Whoever it was that designed the northeastern corner of Los Verdes had clearly had better things to do. The suburbs in particular, or what passes for suburbs here in this barren and mountainous country, where the sun hums a deep bass from dawn to dusk and the wind only ever calls to let you know it won’t be there for lunch- The suburbs in particular had been neglected. The houses are ramshackle constructions dug stubbornly into the sides of the jagged mountains; Lopsided, irrational things whose peeling paint and crumbling roofs at least reassure that only the original constructors had been foolish enough as to ply their trade in this indomitable environment. 

Most of these houses too, like the inner city of Los Verdes (or what passes for the inner city here in this barren and-) are long since abandoned to the heat and the wildlife. What few homes are still occupied either provide refuge to long time loners, voluntary and otherwise, or offer some of the nations lowest rent for some of the nations most down on their luck. Ede falls somewhere in the middle of these two groups. She lives alone on the outside knuckle of the Los Verdes mountains. There she goes now, tottering around her kitchen, mumbling to herself as she often does these days and misremembering where it is she put the kettle. 

Ede doesn’t mind the heat in the slightest. She’s the least sweaty person you’ll ever lay your eyes on. As a kid on the track team, Ede’s times hadn’t stood out much but her inhuman ability to run a full half mile as hard as she could and finish looking as though she hadn’t been out for more than a pleasant morning stroll earned her a small bit of acclaim.

Her incredibly resilient sweat glands serve her well here in this forgotten country. Look at her, spritely as ever, in body at least, on her hands and knees rummaging through the under sink area. She hasn’t a clue where the kettle might be and the stove, where you and I can see it sitting, almost anxiously sitting, is the absolute last place she’ll look. It may be a few minutes yet- She still has to check the downstairs bathroom and behind each of the kitchen curtains at the very least- In that case, I’d best tell you about the Los Verdes cats.

Los Verdes is famous for two things- It’s inhumane design, and a highly improbable number of cats prowling the increasingly empty streets. The only things certain about the cats of Los Verdes are firstly: They can’t possibly be native to the area and secondly: Yet, here they are. They walk their mysterious paths on the burning desert ground around twisting hill roads, scurrying from one spare shaded spot to another, stopping and wetting their paws with coarse tongues before carrying on again. The abandoned houses of the suburbs of Los Verdes serve as mass rescue shelters for these forgotten felines and something of the ponderous heat, the missing humans, the Los Verdes magnetic field, cajoles these creatures into forgoing their territorial tendencies. They live in these houses in relative harmony, eagerly sinking their claws into whatever poor rodent looks to cool their paws on the uniformly tiled kitchen floors of the Los Verdes northeastern suburbs.

And Ede is rising from that floor now. Her knees have bright red spots that will bruise later. She has eyes on the kettle and feels more angry than foolish; A trick has been played upon her but she does not know by whom. She fills the kettle and starts to heat it before walking to her back sunroom and pulling the screen door. At her feet now! In hurries one, two, three, four- But who can keep track? Tabbies and calicos, black and white, green-eyed and orange furred. Cats fling themselves past Ede’s legs and into her kitchen, where they sniff and mewl, mewl and sniff. That ones on the counter already and Ede must shoo him away from the stove, and look at the girl, unforgettable mismatched eyes giving an almost playful look Ede’s way before rushing away to hide in her bedroom. Two large black and white cats whose patterns offset one another (Ede suspects them to be brothers) are the best behaved, at least until the food is dished out. They sit doglike in the corner near their empty bowls and yes, they do meow but it is a polite call, an “Excuse me, waitress?”, hardly a bother at all. Ede glances around the sunroom one more time and relatively certain they have all made it in, shuts the door. She walks over to the pantry and grabs the bag of kibble from the floor, hefting it. The pellets hit the different bowls like an orchestral feeding bell- Dull metal dinks, high pitched drops from the glass bowl, triangle sounds from the good china Ede had to break out when the two brothers began hoarding the others. She sprinkles them all, places the bag back in the pantry after making sure there are no surreptitious stragglers lying in wait, and closes the door to go fetch the upstairs runaway.

They’re rescues, each of them, from the badlands of Los Verdes. Ede is something of a known quantity among the strays, offering creature comforts in exchange for freedom. She doesn’t name the cats- The idea that they don’t already have names is silly to her- So she simply speaks to them in the affirmative: Get off there, don’t touch that, you want some scratches? No proper nouns required. The cats love and respect and maybe pity Ede a little bit. She doesn’t know this any more than she knows their names.

Ede climbs her stairs with ease for a person of her age. See her room, dusted in half-gloom: Hints of light cut like lasers through the dotting of holes on the far wall. The molly is in her usual spot atop the passed over basket of Ede’s daughter's things, nestled into the neck of pink scrubs with one eye a warning yellow and the other an icy blue, looking betrayed by what Ede has yet to do. 

Ede’s bed is new to her and old to the world. Listen to Ede knock the breath out of it as she takes a seat on the mattress and strokes the cat's gray fur. You’re the only one who gets it, Ede tells her. The cat hunkers further down into her nest; It’s clear that she isn’t convinced Ede herself can actually be counted among those who get it. The yowling below them is one of the brothers cornering the Queen Persian in the entryway for a tumble in the sheets. Ede sighs and runs her hand along the sleeve of the scrubs before lifting the molly from the bundle and carrying her down the stairs, much to her verbal chagrin.

It’s a thoroughly Los Verdes day outside. The sun, dragged slowly on a string across the cloud-poor sky, floats yellow and stunning in the eleven o’clock position as Ede rises from the kitchen table to put her mug in the sink. When she’s managed to totter to the front room and begin slipping into her shoes the air outside is so hot it's frozen, like the explosion of a camera, so solidly still that if the odd car does come rolling down the switchback roads the dust it kicks up hangs there until the next comes along to displace it. At this moment you’d be hard pressed to find a thirty yard stretch without a lizard or two sunbathing on a rust colored rock in between. And as Ede’s finally leaving the house, careful to lock the door behind her, shadows are shorter than cactus stumps and rarer than water.

Ede begins her route by crossing the road to walk on the other side of the street, hugging the wall of the mountain and placing herself ahead of cars inching up rather than cars careening down. Her face has gotten all the sunburns it can get in this lifetime; now it smiles at the sweltering rays. White, inconsistent teeth glow between leathery brown cheeks. There’s a small wagon with a blanket tarp- atop this is water, food, a number of hand fashioned or cheaply bought toys. Ede pulls this behind her with determination, rattling up the hilly road. 

As she toils away, note how Ede’s face is suddenly covered by a blanket of consternation. I tell you that has nothing to do with the heat. She’s searching her mind, sifting through synapses and double checking each dendrite for missing memories. She can remember her trip to the town's general store upsetting her, but can't pin down the why. It’s very important, this why. So often, it’s the things we don’t know that hurt the most. 

What Ede can’t and won’t remember before she reaches the first house is the look on the cashiers face as she rang her up. The look was a hard one to place. It felt strange to the girl making it and Ede, though she generally pays very little attention to others when in town, felt strange to be on the receiving end. Before she could gather her courage to ask what it was that had earned her such a look, the girl was handing her her receipt and ushering her out the door with her bags of cat food piled neatly in the cart. 

It’s a good thing too that Ede just went on out of the store, a good thing that she suddenly began to worry she’d forgotten to lock the door and that one of the mischievous brothers black and white may have made a break for it, else she might have ducked back into the store to hear what the girl had to say when her coworker wandered over from restocking the non-perishables. 

That poor woman.

Who? The old one?

Yeah.

Why?

She never buys a thing but cat food, tea, and TV dinners for one.

So she knows what she likes.
You don’t get it. My mother told me. That cat food’s not for her.

Right. It’s for the cats.

You don’t get it.

What is there to get?

The cats aren’t for her. 

But now Ede has made it to the first house, a white saltbox with a catslide aimed directly off the side of the mountain. Luckily, the back half of the house had burned to nothing in the earlier part of the decade, so there was no chance any cat would fall prey to this thoughtless design. Ede wheeled her wagon into what remained of the driveway, bringing it to a stop before the steps to the front stoop. A few of the braver inhabitants rose to the paneless windows of the home to see who had come to visit. A few of the more seasoned mewled in anticipation. 

Ede took her first serving of food and walked into the house. There was the omnipresent suggestion of urine floating up from the wood. She placed the bowl in the center of what used to be the sitting room, shaking it slightly as she did so. Cats began to emerge from every corner of the house, some skittering in through the open front door behind her, others leaping down from vantage points of varying danger, others still stretching themselves into chutes and ladders as they woke from their naps before heading to the source of the commotion. Ede didn’t stop to pet any one of them yet, but headed back out to get water and the toys. 

This routine, which Ede undertook every time she thought it was Saturday, was half charity and half recruitment effort. Once she had fed, pet, and played with whatever cats would allow her, Ede would take her things and start on towards the next cat stronghold. By the time she had completed a few more rounds of this exercise (generally anywhere from three to five, though once she’d continued up the hill for a full eight stops), she’d turn around and head back home. More often than not, there would be a series of cats behind her, at least one or two of which would make it all the way back to her house where they would be introduced to the sunroom and the pleasantries of domesticated life. 

Ede had been performing this routine for about two years with varying consistency.

She only suffered through three houses today before turning her wagon around and starting the walk back home. A group of six cats walked in a strangely martial single file line on the small shoulder of the road behind her. A woman in a very large red suburban lay on her horn, scaring the cats nearly off the precipice as she blared past their caravan. You’ll notice that Ede didn’t jump an inch- In fact, her eyes hardly wavered from the heat-struck ground before her. Watch how the wagon bumps into her calves with every declining step. Keep your eyes on her feet when she gets home to take her shoes off- Blister covered and red as a burn.

Three of the six cats made it all the way back to Ede’s house with her. She parks her wagon, throws the blanket over top of the goods, and sits by the door to get barefoot while the cats look over the entry to their new home. Ede finishes taking her shoes off and reaches into her pocket. She does have a cell phone, despite what you might’ve thought. She takes a picture of the new cats and admires it for a moment. She presses a few more buttons, there’s a swooshing sound, and then she brings the phone to her ear. It rings. It rings. It rings. 

Ede puts the phone back in her pocket and stands, a bit heavier now despite the lack of footwear. She opens the door and coos the cats inside. These three- Tabbies, all of them- Approach in the peculiar, judgemental way native to cats, picking their way along the splintering porch until they feel the cool air coursing through the indoors and the act drops. They rush in across the tops of Ede’s feet. She gives a soft smile, and looks out towards the world, almost like she knows we’re watching, and then out towards the road, almost like she’s waiting for us to come home.

Otto lay with his ankles hanging off the upper mattress of his half-occupied bunk bed, eyebrows furrowed in concentration. Out his bedroom door and down the long hallway floored with coffee-stain colored carpet, bracketed on either side with leering, marginally crooked photos of the Crenpot family, his mother and father with their overbearing grins and each with a hand on one of their two children to keep them from writhing away from this eerie performance and through the silent, moonlit kitchen where crumbs hid beneath baseboards and behind the slowly growing stack of bills, past Otto’s father who had passed out crumpled over in the leather recliner he spent his full Christmas bonus on, much to the chagrin of Otto’s mother who had known she would be sleeping alone the moment her husband stepped through the front door with a cardboard bag of poison, the last contents of which were still pooling amber and powerful, a drowned fly sadly circling the glass in which they gathered.

Through the front door whose shell had been repainted so many times that the surface became textured and uneven, down the three splintered and diagonal steps from which you emerged into the Crenpot yard where things managed side by side to be barren and overgrown. The few sproutings that fought their way from the otherwise dusty and lifeless earth broke from these shatterings into viridescent weeds the height of man on another man's shoulders holding stolid sentry over the windless night. 

Into the bluish and night-struck streets where cars slept dreaming and the activity of the day seemed an alien and impossible thing. Along roads of dirt without name that transformed into asphalt streets true and baptized with light posts keeping highlighted the inexistent happenings of this midnight hour. Towards the other end of the main street, while all the while buildings leaned and morphed into one another, becoming steadily newer and larger like the growth of a cancer.

Beneath the semiotic iron-wrought gate and over the seldom-trode lawns with stalks more manicured than most hands, where even the bees and bugs were kept trimmed and proper until met with a castle of modernity whose primly dying flower beds and hastily poured stone pebble epoxy driveway belied the mass of wealth that had been sacrificed to create it. Above the second floor balcony where a short white fence overlooked unmet neighbors and finally to the third floor, where Dave lay with his hands clasped in one another atop his chest, breathing shallow breaths with the covers of his bed thrown from his body to the floor as thoughts rattled the bone thin bars of his mind. 

They met at 10, near the rotten and gutted railroad tracks that ran rusted and forgotten along the border of the town. Dave handed Otto a strudel, accepted wordlessly. The pair hopped onto an open car and surveyed the oxidized and friable earth. 

“Well”, Otto said with a mouthful of food. “Whaddya got?”

Dave pulled his legs up from where they dangled like fleshy bait, and brought his knees to his chest to pick at the scabs that formed there. “How d’you know I got anything?”

“You’re jitterin.”

“Am not.”

He was too.

“Well- You have somethin’ or not?”

Dave turned his head and spat down the length of the car. The mucus and saliva mixture landed with a satisfying plop against the metal sheeting of the interior, where it began dripping down the wall at a slugs pace. “Might.”

Otto slugged Dave in the arm. “Quit it. I gotta be home at noon.”

Dave whirled on his ass, steadying himself on the siding of the car. An impish smile crept across his face, revealing the front tooth that he had recently misplaced. The freckles on his pale skin seemed to crackle with energy. He wriggled his eyebrows, a trick he’d only just learned from his older brother. 

“I said quit ," Otto complained. 

Dave spoke so his smile preceded the words. “Finn Drury says they don’ ID up in Jussrew.” 

“Jussrew? Who cares ‘bout Jussrew? Fifteen miles gone and we don’ look seventeen if we was smushed together.”

“Says they don’ even care what you look like. They don’ pay no mind after the tickets tore.” 

Otto mulled this over in his brain, twisting the thought and the last bit of the strudel in his mouth with mirrored concentration. The shoes that hung from his toothpick legs threatened to slip off, two sizes too big that they were, and he kicked his feet forward to pull them snug. 

“Fine. Still fifteen miles gone, less you got a license tucked away.”

Dave stood and walked to the other end of the railcar. He hitched his hands on his hips and gazed out through the thin sliver of daylight that peeked through the hardly split double doors on the southern end of the cabin. Slowly, with a grin stretching across his face that he kept hidden from Otto till the last moment, he brought one hand into the air and pantomimed seizing and yanking a pull cord. He turned back to Otto, unable to hide his glee any longer, the smile suddenly spread so wide that his eyes became shaped and glittered like diamonds.

“Choo-choo.”

Otto leapt off the train car and began circling in the dirt. Every few seconds he’d glance up at where Dave still stood before, shaking his head and spitting before circling once again. Dave left his station by the doors of the car and sat back down on the side, close enough to hear his friend muttering under his breath. “...Crazy motherfucker. Loony tunes sonuvabitch. Wackjob-”

“Chicken?” Dave asked. 

The word stopped Otto cold in his tracks on the tail end of the path he drew over and over in the dirt, his back to Dave and the car. Slowly, he swiveled around in his too-big shoes. The sun hit the wild, orange hair that sprouted from his skull like a flame. His lower jaw jutted out from a face that hadn’t hardly begun to lose its baby fat while his right hand squeezed life from the air. “I know you ain’t call me chicken Dave Windhorst.”

Dave hardly pretended to notice his anger. “Depends.”

“Depends?” Otto repeated.

“You in?”

“Loony tunes sonuvabitch”, Otto breathed again. More loudly he spoke: “How the hell we going to get a railcar up and running the length to Jussrew. Last I knew you had no more experience running trains than I got.”

“Sure I do.”

“Yeah? How’s that?”

Dave leapt down from the railcar and stood in the dirt with one hand shielding his eyes from the blinding sun, facing his friend. “Frank.”

“Frank? You mean drunk ol’ Frank? He’s the brains of this outfit?” Otto sat down on the martian earth and dug his fingers through the hard ground, filling the pockets of his fingernails with warm dirt. He reached for a stone and chucked it a ways down the tracks. 

“It’s easy”, Dave continued. “Long as we get enough coal and my folks got plenty. Frank used to do it before they stopped ‘em runnin’. The engine cars set down there-” He pointed in the direction Otto had chunked the rock. “-Already facin’ south. We start early and take it slow and we’ll be there for first showing.”

Otto snorted. He held his head in his hands like a man condemned. 

“You got somethin’ better?” Dave challenged. A wind wound its way around them and whistled through the gaps of the graffitied cars. Otto shook his head slowly, resigned. 

“Good then. You spend the night and we’ll set out before anyone’s up to see where we’re goin’. C’mon”, Dave stuck a child's hand out with the equanimity of a seasoned car salesman who knows he’s just put one over on you. “I’ll show you.”

Otto followed Dave down the length of the tracks. He pulled a long strand of grass from the earth and stuck it between his teeth, chewing anxiously. The dry life of the plant calmed his nerves. Dave could no longer stop moving now that his plan had been agreed to; He kept dropping to the ground and checking the tracks as though searching for the secret that used to run the trains along them before the town had dried up like the ground beneath it. His hair was buzzed short in protest of his mothers preference for it long and he wore what had essentially become his summer uniform: Athletic shorts a size too small for him, so that his summer tan lines were almost six inches higher up the leg than they usually lay, a pair of brand-new, already scuffed white Reeboks with a splash of blue at the heel, the white quickly going eggshell in the dust of the locale, and the military tank-top that had been handed down to him from his older brother, which Dave cherished for the fact that it showed off the cuts and bruises that decorated his arms with what he felt was proper glamor. 

The pair of them made it to the engine car and Dave leapt up onto the black metal platform that was peeling with rust, turning and swinging his hands round in a great show of presentation. “Looky.”

Otto appraised the car with one eyebrow two stories above the other. “I’m lookin’, but I ain’t seein’ much.”

Dave held a hand down to help Otto up, hoisting him until the pair stood shoulder to shoulder before turning from him and yanking the door handle down, pulling it with some effort to the side and stepping into the fresh gap it offered. Otto followed closely behind, his azure eyes blinking rapidly to adjust to the lesser light of the cabin. 

The actual engine car was cramped and darker, with the only sunlight streaming in from the windows that opened like cabinets on either side of the firebox. A small metal seat unfolded from the edge of the train car just beneath a window and just above the water valve. There was scarcely further room for standing in the car, as the engine bulged into the rest of it, with a plethora of spigots polka-dotting the metal engine from floor to ceiling, two water gauges dangling from the roof like bird feeders and a pair of clocks measuring pressure and temperature each resting idly behind this whole display. Along the metal top of the car ran a low hanging line like the one Otto’s mother used to dry laundry.

Dave stepped into the car and yanked a metal lever, opening the jaws of the firebox. He pointed towards the only car still attached to the engine, a sort of metal wagon with the remnants of the coal it usually stored mostly dusted from its floors and a lone cobweb woven over the far back corner. “Coal goes there”, Dave said. “We scoop it here”. He indicated to the firebox. “Frank said… Somethin’ like a horseshoe or somethin’. And the water-” Dave let the firebox close and reached for the water gauge. 

“Otto, come here an’ let me on your shoulders.”

“Why shouldn’t I get on your shoulders?”

“Know how to check the water gauge, dumbass?”

Otto stooped over and let Dave clamber awkwardly onto his bony shoulders. He stood, pushing himself upward with one hand on the engine, and Dave leaned forward to check the float. 

“Alright. We’re good for Jussrew. Put me down.” 

Otto leaned over and shrugged Dave from his shoulders, sending him tumbling to the metal floor below. Dave got up nearly as quickly as he’d collapsed and shoved Otto, a hint of hurt in his eyes before he saw the glint in Otto’s and then the two were playing, shoving one another and making plans for the candy they would buy as they exited the railyard. 

Otto slunk out the back door of his house as the burning red of the day was turning a softer purple in the late afternoon and the closest thing their town ever got to pleasant weather descended upon them. He circled round the side of the house and kept close to the front doors of the neighbors until he was well out of sight of his own, and then he walked onto the edge of the road that downturned into the ditches on either side like a frown. A few cars drove by and the ones captained by high school kids swerved in his direction, hoping to get him to jump off into the culvert, before righting themselves back onto the road. He wore on his back a drawstring bag he’d made himself out of two T-shirts and four good shoe laces his mother had chastised him for wasting. His brow was spat with sweat. 

The luckless main street of the town hid its few patrons from the wind by way of an unbroken conglomeration of concrete whose innards were a dozen different studies in commercial failure. Otto walked past these storefronts with hardly a glance. His shoes slapped the ground with purpose and to the women having a late coffee in the diner across the street he looked something like a bird in the midst of a mating dance, chest puffed out and stalking across the ground. In his pack was a change of clothes, a slingshot, and a single dollar. 

Dave met Otto on the side of his own house. Before him on the grassy lawn lay three different shovels. “Which do ya think is best for scoopin’?”

Otto peered down at the shovels. “Right. Widest lip.”

Dave nodded and packed the other two up, replacing them in the garage. He took the chosen tool and placed it on the ground along the back of his mothers garden. 

“Didja bring a dollar?” Dave asked, wiping his hands along the front of his shorts and leaving streaks of dirt. 

Otto followed him inside to their cool, air-conditioned kitchen. “No.”

“S’alright. I got five out of my dads-”

“Hello boys”, Dave’s mother said, and the initially pleasing cool air suddenly turned icy and rigid as the pair of them swung to face Mrs. Windhorst. The older woman wore a flower patterned yellow sundress, with her brown hair in a complex and stylish bun that added nearly half a foot to her five foot seven frame. She had a pair of light blue heels on, though she’d been home all day, and held in her hand white wine that Otto watched cascade up and down the walls of the glass like the waves of a great storm. 

“Hi Mrs. Windhorst”, Otto said politely, shifting to try and hide his makeshift bag from her sight. 

“David”, she started. “Why don’t you invite Anton over to play with the two of you? I know they canceled their trip to the Rockies and Lynn says he’s been nothing but a ball of melancholy since. It would be good of you to invite him.”

“I don’ like Anton ma.”

“Speak properly when you’re in this house”, Mrs. Windhorst said sharply, and turned her head as though in warning. “And I don’t see why you shouldn’t like Anton. He’s a good tennis player, an excellent pianist, and perfectly polite.”

Otto was too petrified, as he always was in the presence of Mrs. Windhorst, to actually chuckle out loud, but he let the faintest beginnings of a smile into his eyes, which was mistake enough. Mrs.Windhorst looked right at him as she spoke:

“You could do a lot worse than Anton for company David. I often think you already have.”

“Oh ma, leave Otto alone”, Dave complained. “Look, if it really matters to you, I’ll call tampon-”

“Anton.”

“Right. I’ll call Anton tomorrow. Alright?”

“Hmph”, Mrs. Windhorst said. And she gave Otto one last disapproving look before turning and slinking through the hallway back towards her and Mr. Windhorst’s bedroom. 

“Sorry”, Dave said, flatly. 

Otto shrugged. “S’alright. Are you really gonna call him?”

Dave spoke in a furtive whisper. “No- We’ll give them the slip in the mornin’ and be gone before anyones the wiser. Maybe he and ma can have breakfast together. She’d love that.”

Otto snorted and went to throw his things into Dave’s bedroom.

The morning was still drowsy when Dave and Otto slunk from the side door of the Windhorst house. Dave towed a wagon behind him, within which they had stacked a few bags of coal from his parents cellar and a bundle of firestarter wood. Otto grabbed the shovel from the garden and threw it overtop their cargo and they hurried down the driveway, Dave scooping the morning paper from the foot of it as they went, highly conscious of the muttering of the wagon wheels against the uneven surface. 

The sun rose bloody and dripping across the horizon as they made their way to the sleeping railyard. Otto took the wagon handle from Dave and hauled it behind him as they bumped across the lumpy earth towards the engine car. They were alone in this place for nearly a mile in every direction but the stillness of the daybreak was such that they spoke to eachother in gestures and pantomimes out of fear their small voices would carry across the motionless air like distress signals to whichever parents rose to watch the sunrise. 

They arrived at the decaying car and Dave leapt onto the higher platform while Otto hustled the bags of coal from the wagon into the car. When the last bag was aboard, Otto tossed the shovel up and went to hide the wagon among the rest of the abandoned train, while Dave took out his pocket knife and split the bags to spill the chunks of energy into the coal box. Otto arrived back at the car and Dave held open the firebox as Otto took the split wood and carefully arranged it within the metal mouth. He ripped the plastic from Mr. Windhorst’s morning newspaper and crumpled it page by page, setting it beneath the teepee he’d created in the firebox as kindling. The sun was higher now, and shifting to a golden yellow, warming them as they worked. Otto took the lighter from his pocket and flicked his thumb over it, sparking a flame. He leaned into the firebox and touched the fire to the paper, leaping back preemptively as it took. The pair of them watched the heat eat the headlines until the wood caught, and after the first crack rang within the firebox, Otto took the shovel and hefted an amount of coal into the engine. Dave stepped away and peered up at the many gauges, racking his brains for what Frank had told him. He turned a spigot clockwise, and another one counter, and walked to the edge of the car to peer up at the smokestack, but there was not yet anything coming out. He went back inside the car and stared up at the water gauge, conscious of Otto’s glances as his friend continued to work the coal in a horseshoe formation within the firebox. The fire inside the engine was now roaring and powerful, the flames somehow not bursting through the hole the firebox offered as though held in place by some invisible force. Dave bit his lip and turned a number of the spigots once again before racing outside to have another look. After a moment, he came back in muttering to himself.

“You got no idea what we’re doin’ here, do you?” Otto asked, even as he shoveled another helping of coal into the hungry engine's maw. 

Dave didn’t bother answering him. He watched his friend scoop one last shovelful into the firebox, then closed the machine and kept his eyes trained on the pressure dial overhead. He walked over to the foldout seat and pushed it up against the train's side, revealing the water pump. With his eyes oscillating between the pressure dial and the water gauge overhead, Dave began pumping water into the engine, slowly at first, and then with more urgency. Otto wiped the sweat through his hair and glanced out the window at the still scene of the railyard. He turned back to his friend with his hands on his hips. “I told you”, he said. “Loony toons sonuva-”

A short, high pitched whistle emitted from somewhere above them. Otto glanced around rapidly. “What was that?” 

“Safety valve”, Dave said, easing off the water pump. The earth began to groan beneath them. Otto suddenly stumbled backwards. 

“Are we…?” Otto ran to the side window and thrust his head out, peering down at the tracks. The car had slowly begun to lurch forwards, moving so minutely that it looked more like they were coming to a stop. 

