Copyright © 2023 B.R.

Yeager
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Apocalypse Party
Art Direction by B.R. Yeager
Layout by Mike Corrao

Paperback: 978-1-954899-34-6

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Your son is thirty and still can’t take care of himself. He faked it long
enough to secure a wife, but it gave out sometime after the second
year. He goes days without bathing, nursing bacteria-caked pits and
crotch. Always congested. Scratching hot spots into his flesh,
staining bedsheets with blood and snot. Your daughter-in-law tells
you that six months ago she resigned herself to the couch. She can’t
look at him without crying.

Your son lost his job. Your son went back to community college and
dropped out. Your son won’t look up.

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Your son still jerks off seventeen times a day. Lets his seed just drip
and crisp on the sheets that once also belonged to his partner, or
seep and stiffen the fibers of his jeans. He never washes his clothes
—just cycling and re-cycling through three distinct piles of filthed
garment, cultivated into volcanic islands atop the carpet. Every shirt
he owns streaked with dried soup, either red or pus-colored.

The last time you saw him, he smiled but there wasn’t anything
behind his eyes.

Your daughter-in-law tells you she is frightened of him. She says she
can count on one hand the words he says in a day. She tells you that
several months ago they adopted a puppy, but she had to give it
away because your son would never feed or walk it while she was at
work.

Your daughter-in-law buys all the groceries. Your son never leaves
the apartment. He refuses water when offered.

Your son is still a liar, and you still can’t quite be sure you’re safe
because he still dreams of you each night. He dreams of you in ways
you could never begin to imagine. And no one knows this, but your
son is watching you right now. He is standing in his bathroom in his
worn-elastic boxers and sweated-out sneakers, the laces untied and
flailed against the freckled tiling. His eyes are wide open, aimed just
above the mirror on the medicine cabinet, and when he focuses hard
—so hard his eyes go blurry and his temples ache—he can see you,
awake and pacing the hardwood miles away. And if he could speak
to you, he would say he was the face in the light of the moon. He’d
tell you his teeth are made of ice and grit, his breath a frozen spear.
And if he could, he’d breathe all over your world, turning it cold and
gaseous. He would watch your skin and your hair starve gray. And
he would smile at how surprised your mouth curled and eyes
widened. He’d smile at how that expression would be locked on your

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face forever. You would be so surprised because even though you
couldn’t see him—you have no way of knowing it’s his breath raining
down from the moon up high—you would feel his familiarity. And he
would look down on you from the sun’s reflected light, knowing your
last memory is of you fixing his tiny, eight-year-old frame in a bed
shaped like a race car, silently praying he’d still be safe and okay
when you came to wake him the next day.

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Any precious thing can lose meaning. Anything. It’s only a matter of
repetition. That old cliché—repeat a word enough times and it’ll
become nonsensical. Transform into noise. Nothing. Everyone
knows this. Cliché beyond cliché—knowledge so common you get
marked a fool for even mentioning it.
A man answers the phone. “Hello?”
“Good morning,” I say. “My name is Chelle Pleasant, I’m calling
on behalf of the Massachusetts Department of Public Health.”
Beep beep. The man hangs up. Gone.

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 So repeat. Call a different number. Listen to the tones, wait for
someone to pick up, to say hello, and repeat the words. “Hello, my
name is Chelle Pleasant, and I’m calling on behalf of the
Massachusetts Department of Public Health. How are you this
morning?” Beep beep. Gone.
Repeat. Dial the numbers. Speak the words. Repeat them, like a
machine, like hands on a machine. It’s a sound, a tone, vibrations in
your throat, and eventually there’s nothing else behind it. Say it over
and over, until it makes no sense and there’s nothing there.
This job used to mean something to me: self-sufficiency—a
baseline at the very least. I knew the work was bullshit and didn’t
accomplish anything (even with the best intentions, a public health
survey will only ever amount to a bureaucratic check mark), but it still
enabled food and shelter and the occasional night out (when we still
went out). And it still is that, objectively. It just doesn’t feel that way
anymore.
Repeat. Repeat the motor functions until your fingers go numb.
Repeat the words until they’re just ugly syllables. Say “I love you”
each day until it’s only hiss. Barely discernible from wind at the
windows, power humming in the walls. Hold him until he feels like
humid summer air. It’s something that should hurt, that maybe used
to but no longer aches. We pretend it doesn’t matter but we should
be grieving.

Tony sits at the kitchen table, his headset plugged into his phone,
repeating the same lines as me. “Hey, my name is Anthony Rossi.
I’m calling on behalf of the Massachusetts Department of Public
Health.” His voice overlapping mine, at times in sync but mostly
drifting in and out. Competing.

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 It’s supposed to be a blessing that we can work from home. But
now every aspect of living just feels like work, regardless of whether
we’re clocked in or not. No matter what we’re doing.
Dial the number. Wait for an answer. Recite the script. “Hello,
my name is Chelle Pleasant, and I’m calling on behalf of the
Massachusetts Department of Public Health.” Wait a beat for the
sound of the respondent clicking off. The beep beep. But it doesn’t
come. Instead, just crackle and mouth breathing. So continue.
“We’re conducting a general health study of Massachusetts
residents. It will only take ten to fifteen minutes. Can I confirm that I
am speaking to someone who lives in this household and is over
eighteen years of age?”
I wait again for the click, the beep beep. But instead, a ragged
voice sizzles through. “Yes. You are.”

“Generally, I am not very worried about my health. Would you say

you strongly agree, somewhat agree, somewhat disagree, or
strongly disagree?”
“Agree.”
“Would you say you strongly agree or somewhat agree?”
“Somewhat agree.”
“I have many friends I like to exercise with.”
“I dunno.”
“Is there an answer on the scale that aligns with that
statement?”
“What scale?”
“Strongly agree, somewhat agree, somewhat disagree, or
strongly disagree.”
“Somewhat disagree.”
“Thank you. My friends and family tell me I seem healthy.”

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 “Agree.”
“Would that be strongly agree or somewhat agree?”
“Somewhat agree.”
I ask if she’s been pregnant in the past three years. I ask if the
pregnancy resulted in a live birth. I ask about major surgeries,
medications, and whether she’s been raped in the previous six
months. And there—that’s when she hangs up. Beep beep. Nothing
else. It’s over. The interview will be marked as incomplete and the
data will be discarded.

Tony brings in the mail. He cracks open an envelope and unfolds the
insides. “Did you pay the electric?”
“Yeah.” I don’t look up from my phone, scrolling through text and
images. “I mean, I’m going to.”
“Isn’t it overdue?”
“I know. I’m sorry. I’m taking care of it.”
“Like, right now?”
Text and images, unrolling down and down. Jokes by people I’ve
never met, will never meet, will never speak to. A video of human
beings falling from a parade float. “I will. Today.”
“It’s just —” he starts. “It’s just that —” A sentence begins and
aborts, catching in his delicate throat until he snags an opening and
rides it out. “I don’t think it’s fair for me to have to pay half the late
fees when it’s not my fault they’re late.”
An image of a tapir with squinting eyes and bared teeth, face
frozen in a sneer. “You can always pay it.” My stomach, my mouth,
the back of my throat all sour. “If you feel that strongly about it.”
He tosses the bill on the table. “I do a lot, I think.” Small and
sweaty. “I pay the internet. I wash your dishes half the time.”

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 “Alright then.” A cartoon of a woman shrieking at a bearded
man. “I’ll pay it this evening.”
“I take the trash out every week.”
I place the phone on the table and press the heels of my palms
into my eyes. Text and image behind my eyelids now, scrolling down
and down. “I’ll take care of it.”
“You don’t even know where the bins are. I know you don’t. You
have no clue.”

We prepare our dinners separately—fusilli with shitty meat sauce for

me, yellow rice and canned beans for him. We eat separately.
Separate places and separate times—him at the kitchen table at
4:35, me on the couch at 6:00. When I’m finished, I dunk my dishes
in the sink and head back toward the living room, but terminate mid-
step, and return to the sink, twisting on the water, picking up the
sponge.
Tony sidles up, nudging into my side. “If you give me the
account number I’ll pay it.”
Don’t say anything. Focus on the bowl. The cheese that won’t
scrub off.
“Okay? Does that sound good?”
“Yeah.” I keep low, scrubbing the dish. “Sure. That’s good.
Thanks.”

Our house doesn’t belong to us. I mean it’s not our house. A small
house on a tobacco farm, rented from a farmer who lives enough
acres away it mostly feels like we’re on our own. A tiny house,

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almost not a house at all—just a bedroom, a half-kitchen/half-living
room, a bathroom. A dirt floor basement beneath our feet.
Night turns the sky hard purple and rust red—UMass light
pollution sooting the true night. No moon, switching the landscape off
to black. We sit outside at the top of the driveway, pointed out toward
the road. I pack a bowl, take a hit and pass it to Tony. “Sometimes it
feels like if I walked right there —” I point out toward where the
road’s supposed to be, but it’s just a black hole. “— I’d walk straight
off the edge of the Earth.”
Tony takes a hit, silent.
“Like I’d just fall off. Probably just die immediately. Just fall into
space and die.”
Tony hands the bowl back to me. “But it isn’t a ledge. It’s a road.
There is no edge.”
I hit the bowl and exhale pale plumes. “I’m saying it feels like
there’s nothing in front of me. Nothing. Like I don’t have anything in
front of me. That’s it. That’s all.”
Tony looks out at the black hole. “Okay.”

I’m on the couch reading about eastern spadefoot toads when Tony
comes out of the bathroom, scrunching his face like he might cry or
has been crying. “You should do a tick check,” he says.
“Yeah?”
“Just pulled one out of my asshole.”
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah. I mean, I will be.”

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In bed I tuck myself behind his back, rubbing his deltoid and spine
with my nipples. Reaching down and tracing my fingers beneath the
band of his underwear, then further, brushing fingers through pubic
hair, taking hold of his soft penis. He groans. I stroke it, but it stays
limp, refusing to fill with blood. He groans again and bats at my arm.
“I’m exhausted,” he says, flipping onto his stomach.
I touch myself but it isn’t what I want, not alone. I don’t want me.
So I go to sleep, or try to.

We call strangers, we speak words, we make noises, and they hang

up on us.
But not my fifty-seventh call. I get through the intro script and
the respondent is actually happy to talk. “Now’s a perfect time,” she
says.
So we get into it. She tells me her name: Cherise Flint. A sixty-
three-year-old cancer survivor with three grown children, who
doesn’t exercise but feels healthy, and has never been raped. We
talk for twenty-seven minutes and reach the final section. “Thank you
for taking the time to complete this survey. I now just need to ask a
few demographic questions.” And right there she clicks off. Beep
beep.
The interview will be marked as an incomplete and the data will
be discarded. All of it, meaning nothing. I grasp my knees and
squeeze, as though to pull them from their sockets.
The phone buzzes. Work’s number. I pick up, shaking.
“Hey, Michelle?” A nasal masculine voice. Familiar. One of my
supervisors. We’ve never met but we’ve spoken before, maybe. “I
monitored that last incomplete. Now a good time for feedback?”
“Yeah, sure. Just a sec.” Almost crying. So stupid. I put the
laptop on the coffee table and head toward the bedroom. Tony looks

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up and mouths you got this. I close the door behind me, locking it.
“Hey.”
“So close!” the voice says.
“I know.”
“Don’t worry about it. Nothing you could do. It happens. Anyway,
I don’t have much here. So good work answering her questions
about medications. But on Q24, I think it was on the nebulizer part?”
“Yes, totally. I know the one. I know what you mean.” “Right… It
seemed like you may have guided her a little too much there. No big
deal, just something to watch out for. So all in all, I’m giving you a
ninety. Does that sound good?”
“Yeah, sure. I mean, thanks.”
“No problem. And I just need to record your acknowledgement
that I, Dennis McKean, on July 17th 2021, delivered supervisory
feedback on an incomplete with Michelle Pleasant.”
“I acknowledge.”
“Great. Cool. I’ll submit that now.”
“Great.”
“One last thing.” The voice changes; constricts. Like a gentle
hand on his throat. “I hope this doesn’t come off sketch or anything.
But I actually just moved to Massachusetts, and I saw that you
actually live just a town away from me. And —”

Back in the living room, Tony asks how it went.

“Fine.” Trying to recollect, to pull together what just happened,
what was actually going on. “That guy, though. The supervisor. Have
you ever had—Dennis I think?”
“I have no clue.”
“Doesn’t matter. Anyway, after the feedback and everything, he
tells me he just moved to the area, to Hadley, and he doesn’t know

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anyone around here, but he saw that I lived in the area.”
“Whoa.” A frown creases.
“Yeah, right?”
“Why does he know where we live?”
“Right? And that’s the thing—he asks me if I want to get
together sometime or something.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, like he says he just moved to the area, he doesn’t know
anyone, and wanted to know if I’d want to meet up.”
He sneers. “Well, that’s really fucking presumptuous.”
“Right?”
“That’s like, definitely crossing a boundary. Like, professionally
and all sorts of other levels.”
“Right? Like, why does he have access to my address? He
shouldn’t have access to my address.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I told him, I told him, I’m real busy. You know. I didn’t want to
piss him off. But I’m not fucking meeting up with him. That’s for sure.”
“Good. That’s so fucking weird.”

We go on Facebook and type in Dennis McKean. Little circles with

photos inside pour down the screen. All these faces: An old man with
an old woman. A young man with a beard, a chocolate lab’s head
beneath his chin. Two cats staring out a window. We click, skimming
profiles then returning to the list. An elderly man in a recliner. A man
and a woman and baby.
But there: A smiling face, flat and angular, an ugly curled cowlick
atop the head. White, clean hairless skin, outside in the sun. Click,
open his profile, and scan. “I don’t know,” I say. “It says St. Louis,

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Missouri.” But something else. “Wait, he works for MSC Data
Capture.”
“He said he just moved here, right?”
“Yeah. That’s right. It’s got to be him.” Switch over to his
timeline. All the posts are from months ago. Open the gallery. A
photo of Dennis leaning against a Buick LaCrosse. Dennis holding
up a beer, one eyebrow raised. Dennis soyfacing, pointing to a pirate
mini-golf course. “Woof.”
“How old is he?”
“Let’s see. Whoa, thirty-eight. Yuck.”
“I’m so fucking mad this guy lives around here now.”
Scroll further. There are maybe a hundred pictures. Nobody else
in them, only him. Dennis at a Starbucks. Dennis drinking beer,
outside, in the dark. Dennis at a public pool, alone. A broad,
lycanthrope grin. “What a creep.” I close the laptop. “I don’t even
want to think about him.”

I’m cooking stir fry for myself when Tony yells from the couch. “Holy
shit!”
“What?”
“You’ve got to see this.”
“Just a second.”
“What? No, come on, you got to see this.” His voice like hands
wringing me out from the inside.
Inhale. Pull inward. Exhale. I take the pan off the heat, twist off
the burner, and meet Tony at the couch. “What is it?”
He pats the cushion next to him. “Look.”
I sit down and look at the screen. A map covered in red dots.
“Why are you on the sex offender registry?”
“Forget that. Look.” He points to a headshot in the sidebar.

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 A flat face. Jagged-edged. A small flat nose. Unkempt hair. A
long slit of a mouth. “Wait. Is that the guy?”
“It’s absolutely the guy.”
“Oh. Oh no.”
“Our fucking supervisor.”
“Oh no.”
“He touches kids.”
“Oh no.” I look over the map. “Where is this?”
He leans into me, wild eyes. “Fucking St. Louis. Right?”
The pieces snap together. It pulls all the air from my lungs.
“Okay, so he moves here. And, and it’s like he’s trying to start over
here or something?”
“That’s it.”
“Jesus. Like, he doesn’t have a rep here, so he figures he can
start fresh.” Leaning into the screen, focusing on the picture, the
pixels constructing his face. His skin looks different from the pics on
Facebook. Scarred, pockmarked. A ring of days-old stubble around
his mouth. “Are you sure it’s him?”
Tony wobbles his head side to side, sucking teeth—the face he
makes every time he thinks I’ve said something dumb. “Of course it
is. Look at him.” He pulls up Dennis’s Facebook profile and puts it
side by side with the sex offender registry. “Same name, same eyes.
It’s fucking him. In fact —” He clicks open another tab. It’s the web
page for our work, the Hadley branch, the staff directory. He scrolls
to a photo and bio. Dennis McKean. The face there looks more like
the one on Facebook than the one in the sex offender registry. But I
guess it looks like that one too.
I think of his voice. Evoking foul moisture. Shake it away. “What
are we going to do?”
Tony doesn’t say anything. He pulls up the registry website
again and just stares at the headshot.
“Should we tell work? Like maybe they don’t know? Should we
go to the cops?”

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 Nothing.
“What are we going to do?”
He closes his eyes and shakes his head. “I don’t know. I don’t
know. I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know.”

I finish up the stir fry and watch a program about Alaskan-Yukon

moose. Lumbering, tearing their velvet open on tree branches and
bark. Tony never looks up from the computer. At 10:00 I ask if he’s
coming to bed.
“In a little while.”
I fall asleep alone.

“Hey.” A single hushed syllable. A hand at my shoulder.

Twisting awake, eyes snapping open. A blurry shape over me.
“Hey.” Tony’s voice. Tony’s face. Hovering in the dark. “Are you
awake?”

I curl inside his armpit. Kneading my fingers. Making them pop.

“It’s just an idea,” he says. “We can stop talking about it.”
“I didn’t say I didn’t want to talk about it.”
“Well, will you say something?” Tracing his fingers along the
ridges of my belly. “I just think we need to be doing something right
now. Something we can focus on.”
“Yeah. I know. You’re right.”

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My psychiatrist stares empty at me through the laptop screen. “Are
you still doing yoga before bed?” she asks. “Meditation?”
“I’ve been jogging during the day. I haven’t touched caffeine. I
just can’t get to sleep.”
“What about screen time? Are you on your phone before bed?”
Ahead of me, behind the computer, Tony paces, gnawing his
knuckles. Watching me.
I shake my head. “I don’t look at any screens after dinner,” I lie.
“Not even TV.”
“Have you ever tried melatonin or magnesium? Or an over-the-
counter sleep aid? CBD can help.”
“I’m doing all that,” I snap. Tony is nodding at me, mouthing yes.
“Nothing’s working. I need something.”
She stares at me, through the screen, through me. “Okay. I can
write you a script. You can pick it up from Jeanne at the office.”
A smile breaks on Tony’s face. Silent, he pumps his fists. He
places his palms together and gently bows.

We order rope, chain, bungee cords. Handcuffs and zip ties. Two-
day shipping on Amazon. We dig a metal folding chair out of the
closet and take turns tying each other up, seeing if we can break
free.

The number feels wet as I dial it. Five rings.

“Hello?” The voice says.
“Hey. Is this Dennis?”
“Yeah. Is this Michelle?”
“Yeah. It’s Chelle.”

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He arrives early. Tony answers the door. “Hey! You found it!” he
says, maybe too enthusiastic. Almost certainly.
“Yeah, man.” Dennis steps through the door. That flat broad
face. Small nose. Clean pale skin. “Not too hard to find.” He looks
exactly like the photos. Maybe. I can’t remember. Maybe a little
heavier. Or thinner—thinner arms, narrower eyes. Different hair. He
looks at me. “You must be Chelle.”
“Hey.” My voice creaks out like sliced paper. I barely meet his
eyes. “What’s good?”
“You know. Everything.” Dennis scans the living room. “Nice
place! I’d love to have me a place like this someday.”
I head toward the kitchen. “I’ll get drinks.”
“Word’em up. I’ll take whatever.”
A sack of ice, margarita mix, a bottle of Pepe Lopez on the
counter. Three glasses with cartoons painted on them: a Snoopy, a
Grimace, and a generic clown. I blend up the drinks and open a
drawer, removing a bag of crushed powder, sprinkling a thimbleful
into the clown glass.

“So how’re you liking Mass?” Tony’s knee bobs up and down,
sloshing his drink onto his pants.
“It’s cool, it’s cool,” Dennis says. “I actually went to school out
here. Like, way back.”
“Yeah? Where?”
That wide, wolfen smile rises between his lips. “Brandeis. Yeah,
I know, I know. Like, initially I thought I’d major in acting or something
but ended up doing business instead. Figure I could learn art and
philosophy on my own or whatever. Might as well do something

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viable, fiscally, while I’m there, right? You know. But man, I do miss
college.” He gulps his drink, licking the salt-less rim. He points a pair
of fingers at the two of us. “How long you been a thing?”
Tony inhales, eyeing me. “It’s been?”
“Seven years,” I say.
Dennis coughs, nearly spilling his drink. “You’re kidding. How old
are you?”
“Twenty-two.”
“Twenty-three,” Tony says.
“High school sweethearts, yeah? Damn, that’s really sweet.
That’s really lucky, man.” He downs the last of his drink, smacking
his lips, and points to the empty glass. “Delicious. Delicious juice.”
I ask if he wants another. “Yes and please,” he says, head
wobbling on its stem, eyes becoming slits. A mannequin. A toy.

“I mean, no one wants to admit it, and I get why no one wants to
admit it—I don’t even like to admit—but it’s just the way it is. It’s just
a matter of cultural homogeny. That’s it. Like—and I know, I don’t like
this either, I think this sucks, I think it’s a bummer—but really the only
reason those places can pull off safety nets like that is because
they’re, like, intensely homogenous.”
I bring Dennis his fifth drink. Acting natural is easier than I
thought it would be. He makes it easy. He’s the only one who’s ever
talking. He’s only ever aware of himself.
“Ah, mazel.” He takes the glass and immediately slurps at it.
Greedy bloated infant. “Man, if you knew me maybe two years ago,
this would be a completely different situation. Like, I used to get bad
when I drank. Like, really bad. Like, me and this guy Seth—like my
best bud from the last place I was staying—when we’d drink we’d get

30
into just the shittiest most malicious shit. For no reason at all. I
mean, real dark shit.”
“What do you mean?” Tony says.
“You know. Fights and waking up not knowing where you been
and shit. You know. But that’s fucking history. You know. Getting a
new life together.” A big sloppy sip. “New town, new life.”
A simmer in Tony’s eye. He leers forward. “So where exactly are
you from?”
Dennis pulls his lips off the glass and raises a brow. It hits me
with déjà vu. There it is. Recognition.
“Where are you from? Originally?”
Dennis shrugs. “Nowhere specifically. Traveled lots. Army brat
stuff.”
“Where were you before here?”
“Aberdeen. Aberdeen, Washington. Had a gig there, you know,
with this start-up that hooked restaurants up with LLCs and
whatever. But then like, everything happened and they laid off the
noobs.”
I clasp the back of Tony’s neck and squeeze gently. He eyes me
from the side, sweaty, shaken, then looks back at Dennis. “You ever
live in Missouri?”
Dennis pauses. Stares into space, like he’s been switched off.
Then, snapping back, he meets Tony’s eyes and shakes his head.
“Can’t say I have.”
“Really?”
I touch Tony’s forearm. “Don’t.”
“Nah, man.” Dennis rolls his eyes back, like he’s looking for
something just over his head. “Never lived in Missouri. You got family
there or something?”
“Yeah. My mom’s from there.”
“Tight.” Dennis kills his drink, belches and stands. “I must
apologize,” he says, mocking British English. “I must once again
make use of your facilities.” Stepping forward, he sways immediately,

31
knees buckling. “Whoa.” Another broken step, bracing. “That’s a
drink.” He falls into the wall. “Oh shit.” Dark piss revealing across his
khaki shorts. “Oh God,” he whimpers. “I’m so sorry.” And slumps to
the floor.

Tony comes to bed naked. Crawling in beside me, penis hard, tip
already glazed, pressed to the small of my back. Right hand
wrapping me, caressing that dip at the bottom of my belly, just above
my pubic hairs. He kisses my shoulder, my neck, and breathes
gently in my ear. Wind through a wasps’ nest.
I close my eyes. Dennis’s skin, hanging loose in slumber. Loose
flesh cuffed and chained in the basement. Do I recognize him? Is it
the same face?
I jolt. I pull away.
“What’s wrong?” Tony asks.
“Nothing,” I say. “I’m sorry. Just too in my head.”
He sighs. A ruptured beach ball. His hand comes off me as he
rolls onto his back. “It’s okay. Understandable.”
“I think I just need to sleep.”
“Yeah, totally.” He rolls away from me. “Tomorrow’s gonna be
crazy.”
“Yeah. Totally.” And it’s just us breathing, peepers yelping
outside. “Goodnight.”
“Goodnight.”
Lying there, eyes closed, trying to remember. Conjuring the face
I saw online, the face I saw in our basement, trying to overlay them
in my head, trying to make them overlap. Make them identical.
The bed rocks. Just slightly. A rubbing. Tony rubbing his cock
beneath the sheets. Stifling moans, holding his breath. I lie still,

32
waiting until he stops and wipes his mess on the side of the mattress
topper. I wait until he starts snoring to sneak down to the basement.

Dennis. Skin and muscles loose in sleep, strapped to the chair with
handcuffs, bungee cords, zip ties and chain. Heaving breaths
through his nostrils, and the space between his lips and the tennis
ball taped into his mouth. Like an apple in a dead pig’s jaw.
I hold up my phone, one eye on Dennis, one eye on the screen.
Looking at the photo on the sex offender registry, holding it side by
side with his real face, looking for the similarity. Looking back and
forth, at screen, at skin, at screen, at skin, waiting for certainty to
click into place.

Tony wakes me, or I let him think he does. He hugs me from behind
and I flinch, pulling away. He frowns.
“Sorry,” I say, shifting back towards him.
“Are you excited?” he says, the smile returned. “I’m excited.”
I nod. We both get dressed in silence and head downstairs.
Dennis is still bound, still asleep. Heavy snores blowing snot
down his lip, over the tennis ball. The basement reeks of him, his
piss and sweat and gas.
Tony steps forward, dipping his face toward Dennis’s. “Hey.”
Dennis doesn’t respond, slumped forward and to the side.
“Hey.” He claps his hands.
Dennis doesn’t wake. Tony steps closer and slaps him hard on
the temple. Finally, he stirs. His body slowly growing rigid, as though
filling with air. His eyes creak open.

33
 “Finally, you piece of shit,” Tony says, stepping back toward me
and pulling me close, kissing my forehead, but keeping his eyes on
Dennis the whole time.
Dennis groans and bucks clumsily in the chair, against his
bindings, and at first I think he’s trying to break free. But instead, he
wretches, face clenched. Watery yellow fluid spitting from between
his lips and the tennis ball.
“He’s puking,” I say, pulling away from Tony. “He’s gonna
choke.” The vomit smells like milk on hot asphalt.
“Shit.” Tony reaches out and tears the duct tape from Dennis’s
cheek. The tennis ball falls from Dennis’s lips, rolls off his chest and
plunks to the dirt. His face tips forward, spewing hot viscous yellow
into his crotch. He hacks and blubs.
Tony wipes his hand on his jeans and slips around behind me,
running his left hand over my belly, pulling me into him. His erection
pressed into the top of my ass. Resting his chin in the crook of my
neck, he removes an Xacto knife from his pocket. Uncapping it, he
places it in my right hand, folding his fingers over mine.
Dennis’s head lolls. Eyes widening weakly. “Whu—Whus goan
on?”
Tony’s hand around mine around the knife. He points it right at
the flat bloated face, guiding it like a paintbrush.
“Whus happing?”
The face we saw on the screen. Flickering in my memory. I
close my eyes to see it clearer, and open to compare. Screen and
skin, screen and skin.
I let go of the knife. It falls to the dirt on its side.
Tony lets go of me. “You dropped it.”
“Can I talk to him?”
He stares dumbly.
“I want to talk to him.”
“Yeah,” he pouts. “I guess.” He picks up the Xacto knife and
points it at Dennis’s chest, drawing a circle in the air. “Scream and I’ll

34
cut your fucking heart out.”
“Whus—whus—” Dennis mumbles, then a long ragged groan.
Tony looks back at me and tosses his hands. “So you want to
talk?”
I step toward the bound soiled man. “Where did you live before
coming here?”
Dennis just looks at me and sighs.
“Dude,” Tony says. “We know who you fucking are. We looked
you up.”
“Stop,” I say.
“Three fucking kids.”
“Stop. Please.” And now I’m crying, turning from both of them,
running up the stairs. Tony’s voice calling out, chasing after with an
alien, frightened fury. At the top, in the kitchen, he catches me,
grabbing my shoulder, spinning me around.
“Hey hey hey,” he says. “What the fuck.”
“It isn’t him.” Pressing my face into his chest.
“I don’t know what that means.”
“It isn’t him. I don’t think it’s him.”
He steps away. A tremor mounting. “Are you fucking kidding
me?” He throws the Xacto knife at the wall. It bounces off and
skitters across the counter, clattering into the sink. “You saw him on
the fucking registry. You saw him.”
“I don’t think it’s him.”
“Who else would it be?”
“I think we made a mistake.”
“Okay.” Pacing. Pressing his palms into his temples. “Let me get
this straight. Okay. Okay? So, because you can’t trust your own two
eyes, because you can’t trust your basic fucking cognitive faculties,
you’re going to—fuck.” He punches the wall, denting the plaster.
“I—I don’t know.”
“That’s fucking wonderful. That’s spectacular. You know, you
know, it would’ve been nice if you’d expressed this uncertainty, you

35
know, pretty much any time before right now, you know? I mean,
God. Any fucking time. I mean, Jesus Christ.”
“I don’t know what you want me to tell you.”
He bends toward me, bringing his face to my height, meeting my
eyes precisely. “I want you to say ‘Yes Anthony. That’s the kiddie
toucher we saw on the sex offender registry.’ I want you to say ‘Yes
Anthony, you were right.’”
I lift my fist and strike him in the chest. It’s like hitting an empty
box. I go to our room and slam the door.

I imagine a life, a new life moving on. A life without him. Lying to the
cops, telling them it was all his idea, that he threatened to kill me if I
didn’t comply. I testify in court and my fiction satisfies all relevant
parties. He goes to jail forever and I sell half my belongings and
move into a single-room apartment in a sprawling, tucked away
complex in Florence, or Greenfield, or Easthampton. I probably don’t
keep my job, or maybe I do if Dennis leaves to a new career, maybe
in a new state, where this can all happen to him once again.
I go out—to shows, to dance nights, to karaoke, trying to pick up
boys and maybe girls, but I’ve forgotten how to converse, or even
engage. The ones who approach me initially, thinking my face or
body is cute, they cringe when I speak, retreating from my wilted
syntax. Or maybe there’s someone who waits it out till we’re both too
drunk to understand what’s happening, and the next thing I know I’m
on a strange mattress with things stuffed inside me. Sneaking out
the next morning before he or she wakes, getting brunch by myself—
waffles with peaches and whipped cream on top, home fries on the
side. Considering hobbies I could adopt, ukulele or edgy
needlepoint. Then the headache—the bitch from the night before,

36
the drilling of it—turns everything so insurmountable and I put my
forehead on the table and puke in my lap.
Stepping over the ledge. Seeing if anything’s beneath me.

We hear him scream from the basement. Sometimes words but

mostly just sound. Tony stomps downstairs and is gone for five, ten
minutes, then back up again. You can still hear the screams, just
muffled now. Easier to pretend like they aren’t there.

When you’re young, you think of love as something tangible. Like it’s
an actual thing—an energy, or even an object, like a physical
property binding you to another person. And that’s why love fails,
usually. Real love isn’t a thing. It’s an action; it’s a verb. It’s what you
do with that energy that matters, and what you do to preserve it. It’s
work. It’s so much work. It’s so fucking hard and that’s one reason it
fails too.

It’s not the screaming, because eventually Dennis stops screaming,

but I don’t sleep. I’m already up, sitting at the kitchen table in my
underwear when Tony wakes on the couch. Rising, squinting through
puffy eyes.
“Hey,” I say.
He winces in surprise, finding me. “Hey.”
“Hey,” I repeat. “Can we talk?”
“Yeah. Sure.” He gets up, reaching into his underwear, flipping
his hard-on under the waistband so it won’t show as much.

37
 “Come.” I hold out my arms, hands dangling on weak wrists.
“Come here.” He comes and I hug him around the waist, my ear
pressed to his stomach. His belly gurgles. “I think you’re right.”
“Hmm?” He rubs my hair in his palm.
“It’s him. He’s the pedo. You were right.”
He looks down at me. “Yeah?”
I nod. Force a wet smile. “Yeah.”
Tension unwinds from his frame. A small sleepy grin. “Okay.
Alright.”
I stand, snaking my arms over his back. Tucking my forehead
beneath his chin. “You want to go downstairs?”
He squeezes me tight. “Yeah. I think I do.”
“Alright.” I step back. Inhaling deep. Exhaling every alternate
future. “I want to get high first.”

Smoke. Breathe in. Exhale. Tell myself till I believe it.

Dennis lies on his side, on the ground, in the dirt, still trapped in the
chair. He either sees us or hears us because he starts screaming
through the ball again, or trying to—his voice is blown, it’s just a
rasp, like a draft. We grab him by elbow and head and it takes three
heaves to pull him upright. He cries and farts and his skin feels slimy
and not even human.
Tony cups around my belly, slipping fingertips beneath the band
of my sweatpants, and reaches out to Dennis with his other hand.
The Xacto knife flashes in the light. Dennis bucks in the chair, trying
to scream.

38
Tell myself till I believe it. Focus on the children. Children I could
never know but I know they exist, still alive, forever ruined by him. I
don’t even need to close my eyes to see their faces. They hover in
front of me. Spinning globs. Eyes, noses, ears, and mouths.
Composites of children I’ve seen, in person, on TV, online. I see the
children more than I see Dennis. But really there’s nothing there.

The blade draws a curl into his forehead. Red lines poured into a red
eye. A failed red scream. I touch Tony’s thighs and press back into
him, my forehead beneath his chin, a hard-on atop my ass.

The sun in the sky, the core of the Earth. The sweat. My body and
his and his.

The blade reaches out into Dennis’s shoulder and pulls down
through his arm. Flesh parts like a curtain, revealing alien fauna, red
yellow and white. The body attached tremors and squirms.

Tony laps his tongue at mine, at my lips, at my teeth. Holding my

breast, circling the areola with his thumb. Catching on the bumps. He

39
pinches it between thumb and forefinger, tugging gently, slowly
pulling it farther and farther. I grab his hip and gasp into his mouth.

Slice the skin between his fingers, beneath his fingernails. He rocks,
he bucks. Clamp his nipples and pull till they tear. Light his balls on
fire. Break his wrists. Crush his kneecaps. Shave off his nose. Cry
like he made them cry. Sweat and red, sweat and red.

Sliding a finger inside him, pressing his prostate. He moans and his
cock pulses, lifting in my other hand, the tip already glossy. Slipping
my lips over it, sipping salty gel, sucking my cheeks in and out. He
cries out and laughs, running fingers through my hair, behind my ear,
over the back of my neck.

Unspool his mouth into petals. An orchid, candy apple and beige.
Cut lips and gums to swollen anther cap.

He slips inside me like a trap. Rocking above me, his eyes and nose
and lips, his hair and skin. He looks like a teenager. Smiling, he tells
me something, lowering his face to mine, sucking my lips and licking
my teeth. I whisper something back.

40
Press the blade to the corner of his eye. Press just so it clicks
against bone. A rusty tear. Tilt the blade back, scooping. Pry out his
eyeball. Another eyeball squishes out from behind, right into socket.
Pry it out. It falls, and another eyeball, seven, thirteen eyeballs spill
out. A hundred, thousands of eyeballs spilling out, filling the
basement, rising above our ankles.
Blood draws down past his body, past the chair, dangling into
dirt, a wine rope toward Hell. It hardens to a spear, plunging into
earth, planting, spreading roots, fouling soil like salt. Years forward
the crops will rot, the farm will be in ruins, and we will be somewhere
else.

I breathe I gasp I scream.

