The Grief Bearers a Thesis Submitted to Kent State University in Partial

The Grief Bearers

A thesis submitted to Kent State University in partial

Fulfillmet of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Fine Arts

Mary Roulete

May, 2017

Thesis written by

Mary Roulette

B.A., Kent State University, 2007

M.F.A., Kent State University, 2017

Approved by ______, Advisor Professor Imad Rahmn

______, Interim Chair, Department of English Dr. Patricia Dunmire

______, Dean, College of Arts and Sciences Dr. James L. Blank

TABLE OF CONTENTS…………………………………………………… iii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS………………………………………………. …. v

CHAPTERS

I. Prologue ……………………………………………………….. 1

II. Part One ……………………………………………………….. 4

Cri de Cœur …………………………………………………..... 5

Hebrews 13:2 …………………………………………………. 13

They Entered the House ………………………………………. 19

Crone ………………………………………………………….. 21

Little White Lie ……………………………………………….. 25

III. Part Two ……………………………...... 28

House Guests: First Impressions ……………………………... 29

The Well ………………………………………………………. 30

Good Morning…um…Mr. Bird ………………………………. 36

Victor .…………………………………………………………. 42

Ghosts .………………………………………………………… 44

Witnesses ………………………………………………………. 46

Usurpers ……………………………………………………….. 47

IV. Part Three ……………………………………………………… 52

Alice …………………………………………………………... 53

The Possessed and the Dispossessed ………………………….. 57

The Queen of England ………………………………………... 62

A Hundred Dead Animals ……………………………………..70

iii

Collisions ………………………………………………………. 73

Writing on the Wall ……………………………………………. 80

Abdullah Al-Baradouni ………………………………………… 84

In Water ………………………………………………………… 91

V. Part Four …………………………………………………………92

A Blinding Light ………………………………………………. 93

The Truth Is …………………………………………………….. 95

Journal Entry …………………………………………………... 106

Message on the Ceiling …………………………………………107

The Priest ……………………………………………………….110

Lilacs ……………………………………………………………121

VI. Part Five ……………………………………………………….. 125

Run ………………………………………………………...... 126

As the Crow Flies……………………………………………..... 127

VII. Epilogue ……………………………………………………….. 136

VIII. Poems ………………………………………………………….. 137

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to my sister Ellen McHugh and daughter Casey Gruden, my tireless readers and champions, who threw me a rope again and again when I was at the bottom of the well until I caught it. Thanks to my thesis director Imad Rahman and committee members Robert Miltner and Mike Geither for their enthusiasm, encouragement, and priceless feedback on my thesis.

Thanks to my NEOMFA instructors and to the Imagination guest speakers and workshop moderators who cultivated an atmosphere of openness and respectful debate in which every student’s voice was validated.

Thanks to Shelia Schwartz, my first fiction workshop instructor, whose kind, meticulous attention to my work gave me the courage to write the first tentative pages of this novel in progress from which a few sentences still remain. Thanks to Michael Dumanis, whose brilliant coffee shop workshop helped put my poem published in Pleiades in the hands of my father before he passed away.

Thanks to my children and grandchildren for their love; and to my father and mother— and my son Michael—all glimmering over the grave horizon.

Prologue

Micah 1:8

Therefore I will wail and howl, I will go stripped and naked: I will make a wailing like the dragons, and mourning as the owls.

One would think the residents of Cemetery, Ohio—named in 1847 for its founder George

Hobart Cemetery—pioneer, philanthropist, shameless philanderer—might have noticed the macabre coincidence inherent in a town called Cemetery, with its plethora of old grave yards sprinkling the mostly flat, quotidian landscape. But that was hardly the case, unless, of course, you were a newcomer, and newcomers, due to the town’s small size—or rather the lack of anything that would attract outsiders to settle there—were rare in Cemetery.

And unlike other nearby cities and towns that had the practical foresight to circumscribe areas of land large enough and early enough on to gather and contain their future dead, Cemetery had not. No, Cemetery’s ubiquitous dead were scattered like dandelion seeds and sunk in small unkempt grave yards, with the mostly flat markers mixed in with dozens of old falling down headstones. Many of the headstones had long since lost their inscriptions to decades of driving coastal winds and rain, their white stone faces now washed blank and smooth as lake glass. And it was a sorry fact too, though the town’s residents were oblivious to it, that there were more dead now in Cemetery than alive, and, as with the world in general, it had been so for a very long time.

210 Linden Avenue Cemetery, Ohio

People walking by Shane and Claire Bird’s house in spring and summer of that year— when the parlor and bedroom windows were thrown open to let the fresh lake air in—might have heard loud thumps like furniture being turned over, glass breaking, and the gut-twisting howls of a couple duking out the most serious of marital infractions, such as infidelity; certainly the kind of hot domestic dysfunction foreshadowing divorce.

Startling and upsetting but not unthinkable, stumbling upon yet another marriage crashing and burning, witnessed with their own ears, the joggers and people riding by on bikes; moms pushing strollers in the company of women friends walking little mongrels named Max; all the drab and colorful outdoorsies streaming down the sidewalks—for these were a tough, hardy people resigned to extremes of heat and cold and the countless damp, miserable days in between—all of whom must have jumped out of their skins when the first death-metal notes blasted onto the sidewalk from the Bird’s once lovely, now quite dilapidated, old mansion on the lake.

Startling and upsetting but not unthinkable. Yet what had happened to Claire and Shane

Bird was the unthinkable. No marital strife had caused their house to quake and list like a ship in a storm since the nineteenth of May. Claire and Shane weren’t railing against each other; they were railing together, against the unthinkable thing, the unthinkable thing: the death of their beloved son Fen—

—who hears everything now inside that house, and inside the people inside the house, what’s in their heads 24/7. Yeah, I can hear and see and feel everything now, particularly my mother’s grief, that ellipses of trauma, her heart’s trauma taking up all the room, like cymbals crashing and reverberating inside me. And inside the house: shocks of blues and reds, a violet

sky—no, a violent sky—penetrating the roof, windows, doors. The house, if only my mother and father could see what I see, is literally alive with their grief, but mainly her grief, my mother’s grief: Black mold runs down the walls, the white wainscoting. Fat rats gorge every day on my mother’s grief and leave their enormous piles of shit all over the floors. Florescent spiders cling to the light fixtures, shoot out of the vents, their long, serrated legs making a scratching sound like coarse sandpaper filing back and forth, back and forth. The window blinds grind and clatter,

and each night, the stars wince

and withdraw into their velvet sky,

then blink out,

every one.

Part One

It begins in August, that absence of sound, of vigorous bird song grown fainter, then subsumed by the mad cacophony of crickets, frogs, and cicadas, until even that leaches away, is gradually silenced, with the rustling of leaves replaced too by the ache and creak of cold bare trees in winter.

And for months, year after year, they must bend with it or stiffen against it, each new dead season demanding the same painful contortions of the heart…

Cri de Cœur

Claire Bird 210 Linden Ave. Cemetery, Ohio 44045

December 8, 2016

Helen Brennan Poetry Editor Glass Parachute 420 Mauna Loa Lane El Mirage, Arizona

Dear Helen,

Thank you for considering my submission for Glass Parachute. I’ve enclosed two of my poems for your consideration.

I presently teach English and Creative Writing at Florence Dyer Community College. I’ve had my poetry and short fiction published in Lissie’s Mirror; Ink pot; Forgery; Stillborn; Wooden Leg and others.

I was awarded honorable mention in the Fanny Caldwell Arts and Letters Poetry Contest and won the Frieda Oxley Simms Outstanding Essay Award for a paper on Milton’s Paradise Lost— “ Between the Intellect and Imagination, Circling the Open Mind in Paradise Lost: ‘Keep an open mind, but not so open that your brain falls out.’”

I’m at work on a novel which incorporates my love of gothic themes in literature with an emphasis on the supernatural, while addressing the existential component at odds with all of that: mainly, the necessity of confronting one’s anguish as the most authentic and practical route to a more meaningful way of life.

When I’m not teaching and writing, I’m moving pots around to catch the rain—in winter, we sweep the snow!— from the failing roof of our crumbling old house on the lake. Oh, yes, and my young granddaughter thinks this is great fun too!

Thank you again for your consideration, and I look forward to your reply. Claire Bird Claire Bird

Enclosures

How Afterward, the Long Branches Shuddered —for Fen

I can’t write about it, not a poem, no metaphors or dreamy, baroque narratives slipping in and out of consciousness…so what the fuck was that that stopped us in our tracks at Wildwood, late afternoon, the whole park ours? All those gray fallen trees, cross-hatched, one on top of the other, and then the sound, abrupt, emphatic, like a giant’s hand had lifted the collapsed scaffolding and slammed it down hard. We both saw it: how afterward, the long branches shuddered. And the dog stood erect, her tail wagged once then stopped, stopped panting, panted twice more, then done, her soft body turned to stone. This dog who’d run after anything that moves. My son died six months ago—he died—that’s what I’m really trying to say here. And I want to tear up the ground and pull down the sky to find him. The dog, the dead trees, the giant’s hand—all of it— is just scaffolding.

Triptych For My Daughter —for Alice

1 The bones of her face cut like a violin, like the girl— out & in & out again—like the girl who loved the sound of her own voice. Soft tilt, she cups her chin inside a dove’s tail,

2 & the ceiling fan blows & feathers flutter & everything before her rolls out, a cluttered hallway at night on her way to the bathroom: I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know—

I know a sound, that unceasing caterwaul, like an ambulance parked outside,

3. siren stuck. The girl peers through the glass of a locked oven door:

I see you I see you I see you— & the woman holds something like tears in her apron, & our burned hearts still too hot to eat.

It had been a year since she’d sent any of her work out, a whole winter ago, with both her son and dog now memorialized in this, her most recent leap of faith into the land of rejection letters. Her son died. Then the dog died. And her students all gone from her too now, caught under the wings of some other adjunct instructors; a protracted leave of absence that she saw no end to. And winter was upon her again.

She gripped the steering wheel so hard her fingers ached. It was the second week of

Advent when Claire Bird decided to drive the short distance from her snow-ravaged house on

Lake Erie to Cemetery, Ohio’s only Catholic church through a nor’easter with 45 mph gusts.

She had a two and a half hour window, more than enough time, before the pain pills she gave her mother-in-law wore off and she was due home to give her her next round.

The street lights glowed wanly, and the dark roads already covered in a thick white hash uttered that heavy, rumbling, staccato drone of snow compacting under tires. One lone pick up, rusted and plastered with old Trump stickers, spewed exhaust in the road in front of her.

Along the berm of the road rising out of ditches, giant cattails, stiff and dead in December, bloomed anew, their heads dappled with snow like fat white buds, like some strange winter flowers immune to the elements.

A few big pines thrashed up ahead along the roadside, and Claire watched mesmerized as the snow trapped between branches would get swept up by a wind gust, then cascade down like thick white fabric torn into pieces. Another gust, and the pieces, still falling, transmogrified into mist, a phantom mist now rising with the wind’s new upward draft. And all during this dramatic play of snow and wind and branches, the hard diagonal squalls and chaotic flurries continued uninterrupted.

She arrived ten minutes early, the parking lot a fury of white, the white creating its own disorienting light in the darkness. Tuesday evening Mass in the chapel started at seven sharp and would be over, if she was lucky, in less than half an hour. It had been seven months since Claire had attended Sunday services, weeks since she’d attended evening Mass in the chapel. She would not go on Sunday in the great old church again, she was certain of that. Too long, nearly an hour, and all those people. No, this was enough.

She lit a cigarette, cracked her window and let the snow in; let the icy shards strike her face and gather in her hair and on her coat sleeves. Through the windshield, she saw a huddled shape move across the parking lot, reach the lighted walkway, then separate into two distinct figures, two women, elderly by their gait. They took a few hurried steps apart, one woman leading by a stride, then came together again, the two of them once more like a single figure, a bunched wall braced against the freezing wind and snow. Coming in just under the wire, Claire thought, or she may have actually said it. Sometimes, lately, Claire couldn’t remember if she’d spoken out loud or was just thinking in her own head. She dropped her cigarette butt in the empty beer can in her cup holder, turned the ignition off. Inside, she walked briskly to the chapel at the rear of the church, barely noticing the flourish of poinsettias in the vestibule and the

Christmas giving tree with its red and green donation tags, wrapped boxes and gift bags piled around the tree. The priest was making his way up to the altar just as she took her seat at the back of the chapel along the far wall, her own head level with the pale marble feet of St. Malachy.

She was relieved it was Father Dan tonight and not the pastor, Father Hugh—on vacation, last she heard, another trip to the Holy Land—or worse yet, the cherub-faced newbie who read his homilies like a middle school book report and whose name she kept forgetting.

To Claire, Father Dan Callahan, the assistant pastor at St. Malachy’s, was just a really nice man who happened to be a priest and the only priest she’d ever genuinely liked. Claire admired him for stealing time from his warm, family-focused homilies to speak out against

Church corruption and the need for reform. He’d even expressed anger and disgust on more than one occasion over the molestation of all those young boys by priests, which, rumor had it, nearly cost him his post at St. Malachy’s. Father Dan was not your typical priest and Claire, not being a typical church goer, liked that just fine.

Father Dan had presided over her son Fen’s funeral in May. Without any hesitation, not even a pause to check his schedule, had agreed to do it, and this after a deer in the road took her son from her forever—that’s what Claire and Claire’s husband Shane had finally settled on to explain things. A fucking deer in the road, then, had left them just two days to plan a funeral.

The other was too unthinkable, the weight of that possibility too heavy for their shattered minds to ponder very long. But ponder she did, torturing herself over the morbid details, the unknowns of the accident, nearly every day. She was thinking about them now in the middle of evening

Mass; the woman at the lectern reading from one of the letters of Paul to the Corinthians just a garbled underwater sound.

Before the first note of the closing hymn was sung, Claire was already buttoning her coat and winding her scarf back around her neck, had one glove on as the priest gave the final blessing. Claire preferred to be inconspicuous when she made her escape She was waiting just long enough for Father Dan to begin walking back to the sacristy and for the three song birds in the front row to begin singing the closing hymn. But the priest instead crossed the apse and took the two steps down to the nave, bowed his head and ran a worried hand through his hair. His soft gray eyes as he looked back up seemed, to Claire, to take in all of their faces at once.

“We’re gonna forego the closing hymn tonight,” he said, “so, if you could please all hang on. I know the weather’s gettin’ bad out there, but this’ll only take a few minutes of your time. I have a favor to ask, and it’s pretty urgent.”

Claire heard the word urgent and felt her heart beat faster, lowered her face and pressed her lips into the thick folds of her scarf, muttered, “What the hell.” She was ready to leave five minutes ago, wished she could leave now without being noticed. Where she stood at the back of the chapel, she had a clear view of the congregation. Some of the silver-haired men and women—evening Mass was an older crowd—still gripped their open hymnals poised to sing

“Joy to the World,” while others had tentatively closed theirs but seemed unsure of whether to put them down.

For a split second, Claire saw what looked like embarrassment, concern, and sadness, all three at once, pass over the priest’s face; made him, a man in his sixties, look years older. But then just as suddenly his eyes seemed to brighten, his face relax.

“A woman and her son have fallen on hard times,” the priest continued, “and they need a place to stay until…Anna…her name is Anna Cleary, is back on her feet again. Unfortunately,

Cemetery’s shelter is full to capacity, but our food bank can assist with their needs in one of your homes. She has nowhere to go, no family to help her…her and her young son. She’s here in the chapel tonight with us. Please, Anna and Liam—”

Father Dan stepped out into the center aisle, turned and stretched his arms out motioning them forward. “Please, come on up here, so I can introduce you to some very good people.”

Claire looked on as a young woman, slightly built, with long disheveled red hair and pale skin in a drab olive coat made her way down the second row of pews from the front. She was pulling along a little boy, no hat or scarf or gloves that Claire could see, and in a thin navy jacket

with large brass buttons. When the people in their pew tried to make room for them to pass, the boy stumbled and nearly fell. But his mother caught him up quickly, and when she did, he turned his head and stared wide-eyed at the back of the chapel. While Claire knew he wasn’t really looking at her, she smiled at him anyway, then raised her arm and gave him a little wave.

But the boy only looked dazed and turned back to his mother, and still holding her hand followed her up to where the priest stood waiting for them.

After the boy turned away, Claire couldn’t help feeling unsettled by what she was seeing, hearing. With the help of two other parishes in nearby towns, Father Dan had organized the fundraiser that built Cemetery’s first homeless shelter. As far as Claire knew, the shelter had always had enough room to house their poor and the poor of some neighboring communities.

So, how could this be? This was the most unconventional Cri de Coeur she’d ever witnessed.

She didn’t know whether to laugh or weep at the utter spectacle unfolding before her eyes. The whole thing reminded her of some sort of postmodern Christmas pageant, a twist on the one played over and over in every grade school in America, of Mary and Joseph knocking on all those inn doors. But in this case, where was Joseph? And, of course, the baby Jesus wasn’t even born yet. This boy, to Claire, looked four or five years old.

Someone dropped one of the thick hymnals; its loud smack when it hit the floor rang out like gun shot. The boy and his mother didn’t flinched, but the priest did, and then Claire was moving quickly out into the aisle. She did not feel the heaviness of her body as she went, that inexorable weight that dogged her and had ended the bout of anorexia she’d suffered in the weeks after her son’s funeral. An irresistible force was drawing her to them, though nothing like pity or compassion, but rather something as primal as thirst or hunger and just as selfish.

Hebrews 13:2

Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.

There was a break in the snow and wind as they stepped out into the church parking lot and piled into the car, the woman Anna and her little boy slipping into the back seat, which

Claire understood. She was a complete stranger to them, after all, and the boy, Liam, had clung shyly to his mother’s coat sleeve in the rectory after Mass. In the rectory, Father Dan had introduced Claire to them once more, and handed off to the woman their modest belongings, a single gray duffle bag and one well-worn brown leather suitcase, so stained and scuffed and with tarnished clasps, it looked to Claire as if it belonged to another era. Claire had wondered if the duffle bag and suitcase were their only worldly possessions. And she’d been struck by the utter poverty of their situation there in the rectory, even more than when they’d stumbled out into the chapel aisle to be paraded out in front of an emotionally paralyzed bunch of elderly church goers.

But it was the poverty of their story, their history, which struck Claire more than anything else, the why and how of it; why and how they’d ended up homeless and utterly alone just a few short weeks before Christmas. She found it painful to try to imagine what the boy was thinking and what he may have already suffered alongside his mother. An abusive husband, perhaps, thought Claire, and she worried bruises over the woman’s thin arms hidden beneath her sad winter coat; welts from a belt on the little boys bottom. In the woman and boy’s presence,

Father Dan told Claire that Anna and Liam weren’t from Cemetery, that they’d only just arrived in their town today. He asked Claire if she wouldn’t mind showing them around in the next few

days. But he volunteered little other information, other than repeating in the rectory what he’d already said in the chapel after Mass, that St. Malachy’s food bank would gladly provide for their food and that their stay would only be for a few short weeks, just long enough for two beds to open up at the shelter or for Anna to find a job and rent an apartment.

Claire had figured everything out quickly in her mind. Between the chapel and the short walk to the rectory, the rectory to the parking lot, Claire had decided to stall going home with the woman and boy. She would first take them to get something to eat at the diner in town. Shane worked the graveyard shift at the plant and hadn’t left for work yet, was still at home for another hour. If they went to the diner first, Claire could shield Anna and the boy from the awkwardness of hearing her explain things in a rush to her husband before he left for work. Not that she expected any or much resistance from Shane. From the dozens of shelter cats and dogs he’d fostered over the years, to bringing home the occasional homeless person for Thanksgiving,

Shane loved to serve the unfortunate masses.

Claire decided she would text him before she went to bed that night, though telling her mother-in-law about their house guests was another matter entirely and one which Claire chose, for the time being, not to think about.

At the diner, Claire placed her order first without looking at the menu, a club sandwich with extra bacon and a beer. Anna ordered a house salad and tea for herself and an order of fries and Coke for Liam. She told Claire they’d eaten just an hour before Mass with Father, and they weren’t very hungry.

Claire still felt exhilarated, a kind of fight or flight high that had electrified her heart and mind an hour before as she walked up the chapel aisle had hardly diminished. Her eyes, which took on the colors of her moods and clothing and swept the color scale from gray to azure, now

gleamed with the purity of her good intentions. Even the structure of her face, which had succumbed to premature aging after the death of her son, had temporarily regained some of its youthfulness: the skin around her cheekbones and jaw tightened a little, and the marionette lines around her mouth, from months of constant frowning, softened. Only her hair, with its intractable streaks of gray that reflected no light, remained unchanged. Just six months ago, she was a natural redhead with very little gray.

She hardly looked at her reflection in the mirror anymore, and so had barely noticed the change, or noticed it but had gotten used to it quickly. But her daughter Alice had noticed, and so for Claire’s birthday in August, Alice had given her mother a gift certificate to have her hair dyed at a high-end salon outside Cemetery. She told her mother she was too young, in her forties, to let herself go gray. But Claire couldn’t muster the desire, let alone the energy, to sit for hours in a chair making small talk with a twenty-year-old hairdresser, paging through all those books with all those crazy cuts and wild colors. It just seemed so silly, so superficial, and pointless too, when she’d just have to do it all over again in a couple of months. She just didn’t care.

Unlike Claire, who had an olive complexion and whose natural hair color was a deeper auburn red, Anna was a bright redhead with a porcelain complexion and a spattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose and cheeks. Her little son, seated next to his mother in the booth across from Claire, was a towhead and a beautiful child. He had looked up shyly with his lovely hazel eyes at Claire while sipping his drink. But then his eyes seemed to settle on the colored

Christmas lights strung around the diner’s large picture window, and he lifted his arm and pointed at the flurry of paper snowflakes taped to the window pane.

“I can make those,” the boy said emphatically. It was the first time Claire heard the boy speak, and she couldn’t help but be struck by the sweet, quiet maturity of his voice. At the same

time that the boy spoke, his mother reached for the pitcher of hot water to refill her cup of tea, and her hand shook noticeably. Without thinking, Claire reached across the table and rested her own hand gently on top of Anna’s to steady hers, and the two women looked into each other’s eyes for a brief moment. When Anna’s hand continued to tremble, Claire took the teapot gently from her and poured the water into her cup.

