors and grasping those long, drawn-out strings of Mother’s dead cells. I imagine her clipping them all off.

I look down at Mother and I can smell her, that clean, hospital soap smell that lacks any breath of humanity. I could move my hand four inches and touch her shoulder. Just four inches and I could break through decades of gone.

I don’t move. I stand in her soft shadow and forget completely what she used to smell like. I’m muddled as to how precisely her hair used to tumble down her back. Suddenly unsure what colour her hair used to be. Standing near her like this, silent, I hear my heart beating and realize the cacophony of her voice is gone.

Mother’s old camera hangs off my neck. In the perfect dark of the camera’s head the film stands dormant. The camera’s eye jammed shut, capped, and collapsed into the body. The camera is a promise, weighing down at my belly, the thin leather straps digging into the sides of my breasts. As I breathe in, the camera gets closer to Mother. As I breathe out it gets closer to me.

Four inches.

I step back, quietly, even though I’m sure she can’t hear me. I’ll come back tomorrow. Someone in this body will. I turn and walk back toward the door, and as I go, I can sort of remember her again. As I near the door to her room, I remember my little hand buried in her tight palm, remember walking back from the liquor store with an empty wine box on my head. As I get back into the hall, I remember the smell, just a little, of chemicals and sweat and her when she came out of the darkroom, exhausted but sometimes smiling. The darkroom where faces, bodies, and angles all began to appear on wet, blank paper.

At the nurse’s desk I somehow tell her, “Mother is asleep right now” and make for the door. Mother is asleep, her eyes open. She’s enjoying letting the day into her head.

As I step out the door, into the cool air, I remember when the car stopped outside our house that morning and they carried Mother in— the man from Selkirk and Tom—to the bed where she would mumble. I remember the heat of the sun on my skin as I stood there on the lawn and watched. I wasn’t wearing shoes. The dew was nearly gone, but the grass was still cool. I could smell it. Mother’s hands were limp and one of her slippers sat empty on the sidewalk.

The light rising in the grey eastern sky is a false prophet. I get in the car. My bones fit back into the lumps of the seat better than they fit my body, as Mother’s camera floats on the waves of my uneven breathing. As I put the keys in the ignition, I remember the man handing me Mother’s keys and a bag of her personal effects—her purse, her Nikon with her fast 85 mm lens, her small coat—and telling me that she should not drive, but that someone should go and pick up her car from the Downs. Then, he handed me a bag filled with her medication.

I turn on the ignition, crank the heat, and drive, slowly, out of the lot and toward her house, away from the home where Mother is unaware that I just stood behind her, that I was only four inches away from her. I pull away from the home, south, toward the place where I grew up and ran from, the dark from which my light-thirsty stem grew wide, seeking the warmth of the sun. The horizon to the southeast of the city is dark and tall and endless. Widening. The waters of the Red and the Assiniboine are high enough, but more rain is still coming to drown us out.

History is, too.

**

John Elizabeth Stintzi is a novelist, poet, & teacher who was born and raised on a cattle farm in northwestern Ontario. Their work has received support from the Canada Council for the Arts, The Watermill Center, and has been awarded the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers from the Writers’ Trust of Canada and The Malahat Review’s Long Poem Prize. Spring of 2020 saw the publication of both their debut novel Vanishing Monuments (Arsenal Pulp Press) and their full-length poetry debut Junebat (House of Anansi).

Stintzi’s work has been published throughout the United States and Canada, in places like Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, Black Warrior Review, The Malahat Review, The Fiddlehead (see: Magazine Publications), and Best Canadian Poetry. They are also the author of two poetry chapbooks: Plough Forward the Higgs Field (Rahila’s Ghost, fall 2019) and The Machete Tourist (kfb 2018). They currently live with their partner—as well as a dog named Grendel—in Kansas City, where they occasionally teach writing. They are also the resident design ghost at Split City Reads.

**

Music by Catlofe

The following story is excerpted from You Will Never Be Forgotten: Stories by Mary South. Published by FSG ORIGINALS, Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright © 2020 by Mary South. All rights reserved. 

Frequently Asked Questions About Your Craniotomy

If you’re reading this page, chances are you’ve recently heard that you need to have a craniotomy. Try not to worry. Although, yes, this is brain surgery, you’re more likely to die from the underlying condition itself, such as a malignant tumor or subdural hematoma. Think of it this way: insomuch as being alive is safe, which it is not, having a craniotomy is safe. We fill our days with doing laundry, replacing our brake pads at the auto shop, or making a teeth-cleaning appointment with the dentist, in the expectation that everything will be fine. But it won’t. There will be a day that kills you or someone you love. Such a perspective is actually quite comforting. Taken in that light, a craniotomy can be a relaxing experience, rather than one of abject terror.

What Happens During a Craniotomy?

