Between Us and All by Caitlyn Davidheiser a Thesis Submitted To

Home , Already Over

Between Us and All

Caitlyn Davidheiser

A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of

Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Master of Fine Arts

Florida Atlantic University

Boca Raton, FL

May 2019

ii Between Us and All

Caitlyn Davidheiser

This thesis was prepared under the direction of the candidate's thesis advisor, Ay~e Papatya Bucak, Department of English, and has been approved by all members of the supervisory committee. It was submitted to the faculty of the Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters and was accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts.

Eric Berlatsky, Ph.D. Chair, English Department M~~~~ Dean, Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters Apri\ ~ 2.019 Khaled Sobhan, Ph.D. Date 1 Interim Dean, Graduate College

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Acknowledgements

Sincere thanks to Florida Atlantic University’s Creative Writing department and for the guidance and insights of Ayşe Papatya Bucak, Susan Mitchell, Adam Bradford,

Kate Schmitt, and Mary Sheffield-Gentry, without whom I could not have completed this collection. Thanks, also, to my mentors at Rutgers University: Belinda McKeon, Rachel

Sherman, Carolyn Williams, and Mark Doty. I am forever grateful for the privileges of time, attention, education, and inspiration that these writers and scholars have given me.

Thank you.

Abstract

Author: Caitlyn Davidheiser

Title: Between Us and All

Institution: Florida Atlantic University

Thesis Advisor: Ayşe Papatya Bucak

Degree: Master of Fine Arts

Year: 2019

Between Us and All is a collection of fictional stories addressing themes of gender, religion, family, class, and sexuality. A portion of this manuscript is a linked collection of short stories, following the fictional Kelly/Sullivan family through their daily lives in the Coal Region of Pennsylvania.

Between Us and All

Uninvited ...... 1

Free to a Good Home ...... 31

Sun and Heir ...... 54

Open Home ...... 65

Pretty Circles ...... 78

Spread ...... 86

Live Women! ...... 92

Spitting Distance ...... 97

When I Die (Hallelujah) ...... 99

Genesis ...... 111

Birthright ...... 121

What We Do For Work ...... 137

Uninvited

The front door opened without a key and Maggie tripped into her apartment.

Since her brother’s arrival, she was a ghost in her home, dispossessed and slipping through walls like this, howling without answers. In this neighborhood,? and, We’re on the first floor! were returned with shrugs, if at all. Ryan was new enough to the house that she tried not to blame him and, at this hour, there was no one to blame; he was out picking up fares.

She was alone in her unlocked house.

Maggie checked the window for Gabe but the street kept no memory of him. He must have already driven home to his own bed without her. This set-up was supposed to be more practical than personal, Gabe had work in the morning; their separate leases couldn’t be broken. But, one year had become six overnight and now she was twenty- nine, over a decade past the age her mother was when she birthed Maggie.

Tonight was a new moon, which meant another empty sky. The new age self-help books urged Maggie to view this emptiness positively. Maybe the black silent air was the necessary circumstance of newness; the vast empty meant space to be filled. Potential.

She clutched her stomach. Potential inevitably shed, Maggie wished she hadn’t thought it as soon as she had but the damage was done. The universe hears all and manifests. And, now it heard Maggie for what she was and would always be. Lonely ghost.

Maggie inspected her altar, the short table of neo-pagan artifacts that she had kept in the office before it was Ryan’s room, and was now between the living room sofa and

the front doorway. The altar itself had been criticized with each reveal, first to Gabe, who had laughed, then her mother and father, who both sighed dejectedly. Ryan ridiculed it daily now, alternating between calling it hocus pocus or bullshit depending on how vicious his mood. Maggie extended all these criticisms to herself, how laughable, exhausting and ultimately fraudulent her family thought she and her goals were. She became suspicious that others might dismantle it piecemeal, whenever she left it alone, as a kind of test or joke. The anxiety consumed her and now Maggie counted each item on the altar whenever she passed, sometimes three or five times a day, tapping the items as she tallied.

Twelve. As she had left it.

Samhain was tomorrow. This was the pagan new year, the best time for spell work. Maggie spent the past week preparing her fertility ritual. The book called for an athamé – a ceremonial knife – something Maggie had never needed before, so she had provisionally substituted a steak knife. Everything else she gathered was letter-of-the law: the candles (inscribed with masculine and feminine sigils), a chalice embossed with a pentacle, a ripe pear, a banana, an Empress tarot card, rose quartz cut like Venus of

Willendorf, a St. Brigid’s Cross she had made herself with broom corn, dried hawthorn leaves, and the Celtic Motherhood Knot that Maggie had traced in fabric paint upon a square of organic cotton during her latest ovulation.

Only the knife looked out of place.

Maggie’s spiritual doula, a man named Oley that she had met in the New Age section of the Barnes and Noble off I-80, would consider this insufficient. He might say,

These tools set our intentions and all we will reap, why skimp out on your fate? between

his endless sighs of fruity Juul vapor clouds. He might be right. If she really believed this had any chance of working, shouldn’t she also fear that she might completely botch it and ruin everything? Would her spirit guides or ancestors or deities or whatever was in that

Otherworld, conspire to damn her with some ironic punishment a la The Monkey’s Paw?

Something like when, in grammar school at All Saints, Sister Mary-Katherine feigned hearing loss whenever Maggie asked questions she wasn’t meant to have conceived of yet. How Maggie’s compulsion to read ahead exposed her impatience, an ugly vice worthy of punishment. Eve after the apple.

Seems doubtful that anything powerful enough to change the course of reality would care about the hardware and, worst case, a steak knife athamé might mean what?

A baby too sharp-tongued, too utilitarian, too hungry? Isn’t any child of Maggie’s already destined to be all those things? Or, was the athamé meant to be a phallic symbol? Would a crude icon damn her conception to be – violent? The house had been left unlocked all day; she might not be alone. She stopped, else the universe would manifest.

Maggie took the knife off the altar and with her to bed.

The Halloween party was an apology for Ryan, though Maggie did not tell him that.

She had taken immediate pity when he had called to say that their father, James, evicted Ryan on his birthday this August. The eviction was something the Kellys were not shy about promising their children knew would inherit it. Maggie had seen it her whole life, like fine family crystal precarious in the curio cabinet of inevitabilities, but, like Ryan now and soon Dara, its threatening shine collected dust over time, obfuscating

its heavy edges until just when it was completely out of mind – homeless. Ryan was better off than Maggie had been, making it all the way to his twenty-first birthday, compared to her eighteenth.

On the phone, Ryan claimed to have no alternatives.

This was a lie. They both knew that their mother would have let Ryan stay at home forever. Women like Tricia always try keeping their baby boys chubby, stupid and dependent, a weakness they would never afford their daughters because, well what good would that do anyone.

Gripping the receiver, Maggie knew she had said nothing for too long and felt guilt scratch through her, even for only a few moments of hesitation.

She took Ryan to make his key that night – in the same hour that he had asked – despite not wanting to share her home or life with anyone who wasn’t Gabe.

Maggie needed the party to be a fresh start, to assuage her own guilt for all the times the past two months that she had imagined murdering him. Of course it wasn’t a real ambition but Maggie couldn’t stop the fleets of ire whenever she discovered another cigarette butt in the unflushed toilet or an unlocked front door when she came home from work. It embarrassed Maggie that such petty things upset her enough to sulk around the apartment, silent and hostile.

This wasn’t the real Maggie. She was just so tired with the tedium of daily survival, car payments and grocery shopping and credit card debt and all this same nonsense that she had been dealing with since her own eviction from the Kelly household eleven years ago. The perpetuity of it all. The burden of life without any of its rewards.

And now Ryan, who was so sure of himself and/or unbothered with what he wasn’t sure

about. Maybe that was why she had allowed him to stay, that she wanted some recognition, some gratitude. If she was going to always take care of everyone else regardless, she might as well not live alone. She needed somewhere to direct her caregiving. Although Ryan was an adult, maybe he could be a sort of trial run at having something to raise.

By the six-week mark, Maggie had already hated the nagging, anxious woman she had become so she couldn’t imagine how Ryan felt about it. Her frustration boiled into paranoia and the annoyance she had felt about Ryan’s cleanliness or sleeping patterns floated up into the tight, irrational rage that he was somehow to blame for every mild inconvenience of her daily life. Even the mourning dove she had backed over while pulling out of her street parking on her third consecutive morning late to work was

Ryan’s fault. Its bloody wreath of a body was the result of Ryan’s distracting her, filling her with new anxieties and neuroses, how she’d triple checked the lock, the coffeemaker, her altar. Most infuriating, perhaps, was that Ryan wouldn’t know that he was the one to blame, or even notice the poor dead thing.

When she returned home fourteen hours later, the dove was flattened into the curb like a pressed flower in one of Nana Bridget’s baby books. What Maggie needed was to self-soothe. Mindfulness. Mantras. Practice her gratitude. She would start with Ryan. To show him her appreciation, to correct her bad attitude, to forgive him and herself: the

Halloween party.

Maggie took the day off of work to prepare for the party. This was a gesture that she had written off, again, as a sacrifice for Ryan, but that she knew was an excuse to

avoid another fourteen hour day, like all those she had worked since starting at the daycare after high school, when the under-the-table hourly plus tips at Pizza Place couldn’t make rent and utilities on her own.

Until very recently, working at the daycare made Maggie romanticize parenthood, imagining a little human of her own to care for, teach, make into a slightly better version of herself. Invest in the sorts of things Tricia had thought superfluous, dance classes, scouts, even dressing them in trendy little outfits.

It was easy now to resent that these tiny bundles weren’t really hers to influence in any meaningful way – most of these children don’t remember Maggie a minute longer than she cared for them. Once the children graduated into kindergarten, they never saw each other again. Even the sweet ones forgot Maggie’s name after a few weeks and would sometimes shout out to her when their paths crossed at Kroger’s or the post office, but if she responded they would blurt out misnomers (sometimes of other women from the daycare, or the Y) or worse, just stare wide mouthed and silent, as if Maggie were some haunting, undead god. She imagined the wrath of Saturn on his own children.

Despite all her investments and time, they were not her own children and each new child understood this long before Maggie did.

When she had worked at Pizza Place, her boss called her a pretty young thing and all her friends’ older brothers offered her rides to ensure she got home safe. Now, when

Maggie dropped by on the first Friday of each month to pick the pies up for the daycare, the counter girls – Kyleighs and Avas and Mackenzies – all seemed bird-boned and fragile and too short for the register. They wrapped their waist aprons up under their bras two or

three times around and their pocket linings peaked out of the hems of their shorts. Like they were a little too insecure and a little too sure of themselves at the same time.

Maggie wanted to grab their wrists when they gave her change and tell them to run but she didn’t know where to or, maybe more importantly, why. It could be because their faces were the same ones that Maggie wiped snot and tears and food from at the daycare. The counter girls kept theirs under pore-clogging masks of foundation and paint, but the faces were the same.

Of course Maggie never said anything to the counter girls because that would be weird and pathetic and confusing for everyone involved. Instead, she took her change and walked to her car where she usually ate two slices of plain pizza alone, listening to top 40 radio and scrolling her newsfeeds for any article headlines that weren’t outright threats.

No one at the daycare ever asked about the empty triangles Maggie left behind or if she needed help carrying the tall piles of boxes in, for that matter. And no one ever asked if she needed someone to make sure she got home safe.

Seven hours until the guests were due. Maggie chopped cubes of cheese in the small kitchen, already in costume: Dunaway’s Bonnie Parker. She was three women at once. Movie star, thief-lover, plain Maggie. The white wig stuck with weave glue to her hairline under a lint-knit felt beret. Perfecting the makeup took hours, not because it was particularly elaborate, but she was hardly the canvas for the subtle glamour of 1960s

Hollywood. She had to feign deep-set eyes with shadows; color-correct her rosacea; over- line her Cupid’s bow just right with a pencil and two different creams so the top lip didn’t disappear when she smiled. Gabe often teased her about this playfully before kissing her

straight on the teeth. Now, Maggie could not unsee the thin lip in every photo taken of her, washing into her gums like low tide on shorelines.

The front door shook open and Dara slipped into the open doorway. Maggie could see the entire apartment from her kitchen, except for inside the bedrooms. The countertops forced a user to face the front door and the kitchen itself had a small side door attached to it, that led to the narrow walk between her duplex and the neighbors’ .

The kitchen was the center of the apartment.

“Ryan home?” Dara asked Maggie.

Dara had always been close to Ryan like that; his little shadow. They were Irish twins. Maggie was five years older than Dara, four years older than Ryan. When Maggie went off to high school at St. Joseph’s, Ryan and Dara were still at All Saints together.

When they moved to St. Joe’s, she was already working at the daycare across town.

Maggie wasn’t even in the Kelly house during Dara’s high school years, when sisters were meant to share secrets about boys and tips about how to tame their thick Kelly curls with ceramic straighteners or what sorts of things to say to those catty upperclassmen girls to shut them up for good or, even how to placate them if they had something worth swallowing your pride over. The sort of stuff that Maggie would have liked an older sister to do for her, if she’d had one. Worst though was that Dara hardly came by the apartment then since it was so far out of the way and she was busy with drama club and science fairs and she had no car and James couldn’t take her cause of work and she had to feed her guinea pig at the same time every day and Maggie’s living so close to the train tracks gave her a headache and, and, and ad infinitum.

There were always reasons not to visit when Maggie was the only draw but now:

Ryan.

“He’s sleeping,” Maggie said.

Maggie craned her neck theatrically to look past Dara to the porch. The fire department’s Halloween parade had been two nights prior and there were still orange traffic cones along the sidewalk, besides all the candy wrappers and deflated balloons. It didn’t seem worth calling about, but if she didn’t, who else would?

“It’s three,” Dara said, holding the screen door open with her backpack.

“Already?” Maggie dropped the knife onto the cutting board and fluttered around the tiny kitchen, collecting an orange plastic platter and a box of crackers from the cabinets. Maggie lifted the platter to show Dara its full Jack-o-Lantern detailing.

“Target,” Maggie gushed. “Five dollars.”

“Why’s he still asleep at three?” Dara asked.

Maggie sighed and kept her eyes on the cutting board. “He drove last night until four, then had first shift at the gas station. Only got home an hour ago.” Maggie scratched the cheese slices onto the holiday plate and fanned some crackers around them.

She gestured to the platter with her knife.

Dara shook her head.

“Well, are you coming or going then?” Maggie asked, nodding at the open door.

Dara pulled a face like Maggie had poked her with the cheese knife.

“I’m going to make that buffalo dip that you like,” Maggie offered.

Dara walked toward the kitchen, swinging the door shut behind her.

The girl will stay five years old forever, Maggie thought. Once, after picking Dara up from All Saints, she had convinced her to stand in front of the corner shop on East

Main Street holding candy cigarettes, blowing breath into the cold Pennsylvania air to really sell the deception. Then their snitch-bitch neighbor, Megan, the oldest Harrington girl, dimed on them a week later when she saw Tricia bringing groceries in from the family’s Honda Odyssey. Tricia chewed them out for it pretty bad and sent them all to their rooms without dinner, claiming she was going to “give your father an earful about this” though Maggie knew that was an empty threat if ever Tricia made one since the first thing James would say was ‘where do you think they learned it, Tricia?’ But, Dara, young and sick with faith in consequence, had cried for hours in their shared bedroom, demanding to know why Maggie wanted God and Mom and the Harringtons of all people to hate her. One near-melted Baby Ruth bar and two Hail Marys between them and it was like it had never happened.

Maggie took the buffalo chicken dip ingredients from the refrigerator and stacked them on the narrow countertop then plugged in the slow cooker.

“That your costume?” she nodded Dara up and down.

“I brought one,” Dara said and pulled her backpack onto the kitchen table. After briefly fishing, she produced a metal headband with tiny rods pointing out of it like a crown. The ends of each spoke had small costume gemstones attached.

“I don’t get it,” Maggie said.

“I’m the sun,” Dara said, pointing down her yellow knit sweater and beige cords.

“The center of the universe,” Maggie said. “Of course.”

By ten o’clock there were nearly twenty guests milling from the kitchen to the living room to the rickety porch, all carrying ashtrays and red cups with them like their fares for the river Styx. Oley brought his long-term girlfriend, Sage, and they took turns kissing both Kelly women hard on their cheeks. Sage wore a very long white dress and shawl with fringe on it and when Dara guessed that she was meant to be either a ghost or

Stevie Nicks from her Bella Donna album cover, Sage laughed for longer than Maggie thought was warranted or polite. Oley brought some candles, anointed in a variety of oils with competing scents and Maggie felt obligated to set them out with the rest of her candles that she had intended on lighting, for effect, around midnight.

Some men that neither Dara nor Maggie recognized, wearing what could be either lazy superhero costumes or sincere comic book t-shirts, kept asking about Ryan, who hadn’t yet returned from a beer run he’d taken around eight. The group of them intermittently escaped to the porch to smoke their spliffs and always returned with a new member, occasionally younger-looking women in ragged black jersey dresses and once, a matching bra and underwear set under one of the men’s bomber jackets.

Dara turned out to be a great second hostess, making up for Ryan’s notable absence, taking jackets and offering drinks, carrying trash from every flat surface in the home and front porch to the plastic bags Maggie had tied to most door handles. Dara veered her neck toward the front windows whenever car doors banged shut on the street or the doorknob rattled. She made no effort to hide that she was waiting on Ryan and became visibly anxious each time the porch door swung shut behind new guests.

Maggie shared Dara’s concerns – he had left for the liquor store nearly two hours ago, just as quickly as he’d emerged from his hibernation he was off – but there were too many open hands and mouths to tend to without him.

Gabe arrived shortly after his shift. He was dressed as Warren Beatty’s Clyde

Barrow: fedora and a pin striped suit jacket (likely the one he’d bought last year for his cousin’s wedding). Maggie shuttled through the living room to meet him, still holding the long incense matches meant to light the many candles collected in the corners of the apartment. No matter how many lamps she added, the apartment was always too dark.

Maggie wrapped her arms around Gabe’s neck and clung to him as though she had gone months posted at a widow’s walk without notice from him.

“You’re blonde,” Gabe said.

Dara appeared over Gabe’s shoulder as Maggie separated from him.

“Ryan can’t find a spot outside,” she said, eyes locked on her cellphone. “I’m going to meet him down the block. Help him carry the booze in.”

“Wait. How much did he get?” Maggie asked, glancing back at the kitchen.

“Where are we going to put anything?”

Dara shrugged. “Hi, Gabe.”

“Little sister,” Gabe nodded at Dara. One of the things Maggie liked most about

Gabe was his ease with her family. “How you liking County?”

Dara snorted. “Remember high school? Two more years of that. Now with smoke breaks.”

“Y’know, I don’t think I do remember high school,” Gabe smirked at Maggie, still fixed in his forearms.

Gabe had graduated Saint Joseph’s two years before Maggie did, though they had not known each other well then, spare one of two required Religion classes together, a penance Gabe had to make his senior year for routinely skipping his first enrollments.

Maggie was intimidated then by Gabe’s class clown routine, one where he regularly called her a gringa and winked, something Maggie had mistaken to be a slur of some kind, or maybe just an insult, likely about her nose, she had reasoned.

She had also been terrified of his backyard wrestling persona: The Archangel, which surfaced perennially in blurry photographs, strewn in 72 dpi pixels across various social media fan accounts that a small horde of underclassmen girls operated. In those pictures he was less intentionally comical, though the showmanship of his various spandex costumes and his outdated spikey hairstyle were points of endless cringe- laughter for the couple now. At the time, Gabe’s broad chest and near nudity in the profile pictures made Maggie embarrassed to see them, even in the passing “suggested accounts” margins of her social networks. The whole get up was unbearably attractive to her sixteen year old self and made her feel grossly underprepared for whatever sex everyone except her seemed to be having. Years later, when she became reacquainted with Gabe, who also hadn’t left the area post-graduation, she felt grossly underprepared all over again, despite having made a point of losing her V-card to Liam Harrington graduation night and, of course, several other youthfully tumultuous relationships since then.

“Your dress,” Dara poked Maggie in the shoulder, then the stomach. She pulled back a red stain and pointed it at Maggie, “From the salsa?”

Maggie looked down her skirt/sweater set and saw that she was riddled with brown-red spots that hadn’t been there when she’d moved to greet Gabe. She stepped back from Gabe and recognized a mirrored pattern of stains, fat wet red speckled throughout his jacket and shirt. Maggie turned toward the kitchen for her white vinegar but Gabe tucked her back into his chest, laughing deep.

“I got blood on you,” Gabe said into Maggie’s wig.

“That’s gonna be on everything in the house by the end of the night,” Dara said and pushed through the screen door to the street outside.

Maggie wiggled out of Gabe’s grip, shaking her head like she was trying to lose a wasp.

“They get shot at the end,” he said as if to reassure her.

“But that’s not how I wanted,” Maggie started and didn’t finish the protest.

“No? It’s better this way. More romantic,” Gabe said.

His point was so obscene Maggie couldn’t decide how to engage with it without passively accepting its premise.

Ryan emerged from the porch, leading a tiny band of misfits inside with him, and they stalled in a semi-circle at the front of the living room, meeting Maggie and Gabe.

Dara chatted, engrossed, with one of the group’s few women who had cycled in and out throughout the evening, unmistakably costumed, with a painted face, as a sad clown. The group smelt, collectively, a little bit like sweat and smoke, but predominately like spilt malt liquor.

“Where’ve you been?” Maggie asked, glancing toward Gabe in hopes of summoning another parental figure to glower at Ryan with her. Gabe was already turned away from them, talking lowly with Ryan’s friends about the comparative merits of whey or plant-based protein supplements.

“I meant to tell you when he texted. He stopped off at Sheetz for sandwiches,”

Dara said.

“I stopped off at Sheetz for sandwiches,” Ryan said.

“You put gas in my car?” Maggie asked.

“Of course.”

“I’ll know,” Maggie said. Then, “We have food here.”