“Thanks, it’s been a long day, days, really,” Anna said, “and I think it’s showing.”

Anna managed a weak smile and took a bite of her salad, then put an arm around her son and drew him close to her. “For both of us, right, Liam?”

Claire wondered if Anna was baiting her, intimating some sort of opening for a shared confidence, an unburdening of the circumstances which had swept her and her son onto the snowy banks of her town just a couple weeks before Christmas.

“I can’t imagine what you’ve been through,” said Claire, in a voice that sounded, even to her own ears, stilted and somehow disingenuous, though Claire felt anything but. She really did care about this woman and her boy, wanted to help. But Anna’s expression, to Claire’s relief, seemed only to reflect a kind of serene physical exhaustion.

“No, no, we’re Ok now, really,” Anna said, and with her eyes cast down, raised a still slightly trembling hand to push a strand of hair behind her ear. She looked up then, her gaze sweeping the small diner and its patrons, as though trying to pluck her next word out of the din of conversations coming from the other tables, the sound system’s continuous stream of holiday tunes. Anna seemed about to speak, but then their waitress whooshed up to their table and handed Liam a small pack of crayons and a sheet of paper with the outline of a Christmas angel holding a star. Anna thanked the waitress then moved her salad aside and began pulling out the crayons, four of them, red, green, blue and yellow, and set them down in front of Liam. Liam

dropped a French fry midair back onto his plate, and Claire watched amused as the boy studied the four crayons with a delighted smile on his face. He then looked up at his mother who had already begun coloring a part of the picture, the angel’s star, and said, “Wait, shouldn’t we do this first?”

The boy then plucked the crayon, a yellow one, from Anna’s hand, put it down and picked up a blue one. He began then, with his left hand, pressing hard on the paper, tracing the edges of the angel’s wings, his soft, smudgy blond brows pulled together in an expression of utter concentration. Claire saw he was even biting his bottom lip a little. “Remember,” the boy went on, and in a voice filled with calm, patient instruction, “we need to make the edges darker first, like this, and then color it in, and be careful not to go outside the lines.” What a smart, funny boy, and a leftie too, thought Claire, as she picked up a piece of bacon that had fallen onto her plate, popped it in her mouth and washed it down with the last swallow of beer.

“Did you learn how to color so well in kindergarten?” Claire asked, not even knowing if

Liam had started school yet, was old enough. He appeared no more than five years old, but his tone of voice and language skills seemed to Claire, to belong to a much older child. “Or did your mommy show you how?”

“My mommy?” asked Liam, still intent on his coloring, he was nearly half done with the picture. And then to Claire’s surprise, the boy laughed, a lush, sweet sound which seemed to ripple up from deep inside him and fill the air around them with its innocent vibrations.

Claire slid her plate aside, leaned across the table into the boy’s space. “Well, then,” she said good naturedly, “it was your teacher—huh, Liam?—in kindergarten who taught you how to color so well?”

“He missed the deadline for kindergarten this year,” said Anna curtly. “September birthday. Liam’s just always been naturally creative.”

Leaving the diner, the serendipity was lost on Claire; but Liam and Anna both caught it, turned their heads slowly and stared as they followed Claire across the snowy parking lot to her car. All lined up in a row at the rear of the parking lot, their bright primary colors set in stark relief against the cold, white night: a forest green pick up, a bright red sports car, an electric blue

SUV, and a yellow Volkswagen. Liam rolled his small fingers over the four loose crayons in his coat pocket and marveled at the colorful coincidence.

They Entered the House

When they entered the house through the side door into the kitchen, Claire was relieved she’d only left a dim light on. A pile of dirty dishes lay in the sink, but were rinsed, a neat mess, and on the counter the remains of two TV dinners, two black plastic rectangles that had held her and her mother-in-law’s lunches a handful of hours ago, with their snotty gravy, still snotty, not yet hardened, a few scraps of meat, shriveled peas. She dropped them in the trash can under the sink and turned to her two house guests.

Liam and Anna stood huddled together at the threshold of the kitchen. Their expressions, to Claire, seemed vacant and oddly the same, their faces somehow flattened out, colorless in the weak light, like an old black and white photograph, cracked and curling at the corners. Anna had set her duffle bag down by her feet but was still gripping the handle of the suitcase. She looked to Claire as though she were poised to leave rather than just arriving. And suddenly Claire felt so lost, forgetting why she thought she could ever bring them home with her, all of the feelings of confusion and despair that she’d felt every day since Fen died, a tidal wave of regret flooding her mind and heart. What have I done…what have I done? While outside the storm was flexing its muscles, a black howl rattling the old house, and the snow itself like bits of glass pelting the window panes.

“Well, come in, come in, take your coats off,” Claire said suddenly, hating the way her voice came out just then, sounding shrill, impatient. But with each word she felt the mental fog, her anxiety, lifting a little, the desire to move her new friends—she still felt every bit the need to befriend them both—inside, make them comfortable. While Anna slipped out of her coat, Claire

helped the boy out of his jacket, then scrunched down on her heels and looked gently into his young eyes. “How ‘bout a cup of hot cocoa, Liam?—to warm your bones. And, Anna, another cup of tea?” Claire stood up then and took Anna’s coat off her arm. She hung it with the boy’s jacket on a hook on the kitchen door, set a pan of milk and the kettle on the stove as Anna and

Liam sat down at the kitchen table. Claire did her best to make small talk, but both Anna and the boy seemed either too shy or too tired to talk much or contribute much more than polite nods and weak smiles.

Claire set the two steaming cups of tea down on the table for herself and Anna, swirled a generous amount of chocolate syrup into the cup of hot milk for the boy.

“Be careful, blow on it first, and here—“ Claire handed Liam a spoon and made a stirring motion in the air. “Stir and blow on it, and use your spoon to test it until it’s cool enough to drink.” Just then, a branch from one of the tall oaks canopying over the north side of the house snapped off in a wind gust, struck the roof. Bam! They all jumped a little in their chairs and then sat up stunned for a moment, listening to the thrust and heft of the snowstorm as it picked up where it had left off a couple of hours ago.

The old house was drafty in winter—really, in every chill season, on every cold day. But

Claire had two cedar chests upstairs bulging with down blankets, some worn but still-good quilts.

The cold, if this woman and her son weren’t from the north, may take some getting used to—

Claire wasn’t sure what these two souls were used to—but at least no one would freeze or starve.

They all had a roof over their heads—didn’t they?—warmth and food

Crone

The old woman would not hold her tongue any longer, nor her hand: she made an arthritic fist in the dark then whacked the metal bell on the nightstand. She did not wait for the bell alone to do its work but drew a deep breath and called out with the full force of her 87-year- old lungs, “Who is it, who’s there? Is it Alice and Daisy? Claire! Is someone here?” Victor,

Enid’s pot-bellied pig, given to her by her long-dead husband John, snorted in his sleep but did not wake. Snow storms did not wake or bother Victor. Victor slept peacefully atop three large dog beds roped together near the room’s clanking radiator.

Throwing the covers off, Enid pulled herself half-way up to a sitting position, cocked her head, listening to the jangle of voices downstairs. Her eyes, blinking and squinting in the dark, felt shrunken and dry in their sockets. The wind, as it whistled and moaned and rattled the window panes, drew her wider awake. And she felt the draft too now, the damn cold air, damn cold house, and she shivered.

She lay back down with a soft whumf and pulled the covers up, all the way up to her pale, jutting chin, and peered at the open doorway, the dark hall beyond. She could hear her daughter-in-law hurrying up the stairs and down the long hall toward her room while calling out to her, I’m coming, I’m coming. And over those bright, concerned tones, the old woman hissed her own vitriolic mantra: I haaaaate—herrr…I haaaaaate—herrr, and then the capper, Eck, eck, eck. The latter she did not always hold back in her daughter-in-law’s or even other mixed company. No one, including Shane, her own son, had ever inquired about the sound, assuming,

probably, she was just loosening a bit of phlegm at the back of her throat. But it was the sound of contempt toward her daughter-in-law, cooped up for over two decades in her diseased heart. It had been seeping out of her for months now, since the death of her grandson, her Fenny!

Of course, she blamed Claire for the accident; who else was there to blame? A mother’s job was to keep her children safe, wasn’t it? And Claire had failed at this once before when Fen, just five years old, had nearly drowned in the half-frozen lake, and his sister Alice right along with him!

The speed with which her daughter-in-law answered her call always surprised the old woman. Oh, how she loathed being dependent on Claire—for anything! Visitors shouldn’t be dropping by whenever the hell they felt like it; and she had a right to know who it was that had come into the house…it was still her house, damn it!

The old woman saw the hall light go on, and soon after felt an arm slip easily, efficiently under her shoulders. She caught a whiff of something light and floral before it was absorbed by the dank pall of her room. Claire lifted her up to a sitting position, fluffed her pillow.

“Oh, I didn’t hear you come in dear. I must have fallen back asleep…dozing…in and out.

Is there someone downstairs? I thought I heard voices; is it Alice and Daisy? What time is it?”

“It’s time for your pills,” said Claire cheerfully. “How’re you feeling? How’s your pain?”

The old woman’s eyes were getting worse by the day, macular degeneration like her father and his mother before him. And with only the hall light illuminating her room, everything, including her daughter-in-law, was reduced to shadows, both moving and still. But her hearing was still sharp. If it wasn’t for the thrashing lake out back, its muffled roar, and the house itself protesting as the snow battered its walls, she’d know what she heard, wouldn’t have to ask or wonder!

“My pain is always worse at night, you know that,” snapped the old woman as Claire dropped her pills onto the palm of her withered hand and passed her the glass of water. Victor stirred in his sleep, squeaked and gurgled.

The old woman’s hand trembled, and the glass slipped and teetered on its way to her mouth, but by God she got them all down without spilling a drop of water. She believed she could take care of herself if push came to shove, and didn’t need any nurse’s-aid or daughter-in- law wiping her ass or feeding her! Just a little help at night for the pain that sometimes woke her, and during the day when she felt off kilter coming down the stairs—she had only rarely been forced to take the service elevator. Why, it seemed she spent more than half of every day lying in bed. She would not let this go on; she would make her own meals and take care of her own house again—and take care of Fen’s horse too, his Kady! And she would get her car keys back.

She would drive again! If it was the last thing she did in this Goddamn world!

Enid watched as Claire’s shadow set the glass of water on the night stand and then loomed over her, eased her back down onto her pillow. Her eyes followed the shadow as it bent over the port-a-potty beside her bed, lifted the lid and took out the pail. The smell of shit bloomed in the air. Though her daughter-in-law never mentioned the smell, it wounded Enid’s pride every time.

“I haven’t had Communion in a month! Do you know that?”

“Well, Enid, I’ve told you I can call for the Eucharistic Ministers to come by, but you—”

“No, no, I want a priest. Is that so much to ask, for God’s sake?”

“Well, in better weather, I’m sure, you know, Father Dan will even walk over, but with this weather being the way it is, and you know he’s busy with the shelter in winter and Christmas is just—”

God how she hated this mealy-mouthed, sorry excuse for a daughter-in-law; she’d like to smack her, often imagined doing worse. It made her feel better for a time.

Enid reached out and clawed at Claire’s soft sweatered arm, tried once more for an answer to the question nagging at her. “But you didn’t tell me—” The waste pail rocked to and fro.

“Tell you what?” asked Claire, steadying the pail.

“You didn’t tell me who’s here, in the house! You didn’t answer my question!”

“I’m sorry, I must have forgotten.” Claire patted Enid’s hand before pulling away. “It’s just Alice and Daisy. They were out this way visiting…one of Alice’s friends…and didn’t think it would be safe driving back in a whiteout. They’re staying the night is all.”

“I’ve heard that before! You know how I feel about that daughter of yours taking advantage of a situation. She needs to stand on her own two—“

But her daughter-in-law didn’t wait for her to finish her sentence; her long, capable shadow had already turned and disappeared through the hazy outline of her door, leaving the old woman alone once more, spewing insults into the dark.

Little White Lie

Claire carried the pail down the hall to the bathroom, flushed its viscous contents down the toilet, rinsed the pail out in the bathtub, and sprayed bleach in the pail and tub. Three times, then, she washed her hands to try and wash the image from her mind. When she returned the pail to her mother-in-law’s bedside, she lit a match to kill the stench. On her way out, Claire tried to shut the door behind her, but the old woman protested, hollered at Claire to leave the door open.

“How about half open, Enid” said Claire, “so Daisy doesn’t wake you up in the morning with her chattering?”

“Alright, then,” the old woman squawked, “but keep it quiet down there!”

Claire went quickly back downstairs, relieved she’d fooled the crone at least until morning. She’d ask Anna and Liam to whisper when they went up to their rooms for the night.

They’d have to go past Enid’s room to get to theirs, and Claire was counting on the old woman’s poor eye sight and an extra half of a sleeping pill to keep the news of their new house guests a secret until morning.

Claire plainly saw Anna and Liam had been startled by the sudden cry of the old woman; their faces for a moment appeared almost stricken when she came back downstairs. She took

Anna’s empty teacup off the kitchen table and set it in the sink with the rest of the dirty dishes then sat back down.

“My mother-in-law is ill, and sometimes the least sound can wake her.” Claire spoke with as much delicacy as she could muster. Liam sat with his little legs dangling from the kitchen chair still sipping his cocoa, his winter boots still on. So well-behaved, thought Claire, for a boy

his age. “But,” Claire went on, feeling the need to further reassure them, “it gets pretty lively around here when my granddaughter Daisy comes to visit, and she can be just as loud as she likes. Because that’s how kids need to be, how most kids are. And she’ll be so happy, Liam, to have someone to play with!”

Claire couldn’t help it. She yearned to dispel the image of a house so large and gloomy made even more gloomy by the need to whisper and walk on tiptoe for fear of waking the wicked old witch upstairs. When the three mounted the creaking staircase, Claire stealthily led them past Enid’s room—Enid and Victor’s snoring now indistinguishable—down to the guest room at the far end of the hall.

When Claire thought of Fen that night, as she did each night since he died, her thoughts for once turned to something else—to Anna and the boy. She couldn’t help thinking how awful it would be to be homeless, to have to try and reconstruct, even begin to reinvent, a future in a house full of strangers.

She lay in bed revising her text to Shane half a dozen times before she was satisfied with the way she’d explained the events of her day, of the young woman and boy waiting to meet him when he returned home from work in the morning. She took the folder marked coroner’s report out from her night stand drawer. She returned it to the drawer, after holding it to her chest for only a few seconds. She tried to recall the litany of her son’s body, all of its parts, their weight and color, that she’d memorize in the aftermath of his death. Her son’s body was in that folder, the words like flesh and blood to her.

She forgot to take her knock-out cocktail of Dramamine and wine, but sleep was fast pulling her under. And for the first time in a long time, she slept deeply, the black thread of her

grief twisting and knotting through her dreams, a soft interior darkness dragging her seamlessly into its depths.

Part Two

“Poor strangers, they have so much to be afraid of.” ―Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle

House Guests: First Impressions

The oppressive tones and colors, and the stench too! The assault to their senses when she and the boy first stepped across the threshold of that decaying old house was almost more than they both could bear. To stand upright itself was a feat, to show no evidence of their struggle, even to recall their names, Anna and Liam.

The boy dug his fingernails into the palm of Anna’s hand, very nearly drew blood. His thoughts screamed inside his own head and found no solace in Anna’s to quell his own, nothing there but a kind of innate soul-fainting. And so his mind cried out to the one who sent him, sent them: “Do not let us be overcome so soon, carry us along! We will abide! We will abide!”

The Well

She woke from her nightmare breathing as though she had been running for her life, her heart pounding like horses hooves over frozen ground. She could hear the wind’s full force now as it pummeled the house. She’d expected this, saw the orange crawler on the bottom of the TV screen warning of high winds and heavy snow overnight. Claire reached for the lamp on her bedside table, heard the click-click, but it gave off no light. The power was out.

A single, distressed sigh escaped her lips, then shallow breathing after that, as she listened to the house shudder and groan. She stared blindly up at the ceiling, arms crossed over her chest, corpse-like, body rigid; a lingering fear; aftershocks of a nightmare pinning her down.

All her life, Claire had been a lucid dreamer, had trained herself to know she was dreaming in her dreams, though she was finding this gift slipping away since Fen had died.

From the time she was a child, she was able to run, jump, fly and swim away from her nightmares and wake herself. She was able even sometimes to revise the nightmare story line just before things went too far, became inescapable, or nearly so. Claire had sometimes wondered about the ones who hadn’t escaped, who couldn’t wake themselves, those unlucky souls who’d died of fright in their sleep. She tried to imagine the discombobulated feeling of stepping from one surreal landscape onto another: from nightmare to heaven or nightmare to hell.

Though she knew the details of her nightmare would be lost once she fell back asleep, she could recall almost everything now.

She remembered how she’d fallen down a well and heard a voice from high above call out to her to take hold of a rope. But what had been thrown down to her wasn’t a rope at all but a bloody umbilical cord. Claire could not bring herself to grasp the cord, had tried instead to claw her way up the crumbling wall, felt the palms of her hands split open, watched in horror as whole fingers snapped off. She knew she was dreaming but couldn’t wake herself as rubble rained down on her head and rock dust filled her mouth—a cataplasm of cobwebs and cinder covered her eyes, sealed them shut. She was suffocating, believed in her dream that she was dying. She threw one arm out into the void and grabbed the umbilical cord, but it slipped out of her hand.

She felt herself slide down the wall, its jagged rock surface tearing her face in blood-soaked ribbons as she went. But then the cord swung down to meet her again. She grasped it with both hands this time, began spiraling upwards, the promise of light oddly receding as she rose. But just when she thought she’d been saved, the rope suddenly thickened in her hands, began pulsing, which terrified her, and she let go. From high above, then, and making the walls of the shaft shudder, came a woman’s screams, then silence. Then shortly after, Claire heard the cries of an infant filling the void, a newborn cry, warm and full of life. And it was then, finally, that she saw, the woman, Anna, in a kind of dream within a dream, stand up, dust herself off, and walk away from the well, as she continued to fall.

Claire felt her way in the pitch black, moved from nightmare to waking with both arms stretched out in front of her like a caricature of the blind; felt her way along the hemmed-in edges of the room, until she reached the dresser and the flashlight she’d laid there the night before. The C battery—it took a D—knocked around inside like a loose rock, its beam flickering if she failed to keep the flashlight at a precise angle, her hand perfectly steady. Shane would

have made sure it’d had the right battery. As she made her way down the hallway to the stairs, and down to the parlor Claire imagined Enid sitting in her chair, her shabby old recliner, now shrouded in darkness. Scowling at her. For her clumsy, inefficient use of something as basic as a flashlight. “Claire, can’t you get a flashlight to work right!” she’d have scolded; snapping at her like the spirit-breaking invectives of the most despotic nuns from her parochial school years.

Remembering Enid, her verbal lashings, as the wind howled and shook the windows, set her nerves on edge; Claire still hated winter storms. And she had to push away the feeling that her mother-in-law, was there in the room with her.

Meanwhile, the wind continued its vociferous rant, slamming the house like a linebacker an old man: joints creaked, bones rattled, a terminal ward of moans filtered down from the attic.

In the parlor, she aimed the flashlight at the end table’s land line phone, picked the phone up, heard nothing, then tossed it at the soft blob of shadow that was Enid’s chair. It landed with a little wumph. The light from her hand arched and fell to dizzying effect. The sofa and two

Queen Anne chairs, from where she stood, heart thumping, leapt with the light, their large funhouse shadows zigzagging across white walls. Another shadow—which was only her sweater she had shrugged off on another chair—tricked her, made her think it was herself, her own body. Claire waved her free arm around in the air, but when no one waved back, soon realized her mistake, that all the light was in front of her. And so, as her heart settled down to a more steady rhythm, she felt suddenly more insubstantial—hollowed out, invisible, even—than she had just moments ago, standing alone there in the dark.

She went to the kitchen and shined the flashlight at the freezer door, reached inside and felt for the carton of ice cream, the bags of vegetables, all still frozen, was glad she wouldn’t have to put anything out in the snow until the electricity came back on. She found her way back

upstairs to bed, slept the rest of the night with the anxiety that she might oversleep, unable to hear her alarm with the electricity off, and so be late giving Enid her morning pills.

Claire began most mornings by picking up one of her small black notebooks which lay somewhere beneath the covers or under a pillow or—if it had slid off the bed in the night— which it often had—on the floor next to the night stand. Once she’d recovered the notebook, her writing journal, she’d reach over to the nightstand for her reading glasses—though they too may have fallen to the floor, slipped under the sheets somewhere, or in the jumble of books and magazines she still lined down the middle of the bed to ward off insomnia, and to give, she supposed, the sense of a body lying next to her on the nights Shane worked third.

At night in bed, she often drifted off with a pen in her hand, jotting down remembrances from the day, images that developed like a photograph in a dark room when she closed her eyes and brought her back awake for a while longer scribbling in the margins between sleep and waking. And it was on these nights, she felt certain she’d finally figured it all out: her part in the disintegration of her marriage; her inability—though sometimes it felt deliberate, a deliberate unwillingness—to rejoin her husband in a life she now found in many ways repugnant, intolerable.

Claire believed by now her husband must surely be contemplating having an affair. And she wondered why that didn’t at all bother her. Their sex life had dried up fairly quickly in the months since Fen had died, like the sun, indifferently or deliberately, turning back to dry ground all the lovely little puddles after a spring rain. Though she’d expected at first, and Shane had even said as much, that she just needed some time, she now realized something intractable had

happened to her, how she could not get out of her head that she, they, were making love shortly before her son was dying.

She had gone over the course of a few short months from not caring about sex to feeling an outright loathing for it. The last couple of times before the long drought, she thought she could fathom what marital rape must feel like, even though she was consenting, every part of her felt violated, injured.

She used to wonder if having Alice so young had thrust Shane too soon into the burden of adult life, a too-early fatherhood; but he’d never made her feel that way. When she looked at her husband now, she saw a man scarred by grief but not buried by it like her. She knew he didn’t want to join her or their son in any grave. Not yet. So, why wouldn’t he wander, why wouldn’t he stray?