 Nearly all operations begin with the creation of a bone flap so the doctor has an opening into your brain. This opening will be sealed shut at the end with wire or titanium plates and screws. Beneath the bone are the three meninges, connective membranes also known as the mothers: the dura mater (hard mother), arachnoid mater (spidery mother), and pia mater (soft mother). After we’re past that triple embrace—like the Moirai crones of myth that spin, measure, and cut the thread of life—we’re at the precious substance of thought. The blush of living brain has been described as resembling the inside of a conch shell or a crumbling marble quarry. To me, it’s like the revelation of brine and meat after shucking an oyster. Beyond that, what happens during a craniotomy depends on the type of surgery. A translabyrinthine craniotomy, for example, involves cutting away the whole of the mastoid bone and some of the tunnels of your inner ear.

Is It True I Will Have to Be Awake During My Craniotomy?

 Some craniotomies require you to be conscious. When a tumor makes itself comfortable with a good book and a blanket in front of the fire of your eloquent cortex, which controls language or motor functions, we give you prompts indistinguishable from online banking security questions. Certain surgeons fancy themselves as early explorers, sketching out crude cartographies of the thunderous Badlands, the twists of the Amazon, the jagged coasts of Jutland brainscapes. I like to think of the organ as an ancient manor or primordial motel and myself a plumber, electrician, or stonemason reading a blueprint of where to find the stairways, hidden chambers, fuse boxes, boiler, septic tank. It’s a Versailles of the id and ego with a fleshy, well-manicured hedge maze.

Won’t I Be in Pain If I’m Awake During My Craniotomy?

You will be awake for a short interval during the craniotomy. Also, there are no pain receptors in the brain. What you might undergo are moments of aphasia or synesthesia, like Kandinsky hearing his paint box hiss or Schubert visualizing E minor as “a maiden robed in white with a rose-red bow on her chest” when he heard chords struck in that key. The hallucinations aren’t as enchanting. You think you have it bad enough getting brain surgery, then suddenly the OR is covered in roaches. A woman once met her long-lost twin. She didn’t have a long-lost twin. There was also the estate lawyer who decided that his entire surgical team was trying to kill him and wouldn’t stop screaming, “You’ll never make me talk!” Reports of out-of-body experiences aren’t uncommon. I’ve heard it feels as though you are watching your own handwriting uncoiling from someone else’s pen.

What Will My Brain Be Like After My Craniotomy?

It will go on with its braining, provided we got all the cancer or your growth was benign. If you have a tumor that has seeded itself throughout your cerebrum like an aspen grove, however, or been diagnosed with a glioblastoma multiforme, you will have a different kind of recovery. 

In such circumstances, your craniotomy will be followed by radiation. We might even implant some wafers in your head and light you up like a plug-in bust of Christ. Patients tend to squeeze out at most another year after this; vigorous or younger individuals can last a smidge longer. What occurs next is this: fatigue, mood swings, muscle weakness, confusion as to the purpose of a toaster. Family and friends drop by to tell you that you’re an “inspiration” or to utter phrases about “the indomitable human spirit.” There’s the wearing of wristbands and ribbons and the guilt donation of a dollar to the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society or other cancer research organizations at the grocery store or pharmacy. Positive social media updates about your progress or how the tumor “may have killed a couple of brain cells but can’t kill your sense of humor” will proliferate. Chemo makes you lose weight. Steroids make you gain weight. You spend hours on internet medical forums, lament the hours spent on internet medical forums, then spend more hours on internet medical forums. You vow to quit the internet altogether and immediately spend more hours on internet medical forums.

Later: constant nausea isn’t relieved by medication because it’s caused by cranial swelling. Thrush invades your esophageal tract like you’re a neglected fourth-grade science project. Incontinence, memory loss, the inability to wield utensils. Epiphanic moments and inexplicably beautiful solitary hours are devoured by rage. The joy of sunlight, the decency in rain; the hatred of sunlight, the disgust at rain. Your long-suffering, Florence Nightingale spouse grows distant. Neighbors avoid your house in fear they will have to engage in small talk with you or your family. There’s discussion of Kübler-Ross’s Stages of Grief and where you might be—when in doubt, choose “Bargaining.” Manically, you sort through storage boxes in your attic or basement and, also manically, sort through memories. Diets, tonics, acupuncture sessions, and other alternative holistic methods are tried. You ingest so much flaxseed, but flaxseed can’t cure everything.

Much later: Pain pills are increased to straight-up morphine to, finally, liquid morphine that’s absorbed inside the cheek because you’re too tired to sit up or even swallow. Hospice workers visit who seem like they’ve been sent straight from the choirs of seraphim; hospice workers visit who you want to punch in the face because they talk about “wanting to give back” or “observing the whole range of the human condition.” Your spouse or mother or child caretaker is overwhelmed by a crying jag at the sight of a newly delivered commode chair. Your spouse or mother or child caretaker gives you a haircut and you feel fully afraid and not just numbly afraid as you watch your thin hair on the floor get swept away. Your spouse or mother or child caretaker, if artistically inclined, draws your likeness while you nap. This likeness won’t be completed and is left, parchment edges curling, with only one wide turtle eye. Plan on being brought outside for a last trip to see the migration of geese. A dry fever calms you and shuts down all your bodily systems. You breathe harder and harder until you stop.