We fuck again in the shower—arms lifting me, floating me in the fake

rain, to be speared against the wall—and again in bed. On our
backs, crowns of our heads touching, we talk about each other and
memories and a future we previously hadn’t the capacity to envision.
It all opens up before us. He holds me like we’re conjoined and we
sleep like wolf pups.

He wakes before I do, kissing my shoulder. Stretching against his

body, twining our limbs, I suck his neck, then chest, his nipples,
crawling down his torso to his groin. Slipping his cock between my
lips, swirling my tongue around the tip. Resting my pussy over his
mouth. He laps and sucks, pushing his bottom lip against my clit.

41
Making me shiver and gasp. I turn myself around and fall on his cock
and ride until he bursts up through me. Laughing and kissing.
We wash in the kitchen. I pull out pancake mix, eggs, milk,
butter. He slaps six strips of bacon in the skillet and throws on the
Doobie Brothers, singing along. Girl, don’t you worry, I know where I
stand. I mix everything up in the bowl while he holds my hips. Then
he helps me scoop the batter into the frying pan.
We sit side by side at the table, each of us eating with one hand,
holding the other’s thigh with the other. Then he washes all the
dishes while I roll a joint, and we head back to the basement.

Dennis doesn’t move. He won’t move. Slumped in the chair, tilted

forward. Limbs ripped and still. His groin a blackened holocaust. No
throb, only cold red drooling from ruined holes. The stink of old shit.
“Hey asshole,” Tony says. It doesn’t sound like a threat. The
man chained to the chair does not reply. Tony reaches out a shaky
hand and touches the burgundy chest. He looks back at me with wet
eyes. His face explains everything.
The day has left us.

Tony goes to the bathroom so that I won’t see him, but I hear. His
face pressed in a towel, a quiet muted weep.

We take him out of the chains, duct tape, bungee cords and
handcuffs. I lay down a tarp that we’d used years back—that time we
tried camping, spiders and thunderstorms, once and never again.

42
We pull him off the chair. He slushes to the floor, onto the tarp. We
wrap the blue around him and roll him up.
I ask Tony what we’re going to do. He exhales, and for a
moment it looks like he’s going to cry again. “We can dig a hole,” he
says. “A grave.”
“Yeah.” Wait. “That’ll take a while, won’t it? Isn’t it like way
harder to dig a grave than it sounds?”
“I don’t know.” He takes out his phone and types something in.
He scrolls and taps. “Jesus Christ. It takes like ten hours.”
“Oh.”
He slips the phone back into his pocket and stares at tarp-
wrapped Dennis. “Fuck.”
I rest my head against his shoulder. “We can just leave him for
now. We’ll figure something out.”
“Yeah?”
“Sure. Why not?”

We shower separately. Washing off the filth, the filth and some of the
future, the potential. Washing off the way he looked at me last night.
Pulling soap through my hair and crying quiet.

I open the door to take out the trash. And there it is. Dennis’s Buick
LaCrosse, sitting in our driveway, completely forgotten.
I look for where the garbage bins are kept—first in the garage,
then by the basement. Finally, at the back of the house, I find them. I
toss the bags in and get back inside quick.
I don’t tell Tony about the car.

43
We find each other on the couch. He sits, head back, staring at the
ceiling. I lay my head on his lap. We stare at the ceiling together.
“What now?” I ask.
“I guess we wait.”
“For what?”
He gazes down into my eyes, and I see myself in the glass of
his, and I look wrong, I don’t look like myself, I don’t look the way I
remember being. He runs his fingers through my hair. “You know.”
Twisting onto my side, facing his belly, I close my eyes. “What
do you want to do tomorrow?”
“I’ve got a shift.”
And right there the rest of the world comes back and I
remember where I am and who I am. “I almost forgot work was a
thing.”
“Yeah, I know. Are you scheduled, too?”
“Yeah. Of course. Always.”
“I guess that’s what we’re doing, then.”
The evening passes and morning comes without sleep. We
ignore odors. We listen for sounds, foreign footsteps, outside and
within. Doors breaching. Siren’s yelp. But nothing. We clock in. We
dial numbers, we speak words, we ask questions, we speak, we
make noises, together and apart, holding separate spaces in a single
room. Gestures and sounds, repeating, repeating, and none of it
means anything.

44
45
46
But that wasn’t really us. That never really happened. It was a story
she told herself. A dream, a passing thought (the way our memories
and fictions exist in montage—summary—allowing us to, internally,
traverse vast swaths of time in mere moments). This thought, this
daydream, is what kept her from leaving me. That was a decade
ago, and you’d need to ask her if things are better now.
A starved Labrador in a concrete landscape on the TV. The dog
points snout toward a black hole broken out of a wall. The camera
zooms in and when I squint I can almost make out the glint of twin
yellow eyes deep within the dark. The commercial ends, smash

47
cutting back to the show we were watching (Monsieur LeBlanc’s
Premium Eaterinos), and neither of us are sure what it means or
what it’s trying to sell.
Rochelle nuzzles into her corner of the couch, folding her arms
over her chest. “I so hope I’m not pregnant.”
“Why would you be pregnant?”
“I forgot my pill. Like a month ago. Just one day. I went right
back on it, so it should be fine, but I feel all fucked up.”
“I’m sorry.” I spoon a pearly glob of yogurt into my mouth.
“I can’t think of a worse time to get an abortion.”
“You know I’ll do whatever needs to be done.”
She laughs. “You mean, like, get the coat hanger?”
“No, I mean, like, I’ll help find kind and considerate professionals
to take care of it.”
She lifts herself up, slumping onto my lap. She smiles up at me
and presses the side of her face into my belly. “You’ll punch me in
the stomach a couple times?”
The Shrill turns back on. This alien tinnitus, this whining tone
like a laser shot through my skull. When it first started happening, I
thought it was just me—an ailment, maybe real tinnitus—but she
could hear it too. Not something inside me, but vibrating through the
air. Outside, the dogs bark for blocks. At some point, we get up and
make pancakes.

Our apartment is above a preschool, not on a farm (yet another

daydream). A month ago, the children stopped coming, and all we’d
hear was the teachers milling, their muffled speech. Then they
stopped showing up, too. Now it really is only us.
We break into the downstairs, jamming my driver’s license in the
bolt until the doorknob twists. It’s all melon walls, cardboard animals

48
and cut-out numbers taped up. Heaps of wooden blocks. We fuck on
a pile of green ragged beanbags, and kick apart dollhouses and
aged plushies and shelves filled with slim books with titles like It’s
Not Easy Being a Bunny, Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus and
There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly. Piling the wreckage
into a corner, Rochelle says, “If our toilet stops working, we can
always use this.”

I log into Zoom. My boss and co-workers appear across the screen
in a grid of stuttering rectangles. Each rectangle a unique room—
Samantha in a log cabin, Pauline on a porch, Hannah in a kitchen.
All dressed nearly identical, button-up blouses and sports coats.
Made up like they’re going out. I’ve been telling them my webcam
doesn’t work, so I stay in my ragged t-shirt and boxers and socks.
We talk about the projects that apply to me (only two now, since I’ve
been reduced to a support role, which is fine, I don’t care), and when
the discussion moves on I mute myself. I work my dick out of my
boxers and stroke and tug at the shaft but it won’t get hard. The
voices are too distracting, needling, and I don’t find any of these
people attractive, and my space no longer belongs to me, it’s entirely
futile.
Vic wraps up his updates for the final report on the aquifer study,
and everyone says bye and drops out of the call. Still pawing at my
groin, I find Rochelle in the living room, stretched across the couch in
a tank top and bicycle shorts, tapping at her phone. I hop on top of
her and we pull our clothes off and try to fuck but I still can’t get hard,
so we just lie there and listen to each other’s breathing.

49
There’s so much noise. Not just the Shrill—its whistles from robins
and blue jays, throaty screams from grackles and crows. The
neighborhood dogs—a dumpy golden retriever, a ragged terrier, a
rusted mutt that looks like a young Robert Redford—howling and
yelping. Swole pickups dragging U-Haul trailers the fuck out of town.
Blasts echoing off the mountain—thick, basso poooohhms.
Fireworks, maybe. Probably. And then there’s this clicking, like
tapping on the inside of a wall, like an insect’s mouth. This clicking.
She hears it too. We trace the walls but can’t find a source.
If I lie awake at night, after everything has quieted down, I can
sometimes hear the neighbors thinking, I can hear their dreams, and
I go tense with what I learn.
We’d been watching them—the neighbors—and they’d been
watching us, through the windows, or when they were in the yard. A
family of four in the house to our right—a man, a woman, a child and
a baby. We never really met them because who meets their
neighbors anymore? But we’d see them outside, the man raking the
yard and the woman burning brush and the child building kingdoms
of dirt, and when we looked down at them they looked up at us.
Bleary eyes and dead frowns. Moving like sleepwalkers, but also a
simmer somewhere deep in those faces. Some kind of fury.
We never saw the baby. The baby shrieked so loud you could
hear it all the way over in our apartment. Like a rake against glass.
All day and all night. Sometimes harmonizing with the Shrill.
At some point—maybe three weeks ago, maybe three months,
maybe a year—they stopped going outside. We’d only ever see
them in the windows. Looking at us through the glass, eyes sour and
glazed. Rochelle would lean into me and we’d just stand there,
taciturn, looking back at them, until we got bored and turned on a
show or played video games or something. We’d check back every
once in a while, and sometimes they’d still be staring at us.
Then we stopped seeing them altogether. Never in the windows,
never outside. No sign. No trace, except for the baby. The baby still

50
wailed invisibly through day and night, piercing caterwaul ringing
through our glass and walls into our space, impossibly. Then, one
day, it stopped too.
Nobody came for any of them.

Out for a walk in the afternoon, it’s soupy overcast, drizzling, grey,
titanium. A plasticky, narcotic scent. Chalky dew coating my hands,
face and neck. A buzz in the particles, like drugged mist.
I pass the other neighboring house. The one with people still
alive inside. There are two of them. A man and a woman. Elderly—in
their sixties or seventies. Maybe that isn’t elderly, or it’s almost
elderly. It doesn’t matter, I don’t care. They stare at us—at me right
now—through their window. Like the other neighbors before, they’ve
long ceased going outside. Droopy wet wrinkled faces side-by-side,
yellow and blue-ringed eyes. A weird, fiending starvation inside.
A man sings in my earbuds: It’s my favorite kind of day, filled
with the things we fear, that find us where we sleep and fuck us
where we breathe. He shouts but sounds exhausted, like he’s spent
the year pushing his hands through skin and sap. Ugly, stupid and
unacknowledged.
Empty sidewalks. No one on the roads. Geese cackling past a
line of houses—a new prefab subdivision, but already most of the
windows are boarded and vacant. Even the inhabited ones baring
lawns gone to deep primordial hell. Quasi-reclaimed.
A skinny hand of lightning reaches down and touches the
mountain ahead. The drug water falls sharper and harder,
permeating my hoodie and jeans. Buzzes harder. I half-walk, half-run
back home. Past the living neighbors, still at the window, eyes still
following me, like a haunted painting, a real fucking hate creasing
their brows.

51
 Do they have guns?
Inside the apartment, Rochelle asks, “What’s that smell?” That
damp, plasticky reek. I shrug, strip off my clothes and snuggle up to
her on the couch. Our skins break out in hives, hives on top of hives,
until the entire lengths of our skins are just one big hive. We scratch
each other bloody. The Shrill comes but this time it almost sounds
like nothing.

The fog of war describes the doubt and precarity of decision making
during military operations. In video games, you can see it rendered
as a blurry black space beyond your characters’ sight and memory.
A lantern encircled by black smoke.
We turn on the TV and watch a video on how to make plastic
explosives from bleach.

I heat up kimchi-flavored ramen and frozen Brussels sprouts. She

cooks a stir fry. We watch a show about cartoon animals trying to
break out of prison. An anteater shivs a basking shark, saying, “You
gotta have teeth if you wanna make it in Animal Prison, bitch.” I say
that I think the voice is Ray Liotta’s.
“I don’t know who that is.”
“He was in Goodfellas. And Cop Land. And Corrina, Corrina.”
“Huh.”
I pause the show. “Look it up.”
She takes her phone from the side table and taps on the screen.
“Yeah, it’s Ray Liotta.”

52
I go back out at night. There are a few feet of grass dividing the
sidewalk from the road so it feels safe. No cars on the road anyway.
Trees gnarled and hard like broken hands reaching for sky, spaced
evenly.
Something squishes beneath my feet. Balancing on one foot, I
look at the underside of my shoe but it’s too dark to tell what it is.
Probably dog shit. I try and scrape it off on the curb. A woman
comes out of her house with her dog, looks at me, then goes back
inside.
The mountain ahead stretches tall, black against black, lording
over. A pyramid of stringed lights set atop the peak’s pavilion. It
wants me to climb, to reach its summit, to be away from the rest of
the world, but instead I walk back home.
I take off my boots at the top of the stair. The rubber sole caked
with wet red and white. Crushed dark green skin and bone. I let it
drop to the shoe rack and go inside, to our room and wake up
Rochelle.

Here’s what really happens.

Hours before the sun pulses through the clouds in a grey glow,
we drag garbage bags of old mail and clothes to the elderly
neighbors’ house. We siphon gasoline from their Buick LeSabre, and
once it starts flowing we stuff the other end of the tube in one of the
bags, then another, soaking the paper and cloth. The fumes turn our
stomachs, turning the muggy air woozy, but we shrug it off. This is
important.
We remove the paper and fabric from the bags, wad them into
balls, and pack them around the house’s foundation. It takes less
time than you’d think. I take out one of those long-stemmed lighters,
click it on, and touch the flame to the fabric.

53
 It’s like stepping out of a jail cell.
It’s a while before it gets going, but the structure gradually lights
up golden, pumpkin and brass, pissing an onyx tube of smoke
toward heaven. We run out into the street and watch. The doors
never open. No one gets out. Fire trucks never arrive. Rochelle leans
into me and we wrap each other in gas-soaked arms. The space
belonging to us expands—our neighbors’ houses now another wall
between us and the rest. Next week maybe we’ll worry about the
houses beyond, and take care of them too. Expanding the
fortification. But right now, in this moment, I feel safe. I think she
feels safe, too.

54
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 Contents

Waxing Moon
The Young People
Where We Breathe
Burn You the Fuck Alive
The Buried Man
The Autocastrato
Arcade
He Just Takes It
Poison Nurse
In the Shadow of Penis House
Mantra
Puppy Milk
A Favor
The Frightened
If I Could Speak Would You Still Be Laughing?
Highway Wars
Balloon
The Roman Soldier
…
Film Making

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You’ve dreamed about me. A face you thought was your own
invention. But really it was me. I was there, and I saw you too.

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You’ve let me worry you.

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You’ll be thinking about me for weeks. When your gums puff and
swell, when you spit rust while you floss. You’ll think of me, and won’t
ever be able to stop.

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An asshole filled with nail clippings. I dreamed of great white
maggots shaped like anal beads burrowed deep inside my feet. And
now you’ve dreamed them too. Where does it come from? Light from
icy blade moon down to your spine and mine also.

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I killed your dad and married your other dad, so I’m your dad now
too.

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The joyous days are over. Thus says I.

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No one’s afraid anymore. But I can twist your leg into a spiral. I can
make you forget you ever knew how to breathe. When you found the
beaten red sack behind your home, was part of you excited? I mean,
the look on your face.

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The twenty-seventh time in your life you’ve realized there is still so
much you haven’t considered. It’s almost enough to knock you flat,
so hard you never get up.

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Your waist buckles. Your lips pucker like a sweet milky anus. Ankles
and rotator cuffs worn to ruin. I’m the breath that swallows this world.
An inhalation sucking away the oxygen between each body.

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You sucked face with your lover and sucked so deep your lover’s
lungs collapsed.

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How about that?

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My words stitched upon your trachea. You will never forget.

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I ended the world just to get to you.

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The truth is, I don’t expect them to show up at all. I’m used to getting
blown off. It’s basic as hell—New Kid Blues, et cetera, et cetera. You
arrive in town the same way you’ve arrived in the last six towns, mid-
way through the semester—long enough for factions to solidify
among the student body, but too late to find one for yourself. Split
any group of kids into factions and overnight they’ll hunger the blood
of anyone beyond their circle. It’s instinctual—a survival mechanism.
Any new variable is a threat, and right now the variable is me.
So I’m wary when this lanky rat-faced kid approaches at lunch.
Older, maybe even eighteen. And yeah, very rat-faced, especially

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with those mean little eyes and that dopy smirk—an archetypal
outcast. But that goes for most kids at Los Suelos K-12, and sharing
outcast traits isn’t enough to make you kin. So forgive me for not
exactly throwing myself out there when he sits down at my table,
sucks a strand of mucus back up a narrow nostril and asks, “What’s
the haps?”
I ignore him, figuring he’s talking to someone else or just trying
to fuck with me.
“You talk, man?”
I look up. “Sometimes.”
He smiles wide—sharp canines, like a coyote. “You’re new,
right? What brings you to Los Sueblows?”
I push away my lunch tray. “Get on with it. You gonna shake me
down? Show me the hands? You want my food?”
“Damn, dude.” Rat Face puts his hands up, palms open. “Who
hurt you?”
I look back down at the tray filled with pink sludge and maybe
eggs. “Never mind.”
He introduces himself as Max, says his pop hauled him here like
maybe ten years ago, and that he knows the deal with this place. He
tells me he can get me anything I need.
“Okay,” I say. “Cool.”
Then he leans in real close—skin smelling like old yolks, breath
like rotten cabbage—and asks if I’ve heard about the Buried Man.
I smile. I haven’t heard of the Buried Man, but I know what it is.
I’d been in this position before, in any number of bullshit towns,
learning the mythos. Haunted bridges and murder houses. A Kansas
cemetery might contain a gateway to hell, a New Hampshire hill town
might house a Micah Witch, the Florida panhandle might have a
skunk ape. Local legends. The details change, but it’s all the same
thing—an excuse to go out at night. Everything else is just regional
flavor.
So Los Suelos has a Buried Man.

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 “No.” I iron out my smile. “I don’t know about the Buried Man.”
Max leans in close, grin like a sickle. “Then you’re in luck. This
Saturday’s a full moon.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. You’ll see.”

Taptaptaptaptap. I jolt up from bed, my room filled with warm blue

light. Mom snoring away in the room over. Then taptaptaptaptap on
glass. I grope the side table for my glasses and slip them on,
squinting at the window. Taptaptaptaptap. A grey shape moves
behind it, then snaps clear. Max, contorting his face into evil grins.
The tapping stops, replaced by hushed giggling.
I pull on my pants and slide over to the window. Shushing him, I
reach the bottom of the window and gently pull it up. “Lemme get
some clothes on,” I say. There’s another boy standing away from the
trailer. He looks more my age, maybe fourteen or fifteen. Skinny, tall,
in a black trench coat. I point to him. “Wait over there.”
Max nods, still giggling, and walks to his friend. I pull on some
slides and a shirt, then climb out the window and head over to meet
them.
“Dude, what is good?” Max laughs. “This is so tight. Thought
you were gonna bitch out for sure.”
I almost say I didn’t expect him to show either, but bite my
tongue.
He slaps my shoulder and points ahead, past the trailer park
fence. “Let’s go. Up here.”
We climb over the fence and jog to where the ground descends,
down a gradual slope toward a long squat building, hard grey in the
moonlight. Hunkered in the warehouse’s shadow, Max pulls a pack

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of cigarettes and three warm beers from an old burned-out oil drum.
He points to the other boy. “This is Raf.”
Raf dips his head slowly, almost as a curtsy, eyes never leaving
mine. His coat billowing in the wind like a cape. “The pleasure is
mine.” A voice like chain dragged across stone. “So, what hellish
turn of fate brings you to the Suelos?”
Flares in my head. Mom’s new boyfriend. Mom crying on the
telephone. Packets of white. A gun in the dresser.
“New job,” I say. “My mom got a new job.”
Raf nods. “Of course.”
“Come on,” Max says, pointing ahead with his beer. “It’s like a
mile out.”
We step from the shadow to rows of vacant lots, dust skittering
over asphalt, a warm cottonmouth wind rising.

Crossing Cypress Ave to the outskirts, Los Suelos’ lights diminish

behind us and a full circle of moon, hung high above the Bolt Gun
Hills, takes lead. Max and Raf talk and laugh, jokes relying on
contexts I don’t yet understand. I keep silent, watching the shrubs
trembling in the breeze.
“Alright, it’s coming up.” Max points to a car-sized rock ringed by
spiny blooms of thistle. “That’s always how you can tell.” Leading us
past the landmark, a few yards down, we reach a small crater,
diameter of maybe a hula hoop.
“Oh shit,” Max says, pointing at the crater. “I’ve never seen it
come up before.” And just as he says that, there’s a sound—a hiss.
Air releasing. The sand within the crater shifts. A gurgle. The sand
turns brown and begins filling with water.
“Man,” Raf says. “That is beautiful.”
I step toward the crater, now a small pool. “What is it?”

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 Max smiles wide. “It’s the Buried Man.”
“And what the hell is the Buried Man?”
Max squats and lets his ass fall into the sand. “You ready for a
history lesson?”
I laugh. “Sure. What you got?”
“So like, around two hundred, one-fifty years ago, when white
boys started taking over, this place was part of the California Gold
Rush, and folks were setting up mines all over. People going crazy
over the stuff. And sure, a lot of places had gold, but like ninety
percent of the time, they found jack shit. Can you guess which
category Los Suelos fell under?”
“Jack shit?”
“Smart. But before anyone knew that, this prospector, Joe
Barnsey, bought out this land right here and hired up the locals to dig
and sift for gold. Just over that ridge, maybe a hundred yards up
from the river, you can still find the mine.”
“So is that where we’re heading?”
Max laughs. “Fuck no. Even in the daytime that place is suicide.
I knew this one kid, thought he was hot shit, skipped class to go out
there. Never found. Some folks are still looking for him.
“Anyway, one of the miners was this guy Francisco Muñoz. He
had a deep history with this place—his lineage goes back before
even the Spanish. Francisco had a small family out here—a wife,
three kids, a dog, the whole deal. And he always told his children:
never, ever go near the mine. He understood and even respected
the adventurous nature of his children, but he also knew firsthand
how supremely dangerous the mine was. Just that week he’d lost
two buddies from a cavern collapse. All he wanted more than
anything was to keep his family safe.
“Then one day, on his walk to the mine, he hears a noise. A
crying. He must’ve been —” Max turns and points back toward the
way we came. “— maybe a dozen yards that way. And the noise was
right around here—like a little boy crying. So he runs toward the

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sound, but even as it gets louder, he can’t see anyone. He calls out,
‘Where are you? Let me bring you back to town.’ But the voice
doesn’t respond. It just keeps weeping. And Francisco is a good
man, he knows he can’t let a child die out here, so he keeps
following the sound, until he reaches —” He points toward me. “—
right around there. And that’s when he realizes, the sound’s coming
from beneath the ground.” He pauses for some kind of reaction.
“So what?”
“So he starts digging. He figures a kid from town had gone into
the mine and gotten lost. It never occurs to him that if that were the
case, he wouldn’t’ve been able to hear the cries from above ground.
Like, times were different. People were dumb. Anyway, he digs and
digs, and as he digs, the crying gets louder. And by the time he’s
waist-deep in the hole, he begins to recognize the voice. It’s his
youngest son Alejandro! Oh shit! So he starts digging like crazy now,
praying for his son’s safety but cursing him, too, for disobeying his
instructions. He digs so deep, with no concern for how he’ll get out of
the hole. He digs until nightfall, until the hole is twice as tall as he.
But here’s the thing—he never reaches the source of the crying. The
weeping always seems just below his feet. And as the shovel falls
from his blistered hands, he looks up to find the moon, positioned
perfecting over the hole, shining its silver light down on him.” He
stops.
“And so then what?”
Max shakes his head. “The hole caves in on him. He’s buried
alive. When he doesn’t come home, his family goes out searching for
him. Later on, his wife claimed she could hear him weeping beneath
the dirt. And when they called out for him, this little pool gurgled to
the surface. You see—it’s Francisco’s tears, from his ceaseless
weeping. Because he knew he’d never see his family again.”
Mulling it over, sifting the details through my head. I laugh. “Shut
the fuck up, dude.”

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 “It’s true, man,” Max says, but he’s laughing too. “It’s totally that
dude’s tears.”
“This is so far from my first rodeo, man.”
“It’s true. Just ask anybody.”
“Let me get this straight,” I say, waving my hands like a
professor. “So while Francisco was digging, there had to have been
somebody with him, right?”
“Nope, he was all alone.”
“So how the hell would anyone know what he heard? How
would anyone know he got buried alive? He probably just got sick of
mining and dealing with his family and dipped.”
Max shakes his head. “You know how these things work, man.
We just know it happened. Don’t need any witnesses or shit.”
“Okay, and why does he cry when it’s a full moon? How does he
even know that?”
He laughs again. “Who cares?”
I creep further toward the pool, blades of blue shimmering
across its surface. “Really though. What is it?”
“So we actually have another reason for bringing you here.”
I turn back to him.
“It’s kind of an initiation thing.” He dusts his hands on the sides
of his pants. “If you wanna roll with us, you gotta drink the tears.”
Raf starts laughing. Max restrains a smirk.
“Yeah?”
The two boys side-eye each other. “Yeah.”
“Alright then.” Creeping to the side of the pool, I crouch onto my
knees. The water’s skin ripples. Crystal clear, like a jellyfish. Cupping
my hands, I reach in. Colder than I expected. Icy, almost. I lift a
handful of water.
“Wait wait wait.” Raf’s voice, now filled with panic.
I tilt my head back and raise the water to my lips.
“Dude it’s a fucking joke!” Max shouts.

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 I drink it down. So cold. Like ice, or blades. A push inside my
head—vertigo—swaying me off balance.
“You should make yourself hurl,” Raf says. Neither of them are
laughing anymore.
“It’s just water,” I say.
“No, for real—there is so much contamination around here. You
should really make yourself throw up.”
“Raf’s right, dude.” Max pushes himself to his feet. “You’re not
even really supposed to drink the tap water here.”
Flashes in my mind—of lead, of arsenic, of birth defects, of a life
of blindness.
I hold my belly with both hands, now swollen, even though it
was only a sip. “Oh.”

Doubled over, stomach clenched, every muscle in my face flexing.

Grunting dry. I put my finger in my mouth, trying to touch the back of
my throat. Gaggy dry heaves, my limbs going to pins and needles,
and a thick glob of saliva falling off my lips. But the water is still in
me. My stomach gurgles and moves, like an eel’s nest. Reaching my
entire hand inside my mouth, I tap where my tongue becomes my
throat. My guts clench and hot fluid rockets through my mouth, onto
my hand, onto the ground.
“Whoa!” Max shouts.
“Damn, son,” Raf says. “That was a heroic puke.”
Buckled over, hands on my knees, spitting the taste out. Bile
and beer and the mac and cheese with spaghetti sauce Mom made
for dinner. And something else. Like a fire. Burning wood. No,
burning plastic. Like a dollhouse on fire in my mouth, in my stomach.
Standing upright, the landscape blinks in quarter-seconds. It
feels like a fever. I take a step and almost fall over.

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 “You alright?” Max runs to me, around the puddle of puke, and
grabs my shoulder.
“I’m fine, probably.” I step away from him, but the ground is
unstable, like standing atop a mammoth water balloon. I feel myself
falling and shift my weight to the other side.
“Hey!” Max grabs my shoulders, keeping me upright. “You gotta
sit down.”
“I’m fine. Can we just go home?”
“Dude, you’re not going anywhere like this.”
“Nah, man. It’ll be fine.” Leaning back against his hands. “Just
hold me up like this and I can walk.”
“I don’t know, man.”
Then I hear Raf. “I do need to get home.”
Max groans and shakes his head. “Okay. Let’s go.”

It’s only ten minutes before I feel stable again, and Max no longer
needs to hold me up. My stomach still disturbed, but it’s probably
psychosomatic—a product of the atmosphere and Max’s story. We
cross back into town, past the warehouse, over the fence toward
home. Approaching my trailer, Max taps my shoulder. “Hey man, we
good?”
I smile. “Yeah, of course. This was tight.”
He smiles back and points at my belly. “If you start feeling sick
and shit, get that looked at.”
Raf holds out his hand. I take it. “Godspeed, sir.” And they both
walk into the night.
I step to my window, slide it back open and pull myself up into
the sweltering room. I strip off my clothes and fall into bed. The clock
reads 4:44 AM.

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Falling. No, floating. No, I’m sinking. Sinking in blue. A blue the
shade of cosmos. A blue the size of the Earth.
Something ahead of me. No, below. The place I’m sinking
toward. A plane as broad as everything I’ve ever known. Coming
closer, closer. And then I land. My feet meet the ground—clay and
sand. Bubbles erupt around my circumference.
Through the blue, the blue like night, I see the landmark. The
rock, and the swaying thistles reaching out from it. And beneath me,
I hear a quiet weeping.

I wake up wet. At first, I think it’s sweat, but no, it’s wetter than that.
I’m soaked. Oh shit oh shit oh shit. I bolt upright and slide off the
bed. This hasn’t happened since I was little. My underwear, my
sheets—fuck, my entire body. Even my fucking face and pillows,
Jesus Christ. Gagging. How could I have pissed this much? Smelling
my wrist. It’s salty, but not like urine. Almost like the beach. I press
down on the mattress. Fluid squeezes through the fibers.
God. All this fluid. Trickling down from lips, nostrils, tear ducts.
A knock at the door. “Dennis, you up yet?” The alarm clock
reads 11:17. “I’m going for groceries, you want to come?”
“Hey Mom. I-I think I’m coming down with something.”
“Oh no.” The doorknob shakes. Locked, thankfully. “Let me see.”
“I don’t want you to catch it. I’m just gonna sleep it off.” I can’t
stop sweating.
“Oh, okay.” Exhaustion and some sadness tinting her voice.
“Drink lots of water.”
I listen for the front door to shut, for Mom’s car’s ignition to
rumble, for the sound of dirt and gravel shifting beneath tires. Then I

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run to the bathroom and jump in the shower. The water stings, like
it’s tearing through my flesh.
I get out and towel myself down. Immediately, I’m dripping
again. I unplug Mom’s hair dryer and head back to my room. Strip
the sheets, pillowcases and mattress cover. I press down on the
mattress again. More salty liquid rises over the fibers. Completely
saturated. I open the window and hang the mattress cover, pointing
my fan toward it. I plug in the hair dryer and wave it over the
mattress. I don’t feel hot but I keep sweating. Tears keep pouring
from my eyes, but I’m not crying.

Mom leaves me a plate of Italian mac and cheese at my door. When

she goes to bed, I bring it in but don’t eat. I sneak to the bathroom
and pee for fifteen minutes straight.

I leave for school before Mom wakes, before the bus even comes. I
leave a note, lying, saying I feel better, but today it’s so much worse.
Wet fills my mouth, and I keep swallowing, gagging on thin saliva.
Sweating through my clothes the moment I put them on.
I need to find Max.
The sun doesn’t dry me. The wet keeps coming out. Out my tear
ducts. Out my mouth, out my skin. Leaving a trail behind me like a
slug. My clothes cling to my thighs and armpits, rubbing them raw.
At school, Max is standing at the front entrance, playing hacky
sack with himself. He sees me coming and smiles. “Hey, man.” The
smile vanishes. “You okay?”
“What did I drink?” The words glug out. A mouthful of drool falls
from my lips with each syllable.

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 “What?” Then a flash of realization. “Oh, I don’t know. Just
buried water. Dude, you are not looking good.”
“I’m not feeling good.”
“You should go to the doctor, man. Or at least the nurse.”
I shake my head, flicking wet off me like a dog. “Never mind, I
have to get to class.”
I jog down the hall to first period, geometry. All the other kids
look at me, the sheer wetness of me, removing their eyes only once
Mr. Cantillo arrives. He takes attendance and begins talking about
transformed figures, rigid and non-rigid transformations. I look down
at my desk and close my eyes. It isn’t black in there but blue. An
endless blue. Bubbles and shapes in the haze. The opposite of void
—space filled completely, to the brim. It feels like portent.
My bladder expands.
“Dennis.”
Pushes back up through my stomach.
“Dennis.” Mr. Cantillo’s snarl.
I snap into the room. A hard-on swollen with fluid beneath my
desk. I look up. “Can I go to the bathroom?”
“Dennis, we’re just starting.”
I open my mouth to speak again but it’s only water that comes
out. Salty and raw.
“Dennis, can you explain how —”
My bladder releases. Pee shoots against the front of my already
soaked pants, all over my lap and down my leg. I jump out of my
seat.
“Excuse me!” Mr. Cantillo shouts.
I cover my crotch. Everyone looking at me again, giggling. “I-I-I-I
—”
“Sit the hell down!”
“I need to use the bathroom.” And before he can respond, I just
take off, through the door, down the hall, still pissing, leaving a trail of
seawater piss on the linoleum. Shouldering into the bathroom, I yank

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my pants open. I pee. I pee for five minutes. Ten. Fifteen minutes.
Twenty. Thirty. The bell rings. Other students come into the bathroom
and piss and shit in the unoccupied urinals and stalls. I keep pissing
through it all. I can’t stop.
The bell rings for the next period, and when I no longer hear
commotion in the hall, I stuff myself back into my pants—still pissing,
soaking already soaked pants and skin—and open the door. I run. I
run to the front entrance, past a yelling hall monitor and
administrator. I run to the outside, to the heat, to the dry, and I keep
running.

I don’t know where I am and it doesn’t matter. All that matters is that
it’s dirt. The only thing that can dry me—it has to be. Pushing
through the shrubs and brush, hunched over, groping the ground till I
touch a long, thin rock—like a spade. I grasp it, falling to my knees.
Water falling from my eyes in torrents, blinding me. Water falling off
my skin in sheets. It all hits the ground and sinks through it.
Becoming absorbed, becoming dry.
The rock slips in my hand. I lift it above my head and bring it
down to the sand, scooping a tiny amount to the side. I spit out
gallons of water onto the dry, and keep digging. Sweating, weeping,
pissing water, shitting water, vomiting it. Scratching at the dirt with
the rock, deepening the hole ever slightly. In hours, maybe an entire
day, it will be deep enough for me to slip my body into. But even
then, will it be enough? I will have to keep digging, until I’m far
enough under, to the point that I can’t climb out. It’s all I have left.
Dirt to dry me, absorb me. The only thing that can. It will plug and
hold me until it’s no longer able, and I will burst forth and flood the
Earth.

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It was the only thing he ever wanted to do, and once it was done, he
could never do it again.

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Of those offered, the knife seemed the most practical object. But
now you’re regretting it. By your thirtieth mile in the city, the bike has
more appeal.
Live with your decisions.
You reach Davis and Nicholson Ave, which your friend in data
security recommended, but it’s all empty storefronts. Scattered
dough body toughs, in their customary black slacks and bare tops,
roaming the sidewalks, grilling you. Begging you to make your move.
The one posted across the street: just muscle and bulk, scalp
buzzed into a bullet, naked floppy breasts hanging to belly. You didn’t

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expect the hunger in these people’s eyes. You’d thought they’d be
beaten down. A stupid assumption. They’ve been waiting for
someone like you.
You move on, stopping at the next intersection to take a picture.
A burnt orange sunset behind boarded-up complexes. Post it to your
feed and wait for notifications, but none of your friends or followers
even look at it.
Ditch down Nicholson to Balsam Lane. Not a single window lit,
leering black and emptied. But it only feels that way. Feigning death.
The buildings are filled and angry and that makes you ten-thousand
times outnumbered. Walk on. Search for something, any opening,
any activity. But it’s just brown and grey façades and paper blown
across concrete.
Four hours in, still grasping for a starting point. The
hummingbirds buzz overhead, capturing footage, but it’s nothing
anyone will have any use for.