Her handwriting from the night before was barely legible. The futility of trying to write anything in the middle of the night in a power outage! She scanned listlessly what she’d written.

Fragments of another nightmare. It had seemed so meaningful when she’d scrawled it down.

Now it just made her laugh; it made no sense at all.

The electricity had come back on sometime in the night—the low hum, then racket, of the ice maker greeted her when she came back downstairs to the kitchen. As she crossed the foyer, she heard several ice cubes shoot out at once, crash and skid across linoleum. Claire threw off the confusion of the night. She felt, with the surge of electricity now coursing through the house—the morning sun breaking through the kitchen windows made brighter by the obliterating snow—as though she too had been given a shot of adrenaline.

The microwave had stopped working the night of Fen’s accident. Some kind of omen,

Claire had thought, and still couldn’t bring herself to buy another. She used the stove now

regularly. She boiled the water for her instant coffee, then took a cup upstairs with her. She decided to shower before Enid woke, something she’d had a hard time doing in the months since

Fen had died. Most mornings, if she rose before Enid, she’d get sidetracked between going to the bathroom and her first cup of coffee. She’d turn the Weather Channel on first thing for the soft non-fluctuating voices and the elevator music humming in the background. Though, just picking up the remote could throw her into a state of bleary-eyed channel surfing, the physical world reduced to a soft gray haze in her peripheral vision. Then the minutes scattered like buckshot, with Claire scrambling just to take a shower, gather Enid’s dirty laundry, kick the day’s crumbs back under the table.

In the shower, she tried once more to recall the nightmare that had left her paralyzed for several agonizing minutes, but nothing came to her, except a residue of that fright. After only a couple minutes under the hot water, she had to pull the shower curtain aside and stick her head out for air. The heat from the shower had quickly raised the room’s temperature, made the air feel thick and substantial, like a crowd pressing in on her from all sides. She kept her head hanging out of the stall a while longer, inhaled the cooler air, and thought just then she heard voices coming down the hall. Through the steam, she thought she saw the door handle turning too. She listened again, squinted at the door handle, but heard and saw nothing more. She pulled the shower curtain closed, let herself vanish in the steam.

Good Mornin…um…Mr. Bird

Claire realized it must have only been the distant growl and whine of the snow blower that she’d heard while she was in the shower. It was still early, but she decided to go out to the barn anyway and check on Kady. Though her and Shane’s bedroom was down the opposite hall, she’d been careful not to wake Anna and Liam, and her mother-in-law, still snoring in symphony with Victor.

She dressed quickly, put on one of Shane’s flannel shirts, his old winter jacket. Claire still liked the way her husband’s shirt and jacket slipped over her body, like a big, gentle hand easing her from the comfort of her bed out into the burden of her day.

She stepped outside the house and began wading through six inches of new fallen snow, saw the path to the barn had already been cleared. As she started down the path, she saw Shane coming out of the barn with an axe in his hand. From a distance, Claire watched her husband grip the old rusted axe with both hands and swing it like a baseball bat as the snow fell down in dizzying swirls, soft as confetti. Shane was tall, a little over six feet, and still carried himself like a young man, like there was something—a fierce innocence?—coiled up inside his limbs ready to spring. It could make Claire feel both safe and anxious at the same time.

“What in the world are you doing with that axe?” Claire called out. She stopped in her tracks half-way down the path. In the raw morning light, the soft falling snow and the vast stands of gray leafless trees shawled in snow, and the house itself, still and silent, all made her husband, his absurd pantomime, appear even more erratic and strange.

“I’m mad as fuck at the snow, that’s what, and lettin’ a few lousy flakes know it! Roads weren’t plowed, took me over half an hour longer comin’ home this mornin’, that’s over an hour!” Claire watched the rhythm of his respiration as he hollered back to her, watched his breath materialize as puffs of smoke when it hit the icy air.

“And the damn blower took a shit too. Heeeere’s Johnny!” he yelled, while sweeping the axe back and forth in wide energetic arcs. But then a gust of wind very nearly blew his hat off, making him pause in his axe swinging to pull it down firmly over his forehead.

“Just got the driveway and the path clear to the barn, and the damn blower dies,” he said,

They were walking side by side now, Shane, still gripping the axe but letting it fall now to his side. “Your car’s buried. Cleared a path for Victor to do his business.”

Shane was wearing one of Fen’s favorite wool ivy caps, which didn’t keep her husband’s ears from turning bright red in the frigid air. Claire saw her husband could use a shave and haircut; his dark hair shagged out from beneath the hat creating a soft, sooty fringe all around the edges and over his eyebrows. She liked how his face turned ruddy outside in the cold; couldn’t help but notice how his hair, unlike hers, still had barely any gray in it. And his eyes looked extra clear and bright this morning. Shane’s eyes were hazel, like Fen’s; but to Claire, right then, they were a fast changing amalgam of grays and greens, like the color of the lake before a storm.

“You looked like a lunatic out here swinging that thing,” Claire said. She took the axe from her husband’s hand, laid it down on the path. “Kady still not frozen?”

“Nah, nice and warm, she’s good, got her blanket on her. Your message last night…it didn’t tell me much. How long will they be—”

“I don’t know…don’t know anything, really, about them, just that they’re homeless and not from Cemetery. My God, Shane, it’s the dead of winter, and she has a little boy. How could anyone—“

“Dan the Man must’ve been glad you stepped up; I’m sure he’s got his hands full with the Christmas pageant and his New Year’s Eve fund raiser.”

“There wasn’t a free bed at the shelter or he—“

“You know, it sounds more like somethin’ I’d be tryin to convince you of. The plant’s talkin’ layoffs, four hundred maybe by spring. Shouldn’t be in that wave, but I’m not sure we can afford two more mouths to feed. And what about the boy, it’s almost Christmas…did you think any of this through?”

“No, just said yes…and now they’re here. Father Dan said we can use the food bank if we need to, to help with food while they’re here.”

Claire felt a flutter of that same confusion and cold fright that gripped her when she brought Anna and Liam home with her last night. “Shane—” Claire grazed her gloved hand against her husband’s coat sleeve, stopped walking: “I think it’s the first morning since the accident I woke up and didn’t want to die.”

“Well, using this—” Shane stopped walking, turned to Claire and pointed at his heart.

“—isn’t always convenient, but it’s right. House is big enough; we have the room. And will ya quit talking like that, about wanting to die…ya know how I hate that.”

“You can tell your mother about Anna and Liam staying with us? I told her Alice and

Daisy stayed over last night. I didn’t want her up all night worrying I’d brought strangers into the house.”

“I’ll tell her when she gets up. But she won’t remember what you said last night, anyway.”

It was a small shock for Claire to find Anna standing at the kitchen sink when she and

Shane came in through the door stomping snow off their boots, pulling off their gloves and hats.

From where they stood at the threshold of the kitchen, Claire could see Anna had the sink full of sudsy water on one side and the faucet running on the other. She was washing the dishes and setting them in the drying rack on the counter. The word invasive skated across Claire’s mind but was quickly supplanted by thoughtful and industrious, only to have those too dissolve, subsumed by the temporary ether of her own mindlessness.

“Good morning, Claire. Good morning…um…Mr. Bird.” The abrupt sound of Anna’s voice, and the way she paused then blurted out Mr. Bird, made Claire laugh out loud. Claire’s laughter in turn startled Anna, who let the drinking glass on its way from the sink to the drying rack slip out of her hand. As the glass flew and half-turned in the air, Claire heard her husband who stood beside her suck his breath in, felt his body straighten up and stiffen. But Anna caught the glass, her pale arm and hand extended like the neck and head of a swan, her response, swift, silent and, utterly focused.

Shane was already moving past Claire who still stood in the narrow mud room looking into the kitchen. She had been caught off guard by a sense of déjà vu and the feeling that she and

Shane had come upon this young actress impersonating her, Claire; this imposter who’d just invested the mundane ritual of doing the dishes with so much grace and beauty.

Shane broke the silence, said, “Nice catch,” as Claire exhaled a raggedy breath, rode out her waning discomfort on the coattails of her husband’s hospitality. She found her legs then too

and moved a little ways into the kitchen as Shane introduced himself: “Please, just call me

Shane; nice to meet you, Anna.”

Anna was standing barefoot on the cold linoleum, was wearing faded jeans and a black t- shirt. The black t-shirt and her hair, its shock of red, accentuated her pale skin and the dark circles under her eyes. Claire could see Anna wasn’t wearing a bra, and she appeared even more fragile and tired this morning than she had the night before. In fact, Anna looked exactly the way Claire had felt every morning for the past seven months since Fen had died, as if she hadn’t slept at all. Still, Anna was pretty, that was obvious to Claire, and to anyone with eyes.

Anna had the sides of her long hair pulled away from her face with an ornate silver barrette. Claire recognized the barrette almost instantly as her own and wondered where Anna had found it; Claire had thought she lost the barrette and had forgotten about it until now. It was given to her by her husband’s father before he passed away, pressed into the palm of her hand as he whispered from his death bed that it had been a gift from his father to his mother on their wedding day. It was the same, she knew it, the three lilies with a small diamond at the center of each lily winding through the silver scrolls.

“Here,” said Claire, opening a drawer and starting to take out a dish towel for Anna’s wet hands. But Shane extended his hand to Anna before Claire could give her the towel. Anna gave her hands a little shake in the air, then wiped her right one on her thigh, shook Shane’s hand and said, “Nice to meet you.”

“Thank you for doing the dishes, Anna.” Claire put the dish towel back in the drawer, felt the muscles in her face tighten: “I’m a little embarrassed; they’ve been sitting in the sink since yesterday.” It had been more than a couple of days, three or four days at least, since Claire had done the dishes; and Shane, Claire felt right then, knew it, had caught the small white lie.

But her husband’s open, honest face—open as the moon flowers that grew along their crumbling walkway in summer—had already turned away from both Claire and Anna.

Shane had turned his attention to Liam, who had suddenly appeared in the foyer just outside the kitchen. Liam looked absolutely angelic to Claire, with his milky complexion and blank expression, his pale blue pajamas and his smooth cap of blonde hair, and with the whole of his small frame, those whites and blues, emitting a soft light in the dim foyer where he stood. The two women both struck dumb at the same time by the boy’s sudden appearance looked on as Shane strode over and scooped him up in his arms then lifted him high over his head.

“So you must be Liam. Good morning Liam.”

To Claire’s relief, the look on the boy’s face as her husband lifted him up, went quickly from scared to delighted. He was even laughing now, asking Shane to lift him up higher, “so I can touch the ceiling.”

The hydraulic motor of the ancient service elevator as it descended and shuddered to a halt in the foyer startled the boy, made him turn in the direction of the sound while holding onto

Shane for dear life. The double ding of the doors opening was quickly followed by a series of grunts and snorts as Victor, jet black and lumbering, his eyes still droopy with sleep, scurried down the hall from the elevator to the foyer. Straight on through the obstacle course of humans standing in the kitchen to the mudroom he went, thrusting himself through the enlarged doggie door as he did every morning, midday and evening like clockwork to do his business. And, as if he’d just now taken in the snorting marauder, Liam found his voice again, and with a look of both shock and glee on his young face, cried out, “Pig!”

Victor

“If it had grown up, it would have made a dreadfully ugly child; but it makes rather a handsome pig, I think.” ― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

It was all so very very: the pig, Victor, skittering and scuffing, grunting and puffing all around that ginormous rattling and rotting from the inside out and outside in, achy husk of a house, that spirit- and people-infested cavern of light and shadow, halls and staircases, of doors, doors opening and closing, all the upping and downing, the ding ding dinging, the cold and the warm, the bright and the dark ness and all the good food, scraps, smells, tastes, deliciousness, morning/evening slop bucket—beloved! people are not food, but warm flesh would like to taste that meat that blood hear those bones cracking bite it don’t bite— Victor! —the hand that feeds you Victor!

love you love you love you

Ghosts

The service elevator had been given a new lease on life twice since it had gone into disrepair after the first live-in groundskeeper and housekeeper, Mr. and Mrs. Donnelly, both passed on: the first time, when Enid’s husband John had grown too ill to stand; and now when

Enid could not muster the strength in her frail limbs to take the stairs. And it was Enid’s husband, the late John Bird, who taught Victor, when he was just a young pig, how to use the foot stools outside the elevator doors and inside the cab to bump the correct floor button with his snout. Of course, they rode it still, Gabriella, or Brie, as she was nicknamed from birth; her and

Victor mostly now and the little girl Daisy, who took the elevator down to the servants’ quarters to play. Brie, for one, found the elevator extremely calming. Her affection for the old house always began in the elevator where as a child she’d loved riding with Gran and Granddad

Donnelly up to the third floor ballroom and down to the cellar. She liked to relive the hustle and bustle of the kitchen, the heart of the house, revivifying as she went from room to room all of the sights and sounds and smells of the past. But it wasn’t just her, everyone who’d once lived here, and Brie new this was true for so many old houses, felt no need to leave forever at all.

Yet, it was Christmas time and not an ornament hung, no garland or tree. She felt the desire to put out the pall of death weighing heavy on the house and its sorry, pathetic heirs.

Mainly Fen. Once so happy and, well, alive, now all he could do was crouch and moan in the corners of rooms or rouse himself now and then to test the permeability of the physical world.

Brie had witnessed him pushing an index finger, sometimes an entire hand, once his face, through walls and doors, like an obsessive compulsive, in and out, through and back, again and

again, trying to convince himself, of the proof of his dreaming and the evident nightmare in which he was trapped. Brie had not made herself visible nor spoken to him yet. She kept her distance from him and from Claire, too, his mother; and from the long black umbilical cord which joined them, wending its way through the house and its corridors like a monstrous eel.

And there was still the question of the two intruders, or house guests as Claire was calling them, why Brie could not read their thoughts as she could read the others, though she suspected they could read hers and see her too.

Witnesses

Claire remembers what she imagines, and she imagines all of it as if it were real: how the bare branches of the ash tree mimed her son’s limbs cast in shadow on that cool May night. How the length of his body must have felt lying on the ground; the long grass gone to seed, strewn with gravel and broken glass; the broken glass glittering like stars…the dead, persistent leaves.

How the deer—herds of them disseminated throughout the surrounding fields and woods, trespassing through parking lots and lawns at night—how they’d heard the skidding sound and felt the thump of the front wheel when it found the ditch, witnessed the boy and his motorcycle coming apart—flying—a spray of blood in the air—and leapt away towards more innocent ground. And how she, just a short drive away, had dreamed briefly that night not of death but of a flower pressed between the palms of some child’s hands…a girl’s.

When she woke, she at first couldn’t remember if she’d dreamt of a girl or a flower, a flower or a bird, a bird or a butterfly; something winged or the soft lapping of waves over the shoreline.

Only a watery essence of the dream remained the next day after the news of her son’s death. But it was enough to come back to her, to fill her in the weeks and months that followed with a sense of loss and longing akin to, yet somehow beyond, her grief. There was a child, a girl, faceless and perturbing. Grief carrier, guardian angel, harbinger of things to come, praying for her to the smashed-out stars.

Usurpers

“Tuthill’s still have half a dozen trees out front marked down, picked over,” said Shane,

“but good enough. Thought, maybe, I’d take the boy for a ride down to get one. It might cheer him up to have a tree to decorate.”

Claire looked at Shane as he stood naked in the bathroom drying himself off from his shower. The air was still thick with steam, the mirror over the sink obliterating her reflection. Shane wrapped the damp towel around his waist and reached into the medicine cabinet, swiped deodorant and ran a hand brusquely through his wet hair. Claire sat down to pee as her husband crossed the hall to their bedroom to get dressed. He came back in the bathroom for her answer as she was clearing the steam off the mirror so she could see to brush her hair, dab ointment over her sore, chapped lips. The winter had, by December, begun its assault on her skin too, her knuckles were already beginning to crack and bleed.

They had agreed over a month ago before Thanksgiving that they would do without a

Christmas tree and decorations this year. They’d decided together they did not have the heart for it but had not discussed whether they ever would again. Claire felt like she could do forever without anything that wasn’t absolutely necessary for survival since Fen had died, survival itself, hers, feeling almost criminal. Just breathing, holding her mind together, plain, bare-minimum living, felt like a betrayal. She knew the only hope she had of following her son, of finding him, what any good mother should do, would be to stop breathing, stop living, step out of her body and let her spirit scour purgatory, heaven and hell until she found him. She believed this. She

believed this with all her heart, but had failed to take that step, held back by her daughter and granddaughter’s need for her. A crushing burden.

But Shane had seemed, afterward, to want to hold onto life, their life as it once was, with clenched fists. He had woven Fen almost effortlessly at times through their conversations, and conversations with Alice and Daisy, and Enid too, with barely a tremor in his voice. Claire knew he was trying in his own way to deny, object to, to undo, their unbearable loss.

“Yeah, a tree would be nice,” said Claire, forcing a pleasantness into her voice that she did not feel, that pained her. “I’ll bring the decorations up from the cellar.”

Her husband, dressed now—he had put on a fresh flannel shirt, washed jeans—was already turning away from her to go; but then he stopped, turned and looked back at her, one hand on the door, one foot in the hallway:

“Want to come?”

It seemed a genuine invitation to Claire, not really half-hearted at all, though she could not help sensing something of defeat or just a hint of vulnerability in his tone. She had retracted from life and he had adjusted as well as could be expected.

“No, you go on,” said Claire. “I’ll get Enid her pills and explain things, unless you already have?”

“Nah, I haven’t.”

When Claire went back downstairs after tending to Enid—and the old woman had forgotten Claire’s white lie from the night before, was remarkably less antagonistic to the news of their house guests than Claire had expected—she somehow thought she would find Anna still standing or sitting in the kitchen where she left her, and only the boy gone with Shane. But the silence of the house told her Anna must have gone too to get the tree. Of course, she did, thought

Claire. Anna had only just met Shane this morning. What mother wouldn’t have come along to chaperone; it was only natural.

Still, Claire wasn’t prepared for her reaction when, an hour later, the pickup pulled in the driveway as she stood looking out the front window, a tangle of Christmas tree lights still in her hands, a seeming futile endeavor, and two of the four boxes of old ornaments she’d brought up from the cellar still waiting for her inspection. Though the wind was blowing snow in crazy swirls across the truck’s windshield, she thought she could see her husband in the truck laughing.

And Anna, sitting beside Shane in the middle of the bench seat, and the boy, beside her near the door, both appeared to be smiling, beaming, really. Then Claire watched as Shane lifted and waved a hand in the air, said something, and now Anna and the boy were laughing too, the three of them bunched together laughing…like a happy little family. Claire felt suddenly as though she were breathing through a straw. She didn’t wait for the three of them to come in through the door. She instead set the lights down, then quickly took the service elevator down to the cellar for the rest of the decorations.

Claire stayed in the cellar longer than necessary. She hadn’t planned on bringing up much more than what she already had her first trip down. She rummaged around, opened more boxes marked X-MAS, untied the knots on plastic trash bags piled nearby, bags lumpy with Christmas things. She felt as though she were reading the same page in a book over and over but understanding nothing. She felt nauseous, light-headed. She gripped the shoebox with the angel tree topper inside and rode the elevator back upstairs.

It dawned on Shane that even if Claire hadn’t seen them leaving to get the tree, she’d eventually paint the picture of the three of them piled together in the cab of the truck. He hadn’t

really let himself think about it until now, how his leaving her behind might have hurt her afterward. He hoped now that Claire hadn’t seen them get in the truck or out of it when they returned home; hadn’t seen how Anna had sat so close beside him in the truck and not the boy.

He hadn’t thought about Anna coming along to get the tree until she started putting her coat on after buttoning up the boy’s. He didn’t believe it until she got in the truck with him, climbed in right next to him and reached past the boy to close the passenger door. And then it was what it was. He’d made the best of it, turned the radio to a Christmas music station, overdid the caroling just to ease his discomfort and theirs; even after he pulled back into the driveway, waving an arm like a conductor to Deck the Halls and belting out the fa la la la la la la la!

Anna had sat so close to him on the way to get the tree and back, strands of her hair had rested on his arm at times. And he could see her lashes, soft, and red like her hair; a few light freckles across the bridge of her nose and cheeks. And the scent of her, of her skin and hair, perfumed the air in the cab with something not flowery-sweet but more wild-sweet, like the scent of earth and grass after a hard rain.

With Victor scurrying excitedly about as Shane dragged the tree into the parlor; and Liam lifting the flaps of boxes to peer at the ornaments; and Liam asking Anna if he can help decorate the tree; it seemed to Shane as if his wife’s ghost, not his wife, had just entered the room. Claire seemed to glide into the periphery of his vision, a small box gripped in both of her pale hands. Her hair, disheveled and streaked with gray, hung drably around a pinched, anxious- looking face. His wife’s early morning vitality, that glimmer of the old Claire, had leached away in the hour he’d been gone to get the tree.

“You can do what you want—” said Enid. The old woman, having heard the ruckus downstairs had decided to leave her bed and come down on her own, a rare visitation. “—but I

think all this Christmas cheer is a—“ Her breathing was ragged, her sentences fragmented. “—a disgrace so soon after—”

Through the branches of the Christmas tree he was holding up, Shane saw Anna stride over to his mother who stood breathless, hunched and leaning against the parlor wall. His mother raised a withered hand as if to accept Anna’s help, but instead swatted her away, weaved across to the nearest chair and plopped down. A sour stench, like old fruit, dogged her through the room.

“I can manage…Anna, is it? I already have one nurse maid”—narrowed eyes, cold glance at Claire now sitting on the sofa, shoebox unopened on her lap—“I don’t need two.”

Shane watched as Victor joined his beloved mistress on the floor beside her chair; watched as his mother pulled the sides of her faded lilac robe together then languidly reached over the chair’s arm to scratch behind one of Victor’s ears. Her breathing had settled down; she may live another day. Shane returned to his work, sawing off the tree’s bottom branches and fitting the trunk in the stand as Liam looked on.

Enid cocked her head to one side, old crow, then turned her attention to Liam: “Come here, boy.”

Liam peered through the Christmas tree branches along with Shane, but did not move.

Shane whispered, “Go on, she won’t bite…well, not hard, anyway. Go say hello to my mother.”