A few families have even claimed that reckoning with a fatal diagnosis strengthened their bond. I’m here to tell you that dealing with the brain and its illnesses is comparatively simple. It merely requires a good mechanic. What’s trickier to work with is the mind. There are symptoms that cannot necessarily be mitigated with hospice care or a prescription, such as when your spouse informs you that, even though you are a brain surgeon, he is too depressed to leave the house and pick up the boys at school or walk the dog. Perhaps you’re not as understanding as you should be, seeing as marriage to a female brain surgeon is like winning the devotion of a unicorn. Instead of him telling you that he won’t be able to attend the parent-teacher conference, you should be telling him that you won’t be able to attend the parent-teacher conference. You should not be the one to clean up golden retriever feces off the kitchen floor.

 What Are the Complications That Can Occur from a Craniotomy?

Ability to understand language but not to speak. Ability to speak but not understand language. You might become the relative who throws the turkey at holiday dinners. At least it’s not as bad as trephination. Doctors in the Dark Ages used to create burr holes to relieve pressure or remove mental illness, meaning you’d have a permanent open wound in your head, but when they were done, they let patients keep the round piece of bone. Men and women wore the bone around their necks as a charm to ward off evil spirits. I bet it also came in useful for scaring the hell out of one’s nephews.

The worst complication I know of is when an ENT stuck a probe up a patient’s nose and punctured the blood-brain barrier because it was unusually low. Each time the patient took a breath, oxygen siphoned into his cranium and couldn’t escape until he herniated his brain into the vertebral canal. There lurk beastlier medical boogeymen, such as super-gonorrhea or the strain of MRSA resistant to known antibiotics. Eventually, you may not be able to get a rhinoplasty for fear of dying from a staph infection.

If that was blunt, that is because I have been dulled. Today, I had an emergency surgery on a senator for an arteriovenous malformation (a congenital tangle of blood vessels—a Gordian knot of gray matter) who could shut us down based on his demands for Medicare cuts, then got dragged to the emergency room for a thoracic burst fracture, and meanwhile I’m buzzed nonstop with requests for consults. I’m also forced to fetch my own fresh frozen plasma. On top of it all, I drew the short straw to write this FAQ page for our website because, our director said, we want it to have that personal touch.  Now that I am single, I’m also the sole guardian at home (or not at home) responsible for getting a couple of adolescent boys who are both flunking math to stop watching porn or playing video games and do their homework. My apologies if my bedside manner comes across more Groucho Marx than Mother Teresa.

Why Should I Choose St. Teresa of Ávila Hospital for My Craniotomy?

The Department of Neurological Surgery at St. Teresa’s has been recognized for decades as one of the foremost specialty centers that focuses on the brain and spinal cord. Surgeons from all over the globe come to learn about the latest minimally invasive—and the latest maximally invasive—techniques. It’s deliberate that Saint Teresa of Ávila happens to be the patron saint for headache sufferers. Tales from hagiographies describe her mystical trances wherein she would feel herself be stabbed through the heart and out her intestines with the fiery golden lance of God, causing excruciating spiritual torment. Hospital halls are built for suffering. Teresa’s mantra was, “Lord, let me suffer or let me die.”

Can You Tell Me About Your Surgical Team?

Though I wouldn’t necessarily call us a team, I did fill in as pitcher so the hospital could participate in league softball playoffs. Dr. Jay Katz couldn’t make it because he had a Whipple. Jay is a terror both on and off the mound. He can remove half a patient’s pancreas without having to pee. I’d have to rig myself up with a catheter. Dr. Amy Benson is our go-to skull-base surgeon. She recently returned from maternity leave. Now the only thing we hear about is the coltish softness of fontanels, the magical myelination moment of development when her baby recognized—I mean really recognized—her face. Maybe I’m just jealous she has a child who recognizes her face. Dr. Chen, our primary pediatric specialist, decided to retrain from dermatology after his son died of an astrocytoma. I’m very sorry Dr. Chen’s son died of an astrocytoma, and I’m sorry that we’re compared to the example of heartbroken-but-nonetheless-resilient goodness set by Dr. Chen. Then there is Dr. Steve Stevens, who has a decent name for a nemesis; he is the director of neurosurgical operating rooms at St. Teresa of Ávila and once left a sponge behind in a patient’s brain. Do not permit a man with essentially the same first and last name to operate on your spine, his forte, the most lucrative specialization in our field.

As for me, I have a totaled Lexus, the academically indifferent sons, an acute condition of plantar fasciitis, a touch of alcoholism, and the no-longer-toilet-trained golden retriever. But you don’t really want to know this, do you? It’s like when you were a kid and you ran into your teacher parting the mist on some veggies in the grocery store and it dawned on you, “Wow, Mr. Wilson must have to move through linear time.”