“Coal”, Dave called, and Otto ran back inside and levered open the firebox. Inside, a great red and orange inferno blazed wildly towards the sky. He grabbed his shovel and began to layer more rocks evenly across the firebox floor. The rumbling beneath them grew steadier. A slight wind began teasing the heat from the air around them. Otto did not glance up from his work, even as the sound of the tracks beneath them grew to the higher pitched and steady sound of a train underway, until Dave clamped one hand on his shoulder and turned him towards the window where outside, they could just see Dave’s house passing by them in the distance as they raced along the tracks. 

“Coal”, Dave instructed once more. His body was coursing with adrenaline. Otto began once again diligently feeding the ever demanding firebox. They seemed to have already used about a quarter of their supply. The engine passed through the town limits and began running parallel to the interstate, where they saw truckers traveling their morning routes. The old men behind those wheels ogled at the lone two cars while Dave whooped loudly and waved to them as they passed. The gust from their motion brought tears to his eyes and still he stuck his head out the window and continued yelling and gawking until Otto tapped his shoulder and demanded a turn. 

The pale blue sky overhead was their only constant companion. The desert landscape turned to corn fields still cradled with red dirt but somehow fertile and large, into flashes of forest whose lively green looked a trick of the light, and back into the vacant dustscapes that characterized their hometown. The noise of the train was too great for conversation but the pair glanced at one another and their faces were etched with undeniable glee. The smoke that came from the engine met the air above as a dark gray before billowing out behind them into a white cloud like those they saw puffy and magical in the firmament above. Otto let down the fold out seat on the side of the car and hoisted himself up, steadying on the metal siding. He reached a hand to the loose cable that ran across the top of the car and yanked and the boys shouted and laughed as the train let out a roar of approval that echoed across the newly conquered world.

It was the first Thursday morning after I had been let go from my job at the electronics store and I was wandering around the rest of the mall since I hadn’t yet had the heart to tell my fiance that I was no longer bringing in any money and so was still driving to the mall everyday, pretending to be going to work, but really sort of looking for a new job and sort of just moping about the stores. I’m sure that several of the early usuals recognized me and put two and two together regarding the electronics store, though I was careful never to stray too closely to that side of the building.

I remember I saw it from the inside of a PacSun. The teenage girl who worked there, who I believe thought I was some kind of a pervert, though I never did anything perverse really, besides wandering through what was ostensibly a children's clothing store, glanced up from her phone as I let out an audible, “Woah”. There, in the center of the food court, they were unveiling a brand new 2019 Toyota Camry. I walked out of the PacSun as if summoned and went to stand beside the men who were working the red cloth from the similarly colored car.

“What’s this?” I asked. 

“Contest”, the older of the two men said, gruff and wearing a janitorial uniform that looked oddly anachronistic. He gave his end of the cloth to the younger one, who set to work neatly folding it, and turned to me. “They’ll be giving away this car to whoever can keep their hand on it the longest.”

“How do you sign up?” I was slightly embarrassed at how eager I sounded though the truth was I was eager, as the beginnings of a plan were already forming in the back of my mind. 

The older janitor looked at me. He was some kind of Middle Eastern, his hair thin and somehow standing up straight so that it looked like a sort of pale seaweed sprouting from his head and flowing in the waters of the Lindinville Mall. His face was the shape of a cue ball, though a few shades darker, and he had the least neck I had ever seen on a man. His eyes were large and earthy and somehow knowing. They were presided over by two graying eyebrows nearly as thick as his lips. 

“Matt’ll be back with the clipboard”, the man indicated towards the younger janitor, who had finished folding the cloth and looked as though this was the first he was hearing of his clipboard responsibilities. “Contest starts at noon.”

I thanked the man and went to sit down in one of the cheap stacking metal chairs with not only those non-solid backs that made you feel as though you were going to slip through the furniture at any moment, but with the same sort of alternating material and space pattern going on in the seat itself, so that parts of my leg spilled from the chair and hung loose in fleshy suspense. I took out my phone and leaned forward on the sticky table. 

The first thing I looked up was how much the car was worth. It was my rudimentary, and yet I believed fundamentally sound idea, that I might be able to somehow spin to Natalie that I had spent my most recent and several subsequent paychecks on the down payment for this car, and with any luck I might even be able to insinuate that the monthly payments would be taking some from my potential future earnings as well. If I was able to deliver the whole thing with enough fervor, I would buy myself quite a bit of time for the job hunt.

The second thing, once I was satisfied with the car's price, was to look up advice on how to win such competitions. This search proved more disappointing, though I did read a story about a man in Texas who, after 3 days spent holding his hand on a car, lost the competition and immediately walked into a K-Mart and shot himself. That was not encouraging. 

I decided the best course of action would be to fuel up and empty out just prior to the contests beginning. I waited by the car until Matt brought the clipboard back and was the first to put my name down in the fifteen available slots. Then, I went over to the Chick N’ Salad and asked for their largest Caesar. While that was being made, I bought two energy drinks from a vending machine and was halfway through one when my order came ready. I drank the other half on the way back to the table and filled the empty can with water, which I used to chase my sips of the second energy drink. 

I finished scarfing down the salad at 11:45. Prior to this, I don’t think I’d ever had a salad before noon. I went over to the food court bathroom, sat down in a stall, and used everything I had, physically and mentally, to completely expel anything that could be expelled from my body. At 11:55, I washed my hands and walked back over to the car, where by now I had fourteen challengers ready and waiting for me. 

Matt, who had changed from his own classic janitor's uniform into a polo and khakis that must have been provided by Toyota, because how else would anyone own a Toyota polo, began to read aloud the rules of the contest. One five minute break every two hours to go to the restroom. No breaks for food or drink outside of that. You must keep the flat of your palm on the car at all times. No physical contact with any of the other contestants, nor any unreasonable behavior that may be deemed uncompetitive by the judge, which I assumed meant Matt. By now the mall had started to fill up, even on a Thursday, and it was a little difficult to hear him over the jingle of the carousel that had begun running a few dozen yards further into the food court, and the screams of delight coming from the children that caroused there. 

“Does everyone understand?” Matt asked. We all nodded, and he asked us to please cross our name off the sign up sheet and find a place beside the car. When we were all situated, he turned a switch on a large LED scoreboard looking timer, which began counting up from zero. Matt turned back to us and shouted, “Begin!” 

We all placed our hands on the cherry exterior of the car and began looking around at one another, trying, or at least I was, to assess who it would be that would drop out first. 

I realized almost instantly that there was something of a fix afoot- At least five of the competition's participants belonged to the same Hispanic family- A father, two sons, and two daughters. The daughters were about the same age as the PacSun cashier, while the sons were younger and both wearing Cowboys jerseys to match their dads. After a moment of consternation, I changed my tune and began to realize that this was actually fortuitous: Since they were in this as a family, they would be lulled into a false sense of security that would encourage them to drop out early, as surely one of their members would be strong enough to make it to the end. The daughters were of the precise age that meant as the malls crowd grew they would grow more and more certain that someone from their school would come along and mock them for existing, while the sons were still young enough that they would feel comfortable giving up because they believed in their own fathers superhuman abilities and thought his winning the contest was all but a done deal. 

My phone buzzed in my pocket and I wriggled my free hand across my body to reach it, all while keeping my eyes trained on my own hand to protect against slippage. The metal of the car already felt as though it was adhered to my skin through the first vestiges of sweat, though it was imperative I keep this at a healthy balance lest it become more slippery than sticky. I pulled my phone out but there were no messages there and I stared at it stupidly for a moment before replacing it. A loud air horn sounded, nearly causing me to leap in the air and disastrously remove my hand from the vehicle. I glanced around and realized that the first of the Hispanic boys had fallen when he saw his mother had arrived back at the table nearest the car with a full lunch for the family. The father was smiling and saying something in Spanish to the mom. I was smiling too. 

The timer ticked on. It had been just over fifteen minutes at this point, which from my paltry bit of research I knew to be less than a drop in the bucket at these competitions. I shifted from one foot to another, careful to not cramp up or tire myself out. For entertainment, I watched the man in the cell phone case kiosk try and hawk his wares to passers by. All of the mall-goers were capable of ignoring him with practiced eyes; It was strange to see so clearly how the man passed from fellow human to less than dirt the moment they realized his aims. 

Suddenly, a woman walked up to the kiosk man, and embraced him. It took me a moment to realize it was Alyssa, my old coworker arriving for her afternoon shift. I hunched down while keeping my hand glued to the car and tried to look away, though my hands position on the car made this nearly impossible. By the time I had thought to switch hands by placing both of them on the exterior at the same time, Alyssa had spotted me and began to make her way over. Still, I switched and faced away from her in the hope that maybe she had recognized someone else. 

“Leon?” She asked. I pretended not to hear. I buried my head against the cool roof of the car. “Leon?” And now she was poking me. 

“Please don’t touch the contestants ma’am”, Matt boomed through his megaphone. 

“Sorry”, Alyssa called to him. No longer able to ignore her, I turned back and broke out into a faux-smile. “Ally!”

“How’s it going?” She asked, rocking back and forth on her heels. Alyssa was a strange woman, somewhere in her mid to late twenties. I had never seen her hair not in a ponytail threaded through the back hole of her Elis Electronics cap, bobbing against her neckline in a reddish-brown rope. She had pale skin and wore the blocky, rectangular glasses that look bad on men and completely alien on women. Her uniform, a polo and khakis similar to Matt’s, was wrinkled and her shoes looked as though they qualified her to work in the back of a restaurant. She had always been relatively kind to me, though it was a sort of kindness that made me feel she somehow pitied me, which always rubbed me the wrong way being that we were close to the same age and working the same job, at least until recently. 

“Good”, I said. 

She glanced back and forth across the competition, the participants in which were now all listening to our conversation since it was the most interesting thing in earshot. “Trying to win a car?’

“Going to win a car.”

Alyssa nodded and bit her lip. I knew she had a nose piercing, but it was against the dress code to have it in Eli’s. She also had several tattoos but refused to tell me where or what of, which at the time had made me feel like it was something of a personal question to ask, though I hadn’t meant it to be and was just killing time before we were able to start closing. 

“I was sorry to hear about- Well, sorry about Eli’s.”

I nodded. “No worries. Onto bigger and better things.”

She looked at my hand, practically glued to the car, and nodded again. “For what it’s worth you know, I believe you. Jesse can be fucking crazy.”

“No worries”, I repeated. I was feeling rather desperate for the conversation to end. It was making me anxious, and the anxiety was working its way to my sweat glands and making it difficult to keep my grip on the car. I slid my hand slightly up its body to a drier spot, leaving streak marks behind.

“Well”, Alyssa said, and she gave me that same pitying look I despised so much, which was made even worse now that it was somewhat justified. “Good luck.” 

“Thanks. Tell Richie I said hey if he’s working today.” 

She gave another, final nod, and walked off towards Eli’s. My face felt as though it was burning, and I angled myself away from my fellow contestants in case any of them were staring at me. 

I was fired from Eli’s under suspicion of stealing merchandise. Part of my responsibilities had been assembling the pre-built computer models we sold, put together through other pieces of our inventory, and there had been a recent influx of customer returns wherein they complained about getting home and trying to fire up the machine only to find the GPU or SSD or some other critical part missing. I wasn’t the only employee to put together the computers, but I guess Jesse had done some sort of puzzling and came to the conclusion that it must be me that was stealing the parts out of the computers and putting them on the shelves as though they were complete. At first I had tried to appeal to his better nature, and when that didn’t work I tried to refocus on the fact that he kept absolutely abysmal records and wouldn’t know a motherboard from a bored mother, but nothing made any difference and he dismissed me all the same. 

Even now, I didn’t really regret stealing the parts. My wage at Eli’s had been a dreadful $15 an hour with almost no room for growth unless Jesse dropped dead or got suddenly ambitious. The GPUs we were putting into those computers were selling for several thousand dollars online to tech geeks who were certain that this latest upgrade was all they needed to finally be satisfied with their setup, and I only had to flip about four of them to purchase the ring I proposed to Natalie with. I stole the other parts in the hope that it would throw Jesse off the trail, and that was maybe what I regretted most about the whole thing, was how much money I had given up by not doubling down on my theft in the short time I had left at the job. 

“That’s an hour!” Matt’s voice came robotic and deafening from the megaphone, and nearly before he was finished speaking the two Hispanic teenagers and a middle aged woman who I had hardly noticed before now, slunk away from the vehicle. I guess getting to an hour represented some sort of moral victory for the three of them, though I couldn’t really suppose what that might be. The mall was in full swing now. I was always surprised by the amount of teenagers that spent their time just milling about from store to store. When I was young, the last thing I wanted to spend my time doing was shopping. Still is, in fact.

I watched an Asian couple sit down at a table near the noodle place. They both wore masks over their faces, and with each bite of their food they were forced to lift the mask to wriggle the forkful of food into their mouths before they lowered the mask back down to chew. A skinny white dude wearing a wife beater and sleeves of tattoos sat down at the table beside them, making them visibly uncomfortable. I recognized him as a fellow mall regular; He brought a backpack to the food court and sold weed to bored teenagers and husbands. The mall police turned a blind eye to this activity in exchange for a free eighth every week. 

My proposal to Natalie had come as a bit of a surprise to her, I think. I’d taken her to the spot of our first date, which in itself wasn’t too much of a giveaway as we still went to Giovanni’s all the time for frozen yogurt and to fling bits of bread at the ducks that patter along the pond behind the building. It was a Friday evening and I’d just picked her up from a long shift at the hospital. It was lucky for me that her brain was still frazzled from running around those brightly lit corridors all day, or she might’ve found it strange that I was dressed quite a bit sharper than I liked to outside of working hours; Nothing crazy, but a button down and this awful pair of purple pants that she’d gotten me for my birthday a year back and wondered aloud often as to why I never wore them. I suggested to her we pick up some fro-yo as a treat to help make up for her long week and she’d agreed, though again her brain was so fried that at that point I think she would’ve said yes to just about anything. 

I was beginning to realize that the man standing just opposite me on the car was going to be my greatest competition. He had his head shaved in that older man style, with the sides and back present but nothing up top save for three or four stringy remnants of what might have been. The hand with which he was holding onto the car had a thick plastic watch that looked like he’d probably won it in a cereal box. His face was pinched; All of the features seemed ridiculously small for the large amount of real estate they had, like the page of a book with too much white space. He looked back at me with beady brown eyes and I think he came to a similar conclusion about me, at least in regard to who was the greatest threat in this battle. I gave him a slight nod of respect, which he returned, before we went back to our respective thoughts.

Giovanni’s had been nearly deserted when we arrived, which was unusual for a Friday night, though it played well into my plan for the evening to mirror our first date, since the first time we went there was a week after their opening night and they were new enough in town that they hadn’t built up the social trust which would lead to anyone spending their Friday night treat on build it yourself frozen yogurt. I’d asked my brother to be there to take photos of the proposal and even though I reminded him seven times throughout the day of the time and place, I still breathed a sigh of relief when I saw his gray Kia sitting in the back of the parking lot when we pulled in. Nat and I went inside and got our usual orders: Hers fruity and covered in gummy worms and some sort of disgusting nut dusting, mine chocolate and then chocolate some more. The first time we had come here, on that first date, I hadn’t really understood the business model and so upon learning that it was self serve, loaded up my cup until it was full to bursting with toppings and yogurt, only to realize that the cup was weighed before you paid for it and I was suddenly on the hook for a $26 cup of fro-yo that was nearing three pounds. Natalie had found this so funny she doubled over laughing, which in turn caused her to drop her yogurt on the ground and so I had, of course, offered to get her another, though secretly I was sweating buckets beneath my T-shirt since depending on how heavily she loaded up her cup it was entirely possible my card would be declined. 

I remember looking down at my pants and realizing that the ring box silhouette was clearly visible in my pocket, which made me subtly begin to position myself to Natalie’s left at all times so that hopefully she wouldn’t notice before we went outside. I paid for our cups and we stopped at the car to grab a couple of pieces of bread from the loaf I’d packed before heading down to the pond. I threw a few imploring glances over my shoulder that I hoped were sufficient to signal to my brother that it was go time. My hands were sweating and also shaking quite a bit, which made trying to nonchalantly eat my frozen yogurt all the more difficult. It was evening but the sun hadn’t quite set and its reflection off the pond water was blinding and the warmth it continued to give off made the whole thing a bit uncomfortable; It was the middle of Texas and very dry, which made it feel a bit like I’d decided to propose beneath a heat lamp. 

What I didn’t like about the competition were the lookie-loos that it attracted, though I had a sharp enough marketing sense to discern that this was the reason for the whole shebang in the first place. Still, it felt strange to stand there, bent over at the waist and leaning on a car that I hoped would soon be mine, while throngs of people milled about and sometimes stopped to stare for a few minutes before moving on, apparently bored, as though they hadn’t seen the giant red clock ticking up to nearly three hours now and expected that the conclusion of the competition would come in the few short minutes they stood there stuffing their mouth with buttery pretzel bites. At first, poor Matt would walk up to these onlookers and try to explain details about the car but they paid him less attention than they did the man working the cell phone kiosk and eventually he stopped trying; A good call, since in my opinion he was probably doing more harm than good to Toyota's reputation. 

I’d rehearsed what I was going to say dozens of times in the mirror until I came up with something that I could be proud of. It was the usual “I love you, you complete me, will you spend the rest of your life with me blah blah blah” drivel that makes up just about every proposal but with a few small bits sprinkled in that I felt made it more personal, and besides, sometimes the cliches are cliches for a reason. Natalie had her flaxen hair sitting in a bun on her head and she was wearing her scrubs, which I thought looked cute, though later when we were going through the pictures my brother got that was all she could talk about, was how underdressed she was and always would be in her proposal pictures. I could hardly hear her at that time though, partially because I was still in shock and partially because I wanted some time to look through the pictures myself. 

Hour five was when the rest of the competition really started dropping like flies. We’d been to the bathroom a few times at this point, though several of us also used the five minute break for things like snacks, or drinks, or even just to sit down for a bit. But when we hit five hours it was as though a switch was flipped. People started glancing around the car and I think when they looked at me or my counterpart, the balding man with the Omnitrix on his wrist, they could see two men who truly had nothing better to do, who had hardly even noticed the five hours slipping by and could likely stand there for five more without so much as batting an eye. By five hours thirty minutes into the competition, it was me, adult Ben 10, and a tall black woman with an extremely loud pink dress on, though she had been silent as a mouse the entirety of the contest. I personally felt that we had actually gotten quite lucky getting placed with such weak competition, since as demonstrated in the case of the K-Mart suicide these things can potentially stretch to days at a time, though I wasn’t really sure what the malls plan for that was since most the stores closed at 9 and the whole building was locked up by 10 on weekdays save for the movie theater.

After Natalie had chosen her selected photos and posted them online she went to go make a series of phone calls to her parents, siblings, and friends. I watched her walk into our bedroom for a bit of privacy and then I clicked back through the photos. My brother wasn’t much of a photographer really, but what he lacked in ability he made up for in sheer numbers and we had close to five hundred photos of this less than five minute event, which made it possible to click through and watch the proposal happen almost like one of those flip books you might make as a kid, where two stick figures battle to the death if you flip through the stack of Post-Its fast enough. When I had been in the actual act of proposing, the glare of the sun glancing off the pond made Natalie’s face appear extremely shadowed, and I hadn’t wanted to shield my eyes since I thought that might make the pictures come out worse than I feared they already would, so in the moment I had just been looking up at this black hole where my girlfriends face usually was in relation to her body. But as Natalie and I were clicking through the photos back at home I noticed something that made my heart sink, and now that she was in the bedroom- And I stopped for a moment, to make sure I could hear her pacing back and forth and speaking rapidly to her mom in Spanish- I wanted to take a second look. I reversed the flip-book movie back to the very moment I was proposing, right when I had reached into my pocket and said “Natalie Marie Bosquez” and started the transition to one knee. I watched her face, visible from the angle that my brother had taken, crouched behind Giovanni's managers’ car for cover and firing off as many pictures as his entry level camera could take. In this frame by frame view of Natalie, I could see the very moment that what I was doing had dawned upon her, and though she had said yes enthusiastically and we had hugged and kissed and and I’d felt both of our hearts beating at hyper-speed with what I thought was excitement, the pictures revealed that in the most telling moment her face had dropped; Her beautiful brown eyes became downturned, almost sad, while her lips and nose curled up into something like annoyance, maybe even disgust, and suddenly I was grateful for the sun blinding me because I think that if I had seen her make that face in that moment I would’ve collapsed to the ground and rolled into the empty duck pond to drown myself in the muck.

“Hey- You alright?” I turned and saw that the black woman was looking at me with concern and had actually walked a bit around the car to check on me. It took me another moment to realize that there were tears streaking down my face. My whole body felt suddenly shaky.

“Yes. Sorry”, I said, and I turned away from her and used my free hand to wipe the tears and a little bit of snot from my face. People in the crowd watching muttered amongst themselves and once again my face burned with embarrassment but I did not and would not remove my hand. 

Matt was staring at me with worry in his big dumb eyes and I looked at the timer and saw that we were nearing nine hours, which had to mean that the competition was coming to a forced end soon. The man with the watch was slumped across the trunk of the car and looked to be almost asleep, while the woman was still glancing towards me every few seconds as though she were worried that I was going to break out in a new series of sobs. I looked at her to try and reassure her that I was fine but when I saw the empathy in her face, the sheer humanity behind the level of care she held for just some stranger, some yet unexpressed stronghold of emotion caused my lip to wobble and I looked away again. A few moments later, she took her hand from the car, placed it on my back and said, “Good luck”, before walking away. 

I felt horrible about having sort of guilt tripped her into quitting, though it hadn’t been in any sense intentional, but after a few deep breaths I realized that all this meant was that I absolutely had to win now in order to ensure that her sacrifice had been worth it. In the end, it came down to me and the watch man, exactly as I’d known it would. The mall was nearly completely dead now. I knew that back at Eli’s,  Alyssa would be lowering the iron grate that kept the store secure at night and doing inventory count and turning on the security system before she left out the back door, which at least meant she wouldn’t walk by the food court again and see that I was still here. The restaurants around us had closed an hour ago and no one was eating or watching us anymore. The cell phone kiosk was deserted. Malls at night are uniquely quiet, eerie in a way that is somewhere between a high school hallway in the evening and an abandoned roller coaster ride running along without anyone aboard. Matt was sitting at a table and flicking through his phone and I wondered if he would’ve been allowed to go home earlier had either of us given up. 

I glanced over at the carousel. I’d never been much of either a student or a reader, but when I was getting ready to go into highschool my mother took a break from methamphetamines, or more probably hit on a strangely motherly high, and suddenly started forcing me to do summer workbooks and read one book a week under the threat that if I didn’t I would have my Xbox taken away. Odds are good that this was an idle threat she’d forgotten about the day after she’d made it but fifteen year old me took it incredibly seriously and though I never quite came around to liking it, I read voraciously that summer. 

One of the books I read was The Thief Lord, about a little band of children who steal to survive and live in a theater, I think, and there are issues of class and friendship and it really was a decent read, especially for a fifteen year old boy, but what I remember most about it was the magical element of the carousel which one could ride in order to turn back the clock on their own life; Say, for instance, you mounted the carousel at age thirty, you could ride a number of revolutions and reemerge into the world as a bright and pre-pubescent boy. I later learned that this concept had been essentially stolen from Something Wicked This Way Comes, though in all honesty it's an idea that for some reason comes quite easily to mind, something about the mixture of the round-abouts and music and youth that come along with all images of a carousel, so I suppose it is possible that each author had the idea independently, though The Thief Lord was written forty years later. 

Anyways, like I said I read quite a bit that summer but none of the other books stuck with me like The Thief Lord did, and I know that it was because of this image of the carousel and the idea of turning back the hands of time to be reborn into the world and given a second chance at living a proper life. It strikes me as a bit sad that at fifteen I was clearly wishing for another chance at life when most people would say that fifteen is still plenty young to shape your life however you’d like to, but I know that even at that young age I had felt as though I were stuck within the path that I was on and had no way off of it nor really any knowledge of other paths beyond the idea that there were other paths somewhere out there. And even now, as I’m staring at the dark and powered-down merry-go-round in the mall and the lights of all the surrounding stores are winking out around us so that it is only the dim overhead glow emitting from the high ceiling of the food court that is offering any vision at all, I think that if I were able to ride that carousel in The Thief Lord, I would ride it twenty-seven times so that I could fully blink out of existence and be given a truly blank slate to start over, as by fifteen and by ten and even at age five, I felt like there was something fundamentally broken and wrong inside of me that could never be undone or corrected. And maybe that would set Natalie free too, and then when whoever it was proposed to her in that hypothetical life in which I was no longer born she wouldn’t have to make that face as though she’d been betrayed in the most predictable manner known to womankind, backstabbed by her own hand in a way, subconsciously chiding herself for being dragged down and chained to the same great weight that seemed to be keeping me on whatever dull and vapid path that I had been on for as far back as I can remember. 

A great thud startled me out of my train of thought and it took me a moment to realize that the man across from me had collapsed to the floor. I’d almost forgotten what we were doing here and it took Matt announcing, rather pointlessly through the megaphone: “And Justin falls- Congratulations Leon!” for me to realize that I had won the car, and again I thought of that poor K-Mart man who had tried for three days to win and still lost and thinking of him made it difficult for me to enjoy the victory. The man, Justin with the great watch, stood dizzily on his feet and reached across to shake my hand, so I finally removed it from the car and shook, both our palms disgusting and somehow simultaneously sweaty and dry feeling, like we were wearing clothes we’d gone for a run in that morning. 

Matt told the two of us that he would have to escort us from the building and he thought the easiest way to do that was in the car so we piled in and watched Matt start it and glide through the empty halls of the mall, and it was totally delightful to go through the mall in this way, passing by the gated up stores and narrowly missing the Dippin Dots stand. We ended up going through an Ashley’s Furniture Store and out onto their loading bay, where Matt lowered the car down and had me sign a bunch of papers before giving me the keys and thanking the both of us for participating. I wasn’t sure what to do with my car, the old one that was still in the parking lot, but in the end I decided that showing Natalie the new car was probably more important and I could always ask her to help me get the old one over the weekend or something. 

It’s a bit jarring to go inside the mall when the sun is just getting its start on the day and not reemerge until after it's already set. I got behind the wheel of my new car and pressed gingerly on the accelerator, testing it and appreciating the gentle response of speed the car gave. Slowly, I made my way past the yellow-bulbed street lamps keeping the parking lot aglow and out onto a proper road.

I came to the roundabout that sat strangely in the center of the mall lot and waited for a moment until I saw the lights of Matt's car pull up behind me and I drove around to let him go. Without really deciding anything consciously, I drove around again and again, circling the roundabout and picking up speed with each revolution. When I got to thirty I could feel the hands of time begin to tick backwards and I increased my speed further, desperately racing away from the chains of my life that kept me locked within this empty circle, everywhere circles, and it's lucky that the mall was so abandoned because by this point I was no longer looking for other cars but simply riding the carousel as fast as it could take me and I felt light and wonderful and knew that the years were leaving my body and dissipating into the nothingness they were just above me until finally I lost control of the car and flew into the concrete exterior of the Macy’s and out the front windshield, snapping my neck before falling dead and contorted on what remained of the cherry red hood of the Toyota, grinning up at the night sky with a joy I hadn’t felt since before I was born.

