Millie Cousins was born in Joplin, Missouri, in 1993. Her father, Richard, was six foot and fair with hair that had turned gray in his forties. Her mother, Glory, was a foot shorter with sharp cheekbones, and she came from a Black farming family near Albany, Georgia. Glory had short hair that was curly, black, and gray. She only wore makeup for celebratory dinners, when she used blush, tinted ChapStick, and a tasseled pashmina draped over whatever she was wearing. For Richard and Glory, a child wasn’t necessary or a dream, but when the opportunity presented itself at their joint age of forty-two, the thought of it was quite nice. The three of them went camping several times a year, mostly in the Ozarks, where Millie’s penchant for Fayetteville began.

Millie’s father was an international and political affairs professor at Missouri Southern State University. Glory was the manager of the Papyrus stationery and greeting card store located in Northpark Mall. She had a monthly book club meetup as well as a bunco night. She loyally helped her friend Myrna with her soap and candle booth every Saturday at the Empire farmers market. Millie’s parents pushed her to do lots of activities as well, in service of being a flexible person, an excellent sharer of her things. She later understood this as overcompensation, a correction of her status as an only child. But very quickly, the things she was pushed to do as a child became the activities she liked to organize as an adult.

Millie did Girl Scouts, volleyball, and camping club, for which she was voted president two years in a row. In high school she was on the yearbook committee, prom committee, and student council, where she served as vice president in her senior year. She was the stage manager for two musicals, dressed in all black with a headset backstage. After high school she took a gap year. She worked at a bed-and-breakfast and a coffee shop in Fayetteville. She saved a good amount of money and earned in state tuition status.

Halfway through her sophomore year at UA, Millie became an RA. This was something Aimee Pearson, the housing director, said she’d never allowed before, but Millie happily replaced a student who’d had a bedbug scare and subsequent mental breakdown, and she transitioned into RA status with ease. She worked as a camp counselor in the summers. She volunteered to be at the dorms for January term. She house-sat for Aimee and took care of her dog. When Glory told her friends what Millie was up to at the moment, she often ended with “Oh yeah. You know her. Exactly. Always likes to be in charge.”

*

Fourteen months before her second senior year, Millie was finishing her junior year at the University of Arkansas. Her mother was driving home from work when the pressure in her eyes became so severe that she had to open the driver’s side door and throw up. In the parking lot of an Anytime Fitness and Firehouse Subs, Glory dialed 911. The police came and sat with her. Glory said she didn’t need an ambulance, but the officer kept shaking her head, saying, “I think it’s best we get some help.” Millie’s father arrived as the ambulance did in all its unnecessary splendor. Glory collected her things and got into Richard’s car. “If I don’t get in, they can’t charge me.”

Glaucoma was a word that had been said often in the Cousins-Arnold household. It was one of the few reminders that Millie’s parents were older than most of her friends’ parents. She didn’t sleep for two nights after her mother’s episode in the car. The idea of it happening again or Glory vomiting inside the vehicle, Millie couldn’t abide by it, at least not while living in another state. Before confirming with her parents that leaving was a good idea, she went to Aimee’s office.

“Hey, girly,” Aimee said. But then Millie sniffed and Aimee turned around completely. What proceeded was a lot of moving chairs, offering tissues, and holding up a small waste bin. Aimee was as kind as she was unflappable. “Hey. Listen to me. I know this sucks,” she said. “But you are not the first to take a year off. And you won’t be the last.”

Millie didn’t remember saying that explicitly. A year seemed extremely long. But who was to say what her mom’s eyes would be doing in the fall, especially if she had surgery. Yes, Millie thought. She was taking a year off. One year off and then she’d come back.

For the next two weeks, Millie completed assignments that the rest of her classmates had not yet been assigned. She did made up tasks meant to substitute for group activities, and she set up her fellow RAs to take on her residents. A few times, Millie was back in Aimee’s office as Aimee helped her tie up loose ends. “Your professor’s not responding? Who is it? I’ll take care of it. My husband taught with him in Little Rock. We see them at tailgates.”

Three weeks before the end of the academic year, Millie moved back to Joplin and Glory wasn’t pleased. “I’m fine,” she’d said, on the phone and through texts. When Millie pulled up in front of the house, Glory said it again. “See? Look at me. I told you I’m fine.” Millie completed her final exams and papers by emailing two and completing two more online. She got her high school job back at the Starbucks inside the Barnes & Noble at Northpark Mall, which she was not allowed to call Starbucks; she had to say Barnes & Noble Café. Her RA friends—there’d been two she was close to—went intermittent and then quiet on their once-active group text. In the fall Millie took three online classes. She drove her mother to and from work.

*

Doctors and the internet insisted that glaucoma couldn’t be cured but it could be controlled. Millie and Glory googled remedies, vitamins, lists of foods to avoid, and holistic approaches that internet forums cited and swore by. Glory gave up coffee completely, as it could increase her intraocular pressure and lead to more optic nerve damage. Millie wasn’t about to give up coffee, especially when she got a shift drink for free, but when it came to meals, she became an active participant. Together, she and Glory transformed the contents of their refrigerator and the colors on their plates.

The leftover Tupperware that Millie took to work became filled with grilled asparagus, Brussels sprouts, cold-water fish, and strips of eggplant. At home, she and her mother snacked on goji berries and black currants, watermelon and grapefruit, sometimes with mint and salt. There were so many eggs being cooked that Richard purchased an egg storage keeper and drawer. “Look at this,” he said. “This is really slick.” Millie propped her computer on the counter next to the stovetop and watched YouTube tutorials: poached, shirred, omelet soufflés, a béarnaise sauce that tasted better on a second try. It was these protein-heavy meals, the absence of sugary cocktails and beer, and the family gym membership her dad added her to that resulted in the first of three significant things that happened back in Joplin. Over the course of the year, and without meaning to, Millie lost eleven pounds.

The fact that she was losing weight became less important than where she was losing it from. New negative space was seemingly being forged solely around her midline and waist. She didn’t have much boob to lose, but her small breasts didn’t seem so small when she stood in the shower and pressed her hands into her sides. Millie had returned to Joplin as a practiced size ten. By Christmas there were size-eight pants under the tree. “See?” Glory said. “See what happens when you don’t eat all that candy?” Millie didn’t reveal that her kale-and-bean-based meals had no bearing on her consumption of sweet and sour gelatin-based snacks. Haribo Peaches were her favorite. Sometimes she had Cola Bottles, too. But she tried to go to the gym more often because she liked the way she looked. She felt as if her body had gotten its braces off. Like she’d reentered her room after a deep clean.

The second significant thing that happened back in Joplin was that Millie and her mom started microdosing marijuana. Glory had purchased two large pairs of sunglasses from Target to protect her eyes. She wore the bigger pair on the day that Millie drove her to apply for a medical marijuana card. Millie laughed as Glory got in the car, holding her purse in two nervy, flat hands.

“If I get this thing”—Glory shut her door—“you can never tell Myrna.”

Millie put the car in reverse. “Why would I tell Myrna literally anything?”

“Not just Myrna. We can’t tell nobody.”

Millie pulled out onto the street. “Well, you’re in luck because I have no friends.”

“Mill, don’t say that.”

“Mom, it’s fine.”

Glory didn’t want to do brownies because of her new gluten-free diet, so Millie found a recipe for caramel edibles. She purchased a candy thermometer and a silicone pan from a confectionery shop in the mall. They added pecans that Glory put in a Ziploc bag; she smashed them to pieces with the bottom of a mug. Glory had tried smoking in her early twenties and she remembered it making her nauseated and paranoid. But now, after a caramel square in the evenings, her stare became soft and steady. It didn’t take such a pointed effort to read an email or a recipe. She said it felt like she was getting her eyes ready for bed.

Millie partaking in Glory’s medical marijuana hadn’t been discussed prior. But she’d tasted the samples and said when she felt it, so the idea of creating rules around her not having it seemed a bit belated. Sometimes she’d take half a caramel before her shift at work. Activities like washing her dog or sectioning and detangling her hair became moments where she could be clever and inspired. Being tepidly high, in addition to her recently pulled waist, made Millie feel creative and not so alone. But this sensation had much less to do with the edibles than it had to do with her mom. This was the third thing to happen back in Joplin. Millie and Glory became terribly close.

They watched a lot of HGTV, betting on which house the couple would choose. They watched Scandal from the very beginning, and when Richard entered the room, Glory would shush him and Millie would scream, “Daduhh!” They went to movies on weekends and timed their caramel intake, sitting toward the back for Glory’s eyes. Glory quizzed her every morning over breakfast the week of Millie’s final in Intermediate Spanish. They listened to podcasts while Millie took care of her plants, redoing the soil to get rid of gnats.

By spring, so much of their conversations were in their own shorthand. Once, at breakfast, Glory said, “Mill. Guess who finally got married.”

“Who?”

“The bad guy we like from that show. The one with the name.”