Part Three

“But I don’t want to go among mad people," Alice remarked. "Oh, you can’t help that," said the Cat: "we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad." "How do you know I’m mad?" said Alice. "You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn’t have come here.” ―Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

Alice

She saw the sign in the window and couldn’t help smiling, then found herself laughing out loud. Her daughter Daisy looked up at her and asked, “Why are we stopping, Mommy?”

A strip club in a strip mall. Well, this is new. And just when she thought Cemetery couldn’t get any seedier, any sadder, any weirder. Just turn the corner and two doors down’s The

Cupcake Factory. Hysterical! The cardboard sign in the window read: NOW HIRING EXOTIC

DANCERS, PLEASE APPLY IN PERSON DURING BUSINESS HOURS.

The window blinds were drawn tight. Alice tried for a second to peer between the slim cracks in the blinds, but couldn’t see anything. Curiosity got the best of her. She wasn’t going to go in. She just wanted to try the door, see if they were actually opened for business yet. She pulled the door handle. It didn’t budge. She turned and looked back at the parking lot. Just two cars parked next to each other in front of the club. Probably the new managers inside getting ready for the big grand opening. Gross. She stepped away from the building, looked up; the old sign for the unit’s failed business was still there: One More Time Around, consignment clothing

& accessories. Alice imagined a stripper wrapped around a pole dressed in consignment rags.

Fen would’ve seen the irony in all this; or maybe he’d say it wasn’t irony at all, just plain coincidence. Not everything strange is ironic, Al. Yeah, little brother, you’re the literary genius.

Fucking hate you’re gone!

“I want a cupcake, Mommy! You promised!”

“Ok, we’re going.” Alice looked down at her daughter’s face. Snowflakes were gathering on her dark lashes. Her nose was starting to run. She picked her up and drew her close in a warm hug.

Alice just now remembered she forgot to drop the key off in her landlord’s mailbox and would have to mail it back. She didn’t want to risk running into him owing him three months’ rent. He wasn’t a total asshole about it, but the humiliation she felt could turn quickly to anger if he started pressing her about the back rent. These past few months, Alice felt like her luck was leaving her, first in a hot gush, then drop by drop. It wasn’t her fault that she didn’t have the money, not this time, anyway.

Daisy was already asleep in her booster in the back seat, red Christmas icing smeared on her mouth and chin, a half-eaten cupcake still closed in her gloved hand. Alice had been lost in thought after she turned the ignition on, had just sat there, the car idling, as Daisy, in the rear view mirror, licked the icing off her cupcake. Madonna’s sticky sweet Santa Baby playing on the radio.

Alice inhaled deeply, exhaled, reached reflexively inside her purse on the passenger seat for her cigarettes. She thought about turning the heater on high, cracking the windows, but then

Daisy muttered something in her sleep, and Alice imagined her daughter waking up coughing, the secondhand smoke ravaging her clean, innocent lungs.

She counted three bars, a quarter tank of gas. Enough to get us home. Home. Alice couldn’t believe how, without her volition, not a second’s contemplation, the thought had asserted itself, inserted itself into her blind slide backward to her childhood home. But this was,

she corrected herself, just an emergency roof over her and Daisy’s head. Temporary. Not her home anymore. And it wouldn’t be Daisy’s home for long either.

She swore two years ago after a brief emergency landing there—her fault, she took full responsibility—that she would never move back into that dying old house again, never sleep in her old room or put Daisy through that again. Enid, her grandmother, always picking on her, blaming her, Alice knew, for her mother’s “sin.” Though Alice was sure she blamed her mother too, for her mom and dad’s shotgun marriage; her only son forever bound to a girl Enid never accepted, never liked. And her mother always coming fiercely to Alice’s side, while her father, ever calm and receding into the scuffed floors, the woodwork, held both impotence and power in his faraway gaze. Blessed are the peacemakers.

Daisy, thank God, seemed to have no memory of it, but Alice worried her daughter would be old enough this time to remember. And it wasn’t just Enid’s toxic presence in the house Alice was worried about. As soon as she and Daisy stepped over the threshold, Alice imagined her mother’s grief wrapping its tendrils around her daughter’s heart, warping it, its shape and texture; hardening it or, worse, making it soft and vulnerable to all of life’s assaults.

Alice had fought too hard, was still fighting, not to fall into that abyss. And Daisy had come to accept, even enjoy, the stories Alice invented about her Uncle Fen’s not being around anymore. Daisy had let her mother paint her Uncle Fen as a kind of super hero, complete with cape and telepathic super powers to persuade the bad people—Alice called them The Baddies— to become good.

Alice had steered Daisy away from turning her uncle into some intangible spirit thing or shimmery androgynous angel. Through clenched teeth, she’d set a few church ladies straight too when at her brother’s wake, bending down to caress her daughter’s cheek, they told Daisy her

uncle Fen was an angel now, safe and at peace with God now. It still made Alice’s blood boil to think of it.

Alice didn’t know what she believed, but she knew what she needed to believe: that her brother, wherever he was, was still her brother, just as he was before that awful night. No wings, no halo, no sterilized, lobotomized member of some heavenly choir. Fen, Alice knew, wouldn’t drink their intellectually-insulting Kool-Aid, not in this life or the next.

The Possessed and the Dispossessed

Victor, if anyone had been paying attention, was the first to hear Alice’s car, the quick turn and bump up and over the curb followed by the rumbling of gravel and snow beneath her tires as she pulled onto the long driveway, coming to a stop at the mud room door. The great sow’s snorting and carrying on the way their old watch dog used to growl and bark to alert the arrival of guests was noted first by Claire in a rather desultory way, just a whispery “Who could that be?”

Enid was next, looking up and over at her son who had just finished stringing the tree lights and was about to plug them in. The old woman pressed her forearms into the arms of her chair and lifted her buttocks up from the seat as though she might eject herself through the ceiling, then bellowed, “Someone’s here! Someone get the damn door!”

But Alice was already inside stomping off her boots in the mudroom as Daisy, reenergized from her nap in the car, took off running through the kitchen and broad echoey foyer to the parlor, her pink rubber boots shedding melted snow, and Victor lapping it up behind her as she went.

“You can stay as long as you like, need—” Claire had sprung to life and out of her chair as soon as Daisy clomped into the parlor, passed the palm of one hand lightly over the top of her granddaughter’s head and asked, “Where’s your mother?” She then went straight to the kitchen and found Alice waiting there.

“As long as you need,” Claire repeated. “We have room. We always have room.”

Her daughter’s thinness still shocked Claire. Even her hair, her chestnut mane, once so long and thick and shiny, was now cropped short and choppy and had been made brittle from repeated strippings and color changes—this month she was platinum blond with lavender bangs.

Her brother’s name, tattooed in a heavy, black, old-syle calligraphy, seemed to Claire to take up half of her daughter’s pale, slender neck. The letters had droplets of melted snow still clinging to them. Claire had told her daughter months ago when she got the tattoo that she loved it, even wept when Alice, wincing, lifted the blood-speckled gauze and showed it to her. And, in fact,

Claire did love it; the belligerence of it. A fist raised at God for taking her brother, her only sibling from her. An absolute refusal to accept the unacceptable. Still, that didn’t help diminish how funereal, how harsh her son’s name looked written on her daughter’s neck, and how much more delicate and vulnerable Alice seemed to look because of it. And so, Claire couldn’t help wishing that Alice had chosen somewhere else on her body to write it, somewhere hidden.

“You’re sure it’s Ok, Mom, us staying here? It’s just for a few days—” Alice began scratching the inside of her wrist, then cried out, “God, when will this ever end. It comes out of nowhere!”

“Of course you can. I already said.” Claire took her daughter’s wrist in her hand and turned it over to see what was the matter, but Alice pulled away. “If you even touch it lightly, it makes the itching so much worse. I shouldn’t have started. If I just try not to think about it, I can make it stop.”

“Let me see,” Claire insisted. Alice pushed her jacket sleeves up and turned both wrists over for Claire. The word stigmata crossed her mind. The insides of her daughter’s wrists were raw-red and covered in small nicks and scabs from scratching. The veins and bones of her

daughter’s hands were too apparent too—she can’t afford to lose any more weight!—her cuticles, all ragged and torn.

“I have something for it, some lotion. It might help.” Claire walked over to the kitchen counter to get the lotion, but when she turned around to give it to Alice, her daughter was already moving past her toward the door.

“I just need to get our things out of the car, Ok, Mom? And say hi to Kady.” Her daughter took a black knit hat out of her jacket pocket and pulled it over her head, put her gloves back on.

“I really think you should see a doctor for that, Alice.”

“It’s not that serious, Mom, just dry skin…and stress. I’ll be right back.”

Her daughter didn’t wait for Claire to ask why she needed a place to stay. Still in her boots and jacket, Alice went out the door before Claire could ask her if she’d lost her job or her lease was up, or if she was just looking for someplace more affordable or in a better school district for when Daisy started first grade. Claire recalled Alice complaining about some women at work giving one of her coworkers a hard time. She wondered now if her daughter had crossed a line, gotten herself fired. She hated that Alice didn’t tell her what was what right away, had left her standing there in the kitchen agonizing over all the possibilities.

Someone had put a Christmas record on in the parlor. And, now, with the music, came the sound of children, Liam and Daisy, playing hide and seek; Daisy shouting “Ready or not, here I come!”; their shrieks and laughter and Victor’s excited snorting echoing through every room it seemed, from cellar to rooftop. Those sounds and the pile of windblown snow on the floor by the kitchen door from Alice’s coming and going suddenly brought everything up sharp for Claire: The irony of her lie to Enid the night before when she told her mother-in-law the

voices she was hearing downstairs were just Alice and Daisy. How could she have forgotten how trouble invited itself into every home at some point, and so there was never a good reason to extend an invitation to it. But she had had her moment of weakness and forgetting at Mass the night before. And now they were all here in the house together: herself and Shane and Enid, her daughter and granddaughter, this woman and her son, and Victor.

They would make the most of it.

I see the parlor drapes move, not the airy new window ones my mother hung last year, but the useless ones, those heavy, ancient beasts hung from a rod just outside the parlor where a door should be. Grandma Enid’s drapes, just one of the many things my mother hates about this rundown old museum of a house. I used to press my small body inside their tall, thick folds when my sister and I played hide and seek, breathing shallowly to keep the fabric still. Up close, the wash of gold and cerulean threads of the rose and larkspur made the flowers disappear.

Someone else is hiding there now, a young boy. With the rush of memory, time rolling back on itself, I feel myself rebound, and I‘m light and full of joy! And I’m there now too hidden between the folds, small like this other boy. The boy’s breathing is muffled inside the fabric, the fabric damp from his saliva. His lips are parted, panting like a little dog. We’re nearly nose to nose now, separated by a single fold in the drape’s fabric. I feel myself being pulled inside him, into his joy, my arms and legs stretching inside of his. I look down at myself, and it’s as if I’m a shadow made of light, the pixels of light pulsing and expanding inside my form until I’m all one piece again. I’ve completely subsumed this other boy whose body I‘m trespassing, trying to understand if he is me, if I am him. I can feel his small heart beating inside my chest.

“Found you!”

I feel my sister Alice’s thin, wiry arms, the downy hair on them as she pulls me out from the drapes. But it isn’t Alice…it’s Alice’s daughter—Daisy! I’m knocked out of the boy, then, this other boy, Liam. Time riffles forward like pages of a book turned by the wind, and I‘m myself, fully grown again.

And now someone’s gripping me hard by the shoulders, is dragging me away from my family, our Christmas gathering. I see they’ve lit the tree and they’re playing Christmas records, my mother’s vinyl collection she loves.

I try to tell her—this bitch!—as she yanks me hard through the walls of the house, through plaster and brick out onto the deep, snow-covered lawn—I try to tell her I’ve seen her before, but thought she, like the others, couldn’t see me. I have so many questions, but she’s decided in her rage to shove snow in my mouth and eyes and pummel me with her arms and fists.

I’m no match for her; she’s kicking my ass.

“You don’t ever do that again, Fen, you hear me?”

I pick myself up off the ground, digging snow out of my mouth, my throat, my eyes. I tell her Ok. I won’t. Ever. Do that. Again.

And she shoves me back down in the snow for lying.

The Queen of England

Alice carried her worry from the barn back inside the house with her, dropped the four trash bags full of clothes for her and Daisy on the floor, nudged—but more half-kicked, because she was tired and wasn’t thinking—the needy, grunting pig to the side of her so she could pull off her boots, just get her coat off. The sleeping pills she’d been taking lately made her feel groggy and off-kilter and slowed her thought processes down up until a couple hours before she went to bed. That brief second wind only exacerbated her bouts of insomnia. A vicious cycle.

Her mother was no longer in the kitchen. From where she stood, the black and white tiles made the distance between her and the room’s open doorway seem a mile away. The insides of the house beyond the door spilled out into light and shadow and what sounded like her Grandma

Enid shouting, with some familiar organ-heavy Christmas music stirred in. A surfeit of clangorous sounds.

Victor demanded to be petted. Alice acquiesced and watched his damp little black eyes soak up the vision of her as if she were the Queen of England. She then walked alongside him feeling as wobbly on her feet as the waves of melancholy music—her mother must have broken out the vinyls—that rose and crested and fell through to the crackle of the needle turning on dead space.

She was to the doorway now, feeling every bit the stranger in this strange house. She stared out into the foyer, felt her soul swim around in the dust-laden panels of sunlight flung out of the dirty second and third floor landing windows. Wasn’t her childhood home supposed to seem smaller when she returned home to it? Isn’t that what she’d always heard people say? But

being away, no matter how long or short, had always had the opposite effect; it had only made it seem somehow larger, and more ridiculous in its insatiable needs for repair; even the simplest care, just keeping up with all the sweeping and mopping and dusting.

Alice glanced to her right at the service elevator hallway. Past that, another short hall led to the cellar stairs and the stairs going down to the old servants’ quarters. She thought how much she’d like to disappear for a while down there in the servants’ quarters the way she used to when she was a child. The dungeon, was what Fen had called it; her brother had never liked the dungeon, had reluctantly gone down with Alice when they were children. But Alice could never make him stay and play with her for very long; he said it was haunted, believed it. Even when they were older, Fen still avoided this part of the house.

The second smallest room of the five, windowless like the other four, with its narrow iron bed and simple, unadorned furnishings was where Alice had found the most joy. It was a child’s room and that of the young woman the child became. The room’s treasures, for Alice, were many: a cupboard with three porcelain dolls, nearly a century old, a wooden mirror and brush set with matching scrollwork on the handles. There was a large steamer trunk painted black and peeling in parts down to the bare wood with thick corroded clasps. The trunk contained old clothing, even old fashioned undergarments; the most interesting piece of clothing, a blue, beaded, mid-calf dress from the style of the 1920s. The dress would fit Alice now. But the most cherished treasure, for Alice, and the one her mother had pointedly warned her not to play with or ever remove from the room, was a sterling locket with a photograph of the room’s past occupant, a girl, from nearly a century ago. It was a large locket, oval, with a little swell in the front that made it look and feel like a miniature egg. The locket opened with a curved double door to accommodate the bubble glass covering the photo inside. Engraved on the back was the

image of what looked like the sun or a flower—it was too worn to tell. The girl, Alice’s mother had told her, was the granddaughter of the maid and groundskeeper back in the 1920s when the house was newly built and her great grandfather, the first owner of the house, was one of the richest men in the state. After her mother had told Alice the girl’s name, Alice had named one of the porcelain dolls after her, the one with the long dark hair that resembled the girl in the locket the most. And so, the girl Gabriella in the locket and the doll Gabriella had become, during

Alice’s childhood, one and the same. And Alice herself had become Gabriella too when the demands of her imagination drew the other two dolls out of the cupboard to thicken the plot of her make-believe world. Those long hours of imaginative play, those memories, were imprinted on Alice’s consciousness; and as Alice grew, she realized those same childhood memories had been imprinted on the consciousness of the girl, Gabriella. And now Alice’s daughter Daisy was imprinting the same room, doll, locket, girl, on her young consciousness every time she left the main floor, with its necessarily stifling supervision, for the precious freedoms below.

Alice could hear her daughter’s voice, her laughter, coming from high above on one of the main staircase landings. She turned and faced again the expansive foyer with its yellowing wallpaper peeling at every seam, the corroded light fixtures, the faded and tattered upholstery and drapes. Cobwebs streamered down like tentacles from their soft gray masses at corners and arches where only a ladder might reach; and intermittently a bit of snow forced up under a failing shingle made its way through a sliver of cracked ceiling plaster and swirled in the air like fairy dust.

“Mom?” Alice thought she saw someone in her peripheral vision turn the corner of the servants’ hallway, and she, in turn, instinctively decided to follow, thinking it was her mother.

But then her mother was taking her by the arm and leading her through the foyer to the parlor.

“There you are! Come on, I want you to meet someone. Well, actually, there are two—”

Her mother ushered her to the parlor where she found her grandmother, her father and, over in a far corner of the room with her back turned to them hanging ornaments on the

Christmas tree, was a woman.

Her father came over to Alice and hugged her, whispered in her ear that of course she and

Daisy were welcome to stay as long as they liked. Alice was relieved her mother had already told him. But she was also painfully aware of that fact that he’d whispered his warm invitation in her ear, because her grandmother, his mother, was in the room. Her father was still trying to protect Alice from the old bitch. That hurt Alice to the quick more than her Grandma Enid’s long history of overt favoritism for her brother, or even her cruel dislike for Alice, which her grandmother took no pains to disguise.

The woman seemed, to Alice, to be looking for an empty place on the tree to hang the ornament: a chipped mercury glass bird which she held on the flat of her palm as though it had flown down and landed there from one of the boughs. She stood on her toes and hung the ornament on one of the highest branches then turned and saw Claire and Alice. Claire waved the woman over to where she and Alice were standing at the threshold to the parlor. Claire was about to introduce the woman to Alice, but it was Enid who spoke first, barked at Shane who was poised to drop another record on the turn table.

“No more damn Christmas music! Put on my program, Shane!”

“How about something we can all watch, Mom? I’m sure there are a lot of holiday shows the kids would like too.”

Alice looked on as her father returned the record to its sleeve, then walked over to the corner of the room opposite the Christmas tree and picked up the remote from the shelf above the

TV. He then went to his mother and placed a gentle hand on her shoulder and turned the TV on.

A pall fell over the room, a dark, billowy thing. Alice could feel whatever Christmas cheer her mother and father had forged so far that afternoon was fragile; even the lights on the tree seemed dimmer now, the ornaments vulnerable and shy.

Alice heard her mother sigh noisily. Her mother then turned to Anna and then back to

Alice: “Anna this is my daughter Alice…Alice, Anna.”

“Shane! My program, Shane!” Enid was beside herself, turning uncomfortably in her chair; the inflatable cushion for her backside needed frequent repositioning to prevent sores.

“Nice to meet you, Alice.” The woman, Anna, extended her hand to Alice, and when

Alice extended hers, the woman clasped Alice’s hand in both of hers, a warmth that took Alice by surprise. Alice thought Anna must be one of her mother’s friends from the college she taught at, come to cheer her up during her first Christmas without her son. Her mother had not allowed any members of her grief group to befriend her. She could only attend sporadically, told Alice it was beyond traumatizing to have to listen each time to a dozen or more parents who’d lost children describe the dozen or more different ways a child can die.

Her mother continued her introduction: “Anna and her little boy Liam will be staying with us for a while…here with us. He and Daisy were in here playing just a minute ago—”

“I just thought—” Alice heard the exasperation in her father’s voice. “You know, Mom, the kids would like to finish decorating the tree..”

“I don’t see any kids in here.” Alice had always felt her grandmother’s powers of observation were only exceeded by her determination to win every argument, no matter how trifling.

“Don’t you all want to see what our new Commander in Chief is doing to fix this country?” Neither Alice nor her mother and father could tell anymore if Enid was taunting them or still trying to convert them.

“He hasn’t been sworn in yet, Mother. He’s not the Commander in Chief.”

“What time is it? Give me the controller! I want to watch my program!”

Her father, standing in the middle of the room now, legs spread with his right arm extended aiming the remote, looked to Alice as if he were about to shoot the TV. Her father flipped through the stations rapidly until he came to the despised network, and to the man whose red face and crude, blustery psychobabble was now ingurgitating the screen.

“I can’t hear! What did he say? The Commander in Chief! Shane—rewind it!”

Dutifully, her son obliged, and the President-elect spewed forth:

I don’t have to be tooold…ya know, I’m like a smart person. I don’t have to be

told the same thing in the same words every single day, fer the next eight years,

could be eight years, buh, eight years. I don’t need dat.

“Enid,” Claire offered, “don’t you think you could hear better in your room? It’s much quieter there, and I could bring your dinner up—”

Anna chimed in: “Would you like a cup of tea, Enid?”

Both Anna’s and her mother’s questions went unanswered by her grandmother, and no one but Alice seemed to notice Anna slipping out of the parlor and away from the commotion.

“You know I’d rather watch my program on the bigger television down here. My eyes!

Shane, the volume! Turn it up!”

Alice looked on with revulsion as her grandmother twitched in the seat of her chair and ordered her father and mother around. Her grandmother’s hands, two arthritic claws, gripped the arms of the chair as if she were on a plane that was about to crash. Her father gave in and turned the volume up, then Alice watched her mother vehemently mouth to her father the words, “Not down here, you promised!” Her father in turn threw his arms up, then dropped the remote onto the small utility table hooked over the arm of Enid’s chair. With an air of mock pretentiousness he then announced: “I think I’m going to retire to the study. Let me know when dinner is served.”

Alice turned her back to the TV with her mother, followed her mother out to the foyer and watched with her as her father passed the stairs and on his way to his study hollered up to

Daisy and Liam, You two better be behaving up there!

Even with her back turned to the TV, Claire could still see the vulgarian on the screen: his narrowed eyes and thick putty-like complexion, his mouth, which morphed from a scowl to a sneer to a frown to a stitched-cadaver’s grin— Grand-scale nepotism was the new normal for the day; Claire’s ears were on fire:

I’d love to have Jared helping us on deals with other nations, and see if we

can do peace in the middle east and other things…he’s very talented…he’s a very

talented guy.