When it was spoken of, years later, the only thing that people could agree upon was that the house had sprung up nearly overnight, sometime in the spring of ‘17. There was a collection of old interviews gathering dust in the local library, shot on fuzzy VHS tape and spliced together by some local historian, that when played showed a series of townspeople who each professed with equal fervor this or that impossible tale of how the man and his house came to be. 

It was noticed first by a young woman named Hailey Plinker, out for a morning jog along the beachfront when she suddenly saw a rather out of place structure set only a few yards back from the edge of a high tide illuminated in sunlight that was still blinking sleep from its eyes. At first, Hailey claimed, she had been certain someone was playing some sort of a prank on her or, perhaps, this was a sort of advertising campaign, maybe for a new housing development along the beach. And then a man stepped through the silhouette of a front door holding a steaming cup of coffee. He raised it towards her in a neighborly gesture and smiled, taking in the gentle sea. “Morning!”

Word of the man and his unusual structure spread quickly throughout Fanny Bay, and soon there was a crowd of onlookers amassed outside of it. They peered and gawked and whispered amongst themselves until the man emerged once again and a hush fell over the group. “Hello”, the man said, smiling. He had kind eyes, the brown of freshly baked cookies. “Care for a look inside?”

Soon, a queue had been formed outside the man's dwelling, people waiting patiently for their turn to enter in twos and threes for a quick peek around the inside of this minor architectural wonder. For the most part, these inquisitors came away unimpressed. Though it felt preposterous to admit, they were all expecting a more impressive interior than just a few humps of sand the man christened a table and chairs. There was a battery powered hot plate cooling atop the “table”, alongside a bag of instant coffee and a backpack. Other than these few things, it was empty. The man allowed the strangers to trounce about his house for as long as they wished until boredom set in. The crowd left and the marvel of the thing died slightly. 

It wasn’t until a week had passed that the sheriff of Fanny Bay began to grow concerned. He paid the man a visit and found him sitting shirtless in the low push and pull of the ocean. 

“Hello there”, Grant said. He was a large man with a gruff voice and something in his face that spoke of fatherhood. He stood a few yards back to avoid the tide. 

The man threw a hand up in acknowledgement and swung on his bottom to face the officer. The misted hair drooping nearly to his nostrils made it difficult to discern his age, but Grant figured he was somewhere between thirty and forty. “This your… Sandcastle?” It felt very alien to Grant to be having this conversation, an eviction with neither landlord nor a proper home. The man nodded.

“I’m going to have to ask you to take it down”, Grant said sternly.

“Why?”

“Well… Because you’ve been living in it.”

“Is that not allowed?”

“I don’t think so.”

“You don’t sound sure.”

Grant sighed and squinted through the glare of the sun. “You from around here?”

The man nodded.

“Strange”, Grant said, cocking his head. “I’ve been here all my life and wouldn’t know you from Tuesday. Where’d you go to school?”

“Homeschooled.”

“Isn’t that interesting? By who?”

“My parents.”

“Did these parents have names?”

“Yes.”

“Care to divulge that information?” Already Grant was thinking silently to himself- One of these. 

“Not particularly.”

“Alright, sir- Could you please stand up and come over here so we can have a proper conversation?”

The man looked for a moment as though he might refuse, but eventually stood and shuffled through the sand over to Grant. He was very thin. As Grant watched him approach, he couldn’t help but to think the man seemed more like a bit of flotsam rather than a person proper. 

“Thank you very much”, Grant bit his cheek. The man was swallowing his lips, and his foot tapped on the ground below as though he were late for something. “That was very grand of you. Now listen- People are uncomfortable with the idea of a man living on the beach. They don’t want their children to have to worry about running into some homeless-”

“I’m not homeless”, the man interjected.

Grant turned his head, rolled the gum in his mouth over his tongue. “Alright. Where do you normally reside?”

The man pointed. 

“You understand, sir, that that’s not a proper home. You don’t- You don’t pay taxes on that home.”

“I haven’t yet”, the man conceded. “It was just built a week ago.”

“Right. And I suppose when year-end comes the IRS is just meant to put on their swimmies and give you a visit here?”

The man shrugged. “If they so choose.”

Grant hitched his pants up, felt the weight of police gear knock against his legs. “Let’s try this- Where did you live before the sandcastle?”

“I wouldn’t call it a castle”, the man dodged the question. “Not yet.”

“Yet?” Grant asked drily. “Planning on expansion? Who’s your developer?”

The man pointed to himself. 

Grant took his gum and stretched it over his front teeth. He glanced up and down the deserted beach as though it were a street he was preparing to cross. “Alright sir. I’m sorry to do this and you seem like a very interesting man but the fact of the matter is, this is a public beach and no place for a private residence, in any sense of the word.” Grant turned heel before the man could respond and walked into the sand construction. He took the backpack and instant coffee and tossed them out the front door. He went back in for the hot plate and singed his finger. “Fuckin-”, the word started with a yelp and ended with a grumble. Grant nursed his burned appendage.

“Sorry about that”, the man said. His hands were coated in wet sand and he took the hot plate from the slapshod table without complaint, placing it outside with the rest of his belongings.  

Grant waved him off. He did not want this strange man's sympathies. He glanced around the tiny beach home. “This really is sort of impressive”, he admitted. “I’m sorry to have to tear it down.”

Grant stepped outside of the structure. The man followed. The officer, feeling more and more ridiculous as time elapsed, dropped to his knees in the sand and attempted to scoop out the bottom of the structure. His hands scraped against the outer walls as though he were trying to dig through concrete. Not one grain of sand shifted. 

He cursed under his breath and glanced once again at the man, who was watching him with amusement in his eyes. “There some kind of-” Grant tried again to scrape away the foundation of the home, this time coming away with painfully chipped nails. “Reinforcement or somethin-?”

The man shook his head. Grant took to his feet again and gave the bottom of the home a stern kick. Pain shot linearly up his leg in the fashion of a cartoon injury, stopping just short of his head. He turned to the man, properly enraged now. “I don’t know what kind of fuckin’ tricks you’ve got here, but I am ordering you, under the jurisdiction of the Fanny Bay sheriffs department, to take this structure down.”

The man frowned. “I’m not tricking you. But I’m not going to tear down my home.”

Grant considered this. “Turn around.”

“What?”

“Turn around. I’m bringing you in for questioning.”

The man turned around and Grant tightened the cuffs as best he could on wrists that each had a circumference slightly larger than that of a nickel. “Am I under arrest?” The man asked. 

“I-”, Grant paused and considered the question. He more than likely didn’t have the means to arrest the man, as he’d complied with just about every request Grant made of him other than tearing down his own home. “No. Just want to ask you some questions.”

“Can you not ask them here?”

Grant took a step back from the man to formulate a justification for bringing him in. The man slipped out of the handcuffs that hung on his wrists like bracelets and handed them wordlessly to the sheriff. The sun sat orange in its celestial watchtower, observing. 

“Stick around”, Grant said, finally. “I may be back tomorrow, or the day after. I wouldn’t get too comfy.”

“Alright officer. It was good to meet you.”

“I bet”, Grant huffed, stalking off the beach and into his cruiser.

Over the next few days Grant tried to press the issue with the county justice department. “The man is living rent-free on public property! That’s gotta amount to something!”

“An intricate sandcastle and some instant coffee doesn’t mean the mans taken up residence”, responded Jade Bakeswell, the widowed local judge who had hair and a sense of humor that both resembled blackened bacon. “If you had further proof that he had taken up full-time lodgings that would be one thing but if we start banning heaps of sand- Well, I’m gonna have more than a few nieces and nephews giving me dirty looks come Thanksgiving.”

Grant snoozed his alarm at 2AM. He reached a hairy arm over to his wife’s slightly raised head and stroked her hair. “S’alright. Need to check something.” 

His wife mumbled something unintelligible and turned over. Their room was bathed in viscous moonlight and it was by this pale glow that Grant laced his police boots. He drove his cruiser along the drowsy streets, shutting the engine off a good block away from the beach. Moving in shadows with a touch of pink raised to his cheeks from the ludicrousness of it all, Grant approached the unassailable sand castle. He crept around it slowly, soundlessly, before leaping through the threshold with his camera thrust forward and letting out an audible- “Ha!”

But there was no one there. Grant's shoulders slumped. His lower lip stuck out as he exited the building once again. The cool night wind murmured dreams through the open beachfront. There, a hundred yards away, the man walked barefoot on moonlit sand. 

Grant hustled to him as though worried he would disappear. The man had around his shoulders the backpack in which he carried his coffee, among other things. He smiled pleasantly at Grant and made as if to go around him. Grant stuck an arm out and held him there. “You- Man. What’re you doing out?”

The man glanced around as though noticing where he was for the first time. “Nighttime stroll. Same as you, I imagine.”

“Liar! Admit to me you live there! Admit it!” Grant was not quite yelling but his voice felt thunderous in the otherwise tranquil night. 

The man did not respond to Grant but carefully took his hand and removed it from his shoulder before carrying on. The night air was chilly but the man's touch had been incredibly warm. Waves tickled the shoreline rhythmically. Grant spun around to face the back of the man. “At least tell me this!” He called. 

The man turned and piqued his head. 

“What's your name?”

The man smiled and his teeth were an eerie white. “I am Tomas.”

It would not be accurate to say that the people of Fanny Bay forgot about Tomas over the next few weeks. Hailey began waking up an extra ten minutes early to take a cup of coffee with him in the rising sun, while Grant found himself losing his temper even more quickly than he had in the past. Instead, it was as though they had grown used to him. Tomas dropped from the forefront of local minds until Thursday, the final day of the school year, when he finally made good on his promise of expansion.

If sand castle had seemed a misnomer before, it was now definitive. The plain square room had been transformed into a multi story expanse that stretched for a hundred yards along the seafront. There were turrets, inner and outer walls, a moat kept fresh with inflowing water and a seemingly impossible drawbridge to welcome visitors across it should they come. Grant stared at the thing from the street, utterly stupefied as he held up traffic in his cruiser. 

Children came bursting from their classrooms the second the clock struck noon and massed together in a great sandstorm of little legs, discarded backpacks, and loud cheers as they raced for the beach. It felt as though the whole of grades 1-12 stopped short at the same moment, pausing on the precipice between street and sand. Atop the left inner tower of the castle stood Tomas, grinning and waving one arm. With the other he lifted something- A vanilla ice cream cone. “Come!” Tomas called. “There is plenty for all of you!”

His voice came through the air as a countercurse to the spell the sight of the castle had cast upon them. The earth shaking noise of hundreds of children began again with even greater fervor as they stormed towards Tomas. Several were shoved by the weight of the crowd into the chilly waters of the moat, while others still dived in willingly, hoping to scale the walls. None succeeded in this half-hearted infiltration, but those who made it to the front of the building were welcomed by a lowered drawbridge and a smiling Tomas waving them inside. 

Soon the mass of youth was sticky fingered and satisfied. Inside of Tomas’ castle was lukewarm and muted; It felt somehow indoors though through most of it you could lift your head to the sky and take in the electric blue of the afternoon. A few of the kids stuck around to wander the storybook halls but most took their treat and went back into the first free afternoon of the summer, lounging across the dunes with insouciance as ice cream melted down their hands.

Grant came upon the scene with a combination of intense irritation and excitement. There could no longer be any doubt as to the status of the structure Tomas had created. He licked his finger and ran it idly over one eyebrow. 

“Tomas!” Grant called, crossing the drawbridge with three wide strides. “Tomas!” 

The sound of Sheriff Grant’s voice sent the few stragglers still prowling about the innards of the castle flying out the way they had come. Tomas peered his head around a corner and stepped out into the bailey. “Officer Grant.”

“Sheriff.”

“Sheriff Grant”, Tomas permitted. “What can I do for you?”

The sheriff snorted, glancing around. “I see you’ve followed through on that expansion.”

Tomas did not respond to this but followed the sheriff's gaze with his own, giving a number of restrained nods in appreciation of his handiwork. 

“I think even honorable Mrs. Bakeswell will have a difficult time explaining this one away Tomas.” Grant leaned against an expertly crafted sand barrel. 

Tomas shrugged. The joyful shrieks of children recently liberated seemed to have all but disappeared from the air. 

“You understand?  I’ll be back and this time- I won’t be alone.”

Tomas rose to his full height. In all the time Grant had been forced to permit the man to live on their public land, he had never seen him wearing a shirt. His ribs threatened to tear through the pale covering of his chest like inverted wings. Despite his slight stature, Grant could not discern a single vein across the entirety of his torso and something of the uniform sheerness caused him to shiver. He swallowed fear as Tomas began to speak.

“Officer Grant…”

“Sheriff.”

“...Why do you hate me?”

Grant pushed himself from the barrel, matching Tomas’ height with his own. He chewed his bottom lip and studied the man with curiosity. “I don’t hate you, Tomas”, Grant spoke finally. “But a man has to make a living.”

Tomas considered this. He dropped to the ground in a low squat, and ran a pensive hand through the sand, filtering grains between his fingers. “So he does.”

Grant was correct in his assumption that Judge Jade would relent. She allowed for a small portion of public funds to be used in the removal of Tomas and his flourishing sand castle. Grant rented a bulldozer and a man to run it. With these weapons in tow, he returned to the beach. 

Tomas sat cross legged atop one of his turrets, lapping leisurely at his third ice cream of the day. The children had gone home for dinner and so the men faced each other alone in the fading salmon sunlight. The bulldozers' loud, impatient grumbling forced Grant to yell. “Mr. Tomas. I’m afraid I must ask you to vacate the premises as it is scheduled to be demolished by order of the Fanny Bay judicial system.”

Tomas did not respond. 

“Tomas- Get down from there now or I will have no choice but to bulldoze you along with the property!”

“It will not work”, Tomas said. “But I will lower the bridge if you still wish to try.” His voice was hardly raised and yet Grant heard him clearly over the low rumbling of the machine beside him. 

Grant scowled. In his eagerness, he had forgotten about the moat. “Lower that bridge!” 

Tomas did not move but the man watched as the bridge around the front of the castle dropped gently overtop the moat. He guided the dozer across it and once again directed it at the wall nearest Tomas. He glanced up at his enemy and saw that he was giving him a thumbs up. 

“I’ve had just about enough of this sonuvabitch”, Grant said. He turned to the man behind the controls of the bulldozer. “Trash it!”

The man leaned the lever forward and started towards the sandcastle. The tracks made deep patterns in the sand. Grant walked alongside as though he were the thing urging the devastation on. “Go on”, he mumbled to himself. “Get this over with.”

The great blade of the bulldozer made contact with the wall of the sandcastle and for one endless moment, it seemed the wall was wavering. Tomas did not move. The wall bent, then whiplashed forward, holding strong. The tracks circled around the final drive of the machine impotently. Behind the controls of the destroyer, the man looked at Grant, almost embarrassed.

“Again!” Grant said madly. “Reverse and hit it again!”

The man obeyed. Again the angry metal shoved against the sand and again the impossible wall rebuffed the attack. 

“Tomas!” Grant called in bloodcurdling tones. 

The man peered down at the sheriff from the high tower. A single drop of ice cream dripped and fell into Grant’s waiting mustache below. The law man licked the sweetness from his face with venom. “Yes, officer?”

“You take this damn sandcastle down!”

“Um- No.”

Muttering curses he hadn’t broken out since grade school, Grant stomped into the castle. He spotted a long, winding staircase wrapping itself around the tower currently holding Tomas aloft and ran for it. Several labored breaths later, Grant emerged into a dimensionally improbable kitchen area, empty but for the portable hot plate and small bag of instant coffee that rested atop a counter beside the sculpted oven. He looked around in bewilderment. “Tomas!” 

The man appeared beside him suddenly, still working his ice cream cone. “Yes?”

“You’re under arrest”, Grant growled. He did not bother handcuffing the man, but grabbed his wrist, dropping the ice cream to the floor, and pinned it behind the man's back. “For resisting… For obstructing an officer of the law.”

“I let down the bridge”, Tomas pointed out. 

“You have the right to remain silent”, Grant said. “And it’d be best for both of us if you used it to the fullest extent just about now.”

Grant brought Tomas into the station, where they forced a shirt onto him. They sat the skin and bones man in an interrogation room, while outside in the hallway, Grant’s deputy Dewie tried to make sense of the situation from the testimonies of Grant and the bulldozer operator. 

“What’s the charge?” Dewie asked seriously. He was a pragmatic, chestnut haired man whose main drawback as a police officer was the thirty-nine inch waist he sported as the product of one too many Cinnabuns. 

“Obstructing an officer of the law”, Grant said. He spoke in manic, bitter stabs.

“I see”, Dewie noted. “What were you attempting to do?”

“Bulldoze his home.”

“I- What?”

“You know him! He’s the… He lives on the beach! On public land!”

“Oh”, Dewie said, peering in the interrogation room as if seeing the offender for the first time. “Tomas.”

“Yes, Tomas. Don’t look at me like that deputy. It isn’t right for a man to make his home on land that’s meant to be shared, whether it be made of sticks, straw, or sand.”

Dewie had first latched onto the idea of being a police officer while sitting on the arm of his father’s couch, watching the tail end of cop shows well before he was meant to while the old man slept off his most recent bout with McCormick on the cushions beside him. Because of this romantic attachment, he was one of the few officers on the force who still took physical notes. He flipped his pad open now and began writing. 

“So you were attempting to bulldoze Mr. Tomas’... Sandcastle.”

Grant narrowed his eyes, but nodded.

  “And Mr. Tomas- What? Did he stand in front of the vehicle?”

“Well… No.”

“He actually lowered his drawbridge”, the bulldozer operator offered.

Dewie raised his eyebrows and looked at Grant. “Yes”, Grant grit his teeth. “He did. But he refused to vacate the premises!” 

“You bulldozed the sandcastle with him still inside?”

“Not exactly-”

“The wall wouldn’t give!” The operator spoke again, excitedly. “I’ve taken down reinforced concrete with ol Daisy and that wall of sand didn’t move but an inch!”

“Yes, thank you Mr.- What was your name? Doesn’t matter. That’s enough. You can leave.”

The operator slunk from the hall, crestfallen. Fluorescent lights glared down at the remaining two men. Tomas sat in the interrogation room, not moving.

“Sheriff”, Dewie spoke in a low, confiding tone. “ I’m not so sure-”

“Remaining within a building that is scheduled to be demolished is a Class B Misdemeanor. It endangers the lives of the public and the operator.” 

“That’s true enough”, Dewie admitted. “But even so, I’m not sure, given the circumstances… Well, I don’t know if even Judge Bakeswell would sustain this arrest.”

“He won’t be going to Bakeswell”, Grant said, itching to get to his office phone. “I’m sending him to Huey County. Let them deal with this mess. Lord knows we take enough of theirs.”

“Sheriff…”

“Enough, Dewie! You go in there and let Mr. Tomas know he’s going to be spending the night with us. I’ll make a few calls and get the paperwork ready and we can have him on the road to Longview before sunrise.” 

“Yessir.”

The next morning the children of Fanny Bay leapt from their beds already wearing swimsuits. With the energy and joy of summertime they collected the necessary towels, buckets, shovels, balls, snacks, and for the more conservative of the bunch, sunscreen, before rushing out the door with hardly a hello to their parents said between them. They sprinted up the burning concrete streets in blinding sunlight before stopping and fanning out along the beachfront to view the devastation before them. 

There, where Tomas' grand sandcastle had stood just the day before, was a mound of black sand nearly four stories high. The sun hit this pile and instead of the usual beachy albedo, disappeared altogether. Seagulls crowded around the remnants of the castle, picking through the mound like crumbs. The gentle wind that usually ruled the ocean here held its breath. 

A child of only three, escorted to the beach by an older sister, was the first to break the trance. He waddled out toward the mess in a waterproof PullUp, swinging a red bucket shaped in a castle mold from one pudgy hand. As the crowd of youngsters watched, the little boy shoveled some of the black sand into his bucket, patted it firm and scraped the excess over the lip before finding a flat patch of ground over which he turned the bucket quickly. He held it there for a moment, pressed on the sides with gentle force to ensure the mold, and then slowly removed the bucket. For a moment the castle stood there, proud in the shoreline sun, before slowly it collapsed into dark, loamy nothingness.

The Hole was about six feet in diameter, made of old concrete turned tan with time and dirt. It sat nestled at the end of Gimly Street, near the back of the cul-de-sac’s only empty lot. Two houses down from the empty lot, in the narrow shotgun house with the chipped yellow siding and a basement that had been extended so many times it spilled into the neighbors land, the Rowans were still moving in. In another neighborhood, the sprawling basement may have led to a legal dispute but the residents of Gimly Street were closer than most and besides, the large majority of the houses were bungalow style, above-ground structures, more likely to have an attic than a basement and so they yielded their subterranean property without a fight. In fact, the Muddaws, who had lived in the shotgun house just before the Rowans, were neighborhood favorites due to their almost open door policy regarding the basement; More than once Robert Muddaw made his way down the dreadfully long flight of stairs to the underground floor only to find one of the redheaded Litner kids shooting pool on their own, shyly explaining that they had ‘Let themselves in’. But the Muddaw’s had moved out and so the newly christened Rowan house grew quiet once again. 

The Rowan’s were a straight edge, cookie-cutter sort of family, from the silly socks Louie Rowan wore while working at the packaging plant over in Thilton to the tight bowl cut Jo Rowan was given every two months by his mother Maybe. Maybe Rowan, who had jumped out of the fire and into the frying pan on her wedding day when she shed her maiden name of Haffaman, was a five foot four force of a woman whose severity was only just matched by her beauty. She wore makeup like boxers wear black eyes. Louie could expect his breakfast made, his lunch packed, and dinner beginning to defrost all before his alarm went off each morning. Maybe sent Jo off to school with a brown bag full of food that had been carefully portioned to provide him the exact nutrients recommended by the U.S Department of Health and Human Services and if he even thought about engaging in any of that foolish trading that happens at every lunch table across the world she would be sure to hear about it. Jo had his slacks ironed, his hair fixed, his meals cooked and his mouth washed out with soap for anything more explicit than the word “heck”. But Maybe also knew where to draw the line to keep out any “mommas boy” nonsense. The last thing she needed was Jo still wanting his hand held a few years down the road when she was sure to be busy with her second born, whom she and Louie worked diligently at producing once a month according to her cycle.  And so Maybe gave Jo the responsibility of making his bed, doing his homework and an extra hour of studying on top of it, not to mention practicing the oboe and his Spanish and getting at least an hour and a half of outside time each night before coming in to prepare for bed. No one in the Rowan household had their head touch a pillow without a shower. 

Maybe was a strict mother but a good one and she made it clear to Jo that he had the run of the neighborhood provided he never gave her a reason to take that privilege away. In their old house the gorgeous, if a little tight, backyard ran adjacent to a creek that was just narrow enough to avoid the much more likely-to-frighten-a-mother moniker of river. Jo had gladly spent his time hand-fishing, stone-skipping, skinny-dipping, and breath-holding but the new Rowan house traded the secluded stream for a backyard that opened up onto a seeming infinite desert of nothing and outside of the quick interruption of their own house, the street, and the houses across, that nothing continued for miles and miles in every direction. All of these factors combined with the bittersweet truth that school didn’t start for another two weeks meant both Jo and Maybe were quickly becoming fed up with Jo’s new schedule.

“Jo baby”, Maybe said, in a tone of voice that Jo was all too familiar with. 

“Yes?” His own eager tone diametrically opposed to his body language.

“Why don’t you go explore?” 

The two of them were sitting on the back patio, a skinny thing like the rest of the house, with only enough room for a single large patio chair and the re-installed porch swing, whose white paint was cracked and eroded in interesting patterns all across the seat back. Jo swung, staring up at the ceiling where the old chains creaked with motion. Maybe sat in the comfortable patio chair, wearing an old-fashioned sundress and working on the Rowan family tax returns in the windless afternoon.

“Explore what?” Jo gestured vaguely. “I see it all already.”

Maybe pursed her lips. “You used to have such a curious mind.”

Jo ignored this. His eyes followed the path of one of the massive flies native to the area, looping over and around the light fixture hanging from the sagging porch roof.

“Fine. Mope if you want. But don’t do it around me.” Maybe set her papers down and took the reading glasses from her face to better fix Jo with her most motherly stare. “Why don’t you head down into the basement? Your father said he wanted to construct some sort of man cave in there sooner or later. Think you’re man enough to get a start on that?”

Like all boys, Jo had learned from a young age that the worst thing you could be was not man enough. He lazily brought himself to his feet and stretched. “Alright then.” The youth walked inside, his bare feet warm on the sun glazed patio. Satisfied, Maybe reapplied her reading glasses and bared down once again on their available deductions.

Jo walked through the screen door to the kitchen, where a pot roast was slow cooking atop the stove. After a careful glance back at his mother, he stuck a finger into the roast and brought out some stringy pieces of meat. Trying and failing to catch the drips of sauce with his other hand, he threw this meat down his throat greedily, hardly bothering to chew as he made his way over to the basement door. 

The narrow structure of the shotgun house meant that the stairs to the basement were located directly beneath the stairs leading up to the bedrooms. A small white door opened to carpeted steps that seemed as though they might go on forever before Jo flicked the light switch beside the opening. Sighing with the deep melancholy that overcomes all teenage boys forced to do a single thing they don't want to, Jo started down the steps.

The basement was colder than the rest of the house. It had a smell to it, earthy and not unpleasant. The Muddaw’s, during their most recent expansion, had stripped the walls of their fixtures and wallpaper, so that the future man-cave truly earned its name; Jo felt real stone as he dragged his hand along the wall towards the bottom of the stairs. Darkness reemerged slowly as each step was more difficult to make out than the last. Gratefully, his fingers bumped into another switch and he flicked on a second set of lights. 

The hugeness of the Rowan basement cannot be overemphasized. Over the years it had grown to make up nearly three fifths of the house's total square footage. The main room, expansive in itself, had two separate hallways, one of which led underneath the cul de sac, where you could hear the tires roll overhead if you listened close enough. This room had been used by the Muddaw’s mostly to store Robert Muddaw’s biking equipment. Another hallway wormed its way beneath the Lilly house before expanding once again into a second game room. In the past, this area had been the primary haunt of the children. Prior to the Muddaw moveout there were televisions and a pool table and a sort of makeshift snack bar; Children’s toys had been spread underfoot along with forgotten clothes and broken sports equipment. Now, the rooms and hallways were empty but for unpacked boxes. Jo tore into one and found nothing but a mass of his fathers largely unused camping gear, which he might have known had he bothered to read the label Maybe had scrawled neatly overtop the cardboard in Sharpie. 