Millie made a face. “To that woman with the mouth?”

“Yes, girl.”

“Yeesh. Well, good for them.”

“That’s what I said.”

Richard placed his spoon onto his plate. “You two can’t be serious.”

Millie thought her dad was being dramatic, but there were other times when she saw his point. Once, while she was on a walk, Glory phoned her cell. “Hi, I’m in line. So I gotta be quick. Mill, do I like the salad or the bowl?”

Millie sighed. “You like the bowl.”

“And do I want the thing on it?”

Millie was alone, save for her dog. Still, she felt mortified to answer the question, and to know what question was being asked. “Yes,” she said. “But you want it on the side.”

Millie needed to go back to school. But with the absence of friends and four-dollar coffees, and with her B& N shifts and occasional house-sitting, Millie started saving more money than she ever had before. Coming off of so many summers living in dorms and cabins and rooms that weren’t hers, and after becoming mildly addicted to TV shows featuring tiny houses and youngish owners, the idea of owning a home came down on her like a dream. With six thousand dollars in her bank account, Millie allowed herself to entertain the idea that maybe, if she was very, very good about it, she could make a down payment in two years. This fantasy home would not be in Joplin, it would be in Fayetteville. But then in April, Millie was offered a shift manager position at the café, and she found herself tempted to stay one more year.

“No,” Glory said. “Absolutely not.”

“Okay okay, hang on,” Millie said. Yes, she missed Fayetteville, but Joplin wasn’t terrible. And there was a big difference between the $9.12 she was currently making and the $11 an hour she could be making full-time. “You’re acting like I’m not going to graduate. I’m just thinking that if I took one more—”

Glory held up her hands. “This? This was a mistake.”

Millie knew that Glory wasn’t referring to Millie’s year off of school. The mistake was letting her in as something other than a boundaried, limited, and professional daughter. For Millie’s entire childhood, Glory’s approach to parenting had been almost clinical. The way she punished, the way she encouraged, and the way she loved. Everything from Glory, whether she said it or not, came with the same admonition: I’m not your friend, I’m your mom. Sometimes Millie felt that the approval that she wanted from adults or superiors in general was in response to the way her mother tried to establish this partition. But after her year in Joplin, she also felt certain that she just liked being around her mother. Glory was fun to be around.

“You are going to go back to Arkansas and you’re going to have a real senior year.”

“Okay, but just hear me out for two sec—”

“Millicent? You don’t need a house.”

“Well, of course I don’t need it—”

“You’re a kid and you need to be doing kid things with other kids. And if you want more money? Fine. This is what you’re gonna do. You’re gonna tell Starbucks yes—”

“Barnes & Noble Café.”

“Ma’am. You’re gonna say yes and take that position. And then in August you’re gonna say, ‘Oops,’ and you’re gonna go back to school.”

“Okay, first of all, I’m not a kid. I’m twenty-three.”

“Then go be twenty-three in Arkansas.”

“Can you relax? And that’s so not cool to take a promotion and then quit three months later. They would never take me back again.”

At this, Glory staggered back and reached her hands into the air. She blinked as if she’d seen a vision, and she uttered an emphatic “Well, good!”

For the next few months Glory pointedly brought up minor logistics regarding Millie’s return to Fayetteville. Yes, she’d signed up for classes. And yes, she’d talked to Aimee. Everything was fine for her to return as an RA.

“We’re all good to go,” Aimee had said over the phone. “But—don’t be mad at me—I have to put you back in Belgrade.” Millie had been in Belgrade for her junior year, a fact made fine because her friends had been there, too. But the transfer/upperclassmen/scholarship dorm was not great, affectionately nicknamed Smell-grade and Cell-grade. “I know,” Aimee said. “But Josh is an RD now and I need to put him with someone who’s been there before.”

“Josh from accounts payable? He’s an RD?”

“Yes, he’s great. He won’t be at orientation—grandma died, poor thing—but don’t you worry. He’ll be there for move in.”

Millie blew through her lips. Welp, she thought. It had been her decision to leave. Now she was coming back to the bad dorm with the new RD. And this time she’d be friendless and old.

“Hey, Aimee?” Millie said. “While I have you . . .” She went into the backyard so Glory couldn’t hear. Millie told Aimee she was looking for a house to buy after graduation, something small, for just one person. If Aimee had any leads, she would love to know. Aimee said, “Hoo boy. You’re growing up. Okay.”

That summer, Millie worked full-time. She went to the gym twice a week. Instead of social media apps, she was always on Zillow. Sometimes she couldn’t help herself; she used some of her tips to purchase Haribo Peaches after work. But mostly, Millie took the cash and stuck it in the right foot of a pair of rain boots; what she came to think of as her “down payment shoe.” Every other week, she delivered its contents to a new savings account. That summer, she turned twenty-four, and she saved twenty-three hundred dollars.

Two weeks before she moved back to Fayetteville, Millie sat in her RAV4 in the Barnes & Noble parking lot. She psyched herself up, memorizing the speech she’d written in her phone. She asked her boss if she had a second to talk. In response to her prepared lines, Millie’s boss clapped and said, “Oh! Well, that’s a bummer for us, but good for you! Would you be open to training Samantha? I have to ask, but I think she wants the hours.”

__________________________________

From Come and Get It by Kiley Reid. Used with permission of the publisher, G. P. Putnam’s Sons. Copyright © 2024 by Keily Reid.

We know life is finite.Why should we believe death lasts forever?

*

The shadow of a bird moved across the hill; he could not see the bird.

*

Certain thoughts comforted him:

Desire permeates everything; nothing human can be cleansed of it.

We can only think about the unknown in terms of the known.

The speed of light cannot reference time. The past exists as a present moment.

Perhaps the most important things we know cannot be proven.

he did not believe that the mystery at the heart of things was amorphous or vague or a discrepancy, but a place in us for something absolutely precise. he did not believe in filling that space with religion or science, but in leaving it intact; like silence, or speechlessness, or duration.

Perhaps death was Lagrangian, perhaps it could be defined by the principle of stationary action.

Asymptotic.

Mist smouldered like cremation fires in the rain.

*

It was possible that the blast had taken his hearing. There were no trees to identify the wind, no wind, he thought, at all. Was it raining? John could see the air glistening, but he couldn’t feel it on his face.

*

The mist erased all it touched.

*

Through the curtain of his breath he saw a flash, a shout of light.

*

It was very cold.

Somewhere out there were his precious boots, his feet. He should get up and look for them.

When had he eaten last?

He was not hungry.

*

Memory seeping.

*

The snow fell, night and day, into the night again. silent streets; impossible to drive. They decided they would walk to each other across the city and meet in the middle.

The sky, even at ten o’clock at night, was porcelain, a pale solid from which the snow detached and fell.The cold was cleansing, a benediction.They would each leave at the same time and keep to their route, they would keep walking until they found each other.

*

In the distance, in the heavy snowfall, John saw fragments of her – elliptic, stroboscopic – Helena’s dark hat, her gloves. it was hard yet to tell how far away she was. he shook the snow from his hat so she might see him too.yes, she lifted her arms above her head to wave. only her hat and gloves and the powdery yellow blur of the street lamps were visible against the whiteness of sky and earth. he could barely feel his feet or his fingers, but the rest of him was warm, almost hot, from walking. he pulsed with the sight of her, the vestige of her. she was everything that mattered to him. he felt inviolable trust. They were close now but could not make their way any faster. somewhere between the library and the bank, they gripped each other as if they were the only two humans left in the world.

*

Her small ways known only to him. That Helena matched her socks to her scarf even when no one could see them in her boots. That she kept beside the bed, superstitiously unfinished, the novel she had been reading in the park the day they understood they would always be together. The paper-thin leather gloves she found in the pocket of the men’s tweed coat she bought from the jumble sale. her mother’s ring that she wore only when she wore a certain blouse. That she left her handbag at home and slipped a five-shilling note in her book when she went to the park to read. The boiled sweets tin she kept her foreign change in.

*

Helena carried the handbag he had bought for her on the hill road, soft brown leather, with a clasp in the shape of a flower. she wore the silk scarf she had found in the market, made hers now by her scent, autumn colours with a dark green border, and her tweed coat with velvet under the collar. how many times had he felt that velvet when he held open her coat for her. A finite number. Every pleasure in a day or a life, numbered. But pleasure was also countless, beyond itself – because it remained, even only in memory; and in your body, even when forgotten. Even the stain of pleasure and its taunting: loss. The finite as unmanageable as the infinite.

*

They walked to his flat and left their wet clothes at the door. no need to turn on the lights. The blinds were up, the room snow-lit. White dusk, impossible light. John was always surprised, he never stopped being astonished, at how little there was of her, she was tiny it seemed to him, and so gentle and fierce he couldn’t breathe. he had bought the scented powder she liked and he filled the tub. he added too much and the foam spilled over the steaming edge.‘A snowbank,’ she said.