Follow a path over the hill and arrive at a superior vantage point.
Neighborhoods unfold below like a Christmas gift. A centipede of
single-floor public housing units surrounding a courtyard. A small
gathering there. BBQ. Families of dough bodies. Dough body
children.
Slide down the grass to the complex and creep along the
outermost building. Not everyone could be at the BBQ—maybe
someone stayed behind. Maybe someone was left behind. A child—
a rebellious teen pouting in their room. You could probably
overpower that. Maybe an elder, or another sort of debilitant, or a
baby—somebody with mobility issues. That’d make an okay start.
Loping along, you peek through windows, scanning for
movement, but the rooms are darkened. All you find is your

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reflection. So head to the courtyard.
Stilted laughter around a grill. About fourteen mister and lady
dough bodies. Nine children. Turning their heads as you approach,
like they knew you were coming.
“Yo,” you say to the bodies, pointing at the grill. “Can I grab that
lighter?”
The burger-flipping mister dough body puts his hands up.
Shakes his head. “We’re just trying to have a good time, man.”
“I know.” Put your hands up too. Try to ingratiate. “I’m just
looking to light a cigarette. Can I have that?”
The mister takes the lighter, glances it over and tosses it toward
your feet. Pick it up.
You point at the bag beside the grill. “Let me get some coals too.
And that fluid.”
The mister narrows his eyes. “Why?”
“I want to BBQ too.”
He says something to another dough body—you can’t make out
the words and you understand that’s intentional—before picking up
the bag of coals and the lighter fluid and walking them over to you,
dropping them about a yard from your feet. “Look man,” he says.
“Please don’t do anything here. Just go someplace else.”
It’s a reasonable, polite request. You’ll consent, because you
need to start somewhere less populated anyway. Plus these
buildings are made of brick—they won’t catch easy. “Yeah,” you say.
“Maybe.” You like the fear in their eyes.
Drop the lighter and fluid in the coal bag and toss it over your
shoulder, and book out of the complex, down a few blocks into an old
perished suburb where the houses are made of wood. Pick a yellow
house to make your own. An ideal set up—a wooden porch, with a
wooden chair sat atop. Hop up the steps and drop the coal bag, then
grab the chair and shove the top rail beneath the front door’s knob (a
financier friend who’d weekended here had offered this tip). Pour the

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charcoal at the foot of the door, spray lighter fluid all over, and light it
up. Run to the middle of the street to watch the rest unfold.
There’s pounding behind the front door, but the chair holds. A
window breaks open and an arm, then a lady’s face and shoulders,
then her whole dough body scrambles out, slicing skin on the
shards. Kicking out the remaining glass, she pulls a little boy and
young mister dough body out by their collars. They run toward the
street, but catch you hovering with your knife and halt, keeping to the
sidewalk. A second lady springs from behind the house, gripping a
large metal pot, running up the steps, pouring the pot, dousing the
flames while the first lady kicks coals into the yard. Once the fire’s all
the way out, the family just stares at you, a quake in their stance.
Hummingbirds crisscross the lower sky, capturing it all. More footage
that will not be shared, for there’s nothing of note to impart.
There’s nothing else to do here so you leave.

Here and there, it’s the same story. Bodies keep to groups; the only
loners stacked with muscle and brandishing death wish. No simple
prey. Your closest brush with action is a massacre long completed—
corpses split, marshmallows bubbled up through incisions and dried;
hard cakes and candies crusted to breathless lips.
You’ve never felt so out of shape. And you remember your Wall
Street friend bragging how he trained half a year prepping for his trip.
High-repetition heavy lifting, countless miles of running. A diet of fish,
eggs, avocado and powders. By the end, he said he could tear a
body in half.
Think about the emeralds you’ve wasted—fifty-thousand,
scrounged coordinating arms sales for low-level startups. Or
remember what your IT friend had said about how you really need to
spend a week here to get your money’s worth.

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 Think about filing a lawsuit. Taking the cocksuckers for all
they’re worth. But you have nothing to back it up. You signed the
agreements. It’s on record. It’s your own fault you’re dissatisfied.
It hurts but it builds character. That nothing is truly as good as
advertised. That there is no true freedom left in the world. That God,
government and natural law are indifferent to your desires. You don’t
feel sad (you lack the capacity), but a knot ties inside you and grows
dense with mass, almost dragging you to the ground. But you keep
walking, because your money’s gone and you may as well see
everything they have to offer.

There it is. Finally, your first lead. A flyer stapled to a line-less

telephone pole on Rainier Boulevard. A big-eyed clipart lamb
grinning dumbly from eggshell paper. Text sheared into its coat:

LOBE UP!!!

MAD DYNAMIC CALF CHECK

WIN REWARDS | EARN A CUTE SURPRISE

495 WELLINGTON ROAD

Your masseuse had mentioned the Calf Checks before. “A lot of folks
skip them, but they can be worth it. I got my first gun that way. Plus it
toughens you the fuck up. After mine, I felt like I could do anything.”
Check your map and make the trek, past collapsed homes and
burnt trees strung with intestines and hanged cats. Hop onto
Wellington and cross the bridge over slow whirlpools sucking
bubbles into murk. Arrive on the other side surrounded by hollow
beige buildings.

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 It’s night now, and arrows made of Christmas lights hang from
oil drums and dead cars, guiding you through metal and mortar
corridors. You spill into a courtyard clogged with pink and blue buses
with naked glitter-doused women and men dancing atop to no music.
A line of entrants curls around one of the warehouses. A caterpillar.
Join at the end of the queue, watching them try and trade their
starting objects.
A woman walks along, handing out branded nylon bags. You
take the bag and tell her they should have done a better job
advertising. That you’ve wasted all day drifting around like an
asshole looking for something to do. That it’s bullshit, that you’re
entitled to at least a partial refund. But the woman only smiles and
presses down the line, distributing the remaining bags to horny kids
who look exactly like you.
You open your bag and peer inside. A box cutter, a flare, and a
blue and pink mouth guard.

Staff have you fill out some forms before ushering you into a white
room where you sit alone with a woman in a lab coat asking you
questions. “Have you participated in a Calf Check in the past six
months?”
“No.”
“How did you learn about tonight’s Calf Check?”
“A flyer. Out by the suburbs.” Quietly: “You really should
advertise it better.”
“Many have said that the search is part of the experience. Which
starting object did you select?”
“The knife.” You remove it from your pocket, unfold it, and lightly
stab the air.

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 “Good. You should have no problem then.” Beckoning you to the
doorway, she leads you through to a second white room. Two men—
one bald, one with greasy, shoulder-length hair—stand beside a
young brown cow, neck and torso and legs wrapped in wide rubber
straps connected to the wall. Just overhead, a hummingbird flits,
capturing footage.
“Did Allie tell you everything?” the bald man says.
Nod. “I really get a gun if I win this?”
“Is that what the flyer said?”
“Yes.” Though now you’re unsure.
He scowls. “Then why would you think otherwise?”
You consider grabbing him and driving the blade up through his
chin into the roof of his mouth, but assault on staff carries heavy
penalties. You’d never get out. They’d make a dough body out of
you.
“Alright, you ready?”
You nod.
“Great. You’ve got five minutes, starting…now!”
A buzzer blares and you run at the shackled animal, plunging
the knife tip into its eye. The cow moos deep, a pained roar,
resonating off the walls, beating at your eardrums. You want to drop
the knife, to cover your ears, but you waited in line too long for this.
Your fist stays around the knife and you stab again, breaking through
hide and glancing off the skull. The cow tries to struggle away, but
the straps draw tighter, holding her in place.
“Try the throat,” the greasy-haired man yells.
Allie makes like she’s going to hit him, but stops herself. “You’re
free to do whatever you want,” she shouts.
Take the advice. Go for the throat. The knife sinks in just beside
the jawbone. The cow moos. Pull downward through flesh and fat,
severing esophagus, milk bulbs. Yank the blade downward till it
escapes the bottom, opening neck. A flush of milk. It must be milk
because that’s what comes out of cows. A torrent of merlot-milk

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washing down ragged drapes, pooling at your feet. The straps pull
the animal to the ground, refusing her death throes.
The buzzer rings out.
Allie appears by your side. “Excellent. You qualify.
Congratulations.” No emotion in her voice. She hands you an Abject
Dynamix-branded towel and heads for the door. Just before exiting,
she points to the bald man. “He’ll get you to where you need to go.”
The floor opens beneath the bovine carcass, and the straps
drag it to a concrete grave.
“Don’t get arrogant,” the bald man says. “It’s a design flaw. The
only ones who pass are the ones who picked the knife. They always
make it through, while everyone who picks the rope or bicycle—they
never do. So it’s all arbitrary. No skill.” He takes a long pull from his
vape. “They tried to fix it, giving everyone box cutters, but the blade’s
too short.” Exhales a ghost. “And on the other end, five minutes is
way too long to give you. You should have to kill that thing real fast.”
Shaking his head. “Anyway, come on. This way.”

A cavernous loading area, decommissioned and stripped to concrete

floor and steel pillars. Two other entrants—a boy and a girl—sit in
folding chairs, dressed almost exactly as you are. The girl scrolls
through her device, her elbow on her thigh and chin in her hand. The
boy—a teen in an eyepatch—sits back, hands in his lap, cradling his
knife. Hummingbirds flit overhead, recording.
The bald lab coat man presses the nub in his ear. “Entrant three
just arrived. Yeah, this is all we’re going to have.”
The girl looks up. “After this we get the taser, no?”
“Sure,” the man says. He begins explaining the rules.
Your body shakes. “Wait, what?” you say, indignant.
The bald man prickles. “Yes?”

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 “I’m supposed to get a gun.”
He shakes his head. “We ran out of guns three nights ago.
We’ve got tasers though.”
“No no no.” You punch your fists into the tops of your thighs.
“I’ve been waiting here all fucking night. Do you know how much
fucking money I’ve spent on this?”
“Of course I do.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“Look.” He points to the other entrants. “A lot of folks like the
taser.” Tonguing inside his mouth, reaching deep in one pocket. “It’s
pretty fun.” An alarm buzzes. “Okay? You ready?”
Neither you nor the other entrants reply.
The bald man taps his ear nub. “They’re ready. Let’s lift. Three,
two, one, go.”
Ancient gears press against one another, and the steel door at
the end of the room begins to rise. Terrible sounds pressing out
behind it—moans, gurgles, strained whining. So much of it. The
sound of a world being wounded.
The door is three-quarters raised and the bodies begin to spill.
Bodies, bodies, dough bodies, spasming, crawling, whining, naked
or almost. Chocolate-streaked, vomited, inflamed candy,
marshmallow pustules, starved grey. Bodies spilling and spill.
Dozens. Fifty dough bodies spilling to the floor. A hundred. Swollen
grape bruises, bone splintered and protruding, sliced Achilles.
Twitching, frail thrashing, movement deprived of mobility—superficial
action.
Rush upon them.
Grabbing hair, dragging blade across throat. Rotten geyser of
hot soda. Knife tip punching ribcage, cracking through, scraping
plums, breaching neck, reaching throat, rendering irrelevant. Carved
mouth popcorn erupting. Bodies pulled off bodies, reaching new
bodies, reaching, splitting, rancid corn syrup releasing, spritzing,
smelling off. Stuffing released. Bodies still spilling, writhing live

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replacing the inert, replacing the floor. Crawl across, crawl with your
knife, popping balloons. Plastic hummingbirds clicking overheard,
recording, tallying.
The eyepatch boy does something else.
Watch him shove the girl. Twisting her ankle in the soft floor of
bodies. She falls backward to the tangle of them. Falling atop her,
the boy plunges. Two brief stabs. The neck and the chest.
The bald man shouts something.
The hummingbirds flit over the boy, clicking and whirring. Snip
snip. Two darts fired, pinning the boy’s neck. He clutches, staggers,
crumples to the writhing pile.
The alarm stabs out, evolves into a whine, a rumble, vibrating
the walls, shaking your eardrums, churning your guts. You feel like
you’re going to vomit, and then you do.

They put you in a white room. Distinct from the first two. This one
feels like a cell. Allie reviews the NDA you’d signed upon registering,
explaining the penalties upon breaching with the vaguest of
terminology. She finishes and places her palms flat on the table,
flashing teeth. “So with all the boring stuff out of the way, the good
news. Because Elaine was eliminated, and Russell forfeited by
violating policy, you qualify for the final round by default.”
“I still get the taser, right?”
“You will if you complete the final round.”
Boil. Seethe. “Nope. That was the final round.”
“Nope, that was the second qualifying check.”
Shake your head. You know you’re right. “You know that isn’t
true.”
Her smile smooths to smear. “I know nothing.” She stands and
heads for the door. “You’ll get it after this. Some guy will be by to tell

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you the rest.”

A man—winking, familiar to you but not from here—introduces

himself and leads you upstairs into open air. A narrow walkway
slashed ahead between two massive holes torn in the roof, each
filled with piled dough bodies. Twin writhing humped breasts. Crews
in blue and pink hazmat suits waving flamethrowers at the piles for
reasons you can’t decipher. A crane stretches overhead, swinging
nets filled with more twitching bodies, pouring them on the piles.
The man laughs. “Fucking wild, right?” He leads you across the
remaining walkway toward the helipad. “They need to bring you off-
site for this one.” Enunciating slowly, as though to a child. “It’s
special.”
Follow him up the steps, into the copter. Where do you know
him from? Did you dream of him? Did he die in your dream? He
touches the pilot’s shoulder and you lift into the air.
The man reaches into a vest pocket and pulls out a baggy filled
with yellow powder. “You’re going to want to take this. You can mix it
into your water. That’s probably what I’d do.”
Wave it away. “I’m good.”
“I’m not asking. You can take it or we can drop you off right
here.” The pilot chuckles at this. “I’d recommend mixing it into your
water.”
You do so. It’s chalky, also familiar, like a medicine that’d been
forced down your throat as a child.
“Anyway.” The man explains the rules. “Things are gonna run a
little differently. Mainly, no collateral damage. The only ones you can
have at are the targets. Check the dossier. If you hit anyone else
your life becomes forfeit. Understood?”
“Really?” you ask.

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 He shrugs. “That’s what they told me. I don’t know. I’ve only
been here a month.”

You had waited a year for this. The same way, as a child, you had
waited anxious for playsets and puppies for Christmas and birthdays.
Each new thing promising to fill a gape. Always abandoned from
boredom in days. You had told yourself this would be different,
everyone had said it would change you, but they lied through the
same coward’s teeth. A year of planning and saving, amounting to
nothing. Just another present to toss to the gape.

The copter drops you atop a hotel a few blocks from the destination.
Take the elevator down to the lobby. Head outside and follow the
sidewalk to the target apartment tower. Skim the dossier on the way.
The tower is thirty-seven stories, façade all black glass. Wait in
an adjacent alley until nightfall, as instructed. Pacing, fingering the
tranq gun (loaded with a single dart), practicing what you’ve been
told to say to security.
Head in at 8:15. The lobby is dead. Approach the security desk.
“How’re we doing tonight?” the guard says. A cigarette-scorched
voice from a Shar Pei face.
You’ve already forgotten your lines so just whip out the tranq
and fire, plug a dart in the center of his chest. Snarling, the guard
tries to stand, to reach across the desk to your neck, but falls
backward into his chair, immobilized.
Head toward the elevator. The chalky powder has integrated
into your system, outputting signals to your fingernails, which will
function as spoofed access cards. They will get you to the twentieth

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floor and even into most rooms, but the target is on the thirty-third,
so additional maneuvers will be necessary.
Swipe your fingernails over the elevator card reader and smash
the button for the twentieth. The car heaves upward, shuddering
through the shaft, before gradually slowing. The speaker emits a bell
tone and the doors slide open and you rush through, into an empty,
door-lined hallway. Noise behind the doors—music, stomping feet,
dancing, shouted off-key Christmas carols. Follow the hallway,
placing your ear to each door until you find one with silence behind
it. There—room twenty seventeen. Flick your nails over the card
reader. Light flashes green and the lock clicks open. Turn the handle
and slip on through.
The lights are out, and someone’s sawing logs a room over.
Keep quiet. Crouch and feel along the walls, down the hall, into the
kitchen.
Here. There’s a secret. The cabinets. Find the largest and
empty it out—the cereal boxes and canned tomatoes and rice and
bread. Gently and quietly, resting each item on the floor. Then crawl
inside. Press the cabinet’s rear panel. Press hard.
The panel falls away. The cabinet unfolds, unravels like origami.
Creating spaces. Unfolding into ducts, tunnels, crawl spaces,
shallow corridors that did not exist before, that only exist now
because you are here to find them. Crawl in, climb through. The
arteries of the building. They’ll let you reach any room you choose.
Scale the crawlspaces, up to the floors the elevator wouldn’t
bring you. Feel the pulse in your neck as you near the target. A
vibration in your blood. Crawl until you reach the dead end. Press
the white panel in front of you, until it falls away, into a cabinet filled
with flour, sugar and pancake mix.
Push though, letting the boxes and sacks thump to the floor, and
crawl out into a kitchen. Bright white overhead light. Chattering a
room over. Push yourself onto your knees, and from there, your feet,
and remove the knife from your pocket. Unfold it.

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 Right there: a woman, middle-aged, steps around the corner
into the kitchen. Her eyes click onto yours. The way her mouth pops
open tells you she knows, that she understands why you’re here—
not the nuance, not the specifics, but the essentials. She’s used to
people wanting her and her family dead. Just like the dough bodies,
but a completely separate context.
Before she can run or even exclaim, you grab her wrist, you
drive the knife into her neck. She goes stiff, gurgling to the floor, the
wound flapping open, a dozen garlic-smothered Cornish hens
cascading out.
You don’t shake. It doesn’t mean anything to you.
Footfalls around the corner. A generic man appears. Aghast at
you.
You move in.
It’s amazing how many times you can stab a person in only a
few seconds. As quickly as an arm can move. Your arm isn’t even
that fast but in no time the man is crumpled to the floor, coughing
rubies from wet slits.
Head to the adjacent room—a lavish den. Two young children—
probably only five or six—turn from the TV to you. They cry at their
guardians’ milk on your clothing and scamper to their shared
bedroom (predictable). They’re slippery but they succumb easily
when caught, spilling small coins and buttons when opened. You
wait till they stop breathing and head back to the kitchen to wash up.
A voice in your head—unfamiliar—tells you to get out, back
through the cabinet. Climb the ducts to the rooftop and rendezvous
with the copter. The voice asks whether you were detected.
Tell the truth.
“Any survivors?”
“No.”
A sigh hisses inside your head. “Okay. That’s fine. C-tier.”

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Back at the warehouse, Allie gives you the taser. A good weight.
Maybe it was worth it.
“We also added another seven hours to your session,” she says.
“A token of our gratitude.”
You consider tasing her right there. Stomping her head until her
scalp cracks, until her jaw comes apart. But you think better and
thank her and leave.

You return to the public housing complex, breaking into one of the
units through the window and stabbing an eight-year-old girl in the
face while she sleeps. Her mother runs in screaming and throws a
chair at you but you hit her with the taser and she collapses, caving
in, farting and pissing. You’re about to kill her but you stab out her
kneecaps instead so that she won’t be able to chase after you, but
she’ll still live. This will be a story for her to tell now. This is the way
legends begin, and a lasting legacy has always appealed to you.
Capture video of the whole thing and post it to your feed. Nobody
watches it, or if they do, it doesn’t register—it’s as mundane as a
birthday cake or a sleepy puppy.

Your inner ear vibrates. Signaling that you’re down to two minutes.
The hummingbirds course against the sky. One stops, lowering
toward you. A slight hiss. A dart fired, connecting with your neck.
Nausea, vertigo. The world warps and you collapse to your knees,
then forward into grass. Blip.
And you’re back in your apartment, wincing out of slumber on
your couch, stinking in days-old clothing, yeasty in your pits and
crotch. Head filled with cotton and asphalt.

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 And for a moment you believe you had dreamed, not just the
past few days but the entire world and life itself. That you dreamed of
there being simply too much life, so much so that something had to
be done about it. And that you of all people would be afforded the
luxury of dealing with it. You believe it to be a dream the way you
know dreams craft false memories, entire fabricated histories, so
convincing, you may wake and believe what you dreamed was truth,
until days later when it untangles and you realize those places never
existed, those people never existed, you never did any of those
things. But here the opposite happens. It’s in the ache of your
muscles, the material dried beneath your fingernails. It’s the truest
thing you’ve ever known.

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He gets shot in bed, first thing in the morning. The blast pushes his
face, the inside of his face through the pillow and mattress, into the
wall. Speckle and bits obscuring in ornate wallpaper. Bone and
sinus.

They shoot him again on the porch, seven times during his first
cigarette of the day, through his hand, his knees and thigh, his chest
and neck and elbow. Smoke pours from the holes in his lungs. When
he walks, bullets and shot grind together, offering new thresholds
between organs in ways never conceived by G_d.

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They’ll shoot him at work, in the bathroom, and he’ll fall forward into
the urinal, wetting his chest and face. They’ll toss him in the stall
beside, lock the door from inside, and crawl back out beneath the
gap below so no one else can get in. He’ll wake up, shivering and
weepy, vomiting lead shards, but he’ll get up and get on with his day,
and that’s admirable, some believe.

He’s shot on his way home. Seventeen bullets, caving his chest. The
steering wheel falls from his hands, the tires hit curb and his Kia
collides with vendors, middle-class families, and the unhoused. All of
them will die except he, he will get up again, crawling out the back
window and staggering down Ocean Avenue in the July inferno,
gunpowder exploding between his joints.

They shoot him in bed, before he shuts off the bedside lamp. They
shoot through every inch of his body—it takes fifty guns. Pushing
him through the mattress, him becoming the mattress, making him
the blood that soaks the mattress and fills the floor. The impossibility
of vanishing. Still here, in vain refusal of each blast, crying no no no
no no.

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He dies beside me. I wake and he’s dying, or he’s already dead. The
last of his warmth streaming out his penis onto my leg. An endless
swamp shit reek choking the air, balmy but cooling rapidly. His eyes
are open and googly. I shake him though I know. He dies beside me,
he began dying inside me, if he’d never met me he’d still be alive
probably but he did so now he’s dead.
He said I tasted like a swimming pool. Like chlorine and a
battery.
I liked him. I didn’t love him but maybe I would have in a year or
longer. Just because he didn’t mean much now doesn’t mean it isn’t

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a real loss. So I cry, a little, when I roll him up in the bedding and call
Arnold to come take care of it.
Knock knock knock-knock knock. I let him in, the first time in
months. His hulking body, arms round, tight and stained tan beneath
his uniform. Grey beard, grey hair in a ponytail, but whenever I think
about him he’s still a kid like when we first met. I hug him close. He
returns it. “I owe you,” I say. “I hate I only call you for this shit.”
“It’s fine.” He lets go and nods past me. “In there?”
“Yeah. You want coffee first?”
“Nah, I’m good.” He goes back outside and brings in the
stretcher, guiding it through the condo to the bedroom. I strip and slip
into the shower. Hot rain. Getting the piss and stink off my skin.
Washing my vagina’s exterior and interior, his blood and remnants.
Thinking about his mouth on my clit, I cry again.
Arnold gets the body out and loads it into the ambulance, then
spends an hour making the room decent. The mattress is plastic
sealed, preserving it. The sheets, the pillows, the lining, the blanket
—all thoroughly wrecked, so he hauls it out and stuffs it in with the
body. I replace the linens while he washes up. I offer coffee again
and this time he accepts. I ask how he’s been, and he shrugs. He
doesn’t ask me anything because he doesn’t need to. He was raised
right and knows not to twist a knife. He tells me he’s sorry and
wishes me all the best in life, and he leaves, and I do not sleep.

You’re three years old. You wake with a bucket of water in your
chest. Sharp coughs. Barking like a seal. Air shredding throat like
rough soil. Mama wraps you in a blanket and brings you outside in
the cool chirping night. She feeds you spoonfuls of honey and lemon
juice. She sings and rocks you until you can breathe normal again.
This is the first thing you remember about her.

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I pull into the clinic seven minutes past my shift’s start, crushing an
Adderall between two quarters and dumping it in my coffee, then
crossing the parking lot through licking sinister heat, through sliding
glass doors down a long hall on carpet blooming with tacky palm
fronds and mangrove. Roxanne’s at the front desk, thank God.
Glancing up from a book, she smiles at first, but then takes in my
face, my sunken eyes, my paleness. “Oh sweetie, you look like shit.”
I grab my tablet from the cubbies. “I feel like shit. Shit doesn’t
cover it.”
“Shit’s the only thing that covers it. Shit covers everything.”
“Yeah. Fuck. Whatever. How’re you?”
She plays with her pen, swiveling herself side to side in her
chair. “Oh, you know. Awful. Just awful.”

You’re eight. Running off your lawn into the brush and mangrove.
Tracking Key Deer, gathering up shells, wading in streams. Half a
mile down, there’s a tall wooden bridge no one uses anymore. A
terminated bridge, no beginning or end, just a middle standing over
ankle-deep water, three times your height. Pretend the bridge is a
ship—the top deck of a long sunken vessel.
Years from now you’ll bring a boy here.
There’s a rope ladder, leading to the top. Give it a tug—it feels
secure. Put one hand on a rung, then the other, your feet following.
Climb to the top deck to set the sail. Sun glancing off the water,
throwing confetti over the bridge and your body. Reaching the top lip
of wood, you begin pulling yourself up. A sensation. Something
touching, touching your hand. A brush—minuscule tiptoes over your
knuckles. You tense but maintain your grip. You feel it again, and it

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shakes something dissonant within your belly. And then the thing
peeks over the side of the wood—a leg, then three legs, then eight,
attached to a juicy brown lump.
Letting go, you fall backward, to the water, to the sand beneath.
Throwing your hands backward to break the fall, they hit water first,
then the sand all dressed in dead coral, skidding through it.
Something sharp slips between your right thumb and forefinger.
You yank back your hand, bringing it to your face. Ragged white
flesh, erupting red plumes twirling diluted in the already wet. Then
the real sharp comes, infinite sting and the hand turns to fire, the
fucking agony running up your arm to elbow, like a thorn bush
beneath your skin, twisting around.
You are certain this cannot be reversed. You are certain your
hand will be like this forever.
Run home in a scream and weep.
Mama meets you at the door. “My God, what did you do?”
Taking you by your good hand, she pulls you inside to the bathroom,
pushes you onto the toilet seat, grabs a towel and wraps your wound
in it. “What did you do?”
You just cry and yowl.
“Alright, alright.” She opens the towel. It’s nothing but red.
“Jesus.” She twists on the tap water and guides your hand beneath.
You scream, pulling away, but Mama’s grip is strong. “Stop it. Let me
do this, or your hand’s gonna rot off.” Give in and let her wash it. A
million needles in tender flesh. You whimper while she says “Shhhh,
you’re alright.”
She finishes and washes her own hands, and you withdraw
yours and look at it. A clean tear in the crotch of your hand. The
wound smiles, with pink gums and pearly teeth at the back of its
throat. Gape back.
Mama pats the wound dry with a paper towel, then leads you to
the medicine room. She lifts you onto the examination table and
retrieves a canister of gel, a sterile spatula, gauze and a non-stick

138
pad from various drawers and shelves. “This,” she says, “keeps the
outside from getting in.” She scoops a wad of pearlescent gel with
the spatula and smears it over the grinning wound, then places the
sterile pad and wraps it. “That’s the most important part.”
You never see any other nurses or doctors besides Mama. A
nurse is as good as any doctor, she says, and she’s the best there
is. “Only difference between a doctor and a nurse is the paycheck.”
In two decades you’ll learn this to be true. “Plus, I’m your Mama. No
one knows you better than I.”
Mama undresses, washes, and redresses the wound twice
every day. While it’s undressed, take a peek. Watch the wound
change—growing foamy with white blood cells, stitching together
from the corners of its mouth and the back of its throat. In two
weeks, it’ll seal up. In a few months, you won’t even be able to see
the scar.

It’s so many bodies. Grinding against their biomes, wearing down,

coming apart at the micro and macro. And when that happens, the
bodies come to me, to a white room where we play it white and
sterile, trying to keep the outside out and the inside in.
All of my bodies. Old bodies, mostly. It’s Florida, wealthy Florida.
So it’s a 57-year-old lawyer with a ruptured testicle. A
septuagenarian’s taupe swollen calf. The puncture wound in a
retiree’s foot. Bodies wilted or calcified, opened to reveal to me.
Feeling along creped flesh, I observe and I identify. That’s my
medicine.
It’s my sixth appointment this morning. I knock twice and open
the door and the breath gets knocked out of me. This body. Muscle
under baby fat. Soft taught unwrinkled skin. Newly-defined

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cheekbones. A boy, blonde and tan in a white Monster long sleeve,
blue shorts, slides. Thick arms and calves, a little chubby.
I glance at the tablet. Sixteen years old. Remembering him, from
his physical maybe four years back. I had him turn and cough and
his body went stiff and eyes were glassy—maybe the first time
someone had touched him like that (or the second time—a cruel
secret). He was puny, then. Barely anything at all. Now he’s
something new.
“Hi. I’m Yvonne. Not sure if you remember me.”
He looks surprised, scared even, but bobs his head. “Yeah.” His
voice buckles and scrapes—the grit of puberty.
Skimming his chart. “I hear you’re not feeling well.”
“I’m sick,” he wheezes, rolling the words into a coughing fit.
“Sorry to hear that. What feels sick?”
“It’s hard —” A big, deliberate inhale. “It’s hard to breathe.”
“Are you a smoker?”
He shakes his head.
“Even pot?”
He shakes his head again, but his scent gives him away.
“Alright. Let’s take a look.” His blood pressure, his temperature
—both normal. I watch the way he breathes. Pulling slow through his
mouth. Like low wind. He holds it a few moments. Exhales raspy.
There’s a performance here.
“Hop up on the table.” I pat the vinyl. “And take off your shirt.”
He does so. A slight, pursed out belly, firm and smooth save a
trail of hairs beneath his belly button, descending toward his groin. I
place the stethoscope between two handsome peach nipples.
“Breathe in.”
His chest rises.
“Breathe out.”
And falls.
Nothing. No tightness, no rattle in his chest. Nothing but air
passing unhindered through bronchioles and alveoli. Could probably

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get more cardio but he seems healthy enough. I pick up the tablet,
swipe back through his chart, and tap it on the desk. “I don’t know
what to tell you. I’m not finding anything.”
“No —” he moans, forcing a cough. Ramping up the act. “It
hurts.”
“I can prescribe antibiotics.” I take a pen from the desk and click
it. “You want that?”
“This—this happened to me before.” He says it too fast. He
loses the rasp, but catches himself, bringing his voice back to a deep
mumble. “I mean—I was—I was sick like this. Before. And I came
here. And they—they gave me cough syrup.”
There it is. “With codeine.”
His eyes shift to the floor. “Maybe. I think so.”
I click the pen in and out. “You’re getting antibiotics. Come see
me if you still have symptoms next week.”
He looks me in the eyes, and now he really does look sickly.
Who knows what the stakes are. Maybe he promised his friends he’d
score. Or there’s some freshman girl, all fully developed since sixth
grade (estrogen in the water, estrogen in the meat, estrogen in soap,
plastic and everything), and he wants her fucked up so he can pull
off her clothes beneath his parents’ stilt-house. Or maybe it’s just for
himself—after school, sipping at the bottle till he can’t stand or jerk
off anymore.
Stupid things seem so important when you’re young.
Whatever. Fuck it. Life is disappointment. Get used to it.
I hand him the script. His face purses into this gorgeous pout.
Perfect like a conch shell. He takes the paper and fumes out.
I close my eyes. Inhale his scent. Like clean salt. And inside me,
it feels like a glass filling with water.
The needle stirs.
I bounce on my soles, from one foot to the other, then grab a fist
full of sterile pads and stuff them in my pocket. I head out to the front
desk and tell Roxanne I’m taking lunch.

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You’re eleven. You and Mama are walking through the flea market
(painted signs made of driftwood, a table of air plants, a table of
knives and swastikas, a table of sunglasses) and it tears you. You
don’t know what it is but it tears you. Like a dog hooked its tooth just
below your belly and gave a tug. You’re having fun today so you try
to not act like it’s bothering you, but with each step there’s the tear,
forcing a grimace.
“What’s the matter?” Mama says.
“Nothing.”
“Doesn’t look like nothing. What’s hurting?”
Pat the spot just below your stomach.
She touches your forehead. “Is it pain or nausea?”
“Pain.”
“Are you bloated?”
You nod.
“Can you jump up and down for me, baby?”
You make a small hop and the tear—oh God—it shoots through
your body. You double over and cry out. People turn and look.
“Okay, let’s get you home.”
“Why?” You don’t want to go, even with the pain. You want to be
out with people and bric-a-brac. At the house, you’re always alone.
“If it’s what I think it is you’re gonna need all your strength.”
You stop by the hospital and Mama runs in, keeping the A/C on
for you. She comes back with a piece of paper. Then you stop by the
CVS and she comes back with a bottle of pills.
“What’s going on?”
“I think it’s your appendix, baby.”
You get home, throwing up on the way to the front door. Inside,
she cleans you and sets you on the couch. You have no idea what’s
coming.

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 It’s five days and nights of dogs tearing you up, of screaming
and throwing your guts, of crying sweat, soaking shirts and cushions.
Days and nights of heat, a sun’s worth, nuclear, of melting down,
swelling, expanding balloons, water particles moving faster and
faster, drenching, burning off into the air. Boiling brains. You ramble,
talking sugary race tracks and dough bodies, convinced you’ve
learned a way to end the world just by thinking and obliterate all the
past you thought you knew. Five days and nights in Mama’s lap,
sucking pills from her fingertips, ice chips, of cloth wiping lips, forever
wet, her palm cupping your head like a puppy’s.
On that fifth night, the fever breaks. The tear rolls back into a
numb ache, barely there, almost like a friend. You finally sleep,
something that could be described as sleep and not Hell, not the
ruined nerve you’ve been tied to. You sleep, but Mama doesn’t. She
still sits and watches you, and when you wake her eye sockets are
deep and shadowed, her skin a greyed pale. She hugs you close
and you sleep again, together.

Affliction is an education. There’s no better way to understand your

body and what it’s capable of. Whether it’s your body in revolt or
being invaded from without, affliction bends you. It reshapes. It
exerts control.
But with the correct tools and practices, you can exercise your
own control. That’s all medicine is. You can reshape the body just as
an ailment will. You can return a body to how it existed before it was
stricken. You can strengthen it. You can shape it to what you desire.
The boy’s alongside Overseas Highway, walking, swatting brush
with his hand, mammoth palm fronds tearing in the wind above him. I
hit my blinker, pull over to the side and roll down the window. “Hi.”
Flashing teeth and peeking over my sunglasses.

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 He stops, flinches like he’s been caught in something. He looks
over and recognizes me, and I watch the panic deepen. “Oh. Hey.”
“You need a ride?”
“I don’t know.” He looks left to right, like he’s in a trap. “Nah, I
don’t think so.”
“Ah, come on.” I lean over and push open the passenger door.
“Get in.”
He checks his flanks again, then comes forward and gets in.
“Thanks.” He forces a string of weak coughs.
“Oh quit with that shit. Nothing’s uglier than a shitty bullshitter.” I
hit my blinker and merge back onto the highway. “And you’re real
shitty.”
He says nothing.
“So where’re we heading?”
“I live on Bailey’s. Off Watson.”
“Nice.”
“I guess.”
I get down to it. “So why do you want codeine anyway?” He puts
his fist to his mouth, like he’s going to cough again. “I said stop. Talk
to me. I’m not a cop.” Holding the smile.
“I don’t know,” he says. “No reason.”
“Yeah right,” I laugh. “It’s not a weird thing. It’s natural. Most
boys want to experiment.”
He doesn’t say anything.
“That stuff can be bad news though. Especially at your age.”
“God, you sound like my mom.”
I bite my lip, looking at his throat—the newly acquired tangle of
Adam’s apple. “Well, I’m not.”
“Whatever.” Pouting again, looking out at the sea, beautiful and
perfect.
The needle stirs.
“Everyone likes to get high. I get it.” Silence. “I can help, you
know.”