You’re Kind of Angry, and That’s Not Very Professional. Is Everything Okay?

I feel betrayed by the brain. The brain is more or less the same in everyone; there is the Broca’s area, that cul-de-sac of speech in the arcuate fasciculus, and there is the hippocampus, that seahorse of memory, nestled in the temporal lobe. But when you think of the color red, do you picture the insistent primal red of an emergency vehicle or the deep burgundy of an aged wine? If I asked you to visualize a chair, would you picture an ornately carved dining chair or a plush recliner? Similarly, I thought my husband was predictable; I knew which entrée he would order at restaurants, which jokes would elicit a laugh. Then I found my husband in the garage after his suicide by gunshot to the head, and our relationship no longer made sense. I assumed I had known the locations and boundaries of things, where he tended to take off his shoes, the weekend afternoons he liked to be left alone. The older brother he used to idolize had overdosed. My husband was sad, and after a while I became exasperated with him, because I assumed that I understood where the edges of that sadness were. Now I wonder: when I am resecting a brain to prevent seizures, for example, what am I even attempting to fix?

Have You Ever Thought About Not Being a Neurosurgeon?

It’s absurd that I apprenticed and studied for my entire youth to help others live longer so that they can continue to melt the Polar ice caps while enjoying party subs. Still, I am rather fond of my rongeurs, my retractors. After a while, everything becomes routine. My favorite part is when we’re offered up sheep corpses to test prototype drill bits.

Unless you’re Saint Teresa and have taken holy orders, you feel the despair of the clinician, particularly when working with children. Suturing peach fuzz or reopening a bone flap to drain the cerebrospinal sap of a girl with brain swelling leaves a bittersweet existential aftertaste. I sobbed in a supply closet, the first real, gulping sob since I was an intern, after I accidentally nicked the sinus of a toddler with epilepsy and saw the blood drenching my scrubs down to my shoe covers. “I’m trapped,” I remember muttering, and not merely because I was huddling in a locked supply closet. There’s a dissociation from yourself, similar to what patients report feeling upon that first tug of anesthesia. When I was removing a pituitary recently, I had the thought, what if I abandoned my sons and simply worked at the food court in an airport?

 How Are You Going to Move on from Your Life?

After I took out that pituitary, I found myself driving to the mall. Both of my sons had after-school vandalism and weren’t going to be home until late. Escalators that were past the point of caring about anything, a feeling I identified with, stitched me up several floors in a department store until I arrived in the blissful sauna of fabrics that was the section for evening gowns. An emerald-green dress covered in sequins with a plunging neckline was the first to flash to my brittle attention, and I looped it over an arm raw from surgical soap. In the changing room, as I was determining, “My boobs probably cannot handle this,” a female voice, perfectly pitched in helpfulness, had to inquire, “How are you doing in there?” When I opened the door, she fluttered into an excited clap and said, “It looks so great on you! Really brings out the color of your eyes.” I told her my eyes are brown. “Of course,” she recovered immediately, “but I can see ocher, almost amber flecks in them when you’re wearing that dress.” Did I want her to gather up some others that I might like better? She resembled my mother, who had raised me by herself and been so proud of my reliable profession and my reliable husband, who had worked odd jobs to support us — she had been a waitress and a secretary and a stockist of blue jeans — but forty years younger, reincarnated and karmically forced to work retail for eternity. Though maybe that was my dumb imagination too sentimental from bereavement.

The twenty-something reincarnation of my mother brought me a strapless golden dress of stiff satin that curved like a bell but with a slice cut out of it at the front, as if my legs were the clapper on display. “Absolutely not,” I said. She brought me a dress that was layers of frothy raspberry tulle. “I’m the human embodiment of a smoothie.” She brought me a duchesse-silk bustier dress that was hand- beaded with pearls and lacy corsages that looked like crumpled baby fists. “They don’t look like the hands of ghost babies to you?” She brought me a classic black sheath dress with a slinky train that shimmered royal neon blue, so it felt as though I were nearly constantly tripping on an electric eel. “Is this for a special occasion?” she asked. Such information might give her a clearer idea of the best ensemble for my needs. “It’s for the Medulloblastoma Ball,” I replied. “Is that a new start-up?” A variety of brain tumor, I explained. There was no Medulloblastoma Ball; I had invented it on the spot, and the fake event conjured pictures of globular brain tumors in formal wear awkwardly holding each other at the waists during a slow dance in a junior high gymnasium.