“When the mood strikes you, though,” Ryan shrugged. Maggie stepped backward, taking inventory of Ryan’s outfit. He had fake blood smeared indiscriminately across his face, but there was no telling if he was meant to be a killer or a victim.

“I made all this food,” Maggie said, turning again to the back of Gabe’s head.

Dara took the brown paper bag Ryan held out of his hands. She walked into the empty kitchen and unpacked bottles of MD 20/20 and Svedka from the liquor store bag.

Most of the guests were people Maggie hadn’t met before. She began supplanting the faces of the guests she didn’t know with Ryan’s face. She hoped that this would motivate her to stay pleasant or at least polite, despite her paranoia that most of these kids would take something valuable from her home before leaving tonight. When the sad clown girl disappeared to the bathroom, it was impossible for Maggie to bury her fear that the girl would pocket her cosmetics or even something cheap but useful like tampons or the 500 count bottle of store brand ibuprofen Maggie kept in the medicine cabinet.

Oley and Sage sat together on one recliner chair, as close as two people’s faces could be without touching. Gabe was still talking to a pair of Ryan’s friends. The lazy superheroes found new places to stretch since the apartment had emptied: three of them on the couch and pairs of them at each window.

Dara was alone in the kitchen, tidying the counters and tossing empty bottles in the trash. Maggie felt hot with guilt and cut through the room to help her.

“Looks fancy now, right?” Dara said once Maggie was close enough to her in the kitchen. Then, she set her hands lightly on Maggie’s shoulders and twisted her three hundred sixty degrees. Dara had lit eight or nine candles on the newly cleaned counters.

The room felt like a new room, something deeply spiritual or else, solemn in a mournful way.

“It’s beautiful. Thank you,” Maggie said.

She thought of her childhood Halloweens, when she would attend the All Saints’

Day and All Souls’ Day Masses, sick in her stomach with sugar and guilt at having devoured so much without sharing and when she was older, guilt for having eaten anything at all. She thought of what it meant, what it really meant, not to be Catholic anymore. Nana Bridget had no qualms telling Maggie this meant eternal damnation, citing scripture that condemned witchcraft and prophecy. How reading tarot and astrological natal charts and forecasts of any kind were necromancy. How it could be worth it though, couldn’t it? If it meant something indebted, to love her forever.

Something that had no say in who Maggie was.

For so long Maggie had thought she needed the church for a family in God. But it had never really wanted her, never took to her like it did to others, her more devout

classmates with their constant rosary prayers and compulsive gasps whenever someone produced alcohol or weed at a football game. Certainly the Church didn’t need Maggie, she would be no great addition in Heaven, she was no true altruist or even an honest confessor. She believed in consequences, sure, but only earned ones. Abstract consequences, delayed and indirect, and likely self-imposed.

She wasn’t an atheist. She believed in something, just something older, bigger.

Something before even Nana Bridget’s lifetime. Maybe she was wrong, although she felt that she had done her research. The wheel of the year, the triple moon goddess, the good people – they all had roots in Ireland and different iterations around the world. They weren’t brought to her ancestors by force or coercion. They were beliefs simultaneously born across cultures. Isn’t that persuasive evidence? Besides, Maggie was conceived out of wedlock, blooming in her mother’s womb during her parents’ wedding ceremony, a personal sort of original sin. One James favored for giving him Tricia, one Tricia resented for keeping her in town. Maggie had always been destined for hellfire.

“Let’s light up the whole house,” Maggie said to Dara, ripping another match from the book.

The two women fluttered through the living room lighting every candle in sight: the two fetid candles Oley had gifted her set on the coffee table in the living room; a series of tea lights that Maggie had set aside in votive glasses shaped like skulls and pumpkins lined the book shelves; and all the candles on Maggie’s altar. It was nearly midnight now and when Maggie approached the table she whispered her best recollection of the fertility charm to herself. She imagined ancestors she had never met, smiling in some place bright and lush, surrounding her with light, touching her stomach. Each

woman ancestor appeared in her mind’s eye as a cross between Tricia and Nana Bridget, too thin in the neck and shoulders, gaunt-faced and severe. Maggie tried to focus all her energy on imagining herself pregnant and then, a mother. She fixed her eyes on the flame of her candles and then on the Empress tarot card she had left propped against the chalice. She heard her own voice say, “now and at the hour of our death. Amen,” and tried to bite her lips shut but her mouth was closed.

More guests left in the time it took Maggie and Dara to light the candles and when the two finally sat down with fresh drinks in the living room, there were hardly ten people in the house. Two of Ryan’s superhero t-shirted guests remained and sat beside

Ryan and Gabe in the semi-circle of found furniture collected for the party, an upturned ottoman, a series of folding chairs taken in off the porch and some stools hauled in from the kitchen table. Oley and Sage hadn’t moved from the recliner since they arrived. Sage sat with her head leaning against Oley’s chest and her half-awake eyes hidden in the drapes of her fried and teased hair, giving her the appearance of a baby crone to Maggie, somehow very aged but naive. Dara sat with her feet tucked under her body on the carpet, texting some friend Maggie knew Dara would never introduce.

Everyone’s conversation lulled at the same time leaving a cutting break in the rhythm of the room.

“It looks like the dungeon of a sex cult in here,” one of the superheroes – this one in an Iron Man t-shirt – said louder than it seemed he had meant it.

His friend, wearing a Captain America t-shirt, punched him once in the arm. Ryan laughed.

Maggie was able, now that there were far less of them and she wasn’t busy cooking or cleaning or chatting with guests, to take a few moments to study their faces.

Both men seemed younger than she had originally read them as, possibly as young as eighteen years old, although Captain America seemed older. He had severely pitted skin, likely healed from recent acne, and even in this light Maggie felt self-conscious of her own red and textured cheeks, hidden under many layers of makeup.

The guy in the Iron Man t-shirt was tall and broad shouldered and had long greasy hair strung over a bandana like the waxy tendrils of a hanging house plant. He had several thick-lined tattoos faded across his hands and arms but none of them were shapes or logos that Maggie had ever seen or heard of before. She retrofitted a memory of him roughly pushing past her in the kitchen to get a beer earlier in the evening but she caught herself quickly, admitting that it could have just as easily been any of the other unknown guests. Maggie decided Iron Man was the youngest because of how trendy and confident his misanthropy seemed, something that Maggie reasoned most people grow out of by their mid-twenties.

Maggie reached across the sofa arm and gripped Gabe’s hand. He gave her palm a gentle squeeze.

“Okay, okay. Hey, everyone,” Sage said to no one and everyone, clapping her hands together. Maggie remembered that Oley once told her once that Sage had been a competitive cheerleader in high school. “Scary stories.”

“What about them?” Dara asked without looking up from her iPhone.

Sage glared down at Dara.

“Let’s tell them?” Sage said and reached across the coffee table for Maggie’s half-full cup of vodka/diet.

“Okay, you start,” Maggie said, standing to get another drink for herself from the kitchen.

“Well, I don’t know any,” Sage said.

The room splintered into sloppy laughter.

“Or, scary story drinking game?” Gabe said.

“How would that work?” Dara asked. “Drink if you’re scared? Or, if you’re not scared? Or?”

“Just drink,” Iron Man said with a laugh.

“Have any of you seen that website where you can watch people die?” Captain

America asked.

Gabe and Maggie exchanged a glance. Maggie disliked horror of most kinds, even the overproduced, ex-child actor starring PG-13 kind.

“Ryan, who have you brought into our home?” Maggie said, forcing a half-laugh and stepping back into her spot on the couch.

“I’m sorry, Ma’am. I’m Zeke,” Zeke leaned off of his chair toward Maggie and stuck a hand out.

Maggie switched her new cup to her left hand and accepted Zeke’s handshake.

“I’ve seen it,” Oley said almost silently. “It’s nothing any of you haven’t seen before.”

“I’m pretty sure I’d know if I had been on some serial killer website,” Dara said.

“It’s not like that. It collects clips that have already aired or been posted other places online. It’s mostly clips from the news like Budd Dwyer,” Oley said.

“Who’s Budd Dwyer?” Iron Man asked.

“You don’t remember Budd Dwyer?” Oley asked.

“They’re too young,” Sage said. “They’re babies.”

“My cousins told me about him,” Gabe said. “Some politician from Pennsylvania.

Called a press conference and shot himself on live television.”

“And they broadcasted it?” Maggie asked.

“Think so. It was like, the eighties then. People weren’t killing for notoriety as much I guess. Or, he was one of the first?” Gabe said.

“Certain channels did. Most of the local news outlets around here. Replayed it unedited all day. My brothers taped it on the VCR when it aired on evening edition so we could watch it again,” Oley said.

“Fucking gross,” Dara said.

“You’re scared. You gotta drink now,” Ryan tapped his cup against Dara’s.

“You don’t think it’s gross?” Maggie asked Ryan.

“I mean, isn’t death part of life?” Ryan said.

“Isn’t shitting too? Do you watch videos of people shitting in your spare time?”

Dara demanded. Her phone was face down on the carpet in front of her now.

“Dara. Mouth,” Maggie said.

“Fuck off, Mom. You don’t think that’s disgusting?” Dara said.

“Watching it is, I guess. But stuff like that’s existed forever. Hardly edgy,”

Maggie shot a glance at Zeke. “People watched executions for years,” she said.

“And that Faces of Death franchise,” Oley said.

“Oley, they’re babies,” Sage stage-whispered to him.

“They remember Faces of Death,” Oley said. “Everyone does.”

All the guests said something vague to their neighbors but no one needed more details.

“White people attended lynchings recreationally as recently as the sixties,” Gabe said.

The room was silent.

“Yeah, people fucking suck,” Zeke offered.

No one answered.

The skull-cut votive glasses flickered near the ceiling, shooting shadows where the room folded atop itself. Maggie watched the lights for a while and wondered if that might be the view Budd Dwyer had wherever he was after death, if there was a Hell, and if suicide got you there.

Maggie considered setting a hand on Gabe’s knee by way of apology or, consolation. She took a long swig from her diet cola instead.

“Why did he do it?” Dara shot demandingly across the circle to Oley.

“Who? White people?” Sage asked.

“Budd Dwyer,” Maggie answered.

“He was being sentenced for taking a bribe,” Ryan said, holding his phone.

“According to Wikipedia. He had been convicted and was awaiting his punishment.”

“Coward,” Dara said.

“Pussy,” Zeke said, moving his head to catch Dara’s line of vision. “We could try contacting him.”

“Who?” Sage asked.

“Budd Dwyer,” Maggie answered, again.

“How?” Ryan asked.

“Ouija board,” Zeke said.

“No, you don’t want to fuck with that,” Oley said, straightening his back so that

Sage slid a little off his lap.

“Babies,” Sage said.

“You’re getting really fucking irritating with that, okay?” Dara snapped. “Can you knock it off?”

Maggie choked back a laugh and avoided Sage’s eye contact.

“We should get going,” Oley said and the couple stood.

“Oh, Oley, she didn’t mean,” Maggie said, standing to meet them. She pushed the sunbeam headband sideways into Dara’s knotty curls as she passed her.

Dara didn’t say anything.

“We know,” Oley said.

“It’s just late,” Sage finished.

Maggie opened the door for the pair and hugged them goodbye.

“I’m serious, Mags,” Oley said in the doorway, “You don’t want to invite anything into your home. They don’t leave.”

Most of Ryan’s friends left shortly after Oley and Sage. While the party’s members split and re-grouped and split again on the front steps, Maggie made a show of

cleaning up the remaining debris in the household. She considered the televised death she had seen. All that she could remember were the victims of natural disasters, the charred remains of veterans, the occasional Halloween prop turned real life mummy. They were all well past dead, not in process. They did feel in motion though, the sinews and tendons, the Pompeii-style flash. Death must be faster than it felt, she decided.

Ryan, Dara, Gabe, and Zeke were the only others still in the house.

Since Oley had left, Zeke flexed his bloodlust and attempted clumsily to represent himself as some authority on Internet gore culture. He claimed to regularly visit a variety of deep web sites that no one had inquired about. After a few stories, a pattern emerged where Zeke described videos in lengthy, theatrically embellished details while maintaining unblinking eye contact with Dara. When Zeke garishly imitated the death rattle of a decapitated journalist, Ryan removed Zeke from the house entirely under the guise of “going for a smoke on the porch.”

Maggie didn’t want any part of the Budd Dwyer dinner theater or any more impressions of the other videos on Zeke’s list of televised suicides and murders. She extinguished the candles and went to bed.

When Maggie awoke at three-thirty a.m., she was surprised by Gabe’s warm body next to her in bed. It had been a long time since they had spent time in bed longer than necessary for clumsy, practiced sex. This was a welcomed, forgotten intimacy. Then, she desperately needed to pee.

Maggie slipped out of the room as quietly as she could manage, using the glow of her iPhone to guide her. Walking toward the bathroom, the reality struck Maggie that

there might still well be strangers in her home. She had seen the sad clown go into her bathroom but never come out. She wondered if she should have brought something with her, like a knife or some heavy, blunt object, for protection.

Maggie caught a flit of shadow casted from the living room and walked there instead. Dara, Ryan, and Zeke sat around the coffee table together. Many of the candles that Maggie had extinguished hours ago, including the spell candles she had left on her altar, were relit. The entire room appeared to be floating in hellish shadows.

On the coffee table, there was a makeshift Ouija board and planchette: Sharpie scrawled on a square of cardboard ripped from a used pizza box and one of Maggie’s votive glasses, top side down.

“What are you doing?” Maggie demanded, straining to keep the tone of her voice even.

“Nothing yet. Like, at all. Nothing,” Dara said, lifting her brows emphatically.

She shook her head sideways and the crown she was still wearing refracted the candlelight around them into kaleidoscopic dust.

For a second it seemed that shadows were cutting across the room in ways that didn’t honor the boundaries of physics, bouncing independently, severed from any light sources. Looking at the whole messy scene, Maggie tasted overripe berries in her mouth.

Maybe this was some kind of night terror.

“We’ll keep it down,” Ryan said.

Maggie was surprised that Ryan would want to be involved in this at all. When he’d moved into the spare room, he’d brought the confirmation wall cross Nana Bridget

had gifted him and hung it immediately. Maggie always thought of Ryan as the only religious Kelly left.

“This is my house,” Maggie said sharply.

“We should have asked you,” Dara said, drawing circles with her nails into the carpet, the bold crown bowed parallel to the floor.

Zeke scratched at the dry skin of his elbow loudly.

“You can’t summon something into someone else’s house,” Maggie said.

“First of all, this is not your house,” Ryan said.

Dara shook her head in tiny windshield wiper motions at him over the coffee table.

“You rent it,” Ryan said. “Besides, you don’t believe in this really, anyway.

Right? Or, do you? ”

Maggie was too tired to argue but she was curious. If the Ouija board worked, maybe the fertility ritual would also.

“Okay,” Maggie said. “Go on.” She walked to the armchair in the corner of the living room and sat down.

“You’re staying?” Zeke asked.

“I have more of a right than you do, don’t I?” Maggie asked

“I meant are you going to join the circle?” Zeke seemed genuinely hurt and

Maggie felt bad about it.

Maggie fought the urge to apologize. She didn’t want to seem weak in her own home and Zeke had clearly overstayed his welcome, she had thought. “I’ll just watch,” she said.

It was clear immediately that none of them knew what they were doing. Dara and

Ryan read sections of websites explaining the Dos and Don’ts of Ouija. For one, always end a session with “goodbye” or else the entity might remain in the space, able to haunt whomever it liked forever. And, for another, to never ask when you will die, seemingly because it will give you the proper answer.

Once the trio felt certain enough that they had completed their Google-led necromancy training, they all set one hand lightly on the top of the votive glass.

“Are you sure we should be doing this?” Ryan asked.

“Why not? It doesn’t matter if you don’t believe in it, right?” Maggie shot at him.

“I just mean. I don’t know,” Ryan’s head swiveled around the room as if there were an answer hanging somewhere like a cobweb. “Even if it isn’t real, it’s still a sin, right?”

“Wow,” Dara said. “Well, then you won’t say anything. I’ll do it. Keep your hands still.”

Dara cleared her throat more theatrically than Maggie thought necessary but she enjoyed seeing her take Ryan down a peg too much to be irritated by the opulence of it all.

“Hello. Are there any spirits here that would like to communicate with us?” Dara projected her voice throughout the room.

The silence of the room gave way to the typical house sounds – something dripping through pipes in the distance, wind over the trashcans outside. Noises the Kelly parents called “settling.”

After more silence, Zeke repeated the question.

“Anybody home?” he asked, laughing at himself.

“I don’t feel anything,” Ryan said. “The website said there would be a heavy sensation.”

“Shut up,” Zeke said. Their hands slid the glass slowly across the board. It stopped at “Yes.”

Dara resumed her role as proctor. “Are you a kind spirit?”

The glass slid away and then back to “Yes.”

“Is it Budd Dwyer?” Zeke asked.

Maggie was certain that all three of them were all scheming to scare the others.

Their hands glided the glass over to “No.”

“Who are you?” Ryan asked.

“The website said we should only have one person asking,” Dara reminded them.

“Can you spell your name for us?”

The glass slipped across the board too easily for Maggie’s liking.

“No.”

“Convenient,” Maggie said.

“Would you like to do this, then? You’re a witch, right?” Zeke asked.

Maggie realized only then that Zeke and Ryan have talked about her at some point

– or, more likely, points – throughout their friendship without her present. Yet, Ryan had never talked to Maggie about Zeke. This felt like some kind of betrayal. She knelt down out of the armchair and took a spot next to Zeke.

“Don’t, Mag. You’ll fuck with the energy,” Dara said.

Maggie shot Dara a harsh face but she didn’t put her hands on the board.

“Do you have a message for us in the human realm?” Dara nearly shouted the question.

The votive pulled across the board. Maggie couldn’t tell who, if any of them, was pushing it.

“Yes.”

“Is it me?” Zeke said

Back to “No.”

“Who?” Ryan asked.

The votive flowed. “M-A-R-”

“This is ridiculous,” Maggie stood up.

“What’s ridiculous?” Zeke asked.

“Margaret,” Ryan answered.

“Stop. You’re giving it answers,” Dara said. “Now we don’t know who it’s for.”

“What is your message?” Maggie asked. “I’m listening.”

“T-Y-R.”

Their hands clung to the votive, clung in turn to the R, for a moment.

Maggie pushed the votive across the table and shot up. “It doesn’t mean anything.”

Dara screamed at her. “What are you doing? We’re not finished. We don’t know what it means. We didn’t say ‘goodbye.’”

“I’m going to bed. Put the candles out before you burn the house down,” Maggie stomped toward the bathroom.

To ensure she was alone, Maggie pulled the shower curtain back the way she had warned so many teenage babysitters to on the cable-edited versions of the few horror movies she had seen. She was alone, of course. There was nothing coming for her in the night.

She rolled her panties down and found a spot of rust red menstrual blood seeping in the fabric. She filled the sink with them, soaked her own hands with soap, scrubbed.

Gabe was spread across the bed. She climbed in and pinned her arms to his chest, hoping he’d move under her but he stayed dead asleep. The black of her closed eyelids only brought her the dying she’d tried for earlier, half-forgotten news reports – a girl clinging to life in lava for hours; a man gripping his daughters in an avalanche; all the falling bodies forever falling in September – what a show the cameras all make of the body, as if they could tell the living anything in that last moment.

Free to a Good Home

Even when the money was enough, it wasn’t enough. Maybe enough dollars but not fast enough or maybe enough for now but not enough to save. There was no humble way to explain you weren’t being paid right; no way to say a word like enough without sounding entitled, the kind of character flaw that Ryan’s father always spit like venom from his recliner, usually an insult in reference to Ryan’s uncles in New England, or some politician on the news. Sometimes, though, it was meant for Ryan and in the days before he moved out, it had become a regular criticism. Ryan’s father had no problem making it clear that he thought Ryan did nothing to earn his own way. Moving in to his sister’s apartment didn’t help either. “From one teat to another,” his father had said when

Maggie came to fill her car with Ryan’s few boxes.

Zeke didn’t have that same fear of entitlement though, “Fuck humble,” he told

Ryan every shift at the gas station, “they don’t pay me enough.” Ryan knew that Zeke considered him complicit or adjacent to this they, being that Ryan was the shift leader but

Zeke was never bold enough to implicate Ryan directly. Instead, Ryan collected the tasks that “they” didn’t pay Zeke enough to do and did them himself. To date, Zeke wasn’t paid enough to: unload the trucks, pack the cooler, pull the expired goods, front the impulse aisle, mop the bathrooms, replace the receipt paper at the pumps, or – god forbid

– the graceless task of hoisting a six-foot pole up over his head at the plastic numbers on the sign at the edge of the parking lot every time gas prices changed. Turned out that

Zeke got paid just enough to sit behind the counter texting on his phone or counting

cigarette cartons over and over again because somehow, through no fault of his own, another box went missing this week and he had no idea how it happened.

So, when Zeke claimed to have a way that Ryan might make a few bucks on the side – “Could move you out of that bitch-sister’s house faster” – Ryan had his suspicions.

Zeke still owed Ryan money for a gamut of small loans, most recently for the cash upfront that Zeke had needed to buy three of the latest gaming console during Wal-mart’s

Black Friday sale, which were meant to be flipped for a profit on resale websites, although Zeke had yet to sell the three he had purchased and Ryan assumed those were now Christmas gifts to Zeke’s closer friends. Before that, he had lent Zeke money for what he claimed was his girlfriend Niamh’s anniversary present: a tattoo on his shoulder of an anime character that he said reminded him of her. It was a hard sell, even to the generally unbothered Niamh, considering that she was a pasty, waifish girl with a short pixie haircut and straight hips compared to the now-permanent anime heroine, who was mostly breasts and floor length pigtails and from a series Niamh had never heard of before. The couple had split briefly because of it and Ryan didn’t feel right mentioning the money to Zeke, particularly since he was already so testy about Ryan being polite and chatty with her whenever she stopped in for gas and Red Bulls. By the time they rekindled, Zeke was the one to bring the cash up, shoving a wad of sweaty fives and ones into Ryan’s hand and asking, “We straight?” to which Ryan nodded without counting any of it.