Claire’s grief had multiplied since the eighth of November. The black seed that was planted in her heart when her son died had germinated and set down deeper roots after the

election, which she knew, but could not help herself for knowing it, had multiplied the fruits of horror and despair. First her son. Then her country. The consciousness of her country was infected with a dangerous pathogen. Those who were infected would not be cured. They had found a champion to take their shame away and bring them forth from the gutters. A moral and intellectual poverty loping across the American landscape, a profane mandate conceived and disseminated by the President-elect: virulent ignorance, racism, misogyny, xenophobia, homophobia.

Anna brought Enid her tea then joined Alice and Claire in the kitchen. They worked side by side then, Anna chopping the vegetables, Claire boiling the chicken for the stock and rummaging in the cupboards and refrigerator for the rest of the ingredients. Alice called the children downstairs and brought them to the kitchen to help make Christmas cookies. Alice was delighted with Liam; Daisy had a new little friend.

The sun was already setting by the time they sat down to eat. Enid, glutted on her program, had fallen asleep in her chair in the parlor: her cup of tea tipped over and spilled in her saucer on her lap. Her neck stretched and head lolling to one side; the whites of her eyes like a peeled onion beneath her half-closed lids.

A Hundred Dead Animals

When Claire went out to get the mail, she found four UPS boxes stacked two on two on the front porch, along with a large manila envelope standing up inside the mailbox. The boxes were the last of the Christmas toys she’d ordered for Daisy and Liam, backordered in December and arrived just today on the fourteenth of January. Claire pulled the envelope out of the mailbox, shook the snow off. The address was hand written in blue ink across the face of it: To the parents of Fenton Bird.

Claire left the boxes on the porch in the snow and took the envelope inside, walked through the foyer with it, and sat down on the last step of the staircase. She sat like that for a while, with the envelope resting on her lap. The envelope had a firmness to it, like a piece of cardboard had been inserted to protect the papers inside. Claire was both afraid and excited; wanted time to stop; wanted to savor the moment, to imagine what bright good news might yet be announced about her son. She wanted to believe whatever was inside the envelope had to do with some goodness in her son’s life.

Claire had been shocked and exhausted by the amount of paperwork generated by a single uncomplicated accident and death, and how all that paperwork had demanded her and

Shane’s signatures inside so many distressful settings. She didn’t want to believe that this envelope resting on her lap had anything to do with any of that. But the idea was pushing into her thoughts that this piece of mail might have to do with some unfinished business from the funeral home, or the monument company, or the impound lot. Or the police station. Some loose

end they’d forgotten to tie up— And without any say in it, she was there again. In the waiting room of the police station.

no one else there empty but for the two of them and someone moving behind a window at the far side of the room the window like the kind in a doctor’s office but this window doesn’t slide the woman behind the window speaks to them through a fist-sized speaker embedded in the glass can I help you? petite elderly short gray hair a vacant look on her face

Shane is explaining why they are there to collect their son’s helmet that they called before they came I think I’m going to sit down Ok? our son was in a motorcycle accident

Fen Fenton Fenton Bird our son the woman’s sallow skin flushes an embarrassed smile lifts her jowls and her smile melts away and her eyes absorb her smile the woman glances nervously back and forth between us like a sparrow after the rain the sidewalk covered with worms she lifts the receiver of the phone resting on her desk I try to read her lips I turn away from the sealed window the window into the other room sparrow file cabinets brown painted door sitting in the waiting area now sun blazing through a wall of windows and beyond the windows hot pink impatiens parking lot cars a police officer appears gives Shane a clip board and pen disappears reappears with a cardboard box the box is in Shane’s hands now I want to hold it Ok it’s bulky but not too heavy I want to hold it red and black tape seals the box shut evidence evidence evidence evidence evidence evidence evidence evidence evidence BLOOD written in black marker on a large white label bright orange biohazard sticker on the ride home Shane says we should open the box outside there may be an odor the blood— no not outside! in the house the sound of tape tearing off the cardboard box then more tape

sealing the plastic bag inside the box Shane is doing it taking the helmet out of the plastic bag I want to hold it— what’s wrong?— there’s still so much blood my God! we have to take it outside! a hundred dead animals are in the box death is in the box fifty dead animals march outside with us fifty remain in the house even with all the windows open and for days after

Collisions

He had little to no remembrance, no boyhood memories of road kill. Maybe decades ago as he sat staring out the car window, he’d turned his soft, young face away from the small, plush corpses every one. It was only since Fen had died that the deer and geese, raccoons and squirrels, seemed suicidal to Shane. Even a lone bird the other day had looked about to careen headlong into his windshield before pulling up out of its crazy, myopic dive. The deer, though, due to their size, and the geese, their large, congregating numbers, posed a particular—and peculiar to anyone not from these parts—challenge to drivers. Season to season, they worried their way across busy streets, often changing their minds mid-crossing during morning and late afternoon rush hours and twilight’s sleepy, distracted traffic. Day and night, the neon yellow deer signs portended shattered windshields to Shane, his own or some kid’s face thrashed to a bloody, bone-splintering pulp by four calcitrant hooves.

Once, Shane had had a close call with a deer that left a bloody smear, some tufts of fur stuck to a headlight. The deer had struck the front of the car, a car he no longer owned. Even after he’d had it repaired, the long crescent-shaped dent, the memory of it, had made him wince.

It was night when it happened—with these things almost always happening at night or in a downpour or winter’s obliterating snow—and when Shane had been feeling a pang on that particular night of vulnerability, a lingering sense of despair, a moment of lost faith. He’d just buried his father, and his mother had fallen ill, taken to her bed for the first time in what would be a permanent downward spiral of mental and physical decay.

Fen had been around three years old and riding in his back car seat; but Shane could no longer remember where they’d been or why Claire wasn’t with them that night. But he still remembered the worst of it in cinematic detail. How they were cresting a curve in the road when the deer suddenly leapt out in front of them. Shane felt the hard thump to the front of the car, saw the deer fly up and turn in mid-air—thought, crazily, of Santa’s reindeer—swerved over the dead gray hem of the road through a strip of crabgrass then onto the edge of the bike path.

Instinctively, he’d reached for his rearview mirror, pulled it down, as if to make certain, though he knew, that the animal had not crashed through the roof of the car and landed on his young son. No other cars went by. When Shane turned around to look at Fen once more, who was still incredibly asleep, he saw through the rear windshield the deer’s dark amorphous form rise up and teeter drunkenly across the dimly lit road. He rolled his window down, stuck his head out to get a better look. He could see the deer illuminated now under the street lamp, saw what he was certain was a gash on its flank, blood streaming down one leg. He continued to watch as it made its way to the other side of the road, stumbled just once and nearly fell in the ditch before being subsumed by the night’s black shapes and the dark woods beyond.

The call after it came was coiled inside the night’s dark confusion. Hearing the phone ring, then drifting off; then reaching for the phone and seeing nothing new in the call log. Must have dreamed it. The second call came just a few short minutes after the first one he thought he’d heard in a dream. The second ring, a far-away sound now growing clearer, painfully clear, like someone first caressing the side of your face to wake you, then after growing impatient, grabs you by the shoulders and shouts, Wake up, Wake up!

He pushed the blanket off and stood, used his phone light to guide him through their dark room and that thick mental fog of startled waking. He glanced over at Claire as he passed by the foot of their bed. His wife was snoring softly, the sour smell of alcohol from a night out with friends still lingering in the air. And sex too, they had made love when she came home that night; that too was in the air.

Claire hadn’t heard his phone ringing. Her phone, usually on the nightstand, must have been forgotten downstairs. When she came home around midnight, she was still a little drunk or high. Shane suspected some of her younger teacher friends smoked pot. He’d fallen asleep in his father’s old leather recliner, his head resting on top of the faded, worn spot made by his father’s head for so many years and so many years ago. Area 51: The Dreamland Chronicles from his father’s science fiction collection was tented on his chest.

He woke to his wife straddling him, shrugging off her coat and slipping off her shoes.

She plucked the book from his chest and dropped it on the floor, took his face in her hands and kissed him on his forehead and mouth, then led him out of the library and down the hall to the service elevator. They hadn’t done it in the elevator in years, not since Fen and Daisy were little.

Still in that rich fertile ground between or just over the edge of sleep and waking, he watched his wife move to the back of the elevator, slip her underwear off, lift her skirt. The soft, fine lines around her eyes when she threw her head back and laughed at him as he rushed over to her, unbuckling his belt like an eager teenager—those laugh lines and her laughter too, were what he would remember for years after. And after, when they fell into bed, the memory of that recent intense pleasure had brought their bodies together again for a second round.

He pulled their bedroom door closed and continued down the hallway still using the light from his phone. He moved quietly passed his mother’s room, crossed the long staircase landing

to the other wing, pressed the button for the elevator and stepped inside. His wife’s black underwear were puddled on the elevator floor where she’d stood, and off to the side, shimmering a little, was the silver barrette that had held her long hair in a loose knot at the nape of her neck.

He remembered now how he’d taken it out of her hair and held it in his fist until he came.

He scrolled through his calls and saw two new entries from Alice at the very top, eight minutes apart, 2:14 and 2:22 a.m. He realized instantly his mistake, that he hadn’t scrolled far enough up in his call log after the first call came in. As the elevator descended, his stomach muscles tightened with worry. Something was wrong. Something had happened to Alice or

Daisy. This was the middle of the night call. This was that call.

The screech and groan of the elevator as it came to a halt, and the rattling of the caged metal door as it folded back made the voice on the other end all the more incomprehensible. It was an ugly voice, a deep well of horror rising to the top and spilling over the sides: guttural staccato shouts, unintelligible, and other voices too, in his head and it seemed all around him.

He gripped the phone and pressed it to his ear hard, wanting to press it through his ear to the other side of his skull to understand, so he could understand…Who is this?—It’s me! Dad! It’s me, Alice! Why didn’t you answer your phone? I called twice!…crying and moaning coming from deep inside the well, and then out of the well, piercing his eardrum…Dad! Oh, God! Dad!

You have to listen, Ok? No, no, Dad, not me or Daisy! It’s Fen! He was in an accident…But he’s Ok, right? Is he Ok? Is he hurt? I…I can’t under—Oh, Dad!—What! What, I can’t understand what you’re saying! No! No! Oh, God, where is he? What hospital? Who is this? I need to speak to a doctor… someone put a doctor on the phone!— It’s me, Dad! It’s me,

Alice!...Dad, you have to—You don’t sound anything like my daughter…who is this? Please let me speak to someone who can tell me where my son is…someone just said my son died, was

killed…a motorcycle accident! I need to speak to someone, a doctor! Who’s laughing? I hear laughing!—Dad, stop it! It’s me, Alice! He’s at Belmont Community…it’s me, it’s me, Alice, your daughter! Please, Dad! Hurry, Dad!

He sat down on the floor, then rocked over onto his side, forced his fist into his mouth past his teeth to muffle the scream. In his rush to return his daughter’s call downstairs, away from his wife and mother’s hearing, he hadn’t put on any clothes. And now he lay naked curled up on his side on the kitchen floor. He squeezed his eyes shut as if shielding them from a blinding light. He opened his eyes again and saw through the watery veil the black and white tiles spread out in a dizzying configuration and saw now, too, the bare feet of his wife an arms- length away. His eyes traveled up her shins, to her thighs. She was wearing the plain white t- shirt he’d taken off and thrown down on their bedroom floor. A thin stream of his semen ran down one of her legs. Her long auburn hair hung wild and tangled from sleep. His wife’s mouth was opened wide in a silent scream, her head tilted back to one side as if she’d just suffered a violent blow. Shane knew in that moment she’d heard everything or the worst of it. He took his fist from his mouth, and still lying on the floor touched her ankle. “What did you hear, Claire?”

His wife opened and shut her mouth, opened and shut, then bent down and grabbed the phone out of his hand, shouted angrily, viciously, at him, “Where is he? What hospital?”

Shane stood and took the phone out of her hand, tried to pull her into an embrace, to calm her, and because he needed to hold onto something, to calm himself too; but she pulled away, pushed him hard away.

“You don’t know, you don’t know.” She was crying now, her eyes wide with fear. “I heard you. I heard you say something—” Claire was at the kitchen table now, turning her purse upside down, shaking it until everything spilled out of it.

“I heard you say something—you said it didn’t sound like your daughter. Maybe this is just some horrible prank, Shane!” She found her cigarettes and lighter in the jumble of things she spilled onto the table. Shane watched her hands shaking as she tried to light the cigarette, took the lighter from her and lit it for her.

“Claire, I know it was Alice now. I couldn’t understand. Her voice was so changed; it didn’t sound like our daughter…but it was her…I know that now.”

“Oh, God! God, help me!” His wife’s distress terrified Shane, made him feel more alone in his anguish than before, and that in turn made him feel somehow ashamed, helpless to comfort her.

“Other people were talking, calling her away…so many voices around her, calling out to her. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Claire. We have to go to the hospital.”

He needed to help calm her. He didn’t want to wake his mother, not like this, not now.

Claire dropped her lit cigarette into the sink, began rubbing her face and breathing loudly; and

Shane saw a scream erupting in her, saw it in her eyes, and the way her body was heaving, the breath she took just before. And he did something horrible then. He put his hand over her mouth to shush her. She slapped him away, made him feel like a murderer. He told her then he didn’t want to wake his mother, pointed up at the ceiling, steered her gently to the table, pulled a chair out. She sat then, crossed her arms over her chest, began rubbing her arms as though trying to warm herself, moaning and weeping. He told her he would get their clothes, bring hers down

to her. As he left the kitchen and ran through the foyer, he heard his wife call out to him, Who was laughing? And then angrily, “I heard you say someone was laughing on the phone! Shane!

And as he took the stairs two at time, he heard his wife repeat the same question, though more muffled due to the distance growing between them: Who was laughing? Who was laughing? Who was laughing?

Claire called Alice in the car on the way to the hospital as Shane drove, heard for herself what Shane could not describe a short time ago in the kitchen, what would have been impossible for anyone to describe to another human being: that sound, her daughter’s horror, that mad, pitched wailing, inharmonious, disorienting. The mind searches for some resonance in memory, some means to identify, to distinguish laughter from weeping, fear from rage—like the strange notes a crowd makes when heard from a long way off.

Writing on the Wall

What are you writing about, Fen?

The girl in the blue dress is restless, trying to draw me into another conversation. I tell her, this girl Brie, I still have so many walls to write on; she’s interrupting my work. Again. She needs to find her own thing, her own dream or nightmare to inhabit away from mine. Just the other day or night or month or year or minute or second ago, I was sitting next to my mother on the staircase, and she was holding something and remembering me and smiling; then, suddenly, this nightmare that had turned into a pleasant dream morphed into another nightmare, and I saw my mother and father in the kitchen opening a box full of dead animals. So much blood, my father said. And they took the box outside onto the porch. And my mother cried and my father held her. And then they crossed the porch hunched and shuffling and went inside. And they both looked a hundred years old.

I’ve covered two of the third floor ballroom walls and half the ceiling with poems and stories about my life. Brie is reading my thoughts. I turn and look at her, and see the rejection, my rejection of her, reflected in her watercolor eyes. Her long dark hair, defies gravity, stirs around her face and shoulders as if caught up in a perpetual breeze. This girl that inhabits my nightmare reminds me of my sister Alice sometimes. I reach around and reopen the wound at the base of my skull. I dip my index finger in the blood pulsing out and start a new story for my sister Alice, a memory I need to keep, from before she had Daisy, and it was just the two of us.

Some of the blood on my finger floats out into the air and swirls around me like cigarette smoke, a crimson mist. I wave it away and start writing.

There was something close to Jesus stirring just below the surface of my sister Alice’s eyes. I mean, when Alice fell into one of her trances, it was like she could see right through me into another room—or world, even. Take for example one bright, blue afternoon seven years ago—

It was after school, and I was alone walking back from the bus stop, when, suddenly, like

Icarus crashing down out of the sky, there was Alice, my big sister, all bunched up in a sea of rudeness and curiosity, both hands caught behind her back and looking at me sideways. I mean, holding me there. The few seconds before the cop shoved her head into the police car rolling over into years. Alice said it was just my vivid imagination and the stress of seeing my big sister carted off by the cops, but I swear, for each of those seconds, I counted ten dark horses galloping across her blue-violet field of vision.

Alice had two years left before her braces came off. She hadn’t had them on long, but already, if you looked real close, you could have seen her teeth were almost where they should have been underneath the metal. The orthodontist told Alice, who turned eighteen that July, some of his most gratifying work had been performed on the adult population. Alice wasn’t impressed. Instead, she’d blamed Mom for not getting her teeth fixed sooner. She thought twelve would have been a good age; but we didn’t have the money back then, Grandma Enid wouldn’t loan it to us, and by the time we did, when Alice was sixteen or so, she was too hard to pin down for an appointment.

All through that fucked-up time in my sister’s life she was, on any given day, either dropping acid on the beach or stealing shit from Walgreens: a blow dryer, once; a couple clock radios; a bottle of cologne she actually gave to my mom one year for Christmas. She’d lift over-

the-counter pills, hair dye; anything she could fit under her shirt or down her pants or in her pockets to sell for drug money later on. A gen-u-ine juvenile delinquent, Grandma Enid used to call her, among other things. Alice said Grandma Enid had it in for her since she was born.

My mom once told me she was ashamed to admit it, but the one time Alice was sent to the detention home, she was almost glad she was locked up. Not out of spite for anything she did, but for the simple reason that those years Alice was running wild, my mom’s imagination ran just as wild behind her.

My mom and I have had conversations. Did I want to hear the latest about Alice? Well, yesterday the school called. Or juvenile court or the police. And, always, my mom would tell me these things about Alice as if I didn’t already know; but the truth is, Alice had been making her confessions to me long before any real trouble began.

“What’s the most courageous thing—?” That’s how my sister started out telling me about the time she sold her soul for a pack of cigarettes. She said she did it one night when she was broke and trashed and hanging with some borderline devil worshipers. Curses and spells,

Dungeons and Dragons. You know, the ones that don’t kill anything; they just burn a lot of candles and act like they hate everyone.

Alice tried to buy back the piece of paper the deal was written on, but this guy, Lloyd

Breedlove, he wasn’t selling. Lloyd was that bug-eyed pizza dude; you know, the one with the

Medusa dreads still holding up the sign for Pinnochio’s—Two Large Pepperoni $12—every

Wednesday on the corner of Ash and Lake Street. Alice used to work there, too, but quit when it was her turn to hold the sign.

Anyway, this Lloyd dude, he was just in love with the fact that he had something Alice wanted. On more than one occasion, Alice offered him fifty bucks for the piece of paper, but

every time, Lloyd had flat out refused, hollering, No deal, bitch! No deal! followed by a fit of laughter so maniacal, Alice said she thought his blood shot, golf ball eyes would pop their sockets.

I wish Alice could have, you know, found something funny about it all. But I guess, being

Alice, she’d first need the Virgin Mary, or God, Himself, to come down and tell her her soul was right where it should be. Always was.

Abdullah Al-Baradouni

Claire tried to imagine everything at once as she carried the envelope to the kitchen, slipped the knife through the small opening at the top corner and dragged the blade across, careful not to tear the contents. The address on the face of the envelope, the handwriting in loose, bright blue ink, to the parents of Fenton Bird, reminded Claire of someone kind and given over to spontaneity, even to risking crossing that line over into foolishness, so long as crossing that line lifted some sad souls out of their temporal purgatory. Someone, either a man or woman—it didn’t matter—with a plump husband or wife, and a brood of solemn and thoughtful, raucous and energy-sapping, young children.

She pulled the envelope’s contents out and reached blindly for the kitchen chair to sit down again but changed her mind and remained standing. Again in the salutation of the letter,

To the parents of Fenton Bird, though this time in a typed font, times new roman. Without comprehending anything, she scanned the letter to the bottom of the page, then lifted it away.

She wanted to know how long the letter was before she read the first word. Several more pages followed the letter, held together at the top by a small black binder clip. Poems. She recognized what she was holding were poems even before she saw her son’s name typed at the top of the first page. The narrow, vertical architecture of the first poem. Couplets. She resisted the urge to devour the poems before reading the letter, not wishing to disturb the order of these precious things she held in her hands. She pulled a kitchen chair out from beneath the long wooden table, told her heart to slow down and sat.

To the parents of Fenton Bird,

Please accept my condolences on the loss of your son. I’ve enclosed the poems Fen turned in last semester in May; I apologize for sending them to you so late. I confess I had a difficult time both writing this letter and returning the poems to you. I was saddened by your son’s sudden passing and found the poems he wrote, having them to read now and then, a selfish comfort to me. My deepest apologies for this.

Fen was a pleasure to have in class, and I would often find him in one of the student lounges filling up notebooks with his poems and stories before class even started. He was thoughtful and kind and sat in his desk with his long legs stretched out in the aisles and with whatever story or poem we were reading opened up on his desk, his heavy brows furrowed in ardent concentration.

As an example of your son’s generous nature, Fen once came to the aid of another student when the class had ganged up on that student for an impulsive, insensitive, and shockingly racist interpretation of Robert Lowell’s “For the Union Dead.” Fen then had to make his way out of the mire after directing that unwieldly atmosphere of aggression toward himself and away from the provocateur, whose expression of gratitude and relief I don’t think I’ll ever forget. I later told Fen he’d have made a great fireman, so swift was he at putting out that fire.

For context, I will only tell you that three of the poems here were written after viewing three films in class; another after pulling disparate words out of a basket; another on place; and the last, though it’s the first poem you will read, from a childhood memory.

I have to say I’m glad I hadn’t had the chance to mark up these poems with my feedback. You receive them as I did, from his bright intellect and big heart—and with joy. Abdullah Al-Baradouni

In Water

I know I washed my mother’s back

In the scattered morning hours in diffused light she would call me to the side of the tub and when I had arrived would sit up eyes closed waves rocking

I know I washed my mother’s back

I remember the soft profile of her breasts and at their equator, two dark coins and the awkwardness of the rag in my small hands and the smell of soap and skin like an old house or a grave and the inside-out of our voices engaging the invisible surfaces of water

To the Madonna of the Pink Scarf: See, You Look Like an Angel —after watching the film Basquiat

Silence translates the scene: a crowd of people running on TV & whatever I’m looking at—

imagined out of mind, breath— The eye is a mirror. Do you recall the image of the bearded man reflected in the right & left corneas of the Virgin Mary’s eyes ) )?