*

The young soldier was lying only a few metres away. how long had the boy been staring? John wanted to call out to him, make a joke of it, but couldn’t find his voice.

*

Pinned to the ground, no weight upon him. Who would believe light could fell a man.

*John’s child-hand in his mother’s hand. The paper bag of chestnuts from the vendor with the brazier in front of the shops, too hot to hold without mittens. leaning against his mother’s heavy wool coat. her smooth handbag against his cheek. Peeling the brown paper skins of the chestnuts to the steaming meat. The tram squealing on the track. The edge of his mother’s apron escaping from the edge of her coat, the apron she forgot to take off, the apron she always wore. Trams, queues, the smells of fish and petrol. her softness against his hard childhood. her scent before he succumbed to sleep, the burnished warmth of her necklace as she leaned over to him. The lamp left on.

*

The inn had been built beside the rail tracks, next to the rural station, in a river valley. long ago, the inn and the valley had been a tourist destination, promoted by the train company for its view of the mountains, the wildflower meadows, the aromatic pines and betony. The rail tracks were shadowed by the slow river, like a mother struggling to keep up with her child, silver lines running the length of the vale.

Helena had been heading for the larger town beyond, but had fallen asleep. she could not stop herself from drifting off, succumbing as if drugged by the motion of the train. And when the train stopped at the last station before the town, she had, half asleep, misunderstood the conductor booming out the next stop and had grabbed her satchel and disembarked a station too early.

Beyond the dim lamp by the exit, it was dark – profound country darkness. she felt foolish and slightly afraid; the deserted platform, the locked waiting room. she was about to sit on the single cold bench and wait for daylight, when she heard laughter in the distance. later, she would tell him she heard singing, though John remembered no music at all. she stood at the exit, not wanting to leave the pitiful protection of that single dusty bulb in the station. But, leaning into the darkness, she saw, some distance away, the inviting pool of light of the inn.

Later, she would imbue the short walk in the darkness towards that corona of light – the endless fields of invisible grasses rustling in the dark – with the qualities of a dream; the inevitability of it, the foreknowledge.

Looking into the front window, helena saw a room enclosed in a time of its own. An inn of legend, of folklore – warmth and woodsmoke. Faded upholstered armchairs, scarred wooden tables and benches, stone floors, massive fireplace, with a store of logs to last the coldest winter, stacked from floor to ceiling, the self-perpetuating supply of a fairy tale, each log, she imagined, magically replacing itself over the centuries. John watched as she sat down nearby. it was, to him, an encounter of sudden intimacy in this public place; the angle of her head, her posture, her hands. he watched as a man – soused and staggering, every careful step an acknowledgement of the spinning earth and its axial tilt – fell into the vacant chair opposite her, giving helena a slow, marinated gaze until his head fell, heavy as a curling stone, and slid across the table. John and another onlooker jumped up to help at the same time and, between them, dragged the man to the back of the pub to sleep it off.When John returned, he found his own table taken by a couple who did not look up, already lost to the room around them.

‘I’m so sorry,’ Helena said, quickly gathering her coat and satchel, ‘please, take this table.’

He insisted she stay. With a great effort past shyness, she asked if he would care to sit with her. later she would tell him of the feeling that passed through her, inexplicable, momentary, not even a thought: that if he sat down she would be sharing a table with him for the rest of her life.

*

In the little window in the hallway, from the heat of the bath, they could see the snow falling.

*

The black lines of the trees reminded him of a winter field he’d once seen from the window of a train. And the black sea of evening, and the deep black bonnet and apron of his grandmother climbing up from the harbour, knitting all the while, leading their ancient donkey burdened with heavy baskets of crab. All the women in the village wore their tippie and carried their knitting easy to hand, under their arm or in their apron pocket, sleeves and sweater-fronts, filigree work, growing steadily over the course of the day. Each village with its own stitch; you could name a sailor’s home port by the pattern of his gansey, which contained a further signature – a deliberate error by which each knitter could identify her work. Was an error deliberately made still an error? Coastal knitters cast their stitches like a protective spell to keep their men safe and warm and dry, the oil in the wool repelling the rain and sea spray, armour passed down, father to son. They knitted shorter sleeves that did not need to be pushed out of the way of work. Dense worsted, faded by the salt wind. The ridge and furrow stitch, like the fields in march when they put in the potatoes. The moss stitch, the rope stitch, the honeycomb, the triple sea wave, the anchor; the hailstone stitch, the lightning, diamonds, ladders, chains, cables, squares, fishnets, arrows, flags, rigging. The noordwijk bramble stitch. The black and white socks of Terschelling (two white threads, a single black). The goedereede zigzag. The tree of life.The eye of god over the wearer’s heart. if a sailor lost his life at sea, before his body was committed to the deep, his gansey was removed and returned to his widow. if a fisherman washed ashore, he was carried home to his village, the stitch of his sweater as good as a map. And once restored to home port, his widow could claim his beloved body by a distinctive talisman – the deliberate error in a sleeve, a waistband, a cuff, a shoulder, the broken pattern as definitive as a signature on a document. The error was a message sent into darkness, the stitch of calamity and terror, a signal to the future, from wife to widow. The prayer that, wherever found, a man might be returned to his family and laid to rest. That the dead would not lie alone. The error of love that proved its perfection.

__________________________________

From Held by Anne Michaels. Used with permission of the publisher, Knopf. Copyright © 2024 by Anne Michaels.

Can’t dance. Has no rhythm at all. Used to find it adorable until I saw people laughing at her and hate to say I was embarrassed.

Once overheard her say “Let’s grab a cappuccino some time and we’ll talk” to my teenage cousin who wanted advice about his university applications.

Generally has quite nineties ideas about what is glamorous, like cocktails or spending twenty pounds on a plate of tagliatelle in a “little place.”

Refuses to get to the airport a minute earlier than ninety minutes before a flight takes off.

Don’t have to persuade her to like where we live any more.

When she would go for a run in the evening she would come into the living room, stretch in front of the TV and say “What’s this?” and make me explain the programme I was watching even though she knew what it was, just to make a point that she was exercising while I was watching Help, I’m a Hoarder!

Talked too much and too smugly about coming from a big family, as if it was her decision to have three siblings.

Always used to boast about how she’d reject an OBE if it were offered to her because of her apparent lefty republican values but would never know why she’d be offered an OBE in this fantasy when I asked her.

Would definitely never reject an OBE if it were offered to her.

Would take an hour to go to bed, no matter what time she got in, because she’d do a seven-step skincare routine, browse shop-ping apps and listen to podcasts. And yet only left twenty minutes from her alarm going off to having to leave the flat in the morning.

Always late for me, never late for work.

Can’t drive (childish).

Somehow managed to relate the plot of every film we watched back to her own life.

Her unbearable sister Miranda who carries nonsensical homemade signs at protests saying things like HISTORY IS WATCHING and who I know hates me because she always ranted about “straight white guys” when she came round for dinner, no matter the topic. She used to say “Sorry, Andy” but didn’t by the end.

Her work friends: boring and cliquey and not fun or funny.

All talk about being some big adventurer but never followed through. Wanted to take a year off to travel because she never had a gap year (“next year”). Wanted to move to Paris (“not the right time”). Wanted to get an undercut (“work wouldn’t like it”). Wanted to go to an outdoor sex-themed rave (“when my hay fever gets better”).

Goes to therapy every week and has done since she was twenty-nine but would never tell me what they spoke about and I’ve never seen that she has anything wrong with her.

Was too connected to dogs and spoke to them as if they were people.

Her rude dad.

Her weird mum.

Comes from a family who go on long circular walks and play board games.

Annoyingly loquacious and was on a debating team at her school, which meant I didn’t win an argument in nearly four years even when I was right about loads of them.

Always on at me about biting my nails, picking my feet, too much hair in my nostrils and bum hole etc., despite the fact she’s always fiddling with her cuticles.

Talked at the cinema.

Pretended she’s unsure about wanting children because she cares about the planet, but I think she just didn’t want children with me.

Would never talk seriously about having children, despite knowing how much I want to be a dad, but would some times say “That’s one of my baby names” to people in conversation.

Those baby names included: Noah, Blue (?) and Zebedee.

Snob. Once said that she thought people who wear straw hats at the airport on the way to their summer holiday are “regional.”

Lingered too long in museums at every artefact or painting and would have a go at me if I walked through the exhibition too quickly.

Once saw her nod respectfully at a TINY JADE SPOON in the British Museum.

Only saw her cry a handful of times in nearly four years together and it wasn’t when we broke up.

One time was when we were watching a Joni Mitchell documentary.

Ruined my life.