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 “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I said cut the shit. I’m not a cop. And I’m not your mom.”
He stuffs his fingers in his pockets. “You didn’t help before.”
“This is different.”
“Yeah?”
I pull into a Cumbies, coasting behind the store into a dark
parking spot, a swamp swaying just ahead.
“This isn’t my house,” the boy says.
“No shit. Are you on Signal?” I take out my phone.
“Yeah. Of course.”
“What’s your number?” He gives it to me. I tap it into my phone
and slip it back into my purse. “You’ll get an address from me in a
couple days. What’s your worst subject?”
He gives a dopey little look. It’s cute.
“In school. What class do you have your worst grade?”
“I dunno. Science.”
I roll my eyes and back out of the parking spot, back around the
shop and onto the road. “Tell your parents you got assigned a
biology tutor. You can come see me after school. I’m on the bus
route.”
“For what?”
We hit a red light. I lean back into the headrest, looking him up
and down, biting my lip gently. I want him to notice. Or maybe just
the needle does. “So I can help you.”

You’re twelve and Mama is giving you your annual physical. She
listens to your heart, to your lungs. She feels the lymph nodes in
your neck. She puts her fingers on your spine. She tells you to flip
back over on the table and take your underwear off. She tells you to
spread your legs. She says there’s going to be something different

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this time, but not to be scared. “I’m going to just put one finger in. It
might be a little uncomfortable, but be brave for me.”
You say okay.
Feel her fingers press just below your stomach. And below that,
a pressure. A breach. Feel her reach inside, across the smallest
possible distances.
“Ah!” Mama shouts. And the pressure releases, she’s yanking
her hand back. You look up and she’s staring at her gloved finger, a
bead of red sprouting from the tip. She sees you watching and pulls
her hand down by her side, hiding it. She smiles, nervous. “That’s
enough for today. How about some ice cream?”

I drop the boy off, back a few houses before his so his parents won’t
see my car, and head home. I get inside, go to my lab and check on
my newest psilocybin crop. Another week and they’ll be ready for
harvest. I grab a chocolate cap from the mini-fridge and pop it in my
mouth, chew and swallow, then head to the bathroom and pee. I pull
off my scrubs, bra and underwear and run the shower.
Washing myself, thinking about the boy. His eyes, his lips, his
arms, his belly and his thighs. Space throbs. Light smears. The
needle trembles. I barely towel off and head to the bedroom.
It still smells like the boy who died here. His name was Terry—a
gorgeous spring breaker from New Jersey who showed up at the
clinic needing his stomach pumped. Once he was in the clear he told
me he needed a ride back to his Airbnb, so I offered. On the way, he
grabbed my phone and punched his number into my contacts. He
said he wasn’t supposed to be in town for much longer, but he could
change his mind if persuaded.
He was fun.

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 I brush my wrist up my belly, across my breast. Glow building in
my sternum. He would circle my nipple with his thumb, letting friction
catch on the areola bumps. He’d breathe gently in my ear and I’d
squeeze my thighs together. Warm light in my belly. He would move
his mouth from my ear to my neck, to my shoulder, to collarbone. My
nipple, firm and sensitive, would disappear between his lips. Sucking
air as his teeth grazed it.
Breathe in, then out.
I slide my middle finger down past my belly, through the tuft of
hair, parting my lips, pressing down on my clit. Rubbing a slow
moon, remembering his mouth on my thigh, beautiful plump lips on
my pelvic bone. The way he tasted me, even as I pushed him away,
like he couldn’t help himself. Like he was addicted to what’s inside
me. And that last time, sliding in, clutching my hips to pull me further
onto him. The way he grinned looking down at me.
Light swirls and ripples. I buck, arching against the mattress,
and discharge. Gasping. Sheets soaked in sweat.
My head stops spinning and I get up, wobbling from foot to foot
toward the lab. I tear the wrapper off one of the sterile spatulas I
stole from the clinic and scoop it up inside my pussy, pressing
against my walls to capture my lubricant, and withdraw. With another
spatula, I scrape the fluids into a glass vial, then place it in the mini-
fridge. I toss the spatulas in the trash, go to the bathroom, pee, wash
up and head back to bed, collapsing on the mattress, flipping on the
TV.
Terry’s on the news, or at least his name and a picture from
when he was still alive. I always know it’s coming, but it doesn’t
make it hurt less. Discovered by kayakers, tangled in mangrove. The
authorities call it a drug overdose, leading the anchors into a
segment on the opioid epidemic.

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You’re fourteen and meeting your new boyfriend for the first time.
Dennis. You meet Dennis on the internet. He messages you, saying
you have “beautiful cheeks.” He’s your type—big Jewish nose, a little
chubby, beautiful brown eyes. Ask how old he is. Twenty-four, he
replies. Tell him how old you are. He doesn’t respond. Go to bed
sad.
But the next day there’s a new message from him. Soon, you’re
talking on the phone. Ask him to come over.
“What about your mom?” he says.
Tell him she’s at work, that her shift lasts all night.
All you hear is breathing on the other end. “Okay,” he says
finally.
He comes over. He’s stiff and shaky but you lead him to the bed
and you lie on your sides and make out for an hour. He barely
speaks, and when he does it’s about how beautiful you are. He
touches your waist and belly. You crawl on top of him, pressing all
your weight down, both your clothes still between you. He takes his
hands off and lies there stiff.
Roll off. “We can do other stuff,” you say.
He tenses beside you. “Yeah?”
“Totally,” you say, nestling into him.
He’s quiet. Listen to him breathe. Then: “Can you strip for me?”
You smile and kiss him deep. You get up and put on Mike
Jones, dancing a sequence you’d long practiced in the mirror. Pull off
your jeans and grind little circles in the air with your ass, looking over
your shoulder, giving a smile and wink, hoping he can’t see you
tremble. It feels like a movie. Tell yourself it’s perfect. Pull off your top
and watch him stare, thirsting at your waist and breasts. He undoes
his pants and pulls them off. You unclasp your bra, shaking it free,
letting your breasts flop, and shimmy your panties down. He stays
clothed in his shirt and underwear, stroking his cock through the
fabric. “You’re so hot,” he says.

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 Slink over, climbing his lap, your knees on either side of him,
straddling his clothed cock. Put your mouth next to his ear and
breathe. “Should I get a condom?”
“I don’t need one,” he says, and takes you by the shoulders and
pushes you to the bed. He lays down beside you and works his
penis out of his boxers, stroking, staring at you.
A cold snap through your spine. You tense, feeling your
nakedness, the moment rotting. Ask: “Do you want me to do
anything?”
“You can touch yourself too. Just lay right—” he moans “— like
that. And make sounds.”
Lay there. Moan. He groans quiet. His skin turns slick and moist.
He works harder and harder, and goes uh uh uh. Uhhhhh. Strands of
wet white burst over your skin.
Put your hand on his belly and kiss his neck.
He bolts up, stands fast, yanking his pants back over his knees.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I got to get home.”
The world shrinks, collapsing inward, just a little. “Okay,” you
say.
He heads towards the door. “I got to get groceries.”

There was a guy in college (another who died) who said that the only
thing anybody wants is control. Power over another. He said that all
relationships are just exercises in power, dressed in delusion and
tradition. Especially romantic relationships. Especially purely sexual
relationships.
He said that everyone gets it wrong. Everyone thinks that men
only care about the physical, and women only care about the mental.
But actually it’s the opposite. He said that in every survey of long-
term heterosexual couples, men’s greatest complaint about their

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partners was a lack of companionship and emotional bonding;
women’s greatest complaint was a dwindling sex life. The fact is, he
said, more than anything, men want to be adored. They want to be
worshipped. They want a slave to dote and ego stroke. And this
makes them profoundly vulnerable.
Women, however, desire sensation above all things. They seek
to own men’s bodies, in order to be filled by them, as the female life
is vacant otherwise. So, by biologically intuiting the vulnerabilities of
men, women seduce through coy looks, childish whimpers and other
maneuvers of deception. Melting men down, fucking them hollow,
until their souls are destroyed. He said that since time immemorial
women have ruled the world through men’s bodies.
I laughed in a manner that didn’t reveal its mockery, and said I’d
never heard it put that way before, “that’s such a unique take on
things,” etc. But in truth, what he said scared me. The possibility that
what he said was generally bullshit, but true specifically for me.
I dress in scrubs the first time the boy comes over. Sometimes it
puts them at ease to view me as a professional. I’m nervous so I
swig a third microdose and pace in front of the door, waiting.
He’s almost fifteen minutes late. Dressed more or less the same
as when I last saw him. Unwashed—B.O., oily hair, that faint dead
bleach stink of semen. That’ll need to change. It will, in time.
“What’d you tell your parents?”
“I dunno.”
“Did you tell them I was your tutor?”
“I said I was going out. They don’t give a shit what I do.”
“You sure?” I peer through the blinds into the parking lot. Wind
pushing the palms, Key Deer lumbering toward the trash bins, but no
unfamiliar vehicles. “I don’t want a mini-van rolling up on me.”
“They don’t care.” He glances around the room, at the mini-lab,
at the chaise lounge sealed in plastic. “So you said you’re gonna
help me?”
“Yeah. I am. But you’re gonna have to help me, too.”

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 He rolls his eyes.
“I actually think you’ll enjoy this.”
“Yeah? You’ve got some good shit?”
“Yes. If you behave.” I point toward the chaise. “Sit.” He does so.
In the mini-lab, I collect a thermometer, a sterile sheath, an alcohol
swap, a 2x2” square of gauze, a roll of tape and a syringe, placing
them all on a stainless steel tray. From the fridge, the vial filled with
my discharge, diluted with saline. I uncap the syringe, jab the vial,
draw the contents, and return the syringe to the tray. Then I head to
the kitchen and fill a glass with ice chips. I return to the chaise,
placing the tray on the end table, and ask him which arm I should do.
“What?”
Tapping the syringe. “You got a problem with needles?”
He shakes his head. “But what’s in it?”
“It’s a blind study. If I told you, it’d skew the results.”
“Is it safe?”
“Do you think I’d give you something if it wasn’t safe?”
He considers the syringe, the rest of the tray, and me. “Okay. Do
my left.”
I sterilize the middle of his left shoulder and jab, inject, and
withdraw. He doesn’t flinch. “There we go. Good job.” A tiny bead of
red. I cover it with gauze and tape it over. “Why don’t you lie down.”
“I’m fine like this.”
“You won’t be. Lie down.”
He lies down.
I sit in the chair beside him and pull a small lined trashcan next
to the chaise. “If you have to vomit. Don’t try and stand. That’ll make
it worse.”
He says nothing, but nods. The minutes pass. His face twists
into a grimace. His hands move atop his stomach. I touch his
forehead. Warm, moist. Venom interacting with his blood.
“I’m gonna take your temp.” I take the thermometer from the end
table and place a sterile sheath over it. “Open.”

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 He opens but immediately retches. He tilts his head over the
chaise and pukes a viscous orange stream into the trash can.
“There there.” Stroking his hair, letting the curls wrap my fingers.
“It’s alright.”
He retches and vomits again, watery yellow. He gags and
gasps. “What’s happening?”
“Shhhh. It’s alright.” Dabbing his lips clean with wet cloth.
“What’re you doing to me?” He rolls onto his side, curled,
drooling onto the plastic. The needle trembles, and I smile at this—
what my body is capable of—but stop myself.
“I’m making you strong.” I move from my chair to the chaise,
sitting inside his curl. An erection presses through his shorts into the
side of my ass. I pinch up an ice chip from the cup and place it
against his lips. “It’ll take time.” He sucks at the chip. “But you’ll get
there.” As it melts down, my fingertips meet his lips and he gently
sucks them too. When it’s melted all the way, I remove another chip
and place it in his mouth. He accepts and crunches gently.
He groans. “You wouldn’t hurt me, would you?”
I try not to laugh but I do, a little. I explain that the truth is, most
nurses are idiots. Everyone trusts them because they have a degree
and wear scrubs, but that doesn’t mean anything. It’s even worse
with doctors. The truth is that you don’t got to be anything special to
be a nurse or a doctor or a surgeon or a senator or anyone with
station. The truth is, they’re all just people, so most of them are
average or a lot worse than that.
Forgetting my point, I pick up the tablet, jotting notes while he
tremors on the chaise.

You’re fourteen and Dennis is jerking off on your chest, watching you
rub circles between your legs. Together and apart. It’s been a month

152
and that’s the extent of your relationship now. He comes over, you
make out, he jerks off on you and he leaves. He’s always finished
before you are, so you stay in bed and rub your clit while his cum is
still on you.
But not on your birthday. On your birthday you dress up in
purple fishnets and a mini-skirt and black strapless top, no bra. You
paint your fingers and toes metallic purple, your lips a matching hue.
You put on the music he likes.
Watch for his headlights to come up the driveway. When they
do, step out so he can see you, swaying in the night, warm and
electric like skin. When he gets out, run up and wrap your arms
around his neck. Wrap your thighs around his knee and squeeze.
Whisper in his ear.
He pulls back, looking you up and down. “Wow,” he says. He
looks side to side at the neighbor’s houses. “Maybe we should get
inside.”
Lead him to your room and push him down on the mattress and
straddle him, kissing, sucking, lapping at his lips, working around to
his ear. Whisper: “I want my present.”
Feel him tense beneath your weight. “I-I’m sorry … I … uh didn’t
—”
“I want you.” Kiss his earlobe. “I want you inside me.”
He pauses, then gently pats you on the back. “Okay.”
You hop off him, grinning big and horny dumb, grabbing a
condom from the dresser and stripping to nothing. He takes his
pants off but keeps his shirt and underwear on. You grab his cock,
warm and firm, and pull it through the opening. You tear open the
condom’s wrapper, unroll it onto him, and hop onto his lap, guiding
him inside you.
Pressure. So tight at first. Like it won’t even fit. But then the
breach, it slides in and it’s like light and heat shooting straight
through you.

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 Place your feet on either side of his thighs and pump up and
down on him. Looking down, watching it slide in and out. He looks
down too. He says that you’re so beautiful. He grabs your hips and
swings you over onto your back, thrusting hard and deep. A nice
long ache, in and out, hard and slow, your calves wrapping his hips,
clenching him deeper inside. Pounding heat and light. A balloon
filling with water. Pulling his face down, pressing it against yours,
sighing in his ear.
“Ah,” he gasps. Like pain.
“You okay?” Grinding against his pelvis.
“I’m fine.” He pumps, sweat dribbling off his forehead into your
mouth. Speeding up, like a machine pushing inside you. He gasps
and groans again. Louder. Louder. The water pours inside.
He holds his breath. His body stiffens. Releases. He pulls out
and falls beside you onto his back, heaving. The condom, half-
hanging off his penis, smeared with blood.
You’ve gotten your period since you were ten, but didn’t think it
was time. Must have lost track. The blood has to be your own.
You swing your arm and leg over onto his torso, pulling close,
laying kisses on his cheek and ear. “Whoa,” he says.
“That was greeeeaaattt,” you say, not knowing whether it was or
not.
“Yeah,” he exhales.
“You okay?”
“A little dizzy,” he says.
“Want some water?”
“Maybe.” He closes his eyes. “Yeah.”
Gently crawl over his body, kissing his forehead. Then head to
the kitchen, humming to yourself. Head swollen with vision and
potential future. Dates in Key West, fancy dinners, drinks and
nightclubbing. Him tugging you by the wrist to an ancient cemetery
where you lie him down and mount. Lying together on the beach,

154
watching egrets overhead, surf lapping your thighs. A home for the
two of you that you’d carve out from the mangrove.
You fill a glass with tap water and return to him. He’s sweating
through his shirt, clutching his stomach. “Here you go.” Hand him the
glass and lay back down beside him.
“Thanks.” He takes a sip, trembling. Ask again if he’s okay.
“Yeah. I will be.”

Removing my clothes, stepping into hot night. Sweat joining with the
wet in the heat. Insects and animals clicking, chirping. Wind flushing
through fronds, over my body in waves. Closing my eyes, I imagine
going back, not to my earlier life but further, beyond my mother and
father or any of my family. Even this country. Back to old dead
continents. Worlds of worship. If the world and the people in it could
know my body and its capability, it would be worshipped. They’d
throw boys to me, and my body would never be in want.
Either that or they’d toss me to fire. Maybe even today they
would. Never too late. Maybe even better that way.
The boy returns the following week. I greet him in a tank top and
tight black bicycle shorts. The needle shivers when he looks at my
legs. He’s unwashed again, so I make him shower. “Most boys your
age already learned to manage their hygiene. Guess you’ll be a late
bloomer.” I give him Tazorac and instruct him to apply it daily. I give
him money and tell him to buy body wash, shampoo and deodorant
or he can’t see me again.
The session is more or less identical to the first. Once shot up,
he curls around me, and between bouts of vomiting, I feed him ice
cubes and let him suck on my fingertips. Once it’s all done and he’s
good to go home, I give him two grams of psilocybin chocolates and
drop him at the end of his street.

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 But the third week he doesn’t show. I message him. Where are
you? It’s important that we keep our schedule. And it’s true.
Cultivating tolerance requires a strict, deliberate routine.
But no response. Anxiety climbs into my shoulders. It whispers,
telling me I was wrong to pick him. A lapse in judgement, a stupid
side effect of my grief for Terry. And it hits that maybe the reason
he’s not responding is that he’s gone. The anxiety twists. And if he is
gone—his parents. They could be going through his phone. They
could be seeing these messages. They could be putting it all
together.
Pacing the condo, one room to the other, waiting for sirens, for
flashing blue lights in the parking lot, I get a reply. Sorry. I don’t think
I’m gonna come anymore.
Relief washes, then another, separate panic. Why? I type. I miss
you.
I feel like shit. This was always a possibility. Maybe I was wrong.
Maybe he wasn’t made for this.
The needle stirs. Can I see you?
Nothing for a minute. Then: Okay. Get me at Matthew & Ortega.
I pull on my tight purple cocktail dress and drive out, sky ebbing
pink and peach, like my skin and his pressed together. Turning onto
Matthew, I find him at the corner, hunched. He looks weak, decayed.
That’s just how it is at this point, before he’s conditioned.
I pull over, lean over and push open the door. “You had me
worried.”
He steps toward the door. “Why?”
“I thought I wouldn’t see you again.” Repressed people believe
the reason guys go to strippers and pros is just for tits and pussy, but
that’s not it at all. All they want is to feel desired. Missed. Because
chances are they aren’t getting that anywhere else. Once you
understand this, it’s the easiest role to play.
He hesitates, then gets in the car.

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 “Why didn’t you come back.” I bite my lip, frowning small and
pretty.
“I told you. I feel like shit. That shit you shot me up with. What is
it?”
“I already said, it’s a blind study. If I told you, it’d —”
“Is it heroin? Is this because I tried to get codeine? Is this, like,
your dad catches you smoking and makes you smoke the whole
pack?”
Fucking disappointing. “It’s not heroin. I’d never.”
“Then what the fuck is it?”
“I already said.” I pull over to the side of the road. “Look at me.”
Pushing my sunglasses down the bridge of my nose, so he can see
my eyes. “Do you really think I would do anything to hurt you?” I lay
my hand atop his thigh. He’s shaking.
He stares at me. Weak. Almost like he might cry.
The needle stirs.
He looks down in his lap. “No.”
I smile, lean in and plant a kiss on his cheek. I merge back into
traffic and bring us to my place.
He huddles, wrapping his waist with his arms on the chaise. I
return with the syringe, the gauze, the tape, but also two hits of acid
I’d been saving for a rainy day. I lick my fingertip and place it to one
of the tabs. “Let’s do something different tonight. Open up.”
He shakes his head.
I pout and pop the tab in my own mouth. “Come on. I’ll still give
you your take-home chocolates.” I pick up the other tab. “Open.”
He opens. I place the hit on his tongue and leave it there. He
closes his mouth around my finger and sucks as I withdraw. I smile
and give him a light playful slap.
He points at the syringe on the table. “Aren’t you going to do
that?”
“In a little bit.” I sit across from him. “I think that hit will help you
with the nausea, so I want it in your system first.”

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 “Okay.” Some tension falls out. His posture loosens. “Cool.”
“So how much longer do you have of school?”
“Two years.”
“Nice. Do you know what you’re doing after?”
He smiles sheepish, shakes his head.
“That’s fine. I did all sorts of bullshit before I started doing this. I
mean, my job.” I catch him looking at my cleavage. “For a while, I
wanted to be a chemist.” I arch my back and lift my neck. “You could
be a model, you know. Or an actor.”
He laughs. Blushes. “Nah.”
“No, really, I could see you in a GQ spread or, like, on the CW.”
He shakes his head again. “Thanks. I’m actually really into
music.”
I smile big. There it is. “Oooh, that’s very cool. What do you
play?”
“Some guitar. And I make some beats.” He looks away, smiling
but still embarrassed. “And I rap.”
Flashing big teeth, reaching out a hand, touching his knee. “Oh
my God, that’s so hot. That’s like atomic. Can I hear?”
“Nah,” he laughs.
“Come on! Spit something. Give me some bars.”
He grins and leans forward, resting his elbows on his thighs. He
opens his mouth, starts, stops, then—

Got a real long knife and it gets real hot

Smokin’ too much weed and downin’ too many shots
Got too many girls I can’t tell’em apart
So I keep to the shadows and try not to get caught

He laughs a little. Shakes his head, cheeks rosy. But I keep looking
at him, scraping my front teeth over my bottom lip. I start snapping in
rhythm. He jumps back in.

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 Now I got a warrant and the smoke got me worried
Signal blowing up, bitches want me to hurry
But I don’t give a fuck ‘cause you know I stay lucky
Rollin down the block and they all look at me funny
Got a wide hat, got a perm
Gonna slide back, gonna learn
Bitches don’t mean nothing but a really nice time
Just hanging in the summer and we feelin’ real fine
Tempest got me rocked off margaritas and marinade
Blood clots got me runnin’ like we got no intensive aid
Biiiiiiiitch, I hear these kids afraid

He shrugs and laughs again. “Those last bits were off the top.”
“Oh my God.” Cooing, clapping my hands together. Making a
show of it. Inside, I’m laughing. At him, yes, but there’s more to it. It’s
dumb and ridiculous, but I feel fifteen again, laying in fields smoking
cigarettes with a boy (someone real, another boy, a different boy
who dies) trying to impress me. The acid beats inside me, beating
me like a drum, and it beats inside him too—the sway, the ripple, the
slight loll of his head. It’s like a rope pulled through me and tied
around him. He sways, and I sway too.
He lies back on the chaise, rubbing his chest and face. “Hey,
sorry for being weird. Thanks for picking me up. You’re really cool.”
I stand and retrieve the syringe and pad from the platter. “Thank
you, sweetie. You’re real cool too.” I sit beside him, take his arm and
find a vein, jab and inject. He rolls to his side, curling around me.
The usual hard-on pressing through his jeans into my thigh. I pull the
waste basket beneath his face and feed him ice chips with my
fingers. Half an hour passes and he doesn’t vomit. I ask if he’s
nauseous.
“Yeah. But not as bad as it’s been.”
“Good.” I feed him two ice chips and slide off the chaise to the
floor.

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 “Hmmm?”
“Shhh.” Folding my legs to the side, resting my elbows on the
chaise. Grabbing his belt, unbuckling. Working his jeans’ button
through the eye. Unzip and open.
“Wha—” He tenses.
“Shhh. Relax.” I wrap my fist around the front of his boxers and
squeeze. It flexes back. “Thank you for being here,” I whisper.
I reach inside his boxers and pull his penis through the hole.
Uncut—thick, glistening tip. It smells like gauged ears and old
pennies. Ringing it lightly with my fingers, I give a long, soft stroke.
He shivers.
“I’ve never seen one this big,” I lie, placing my mouth over it,
dragging my tongue around the glans. Bobbing, bringing it further
into my mouth, sucking my cheeks in, creating vacuum. He tenses.
His cock pulses. I graze the tip with a tooth.
“There’s a knife inside me,” I say, breathing it in.
He spasms and heaves. He coughs. He leans forward and
pukes into the waste bin.
I ignore it. I stay on his cock, taking it in palm and twisting,
tracing the glans with my thumb. He heaves yellow bile. The reek
permeates. I’m miles away from turned on, but that’s not the point.
This is just training. Classical conditioning. He’ll learn to associate
the nausea, the fever, with my lips around him, the wet warmth of my
cheeks and tongue. He’ll never run off again.

It’s 5:14 AM and Mama’s walking in the door from her shift, finding
you in the living room. Not crying, because you’ve cried everything
you’ve got. Completely cried out. Tell her you’re sorry, you’re so so
sorry. You truly believe that this will be the last time you ever see her
again.

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 Bring her to your room, early sunlight carving through the blinds,
falling on Dennis’s rigid body in the dark roiling swamp of vomit and
piss. She gently covers her mouth and nose. She pulls you close
with her other arm. “It’s okay.”
She tells you to go back to the den. She goes to her own room,
and you can hear her through the walls, talking on the phone. “Bless
you. Good Lord, I owe you I owe you I owe you.” Then she hangs up
and comes back and sits beside you, wrapping you in her arms. She
asks you to tell her everything.
Tell her. All of it. Tell her you’re sorry again.
Deep inside, you believe she is going to take your life away.
A knock at the door. Knock knock knock-knock knock. Mama
opens it. A young broad man, dressed in scrubs, stands in the frame.
“Ms. Williams,” he says. And then looks at you. He introduces
himself as Arnold. Mama leads him into your room.
That’s how it goes, every time until Mama dies, and then it’s just
Arnold. Establish a pattern early and you’ll never disappoint anyone.
You make a mess. Someone else cleans it up.

Two sessions later and he’s ceased vomiting. His spasms diminish,
his fever hums low at ninety-nine point seven. He still lets me feed
him ice chips, sucking and licking them out of my fingers.
“Any nausea?”
He shakes his head.
“Good.” Tussling his hair. “That means you’re getting stronger.”
“Cool.”
“I sure think it’s cool.” I place an ice chip between his lips. He
sucks it into his mouth, crunches and swallows. I let my thumb rest
there on his bottom lip. He waits, breathing gently on it. Then he tips

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his face forward, taking the digit into his mouth, sucking gently,
swirling his tongue around.
The needle shivers.
I withdraw my thumb and wipe it on my blouse. “You can sit up.
I’d like to try something new.” Uncrossing my legs—spreading them
slightly, so maybe he can see up my skirt—I pat the top of my right
thigh. “Come here.”
He looks confused, but stands anyway, a little woozy on his legs
but steady enough. He comes over.
“Sit.” I pet my thigh again. He sits. His ass is soft but strong. I
lay my wrist and forearm across the top of his thigh, just an inch
away from his groin, and rest my chin on his shoulder. “Remember
what happened a few weeks ago?” I whisper.
He takes a deep breath.
“What I did?”
“Yeah,” he exhales.
“Did you like that?”
“Yeah.”
“Good,” I coo. “Do you do things like that with other girls?”
He nods.
Breathing him in. Scrubbed clean. Like plastic pomegranate and
salt water. “What do you do with them?”
“What do you mean?”
“You fuck them, right?”
He nods.
“You finger them?”
He nods.
“You eat their pussies?”
He nods.
Cervical tissues swell with fluid and press upon the needle.
“Are you good?”
His body tightens, compressing. “What do you mean?”
“Do you satisfy the girls you’re with?”

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 His face goes red. He turns from me. “I dunno.”
“It’s okay.” A light kiss on his earlobe. “Stand up. I’m going to
show you something.”
He gets off my lap, turns his back to me, fumbling with the front
of his pants, hiding himself.
“Don’t,” I say. “Don’t hide. Turn. Face me.” He does so, full
erection pressing through his jeans. He looks down and to the side.
“Look at me,” I say. He does. Hooking my thumbs beneath my skirt, I
pull off my underwear, already glazed wet. The boy trembles.
“Kneel,” I say, opening my legs, pointing to the floor just in front of
me. He does. “Now this is important,” I say. “Disobey, and you can
never see me again. Understood?”
He nods.
“Good. You are to do exactly as I say. No more, no less.
Disobey, and I will never let you see me again. Understood?”
He nods.
“Understood?”
“Understood.”
“Good.” I smile big. “Touch me.”
He reaches out a tremoring hand toward my lap, my pussy
already slick and puffed. I reach down and spread myself.
“You’re going to put your fingers in me. Only two. Your middle
and your index on your right hand. Only those.” My own two fingers
press against my clit and rub a slow circle.
His fingers enter with ease. The ridges of his knuckles rub
against my walls as he pushes in and pulls out, slowly, gently, in
rhythm with my own rubbing. I tense my seat, the back of my cervix,
keeping the needle in place.
“Reach further,” I say. “You won’t hurt me.”
He does, and his fingers press against the bulb of my cervix. I
spasm. He begins to withdraw his fingers, but I grab his wrist,
holding him inside me. “Stay there. Stay right there.”
“Okay,” he whimpers.

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 “Now,” leaning in, smiling, “I’m gonna show you some real
magic.” I tell him to curl his fingers, like come hither. And his fingers
curl, pressing his tips into the sponge of my ceiling. And I fill with
oceans and storm. Shake and inhale. Becoming nothing but wet. A
flood, a torrent. Primordial throb. A phantom heel on my spine,
making me arch, threatening to snap me in half. His fingers pulling
me apart. I want all of him inside me. His entire body. To pull him up
through my opening, from his cock to his hips, his torso and limbs,
his head. All inside me. His hands stroking circles around the base of
my cervix, his neck bending backward, pressing his lips, his teeth,
his tongue into spongey wet.
The needle buzzes. It shakes in insistence.
The needle slips out.
“Ah.” The boy shouts, a sharp exclamation, and reels back from
me, onto his ass, cradling his slicked hand. A small bead of blood on
the tip of his index.
“Oh sweetie,” I say, leaning forward, out of the chair toward him.
I take his hand and pull him to his feet. “I’m sorry ‘bout that.”
“What?”
“Nothing to worry about,” I lie.
“What the fuck is that?”
“It’s an IUD,” I lie and smile. “A girl’s gotta be safe. You wouldn’t
want a little surprise, right? Not at your age.”
“Oh.” His breathing slows. “Alright.” His world pulls back
together into something rational and knowable. “Yeah, alright, I get
that.”
I kiss his earlobe and rub my nose against his cheek. “Let’s get
you cleaned up.” I bring him to the bathroom and run the sink.
Standing behind him, my breasts pressed into his back, holding his
hand beneath the water, coating it in soap, scrubbing it, then rinsing,
coating, and scrubbing again. I slide down to the floor beside him,
open his pants and breathe on his cock, letting it fall between my
lips, twirling my tongue around the tip. Reaching down and rubbing

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my wetness, I tell myself this could go on forever, and I’d be happy.
This could be my life now, me and him, eating mushrooms and
colliding forever in four walls, A/C and artificial light. Sucking his
cock, rubbing moons into my clit. This could be all that we have,
forever, and that could be alright. Coming together as vibration, as a
smoky orange light. This could be enough this time.

The needle shakes, furious. It threatens. It tells me it will tear me

apart from inside if I disobey. It tells me it knows best. That I worry
too much. The needle tells me the boy is my soulmate. The needle
caresses me from inside, knowing if it were to press any further it
would puncture, it would burrow, until it was no longer inside me,
until there was no longer a me to be inside.

I tell him to come over Saturday. Not for a session. Something

different. I tell him to tell his parents he’s staying at a friend’s house.
He says he won’t have to say anything, his parents won’t care.
I come to the door in a purple strapless sundress, no bra,
barefoot. Lights dimmed low, music already playing—low wormy
grooves, like massive bodies rubbing against one another. I open the
door and he’s dressed up, in long khakis, a pink and blue Polynesian
shirt. His eyes go wide at me, smiling and swaying in halftime to the
music, pushing my hips side to side. Watching him watch me. “Hi,”
he says. He tries to hide his smile but it breaks through every time.
“You look beautiful.”
“Aww.” Reaching out, squeezing his wrist, I gently tug him
inside. “Thanks, sweetie.”

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 “I brought this.” He reaches into his breast pocket and pulls out
a poorly twisted joint. It makes me laugh a little, making me young
again. I grab him by the back of the neck and kiss him. “I love it.
That’s beautiful.”
We sit on the chaise, him behind me, me between his legs. He
lights the joint and pulls deep. Before he can exhale, I twist my head
and open my mouth to his, breathing in his smoke. We lap tongues,
and I pull back, snickering, taking the joint from his hand. I take the
hit, hold it, and tilt my head back into his chest, parting my lips. His
lips meet mine, catching my exhalation. He runs his hand down the
center of my chest before cupping my breast. Pinching my nipple
between his thumb and forefinger, pulling in a circle. I arch and suck
his bottom lip.
The needle stirs.
Turning and climbing onto his lap, my breasts fall from the dress
and he catches them in his mouth, circling each nipple with his
tongue, gently grazing his teeth against the tips. I push him
backward and press my mouth to his, sucking his lips, brushing my
tongue over his. Licking his teeth. He presses his groin into mine,
rubbing against me dry to the synthetic beat. “Take off your pants,” I
whisper. He keeps humping, sucking my neck. I pull away, rising up
off of him. “Now.” He jolts beneath me, wrestling his belt open, his fly,
squirming the jeans down to his ankles, kicking them off. His penis
slips through his boxers’ opening, plump and glossy with pre-cum.
My fingers encircle it, running up and down the shaft. Just two long
pumps. He sighs deep, and I climb atop his lap.
I hover my pussy above his cock, bringing it down lightly until it
just barely touches. Connecting our wetness. He runs his hands
down the small of my back to my buttocks. I gyrate my hips,
dragging myself across his glans, letting it spread my lips gently. His
body goes rigid, and he pushes himself up off the couch, his hand on
my ass pulling me down toward him, and he enters me, slightly. I put

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a foot on the ground and lift myself off, letting the shaft rest against
my clit. “No,” I say.
He moans and tries to push himself up inside me again.
“No,” I repeat, and wrap a hand around his throat, thumbing his
Adam’s apple. Sliding off his lap to the floor, between his thighs, I
envelope his cock, licking my lubrication off his shaft and tip. He
moans, tremors and giggles.
But then he stops. “No,” he says. He grabs me, pushes my head
off his penis. “Your turn.” He grabs me by the shoulders, so hard it
may bruise, and throws me onto the chaise, onto my back.
He parts my knees with the backs of his hands and kneels
between. Reaching a finger inside, then another. Pressing against
my cervix. I suck in, I tense, I hold back, and the needle holds too.
He pulls the tips of his fingers back, into the spongey ceiling inside
me. He strokes and I arch. He leans forward and puts his lips to my
clit. And I let him. For a few moments.
Shake out of it. “Stop,” I say, placing my foot against his
shoulder and pushing him away. But he’s strong. He swats my calf
and my foot slips past his shoulder. He pulls my hands from his head
and holds them down by my sides. He puts his lips and tongue to my
pussy and drinks me.
The stomach is actually remarkably good at breaking down the
toxin. He may have some nausea, some light hallucination, but it
shouldn’t be so bad.
Then he stands, holding my waist, and he slips inside me. He
fills me, a slow piston grind, felt on every one of my surfaces.
I don’t tell him no.
He feels the ridges of my walls caressing his shaft. He feels his
glans press against the plump bulb of my cervix. What he doesn’t
feel is the needle slipping out from behind it. It’s so fast. He doesn’t
feel it slip inside his urethra. He doesn’t feel the needle widen it. And
in the throes of fuck, he doesn’t feel the tear in his urethral lining, the
exposure of his blood to my venom—all that he’s been training for.