Zeke suggested the hustle on a shared smoke break when there were no customers inside. The early December air was frigid enough to warrant real jackets, though both of them wore black zip up hoodies.

“All you have to do,” Zeke said, re-lighting his cigarette for the second time since pulling it from the pack, “is pick up those free kittens off Craigslist, Facebook, whatever, and bring ‘em to me and I do the rest.”

“Whatdya do? Resell ‘em? Tell people they’re show cats or something? Rare breeds?” Ryan asked.

“I can give you a finder’s fee upfront and a cut of whatever I make by the end of each month. It’s all profit.” Zeke sucked at his cigarette but the cherry had gone out again.

“Why don’t you do it yourself?”

Zeke shot Ryan his Heath Ledger smile, the one that got him in bed with Niamh in the first place, who had always been so unduly out of his league, the smile he made recounting any number of criminal exploits whenever he was four Miller High Lifes deep and there was an audience. Then he gave Ryan the same run-around he always did when he was really asking him to do some illegal shit or something that was gonna cost more than it was worth: a slew of y’knows and right?s and vague gestures with his hands.

“Here. Look,” Zeke said, opening his Velcro wallet, fanning a book of fifties and twenties. “I’m in it now. I’m good for it.”

Ryan nodded. “Alright, I’ll see what I can do.”

Zeke flicked the singed short of his cigarette toward the vacant pumps and opened the door, the sensor buzzer ringing in their re-entry.

Ryan found the first listing for kittens while he was parked in the lot behind a

McDonald’s off University Drive. He worked after his gas station job as a driver for

every reputable ride hail and freelance delivery service in the App Store. Usually Ryan got lucky with the students at the small University or even near County College on the days that there were many off-campus parties. He could clear upwards of eighty or so dollars a night. Since it was nearing the end of the semester, though, work had been light.

Finals, Ryan guessed. Or, maybe classes were already over for the year.

To keep himself awake, he had decided to check pet listings online. Most posts were for odd pets, the ones too dangerous or fragile or otherwise untouchable, visual pets, he had seen them advertised as at pet shops: snakes, lizards, tarantulas, stag beetles.

Every third post was a knot of ball pythons with exorbitant “rehoming fees” sometimes as many as five or six hundred dollars for a heat lamp and a tank. There were very few mammals on the site and those that were, were typically dogs listed as ‘purebred’ or

‘breeding quality’. If the racket that Zeke was caught up in meant selling cats with these kinds of deceptive markups – misrepresenting/masquerading them as purebred Bangals or

Hairless Sphynxes, then maybe it was profitable but it certainly wouldn’t be long-term.

The first kitten listing was across town to a wealthy neighborhood northeast of the city limits. He was close enough now, at the downtown intersection of the colleges, to shoot by in the morning, after a nap in his car. He clicked through the picture album attached to the post. No way of telling if the animals fit Zeke’s needs since he hadn’t specified. Each photo had a gender and a name assigned, though Ryan thought they might as well have all been the same cat in different lighting. There were no distinguishing features between them. Even the placements of their spots or stripes seemed haphazard in the same ways on all of them, their net impressions were plain and nondescript. The decidedly generic: cats.

Ryan emailed the poster, HappyGranny54, expecting to hear back hours, maybe days later. He offered to take the whole litter of them, four cats total, since he had already decided not to do this again. Instead, the poster responded immediately and tried sweetening the pot, “Give you the cat food and carriers if you can come by before nine.”

The woman agreed to meeting around four-thirty a.m. since that would avoid sacrificing

“gym time” from her “morning routine”.

He pictured a chubby, wrinkled old woman, something like a nesting doll with the face of Betty White, sitting on a folding chair in spandex brushed with loose cat hair, lifting small, neon dumbbells as she watched traffic and weather reports on the morning show.

Ryan gave up on any more responsible drunks or irresponsible students after he’d made around sixty for the night, which was enough to cover gas for the week and, since

Maggie still expected less than half-rent from him – an advantage Ryan felt bad for knowing she was extending but not bad enough to correct her – the rest went to his

Mustang fund. He hit the highway toward the address Happy Granny had sent him.

He arrived fifteen minutes early. From the email handle, Ryan had imagined

Happy Granny’s home would be the Ranch-style type that he often saw on the wide suburban streets of neighborhoods like hers; ones that can afford to build outward and not upward. The ones with screened in porches on their backs or sides, clustered with heavy houseplants, a fat pool or trampoline cutting holes out of their fenced in yards. He pictured a wide Cadillac or Buick in the driveway, for taking her many grandchildren from her home to the movies or maybe violin lessons or tutoring in some impressive but impractical languages like Latin or Greek. He imagined she wore oversized octagon-

shaped glasses and knitwear constantly. That she was a lonely widow, who had used her husband’s pension exclusively on her many children and her children’s children. That she was out of place in her expensive neighborhood but adored by her neighbors because she had invested so much love into her home it couldn’t help but spill out onto the street.

Instead, the home Ryan arrived at was the only split level on the block. No porch or deck. No cars in the driveway. No fence.

Ryan hit the illuminated doorbell, realizing that it was still nearly black outside.

The sky’s lowest edges hinted faintly at the yellow-blues of dawn. From the neighboring windows, this was likely an indecent image: a young man knocking at the door of a lonely old woman at near-dawn – had she said she was a widow? Certainly any husband would stop a woman from inviting a stranger from the Internet to her home. Without a glance at a clock, Ryan could even forgive onlookers for mistaking this as a midnight booty call.

From the street, though, morning was obvious. There were quiet clips of bird sounds along the sidewalk’s row of oaks. The dew-tight air was amniotic. Forecasts the past few weeks had called for snow that never came. The fresh wet of morning settled down to his bones. Ryan zipped his hoodie to his chin and raised his hand to ring again.

A tall white woman opened the door. Her white-blonde hair was pulled taut against her scalp into a frizzy, high ponytail. Ryan thought he might have the wrong house. This woman seemed much too young to be Happy Granny 54. Her eyes were deep-set perfect circles and were smoked around the rims with brown shadow, a style he had seen his sister Maggie wear to formal events. She wore a thin navy housedress without sleeves. Her upper arms were noticeably toned in a way that didn’t seem

consistent with the rest of her body, like maybe she had been a professional drummer or boxer in her earlier life. He tried picturing the woman without her face feathered in wrinkles, concentrating on some lifting or punching or otherwise arduous upper-body task. Was 54 her age or her birth year? He couldn’t decide if her gauntness aged her and she was really only twenty or so years his senior or if maybe she seemed younger than expected because she was so obviously active.

She pinned the door toward him, extending her arm fully, locked like an opened umbrella.

“I’m here. Are you Happy–” Ryan started.

“You want the cats,” she raised her eyebrow in a demanding way that Ryan hadn’t expected so early in the morning.

“Yeah,” he said.

She was at the landing of two staircases. Behind her, Ryan saw one short staircase leading upstairs and another leading down. Tiny, framed portraits dotted the wall of the downward staircase. There were lights on at the ends of both stairs.

“Where do you live?” she asked.

“With my sister,” he answered. Then added, “It’s a duplex. We have the first floor.”

“Where?”

Ryan nudged his head southward, “Iron Triangle.”

“Whatdya gonna do with four of ‘em?”

Ryan thought she might have also been awake all night.

“Isn’t it bad to separate them?” he said, shrugging.

“They’re a lot of work,” she said. Obviously she thought he was a fucking idiot.

“I don’t need all four if you don’t want,” he said.

“You had cats before?” the woman’s elbow bent a little from the weight of the door and they were suddenly closer without moving.

“All my life,” Ryan lied.

“You have some now?”

“No, he – Whiskers – he died recently,” Ryan felt ashamed. Not by the lie, he never felt too bad about lying when he did it, afterward always, of course, but in the moment, instead, ashamed by the absurdity of it all. Lying to a woman for her cats. For what? Money he’d probably never see from Zeke anyway.

“I’m sorry,” her voice and face softened a bit. “How old was he?”

“Thirty,” he said.

“Wow,” she laughed. “That’s old.”

Ryan was certain she knew he was lying. He forced a laugh. “Yeah, we were very lucky with him. Little Whiskey.”

“Well, okay. I’ll go get them.”

The woman turned a few degrees to let Ryan pass her onto the landing. She yawned and swung her hip to catch the door as she let go of it, all in one motion. The little thud the door made against her body reminded Ryan of stones dropped in still water.

It was a few degrees cooler inside her house and Ryan thought maybe she hadn’t put the heat on yet this season. Maggie had done so two weeks earlier, after layering sweaters and undershirts and doubling socks since the end of September. Ryan only

convinced her to turn it on after he promised to pay whatever its difference was to the rest of their bills; he was so tired of wearing sweatshirts to bed.

“Don’t move,” she said and descended the stairs.

The framed photos along the downward stairs were all in black-and-white, even the photos that had obviously been taken by digital cameras or cellphones. One, closest to the door, had a young man a little older than Ryan holding a toddler, both wearing

Steelers shirts, the toddler, pantless except for its diaper. Ryan guessed these were her son and grandchild.

That photo seemed starkly contrasted to the prim air of the rest of the photos. The next was Happy Granny and an older man (Ryan guessed that this was her husband) along a cruise ship deck, smiling squarely in formal wear, faces turned away from each other, both toward the camera, standing in an upright-spooning position, their pelvises nested like a high school prom pose. Their bodies and faces seemed pained and awkward, distant from themselves and each other.

At the bottom of the stairs, after several photos of her son’s wedding and graduations, was a single colored photo, one that was in a smaller frame than the others, which were all matted to the same dimensions, regardless of the photo’s orientation.

From where Ryan stood, it looked as if it could have been a mirror. He took a step down the stairs.

Happy Granny rounded the corner with both her hands full. One gripped a rolled half-bag of Dollar General generic kitten chow, and the other elbow bent around an unopened bag of clay cat litter.

Ryan stepped down the remaining stairs to meet her.

“I’ve got them packed in two carriers. Girls in one, boys in another,” she said.

Ryan remembered the genders and names under the photos.

He reached out to take the bags from her. She ignored his outstretched hands and struggled past him on the stairs. Ryan moved quickly behind her to the bottom level, a sort of finished basement, somehow even colder than the landing.

“Stay there,” she chided, after dropping the bags on the front door landing. She shuffled past again. “I’ll be right back.”

He turned back toward the stairs. The final photograph glimmered like a last green leaf against fall foliage, the colors stark against the post-effect filtered black and white photos along the rest of the way.

This photo seemed to be edited dramatically from its original. It was significantly lower quality than the other photos, as if a blurry photo taken with an instant film camera had been blown up larger than the resolution would allow. It was a bride and groom, candid, overexposed by a flash. They were just outside the depth of field – their features obvious but unclear. The bride had no face, was only golden hair and veil turned from the camera into the groom’s chest, the very corner of her orange lipstick peeled upward mid- laughter.

The groom was Ryan.

Everything about him: his thick dark hair, matted without styling, in a nebulous shag along his forehead. His pale skin and gawky frame. Even the crooked-mouthed smile, opened so the one chipped canine on the left sunk further into his bottom lip than the other teeth; the fat bump at the bridge of his nose; the way his brows pinched together, cutting his blue eyes in half. He looked more like Ryan than any male relative

he had ever did. More than any photo of his young father or grandfather. If the man were wearing a Slayer t-shirt and zip up black hoodie right now in front of Ryan, the two would be indistinguishable.

The woman reappeared from a room around the corner. The sounds of a running washing machine sloshed in there now. She held two crates, much larger than Ryan had anticipated, with square grill bars in the front of them, like tiny prisons. He couldn’t see any cats inside. Should he have asked to see them beforehand?

Ryan turned back once more to the photograph.

“He looks a little,” Ryan began, pointing at the frame, then realized how narcissistic it would sound. Of course he didn’t look that much like Ryan. Ryan was just tired.

“My first husband,” she said.

Ryan nodded and took the first few steps toward the front door. He realized then that all the other photos’ subjects were also blonde.

“I’m sorry,” he said. He didn’t know what else to say. She was a widow after all.

“Nothing to be sorry for. You didn’t leave me,” her voice was tense, but not more than it had been the whole night.

“I just meant. I mean, since you still have the photo,” Ryan picked up the litter and food and set his hand on the door handle. “I just thought maybe he died.”

“Maybe he has. I wouldn’t know,” she said. She nodded toward the door and

Ryan held it open for her as they walked out into the morning light.

It was much brighter now that dawn had started. It seemed like maybe he had been there for hours though it couldn’t have been more than twenty minutes.

“Yours?” she asked, stopping before Maggie’s 2005 Dodge Neon.

“My sister’s.” He put the supplies in the trunk and opened the back seat for Happy

Granny. She set one carrier in the bucket seat and walked around the car to the other door.

“I would offer you coffee but my husband will be home soon,” she said.

“He wanted to keep them?” Ryan asked.

“He didn’t know about them,” she said. “My neighbor found them under his car a few mornings ago. No mother around. He wanted to take them to a shelter but I don’t like those odds. Those places put down most of the strays they bring in.”

Ryan nodded.

“I wanted to be sure they went to a good home. You get it. You’re a cat person.”

She set the second carrier into the passenger side backseat. Ryan shifted his weight. “I would keep them but I’m allergic. I’ve gone through enough Benadryl this week to kill an army. If Marek knew, he’d have told me to put them back out there,” she swept her arm across the street.

“Your husband,” Ryan said.

“Yeah. He’s a worrier.”

Ryan nodded again and opened the driver’s door. Happy Granny walked around the car and stalled in front of Ryan for a moment. He could see little bumps rising along her bare shoulders.

“Thanks for the cats,” he said, unsure if he should give her money or a handshake or something.

“Take good care of them. Bring them by when they reach thirty,” she smiled for the first time and Ryan wanted to hug her or, at least to offer her his hoodie, but it felt inappropriate.

“Why do you keep it?” he said, and his stomach dropped, embarrassed for being so rude and impulsive.

“What? Keep what?”

“The wedding picture. The guy who left,” he said.

“Nice picture,” she said. “I look good in it.”

Ryan strained to remember the shot, all flashback, half-hair and veil, the faceless blonde bride hung on his – not his – shoulders.

“Maybe it’s a warning to my husband,” she said but didn’t elaborate.

She laughed to herself.

“He looks like me,” Ryan said.

She stepped backward onto her lawn, assessing him.

“I don’t see it.”

Ryan wanted to argue with her. There was no need to see himself in this strange woman’s old wedding photos. He wasn’t the kind of person who just went around inserting himself into random people’s memories or photographs. What would he have to gain from that? It was self-evident. That man looked like Ryan.

She retreated toward her front steps and Ryan waved his keys at her.

“Thanks,” he said.

She turned back towards the car once she’d opened the front door.

“You meant Daniel,” she said. “Yeah, I can see it now. From here. You’re Daniel for sure but, you’re no Marek,” and she swung the door shut behind her.

Ryan never minded driving before six am. The roads were always either clear or full of blue-collar workers, focused and quick to arrive for their first shifts. Both outcomes meant quick or little traffic to contend with. Trying to get anywhere after seven-thirty was impossible on weekdays though. The office monkeys and middle managers, in their Subarus and Nissans, were all salaried, and thus slow moving, willing to risk anyone’s safety to rubberneck a roadside flat or slow suddenly to fiddle with their iPhone’s Apple Music functions when Rock 107 wasn’t playing their preferred Beatles song fast enough.

When Ryan shared his white-collar versus blue-collar traffic theory with his father, James was too ready – as he always is – to shoot him down.

“You think just because someone is salaried they don’t take pride in their work?

They don’t want to get there on time?” he had asked, shaking his head down at Ryan.

Ryan had wanted to ask him what skin he had in that game, why die on that hill, whose boot was he licking, can’t he just fucking once smile and agree, the list goes on.

James hadn’t been salaried since some newspaper gig in the eighties and wasn’t it obvious with all his OT at the warehouse that there was a quantifiable difference in effort between hourly and salaried workers? Couldn’t he see that? Ryan thought that his father was of the mind that he was only temporarily working class, that maybe there was another version of himself in another town or timeline, just shuffling through life without any problems, living large, in need of having this James, Ryan’s James, defend his honor.

Ryan left his comments in the chamber. Leaving well enough alone was often the best option when dealing with his father. But, he had rattled James’ cage nonetheless.

“Everything’s not as black and white as you want it to be.”

Well, fuck did he know? Here Ryan blazed down the Expressway to Zeke’s house, only accompanied by pickups and shit used cars, and they were all moving their speedy best, busting cigarette filters out their windows like bottlerockets.

He rolled the window down. He should have gone home to sleep first, but he knew Maggie would lose it if he brought four cats to the house unannounced. She wouldn’t say anything, sure. She’d probably just clean real loud and passive aggressively around him, vacuum while he played videogames, and then bake trays full of muffins for days. Wait til he complimented them and make some comment about how he’d earned them. Maggie was like a tame version of Ma – always cooking or cleaning her feelings out, fussing over the rest of the family, trying to love the worst out of everyone. Except, where Ma made no qualms with saying it outright, Maggie clenched her bottom jaw hard enough her neck looked longer. When Zeke confirmed that he had the money for the cats,

Ryan figured it was best for everyone to get it over with immediately.

The air lashed ribbons against Ryan’s face, enough to keep him awake for the rest of the ride. It was proper morning now, bright white-gold against the crags of mountains, the dead-grassed traffic median. Time felt suspended in the most promising way, as if there were a destination waiting on the other side if he could only figure out which direction to take. But, there was no hope of discovering that direction. No guide to tell him which was right.

He should have joined the Army, he thought. Like his grandfather did.

His hands seemed distinct and separate entities from him, either a symptom of exhaustion or the grotesque loss of purpose he had felt lately. They were gripping the wheel, and serving his instructions, but was any of this really his doing? Ryan considered letting go of the wheel and letting himself drift, just for the guidance that inertia would bring him. But, he wasn’t so stupid to surrender control.

Zeke was already standing in his mother’s driveway when Ryan pulled up. Niamh sat on the curb apart from him; her long straight frame tucked inside one of Zeke’s old

Thrasher pullovers. On again, Ryan supposed.

He parked on the curb across from Zeke’s house and left the cats in the car with the windows down.

Niamh stood and stepped toward Ryan to meet him in the street. Her eyelids were swollen and pink. “Are you going into town soon?”

“Yeah, I’m just,” Ryan started but Niamh interrupted.

“Can I get a ride? Can you bring me to my car?” she stopped but her mouth hung open like she had more to say, just not to Ryan.

“Sure,” Ryan said, and Niamh pushed past him to the Neon.

“Thanks,” she said.

Ryan turned to Zeke, pacing the sidewalk and hacking a butt.

“Don’t mind her, man,” he said, eyes on his phone. “She’s been a bitch all night.

Thanks for taking her. I thought I’d have to call an Uber.” He laughed, “But I guess you’d wind up taking her then anyway?”

Ryan nodded it off. “Right.”

“So you got four of ‘em?” Zeke walked with Ryan to his car. Niamh was already buckled and in the passenger seat, flipping a Zippo open and closed.

Ryan pulled the two cat carriers from the back seat and set them on the roof of the car. “Woman gave me food and litter for them, too,” he said.

Zeke shook his head and leaned against the car, popping open the metal door on one of the crates. He chucked a half-smoked cigarette into the street and Ryan watched his arm disappear into the cat carrier. There was a flimsy mewling from inside, as several small squeaky toys were stepped on at once in a distant room. Ryan imagined hungry baby birds.

Zeke nodded at Ryan and repeated the prodding with the second carrier crate.

“This one’s too old,” Zeke said.

Ryan lifted his eyebrows and stepped toward Zeke, following his arm into the cat carrier with his eyes. Zeke poked a round mess of charcoal fur in its abdomen. It was true that it was bigger than the others, but still barely the size of a softball. Its eyes were two small dots of bluish gray, sealed over with a film of water. Ryan imagined it had been crying since Happy Granny had found it, silent and stoic like a saint in a Renaissance painting.

“You can’t sell ones this size?” Ryan asked.

“Not for what King wants ‘em for.” Zeke shook his head and lit another cigarette.

“I can give you $200 for the other three.” Zeke tapped the screen on his phone a few times before Ryan heard his own phone ding in his pocket. “You’ve got funds,” Zeke said.

Ryan checked. All $200 was there, in his Venmo account. The app listed three kitten emojis in the ‘for’ section of the transfer.

“Great. Thanks.” Ryan hadn’t imagined he’d get so much, although, now that a number was determined, the effort seemed to far outweigh the reward. He popped the trunk and grabbed the kitten chow.

Zeke shook his hand, waving Ryan off. “I don’t need that shit. I’m gonna take them over to King’s in an hour or two anyway.”

Ryan shut the trunk. “What do you want me to do with the little one?”

“Give it to your sister – Sarah?”

“Dara.”

“Yeah, tell her it’s from me.” Zeke laughed hard and pantomimed kissing the air.

Ryan didn’t respond. “I’m kidding, man. Fuck. I don’t care what you do with it. Leave it in a dumpster. Buy it a sweater and some Yeezys. I can’t do anything with it. It’s yours now.”

Zeke took the three kittens away in a single crate and only acknowledged Niamh when Ryan started the car to leave.

“Call me when you’re thinking straight again,” he said. Then addressed Ryan, “I told you, man. Fast money, right?”

Niamh said nothing the first half of the ride into town and, as Ryan had predicted, it was a classic white-collar traffic stop and go nightmare. The only sound in the car now was the tinny mewls of the cat. Ryan didn’t remember any sounds on the ride from

Granny’s to Zeke’s.

“Do you mind if I?” Ryan gestured to the stereo and tapped a CD on.

“She’s doing that because she’s lonely,” Niamh sighed.

“Maybe so,” Ryan shrugged.

“You took her fucking family away.”