__________________________________

From Good Material by Dolly Alderton. Copyright © 2023 by Baby Fish Mouth, Ltd. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

1996

MONDAY

Sara and I walk through the hospital doors, up and around the large staircase as I recite the nurse’s directions in my head. Take the hallway on the left, then another on the right, straight through the waiting room to a row of patient rooms, then turn, first door on the right—there he’ll be. And there he is. My brother’s hospital room smells like air-conditioning and antiseptic and the musty stench of something decayed. I glance up at the far corner, afraid I’ll see a muted TV showing black smoke gathering above green trees like I saw the last time I was in a hospital, when I was nine and my mother was declared dead.

“Hey,” my baby brother Bryson says, smiling up at me from his bed. He’s already been here a week.

“Hi,” I whisper.

He coughs—heavy, threatening, on the brink of something nasty. My girlfriend Sara hands him a tissue while my father watches from the hallway.

“Here y’are,” Sara says.

Bryson’s face spreads into a wide grin. Y’are, y-are, long drawl rolling easy in a familiar caress. He was two when we moved to Texas, only six when we left for Canada. He knows he’s Jamaican. He knows what it says on his birth certificate, but there’s something about slow-smoked brisket and fruit paletas and screaming Hook ’em! from football bleachers that makes him feel like he’s where he belongs.

“How y’all doin’?” he says then coughs again, his small body convulsing.

“Akúa,” my father calls from the doorway, gesturing for me to join him in the hallway.

But I don’t move. I can’t stop staring at my brother, watching the slow blink of his eyes and the way he squirms under the stiff sheets, IV lines pulsing red in and out of his sallow skin. He shouldn’t be here. He’s only twelve years old.

“We’ll be right back, champ,” Sara says, ushering me out of the room.

Out in the hallway, the doctor extends his hand to me, his head cocked at just the right angle to exude concern. “I’m sorry about all this,” he says.

I stare at the gray hairs on his knuckles, my own hands limp at my sides. Daddy shakes the doctor’s hand as Sara heads down the hall to give us space.

“Now that we’re all here,” the doctor says, looking from my father to me. “Bryson’s sickness, it’s hereditary. Passed down from parent to child just like eye shape and skin color.”

Daddy looks at his knees.

“Is there a history of sickle cell in your family?” the doctor says. “Any extreme anemias? Blood-borne illnesses?”

I watch my brother through the small window as he coughs, his body retching with our mother’s disease. Daddy buries his head in his hands.

“My assistant will be with you shortly,” the doctor says. “She’ll explain all the information we need to help you through this difficult time.”

Sara looks at me longingly from the other end of the hall. She heard enough. She knows. I stay where I am, heavy as lead. 

TUESDAY

I flip the quarter between my forefinger and thumb, forefinger and thumb, as I stare at the gray pay phone hanging on its hook. Behind me, I hear machines beeping and nurses shuffling in and out of patient rooms. I have to do it. I have to call. Sliding the coin into the machine, I dial my older sister’s number.

“I know,” my sister Tamika says as she picks up. “Daddy called me this morning.”

“When does your flight get in?” I rest my forehead against the booth’s cool wall.

She says nothing, her breath coming quick like she’s struggling for air.

“Tamika?”

“Daddy didn’t tell you?” she says.

“Tell me what?” I squeeze the phone. “Are you sick too?” I go dizzy for a moment, knees threatening to give.

“No!” she says. “Praise be, I’m fine.”

I exhale, relieved. “Then what?”

She goes quiet again, scratching sounds filling the receiver like she’s fiddling with the cord. “I’m not coming,” she says. “I can’t come.”

“What?” I wrap the phone cord around my wrist. A nurse rushes past me, a clipboard under his arm. “I’m sorry, what?” I say again.

Tamika stays silent as the nurse knocks on a door then lets himself in.

“He’s sick, Tamika,” I exclaim. “Yuh hearin’ me? He’s sick.”

“I know,” she says. “Can I talk to him?”

“Why can’t you come?”

She goes quiet again, static filling the phone pop pop pop then clearing.

“Tamika?”

Nothing.

“Tamika, yuh cyaa be serious.”

The phone line remains silent. She has nothing more to say. I unwrap the phone cord then stare at the crisscrosses of pulsing red on my skin.

“Are you serious right now?” I yell.

She sighs. “Why are you always like this?”

I don’t know why, but I laugh. Our brother’s in the hospital and she isn’t coming, so I laugh and laugh and then I hang the phone up. I pick up the receiver, dial tone beeping, and I hang up again, and again, laughter rolling up my throat like fizz from a shaken soda. And I hang up again, and again, smashing the receiver against the metal clip harder, and again, and again, until Sara wrenches the phone out of my hand then pulls me away.

“Shhhh,” she says as she wraps her arms around me, but I will not cry, I will not be soothed.

“Akúa!” she hisses as I push her away and march down the hall to my brother’s room.

Slamming the door behind me, I pull a chair over to Bryson’s bed. He looks up. I am here. He smiles. I am where I should be. I will not leave. I will not be known to my brother only as a voice through the phone. Running my hands over my braids, I force my face into a smile. I want to grab his lunch tray. I want to watch it smash against the far wall. Our sister isn’t coming. “Eat your Jell-O,” I mumble, pushing the tray closer to him.

“The food here sucks,” he says. “Don’t they have any enchiladas? Or taquitos?” He curls his hand into an O, then stares at the empty space between fingers and palm.

I know what he’s thinking: scrambled eggs and melted cheese seeping through toasted tortilla, fresh and steaming as it wafts around the school courtyard.

“You remember Dave?” he says, wiggling his fingers as they bunch and grasp at nothing at all. “This one time,” Bryson says, “me and Dave, we bought too many taquitos at recess. Daddy had just given me my allowance, so we bought too many and I saved some for lunch.” He closes his hand into a fist. “Cold taquitos are gross.”

“Should’ve made Dave pay for them.” I sit on the edge of his bed. “Then they would’ve been his problem.”

“But that’s mean,” Bryson says.

“But you would’ve had hot and free taquitos.”

He chuckles as he picks up the plastic cup from his lunch tray, watching the green square jiggle in his hand.

“Eat,” I urge him.

He slips a chunk in his mouth, chewing slowly then swallowing.

“See?” I squeeze his knee. “Not so bad.”

He makes a face, pretending to puke, as Daddy comes into the room.

“Tamika should be here soon,” Daddy says.

“She’s coming?” I exclaim.

Daddy looks at Bryson and says to his son, “Her flight’s been delayed, but don’t worry, she’ll be here.”

Bryson puts his Jell-O down with a soft smile. He hasn’t seen our sister since when we first got to Texas, when he was two.

I grab my father’s arm. “Is she really coming?”

“What are you going to say to your big sister,” he says to Bryson, “when she arrives?”

Bryson thinks for a moment, fiddling with his gown. “I’m going to say, ‘Sister, if you were in a burning car, who would you call: Batman or Superman?’”

Daddy laughs. I dig my nails into the cotton of his sleeve. Is she really coming?

“Such a smart bwoy mi have,” Daddy says.

Bryson tries to laugh but his laugh turns into a cough. Closing his eyes, he sinks deeper into his pillow. He’s breathing harder than before, air gurgling slow through his open mouth. I let my father’s arm go.

“She’ll be so glad to see you,” I mumble to Bryson.

Daddy looks at me. “Yes,” he says. “She will.”

“Will she cook with us?” Bryson says, trying to sit up. “Does she like to eat?” Bryson loves to eat. He marks his days in meals, memories cataloged by the sensations on his tongue.

“Of course she loves to eat,” I exclaim, leaning over Bryson and giving him a big big smile. “As soon as we get home, we’re gonna whip up nuff cheeseburga and enchiladas.”

“Enchiladas!” Bryson exclaims as Daddy chuckles. “And brisket! And rice and peas! And curry chicken but without the potatoes. I hate potatoes.”

“Lawd, bwoy,” Daddy says, pulling the blanket down over his toes, “yuh goi’ eat yuhself sick.”

Bryson smiles, closing his eyes. “I think I need a nap,” he says, having worn himself out from saying so much.

“You do that, little chef.” I lean over and kiss his forehead, his skin sweaty yet cold.

Daddy fixes his pillow as I tuck the sheets under his hips.

Bryson touches my arm. “You’ll be here when I wake up?”

I smile at him. “I’ll fight anyone who tries to make me leave.”

The doctor knocks lightly on the door. “A word?” he says.

Daddy and I follow him out of the room. From her seat down the hall, Sara throws me a small smile then a wave. Blinking fast, I look away.

“It’s a long shot,” the doctor says, rubbing his chin and handing over the forms, “but we’re running out of options. The illness is progressing quickly. It’s worth taking a look.”

Daddy nods, signing the forms then handing them to me. He doesn’t read them—doesn’t need to read them. He’s been signing forms and sending Bryson and me for tests in hospitals since I was ten. The tests should’ve caught this. I flip through the pages and pages of fine print, trying to take it all in.

“Just sign,” Daddy says, sounding tired.

Through the shut door I can hear Bryson coughing, fever getting worse.