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 The wound widens, and then he does feel it. He tenses and
yells, but stays inside me.
“You alright?” I ask.
He shakes it off. “Yeah.” And he thrusts deeper into me and I
feel the needle lodged, pulling when he pulls, and it hits me like a
gust, like a torrent, like an egg through a serpent’s throat. It makes
me gasp and shake and we gasp and shake together, and maybe we
will always be here in this shape, and maybe this lasts forever.

Dennis. My uncle. A boy named Sanjay. A boy named Austin. A man

named Trevor. A boy named Yuze. A boy named Omar. A man
named Liam. A boy named August. A boy named Angel. A man
named Sal. A boy named Benjamin. A boy named Ji-Hoon. A boy
named Oliver. A boy named Terry. A boy.

I message him and ask how he’s feeling. He says he’s alright and
asks when I can see him again. I tell him Wednesday.
He’s twenty minutes late. Eyes sunken. Complexion a wilted
bronze. Strained inhalation, deep sighs.
I touch his elbow, guiding him inside. “How are you?”
He sucks dry mucus through his sinus. He exhales and his
chest rattles wet, like God blowing on a lake. “I’m fine. I missed you.”
He leans into me and I tuck my chin around his neck. “I missed
you too.” I let him kiss me and press himself into my waist. “Can I
take a look at you first?”
“Okay.”
He lays down on the chaise and unbuttons his pants. I take his
temperature (101 degrees), check the lymph nodes in his neck (very

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swollen), give him a sip of water, unzip him and pull his pants and
underwear off all the way. His penis red and erect. Looking close, it’s
two reds. A red like a bug bite and red like wine. Infection and dried
blood.
I kiss him on the forehead. “You sure you’re alright?”
He nods, lifts his head and catches my lips in his.
Pulling away. “Why don’t I do something for you this time?” I fill
a bowl with warm water and grab soap and a wash cloth from the
bathroom. Alcohol swabs and antibiotic cream. Sitting beside him, I
swaddle the wash cloth around his penis. Moving it gently around the
flesh. He tenses and coos. Like a time when I was a child with
Mama, except I’m her now, as well as myself, all at once. I dunk the
cloth back in the soapy water and return it to his penis, wiping the
crusts of red off the tip. Infected swelling on the glans. Wrapping it
around the shaft, I give three long strokes. A snake around a branch.
He gasps and grabs my arm. “I want you,” he says.
“You don’t want me to take care of you this way?” Circling the
base of his glans with my thumb.
He shakes his head.
What he said when he got here.
The needle trembles.
He said he was fine.
He said he was fine.
It’ll be okay.
Shaking it away, I stretch toward him, letting him kiss me deep
(a cold taste). I remove the cloth, bowing my head back to his penis,
briefly slipping it between my lips. Bobbing slowly, twirling my
tongue, up and down, letting its tip touch the back of my throat. He
bursts in my mouth. A salty white universe. I swallow, letting it die
inside me, resting my head on the chaise, next to the softening,
shrinking cock. He traces my ear with his fingers, stroking my hair.
“God, thanks,” he says. “That was the best.”
I don’t say anything.

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 “You alright? Sure I can’t do anything for you?”
“Nah. I’m fine.” I lift his shirt and kiss his belly. “Maybe next
time.” And maybe that’s how it goes. He, unlike the others, returns to
me. Strengthened and renewed. It continues, it proceeds infinitely.
Maybe next time, and maybe next time, and maybe next time, and
maybe next time.

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No palace more fit to rot. Born in the corner tower, a beam of
mansion carved across an entire state. When the sun was high and
everyone could see, your family owned modeling agencies, credit
unions and pet stores. Then dusk crept over and guided them to a
separate trade.

Three thousand and seventy-three rooms comprise Penis House.

Home to at least a thousand souls and their personal effects and
actions.

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These are the ones you know of.

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 Wake in Bottle Nest. Hundreds of
bottles—Snapple, Mountain Dew,
Glaceau Vitamin Water, et cetera— Before you were alive, this space was
emptied or half, filling your bed, majestic. That could not do. Time
spilling to the floor, eclipsing end recognizes only ruins, and you went to
tables and all other surfaces. A bottle work immediately, in fear of being
for each day you’ve resided here. forgotten.

You were still children, but close

enough to grown that you could kill if
need be. A tick clamped to your inner
thigh. Plumped and beigey. (Ticks
sprung from void when G_d left the
Earth). You pulled it off, leaving that
warm rosy bumper behind, and taped it You can piss in anything. Failure is only
to the tip of a pencil. You took it into what’s visible.
the walk-in closet and mounted it on
the wall with more tape. With an
aerosol deodorant (your father’s) and a
Bic, you sprayed flames over the tick’s
plump little bod until it blackened and
curled and disappeared.

The aerosol could’ve inhaled up the

flame, suckering up into the canister
and bursting, bursting up your palms
and hand bones. The wall could have A space’s quality is proportional to the
catched fire, reducing the house to secrets kept within.
cinder. You didn’t care. You wanted to
bring that thing to the end.

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 The bed sucks at your body like a crib.
You lift yourself forward and up, letting the
mattress’ tacky lips peel from your back.
Powdery creped skin dripping from your
frame like a sheet. Is it yours? It’s not like
any you can remember.

The outer chambers. Where you were

born. Where you’d sit at the window,
The Moth Closet. Filled with moths. A gazing down on the great expanse of
thousand palm-sized moths. Devouring Penis House. The lanterns and ramparts,
fabrics and cottons and now devouring the homes of people you own. A secret
each other. Generation after generation, you prefer kept.
hatching and dying and eating their own.
Devouring children, their olds. They love it
here. The only thing they ever knowed,
the only thing they evered loved.
So would you have wanted to eat her
clothes? Another way you’ve failed her?

That time, as children, when you laid

across the tile, and let go of your bladder,
and the hot yellow sputtered over your
thighs and knees. You kept still, inhaling
the reek, divining your future. Fate exists
so long as you stay true to it.

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 Your family conducts a ritual in the form of
The floorboards whine and warp, industrialized agriculture, genocides in
shellacked by generations of blood, feces, seven countries, lavish galas, and globe-
amniotic spill. The room—its trinkets, set spanning human traffic. An attempt to
upon dusty dressers and shelves—send change the name of G_d, and therefore
twinkles up your spine. Tiny porcelain the nature of the world.
mother dolls. Muddy nostalgia. Walls
pocked with cubby nests, where as a child
you would burrow between the plaster
and sing to the mites. A space between
joy and dread. You weren’t an only child. You forget
this, you pretend to forget this, you
pretend to forget this for so long you
no longer need to pretend. There were
other children. What did you do with
them?

Trace the walls, beams of uterine oak,

scanning over the photos of men and
women whose lives were beyond the
house’s walls. Dust your fingers over the
porcelain statuettes, slip a bleach white
pig into your pajama pocket. You can
almost hear it squeak, but keep your
fingers wrapped tight, smothering it in skin
and dirty cloth. Far beneath broken earth, the Penis
shudders.

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 You can’t remember if this house ever
belonged to you. Only in other’s hands,
Some say Penis House exists upon an just as you were in their hands. For how
island in a whale. Others claim it lies in long? Decades, a hundred years, a
the center of the city, on a forty-acre thousand? It’s difficult. The house is a
grassed plot surrounded by fifteen-foot diorama standing in a single circle of light,
razor wire fences. I’ve heard (and you a star cut from a cloudless black sky. It
have too) that Penis House rests far doesn’t even feel like a wound. The inky
underground, that it was constructed just lake sits beyond the window. A curled
after WWII with atomic fears. Some say rope lying beneath its surface—a noose
Penis House has always been here, for drowning cattle. You were once
existing many places across time. condemned, but those same hands pulled
you from the depths and pounded water
from your lungs. It was a lie when you
You can’t remember ever eating here. thanked them.
You can barely recall passing through.
You can’t picture the walls or floors
even when you’re here. Just blank
where a room should be, where a room
should be, where a room should be.
Blank where a room should be. It’s
blank where a room should be.

Do you know of the tunnels? Of the

second house? Identical to this one, but
inverse. A second family too, but all with
different names and faces. They have a
Father and Grandma too, but the children
are different. No need to even think about
them.

A finger trap. Lamprey in the walls.

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A thump from below, somewhere beneath Covered in bloods. Dry bloods, burnt
the floorboards. Like blood-wrung bloods. The knifes rusted and dulled.
eardrums. A wandering body or wet Stove hissing a mild perpetual leak,
machinery. And you remember. Not just sucked out the space through a broke
her hands. Her outline. Her face. The up window, saving your life and the
woman with yellow cake sticky on her lips house’s too. The refrigerator broke a
and cheeks, her oily kisses. The way her year ago, or ten years ago, or maybe it
knuckles danced like panicked bucks. The has always been, but still you fill it,
way she changed your landscape, the with hairs and hornet’s nests and
texture of your skin, with her rot and stain. pieces of animals you’ve snatched.
A secret. A tumor to always be within. You pretend it’s cold in there, and
sometimes it is.

You hated food. You’d stay in the She is the thump. Clutching half a dozen
bathroom (before it flooded to ruin), candles, stalking the halls. When she
staying for hours, stuffing toilet paper thinks of you, she giggles and it makes
down your throat, until all your insides you quake.
were paper, your skin was paper, your
hair and fingernails and eyes and teeth
were paper.
The closet held your parents’ long
coat, parka, winter coat. For long they
There’s a room with walls covered in still smelt of them, because they were
cardboard, cardboard made to look like inside them, somewhere. Now here you
buildings, cardboard on the floor with lines burn meats. Walls blasted to black and
down the middle like a street. Cardboard ash. You need to burn the meats or the
phone booths, cardboard cars, cardboard meats’ll make you puke.
lampposts, cardboard fountains in a
cardboard park. And if you spend longer
than the least amount of time, it all sort of
shimmers and blurs, and it’s like you can Every window a one-way mirror, reflecting
feel the breeze and smell exhaust and inward.
hear the speech of those not trapped
here. You look at the ceiling and the
ceiling’s a sky and the sky is blue,
extending forever, wind blowing all around
you.

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 They die in cribs. You nail up the
coffee table, a pair of shutters, a chair
across the door. You tape over the
seams. They’re in there still, grew,
grown, growing. Their bodies swole,
the real swole (the real real swole),
filling the room with gas. The gas
liquiding, turning flesh, coats of skins,
blooming fractal petals of skins,
coating the walls and furnitures, before
bloating and poppering again, filling
the room with more gas, liquiding
The pics are still there, tucked in again into skins, another and another
wetted bursting boxes. You know what coats of skins. Over and overs. By now
they are. You’d sooner burned the it’s swallowed everything.
entire house before seeing those pics
again.

They still think about you.

Your skin always belonged to them.

Even when they tried to send you
away, they wished for your skin to
remain.

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You will return to your bed, letting it suck you to sleep. You will dream of a child
with a face you once recognized as your own. A child who pulls a thin silver knife
from the swamps (those just half a mile from where you really live). The child will
carve a new world with that blade, at once sensical and just. One inhabited by soft
nuzzling animals and hands that don’t clench and carve. A world you can think
about without shaking, without bawling into your pillow. A world you won’t need to
push far away, down into your soured gorged intestines.

Or maybe you will not dream at all. A hole pulls open where your mind was. You
will wake to a new day in a life you can’t recall, wearing skin you no longer
recognize. The thumping down below, the bed sucking skin. You’ll fumble the tiny
white pig in your pocket, squealing frantic through the cloth, crying to get out.

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Board up

Bury

Burn low inside

and never let it go.

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It’s like a toothache. It takes over everything. A patch of rot grasps a
nerve and the world falls away. Your body disappears, your pasts
and futures dissolve into a single intolerable present and all you are
is a throbbing sweaty toothache. Like it’s the only thing you’ve ever
known.
They aren’t the words I’d prepared. They come in the moment,
like a wave crashing through me. I don’t even look at the paper
crumpling in my hand. I close my eyes and it all comes out between
gasps.

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 You said you didn’t believe in free will. That’s what war is.
My body isn’t my body. A pale tooth. The world’s a pale
tooth. A twirling spear drilling through the spaces. All the
spaces. It’s a twirling tooth. A pale tooth. A twirling bone.
The world’s a twirling beak. A pale tooth. A pale bone. The
world twirling like a drill. A twirling tooth. A pale bone. A
pale drill. Twirling like a tooth. A bone. A drill. A bone. A
tooth. A drill. You don’t even know. It’s the music that used
to be you. In your ear. In the air. You don’t even know. A
twirling tooth. A pale bone. A pale drill. Twirling like a tooth.
A bone. A drill. A bone. A tooth. A drill. A tooth. A bone. A
drill. Drilled milk and cum. A bloody fucked tooth. Fucked
bloody. Drilling. A tooth. A bone. Spins and spins and
spinning milk and cum. Milk and cum. So much and all you
can do is stop breathing.

I breathe in. My head tips forward, my lips press into the microphone
(Warm and sticky. Why is it sticky?). I exhale and my breath hisses
through the room. I jolt upright. Back in my body. Back in the room.
In the café. All Sedona-red walls, curving bulbous plaster giving a
shoddy illusion of something organic, like the walls of a cavern, like
we’re all trapped in this tiny wet pocket. All of us—me and Derrian
and Chelsea and the other Leeds High burnouts, encroaching on the
shitty old bohemians. All of us packed in and robbing each other’s
breath.
Hesitant clapping. The open mic emcee taps my shoulder. “Um,
cool. Thanks Nicole.” I look away and wobble off the stage. “Okay,
next up we have Mya W. Let’s give it up for Mya!”
I drift between the chairs, gently bumping into shoulders, toward
Derrian and Chelsea in the back. Derrian looks away, at her shoes or
over her shoulders. Like she’s trying to hide. Embarrassed, for me or
of me. But Chelsea stares me right in the face, and that throws me
off. She’d been in her own little world all day, big puffy headphones

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wrapping her ears, fist clutching a Walkman, thumbing the radio
tuner, barely saying a word.
“That was different,” Derrian says, forcing a laugh. A solitary ha.
“Where’d you hear that?” Chelsea asks, still staring, almost like
she’s staring through me—not all the way, but past the skin, the
muscle, the bone. The question crawls inside my mouth. It pries at
my gums. “What?” I say (What’s she on? Am I on it too?).
“What you said up there.” She’s almost shaking. My jaw throbs
in sync with her tremors. “Where’d you hear that?”
White. Sticky white. “Nowhere,” I say. I believe it but it doesn’t
quite feel true.
Derrian finally looks me in the face. “You don’t look so hot.”
I wipe my forehead with my sweatshirt, smearing a charcoal
birthmark on the sleeve. A wet achy fever beneath my skin. But I
don’t tell her that. I just say I need some water and push through the
clusters of people to the pitcher between the stage and bathroom.
Empty, except a few dying ice cubes and a limp lemon sliver. I head
to the counter and wait while three customers crawl through their
orders. It’s the busiest I’ve ever seen the open mic. All strange
smelly bodies pressing into each other, chatting over the awful uptalk
poetry honking through the PA. I hate it, but it’s the last place in
Leeds that’ll let kids hang out.
The barista—I’ve seen her almost every Friday this past year
but still don’t know her name—waves me in. “What can I get you?”
“Water.”
“Water’s over there.” She points toward the pitcher. “Next.”
“It’s empty.” Sweat pours down my forehead, into my eyes,
distorting her features. Making her blurred, bloated, monstrous.
“What?”
“Pitcher’s empty.”
“And?” She clenches and unclenches her jaw.
“And?”

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 “And what, you didn’t bring it with you?” She slaps the bar. “I
can’t leave the register. Bring it up so I can fill it. Next.”
Pushing back through the crusts and failed Rainer Marias, I grab
the pitcher and head into the bathroom. The mirror stretches across
the entire wall. I almost don’t recognize myself in it. Like I’d been
dipped in water and aged two decades. I look like my mom.
That fucking toothache. Stuck in the back of my jaw. Like I’d
been gnawing gunpowder. Tiny explosions. Buzzing. Like the
enamel’s vibrating. Stirring up my pulp.
White. Swirling, smelly white. A swirling white tower. Twisting
milk and cum.
Last fall, Derrian and I copped a quarter of mushrooms off this
townie spanger, Dennis. He chewed our ears off, all this stuff about
fungal intelligence, these massive networks of membrane that
mushrooms use to communicate. He said that tripping is just
mushrooms’ attempt at communion with us. “It’s translation,” he said.
“They’re making your brain think the way a mushroom thinks. That’s
all that tripping is.”
Hours later, Derrian and me were rolling in the leaves, giggling,
listening to them crackle—an almost horny sound. I closed my eyes.
A mass of scaley meat, a world’s worth of heaving wet snake flesh
wrapping my body, wrapping the Earth’s entire skin. “Yooo,” I said.
“I’m feeling a little snaky right here.” Derrian laughed and threw a
fistful of leaves at me.
That’s almost what this feels like. Almost. Not like snakes. A
world of milk and cum, spilling over the world until there’s no air left.
I shake it away. Squeeze my eyelids tight and open them again.
Back in the ladies’ room. In my body. Mom’s face in the mirror,
staring back at me.
I fill the pitcher in the sink and glug it down—the whole gallon in
one go. Yanking fistfuls of paper towels from the dispenser, wiping
my face. Then I drop the pitcher in the toilet bowl and leave.

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 Onstage, a middle-aged man in a Panama straw hat hovers
over the microphone. “Come on, America. Listen to your brother. You
used to call him Jesus. Listen to your mother. You used to call her
the trees.” I pop up on my toes, scanning the room for Amber. Her
narrow pale face and spiraling red hair. She’d told me at school she
was coming tonight. Forgot? Lying? Whatever. I head back to
Derrian and Chelsea.
“You good?” Derrian asks.
I lean close to her face. “Can I ask a weird question?”
“I’m used to it.”
“Did you dose me?”
Chelsea scrunches her forehead, eyeing me.
Derrian laughs. “Dose you? Like, did I roofie you? Bitch, I’m not
that desperate.”
“Like with acid or something?” There was a guy at school who
got dosed at a party. Some prick rubbed liquid LSD on the back of
his neck. Had no idea what was happening when he got home. Tried
to slit his wrists but his folks caught him just in time. “Anything like
that?”
“Come the fuck on. Are you really asking me that?”
“I know. I know. I’m sorry.”
“You sure you’re okay?” She presses the back of her hand to my
forehead, like my mom when I’m coming down with something.
I step back. “I’m good. Sorry. I just need to smoke or
something.”
She drops her hand to my shoulder, squeezing it like a giant
leech. “Then let’s book. You done here?”
I make one last scan for Amber. I almost think I see her onstage,
but it’s another red-haired woman, older, probably in her 20s,
reading from a Moleskine: “My heart is a robin’s egg, and my fingers
are feathers, lifting me from another broken shell.”
“Yeah,” I say. “Sure, I’m done.”

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Outside’s a warm, damp thaw. Patches of white dissolving on soggy
dead grass. Storefronts blacked out, gaping voids under glass. Not
even the spangers are out. The streets wet and dead. An inversion
of the café. Dead, maybe, but at least enough space to breathe.
Derrian pulls a cigarette from her pack and sticks it between her
lips. She’s about to light it but stops. “You hear that?”
I do. This warbling—barely audible beneath the wind and lamp
noise, but it’s there. A single sustained note. Singing, maybe. A
stagnant, violent sound. My teeth wiggle and ache. A heat inside. In
my gums, in my jaw.
Chelsea pulls off one of her headphones. “Over at the park.”
“A concert,” I say. It’s like the singing is inside my mouth, prying
at my teeth. “Spring concert or something.”
“Let’s check it out,” Derrian says.
“It’s just a choir or whatever. Boring shit.” I don’t want to go. My
teeth don’t want me to go.
“We’ve got to cut through there anyway. Let’s check it out. Just
for a minute.”
Our sneakers clap against the sidewalk, echoing off hollow
buildings. Empty storefront after empty storefront. Only the
occasional headlight cutting out from the hill ahead as proof we’re
not alone. The singing grows louder. The note bends gently, like a
warped record. It rubs against my teeth. I run my tongue over the
enamel, wetting the gums, but it doesn’t stop the ache.
A voice calls out across the street. “Woop woop!” A man
kneeling on a stoop. Long ratty hair stuffed beneath a stocking cap.
A torn-up bomber jacket, camo shorts over long johns.
Derrian claps and smiles. “Yo Den!” We dash across the street.
Good old Dennis. “What’s good?” She gives him a hug.
“You know.” He pulls back and shrugs. “Same old same.” He
points at Derrian’s cigarette. “Think I can buy one of those off you?”

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He digs into his pocket, fistfuls of change rattling.
“You can have one dude.” She takes one out and hands it to
him.
“Danke.” He lights up, inhaling deep, holding it, then exhaling
long and slow. “What’re you ladies up to?”
“You know. Just came from the open mic. We’re checking out
whatever’s going on at the park.”
“Pulaski Park?” He turns and spits on the sidewalk. “Nah, you
don’t want to be there.”
Derrian smirks. “Why’s that?”
“Bad scene. Just real bad news.”
“It’s just a concert or something. You don’t like music?”
“They’re giving their children away.” Dennis rolls the cigarette
between his fingers. “Real ugly business.”
Chelsea goes stiff beside me, but Derrian keeps smiling, forcing
her laugh. “Who is?”
“Coward parents. You know, scared people are the most
dangerous people in the world.”
Derrian chucks him on the arm. “We’re tough. You know that.”
Dennis grimaces. “I know. I still wouldn’t go there if I were you.”
“How ‘bout if I promise we’ll be careful?” Derrian gives him
another cigarette and leans in for a hug. “It’s good seeing you,
buddy. Be good, okay?”
“Yeah, I’ll try.”
I nudge Derrian once Dennis is out of earshot. “What was that
about?”
Derrian wipes something out of her eye. “He’s fine. He’s just
sick. He’s trying, but you know. It sucks.”
I drop it. The drone rises with every step forward, pushing
against my skin, through my lips. My teeth buzz like a bee colony.

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Pulaski Park glows between city hall and the Academy of Music. A
glow that spills into the street. Lanterns strung from tree and post;
torches pounded into the ground. A bonfire. At least a hundred
people, dressed in jeans and button-downs, or skirts and blouses.
They hide their faces in masks. Papier-mâché animals—pigs and
horses and roosters and goats. They circle the park’s central pine
tree. Hundreds of small paper circles tied to its branches, like a skirt
of fungus. As a child, I’d look up at the pine in terrible awe, unable to
fathom how a tree could grow that tall and wide.
A band—a fiddler, an accordionist, a tom player—walks the
crowd. It’s barely music—a shrill keening, an approximation of a
cicada’s hum. The voices—this looping, warped falsetto, the timbre
of cats drowning—comes from everywhere, from every person, from
behind every crude animal mask.
Chelsea pulls off her headphones, staring at a couple dressed
as matching otters. She stares like they’re on fire. “We should go.
Can we go?”
“Yeah,” Derrian says. “Let’s book.”
We maneuver through the bipedal rams, rabbits, serpents. All
staring at us now. The keening scrapes at my teeth, slipping beneath
the gumline, prodding my jawbone. Through the bodies, between the
pine and bonfire, I glimpse a stained wicker cradle, rocking gently
back and forth. Something bursts beneath my gums and I grab my
face and look away. Derrian pushes me along and we break from the
crowd, onto a path toward the concrete steps where I knocked my
front tooth out when I was seven. We descend and cross Pulaski
Parking Lot to the South Street underpass and the dirty trail beyond.

Tall metal lamps light the path all rosé beige, the season’s first moths
tapping at the bulbs. Clots of fresh mushrooms encroach the path,

283
around my feet. I kick a patch. Spore motes explode and lift through
the lamplight. Another kick, another milky cloud rising, drifting in
waves, into my face, up my nose, down my throat, into my lungs.
We hop off the main path onto a thinner vein, scaling the hill
between the woods and society. We push through brush and thorns
until we reach it: The Pod. A mass of thick vines curled into a round
hut. We discovered it last summer, figured someone homeless had
built it to sleep in, but we never saw anyone use it except other kids
getting high. We dragged a fallen tree trunk inside to use as a bench
and made it our own.
Ducking inside, Derrian and I call “Not bitch.” We take our seats
on the rotting log, Chelsea stuck in the middle (but she’s still lost in
her headphones, staring quietly at the rusted coffee can blooming
with cigarette filters). Digging into her backpack, Derrian removes
her glass bowl and weed, then packs it and lights up. I ask her if
Amber said anything about coming out tonight. She lifts her head
back, blowing smoke through the vine ceiling. “You’ve got to stop
chasing that.” And hands the bowl to Chelsea.
“I’m just asking if she said anything.”
“You’re in for a whole world of hurt if you keep after her.”
“You only know, like, the persona she puts on. I know —”
“You know I love Amber,” Derrian says. “I love Amber. But
Amber’s fucked up. It’s not her fault, but she’s fucked up in so many
ways and hasn’t even begun working toward rectifying that shit.
You’re gonna get wrecked if you go down that path, that’s all I’m
saying.” Shrug. “Anyway, there’s like literally millions of girls out
there.”
Chelsea flinches in her seat. Coughing through the bowl,
blowing the weed out. “Oh shit.” Clutching the right headphone to her
ear. “Oh shit.”
Derrian roars. “Those were my fucking headies.” Reaching
across me, she yanks the bowl from Chelsea’s hand.

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 “Holy shit.” Chelsea presses the headphones tighter, pressing
so hard it’s like she’s trying to cave her own skull in. “I found it.” She
pulls them off and pushes them at Derrian. “You’ve got to hear this.”
“Nah. I’m mad at you now.” She pulls her baggie from her
backpack and loads a nug into her grinder.
Chelsea turns to me, forcing the headphones into my hands.
“Please. Listen.”
I slip the headphones over my ears. A voice like pebbles
dragged by a river. A hornet’s buzz pitched down to a low rasp:

A bone. A drill. A bone. A tooth. A drill. A tooth.

A bone. A drill.

I pull the phones half off. “What is this?”

Chelsea’s eyes crack wide open. “I’ve heard it. You’ve heard it
too.”
My teeth go alight. Like they’re bursting, frothing with pulp.
Melting down to tendrous nerves. Entangled in radiation.
White. The world. Everything white. All a dense, silky light. No,
not waves or particles. The texture. Milk. Milk. Soft sour milk. A flood
of it. A tower. A white twirling tower, as wide as a mountain, as wide
as the Pioneer Valley. A churning tower of sweet old milk, pungent
like semen, flushing up into the sky. Twirling like a drill. A tooth. A
bone.
The bodies inside. Hundreds of thousands. All our bodies. We
can’t move, we can’t speak. Just flushing upward into the sky, a
torrent of rank milk and cum.
“Yo. Yo.” Derrian’s voice. The world drifts back. No white. Just
sooty night and thin blades of moon spilling through the gaps in the
Pod’s ceiling. Derrian hands me the bowl. I wave it away. “You
sure?” She takes another hit and cashes it. “Bus should be coming
soon. Let’s get back.” Stuffing the bowl in her backpack, she rises
from the log, ambles onto the trail and down the hill.

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 Chelsea gapes at me like I have a gun for a face. “You’ve seen
it,” she says.
“What?” But I know.
“You’ve seen it. The tower.”
The white simmers in my spine.
I stand. “I haven’t seen shit.”
Chelsea grabs my elbow. Skinny fingers like bones. “Can I stay
at your place?”
“Tonight?”
“I don’t want to go home.”
I pull away. “Okay. Sure.”

The voices are gone. The accordion, violin and tom. Everyone
vanished. The bonfire doused, though the torches and lanterns
remain, flames dwindling. A gust tears through the ancient pine, and
the paper circles flip and sputter on its branches. Chelsea grasps at
them, putting her face close to see what’s written. Derrian jogs
ahead toward the bus stop. I’m staring at the stained wicker cradle.
My teeth buzz.
“Come on,” Derrian shouts. “It’s gonna be here any minute.”
“Just a sec.” I step toward the cradle. A black lace veil lays over
it. A sound inside—a whimper. A slurp.
“Yo!” Derrian yells. “I see it, it’s up the block.”
“Just a second!” My gums ache and throb. I pinch up the veil
and let it fall over the side.
A puppy. White and brown. A beagle, maybe, coiled inside the
cradle. Shivering, its mouth pressed to its loins. Whimpering,
suckling. Suckling gently on its penis. Not licking or gnawing.
Suckling.

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 It stops. Removing its mouth from its penis, its maw sticky wet
white. It looks up, straight into my eyes, and smiles like a person
smiles. In a hushed sweet voice, a toddler’s voice, it asks: “Want to
know a secret?”

I was four and my mother fed me an apple. It had gone mealy—the

first mealy apple I’d ever had. I had loved apples but this felt wrong. I
didn’t understand the texture. In my young dumb mind, it could only
mean one thing. “It’s poison,” I yelled.
“How could you say that?” my mother cried back at me.
“It’s poison,” I wept. Believing mother to be a witch in disguise,
serving tainted apples as I had seen in a film or cartoon.
“How could you say that about your mother?” My father scolding
me for daring to slander her name. Neither of them willing or able to
grasp my perspective—the naïve terror of my age and vulnerability.
Both I and them enthralled by a sense of supreme betrayal. It was
weeks before they’d look at me the same.

The bus drops me and Chelsea off a quarter mile from my house.
We barely speak the rest of the way. I don’t tell her about vibrating
teeth or towers of semen or puppy secrets and she doesn’t tell me
about any of the things she’s seen.
My parents are already asleep when we get in. We head straight
for my room. I flop on my bed. She sits at my desk. “I don’t know
how much left I got in me,” I say.
“It’s okay.” She looks down at her Walkman. “You can go to
sleep if you want.”
“Okay.” Twisting onto my belly, closing my eyes.

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Pale marble towers. Taller than trees, than the mountains. The scent
of animal lactation. Driven between the river, white water rising up
the banks. Soaking the soil to sludge.
He’s standing there. I can tell it’s him, though his back is turned
to me. A scalp and shoulders I’ve known my entire life. He turns, and
his face is a flower. A fruiting. A bloom of flesh. Like Amber’s orange
pussy rotting beneath my tongue. He steps forward and the slit pours
white.
I wake up drenched. Face stuffed in a pillow, a rotten ache
pounding in the back of my mouth. Slipping my fingers past my lips, I
feel along my gums. Dry and swollen. I twist upright and tap along
the night table until my hand finds the water glass. I glug it down in
one go—washing the ache, but not diminishing it. I feel for the lamp
and switch it on. A crack of beige light. The room throbs. An empty
room. Alone. Chelsea’s gone.
I go out to the hallway. The bathroom door is open, a black void
inside. I creep downstairs, slipping through the den, the dining room,
the kitchen. She’s nowhere.
I head back to my room. My foot kicks a chunk of something,
something plastic on the floor, sending it skittering across the
hardwood into a patch of dirty clothes. A plastic charcoal brick.
Chelsea’s Walkman.
Picking it up, running my thumb over its surfaces. Rough on the
back. I flip it over. Stalks and dots and infinity signs carved into the
plastic, just above the battery cover. I turn it sideways. Two dots, a
dash and six numbers: 88.1-89.3.
I place it on my desk and climb into bed, but I don’t get to sleep.

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The weekend passes. I call Chelsea but each time it’s six rings
before cutting to the answering machine. Monday comes and she
isn’t in school. I ask Derrian if she’s seen her, if she’s talked to her.
“No.” At lunch, I hit the cafeteria payphone and call her again. Six
rings, then answering machine. My gums flex and throb.

Mom and Dad look at me different now. Like they’re reading my

thoughts. They hardly even speak to me anymore. They’ll smile, but
there’s a great strain in their eyes, like jets of water pounding on their
optic nerves.
Mom makes cream of mushroom soup for dinner. Whole
creminis that burst on my teeth like dead mice. I get through two
bites and ask to be excused.
I hear them talking downstairs, when they think I’m asleep. My
father’s voice: “It’s got nothing to do with what you or I want.”
Inaudible. “You make me sound terrible.”
Silence. Then a single rising note. Mom wailing. Fried rasp.
Weeping.
My teeth shake. An awful pressure. Like worms, botfly larvae
crawling beneath the enamel.
White. Sticky sloshing white. A sea of white. Stinky milk and
cum. Submerged in it. My head floating just above the surface.
Hands at my throat. I reach up and pull at them. Familiar textures—
hairy knuckles, ill-trimmed hangnails, the pads of rough callus. My
father’s hands. They push me under, into the thick smelly white. I
thrash my arms and legs but the hands are too strong, too steady.
They push me far below, further even than his reach. My world is
slick greasy white and when I scream it floods my mouth, my throat,
my lungs. Sticky rotten and hot.

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 I snap awake. Sheets soaked through. A knifing headache. My
mouth filled with warm copper.
The moon’s gone tonight.
I switch on the lamp and the room comes alive with light and
opaque brown dots and dust motes. Little dancing spores. I spit in
my palm—red swirling in clear and white—and wipe it on the
comforter.
Crawling to the end of the bed, I reach out to my desk, grabbing
Chelsea’s Walkman. I put in my earbuds and flip on the radio. A
wave of static. A wall of hissing flies. Thumbing the tuner. Crackly
blasts of country music, then top forty, and more static. Watching the
dial, rolling the tuner, back and forth between 88.1 and 89.3.
The voice. I hear the voice. Gravelly and hollow, almost like
water. It crackles against my eardrums. Like a wave crashing
through me.

…and won’t even blink. Blood is so thin. You don’t even

know. When it comes down to it, there isn’t anyone who’ll
let blood stand in the way of dry land. Ever more cats in
bags and ever more bags in rivers.

My teeth vibrate in time with his cadence. An almost comforting

throb, like an old friend’s caress. An agony I’d miss if it were gone.
I listen until sunlight cleaves through the window. I switch off the
radio and twist onto my belly. I blink, and when my eyelids flip back
open my mom’s yelling it’s time to go to school.

Chelsea still isn’t anywhere and Derrian still can’t reach her (I’ve
stopped calling, I know it’s useless). I tell my teachers I have cramps
and spend half of each class in the bathroom, thumbing the radio

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tuner on the Walkman. The voice is never on the same station—it
drifts. Never really a station at all—somewhere between them.

Seed will go to seed will go to seed will go to seed. Goats

make promises with fathers, but goats are always goats.
Goats never care about our words, let alone promises.

I pinpoint the tooth. At first, I thought it was my entire jaw but it’s only
a single tooth. My right bottom molar. I open wide and pinch it
between my thumb and forefinger and feel it quiver, buzzing like a
fly. I wiggle it side to side—loose in the gum, but when I yank it won’t
pop out. Throbbing burning copper. I spit red and white into the sink
and twist on the faucet, flushing it away, spiraling around the ceramic
into a deep black hole.
Pliers. Pliers pliers pliers.
Downstairs, through the kitchen, out to the garage. Even though
I’ve never seen Dad fix anything, I know he has a toolkit. Every dad
has a toolkit.
I trace the walls, pulling tarps off bikes, coolers, snow tires. A
shock through my gums. Impossible agony, like my tooth twisting,
like it’s trying to spin around, or burrow deeper into gum. I buckle in
half, sinking to my knees, hissing and spitting on my nightshirt, trying
to keep quiet. Closing my eyes, it’s pure white, dripping out and
smearing across my cornea. Open again, shake it away, clenching
my jaw, trying to push the pain out of my mouth.
Then I see it, tucked between the trash bins and the volleyball
set: a broad grey box.
Leaning against Dad’s SUV, I step toward the box. And there, I
glimpse them resting atop the trash bin. Two ovals, each the size of
a face. Two papier-mâché ovals, lumps running down their centers,
like snouts. Twin gaping black eyes punched through each of them,

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staring up at me. Dull grey stubs rising from their foreheads. A pair of
goat masks.
White. Dripping white. Dripping from my eyes, my ears, my lips.
All my insides clogged with white.
I beat my forehead with my fist until it goes away. I spit copper
onto the concrete floor, then unsnap the toolbox latch and flip open
the lid. Nails and screwdrivers stab at my hands. There. Round
rubber grips. A pair of needle nose pliers, greasy and old. Tucking it
into my sweatpants, I head back to the bathroom.