Ryan didn’t know Niamh well enough to know how to respond. She didn’t seem this aggressive most other times he saw her at the gas station or the 24 hour diner Zeke sometimes took her to with them after work. Maybe to Zeke, if they were fighting but, still, Ryan didn’t deserve this at the end of his night, caught in morning rush hour on the

Expressway, with a wailing cat he didn’t want inside his car.

“Don’t curse like that. It’s not becoming.”

Niamh choked out what sounded like both a laugh and a whimper.

“I mean, it’s not ladylike,” Ryan said, as if appealing to her femininity might be like evoking a higher, calmer spirit.

Niamh rolled her window down and lit a Parliament. “Well I guess we both expected better of each other,” she exhaled wispy smoke.

Ryan took his eyes off the gridlock ahead of him. “Better for what? What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about selling kittens to King like a fucking slave trader and you walking around like you’re such a fucking good guy with your anarchy tattoos and your acoustic guitar free love bullshit and your fucking bumper stickers.”

“This is my sister’s car,” Ryan said.

Niamh shook her head. “Whatever. You’re a bag of hot air fucking poser anyway.

What kind of asshole listens to Folk Punk and preaches community and class consciousness and shit and then goes and sells kittens to a dog fighter?”

She was full blown crying now. Tears and snot all over her, though she tucked her chin away, towards the window, to hide it. The passenger mirror was only Niamh’s face, blotched with red and filtered through smoke.

He didn’t understand.

“Who is King?”

Niamh wiped at her face with the sleeve of Zeke’s hoodie and took a deep breath.

“Like you don’t know Mike King? He lives over in Dallas on a big plot of land his bankowner Daddy left him? Sells all kinds of shit – bud, xannies, molly, fucking heroin.

Dogs now, I guess. Look, Zeke knows all this.”

Ryan took the exit ramp toward the gas station, where Niamh’s car was parked.

He shook his head. “No. Zeke said he sells kittens. Like, flips them for profit?

Free cats from kill shelters, new homes. Nothing about dog fights.”

“He brings them to King and King’s people tape them up so they can’t fight back and they use them as bait for the pitbulls. Then they sell the dogs down in South Philly to some fucking nazi maniacs King knows. He’s real tied in down there,” Niamh slurred all her words together in one furious string like a child reciting the alphabet.

Clearly she was serious, but Ryan didn’t know how accurate her information was.

He pulled into the gas station’s parking lot, around back to where Niamh’s car was parked. He passed the manager’s Fiat on the way and tried hurrying Niamh out.

“Look, I don’t know anything about this.” He shook his head.

“What did you think he was doing with the cats?”

He took a cigarette out of her open pack of Parliaments in the center cup holder.

Niamh pulled another out of the pack for herself and tucked the pack into her purse. “You can Google it if you don’t believe me. It’s how these people do shit.”

Ryan hated her. Something in the tone of her voice, so self-righteous and important, taking him to task for everything wrong in the world like it was his job to fix it. Like she was so perfect and he invented dog fighting?

He just, hated her.

Who even was she? Some girlfriend of Zeke’s that flipped in and out of their lives like television static. What did he really know about her? And, now she was telling him who he was? Based on his tattoos? The music he plays at parties? His sister’s fucking

COEXIST bumper sticker? Maybe he was dangerous. More dangerous even than King.

Maybe he didn’t give a fuck what happened to the kittens, just like Zeke didn’t. Maybe she should be scared of him.

“You don’t care what Zeke does? And, I’m supposed to know better?” he scoffed.

Niamh pulled a knot of keys from her purse and opened the door. “Maybe not.

But, now you can’t say you don’t know.”

She slammed the car door shut behind her.

The cat whined through a silent lull in the CD tracks. It echoed through the whole car.

Niamh leaned in through the passenger window. “And, by the way, I don’t give a fuck what that sad S.O.B. does anymore. He’s not my fucking problem. I have my limits.

How’s that for becoming fucking ladylike?” she opened the door to her hatchback.

“Thanks for the ride.”

Dara was waiting on Maggie’s porch when Ryan pulled in around ten. He was ready to be dead to the world. He’d done more than enough for one night and now he had a cat to look after, some guilt he didn’t deserve, two hundred dollars of kitten-blood money in his Venmo. He carried the crate and kitten chow out of the car with him.

Dara stood immediately and followed Ryan into the house.

“You got a cat?” she asked.

“Shouldn’t you be in class right now?” He opened the lock and stepped into the house.

Inside, Ryan set the cat crate on one of Maggie’s recliners, a paisley mess she’d gotten at a secondhand store that Ryan and their father had to carry in for her when she’d first moved in. A bitch to carry up the front steps.

Dara didn’t say anything.

“You know there’s no point in staying enrolled if you aren’t going to attend, right?” Ryan asked. “You should drop out and get a job.”

“I’m going to go, I just need some time.” Dara sat on her knees in front of the recliner, eye level with the kitten in its tiny prison. “What’s its name?”

“Fuck if I know. I don’t even know if it’s a boy or a girl.”

“That’s much less important than a name,” Dara said.

“It’s yours if you promise to go to class,” Ryan said.

“Ma won’t let this anywhere near the house.” Dara turned to Ryan, unable to stifle a smile.

“Keep it here then,” he said. What did any of it matter? He was a hero to Dara, a loser to Maggie, a murderer to Niamh. None of it made any fucking difference.

“Well, you’ve got a home, little buddy.” Dara smiled, holding the fluff ball in her palms. “Now you need a name.”

Ryan watched Dara with the young animal, its claws gripping her shirt, his shirt, really, a hand-me-down Iron Maiden tee from his high school days. It popped little holes in the fabric, but it was safe. The mewling had finally stopped and instead, it was purring so loudly Ryan could hear it across the living room. He wouldn’t do anything about the others. They weren’t even real to him. Maybe he could pretend none of this had happened and just never do it again. Niamh was right, now that he knew he couldn’t stop knowing.

He didn’t need to tell Dara, though. He never would.

Sun and Heir

Pussy everywhere suddenly. In the weeks before the election, every network played the tape once it leaked, speculating with certainty that it would mean a loss for the candidate. First, uproar at the footage itself. From the Left: the language, the disrespect, rape culture! and what of his wife? From the Right: he had not known he was recorded, he has a right to private conversation, this was what men say, it was a performance. Then, outrage with any politician or pundit willing to repeat it. Let’s call it what it is. Finally, the t-shirts and handmade signs, televised at rallies: Grab ME by the pussy! It was distant from Dara, until classmates wore the shirts on campus.

Home life was trickier. It was easy enough with Nana, who pretended not to hear when the clip played on the evening news. Instead, only scooping cottage cheese on her spoon, eyeing Dara with pity and guilt, tight-closed lips. Her brother, Ryan, obviously, didn’t say a word about it whenever they met up to smoke or eat or play videogames.

But, Maggie could not help herself. She was tunnel vision, constant: Facebook posts,

Group iChats, Tweets and IG posts. Pussy’s Got Claws. Pussy Grabs Back. Pussy Power.

Everywhere. Dara muted her sister on all social networks.

No matter the context, the word was disease. It was weakness. There was no reclaiming it. When she first heard it, on the playground at All Saints, she’d imagined a stray animal – more ferret than cat – flea-ridden and balding with mange, tucked under all her classmates’ wool plaid skirts. Also, fishy? Maybe? High school made it more common and more nuanced, fluctuating from a flaw to an opening. Don’t be a pussy

became Let me in that pussy depending on who lobbed it at whom. Dara imagined a crack in a dike.

It was not easy to ignore but Dara only had to make it to Election Day.

Then, he was no longer a candidate but, President-elect.

The Sunday before Thanksgiving, Dara lay atop her bed, hanging her ankles off the end, careful not to smear the bottom of her Doc Martens on the hospital-tucked comforter. Nana and Ma left for Mass without trying to wake her. They hadn’t tried since graduation, which was either a gift of adulthood or some youngest-child, minimum-effort concession. She had been awake though, and dressed even, albeit not for Mass.

Ma and Nana shuffled around the living room looking for keys and purses, every murmur echoing through Dara’s bedroom wall. The process was longer these days with

Nana’s worsening MS. She wouldn’t admit to her limiting mobility; she was prone to confusion, irritable. More than once she had mistaken Dara for Maggie or even Ma.

Dad’s plan to move her downstairs, to the den in the addition, was a wicked contention inside the house as of late. This was the room she had shared with Granpa. After refusing, she had been asked one too many times more, and now Nana was not speaking with Dad outside of pleasantries.

Dara heard all this through the walls. It was two weeks since she had gone further than the kitchen, not even upstairs to shower. She couldn’t bear feeling her body, let alone seeing it. Before the incident, she was already skipping classes. There was no cause. She should have excelled at County College by all high school metrics. The classes weren’t difficult and she knew more than a handful of classmates with whom she

could endure learning the small campus, its rules and payment deadlines. Ma and Dad didn’t particularly pressure her, either. Not any more than they had when she was in AP classes at Saint Joe’s, with their occasional You can do anything you set your mind to’s and We are so proud of you!s. The unearned praise she knew would be there regardless.

She just couldn’t bring herself to go and no one had made her. Her brother was the only one to mention his suspicions that she was skipping, and that was only because she had spent so much time stopping by his house to smoke. She made an effort, after

Ryan’s call outs, to go back. But, then there was the incident.

A man from her poli-sci course had been flirting with her. They had both been flirting. She was interested. He offered to walk her to her car one Thursday after class.

The pair cut down a side street to the satellite parking lot her car was parked, his pace was strong, purposeful. When they reached her car, he stood against Dara alongside its locked doors. He was faster than she could process what was happening, though it had felt like hours were elapsing. The street was suddenly too wide and she was too small.

Twisting away from him, squeezing shut her eyes, reaching for her keys did nothing.

With one hand, he gripped her neck while the other pushed down the front of her jeans. He clawed at the elastic of underwear. The hot sting ripped against the soft fat of her stomach, down and across her hipbones. Dara knew instinctively that he had drawn blood. More than anything, she felt cold. Bare.

When he couldn’t reach her panties through her squirming, he began scratching upward to her breasts until she felt his nails against the tender skin of her areola. She

shook toward him, thrashing her arms and he stepped backward. Dara smelt his rancid breath through her hair as he croaked, “Hold still, you fucking dyke.”

Then, he was gone. She crawled into and locked her car, watching the back of him, his black and yellow Steelers jacket, running toward College Avenue.

She did not call the cops.

Keeping her eyes open, she had learned, was the easiest way to ignore the incident. So she did. For as long as she possibly could, at the risk of exhaustion or suffering or death, she kept her eyes open. She would see it all. She had no will to do anything else. For hours she stayed flat above the covers, watching the sun try to force its light through her blinds, unsuccessful. When she rolled her face into the pillow, she found wet spots of tears that she had no memory of leaking.

Nana came knocking at the door around two. Dara’s parents weren’t in the house, and most days Nana sat alone listening to AM radio in her bedroom. She couldn’t leave the house unattended since she turned sixty and lately Ma left her home to spare the worries that she might be too exhausted once she reached her destination. The solitude chipped noticeably at Nana’s morale.

Nana was popular in the way that everyone in town knew of her; she’d bought this house with Granpa as soon as they married. It was impossible to get a meal in a twenty-mile radius without someone stopping to say hello or, asking after Nana once

Dara confirmed a passerby’s charge that she was one of Tricia Sullivan’s daughters. Most people claimed it was in the mouth: that’s a Sullivan smile if I ever seen one, etc. etc.

But, Nana said it was the eyebrows, we all had Granpa’s eyebrows.

Dad hated it. Dara took after Ma, but here, even Maggie was a Sullivan, despite her dark Kelly hair, the bump in her nose. Every summer’s Boston vacation, Maggie and

Ryan disappeared seamlessly into the extended Kelly family. But, there were none of

Dad’s people down here; he was alone, on Nana’s territory. Ma would always be Tricia

Sullivan or, if the right high school classmate remembered her softball record, Sully the

Slugger and, worse even, his daughters were de facto Sullivan’s about town too.

“You’re awake,” she knocked again. “I have something to show you.”

Dara rolled off the bed to the bedroom door. Nana stepped into the doorway, pecking Dara on her cheek.

“Take your shoes off in this house. Come,” Nana said, walking to the kitchen.

An array of ingredients was spread across the dark wood tabletop in the center of the room: buttermilk, caraway seeds, raisins, baking soda, salt, egg, butter, flour, sugar.

The whole scene was desperately foreign to Dara, who had never been allowed near the stove, as long as Maggie and Ma and Nana were alive, working their own hearts and fingers into each meal, celebratory or otherwise. Maggie was something like Nan’s protégé. The two of them would have reign over the kitchen come Thursday, as they did every Thanksgiving while Tricia hovered in and out, cleaning and setting. Ryan and Dad would they watch television around whatever hours their jobs had granted them off.

Initially because of her youth, and later her ignorance, Dara was a hazard in the kitchen.

She would sit with Ryan and Dad, bored by the football, and eat herself sick, due for no chore in particular, until maybe clean up, and even then only the plates Maggie or Ma missed.

Nana had propped the door to the back porch open, and the natural light streamed through the screen door illuminating the kitchen. The air was still outside and Dara realized what an unseasonably warm November day it was, how just a single open door brought so much life to the house without any risk. The house brought light without the need to leave. With days like this, why would anyone ever leave?

“Well,” Nana had greased a cake pan before her on the countertop. “It’s time I taught you something to bring into your adulthood with you.”

“Baking?” Dara asked.

“A forgotten art. Part measure, part intuition. Sharpens your wits,” Nana said.

“Soda bread,” Dara said.

“Baking soda bread,” Nana repeated. She gestured to a hand-scrawled index card in the center of the table, taped along its yellowing corners. “This is your grandmother’s recipe. The one she made for me as a girl.”

“Nana, you’re my grandmother. This is your recipe?” Dara asked.

“My mother’s.” Nana said, after slight hesitation. She stared hard at Dara while

Dara skimmed the notecard.

“Can you read that script? I heard on T.V. they don’t teach cursive anymore.”

Nana laughed and Dara wasn’t sure she was teasing or sincere. It seemed within reason that the MS had snatched Nana’s memory of holding Dara’s young fist in her own like a shell at this very table, gliding it along the trace-lines in her penmanship workbook.

“It doesn’t call for the caraway seeds. Or the raisins,” Dara said.

Nana smiled. “No, but it would taste like leather shoes without them.”

The recipe was simple; a kindness that Dara assumed was extended for her benefit. She didn’t have the heart to tell Nana that she had cooked more complicated things in high school. Saint Joe’s was one of the few schools in Pennsylvania still requiring home economics, though it was now titled, “Family Sciences,” which seemed an altogether wash on the progress front, in Dara’s opinion.

Dara washed her hands and met Nana at the table for her instruction.

Nana spoke the entire time. Dara considered recording Nana on her phone. Not for her instructions, but because she knew there were only so many days like this left.

When Nana cracked the egg into the buttermilk, she paused briefly, smashing both halves of the shell in her palm. “Don’t forget to crush the shell,” she said, making a show of shattering the hard white to pieces.

“Prevents witches,” Dara laughed and suddenly she was ten again, eating hardboiled eggs on Easter.

“Yes.” Nana’s voice was stern. “Do it every time.”

Dara mixed the dry ingredients while Nana whisked.

“Your father always wanted a son,” she said.

“Ryan?” Dara asked.

“No, no. Granpa always wanted a son,” Nana repeated, her voice strained with frustration.

“I’m sure most people did then,” Dara said.

“I didn’t,” Nana kept her eyes on Dara’s hands. “Boys are a different sort of trouble.” Then she said something that could have been either “uncontrollable” or

“inconsolable” but Dara did not ask for clarity.

Dara dropped butter into the mixture, feeling every granule slide around her fingers. There was some release in working through the food.

“We tried again, so many times. But, God knows what’s best. We were lucky to get Tricia, I think. After the others.”

Nana cupped her hands around Dara’s, shaping a crater in the dough before pouring her ingredients in. “Squeeze it now, that’s right, dear. Smaller. Good.”

Dara watched Nana’s face, how it was almost exactly as Dara had always remembered it, only a little weathered, maybe. Weathered against the elements, some natural opposition braved for too long. Her chin and neck were tight still, her skin firm and youthful. She looked much younger than other grandparents did although, Dara had been trained her whole life to consider Nana more fragile than her friends seemed to consider their own grandparents. In this light, though, she could have been Dara’s own mother.

Nana scooped the sticky ball of dough from Dara and set it on a wooden board she had sprinkled with flour. “This part is important.”

Dara watched Nana’s wrists. Her hands shook but she was quick. She was done kneading before it seemed she had begun.

“Now, you do the honors,” Nana said, sliding a butter knife to Dara. Dara scorched a large X through the mound – a practice Maggie said was meant to keep the devil away, though even Dara knew it was for even baking.

Nana carried the uncooked dough on the cutting board to the greased pan.

From her turned back, Dara heard Nana whispering prayers.

The morning was another warm day, enough for Dara to sit on the back without needing the afghan she had brought out from the house. She could not sleep again last night. In the middle distance she counted the wrought iron spikes of Our Lady’s back perimeter cemetery fence. A fence for death seemed funny once, how laughably human to try imposing limits on the natural, as if they weren’t all sprawled out down there, decomposing whichever directions they pleased. From here, now, the fence was reassuring. There were ways to make lines. There were ends, even in death.

Ma and Dad were both working and she knew Nana was inside somewhere, alone.

Today was the last day of classes before Thanksgiving break but there was no point in attending. She was so far behind. It couldn’t be recovered. Maybe she would try again next semester. Maybe she would never go back. It was an exhausting place to be, with so many options and none of them good.

Dara heard the clatter of plates and silverware, then she felt Nana at the screen door behind her.

“Hungry?” Nana asked.

Dara nodded and held the swing door open for Nana as she stepped onto the porch with some slices of soda bread wrapped in tin foil.

“Someone got into the bread last night. There were only three pieces this morning.” Nana sat in the empty seat across from Dara and offered her a buttered slice of soda bread.

Dara didn’t have the heart to tell her she had spent most of the night stealing slices from the loaf in hopes it might put her to sleep.

“Heavens to Betsy,” Nana said. “Aren’t you freezing out here?”

Dara shook her head and handed the folded afghan in her lap to Nana.

They both quietly ate their soda bread, staring past each other at the dusk above them.

“Something happened to me,” Dara said. She was crying already. “At school.

Some boy. I don’t know what.”

Nana began crying too. “I know, I know. Let it out.”

Dara’s whole body shook with sobs. She felt the greasy weight of her unwashed curls as they shook with her. “I don’t know what to do,” she said.

Nana reached an arm across the porch, wiping Dara’s face with the corner of an afghan. “Of course you do,” she said. “We survive. We move on. It’s our gift.”

Dara thought she might vomit. She couldn’t breathe. Nana wrapped a firm hand around Dara’s shaking wrist and shushed until Dara’s sobs became whimpers.

“It was so long ago,” Nana said.

Not long at all. Dara felt the scratches against her waist, still healing, pimple against her shirt.

The sun peaked out through the clouds, swelling and stronger than November should allow. Dara felt the warmth through Nana’s hands. Nana rubbed the tops of Dara’s palm and stood up.

“Leave this for the good people,” she said, handing Dara the last slice of soda bread.

Dara nodded, didn’t even roll her eyes, and accepted the bread. She set it down on the wooden step below her.

The screen door swung shut and she was alone again. She closed her eyes, listening for wind, praying for a frost. Something natural or something more. Anything at all.

Open Home

The Sullivan House sat at the end of a blind road, two side streets removed from any local traffic. Visitors, however infrequent, were deliberate because they had to be.

Three sides of the property met the back end of Our Lady of Mercy’s Cemetery, which gave the appearance from above (or below) that the Sullivans’ backyard had been cut out from the cemetery like a cookie stenciled from dough. The wrought iron fence marking

Our Lady’s perimeter did not disabuse onlookers of this notion. As a girl, when Tricia’s only family buried there was the three stillborns her mother had delivered before her, she made a game of spotting the spear-pointed tops of the iron fence from every window in her home. She dashed across hallways, to various, opposing views, chasing the sun. In her middle age, with both her parents buried in Our Lady’s, she imagined, in her more paranoid moments, that it was the cemetery moving, nightly, by inches, to encompass her home. She was not afraid, only cautious; trying to estimate what she knew was unknowable, just how close her home was, at any moment, to death.

When Tricia’s mother, Bridget, died this December, the home was all she left behind by way of mortal property. And, inside it, a refrigerator of her mother’s preferred nuts and cheeses; an attic of her mother’s old journals and photographs, gowns and outdated home decorations – most things were touched by one natural disaster or another, the gowns: moth-bitten, the paper goods: crinkled with floodwater. Those things would stay, as would Tricia, her husband, and her youngest daughter, Dara – the other residents of Bridget’s home at her time of death. Tricia was born in this house and her mother had

died in this house and if she was too sentimental to throw away used cups of single served cottage cheese, she was certainly too sentimental to sell her mother’s home.

They were not a wealthy family but the house had been paid off for more than a decade before her death, thanks to the reasonable VA Home Loan Tricia’s father had procured after his service during the Korean War. Her mother had worked long hours on her feet at the hospital under her husband’s word that her salary would finance an in- ground pool. When the home was paid and he admitted there would be no pool, Tricia’s mother quit her job on the spot.

No, this would remain in the family. It was the last of Tricia’s family that had made her; the last family she had not made herself. This home was the only evidence that

Tricia had ever been a daughter herself and she was not ready or willing to leave it. She doubted if she ever would be ready or willing to leave it.

Bridget Sullivan’s death was sudden, and the weekend before Christmas. But it was not a tragedy. Seventy-one is an age few live to. Tricia was grateful for her time with her mother. And, now the Sullivan house inside Our Lady’s Cemetery was the Kelly

House to all who visited, there were no more Sullivans to call for.