I’ll say this only once, “I do this because I can—or you do this because you can— so why not, why the hell not?” Translate this landscape: your adorable vandalizing gaze. Would you have hated the sound track, embraced your changing postures in rumpled bed clothes, your pretty Italian girl? You are twenty years old & so opposed to your own obscurity—

O little primrose man, with your palette of blood &clay, the green of life & infection. Brown doll, brown Raggedy Andy doll: You would have loved Benecio Del Toro in his part opposite you, if, well, if you had just let yourself live, & he—he would have adored . you . too

A Waiter Predicts the Resurrection of Gods and Monsters

I loved Brendan Fraser in Gods and Monsters, his mute, lumbering slow dance

in the end miming the monster, the saint reinventing the stalker, with his size twenty shoe-box feet; with his legs like two telephone poles (a new-born with gout—whoever heard of it ? ) ; with his heart like a deserted hive, but for one mad bee humming Mother, Mother—

All his missing pieces…

But there comes a time when you have to forget all that: the crushed caviar eye floating like an oil slick and his one good eye, a stone— a stone taken from the Vatican collection—priceless! But there comes a time, you know, when you have to forget all that: the sloppy, twisted grin, his moaning all night long, his moaning over a toothache, always his moaning— And the tender, clumsy way he applauds the body and its corruption, down to the smallest imperfection, or as if to say:

What’s a little death, when we’re all gonna rise again?

Documentary

…and so I continued to watch, as though disembodied, this 70-year-old man— this piece of you— as he wept near the end of a film interview, that subtitled (though I did not get to see her) his invalid wife and these past fifty years spent cutting cane (fifty years and still he is cutting cane) back and forth in a veteran sweep under the white Guianan sky: the edge of his machete glancing off the sun—

And still I wonder how he makes the day go I wonder how he makes the day go

She Said, I’m Talking About Burning for hours, au naturel, just the two of us & the scorching sun, a wild- mooning event— A fire, a story of want & wilderness, joined later

by Moroccan bears, wee & blissfully wearing veils.

Fall in Cemetery, Ohio

Wandering past color- form trees, you cover your eyes & through splayed fingers nearly miss the compunctious rise of starlings, their immense cloak, flapping vampiric in the gray- engorged sky— Neither for mourning nor against, you unmake the bed of choked flowers, between the lake & the desert, far enough away from miasmic towns, on the outskirts of skyscrapers & street sweepers, when suddenly—

You can’t turn back now— the unchoreographed helium float of the emboldened moon.

In Water

Claire did not let questions induced by that first poem stall her reading all the others, but she came back to that first one nevertheless. Its mysterious images—and how the professor had described it in his letter from a childhood memory—played over in her mind and drew her attention away from the other five.

She at first only had a vague memory of what her son was describing in the poem. How melancholy this poem made her feel compared to the other five, and embarrassed too, worrying her son’s professor may have thought she’d been inappropriate with her son when he was a child.

She thought she did remember sometimes calling Fen and Daisy to wash her back to keep them near her when she was taking a bath. But it was only because their father was working nights, and Claire was worried about them coming to some harm wandering around in that big house for very long unsupervised. She thought she recalled now both of her children taking turns and even arguing over whose turn it was. Now, Claire wondered if this seemingly harmless act had frightened her little son so long ago. After reading the poem three times, with little difference in the sadness she felt with each new reading, it certainly seemed as though it had. Claire tried to tamp down the flood of self-recrimination now overwhelming her. Alice, after all, couldn’t have always been trusted to look after her little brother. As soon as she’d discovered the servants’ quarters in the depths of the house, Alice would either leave Fen to play by himself or coax him down with her where he would always end up scrambling back upstairs pale and anxious as though he’d seen a ghost and had told his mother exactly that.

Part Four

I sat before my glass one day, And conjured up a vision bare, Unlike the aspects glad and gay, That erst were found reflected there— The vision of a woman, wild With more than womanly despair. —Mary Elizabeth Coleridge, The Other Side of the Mirror

A Blinding Light

Shane hunted around in the bed sheets, found first his wife’s reading glasses, then laying his hands on the remote, pressed the mute button. He was watching reruns of the X-Files, and one of his least favorite episodes, one that had to do with monsters rather than space aliens, had just ended and gone to commercial. He looked over at the line of books arranged fortress-like down the middle of the bed. His wife was absent from her side of the fortress, working on an assignment from an art class she picked up as part of her grief therapy. He found his book, the only one that was his in the fortress. It was the most recent in a series of UFO-type books that

Shane had been reading from his father’s small science fiction collection of books he’d discovered in the library. The binding was broken, a smell of mold and decay rising. As he opened the book, a puff of dust riled the hairs inside his nose. He sneezed a powerful sneeze and, for a few seconds, went half-deaf in one ear.

Shane flipped quickly through it, scanning for pages that contained such words and combinations of words he’d grown somewhat attached to, such as the much maligned “UFO” and “alien.” And others, too: “lights,” “sky,” “mysterious,” “mysterious lights in the sky”; plus

“sighting,” “saucer,” “implant” (referring here to the tiny device surgically inserted by aliens for tracking their human subjects once safely returned home). And, lastly, the three that drummed in his mind like a mantra: “kidnap,” “abduction,” and “missing time.”

Still, Shane had no intention of becoming an expert in the UFO field—not that he believed there really were any experts, or that one should refer to anything having to do with little green men as a field. After all, such sci-fi nonsense had only been a diversion for his father

and now him, nothing more. Though he did sometimes feel as if death had kidnapped his son, and wherever death had taken him was as much a mystery to him as any alien abduction story.

Still, he found comfort in the books his father once read, touched, enjoyed. He knew on some level he was trying to find succor from a ghost, his father’s ghost, in order to lessen his own anguish over his son’s death.

The darkness in the room deepened for a split second, signaling for Shane the next episode in an all-night marathon of the X-Files; he doubted he’d be awake to see the ending of this one. He looked up sleepily from his book as an enormous spaceship filled the screen, and directly beneath it, on a pitch black, lonely road, a young couple out for a drive came to a screeching halt and was enveloped in a blinding light.

The Truth Is

Claire disliked the exercises in perspective most of all. She hadn’t had a drawing class since high school, not in over twenty years. Now, once again, she was the slow and careful budding artist and, at the small regional college she herself had taught at for fifteen years, would require an entire class just to get the lines right—but even then some were not. Afterwards, both frustrated and curious, she would turn and take a look around; would see to her awe and dismay that most, perhaps all, of the dozen or so twenty-somethings—she was forty-three, the old lady of the class—had gone on to shading the walls and ceiling tiles, drawing in smart little details: a drinking fountain, some potted plants (a lovely invention, she thought, there were none in the lobby). One highly resourceful girl, taking the potted plant idea a step further, drew the instructor—when he was gone on one of his ten-minute breaks—pressed flat as a bug specimen inside Administration’s long glass wall, lips puffed out like a fish.

Remembering her self-conscious rendering of two-point perspective, Claire tried to approach the next assignment, the self-portrait, with the same reckless abandon as writing a first draft of a poem.

She set up the black metal easel in one of the three spare rooms down the hall from their bedroom which she and Shane now used for folding and ironing. There was already the little scratched Italian mirror hanging on a wall there, the perfect size. Claire had always thought of it as a “mirror, mirror on the wall” sort of mirror with its oval glass and ornate gold leaf frame.

The mirror, Shane once told her, had been a gift to Enid from his father, from one of their many

trips abroad long ago.

So she had the easel on which rested a large drawing pad; the little Italian mirror hung on the wall beside the mahogany side table, circa 1820, brought up from its useless place in the library; and the portrait’s subject herself—a 40-something, gray-streaked redhead in jeans and a tank top—as she stood in her stocking feet, between mirror and easel, gripping her number six graphite pencil.

Claire set an old art book from the library and her supplies on the side table beside her: a bread basket filled with a variety of pencils, numbers two through nine, purchased, along with number six, at her drawing instructor’s suggestion from Prisms Art Store an hour’s drive away from Cemetery, plus three different kinds of erasers, blending sticks and a thimble-sized plastic sharpener.

With a single contour line that she would almost immediately erase, she tried to coordinate the movement of her head back and forth from drawing pad to her reflection with that of her hand. It was above all an exercise in short term memory with the added complexity of herself as subject. From the very start, she felt like a dog chasing its own tail, as over and over she searched for herself, went after what it was she thought she saw just seconds before in the mirror.

Nearly half an hour went by, marks made and erased, with each new attempt undermined by the shadows of her mistakes. She was still, without a doubt, unsure of where or how to begin.

At the same time, her reflection, or more specifically the gaze of her reflection, looked, to Claire, equally unsure, while lagging behind in its movement and expression just long enough to seem oddly and, yes, she observed, quite singularly distinct from herself. And within this dust mote of time that it took her to turn to her drawing pad and then back again to her reflection, she

suddenly burst out laughing. It seemed her laughter was unexpected not only for Claire but for her reflection, which looked as though it were trailing the last “Ha!” even after she, Claire, had collected herself, tried on a quiet meditative smirk as remote as the Mona Lisa’s.

In the wake of her laughter, Claire relaxed her grip on the pencil, looked past her reflection into the hallway behind her and thought of Shane asleep down the hall. She was sure she could discern the loose elastic notes of his snoring. For a moment, she traced the sound back

to its source, pictured herself lying beside him in bed, then hovering over him in the darkness: a benign poltergeist, disseminating light like the static white field playing across the face and hands of Seurat’s mother on page ninety of the old art book she borrowed from the library.

Once again, she tightened her grip on the pencil and nearly in the same instant relaxed it, allowed for a few seconds more the image of her sleeping husband and the familiar cacophonous waves of his snoring to wash over her. For the first time in months, it dawned on Claire how much she’d taken Shane for granted. It had happened so gradually, so unconsciously, to them both after the death of their son. That singular event having had essentially tilted the stage that was their life and caused her husband to come toppling over into her corner. It was an extravagant togetherness which, viewed from any angle, window or doorway, had the unhappy effect of magnifying all that was wrong with their marriage.

A panacea: She began at the coal shadowed valley between her breasts, leaned in, lit a match. Tugged at the hem of her black cotton tank top in order to draw down the neckline, understand further the impenetrable allure.

Later that week, during his critique in front of the class, the instructor, Arthur

Briganski—Everyone, please, call me Art!—will say this area, this place which, for her, had

been the only conceivable way into the drawing, resembled a scar more than a woman’s cleavage; will again advise her to be more aggressive with the blending stick, less ambitious about the scope of her composition. The head and neck, he will scold, are daunting enough to the beginner.

But her class wasn’t for four more days and since she hadn’t yet heard the professor’s disparaging remarks, she went on...

At midnight, Claire began sketching the eyes, having worked from the chest upward through to the neck and face—she was thrilled with the way the nose turned out, finished to her satisfaction one ear. Slowly, awkwardly, she moved closer to the mirror, the tip of her nose grazing the glass. As she struggled to locate the twin pinpoints of light, she felt her own eyes burning and, at the same time, was surprised at how clear they looked, sparkling back with an intensity that seems almost drug induced. At night, the house was often too cold for her; Enid’s refusal to reinsulate the house year after year kept the temperature in every season but summer around sixty. But she was uncomfortably warm now, her face, her reflection, flushed, even glowing. Hours before when she had sketched the first tentative lines, she’d been shocked by how washed out she appeared—the word cadaverous had crossed her mind—and she wondered if she should sign up for a week’s worth of tanning.

Shane had emptied the dryer, set the basket of laundry atop the low, stout dresser behind her. Now, each time she took a step back from her easel to reach for another pencil or a clean piece of eraser, Claire saw the baskets reflected in the mirror. It’s like a machine folded these! was what she’d exclaimed months back when Shane had taken over the wash. Shane had taken to doing the laundry compulsively, used up all the detergent before Claire had a chance to shop.

Most days, by the time she got up and had her shower, the laundry would all be washed, folded and put away.

During his time off after their son’s funeral, a whole month, Shane had adapted easily to

Claire’s own time clock: I finally get to go to bed at night like a normal person was what he’d said, and had sounded genuinely relieved, as if that were some sort of consolation for losing a child. Claire, on the other hand, found her husband’s time off, which coincided with the start of her protracted leave of absence from her job, burdensome. During that month of tears and long, dead silences between them, Claire had begun staying up later and later. She would use the time alone while her husband slept to read and work on her writing, sometimes rent the kind of movie

Shane never cared to watch with her.

She had begun sketching the hair and eyebrows, a barely visible portion of the left ear, when she found it had become too warm in the room to go on. She gripped her pencil like a dog his bone between her teeth. Then, like a magician, she removed her bra without taking her shirt off, unzipped and slid her jeans down around her ankles, kicked them over into a corner of the room. For a moment, she dropped her gaze, drew the palm of her hand from her knee to her thigh, felt the rough, unshaved patches. Claire was sure Shane had not made love to her since before her last period, and now she was due again. She felt the tender corpulence of her breasts when she removed her bra, little fishhooks of pain all day long in her abdomen. She pulled her socks off, was standing before the mirror barefoot now in just a black tank top and underwear.

It was nearly three a.m. when she put her blending stick down. She had begun to worry if she didn’t stop soon, she might just get too attached. In fact, for over an hour now, each time she

had reached for it, she felt as if she were trying to obscure, even rub out, some important truth about herself.

It began with the port wine stain, a purplish red starfish nearly a half inch in diameter floating just outside her temple above her left eyebrow. An unremarkable congenital tattoo—

Claire sometimes chanted smaller than a bread box, bigger than a mole while applying her makeup—it caught her eye as she was shading the forehead, though she had almost overlooked it, being so much a part of the familiar landscape of her face. Still, once she’d taken it into account, she went ahead then, attempted several times to sketch it in only to find minutes later that she’d accidentally erased it or obscured the tiny birthmark within a scrap of shadow.

But she was too near the end, didn’t want to waste any more time obsessing over the little identifying mark, her little starfish that disappeared every time her head turned. As a matter of fact, she was so engrossed in applying the finishing touches to the self-portrait, she barely noticed that for a split second the lights went out. Just a flickering, yet it marked a turning point in her mood and the uncharted trajectory of the night.

Right then, a strange mix of longing overtook her. She dropped her pencil onto the easel’s thin metal tray, turned away from the mirror and went downstairs to the kitchen. She was on a quest for more, more substance...more color. Yes, it was perfectly clear now what she’d been unable to grasp but what her reflection had been arguing for all along. Though it would be dawn soon, everyone up and moving about the house, Enid needing her. Recognizing this,

Claire felt a certain hostility toward the approaching daylight; felt as though a spell were about to be broken as she rummaged through the kitchen cupboards, put the few things she found in a plastic bag and went back upstairs.

Now, laid out on the side table was all she needed to finish the self-portrait: four vials of

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food coloring, a half-empty canister of baking cocoa, paprika, and Saigon cinnamon—a full jar of the latter, still with the lid sealed, from the Gourmet Collection: We’ve searched the world to gather the most exotic, premium herbs and spices so you can create an authentic flavor adventure all your own! And there on the table—it has been there all along—the old art book from the library, The Natural Way to Draw, by Kimon Nicolaides.

With her back turned to the mirror, Claire leaned over the table, opened the book to page twenty-eight—it had been dog-eared—and read aloud:

The eye alone is not capable of seeing the whole gesture. It can only see parts at

a time. That which puts these parts together in your consciousness is your

appreciation of the impulse that created the gesture. If you make a conscious

attempt merely to see the gesture, the impulse which caused it is lost to you. But

if you use your whole consciousness to grasp the feeling—the impulse behind the

immediate picture—you have a far better chance of seeing more truly the various

parts. For the truth is...

Here, Claire paused, brushed back a strand of hair that has fallen forward over her face, repeated slowly, and not without a degree of reverence, the words For the truth is before continuing aloud:

that by themselves the parts have no significant identity. You should attempt to

read first the meaning of the pose, and to do this properly you should constantly

seek the impulse.

For the truth is— Suddenly, Claire felt both relieved and exhilarated, felt, that she was no longer near the end. What she’d thought of just hours ago as a simple class exercise for channeling her grief had become something in its own right—the very blood and bones of a

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thing.

Claire took the vials of food coloring out of their small box, broke the seal on the jar of cinnamon, and repositioned herself before the mirror. Now, staring down at the raw natural medium arranged on the table beside her, she imagined its colors arousing something thus far undefined in the self-portrait. As it was, the drawing could not, with its shades of gray, its tame precise marks, satisfy her desire for that elusive impulse Nicolaides spoke of.

At four a.m., while it was still pitch black between the slats of every closed shade, Claire launched into a search for the ineffable gesture. Without any of the previous stalling and with the eyes in the mirror looking back at her still somewhat guarded, she dared her reflection to guide her hand, to be her eyes. She knew if she was to go after the truth, she must dive in blind, risk abandoning everything she had accomplished thus far in the night, even, if necessary, begin again from scratch.

Using the palm of her hand like a palette, she arranged two powdery mounds, burnt orange and brown in the center, and in a semi-circle around these, beads of yellow, green, red and blue.

At half past five, she was chasing down the little starfish—one of its quick, wiggly legs had gotten tangled up inside her hairline—when she glimpsed Shane behind her in the mirror. He was wearing a T-shirt and boxers, having just woken, and from that distance away, in the dim hallway, his tall masculine frame seemed somehow less substantial, even boyish, to Claire. He moved out of the mirror’s reflection, and, shortly after, Claire heard the toilet flush. She watched as he came into the room and reentered the mirror’s reflection, saw that his face needed shaving and his hair had been pressed flat on one side and molded into stiff

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peaks and waves like meringue on top. After so many years of marriage, Claire was still surprised at how rough and tumble her husband looked upon waking, as though he’d been wrestling all night with a bear.

Shane walked toward the baskets of clean laundry on the dresser, cast a sideways glance at Claire—the last time he renewed his driver’s license, he’d passed the vision test only by squinting. For an instant, as he circled tiredly around to the other side of the dresser, Shane was beyond the range of the mirror. When he reappeared in the mirror, Claire saw that he was now slightly off center, a portion of shoulder, his left arm, just outside her line of vision.

“What got into you in there?” he asked. He was already gripping the laundry basket by its handles, head bowed down, considering its contents.

“In where?” asked Claire. Claire trapped the starfish beneath her right index finger then turned her attention back to her husband. She watched as he picked up one gray sock and then one white, then apparently unsure of how to proceed, shook his head and dropped both socks back into the basket.

“You scared the hell out of me,” he said, still not looking at her and beginning now in earnest to sift through the clean tangle of laundry.

Claire felt the starfish struggling to free itself, felt its pulse throb and flutter beneath her fingertip.

“I woke up in the middle of the night,” Shane went on, “and you were lying on top of me, whispering—” The activity of his hands, slow and tentative at first, had become swift and rhythmic now, going back and forth between the basket of laundry and the stacks already folded and spread out on the dresser. “—but I couldn’t understand what you were saying. And the worst thing was I felt like I couldn’t move, like I was paralyzed. Couldn’t even open my eyes

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until you rolled off, and I heard the door close behind you.”

With her back still turned to him, still standing before the mirror, Claire told him that he must have dreamed it, that she had been where she was now all through the night. Then, shyly, nervously, she warned him that she has painted herself, used up nearly everything she had taken in the night from the kitchen: the canister of cocoa, the vials of food coloring, the bottle of paprika—only the cinnamon, with its course, granular texture that rolled off her fingertips like ordinary table salt, had been of no use to her. And all this, she told him, as he let the pale blue bed sheet he was poised to fold fall back into the basket, in order to go deeper into the exercise.

To try and understand where it was she had gone wrong with the self-portrait. “Other than that, I don’t know why I did it,” said Claire, “I just couldn’t stop myself once I’d started.”

He was, at first, unable to find words. For what she’d made of herself in the night struck him as both beautiful and grotesque. Instinctively, he took her face into his hands, slowly turned it to the right and then to the left like a physician examining some exotic disease.

His wife’s complexion looked jaundiced, a streaky mix of yellows, though he quickly recognized that her skin had only been stained with something to appear that way. He saw where a bright rust-colored powder had gathered in her hairline and where, along the edges of her face glowing like a nimbus, the same powder has left its residue. He was both shocked and captivated by her handiwork, by the manner in which she’d layered yet another darker powder in a grid-like fashion, following the direction of bone—the variations of flesh on bone.

He dropped his hands from her face and gripped her shoulders, leaned in closer, and as he did, a harsh bitter smell invaded his nostrils. Yet, even more unsettling than this strange odor as he now drew back a little were the many rainbow-colored crosshatchings and wildly juxtaposed

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patterns rendered from her neck down like a kind of bruised pedestal upon which had been mounted the transmogrified head of his wife.

He tightened his grip on her shoulders. He was aware of his own heart beating and a familiar ache there as he tried to discern the derelict strokes of color staining the wife’s neck and chest and which even ran like psychedelic highways down the lengths of both arms.

Shane followed her down the hall to the bathroom, and something about the way he opened her stained hands, wet the wash cloth for her with soap and water, made Claire feel both foolish and cared for. And as he began restoring her to her former self, she found she was too tired to resist, was so moved by the kind, intimate gesture of his washing her that she could only give in to him when, afterwards, he followed her to bed.

For a while, she let herself imagine words, thought she could make out whole sentences in the erratic rhythm of their breathing. She opened her mouth to speak, was sure what she was about to say would give wings to the slow, hammering grief that was their body. But as the familiar shadow climbed higher, she could only murmur the same old mantra and ride the storm out to its predictable and merciful end.

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Journal Entry: 911 Recording

What were you thinking, My Heart? Did you think you would keep living, breathing, forever, no matter what road you wandered down, even if only briefly? I can’t wait until the lake is moving again…its icy surface feels intractable today, makes me feel like there’s a hand over my mouth. Beneath the lake ice, the water and its fish are like my tongue and teeth and breath pushing and scraping against that hand. I read somewhere that hearing is the last sense to go; and what of touch? No one was there to hold you in their arms to say I love you when you were dying. Correction, there were several people there who could have done this: your sister, who was there first, but too out of her mind to do anything but try to make you breathe again; the man who ran out of his house when he heard the crash (I need to find him, touch his face); the two officers who arrived just before the fire truck idling on the street in the accident photos; the paramedics in their white ambulance. But how strange that that one small act of mercy for the dying didn’t cross any of their minds; or if it did, they just let the thought, the impulse, evaporate. Not one, to speak for us, to be us, for me and your father, who couldn’t be there to pick you up in our arms and say I love you I love you I love you as you were dying.