I no longer see white. I don’t need to anymore. There are other ways
to prepare.
The cops find Chelsea’s parents but they don’t find her. Her
mom’s body is half-hanging out the front door to their house, burned
to grey. Almost just bones. Chelsea’s dad’s body is burned to black,
a skeleton curled into a fetus beside the toilet. She left the dog alive,
locked in the pantry. They can’t find her brother.
It was stupid of her to do that. Only brings attention. A stupid
mistake, but I get it. I hope she’ll be alright, though I know that’s
probably impossible now.
You have to wait it out. Wait for the tide, the tower, the torrent.
By then, there won’t be any cops, or hierarchy. You’ll only have your
parents to worry about, and their hands, and even then, they’ll be too
preoccupied with reaching dry land. A tooth. A bone. A drill. Twirling
in space. A torrent of rank, mucousy milk. I can wait. Lying awake,
sitting up when my door creaks, finding my father in my room,
clutching an object I can’t quite see. I can outwait them. When the
tower comes and blocks the rivers and drowns the valley in cum.
The torrent. A tooth. A bone. A drill. Then I can run free.

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She asks for a light. You reach in your pocket and dig out your Bic,
strike the flint, and touch the flame to her cigarette. She inhales. The
tip roils cinder. A line of flame draws down the paper, crossing the
band, down the filter. It touches her lips and her entire face is a
blaze. Engulfing, disappearing her hair, climbing down her throat,
down her shoulders and arms and chest and belly, down her pants to
her shoes. Washed in pumpkin light. She waves her arms, spinning
in circles and howling.

You run.

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The letter arrives a month in advance. It’s been eleven years. You
didn’t think you’d ever hear from him again.

You are graciously invited to celebrate Frank and Diane’s union.

The Elwood Hotel
53 Parrish Blvd
Providence, RI 02903
May 31, 2019 - 7:00 PM: Pre-Game Bash
June 1, 2019 - 3:00 PM: Ceremony Followed by Reception

Providence. Cities breed nothing but uncertainty. Uncertainty and

goblins. You can’t stomach it, ever since fleeing to the country.
Where you live now (population six thousand, two hundred and
eighty-four), you generally know who you’ll see, what situations you’ll
encounter. But anything can happen in the city.

You place your revolver and some cartridges in your suitcase,

between the linens.

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It’s an hour drive, two hours on the train, and a fifteen minute taxi to
the hotel. The Elwood’s façade is bronze and marble, the rot of jazz,
a broad golden portico above revolving doors. You smoke a cigarette
before entering, watching the park across the street. Tents scattered
across the green and dirt. Homeless milling—tens of them—
independent from one another, reading books, petting dogs, drifting
out from their designated areas to haunt regulars, requesting change
and smokes. Like spit particles, like germs.

Halfway down your cigarette, you glimpse one preying toward you.
Long ratty hair stuffed beneath a stocking cap. Camo shorts, a torn
up bomber jacket. A smile like rusty razors, like falling icicles. You
toss the butt and head inside.

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The lobby is all ornate gold-painted trim, purple and emerald
wallpapers; black with curling pinks and greens in the carpet. The
space is broad but clogged, about a hundred people arrived. Milling
faces—faces unknown, strange faces, and faces from high school.
Faces like bags filled with water. Aged and reduced, their potential
obliterated. You hold your breath—as though doing so would turn
you invisible—and weave through the crowd, peripherally scanning
for people who might recognize you, so that you may better dodge
them.

Particularly the groom. What does he even look like now? What
could eleven years have done to him?

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Having successfully avoided any and all familiar faces, you enter the
registration queue. Bulbed men and women chattering about home
ownership and children. Shrill hateful voices, amplified by the
acoustics. Drilling your ears like bad frequencies. Like hornets
buzzing.

A massive hand claps your shoulder. Like a hand wrapped in steaks.

You flinch toward it to a face you almost recognize, like a face you’d
known that’d been blown up like a balloon and deflated again.
Wrinkles and jowls. An elder, battle-scarred ape. But his eyes, the
smile carved in his face. You know him. The groom. Your friend.

You made it.

You nod and tell him of course. You wouldn’t miss it for the world.

His lips scrunch. Eyes moist and trembling. He pulls you in for a hug.
If he applied only a bit more pressure his arms would crush you into
his chest.

The queue moves forward, and it’s just about your turn.

Don’t let me keep you. We’ll catch up later.

Stepping away, he pauses a beat, turning back to you.

Thank you. Truly. Thank you.

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The front desk clerk gives you your key card, your room number, and
some disquieting news.

CLERK: Have you been informed about the security compromise?

You have not.

CLERK: It’s the transients. I’m sure you saw them outside.

Yes. You did.

CLERK: They’ve infiltrated. Wandering the halls. Nights usually. It’s

the weather, you see. They don’t have rooms, of course. They can’t
afford them.

Of course.

CLERK: We’ve done our best to respond. But there’s only so much
you can do.

And what does this mean?

CLERK: Just be wary. You’ll be safe in your room. I can assure you
of that.

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The elevator is full of mirrors. Walls of mirror, reflecting infinitely.
Sipping your image and spitting it back at you. Your face. Your face
is terrified. Your face is furious. Your face is untrustworthy.

A bell dings and the elevator shudders at floor seven. A woman

steps in.

You look her over. She won’t return the gaze. She’s smaller than
you, maybe muscular beneath the baggy sweatshirt and pants. You
look for filth on her clothes and skin. Sniff the air, trying to determine
whether she belongs outside. Reading her body language, deducing
whether she’ll try to rob you.

The bell dings at floor fourteen. Your floor. You get out, the doors
close between you and the woman, and she continues her ascent,
leaving you alone in the empty hallway, with only the buzz of old
wiring.

Ornate carpeting beneath your feet. Pink flowers curling around

metal spoons. Like heroin spoons. Such an odd design choice.
Maybe a mutation, a passive effect of the transient invasion. The
outside taking over, tainting and altering the world, without even their
knowledge of doing so.

You head down the corridor, lined with more mirrors, floor to ceiling,
spitting out your visage. Each looks like an attacker, rounding the
corner, about to grab hold of your shoulder and pull you into a
corner.

You lock the deadbolt and slip the guard chain into place. You
remove your shoes and pants. Removing the revolver from your
luggage, you load it with cartridges—how soothing as each presses
snugly into the cylinder—and place it on the bedside table.

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The plan is to seclude here until the ceremony. The only place you’re
guaranteed safety. An embassy in hostile lands.

Glancing over the room service menu, you settle on a light soup and
salad, and call down to the restaurant. An automated message
informs you that due to the event, the restaurant will not be able to
provide room service until June 2nd. But you were prepared for this,
gathering fistfuls of take-out brochures from the lobby.

You settle on Chinese. Vegetable lo-mein and an order of steamed

vegetable dumplings. You call it in and the woman on the other end
says they will deliver to the lobby.

The hallways. The elevator. All crawling with homeless. Men and
women with knives, dirty knives and needles. Shoving you to the
ground and taking all that belongs to you.

You ask if they can bring it to your room.

No. Pick it up in the lobby.

You cancel the order. Pick another restaurant. Italian. A big plate of
spaghetti and extra garlic bread. Call.

Alright, you can pick it up in the lobby in about forty minutes.

Can’t you bring it to my room?

No, we only deliver to the lobby.

You cancel and pick another brochure.

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Lying in bed, failing at sleep, your stomach twisted, trying to devour
itself. The phone rings.

You pick up. For a brief idiotic moment, you think it’s one of the
restaurants. They changed their minds. They will bring your food to
you.

THE GROOM: Buddy!

He shouts over music and crowd chatter.

THE GROOM: Why aren’t you down here?

You lie. You say you don’t know what he’s talking about.

THE GROOM: It’s a party. Y’know. Pre-game. Come on down.

You tell him you’re tired. That you’re the sleepiest you’ve ever been.
That you need your rest for the big day.

Something changes in his voice.

THE GROOM: Get down here right now.

You tell him that you have to get some sleep, and hang up, sprawled
in bed, wide awake.

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Footsteps pound down the hallway. Drunken cackling. Side parties
stomping above you. An orgy in the room adjacent. Apes unleashed.
You hear every movement. Hours of it.

And something else. Like dry fronds scraping the brick outside.
Skittering. Appendages tapping at the façade. You see it in your
mind—a man with thin spider legs, leering in windows, seeking
children and invalids to suck dry. Keep your eyes squeezed tight, for
if you were to see something it would suddenly become reality.

Another set of footfalls clunk down the hall. A lumbering gorilla. The
sound halts at your door.

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Years from now you’ll laugh about it together. Old stabs, old wounds.
Your terror. His refusal to accept the things he cannot control, and
the consequences that accompany those refusals. But that will be
years from now. Right at this moment:

His meaty fists slamming on the door.

The wood buckling from the weight of his shoulder.

Finally, the wood cracking around the strike plate, the bolt tumbling
to the carpet. The guard chain stretching and snapping. The door
giving way, the groom, your friend, falling through splintered wood
but still on his feet, shirt unbuttoned, sleeves rolled up, face bright
pink and eyes ringed dark.

THE GROOM: The hell you doing?

I need to sleep.

THE GROOM: You should’ve come down.

His enormous calloused frame lurches forward.

THE GROOM: Disrespectful.

Grabbing the revolver from the bedside table, you barely take a
moment to aim before pulling back the hammer and squeezing the
trigger (you never keep the safety on). Pop. Pull and squeeze, pull
and squeeze, pull and squeeze. Pop pop pop.

Only one shot connects but it shoves him backward into the hall. You
run to the door and push it closed. The wood is shattered down the
middle but it still closes, as closed as it can be now. Watching
through the crack, the groom, your friend, rises to his feet, clutching

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his shoulder. You push a dresser, the end table, a plush chair in front
of it, listening to him stagger down the hall, bellowing and striking
walls.

You return to bed. Pull the blankets over your head. The phone rings
but you don’t answer.

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The next morning, there’s a knock at your door. Pushing the furniture
away, you gaze through the crack, ignoring the red speckling the
doorframe. It’s a bellhop, uniformed in black and purple. He tells you
the ceremony is about to begin.

You take the elevator to the ballroom. A purple and emerald hall with
tented ceiling. Ornate frescos beneath the trim—mean-faced
cherubs encircling a boy, holding him down, pushing his face into
dirt.

You take a seat on the groom’s side, in back and far from anyone
else. The ceremony’s already begun. The bride—someone else from
high school, but who you never knew, really—has already been
given away, and now stands, facing the groom, his arm in a white
sling, the officiant standing between them.

Faces turn to grimace at the sight of you. Faces you recognize, and
you’re certain they recognize you.

The groom, your friend, holds the fingers of the bride with one hand,
his good hand. They smile into each other’s wet eyes. You almost
begin to cry. You reach toward your hip and caress your holster.

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You dodge the reception, the dagger eyes from everyone who knows
who you are and what you’ve done. You consider seeking out the
groom, just to say hi, maybe apologize for last night, but he’s
nowhere to be found.

Ride the elevator to the fourteenth floor. Down the hall, past the
mirrors, to your door, which had been replaced with fresh, unbroken
wood during the ceremony. You swipe your card and step inside.

Another breach.

A window thrown open, sucking A/C into hot wet night. The stink of
ape sweat. A wooden chair smashed to pieces beside the desk.

The bed.

Your bed is occupied. A man in a black suit atop the mattress, facing
away toward the open window. You know who it is immediately, even
before the white cast drawn over his shoulder gives it away.

The groom stands, turning to you, a leg of the splintered chair in his
fist. His face flattened, neither a frown nor smile. Nothing. Pulling his
damaged arm away from his chest, he tears off the cast, grunting
like an elk. Circling around the bed, he slowly advances, saying
something. You hear the words but your brain refuses to decipher
them.

You say please don’t. You say you don’t want to get hurt. You yank
the revolver from its holster, pull the hammer, point, and squeeze.
Pop.

The bullet twists the air and connects as intended. Spinning through
his right eye, spitting out the back of his head, releasing pale mist
like sliced grapefruit. He staggers, smashing into the dresser.

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Pushing off the drawers onto his feet again, he continues his
approach, snarling. Wolfen. A red wet bulb for an eye.

You tell him to stop.

He halts. Studying your face with his one good eye. He says
something again. You hear the words but refuse to accept them.
Dropping the chair leg, he turns, rushing the gusting window. Bracing
his hands on the frame, he steps through onto the ledge, one foot,
then the other, fast and fluid. Just before vanishing, he turns and
gives a quiet, solemn smile.

You rush to the window. Lights of the city bloom through soup fog.
And the groom, clutching the façade, scuttles down the bricks like a
mantis. You watch until the fog consumes him and you’re alone
again.

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You wake early and pack, hoping to avoid as many people as
possible at check out. Descending in the elevator, you’re thankful it
doesn’t stop at any other floors. The car’s light shines L, the doors
slide open, and you step out.

The lobby is filled. Wet swollen faces, both familiar and foreign. They
turn to you, meeting your eyes. Glowering.

Speeding along, keycard in hand, you navigate the bodies toward

the front desk. Eyes scanning for the one who can harm you, who
has every reason to harm you. You slip into line. Only five heads until
the front desk. Holding your breath again—still that stupid hope you
can shrink into invisibility.

A finger taps your shoulder.

You turn. There’s no surprise here but it still sucks the air out of you.
It’s the groom. Your friend. A wad of gauze taped over his eye,
another padding the back of his head.

You shake. You say oh my God. You say I’m so sorry. You say I
didn’t know what was happening. You say you didn’t know what was
going to happen. You say you’re so sorry. You say. You say.

He gives a tired smile.

THE GROOM: Come meet the family.

But you have to check out. You say you have to check out before
ten.

He looks up toward the brass clock overlooking the lobby. The face
reads 5:48.

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THE GROOM: Come.

You follow him to a hall shooting off from the lobby, connecting the
hotel to its restaurant. He gently takes your elbow and guides you to
the bride, still in her wedding gown. You ask her how it’s going.

THE BRIDE: Oh, you know. Terrible. I got canceled last year.

You clarify that you were asking about the wedding.

THE BRIDE: Even worse.

The groom, your friend, wags a finger at her, then leads you down
the bench to two small children.

THE GROOM: This is Evan. This is Angelica.

He picks up Angelica and gives her a kiss on the cheek. Evan hides
behind the groom’s broad calf. Their faces look almost exactly like
your friend’s, when he was young, and you were too.

It was decades ago, both of you in your late teens but already old
friends, friends since freshman year, failing out of life together. He
had taken you to a party—no, just seven people on the couch
splitting joints and growlers. Someone had made a blow dart
shooter. A simple plastic tube. Everyone took turns shooting thin
silver darts into beer empties lined on the mantel. Thwip. But when it
passed to your friend, he tilted the tube downward and shot the
needle straight into the host’s shin.

He said it was an accident but that always felt like a lie. What would
it matter, the outcome’s the same. But even then you still kept beside
him. That isn’t the reason you closed off.

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His silver hair. The crags in his face. Years distend. Such terror. You
know it, it’s true, but only partly. Epidermal shedding, sowing fresh
allergies, discarding the old. You mimic. Discarding the old. The
friction of other people, even those you’ve loved. Discarding when
their faces rub you raw.

He, his wife, his children.

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The world, and your life within it, shrinks as you travel back home.
The train’s compartment more cramped, the highway’s lanes
narrowed. Earth’s curvature almost visible. Sun and moon pass
overhead three separate instances by the time you reach your
apartment.

And the apartment has shifted as well. Now only a single room, and
hardly that. A walk-in closet. The ceiling lowered to your chest. Just
enough space to lie down in, so you lie down, and the walls pull in
further, the ceiling descending till it nearly touches your nose.

Tell yourself it’s fine. That it’s actually what you wanted. That you
hadn’t planned on ever standing again. Relinquish. Find
empowerment in doing so. Find sleep in the one place where no one
can find you.

318
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The golden retriever smiles, encircled. Her name is Lavender and
she believes she is loved. Encircled by the mother, the father, the
son, his wife and their child.
Lavender watches hummingbirds through the window. Following
as they flit from stalk to stalk on a feeder, a gift from the son to the
mother and father for their anniversary. The mother and father
complain that the hummingbirds possess such nasty temperaments
—dashing after one another, battling for exclusive rights despite
there being plenty of space and sugar water for all.
The child pets Lavender’s ear.

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 Three days ago, the son, his wife and their child arrived at the
mother and father’s house. Together, they walked through the
neighboring woods, following a restful brook. The child, in her
rubbers, hopped through shallow water, pulling stones with sparkling
minerals from the stream, holding them up to the sunlight, smiling at
the glittering, before shoving them into her pocket. The adults
discussed the emerging war, until mother finally exclaimed, “Enough.
It’s the first time I’ve seen you in six months, I don’t want to talk
about it.”
A tick—a perfect evil bead—perched from a thicket, raised its
appendages and grasped Lavender’s fur. Scaling leg to chest to
neck to head to ear, the tick—undiscovered—crawled to bare skin. A
canal. A tunnel. The tick entered.
Now, this morning, a pressure swells inside Lavender. A
pounding, deep in her ear canal, just beside the drum. The pulse of
her blood being drunk by the tick. She doesn’t understand. She
walks in circles. Whining. Pawing her ear.
“Oh who’s a silly girl?” mother laughs, rubbing Lavender’s neck
in a brief pause from her circling. It soothes. Distracts. For a
moment, Lavender believes this affection will cure her of the
pressure and ache as she becomes lost in the sensation.
But mother’s hand withdraws, returning Lavender to the
wrongness inside her. The tick swelling. The size of a briolette.
“Is she okay?” the son says, scratching Lavender’s rear.
Lavender barks.
“She’s fine,” mother says. “Just a silly girl.”
Lavender barks again.
“Did she eat?”
“Of course,” father says. “I fed her before you got up.”
“Maybe she needs to go out?”
“No,” mother barks, fed up with the questioning. Desperate for a
pleasant visit from the people she remembers loving. “She was just
out. She’s just being silly.”

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 Lavender whimpers. Failing to comprehend. She barks. Failing
to communicate.
“Hush.” Mother gently bops the dog’s nose.
“Grammy,” the child says, running to her grandmother’s leg.
“Doggy hurt.”
“Oh no no no sweetie.” The mother scoops her granddaughter
up. “She’s just being a big goofball.”
“No no. She hurt.”
“She just wants attention.”
Beneath them, Lavender spins, pawing her ears, keening.
Trying to mold her whines and grunts into vowels and accents. A
noise her keepers can understand. Stamping her feet, tapping a
message in an undiscovered language. The tick swells, the pressure
grows. Her body invaded, turned alien. Home turned unrecognizable.
Her family turns their heads away, distracted by a new discussion,
another hummingbird lit upon the feeder. She flails at empty air, at
the carpet, at a wall, as though sunk through thick old water, fathoms
down, where no one can see.

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It’s almost every night: I’ll be driving home when some cocksucker
rolls up behind me, running their brights, blowing out my rearview,
flooding my vision with blinding white. Maybe it’s by mistake, maybe
it’s intentional—a jackass trying to fuck with me, but it doesn’t matter.
The outcome’s the same.
So here’s what I do: I grab the rearview mirror and tilt it just so
until their headlights shine right back in their fucking eyes. Rub their
faces in it. See how they like that. And I’d like to say that what
happens next is that the car behind me wobbles side to side,

338
overcorrecting before careening off the road. Headlights gone,
nobody’s problem now.
But that never happens. Not once. At best they switch off their
brights or they accelerate and pass. The definition of anticlimax.
Lynn hates that I do this, and I’ve been doing it longer than
we’ve been married. She says I could get someone killed. I tell her
that if you run your brights right behind someone, you deserve to
crash.
“You’ll just piss’em off,” she says. “What if they follow you
home?”
“No one’s gonna follow me home.” And no one has. Not yet.
Chickenshits, all of them. But ever since she mentioned it, I’ve been
praying for one to try.

I hate driving during the day. The sheer congestion of it. We’ve
convinced ourselves that every space needs to be filled, so we fill
them with cars, every single day. So I mostly work evenings into
nights. But not today. Today, I signed up for a morning-to-afternoon,
because it’s a longer shift and I need the hours. So I’m out of the
house at 9:00 AM, which is just more salt in the wound. I try to never
be out of bed before noon.
At least it’s summer. There are three fucking colleges in this
town, so during semester the commute is even more of a nightmare.
Clogged with living garbage in tank tops and pajama bottoms. Tan
muscled trash babies in sports cars racing up and down narrow
avenues, tossing empties from windows and running over strays. But
for now, the students are gone—oh so thankfully gone—and the
streets are wide open, the whole world feels open, the sky open, the
sun is gold, and even though it’s horrible to be awake this early, the

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ache is ignorable from moment to moment. A twinge of sensation
that could be interpreted as warmth and life inside me.
I slow my ’99 Camry—rattling with age, trembling grey like a frail
horse—to the North Pleasant Street/Kellog Ave intersection in the
center of three lanes, heeding the red light. Flanked by two others—
a blue Honda Civic to my right, a white Kia Sedona idling in Left Turn
Only. The light clicks to green and I ease off the brake but this
fucking, this fucking Honda Civic just guns it, swinging out in front of
me from the right lane, nearly clipping the Sedona turning left,
blowing past us onto Kellog. I smash the horn and the Sedona does
the same and I catch a glimpse of the kid driving: tank top, wavy ball
of surfer hair. Face like a male model’s.
A fucking college kid. I always forget—some students stay on
campus through the summer. You can never get rid of all of them.
Like fucking ants.
If he’s heading where I think he’s heading, there’s a spot I can
cut him off. So I stomp the gas. The Camry shakes and heaves but
complies, engine moaning, under-inflated tires pulling at the blacktop
to push me forward. I keep it ten miles over the speed limit, and the
street is mostly empty so there isn’t much to worry about. Up ahead
at the Main Street intersection, I’m blessed with a fresh yellow and
zero oncoming traffic, so I press the gas harder and whip the wheel
left and gun it down the way, passing the bookstore and Indian
restaurant and Black Sheep Bakery. Past the pizzeria and Women’s
Club and boom—right there, the Kellog Ave outlet. I swing left and
there it is—the blue Civic heading straight toward me.
I wrench the wheel till the hood points toward the sidewalk, then
pull the Camry in reverse, evening it out so its side is blocking both
lanes completely. Blue Civic would need to go up on the sidewalk to
get past me, and even the most reckless shitty kid is unlikely to pull a
move like that. I shove the car into park.
The Civic arrives, slowing to a halt. The kid starts honking. I roll
down my window. “You can’t just do whatever the fuck you want,

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man.”
The kid scrunches his face. Baffled. Stupid.
“I saw what you did back there. You cut us all off.”
The kid rolls his eyes and leans out the window. “Are you
fucking kidding me?”
“You can’t just do whatever you want, dude.” I shrug at him.
“Other people live here.”
“Get out of the fucking way!” He screams, pounding on the horn.
“Jesus Christ, go.”
I think about getting out. I think about getting my bag. But
there’s too much daylight and this is already too blatant, too
provocative. I pull the car out of park. “You think about what you did,”
I yell. “This isn’t your goddamn mom’s house.” I swing left, pulling
forward, opening the roadway. He guns around me through the
empty oncoming lane, screaming while he passes, the words
indecipherable, just noise.

The joke is that literally everyone around here has worked MSC Data
Capture at least once or twice in their life. It’s the easiest job in the
world to get, and even easier to keep. Dialing the public, reading
survey scripts off a computer screen, inputting the data. That’s it. All
you have to prove is that you can speak and hear and they’ll hire
you, even if you otherwise can’t perform the position’s other basic
functions. There are guys working here who can’t pronounce half the
script—dudes who can’t read half the script—but they still thrive
here, because none of it actually matters. (There’s this kid—Bruno
fucking Bailey, this real wild Southie—who rolls joints at his desk
every other shift. Never been caught). It’s a numbers game where
the numbers don’t matter. All you got to do is show up and put in the
minimum. Not the kind of place you’d want to get stuck at if you had

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any ambitions. The only way you’d consider it a long-term prospect
is if you were fucked for life.
I’ve been here thirteen years.
I’m late, as usual, rushing in through the sliding doors, exhaling
a quick “hey” to Shane the security guard, then into the dialing room
to sign in at the supervisors’ desk. Paul, one of the supes, looks up
at me, then at the clock, then at me again. “You’re seventeen
minutes late.”
“Traffic.”
He arches a brow, cocking his head toward the rest of the room.
“Everyone else made it on time.”
“I very much doubt that. Sincerely.”
“It’s a figure of speech.”
“Look, please —” and it’s a surprise even to me that I’m already
almost crying “—please please please I don’t need this today.”
Paul snorts his wide pig nostrils and tosses his pen on the desk.
“Honestly, I’m just making conversation here.”
“Great. Fun. Thanks.” I drop the pen on the sign-in sheet, grab
my headset from the filing cabinet and head to my station.
The dialing room is big and beige—ten long desks each split
into twenty-five stations on either side. Each station equipped with a
touchtone landline phone, an autodialer, and a desktop computer
that was already old in the early aughts. A quiet, ambient hostility—a
factory floor but white collar, without even the superficial benefits of
American myth.
The higher-ups randomize the seating chart every day to keep
us off balance, so you never know which station you’ll be at or who
you’re gonna be stuck between. If you’re lucky, you get Cynthia Falla
and Jerome Powers (at least those are the names they use while
dialing. MSC Data Capture allows for pseudonyms), because they’re
total fucking pros with insane completion rates, so you never have to
worry about small talk. But today I’m between Hilda Swan and
Ricardo Boston. Ricardo Boston is always organizing and re-

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organizing his pills at his desk, and grunts and curses whenever he
gets hung up on (which is almost always). Hilda Swan just stinks of
gasoline and pee. On the plus side, she has a surprisingly great
completion rate, so she barely stops to chat. But today she’s
nightmarishly ripe, canceling it all out.
I plug in my headset, sit down, and stuff tissues between my
eyes and glasses so no one will see me weep.

“Now my third sister went to live in Louisiana to be closer to her

father-in-law, and we weren’t real close to begin with so I was fine
but Mama was real put out. And this wasn’t my sister with the drug
problem. She lives real close and I still see her, sometimes.”
The respondent has been talking for five minutes. I had asked
whether she had had a physical in the past twelve months and this is
her response. MSC Data Capture requires that I state the question a
full three times before marking it as a refusal and moving on, but I
can’t get a word in. I can’t bring myself to. She said she lives alone
and it’s apparent she hasn’t spoken to another person in days.
The survey is supposed to take twenty minutes, if your
demographics qualify. We’ve been on for thirty-five and haven’t even
passed the screener questions yet.
“My mother lives in Carl Junction and she has her entire life,
except when we lived in Clarksdale but that was long enough ago it
doesn’t really count.”
A hand reaches out in front of me and clicks mute on my
headset receiver. The hand is attached to Malinda, another
supervisor. Only twenty-three. Way too young to be in that role, but I
guess she possessed a severe enough face and personality to
qualify. We all resented her when she got promoted, though most of

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us would rather self-immolate than supervise this place. But no one
here would waste an opportunity to be resentful.
“You have to end the call,” she says, arms folded, eyes fixed in
resting glare.
“I can get through this,” I say. I haven’t had a complete in weeks.
It doesn’t actually matter because this place will never actually fire
you because of performance alone. A written warning at most. But
there are people here who’ll show up without pants because they
forgot to put on pants before leaving home and they get more
completes than I do. Jesus Christ. At my last performance review,
the supervisor just shrugged and told me that maybe my rates are so
low because I’m just unlikable. Fuck. “I can do this,” I say.
“No, you can’t. End it. I can’t fucking take it.” She stomps back
to the supervisor desks, puts on her headset and glowers at me. I
click myself off mute and try asking the question a third time.

People see me and they see an ape. They see an ape pulled over
my skin. A stupid disgusting orangutan blowing snot, batting at
objects he doesn’t understand—trying to make them work in ways
they were never intended. Stupid fucking shirt and sweatpants filled
with garbage stupid disgusting ass ape. They look at me like I’m not
worthy of life.

The sun’s still high when I get out. Again, this almost never happens,
and I hate being out during daylight—more people and that means
more cars, more wolves feuding for the head of some fraud
hierarchy. But I know it makes Lynn happy because it means we can

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actually have dinner together. I can’t remember the last time. So I
swallow it down and grip the wheel tight, telling myself it’s worth it.
I take backroads to dodge traffic, but even then, there’s no
escaping people. Spilling out of houses, out of the sky, bubbling up
from the earth. Building new structures, new complexes, casting dust
and shadow over the old world. Future ruins, and of course new
roads to reach them.
So many people, too many people, and on a strip of blacktop
between vacant rolling fields I get stuck behind one. A woman in a
merlot Chevy hatchback, swerving back and forth across the lane.
Through her rear windshield, I see her hand lifted in front of her face,
clutching a phone. So predictable. Split between worlds, she glides
over the painted lines, before overcorrecting and kissing the
shoulder.
Up ahead, maybe a few dozen yards, I see the bicyclist.
Bicyclists and pedestrians are always paying the price for driver
negligence. Everyone knows that. But there’s something more to it.
A real animosity. The fact is: drivers despise bicyclists—they view
them as an impediment to their vehicle’s sovereignty. Bicyclists and
peds are just reminders of social obligation, a responsibility to
others, and there’s nothing drivers hate more. Sealed away from all
others and their disgusting oxygen atop thrones of plastic and metal,
glass and pleather—drivers loathe their responsibility to fellow
travelers more than anything. Because driving is like any drug. You
never want to care about anyone else when you’re strung out.
My muscles tighten as the Chevy rides up on the cyclist, driver
still clutching her phone, weaving back and forth. The hatchback
veers left over the centerlines, and for a moment there’s this hope
that she sees the bicyclist, that she’s giving the rider enough space,
that she understands precisely what her vehicle is cable of inflicting
on a human body. That she’s simply doing the right thing. But then
the car yanks back toward the shoulder, and its tires cross over into
the bicyclist’s space.

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 I lay on the horn.
The cyclist sees it coming and maneuvers, dodging the Chevy’s
bumper, swerving off the road, wobbling, then falling sideways to the
grass. The hatchback proceeds down the road, oblivious to what it’d
done.
I don’t pull over to see if the cyclist is alright. I press the gas,
keeping the Chevy in sight. The Chevy cruises past the turn I usually
take to get home. I take my foot off the gas and touch the stem for
my turn signal. Fuck it. I stomp hard, blowing past my turn in quiet
pursuit.

She pulls into an empty driveway to an Easter-yellow bungalow and

barren lawn. I roll on past and keep driving until I’m two blocks away,
before slowing to the curb and shoving the Camry in park. I pull my
bag into the front seat and open it.
All I need is my hoodie and hunting knife, so I remove each and
just sit. Pulling on the hoodie, running the AC, waiting for the sun to
sink, sky shifting from pink to charcoal. The block fills with hazy blue
moonlight and I get out, knife folded, held tight in the hoodie’s
pocket. The night breathes hot and waxy. The sweatshirt is like a
trash bag, wringing out moisture, but the hood feels like a mask, and
that feels like safety. I bob down the avenue, behind the bushes,
between the street lamps.
Pretend to disappear. Become objective, just a perspective from
a vantage point. What do you see? Single-story houses, passably
manicured lawns, stone walkways, trellises, wind chimes, political
signs. Crows. Squirrels. But no people. Not a single person outside.
Too perfect.
I reach her house. The lights are on inside, and that’s scary, but
it only feels scary. You can’t really see through a window when

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there’s light on your side and darkness on the other. I’m as good as
invisible. So I step onto the driveway and unfold the knife.
Crouched at the rear of the Chevy, I peer over the trunk at the
house. No movement through the yellow-lit windows. I look down at
the tire, grip the knife, and cover my face with the inside of my elbow.
Stab. The rubber’s tough but it gives, it opens, it lets me in, and the
air pushes back, pissing back the blade. I look up at the windows.
Still no one there.
I crawl along the bumper to the other rear tire. Stab. Release.
The rubber sinks, flattening into the asphalt. I scuttle along the
passenger doors to the front of the car. Stab into rubber. Air hisses
out the wound.
A hinge squeals, a door slams. A bellow. “What the fuck are you
doing?” The driver, the woman, standing there, a silhouette in the
doorframe.
I run. I don’t even think, I just turn and run. I run even though
generally no one gives chase, no one gets farther than the end of
their lawn. Most people aren’t that stupid. They know I have a knife.
But you never know.
So I run. I run for blocks, I run until my lungs give out and I toss
myself into some public bushes, shaking, heaving, trying not to puke.
Righting myself, I peek back, squinting through street lamps’ pale
light. Glancing at the other houses, the lawns.
No one. Not the woman, no neighbors, not even pets
wandering. Just croaks and buzzing; crickets sawing and frogs
screwing.
Crawling from the bushes, I keep left and circle the
neighborhood, back to where my car is. I get in, stuff the knife and
hoodie into my bag, and drive home.

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I don’t delude myself. I know this is only getting her off the road for a
week, tops. But last year, at least four hundred people died on
Massachusetts roadways. An average of at least one person per
day. And because of me, there will be at least three days where that
woman isn’t on the road, and maybe somebody will live because of
it. I don’t know. I just don’t know. I know it’s a Band-Aid on an
amputation but what else is there?

Lynn cries and screams when I get home. “Why didn’t you call?”
“I had my phone off,” I say. “I mean, the battery died.” I toss my
bag in the spare room where I’ve been sleeping.
“Well, what were you doing?”
“Just driving around. I lost track of time. I’m sorry.”
“I thought you were fucking dead.”
Massaging my temples. Needles in my lobes. “I said I’m sorry.”
She sniffs the air. Trying to pin a scent on me. “Were you out
with someone?”
“What’re you talking about?”
She looks down into the table and doesn’t look back up. “Were
you with someone that I don’t know about?”
“Jesus Christ.” Voice cracking. “Like anyone else would have
me. What the fuck.”
Her face twists like a rag and she bawls. “Then what were you
doing?”
“I was fucking driving around. I like to drive around.” And this is
true. Sometimes I’ll take Route 116 up to Conway on a winding gray
serpent, pushing through conifers as tall as office buildings. Even
during the day, the road is empty and free, like the beginning of the
end of humanity, like the world is beginning to come back, and only I

348
am around to witness it. “You never think about this shit when I’m out
late.”
“That’s different.”
“Not really.”
She sinks into her chair and looks away. “I wanted to have
dinner with you.”

I always need to know I can exit any place and any situation at any
moment. Never get stuck in a corner. Never get boxed in. So I keep
my bag close.
Inside my bag:

One pair of clean pants

Two clean shirts—one short sleeve, one long
One sweater
One hoodie
Three pairs of clean socks
Three pairs of clean underwear
Two bottles of water, unopened
Five cans of Chef Boyardee ravioli
Flashlight
Phone charger
Burner phone and charger
My birth certificate
A crowbar
The hunting knife

Thank God we never had children.

I can’t believe she hasn’t left yet. Or kicked me out. But in fact, I
know precisely why. She’s terrified of the disruption it would cause;
of becoming spinning, alone. The horror of re-entering coupling, the

349
bars, the matchmaking websites, faceless strangers messaging,
desperate to own and plug your body. I know her too well. She
wasn’t built for that shit. Me being the way I am is already a blow to
her sense of stability, but if I left it’d be even worse—or at least that’s
what she’s convinced herself. Our dissolution would signify a failure
—a failure of her faith in herself and me and us; of so much
irreplaceable time misspent. It’s a genuine fear, therefore an
exploitable one, and as much as I tell myself I’m not exploiting it,
deep down I know the truth.