The funeral had been expensive. Much more expensive than anyone could have possibly prepared Tricia for. There were fees to pick up the body, to cremate the body

(more if she needed to be cremated immediately), to embalm the body (which the funeral director claimed was required even of cremated bodies, if they were to have a viewing), a casket (again, only for the viewing), the hearse (to drive Bridget’s urn to the graveyard beside her house), costs for the viewing, graveside service, the plot, and of course her

gravestone. With three credit cards, and a small loan from her eldest daughter, Maggie,

Tricia paid a little under nine thousand dollars for what was, by most standards, a modest funeral.

It had seemed easy at first. She was an only child, she had been a mother since her twentieth birthday, certain instincts take over. There were things to do, so she did them.

The condolences were easy – only a matter of the Do Not Disturb cellphone setting and making room in the refrigerator. The costs were easy enough, perhaps too easy – only a matter of swiping a credit card.

Then, she came home, with her loving husband, her loving daughter. James, in his single black suit (what had once been the wedding/graduation suit and was now the funeral suit, and a little snugger across his back). Dara in a dress that might have been black and calf-length when she had bought it for her, but was now a charcoal cocktail dress. They hung their teary faces into their pillows and they fell asleep.

The house was empty. And silent.

The house her mother brought her home to from the hospital; that Tricia had brought all three of her own children home to. Silent. Tricia did not know that she was listening until she heard, or, could not hear her mother scratching paperback pages against themselves while she read in her bedroom; couldn’t hear her tinny radio tuning to talk stations; or her shuffle to and from the bathroom in the middle of the night.

She saw her husband, caught in the red light of his digital clock, dead asleep beside her. Watched his long body pulse with muted breath and she knew that he would not be enough. Even Dara, downstairs, willing to go anywhere that Tricia invited her, begging even, to be taken. Or, Maggie across town, likely sleeping too; or, Ryan, who

Tricia could always assign more worry than necessary, fill her time with fears for him.

None of them were enough either.

Her mother was dead. Tricia was an orphan.

Tricia found the OpenHome program through an email and its proposition was something like a pop-up bed and breakfast. Let four to ten guests stay one night in her home for compensation. It was the compensation that gave Tricia pause: Upwards of five thousand dollars! in a flashing red font. There was a link at the bottom of the email titled,

“Eligibility Survey.”

The page the link redirected to was much wordier, confusing with its varying font sizes and typefaces. In a section titled, “For Hosts” Tricia found the following: The

Immersive Experience, our most popular package, grants guests full access to the property for fifteen hours. Any house rules must be explicitly agreed upon, in writing and signed by all parties (guests and hosts) as well as two OpenHome certified witnesses.

Hosts must tour guests at the start of the stay. Hosts must be within reach by telephone or similar devices during the length of the stay, but off premises.

There was a questionnaire at the bottom of the page but many of the answers had been auto-populated, including her name and address. Tricia saw from the address bar that the hyperlink had been a unique URL designed for her, containing her first and last names between its many forward slashes.

She skimmed the answers her link had suggested. A question labeled, simply,

“Attractions,” had a series of checkboxes beneath it. OpenHome had checked three on behalf of The Sullivan House: Cemetery; Hauntings; Recent Death.

James was not repulsed enough for Tricia’s comfort when she told him. He shrugged over coffee, scratching at his face enough that the copper in his tidy beard reflected under the bare kitchen light.

“Lot of sickos out there,” he said.

Tricia didn’t respond. Instead she pulled the email up again on her phone.

“I don’t think it’s real,” she said, tapping the touchscreen vehemently. “No one’s paying five thousand dollars to see any house – haunted or otherwise.”

“It says five thousand on there?” James asked. “For one night in this house?”

Tricia lowered her phone and sunk her eyes into James’s. There was no unringing the bell now that he knew.

“It’s disgusting. They think my mother is haunting us.”

“So? Let ‘em! I’ll put on her church dress and shake the beds while they sleep if that’s what they need to give us five thousand dollars.”

Tricia smiled a little at that and James continued.

“Flip the crosses. Spit some pea soup at them.” He rolled his neck in short, sharp movements, mimicking The Exorcist.

It was settled.

The guests that arrived were not what Tricia had expected. For one, there were far fewer of them than the reservation. OpenHome’s five thousand dollar promise only applied to maximum capacity parties so Tricia had waited until a party of ten expressed

interest. Instead, a well-dressed couple, one woman and one man, looking to be in their mid-thirties, rang the bell fifteen minutes early.

Emptying the house was easy; it was always half-empty now regardless. Tricia’s daughter went to stay with her other children in their shared apartment downtown and

James had made a reservation for the two of them to stay at a Red Roof Inn near the airport. He’d tried surprising her with something more elaborate, in the Poconos, a second honeymoon, a suite at the casino or even a lodge in the mountains. She was never the reasonable one, always impulsive, a shopping addict. Champagne taste, etcetera. She was proud to put her foot down and stand for the sensible option. This showed growth, she thought. Besides, the more she had before the check cleared, the more she would have after it did. There would be other times for luxury, ones not so tied to this sensation of wrongness that Tricia felt whenever she considered letting strangers into her late mother’s home. She might have suggested the Red Roof Inn to punish herself for the betrayal.

Any other circumstance and James would have encouraged Tricia’s frugality, but her suggestion curdled his smile into itself like the rind of a squeezed lemon wedge.

“Whatever you want,” he had said.

Now, the pair before her was tidy in an expensive way. The woman’s navy ankle pants were creased sharply, echoing the harsh triangles of the man’s brown peacoat. They both wore lightweight sweaters with puddling necks, as though the seamstress began a turtleneck and gave up, twice. A young woman who had taken a job she didn’t need at

Tricia’s bookstore some years ago had told her that the truly wealthy among us never announced their wealth with flashy clothes or loud designer graphics but, maintained the

exorbitant fees of hair, wax, manicure, and dentist appointments regularly enough that their wealth could be felt. Tricia hadn’t thought the girl knew much of anything at the time but the couple before her were exactly that: a healthier, nondescript version of nearly any other brunette white people she would pass on the street.

The imperceptibility of it, as if they were operating at only ten-percent higher value than Tricia and James were, though it was likely much, much more literal dollars, embarrassed Tricia. She felt conscious of all her stray, wiry hairs, above her lip, between her brows, and how she wore no makeup today (or really any day the past three or four years). Thankfully, her nails were not chipped with polish the way she had a habit of letting them become in her early years of motherhood, when she had still made the attempt to keep them painted at all. She tucked her fingers into fists regardless.

“Hello. Thank you,” Tricia said. “We’re so glad to have you.”

The couple stepped into the Sullivan House. Tricia motioned to the coat hooks drilled beside the front door. “Can I?” but both strangers shook their heads.

“Would you like anything to drink? Maybe some crackers?” Tricia asked. They didn’t seem to have heard her. Tricia stepped past them into the dining room. “Are there others joining you?” she asked.

“It will only be us,” the woman said. She seemed unbothered.

Tricia wondered if this would affect the rate they had agreed upon. James came down the stairs, and joined the group.

“Didn’t even hear you come in. Like ghosts,” James laughed. “James Kelly, let us show you around.” He smiled. Tricia thought he seemed too comfortable with the entire endeavor.

The male stranger pulled a chain from the pocket of his peacoat. It was short.

Tricia thought it looked like a delicate necklace for a child. He brushed his thumb and fingers against his palm then dropped one end of the chain to reveal a pointed, polished hunk of clear quartz.

Tricia tried not to stare but the man was now swaying the chain like a miniature thurible. She thought maybe that was what the man was waiting for, a smolder of incense.

James walked the strangers through the first floor. He stopped occasionally to point out odd nicks in the walls or flickered bulbs. Tricia had rehearsed with him some lines about feeling cold spots or watching cat scratches rise through her pale skin without cause. They were all stories from websites. She missed several of her cues and James continued through without her.

He said, “She doesn’t like to talk about this,” and nodded as if she were diagnosed terminally.

The man nodded his head sympathetically, still swaying his chain.

The woman swiveled her neck from floors to ceilings.

When they stopped at the den, a room James had built by hand only five or six years earlier, he lingered, pointing out the seamless integration of support beams to preexisting structure, with an irrepressible pride.

The couple seemed to fidget here, restless. Then the man’s tiny chain swung in full, wide circles. He said, “I feel something here. A presence.”

James did not miss a beat. “Yep. Lots present here. Lots of,” he glanced at his wife, “Happenings.”

Tricia nodded, “We avoid it, usually.”

The two strangers exchanged conspiratorial whispers and nods. The woman pointed to a spot on the exposed beam above their heads. They whispered some more.

James huddled toward Tricia, wrapping his arm around her shoulder paternally.

She straightened, instinctively, under his weight, trying to prop him up.

“Is this – ” the woman stopped mid-question.

“Yes, I think I feel it, here,” the man said. He cocked his chin toward Tricia. “Is this where they departed?”

Tricia shook her head just as James said, “Yes,” behind her.

The woman pointed an oval nail Tricia. “Where then?”

James looked at Tricia. She did not want to tell these strangers. They had no right to know but she could not think of a lie fast enough, since she had already denied the man’s suspicions.

“The stairs,” Tricia said.

“Show us,” the man said, stepping past her to the way he had entered.

“Not those,” Tricia chided him.

The stranger returned his rock-chain to the pocket in his peacoat that it had come from.

James squeezed Tricia’s shoulder and sidled to let the man back ahead of him.

Tricia led the group, single file, through the remainder of the first floor, around the staircase that struck through the entire home from above; then through the kitchen to the back porch. When everyone collected behind her, she gripped the door handle to the porch.

“Not inside the house?” the woman’s voice seemed strained, irritated.

James cleared his throat as Tricia pulled the doorknob open. “Well,” he said. “No, she didn’t die inside.”

The woman crossed her arms tight around her ribs. Tricia pushed the screen door open and held it for the party behind her. The woman pushed past James and stepped under Tricia’s open arms onto the porch.

“She lived inside, though.” James said, a little louder than before, though the night air was still and silent. “Most of her life. At least fifty years.”

“That will do it,” the man said to his companion. “The body remembers.”

“Where?” the woman shot at Tricia.

Tricia had descended three of the five rickety wood stairs of the porch and stopped. She did not know how sure she was or, if this only seemed right because of its centeredness. The orderliness of being exactly between.

“I found her, here.” Tricia waved small circles of air above the step, as if she were washing a dish.

“Was she ascending or descending?” the man asked, from the back of the group, closest to the heat and light inside.

“What?” Tricia asked.

“Was the body face up or face down?” the woman clarified.

“How should. Why would that matter?” Tricia said.

“What does that change?” James asked the man, turning away from Tricia on the stairs.

“Just tells us where she was trying to go,” the woman said. “Sometimes they feel it coming, know where they want to be found or, what they need to finish.”

They. Who has she asked? What experts did she have in the field?

“Then, of course she was climbing the stairs. Coming home,” James said. He hadn’t been there. Tricia had. True, her mother was halfway, slouched on the middle step, her body slouched, her chin dropped into her chest.

She saw her mother’s claddagh ring on her left hand in her lap, the heart tucked toward the pulse of her wrist. Her right hand, held the splintered wood slats holding the banister above her.

“No,” Tricia said. “She was walking down the stairs.”

James shook his head. “We have no way of knowing.”

“She was leaving then,” the woman said.

“I don’t think so.” Tricia said. “Not leaving.” She used her pinky to point-count the spikes of Our Lady’s fence at the edge of their deep yard.

“Ah, so she did know,” the man said. He stepped toward the woman on the precipice of the landing. The two whispered for a few moments.

“You don’t need any signatures from us?” the woman asked James.

“No specific rules?” the man asked.

James shook his head. “I guess not. Trish?”

Tricia began her recount of the spikes that she could make out from her position, now her mother’s position, on the porch. She never got the same number. Was this what her mother did, just waiting for her heart to stop or, had she thought until the very end that there would be some relief, redemption? Had she waited for Tricia? Yelled into the empty home over her shoulder, even in vain? Or did she – what had they said at her memorial? – rage against the dying of the light?

“Do whatever you want with it,” Tricia said. “You have fourteen and a half hours now.”

At the motel, James and Tricia shared one full-sized bed, the smallest space between them in years. Tricia tucked all the pillows she found under her aching body, she sat at nearly a right angle the entire evening. Long after she’d thought James had fallen asleep he said, “What do you think they’re doing right now?”

It hadn’t occurred to Tricia to consider it. They’d already taken anything from her that should have stayed her own. “Maybe sex?”

“Or, blood sacrifice.”

“Or, hawking your Golden Age comics.”

“I don’t think they could find ‘em,” James snorted.

“Not even with that rock of his?” Tricia laughed, deep from the center of her body. James laughed along with her. James reached a hand, shaky with his laughter, toward her face and wiped a tear from her cheekbone.

“Should we worry?” Tricia asked.

“Always,” James said and began a fit of laughter over again.

OpenHome’s money was deposited, as promised by the website, the first business day after Tricia’s guests confirmed their satisfaction. It was a Wednesday, some weeks after Tricia had already given up on the entire thing, assuming it had been a grift of some kind.

She called all three of her children home to search the house for missing belongings but all was as it should. The attic was cluttered with as many heavy boxes of junk as she had left there, all her jewelry was still in the trinket box she kept atop her bureau, the small roll of twenties, in case of emergency or, more often, funds for forgotten bills past-due, was in its coffee can above the refrigerator. Tricia wanted to report her experience to the police but she did not know what her claim would be. She was peaceful, all things considered.

Years later, Tricia’s first granddaughter took a tumble coming in from the pool, climbing the back porch stairs. When she screamed for her Nana to come help her, Tricia came running with ice already wrapped in a paper towel. As she knelt beside her granddaughter in the grass, lightly patting her pulsing, slender back, Tricia let her own eyes wander along, underneath the porch, to a sharp curve of metal protruding from the balding grass.

When Tricia tore at the ground, alone that night, she pulled a framed photograph of her mother from the dirt. She was young, happy. Tricia traced the shadows and contours of her face through the packed dirt and glass with her fingers. She thanked her mother.

Then she put the photo back where she found it.

Pretty Circles

Throughout their childhood, Perry considered Mom average, if not healthy.

Although, their memories often shifted like mounds of sand under the weighty steps of

Perry’s moods, unable to ever stack quite the same way again. Reflecting in more tender moments, they remembered Mom as colossal: a winding staircase of a person. They were a timid child by nurture and dutifully tagged alongside their mother, clinging to the waists of her pantsuits, or aprons, or church dresses like a banister. Mom’s body was solid then. Warm and earthy as clay.

Then, with pity or loss, Perry might distinctly picture Mom years later, when she had already begun shrinking and sagging into the feeble question mark that hung too often at the sink or stove, tsk tsk-ing Perry’s decisions (their shaved head, tattoos, and partners) and wondering aloud, when prompted by a particularly gruesome news report, whatever has happened to this world? She became a wrinkled half-woman focused intently on bubbling dish soap or stir-fry, asking (of no one and everyone), Who loves anymore?

Mom’s withering had worsened quickly once it began and, being that she was widowed, it was up to Perry and their brother, Simon, to decide how best to care for her. Often, Perry fell asleep tearing with frustration, smudging ruined foundation onto the face of their iPhone, while Simon harangued them for the callous suggestion that

Mom be, in his cutting misquote of Perry, put away in a home.

Don’t you know what goes on in places like that? Do you want that on your conscience? Simon would continue for hours if Perry let him, which, most nights, they did.

They can help her in ways we can’t, Perry occasionally claimed, in hopes saying it aloud might convince their self too. Of course, it was much bigger than this. Perry felt unqualified to help their mother in any situation, let alone this grotesque medical anomaly.

Perry had always felt deeply disconnected from their mother. They tried constantly, and with very little success, to pierce the surface of their shallow conversations. Perry knew their mother did not know them. Worse yet, Perry had resolved that they were done introducing their self.

Are you going to take her in? Perry had asked Simon.

Their arguments stalled progress so effectively that Mom was the height of a mid- sized, ball-jointed doll by the time either child was ready to concede. The questions had then turned to, how would we explain her? and would they take her to some lab? rather than what’s best for Mom?

Simon won, as he always did; somehow appealing with the perfect combination of both logos and pathos. Or, perhaps he won by default, always the last one to stop talking. Either way, Perry’s shame at the notion they were abandoning Mom was consuming. Maybe they could try again to forge a connection.

Instead of, as Simon had said, locking away the woman who birthed you, the woman you owed everything, the woman who brought you into this world and, god help her, she could take you out, Perry offered Mom a room in their townhouse. Simon,

unfortunately, had no space for a shrinking mother in his Bed-Stuy studio, though he made the drive to help Perry move Mom and the few belongings that did not go to storage or Goodwill. She wore her wedding band around her thumb, then wrist, then waist, flaring her body like a napkin ring, until she woke one day, too small to even lift it.

When the time came for the jar Mom begged Perry not to transfer the ring too, which she had been using as a sort of avant-garde, architectural hammock. Perry complied and stashed the ring in their room where they could always see it, like a crow does with shiny, stolen sentiments.

One night, early in Mom’s time with them, Perry woke to their own voice screaming at phantom hands, pressure. They shook clammy sheets from their skin. Perry had tried to delay this with mouth guards, melatonin, whiskey, ganja, Xanax. They begged for dead- sleep. But, it was inevitable, certainly nothing new.

Their mother woke, scared for them both.

Perry could not tell Mom what they knew she could likely handle. She was a grown woman, once upon a time. Might handle it well, even. They thought Mom should know, that maybe other children tell. Children with complex relationships with their mothers. Children with the love they wanted from their mother. But, not in this way.

Please, they thought. Not like this.

They had told so many doctors and police and psychiatrists. So many men kept a piece of them, rounded the details of it all to one blunt instrument, prodding them through dissociation, avoidance, then rage. Perry woke often, feeling winded and torrid. They

were not ready for their mother to know, though she had all the clues. They knew their screams were very clear, articulate.

In the hot silence, Mom chirped, Perry. I’m here. You’re okay.

They did not respond.

Simon resurfaced sporadically, never calling ahead. Usually it was between his contracted choreography gigs, when freelance work was hard to come by. Or, when he seemed particularly nostalgic for the family all three knew they had never been, suggesting they play board games or dine at an upscale restaurant.

On one such trip, Simon discovered Mom on the shelf, devolved into a bodiless voice.

Why didn’t you – he had started at Perry. Perhaps he stopped because he realized that the only way to know was to see. He would not have believed his sibling if they had told him.

Simon clutched his mother’s mason jar (now equal parts body, home, and prison) to his chest silently. The pair shone motionless in the center of Perry’s kitchen for hours like a sun. Not a word split between them, but in that fecund void, Perry felt the static of

Mom’s aura stronger than she had been in months.

Perry’s envy of the pair clogged their veins, arteries, organs. They felt buried alive. So, they fled, swinging the front door recklessly behind them.

Simon’s visits remained erratic despite Mom’s condition, though he had plenty of suggestions regarding Perry’s care for her, which he submitted on the phone or in emails,

always sandwiched between obligatory but, how are yous. First, he thought Mom might prefer a shelf in direct sunlight, to which Perry countered that it could burn her alive:

Haven’t you magnified ants?

Then, he suggested Perry leave some food in her jar when they left for work. Had

Simon cared to check in more often, Perry asserted, he would know Mom hadn’t needed food in three years. Would you like her to share a jar with crumbs of molding pound cake?

The proposals were exhausting (and cringingly uniformed), but their absence meant silence from Simon entirely. Perry wanted so badly to be close with their brother, as they had been in high school. Being the younger sibling, Perry’s life felt tinged in some ways by the switch-flip of Simon’s domineering presence or unbothered absence.

After long spells of Simon’s disappearances, Perry would catch their thoughts drifting more often to questions of how Simon might handle things as simple as returning ill- fitting clothes or haggling a mechanic.

Of course, there was always Mom. Neat in her little place on the shelf. Full of unsolicited answers. Simon and Mom were, effectively, the same person to Perry. Certain days, Mom filled the home with aimless chatter like a displaced fruit bat cracking sonar- shrieks through the night. Who’s to say Mom does not have sonar now, Perry thought.

She rattled ceaselessly:

Set the crockpot before you leave. You will be hungry when you get home.

Perry, why do you insist on going out in that leather? It’s seventy degrees.

Whatever happened to that nice, smart girl from work?

Perry knew this was their mother’s love, actualized in plain language. Really, language was what she had left to give now. Mom meant well or, not even well – the best. She meant the best for them and she was all Perry had, and Perry was all she had.

Except for Simon. They both had Simon, too. When he came around.

I need to tell you a secret, Perry. Mom was fading away in her little jar. For weeks, she was much softer than she had ever been before. Dead quiet. When she did talk, Perry had to strain to hear her.

Okay, Perry answered. They turned off all electronics. Even the hum of light bulbs, drip of distant pipes, the gnash of termites - all washed their mother out. I’m ready, they said.

You are my favorite.

Favorite what?

Child.

The claim was so preposterous. So outlandishly untrue and tedious, Perry laughed violently.

No, Perry, I’m very serious.

Okay, Mom. Of course.

Don’t tell Simon. He won’t understand.

I don’t know if I do. Perry wiped tears from their lashes. Tiny giggles buried themselves like mines in Perry’s memory, ready to burst with any recollection.

Then, as composed as they could manage, they asked, Why?

You are so far from me, the little jar echoed, unanswered.

Perry keep the silence like a contract between them.

Perry called Simon, maybe too late, when they were certain that Mom was near-gone.

Simon arrived the same day.

Huddled along the shelf, the pair whispered desperately to each other.

Have you tried knocking? he asked.

Nothing. Perry answered.

Well, what about food? Water? Smelling salts? Simon motioned a fish-food type gesture above the jar.

In what quantities? Do you know her body weight? I haven’t seen her in months.

A single drop could trample her. If there even -- Perry stopped.

Simon croaked the first wet sob Perry had seen of him since grade school.

Look, I’m sure, Perry stopped again. Simon dropped a hand on their back. More burden than consolation but, they knew what he meant.