Jo followed one of the hallways down, his hand always softly tracing the wall. The lights down here were plentiful and glowed a strange, nearly gold color. Everything seemed to echo. Jo found the old children’s playroom. This room had not been cleaned out as well as the others. A neon sign hung on the wall, coming to life as Jo flicked yet another light switch- KIDS ZONE blinked back at him in bright, rainbow letters. Just beneath the sign hung a large poster depicting some old baseball game. A few board games gathered dust in the corner, seemingly untouched for months even prior to the move, while just beside them rested a half-empty carton of tennis balls. 

The air was cool down here, a stark difference to the warm kiss of sunlight Jo had grown used to in their short time since the move. He shivered and glanced over his shoulder. The lights overhead reminded Jo of the heat lamps his friend back home had used to keep his lizard warm, in appearance if not effect. Jo emptied one of the tennis balls into his hand and began throwing it against the wall across from him. The bounces were great and hollow in the massive underground space. 

His parents insisted that this was their “forever home” now. This was where they wanted to grow old together, in this tiny little shoebox of a house. Jo began to throw the ball harder. All of his friends were back home, his whole life, but that didn’t matter because Jo was only fourteen years old and so he had time to start again. His parents didn’t. Jo threw the ball even harder, not consciously understanding the transference of intensity from his emotions to the physical action. He threw again and again until there was the scraping sound of paper being torn apart and Jo watched as the tennis ball flew through the home plate of the baseball poster, a perfect strike, and continued flying through the wall on the other side. He heard it bounce, distant and muted, a good twenty yards away. 

Slowly, checking over his shoulder, Jo crept over to the poster. He lifted the bottom of it and found a child size hole; Certainly not big enough for his father to fit through, though knowing his mother she would’ve found a way. The tunnel seemed to stare back at him, it's rough edges like an endless set of bared teeth. Like any sensible kid, Jo tore away from this terrifying aperture in a hurry. He returned thirty seconds later, having retrieved a flashlight from his fathers set of camping gear. Jo shined the light through the darkness and saw nothing but stone. Breathing hard, adrenaline pumping in his ears, he stuck the flashlight out in front and began army crawling through the space.

Dust immediately began to fill his lungs and a few moments later, he was coughing, an awful, endless sound of sickness that filled the cavern. His knees called out in pain with every step, scraping along the bottom of the passage. His light fell onto something yellow and he increased his pace towards the tennis ball. He grabbed it, inspected it, and tossed it clumsily back towards where he’d come from. Jo made an effort to shine the light further down the tunnel, but it fell on no end. Swallowing, he crawled forward. 

To distract himself, Jo began to think of what he must be crawling under. Surely he’d made it well into Lilly's property by now, and was perhaps even approaching the other end of it, with the driveway and the basketball hoop that had one of those stupid shot-catchers attached to the underside of it. He’d probably be underneath the empty lot soon and then it would be only a matter of turns and angles until he’d find himself at-

The Hole. The tunnel from Jo’s house finally came to an end, or rather, a beginning. Jo shined the flashlight around the room. The walls were angular, narrowing as they rose to one small point overhead, where a tiny disc of light made itself plain. Tools and trash littered the floor; What looked like a workbench curved along the far wall. Jo brought his legs forward, contorting himself in the tiny tunnel, and plopped down onto the floor below. The sound of his landing felt strangely huge in the lifeless cavern. 

The dust overhead created a wavering film in the air, obfuscating the opening of The Hole. There were a few other tunnels leading off from this central room. Jo shined his light down each of them, his breath coming fast and frightened. Once he was certain he was alone, Jo turned around and surveyed the wall nearest his home tunnel. His heart seemed to sputter.

Overtop of the opening Jo had just squeezed out of, tiny human skeletons were stretched along the wall like museum displays. Each had been fashioned in a different way. One with an arm stretched overhead, another almost curled into a ball, another splayed out like a starfish. Beneath each was a name etched into the stone- Grant, Mindy, Jax. Jo whimpered, and suddenly there was the unmistakable patter of footsteps behind him. Glued to the spot, Jo swiveled around on his feet, his hands sweaty and lips quivering.

The shock of the moment kept Jo pointing the flashlight towards the ground and so it was from the bottom up that he finally began to take the shape of the ground dweller. The feet were tiny and rotten looking, browned to the point of charring, calloused to the point of armor. They looked as though they could walk through a mile of broken glass and not feel a thing. The legs and the rest of it were hairier than hairy; In parts it wasn’t clear where the creature ended and the fur began. It wore no clothes but its genitalia, or at least where its genitalia would be if the creature were indeed humanoid, were covered by a thick matting of brown hair so as to obscure its gender. All of the hair was dirty, matted; Jo shivered at the thought of the complex ecosystem of insects that existed within this mass of follicles. 

The torso was thin but wide, a strange look on the wiry frame so that the thing seemed almost to have wings, or had at least set the stage for them to emerge. Cracked and clenched fingers confirmed the creature's humanity, though like the rest of it they were so contorted as to be nearly beyond recognition. And the face…

The face of the creature, or what could be seen of it above the neck of hair that it wore, was deeply sunken. It looked as though its features had been shrunk while the skull they were placed upon remained the same size. The eyes in particular were little more than black beads, constantly whining and rolling within their cavernous insets. Out of the nose grew a horrible mass of hair that was the man's only facial hair- For it was a man, it seemed, of some sort or another- Giving them the eerie look of tendrils escaping from each nostril, whiskers with which to scent the air. The man had hair atop his head still, yes, but it was horribly misshapen with parts being chopped short, others grown for years, others still stripped clean off. Jo gasped in horror, turned and began wriggling with way back towards home, towards his mother.

The man watched Jo go. His expression was entirely blank. His hair seemed to unfurl with a mind of its own, searching the air. He did not move until Jo began to call for Maybe. 

Suddenly, Jo heard noise behind. He flipped the flashlight around and granted himself a quick look- The man's impossibly wide frame seemed to somehow contract in the tunnel, wings folding into themselves. His movement was horrific and fluid. The tunnel propelled him along and the expression on his face was almost bored as he clawed for Jo’s leg. His long nails cut the skin, causing warm blood to seep down onto the tunnel floor. Jo screamed. The man was frighteningly strong. His limbs seemed half the length of his body and the distance this created gave Jo nothing to kick. Scrabbling, fighting, the boy tried to dig his fingers into pure concrete, the nails on them shaving down and then breaking off, bleeding as the man drug him. 

Jo was pulled back into the Hole, dragged to the side opposite the tunnel back to his family. The man set him there and as Jo went to move, he knocked him back to the ground, stealing the wind from Jo’s lungs. A guttural sort of hiss bloomed from the man's throat, all phlegm and guts and nasty. Suddenly, a brilliant kaleidoscope of pain erupted from Jo’s right wrist. Stunned and hazy, Jo looked to the left and saw a large, rusted piece of metal like a discarded railroad tie stemming from his forearm. He screamed, more in shock than in pain, as most of the pain would come later. The man beat Jo’s head with childlike blows, the tantrum of an overgrown toddler. Jo sat in a daze as the second railroad tie entered his left wrist and suddenly he was pinned against the cave wall, dripping blood to the cold floor below. This done, the man seemed to relax. Jo moaned and gurgled.

The man made another wretched sound, like velcro formed from flesh and began to move again, dropping to all fours as he had in the tunnel. Jo watched in a stupor as the thing seemed to fold into itself, becoming something else entirely before skittering off down another one of the tunnels. 

The desire to pass out was overwhelming, nearly tangible. Jo toyed with the idea, set the pros and cons of each on balance. The calculation did not take long. Using a bravery and foolishness that is most at home in adolescents, Jo bent his torso out of shape so as to be sidelong the wall rather than stretched out in front of it. This pulled on the railroad tie dug deep into his right wrist, and he gasped for air, his life bubbled at his lips. Moving as quickly as possible, more to prevent him losing his nerve than out of fear of the man returning, Jo wrenched his legs from the ground and, with flexed feet, began trying to work the tie out from his left wrist. His teeth ground into one another, enamel surely dusting up from the friction and still the tie remained in place. He sank lower, shifting angles and further tearing the tendons in his right wrist still stuck in place against the cave wall. Crying out, he finally forced the tie free with his feet, tears soaking his face, his lips, his clothes, becoming indistinguishable from the blood that ran from his fingers, his wrists, his mouth. His left hand was free but still stuck through with the tie. It shook uncontrollably. Jo brought it towards the right wrist but found it unusable; Each movement brought enough pain thundering through his body to scare him away lest he blackout from the damage. Instead, he swung his body back around and, working the same procedure he had on the other wrist, wriggled the tie out of the wall with his feet. This one gratefully came free of his flesh as well. Jo found he did not have the strength to come to his feet. Instead, slowly, he almost rolled towards the tunnel home, inching like a caterpillar, like a butterfly whose wings have been clipped. 

There was a scuttering from the tunnel down which the man had fled. Jo nearly screamed in anguish, nearly chose death, but instead averted his journey home towards a less likely tunnel to the left. He only just ducked in the crevice, pinching his body against the sides as best he could and becoming tiny. His flashlight lay on the ground beside his previous station in the wall furthest his home tunnel- What he thought was his home tunnel, for now his head was swimming with pain and disbelief and surrender. He brought in a deep breath and tried not to cry.

The man emerged into the Hole. He unfurled his body as he approached the wall Jo had been attached to, studying the flashlight sitting lonely on the ground. He brought one violent fist down on the workbench and, without bothering to look around, slithered towards Jo’s home tunnel, threw himself down the opening with abandon. Jo waited only a moment before reaching his trembling right hand to his left wrist and ripping the tie from his body along with veins and blood and function. An impossible hole now sat between his forearm and palm. Gasping and wheezing, his body entirely unsure how to respond to pain of this magnitude, Jo dragged himself deeper into the system of tunnels, away from the horrible man, deeper into the darkness. The railroad tie trailed limply from his fragmented fingers.

Maybe Rowan smacked a mosquito trying to have lunch on her thigh. Blood and mosquito entrails mixed on her skin and she picked the carcass from her leg delicately, throwing it to the desert, before walking inside to check on her pot roast and clean herself up. 

Maybe peered into the roast and nodded to herself, turning away to go wash before something she had seen halted her and she turned back towards it. Her eyes searched for a moment, trying to pinpoint the item that had given her brain pause… There- The splash of sauce on the floor midway between the pot roast and the door to the basement. Bingo.

 “JO BLAIR ROWAN! GET YOUR GREEDY BUTT UP HERE RIGHT THIS INSTANT!”

Maybe turned on the water, tapping her foot with anger. She washed her hands and ripped a paper towel from the roll that hung over the sink to dry them before wiping her leg with the wet towel. She threw the whole thing in the trash and turned around, fully expecting to see her son standing sheepishly before her. Instead, it remained just her and the pot roast. She walked to the edge of the kitchen and put on her yelling voice once again. “I KNOW YOU CAN HEAR ME DOWN THERE JO! GET YOUR ASS UP HERE! IF I HAVE TO GO DOWN THERE IT AIN’T GONNA BE PRETTY!”

Maybe was one of those mothers who kept curse words in reserve, only calling upon them when she really, truly needed to convey the intensity of a feeling or event. If Jo had any sense at all, he would be scampering up those stairs double time at this very moment. She stood at the edge of the kitchen, her hand resting on the countertop and her foot tapping like a metronome in her house slippers. In her head a stopwatch ran with seconds a few ticks faster than those measured in Greenwich. 

“THAT IS IT YOUNG MAN!” Maybe yelled. “HERE I COME!” She grabbed a spatula from the cup of kitchen utensils, more for gesturing than for threatening, and started down the stairs, careful not to step on the ends of her dress. 

“Joseph Blair Rowan”, Maybe repeated, muttering now as she searched the basement for the boy. No doubt she would find him tucked in some corner, headphones causing lifelong damage as he bobbed his head to some horrible modern song. She walked through the main room, sighing as she noted the unpacked nature of the boxes. She peeked into the old bike equipment room and heard Macy Linter pulling out of her driveway overhead to pick the kids up from a week-long stay at their grandparents. She looked in the game room and the emptiness of it caused her to shiver. Finally, she walked down the hall to the old childrens playroom and saw the tunnel in the wall. Maybe dusted the floor before it, got to her knees and peered into the darkness. “Jo?” Her concern was mounting rapidly. “Jo baby, it’s okay. I’m not mad about the roast anymore, baby just come out, okay?” 

There was no answer and suddenly Maybe’s heart was threatening to pound through her dress. She thought of her cell phone, still sitting on the back patio. Louie should be here, Louie would help. Maybe rose to her feet and in that moment, a dozen different horrible scenarios flashed through her head. In each of them the time spent going to get her phone cost Jo his life. Maybe took a deep breath and fell once more to her knees. She began crawling down the tunnel to the Hole. 

Jo did not understand where he was. He didn’t even really understand why he was still awake, still alive. The tunnel he had crawled down soon collided with two more, each peeling off in a different direction and he’d chosen one at random. The railroad tie that he held with light, airy fingers, made a horrible scraping noise as he crawled but he could no longer bring himself to care. He came to an opening once again and he tumbled forward headlong, as though the tunnel were a large worm spitting him out into the world. 

Jo was surprised to find himself wet, and it took him a few seconds to recognize the sound of running water; A few more to register the stench of the room. The smell was overwhelming, wretched, and unfortunately entirely uncomplicated: He was currently resting in 5 or so inches of shitwater. He did not have the strength to heave but even so, his brain sent waves of further displeasure through a body already wreaked with pain and he scooted against the far wall, shuddering.

Maybe Rowan was extremely displeased. If Jo was safe, she decided, she was going to kill him. Her knees and elbows, which were usually so smooth that it drew comment, were nearly scraped to the bone. Her sundress was absolutely ruined. For some reason, she had decided to hang on to the spatula. 

Maybe emerged into the Hole and glanced around wildly. “Jo?” She whispered. There was the sense of being watched. She saw Jo’s flashlight across the way, ran to it and found it abandoned. She noted the blood on the floor and her stomach leapt from her throat. Finally, Maybe turned around and couldn’t help but let out a scream, which she cut unnaturally short, clamping her own hand over her mouth. Her eyes scanned the stretched out carcasses of children but she saw no sign of her own son- The perverted sense of relief this brought could be analyzed later. She glanced around frantically. With one hand trailing along the wall, Maybe began to circle the room, trying very hard to breathe silently.

Jo’s eyes were beginning to adjust. He had spotted at least four other tunnels that opened into the sewer room. The boy sat beside the one further from where he’d entered, clutching the railroad tie with both hands, squeezing it, and trying very hard to listen for sounds above the water. The remaining portion of his efforts were centered on staying awake. Adrenaline coursed through his veins. 

There was a splash. 

Jo peered into the darkness towards where he thought the noise had been, but it was impossible to make anything out. He brought his knees even closer to his body, wriggled his soaking toes in preparation for the fight. His mouth was dry, his eyes frantically wide. 

The man leapt from an opening ten feet above the tunnel beside which Jo waited, crashing down onto the boy before he realized what was happening. Jo cried out and then he was underwater, face down in the shit. He tried to turn, wriggled and struggled beneath the man's weight but could not throw him. HIs eyes watered in the wet. He contorted his arm with the tie and thrust up. Somehow, the effort missed. The man seized upon Jo’s arm with his own and wrenched the weapon from the boy's grasp. The tie fell to the ground with a splash. Jo could not breathe, could not see. He went limp and waited, gratefully, for the end. 

Suddenly, the pressure slackened, then disappeared entirely. Instinct took over Jo’s body and he shoved the floor of the sewer, gasping for air when it came available. Shaky hands rubbed the water from his eyes, and he blinked rapidly, trying to bring the scene into focus. 

The man was standing, hunched over a few yards from where Jo leaned against the wall. His mother stood above him, beating him savagely with a metal spatula, spit flying from her mouth in unbridled rage and adding to the water level beneath her. The flashlight flickered in the water, discarded and forgotten. Jo yearned to help, was desperate to. He took a step towards them and felt his knees buckle, falling crudely to the floor, letting out a yelp as he did so. Somehow, there was still more pain to be dispersed throughout his body, beginning at the knee and racing up the spine. He steadied himself with a hand and looked on helplessly.

Maybe was normally a quite rational individual. If she had been watching herself from afar, in a more sober state of mind, she might have thought it more prudent to take her son and run, rather than remain in the sewer beating humanity into the occupant of the Hole. In her current state of mind however, Maybe saw no path forward outside of bludgeoning this man a path to deaths door. Then she heard Jo’s yelp, and glanced up to see him fall to the sewer floor in pain. The oscillating glow of the flashlight revealed that her boy was caked in blood. Maybe smacked the man with the spatula one more time, forcing him to the floor, where she stomped on his head with her house slipper once, twice, three times before rushing to her sons side.

“Jo baby”, Maybe said. “I’m here, it’s okay. It’s okay. We have to go baby.” Maybe slung her arm underneath Jo’s and grunted, straining to raise the two of them. Jo grit his teeth and stood, and together they made their way over to the tunnel back to the Hole. The man lay still in the water behind them. It was not clear whether or not he lived, but a few more minutes of lying underwater would erase any doubt. They started down the tunnel. Their breaths overlapped one another, each coming in sharp, shocking gasps. 

It took them close to fifteen minutes to emerge back into their basement, and another ten to get to the car. Jo had lost all feeling in his right hand. Maybe peeled out of the driveway and raced to the nearest hospital, a thirty minute drive away. She still didn’t have her cell phone.

The cops weren’t called until the following day, when they met Louis at the Rowan house and ran him through a series of questions, which he answered by playing a game of telephone with Maybe phoning in from the hospital. The police drew straws for who would be the first to crawl into the Hole, and when they eventually arrived the things they discovered led to ten year veterans of the force vomiting in the dank enclosures of the sewer. The bodies of the children were identified and taken down, their families given a closure that was almost more horrible than ignorance. The man's corpse remained undiscovered, which, along with the history of the Hole, led to a large taxpayer funded project to fill the hole and its adjacent tunnels with concrete. Maybe watched the trucks back into the cul-de-sac with Jo beside her, sitting on the driveway with cartoonishly bandaged hands. She brought a gentle palm to his back, comforting him. 

“So”, she asked. “Are you excited to start school next week?”

Gray-black clouds rumbled through a sky the color of pain, the wind beneath them shifting every dozen seconds or so, confusing flags and people alike. There’s a weight in the air, soft and uniform as though gravity is putting more effort in. It’s quiet, but not too quiet; Noise is around but cannot be pinpointed. The squeak of a hinge here. The scuttle of an animal there. 

Franny is huddled in the hayloft of the barn, her backpack still slung over her shoulders and one shoe off to allow herself to itch her foot. She’s a frantic, unapologetic itcher, rubbing the skin raw and pink and pained, the sky, and the itching gives her something to do for the moment. She’s not sure what the rash is. Athletes' foot, poison ivy, gangrene- Did people still get gangrene? She itched and thought and itched and thought.

The backpack is more psychological than practical. It gives the illusion of preparedness, offers up the concept that there could, potentially, be something useful within its confines. In reality, or wherever Franny is, it contains nothing but a few dry snacks, a change of socks, and a thermometer.

The boards of the barn creak and grumble.

She’s got a watch but she isn’t sure how much she trusts it. Time only seems to pass on the face of the watch anymore. Tick tick tick. The sun neither rises nor sets. Night has solved its perpetual issue with falling. In a way it helps; Without the demands of a clock, the stomach grows more easily content. The body isn’t sure whether it has any right to its fatigue. These are the good things.

A spider crawls along the floor of the barn. Franny watches it go, its legs moving in machine-like tandem with one another. The web sits in the back corner where the wall meets the roof; Within it, a couple of flies wriggle. She wonders if the spider knows that anything has changed. 

The trees know. Franny once thought of trees as lively, wondrous things, generous with their offers of branches to be climbed and fruits to be plucked. But now, the trees have grown serious. Now, the trees resist the ferocious winds, stand strong against the impetuous gusts, daring the world to bowl them over. Their bark is tough, scratched like Franny’s ankle.  Their leaves bristle in anger; Branches point with menace. The trees have grown serious.

Franny puts her shoe back on and stands. The spider seems to notice her for the first time and rushes to safety. It has begun to rain. Franny walks outside and starts off across the field.

It must have been a nice place to live before. The main house is a huge, white bricked monstrosity, an ugly eyesore but large and comfortable looking. The barn within which Franny had taken refuge is idyllic and quiet. The surrounding fields are more pleasant still. Something had been planted here, not anything too tall, potatoes maybe, but Franny knows better than to eat anything that isn’t packaged. She grabs a handful of dirt from the ground and turns it over in her palm, balling it up before rearing back and tossing it as high as she can in the air, losing it in the clouds. The dim light of the sky would be pleasant if it were temporary. 

The rain is miserable and hot. Franny takes her backpack from her shoulders and rests it on the wet ground for a moment while she shrugs off her jacket and wraps it around her waist. It was safer not to drink the rainwater but she sticks her tongue out to catch a few droplets all the same. 

She is walking across this potato field towards the woods that draw its border on the far side. The ground squashes beneath her feet. Her cargo pants are army green and oversized but they seemed like the thing at the time, ransacking the remnants of a Salvation Army warehouse near the start of it all. Freckles dot a face that earned its worry lines too quickly.

She comes to the berth of the forest. The map she’d glanced at in the ugly estate behind her called this the Forest of the Volshebny. She rests a hand on the trunk of the tree nearest her, a huge cedar without any branches growing at a height under fifteen feet. Down here, on the floor of the forest, nature relied on the prick of the thorn bushes and the threat of its wildlife to keep the disease of humanity at bay. Franny pet the trunk of the tree gently, patting it, before stepping further into the woods. 

Franny is fifteen years old, and if you were to remove her T-shirt you would find her torso covered in tattoos, what her mama had called her “markings”. She had borne these punishments bravely, lying face down in her grandmother's caravan ignorant of the purpose, with nothing for pain relief but the squeeze of mama's hand in her own. Nana would carve her way up and around her spine in silence, freehand, with only the flickering of her many candles to light the way. 

The foliage is thick and healthy. It takes some work to weave her way around it, careful not to break, to kill, to maim. For the most part, the rain is caught on the leaves above, and the only moisture that makes its way to the floor does so irregularly, after the natural glide from one tip of the leaf to another. It should be dark in the forest, but instead it seems almost brighter than it had in the open field. The animals are in hiding but the insects come out to greet her, buzzing and prodding and studying her every move as she clambers deeper into the thicket.

Her grandmother had gone first. This was before the shift, and at the time had seemed the cruelest and most senseless thing the universe could imagine. Worse still, it was her mama who had found her, lying in the grass beside her caravan, her wrists and throat cut, blood soaking deep into the earth, grinning hopelessly at the orange sky overhead.

The insects and the forest were working in tandem to discover just who it was that was pushing through their ranks. They spoke in clicks and shifts of their branches, in the short song of crickets and the flight pattern of fleas. Slowly, a profile was being produced, an understanding of who it was that still dared to tramp through their ever dwindling homeland at times such as these. There was the first croak of a bullfrog.

Her mama went shortly after, in the midst of it all. Franny had tried to pull her, tried to bring her to safety but she was glued to the hill her Nana had died on, digging her hands in the dirt as though reaching for the skeleton of her dead mother. “Mama!” Franny cried, pulling the older woman's arm with a ferocity that would’ve felt alien to her only a few weeks ago. “We have to go mama!” 

Her mother shook her head. Her eyes were glassy and regretful. She turned towards her daughter suddenly, grabbed her arm and yanked. Her mouth opened and made as if to say something, but the words caught in her throat. Coughing, hacking, her mother leaned towards Franny and placed a finger on her torso, tracing the markings that lay beneath her thin T-shirt. She made it a mere fraction of the way up her spine before slumping back against the caravan steps, motionless. 

Franny came to an important clearing. There was still running water here, the light trickle of a small stream feeding something between a puddle and a pond, but it was clear and Franny dropped her knees to the forest floor and pooled some of the liquid in her hands. She brought the water to her lips and lapped greedily, freely. Her reflection stared back at her from the water's surface, expressionless.

When Franny raised her head once again she found that the forest beyond the clearing had changed. Filling the spaces between branches was pure black; When she looked overhead, it was the same, as though the area beyond this clearing had simply been undone, erased to reveal the emptiness beneath. She took another uncertain sip of water.

Soft green light filtered in an oval from above, illuminating something towards the far end of the stream. Franny stood, wiping her mouth with her hand and her hand on her pants before striding over. She was frightened but she had been frightened for a long time. 

The light was pure. It shone on a turning point of the creek. A sort of inadvertent dam had been created with an amalgamation of trash, a tower of garbage that seemed almost ludicrously high. Driven by something beyond her, some innate knowledge, Franny immediately stripped her socks and shoes from her feet, stepped in the moderate water, and began dissembling the blockade of waste. She lifted a soggy cardboard box that had had its bottom half severed from its top and turned to step out of the water before pausing a moment to think. She looked around the forest and called out, “Where do I put it?”

There was no answer. Franny felt in her bones that simply taking it out of the water would not be enough. The trash would need to disappear. Begone forever. But where? The only option was from here to there, there to here. There was no chute, no shuttle, no magic word.

Suddenly, her stomach began to heat, a comfortable warmth at first and then a searing, demanding burn. She dropped the trash and lifted her shirt, heart pounding. The markings circling her bellybutton had turned from their usual inky black to a virulent red which pulsed with anticipation.

Franny cried out. The clearing seemed to grow smaller. She fell to her knees in the water, scraping them on the rocky bottom. Understanding came to her in quick, alarming gasps. Her hands reached once again for the cardboard: Soggy, dirty, disgusting. She tore a piece of the material with shaking hands and frowned, swallowing sobs. Steadying her breath, she closed her eyes, opened her mouth, and began to chew. 

It was painful, vile work. If the garbage had seemed mountainous before, it now appeared infinite. Her cries echoed in the closed off world of the clearing, bouncing around the abyss, and still she chewed and swallowed, chewed and swallowed. She pecked at Pringles cans and nipped at knick-knacks. Gorged on Gameboys and slurped down shopping bags. She ate inedible things. She ate impossible things. Her mouth cut but didn’t bleed, her stomach grumbled but didn’t revolt, and an eternity later, it was finished. 

The stream began to flow more fully. The water in the pond started to rise and there was the splash of fish where none had been before. Franny sat on the edge of the water, crying with dry eyes before mercifully fainting. The marking on her stomach cooled and faded to nothing.

Nature breathed deeply. 

Franny awoke to a blistering feeling in her breasts. She tore her shirt from her body, still unused to the sight of the mounds of flesh beneath her collarbone that had grown larger over the past years. The markings wormed their way up and around these new growths, and now they too burned that hateful red. The poor girl glanced around, her fingers curling in the mud of the bank with pain, but there was no trash to be seen. She collapsed back to the earth, neck craning in agony. She breathed in the grass beside her.