“Are you all of Bryson’s next of kin?” the doctor says. “If there are other family members, it’d be ideal if we could test them too.”

I can’t come, Tamika had said. She could and she should but she won’t. Because why?

Because ten years ago, my father packed up my family and flew us over the sea. My sister and brother and me, Daddy flew us first to Texas before finally making home here, in Vancouver. I was ten when we first left. Bryson was two and Tamika was sixteen. In my head, Tamika’s still sixteen.Soon after we moved, Tamika left us abroad and went back home. All I know is that years passed with her in Kingston and us in Texas then Canada and Daddy calling her on the phone yelling—back then, he was always yelling—calling her wah eediat chile for leaving. “What about Mummy?” Tamika would sometimes say. “Who is here to tend to her?” Every time the line would fall into hard silence, just heavy sighs echoing until someone hung up. Our mother is dead so Tamika stayed behind, shaking her head in a never-ending no.

But now our brother is dying. And there’s me, wanting my big sister. What a eediat chile. Signing the form, I press the pen against the paper so hard that it starts to rip. Our sister is in

Kingston, delayed by a plane that will never land. I watch my brother through the small room window, his breathing shallow as he tosses in his sleep. I hope he’s dreaming of his sister sprinting through the airport, of her waving down the plane with her voice rising and arms flailing as she throws her handbag, her suitcase, throws her whole body, doing whatever it takes to stop the plane so she can climb on and come to him.

“Great,” the doctor says, watching me sign. “My assistant will walk you to the lab to get the blood work started. Who knows, one of you might be carrying just the thing we need.”

A nurse enters Bryson’s room, introducing herself with a curt smile as she replaces one of the pouches hanging over his bed. Inserting the new needle into his IV line, she squeezes the pouch to start the flow—dripdrip Bryson’s blood goes, dripdrip like counting seconds, losing time. 

WEDNESDAY

Water rushes through the tap, hot and unrelenting. Stepping into the shower at my father’s house, I reach for the body wash next to shampoo next to two types of conditioner next to olive oil hair treatment next to face wash next to Bryson’s body wash in a bottle shaped like lightning. Before, in Jamaica, I only knew castile soap. You need face wash? Shampoo? Grab the castile soap.

I wonder about her in moments like these. I wonder what Mummy would think of this house, of Daddy directing trucks of gray dirt to silos caked in soot. Would she be relieved, happy to see us with trimmed nails and moisturized skin as we walk down roads where the asphalt never burns? Or would she be annoyed, wrapping her belt around her fist to discipline us for indulging in excess? I wish I could stop myself from wondering. My brother is in the hospital and my mother is dead. The exhaust fan whirs on, sucking the room cold.

“Call me if anything changes?” Sara says. “Good or bad?”

Stepping into the bedroom, I tie my robe around my waist. Sara’s missed three days of class. This is my emergency, not hers. If she misses any more, she might fail. I look at her cowlicked hair and milk-smooth face, her three brown moles beneath thin pink lips. She twirls one of my braids around her thumb then leans in close, the soft point of her nose pressing against the broad swell of mine. We are in love. We are twenty years old.

Sara stuffs her socks and toothbrush into her small backpack. She’s leaving the suitcase we came with from our apartment for me. “Everything will be okay.”

I glare at her. “Will it?”

She flinches then rolls her pants into a tight log, tucking them into the small crevice between her books on anatomy and biochem. She tells me she wants to stay, how she feels so awful, but it’s all right if she leaves because my brother will be just fine. She smiles, cheery and bright. He’ll pull through and I’ll be back in class in no time.

I watch her as she shoves her sticky notes next to her deodorant and bag of dirty laundry and I can see it, she won’t say it, the truth hiding behind the whites of her eyes. She’s thinking about her test next week. She’s thinking about keeping her grades up to flip her med school admission from conditional to guaranteed. Med school means going back to foil-wrapped taquitos and dark beers in cool bottles named after her great state. It means cicadas buzzing in fields of swaying hay and long dips in cool rivers feeding into the Rio Grande in her beloved Texas. I don’t want that home. I say the word that’s been lingering like sour meat on my tongue.

“No what?” Sara says.

“No.”

“No, you won’t call?” she says.

Standing back, I take her all in. “Take the suitcase,” I tell her. “It’s yours anyway.”

FRIDAY

The lab results come back. My father and I, we don’t have what Bryson needs. We watch through the window as a nurse wipes his brow.

“I’m sorry,” the doctor says. He’s looking right at us this time. He’s being sincere. “This is one of those things we can’t predict—what may trigger the anemia, how deep it may go.”

A bag expands, contracts, making Bryson breathe. A small machine registers his heartbeat, black monitor showing a white line rising and falling in sharp peaks.

“He showed signs of improvement,” the doctor says, “then his blood pressure dropped overnight and internal organs began to fail. He was clotting faster than we realized.”

My brother’s lying unconscious, thin and shriveled like a rind of old fruit. The nurse puts the rag away then reaches around him, slow and careful, and turns him over. My brother does not blink. He does not scream in protest against this stranger’s touch. Expand. Contract. The machine beeps.

“Do we have your consent to take him off life support?” the doctor says.

“Jesus,” I exhale. I was talking to Bryson just yesterday, and now we’re taking him off life support?

The doctor looks at me. “Don’t worry,” he says, “your brother won’t feel a thing. Brain activity slowed to dormant around five this morning.”

“I wish you hadn’t told me that,” I mumble. I want to think of him as my Bryson, my brother, asleep but still here.

“Sorry,” the doctor whispers.

Daddy flips through the pages on the clipboard, his hands starting to shake. He’s done this before, tucked my mother away safe beneath red Kingston dirt. I watch him uncap the pen as he stands next to me in the hospital, doing it again. Flip flip, he barely breathes as he finds where he needs to sign.

“If you’d like,” the doctor says, glancing at me, “if this is too painful, we can retrieve you once—”

“No,” Daddy says, signing the form. “We’re staying right where we are.”

The doctor takes the clipboard. “I’m very sorry for your loss.”

A nurse follows him into Bryson’s room as I rest my forehead against the small window. The tube running from Bryson’s mouth gurgles, sucking his spit through the clear coil then into a port in the wall. My brother cannot speak. He cannot swallow.

Hey Bryson, I murmur to my brother in my head. I watch the doctor silence the alarm on a beeping machine. Hey baby brother, remember your first day at school here in Canada? I close my eyes. Remember how upset you were?

“I just don’t get it,” you’d said. You were standing in the hall in our new house, still wearing your backpack. You were crying. “This one girl, she kept asking me, ‘Do people in Texas ride horses to school?’” you said. “I told her no, we drive cars, duh. But she kept asking, ‘Do you ride horses? Do you have to scoop poop every time you reach a stop sign?’ And I said no, but everyone kept laughing. I didn’t laugh. I didn’t think it was funny.”

I bent down until my head was level with yours. “You should’ve said yes,” I told you. “You rode a horse to school and John Wayne was your gym teacher.”

“What?” you said.

“Why not?” I shrugged. “If they want to ask stupid questions, give them stupid answers.”

You wiped your damp cheeks. “Yeah,” you said. “Yeah, okay. Yeah! Like, um, we use tumbleweed for floss.”

I grinned. “And we turn cow poop into electricity for our houses.”

“And, and,” you said, thinking hard, “we make sushi out of snake meat!”

I laughed. “Every evening, we hunt wild cougars with our bare hands.”

“Rawr!” you growled, crouching down on all fours as I spewed lie after lie to make my brother grin.

Now you’re not laughing. I’m not sure if you’re even still here. In the hospital room, the doctor signs something then moves to the end of the bed, sliding a thick tube between my brother’s hips. Bryson doesn’t speak, can’t scream as the doctor tapes the tube to his knee then attaches the other end to a large clear pouch. The doctor pushes on his stomach, brown gunk seeping into the pouch as both nurses move to the head of the bed and start pressing buttons, turning things off.

“Daddy?” I murmur, my breath fogging the glass.

He lifts my head off the window, resting it on his shoulder as he wraps his arms around my waist. With a slight groan, he tries to lift me up like he used to, when I was a kid in Jamaica. Following his movements, I stand on my tiptoes just to make him feel like he can still do it, that nothing’s changed.

Beepbeep the monitor goes, line climbing slowly. Beep beep the machine sings, line already beginning to fall, beep then I wait, I want to hear it but there’s no more. Daddy buries his head in my shirt collar then lets out a long wail.

Our mother and brother, who art in heaven, hallowed be their names.

__________________________________

From Broughtupsy by Christina Cooke. Used with permission of the publisher, Catapult. Copyright © 2024 by Christina Cooke.

Friday morning one late summer in a city where the trash from the buildings with balconies facing the corniche is driven to where the palm trees droop and the earth corrodes green and brown; to where the children with palm fronds in their arms stop every day to poke around in the puddles of mud, waiting for the dogs to eventually arrive and tear the trash bags wide open.