What do we do with her now?

Perry swept the cracked glass from the floor while Simon watched from the kitchen table. She’s free now, at least, they said.

Simon nodded.

The wedding band sat fat and gleaming in the jar’s place on the shelf.

Did she ever tell you, Simon began and Perry was certain that they would discover Mom had fed the same line to Simon about playing favorites. About being raped in her twenties?

Perry stilled, hot like glue to the floor. They shook their head.

She said she thought it was a family curse.

Perry felt closer to their mother than they’d ever felt before and then, so distant.

How could she keep this from them? They tried seeing Simon the way Mom must have: an equal? A confidant?

They said, I was too.

Raped? he asked.

They nodded.

Yeah. Me too. he said.

The sun yoked pink over the windows. Months ago, years ago, this light was best to catch their mother’s lost body. If Perry searched hard enough, they might find her. Might have told her they were no favorite after all: closer to her now than the day they were born. A real legacy.

She could be in here still, I think, Simon tried changing the topic.

Perry kept their eyes on the glass on the floor, sweeping pretty circles into the laminate, watching the shards disappear and reappear through the bristles.

If she is, she’s only an echo.

Spread

The morning of Claire’s funeral, I lie naked on the table and wait for her mourners to arrive. Thomas scrapes a knife against whetstone in the kitchen. When he appears above me, the blade glints harsh in his hand. It’s all I can see. To minimize the pain, he explains with a paternal smile. I smile too.

Can’t seem ungrateful.

Still, pain is pain.

I resist the desire to guide Thomas’ hand with my own as he poises the knife over my abdomen. Seems romantic to make the first cut together. Instead, I grip the dark wood of the table. Thomas pins his other palm on my sternum to steady himself. Only one chance at this.

Claire would have done this for you, after all, he says. As if I hadn’t known her. I clench the table, claw its underside. Knuckles go white, pink, white again.

After all. After they found Claire splayed and pale in her driver’s seat. Her car parked behind the grocer, no idea how long. In the flat glamour of repose: mouth slack, eyelids like open beetle wings. A blue tableau of heart failure in anonymity. She was always so kempt but so tired. Still, fifty-five was too young.

Thomas had cried with his head in my lap, wet soaking my nylons. I traced his veins with round nails, considered his own organs, dutifully continuing when he felt too weak to. I had no other dead loved ones. How long did he have? I finger-combed patches of his thinning hair.

It would mean the world to Claire, Thomas had said, begging me to be the spread.

Of course I had said yes.

Thomas dips the blade into my stomach and it glides back red. I dog yelp and heave through the hurt like a crowning mother. Breathe. I have the sense not to writhe too much but when I do, Thomas jabs the heel of his hand in my ribs as a warning.

He reaches in to excise me.

When it is over and I am empty, Thomas drops cups of chilled fruit into the space.

I met Thomas and Claire while waiting tables third shift. Under diner light, they doodled on napkins in a corner booth. Said they were resolved to make their marriage work for themselves. Just themselves, Thomas repeated, no children. He said the open relationship was Claire’s idea. She sat there a quiet smolder, disinterested. Everything she had seen ran in lines through her face. I thought they were putting me on until I found

Thomas’ number in my apron, on a scrap of Claire’s smudging art, laughing moons with crooked eyes.

When I called, more curious than hesitant, it was Claire who convinced me. Three makes a family, she said. Like they had been waiting.

Thomas hauls a damp bag of my innards to the compost. The paper tablecloth against my back feels clinical. As I sit up, the jagged hole folds in the rolls of my gut. It’s more yellow than pink. Nearly endearing. Fresh berries, melons, grapes bubble from me like druzy. Too pretty to eat. Kind of thing Thomas always says, too pretty to work, too

pretty to talk. His compliments are instruction. In his warm voice, they feel self-evident. I await and comply.

Cool juices pool at my spine. There is no practical way to contain all that fills me.

I lie back down, lightheaded. Blood loss might be too much. Instinct tells me to pray, though I haven’t since childhood, bartering obedience, loyalty, faith to be the next Virgin

Mary. Not from a want to nurture. From hope to be essential.

No use asking for anything now, so much further from God with nothing to offer.

Drawers open and slam in the kitchen, flatware rings. Thomas doesn’t know where things are without Claire. He returns holding a paring knife for my edges. He trims so cautiously, a half tongue pinking out the corner of his mouth. I’ve never seen him work before. The room he calls an office is barren except for framed photos of Claire. I don’t think he’s ever used it; he is so rarely home.

Once, after dinner with all three of us, I cracked a glass in their sink. Claire pulled shards from the dishwater, dried and set them on the rack. She checked my hands for splinters, kissed my pruned fingers.

I cracked another on purpose.

This is the sexiest I’ve ever seen you, Thomas tells me and wipes blood off my pelvis. I tense my stomach and ask how long this will be. He only says, Stay, and leaves the room.

I hang my head off the table and watch him walk away upside down. Vertigo flushes my face. Thick, curled hair like Claire’s would dust the hardwood from this

height. Likely her stray grays still constellate the floors; I can’t see to know. Instead I trace the seams in the wallpaper to where Claire had parted it with chainsmoke.

Anxious that Thomas was straying, I had asked Claire for help loving him. Made her a mentor in my mind. Claire was sure and calm like I never could be. I wanted her experience, her rationed breaths, patient answers.

She seemed to want for nothing.

We sat together, waiting for Thomas to come home. Claire’s housedress soft on her angles, the bones now reaching like twigs through her skin.

I demanded to compare notes: What more can I do? What won’t you do?

Claire kept devoted eye contact but said nothing. I tried goading her. Don’t you know what I am worth?

No answer.

Have you fucked in this room? Because, we have. I punched the cushion between us. She lit a new cigarette with the last one’s filter, eyed me like a spill edging too near her.

Tender girl, she blew at me, shook her head. There are always others.

I ripped the cigarette from her mouth and snuffed it under my heel on the carpet.

Claire stood, hand raised to strike. I pinched my eyes closed, ready for a hit that never came.

On my way out, I heard the snatch of her lighter’s flint.

Thomas didn’t return my calls for three weeks.

The room fills with lilies and wreaths and photos, chairs set where they don’t belong. Thomas lines napkins, dishes, and wine along my table. I am the centerpiece. The bisected woman. Too pretty.

Thomas kneads my shoulder with his thumb, surveys the room. After this, he says, we can be alone again.

Fruit flies begin to crowd.

When the mourners arrive, I’ve been open for hours. My limbs are slow to circulate. Vision fades. I can’t discern specific features. Bodies are half human, the rest ocular eclipse. Which is Thomas?

All the women wear black heels, clicking in chorus. Pairs on pairs of black pants and stockings titter when they reach me. They spear the fruit from my gut. They are calloused hands and open mouths. I know their thoughts. Spider-veins tell pressed- trousers all I am with two words.

Other. Woman.

One fat hand sets a plate of used napkins by my knee. I want to ask the hand to take a photo of me with Thomas. I know I shouldn’t – it would be rude – but how else will Thomas remember?

The afternoon imbues the house with gold light, heaven-like. I grope the hole in my stomach. Nearly empty. A few melons float where my navel should be. I pinch a honeydew from the puddle.

I always knew, or should have, that I will not make it.

There is no after.

Can only hear the flies inside me, the women’s clicking heels. So much clicking.

So sure of themselves – that they knew Claire, know me.

I close my eyes and roll the fruit in my palm. Soggy. It puckers in my fingers. I want to say grace. Something should be said.

Claire could never lie here. Not like me, in front of all these people.

The weight of my half-body surprises me as I whip myself off the table. I am too quick. Knock a plate on the floor. I step into its shards and feel nothing.

The guests turn toward me like children. Like children, they wait.

I drop the fruit into my mouth and chew.

Live Women!

My brother and I hatched from an egg two decades ago. Know the joke, In dog years I’m dead? In spider years, I’m primordial.

In my booth at The Toy Box I am born again. This time alone.

It would devastate my twin to know where I am so I don’t tell him. The other dancers wave mascara wands, warning, Family always finds out. My silence is to repay his protections. In high school, he shook unloaded pistols at anyone he caught gawking.

Names that I had heart-scrawled in diaries, mistaking their attention for love. He would say, Don’t kid yourself – they’re disgusted.

Now, The Toy Box prints fliers with my face and stage name. Some hourly- worker spreads them on city streets like scripture, $10 for ten minutes! That’s all you’ll need! Leaves of the glossies pile in public bathrooms, newspaper-vending boxes, the stairwells of train stations.

The owner wet-whispers to our patrons, You ever seen anything like it?

I am it:

five foot one

two hundred ninety-five pounds

eight eyes and six legs.

Flesh like installation over crunchy bones, soft breasts and hips. Mortal design warped like blown glass. I am half-woman/half-spider.

In the dark, folks can’t see the all of me from just looking. They feel my skin, the small of my back until – a waist so snatched it looks detachable with new joints cut where they shouldn’t, my extra legs tied in fishnet.

My boss couldn’t waste me on the floor. He made a private booth in the back, salvaged from the now-outlawed arcade with its glory holes and half-walls. Spit shined it; lit it up bright with spotlights for me. I glisten like a prize in a claw machine. Safe from touch behind Plexiglas.

I never need to leave so I never do.

Inside, I sway to lounge covers and old blues songs. I drape webs like shadow, curl silk from my spinnerets: the holes in my gut that these men would kill to touch

(maybe fill?).

Wanna see me bend backwards? Watch me climb the wall! Can your wife do that?

Here, I am apex predator.

They adore the monster parts of me. They want to know why-how-what made me like this. I pierce the veil with my fangs. I am their closest to holy. And, what do these men do with my majesty? While I pirouette, shoot hot silk and defy whatever Nature-

Science-God they trust[ed]?

They tug their dicks – in confusion? In earnest?

They say, I’ll make you a real woman, baby.

I bake under the lights. Can’t be bothered. Let them stare. I am safe. I have rules.

Let them cum.

Slip the money through the slot, I say and flex all my limbs.

On our Scorpio birthday my brother sings Morrissey’s November Spawned a

Monster.

Us versus the world, he says, smiling face lit by trick candles.

The gall! He passes for human. When he walks at night, too close to strangers, he doesn’t share my nagging arachnid fear. No worries that any wayward light could betray an extra eye under bangs, how someone might graze his many knees and out him.

His pointed questions teach me to lie. When he asks where I live I supply changing, fake addresses. Where the money comes from? Fake suitor names. I change the subject.

Hugging goodbye, he slips me bedazzled pepper sprays, self-defense key chains shaped like kittens.

Men only want one thing. Even from you.

I know better than to believe that this is how he loves. This is how he keeps.

I nod anyway. Take his offerings and leave.

I am naked when my brother finds me. He breaks open the door with the butt of a gun, pulls a regular from my booth. The man sloughs off his unzipped jeans as he flees.

What kind of whore are you? he hollers, waving the pistol.

I let the silence answer him. There is no way through except the cash slot.

It is my body too, he says.

I am it. He means me.

I approach, forcing sharp eye contact. He pops four holes in the Plexiglas and misses. He is not aiming to kill. He wants to shoot his way in.

I’m sorry, I coo. He drops his arms to his sides.

Maybe I am sorry. Remember how he had tried hiding my body; the gifts he had made of maxi skirts and oversized sunglasses; his guiding palms as we had bound my spinnerets with gauze; the harsh edge of plea when he would say, twins are each other’s second halves.

I bend my knees near-backward and crab-crawl to the window. He squats mute and frozen.

I am so sorry, I lull and brace my face with one hand. Girlishly wipe at imaginary tears.

My other palm cups a spinneret above my hip. Warm gel crystalizes in the hole. I cloud his view with rows of eyes. We fix in on each other. His face flushes with panic and stuck ego.

The open slot is groin height. I am low, belly-toward-ground, my legs star- sprawled around me.

You should have known not to come here, I chide.

He weeps silent. Pathetic. What of that righteous fury now?

I pivot and shoot silk through the slot. He sticks to the bench like flypaper. I finger the bullet holes and rip the Plexiglas from its half-wall. I climb into the room baring fangs and trailing silk.

Before I can stop myself, I bite my brother on the face. Just once.

His cheek bloats around my incisors. I am ugly and sick for it, feel his blood clot between us like curdling milk. When I spit him out, I am lighter.

He won’t worry about my venom knowing that our shared blood spares him. I step over him, through the club to the full night outside.

Leave the man alone to his whimpering.

Spitting Distance

We live spitting distance from the coalmine fire of Centralia. Still burning. All that’s between it and us is forty miles farmland. By government orders that town is vacant now, sputtering smoke, hissing for attention. Idiot outsiders will go tag the place, not us. The asphalt’s hot beneath our shoes, prone to cave-ins. Might be walking one minute, roasting under the next. There but by the grace of God, our Mamas say. Our town is no better. The storefronts are closed; the houses are boarded. We live two, three generations a home. We keep fucking and birthing and testing our limits. Our town swells, then hollows with no life to show. Stillborn.

We have to find ways to pass time, us Matthews, Christophers, Jonathans. We soak our red gums in Skoal and hawk the muck at high school girls’ feet in convenience store lots beside our trucks and used Jettas. The girls machinegun stops and don’ts through helium giggles. Girls will be girls until they’re Ma’ams buying Pall Malls with change at the gas station. Or, until they’re whores/mothers, always demanding something. What else do girls want besides dick and cash and maybe some blow when they don’t have work in the morning? Used to be women were women and men were men, our grandfathers tell us. Don’t let them trap you. We know. It’s easy for a girl to say she don’t want it when really she do and vice versa. We have to be careful about things like that. Girls can ruin our lives with the right words. But our grandfathers don’t know, don’t have to deal with these girls – skin/eyes/curls soft like fleece, naked like lambs – swaying with appetite. Things a man goes to jail for.

Feels like every week we find another one of us dead – driving drunk or shooting bad H or cleaning our rifles. We try and laugh about it if we can. Didn’t we tell him, or, who gets his stuff? What else can we do when we hear the call on our radios and we already know? Above all the specifics (Was he streaked red or flat pale? Did he bloat or decay? Was his body stiff or mangled?), they become the same man. We can’t shake the shine of fresh violence composed too neatly, too fake. Don’t misunderstand – we ain’t scared. We’re angry. One of us is here and then they aren’t. Shouldn’t that mean more?

We assign the dead men elegies. Songs we say he loved. We tune and retune guitars. Learn some Queen or Zeppelin or Stevie Ray Vaughn. Play until the strings rip our calluses. Some glue the hard skin back on undeterred. Some quit for good. We know there’s no god, of course, obviously, what did you think? Still, we wear our saint medals under everything. When our girls uncover the round gold in backseats, woods, bathrooms, they kiss it to our chests. Their pity burns down to our sternums like shrapnel.

Sometimes we imagine Centralia’s furnace extends under us. It follows like a patient dog, panting (never nipping). We feel it best after dark. We hear its whistle when we stumble drunk with a crowd through the mountains, to that same spot we first had booze or weed or sex. We don’t go too far east, that’s where one of us was found –

Mark? Mike? We lie down, sweating in the sour night. We want the ground to make space for us, to hear the rip of inferno. We want to warm ourselves.

When I Die (Hallelujah)

Kathleen learned that she could feel what others feel on the day Ma cut Jenny’s wings off. The sisters had fashioned them out of shoebox cardboard and perfumed magazine inserts. It had already been an afternoon of discovery, left alone as usual while

Ma was at the diner. They’d found a dark, half-clogged industrial paste in the laundry room junk drawer, beside lone batteries and pocket change sticky with detergent. The craft glue first meant to hold the wings had molted in long, porous strips. While ransacking the house for an alternative, Kathleen pulled the dried glue flakes against her forearm. Still warm with Jenny and already so lifeless.

As Jenny lay face down, one cheek on the garage concrete, Kathleen squeezed amber lines along her bare shoulders and poked the flimsy board, still wet with glitter nail polish, hard in place. Patient for the transformation, Jenny counted while Kathleen sang what she remembered of her favorite hymns.

“Thirteen Mississippi.”

When I die –

“Fourteen Mississippi.”

Hal-le-lu-jah. Bye bye bye.

When Ma returned from work, Jenny postured at the front door, all glossy and canonized. Hair limping down her narrow shoulders, caught in the stick of her wings. Ma only huffed, setting a lukewarm doggy bag on the coffee table. Confused fear knotted the girls’ windpipes.

Ma kept her orthopedics on as she squat at the edge of the bathtub, tugging Jenny to the floor between her knees. Safety scissors freed most of the paper from her skin, but the dense industrial glue stayed inborn as dimples. At Ma’s demand, Kathleen trapped

Jenny in place by her shoulders, while Ma picked at the paint thinner-soaked remains.

Ma might as well have used the vegetable peeler for all Jenny twisted and winced.

Kathleen had felt only empty pity until she sensed the skin of her own back ribbon and river and bleed. At first, Kathleen was hot with the terror that something might be attacking her, though the whole family was present. When Ma paused to pick gluts of paste from her nail beds, Kathleen’s pain stopped.

Understanding swelled through her. She pinched her sister’s shoulder and felt a nip on her own. It was as if Kathleen had only just now seen a chair and was learning to sit, realizing she could never unlearn it.

She watched Jenny’s stunted wings and felt the seams of glue, still tightening.

What remained of the clipped papers waved little breaths onto Jenny’s back as she dodged Ma’s reach. Each gust meant more scratching. It was all too much – Kathleen’s own back was torrid. Instinctively, she clawed at Jenny’s remaining paste in hope of relief and squealed along with her sister at the pain she continued instigating.

Ma snatched Kathleen’s wrist mid-tear, and palmed her hard on the cheek.

Kathleen’s sobs cut through new silence – that sting was hers alone.

With time, Kathleen learned how to steal – that’s David’s word – more subtle, nuanced emotions, even memories. She played both receiver and operator, though there was often no controlling it. Her body was vessel to the strongest signal.

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When she moved in with David, they blamed his third-shift schedule for their self-isolation. Old copies of The Eagle-Tribune papered their bedroom windows, poorly masking the light. They hung black drapes. From her end of the curtain rod, Kathleen joked that it was just like a man to try outrunning the sun. Pretending that any of this had to do with David was her way of thanking, apologizing. The less she mentioned her empathy, the safer David felt.

Their lives of avoidance caught Kathleen in the day’s edges: dawn driving to work, dusk driving home. But, light found its way. Even halved or quartered, the sun flaunted golds and purples over the cracked ugliness of Lawrence. When it flashed the matted hair of boney street dogs or the red Xs marking foreclosed homes, she resented light’s equity.

Kathleen woke before the alarms and couldn’t fall back asleep, imagining what she and David had missed at the vigil, what might have been said about them. David was a dense curl of sheets, snoring strenuously beside her. He was still warm with Benadryl: his best shot at a night’s sleep. He was often the product of over-the-counter uppers or downers, a habit Kathleen could not break him of. She hadn’t tried. He was always needed somewhere. David knew everyone and they knew their own Davids, versions never compared in a city so splintered. Kathleen felt privileged to see all his faces.

Four days prior – when he received the news of his father’s death – he had sat, immobile on his recliner, television mute, with damp eyes that would not break. He spent the night silent, only moving to the bedroom after the Sox lost in extra innings. Kathleen

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knew it wasn’t for her sake, though David was often kind like that, keeping his voice cool in times of crisis. It was just how he was raised.

David had learned to be mindful, that Kathleen felt things she didn’t want to, but when the news hushed him that night she tried reading him. She had stolen angst before.

They had left doctor’s appointments, funerals, mass when it was too heavy around her.

Kathleen had hoped for a trace of it when he got the news, stalking him from the kitchen like a housecat. She kept low and light-footed. She tried conjuring whatever ancestral skill she had but the air was empty. She felt black ice under worn sneakers, soft hands on his thighs, Pops prodding David’s back in line for communion. There was no grief or relief, only glimpses of life too nuanced to hold still inside her.

She sated herself with memories that she had already squirreled from him: his mother would hold a hand over his mouth in his bedroom when Pops went in on Bobby or Chris. Kathleen felt his mother’s hand, wrinkled with lemon-scented Ajax, hard against David’s mouth, the other round his belly, curved with boyhood. David shook with the thwacks of skin against skin: leather belt on son, then father on son, then son on son when Pops left the room.

He never told her. She’d felt this at his childhood home, the whole Murphy family around her. She was only nineteen, a prize David caught at State before he dropped out, his hand on her knee under the table. Chris broke his glass and she felt all the brothers at once: shallow breath, tense sinews. They were boys again. She held David’s the longest.

Skin and tears and citrus.

They had told her plenty of Pops. She wanted to summon the memories for him.

The communal cup of warm beer he snuck the boys at barbeques with a wink. The slurs

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he had spit with brown yarns of tobacco when he taught David parallel parking. The latticework of foliage David averted his gaze to when Pops had taken him outside to explain that despite his age, Mom was his responsibility, should, well, ya know. It wasn’t enough for Kathleen. She skulked around, fecund with the secondhand memories of a dead man. She needed to know what to say, what to do, how to help but David didn’t feel anything.

White morning shone lazily through the space where the drapes didn’t quite meet.

Even if she wanted to Kathleen couldn’t steal from him now. Sleep made people illegible.

She had learned that while lying awake beside Charley McGowan in the back of his sister’s car sophomore year. She had desperately laid hands on him, stiff as Lazarus, rifling for signs of adoration, lust. The gnashing hum of bugs and bees reverberated through her like feedback. She was nauseous.

She never tried it with David.

Kathleen stood and tugged the drapes closed. She didn’t need to look to know that there were two or three bums on her stoop, likely having a smoke or sharing a nip from the bodega on the corner. When they first moved in– Kathleen from the state line, where there had been space enough to feel lonely – the faces framed by torn hoods, cutting relief through the sun-bleached newsprint, had charmed her. She needed to know how they got there. But, it didn’t take much to steal from the homeless. They wrote their stories, true, false, in-between, on brown paper bags and stained cardboard.