A bird, hardly two fistfuls of a thing, landed gently on her stomach. She raised her head to look. Mostly black plumage, with a brilliant helmet of yellow in and around the top of its skull. The animal walked across her torso; Despite its long talons, there was no pain. Ahead of time, Franny realized what the bird was searching for, what she was being called to do, and she screamed in agony before it was earned.

The bird brought its sharp beak to the crest of Franny’s nipple and began to drink. The pain was not only sharp, though that was there, but there was an element to it from deeper within; The essence of Franny was being drained and given to the myna. She found herself growing weaker and weaker. The bird lifted its beak and screamed before rising, flying off to watch from a seat in the trees.

A horrible wet feeling wormed its way across her chest. She glanced down and looked into the pure-black eyes of a salamander. The creature was strangely shaped, with a torso that seemed too wide and a tail nearly double the length of its body, flickering and black. Orange patterns like hastily drawn birds dotted its spine. The salamander turned its head and its tongue flicked out of its mouth hungrily. Franny grit her teeth and wailed.

She did not know how many beasts she fed. Her body felt crippled, broken, diseased. She fluttered in and out of consciousness. Her vocal cords wore too thin for screams. Until finally, she awoke to her chest unperturbed. Her markings had vanished. Creatures scuttled along the edges of the pond, hissing and calling, alive. Franny sat up. She felt as though she’d grown shorter. She drew her knees into her chest and rocked back and forth.

Suddenly, the noise of the creatures stopped. Franny raised her head. Exhaustion dried her face and eyes. To her right, a gaping pit had appeared. 

Franny crawled to the pit. She peered over the edge, vaguely frightened of falling in. The hole seemed endless, beyond comprehension. Her mind and spirit had both grown entirely numb. She pushed back from the abyss, shoving dirt inwards as she did so. The crumbs of earth fell an immeasurable way and for a few moments, the sounds of wildlife returned to the clearing before silence fell again, abruptly, harshly, like the drawing of a curtain. So that was it. This was too much. They had already asked too much. 

She wobbled over to the edge of the clearing and pressed through the pitch black between the breaks in the trees. The feeling was one of being engulfed by a sticky, heavy mass; Traveling through tar. She shoved forward on shaky knees. It was becoming harder and harder to breathe. She had left her shirt back in the clearing but still she soon found herself overheating, covered in sweat and desperate to break through the muck to the other side. On and on she pressed, propelled forward by blind, unearned faith until finally she broke through, stumbling and falling to the ground of the same clearing.

The hole watched her cry. The markings on her back began to smolder.

When the tears would no longer come, she began. There were no tools afforded to her, and so it was with her bare body that she shoved the dirt into the hole, beginning at first on the edges of the void, and then as she sunk deeper, further and further back. A medley of nature stirred around her but she dare not look, dare not stop. The task was exhaustless; The time, incalculable. It became clear that the work was twofold; Not only was the hole to be filled but the rest of the clearing, in giving the dirt, lowered as Franny pressed on.

She did not know when she had finished. Dirt was all around her, caked into her fingernails, casking her skin. At some point, the sounds of nature surrounding her stopped. She brought her attention to this and realized, rather calmly and without understanding how, that in her frenzied work she had buried herself alive. The realization seemed to bring reality crashing in: Suddenly she couldn’t breathe, suddenly, the pressure was immense, suddenly-

Suddenly she emerged. A slight wink of green peeking out from beneath the newly filled hole in the earth. The clearing was alive and vibrant. The brilliant blue sky above reflected across the top of the widening pond. A breeze purred across the scene, brushing Franny pleasantly as the markings were cleared from her and the earth.

By 12, I had been going to the park for long enough that my mother should’ve trusted me to go alone. It was close enough, after all- From our front door, I could sprint there in a little under two minutes. Under one, if I cut through the Cassell's, though both Mrs. Cassell and then eventually my own mother, asked me to stop doing that. But she didn’t, and so most of the time I told my mom I was going over to another kids house- Brian Young maybe, the pudgy Swedish kid who lived the neighborhood over and who, despite his weight, was the only one of us who could really shoot a basketball with any accuracy. Clint Frestmen was another safe bet; Mom hated Mrs. Frestmen for reasons that had nothing to do with her parenting, so I could use Clint as a cover with relative assurance that Mrs. Frestmen would never be called.

I can’t remember who it was I said I was meeting on the first day I saw the man, but as with most times I went to the park, I was alone. It was fall, I think, because the air was cold and the leaves crunchy with decay. Wind brushed the bangs from my forehead(from grades 5-9 I was perpetually in need of a haircut) and my ratty sneakers slapped the sidewalk beneath me. The breeze continued to pass by me in cartoonish swirls as I crossed the street to Plusieur Park. 

Part of the reason I preferred coming to the park alone, especially as I grew older, was that the other kids seemed to phase out of the playground a lot more quickly than I had. The first time I made this discovery had not actually been at the community park but rather recess; The middle school shared a yard with the elementary school and generally the fifth and sixth graders were let outside at the same time. I suppose I hadn’t noticed at the time due to sheer youthful self absorption, but none of the sixth graders would ever be caught dead on the playground, an unwritten rule I eschewed on my very first day of middle school. Only after receiving a pretty severe mocking in the lunchroom the next day, the result of which was my first in school suspension, did I cease going to the playground during normal hours entirely. Now, playground time was reserved for the weekend, preferably early Sunday mornings when most of the kids I knew in the area would be nestled tightly in a church pew with parents who had a stronger moral backbone than my own.

That first day he was alone on the swingset when the park finally came into view. I think the very strangeness of this, a grown man swinging alone, might have been what solidified the memory for me; It’s entirely possible I had seen him there before, performing some innocuous activity or other, but had not remembered it due to its normality. The swinging- This got my attention.

The swings were something of a specialty of mine. I possessed the talent, a fact which I will never reveal to my mother who already suffers from something of a weak heart, of being able to work myself up to such a pace that I could eventually achieve a full 360 around the topmost bar of the swingset. The first time I managed such a miracle was by accident and it was several months before I gathered up the gusto for another attempt. To this day, I have never captured the attention of women as rapturously as I did those third grade girls lined up on the concrete curb that surrounded the wood chip floor of the park to watch me swing over and over in circles until the dizziness forced me to rest. 

 This ability on the swings was perhaps part of the reason why I felt so comfortable taking a seat on the swing directly adjacent to the man; I was in my element. The first few minutes we sat there alone, swinging in a park that was noiseless outside of the breath of the wind and the whine of the chains. I pieced together a picture of him in snapshots, taking the opportunities when he swung forwards and I swung back to sneak discrete looks at my fellow park-goer. On that day, the man was dressed to the nines, the navy blue of his three piece suit accentuated by a periwinkle button-up, a bright yellow tie, and smart looking loafers. He had simple brown hair and a face that belonged somewhere within the middle third of life. My study of his character was so thorough that unbeknownst to me at the time, I began to lose velocity, eventually slowing to a slight back and forth oscillation just above the dug out divot beneath the swing, my eyes glued to the character to my right. 

The man glanced back at me and I felt the featherweight legs of a million insects crawl over my skin. Through glasses consisting of two golden squares peered a pair of colorless eyes, poring over me in full without respect to any of the social niceties I had taken care to honor when shyly studying him. A brash and frankly stupid child, I immediately took this as an insult.

“Hey! You need something, mister?” I’m sure the tinny whine of my voice did little more than amuse the man, though at the time I felt brave; Robust. 

He did not bother answering me but instead reached for his inner suit pocket, from which he drew a small grey notebook. He began leafing through the papers, glancing up every now and again as though to reassure himself of some facet of my character before returning to the pages in his hand. My brow began to moisten with anxiety and my stomach had an uneasiness I’d only ever felt after completing a dozen rotations around the swingset. My hands were sweaty and loose on the chains holding the swing aloft. I dropped my sneakers to the ground, turned, and ran home.

Within the safety of my own house, I began to take stock of the situation and the more I dwelt on it, the angrier I became. I had been robbed of the playground at recess and now I was being forced from my most secret weekend pleasure by a man who surely had less right to be there than I. Within the boiling confines of my small mind, I began to formulate a plan.

Next Sunday, I left the house at my usual time. It was warmer this day than it had been the last, and I wore my school gym clothes and a blue baseball cap that struggled to keep the mountains of long, black hair atop my head contained. The drivers of the few cars that rolled along the roads to the park all gave me friendly waves as I pushed forward on my journey. Strangely, these gestures fueled me; This was my park. I would not be made a stranger in it.

Fired up as I was, I still nearly turned around when I saw the man hanging from the monkey bars. He too, had changed for the weather; Replacing the suit were a pair of loose grey sweatpants and a plain green T-shirt. The muscles in his arms looked soft. I have never been one for pretense and even less so as a child; I marched right up to the man and demanded of him:

“What are you doing here?”

Just as last week, there was no reply. I had expected this. In the many iterations of this moment that had played out in my head this past week- During algebra, brushing my teeth, in the midst of a rather boring tetherball match- I had watched this interaction play out a hundred different ways and more often than not, the man would hold steadfast to the silent vow he had taken the week prior. However, if words couldn’t make him talk…

With my left hand, I reached into the backside waistband of my gym shorts. Slowly, without taking my eyes off of the man who still dangled from the monkeybars, I brought my hand around and revealed my secret weapon- A Mini Super Soaker. It was critical not to hesitate in moments like these. I unleashed the full blast of the water gun directly at the man's face; The vision of those blank eyes was obscured beneath the fury of my aquatic attack, his glasses murky and soaked, his shirt turning from mint to forest green under the assault. I even let out a battle cry as I was doing it, a call of rage that came not from within me but from my ancestors who had fought and bled on battlefields in ages past so that I, now a child of eleven years, could maintain my secret playground habit in peace. 

Eventually, the Super Soaker ran out of fuel. The man hung limply from the monkey bars. The wind blew harshly and still he hardly swayed. We were two beings frozen in an unfrozen landscape, entranced with one another. My gaze never left his fogged over glasses. His focus on me was entire. Slowly, the opaqueness faded from his eyes and I saw with some horror that he was smiling. Or rather, his eyes were smiling. His lips remained a flat line, as straight and narrow as last week's tie, but the corners of his eyes crinkled, straining to keep something within. 

Movement from the slide behind me broke the trance. I looked over my shoulder, mouth still agape from what had just transpired. There, atop the playground near the entrance of the slide, stood the man. Dressed to the nines. With a periwinkle button up. Taking notes in his grey notebook with an identical half-smile to the one that at that very same moment hung on the face of the man suspended from the monkey bars. The man glanced up from his notebook to look at me and I suddenly noticed that he was soaking wet.

I do not remember getting home. I do recall that the Super Soaker was lost in the process, though whether I dropped it immediately in my horror or later on, as I realized the awkwardness of the object may be slowing my dash to safety, I do not know. The next thing I remember is sitting in the shower, watching the water fall from the tips of my overgrown hair to the floor of the tub below, and thinking of that expressionless face behind which danced a horrible mirth.

My mother served Hamburger Helper that night and, as always, we ate it gathered in a silent threesome around the small television in the living room, my father comfortable with his TV tray in his recliner, my mother and I knocked-kneed on our small sofa, balancing our plates in our laps. 

“Mom?” I asked, tentative.

My mothers way of acknowledging me, particularly when I began conversations like this, was to shove me with some part of her body. She pointed her toes and pushed into my legs, nearly dumping my dinner onto the floor. 

“There was a man at the park today- Two men.”

“What were you doing at the park?” My mother responded sharply. My heart began to pound in my chest as I remembered my parents both remained clueless about my Sunday ritual. I couldn’t remember whose house I had lied about going to instead, so I took a leap of faith.

“Clint wanted to hit some baseballs. Mrs. Frestmen said it would be alright as long as we watched out for each other whenever we crossed the street.”

My mother snorted. “I’ll bet she did.”

“Anyways, we were at the park and we saw two men-”

“Riveting.”

“-Who looked exactly the same.”

This got the attention of my father now. He turned to face me, at least as much as he could turn without moving from within the comfortable cocoon of the recliner. “Twins? You do know what twins are, don’t you?” To my mother: “What are they teaching him at that school?”

“Bad manners, apparently. Don’t slurp at your dinner Kyle.”

This was the first and last time I tried to bring the man up to my parents. 

Next Sunday, instead of going to the park, I went grocery shopping with my parents. I recall standing in the checkout line, glancing around at anything and everything for some sort of distraction when I found it. The man directly in front of us in the checkout line looked almost identical to my father: Short, brown hair. A half dozen or so worry lines creasing their sun-damaged foreheads. Left arm longer than the right. They even had similar clothing: Goofy glasses with the thick black frames that were in style at that time. A khaki jacket that sat too big in the shoulders. And boot-cut jeans that looked ridiculous when you wore anything but boots(which neither of them were). 

“Look”, I said, whispering to my parents. “That guy looks just like dad.”

They glanced up at the man; My mom snorted and my dad frowned. “That’s part of men's charm”, my mother explained to me. “Their interchangeability.”

It was a full month before I braved the park again. There were no tricks this time. After all, the man hadn’t actually done anything to me, had he? He’d never pursued me, never laid a hand on me, threatened me, hell, never said anything at all. This was the way I convinced myself back to the park, though reflecting on it now, I believe the time away along with my parents' reactions to my story of the man was causing me to doubt the validity of it myself. And so, I set out that Sunday with the mission of proving that I was solidly sane. Unfortunately, when I finally turned the corner towards Plusieur, I felt anything but.

There in the park were hundreds of men. Or rather, one man, iterated a hundred times. The differences from one to the next were in their activities: Some on the roundabout, some slipping down the slide, some gathering wood chips in piles, a few playing catch back and forth with a ball that had been left there by one of the park's previous patrons. And in their outfits: Neon green shorts and a bright yellow T-shirt on one, black slacks and a lavender button down on another, cargo shorts and a ratty looking sweatshirt on a third. I continued into the park as though hypnotized. The moment my foot stepped onto the wood chips of the playground, every single one of the men stopped what they were doing and looked at me. The ball traveled through the air, missing its mark and plodding sadly in the ground behind its intended target as he too turned to stare. 

At this juncture I must admit, I am absolutely clueless as to what was running through my young mind. I have no explanation for why I did not turn tail and run with a hundred impossible faces staring at me with the same blank eyes. I do recall that the man had a calming sort of presence about him, even during our first two encounters, that perhaps had lent me courage during our confrontations, firstly on the swings and then again near the monkey bars. I’ve theorized in the years since that the proliferation of this man into a hundred different life forms may have diffused this calming energy at an even greater clip, forcing me into an almost Zen like state wherein nothing, even this maximum strangeness, could deter me from the swingset. Regardless, I continued through the crowd, their gazes locked onto my tiny frame as my sneakers skittered over the woodchips.

The man dressed in the navy blue suit was seated on the swing beside my favorite. His notebook was out, but he, like the rest of the group, was looking at me rather than it. My face burned; I was blushing, feeling embarrassed, of all things, that this many people were paying attention to me. Again, without really knowing why, I leaned on what I knew best and simply began swinging. 

There was no wind that day. The sky overhead consisted of grey clouds overlapping one another, the soft sort of grey that means the day will be cool but not wet. I remember regretting not wearing a sweatshirt as the swish of the swing back and forth began to chill me. I worked my way further and faster in this pendulum motion, kicking my legs out and tucking them in as one does to work up maximum velocity until I finally reached the point that I thought I might go for it. I reared back with intention, practically leaning out of the seat in order to build up the proper momentum, and then propelled myself forward with ferocity, throwing the whole of my being into it. Hundreds of eyes watched me work in silence.

I flew over the top of the swingset and knew immediately that I would do another revolution, and another, and another- Over and over I traveled, more than I ever had before, conjuring up my own wind to speed me on the way, my hair whipping behind me and then falling forward over my eyes, though I was not looking at anything at this time, not really, for in those moments the whole world was a blur of motion and delight. 

Stopping this sort of sequence cannot be a halfway measure, lest you wind up directly over top of the swingset bar and realize that you no longer have the momentum to carry you forward, dropping you down to the nasty metal below. I had found over years of testing that the safest, and frankly, most enjoyable method of exit was simply to leap off when the time was right, and so that was what I did, loosening my grip on the chains beside me and thrusting my body from the seat, flying forward ten yards and landing harshly in the wood chips. 

The quick shift from flying to motionless wrenched my gut uncomfortably, and I was only a few seconds deplaned when I began vomiting. It was a small amount of vomit, with unfortunately identifiable bits of that morning's Lucky Charms mixed with yellow bile. After half a minute of this, I caught my breath and wiped my mouth with the back of a shaking hand. Slowly, I rose to my feet and turned to look at the one in the navy blue suit. 

The man studied me, was always studying me. He made a few quick notes in the notebook on his lap, adjusted his glasses, and then suddenly, brought his hands together and began to clap.

The noise was jarring; The clapping of the hundreds of men happened in unison, over and over. It sounded more like the beating of a drum than typical applause. Despite the absurdity of the situation, the shakiness of my stomach, the feeling of danger that tickled the back of my brain, I couldn’t help but smile at the attention. Strangely enough, I took a bow.

I saw the man only once more in my life. For a few Sundays after that strange morning I had continued going to the park but he was nowhere to be found and I soon discovered that without an audience, the swinging had lost its joy. I stopped going to the park entirely. My mother took silent satisfaction in the apparent falling out between Clint Frestmen and I. Years passed. I moved away and grew old. My father died of natural causes at age 54 and a few years later, my mother had a health scare of her own. By this time my own children were out of the house, and so it was an easy thing to move back home with her to lend some comfort in her twilight years. 

One particularly lonesome morning, while my mother was still asleep, I decided to stretch my legs and walked the few blocks to Plusieur Park. Crosswalks and stop signs had been added, the lawns were more tightly manicured than those I had cut across in the days of my youth, but the park remained largely unchanged. The same sign announced it, worn and hardly legible, and the same swingset sat in the ages old wood chips, rusted and forgotten. And there, making gentle movements back and forth, sat the man. 

The years had not been kind to him. His face was sallow and pock marked. His lips had grown while the rest of him shrunk; There was little to him other than bone and vein and his old hair had deserted him, replaced by thin wisps of white that peeked out from beneath the blue baseball cap he wore atop his head. I may not have recognized him at all had he not glanced up as I made my way towards the playground and stared at me with those same blank eyes. It took me a few moments to realize that he was wearing my middle school gym uniform.

I took a seat on the swing next to him. He could not meet my eye as he had in the past. Instead, he began to swing. Back and forth, the chains groaned with effort as the man picked up speed. His knees clicked when he brought them into his body, his teeth grit with effort when he forced them out again. Faster and faster, higher and higher the man flew until finally he had gathered enough behind him to make the leap. In one final swoop, he swung over the bar-

But not around it. The swing fell harshly, jostling the chains as I glanced around frantically for where his body might land. But there was nothing. The man had disappeared. The swing softly rocked back and forth, steadying itself for the next. The park was suddenly lonely. With a wobbly lip, I took to my feet and began to applaud.

Back home in Yellow Springs the cold had bleached the grass dead and a wind that could be mistaken for gentle brought tears to your eyes should you happen to be walking east that morning. If the roads were clear enough to drive on, the latest storm’s damage would be revealed in the form of potholes whose frequency was such that they seemed the rule rather than the exception. The Lightspark river that ran on the outskirts of the town flushed the dirt that had melted into its tributaries, staining the water a queasy brown. Nick had lived in Yellow Springs for half a decade now and every winter it was the same. And so, during a particularly miserable shut-in period last January where he had failed to stock up beforehand and was forced to subsist on bits of bread and ice cream for a week and a half, he booked a ticket out to Nags Head for the coming winter along with a small beachside bungalow for him to work out of during those darkest months.

Now Nick sat on the beach of Nags Head, wearing only a baggy blue swimsuit whose dampness caused it to cling to his bone pale legs. Sand found its way everywhere: Between his toes, beneath his eyes, buried in his most intimate regions. He shifted from one buttock to another to try and bring some relief. The waves came in regularly, though they felt distant from clockwork. It was a Thursday, and around 2 PM. Bright rays of light warmed his back and made the white sand difficult to look at straight on.

A girl whose age could’ve ranged anywhere from five to eleven was playing in the waves in front of him. Nick glanced around but failed to spot any responsible adult that could conceivably be in charge of the child. He supposed this meant the role defaulted to him. His work computer sat back in the bungalow, activity status a menacing yellow. When Nick had taken his intro to art class he’d gotten in heated arguments with his otherwise mellow teacher about whether yellow or red was the more threatening color. His teacher had taken the classic line that red was meant to symbolize danger, blood, fright, death, but Nick felt that this was taking all of the nuance out of the discussion. After all, yellow precedes red, yellow is what you see when the danger is coming; By the time red arrives, it's too late to feel threatened. You’re already dead.

The girl was at war with the waves, throwing herself life and limb into each of them with the ferocious abandon that belongs solely to children. Their synchronicity was almost that of an assembly line- Wave approach, girl leap, head SPLASH, wave continues, flattens onto the shore, girl raises her head and looks at her opponent now dying on the sand; Another successful campaign. Turns, wave approach, girl leap, head SPLASH- On and on the two clashed. Nick watched and didn’t watch, his eyes focused and his mind elsewhere. His work computer sat back in the bungalow, his activity status a threatening yellow.

The girl came out of the water now. She stood with her small feet in the damp sand and shook her hair out like a dog; Long, blonde strands turned brown with the wet whipped back and forth in front of her closed eyes. Satisfied, she steadied herself and walked straight up to Nick, hands on her hips with six different bracelets encircling her right wrist, stomach protruding with exaggeration. Her lips were unnerving. They somehow gave the impression that the girl's lipstick had been smudged, making the borders of her mouth inexact, though she was far too young for this to have been the case. Her eyes were careful and brown. Nick shoveled sand over his feet.

“What are you doing out here?” The girl demanded.

“Enjoying the beach, same as you”, Nick said. He relaxed back onto his elbows, stretching his torso. 

The girl turned her head quizzically, as though Nick hadn’t understood the question. “Aren’t you old?”

Nick lifted his hand up and pretended to be inspecting it. “It does seem that way.”

“So don’t you have a job?” The girl asked it with a childish sneer borne less out of any sense of meanness and more out of the overwhelming satisfaction that is bestowed upon every child when they are able to prove an adult wrong.

“I do have a job.”

The girl seemed caught off guard by this admission- She waved her body around, limbs flying every which way until she finally came upon a gesture that looked something like shrugging her shoulders.

“I work from home. And right now-” The man pointed at a colorful little building sitting a half mile down and back from the beach. “-That’s home.”

“It’s 2:13 PM”, the girl said, checking one of her many bracelets that must’ve been a watch.

“So it is.”

“So you should be working.” 

“Well”, the man said. “Strictly speaking, that’s true.”

The girl fell to her knees suddenly and began packing tight the heaps of sand Nick had been scooping over his feet. Once satisfied, she rose again to her feet and walked towards the water, where she collected damp sand against her stomach, cradling it with both hands, and transported it back over to Nick where she fell to her knees again and began packing the foot sand with this wet outer layer. The time Nick’s status had left as yellow was dwindling.

“It makes it stick better”, she explained.

“Is that so?” 

The girl nodded, tucking chin to chest. Nick glanced around. It felt odd that they should be the only two on the beach. He could hear the far off sounds of traffic coming from downtown a ten minute walk away.

“I like your bracelets”, Nick said. 

The girl lifted her arm up and jangled it in front of Nick, to give him a better view. There was one that seemed to be made of plastic seahorses hot glued to one another; A thin watch that looked as though it had been won out of a cereal box; Two were plain rubber bands; A circle of turquoise colored beads that rattled as she shook her arm. 

“Very nice”, Nick said.

All the while the girl was at work. She had begun to cover Nick’s legs with sand as well, packing them excessively until both united in one huge mound of sand that she began to carefully apply damp material to as a finish. “So what do you do?”

“I’m a market insights strategist”, Nick replied automatically.

Her nose wrinkled and she looked at Nick as though to make sure he wasn’t pulling one over on her. “Wassthat?”

“I provide relevant reports regarding the most actionable movements in the market.”

“Which market?”

“The…” Nick seemed to remember who he was talking to. “The fish market.”

The girl looked up, nodded sagely. “Not eating fish, you mean?”

“Right. We only deal in live fish. Pets.”

“Good”, the girl said, heaping sand onto his midsection. “Good. But I mean what do you do for fun?”

“Well”, Nick said. He could feel the beginning of a sunburn forming on his back. Beads of sweat tickled down his chest but he didn’t dare shift his base to wipe them. “Well, what do you do for fun?”

“Explore”, the girl said confidently. “I make bracelets. I made macaroni too. I’m a striker. And I help cats.”

“Cats huh? I almost went into the cat market myself. How do you help cats?” Nick's mind turned with the thought of his status now showing as an intractable red.

His boss messaging him frantically, the entire company going under and the livelihood of hundreds jeopardized because he wasn’t at his computer to send the quarterly Scraping Report out a day early. Likely the world would end. Religions would capsize and countries balkanize into angry nothings.

“Well the best way is to take them”, the girl said. “But mom doesn’t let me take more than 3 at a time. So then I have to try and train them.”

“How do you train them?”

“With food”, she stood and walked to the water for more wet sand, talking the whole time at the same volume as though oblivious to her own movement. “I put food and water out in my bowls at the corner lot and then I sit and wait and when they come I can pet them while they’re eating.”

She sat back down and cemented his stomach. 

“That’s good. That’s a good training method.”

Clouds shifted in front of the sun, giving a momentary reprieve. The girl scooted behind Nick for a moment; There was the muffled sound of sand being shuffled and then she gently took him by the sides of his head and laid him back onto the mound she had created, a soft pillow of beach. 

“Thank you.”

The girl did not acknowledge this but immediately began work on his upper chest and arms, tucking them close to the rest of his body to minimize the work. 

“So”, the girl asked again. “What do you do?”

“I run. Sometimes I read.”

“Do you want to race?” The girl asked instantly. She looked at him with a discerning eye. “Wait. Don’t stand. You watch and tell me if you could beat me, okay?” She stood and brushed the sand from herself. Her knees dropped into an approximation of a runner's stance. She took one last look back at Nick. “Don’t lie.” And then she took off like a tornado, her feet jutting this way and that in the uneven sand, her path anything but direct and the finish line nowhere to be found. Eventually, she reached whatever terminus she'd created for herself and turned around to race back to Nick. 

“Wow.”

The girl stood tall, her hands raised over her head, willing herself to breathe quietly. 

“No way I could beat that”, Nick shook his head as much as he could. “Not a chance. Are you even tired?”

The girl frowned and dropped to her knees again. “Don’t move! You’re ruining it.” She tucked the sand back over the top of his chest.