“I hope you don’t personally know anyone affected,” my retail mom said, with that concerned-from-a-mountaintop look surgeons use when they’re giving bad news but they don’t want to hug. “My husband died from a medulloblastoma,” I lied, and she came down the mountain in what appeared to be genuine sympathy. She must have realized she was going to have to hug. “My intuition homed in on a sad aura around you,” she whispered into my hair while hugging me. “I am sad,” I agreed and became preoccupied with the thought that she might spot errant gristle nestled in my bun. Despite the most herculean of hygienic efforts, it’s funny where you’ll find tissue—your hair, the corner of your lips, in your bra. “When did you last make the space for self-care?” she pressed on. “I can’t mourn my dead husband with pedicures or spa treatments,” I protested. No, no, that’s not what she meant, but she could let me in on her secret if I was interested. Her secret, she continued without waiting to find out if I was interested, was to take one ordinary action—pouring a glass of water, or peeling an orange—and slow it down, slow it way down until it becomes almost unbearably beautiful, then recite to herself, “I am alive.” It’s a trick of your nervous system that speeds along the process of allowing psychic wounds to heal. In response I said something like, “I guess I am going to buy the sparkly green dress that brings out all the not-green in my eyes for the totally legitimate brain cancer dance.”

Did You Take the Advice of the Department Store Reincarnation of Your Mother?

I wore that emerald gown out of the store, and I was wearing it when I bought a case of cheap sauvignon blanc, setting the alcohol on top of my balled-up scrubs in the passenger seat, and when I got home, I wore the emerald gown as I uncorked a bottle and slowly, ever so slowly, poured the liquid into a glass and took a sip. Conclusion: I felt the same amount of boring PTSD. Operating in the emerald gown would be so glamorous, I mused, provided I had matching hairnet and face mask accessories also studded with emeralds. Wouldn’t it be fun to cut into a brain, adorn it with gems, and then cover that diadem back up with the patient’s skull? A surgeon could remove a tumor but replace it with a sapphire or ruby. The emerald gown and I let the golden retriever out to take a shit in the middle of the driveway, then the golden retriever, the gown, and I lay in bed, where I drank the rest of the opened wine. Since my husband killed himself, the golden retriever sleeps on his side while the dog bed on the floor remains empty and disgusting. That dog bed has probably been disgusting for a while, but only now that the dog no longer uses it do I find the dog bed beyond repulsive.

My sons returned and yelled for me. “I’m in the bedroom,” I yelled back at them, and they located me in the bedroom. “What do you think of my new dress?” I asked. They were standing extremely still, too still for teenage boys, which meant they were either afraid that they would be told to do something or afraid of something I would do. “I hate it,” the elder son unambiguously passed judgment. “Yeah, it’s ugly,” the younger confirmed. “You’re right. It is hideous,” I said, rolling the depleted wine bottle against my leg and listening to the sequins ting. “What should we do with it?” “Run over it with the lawn mower,” Elder proposed. “Throw it in the pool!” exclaimed Younger. “To the pool!” I decreed, stripping off the dress, at which they made gagging sounds and averted their gazes, then I slowly, ever so slowly, just to mess with them, donned a robe also slept on by the dog. That time I did feel an increase in tranquility, so my retail mother’s advice did work. “Goodbye, you worthless overpriced knockoff dress I spent money on for no reason!” I shrieked as I hurled the dress into the pool. The dress pirouetted elegantly in the jets like a jellyfish or a severed mermaid tail. Water was the proper medium for dresses, I decided. Celebrities at the Met Gala should promenade down the red carpet and into an enormous fish tank. “Toss whatever you want into the pool,” I told my sons. Were there exceptions, rules, items that if lost to the depths would later make me mad? “Do your worst,” I said, then added, “as long as it won’t electrocute us.”

What Else Did Your Family Throw in the Pool?

A nine-iron, a leftover jar of marinara sauce, medical textbooks, my son’s calculus textbook, which I remembered he is failing, my other son’s history textbook, which he also is probably failing, my dead husband’s button-down shirts, a couple of pork chops. Our filter buckets are often clogged with snakes, frogs, and tiny lizards—a chlorinated witch’s cauldron—so a pork chop, I reckoned, with its plush padding of fat, could make a welcome life raft for some desperate gecko. In went a hammer, a basketball, and a single leather glove, as though we had challenged the pool to a duel. A Nativity set was sacrificed, and drowned, too, were childhood action figures, those superheroes and supersoldiers, intriguing me as to what they might bring as gifts to round out the frankincense and myrrh. Additional flotation devices for the geckos in the form of couch cushions were hurled, and under them I made a note to check for untold quarter, booger, and, most important, benzodiazepine treasures. The gross dog bed was chucked, so for good measure I pushed in the dog. We laughed at him as he paddled around the obstacle course of our crap in that terribly inconvenienced yet gentlemanly manner of swimming dogs. When the boys carried out the framed photo of the four of us from the foyer with their father’s arms around each of them, I said, “Okay, stop now, that’s enough.”

Is There a Piece of Hope You Can Impart to Readers of These Frequently Asked Questions, Something You’ve Learned from Staring down the Naked Occipital Lobe or Losing a Patient to a Random Basilar Aneurysm or Hearing the Nurses and Residents Change Shifts for the Night, the Various Rhythms of the Hospital, or the Suicide of Your Husband, or Trying to Reach Your Sons by Ruining Your Belongings in the Pool?