Now she needed to know where they would end up.

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Shrill alarms sounded on both nightstands. The cloying bells of Kathleen’s phone rang in three-four time against the four-four gongs of David’s. He woke, immediately disgusted by the oversight.

“Will you turn yours the fuck off then?” he mumbled under the blankets, holding his own phone.

“I know you aren’t mad at me,” Kathleen said, tapping hers off.

“Do you have to start in with that so early? Today?” He rolled over, eyes tight despite the dark of the room.

“I don’t mean that I stole anything. I mean I know like a woman knows,”

Kathleen sat on the end of the bed.

“Wicked difference it makes if you take it from here,” David motioned to his own head, then blindly toward Kathleen’s, “or there.”

“Seven-fifteen,” she said.

David sat up with his back on the cold of the wall. Kathleen shivered. “When’s

Bobby want us there?”

“There’s no mass, he says.”

“Who decided?”

“Mom. They went yesterday morning. Before calling hours.” Kathleen pulled her ankles underneath herself and sat cross-legged like an idol cut out of soap at a flea market.

“Straight to Keefe’s then?” It was the closest of six funeral homes in the city.

Kathleen nodded. David stood and at once the bed was higher. She watched him move to the door. He stopped with his back to her.

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“No stealing today, Kathleen. Please,” his shoulders fell and he turned his head. “I mean, don’t tell me about it.”

She said nothing while he walked to the bathroom. She heard the faucet run, felt the steam surround David. She dropped back on the mattress.

When David came back from the shower Kathleen was ready to leave, dressed in her usual Sunday clothes. Most of her closet was funeral appropriate. She was unduly proud of this accidental pragmatism. She wondered what other terrors she was unwittingly prepared for.

“Is it nine o’clock then?” he asked, combing his hair.

“Seven-forty.”

“No, no. Nine at Keefe’s.” It was the first time he’d laughed since he’d heard about Pops.

“Oh,” Kathleen laughed too loudly. “Nine-thirty but Chris said that Mom told

Bobby we should set up before then.”

“Set up what?” He moved past her into the bedroom and began dressing.

“You know, drinks, donuts, whatever.”

“That’s our job? I thought we were the mourners.”

“Well, we’re all the mourners.” Kathleen eyed him nervously as he knotted his tie. She hadn’t seen him wear one ever before – where had it come from? She tried to steal a memory of Pops. There was nothing.

“Don’t they bring us food?”

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“I’m sure they brought your mom some,” Kathleen answered. As a clever woman with a closet full of dark clothing, she was comfortable acting as an authority on funerals, though her family was still alive.

Kathleen stepped toward him, first pulling his hands then his chest into her. She laid her head on his shoulder, said nothing. Waited. The grief and anger pulsed under his skin; it nearly surfaced. She wanted to act as his pyre, to let his pain smolder inside her, coughing up wisps of it when called for.

She tongued the back of her teeth, wondering if she could bite her way into his blood, his essence – him. David tapped her forehead with pursed lips and Kathleen turned her chin to meet him. She caught his bottom lip between teeth and held it, willing his pain into her. In her mind she repeated something like a spell with no certainty it would do anything. She had never gone this long without someone else’s feelings inside her before.

She was parched.

Melt for me.

Kathleen felt it before she could bite him: a tingle, a strain, an itch scratched deep in her – David’s – center. Arousal and shame. In this, he was so young. His body so small, gaps where she knew his bones would learn to meet each other, feather-light limbs just shy of puberty. And, arid guilt, drying his mouth and pinched eyes, desperate for the camouflage of sleep.

She stepped backward disgusted. Vomit burned in her throat. She rushed out of the room. Brushing her teeth, Kathleen heard David debate aloud whether to bring food to the funeral home. He said first that he shouldn’t have to and then that he wouldn’t have to – he was sure his brothers would bring some. His voice was resolute but Kathleen felt

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his doubt through the closed bathroom door. He wanted to bring something; the guilt echoed viciously in his stomach. Kathleen honored his request not to mention it.

At the door, David turned to Kathleen, tugging the buttons of his dress shirt. “Do I look alright?”

She knew that he wanted her to say he did not look alright, that she would need to take him clothes shopping right then. He would need a new tie and new shoes and new suit jacket; he was so ill prepared it would be a travesty to arrive in this condition. She would have to take him away until he was in a condition fit to bury his father.

“Of course you do.”

The glow against their windshield was celestial. The city made the chipped brick facades their gatekeepers. We lock ourselves in, Kathleen heard David think, they keep the good out.

In the lot behind Keefe’s, Kathleen turned in her seat to David, setting both her hands out, palms up.

“Hands Down?” she said. A game they played when he wanted to be read. She would guess telephone numbers that rang to empty landlines now. Or, the feel of his childhood pets – hamsters, rabbits, goldfish – long since flushed or buried.

“Kathleen, what did I say?” He was incensed. She didn’t need to steal that, he made certain.

“Why did you never tell me?” She wouldn’t be dismissed.

“Tell you what? What could I ever keep from you?” David stared hard at her, dark eyes unblinking. He had never made an effort to hide his fear of her. He was honest.

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David turned for the door and Kathleen lunged at him. She gripped his arm tightly. The itch was there again, the tight strain in her thighs. He was young. So young he had forgotten. She felt his young body touched, searched, wickedly. Kathleen felt her face and chest flush. She was pressed and sheared and brittle. She was kindle. Soft hands.

Citrus. She let go.

Keefe Funeral Home was renovated from an old bank. There were still drive-thru teller windows on the side of the building. Kathleen imagined receiving an urn through those tubes that shoot capsules of money. When she told David, he didn’t laugh.

He was still angry with her, though he wasn’t sure why. She sensed his ambivalence and slid her hand inside his while climbing the side stairs into Keefe’s. He held the door for her, but made a show of avoiding eye contact.

Bobby and Chris stood staunch and centered in the short hallway. They might have matched the marble décor, blue veined and top heavy as they were, had it not been for their silk shirts. David stepped away from Kathleen, leaving her hand empty, free to pick up anything.

“This guy can’t even wear black to his own Pops’ funeral?” David forced a deep laugh and punched Chris in the gut of his brown polo.

Chris smiled, quietly. His grief smogged Kathleen’s senses. He was doused in it, drunk from it. She saw everything: Chris’ legs tapping from nerves when told Pops he’d made him a granddad. The harsh stucco Pops grated his raw hands over the when he’d stained it with spray paint. The patient gaps in Pops’ directions as he taught Chris how to pet bumblebees.

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Kathleen let them slip over her without holding any too long. She tried ignoring it, as if Chris were a misbehaving child. They were sticky and cloying and she felt as if all these moments had been tracked in on a wet dog. She tried humming hymns in her head.

Some bright morning when this life is o’er.

David returned to her side, no trace of the anger from the car. She was grateful for his static thoughts. There were no memories tantamount to a life in David’s grief. Just an unfocused dimness.

Bobby set his hand on Kathleen’s shoulder, saying something she didn’t hear. She felt his grip tighten though it was already gone. She knew then that Bobby had dreamt it was his fault Pops died. Nightly scenes of him killing Pops – all red and flesh and blunt household items. Kathleen saw a new wave of violence each time she blinked. It was an open secret that Bobby had always hated his father. He felt so powerful in these dreams and then, woke to regret.

Kathleen had to focus exhaustively to shake Bobby’s anger.

“Well, with my night shift,” Kathleen heard David explain. She nodded loyally.

More hymns.

I’ll fly away, O Glory.

“Of course we wanted to be here,” she supplied for her husband.

“Of course you did. Of course,” Mrs. Murphy stood behind Kathleen.

And, she felt nothing, from anywhere.

The amniotic clouds of loss and anger that had surrounded Kathleen dissipated.

She strained for direction, a signal to buzz life through her. But, she was severed from the

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others and worried faintly that this emptiness meant she would not recognize herself in a mirror.

“Mrs. Murphy, I am so sorry for your loss,” Kathleen managed.

The woman was short and round: bloated and shrunken by motherhood several times over. A lifetime of New England winters frayed her at the edges. Her stray sandy hairs haloed her red, patch-dried cheeks. An oyster shell slip peeked out beneath the hem of her black crepe dress. This typically would evoke pity in Kathleen but today she was disgusted.

Still, the brothers huddled their mother, as if she deserved their warmth. As if none of them remembered. David held her the closest. Kathleen stood apart, probing for

Mrs. Murphy’s grief. She shut her eyes; the lull of their soft sympathies was too intimate.

She meant to drift away in their ids. She dragged the dark lake of their mother, blue faces bloomed against the ice she had cast over the pain: her sons.

Kathleen opened her eyes, all three men were crying silently. They were boys again. Her David, always the loudest. Above Bobby’s red power, Chris’ gold youth,

Kathleen stole David. He was soothed by his mother, though something in his center still quaked. His body remembered though he had buried the memory, they all had.

She felt Mrs. Murphy wipe the tears from her – no, David’s – face. Soft hands and citrus.

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Genesis

Gen was at the company Christmas party, the year that six MHS alumni had died, when she saw Luis Perez, class of 2000, across the airport Hilton ballroom. She only attended at Patricia’s urging, which was conveyed through violent reminder memos and targeted emails sent to previous years’ no-shows. Each new subject line multiplied in exclamation marks, Patricia’s VP title heavy like the glint of brass knuckles at the bottom of every email. Gen had caved only a week prior, after waking up another morning in yesterday’s blazer and nylons, smearing makeup into the seats of her beige sofa.

Six of them had died so far and Gen was sure this was an omen. They were only a graduating class of two hundred. Six of them within months of each other and Marlene was second. It almost didn’t matter to count after her, but still Gen’s mother sent the clippings with times and arrangements, where to send your prayers, flowers. Gen kept an envelope of them above her refrigerator, a little file of pain she felt unentitled to, just in case fifteen-year-old her came back, gawky and peach fuzzy, demanding to claim the lament.

She couldn’t mention it to Luis if she didn’t want to give herself away. It was better if she didn’t speak to him at all, she realized, and turned sharply into the refreshments table, now manned by the bloodshot intern with crooked bangs.

“Sorry,” Gen said, scooping orange-pink juice into a Solo cup.

“What?” the intern said, too loudly, competing with The Waitresses’ Christmas

Wrapping, ringing through the hall’s acoustics from its other end. Ticket prices were

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meant to defray the cost of hot meals and a live band, but a sweat-wet ponytailed DJ and coldcut buffet proved the money had gone elsewhere.

Gen shook her head, unsure what else needed to be said.

“Patricia told me to watch,” the intern continued. “So if someone eats too much or spikes the Berry Berry Christmas Whatever.”

A placard before the punch bowl read “Have Yourself Some Very Berry

Christmas Juice” with tiny doves on either side of the text. Gen followed the gold lamé runner down the tabletop, cluttered with off-brand liquors and hard ciders. She looked back at the intern, staring at her cellphone and swaying faintly enough that it could have been either of them moving.

“For the drivers, ya know? And alcoholics, I guess.”

Gen nodded. “That’s nice. To think of everyone.”

When Gen first started her HRT regimen, after moving back home post-college, she had avoided everything advised against in the pamphlets: no alcohol, low sodium, stay hydrated, no salt substitutes, no potassium, not too much water, don’t smoke. She had giggled into Marlene’s neck on the gray mattress of their extended stay room at The

Beauty Rest Motel. There were warnings that facial bloating might mean internal bleeding, but weren’t they meant to fill her cheeks out? Soon enough, Marlene had kissed her forehead, everyone will see what you do. That was ten years ago.

“I’m going to circulate,” Gen told the intern, her over-lined eyes still stuck on the blue light of her phone. “Good seeing you.”

Gen heard the intern’s too loud ‘what?’ from the refreshments once she reached

Accounting’s table. The circle was split Payable/Receivable, with everyone in their

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cubicle pairs, spare Tony and Antonia, who had married after a messy affair several years ago. Antonia was Patricia’s receptionist and, as the other woman, was generally agreed to be conniving. Tony was only allowed to stay on the unwritten condition he never be promoted. They told Gen during her orientation just as plainly as the rules of a shared kitchen and the copier password.

She smiled and took her seat at the table, holding her breath until the chair was tucked silently beneath her. “Excuse me,” she mouthed to no one. Tony and Antonia were lively splitting a monologue, a routine they must have perfected talking to balloons at children’s birthday parties.

“No one tells you this when you have kids – ”

“Twins!”

“Yes. But, Rayden can’t get enough of Pixie.”

“And vice-versa.”

Gen remembered skimming her options in the dozens of baby name books at

Barnes and Noble. She left water rings on the pages, setting the books on café tables, trying to focus her flip phone camera to exactly the right one. She hadn’t seen Radon but wouldn’t have chosen it anyway.

“So now that they are losing teeth – ”

“Forget about it!”

“Pixie realized she could pull them out – ”

“And Rayden went right in and did it for her!”

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Tony passed his iPhone round the table, locked to a photo of two miniature

Antonias gummily drooling blood down their chins, spreading twenty fingers to reveal three incisors and a canine.

“I told them they should give each other a cut of their tooth fairy profit.”

“You know, for helping out.”

The table laughed and Antonia wiped a smudge of mascara from her eye. She set herself on her husband’s shoulder like an inert vaudeville dummy.

Above their heads, Gen saw Luis walk to the buffet, beside an unmanned refreshment table. She didn’t remember much about him from MHS. Not from the same crowds. Though, once on her way to the nurse, he made eye contact with her in an empty hallway. She had used her sister’s old compact and a stolen eyeliner to follow a tutorial she read online. It said: beauty is only light and shadow. When they stood exactly beside each other in the middle of the hall, she felt like he could tell she was wearing makeup.

She remembered thinking in that moment he was light and she was shadow, unsure what that meant for either of them. If Luis died tomorrow she would repeat that story quietly to a cousin or old girlfriend over the phone, but never attend or send things to his funeral.

She had those stories for all six of them, with their flat pictures and dates in that envelope, and it hadn’t meant anything yet.

Gen watched Patricia join Luis at the buffet, snaking her hands around him, fingers knobby with red and green cocktail rings. He struggled feebly to make up two plates while Patricia nestled her grey-blonde head into his. It was not unlike a television show Gen once saw about bugs that mistakenly lay eggs inside sleeping humans’ ears or

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noses. Even assuming Luis had an early birthday, like Gen, he still must be twenty years

Patricia’s junior.

Gen realized she was staring and felt a hot rash of shame cloud her face. She redirected her attention to Antonia who was somehow still speaking while buttering a roll.

“If I couldn’t conceive, we would not adopt.”

“Of course we would.”

“No, we wouldn’t. Could you, Gennie?” Antonia pointed her knife towards Gen mid-stroke.

“A baby? Yes.” Gen tried following the conversation backward to exactly where it involved her.

“You would adopt?” Antonia pushed, buttering a new roll for Tony.

Gen was sure Antonia had suspected at least her sexuality for some time, if not her origin, but she wasn’t sure of her motives. Marlene would have called her a breeder and left it at that; she was very divisive that way. Combative. But, Antonia was trendy and it was en vogue to have lesbian friends now. Trans friends, Latino friends, queer, disabled, veteran friends: hung round your wrist by their necks like charms.

In high school, Gen spread her questions and identities out ahead of her for trade and corroboration. Marlene was open, loud, unscathed. Her problems fit Gen’s like a matching set. Maybe even a uniform.

Now it seemed her lives were mass-produced, printed on tabloids, played by beautiful people for Oscars. They were characters. With recognition came inspection.

Gen told no one. She could never be too careful.

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Antonia arched a sparse eyebrow.

“I’m sorry, yes?” Gen asked.

“Even though it would not really be yours? Not on the inside. Wouldn’t look like you.”

Gen stared at each face of the table, hoping it would call Antonia off.

“I’m sorry. I don’t know why that would change anything?” she answered.

“Well, you’ll know when you squeeze out a few of your own,” Antonia smiled.

“Right?” She turned to the other women.

When Antonia moved on, Gen slowly stood, mumbling “Out for fresh air,” to no one and walked to the balcony.

The intern stood in the corner, puffing weed from a vaporizer. Gen realized, standing perfectly still, the girl herself was crooked, one eye higher than the other, measured iris to iris. The intern extended the black box to Gen silently.

Gen shook her head. “Thanks though.”

“These people, ya know?” she shrugged.

Gen strained a laugh. She was sure that she was just as much one of those people.

“You won’t narc,” she clarified.

“Never. ” Gen turned back toward the sliding doors.

Tim from Marketing, or, maybe Production, swiped the glass open, half- drunkenly stumbling to the deck’s edge. The intern ducked behind him, shutting the door smoothly behind her.

Gen stared down at the parking lot, trying not to be rude. He was rum soaked and disoriented. His tablemates should have come out with him. Gen was responsible now,

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lest she hear about his three-story suicide on the news. She had no memories of him. She wondered if his death would mean anything at all.

“Tim?” she tried.

He swung his head toward her, overarching twice before he focused his squint on her. “Did you even see? Hi. Tim,” he shoved a hand toward her. She accepted and quickly withdrew.

“Let’s just,” she said, guiding him by the forearm away from the balcony’s edge.

She considered how plump he was for a man his height, though plump felt too feminine a word. “There you go.” Gen dropped her hands.

Tim clawed at his suit jacket, producing a pack of Marlboro Reds after several tries. He smacked the pack against the ball of his hand. Gen was sure it was empty, but he tugged one out and stuffed it filter out, into his lips.

“Uh, ah.” Gen pointed to her own mouth. “It’s backward,” she said.

“Thank you, my darling.” Tim dramatically fluttered his lashes at her. “Women like you are why men like me,” he lit the cigarette.

“Yes?” she didn’t mean to encourage it but she needed to know what women like her did.

“Did you even see them?” Tim asked her.

“See who?” Gen watched Tim’s head swinging widely beside the faux brick façade. She imagined gushing blood or worse, with no witnesses and the scent of weed.

She would be blamed for every canceled Christmas party for the next decade. She stepped away from Tim, who in turn stepped toward her.

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“That cunt brought some young, some little,” Tim sucked at the cigarette, its tiny ember floating into the lot beneath them.

Gen caught herself nodding.

“I can’t. You know? I asked her and she said she was my boss. It’s work. Then here she is with some, some,” he was mumbling into his chest, his hands both fallen well below any useful height. Gen searched the floor for his cigarette.

“There are plenty of other, you know, fish,” she offered.

“Fish! That’s what they are, aren’t they?” He laughed heartily as Gen stomped the black ash of a full cigarette into the deck’s grout.

“He’s a fruit I bet,” Tim continued laughing. “No man on earth’s meant to look like that.”

“Well, I don’t think,”

“No, no, no. I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Tim set his plump hand toward Gen’s arm, tapping indistinctly. She turned her shoulder away from him, shielding her breasts. “It’s not appropriate for ladies but, you know, he looks it, doesn’t he?” He let out a mouthy, wet noise, part chuckle, part sob.

“We should get you back inside,” Gen said, gripping his hand from her shoulder.

As she opened the glass door, Tim shook her hands from him. He moved swiftly inside.

There was a choir of ‘we’ve been looking for’s and ‘where have you been?’s. Gen shut the door wondering if she was envious of Tim’s feigned supporters.

She pivoted back to the railing. She gripped the cold metal, blowing hot breath into the air. It was nearly a year since Marlene. Death number two. Mid-march. No one called her when it happened. She guessed that was how adult deaths were, though: word

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of mouth, like recipes, recommendations. She had imagined when it finally came it would wake her from her sleep, like twins split by distance feeling surrogate pain, but it didn’t.

Gen’s mother sent Marlene’s obituary in an Easter card, weeks after her service.

It was a beautiful photo – full color – one from when Gen still knew her, before she was brown teeth and bone, before her second, third relapses. Gen knew Marlene’s father had printed it, his only daughter, cropped to a one-third-page rectangle. He would have made it larger if they let him.

Gen slid one leg through the railing, feeling the new winter cold pimple her skin through her stockings. If she jumped, she’d be number seven. She pulled her leg back in, side stepping to the intern’s deserted corner. She was hidden from the glass doors.

Marlene was the only of the six that Gen felt entitled to mourn. The only she had known, really. They shared Marlene’s room at The Beauty Rest for months after college.

The four years apart had changed them, she thought. For one, she was Gen now, but

Marlene soaked in the differences smoothly, learning them without conversation.

Marlene was the only woman to see Gen bare in the making. Without her, there were no witnesses; there was only then and now.

Gen turned back to the glass, tugging the door open. She stepped into Luis Perez.

The cold, painted to her skin, coated the heat of fear boiling inside her. She felt as if she was only a parched throat and empty ribcage. She had nothing to say, no means to say it. She stood still like a child, hoping it made her invisible.

There was half a foot between them and Luis stepped backward. He held an unlit cigarette between his lips, a lighter in one hand.

“Excuse me,” he said, removing the cigarette from his mouth.

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She ducked to his left just as he did the same. They caught eyes again. Luis laughed.

“Luis,” he said, extending a hand.

“I know,” she said before, “Gen.”

Luis opened his mouth to speak, face pinched in confusion.

“Tim, from Production, just said. You’re with Patricia?” Gen was sure her voice had broken, high pitched shards of it working discordantly to convey her flimsy cover.

Luis nodded, and took a step toward the balcony.

“You look,” he started.

Gen could move out to the west coast. She could build a life in Portland, she imagined. She was still young enough to start over.

“Nevermind. He’s dead.”

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Birthright

Maureen watched her father’s face in the mirror behind the bar, edges frayed with gray. He had given up shaving after the divorce. Eighteen months seem longer when you can run a comb through them.

“I’ve been praying a lot lately,” he said.

She’d never seen it. Did he kneel? She had seen him tie shoes. Maureen pictured her father half-knelt, mumbling to God, pulling laces until they broke. The waitress set their drinks on coasters and disappeared.

“The Lord told me I’ve been chosen,” he said.

She took a sip of lager.

“Chosen?”