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Message on the Ceiling

From Shane Bird ([email protected]) To… stoneybrookmedicine.edu Cc… Bcc… Subject: Sam Parnia, M.D., Ph.D., MRCP | Nour Foundation

Hello again, Dr. Parnia,

I understand you can’t answer emails personally, I get that. And I know the work you’re doing with the Consciousness Project can’t bring my boy back from the dead. But it gives me hope, you know, that some pretty smart people, scientists, and doctors like you, are still taking the time to look into this, this place we’re all going to. Because my boy’s there, and if he can somehow see me, I want him to know I’m searching for him the only way I know how, by believing in what you guys are doing and sending what small donations I can.

I have to tell you until it happened, I was just going, going, never stood still long enough to really think about it, like 99% of the world’s population, probably. My dad’s death, that hurt, but turned out it was a bearable hurt. I think it’s weird now, shitty, really, how I used to be, and I think the whole world’s pretty crazy too now. How we talk about everything but that. It’s like we have to be in some church or stoned or just out of our minds with grief to even bring it up.

Why the fuck we’re here, where we’re all going, blah, blah, what the fuck it’s all about, what kind of God, if there is one, and he’s half man, so he should have at least half a human brain and

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heart, can allow so much suffering. This planet’s a blood and tear-soaked ball of dirt, and we have to build our short lives on it, keep that awful truth from our kids as long as we live. I know no one’s listening on your end, reading this, but pretending there is, that you are, gives that stranger’s voice that is and is not my voice, screaming inside my head 24 hours a day, a kind of sounding board.

Please just keep shooting me those form letter replies. Here’s hoping one of your floaters sees the message on the ceiling and lives to tell it.

Shane could hear his still-unarticulated thoughts roaring inside his head. This email, like all the rest, seemed now just a fragile gesture that would not, could not, accomplish anything, nor ever be read by anyone, by any real person who cared. So how was it then that every time he sat down to write he felt the opposite, as if every keystroke mattered, the blinking cursor like a pulse pulling him along toward some terrifying epiphany, its disappearance and reappearance mirroring his own fear of annihilation. Alright, not his own—he didn’t care if he lived or died, if his own soul was eternal or not—but his son’s, his son’s soul, and his son’s body, yes, that too, all of him. He would not let religion or his own dark imagination debate it for long. Fen is just as he was and still is, for Shane, forever. No one, especially Shane himself, could ever debate that; because the point of that would be to use his son’s death and his own grief as some sort of teaching tool for the nihilists and the religious fanatics alike. Like scavenging. Scavengers all, using his loss to somehow validate their own fragile beliefs. Not like the Project, those doctors and scientists, a force of human objectivity and logic, believed as he did, that his son was alive

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and well. Somewhere. Like a POW or a time traveler. Out of touch, maybe even out of the solar system, but not gone. Not gone.

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The Priest

Spring 2017

He rose early, let Father Hugh’s old dog out to do his morning business. He saw he had time to spare, saw too as he pulled the kitchen curtain aside to check the dog’s progress that the wind had died down. It looked like the day could go either way. Through the window, heavy purple clouds loomed over rooftops, but the priest was glad to see a tattered yellow nimbus around their edges, a small light pulsing through the trees as the clouds moved by.

He would get his morning exercise in the hour it took to walk Communion over to Enid

Bird and back to the rectory. He poured water for his second cup of coffee, tossed back his morning pills to keep his heart going and the pain at bay, then checked again his schedule; he’d have to be back to say Mass by 6 p.m. then to the shelter for a community prayer vigil.

He wanted to look again at the little green booklet titled Sturge-Weber Community, the section on symptoms, severity, and methods of treatment, and which, to his surprise, included images of the afflicted. Almost all the photos in the booklet were of children. None appeared the least bit uncomfortable to him, most were smiling as if for a school picture. A young golden- haired boy looked as though he were wearing a magenta mask. His port wine stain—according to the literature, the defining physical symptom—wrapped around both eyes in near perfect symmetry. A slightly older girl, fair and blond like the boy—the priest wondered if they could be brother and sister—had a pattern of embossed flames that reached from the tops of her cheeks to her forehead in a dramatic, and to his eyes, near-beautiful conflagration. A woman at the shelter— her young son suffered from Sturge-Weber, had to be rushed to the ER for seizures

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twice in the month since they’d arrived. He would try to find a family to take them in. This would not stand. The adults there, after all this time, their plights rolled through his heart and out the other side, but the kids…they got stuck there. So many over the years, he wondered that it was still beating.

He dressed quickly, combed his hair back without looking in the mirror, slid the pyx with the host inside into his shirt pocket. On his way out the door he patted the dog on the head, said,

“Guard the home front,” and felt hopeful as he set out, that the rain would hold off, and he’d get his walk in, like the doctor ordered before the start of every day.

The scent of anise from a weed or wild flower permeated the air as he walked past a dozen sleepy cottages, then a mile up one road and half a mile down another. He both felt and heard the sudden rhythmic crunch of his own footsteps over gravel as he started up the Bird’s long s-shaped driveway. Felt, too, the blood rush to his face, when a sharp piece of slag nearly pressed through the bottom of his shoe where the sole had worn thin on one side. For an instant, he understood the pain in his foot in some vague relationship with the memory of his mother. He felt the pain shoot from the sole of his foot up through the back of his leg, the sciatic nerve chronically inflamed, and on up through to his arthritic hip, that sister pain now a little awake.

He stopped for a second, tested his foot, made sure he could go on. At the same time, two squirrels making a racket chasing each other up and down a lightning-struck tree stopped too.

Both squirrels peered at him stock still from around the wide, blighted trunk. He looked back at the small frozen creatures, wished he hadn’t disturbed their play and wondered how long they’d remain that way. As he continued up the long gravel drive, he tried to see through the brackish morning light, a sepia haze trapped between the branches of trees obscuring the house looming in

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front of him. The two windows of the third floor, the only ones in plain view—rectangles of black construction paper.

At the gate, he pressed a hand to cool iron, and, just then, as he lifted the latch, a large spider jumped seemingly out of nowhere landing on his shirt front. He brushed and slapped at his shirt while checking the ground and pulling his pant legs out in front of him until he was satisfied, though not certain, it was gone. He pushed the gate open then and it swung out defiantly; sounded to him like a stuck pig.

The house, the sight of it, opened up as soon as he reached the driveway’s second gate. It was as he remembered it in winter when the leaves were down and it could be seen plainly from the road when he passed by, like a small castle gone to hell; here and there, boarded up windows, the paint peeling down to bare wood. He believed the house and property went from bad to worse in the year since the funeral of Claire and Shane Bird’s son. The vegetation, gnarled and shrunken and more dead than green even now in May, pressed up against the foundation and rolled out in bleak ruination across the sprawling grounds. Though it was still too early in spring to make a fair prognosis, it seemed whatever dark angel had cursed the house, had blighted nature as well.

As he began trudging down the long dirt path leading up to the house, he tipped his head back, looked up at the sky in response to the sudden harsh cry of gulls over the lake. And just then, something small and light struck the back of his neck. He felt it trickle underneath his shirt and against his skin, and he remembered the spider. He slapped the back of his neck and did what looked like a quick, nervous jig to the three pairs of eyes studying him through a sliver of curtained window on the second floor of the house. Then something struck the top of his head.

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Then both arms, then his face—once, twice, three times—and now a deluge and he was running, the fresh, thick mud grabbing at his shoes with the sudden blast of rain and wind off the lake.

That’s him——

Where—?

Look, Liam, down by the gate

Is he your friend?

He’s the priest, silly, here to see Enid . . .to bring her Communion

Look! The wind’s blowing him around . . . he’s getting all wet!

Alright, alright, I’ll go . . . and get the umbrella . . . you stay here with Daisy…you stay

here too Victor!

As the priest ran, he breathed a sigh of relief that it hadn’t been the spider he’d felt running down his back but rain, then looked down with displeasure as mud splattered his pants and shoes. He felt a chill and his face blanching from the sudden drop in temperature. He was looking down at his feet in a near trance, trying to run without splattering more mud, when he felt a firm arm go around his waist, saw a black umbrella open up over his head. He turned then and looked into the face of Anna Cleary as an expression of amusement danced across her delicate features—she had such large, lovely green eyes. He had at first taken her for Claire,

Enid’s daughter-in-law, before he saw her face. What wiry strength she seemed to possess as she guided him beyond the mud path, through yet another iron gate onto firm ground—a walkway of old brick grown over with moss and myrtle, and in the cracks between, small purple flowers.

They hardly spoke, near breathless as they ran, though with the young woman shouting “This

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way!” and “Watch your step!” and “Almost there!” into the tearing sound of the wind and a pelting rain that seemed to come from everywhere at once.

They went around the wall of hedges—he knew these, could see them in the distance from the crest in the road on his walk to the house—then up to an old door, gray paint peeling.

And it crossed his mind that for the many years he’d brought Communion to the matriarch of this cursed house, he’d never known there was an entry there; had always turned from the dirt path to the sidewalk leading up to the front of the house and its massive carved double doors, still beautiful, still nearly successful at conjuring the mansion as it once stood in all its splendor a century ago.

Anna released him, and with one hand opened the door and with the other closed the umbrella. He smoothed his hair, the wet mass that was his hair, into something he hoped was presentable. He cast a downward glance then at his drenched clothes, his muddy shoes, which seemed a kind of visual cruelty to him in the presence of the young woman whose beauty was substantial, and even made more so by the rain that streaked her face, soaked her hair.

“So we meet again, father,” the young woman said.

“Miss Cleary.” He was at a loss for words, catching his breath and trying to conceal as much as possible how breathless he was after their mad dash to the house. He wasn’t a young man, and his heart now thumping loudly in his chest reminded him of that and at every turn it seemed.

“But you can call me Anna; we’ve already been introduced.” The unusual cadence of her voice—warm and, yet…did he detect something mocking in it, just a hint of sarcasm?— interrupted the anxious trajectory of his thoughts.

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The morning lost most of its light to the storm. He couldn’t help but notice how the darkness outside penetrated the rain-streaked windows, spreading its gloom inside. A kind of intangible weight that seemed to attach itself to everything moving and still within the house.

Even the shadows spilling over the walls and floors seemed broader and less finely articulated, lending an aura of claustrophobia to the gloom,

He and Anna had entered through a side door at the rear of the house, a mud room off the kitchen. He followed her into the kitchen, but then Anna stopped abruptly causing him to clip her heels. She spun around and pushed her umbrella into his hands, said, “Wait here just a minute, please!” then walked quickly back towards the door, and back outside, leaving him standing alone in the middle of the room. There was nothing he could do but wait. He figured, hoped, she’d be true to her word and only be a minute, two at the most, that she probably just forgot to close one of the gates or—

He saw her, then, through the kitchen window’s three narrow casements set side by side in rows. That triptych created of the space beyond the window, and the window’s rain-streaked leaded glass—the gray watery backdrop of the day, the rain coming down—made him feel like he was watching a scene from a silent movie: a flash of gray, a shade lighter than the sky, half a coat sleeve, and a pale hand upturned in a gesture meant for collecting rain. A child’s gesture.

He stood for a moment staring, not certain what he was seeing. He went around the table and chairs, trying to stay hidden, to keep her from seeing him. He stood close to the kitchen wall, still holding her umbrella, forgetting that he even held it in his hand. With his other hand on the sill for balance, he tilted his head toward the window pane, but just enough to see. He saw her plainly then, though only the back of her. Her gray raincoat and the coat’s long sash were whipping around in the wind; and she was standing with her face upturned to the sky, arms

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outstretched, bent slightly. Her figure, the garden statue that she’d become, reminded him of how the congregation stood at Mass for the Our Father, something religious, even otherworldly about it. He watched her for less than a minute, but in that brief time he was overcome by the strange drama of it, so much so that he couldn’t resist leaning further into the window frame to get a better look. He was half-tempted to knock on the glass, wave her back inside out of the rain. But just as soon as the thought crossed his mind, she half-spun around like a child pantomiming an airplane, and he, feeling instantly the voyeur, jumped back, knocking the umbrella out of his hand. He left the umbrella on the floor and walked to the middle of the room.

Though he thought in that split second before he drew back from the window that she’d smiled at him, knew he was watching her, and didn’t care, even desired it. He pulled a chair out from the table and sat down and waited.

He studied the room’s self-consciously, wondered where the matriarch of the house was, or Claire, the daughter-in-law, who he called the day before about his coming this morning to give her mother-in-law Communion. He thought he heard kids’ voices coming from somewhere in the house, but it could have been a couple of cats for all he knew…or that pig…they had that crazy pig…what was its name? Starts with a V…Vincent, that’s it. Odd name for a pig. Cochon dans la maison. Très bizarre.

He’d grown accustomed to the occasional bizarre and unexpected circumstance from so many years going in and out of so many houses, but rarely this many oddities all under one roof.

There was the pig for one, and then the house itself, a case for a wrecking ball if there ever was one. Then the two mysterious strangers, Anna and her young son. Well, at least they weren’t strangers in this house any longer. It had turned out well for them, for all of them, it seemed.

Claire’s turning down his offer to bring them to the shelter when two beds opened up three

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months ago in February made him feel for a while less cynical; and he remembered Claire’s spontaneous act of charity that night in December when she flew down the aisle and took those two lost souls home with her.

He’d never been in the kitchen before today, always rang the doorbell and went in through the front door, through the foyer. And until he was offered the elevator, he’d suffered that grand staircase, that agonizing climb to the second floor where Enid either greeted him from her bed—a relic from the mansion’s decadent past, the bed’s carved headboard and footboard depicting angels and dragons and men in military garb—or from her place by her bedroom window, seated in a chair next to that insufferable pig.

His gaze was first drawn to the floor and its black and white linoleum, not the typical checkerboard but rather large black cruciforms broken up by smaller white squares; made him think of Vermeer’s “The Concert”—a framed print of the painting had hung in his boyhood home—and he wondered if the pattern was meant to reflect that. His eyes next fell on the room’s fireplace, with its rough-hewn stones, which looked to him almost primitive in its design, and the stove, too, more like a piece of antique furniture than an appliance with its chipped enamel and cabriole legs. He wondered if the thing even worked, if anyone actually cooked on it. No dishwasher or microwave that he could see.

He thought he recognized the scent of dried eucalyptus and of something cooked or baked recently in cinnamon, and some other spice he couldn’t put his finger on—incompatible scents mingling with an antique-store mustiness.

The house felt cooler compared with the temperature outside. And there seemed to be a natural quality to the temperature, the way basements are several degrees cooler than the rest of the house. He wondered if the house was air conditioned; radiators in every room made him

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doubt it. Someone had folded a towel on the window sill above the kitchen sink to catch the rain. The window was cracked, but the rain didn’t seem to be coming in through the screen.

Against a wall, behind the heavy farmhouse table, a wheelchair was folded up. Must be for the old woman; and for some reason the thought entered his mind again of how capable, how strong,

Anna seemed compared with the exhausted, disenchanted young woman he’d met in December.

His gaze trailed along the wall to the kitchen window he’d glimpsed Anna through. He could not see her now, but saw instead the broad back lawn, all crab grass and dandelions rolling out in the rain and merging with the lake bluff; that other gray and green watery expanse, the lake, its white caps rolling and rolling; the gray, turgid sky and lake merging at the horizon; the lake and sky of one piece there.

He remembered the burial of their son, the cemetery hidden inside a ring of monstrous pines. It rained that afternoon too. Recalled the few headstones there, how they tilted vulnerably in the rain. One of them, the top had completely broken off, chunks of what looked like century- old granite lying beside it.

Most everyone now in Cemetery buried their dead less than an hour’s drive away in

Grafton where there was space for decades to come. But the family, the mother and grandmother mainly, wanted him here. He didn’t know why their boy’s burial in this family cemetery had bothered him then. Perhaps it had been the rain too that day, and the feeling that the house looming in the near distance, was observing and recording, and so absorbing, in a sense, this family’s tragedy, their grief—particularly the boy’s mother’s, whose anguished face that day came back to him even now: How she had to be pulled off the casket, her arms outstretched as her husband and daughter ushered her away. And as the rain came down, the mourners with their black umbrellas and black raincoats had turned their backs to the distraught

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family, made their way like a trail of ants across the back lawn to the dreary mansion, a catered brunch and coffee waiting inside.

The priest heard the back door open and slam shut; saw that Anna, when she appeared again in the kitchen, seemed no wetter than before she went out the second time. He guessed she’d already caught the worst of it running up the long path to the house. The sound of the rain and wind had diminished, the house grown quieter now.

He found it difficult to comprehend what he’d just witnessed: a grown woman, late twenties, doing whatever Anna was doing out there in the rain—like a kid playing in it. It had unsettled him. He had the urge, when he returned home, to look over his notes taken down that

December night after she and her boy left the rectory with Claire.

What was there, he wondered, in her vague tale that first meeting, that first hushed convoluted narrative in the rectory, that had convinced him of her goodness and maturity, her sound mind—or anything else that may have instead caused him to question her mental health?

He would check his notes again this evening. Perhaps, she was much younger than he thought.

Perhaps, he had given her too much credit because of the boy. Were it not for the boy, maybe he would have asked more of the questions he should have when they came knocking on the rectory door. He wouldn’t have wanted to risk scaring them though, her and her young son, back out into the savage cold. He’d learned from his years working at the shelter how the fear of judgement, of persecution, could frighten the neediest souls back to the same hell from which they’d come.

He followed Anna then, who did not shed her coat or wipe her feet after she came back inside, but traipsed rainwater across the black and white linoleum and then onto the foyer’s dull

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wood floors. And she said nothing as she went, her hands plunged deep inside her coat pockets.

So, he just naturally picked up where they’d left off, with Anna leading the way.

He was already forgetting the few words she’d first spoken to him as she whisked him down the path to the house and out of the rain; and he found himself straining to remember the sound of her voice, that unusual cadence, during their brief reintroduction.

He still hadn’t really reintroduced himself, though he thought he’d made an effort to, feeling a temporary shyness, that awkwardness between strangers he still struggled at times to overcome. And while Anna had appeared invulnerable to the driving wind and rain, he still couldn’t shake the memory of his own feeling of vulnerability as they ran for cover. What’s more, as soon as he stepped inside, he’d felt compelled to observe, as in a library or courtroom, some long-held tradition of silence. There were no TVs on in the house that he could hear, no radio. And now Anna’s face flickered across his line of vision like the bright spot from a camera flash, her long red hair wet and streaming over her shoulders and down her back, her wide green eyes, her face still wet with rain. She had looked to him like some exotic creature, a mermaid come onto shore. Anna stopped for a moment, turned her head and looked back over her shoulder at him, and he thought she’d just read his mind.

He said lightly, and for no other reason than to ward off paranoia, “The cemetery across the way—that part of the grounds—is it just the family?” Though what he’d meant to ask was the family’s, so as not to seem as though he were prying too much into who was buried there, but rather just ruminating over the ownership and parceling of land.

And to that, Anna simply replied, “Oh, I was just making sure you were still there,

Father,” as though she hadn’t heard a word he’d just said. And so they continued on, with him lagging just a little behind as he followed her deeper into the body of the house.

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Lilacs

Summer 2017

Ribbons of light streamed in through the pair of arched stained glass windows on the wall above the second staircase landing. The light cast a milky haze over the woman—Anna?—as she stood still and erect cradling what looked to be a baby or very young toddler to Claire.

From the bottom of the staircase, Claire watched the woman lift her squirming bundle over her shoulder, begin patting its back, thought she could hear fussing and crying sounds—Claire loved the lusty cry of an infant when it broke out in the grocery store or the silence of a church.

As the woman began descending the staircase, Claire felt the air in the room grow thinner. And she felt for a second as though the air too had been sucked out of her lungs. She smelled some noxious chemical, which, to her mind, if it’d had a color would have tinted the air with a pale yellow vapor. But as the woman continued her descent—and Claire had now called out two or three times, Is that you, Anna?—she thought she noticed her own voice seemed weak, barely audible. She felt the need to steady herself, to grab the bannister with both hands. The strange chemical smell disappeared, was replaced then by the scent of a flower. Lilacs. The woman on the staircase had now reached the first landing, was moving across it toward the descending stairs. The sun’s rays coming through the first landing’s stained glass windows soaked up a spectrum of colors, and the dust motes illuminated like a giant swarm of no-see-ums obliterated the woman’s form even more.

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The heady scent of lilacs hung in the air now, made Claire swoon; and she was immediately struck by a long-ago memory of her son, and the photograph which had kept the memory alive all these years.

Fen had been just a toddler standing before an enormous lilac bush that had, because of its size and the profusion of color, dwarfed him all the more, made the fine young bones of his face, his pale complexion and eyes appear transfused with light. That afternoon, the sun had had a soft incandescent quality. It had been late spring, and the trees, their leaves, had just recently unfurled, a pale new green delicately filling out the spaces between branches.

Claire had stopped that day at the park with Fen after dropping Alice off at kindergarten—had remembered this time to bring a bag of popcorn for Fen to throw to the ducks.

And she’d packed a brown bag lunch which they ate in a picnic area new to Claire, walled in on three sides by lilac bushes. When they finished eating, she steadied her young son on the bench, slipped the throwaway camera out of her pocket and quickly snapped the picture.