Summer allergies. The worst thing in the world, the worst fucking
thing. You can never understand unless it happens to you. All day
and all night blowing ropes into stupid little hankies. Little disgusting
crumpled tufts filling up my car, filling up my station at work.
“You got a cold, man?” Dante Paris says, covering his mouth
with his hand, peeking over at me and my station. Usually, he’s one
of the better dialers to be stuck beside, because usually he minds his
own fucking business. But usually is only fucking usually, apparently.
“It’s these fucking allergies,” I tell him, muting my headset,
huffing the tissue, blowing dry sticky slugs. “And you know what? It’s
worse than a fucking cold, because a cold will end. But not this shit.
This is just my fucking life now.” I open the tissue and peer at the
slug—tinted rust—then crumple it, tossing it into the station’s corner.
“It’s not fucking fair. No one—no person, animal or otherwise—
deserves to deal with this shit. I mean, look at this.” Gesturing at the
pyramid of crumpled tissues. “Do you know how much tissues cost?
I don’t want to have to pay for this shit. It’s so fucked.”
“Okay, man,” Dante says, angling away from me in his chair.
I hit the autodialer. Three rings. Voicemail. Enough time for my
sinuses to fill with more warm thick slugs. I stuff my hand into the

350
tissue box. My fingers scrape nothing. Look inside: nothing. I pat the
pile of used kleenex—all soaking wet, unusable. Jesus fucking
Christ.
Maybe just wait it out. I look up at the clock. Two hours left.
I get up, heading past the supervisor desk toward the bathroom.
“Hey!” Dennis calls out from the desk. Fucking Dennis. No
supervisor takes his job more seriously than fucking Dennis, and that
makes him the worst person in the world. Worse than anybody.
Worse than Jean-Bédel Bokassa. He taps the sign out sheet with his
pen.
“Look —” Voice cracking. Trying to contort my face into
something that suggests affability. “These allergies are killing me. I’m
out of tissues. I’ve got to blow my nose.”
“Still got to sign out.”
“I’m just getting some fucking tissues. I’m not signing out.”
“Anytime you leave this room you have to sign out.”
I take the pen and sign and mark my time, letting my fucking
snot drip down onto the sheet. “You fucking happy?”
“That isn’t necessary, Ezra.”
I just walk away, out of the dialing room, down the hall to the
men’s room.
The stall furthest from the door—my stall—is occupied, so I go
in the one at the other end and sit on the seat. Sometimes I’ll just
stare into the grey of the metal stall door—imagine it was the world
and the world was nothing. That I was nothing, melted down into
warm soft grey.
Down the row at the end stall (my stall), I hear Ricardo Boston
grunting through clenched teeth. “Fuck I’ve got a dirty butt. I’ve got a
very dirty butt.”
The illusion breaks. I’m here. I’m something, and so is the world.
I’m here and so is everybody else.
I wad up like twenty plies of toilet paper and stuff them into my
pocket, then head back to the dialing hall, to my row and there—

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there right in front me: Dante Paris bending over my station, lifting
my bag.
“Hey,” I shout at him, passing the supervisor desk, Dennis
gesturing at me, telling me to sign back in. “Hey.”
Dante looks up, dropping my bag to the floor. “Sorry, I was just
moving it.”
“Don’t touch my fucking bag.” I get in his face. He falls backward
into my station, knocking the computer monitor with his elbow,
pressing his hand into my pile of kleenex.
“Hey hey hey,” Dennis shouts, coming over. “What’s the
problem?”
“Nothing,” I say.
“Yeah, nothing,” Dante says.
Dennis points at me and gestures toward the break room.
“Come talk with me a minute.”
“Nothing happened.”
“I know, but let’s talk. Real quick.”
Fuck. It’s fucked. It’s all fucked. I somehow fucked my spot at
the one place where you can get away with anything.
I follow him.
Dennis leans against a vending machine and looks me in the
eye with that I’m-not-mad-I’m-disappointed wannabe father shit. “I
think you should head home for the day.”
“God.” Bones and blood pushing through my skin. “I said
nothing happened. He said nothing happened.”
“Dude, I fucking saw you. You can’t be pushing and intimidating
people, man. I’m not writing you up or anything but you have to
leave. Just for tonight.”
I storm back to my station, grab my bag—leaving my headset
and tissue pile—and exit out the building. It’s already night. The only
thing to go right today. I get in my car and take the backroads
because I’m in no rush to be home.

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A long straight corridor unfurls before me and it’s beautiful. Plowing a
tunnel through the night, past the blur of trees and hills beside me. A
droning bass rattling my speakers—vague music from one of the
college stations, intermingling with the engine’s dull thrum and it
feels like fingers adjusting my spine. I move like a cell through
vessel. Alone in the body of the world.
A ropey strand catches in my throat. I grab a handful of toilet
paper and hock into it. Like egg, like cum. I toss it to the passenger
side floor, a floor you can’t see for the tissues.
A pair of lights creep out from around a bend and into my
rearview, rending the illusion of isolation. Only seconds and they’re
growing, gaining, and then the car’s right on my ass, practically
tonguing my bumper. High beams flash. I wait. They flash again, and
the driver lays on the horn.
A rule of mine: when I’ve got some guy behind me, and they’re
honking or flashing trying to get me to speed up—especially when
I’m already going the limit—I’ll drop my speed by five MPH. They
flash or honk again, they lose another five. Do it again, they lose
another. See how they like that. Once I get down to thirty or twenty-
five MPH, they usually pass, and I’m left wishing they’d followed me
home instead.
Maybe tonight.
So I let my foot off the gas. The Camry moans and drags down
to forty-five MPH. The car behind clutches closer to my ass, less
than half a car’s length between us.
You like that?
The lights flash again. A double honk. I drop down to forty MPH.
The centerlines change from solid to broken. If they had any
sense they’d pass, but the car honks and flashes its brights again. I
can go all fucking night, bitch. I drop it down to thirty MPH. More

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honking, more flashing. Half a mile later and the centerlines return
from broken to solid.
There: the headlights veer left toward the oncoming lane. Now
the car’s trying to pass. Fucking idiot.
Nope. Smashing the gas, I tug the wheel left to stay ahead. You
lost your chance buddy. The engine growls, shuddering to keep
pace. Now you’re stuck with me. My eyes flick back and forth
between the rearview and the road. The headlights behind glide
right. I fucking stand on the gas and swing back into the right lane,
engine rumbling up through the floorboards into my anus. The
Camry glides too far, front tire grazing the shoulder. I wrestle it back
into lane, still flooring it, climbing to fifty-five, sixty, pushing all the
way to seventy MPH, seventy-five, eighty. The headlights in the
rearview slowly shrink. My eyes click back to the road and
Four legs. Mottled fur. Glowing marble eyes. Broad beautiful
antlers.
I nudge the wheel and slam the brakes, but my right foot is still
on the gas. The Camry slides, slides past the deer, tires squealing,
branding blacktop. Spinning out. Releasing the gas, the Camry
bucks to a halt at the end of a perfect one-eighty arc. Headlights
resting back on the stationary deer. My headlights blending with the
other car’s headlights. The deer between. And then
It sounds like buckshot into a beer keg. The car—a piss-yellow
Volkswagen Golf—swerves too late, smashing the animal’s hind.
The deer spins like a wet nickel, spitting meat and fur, half-
annihilating across the roadway. The VW passes, shifting the air
pressure, rocking my Camry. Brakes squealing, burning deeper
blacks into the asphalt. It skids right, breaches the breakdown lane,
tries to correct but loses purchase, and plows the guardrail—a
second round of buckshot—before flipping through to the ravine
below.

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Heave in. Heave out. My heart in my throat, my fist pulling at my
chest. I tear the seatbelt off. Put the car in park but keep it running,
and let my foot off the brake. Pull my bag from the back into the front
seat. Unzip it and remove the knife. Step out into night. Blend into it.
What do you see?
There’s red, and there’s red twisted red, smashed into blacktop
and smeared. Fetid heat and perfect moon grey and the filthiest
dead shit reek you can imagine. An impossible stench, like rotting
already, like bags of shit left in the sun. Logs of shit in ruptured
intestine. Unwashed fur on burst flesh. Unwashed red stench,
unwashed fur hot guts. The stench of bones. Unwashed red.
An insane scream. Sustained. Like the way babies scream
forever, never blowing out their voices. It isn’t coming from the car in
the ravine, but from the road still. Behind me. Turn to it. It’s a shape,
moving jagged in the grey light. A maw and antlers stretched toward
sky. Two legs, a pair of hoofs trying to stand. Only its front two legs
exist now, the rear vanished into ripped red. It keeps trying to stand,
unable to comprehend its predicament. All it understands is hurt and
wanting to get away from it. To run away on legs that no longer exist.
It screams. A scream that would end the world if the world made any
sense, but here we are so what does that mean?
Another stench wafting through heat. Exhaust stench. Sickly
brown syrup sucked through tubes, burned in engines, burned and
exhaled grey and black. Follow it. See it hissing up from the ravine.
The glow of headlights producing a faint halo at the lip.
Tracing the black skids to the flattened guardrail, I peer down
the ravine. It’s a miniature tornado’s wake—leveled trees and brush,
a path carved down to the Volkswagen. It rests on its side, nuzzled
between ancient firs and the ravine’s incline. Coolant spitting.
Billowing dense miasma.
I keep the knife folded and stick it in my back pocket, sliding
down to the car on damp grass and earth. Stepping onto the driver
side door, feeling the ruptured engine’s vibration through my foot.

355
Peering through the open window. A stink of beer and filth rising
through. A gurgling down there, distinct from the radiator spitting.
Sounds a body makes.
I take out my phone and shine a light into the crushed
compartment. The driver—a rag-dolled bloody frat boy—appears
beneath the light, crumpled into the dashboard, resting atop the
passenger window (now a floor to him). Head split, maybe—not sure
whether the ragged red of his face is only ruined skin or that the
bone is cracked, too. “What the fuck,” he froths and gurgles.
“Hey,” I say. “You alright?”
“No. No,” he shrieks. “I’m—I’m fucking hurt.”
“Can you get up?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know.”
I reach for my knife, hold it tight inside my pocket, then release.
“You really shouldn’t’ve done that back there,” I say.
The boy just moans.
“Running your fucking brights on me. Fucking drinking.” I’m so
angry I’m almost crying. “What the fuck did you think was going to
happen?”
“You—” the boy gurgles. “You fucking—” And I can see him
putting it all together in his damaged brain. He realizes who I am.
“You fucking—” He wants to blame me.
Completely disgusting. Refusing to take even the slightest bit of
responsibility. I switch off the light and turn from him, scaling the
grass and dirt back up to the road.
“Wait,” he screams. “Wait. Please.” Again and again, then it isn’t
even words, just screaming, a counterpoint to the doomed deer’s
bellows above. Two jagged tones, sometimes in harmony but mostly
not.

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Years back, before we were married, when we still shared a bed—
more than a decade now—I was driving Lynn home, in her car (she
was drunk), late from one of her aunt’s parties. I didn’t want to go,
and I was right to resist it—none of her family took me seriously.
They’d look at me and they wouldn’t even see an ape—not even a
living thing. Just a weight fastened to Lynn’s ankles. They were
disgusting people then and still are, those who’ve survived.
We wound around the hills cutting from Westfield to
Easthampton, silent in our seats, not even music on. I wanted her to
hear the simmer.
It doesn’t matter how closely I was watching the road. It was
inevitable. Rounding a bend, a deer appeared beneath my
headlights, stopped stupid in the middle of the lane.
It pulverized the moment we touched it. A burst of meat and
stench. I stomped the brakes. We caught our breaths, examined
each other’s bodies and finally got out. That identical rotten meat shit
stench.
The bumper smashed; a crack in the windshield; a crater in the
hood. Red freckled all over. Tufty chunks of hide. Lynn beginning to
cry, me holding her tight, no longer craving her guilt.
I told her that the car could probably make it home, so we got
back in and continued on, new internal rumbles accompanying the
standard engine growl. Lynn slipped her hand onto the top of my
thigh. I placed my own over and squeezed it tight.
At home we showered and fucked, harder and with more love
than even our first days of courting. A fresh knot in the rope of us.
We fell asleep, a strange peaceful slumber, clutching each other, her
head on my chest, breathing in sync.

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Thank God Lynn is asleep when I get home. I remove my shoes,
tiptoe to the spare room, and lie down on the cot. I think that I won’t
be able to sleep, but I do. My eyes blink closed and I’m inside a
container falling through space, falling through the atmosphere,
falling through oxygen and steam, landing on a black gelatinous
planet, a planet of endless swamps in every direction and trees like
razorwire. I dig crabs from sunken marshes, tearing them open with
bare hands, sucking their insides from carapace for sustenance. No
sun—just a silver moon straining through fog and ropey vines. Voidal
brush shivering. No sound but my breath and my jaw clicking and
sloppy skittering at my feet.
I wake behind the wheel, smashing through a guardrail, my
body tearing through the seatbelt, launching through the windshield,
my weight flying forward. Flying through trees and the windows of
houses. I break my arms, legs, and neck on branches and
doorframes. Still flying, flying higher and higher, up through the
clouds and atmosphere, past gravity. I fly through the zero of space,
past the sun, the rest of our system. Flying past our galaxy to the
end of the universe, and break through the wall of that, to whatever
lies after. Then I wake up for real.

Driving to work means running the Route 9 gash through Hadley. A

scar of malls and strip malls. Malls always growing. Malls in front of
malls in front of beautiful shrinking farmlands that fill the air with
cattle shit heat stench.
Constant redundancy, at least twice of everything. Three
supermarkets and a Trader Joes, a Barnes & Noble and Bed, Bath &
Beyond; a Walmart a Lowes and a Home Depot; a Michael’s and a
Joann Fabrics; a JC Penny’s an H&M an Old Navy a TJ Maxx and a

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Marshalls. So compressed you could stand atop a utility pole and
see it all.
The Russell and Maple Street intersection divides the main
malls. Just take a left onto Maple, between a Wendy’s and a
KFC/Taco Bell, then a right onto another artery and you’re in the
Venture Way office park, where MSC Data Capture is nestled on the
first floor.
Traffic’s a holocaust. I see three accidents—a Highlander
wrapped around a tree; a fender bender between an F-150 and a
Chevy Venture; a motorcyclist being pulled onto a gurney—and it
takes all of my discipline not to stop at each crash site and open my
bag. But I’m almost there, I’ve almost made it, stuck at the Russell
and Maple red light, watching a Jeep Wrangler run over a seagull.
The bird just walks into traffic and stands there, doesn’t even attempt
to fly. The Wrangler rolls forward, front wheel smashing the gull into
tar. Wings flash wide and symbolic, beak open, batting, shrieking. An
SUV full of young men in tank tops and headbands—they point and
laugh at it. They’re watching and they’re just laughing, all of them.
I become extremely aware of my bag.
A loud fucking bang across the street. A bang and a scrape, like
a shovel dragged across steel. I look just in time to catch this coupe
—this huge white boat—swinging left out of lane into oncoming
traffic, scraping against the car in front of it. It weaves over the
centerline and bucks, like the driver’s tapping the gas and releasing,
over and over. Oncoming traffic honks and swerves over the
breakdown lane, cutting around while the coupe pushes forward in
violent heaves. Finally, the boat just guns it, shooting ahead through
the intersection, swaying back and forth across all lanes while
everyone else scatters to the roadside.
Squinting through the coupe’s windows, I can’t see anyone. Like
no one’s driving. Phantasm.
I wait for the green. One second, two, three, four, five. It doesn’t
come so I check left, then right, and smash the gas, whipping the

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wheel left and pushing through onto Maple, horns caterwauling all
around. I reach my turn and blow past Venture Way, keeping the
coupe in sight, gaining on it.
The coupe sways and staggers like a drunk, slowing suddenly,
before taking off again, tearing all over the road. We’re into
farmlands now with thankfully less traffic, and the two cars that do
pass expertly swerve out of the way. It’s only seven or eight miles
before the coupe finally wags all the way across the road, departing
asphalt, hopping a runoff ditch and smashing forward into a utility
pole. Halted.
Letting my foot off the gas, I drift into the shoulder. Park it but
keep it running. I pull my bag into the front seat and remove the
knife.
Crossing the street, squinting through terrible sunlight into the
coupe. I still can’t make out a driver, or a passenger—no one. It’s not
that the windows are tinted—I can see into the car just fine. I just
don’t see anybody.
Approach the way cops do—from the rear left taillight, hugging
the body. Keep checking for anyone who might spring out. Even if
they’ve schemed up an ambush, they’ll still need to turn around to
get at me. This provides some advantage. I glance back at the road
—left and right. No cars, for now. I unfold the knife.
A squeal. A squeal from inside the coupe.
Through the rear window and passenger windows—still no one,
just empty seats. Stepping forward, I peer through the driver side.
Another squeal. A raspy inhuman grunt.
Movement. Movement in the driver seat. Naked flesh, folded
over. Hairy and pale. A large nub of flesh, shaking and bucking.
I breathe in. Knife secure in hand, I grab the door with the other,
yanking it open. The driver falls out. Pink skin. White hairs.
Squealing pink blubber, falling from the driver seat into the grass.
A pig. A hundred or so pound hog snorting and squealing. It
hops up on its trotters and scampers away through the brush,

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popping out the other end onto farmland, shrinking away toward
somewhere, away from something.
Jerking back to the coupe’s interior, I scan for an attacker, for
someone else. Ducking my head inside, scanning the seats, the
floors. No one there.
Folding the knife, I head back to the Camry. I sit and stare at the
wheel for five minutes. Humming a song, one from my childhood.
I’ve forgotten the name but the melody holds tremendous relevance.
Then I put the car in drive and steer it back toward work.

They seat me by the supervisor desk and I have to listen to them all
bitch and chatter the whole shift. My father hates my husband. My
wife hates my sister. I hate my daughter’s pre-school teacher.
Fucking narcissists, all of them.
Then the droolings coalesce into something familiar. Something
with terrible potential. “It’s gotta be just one guy, right?”
“Yeah, or like a few of them. A gang, maybe.”
“It legit happened to my sister’s neighbor. Just last week. She
came out and there was this guy by her car. All her tires slashed.”
“Yeah, we’ve got a group going on NextDoor. We’re gonna get
this guy. I mean, like, tires are freaking expensive.”

I never eat before my shift’s over. I just can’t before then. It’ll ruin my
day. Food is an enemy. The floods of anxious nausea. The way
ulcers tear me open from the inside out. The way fibrous foods turn
to liquid shit the moment they hit my pancreas, leaking out my anus.
Work exacerbates it. People’s voices exacerbate it. I just can’t do it.
Not until the day’s finally over and I can be alone. Real alone.

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 I know Lynn is worried. Everything about me worries Lynn, but
this one particular thing—this I can hide, somewhat. I tell her I eat at
home while she’s at work. I tell her I eat again before my shift. I tell
her I’m eating three square meals a day, vegetables and protein and
all the essential vitamins and nutrients. It would be wonderful, but I
can’t do it. I can’t.
I clock out at 11:00 and call in an order. Domino’s pizza—ground
beef, black olives, onions and peppers. Every time. I’ve got the
timing perfect so it’s fresh out the oven and into the box when I roll
up. Then I drive to a parking space downtown to ingest it in solitude.
Stomach twisted, walls squeezed together, begging for its first and
only meal of the day.
I slide the first greasy slice into my mouth and scan the block.
Lines of darkened storefronts—what used to be a Korean restaurant,
what used to be a bookstore. A mom and pop café being converted
into a Dunkin’. The streets empty. Empty aside from a man—this one
man I always see.
I’ve seen him for years, as long as I can remember. Long gray
hair, ripped jeans, never in a shirt. Scrawny frame but not without
power—taught, stringy muscles beneath tanned flesh. Homeless—
an always-was, I’m sure. A stray, a true lifer.
I’m jealous of him, sometimes.
He’s always picking trash off the road. Nothing to sell or trade.
Just cleaning his space—our space. Work that no one else will do.
He never begs. He never asks for anything.
He fears God. I’m sure of it. Some god—maybe not anyone
else’s but his. At crosswalks he’ll get on his hands and knees and
slowly crawl across, muttering prayer. Before I had a car, I’d see him
on the bus, climbing up the steps hand over hand, crawling up and
down the aisle, between people’s legs, praying under his breath.
Now he’s here, in the dead vacant heat, setting down on his
hands and knees at the foot of the crosswalk. He begins crawling
across, one hand after the other, whispering prayer, unaware that I

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or anyone else is watching. That’s true faith, true commitment.
Performance not for anyone else but him and his god. One hand
after the other, crawling to appease.
A roar from behind, chewing up the quiet. Rubbernecking, I
catch a pair of headlights scythe around the bend, tearing toward us.
I press on my horn to warn the man in the road, but he ignores it,
continuing his slow scuttle. I honk again as the headlights gain,
glowing at my back, pushing out in front of me, setting the man
aglow, pulling at his shadow and stretching it far up the street like
putty.
The car—a wine-red Scion—growls past me and collides.
The bumper flips the man on his back, pressing him down into
the street. His body twists, tires and undercarriage wringing him. The
rear wheels hump over his arms and legs and only then does the
Scion brake.
The driver side opens. A man—a boy—steps out. Tufts of
blonde hair poking out the bottom of a Patriots cap. White muscled
forearms. Cheekbones with baby fat hanging off.
I know him. From the call center. The piece of shit. I dialed
beside him earlier in the week. Spent his entire shift hitting on
Mackenzie Russo. Zero completes. Piece of fucking shit. I can’t
remember his name. But now I know his face. And his car.
The boy’s face conveys nothing. Just a mouth hung agape. Void
inside. I watch him glance side to side, up and down the road. A
panicked animal. Looking all over for witnesses but never glimpsing
me.
I wait for him to approach the body in the street. To see if the
man still breathes. I wait for him to look at what he did. But it never
happens. He gets back in his car and tears off.
I toss the pizza box off my lap, crank the ignition and stomp the
gas. The Camry heaves after him, rattling down empty Pleasant
Street. He’s far ahead but I can maybe stop him at the next
intersection.

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 Like a miracle, the traffic light flips yellow, then red. Stop, you
fucker. But true to his nature, the Scion pushes through, over the
hump, down the hill through the colleges. I lean on the gas, eyes on
the red light. The streets are dead, I tell myself. No one’s coming
through the intersection. I can just jet through, just this once. It’ll be
fine.
I slam the brake just ahead of the light.
I was right. The intersection’s clear. I could’ve run it with no
consequence. Too late now. The Scion is gone.
The light switches green and I swing a uey, back toward the
body in the street. Twisted, swollen all over. No breathing. Blood spat
from lips and nose, already congealing. Limbs crushed into
pavement. I get out of the car and scream for help but nobody
answers. I call 911 and nobody comes.

The body’s still in the street the next day, blackened with flies.
People walk by, they drive by, but they don’t look. They pretend it
isn’t there.
I make it to work early. First time in a long while—longer than I
can remember. I walk the parking lot, chaining butts, looking for the
Scion. Watching as everyone rolls in for their shift. I wait fifteen
minutes for that stupid red Scion but it never arrives so I go inside to
sign in.
“What took you?” Dennis says. “I saw you get here like an hour
ago.”
“Had an emergency,” I say. “I had to, like, check on something.”
“Oh. You okay?”
“False alarm.”
“Okay. I won’t mark you. Sit down and get dialing.”

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 I sit between Raul Vargas and Nashra Dar. I ask Nashra if she
knows the young blonde kid who works here. “Drives the red Scion,”
I specify. She shakes her head. I wait for Raul to get off his call and
ask him. He scrunches his face weird, like a whiff of halitosis, and
says “No, why?”
“Haven’t seen him today.”
“You two are pals?”
“There’s something I want to talk with him about.”
On break, I go out for a butt and see Tony and Chelle by the
smoker’s pole. I ask if they know the kid. “Why?” Chelle asks. “Is he
selling?”
“So you don’t know him?”
“Not really,” Tony says. “I’ve sat next to him a couple times. He
uses the name Dustin Callahan when he dials if it’s the guy you’re
talking about.”
“Does he drive a red Scion?”
“I don’t know, man.”
I head back to Dennis at the supervisor desk. “Hey, was Dustin
Callahan scheduled for today?”
“Excuse me?”
“Was he on the schedule? Or is it his day off or something?”
He narrows his eyes on me. “I don’t think that’s any of your
business.”
“Did he call in sick?”
“What did I just say? Get back to dialing.”
Back at my station, Raul eyes me from the side. “Did you find
out about your buddy?”
“Yeah, it’s fine. Forget it.” And I get back to dialing.

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In the spare room, on the cot, I wait for sleep. Fits and starts.
Miniature images flitting beneath eyelids. Castles hammered out of
torn steel. Burned bodies growing swollen in lakes. An enormous
hand, the size of Providence, smashing down to soil and concrete,
dragging across Earth’s surface, wiping out all in its way.
Then it hits.
Dustin got caught. That’s why he wasn’t at work. The cops
found him, easily. There’re cameras everywhere. There’s no privacy.
That has to be it—a CCTV camera captured the crash, the kill, his
face, his plates. There it is. It’s so obvious. I’ll be reading about him
in tomorrow’s paper.
And with that, the visions slip away into warm darkness. My
muscles unwind and I sink into mattress. The night wraps around me
and I’m gone.

He’s at work the next day. Smiling. He’s smiling. Bullshit blonde hair
under that stupid fucking Pats hat, bopping along, smiling. Just
hanging out, chatty with the other teen wastes.
I take my first break early and go investigate his car. It’s been
washed. What a piece of shit. The only evidence is a cracked front
bumper. No problem there. You can explain something like that away
easy.
Hit a wall in the parking garage.
Hit a dog on the way home. Nothing I could do, it ran right out.
I don’t know what happened, I just came back out and found it
like that.
A fucking demon. Ruiner of life.
Back at my station, I barely dial. All I can think about is what I’m
going to do. What I’m going to say. The words don’t come together in
my head. Only a vision of light and undefeatable justice. A brilliant

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white flame erupting from my throat, to lick the wickedness from the
whole of his being.
Clock hits 9:59. I’m scheduled till 12:00 but the college kids
never work late shifts so I switch off my dialer and watch the supe
desk, waiting for him to sign out.
“Hey. Ezra.” Dennis stares right at me. “What are you looking
at?”
I ignore him.
“I have you down for 12:00, Ezra. Keep dialing.”
I stare the biggest fucking knife at him. “I’m resting my eyes.”
“That’s what breaks are for.”
And here he comes. Dustin bopping up to the sign-out sheet,
one of the first in line. I get out of my chair and jog past the queue.
“Hey.”
He turns and sees me. He tenses. Maybe recognizing
something in my expression. Understanding fury and fate. He drops
the pen on the sign-out sheet and speeds toward the door.
“Ezra.” Dennis stands, coming at me. “You gotta stay dialing
your whole shift. Man, you know this.”
“I have to take a fucking dump, Dennis.” And I rush past him, to
the main lobby. Empty except the security guard. I jog through the
sliding doors into a wall of slumbering heat, just as the bloody Scion
rips past, out of the lot into another violent night.

I wait in the doorframe for Barb from HR to look up. Hunched over
her desk in a scoliotic curve, running a pen down triplicate forms. I
stand there for minutes, waiting for her to notice. Cherishing each
second, running through my spiel in my head.
Finally, she looks up. “Jeez.” Her head rolls—a small startle—
but her eyes stay dead empty. “Yeah? What is it?”

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 I step forward, wiping sweat from my forehead. “I’m sorry. I
wouldn’t normally do this.” Words I’ve been practicing the past half
hour, steeling up, staring at my reflection in the computer’s screen.
“It’s Bruno. Do you know Bruno?”
She places her pen on the desk and rests her chin on her palm.
“I might know Bruno.”
“He’s got drugs out at his station.”
She nods and looks back down at her papers. “Lots of people
got prescriptions. They got to take them at certain times.”
“He’s rolling a joint.”
She stops. Closes her eyes, exhaling the entirety of her.
“And I think he has a gun.” An embellishment on my part,
possibly. One time on a smoke break, I overheard him bragging
about carrying. Never saw any evidence to confirm, but none of that
matters. All I need is for Barb to leave this room.
She opens her eyes, resting them back on me. “Alright.” She
stands, grinding stained teeth beneath bloodhound jowls. “Where is
he?”
We head down the hallway, toward the dialing hall, stopping at
the door. I point out the row where I’d seen Bruno earlier. “Alright,”
Barb says. “I’ll take care of it. Go back to your seat.”
“I need to use the restroom.”
“Alright, go ahead. Then get back to it.”
Barb follows me to the lobby, stopping to talk with the security
guard. I continue around the corner to the men’s room and stand
outside the door.
“Hope you didn’t think it’d be a quiet night,” Barb says, and tells
the guard everything I told her. He gets up and follows her into the
dialing room.
I jog back to the HR office and hit the filing cabinets, yanking
open the top drawer. A-D. Fingering through the files—Cabello.
Cafferty. Cahill. There—Callahan. I pull it, flip through, find his

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address and snap a picture, then return it to the cabinet and head
back down the hallway.
“What the fuck are you talking about?” Bruno’s voice shouts out
from the dialing hall. “What the fuck?” Passing the doorway, I catch
him swinging at the seventy-one-year-old security guard. I take the
corner, through the lobby, through the sliding doors, to my car.

No music. Just a voice on the stereo instructing me where to go,

through winding bends to suburban hills. “Go through this light. Then
take the first right.” I swing a right onto Snowberry Court. “Your
destination will be on your right.” Cruising past identical pre-fab
saltbox houses, windows lit like jack o’ lantern sockets.
And there it is—the Scion settled in its driveway.
“Reach your destination.”
I roll on further and take the first right onto Trumble Lane. Slow it
to a park beside a row of arborvitae. I open my bag and remove what
I need. The hoodie slips over my torso and the knife grip into my
palm. The crowbar slips behind my waistline, down my leg,
obscured.
Heading up the street, the crowbar gives me a stiff gait. Trying
to make it look natural as cars pass, it occurs how obvious I look.
Especially in this neighborhood. The type of place where they call
cops on dogs barking. But I keep on, half-expecting each oncoming
car to light up white and blue the moment they clock me.
But they just drive by. No one stops me, cop or otherwise.
The Scion and its house sharpen into view. Waiting for one last
car to pass, I pull out the crowbar so I can really move. Crouching
low against the bushes, scuttling in fast, breaching the driveway. The
Scion just ahead, beneath a lit up house. I toss the crowbar to the

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grass and creep to the vehicle’s rear, watching for movement, inside
or out.
The knife unfolds. The tires deflate with familiar gasp. I wait a
beat between each one—for a motion detector to flash on, for a
figure to run past a window, for the front door to swing open. Some
kind of confrontation. But it never comes—just a long empty ellipsis
between each stab. A coma of a house. When the final tire deflates, I
collect the crowbar from the grass and climb the steps to the
entrance.
First try the knob. It doesn’t turn, the lock catching on the latch.
Then pound the door. Give him one last shot to do the right thing.
“Hey,” I yell. “I know you’re in there.”
Only quiet. No scrambling. Not even the lightest footfalls.
“I just want to talk.”
Nothing.
The crowbar’s tip presses between the door and frame as
though it were crafted for this precise purpose. I wedge it in tight and
push. The pressure warps wood, bends it. Press harder. Snap. One
last shove. It’s like teeth breaking. The wood cracks deep around the
lock, and the door wrenches open and the crowbar clatters to my
feet.
The doorframe explodes beside my head. A shower of soil, clay,
leaves and root systems. A clay pot thrown, at me. A miss. Dustin
stands ahead, doubled-over, wide-eyed—first at me, then the knife in
my hand. Twisting on his feet, he bolts toward the stairs. I head in
after him, past vases and photos of smiling families and amusement
parks. He’s halfway up the stairs, whimpering and grunting, when I
reach him. I climb quick, three stairs at a time. He’s shouting
something. Maybe just noise.
Reaching, I grasp ankle and pull.
Dustin falls forward, going horizontal. Chin meets hardwood. A
sick crack. A break. A scream, a spit of rust. I yank him down to the

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ground floor, his head and chest thumping off the stairs like a falling
ball, and drag him into the hallway.
The look on his face when I flip him over. A coward’s face.
Already given up. A stupid fucking gape. Stupid young green eyes.
“I just wanted to talk,” I whisper, kneeling down, straddling the
crease between his belly and chest.
“Please,” I think he says. He kicks his knees up, lightly striking
my lower back. He pushes at me weakly. Posing no threat.
I raise the knife. He’s already wincing (coward), squeezing his
eyes closed, throwing his hands in front of his face.
The blade rains down through his fingers, splaying them red and
white. Down between his cheek and eye, glancing off bone into his
eye socket. Slipping in like through a melon. Barely any give, a light
pop—silent, only felt—and the blade is inside him and he’s
screaming. Nothing like a tire. No glass or plastic, no armor to hide
behind. It slips in and I hate the sensation, feeling his insides through
the steel. Chills and gooseflesh—a button being pounded inside me
that’s supposed to make me stop, an evolutionary measure to
repulse me from homicide, but he’s flailing and a bastard and my
own will toward justice and preservation wins out.
The blade rises out of him, a plume of red, and he’s still
throwing out what used to be his hands, guarding an already ruined
face. The blade descends, into his mouth, splitting teeth from gum,
splaying a tongue. Splaying throat, scratching spine. Again, blade
rising and falling, a machine on its own accord now, repeating until
the mangled hands fall aside, until the face stops shaking, until the
face is no longer a face, just something, something that was and
now is not.
I’m covered in him. The him of him all over my knife, my hands,
spattered across my chest. Hot wet soaking the crotch of his jeans,
touching my jeans, soaking the crotch of my jeans. He pisses my
pants. He soaks me in blood. An evil thing. His him on me. All over
me. Sticky. Tacky on my skin. Disgusting. I hate it.

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 Head to the kitchen, the sink. Twist on the water, running it over
the blade, my hands. It comes off easily, easier than you’d think,
easier than it has any right to be. It becomes gone like it had never
been there, like it was imaginary, a game we’d been playing.
The window above the sink looks out onto his car. If he’d only
been looking, watching me crouch at his tires, he could have maybe
seen me and prevented this. He could have changed it all if only he’d
paid attention.
And like that a pair of headlights splashes over the road,
swinging right, up the driveway, flashing over my face.
Oh no.
I duck behind the sink. This new car beeps, its door clicks open.
Peeking over the windowsill, I glimpse a woman—somewhere in her
fifties, in clothes too young for her, long grey hair curled into ribbons
—exiting the car. She gapes at the doorway and runs toward it.
I reach the entranceway just as she steps through the
doorframe. She jolts upon seeing me—such shock—and I steal the
moment to grab her hair and swing her head into the wall. The
plaster dents. She loses balance. My fist pulls back, full of thin silver
strands.
I don’t give her a chance.
The knife slams her shoulder. A plume when removed. Again.
She makes no noise but gasps, air escaping. Familiar. I kick her to
the floor and drag the knife across her throat, then her wrists, trying
to make it quick because I don’t want her to feel this. She doesn’t
deserve this, probably.
Finally she stops moving and I feel the warmth of her on my
hands. The tackiness, congealing, on my hands, on my clothes.
Jesus fucking Christ get it off me. Back to the kitchen, twisting on the
sink, running it scalding over my hands, over the arms of my hoodie,
over the front. It’s all fucking over me. It’s in the fabric. It’s still in my
clothes.
Okay.

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 How do you get it off?
Rushing down the hall, pushing open doors—bathroom?
Where’s the fucking bathroom.
A living room. A closet. Stairs to the basement.
Finally, at the ass end of the hall, a bathroom. A bath.
I tear off the shower curtain, kick on the water, and step beneath
the rain fully dressed. My clothes soak instantly, accruing weight,
sticking to my skin, chafing. Grab some fancy body wash, drizzle it
over me. Scrub at my arms, at my chest. Rose blooms swirling from
my feet, drifting across the floor, slipping down the drain. Scrub until
it’s all the way clear again, and step out, leaving the water running.
Tracking puddles through the hall, stepping over the woman’s
body, through the front door, back into the night. Halfway down the
driveway, something clicks in my head and I turn around, head back
up the steps, and collect the crowbar (covered in my prints. The
house, everywhere I’ve been—covered in my prints). I slip it behind
my waistband, down my leg, and hobble back down the driveway,
down the block, to my car.