The children anticipate the dogs bounding atop the trash pile soon taller than the house along one side of the alley, and then them bounding back down and the mound sinking and spreading out; the children watch muddy water pulsing, filling the pits in the ground and flowing out to the cars and the newspaper stands, the shops, the fountain and the cherry trees too.

The woman searching for her child wakes up in the morning sunburnt and sits up in the sand. The great loss has already rolled in across the earth, grief and drought, a tattered sunbaked landscape cupped by two empty hands; these days are not the days that once were and this place is a different place, the air close and old, and the city a hole between what came to be and what could have been.

If I feel the sun to be large and hot, it is even hotter to the child she says from her place on the beach, lifting a fistful of sand to her cheek—if in daytime I always appear as the stranger I am in this city, then the child must also appear somewhere—if only I could find the right position and turn my gaze in her direction she says, looking around as if seeking the place from which the child might finally appear across the beach.

The inner distances are greater—between memory and memory and from experience to experience time no longer passes, and the woman does not know where she is or why, whether it was a year or a lifetime ago that the child was playing in her belly and the sun almost extinguished was setting over the sugarcane fields and the mountains, or whether she will again be consigned here tonight, to this place on the beach, to the here and now.

She no longer knows whether the homes on that distant hillside existed at all before they, at dawn with the morning haze, were levelled to the ground; nor does she know whether anyone sees her today as she like every other day searches and calls her child’s name throughout the city, saying you are not alone, my beloved and thinking of the mother among the tent rows who pressed her little bundle already blued against her body and sang the only lullaby she knew in the language she had not yet forgotten.

The mother said I can hear him breathing and held out the baby for the people sitting around to inspect, then crawled onto the rug in the middle of the tent and asked can’t you hear it too? before falling back into her rocking and singing. I saw it happen with my own eyes the woman says out loud from where she is sitting, the morning waves foaming and the sand dunes before her—it happened to the woman two tents over she says and I could see that nothing of the child remained, but I couldn’t say anything to the mother, to the mother I said nothing, for that mother I had no words she says and stands up.

Today the world feels different somehow new and the woman decides to search for her daughter one last time and thereafter no more—never more by the sea or along the harbour and not by the deserted plots of land or in the half desert below the mountains.

She takes stones from the water’s edge and stamps out a rectangle, lets the stones frame a bed and a pillow and says if she passes by, she will know that this is a resting place before continuing her daily trek through the city. Today she will first go to the alley, then to the square and the library and finally return here, to the beach and the corniche.

She walks slowly, stopping often, looking around, waiting impatiently in the city.

Sometimes it happens that someone turns to watch her while she is speaking loudly and angrily or softly close to tears, saying my child and shutting her eyes or have you eaten anything today? as if The Missing One were standing right beside her and could answer once and then again.

Maybe if you wait in the shade of the walnut trees for a barefoot mother to come by and take you in her arms she says and turns around—maybe if on the street corner by the newspaper stand you feel a familiar eye seek you out and understand that it is me she says and looks down the road this way and then that.

She sees them—she sees that those who have stopped to look at the dust and the stains, the bag she carries close to her body and the bare feet with split nails and cracked heels do not understand to whom or in which language she is speaking, and so she wants to say hello and wait, explain herself. The woman wants to share something about her girl with the few words she has managed to commit to memory without them taking fright or turning away, but this too she sees is impossible—they are now speeding their steps up the street to the traffic lights and melding with the swarm that begins on the other side of the road.

What is there if it cannot be close to this and this the woman says and first puts a hand to her belly then to her forehead damp and warm, moving on in the morning sun to the alley.

What is there if it must always be taken away she says and removes her headscarf, wipes her face and the back of her neck, glances up at the sky as blue and blithe, as high and smooth as always, when she makes her way to the children and her mother, all waiting for The Missing One to return to the alley.

*

Friday morning one late summer in a harbour town spread out along a coastline nestled against the mountains and near a bay that farther up, in another country, curves in and out the image of a half moon, soft and beautiful.

The children in the alley run their hands across the half moon on the map and then draw it in the dust across the sun-drenched alley.

The children say on the map all mountains look alike, but I know that one is red and by that red mountain we once lived.

They say from a hole in the middle of the red mountain ran water soft and pink, and when in the afternoon sun we kicked the ball against the mountain face, the water beaded on our arms and legs and cooled us down, gave us shelter; the water lifted us up high, a cloud of mist to hide in when someone looked up from the road and heard us playing and sleeping and living and eating by the red mountain, do you remember?

Yes the children reply to each other and say we followed the water into the ditch and onward between the homes and saw that at the hillside it pooled like a shimmering lake of garbage and mud— this we remember.

Minna looks up from the half moon drawn in the alley and continues do you remember that we took fistfuls of that mud and built small beds where the kittens could sleep, and we filled the beds with dry grass and newspaper and later dried flowers, dried palm fronds broken and shredded and some old rags? Do you remember that the kittens liked it better there than anywhere else and we felt that so keenly then, that we had done a good thing?

Yes Mo and Pearl reply and continue running their fingers in lines across the alley, now drawing the red mountain and the homes they once had and the ditch and the hillside; the children draw the school at the foot of the slope and the awnings that ran between their homes and also the mountain of trash a short distance away; they draw the water tap and the bicycle and finally the kitten beds like a scattering of small dots in the heat soon unbearable in the alley.

It’s morning and the sun beats down on every child and every stone fallen from the ruined wall and collected in the middle of the alley; it’s morning and the rats zip down the broken waterspout and into the rubble by the house next door, and the cockroaches shimmering find their way out of the dust and climb the walls, going as far as they can away from the alley.

Here there are no longer friends to call out to and no starry sky under the red streetlight’s glow, and neither a hillside nor a mountain rising to hold and comfort, to shield the children from the wind and the rain or just from the cars and eyes prying deep into where the children are sleeping and eating and walking and playing in the alley.

The alley is dusty and deep and at the far end, where the sun does not reach and something darker and larger blooms, there a grandmother sits against a wall keeping a watchful eye on the children.

If she comes home tomorrow, I will draw a flower and a house and next to the house I will draw a ditch and above the ditch a haze the children say and search for a piece of paper that blew in and landed in the alley; if she wants to borrow my catapult, she can have it and if she wants to sing a song, I will sing it, even though I don’t know how the children say and draw the flower, the house and a palm with leaves big enough to keep the rain off.

Grief draws in and widens the distances without the children knowing how or why, and in the bushes that no longer bloom, what is burnt pushes through the deep green and takes over; at the mouth of the alley, an orange tree no longer rises like a crown over the patch of earth where The Missing One would sit with her notebook, and down the road a neighbour no longer stops by to ask the children if they want to come along to the beach or the square for a bit.

Rocks are mountains the children say as they sit either at the ruined wall or in the middle of the alley, waiting for The Missing One to return home.

If you hold a stone in your hand, your hand takes the shape of the stone and if you put the stone in your mouth, your mouth becomes as hard as the stone they say and press their stone hard into their hands. Yes the children reply—if you stack your stones, you can build a hut and if you throw your stone at something, the stone will always win the children say and either pour out or collect the stones that have fallen from the ruined wall in piles across the alley.

Unless it’s at water the children say to each other and look up.

Yes, unless it’s at water the children reply to each other and look around.

If the loss is present, the children no longer know whether it is their mother or sister it has laid claim to, and if heads tilted they stand by the ruined wall and search in the swarm across the road, they no longer know which of the two to search for.

Remember when she came home with a big tin of olives and we sat down to eat every single one? the children ask as they lie there and lift a medium-sized stone towards the sun, holding it there and letting it for a moment hide and push away the sun.

Yes, I remember the children reply—she was happy and cheerful that day, had found a friend there on the corniche and said it was getting better, a girl who worked a few restaurants down and who she could smoke and talk with, they could accompany each other home and maybe she could even invite her here, she said. The olives gave us a stomachache that lasted all night and into the next morning too the children say and start sorting the stones they’ve collected in order of size from one side of the alley to the other.

When Mum and Gran came home from the market, we had to keep quiet about it even though we were rolling around in pain the children say and laugh out loud for the first time in a long while in the alley.

But then we teased her when we saw her carrying the pits in a bag and tossing it into the container across the road the children reply and look at all the piles that have now grown bigger and spread across the alley.

It was a heavy bag the children say and take a stone from each of their own piles and put it in their sweater now stretched out and pale from all the stones borne across the alley.

Imagine the people on the corniche got angry when they realized she’d taken the olives even though the can was only going to be thrown away the children say and from the depths of their sweater pile the stones into a mountain in the middle of the alley. Yes, imagine if that’s why she disappeared the children say to each other and use their feet to dig a trench that runs from the mountain to the ruined wall and the road, they build a sort of hillside in the alley.

Mum didn’t like her working there the children say and place stones like homes on either side of the ditch and farther away a school, a food storehouse, a small house for the cats to sleep and play in.