“Sorry about that. No more moving from me.” 

By now the main office building in which the more gung-ho members of the staff still regularly gathered had likely caught fire from the sheer catastrophic nature of the situation. Alarm bells were ringing throughout the country and would probably reach the two of them sooner or later. If the dollar hadn’t already begun tanking, it would do so shortly.

The man glanced around, suddenly uncertain. “Where are your parents, by the way?”

“In the shower.”

“In the shower where?”

The girl shrugged. Her tongue stuck out of the corner of her mouth as she concentrated on getting a particularly tight pack close to Nick’s neck. “Mom says to tell strangers she’s in the shower.”

“I’m Nick.” Nick raised his eyebrows.

“Cherry”, Cherry said. She looked seriously at Nick and gave a polite, showy smile. “Pleased to meet you.”

“Likewise, Cherry.” 

The President has been alerted and a council of the highest ranking members of government and military has been called in order to determine the best course of action. National alliances shift and tighten. 300 lightyears away, the Draxen race watches the proceedings with great intrigue. 

“Do you ever wish you had been a vet?” Cherry asked.

“Why’s that?”

“Vets get to help cats. I’m gonna be a vet.”

“A vet is a great thing to be”, Nick agreed.

“So why did you choose fish markets instead? Anyone can be a vet if they try.” She said this matter-of-fact lightly, as though commenting on the temperature or the benefits of regular exercise. With tiny, practiced hands she began clumping sand around the outline of Nick’s head, raising the ground to match the height of his pillow.

“I wonder that myself sometimes," Nick admitted. 

“How old are you?” 

“I’m 33 Cherry. How old are you?”

“33 is old”, Cherry mulled it over. “But not too old to become a vet, I don’t think.”

Soon, war will break out within the islands of the East Indies; Unsure of what else to do, every world leader has begun to flood the area with troops. At the moment, they are still choosing sides but soon, a bloodbath. 

Something about Cherry’s most recent comment had awoken Nick to the situation. He tried to shift up slightly, finding it ridiculously difficult to crane his neck for a better view of the girl. “I don’t think I’d like to be a vet. I’m not sure of it, at least.”

Cherry had begun work on his ears, so it was difficult to make out her reply. “What did you want to be? Fish markets?”

“No”, Nick laid back down. The sand felt abnormally heavy on his chest, straining his breaths. The cloud still had not moved from in front of the sun. He thought of the empty easel sitting in the drawing room of his oversized bungalow, of the dozens of sketchbooks used and discarded cluttering his attic back in Yellow Springs, of the mousy girl with a face like a question mark who, on portrait day, had told him that she thought his had some of ‘the most personal detail she’d ever seen’. 

“I don’t think I ever wanted to be anything, really. Not that badly.”

“Then you did good!” Cherry beamed from her new perch on the sand crushing Nick’s chest as she packed wetness over his forehead. “You became nothing!”

“Well”, Nick said, sputtering as Cherry drizzled dry sand over his lips and nose. “I’m not nothing. I happen to be playing a key role in our expansion towards the west coast through providing crucial KPI reporting that leadership uses to inform their deziz…” Nick trailed off as the sand made its way into his mouth, stifling his justification. It tasted dry and yellow but there was too much of it to spit out. He tried to tell Cherry that he’d had enough but could no longer form any words. 

Ancient gods, having been long replaced by humanity's faith in the rational, are awoken by the uncertainty that Nick’s tardiness has placed into the air of the world. They rise from the depths of the ocean, the cracks in the sidewalk, the holes in the hearts of the people. The Bills continue suiting up to play the Chargers that evening as scheduled.

“There is so much nothing”, Cherry said, frowning with her legs saddled on either side of Nick’s tomb. She took some of the wet sand sitting in her lap and painted her cheeks with it, almost without thought. “Do you believe in reincarnation?” She pronounced the word slowly, as though just learning it. Her brown eyes turned huge in Nick’s limited vision; A grain of sand fell burning into his cornea but he could no longer scream. The world became blurred and red. Nick's breathing slowed.

“I don’t either,” Cherry continued. “That’s why I’m going to be a vet. That way, I can be something now, instead of hoping for it later. Is that what you do, you think? Hope for it later? Or have you pretty much given up? " A wave crashed. "That’s probably smart.” Cherry clicked her tongue. “I think you’re done, don’t you?” 

Cherry drizzled the sand over his eyes, forcing them shut to avoid further irritation. She packed it tight with rough, violent punches to Nick’s head, a thundering that would’ve been a death rattle had there been anything left to kill. Slowly, she stood and took two steps back, admiring her work for a few seconds, hands on her hips. Her face was tomato red, either from exertion or sunburn, and her stomach grumbled. If she was hungry, the cats were hungry. “Bye!” Cherry called out. And she ran the whole way home.

The next day, as cities burned and wives were widowed, Nick’s boss scurried from his panic room and made a mad dash for the work laptop resting on the desk of his office. Without glancing out the window, he raced back, slamming the cellar door behind him. His wife's corpse, the decisive, self-inflicted bullet hole a red splotch through her forehead, sat against the far wall. Their sons, 3 and 5 years old, comforted themselves beneath her lifeless arms. The building rocked back and forth as chaos reigned on the streets below; Ancient entities warred with one another while the people mourned their needless losses. With a shaky hand, he clicked into his team's shared folder, dragged the quarterly report into his open email, and pressed 'Send'. Not five seconds later, an emergency bulletin came through on the laptop; Indeed, on every communicative device the world over: The report had been sent. Treaties had been reached. The gods retreated at the sight of the quarter over quarter improvements. Humanity breathes again.

You think you know darkness when you turn off the light and scamper up the stairs as a child. Once more the first time you sneak out into the woods; And then again when you return home to find yourself locked out. You think you know darkness when you read about it, hear it described by those who claim to have come by it honestly: Complete black, the reduction of a sense, as though there will never be light again. You do not know dark like the dark that swallows the cosmos in the middle of the sea. This is the dark of myth, of the underworld, of the river Styx that runs wide and long through the spine of the world. This is the dark that rocked Axel and Bo to sleep, night after night aboard their catamaran. 

_______________________________________________________________

         Morning comes and neither wakes because dreams are all that has been left to them. A bird passes by overhead but no eyes are open to bear witness. 

         It’s a little before noon, probably, when Axel nudges Bo’s ribs with his overcooked foot. 

“You awake?”

         “Mhm.”

“We’re going to die out here.”

         Bo blinked sleep out of his eyes, rubbed the crust of the night from them with sweaty palms. “Do you feel better now, having said that?”

         Axel snorted. “Really wearing that psychology major on your sleeve, aren’t you?”

“Keep up this attitude and I’ll let loose my sociology minor- And trust me, neither of us wants that.”

         “I do feel better, actually”, Axel said. He was more animated than either of them had been in days. Fully sitting up, with his feet drawn into his chest; His hair was cut short and dyed jet black; Tattoos wormed their way up and down his arms.

         “In general or for-”

“For having said it, yeah. I think it’s important we both do.”

         Bo was still adjusting to the light. One hand worked to shield his eyes from the sun, while the other twisted a stray curl over each knuckle. He swung his legs over the side and let his feet dangle in the water. 

         When it became clear this call to action wasn’t going to get a response, Axel repeated himself. “I think you need to say it, Bo. You need to admit it to yourself.”

         “You don’t want me to admit it to myself. You want me to admit it to you.” Bo looked at Axel, his eyes not even half-serious. “You want permission to give up.”

         “Wh- Permission to give up? Take a fucking gander Bo!” Axel spread his arms wide and twisted, his spine splintering with the effort. The still sea was violent in its vastness; The horizon acted as a distant, too perfect border, splitting the neverending blue into Atlantic and atmosphere. “We don’t have anything left to give but up!”

         Bo snorted, smiled. “Clever.”

“You fu-” Moving quicker than either had in days, Axel clambered across the boat and shoved Bo into the water.

         Neither the shove nor the chill of the water further below the surface came as a surprise to Bo. The ocean was familiar now; Not a friend but an authority and he welcomed its embrace as one might a father’s heavy hand on their shoulder. He floated there, suspended in time, patient.

         Axel watched Bo beneath the surface. His heart was beating quickly in the shallow protection of his ribcage. 

         Bo’s breaths came in short, rapid fashion when he resurfaced. His hair turned two shades darker in the wet and the water highlighted the veins that strained against the surface of his skin. Slowly, he floated over to the side of the boat and threw his arms up, waiting for Axel to hoist him inside. After a moment of hesitation, Axel clasped Bo’s hands and hauled him into the boat. 

         They both sat, wheezing after such little exercise. Half an hour passed before either spoke. The sun glared daggers at the pair of them.

         “I’m not dying out here,” Bo told him. “Are you?”

“No.”

_______________________________________________________________

The heat of the sun stacked atop itself like blankets, layer upon layer pressing down from above. The cool lick of the salt water did little to relieve this awful burning. The two men, boys really, lay side by side facing one another. One stretched nearly the full length of the boat; The other came about half a foot shy. Each was facing down, so that their backs baked as the water rose from below and teased their lips through the holes in the rubber that made up the bottom of their boat. They spoke to each other slowly, between waves, as though with each sentence came a turn of the page.

“Do you miss her?” Bo asked.

A wave arrives, wetting their noses and mouths.

“I try not to think about it.”

“And? Does that work?”

Axel had his eyes closed, but he made the extra effort to roll them beneath the shut lids. “Not too well.”

“I suspected as much.” Bo flipped over onto his back, giving it a break. He tucked his chin to his chest and threw his damp shirt over his golden curls. There was a scar on Axel’s back, an old diving wound he’d reopened their first night in Newport that Bo stared at now. The edges were cracked, the sun and the sea working together to spread it apart, giving it the appearance of a rusted fishing hook. “What do you miss about her?””

Axel flipped too now, the rubber peeling from his body with a sound like muffled velcro. The crisscross pattern of the bottom of their boat was reflected on his tan chest as he turned over. “Is there a point to this conversation?”

“C’mon old buddy”, Bo prodded Axel’s shin with his overgrown big toe. “We’re well past points.”

The larger man sighed, his pale chest heaving up and down. “Her laugh, her hair. The sideways look she’ll give me when she thinks whoevers talking is an idiot.”

“What look?”

“You know…Like-” Axel tried to flash Bo the face, his eyebrows raised, head tilted down and a wry smile hinting at the corners of his mouth. 

“And this face- You enjoy it?”

“It’s cuter when she does it.”

“It’d have to be.”

There was a pause. The waves had become much more refreshing on their scorched backs. It was impossible to tell sweat from the rest of it. 

“I miss her voice more than anything.”

“She’s got a great voice.”

“And if she was with us in Newport she would’ve stopped us. She always gets feelings about stuff like this.”

“Stuff like this?” Bo scratched his chest, gentle with the burned skin.

“Well”, Axel conceded. “Anything really. She has a lot of feelings.”

“Holly has always come across as very in touch with herself.”

“True but I mean more like… In touch with the world, you know?”

“Ah. The type to feel a storm coming in the joints of her elbows?”

“Exactly.”

Bo let out a low whistle. “In that case, we sure could’ve used her.”

They were quiet now. Silence out here was more than anywhere else, the lap of the water light, the vacant air deeply still. Axel poked his fingers through the rubber holes and wiggled. He brought one eye open, red rimming the cutting green of his iris. “What about you?”

“Oh I never get those sorts of intuitions. The world knows I love a surprise.”

“No I mean- Do you still miss her?”

For once, Bo grew quiet. Axel was patient. He listened to his stomach rumble accusingly, though its protests had become less and less lively. Their mouths tasted of desert.

“I want to tread carefully here”, Bo began.

“Please do.”

“In that I want to be incredibly clear that I am not downplaying your feelings of longing.”

“You wouldn’t dream of it.”

“It is a different sort of missing. Less like the feeling for your old friends after you move away. Less like the feeling you’re so surprised to have for your parents the first few months at college.”

A cloud blocked the sun for a moment, draping them in an unfamiliar shade. Axel sat up and let his dark hair create a curtain around his face.

“Think of it like this”, Bo went on, staring down at the sea through the perforated floor. “It’s as though your dog gets out and a few days later you see the body of a dead boxer in some back alley. And you know. In that moment, you know and you’re sure of it. But you keep hanging up missing posters all over town, for years and years afterward, not out of some false sense of hope; But because they’re missing. And they always will be.”

The wind blew intermittently, gasping for breath. Axel’s eyes were wide open, staring at his friend. His stomach was quiet now, and heavy. With one hand he reached for Bo’s foot and held it.

Bo raised his head, looking at his foot to confirm what he was feeling.“What- What the fuck are you doing?”

“Ah- Comforting you?” Axel answered as though he wasn’t sure himself.

“This is for me?”

Axel threw Bo’s foot away, his cheeks turning even redder. “Go fuck yourself.”

“Hey, no”, Bo wiggled his torso down so his legs could stretch the full length of the boat and shoved his feet into Axel’s face. “C’mon. Give ‘em a kiss or I’m gonna cry.” He wiggled his toes up and down as though they were speaking. “Smooch us Axel. Smooooch us.” 

“You’re a fucking bastard.”

_______________________________________________________________

There is plenty of time to think when stranded at sea and after a week, Axel had taken a pretty hard stance on the idea of social constructs; Specifically, weeks. 

         A day, in Axel’s thinking, was a truly cut and dry sort of thing. You could pretend that humanity made up the idea, and that in places like Antarctica in the summer or Antarctica in the winter, there was no such thing, but in reality, it was a pretty solid idea. Weeks, however… Months? These were the fallacies of man, boundaries put into place to try and help feeble minds make sense of infinite time. There was no such thing as a week- That had become abundantly clear after seven days at sea.

         He conveyed these thoughts to Bo, who mused over them from his new favorite position- Hanging entirely off the raft, legs dangling in the water, being dragged along like an inner tube. He swore that the energy it cost was more than made up for in the morale boost it gave. 

         “Seasons?” Bo posed the question.

“I suppose seasons are closer to days than they are to weeks.”

         “In relevance, not in length of time.”

“Correct.”

         “Hmm”, Bo said. “I think I agree.”

“Huh”, Axel frowned. “Boring.”

         “It is more fun when we disagree.”

Axel itched his peeling skin. He pretended to play rock, paper, scissors against himself. He tried to think of a rhyme for ‘nautical’.

“You can eat me, you know”, Bo offered.

“What?”

         “If it comes down to it. I won’t mind. I want you to live.”

“I’m not going to eat you.”

         “Sure, you say that now.”

“Yeah- Now, after a week of no food or water. Feels pretty safe to say that’s out of bounds for me.”

         Bo’s toes were raisinettes in the deep blue. He closed his eyes and imagined himself with propellers for legs. He imagined bringing them back home, the burger he would have, the book he would write. He wondered how quickly his roommates had realized he was missing.

Axel took a shaky breath. “But… You know if you feel… If you have the urge…”

         “Hm?”

“If you want to eat me you can. Is all I’m saying.”

         “Gross”, Bo said flatly.

“Gross?” Axel sat up, not sure if he was feigning offense or actually insulted. “Eating me is gross but I’m somehow supposed to be happy eating you?”

         “Of course; I take care of my body. No offense, but I’ve seen your diet. Garbage in, garbage out.”

“There hasn’t been any garbage in or out for quite some time. I think your figure can take it.”

         “I’ll take my chances fishing.”

“With what?”

         “My toes, for the moment.”

“And how’s that going?”

         “It’s going.”

“Not well then.”

         “Did I say not well? I don’t seem to remember saying not well.”

“Caught any fish?”

         “It’s a patient man's game.”

“You’re some kind of patient alright.”

         “Ad-hominem? Not a good look for you, old friend.”

Axel sighed. “You really can eat me if it comes down to it. I mean it.”

         “Keep saying that and I might just upchuck some bait for these minnows.”

____________________________________________________________________

Axel awoke to something prodding him in the thigh. His eyes opened slowly, dramatically revealing his friend's face caked in rare moonlight. Bo motioned for Axel to follow him, a silly notion on the hardly 7 foot long vessel. He pointed towards the moon, where the light cascaded in a tornado pattern across the water towards their boat. The soft white glow carried across the ocean, highlighting the low peaks and valleys of the gentle waves. He turned back towards Axel, hopeful.

         “Pretty.”

Bo nodded. 

         “Is that all?”

Bo nodded. 

Axel sighed, and scooted over to sit beside Bo, his eyelids heavy. “Thanks.”

         Bo put his arm around Axel. He sighed, his breath filled with purpose. “We might die out here. But until then, we may as well live.”

A few moments later, it began to rain.

_______________________________________________________________

Time passed. The sun and moon played hide and seek. The sky and sea seemed to reflect one another, Axel and Bo stranded in a ridiculous vessel between two universal mirrors. Bo no longer dragged his legs behind them as they had both begun to faint frequently. Instead they lay together in a crumpled, sun bleached heap. Axel’s hair had started to grow out, revealing soft brown roots beneath the blackened tips. Each had their own version of facial hair sprouting from tanned cheeks; Axel’s fuller, sharper. Bo’s was a loose and stringy red. The days were long.

         Axel knew they were hopeless when Bo stopped sweating. 

         “Axel.” Bo reached across and gently poked his friend's chest. “Axel.”

“Wh- There better be a cruise ship on the fucking horizon.”

         “Look”, and Bo took Axel’s hand and held it to his armpit.

“Gross! Why would you-?”

         “Dry. Completely dry.” Bo laid back on the rubber and kicked his legs over the side. “I’ve stopped sweating.”

         Only then did Axel notice his hand. No moisture. He looked at it, looked at Bo, and processed. 

         “I still feel like you didn’t have to put my hand in your armpit.”

“I’ve always thought of you as a primarily kinesthetic learner.”

         Axel rolled his eyes yet again. “You know what this means, I assume?”

“I no longer have to worry about our lack of deodorant?”

         “You’re so dehydrated that your body has stopped one of its core processes. You need to start seriously worrying about overheating.”

         “If I start worrying only half-seriously, will that affect my results?”

“Bo! Enough!”

         Bo shrugged. He turned to the water and tried to muster up enough saliva to spit. 

Axel sat against the rubber side, his mind racing. Even in the miraculous event of another rainstorm, they still had nothing to catch the water with. It might tide them over for another few days, but eventually they would wind up in the exact same position they were now but hungrier. Weaker. 

In a way, Bo was right. Worried or not worried, death would come all the same.

_______________________________________________________________

“Bo.”

There was no reply but Bo opened one weary eye.

         “Please eat me.”

Bo closed his eye. He began to whistle, a low-eerie sound that carried across the surface of the water.

         “Bo.”

The whistling continued. The tune was familiar but so poorly produced it remained unidentifiable.

         “Bo, fucking answer me.”

“I’m a vegetarian.”

         “No you’re not.”

“I made the change recently, after taking some time to reflect. I would really appreciate your support as I begin this new chapter.”

         Axel groaned and curled and uncurled his spine. “How do you have the energy to be this insufferable?”

         “For me, it comes effortlessly.”

“If our bodies get found by some deep sea fishing boat twenty years from now, they’re not going to be impressed with our sense of humanity. They’re going to think we’re fucking idiots.”

         “Do you make a lot of your decisions based on the opinions of deep sea fishermen from the future?”

         “College was the worst thing that ever happened to you.”

“Hm”, Bo said, glancing around. “I can think of one or two things that I might place above it.”

         Axel grit his teeth. "I’m going to die, Bo. Very, very soon. I can feel it.”

      “I’m going for a dip.”

“Bo, please”, Axel begged with all the strength he had left. His thoughts had become clouded and incomplete,  loose strings with only this one unifying thread to tie them all together. “Please tell me you’re going to eat me when I’m gone. I need you to live, Bo. I need you to tell Holly. I need you to try.”

With supernatural effort, Bo swung his legs over the side of the boat. The chill of the water sent a shiver through his body and down his fingertips. “Tell Holly what?”

Axel bit his lip, hard. He felt suddenly frantic. “She needs to know that I love her. And I’m sorry, and, and-”

Bo studied the surface of the water. A siren song seemed to bubble up from below. “She knows Axel. I promise she knows.”

Axel let out a guttural sound, somewhere between a grunt and a yell, the natural exodus of pure frustration. Moments later, he fainted. Bo sat on the edge for a moment, staring up at a night sky littered with stars. He leaned down and took Axel’s foot in one tired claw; Raising it to his cracked, blackened lips, he gently kissed his friend goodbye.

 “She knows”, Bo said. And he slipped over the side.

_______________________________________________________________

At the end of our lives, we all finally become acquainted with this true darkness. Some of us first meet it as our lungs fill with seawater. Every instinct in our body screams at us to fight for the surface while the few circuits still firing in our slowing brain remind the rest of us that even if we tried, we would never be able to locate anything down here in the cold, infinite nothing. So instead, slowly, eyes close for a final time and somehow that makes things seem a little brighter. This dark is not so bad as the dark that envelopes a man that has desecrated his brother. It is a few hours before the body reaches the floor of the endless deep.

Others of us dance around the darkness until our final breath. Our eyes shutter open from our latest fainting spell aboard the catamaran. Though we are dying of dehydration, it is the starvation that causes us to feel too frail to look around for our old friend. The moment we finally realize what he has done, we want to scream and cry and beat ourselves and then again when we understand that we’re too weak to do any of it. We try to crane our neck to stare at the night sky one last time but once again we are calling upon a strength that is no longer there; Instead, we slump even further and shiver at the cold touch of the water from the sea brushing against us from below. In these fleeting moments we begin to lie to ourselves; Maybe he has lived. Maybe he swam for shore. With the final breath before true darkness comes our final thought: At least my loved ones will have my body. This too is a lie, and months after we’ve passed and the birds have pecked us fleshless, a storm wave swallows us whole. In a few hours time, we are reunited with our old friend.

         Hubert sat with his beloved in their office, laughing. He never laughed from the belly anymore; His laughs began in the throat and ended on the tip of his tongue. His mouth was wet with spittle and drink, filled with chipped and yellowed teeth that matched the walls surrounding them. Hubert reached a hand over to stroke his wife's arm, her back, her thigh and laughed again as the ceiling moaned above.    

         Rachel’s hands held the steering wheel so tightly her forearms ached. A podcast droned from her speakers, the monotonous voice a reassuring blanket with which to cover the worries springing from her mind. She was breathing slowly, purposefully. Her face was without makeup and her car spotless.  

         The sound of gravel crunching beneath car tires lifted Hubert out of his chair. He set his empty Coke can beside the others atop the television set and turned to trudge his way to the front door. The newspapers lining the carpet crinkled beneath his boots as he shuffled down the narrow hallway. Once a tall man, the weight of old age forced Hubert to a stoop so that when he opened the door to greet his daughter, they looked one another evenly in the eye.

         “Hi dad!” Rachel's eyes began to well as she smiled at her father.  The stench, a rotten mixture of excrement and decay, had come to life when she’d first pulled into the driveway and now that the door was open it began teething on her tear ducts. She held the cough in for as long as she could but eventually it forced its way out, all the more violent for being made to wait. “How have you been?” She asked weakly.

         Hubert surveyed his daughter. There had been a time when he had enjoyed Rachel’s visits but that was before the strained smiles, the regretful eyes, the endless fucking lectures. A neighbor's dog barked a warning. Without a word, Hubert turned and wandered back inside.

         Rachel spun away from the home and took a big swell of air into her lungs, though even out here the air could not be considered fresh; Littered throughout the lawn were garbage bags, half empty jugs, rusted car parts, old washing machines, swing sets, tool kits, grocery bags, half a toilet, broken lawn chairs and dirty tables. Shards of glass from a cracked mirror on the porch steps reflected Rachel in puzzle pieces: Simple, brown hair; A battered purple college sweatshirt; The tattoo of a lamb peeking out from behind her khakis. Her arresting gray eyes worked into a grimace as she turned to follow her father inside.

         It had been years since her mother died but each visit home still managed to bring fresh horrors. The front living room where she had her first memory, a flash of a Disney movie from beneath the folds of a blanket in her fathers lap, had been rendered unusable by the towers of boxes that leaned precariously over every square inch. DVD cases peeked out of one; Dusty, unread books from another. Rachel spotted the flowery design of their decades old couch crushed beneath several of the towers, the pattern turned lemon with age.

         Hubert headed to his office, the only room in the house that still offered multiple seats. He mumbled to the walls, caressing the hunched over cabinet containing the old ceramic art his wife used to collect: White owls and dusty wolves, smooth turtles and mischievous rabbits, all carved into marble-like clay. “Rachel’s here”, he told the cabinet, and it gave him a contented sigh.

         Hubert’s old leather swivel seat sank comfortably under his weight. The fold out lawn chair that Hubert managed to keep mostly clean for her occasional visits sat across from his, a blanket spread over the top of it. Rachel lowered herself into the seat and glanced around the room. Hubert’s primitive television sagged against the wall with scenes from some old cop show flashing in and out of focus.

         “So”, Rachel repeated. “How have you been?”

“Peachy”, her father said. “Just fucking excellent.”

         Rachel bit her lip and glanced towards the desk, where three different printers rested one atop the other. “That’s good to hear. You keeping busy?” She accidentally breathed in through her mouth and bile came to a boil in her throat.

         Hubert grumbled something unintelligible. He turned to a lamp on his desk and stroked its golden base softly. The light tap of skittering paws fell from the caved ceiling like raindrops.

         “Dad? I got a call from Mrs. Beatty. She said you haven’t been to the shelter in months.” Rachel looked around, nervous. “Where is Meowster Miyagi?” She searched the room for a hint of the cat's orange and white coat but came up empty.

         Hubert’s eyes grew wide, straining themselves to hold back whatever lurked behind them. “Haven’t seen him.”

         “In- How long dad?”

Hubert shrugged. The leather jacket he’d had custom made decades ago hung off his emaciated frame like an old hand-me-down. “Couple weeks, maybe.”

         Rachel pursed her lips.

“He’s still eating”, Hubert began to build his defenses, draw his moat. “I feed him every morning and every night it’s gone. He’s around.”

         She was surprised at how quickly the exhaustion could build up at her fathers house. She felt a dense weight between her eyebrows, dull and unyielding. Maybe it was something in the rancid air. “Could be the rats, dad.”

         Hubert didn’t respond to this. He reached for the remote sitting atop a pile of papers on his desk, mumbling something beneath his breath. The TV went silent and Hubert slowly swiveled back to facing Rachel, meeting her gaze with new eyes.

         “How’s school?”

“I graduated, dad. 3 years ago. I work for Dr. Hiskell now- Remember Dr. Hiskell?”

         Hubert did remember Dr. Hiskell. He remembered taking Rachel there twice a year at Jo’s insistence, sitting in the sterile waiting room with animal portraits plastered over each of the walls and a children's movie playing muted from a TV in the corner. He remembered the buzz in his stomach as he watched Rachel nestled tightly in Jo’s lap while her mother read the subtitles to her in cartoonish voices. A smile crept over Hubert’s face, vacant and damaged.