Read these answers once again, but very slowly. Recite to yourself, “I am alive.”

**

Mary South’s debut collection of short stories, You Will Never Be Forgotten, was published in March by FSG Originals. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, American Short Fiction, Conjunctions, Guernica, BOMB, The White Review, and NOON, among others. She lives in New York.

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Music by Catlofe

The following is excerpted from the novel The Distant Dead by Heather Young. Copyright © 2020 by Heather Young. On sale June 9 from William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Reprinted by permission.

The Distant Dead – Excerpt

To get to Marzen from Lovelock, you took Interstate 80 thirteen miles east to the Lovelock-Unionville Road. Then you drove south through three miles of sage and sand, climbed into the foothills of the Humboldt Range, and took a nameless dirt road that forked to the right halfway up Limerick Canyon. This road rose through more hills furred with sagebrush until it ended in a small, square valley where a few dozen buildings huddled together. Only when you were upon them would you see that they sketched a town: a smattering of houses and trailers, a general store and a bar, a small school, a fire station, and a church the size and shape of three shipping containers welded together with MARZEN BAPTIST painted in red letters on one side. 

Two hundred and seven people lived there. Eighty-four men, seventy-six women, and forty-seven children. Most of the men, and some of the women, worked at the open pit silver mine farther up in the hills. Their fathers had been miners, too, and their grandfathers, but they knew the ore would be gone long before their children could punch the clock. They didn’t talk about this, though. In Marzen, you took your problems one day at a time.

The town had no police force – its citizens managed the occasional drunken fight just fine on their own — so the fire station was where you had to go if you wanted to report a dead body. Jake Sanchez was the volunteer on duty the morning of March 14, which for him meant watching The Price is Right on the black and white television with his feet on the desk. He didn’t notice the boy in the doorway until the boy said, “Jake?”

Jake put his booted feet on the floor and turned the swivel chair to face him. He knew him, of course. His name was Absalom, though no one called him that, not even his mother. One night, after last call at the bar she ran, she’d told Jake she picked it because she sang in the Baptist church’s small choir and loved the anthem “When David Heard.” O Absalom, my son, my son, it went. Would God I had died for thee! Her own son had no father to weep for him, so she’d decided to name him after King David’s favorite son, whose father beat his breast upon the walls of Jerusalem when he heard Absalom had fallen in battle. Of course she’d known her boy couldn’t really be Absalom, not in a town like Marzen, so she called him Sal. She’d died nine months ago, and sometimes Jake wondered if he was the only one left, other than Sal and the uncles he’d been sent to live with, who knew her son’s secret, unspoken name. 

“What are you doing here, Sal? Did you miss the bus?” When Marzen kids finished fifth grade the Pershing County school district sent a bus to take them to Lovelock for middle school. Sal had started sixth grade in the fall. Jake looked at his watch. It was just after seven-thirty; the bus had left fifteen minutes ago. 

Sal didn’t answer right away, and Jake peered at him more closely. He hadn’t liked it when Sal was sent to live with his uncles. Gideon and Ezra Prentiss lived three miles outside town on land that had belonged to their family since the Gold Rush. They were pariahs of long standing, thanks to family history, a reputation for violence, and rumored criminal enterprises that, depending on who was talking and how imaginative they were, included cattle theft, meth cooking, drug running, and money laundering for the Russian mafia. Since Sal had moved to the Prentiss place he’d grown thinner and he always looked tired, but this morning he looked even worse than usual. He was pale beneath the tawny skin that was the only clue to his father’s identity and his shaggy dark bangs flopped into eyes that were sunken with exhaustion. 

“I found a dead person,” he said.

Jake rocked forward. “What?”

Sal’s shoulders twitched, as though he thought Jake was going to grab them. “I found a dead body. Up the hill a ways.”

“Holy shit.” Jake stopped and got himself in hand. He was wearing the uniform of the Marzen Volunteer Fire Department, and despite the game shows he took that responsibility seriously. He turned off the television. “Is it a skeleton?” No one in Marzen was missing that he knew of, and every once in a while somebody turned up the bones of a miner or a settler who’d taken a wrong turn on the way to California. 

Sal hesitated. “No.” 

“Do you know who it is?”

The boy’s dark eyes slid sideways, to the station’s refrigerator. There was a sign taped to the door that warned of terrible consequences if food was left in there too long, or if anybody took food that wasn’t theirs. “I think it might be my math teacher.” 

“Your math teacher?” 

“There’s a car. I think it’s his.”

Jake didn’t know what to do. He looked around the small station for help, but of course there was none. Leon Petrelli wouldn’t relieve him until two. Maybe he should treat this as a medical call, he thought. Marzen was small enough that its fire department volunteers doubled as paramedics, and Jake was even more proud of his EMT license than he was of his fire department uniform. He could take the ambulance up there, see what Sal had found. He wiped his palms on his pants. “Okay, why don’t you show me.”