Cops. Cruisers everywhere, driving home. Cruisers at the

intersections, cruisers parked on the roadsides, cruisers blowing
past me. Then, passing Venture Way toward Route 9, I look toward
the office park. Flaring blue. The whole lot lit up with flashing blue
light.

I drive till early morning. Carving a tunnel through the night, moon
high silver and sharp as a knife. Black woods rolling out all around.
Waiting for cruisers, for flashing blue lights, but they never come for

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me. At 3:00 AM I head home, strip naked in the backyard and burn
my clothes in the BBQ grille.

I wake at 2:00. Throw on some cleanish clothes, head to the living

room. Lynn stares at the TV, fist to mouth.
“What’s wrong?” I ask.
She points at the screen. “Home invasion. Last night. Over in
Sunderland. Whole family killed.”
The screen shows a still photo, Dustin and the woman—his
mother—alive in the past, smiling beside a Christmas tree. I look
away. “Does two people really constitute a whole family?”
“What the fuck is that even supposed to mean? That’s not the
point, like, at all.”
“This stuff happens all the time.”
“Not around here.”
The screen snaps to a news anchor. “— and Dustin, who
worked for a local data research company.”
Lynn looks at me, wordless. I shrug and go out to the garage.

I never find out what happened with Bruno. Dustin overshadows all
of it. About half of work uses his death as an excuse to skip shifts.
I’m utterly certain they don’t actually care, but good for them.
Everyone needs a break now and again.
Then two days later, the cops come by. Four or five of them—
the moment I see blue and silver I turn to my monitor and stare at my
reflection staring back. Watching my skin grow wet.
The guy next to me leans into my station. “You think this is about
Dustin?”

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 “Don’t know.” But of course it is. I steal a quick glance as one of
the cops leads Dennis into the training room. I stare back into my
monitor, pretending to dial. Waiting for them to go down the lines of
dialers, pulling each aside. No, they won’t need to do that. They
already know. They’re asking Dennis to tell them everything he
knows about me. Asking if he’s seen me with any weapons. I had the
foresight to leave my bag in the car, but I should have left it at home.
The first thing they’ll do is lead me out to my car for a full search.
They’ll find my bag, and the knife inside, which will be sent to a
forensics lab where they will identify latent bloodstains, because I
was an idiot and didn’t bleach it or chuck it into the Connecticut
River. They’ll find my fingerprints, my hair, on everything. And fuck, I
still have the photo of his address on my phone.
The rest of my life is easily foreseeable. I’ll be put in a cage
where men with werewolf physiques will split me from belly outward
and sleep inside my skin. I will be less than alive. The inverse, in
fact.
“You okay man?” Raul’s voice beside me, snapping me out of
premonition. I didn’t realize I’d been weeping. I turn and the entire
room is looking at me, including the massive troopers standing over
the supervisor desk.
Raul holds out his palm. “Don’t worry, I’ll take care of it.” He gets
up and heads toward the troopers. He points me out and says
something to them. The cops nod and say something back. Raul
returns. “I told them you were very good friends,” he says, and
returns to dialing.

About an hour passes and the cops leave, never once speaking to
me. The entire world feels like a trap.

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Everything sounds like a footstep when it’s late enough. Falling
acorns. Wind pattering against grass. The quiet is most violent in
summer because there is no real quiet—it’s all animals and insects
and flora scraping in the wind.
And on top of that, there are still people. As much as I want to
block them out. Cars and mail delivery. And fucking helicopters.
Thrusting above, flashing spotlights down, seeking something.
Always seeking something. Always certain it’s me, but it never is.
Clawing through the sky, above our house, but always moving on. I
don’t know what to make of that.

Dustin Callahan and his mother vanish from the news as quickly as
they arrived. At work, it’s like it never happened, like he never
existed to begin with. A good month later, no one speaks of him. We
just keep dialing.
This is how you’ll be mourned here.
Moreover: no difference was made. I pushed against the world
and the world wouldn’t budge. The commute is still a holocaust—
steel-wrapped phone poles and bodies through windshields and
babies on asphalt. Nothing earned, nothing accomplished. A death
amounting to nothing.
But scale. It’s a matter of scale. Minor actions culminate.
Culmination is key. Patterns are established. I’ve seen it. Stab one
set of tires and you’re a nuisance easily forgotten. Stab enough of
them and a militia forms against you.
Patterns move people. Patterns weave the world together.
Something exists only ever as an act of repetition. Anything that

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does not repeat cannot exist. An objective fundamental truth, and all
that matters is whether you act in accord.

The backroads are dead to me. The nighttime is dead. Dead empty
worlds. When I’m the only car on the road, everything beneath my
skin feels empty, like cold silver wind blowing through. It’s all dead
and I feel dead with it.
The highways. That’s where I am. It’s where the world happens.
Life packed in, a hundred thousand vessels a day. Plastic and metal
weaving together, holding space till they can no longer maintain.
Collision, departure. That’s the pattern and it happens here.
So I’ll hop on I-91 from Northampton and drive it all the way
south till I hit Connecticut. Then I’ll get off, swing back around and
gun it all the way to Vermont. Watching the traffic, the drivers’ faces.
Their maneuvers. Finding the repetition, where people push their
luck.
There it is.
On that stretch in Holyoke, passing the soldier’s home, a pale
green Ford Focus rises out of the onramp, slashing across the lanes
between me and a tractor trailer. It slides into the inside lane and
leaps past. I flip my blinkers and follow.
The highway splits into three lanes, each packed with rush hour,
and the Focus weaves through, gliding from the leftmost lane to right
and back again, only inches between other vehicles. I follow its
invisible wake, holding ground at four car lengths, finding breaks in
the congestion and moving in. Gas to the floor and the Camry
groans, roaring with upward inflection, catching purchase and
advancing, hurling past the mall, now only two cars away. The Ford
slashes diagonal again, from left lane to middle.
A Harley rises out from the onramp.

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 The Ford slashes middle to right.
I see it in my head before it happens: the Ford clipping the
cycle’s front wheel, the cycle wobbling, then tipping. And then it’s
happening for real in front of me, trailing behind the ghost of my
premonition. The Harley tips, throwing the rider, and both disappear
beneath a truck following behind.
The Ford keeps driving.
I slam the gas and weave through, threading needles, gaining.
The Focus stays in the far right lane, and it’s perfect, there’s a ravine
to the side, no guardrail. I haul up in the middle lane, matching
speed. Through the window, I see the driver—a young woman,
younger than me, lips moving, singing or mouthing a song. Big round
sunglasses like insect eyes. Oblivious.
I yank the wheel.
She turns her head to see me just before our vehicles kiss. Just
enough time to see her recognize what’s about to happen. The
opening of a scream. Then the shove, the bang, like a gunshot. The
impact pushes me away but I wrench the wheel, staying on top of
her. She pulls away, leaving the roadway, launching down the
shallow ravine.
Another bang—a blast just beneath me. My right front tire
blowing out. The rim hits blacktop, an anchor by mistake, swinging
me in an arc, hurling me, flipping me into the ravine as well.
Rolling. Body yanking against the seat belt, swinging around,
losing gravity, hanged from ceiling, smashing knees and fingers on
objects, the walls of the compartment, my head on the steering
wheel, then back around, until I’m sitting right side up again, awake
and alive. The airbag never deploys.

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It’s a sick heat, a flu in a sleeping bag—either the air around me or
just my body, I don’t know anymore. I’m almost sick enough to puke
and can’t find my glasses. The world’s a blur unless I squint. There
may be blood in my hair. My neck won’t turn all the way. Din in my
head, a thick sharp eeeeeeeeeeeeee. Fire in my collarbone. A throb
in my kneecap. I picture a cracked geode.
I look at my hands. Blurry stupid hands. I close them and my left
hand closes. My right begins to close but the middle finger, I try to
close it and it starts to close but it’s like a rod’s been shoved up
inside. It tries to bend but instead it’s all shrieking agony.

Feel along the crumpled flesh of the Camry. The imploded roof. The
smashed windows. The engine shaking like a trapped animal until I
switch it off.
It will never be driven again. My old steed. I begin to cry. Then I
fish my bag out from the rear window, remove the crowbar and head
back toward the other vehicle.

The green Ford Focus, crumpled all the way around, at rest on its
roof. Engine still growling, tappets clanging, puffing grey clouds from
the hood. What the fuck did you do, I say to her, wordlessly.
Another noise. A piercing squeal, other than the one inside my
head. An organic alarm. A needle, a fist full of needles in my ear,
harmonizing with my tinnitus. A voice. Real screaming. A child
screaming.
I call out. “Hello?”
No reply but the scream, the engine, the scream, the hiss of
coolant splattering and misting off hot metal. Wailing.

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 “You okay?” Toward the driver side window (broken out, candy-
sized pieces scattered in the grass), a lump rests on the inverted
ceiling. “Hello?” Resting the crowbar on my shoulder, I kneel to peer
in. “Hello?”
The lump twists. A face reveals, in and out of focus—the driver.
Bloody swollen lilac lips, front teeth all punched in. A twisted anus
mouth. Her fist rises and points at me. A burst of mist into my chest.
Reel backward, almost losing footing. A sting, an abrasion in the
air, crawling up my chest, into my mouth, up my nostrils, licking my
eyes. Pepper spray fuck. Eyes going wet and blurry, with the woman
crawling forward.
I wait for it. To go all the way blind. That scratchy fire dancing in
my eyes—it persists, but my vision holds. And that’s the thing: most
civilian pepper sprays are little more than an irritant. No real stopping
power. And here’s a real life example. She made a mistake.
I move in.
Her neck snaps sideways under the crowbar’s heel. Gurgle and
wail. Bring it down again in a wet crack. Again. Again. Until she
cannot drive, she cannot speak, she cannot sing. Until her only
movement is twitching, until she can’t even do that. I hit her until she
shits her pants, a long wet fart, and I smell it past the pepper spray. I
hate it disgusting how could you fucking do this. I hit her again,
though she’s already motionless. I hit her again for no reason, with
no purpose. I hit her until I’m no longer compelled to.

I feel along the Ford’s inverted ceiling, covered in trash, fast food
wrappers, small toys. There has to be something. A half-survived
coffee cup. A can of soda. God forbid water. Anything to rinse out my
eyes.

380
 A flailing lump hangs from the rear. Flailing and screaming. An
infant strapped in a car seat, locked in this hell, hanged upside
down, screaming and screaming. A drill on a nerve. Pitch a rising
arc, a dart swung up toward heaven, to fall and pierce me entirely. I
look at the blur, the squirming blur, pink and yellow and green, the
wailing blur just wailing, wailing unstoppable.
I squeeze my palms over my ears and scream back at it. I
scream to drown out its scream, but my scream is identical, just
more of the same scream, so I stop. I put my hands back to the
ceiling/floor and grope.
There. Fucking there. When all hope is gone, my hand wraps a
bottle. A baby bottle sloshing white.

Back at my car, my poor beautiful car. Choking back the reek of

almost sour milk poured over my face, rinsing my eyes. Slumped
down to the grass against the driver side door. Looking up at the
freeway, traffic blowing by. Truly impossible to appreciate just how
fast unless you’re standing still, watching.
Wiping away the milk. Waiting, in the sound of the traffic and
wind and the screaming yards away. Waiting for the screaming to
stop, to be overcome by sirens. Waiting for red boxy vehicles,
muscular blue SUVs that could knock over trees, tearing over the lip
to bring obliteration. Waiting for tear gas and bullets to fill my body.
Waiting for war. I wait for the sirens but they don’t come. They won’t,
not ever. No one to take me. No one to save me.

381
382
383
384
if i pushed the tip of a knife through my belly you would hear a tight
invisible hiss. a stovetop clicking over to light & the pilot’s out. you
would watch my skin shrink & wrinkle like facsimile & so little of me
would be left a box would be a waste.

you will find the pornography & hints within binding but my terror is
tucked in strangers littered throughout fifty mile radii. shaking in bed
& sweat my words peeking from the collage of their abuse & my
legacy.

you can only re-read so many times before stories become chapters
& chapters become paragraphs & paragraphs become sentences &
sentences become words & words become letters & letters become
stalks & circles & clusters of ink or pixel.

& you could never believe the emptiness in my chest & head or the
white filling my retina & wind so fast to pop eardrums & it’s like water
filled with salt or oxygen twisting into your heart & the lack of space
between being here and being in everything & there’s no way you
could grasp it but it’s okay & i’m okay & the world only grew that
much more gentle & soft & calm & it’s all okay. it’s so okay.

385
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387
388
389
We did it as a joke. Renting the Westfield Econo Lodge jacuzzi room.
A joke, but not really.
I’d mentioned it to Brian on a bowl ride maybe a month earlier.
“I’m gonna rent a jacuzzi room for my birthday.”
He laughed. “What?”
“At the Westfield Econo Lodge. We can, like, drink and smoke in
there. No one will bother us. It’ll be funny.” Giving a jester grin. “It’s a
jacuzzi room.”
He laughed again. “Okay, dude.”

390
 I told Efrim my plan later that week, over at his dad’s place. I
pushed open his door and he looked up from his computer, cracked
lips and sinkhole eyes. He hadn’t slept in days, obliterating his
father’s liquor cabinet and recording songs about the Jordanian Civil
War.
“I’m renting a jacuzzi room for my birthday.”
His eyes went live. He smiled the way a mask smiles. “A jacuzzi
room?”
“Yeah, at the Westfield Econo Lodge.”
He stomped out his cigarette on the hardwood, giggling, making
a goblin face. “That’s so fucking stupid.”
Then Seth called the day of, while me and Efrim were coming
out of Liquors 44 with the supplies. “Dennis, what’s good?”
“I’m with Efrim,” I said. “It’s my birthday.”
“That’s delightful. Happy birthday. What’re you jerks up to? You
need any buttsex?” Our codeword for weed (“Soapy buttsex” if it was
good shit). We told everyone the reason we called it that was
because cops are less likely to follow you into the woods if they
overhear you talking about “getting into some sketchy buttsex,” but
obviously that’s a lie. We did it because it was stupid. It was funny.
“Yeah, absolutely. I’m renting a jacuzzi room. We’ve got some
liquor.”
“You’re renting a jacuzzi room?”
“At the Westfield Econo Lodge. You want in?”
Silence, then laughter. “Okay, sure. I’m in. Pick me up at my
place.”

Everything I’d ever done was for someone else’s enjoyment. In third
grade, I stuffed my fingers down my throat, forcing a stream of puke
(leftover hot and sour soup from Chinese takeout) onto the lunch

391
table. The cafeteria came to life with disgust and awe. When I was
twelve, I told the drama club I jacked off ten times a day (a lie—I
hadn’t once successfully masturbated, still unsure of the mechanics,
of the necessary vigor to let the white out). It was a gift to them—
something for them to joke about. Two years later, I’d tell my closest
circle about the watermelon I hollowed out and fucked (another
fabrication—I still didn’t understand masturbation, and wouldn’t until
after high school). They gleefully tormented me about this for years.
This was my purpose. All I had to offer. I was sure of it. People
won’t keep you close out of love. But destroying yourself, letting
others destroy you—it keeps them from hating you completely.

The sign evoked a hospital, or a barbershop—words and bars in red

and white. Centuries ago, hospitals and barbershops were the same
thing, more or less—you’d go to the barber for shaves and cuts, but
also bloodletting and amputation. That’s why the poles look like
candy canes.
The structure below was beige stucco and deep green roofing.
Sickly trees clawing out from mulch. It sat between the I-90 off ramp
and a Wendy’s, overlooking Westfield—a gasping town, a murdered
town, with streets and avenues full of feral dogs and monsters
dressed in people’s skin. An apocalypse happened there, was still
happening, and no one quite knew what to do. So they climbed the
tallest hill they could find and built an Econo Lodge on top. A retreat,
an oasis you could afford.
We tore into the parking lot, sliding into a spot between a
Humvee and a Pontiac station wagon. Efrim wanted to come in with
me to register. He hated the idea of me doing anything without him. I
told Seth to stay in the car.
“Why?”

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 “It’s sketchy if it’s three people.”
“How is three sketchier than two?”
“If they see three guys renting a one-bed jacuzzi room, they’re
gonna think it’s sketchy.”
“Anyone who rents a jacuzzi room at the fucking Westfield
Econo Lodge is gonna look sketchy.”
“Just stay in the car. We’ll be right back.”
A grey weed miasma poured from our doors, quickly diluting in
the hot garbage air, and we headed in. The reception reeked of
bleach, stabbing up my nose and scraping at my throat. The woman
at the desk looked like Peter Cook but prettier. “Can I help you?” A
voice that’d been choked. A collapsed voice—one that knew, deeply
knew the world was ending, but you still got to pay bills. You still
have to show up. We weren’t old enough to understand, to recognize
how much we had in common with this woman. We still thought our
lack of franchise was temporary, that our best days were still in our
futures. Genuinely believing that one day, if we played our cards
right, each day would be as carefree and joyous as this one.
“Yeah, do you have any jacuzzi rooms?” I held in my laughter,
but Efrim giggled at my side, gently bucking forward and back.
The woman’s face stayed iced. “Let me look.” Dried apricot
hands tapped across the keyboard. “Do you want the square jacuzzi
or the heart-shaped one?”
Efrim cackled. “Oh, you gotta get the heart-shaped one.”
“Yeah, I’ll take the heart-shaped.” She copied my ID and took
my cash.

It was exactly what you’d expect: creamy, mold-speckled wallpaper

peeling where the walls and ceiling met. A charcoal carpet with grey
and wine accents. A bed and two chairs. And wedged into the

393
corner, set before two streaked wall-length mirrors: a concave, dog-
dick-red heart, encased in concrete and tile. Its bottom coated in
chalky grey stains.
“Whooaaa,” Seth said. “This is pretty, pretty, pretty grimy.”
“No.” Efrim ran his hands over the tub’s lip. “It’s perfect.” He
twisted the jacuzzi knobs and steaming grey water thundered out.
I flipped on the bedside lamp—the shade runny with weird
amber resin—and punched the A/C down to sixty degrees. The unit
shuddered and gasped. I filled the bathroom sink with ice and stuck
the Smirnoff and Bloody Mary mix in. The OJ wouldn’t fit, so I took
off the top of the toilet tank, poured down some ice and lay the bottle
on top.

It’s easy to get drunk fast if you want it to be. Orange juice
neutralizes the choke of vodka, so you can down at least three Solo
cups of the stuff in under five minutes. You won’t gag, it won’t twist
your stomach. That’s how clean it tastes. You can drink and drink
and it’ll only taste better the more you drink. Still young in our abuse,
years before our guts would be ravaged by ulcer and abscess. I
don’t miss those days (I can’t, it’s impossible), but I know Efrim does.

Three screwdrivers and two bowls and the steaming grey water rose
to the tub’s lip. I shut off the faucet and got the bottles from the
bathroom, placing them atop the jacuzzi’s tiled edge. We stripped.
Efrim’s wire body practically hairless, all sallow skin, tight starved
muscles clinging to bone. Seth wrapped his waist with a towel before
disrobing. We turned on the jets and slipped in.

394
 Efrim and I sunk into each of the heart’s butt cheeks, while Seth
sat at the point. Cramped, but as long as we clung to our corners we
wouldn’t touch. Any touching would need to be deliberate and ironic.
“It isn’t gay if people are watching,” I’d told Efrim once, wobbling
drunk at some dance night (no, I know the precise one), before
sucking on his disgusting tobacco-resined lips. Everyone around us
laughed.
I poured another round. The heat climbed into my skin, mixing
with the liquor, strengthening its power. Water pounded at my
vertebrae, punching gently at my discs. I touched myself beneath the
murk of the jets, where no one could see.

“Shit, I’m fucked up.” I pointed to Seth. “Is tonight gonna be a bad
night?”
Seth looked down and away.
I nudged Efrim’s elbow. “Seth and I get fucking bad when we
drink together.”
“We don’t need to talk about that,” Seth said.
“Like two years back? We got this bum to buy us growlers.
Fucking plowed through them shits like nothing, so quick we didn’t
even know we were wasted until we stood up. Like whoooaaaa. We
go outside, smoke some butts, and end up tossing half his dad’s
firewood into the road.”
“Hold on,” Seth said. “It was like five pieces of wood.”
“Like fifteen. At least fifteen. Like twenty pieces. Then we spend
the whole night waiting to see if cars will run them over.” I laughed.
The only one laughing.
“Nothing happened though. I knew nothing was gonna happen.”
“Or how ‘bout that night at Gianni’s? So they used to have this
bartender, and he never carded us. So one night we go in there and

395
pound three Long Island Iced Teas. Like one after another. I give this
guy a look and we head down to the bathroom, like this shitty
basement bathroom, and we do a little coke. Next thing we know,
we’re fucking that place up. I’m talking smashing the goddamn
mirror, I’m puking in the air dryers, just out of fucking control. It was
like fucking Fallujah.”
“Come on man.”
I slapped Seth on his shoulder. “This guy’s a fucking monster
when he drinks. At least when he drinks with me.”
“Stop.”
“What? These are classics. It’s fun. This is fun.”
Efrim frowned, eyes away from us. Looking at himself through
the fog in the mirrors. Not disgusted. He didn’t care about strangers’
tires popping over splintered wood, or the poor bar-back who’d have
to clean up me and Seth’s wrath. He didn’t care about those things.
He was only jealous. He always was jealous, of any world existing
without him. He still is, and will always be.

Eight months back at Seth’s twenty-first birthday, he dropped acid

and sliced a cigarette out of his girlfriend’s mouth with a katana.
Weeks ago, he saved an elderly woman who’d collapsed face-first in
the Stop & Shop parking lot. Her glasses snapped apart, wire frames
sticking in her retina. I didn’t tell those stories. Those were hero
stories, and I didn’t care if Efrim knew them.

We drank another round, smoked another bowl, ripped around three

more butts, just ashing over the side onto the carpet. Seth’s head
lolled, nodding forward before snapping back. “I feel like I’m gonna

396
pass out.” He stood, wobbly, lifting one leg over the side of the red
heart and tile, dropping his foot down on the blackened carpet.
Glistening thick thighs, belly and ass. He pulled a towel from the floor
and wrapped himself quick.
I swigged from my cup. Head swimming and throat ached,
cracked. “Yeah, not a bad idea.” I stood up.
“You fucking pussy.” Efrim put on a faggy lisp, like he always did
when we were drunk and around other people. “Come back here and
stop being such a fucking pussy.” He grabbed my wrist and gave it a
yank.
My feet skidded, my knees buckled, but they didn’t fall out. “I’m
gonna crack my fucking head,” I snarled, pulling away, my wrist
slipping from his fingers, nearly toppling backward over the rim.
Efrim squinted, cutting his mouth into a frown. He’d given me
the same look the last time we’d done mushrooms, when he grabbed
a kitchen knife and jokingly waved it at me, before winking and
returning it to the drawer. He raised his fists and leaned forward.
“Don’t.” I put my hands up in front of me.
Giggling through creased frown, he pushed forward, swinging a
long stringy arm, slapping me just between my crotch and belly.
“No. Fucking stop. Knock it off.” But this was what drew us to
each other’s orbits. The constant push and pull. Always competing
for the room. Gobbling up each other’s oxygen, just sucking it out of
every space we occupied.
“Maybe we should be a little more quiet?” Seth said.
Efrim splashed water toward him and the bed. “Sweetie, the
only people here are lawyers and their whores. It’s fine.”
I stepped down to the carpet (soaked and slimy, like something
alive), grey churning against my skin, space pulsing against my eyes
(the vodka in my blood circulating through me, top to bottom, limb to
limb, over and over). I grabbed a washcloth from the floor and tied it
around my balls and outer thigh, so only the side of my sack was
visible. I asked Seth (sprawled across the bed, a round leg peeking

397
through his bath towel, like a gutter Frazetta cheesecake piece) if he
wanted another drink.
He grimaced, but then: “Yeah, sure. A Bloody Mary. I didn’t eat
today.”
Grabbing the bottles, I filled half his Solo cup with vodka and the
other half with Bloody Mary mix. I dug into a grocery bag and tossed
him a bag of potato chips. Then I grabbed the disposable camera.
Dew beads clung to it, like it’d been sweating.
Seth ignored the drink and tore open the chips, scooping fistfuls
into his mouth. Lifting the camera to my face, I framed his sprawled
wet body in a tiny black box—a diorama. Something unreal. He
stopped eating. “What are you doing?”
“Documenting our love,” I said, misquoting a movie I otherwise
couldn’t remember. I wound the advance. Click. Flash. Captured.
“Don’t let him have all the fun.” Efrim rose from the tub, still in
that raging queen affect. He lifted his leg, standing his foot on the
jacuzzi’s lip, like Teddy Roosevelt perched on a bear carcass. The
heat dragged his ball sack toward his knee. An old man’s sack. I
turned the camera toward him. Click click click. Lifting his palm to
just beneath his chin, he blew a kiss. Through the black box of the
viewfinder, he looked doused in blood.

Brian and Roy swang by. I answered the door in my washcloth loin
cloth and Brian’s face melted with equal parts inspiration and
disgust. Looking past me, over our wreckage. “Jesus Christ.” Roy
just stared down at his shoes, clenching and unclenching his jaw.
Efrim flung a thin knobby finger at Brian. “Why don’t you get
more comfortable.” Pushing past me, rushing him, grasping his belt.
“No. No no no.” Brian pushed back at Efrim’s hands, laughing
but some real panic there too.

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 I went for Roy, hands outstretched toward his crotch. He
grimaced, almost smiling, but mostly grit teeth, shaking his head. “If
you touch me, I’ll fucking belt you.”
Efrim made a few more lazy gropes at Brian before slapping his
ass, hard and loud. He teetered backward in the heat, face turned
slick and lazy, sloshing, rapist eyes. Lumbering into me, pushing his
belly into mine, gyrating sweaty and slick. I pressed further into him,
my belly slipping off and around his starved concave pelvis. “Oh
here’s the real man,” he said. Humping. A joke. Blood rushing to my
shaft. My balls slipping out from the washcloth, slapping the inside of
his thigh. A joke.
“Jesus Christ.” Brian laughed and clapped, red-faced, pushing
past us, looking away and then looking back. “You should just give
him the Roman Soldier and get it over with.”
Efrim stopped and squeezed my shoulders (those enormous
neanderthal hands), like he could yank my flesh right off the muscle.
His mouth became a circle, an O, a perfect round void punched
through his face. Eyes wild like when I first told him about the jacuzzi
room. “Dude.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Dude,” he repeated. “We have to.”
“I don’t know man.”
“We have to. Don’t be a bitch.”
“Let me piss first.” I slipped out of Efrim’s hands and into the
bathroom. My piss sputtered toxic orange into the pristine pool, so
dehydrated. Through the walls, I could hear them all talking, then
laughing. Someone—Efrim—hushing them. Then bad stage
whispers. Laughing again. I flushed and came back out and they all
stopped and stared at me, smiling.

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We found it online. No pics, just a .txt file. This collection of sex
positions. At least half were fake, like ones no one could’ve possibly
done. Like the Disrespectful Winston—you fist a girl (or a guy, I
guess) in the ass, get a fistful of shit and rub it in her (or his) face,
like Look what you did. You should be ashamed of yourself. Or the
Teleporter: you bang a girl (or a guy, I guess) doggystyle, facing a
window, and you swap out with a different guy with the same sized
dick. Then you creep outside, go around to the window and wave
while the other guy keeps plowing her (or him). Probably no one’s
ever done that either.
But Efrim’s favorite was simple and entirely plausible. When he
first read it off to me, the image snapped together in my head like
one of those cheap 3D animations. Click. The Roman Soldier.
I cackled. Efrim cackled with me. We told it to our other friends,
who cackled too. Simple and perfect, like an orchid, or a scalpel.
Like all the best jokes.

I laid down on the floor, the whole carpet saturated, soaked and
slimy and cold. Brian wound the disposable camera’s advance. Click
click click.
Roy leaned over me. “You sure you want to do this dude?”
I sat up. “Can I get another swig?”
Efrim handed me the vodka. Even though it was almost gone,
the bottle felt heavier now than when I’d bought it. I took my swig. I
could barely even taste the burn at that point. I handed it back.
“Alright,” he said. Face scrunched, shaking giddy. “You ready?”
“Yeah, sure. I guess.”
“You heard’em.” He stood over my face. A strange inverted
valley between his legs. A sacred mountain. All my futures. He
unbuckled his knees and began descending.

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 “Jesus Christ,” Brian said. “Holy shit.”
Efrim lifted and held his cock. His hips descended lower, lower,
closer, closer, until they almost smothered the light. I closed my
eyes.
Warmth. Insane warmth. One sac over one eye, and then the
other. Soft loose flesh like a grandmother’s throat. A weird reek—of
shit and sweat, but also beyond those scents. But it was the warmth,
this fleshy sticky fucking warmth on my face. Warmth like heaven. A
pink pig draped over my face.
“Holy shit,” Seth said.
Then down, draped down my nose. A pungent tube. Hot as a
stroke. A thimble’s worth of sticky fluid dribbled from its end, down
my septum.
It was done. A ball over each eye. His cock down my nose. A
flesh helmet. A mask. I became the Roman Soldier.
The shutter clicked. The room screamed and laughed. The flesh
jiggled on my face, but didn’t let up. I could hear Efrim hushing
everyone. He whispered. “So … lift … hold … I’ll —”
“What’s going on?” I said. His crotch reek slipped into my
mouth, sour like mold.
“Nothing,” Efrim said. “Just a second.” More whispering. “Don’t
let … the rest —”
“Yo I think I’m done here.”
“Okay, okay.” The flesh lifted off my face. Opening my eyes,
black became brown became the room, the mold-speckled ceiling.
Efrim stared down, bloody eyes, teeth locked in gaping crescent.
“Happy birthday.” Raising the Smirnoff bottle above his head.
Bringing it down.
Crack.
The world goes hot. Hot and wet. Crack. The world becomes
slick and hot and gaping. Crack. Throwing my limbs up in front of
me. Trying to scream. A thick round knee dropping to my throat.
Crack. The world as two sets of hands holding me down. Crack. The

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world as glass against skin and hair, as glass against bone. Crack.
The world as my nose plunging down into face. Teeth snapping
against glass. Crack. Booted feet stomping ribs and crotch. The
world as grunts and laughter. Crack. The world as caved-in ribs and
burst testicles. Crack. My skull breaks before the glass does. And
when the bottle finally falls to splinters, Efrim yanks the phone off the
nightstand and pounds my face till it’s no longer a face, until it’s no
longer anything. They stand there, heaving, inhaling the mist, the
reek of mold and piss and shit and brains, they huddle over my body,
they hug and they laugh.

It’s something they’ll always remember. Something for when they’re

old, a reminder of what it’s like to be young. Brian and Roy finally
strip, they hold their dicks and piss on my body, into the broken hole
that used to be my face. They’ll pose with my body, snapping
pictures, knowing they’ll never be developed, that the camera will be
burned in the bedside trash can. They’ll watch the sunrise from the
balcony, streaked with blood, smoking cigarettes and the last of
Seth’s buttsex, telling each other secrets they’d never shared with
anyone and never will again, laughing and crying, holding each
other, kissing each other’s foreheads and cheeks with dry, ripped up
lips. Saying how much they love each other. They will pull my body
onto the bed, fill the sheets with toilet paper and towels and set it
alight. They’ll leave, loading into Roy’s car and setting off onto the
highway, dropping everyone at their respective homes. They will
sleep the rest of the day, wrapped in cotton cocoons while the A/C
flushes out the summer fever. Or maybe they won’t sleep at all,
shivering, replaying the night over and over, sometimes giggling,
sometimes completely still.

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It bursts, blooms and is no more.

He wakes up.

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It was five years and two weeks when we filmed. She was the dead
woman and I played her husband.

I tip the Ziplock and drizzle a shotgun-red halo around her forehead’s
perimeter. Only a little makes it into her hair. She slipped—cracked
her head on the hardwood, the bottom of her boots caked with ice
and slick. (What we already shot).

The aperture shifts and it’s behind my shoulders and I mock tears
over her body. Later, I’ll make her spirit rise with opacity adjustments

414
and overlays. She will move through her kitchen (my parents’, really)
and hesitate over a picture of her and her husband (a photo of us—
the real us—from a year before, holding half-sour pickles at the
Brimfield Flea Market). She will walk through the house and through
plate glass into snow (freshly fallen—not in the storyboard but it
works). She will walk through the snow and lie between two maples,
holding in a quiet place—all quiet and grey. She will lie and close her
eyes and fade and drift apart from This Place and be gone and be
quiet and grey.

Everything preserved I see, in milky plastic video. Milky like thin

disgusting milk. Everything more or less how I envisioned.

The dead woman laughs and I wash strings of blood from her hair.
We kiss and eat leftover mashed potatoes and stuffing. We depart
the house she died in and drive back to our apartment, studded tires
gripping iced concrete.

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 Acknowledgements
“Waxing Moon” originally appeared in Gravel Magazine.

“The Young People” image courtesy of Nick Verdi and Isidorah

Germain.

“Where We Breathe” was edited by Mike Corrao and Andrew J. Wilt,

and originally appeared in Collected Voices in the Expanded Field
(11:11 Press). The title and lyric excerpt are taken from the Boys
Night Out song of the same name.

“Burn You the Fuck Alive” was edited by Maggie Siebert, and
originally appeared in HARSH.

“The Buried Man” was edited by Ian Kappos and Karter Mycroft, and
previously appeared as part of Los Suelos, CA (Surface Dweller
Studios), a multimedia project consisting of short fiction, visual art, a
video game, and a goddamn skramz band, with all proceeds
benefiting the California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation. Check it
out at lossuelos.com

“Poison Nurse” was edited by Charlene Elsby, Alisa Leigh, and

Lindsay Lerman.

A portion of “In the Shadow of Penis House” originally appeared in

Witch Craft Magazine and was edited by Elle Nash. Another portion
originally appeared in Acéphale and Autobiographical Philosophy in
the 21st Century (Schism Press), and was edited by Gary J. Shipley
and Edia Connole.

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“Puppy Milk” was edited by Justin A. Burnett and originally appeared
in Hymns of Abomination: Secret Songs of Leeds (Silent Motorist
Media), a celebration of the work of Matthew M. Bartlett. As such,
“Puppy Milk” borrows several elements from Bartlett’s oeuvre, such
as the town of Leeds, a sinister radio station, and goats.

”Highway Wars” and its title (a misheard Smashing Pumpkins lyric)

originates with my very good friend Justin Davis Jacobs, who
brought the concept to me several years ago. Many of his ideas
made it into this final version.

“Balloon” originally appeared in decomP Magazine.

“The Roman Soldier” was edited by Maggie Siebert and Caitlin Forst,
and originally appeared in NDA: An Autofiction Anthology (Archway
Editions).

“Film Making” originally appeared in Unbroken Journal.

Final edits completed by Ben DeVos and B.R. Yeager.

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Table of Contents
Copyright 1
Waxing Moon 7
The Young People 14
Where We Breathe 46
Burn You the Fuck Alive 59
Contents 61
The Buried Man 86
The Autocastrato 104
Arcade 108
He Just Takes It 127
Poison Nurse 134
In the Shadow of Penis House 175
Mantra 250
Puppy Milk 274
A Favor 295
The Frightened 299
If I Could Speak Would You Still Be Laughing? 320
Highway Wars 336
Balloon 383
The Roman Soldier 388
… 407
Film Making 412
Acknowledgements 418

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