         “Of course I remember Dr. Hiskell.”

Rachel’s stomach felt twisted, wrong. She leaned forward in her chair and tried another smile. “He remembers you too. He asked about you the other day- Said he’d love to go to dinner with the two of us if you’re up for it. We could swing by Edgar’s, maybe get a couple burgers?”

The memory faded from Hubert, and the smile along with it. He stared at his daughter plainly. “Can I help you with anything, Rachel? Something on your mind?”

         “Dad”, Rachels throat caught and she forced herself to take a deep breath. “Dad. Please. It’s killing you.” She reached out to touch her father, but he recoiled away from her touch, pouting.

 “Never just a visit. Can never just say hello to my daughter.”

“Well”, Rachel said, folding her arms. Tears perched threateningly at the corners of her eyes but she held them back with a stern jaw. “You’re welcome to say hello to me dad. I live thirty minutes away and you haven’t dropped by once in the last two years.”       

         Hubert’s bones weighed more than they used to; They ached in his skin like an intractable bruise. He stood, coughing for a moment. “Take a piss.”

Hubert lumbered past his daughter, and back down the main hallway. His kitchen, like the rest of the house, had been immersed in a dry sulphorous stain. Finish was peeling off the old wooden cabinets which burst with unwashed tupperwares, filled to the brim with stinking, rotten food. Picking his way through the dining room, Hubert threw open the backdoor and emerged into his backyard. Two broken trampolines, both acquired years after Rachel had gotten her masters degree, slumped side by side. A Porta Potty won in an online auction sat off balance a few yards from the porch steps.

         Rachel left her fathers office and began to look around the rest of the house. The hulking mass of things seemed to grow like a cancer every time she visited. It was to the point that the floor plan was unrecognizable; The second hallway had become an impassable collection of board games, used laundry detergent, stained clothes, snapped hangers. She spotted a paper mache volcano she’d made for the second grade science fair resting atop a slush pile of unread mail like a tree topper. The air conditioner breathed choppily. A chill settled over her body and she shook it off, heading out to her car.

         When Hubert returned from the bathroom, he found his daughter shoveling papers into a trash bag with gloved hands. “What are you doing?!” Hubert cried. He dropped to all fours; His knees met the floor and he cried out in pain, sprawling on the ground for a moment and mustering strength in pained gasps before crawling towards the bag. “I need these, there are important things in here, bills and-”

         “DAD!” Rachel yelled. She grabbed his hands and held tight, forcing him to meet her gaze. “This. Is. Garbage. Okay? We can go through some of the other stuff more carefully but these papers- I mean, this is a Sears catalog dad. I don’t think Sears even exists anymore.”

         “Memorabilia”, Hubert whispered. Phlegm built up in his throat and he spat it onto the newspapers below.

         Rachel helped her father to a seat against the wall. On the floor with his throbbing knees pulled into his chest and his arms wrapped around them he looked like an ancient child. Rachel nodded at him and went back to shoveling papers into the bag. A song played unintelligibly from the phone in her pocket. Hubert whimpered. Slowly, he scooted over to the bag and began to inspect the items within. “Rachel, see- Look Rachel. This is the cable bill, if I don’t pay this-”

  Rachel snatched the paper from her dad's hand and quickly scanned it. “Enough dad! This was the cable bill- In 2009. I think it’s safe to assume they sent another.” She shoved the bill back in the bag. Her dad stared up at her with a trembling lip and she sighed, turning her head to roll her eyes. “Why don’t you go- Why don’t you go to the kitchen? Start splitting stuff up into what you want to save and what can go. Okay? But try to be… Discerning. Sound good?”

Her dad didn’t answer but crumpled dramatically to the floor. Slowly, he crawled his way out of the room.

Rachel carried on, boiling. With a grunt of fury, she raised the old volcano above her head and smashed it on the ground.

         Hubert inched through rat dung and cat piss to his living room. Rachel had thought the clutter rendered it unusable but there was a small burrow carved out near the dining room entrance that he crawled through. Boxes full of junk balanced precariously overhead as he inched his way along the tunnel. His senses had all but deserted him. Hubert emerged into a small cave in the center of the garbage and looked up into the glossy face of his late wife.

         The large golden frame rested proudly beside the urn full of her ashes atop a table cluttered with memories. The sounds of Rachel’s muffled cleaning pierced his head like needles. Hands clamped on his ears, Hubert tottered over to the table and stared in horror at the picture. Jo’s beautiful smile was gone, replaced by a look of pure agony that grew more terrible with each stack of papers that Rachel bagged. Hubert took the frame in his hands, jaw agape, tears melting down his face. “I don’t know what to do Jo. She’s trying to kill you. Our own daughter, our Rach, she’s attacking us- I don’t. I can’t. Rachel, Rachel, Please…” The words spilled from his lips like snot bubbles, popping as they came into contact with the shrine. He rocked back and forth on the ground, cradling the picture, waiting for an answer.

         The mound of papers had taken four trash bags by itself. Sweat fell from Rachel’s brow to the now cleared tile below, plopping in the center of a dark red stain. She lifted her sweatshirt to her face and dried it, allowing herself a breath of relief.

         “Okay”, Rachel turned to the desk and eyed the printer triplets. “Now the question is- Do any of you actually work?”

         A violent wail like the sound of a pig being slaughtered cut through the thick air of the house.

         “Dad?” Rachel hurried from the room, peeling her gloves and stuffing them in her back pocket. “Dad? What’s wrong?”

         The wailing continued, growing even louder. Rachel hurried to the living room, puzzling over how to break into the fort of garbage. She picked her way along until she finally found the tunnel spilling out into the dining room. Without giving herself time to think about the filth below, Rachel fell to her hands and knees and began crawling towards the sound. “I’m here dad, I’m coming.”

         She saw the low light coming from the cave before she fully emerged into it. Her father was curled in a ball beneath the table littered with photos of her mother. Screams escaped from deep within his stomach and ran fleet-footed throughout the house. Six candles burned on the table, flickering brightly in the tight space.

         “What the fu- Dad! Hey, dad, hey”, Rachel crawled over to her father and lifted his head into her lap. His skin felt aged in her new hands. She ran her fingers soothingly along the few hairs still hanging on to the back of his head. “It’s okay. I know it’s hard. I know.” She leaned over Hubert, hugging him close. They stayed like this for a moment, listening to the soft sound of each other's breath.

         “She needs this”, Hubert hiccuped. “If you take it she goes.”

“Mom’s dead, dad. I miss her too but she’s been dead for years.” Rachel leaned to blow the candles out but her father sat up, stopping her. His eyes were wet and raving.

         “Gone Rach, but not dead. She’s here. Listen.” Hubert closed his eyes and heard her- Heard her laugh coming from the old Happy Gilmore DVD and her sniffle in the six or so copies of Where the Red Fern Grows. He listened to her pleased groan coming from the boxes of hot chocolate, and felt her light touch in the fuzz of an old blanket. The putrid air was tinged with the faded perfume of floral Estee Lauder, which mixed warmly in his mind with the welcome smell of spongy banana bread and spiked eggnog. He opened his eyes. Rachel stared at him, horrified realization spreading across her face. Hubert set his jaw.

         “She’s here. You can’t take her from me.”

Rachel scooted from him, taking as much distance as the cove of trash allowed. “You need help dad. Real help.” She started to reach for her phone.

“NO!” Hubert screeched. He lunged forward and batted her phone away into a pile of old Walkmans. His outstretched feet kicked the table behind him and two of the candles fell from the table and set the newspapers alight.

“FUCK!” Rachel yelled. She shoved her father off and began trying to stamp out the fire but it was too late- The flames' eager search for fuel had immediately borne fruit. Rachel snatched her phone from the ground and turned towards the tunnel. “We have to go dad- NOW!” Suddenly, she felt a tight grip on her hand. She turned and saw that her father had latched onto her and was staring up at her with pleading eyes. His pant leg dangled carelessly in the growing inferno.

         “Stay Rach”, he begged. All the strength that had left him over the years rushed back to him now and he yanked her even closer to him, to the flames. His breath came in frantic, miserable gasps. “Please. Let’s both stay. We’ll be a family again.” The baking air pressed down, coating each breath in heat. The fire had begun to encircle them and it reflected brightly in Hubert’s hollow eyes.

         “Dad!” Rachel screamed. Tears flung from her face as she jerked left and right, trying to loosen her fathers grip. He grabbed her jacket with his other hand and she spun out of it, kicking his head with her boot and scrambling free. Hubert screamed in anger and crawled towards her. His bottom half was now entirely ablaze. The fire was ravenous and had found itself a feast, spreading along the newspaper lining the home and creeping up the cardboard skyscrapers. Rachel turned and scurried out the tunnel just as it collapsed behind her.

         The house, so long neglected, welcomed its demise with open arms. Flames licked up and down the walls; Boxes tumbled as their supports burned away, spilling Christmas decorations and old cookbooks onto the filthy floor. Rachel stood and raced towards the back, vaulting over an unopened air fryer and shoving aside a failing bookcase. By the time she made it to the backdoor, she was already on the phone with the police.

         “4156 Juniper Falls. A fire, my dad started a fire and he’s trapped inside. Please hurry- Please it’s-”

         Rachel flung herself outside and raced around the house to the front. The fire had spread like a nightmare; Already, neighbors were gathered in the front yard, gawking.  They called out to her as she sprinted around the side of the house but their cries broke no ground; She vaulted up the front steps and grabbed for the door handle. The aged metal singed her, warning her away. She peered frantically through a front window too stuffed to see through. With shaky hands she grabbed the broken mirror frame from the porch beneath her and rammed it through the front window, breaking glass with glass. Her fingers sprouted cuts like weeds and still she ran the frame along the window, creating a larger and larger hole until she was able to reach through and begin to tear away the piles of garbage. She seared the air with fresh obscenities and raked through the trash that had given her father purpose, digging for him as desperately as he had tried to bury her. It wasn’t until a neighbor pulled her screaming from the wreckage that she realized the flames were upon her now, dancing up the sides of her khakis like a mirage and she fell to the ground in her fathers front yard, rolling over and over in the dirt and junk and scum, covering herself with it inside and out.

         Hubert sat in his home, cradling the portrait of his wife. Echoes from a past life gasped and popped around him. He could no longer feel his legs. The table collapsed over top of him, spilling Jo’s ashes into smoke. Hubert flattened to the ground and wheezed.

         “Rachel’s not with us. She left. But I’m here… Is that okay?”

“It’s okay, Hugh”, Jo spoke with the creak of the ceiling fan before it crashed to the rubble below, the cracking of wood within its plaster skeleton, with the thick hum of the air. She spoke with the soft collapse of his desk, the smoke burning in his eyes, with the blood in his veins. “She’ll come when she’s ready.”

         Hubert nodded and smiled and hugged his wife close, breathing softly. She was just as warm as he remembered.

The twilight was oxymoronic, a brilliant darkness sweeping over the trunks of the trees as the procession made their way to the site. Night was never silent, but it was quiet and the group listened closely to each other's footsteps as they plodded along the path. The experienced Lo’ Sin led the way with a single torch in hand, strong and able even in his advanced years. Wind wound its way through the forest and brushed at the backs of the men's togas, causing each of them to shiver in turn. 

They were arranged in a line by age. The youngest, yet to receive his name, held the staff at the rear. It had been carefully carved by the first of the line, generations ago. A great scene wound its way along the staff's wood, whittled and retouched throughout the years until the once sturdy staff was little more than a stick. No longer could it be plunged into the ground with every step; The boy took care to raise it above the roots they stepped over.

It was the tradition of the tribe to keep the young ones in the dark about the truth behind the ritual. There were whispers of things, rumors that couldn’t possibly be true: Some said they had died and come back to life. Others told of horrible visions, of ritual mutilation and a nightmare that never seemed to end, tales that seemed to be corroborated by the markings the men came back with. The boy put no stock in such rumors. The others came back stronger, shining with the vitality their new names lent them. He did not believe in nightmares; He believed in dreams.

The line began to slow. Up ahead, Lo’ Sin raised one weathered palm. The signal was passed down until it reached the boy, who had been told what he must do. He raised the staff and placed it over his still slim shoulders. Hair blacker than the cool pools of water that dotted the forest floor the night after a rain fell before his eyes as he bowed his head and made his way along the line. Each man he passed thumped him on the back and called out their own name in turn. When he reached Lo’ Sin, the men behind began a low chant, their voices somewhere between a grunt and a hum. 

Lo’ Sin looked appraisingly at his first great grandson. There was a cold pride in his eyes, detached and serious. He dropped the hand he had raised and held it out silently. The boy knelt down and lifted the staff from his shoulders to the old man's palm. Scarred fingers wrapped around the familiar carving. The elder carefully set the torch into the ground before sitting himself before it. The staff he kept aloft in his own hands. The men behind, still chanting, began to encircle it. No birds spoke.

The boy had been focused on completing the tasks that had been given to him but now that they were at an end he raised his head slightly and peered out the tops of his eyes. The wide mouth of a cave screamed before him, sharp stalactites salivating from the ceiling above. He flicked his eyes towards Lo’ Sin, who met his gaze. The old man inclined his head toward the cave. Swallowing, the boy walked gingerly into the darkness. 

The chanting seemed to fade with unnatural speed as the boy made his way inside. Only once he was certain the men would not be able to see him by the light of the torch did he chance a look behind him. The light, the torch, the men; All were gone. The boy put one hand on the cave wall and found that it was damp. He kept his hand there, dragging it along as he continued on. 

The boy did not know how long he had been walking before the light appeared again. He dropped his hand from the wall and began to walk faster. His breath came in short, shallow injections. The cave grew wider and wider until he was spat out into a cavity that resembled a great room. He could hear the men chanting once again, though it was a muffled and low thing; He squinted towards the edge of the space to try and make them out but found nothing. The light from the fire reached only the bare back wall of the cave. Unsure of what to do, the boy took a seat beside the flames. It was not long before the wet warmth of the cavern lulled him to sleep. 

When the boy awoke, he was no longer alone. Someone was perched strangely on the back wall. A headdress of feathers tumbled down their back and along their arms. Blinking sleep from his eyes, the boy rose to his feet and spoke with uncertainty: “Who are you?”

The creature did not leave its perch facing the wall. Instead, the boy watched in horror as its neck swung around while its body remained still until he stared into the face of an owl. The boy did not cry out but leapt back, startled. The creature gave a loud scream and the horrible sound echoed again and again so that it sounded as though dozens of these monstrosities littered the darkness beyond. The boy felt his heart burst through his ears but he stood his ground with a certainty that betrayed his courage. The creature erupted from the wall and flew upwards, far beyond the reach of the flames. 

“Yoooouuuu”, a voice called, deep and wild. The chanting of the men echoed the voice. “You, You, You, You.” The boy's muscles tensed. The smell of ginger began to rise from the cool cave floor.

Suddenly, there was a rush of wings and the boy found himself less than a foot from the creature. It inched closer towards him in iterative, abrupt movements. The head twisted this way and that, studying him. Deepset eyes, entirely black, gave no hints as to what the creature might be looking for. The boy saw in horror that the thing breaking through the feathers of the face was a beak only in name. Instead of bony and sharp, the protrusion looked as though it were made of human lips. Feathers ran along humanoid arms and down the creature's neck before breaking into nearly translucent skin. Long legs reached from the torso; At the ends of each were four long talons, three creeping steadily towards the boy and one stretching backwards. Budding breasts on the misshapen body identified the creature as female.

The boy stood still, defiant and silent. His jaw clenched as the creature began to pull at him, prodding his essence with curious hands. The creature put its lip beak to the lines of sweat running down the boys cheeks and drank. A sound of deep pleasure rumbled from its chest. It raised itself to full height, towering over the boy by several feet. He stared up at the living darkness within its eyes. His breath swelled. 

There was another screech and the boy felt lightning across his torso. He fell to one knee and cried out, reaching to his chest and pulling his hand away soaked in blood. His toga lay in tatters below him. The creature shrieked again and again, circling towards the roof of the cavern. The chanting grew louder but the boy could no longer make out what they were saying. His knee failed and he fell to the cave floor. His vision began to go.

Through blurry eyes, he watched the creature retake its perch on the back wall. Its head swung around again, and the beak of lips flapped grossly as it spoke, “Choooooooosse.” The echoes grew louder. The cave wall seemed to swim with the skulls of a dozen owls. The boy's eyes were still open as he dropped gratefully into nothingness. 

When his eyes opened he felt chains on his wrists. He looked around and found himself in an unfamiliar village. A man was barking orders at him in a language he didn’t understand. Life came in brief flashes: Pulling a cart alongside a donkey; Whippings and beatings taken silently; His body stretched over a ceremonial altar as the man above him raised the greataxe over his straining neck.

He awoke in the cave again. The creature sat cross legged on the other side of the fire, staring at him. The chants had fallen away to nothingness. They were alone. The boy put one hand to his chest and it came away dry. He peered down and saw a long white scar the color of the owl's skin stretched across his torso, still pulsing with pain. He struggled to his knees, panting, and met the creature's eyes. It inclined his head at him, a question answered with a glare. 

“You think that of me?” The boy spat into the flames.

A screech. An incision. This time the boy met the darkness in silence. 

He dreamed of life back in the village. He was older now. His hair was cut short in the fashion of the warriors and a thick club hung from the side of his garments. He saw a marriage to a girl from the village over; A great hunt, falling an elk with a score of his brothers; Children clinging to his tired thighs; A shared laugh over a bright fire; Smiling family gathered around his failing body.

The cave seemed to have grown smaller when he awoke. The creature stared at him still without judgment, waiting. The boy saw the second scar across his chest and rose to his knees again, wheezing in pain. He grit his teeth through copper saliva.

“Triflings.”

A pain twice what he had already felt raked across his stomach and the boy saw himself again: Older still, his beard grown out in the fashion reserved only for those on the high council. Meetings held in hushed voices; Great triumphs celebrated in a massive hall; The sense of certainty as he planted his feet and surveyed the village below him. He watched his lifeless body being carried to the top of Mount Okanim and tossed into the sacred fire within. He felt the world shift as his corpse sunk into the bubbling heat. 

The boy tasted the cave floor. His mouth hung open in shock at the pain. His arm ached and he saw a white line etched permanently into his bicep. Grunting, he stood. The demand was simple.

“More.”

Morning had come to the forest and still the men waited. They were to continue the chant until the boy returned but their mouths had long since run dry. A waterskin was passed around and the ritual continued. Lo’ Sin’s tired arms held the staff vigilantly. His trained visage contained no trace of the worry that coursed through his veins. The torch sparked weakly, its light growing ever lesser in the day. 

A form began to emerge from the tunnel. Chanting ceased as the men watched the figure take shape. It appeared taller than the boy they had led here the night before, recognizable only by the dark hair that fell from his head. His toga was gone. The whole of his torso had been raked over, his scarred skin as white and translucent as that of the creature within. A great gash marked his face over one eye that had been permanently shut. The other glinted gold as he strode to his great grandfather and took the staff from his tired hands. Lo’ Sin stood and the two generations reflected one another. The boy leaned into the old man and whispered. 

“Behold”, the elder boomed, gesturing proudly to his great grandson. “Cho’ Sin!” The men took to their feet, their tired voices finding renewed strength as they lifted the boy onto their shoulders. Their chants of “Cho’ Sin, Cho’ Sin” reverberated down the walls of the cave to a creature that had only just begun to roost.

I got the bounce, I said to myself, strutting out into the apartment hall. My keys jingled as I locked the door behind me; I tossed them up into the air and caught them, throwing them into my pocket all in one swift motion. I liked to think I moved with a sort of deliberation that can only belong to men like myself and big cats. With a pop of a bubble and a flick of my hair, I called the elevator up to the third floor.

As soon as it dinged, I found myself beyond those sliding doors and sent the machine right back downstairs where it had come from. The inside of the tiny transportation room smelled like drying paint and I scraped the walls to see. Sure enough, my hand came off wet. I turned back towards the opening elevator doors just in time to see the sign that read “CAUTION: WET PAINT”.

“Careful”, I told the old lady who was getting on the elevator. I grabbed her shoulder with my wet hand, wiping it clean as I pointed with the other. “That wall's paint is wet.”

“Thank you young man”, the old hag croaked at me. But I was already gone. I wasn’t too worried about what she would do if she found out I had painted her. Maybe in your old age you forget whether or not you have done things like paint yourself. Maybe she was an ex-alcoholic, dementia ridden artist who I had just inspired to do her last, and greatest, piece of work. Who cares? My hand was clean.

The street was boring before I stepped on it. All the cars were parked in their usual spots; I checked myself out in the mirror of Chester’s delivery truck and found that even after 18 years I could still get surprised by how good looking I was. I slapped his mirror and gave a start when it shattered. I left the glass on the ground for the birds.

Downtown Christen is about as old timey as it gets- the diner still has a jukebox in it, and yes I just said both of those words. Someone needs to update whatever system the town is running on because clearly the majority of the population still think we’re at war with the Allied forces or whatever. Unfortunately, this diner was also home to the best burger in town. Or as I like to call it, the fifth worst burger in town.

I slid into my usual booth with an air of both confidence and humility. Daphne came up to serve me, and I told her to bring me some napkins. When she said what for sir, you haven’t ordered yet. Would you like to? I said, They're not for me dollface, before winking and gesturing to her crotch.

The worst part about spending the night in the Christen jail is the lack of mirrors. I guess one of the geniuses in this poor excuse for a drunk tank figured out that if there was a mirror in the room, it could be broken and the shards used to improve the average town IQ. I wouldn’t have broken anything though- When you look like I do you learn to respect mirrors. So, with nothing else to do, I stole old man Fraiser’s shoes. He threatened to tattle on me like some sort of child, so I told him that if he said a word, I’d get his daughter pregnant. I could too. I took an online test that told me I have incredibly potent sperm.

When the pigs finally had the decency to let me out in the morning, I headed right back over to the diner. As soon as I walked in,  I saw Daphne go over to her manager and begin exchanging some words- It looked like she was probably pleading for the change of clothes she would inevitably need- Before marching over to my table. The look on her face told me that she wasn’t offered the wardrobe change she desired.

I asked if she missed me and she didn’t answer, because it was obvious. She seemed to really enjoy standing around so I kept her occupied for a little longer by ordering two eggs and four pieces of bacon. Make sure you fry those bacon extra long I told her, just as Officer Lanclaw walked in. I like my pigs burned to a crisp.

You better watch your tone Lachowski, Officer Lanclaw said just because I had been staring at him.

You should do the same with your weight sir. I wasn’t able to hear how many people laughed at this because out of nowhere Officer Lanclaw punched me. When I came to, my eggs and bacon were sitting in front of me,practically frozen. I called Daphne over and demanded she sit on them to warm them up. When she said no, I don’t want to sit on them, that would get eggs all over my legs, I asked to speak to a manager.

The manager was a fat man who probably thought he was more important than me because he made more money. Little did he know that money isn’t everything- Appearance matters just as much. I tried to explain to him that Daphne had given me freezer temperature eggs, and that I was baffled as to how she had even managed to make them appear as though they had ever been cooked at all. He asked me whether or not it was true that I had told Daphne to sit on my meal. I asked him if he was a police officer- This was a joke, because I know all of the police officers in Christen but it seemed to really upset the fat manager. He started telling me I had to leave. I tried to explain to him that since he was ugly and rich and I was beautiful and soon to be rich, I was actually higher status than him but I think he slammed the door too hard to hear the really important end bits. I wouldn’t be surprised if the fat oaf learned nothing.

It was about four o clock which meant it was nearing time for me to start my shift. Technically, my shift had started about an hour and a half earlier but I had to arrive very fashionably late to make up for the disgusting uniform they insisted on clothing me in.

As I strode inside, my manager immediately began barking at me about how understaffed he was and how hard the last hour had been at his restaurant and all I could think was how ridiculous it was that he was blaming me for all his problems when I wasn’t even here! Something I’ve noticed about people who like to toss the blame on others: They don’t really enjoy being called out. All of the sudden I was handing over my nametag and uniform and somehow it seemed like I was supposed to be sad about the whole thing. More than anything else, I felt grateful I would never have to wear any of those cheap garments ever again. I asked my ex-manager if I could go in the back and pick up my checks. When he said yes, I walked into his office and robbed him of about $500 cash.I wasn’t afraid to do this because I know he doesn’t keep cameras in his office since he loves smoking weed in there. He is an immigrant and can’t help but break the law.

Walking down the street after what had turned out to be one of my most successful days at work in quite a while, I was feeling even better than usual. A stressed looking woman shoved a clipboard in my hands and said something about the whales. I signed it and patted her on the head. One thing I’ll never do is be ungrateful to my fans, no matter how much nonsense they spew my way.

After helping a few drivers learn to stay on their toes, I made my way into the town's nicest bar. There were a few other bars around, but they didn’t attract the quality of woman I was looking for- That quality being easy to manipulate, of course. I took a seat at my favorite barstool and ordered a whiskey coke. There was a fair looking woman sitting on my right, crying about something or other. I reached over and lifted her chin with two gentle fingers- There’s no need to cry darling. I told her. I’ll give you a chance. After years of dealing with the crazies, I’ve gotten good at dodging slaps. Not that one though. She hit me pretty square.

After being assaulted by a woman who was a four at best when her makeup was ruined, I quickly downed two more whiskey cokes to regain my confidence. Another man, likely on the prowl much like myself, took a seat next to me and ordered a gin. I said I’ll have a gin, extra vir. No one seemed to get it and I had to once again remind myself to talk down to the level of the average man. Sorry, I know that went over your balding head. I offered the man my hand. I’m Lachowski. I’ll bet, the man said, which if you know anything about having conversations is an incredibly difficult thing to respond to. For anyone else, that is.

How much? I asked. The man raised an eyebrow, finally looking my way. He had a boring sort of look about him- He reminded me of someone I might see on the poster for one of those overdone superhero movies. I had no doubt he was in need of a win, so I asked him again. How much do you bet that my name is Lachowski? Um, I don’t know. The man said. Nothing I guess. My heart finally slowed to a normal pace. For a moment there, I thought I was going to lose all of my hard earned money. Another gin for the man with paper balls I said to the bartender. The boring looking guy turned towards me, probably to thank me, but then his paper balls got the better of him and he grabbed his new gin and wandered off,  most likely in search of more flattering lighting. Having seen him, I couldn’t blame the guy.

I tried ordering another whiskey coke but the bartender seemed to realize that if I stuck around much longer, the rest of the men in the bar would feel discouraged and stop ordering any drinks. You need to go home right now, he told me. Okay, I said, and left without paying. I am very good at listening to instructions.