No, she was worried and angry and one time they fought and stopped talking to each other for a whole day the children say and line up stones like labyrinths around the homes, building a wall and erecting a shelter.

Then just before she had to go to work Mum hugged and kissed her, told her to be careful, that Friday nights were the worst on the corniche they say and decide that the labyrinths are borders you cannot cross any which way, not without first asking permission and paying a toll.

What if the people on the corniche harmed her the children say to each other, now quieter, and decide that if you crossed a border and grazed a stone, you are not allowed to cross another until you have stuffed your mouth full of stones and said a rhyme out loud in the alley.

She had bruises all over her arms and legs the children reply to each other and decide that the rhyme should be one that Mum had taught in the tent school before the people in military uniforms arrived and took everything the children hadn’t had time to carry along with the slate and the table, as well as the map of the world they’d drawn and the shelf Mum got from the nice lady at the library.

Yes, and all over her back and chest too, I saw them when she was washing herself in the bathroom one day and I happened to go in there they say and slowly begin to move through the labyrinths, their mouth full of sharp stones and their rhyme drawn out as the morning sun crosses the alley.

The children play a while and rest a while, position themselves to look out over the road and search for ants near the ruined wall a while. Then they sleep, long.

When they wake up it all begins again and they do what they usually do in the same order and in the same way as before: take out the bread bag from the tin that once held flour and salt and put the part of the bread that hasn’t gone mouldy on a newspaper, pour a can of beans on top, and slice some tomato or cucumber and put it on the side.

Sometimes they call for their grandmother to come and sometimes she steps out of the darkness and says thank you and that’s enough, says she can still feel yesterday’s bread in her throat and again disappears into what has become her spot at the end of the alley.

Now and then the greengrocer comes by to drop off more cucumbers and more plums, asking if the children have seen their mother lately or if they’ve had any news about their sister, will she be coming home soon?

The greengrocer asks if they are managing well in the alley and if Gran is cooking what he’s been dropping off, and which out of the corner of his eye he sees is rotting in bags next to the wall. He asks about the men who make their way here—if there are fewer of them now that the tourist season is over—and if the children are sleeping better and no longer having nightmares in the alley.

The children answer maybe or no, say we haven’t heard anything about our sister and Mum hasn’t been here in a long time and then again I don’t know.

The greengrocer leaves more bread and beans, and the children thank him and follow him to the ruined wall and the pavement— that’s as far as the children will go, and when the greengrocer disappears towards the square, the children think they can see the cherry trees and the library, the food stalls and the fountain; they think they can make out the light that this time of year always hits the shop windows and the playground and also how it thereafter softly falls back on the same cherry trees billowing large by the fountain.

The children see this and turn away.

After eating they rinse their hands and begin again collecting stones collecting scrap, waiting for something anything to happen, and pressing the rocks to their bodies.

What day is it? The children don’t know, can’t read their way to it, have no one to ask.

Was it recently or long ago that their sister disappeared and is tomorrow the day she will finally return?

Will it be this winter that they start school and are given a home where they can rest and warm themselves, draw and play?

The children look up at the trees and the sky and then turn back to the ruined wall and the alley, pick up a stone.

*

Late summer, one Friday morning in an alley where no one hangs palm fronds anymore green and speckled, and no one knots two ropes together and jumps rope with the children happy under the shadows of the tarpaulin, stretched like a roof from one side of the alley to the other. No one tugs at the other’s hand anymore and says come, look what I’ve found and no one follows after and laughs, taking a bumblebee more beautiful than ever out into the sun and leaving it on the pavement a short distance from the alley.

The grandmother sits in the dark and looks around.

When construction began on the house next door to the razed lot they call the alley and the walls were torn down in anticipation of new ones for a new house with new windows and new doors, a prettier garden and a metal gate with no bullet holes or dents from the war, it was no longer possible for the tarpaulins to hang across the alley, leaving it bared to the sun and the world.

She tried to hang up the tarpaulins, to protect the children, but it wasn’t possible—the walls on one side weren’t there anymore and her spot was the only one that still had a stump of wall from which a piece of cloth could be hung to draw a darkness over her deeper than she could ever have imagined and all that had been left for her to take care of in the depths of the alley.

The grandmother went into the darkness and there she stayed.

From here she can see the movement of loss and doesn’t know what to do; she sees it all the time and fears it as she sits there watching over the alley—she even sees it when the children for once seem to be laughing or playing, and fears it too in dreams when they emerge from the red streetlight bruised and naked, and tell her yet again that the girl has disappeared.

If I stand in the middle of the road and stay there, even if everyone wants me to keep going she mumbles—if I rip one of the men out of the driver’s seat and threaten to slit his throat, maybe someone will give her back to us she says almost invisible from the back of the alley.

Have the missing ever returned she says and runs a hand over the wall and the bullet holes sharp in the middle of the wall—has spilled water ever been unspilled she says and falls silent.

It is summer, even if the tourists have left the cool cottages in the mountains and the small shops along the promenades have shut their doors; summer, as if summer never wanted to end, and past the broken windows of the deserted houses red dust ripples towards the grass.

It doesn’t cool down no matter how many pieces of cloth the grandmother spreads across the ground, not even if at dawn she douses the alley with water from the tap in the only bathroom they dare to enter, with the roof almost split in two and the green tiles in pieces underfoot; the alley will not cool and in the air the swallows fly ever higher and fall again and again against the half-demolished roof of the house.

The grandmother remembers, watching over the children in the daytime and at all other times turned to darkness waiting for those who should return, it’s high time now, where are they?

She remembers that once her cousin Naima and later The Missing One were with her and now neither of them is here—her daughter only barely so, returning to the alley only sometimes. She did what she was supposed to and was loving and held them close—even so neither of

them is here, why is that?

Where are they? Why don’t they come home? She wants Naima and The Missing One back and leaves her spot from time to time, slaps herself hard across the face and thighs and pulls off her headscarf, waving it in the air.

The grandmother picks up the tea glass as if it were hot even though she hasn’t boiled tea for days and pretends to eat a piece of bread even though there is no bread at hand. Would you like some? she asks The Missing One as if she were sitting beside her, and then you don’t eat enough, you never have, I don’t like it. When you get home, I’ll throw you a party—I promise this before the stars and God—and I’ll take off these ugly black clothes and wear something red or airy, this I swear. I’ll wash and comb my hair and offer bread and sugar to anyone who comes walking down the street; I will air the blankets and mattress so you can sleep the softest sleep and I’ll cook all your favourite meals even if my hands have forgotten the measurements and I no longer know what you like, can you tell me?

Do you remember how we used to roast the tomatoes soft over the fire and I would call you in to eat from where you were playing with the other children by the hillside and the mountain face? You’ll never grow big if you don’t eat, I said, and how you gave no answer even though what we’d prepared was so tasty and sweet and not as hard to get hold of as now—do you remember that?

Do you remember how we were able to bring home what we needed without being beaten up and how bad it got when they started marking us in town? Still you grew taller than all the children running up and down the hillside and taller even than me, no matter how many times I begged you not to grow past me like that. I used to watch you, see how the children gasped when you got up from dinner by the hillside and how afterwards they’d knock on our door and ask you to pull at their hands and legs to make them as tall as you, do you remember that?

I used to look at you and when you turned around, you’d blow me a kiss and I’d blow two or three back.

Do you remember how you’d linger by the ditch for hours waiting for Mum to turn off from the road? She’ll be here soon, I said, but you wanted to see her— nothing would do but seeing her with your own eyes coming up the hillside with sacks or planks over her shoulder and then you’d run to me at the same time every day saying Mum’s coming, Mum’s coming, as if it were a miracle that your very own mother was returning from the sugarcane fields and taking you in her arms each day.

The grandmother fidgets in her pit, puts her hand over her mouth, squats down. She can no longer stand to see the children’s movements in the alley and instead stares at the wall.

I was your age when my cousin Naima disappeared and a few weeks later the neighbour girl Selma too, Selma who everyone thought was so bright and beautiful and who I never got to know except for sharing the occasional soft drink and smoking one of the cigarettes she always had with her. I remember that it was winter and I didn’t have a warm jacket and the power was always cutting out; I remember that Naima got sad and cried ever more often and that sometimes I’d steal chocolate for her or bring a newspaper from the stand near our home. When she disappeared Mum kept me home from school for weeks and didn’t let me go along to the market or visit my aunt and our young cousins who didn’t know what to do with themselves amidst waiting for Naima and everyone who was searching for Naima along the roads and in the desert. I was searching too even though I wasn’t allowed—setting out when Mum and Gran were in the fields and searching for Naima and Selma where I thought they might be held captive by those men they had talked about and feared. Once I walked all the way to the city centre to wait for a car to approach me as I knew they had approached Naima on her way home from the food storehouse one evening. And as I stood there by the red lights, one of the men slowed down and looked at me, rolled down his window, made a gesture. I ran away as fast as I could and escaped by a hair, can you imagine? the grandmother says and moves in the darkness now deep and resounding across the alley; I made it out then, my darling, but I ended up here instead she says and lies face down in the dust, saying nothing more.