They drove up the dirt road that led from the town to the Prentiss place. Jake figured Sal had found the body on his way to the school bus, and sure enough, about a mile along they came upon an old brown Corolla parked just off the road, and Sal told him to stop. Jake walked over to the car. He knew better than to touch it, but he looked inside. It was empty.

He walked back to where Sal waited beside the ambulance. All around them the foothills of the Humboldt Range rose in bristly mounds, treeless and dry. To the right the land sloped up toward a rocky cliff that threw man and boy into shadow.  The wind pushed Sal’s Denver Broncos sweatshirt against his thin chest. It was cold in this high desert country in March; the tops of the mountains were still white with snow.

Sal turned and led Jake up the slope. They climbed in silence, through sagebrush that snatched at their pants legs. When they reached the top the ground dropped into a seasonal wash that ran along the base of the bluff. A cluster of acacia trees stood there, their canopies lifted to the sky like open palms. They were the only trees Jake had seen since they left Marzen, and the dense little grove spoke of shelter, of safety. Of a place to hide.

Sal stopped. The wind whipped in the sagebrush and the gray-green leaves of the acacias, and moaned as it curled among the hills. There was a smell, too, faint but insistent. Tangy, ripe, burnt. Far above, two chicken hawks floated in lazy circles, their wings tipping in, then out, then in again.

Jake looked at the boy. His eyes were closed, his shoulders drawn in tight.

“Is it down there?”

Sal nodded without opening his eyes.

“Wait here.” Jake pressed one hand against his belly, tucked in his shirt, and walked into the wash. 

When he reached the grove of trees, he didn’t see the math teacher right away. He saw the careful ring of stones that made the fire pit, and the ashes piled in the center. Around it lay trees that had grown and died and fallen, their corpses blackened in the long, quiet decay of desert things. At first, Jake took the math teacher’s body for one of these. Only when he saw the empty vodka bottle and the children’s jump rope did he see what was left of the man. Then Jake, too, closed his eyes.

* * *

Heather Young is the author of two novels, the award-winning and Edgar-nominated The Lost Girls and The Distant Dead. She holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars, a Fellowship from the Sewanee Writers’ Workshop, and is an alumnus of the Squaw Valley Writers Workshop and the Tin House Writers Workshop. She lives in Mill Valley, California, where she writes, bikes, hikes, and reads books by other people that she wishes she’d written.

**

Music by Catlofe

The following is excerpted from All the Things We Never Knew by Liara Tamani. Copyright © 2020 by Liara Tamani. Reprinted with permission of HarperCollins Children’s Books.

All the Things We Never Knew – excerpt

Carli

Rex is leading me across his backyard by the hand. When the lawn ends and the forest begins, he doesn’t pause. But it’s dark. And who knows what’s in there. 

I stop. “Umm, where are we going?” I ask and fold my arms across my chest like it’s cold, even though it’s pretty warm. 

“Come on. You’ll see. Trust me.”

I don’t move. I feel like I’m the star of a scary movie and the audience is screaming, Girl, don’t do it. 

“I come back here all the time. You’ll love it,” he promises. 

The audience is still screaming, Don’t listen to him, girl. Not unless you want to die! And to their point, what good can come out of walking into a dark forest at night?

Rex reaches into his backpack, takes out a big flashlight, and shines it into the woods. “See, just trees.” He lights the ground. “And dead leaves and shrubs and fungus. No boogeyman.”

“What about snakes and raccoons and whatever else lives in there?”

“We’ll be fine,” Rex says, and shines the light at our feet. 

In protest, I take a deep breath and let it out slow and loud. But when he grabs my hand, I start walking again.  

After a few minutes, we reach a clearing with a wooden picnic table. “You brought this out here?” I ask. 

“Yeah, it used to be in the backyard at my old house,” he says, and takes out a long, red lighter, like Daddy uses to light the barbeque pit. He hands me the flashlight and lights two tin citronella candles sitting on the benches, one on each side of the table. Then he takes a blanket out of his backpack and arranges it on top of the picnic table. 

“This is actually pretty cool,” I say, admiring the setup. 

“You better listen to your boy,” Rex says, smiling, and climbs up on the table. 

I climb up, too. 

And now we’re lying on top of the table with our pinkie fingers linked, looking up at the crowns of tall pines reaching for a patch of star-sprinkled sky. 

**

Rex

This has always been my secret spot. Even at my old house, when there was just a tiny backyard with two cedar elm trees. This table, the trees, the stars, this stillness—they’ve always been there for me. And now Carli is here, and it’s like I’ve introduced her to my best friends and they’re vibin’. And it’s making me feel closer to her than I’ve ever felt. Like even if we were butt-naked having sex, I doubt I’d feel closer. 

“Crazy that there are more trees on Earth than stars in the Milky Way, isn’t it?” Carli says, her voice soft beside me. 

I was already looking up at the stars, but I look closer. At all the bright spots peeking out from the darkness. At the giant pines stretching toward them. “Are there really?” I ask, wondering why I’ve never come across that fact.