Somehow, the street was already dark. I walked steadfastly down the sidewalk with my course set for home. I would need to get an early start for tomorrow if I was going to make it to that charity event and save all of those children. I took the money out of my pocket and counted how much I had left to give to those poor villagers. I was only a few steps from my apartment stoop when a hand reached out of a ink-black alleyway and dragged me behind a dumpster. I have a very high pain tolerance, so it was a few moments before I realized I was being repeatedly stabbed in the stomach. You have no idea who you’re messing with, I told the guy stabbing me. I waited for him to ask who it was he was messing with but he didn’t care. These brutish types rarely have a curious mind.

As I laid there in a pool of my own blood, I chuckled to myself. The stupid thief hadn’t even thought to check my socks, where I stashed my $25 emergency fund. I thought about how fortunate it was that I had never had to use it.

The familiar thrum of the air conditioner filled the room as Fred took a seat on the plush, velvety armchair. Fake wooden doors stood along the opposite wall, the rightmost corner of which held an equally fake fireplace, flickering false flames to match. The walls were littered with pictures of different unidentifiable sports teams, quotes that were probably supposed to be motivational, and an entirely empty calendar. The warm overhead bulb filtered through the yellow ceiling cover and gave the entire room the look of having been recovered from the home of a lifelong smoker. Fred’s stomach rumbled.

“Hello Fred”. Dr. Gimly sat in the armchair opposite Fred. There was a small mobile nightstand that he had pulled up alongside him upon which rested a notebook, two pens, and three different drinking vessels. His baby blue cotton collared shirt was oversized around the shoulders and grew more lacking in material the nearer it came to his waist. His bulging beige pants were held together with a brown belt that had scratches on it Fred always thought looked like a Christmas tree. Blue eyes peered out questioningly from within Dr. Gimly’s bald head. He paused to take a sip of the mug beside him before continuing. “How have you been since we last met?”

Fred sighed inwardly. “Good. I've been good.”

“I’m glad to hear it! So what we talked about last session- Do you remember it? Have you been applying it?”

Of course Fred remembered. It was the same drivel that Gimly had been drilling into his skull since he’d first had the bad luck to book an appointment here. In fact, if he had to go on remembering it for one second longer, he might start plucking eyebrows- His or Gimly’s, he wasn’t sure. Rather than say any of this however, Fred nodded dimly.

“That’s great to hear! Well, should we just wrap up then?” Gimly made as if to pack up his notebook, before unfurling it once again and letting out a deep laugh. “Kidding, of course. Only kidding.”

Fred gave a weak smile. He felt incredibly conscious of where he was placing his hands.

“So Fred- If you don’t have anything specific to discuss…” Gimly paused and lowered his eyeglasses in case Fred decided to divulge some tragedy that had happened in the week past. “-Very well then. Let’s pick up where we left off. Your anxiety.”

Fred recognized these lines and prepared himself to pretend to pay attention for the next half hour.

“As I might have mentioned last week, anxiety is typically characterized by excessive worry…” As Dr. Gimly delved into his usual thirty minute definition of anxiety, Fred began to trace the wallpaper that lined the top of the room. It was old, and not quite stylish enough to be vintage, but even so Fred enjoyed the different drawings of the carriages and couples, the horses trotting along…

“-You see what I mean?” Dr. Gimly gave another chuckle and flashed Fred an expectant look. This would be about the midway point of the first football metaphor then. Fred nodded. “Yeah!” And Dr. Gimly went back into it.

There had been a wreck on the way to the appointment this morning. Two lane road, one car accident. Hardly any debris or damage to the car. It looked almost gentle; A smooth gliding into one of the trees that lined the side of the winding mountain road. Unfortunate it happened at 60 miles per hour. Fred’s impatient fingers drummed on the dash as he waited for the woman to be Care Flighted to the nearest hospital 30 minutes away. Dr. Gimly charged for the same hour regardless of what time he showed up. The gravel crunched loudly under his tires when he was finally able to get going again.

“And that’s the whole thing!” Dr. Gimly was shouting excitedly. “Anxiety is just being worried!”

Fred had found that more dramaticized reactions worked better to appease Dr Gimly. He threw his head back, eyes closed, mouth slightly open. “Oh!”

“Now you see! And with that…”

There was no clock in the counseling room. To make sure he was staying within the hour, Dr. Gimly had a timer set on his phone. Once, his phone had died mid session and he had accidentally continued speaking for almost two hours. That had cost Fred a pretty penny.

There was no clock in the counseling room, but Fred imagined a clock face now, sandwiched in the wallpaper between the cottage and the cobbler. Rather than ticking, the clock in his mind dripped sleepily, all of time falling through history as Dr.Gimly droned on and on. Drip, drip, drip…

Fred crossed and uncrossed his legs. Idly, he wondered whether or not Dr. Gimly accounted for things like patient body language when he was speaking. He tried to imagine himself from Dr. Gimly’s point of view. How did he look? Guarded? Contemplative? Disinterested? In an effort to combat this last, he furrowed his brow.

The notebook Fred had brought with him was sitting on his lap, and he opened this now, grabbing his pencil as though to write down some particularly astute observation Dr. Gimly was making. He tuned in for only a moment- “And so do you think, when Tom Brady is lining up behind the center, he’s worried? You best believe-” And tuned back out.

‘Tom Brady’ he wrote in his notebook. The words looked lonely on the blank page.

What do I think about Tom Brady? What does Tom Brady think about me?

He doesn’t.

Fred closed his notebook.

He noticed that Dr. Gimly appeared to be reaching the end of his usual limits. The pauses between sentences were becoming longer and the occasional glances toward Fred seemed to be becoming increasingly pregnant. He shifted his legs towards Dr. Gimly and prepared for the last ten minutes of the session.

“-And so”, Dr. Gimly concluded, rather lamely. “Anxiety is just being worried- As evidenced by Tom Brady.”

Fred gave a calculated smile. “Wow. Um, yeah I can see that.”

The doctor studied his patient for a moment. He wondered what it was that kept either of them coming back here.

“Fred.” Dr. Gimly spoke in a tone that Fred had never heard him use before. He imagined his ears pricking up like a dog’s. “For about ten minutes now I’ve been talking about how well Tom Brady would play a Disney princess.”

They both sat there stupidly for a moment, two actors who had forgotten their lines.

“Right”, Fred smiled again, trying to save face. “And the reason he can do that is because he doesn’t have any anxiety and so to play a princess wouldn’t be-”

“These sessions aren’t going to do either of us any good if you don’t even attempt to pay any attention.”

“I agree these sessions aren’t going to do me any good, but it seems like you still make money regardless.”

Neither of them spoke angrily, or looked upset. The counseling room was underground, deep within the basement of some house-turned-office and yet they still heard the rain as it began to fall outside. The sheriff residing in the top left corner of the wallpaper looked at Fred accusingly.

“Do you think that’s why I got into counseling? To make money?”

“I think that if counseling didn’t make money, it wouldn’t exist at all.”

“That is true of a lot of things.”

“A lot of things suck.”

Dr. Gimly sat back. “Do you realize that this is more than I’ve gotten out of you in our last five sessions combined?”

Fred bit his lip, and consciously tried to adjust his shoulders to look more casual. “Do you realize this is the first time you’ve let me get a word in? Jesus Christ, what kind of counselor does all the talking?”

“The one who doesn’t have anyone to listen to!”

“Is that what they teach you at your shitty little state school?” Fred asked, referring to the diploma on the right wall that read ‘Albert Gimly’. “‘Be sure to talk the entire time and hey, if they call you out on it, make it clear that it’s their fault!’ Real sound advice!”

The alarm on Dr. Gimly’s phone began to blare loudly. A look of terrifying calm passed over the doctor's face. “Well Fred, I’m afraid our session is over. Will next Tuesday work?”

Fred studied Gimly’s face for any sign of a smirk. “What? That’s it?”

“If you wish to continue this conversation we can do so next Tuesday at 11”, Dr. Gimly had stood and was practically ushering Fred out the door. “Thank you for your time today.”

“Why are all your appointment times during the workday? I have a job!”

The door of the white house slammed shut and Fred found himself standing alone in the rain.

“That’s not how you’re meant to do it, you know.” Annie Gollton had a lazy, intentionally affected drawl that gave her an air of intelligence. She held several strands of soft brown hair in her hand and was looking down her nose to see if there was anything hidden within them. The last few crumbs of the days sunlight ration sprinkled in from the window by which she was seated. After deciding that the hairs were devoid of anything interesting she looked up at her roommate, to whom she was speaking. Fisk Bellinging, a well known admirer of Annies, was attempting to juice an orange. He had taken the juicer and was currently mashing an unpeeled orange against it, accomplishing little other than flaking bits of orange skin off the fruit and onto the plastic laminate countertops.

“This is how I learned”, Fisk replied. He had thinning black hair that made it’s home atop a lumpy head, egg in both shape and color; His eyes were dark and dim and he had the puffed cheeks of a man who had never grown out of his baby weight. His skinny-fat frame was draped in an oversized suit the color of charcoal. He had hunched posture which practically pleaded with anyone who might look his way to please not pay him any mind, which didn’t make much sense being that Annie and he were the only two occupants of the apartment.

“Who did you learn that from? A disabled orangutan?”

“My mother.”

“Fisk. Look. Do you see the cord coming from the juicer?”

“...”

“What do you suppose that’s for?”

“Could be used to hang it, if one were pressed for cabinet space.”

“It’s electronic Fisk. Plug it in. And peel the orange first, for Chrissake.”

Fisk stopped what he was doing and obeyed. He couldn’t help it- Annie had some sort of power over him, an allure hidden somewhere between her womens size 6 slippers and her teasing gray eyes. Not a kind sort of teasing, not a sexual sort, but the same teasing a mean spirited child might use to torment the orangutan from whom Fisk learned to juice. Not that Fisk was able to mark the difference. He made that sort of mistake all the time with Annie; Took her slender frame to mean she was frail rather than fit. Mixed up her smirking as sexy rather than snarky. Misinterpreted the lack of clothing she seemed to wear around the house as a positive sign rather than a hint that she had entirely dismissed him as a sexual being. Annie didn’t mind. It was more fun this way.

Fisk had done as she asked and juiced the orange properly. He poured the juice out into a silver cocktail shaker and then topped it off with vodka and shook. He brought the drink over to Annie, who was lounging on a chaise with her feet pressed up against the far wall. Her gaze was set outside the window, where the billboard that constantly advertised how good it would be to have an advertisement on that billboard stared back at her. Fisk handed her the drink and then went and sat in an armchair on the other side of their cramped living room. In between them, there was a small TV set which played nothing but static. Annie insisted it helped her to think. Atop the set were Fisk’s eyeglasses and a small snow globe that had been given to him by his grandmother, recently deceased. Other than these items and a clock on the wall that gave the time wrong by about three hours, the living room was entirely bare.

The rest of the apartment was similarly decorated. Neither Fisk nor Annie could really be said to be well off, and so their kitchen held only necessities. One of the few things the pair had in common was a propensity for a clean household; Fisk had made certain to wash the juicer and the mixer used to make the drink prior to bringing it over to Annie. They sat dripping warm, soapy water onto a red and white striped towel adjacent the small sink.

The one exception to this cleanly nature was Annie’s bedroom. Posters, printouts, long forgotten movie tickets and hastily scribbled reminders plastered her white walls. Three broken disco balls hung from the ceiling, books opened and closed at random were strewn across her desk which was plastered with stickers like the sort you might find on the bumper of a car- HONK IF YOU HAVE TO PEE! On the shelves resting atop her desk, Annie had a hula boy with a fig leaf that failed to cover up all it needed to cover up. When she pushed him back and forth, the clicking sound his impressive appendage made against his bare thigh fell into beat with the ticking of her alarm clock that took up the place next to him. A trash can filled with band aids, beer, sticker wrappings, stamps, fingernails, and invalid matches sat next to the desk.

There was a clearing on the floor, which was otherwise covered with outfits hurriedly torn off and thrown aside, by which Annie could make her way from door to desk to bed. Her bed was made, as it always was, the only consistently orderly thing within her tornado of a room. Fisk found this ridiculous. There was a candle sat upon the nightstand, next to a blue lighter, from the time when Annie thought it would be fun to read by candlelight (she’d found that although it wasn’t fun, it was sort of painful).

“Thanks for the screwdriver Fisk”, Annie said cordially. She tore her eyes away from the billboard and looked directly at her roommate, who had been staring at her for quite some time and now pretended to not be.

“Screwdriver? That’s a highball.” Fisk had raised his right foot to the chair and was untying a black shoe that Annie found unattractive(far too pointy).

“Have you heard the one about the square and the rectangle?”

Fisk took his shoe off and placed it beside the chair. He began work on the left. “All squares are rectangles right? Or is it-”

“You have it right. All screwdrivers are highballs. But not all highballs are screwdrivers.” Annie pondered for a moment. “I bet there are even more highballs than there are rectangles.”

“Oh”, Fisk said. Sometimes Annie said something that he didn’t quite know how to respond to, and he found this monosyllabic parry to work more often than it didn’t. It wasn’t a secret, even to Fisk, that Annie spoke mostly for her own benefit.

“How come you think no one ever buys that billboard space out there?” Annie had finished her screwball, and wanted another. This time, she rose to get it. Fisk had completed taking off both shoes and shoved them to the side of his chair. He now began work on unbuttoning the cuffs of his dress shirt.

“Well”, he spoke. And then he paused, for more than could be considered a natural period of time. He had grown used to this game, in which Annie asked him questions and he never supplied the correct answer. It wasn’t a game he was interested in continuing to play, but it also wasn’t one he intended to quit; Which meant the only escape was answering correctly.

“Well”, Fisk said when he had finally decided upon a response. “There has probably been someone, somewhere doing a study on how many people see that billboard everyday. And then that study is presented to a marketing man, or a marketing woman, either is possible, and that person, him or her, or her or him, decides that it is not a profitable venture at this time for the foreseeable future, unless unknowable factors somehow influence later financial decisions.”

Annie had only just finished drying the juicer. She peeled an orange and went to work, the machine making a high whirring sound. She finished with the first and began to peel another. Fisk went across the carpet into his room, where he dropped his shoes and dressed himself in more casual clothes. He also retrieved a book from a shelf that had recently caused him quite a bit of pain to install. He brought the novel out into the living room.

Annie had finished making her screwball, this time twice the size and quite a bit heavier on the vodka. She repositioned herself on the chaise. Fisk grabbed his eyeglasses from atop the television and sat back down. He feigned as if to open the book just as Annie started to answer.

“But that marketing person doesn’t know me.”

“What?”

“The marketing woman, in your hypothetical scenario, has no idea who I am. She doesn’t know you either, despite how much you seem to be fantasizing about her. I’d be willing to bet she doesn’t know a single person in this building.”

“Oh”, Fisk said.

“And yet, she chooses to let the billboard sit and do nothing other than tell me how effective it would be, if only given the chance. An entrepreneur with a bad startup idea and no angels looking to be investors.”

“Oh- Mhmm.” Fisk put his book down, for now.

“Or maybe it’s a great startup idea. Because like I said, this marketing woman- Let’s call her Zenzi- Has no idea who you are. So Zenzi, who works for Church’s Chicken by the way, doesn’t know that you have recently begun an all fast food diet. She doesn’t know that if she had put in the billboard, something simple, like a chicken crossing the finish line of a 100 meter dash with the words “CHURCH’S CHICKEN IS THE FASTEST WAY TO GET A GOOD MEAL”, you would see it everyday, multiple times a day. And eventually the stupid slogan would rattle around in your brain and strangle so many of the thoughts you used to have that you would go to Church’s just so your brain could breathe again.”

“I love Church’s Chicken”, Fisk offered helpfully.

“You do! And you know that, now that this billboard has finally driven you to try the place. And since you love it so much and since it is sticking to your diet by doing so, you decide to eat there everyday, three times a day for the next year. And at the end of the year, the CEO of Church’s Chicken looks down at the company’s income statement and sees that the profits of Church’s have quadrupled! You ate enough chicken, encouraged others to eat enough chicken, and held business meetings in the corner booths of Church’s Chicken enough times for the CEO to retire. And who does he promote in his place but Zenzi! She’s a CEO now and the first female CEO in company history. Her mother, living the last days of stage four breast cancer, got to see her little girl achieve the highest position her company had to offer just before she passed away for good. Or she would’ve. If Zenzi had even bothered to learn your name.”

There was a long moment of silence.

“A bit of a dark end”, Fisk quipped as he mulled it over. Annie shrugged.

“But Zenzi’s not real right? So how could she even learn my name? You can’t blame a non-entity for failing to make contact with an entity, and so you can’t blame any of these ‘marketing managers’, even if they do exist, for not buying up that billboard”, Fisk said smugly. He was very proud of his use of the word entity.

Annie sighed. She looked back out the window, taking care to avoid any eye contact with the aforemanytimesmentioned billboard. “I guess you’re right Fisk. I’m being stupid.”

Fisk astutely observed that something was wrong. “I didn’t mean anything by it Annie. I was just talking. Only making conversation.”

Annie smiled wanly. “I know Fisk. You’re always just talking.”

It was quiet in the living room. The window through which Annie gazed was opened only slightly at the bottom, which let the cool outside air drift indoors and over Annie’s pale white legs. Her skin grew goosebumps in response. Fisk opened his book back up and pretended to read. Every few moments, his eyes would shift slightly, up towards Annie.

Outside a siren wailed. A couple argued, their footsteps loud in the alley beneath the window. There was the faint, far off bass of a party being held somewhere nearby. Fisk relaxed and began to read, this time for real.

It was about ten minutes before Annie turned back towards him, eyes nasty, drink empty.

“Why do you read Fisk?” She asked.

Fisk was startled out of his book, a riveting read about a group of quirky tweens with unexpected super powers. “What do you mean?”

“I guess I mean I would like to know what it is you are getting out of that book that you’re reading right now. And all the other books you’ve read like it, in that exact chair, night after night for as long as I’ve known you.”

“Entertainment, I suppose.”

“If entertainment is all you want why do you never watch television? Or catch a movie? What was the last movie you saw Fisk?”

“I- Well I don’t know. But reading is good for you.”

“In what way?”

“What?” Fisk was flustered. A bit of spittle, caused by his fluster, flew off his lip and landed in the carpet between them. Annie pretended not to notice.

“C’mon Fisk. Stay with me here. In what way does reading that book better your life in any way? How is it any different than watching television?”

Fisk tried to choose his words carefully. “Television is… For a lower attention span.”

“Forgive me if I’m not in awe of how long you can tolerate something before realizing how awful it is.”

Fisk’s mouth actually dropped. He was that sort of person, who thought that the way people reacted to things in plays and yes, on television, was how you were meant to react in real life. Annie realized her misstep.

“I’m sorry Fisk. That was harsh, which I did not mean to be. Let me try another angle.”

She paused to adjust herself atop the chaise. “Do you enjoy your work?”

Fisk was a supply chain manager at a lumber supply company. “I do.”

“What about it do you enjoy?”

Fisk’s mouth was unnaturally dry. “I suppose I enjoy the challenge of trying each day to think of a new angle at which to attack the problem.”

“The problem being what?”

“Lumber sales.”

Annie nodded. “And this is your passion- Lumber sales.”

“Well, perhaps passion is a bit of a stretch, but a man has to make a living.”

“Doesn’t he though? But there are so many ways to make a living- How is it that you got into lumber sales in the first place?” Annie had a scab on her knee that she had begun to pick at. Fresh blood crept out from beneath the ugly brown top.

“Well you know this. It’s my father’s company.”

“Ah! So you got into lumber sales to impress your father?”

“I got into lumber sales because it makes good money. And because I have a good path towards promotion, if I want it.” Fisk tended to grow more articulate the angrier he became. It was rather backwards.

“And do you want it?”

“I haven’t yet decided.”

“Well Fisk, I mean”, Annie scoffed. She had pulled her scab all the way off and flicked it down to the carpet to make friends with Fisk’s spittle. “You’re 26 years old. Shouldn’t you have already decided what it is you want to be when you grow up?”

Fisk dramatically whipped his eyeglasses from his head. He glared at the woman, smoldering. “I’m sorry Annie- Is there a point to all this?”

“I am only asking whether or not you are ever going to reach a point in your life at which you decide things for yourself, or if you are content with living with the future everyone else has chosen for you?”

Fisk laughed. It was a vacant sound. “I suppose I should feel lucky.”

Annie’s eyes narrowed. “And why is that?”

“Because at least I have people in my life to make decisions for me. It could be worse. I could be like you, drifting aimlessly, alone, convinced that because you’re so much smarter than everyone else you can afford to waste your life. After all, you’re the special one. You’re the genius who sees above the rest of us, who knows that life is pointless and so why even try. Isn’t that right? Isn’t that why you’ve never done anything- By choice?”

“What do you know?” Annie spat. “You pathetic daddy’s boy-”

“I know that even if I may not be following the 'right' path, you’re not following one at all. And yet somehow, you’ve managed to convince yourself that makes you better than me.” Fisk stood. “You’re not forging your own path, Annie. You’re just lost.”

Fisk walked back into his room, shutting the door quietly behind him. Annie took a long look out the window. All the sun was gone from the sky. Slowly, she peeled herself off the cushions and walked over to the kitchen where she began to fix herself another drink.

I don’t understand people who go to the library to study. If you’re in college, you must have a room right? Why would you ever go somewhere with more distractions if your goal is to get work done? But I guess maybe that’s the heart of the problem.

I stretch out on the bleachers. The metal feels cool against my back and the sun is high overhead. One of my arms is outstretched, blocking the light, until a cloud finally agrees that enough is enough and covers the brightness. There’s a cigarette in my mouth. It’s lit, but I’m not inhaling. I don’t want lung cancer; I just like watching the smoke rise up towards the sky. It calms me down and for a moment I’m weightless.

There’s a girl down there, running around the track. She’s been doing it for the last half hour. If I talked to her, it might be a welcome distraction from following the same red rubber path over and over again until she’s skinny enough. I roll over and stand, pushing in my lower back like I’m a senior citizen. The cigarette is nearly out, so I throw it down and stamp on it before making my way out of the stadium.

The stadium is small because our college is small. I had the grades to go somewhere else but I wanted to make sure that I went to a college where I had no chance of running into anyone from my high school. I chose this one because there’s a lake that’s not too far from campus. The girl was still running. She made eye contact with me as I left, and I gave her a wave. She started running faster. I started walking to the lake.

The roads are quiet. There’s not much traffic here at the best of times, and right now most people are home for winter break. It feels like I’m the only person on campus who has an exam the very last day. Me and that girl.

To get to the lake, I have to walk through a few neighborhoods. The one closest to it is also the most wealthy. There’s something about living near a body of water that rich people go crazy for. It probably has to do with the view if you’re near the ocean, but I can’t imagine anyone buying a house for a view of our shitty little lake- Green(not a pretty green) and a surface covered with that plant that looks like floating moss; I don’t know what it’s called. A little more than ten feet deep in the dead center and on the best days, you can spot dozens of beer cans crumpled up on shore. No, no one was buying a house here for the view.

The houses are nice though; Maybe it’s the developers fault. They build the neighborhood after all. If you’ve got the money, why wouldn’t you live in the nicest place you could afford? I walk on the sidewalk and crunch fallen leaves beneath my feet. A few of the houses have their yards raked and the leaves bagged up on the street. There’s no one in sight. I rip one open and dump it back out onto the lawn without really knowing why. It doesn’t matter.

I’ve only walked ten more yards when I start to feel like an asshole and go back to shovel the leaves back into the bag with my hands.

I guess you might be in the library if you really wanted a new book. Though reading isn’t as popular as it once was. Or maybe if you’re in a study group; But that leads back to the same problem. If you’re really trying to learn, what are you doing in a study group?

I can smell the lake before I see it. I think most people probably would say it’s a gross, polluted smell, but I like it. It’s what I think nature smells like. There’s a final hill before the water really comes into view, then the cement gives way to grass, the grass gives way to sand, and the sand melts into the water. I decide I’m going to run up this hill and make it about halfway before I’m keeled over and out of breath. I decide I’m going to walk up this hill.

Just as I reach the high point, I hear a pattering of steps behind me and turn my head around. It’s the girl from the track, of course. We’re the only two in town. She’s keeping her head down but I know she’s running to me. She knows I know. I turn again and walk further towards the lake, taking a seat with my back against the trunk of a tree to wait for her.

She takes longer than I thought.

“Hey.” That’s her greeting to me, when she finally does make it. Clearly she hadn’t spent too much time thinking about how she would open the conversation.

“Hey.”

She looks at me. Her face is nice. Soft. One of her eyes is a little bigger than the other; It looks like she’s constantly raising one eyebrow- What? I pat the ground next to me and she takes a seat, still breathing hard.

“That hill’s tough huh?” I say, to have something to say.

“Yup.”

It takes a while, but she tells me her name, her major, where she’s from, and what she wants to do when she’s older. There’s always something you want to do when you’re older, but you never are older; It’s what you want to do that changes.

“What about you?”

“What about me?”

“Well. let’s start with your name.”

“Wouldn’t you rather…?” And I lean in to kiss her. I know she’ll kiss me back, because they always do, because I have good cologne and nice hair. We make out for a while; I have good cologne but she doesn’t smell too good. I don’t really mind. After a minute or two, she pulls back and runs her hand over my head. “You have nice hair.”

“Thanks.”

I want to pull her back in before she can ask anymore questions, but first I have one myself: “What do you think of the library?”

“The library?” She’s confused.

“Yeah. Like, don’t you think that if people wanted to study, they’d go back to their dorm or wherever to do it? Seems kinda pointless.”

“I guess. I don’t really think about the library. I study at home.”

That was good enough for me. We start again.

We round all the bases, and at the end of it all I’m glad she’s here. The sun is starting to set, a pretty pink-yellow watercolor that I’ve seen too many times to be impressed by. My clothes are in a heap by the tree and I leave them there, standing and gesturing towards the lake. “Wanna swim?”

She shakes her head. For a minute, I’m worried she might leave but then she leans back on her elbows and smiles. She must’ve had an excellent orthodontist. “I’ll watch.”

I shrug. “Suit yourself.” And I start wading into the water. It’s cold, freezing even, but I don’t hesitate. I barely even shiver. Soon only my head is poking out of the water. Some fish bump against my leg and I kick them away. The girl is waving at me.

“Now what?”

The air breaks; We hear a gunshot in the direction of campus and both of us turn our heads to look. The noise is too loud for a gunshot actually- Has to be a bomb, an explosion. We’re too far away to hear any screaming, but I can imagine it. After a few moments, I start to see smoke rise towards the sky over the treetops and I smile.

The girl stands up, frantic. “Fuck! What the fuck was that?” She starts pulling her shirt over her head, ready to leave.

“I wouldn’t worry too much about it. It’s just the library.” I take a few steps back until I can’t stand, and keep my head above water just long enough to see her look at me. There’s a question forming, but by the time she says anything, I’ve stopped treading water. The cold covers my head and I try to sink but I can’t.

I’m weightless.