“Maureen, I need your help.” He leaned toward her, sinking his neck to her eye line. This technique had worked before. When you’re a necessity there’s a certain dignity to everything, even taking out the garbage, feeding the cat.

“Chosen for what?” She turned to face him.

“The Rapture. I have to – we have to – warn people.”

“Oh, Dad.” It had been her mother’s job to squash investment opportunities. Now it was hers. God was the top of the pyramid scheme.

“We have to do it, Mo. First there’s the Ascension and then the Second Coming.”

His voice was clear, certain. The same he used to explain penny stocks and fad diets.

“We don’t have a lot of time. We have to tell people so they can repent.”

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His eyes were bloodshot. They seemed greener amid burst veins. Her green.

Like looking in a mirror, he had said at softball games and spelling bees. His genes were clearest in her successes. Her mother claimed she was her father’s daughter with each broken curfew, deserted hobby.

“Okay,” she said.

He straightened his back and smiled. She had made him tall again.

“How’s the new apartment?”

“Empty.” He swept his hands in front of him.

“Sarah says it’s near a park.” Maureen slid her nail between the glass of the bottle and its paper label. She stretched until it ripped.

“She wouldn’t know,” he said. He looked aged beyond measure. He was sixty- five.

“I thought she helped you move.”

“You thought wrong,” he coughed into a napkin. “She’s taken Colleen’s side in all this.”

“There are no sides, Dad.” She tore the label from the glass.

“If that were the case you wouldn’t be here.”

Maureen searched his face. Unfocused eyes under skin-tagged lids, lips paired like prayer hands cracked from wear. He could have been a drowning victim. He could have been anyone.

“He thinks he’s God’s messenger.” Maureen switched her cell from one hand to the other at the stoplight. “I thought you were coming. Where were you?”

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“I told you I had things to do here.” Her sister sounded distant.

“Am I on speaker? So help me, Sarah –”

“Calm down. You aren’t on speaker.” Sarah’s voice treaded the white noise of the city, dipping below whistles and shouts.

“It sounds like you’re underwater.” The light turned green. Maureen wedged the phone against her shoulder and twisted the wheel. Her car turned at a side street into darkness.

“I’m about to be. I have that thing at the gallery tonight. I’m late,” Sarah said.

“You need to see him. He thinks you’re mad at him.” She gripped the cell again.

“Who? Pat?”

Maureen winced. Sarah began calling their parents by name when she got her first period. It was supposed to be a statement. She stopped with their mother after they heard her crying on the phone to their aunt about it. But, their father never reacted so Sarah never stopped.

“He says you’re on Mom’s side.”

“There are no sides.”

“I told him that.” Maureen turned her high beams on. “Come tell him yourself.”

“Look, I have to go. I’m gonna lose you in the station.” She heard her sister’s bangles jingle as she smoothed whatever vintage frock she had tied herself into. Maureen imagined Sarah checking her reflection in a storefront by the subway steps, tugging at her hair and sides like a little girl in dress-up clothes. “Don’t let him do this to you. He always does.”

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“What?” Maureen said it as if the question were an excuse, louder than she meant it.

“You know. He sucks you in. Brings you with him.”

“Just make some time for him, okay?”

“Obviously.”

Maureen dropped her phone into the cup holder. There were cigarettes in the glove box but they would be stale by now. She returned her foot to the gas and stepped hard. The car surged. Some people get off on the speed. Maureen had seen documentaries: broken bodies at sharp angles, dustings of glass like fresh snow. She tried, pushing harder.

It did nothing. She felt both swollen and hollow. It seemed like phantom limb.

Though Maureen wouldn’t know. She supposed there were documentaries about that too.

Only a half-mile now. The road curved; the turns were soft, expected. She pulsed through the dark increasing speed, still trying.

A large blond dog bloomed in her windshield like the smudgy entrails of a fly.

She saw his eyes first, fierce gold. He saw her. She did not break; she swerved. He followed. The impact was unremarkable, a quiet tap. Maybe she only clipped him. She slammed the car to a stop.

Kneeling on wet asphalt, Maureen understood that inflicting pain is a birthright. It was her place in the chain. The dog limped toward the trees. He would not die with company. Red stains of life dripped from his coat. She could take him with her. She could save him, maybe. More likely, he would die in her car. It wasn’t right but it was natural. She inspected her bumper in the whimpering darkness.

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Maureen watched Mark eat his eggs from her side of the kitchen nook. He chewed with eyes shut and mouth open. It might have looked like he was laughing without the minced food. He swallowed.

“I didn’t know your father was religious.”

“I didn’t think he was.”

“He’s finally lost it.”

Mark was an expert judge of the Flynn family. He had predicted various emergencies in the decade he’d known them, always retrospectively. Sarah’s dropping out of UPenn to move to New York; her mother’s sudden demand for divorce; now her father’s conversations with Christ: Mark had seen them all in his perfect hindsight.

Maureen collected the dishes and brought them to the sink.

“What’s the rush?” he asked. She turned the hot water on. “I can do those, Mo-

Jo.”

“It’s no trouble, really.”

Her hands turned pink then red scrubbing the scratched dishes. The plates were her mother’s. A wedding gift, she had told her, shoving them into a bag when she could not stand to own them anymore. Sarah got the bedspread.

“Look. I’m already done.” She set them on the rack. It was not the water but the steam that had become too much to bear.

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The cigarettes were stale but it didn’t matter. She would only smoke one and throw the rest out. Or, maybe save another for the drive back. She could throw this pack out and buy a fresh one at the store, just to have. Just in case. She’d leave it wrapped.

It wasn’t until Maureen passed the dog that she remembered what had happened.

He lay there, on his side by the trees, face to the road. He collected trash and flies, a busted tire tread not far from his head. You wouldn’t know he were dead if it weren’t for the blood. He looked like he was waiting, restful. She felt tense, down in her gut. She sucked at her cigarette.

Sundays were the worst for groceries but the only time Maureen could go. The supermarket lot was crowded with scores of black SUVs and minivans, the stalled procession of suburbia. She had to park at its edge.

Maureen dropped the Camels in a garbage can before the sliding doors. She surveyed the road beside the store. A man stood on the corner draped in cardboard signs, ringing a hand bell. He looked like an imitation charity Santa. She walked toward him.

The sign down his back read, “REPENT NOW, PLEASE” in full dark letters.

Flesh crowned his head like a stretching thicket. She had stared down at that bald spot a childhood’s worth of piggybacks.

“Goddammit, Dad. What are you doing?” Maureen called from behind him. He turned around.

“Sarah, I’m glad you’re here.” A second sign hung against his chest like a stole.

“2 DAYS TILL THE END” was drawn in streaks against the cardboard. Brown showed through the final letters. He must have used too much ink on repentance.

“Maureen,” she corrected. A car beeped in the intersection.

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“Maureen. You’re here.”

“What are you doing?” She pointed her keys at the bell.

“The people need to know,” he said.

There was an open military knapsack at his feet. Inside were two water bottles, a change of clothes, the Bible. Maureen pulled the book out. The pages were dog-eared and greased with thumbprints.

“Be kind! Forgive!” Her father was shouting indiscriminately at passing cars. It was not unlike when he coached her track team. There was not much to teach after form.

He could only shout. She could only run. “Repent!”

“Dad.” Maureen dropped the book into her father’s knapsack with a low thud. Its gilded edges splayed like wings.

“What?” His eyes met hers with the incidental focus of an animal.

“You can’t stand out here all day.”

“I have to.”

A Honda without hubcaps sputtered down the street toward them. The car slowed at the light. A teenager with brown curls leaned out the passenger window, her small face lost in thick hair.

“Women have the right to choose, Pops!” she shouted, despite their closeness.

“Choose to repent,” her father smiled back. He was always too quick.

“She chooses sin!” the driver, a jaundiced-looking boy with a gaunt face, shouted across his passenger’s lap. He laughed and tossed a half-full Big Gulp at him. The car sped off with coughs of exhaust like infant puffs of nicotine.

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Maureen’s father dripped soda from his khakis. The empty cup rolled at his feet with other roadside trash, used condoms and cigarettes, gathered like an offering. He stared past the road to the sky.

“Daddy, please go home.”

“Soon,” he said.

Maureen walked back to the grocery store. A shrill bell cut the air. She did not turn around.

Her mother kept their childhood home. The stout Cape Cod sat on the curve of a cul-de-sac, delivered its visitors by the umbilical road before it, congested with basketball hoops and abandoned jump ropes. Regular visits were impossible before the divorce but guilt cleared both Maureen and Sarah’s schedules once a season. On the ride there, Mark had no such guilt.

“We could stop there.” Mark pointed to a fast food place on the highway. “Or there.” Another one.

“It’ll only be two hours.” Maureen squinted through sunglasses at the blinding road before her. There was nowhere worth driving at dusk.

“That’s two hours we could be home.” Mark dropped his hand in her lap. “Doing it.” She swatted at him with a laugh but he had already slid off her thigh.

She pulled into her mother’s driveway and Mark walked the long way around the car.

“What’s this?” he asked, pointing at a crack in her headlight.

Maureen saw fine white hairs caught in the fracture.

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“I tapped a cart at the store. I’m sure my dad can fix it.” Maureen moved between

Mark and her car, guiding him toward the porch.

“If he’s even still here,” Mark laughed.

Maureen’s mother opened the door before the knock and pulled the couple inside.

She shrieked, swaddling them both in a single bony hug. Maureen wriggled free, bumping something behind her.

“I’m sorry, Mom.” She turned to the culprit – a porcelain fox, about three feet high, standing on its hind legs. The amber paint of one iris was chipped, giving it a cross- eyed bewilderment. “Is this new?”

“Good eye, dearie. I’ve become a bit of a collector,” she gestured toward the living room. Maureen stepped inside.

A wooden crate sat on the area rug. Around it were more animal figurines, the kinds Maureen had never seen outside a furniture showroom. A fading tiger was caught in evening light on the floor beside the window, just below the sill.

“Oh wow. Where did you get these, Colleen?” Maureen heard Mark sneer from the doorway. He had a tone reserved for her family. He also used it with wait staff and small children.

“Shelia and I have been scouting flea markets and auctions.” Her mother walked to the crate on the floor. Mark stayed in the hall. “We resell them after some restoration.

It’s a lucrative hobby, really.”

“Should I try my hand at it?” Mark asked. Maureen was sure now that he had crossed his arms but she did not turn to confirm it.

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“Only if you know you won’t fall in love with them,” her mother said, pulling a ceramic rabbit from the crate. “I just can’t bring myself to part with them sometimes.”

“Where’s Sarah?” Maureen asked, turning to her mother. “Don’t tell me she canceled.”

“Why would she?” She returned the rabbit and stood up. “She’s in the kitchen making some vegetable something or other. She’s vegan now, you know.”

They walked into the dining room as Sarah set a casserole dish in the center of the table.

“Took you long enough,” she smiled over a full table. Maureen stepped toward her sister with arms outstretched. Sarah was magnetic in that way, essential at close range. They hugged. Sarah held Maureen around the waist, squeezing her tightly.

“I missed you,” Maureen said through the endless hoops in Sarah’s ear.

“You too.” Sarah hopped backward, scratching at the buzzed side of her head.

“You know, you could come visit me.”

Mark dragged a chair at the head of the table against the hardwood and sat down.

“Let’s eat. I’m starving.” Her mother’s voice folded them neatly into seats.

“What’s this, Sarah?”

“Broccoli casserole.”

Mark scooped two servings on his plate and the rest of them divvied his leavings.

Sarah shared stories of the gallery and some terrible artist named Trevor who would only leave her alone after she claimed to be a lesbian.

Her mother countered with tales of antiquing in jargon so specific Maureen was unsure if she had made it up. She wondered if her mother had been hit on at these

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auctions, she looked a bit like Sarah after all. She imagined her mother employing the same fake lesbian defense. It would be more believable, with Shelia and the divorce, the antiquing in general. Maybe her mother was a lesbian.

Sarah served poached peaches for dessert before anyone mentioned their father.

“How is he doing?” Her mother did not say his name.

Mark scoffed. “You haven’t told her yet? You’ll get a kick outta this, Colleen.”

Maureen glanced at Mark the way parents do children running near pools.

“What happened?” her mother asked.

“Mo says he thinks he’s God now or something.” Sarah sipped her wine.

“He thinks he’s talking to God,” Maureen said.

“Oh, good Lord,” her mother said.

“You can say that again.” Mark tongued the fruit against his teeth, mouth slick and red.

“He doesn’t get much company.” Maureen said, watching her sister.

Sarah gripped the saltshaker and spun it on its side, tipping white granules into a pile on the table.

“He says he’s going to be raptured,” Mark’s laugh echoed in his tumbler.

Sarah stopped the shaker mid-spin and looked at Maureen. “He thinks he’s going to die?”

“He didn’t say die. He’s just, you know, lonely.” Maureen leaned forward on the table grateful she hadn’t told Mark about the grocery store.

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“Oh, I’m sure he’s fine.” Her mother started picking settings apart from her seat.

“He’s always been like that. First it’s solar energy then that timeshare.” She took a pile of dishes into the kitchen.

“Let me help, Colleen.” Mark trotted after her.

“Call him?” Maureen set her hand atop her sister’s.

“And say what, Mo? Hey Pat, how’s it going? There is no God. Don’t kill yourself? He’s a grown man. He can handle himself. Don’t indulge him.” Sarah pulled away, holding the shaker.

Maureen’s palm fell into the salt.

Monday morning Maureen drove to work with open windows despite the cold.

She needed to breathe. She lit her cigarette one handed, careful to blow the smoke away from her blazer.

At the streetlight next to the post office she saw her father. He brandished a new sign above his head: “TOMORROW IS THE JUDGMENT!”

She watched him shrink in her rearview. The cardboard was an island on the buoyant overcast. He waved it with the half-desperate, half-hopeful madness of a survivor washed ashore, clinging to the promise.

Maureen turned into the post office and parked. She would be late. She should call in. And say what? Can you use a personal day for the Rapture? Not even the Rapture,

Rapture’s Eve. She hid her attaché under her blazer on the passenger seat and got out of the car. She lit another cigarette with the remains of the last one.

“Okay, Dad,” she blew from behind him, “This has to stop.”

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“Maureen, you’re here.” he said, turning to her, arms open.

“I should be at work. But here you are.” A breeze swept ash into her face.

“Christ told me to preach. So, I am preaching,” he said.

“It’s seven-fifty. How long have you been standing here?” She rubbed her eyes.

“Well, we spoke at dawn.”

“Stop saying you spoke to God, Dad. There are people who really believe.”

“I believe, Maureen.” His eyes were stained glass, faith in mortal color.

“Really? What does He sound like?”

She thought he might not have heard her. He was stone still for a moment.

“Nothing,” he said finally. “You can’t hear him. First there’s nothing, then you know. That’s God.”

They were silent.

Maureen dropped her cigarette on the curb. Cars passed with indifference. They had destinations. They had jobs and families. She should have been among them. When one honked, her father produced the hand bell from his knapsack. He rang it above his head well after the car had passed. She stood next to him, chain-smoking.

The sign slipped from her father’s grip and fell to the curb. Maureen looked down at it, flat in her shadow. She picked it up.

She could frame it. Take it, and him, home. Hang the sign between her and

Sarah’s high school photos. It could stay in the hallway innocuous as a clock, until years from now when her father would point to it and her mother would laugh and everyone would say how crazy that had been. How they had all nearly forgotten.

“It starts tomorrow, Mo.” Her father patted her on the back.

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“Stop,” Maureen stepped away from him. “Come on, Dad. Let’s go home.”

“You’ll see, Maureen. It’s happening.”

“And when it doesn’t, Dad? Are you just going to sit here until you die or the world ends? Is that your plan?”

“It’s not my plan. It’s not my world.” She hated that he was being patient with her.

“Take some fucking accountability.” Maureen felt the smoke in her mouth, in her eyes. “You have to stop.”

Her father wrapped his arms around her shoulders, pinning the cardboard between them. She imagined being crucified. “I love you, Maureen. Always.”

Maureen could not hear anymore. She left her father on the corner with his hand- painted truths.

Mark was asleep beside her. She turned onto her side. Nothing helped. She would have to be up soon with excuses. Excuses for missing work, for the smell of smoke, for leaving her father on the street. She had none.

Maureen got in the car. Two weeks until it was out of her system. She remembered quitting in college. It was not impossible. There were none in the glove box, no excuses anymore.

Her father’s home was near a park after all. Not a nice one, the kind made of twisted metal and old tires, the kind built for climbing, for standing above and surveying.

Maureen felt guilty for noticing this, even in the dark.

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The building was unlocked. Maureen read ‘FLYNN’ above a mailbox in the lobby. Her father lived on the top floor. After climbing the third narrow staircase, the ceiling dipped. His apartment was a converted attic. Maureen knocked on the door.

No answer.

She struck the wood another four or five times. She lost count. It gave way before she could hit it again. Her father stepped backward, dodging her fist. He wore an old t- shirt, screen-printed white block letters read ORANGE YOU GLAD. One of Sarah’s defunct garage bands.

His eyes were bloodshot again. Maureen wondered how long he had stayed up, waiting.

“You’re still here,” she said, realizing after that it sounded like gloating.

“I know,” he said.

Maureen didn’t know what she expected. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“Let me make you some coffee.” Her father reached a hand toward her.

“I have work,” she said and stepped toward the staircase. His head was inches from the ceiling. How could he live, so stunted like this?

“It happened, Maureen. Just not for us.”

“I’m sure it did.” She turned her back to him and left.

Driving home, Maureen realized that she would have to see the dog. There was no alternate route. It was still dark; she could ignore it. Or, she could atone.

The road seemed foreign. Maybe this was how refugees felt, victims of home invasion, animal victims of forest fires, displaced battered housewives. But, she knew she

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was not the victim. She held the brake with her foot gently, slowing the car to a crawl. It had not been far from here. She could have stopped, but she swerved.

She parked the car in the shoulder and got out. The air was thick. Dark raindrops fell, spotting her like mist.

He was gone.

The ripped tire that had draped him days ago was there, by the trees. No dog.

Cigarette butts swayed in the depression he left behind. The high beams of a passing truck set on the roadside like the glow of a lighthouse, exposing only more trash.

Searching for him, Maureen decided to apologize to his absence. She whispered into the dark but it meant nothing. She felt as if she had always been, but only now realized, she was some pitiful, lonely thing.

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What We Do For Work

With a straight face, the client says he prefers we blow him because he’s worried our cunts have teeth. The name for this myth is vagina dentata. It’s obviously not real.

What is real is eurotophobia: the fear of uteri, vaginas, labia. I guess that this is what he has. Or castration anxiety, Melanie says later. Between us, we have a half-major in sociology, another half in lit, one minor in psych. I would have finished mine but what difference does a BA make in this climate?

Melanie offers her ass, but she won’t go half-and-half. She’s hardline with our profits like that. No deals, no discounts; I’m lucky I found her.

He doesn’t want it anyway. Just your mouths, he says. We didn’t come here to argue so we just do as told, knee-highs to the kitchen floor.

He stops us.

Can’t you put your hair up or something? Pigtails? He needs something to hold onto, he says.

I crack my neck toward Melanie. She hates taking directions, says she never gets used to it, says she’s above critique. I can’t admit to her that I enjoy it, feeling led and handled. Useful. If I could, I’d say, isn’t that being absolved of critique? Isn’t it transcendence?

Melanie doesn’t want him watching us primp so we use his bathroom. I split her dark waves straight center with the end of a key and channel my hairdresser mother. I see the violet dyed tips of her fingers, smell the ammonia. After the predisposition to

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alcoholism, the flat feet, she found time to give me something practical. She became her job to me.

Not my kids, I hope. If I have any.

Melanie calls this look the Pedophile Package: mary janes, pigtails, pleated skirts.

Not to them of course. It’s our most common. She markets us as eighteen despite being mid-twenties. She says it’s all a performance, seven veils, smoke and mirrors.

It’s closer to ephebophilia though; we play late adolescents. Most people who call creeps pedophiles really mean ephebophiles. And I guess I don’t have a problem with them.

They easily make three-quarters of our clients. Better us, right?

When we start I know Melanie’s gotten over the pigtail thing because she complies without hesitation. His demands are all the classics. They bore me: Call me

Daddy, Kiss each other. Melanie has this way of committing through distance. She has to close her eyes. Sometimes I think I can hear her counting. She pouts her lips cartoonishly like she’s been taught sex by numbers. Times like these I tweak her breast real hard just to wake her up. It’s money, yeah, but can’t she enjoy it with me?

He says, You ready to swallow this load? and Melanie stops. She swats my mouth closed. Says we don’t swallow even though she knows I do. He’ll have to finish somewhere else, she says. She’s loud and deep; she wants to be ugly.

I hate her like this.

We get back in rhythm but he’s focused on me now and Melanie knows it. She tries redeeming herself with excess petting, moans. I can feel her fluttering in my periphery, hot cheeked and ravenous.

He cums in my mouth without warning and habit takes over.

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There are illusionists who swallow fresh water with live frogs, fish, snails – gallons’ worth – and keep them alive in their guts for hours. They practice for years stretching their stomachs, regulating their breath. They can coax them out of their mouths on command. They spit them back up. Abracadabra. Look who’s alive.

I wonder if swallowing tadpoles could grow frogs in your stomach, like they tell kids about watermelon seeds. I wonder if there was a time people thought women got pregnant orally. Were there Vikings or Cro-Magnons or half-chimps shooting it in the snatch to avoid the dangers of another mouth to feed?

It’s $150 each all said and done, which isn’t our best rate but what does it matter when it only takes twenty minutes and maybe another fifteen to fix our makeup? He makes a big show of handing me an extra twenty in front of Melanie. We use it to get Big

Macs on the way home.

Never again, Melanie keeps saying, grubbing fries in her mouth.

But I see him a few more times alone. I chew tinfoil before we meet. It’s what my mother had used to sharpen her shears before a new client. I can still see her sitting in our living room, gliding an open pair down soft metal, spitting cherry pits into a ceramic cup.

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