They headed then over to the pond, slowly making their way to the edge of the fishing pier—the busiest one that extended furthest out into the water, Fen’s small hand snug inside

Claire’s. They weren’t there long, though, when two teenagers, a boy and a girl, began arguing behind them on the pier. Claire heard the boy shout, “Fuck you, too, you cunt!” and had reacted angrily, instantly; wanted to find out who’d said it, to stop it before anything more was said, didn’t want Fen to hear. And she’d thought she might—but, no, she hadn’t really thought at all, had simply reacted, letting her two-year-old son’s small hand slip out of hers as she turned to find out who, where had said—

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And Fen, having just then sensed his momma’s hand release his, release him, that weight now gone, had felt a Wooooeeeee! of pleasure bubble up inside him as he knew without knowing, though it was more like an impulse, that he was free to reach out with both hands—for it was the ducks he was after now—to bend over the pier’s gray-weathered edge and lean into his growing reflection on the water. That thick primordial soup, its splash barely audible, like a finger through Jello, as the boy did his little sideways cartwheel, down and into the pond with its tattered skin of algae and whirligigs, stoneflies and water lilies; water full of duck shit and rotifers, water bears and gastrotriches and—

Oh, no! There were snakes down there, and large, lumbering fish with sinister black eyes and razor sharp teeth. And now a doll, a green-eyed, toe-headed doll—Underwater Fen!—in

OshKosh B’Gosh overalls and a blue and white striped Garanimals T-shirt, with a fist full of crushed popcorn—he would not let go of it now!—was transgressing their strange, murky kingdom. And over the boy, the filthy green door was sliding shut, and the door and everything slithering and swimming beneath the door, already denying what had happened, lying about his whereabouts.

While up above on the pier, a hyper Pomeranian leapt anxiously in the air; had begun yapping at the frumpy, middle-aged woman in the stretchy red slacks as she held onto the leash, began shouting at Claire, “Get him! He’s fallen in! Get him! Hurry! Hurry!” while pointing towards the water and running at Claire, rat dog yipping and pittering alongside. The frump’s heavy-clomping gait on the old pier had sounded to Claire like bricks being thrown down; the wood planks shaking as the woman ran, and her face, the flesh there, shaking too. The woman had appeared to Claire—and the half-dozen people stopped cold in the midst of their fishing and strolling—disfigured, ugly, as though she’d just been seized, stabbed in the heart, as Claire, too,

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realized in that instant—for all this took place in the blink of an eye—that the hand which held her little boy’s hand was empty; and beneath her, and stretching far out into the distance and all around her, the water now held a secret, which, if it had its way, would never reveal to anyone.

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Part Five

“If you don't know where you are going any road can take you there” ―Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

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Run

After the wake, it occurred to me (when I remembered Odysseus wandering): I’m a stranger to the child I was. The road home

is through a hole in my sock, past the wind slamming doors, round where pale oranges the night—her innocent oils, her brushes bright—

It buckles like a scratch into which the sea is poured.

This is how you looked back then: one leg up, a hundred years old against the ruins, a great little liar. a great little liar. a great little liar. a great little liar. a great little liar. a great little liar. a great little liar. a great little liar. a great little liar. a great little liar. a great little liar. a great little liar.

I have dreamed you, drawn you, but there is one new detail: a sprig of hemlock in your shoe.

You never knew you could fight it. You see, a poet used the word leg, she didn’t write it, so if you have to run —run

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As the Crow Flies

Fall, 2017

Claire had been alone for less than a week, for God’s sake, away from him for just five days when she heard the car door slam. It was a few minutes past one; she was still in her pajamas. She hadn’t showered, hadn’t slept well; her nights, like the night before, were plagued by insomnia, nightmares and, most recently, though she didn’t know it, sleepwalking. She was standing in a corner of the foyer using a glue stick to smooth a century-old strip of peeling wallpaper back onto the foyer wall, a quick fix. Her hand slipped—she was just so damn tired— scraped the small head of a nail where the portrait of Enid had hung before she removed it to repair the wallpaper. She had reopened one of the many small cuts on her palm.

She walked quickly then, from the foyer to the parlor, trailing blood as she went, to get a tissue from the small utility table next to Enid’s chair. She saw Shane through the parlor window, watched as he started down the walkway flanked by stone benches and cherubs, all moss-covered and somnolent in the autumn gloom. She followed his progress then, window to window, from the parlor to the study; saw him through the two small arched windows in the study step off the walkway and cut a straight path across the front lawn. Claire recognized that hard stride from a mile away, and the profile, strong, even beautiful for a man, glancing off the windows’ 100-year-old crown glass.

He was to the door before she knew it. She couldn’t get away or stop him from coming: a boulder rolling fast down a hill, and she was at the bottom of it, stunned, looking up, unable to move out of its path.

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But where could she have run to, hidden—under their bed? Ridiculous and impractical!

Their quilt barely covered the mattress, and there was no bed skirt to keep her hidden once she’d flattened and dragged the length of her body underneath it. Claire imagined herself running down the rickety wooden stairs to the cellar, tripping and falling out of her shoes, a chaotic gravity pulling her limbs in all directions. Or taking off for the fourth floor attic, for the crawl space at the base of the attic wall, a secret place full of exposed wood and velvety darkness, and just one of the many things Fen had loved about this old house from the time he was a boy. But Claire knew that too was an absurdity; like Alice in Wonderland, she’d be too big to squeeze through the small wooden door.

The ancient doorbell sounded through the house like an old bicycle bell, then jangled and gurgled and sputtered out. Her husband’s face appeared distorted through the front door’s leaded glass window: a gargoyle, thought Claire, Mr. Hyde. As she let him in, she caught sight of three black crows over her husband’s shoulder. Two were pecking and tugging at something on the ground while the third hopped up and down with its enormous wings spread wide, cawing and squawking. All three then began pulling ropes of viscera out from whatever it was, a dead raccoon or squirrel, as hundreds of red and orange leaves purged from the enormous tree out front skittered and flit across the lawn.

“Did you see that?” asked Claire. A gust of wind swept a handful of dead leaves in through the door before she could close it, bringing with them a sharp, deciduous scent. She felt suddenly nauseous, a sour taste in her mouth making her jaws ache.

“See what?” asked Shane, impatient, confused. “What are you talking—“

But she was already running for the bathroom. She pulled her hair back and fell on her knees in front of the toilet in one swift motion, then emptied her stomach of the three cups of

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black coffee and piece of plain toast she’d had for breakfast. Her hands shook as she splashed cold water on her face. She squeezed some toothpaste onto her finger and put it in her mouth, ran her tongue over her teeth, looked in the mirror. Scary lady, thought Claire. In a scary movie.

The sides of her hair now hung in long, wet strands against her face and over her shoulders. Her pale complexion had a sick greenish hue, and her eyes looked clouded over, the whites, bloodshot. A light knocking on the bathroom door, then more insistent, a firmer hand.

“Claire? You Ok, Claire?”

She dried her face, smoothed her wet hair down, then pulled yesterday’s skirt and blouse from the dirty clothes hamper, dressed and went out. Shane followed behind, sulky, pensive, when Claire went into the kitchen to get her cigarettes. Without a word, she grabbed her coat, slipped her shoes on. She went out the kitchen door and down the gravel path, crossed the back lawn and passed the dying gardens, until she reached the bluff overlooking the lake.

Claire could feel Shane right behind her, smelled the fresh clean scent of soap—as if he’d just stepped out of the shower—and cologne. His obvious attention to hygiene made her feel suddenly more wretched. She knew letting things like daily showering go, not bothering with makeup, fixing her hair, were symptoms of mental illness. She’d read something like that in one of the handouts at the grief group. But wasn’t self-awareness, a sign of sanity too? After all, she’d been quite aware of the difficulty she was having caring about and resuming all of life’s little rituals.

“Do I…did I make you sick—coming here?” Shane was pressing her again. He was asking a question that he thought he already knew the answer to, for dramatic effect, to, Claire felt, try to tease out and do battle with that thing in her that was eroding her mind and her health, killing their marriage. Her grief.

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“Of course not. Didn’t you see the crows in the road, how they were tearing into that animal? Horrible.” Claire tried to light her cigarette but it was too windy, and her hand—she hated Shane to worry or, worse, to pity her—was still shaking.

“I almost thought you weren’t going to let me in.” Shane took the cigarette and lighter from her, turned his back against the wind, hunched over and lit it, passed it back to her.

“What do you mean, let you in? You have your key. You’re early…said it would take a week. Did you find what you were looking for? Your dream house?” Claire couldn’t conceal her bitterness. She felt old. A bitter old hag, like his mother. Was she, Claire, dooming herself to becoming just like Enid, forcing her child—Alice!—to a life burdened by her mother’s wretchedness?

Shane pulled a black knit hat out of his jacket pocket, hollered, “Goddamnn wind!” He was wearing a blue-gray denim jacket that Claire didn’t think she’d ever seen on him before. It matched his eyes. He pulled the hat over his head, tugged it down over his ears, the tops of them already reddening from the brisk wind.

“It’s October, Claire. I want to get the hell out of here before there’s snow on the ground again. We have the money now, can go anywhere. I found a house in Charleston, it’d be perfect for us. No more gray skies, no more winter.”

“I like winter. I’ve grown used to it. It’s in my blood now.”

“Do you know it’s been over a year? It will be two years soon, Claire, and this rotten ruin of a house and dull little town won’t bring him back, you know that. And burying his remains here wasn’t—“

“It’s Fen’s body, Shane. Our son’s body.”

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“He’s…he’s not just that anymore…he’s more than that now, Claire. Fen’s free; you’re the one who’s keeping him buried.”

“And Fen loved this house,” she had to say it out loud again, tell the same story to her husband over and over, because he kept forgetting, and his forgetting made her worry it might be contagious, might be a kind of unravelling and a flattening out of memory, of the truth, and eventually a disappearing, which could take her son away from her, she feared, forever.

“When we first moved in, remember? Remember how much he loved this house, the lake, not even your mother could make him hate this house. Remember how he said he couldn’t wait to swim in the lake, how both he and Alice loved the lake? Isn’t that why we stayed so long, for Fen, for Alice too? Not just to care for your father in his last days, and then your mother after and for all those years. You said some day we would restore it to the way it was long ago before your grandfather died and before your mother killed its beauty with her stinginess, her madness.”

“Fen’s never coming back, Claire. He’s never going to live in this house again.”

Shane’s voice sounded firm, controlled to Claire; she wished it still sounded sad. “You have to know now it was a bad decision,” her husband went on, “burying him here, on these grounds, my mother and father, my grandparents, the Donnely’s, fine; but not our son, Claire.

They’d had so little time to make arrangements, just four days between the accident and the burial. Claire had insisted it was meant to be. Shane’s grandfather had included a family cemetery in his initial plans for the grounds, for what he imagined would be generations of his kin buried there. Imagined too, that the house itself, magnificent in its day, would be forever immune to the ravages of time. And Shane’s father could not have predicted his wife’s future

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contempt for it: her unwillingness to provide even the most meager remedy for its deterioration when she saw there would be none to cure her own.

Shane’s grandfather had prepared an area just beyond the west lawn, planted white sapling pines in a circle around the black wrought iron fencing which encircled the family cemetery itself. The pines were now a hundred feet tall. Nothing barred them from burying their son there, Claire had argued. And Shane was too blinded by grief to see how it would sit with him later, laying his son to rest on the grounds of the old house. Macabre, was the word he kept using now, months later, when it was done and so could not be undone. And Claire always countering that it was a gift to them to have him so near.

“We should’ve cremated him, Claire. We should have. Then we could have taken his ashes with us anywhere.”

She really wanted to hit him now, hit him hard, for daring to say those words, “cremated him” and “his ashes,” when he knew, he knew, she had told him, she couldn’t bear the thought.

But what she hated even more was how he kept referring to their son’s body as “his remains,” which brought to her mind images of decay, of putrefaction, of the smooth and bloodless skull and bones of her son. Relics of the saints. She could never reconcile those images with her son, her child.

She tried to light another cigarette, but the damn wind. Her husband’s voice droned on:

“I never should have agreed to it. I should have known neither one of us was in in the right state of mind to make that kind of decision, about where to bury him. Fen, if he could see you, Claire!

Our son would want you to move on, not be tied down to his grave!” Shane threw an arm out angrily in the direction of the west lawn, toward the dense circle of pines. Their green arrow

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tops towered over and dwarfed the small fruit trees and taller oaks planted there to further obscure the cemetery beyond.

Claire believed Shane wanted to start over again, to move far away, so that he could pretend none of this had ever happened, that his son did not die. And after that, she believed he would will himself to believe he’d never had a son at all.

Claire tried to imagine the For Sale sign up in the yard, wondered if any old friends would, out of curiosity, stop by for one last gesture of kindness remembering their loss. Friends had slowly vanished after the accident, month by month, it seemed. There were at first a flood of phone calls and flowers, then less frequently, then slowing down to just a trickle of “how are you holding up,” “let’s do lunch sometime” quick obligatory text messages. And, of course, no one wanted to visit her here, in this crazy, broken down madhouse, and she didn’t want to be anywhere else. This house. This cemetery. For months, two lost, raving-mad souls, moving through their days, squinting through the sunlight; and their nights, holed up like they were buried too, really. They’d shuffled from their bedroom and down to the kitchen, back and forth, dishes sitting unwashed on nightstands, clothes piled at the foot of their bed and strewn on the floors. And Enid, both Claire and Shane had forgotten her in the immediate aftermath; leaving her broken mind and body to the care of strangers. But little by little Claire now saw her husband was returning to the land of the living, crawling out from under his grief.

Shane was ranting now, and Claire was growing weary of it, of the same worn out argument they’d never stop having so long as she kept her heels dug into this house and Shane wanted to run away from it.

“Asbestos, knob and tube, Claire. That old boiler heater in the cellar. Neither one of us has the heart or strength to fix this house, and it isn’t safe to live in the way it is!”

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“That’s even dramatic for you. It’s not an ancient ruin. We’ve lived in worse when Alice was born, before we came here.”

“Do you even hear yourself, Claire?”

Cookie-cutter McMansion. That’s what Shane wanted. He’d always said he hated old things—garage sale junk, old houses, old cars—as much as Clair loved them. The only sign of life, of warmth, in those housing developments was when the landscapers arrived once a week in their beat-up trucks and took their lunch breaks out on the perfectly manicured lawns, eating and smoking and laughing. And the sound of garage doors opening in the early morning and closing in the evening. No kids for miles around. Just yappy little dogs inside their electric fences. And as the prefab houses got larger, the dogs got smaller. Did Shane ever notice that, Claire wondered?

The wind grew in strength, and the roar of the lake was now nearly deafening. Shane grabbed Claire around her waist, made a clumsy attempt to turn her around, to face him.

“We can take Alice and Daisy with us. Ok?” But his words sounded strangled to Claire.

He repeated them, forcing them through the cacophony as if he were waging war with something unyielding, then half stammered out, “And I’ll be a better husband. You’re not well, Claire—”

He took her hands then in his and seemed to see for the first time the nicks and scratches, her broken nails, all embedded around the cuticles with old blood and dirt. Claire saw the disgust and confusion reflected in her husband’s eyes as he turned her hands over in his, and she both ached and feared for the questions that should follow. When they didn’t come, she withdrew her wounded hands, buried them deep in her coat pockets.

It didn’t surprise her that Shane no longer asked questions, but it sharpened her loneliness and the distinct feeling, a hollow feeling, that she was disappearing from the inside out.

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After Shane had gone back up to the house, Claire walked across the bluff, went around the old No Trespassing sign—she’d memorized the sign’s spot exactly, half hidden inside the tall ornamental grasses and jutting out of the ground like a crude wooden crucifix. Then on through swamp milkweed and coneflower, purple loosestrife and thimbleweed, bull thistle and poison ivy. She reached the cliff’s edge and turned her back to the lake, looked out over at the pines and the cemetery concealed within that evergreen fortress.

She remained there on the cliff for a while, before beginning again. Her private ritual.

With her gaze held steady over the lake, she lifted her arms straight out from her sides like a tightrope walker. The wind whipped her hair around her face; got inside her black wool coat with her; made her skirt billow out like a sail. She began as she’d done every day for the past several weeks, inching forward little by little until the tips of her worn flats lined up with the cliff’s edge.

There were about a dozen seagulls flying over the lake and shore. The wind appeared to be battering them as they flew above the churning surf. Two or three of them, Claire noticed, seemed to be loving it…to be boldly diving into the gale-force winds as if to test their strength against it before flying back over land.

Through her thin soles, she felt that place, beneath the heels of both feet, where the sod ended and the ragged cliff’s edge began. The edge: a precarious marriage of sand and soil and small rocks. The vulnerability of the ground there, crumbling a little as she leaned forward, arms still outstretched, filled Claire with a hypnotic mix of emotions: recklessness and peace, little stabs of freedom and terror. And a dark joy.

She would not jump today.

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Epilogue

It’s early morning, still dark, when she goes out, so she’ll be back before Shane gets home from work. Claire puts Anna and Liam’s belongings in the trunk of her car but lays Fen’s old winter jacket—the one with the missing button that Liam has worn through two winters now—on the seat next to her.

She was no mother to that boy. Claire is certain of this, after what she saw, heard. How did she fool her for so long? The snow had died down, any footprints would have been swept away from the previous night’s storm; but Claire still takes a flashlight out onto the porch, the front lawn, and, before getting in the car, searches for signs, for two sets of scrambled tracks in the snow from the woman and boy’s sudden and furious leaving. When she finds none, she gets in the car and drives to St. Malachi’s, the whole way there feeling as though she’s committed murder, their few belongings in the trunk, that weight, her victims’ bodies.

When she pulls into the church parking lot, she sees the plow truck has just reached the back of the lot by the used clothing bin. She waits until he’s finished plowing, is finished and gone, before pulling around to the back of the lot.

She gets out of her car, uses her arm, her coat sleeve, to sweep the snow away from the opening to the bin, stuffs in the duffle bag and suitcase, the plastic garbage bag full of Liam’s toys. She goes back to the car then, opens the door and reaches through to the passenger seat for

Fen’s jacket. She clutches it to her chest, inhales the scent of it, rubs her thumb along the blood stained collar—her little son’s, her own Fen’s DNA, she believes, still living in its fibers, and perhaps the boy Liam’s now too. She drops the jacket in the bin, and she knows without

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knowing she’s taken the first step in letting her grief go, letting her son be whatever and wherever that is outside of her watchful gaze: away from her, yet always with her—freed from her pain and she freed from his.

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Claire’s Poems

After Life Think where you came from: lost child, half blind in a shoe store. Your mother, loose star, bent over or hunched down for a second— then gone!—like a cloud passing over Hesperus in the bleak and blue sky. I hate waking in a sea of such infrelligence-shmelligence, This life, one giant leap of faith-shmaith after another. And my father and mother—my 18- year-old son!— all glimmering over the grave horizon.

You—& Star and Bird Twined with the

~~ ~~~ ~~ ~ ~~~~ skittering clouds, thin as spirits, as they take their horizontal path across the full moon, & how I go on and on over you… out there somewhere— nowhere?—over the rainbow: You know what I mean. You were never mean spirited, always just so—so damn

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good, your leaving persists in demolishing us, though my wild- eyed grief counselor insists it ain’t so, her gold homunculus crucifix slicing through air like Poe’s pendulum: “No, really, I’m so happy. I’m so at peace with it all. I am—” This seems an affront to love, to grief. My lungs ache from chain smoking—longing is long, is before me: road, dance, annihilation—I will if you will.

After You Around Come to Me —for Fen

Son, little o, in my own mind, I did come to you— the day so bright, ash-hot wind, and a sun like new skin washing over the body. I said: Brave the burn— words containing words—his: “Oh-uh, must we that? Mother, picture the escape:

flowers of banks pale seamed us around air around us,

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and where nights spring hot— Anyway, you are who?”

Me. Over you. Closed eyes. Rats up so high, the windows coughed, broke that heart, violent. And, my child!—in a place like this: your wicker heart, and a thief called envy, and the poor consolation of stars.

Signs

It’s easier for the old when the young die. They’ve been through so much already, felt the rough hands of gravity, not beckoning, but insisting; insistent as a child’s sick call in the night, the dial on the alarm burning red: twelve o’clock, one o’clock, two—

And you went, cleaned up the vomit, the cold wet sheets, doused fevers, and the years thundering by at warp speed; your poor hearts in the flotsam of wars and horrors and happiness, when suddenly somebody dies too young, and signs—I shit you not— fly from heaven

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like white doves in a magic show: a flock of birds in military formation over our tent at the cemetery, a double rainbow— and the raw architecture of our faces unhinging

the sky.

On Second Thought

Why not remember the nightmare as if it were a dream. All the love we collected along the way: Our children— once radiant as manna, now each one obscured on the berm of the road, and for years . . . for years, picking lint out of our pockets— wondering what was, wondering what was lost.

Now, we’re picturing you as if you are— not the way you looked back then but much later when, when the skin detaches itself just so from memory’s bone,

and the color of your hair, and the color of your hair, necessary as this newborn cupped in the palm of your hand.

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It trips the mind—

Yes, this is how it feels, blood and bone, as one soul takes another without discretion.

Transition —for Alice

If you did not know her, nor the pain she was carrying, you’d think she’d just paused on her slow, staccato walk down the long, hospital corridor to smell a flower, her face itself— that is, her face—and what I’m trying to say is the concentration was not so much written there as unopen to erasure & had become in that instant—or from that instant became—as she inhaled the dolorous scent, like the flower itself: like thef low erthe

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fl ower the flowe rthef lowerth eflo wertheflo wer theflow erthefl ower the flower.

Poem in Two Parts with Epilogue

1. Jesus Leaving 2. Jesus Returning

what waits Tonight, the moon far is the sun, its hazy from this place yellow nimbus, staid like tempered glass & bitter: there after a hot shower; a scavenger & behind it, the body, there a hitchhiker dilating & contracting & the in its velvet womb . . . lonesome whine The sky has room dis- for everything!— a- p-p-p- dead priests, pearing the hierarchy of angels, dust rising me & you and still no sign of you

Epilogue

The forgotten response, that which you cast aside, throw out (your perspective

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is threadbare), or swallow like air. Then suddenly— A grain of light. A grain.

And there you are: the shoe, your body, the night-walking city, a desert held motionless on the tip of your left index finger . . . or was it your discordant nature (disciple, clown, disciple) teetering to hear what the dead were telling?— the drip pan of the soul full of something like honey— and all of it: nirvana, nirvana, nirvana.

Untitled —for Anna

I wanted to say you’re crazy

& need to see a psychiatrist, but, instead, I amended my complaint

& said you’re selfish

& mean & drowning in recklessness; & now I

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worry that I’ve put the blood of indignation into one of your wide green eyes & the pale orchid of despair into the other.

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