“Yeah, there’s something like three trillion trees on the planet. But scientists estimate there are somewhere between one hundred and four hundred billion stars in the galaxy.”

“Word? I never would’ve guessed that. Especially since fifteen billion trees are chopped down every year. Did you know that almost fifty percent of the trees on the planet have either been cut down or died some kind of way since humans have been around?” I ask, offering up my own facts. 

“Really? I knew all the Amazon boxes had to come from somewhere, but fifteen billion? Dang, at this rate, our stars are going to start catching up to our trees.”

“I know, right?” I say, feeling my insides grin because I’m sitting in my favorite place talking to my favorite person about one of my favorite things. I didn’t even think Carli was into trees like that. She acted like she barely cared about the magnolia dying outside of her dad’s house. “Who knew you were into trees?”

“I’m not,” she says, bursting my little bubble. 

“So, you’re into stars then?”

“Well, kinda. But I’m more into random facts. I like collecting ones I find interesting and putting them up on my walls.”

“Yeah, I saw all the stuff in your room. It’s dope. You must not let Cole take pictures in there because I’ve never seen your walls on his feed.” 

“Cole and his Instagram,” she says, like she’s rolling her eyes. “Yeah, no pictures of my walls allowed.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. I guess I’m afraid of them losing their magic.”

“Magic?”

“Yeah, I’ve always found magic in small, random things . . . in thinking about them . . . in piecing them together . . . in seeing what they may have to say about big, important things.”

“What do they say?”

“A lot. But nothing, really. I don’t know. I mean, my walls still have a lot to tell me. And I can’t have them out there speaking to everyone else before they even let me know what’s up,” she says, and laughs a little. 

I love talking to Carli like this. It’s like I’m inside her mind, hearing how it works. “So what are you waiting on them to tell you?” I ask. 

“Everything,” she says. 

“Everything like what?” I ask, remembering her necklace. It looked magical. I sit up on my elbow and reach for it. Rub my thumb along the curved left edge, where the raised crescent moon sits cradling a sun in the form of a cut-out circle. From the circle I slide my thumb along the engraved rays that reach toward tiny raised stars on the other side. It’s like she has the whole universe dangling from her neck. 

“I don’t know. Just everything.”

“Everything is a lot.”

“I know.”

It feels like she’s kicked me out of her mind. I want back in, but I don’t know which words will get me there. So I lie back down. Don’t say anything. 

And neither does she.

For a long minute. 

Then she shifts around on the table. “I can’t see you,” she whispers. Her words—after our long, dark silence—feel like a spark. 

I roll on my side to face her like she’s facing me. “I can’t see you, either,” I say into the blackness. There’s only a sliver of a moon tonight. And I’m not sure when, but our candles went out.

“But I’m here,” she responds.

It’s weird. In the darkness, it’s almost like we don’t have bodies. Like we’re spirits in the night. “You know I come out here to feel closer to my mom,” I say, imagining Mom’s spirit floating around us through the trees. 

“I can see that. Out here, it’s like we’re closer to God or the Universe or whatever you want to call the mystery of all there is. And I guess your mom is a part of all that now.” 

“Yeah, I guess she is,” I say, thinking about Mom’s soul leaving the Earth, traveling out of our solar system, out of our galaxy, and on and on through the stars forever. 

Carli puts the palm of her hand against my chest.

“My father blames me for her death, you know,” I say, surprised at how easy the words glide out of my mouth. “I mean, he’s never said it, but he’s pretty much ignored me my whole life. And I always knew why. Then he went off and sold our old house. The house my mom lived in, my biggest connection to her, without even telling me first.” 

“Oh my gosh. That’s awful. I’m so sorry,” she says. 

“It’s okay. We’re cool now.” I try to reassure her. “Actually, you know that video your dad made?” 

“Yeah.”

“Well, I sent it to my father, and afterward he came to my game. Like, for the first time in my life. And he’s been to a couple more. And we’ve been talking more. And he’s been out of his room more. He used to stay in there all the time when he was home. I rarely saw him. But now we’ve even chilled on the sofa a few times. Oh, I forgot to tell you. We want to hire your mom to help us make the house more of a home.” 

“Wait . . . wait,” Carli says. “You mean your father basically ignored you your whole life and sold your mom’s old house, but now, just like that, everything is cool?”

In the darkness, her words almost feel like my own. The ones I’ve been shoving back down inside myself every time they try to rise up. But out here, I can’t push them around. “No. I mean, it’s surface cool, but that’s it. We haven’t really talked or gotten deep about anything, yet. And to be honest, I’m kind of afraid to. Afraid of everything that might come up. . . .

**

Liara Tamani lives in Houston, Texas. She holds an MFA in writing from Vermont College. She is the author of the acclaimed Calling My Name, which was a 2018 PEN America Literary Award Finalist and a 2018 SCBWI Golden Kite Finalist, and All the Things We Never Knew. 

**

Music by CatLofe

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.

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Music by Catlofe