__________________________________

Excerpted from The Singularity by Balsam Karam, translated by Saskia Vogel. Reprinted with permission of the publisher, Feminist Press.

Saved, yes. David Rizzo knew his son’s resurrection had saved his gun shop. The arrival of this fact abrupt, vivid—brought him to silent tears behind the wheel of his unreliable Eldorado. He drove through txhe depthless desert sky, wiping his face, the world a smear of bare earth and sunlight. Rizzo’s Firearms, rescued. His son, not dead. It settled between his stomach and his throat, this stark revelation.

As Rizzo drove to the hospital on that heat-sick afternoon to pick up his son—drove fast across the tall loop of the freeway, over the lifeless suburbs: Sonora Gateway, Arroyo Foothills, Moon Valley Manors; above the carnival spreads of outdoor shopping centers: Desert Ridge, Scottsdale Quarter, Metrocenter; past the pockets of turf fields, car dealerships, adobe churches, drive-through liquor stores, uncharmed apartments; as he drove on beside the midday glitter of the casino, Talking Stick, across boundless land streaked with posing saguaros, then the barbed purple columns of the east valley mountains, Superstition, toward the minor glass of downtown—yes, as Rizzo drove through his home of Phoenix, Arizona, he began to unbend all the angles of his elaborate salvation.

All his life he had waited for a sign from above. Here it was, his estranged son, back for a reason. It had been more than a year since he had last seen the kid. And of all days this one: when Rizzo was supposed to sign the shop away, the call came. Overdosed three days ago, he said. Flatlined. Nicholas, on the phone with that familiar mumble, meek and sorry. It was obvious: if his son could return from the dead, so could Rizzo’s business. Now, in the clay-colored valley of the desert, all was glory, all was light, all burned with the eternal grace of the divine.

The Eldorado’s engine was smoking. Rizzo, distressed, parked in what seemed like the only open spot at Banner Health. His shit engine. Outside the car he paced around, afraid the whole thing might catch fire. Seared the shit out of his fingers when he tried to lift the hood. He twisted his pinkie ring, patted the gray curls at the back of his head, hoping the coils of smoke would suddenly quit. They did not.

After walking a mile to the Circle K for some coolant—a lonelier journey than Rizzo anticipated: he leaned through the dust knocked into the air, the one man on the roadside, and the sound of every truck bed rattling past made him feel as if he was somehow left behind—Rizzo got back to the hospital just in time to watch his Eldorado be loaded onto a tow truck. How could he have missed the sign that said those spots were reserved for medical vehicles? Rizzo, dumbstruck, sweated through his silk shirt, still hugging the container of coolant, unsure of how to spare his Cadillac the sad ordeal of the tow yard.

“You see that last night? Six dead. Fourteen injured. Sorority girls, deputies, cyclists,” the tow truck guy said, tearing several identical pieces of paper from a clipboard. He was a man of frail build and dense beard. “Makes you wonder. Some maniac in a car, mind gone, shooting everyone. You never know. Right here right now. Could be us. Except this kid hated women or something and wanted to kill them all. But hey, you never know. We could be women. It could’ve been us. Random, everything, right?”

The tow truck guy socially pondering a recent massacre meant the vehicle was safe—or so Rizzo thought, but then a button was pressed and the car rose with a groan to the flatbed.

Of course this was not a big deal. In the grand scheme. Calmly Rizzo, inside the hospital, introduced himself to the first-floor receptionist, who sent him to the second-floor receptionist, who held up a finger while she called the first-floor receptionist before unloading Rizzo on Maria, a lisping medical assistant who, phone pinned between shoulder and ear, steered a stretcher through the packed hall. “Unforgivable. Totally unforgivable,” Maria said to her phone. Rizzo jogged beside her, explaining. His son? Yes, his son, you know: Nick Rizzo—the tall kid with the crazy hair who might be decent-looking if he put some weight on—brought in because of an overdose? But Maria did not know. So Rizzo repeated all he knew, how he had been trying to reach his son on the number the kid had called from but got only a busy signal. In response a laconic Maria said to take the elevator to the third floor and walk to the east wing, two lefts, a quick right, and Rizzo said he planned to do just that, but he first wanted to talk to the doctor.

The old guy spread on the stretcher pointed a finger at Rizzo. “Do me a favor, please. Hey. Okay? A favor.” He was a wrinkled man with striking eyebrows. “Tell Charlie Miniscus I hope he rots in hell.”

Everything stayed in motion: Maria with her stretcher, but also a flurry of creaking wheelchairs, wobbling gowns, a traffic of the diseased and the damned—and there went Rizzo, weaving to keep up, embarrassed and breathless.

“The doctors are in meetings,” Maria said, walking faster now. All of them? “One second,” Maria said, to her phone, while looking at Rizzo. She said she understood now, and then repeated her earlier directions: third floor, two lefts, a quick right.

The guy on the stretcher again: “Rot in hell, Miniscus!”

Rizzo smiled at everyone in the elevator so that they all understood how completely fine he was. Oh, he was so fine. A sallow man in the corner of the compartment wept, Rizzo noticed, while incanting the word kidney.

Maria’s directions brought Rizzo to a florid man in a suit who, with his legs crossed in a wheelchair parked near a bathroom, stood to introduce himself. “Chad Garlin. Hey there, how you doing?” Chad—who was just fantastic, thanks for asking—happened to be a medical supplies salesman from AventCore specializing in heavy-duty gauze. “Best stuff for your gunshot wounds, your buzz-saw wounds, any impaling situations.” And he was on break, technically, Chad choosing this wheelchair here because he spent much of his day walking up and down the stairs for his meetings with doctors. “Good way to get my steps in,” Chad continued. Up, down. Up, down. Half his day, lost in the dumb metal heat of the stairwell. How many steps had Rizzo taken today, Chad wanted to know. How many? Chad mimicked a marching motion. It amazed him how doctors could be so oblivious when it came to their own health, he said, slapping Rizzo’s shoulder. “Oh, is that right, not a doctor?” Chad, dimming, lowered himself back into the wheelchair, then directed Rizzo with a wave toward a far window.

Rizzo found the area disastrously hot, the hallway a blur, and the only person around was the janitor, a confident man with a limp, mopping, who explained they had moved all the patients in the third-floor east wing to the first-floor west wing because of the busted AC. “Or at least that’s the story they’re telling,” the janitor whispered. After listening to the janitor’s theory—basic experiments: risky organ removals, unproven pharmaceuticals—Rizzo was back in the first-floor west wing, near where he had entered, and soon he figured out from a cafeteria worker with an eyebrow piercing that his son was no longer in the hospital; that is, his son had been sent across the street to the health system’s psychiatric center, the place they used for the detox spillover.

Not that any of this frustrated Rizzo. Oh no, not one bit. It all almost made sense.

Rizzo halted and sprinted in accordance with the traffic on his way to retrieve his son. After a day in a coma, after three days of detox, Nick looked even worse than Rizzo expected: pale, sunken, forlorn. He had a lazy beard and the curls in his hair were greased to the right side of his head. Nicholas Rizzo, his stupid fragile son. He stood there in the lobby waiting, glum and unkempt, in jeans and a flannel. Behind the front desk a man said, “And in my opinion he got what he deserved,” into his headphones. Rizzo gave his son a firm nod that he hoped communicated what a shit time this would be to talk.

Outside they waited for an Uber in silence. It was at this point that Rizzo realized he was still holding the container of coolant. The car that came was a minivan, and the driver apologized about all the stuff they needed to climb over: dented boxes of TiVos, iPods, DVDs, smart alarm clocks, noisy baby toys. The driver was helping a friend unload some stuff—speaking of which, the driver said, a thumb over his shoulder, if they saw anything they liked? Let him know. He could maybe possibly perhaps make a deal. So just let him know, okay?

They sat crammed in the last row. “My phone,” Nick whispered, all the sudden. A frantic pat down followed. “Shit.” Leaning back, dejected. Then, hands behind his head: “Hey, Dad? Thanks for coming. I’m sorry about all of this. But things are different this time, I don’t need rehab. The hospital was enough.”

In a rare occurrence, Rizzo agreed. This rehab crap? Not worth it. Same with NA. For some it helped, but for others, like you, my son, all it does is acquaint idiots with more accomplished idiots. So instead of rehab Nick would work—as in, work for his father’s business.

“Oh.” Nick, scratching his head. “Wait. You’re still doing the gun thing?”

It would be easy to sleep tonight, Rizzo knew, because there was absolutely nothing to worry about. Rizzo was okay. He was at the kitchen table with a cigarette. This was a good table, a scarce heirloom, the surface tiles painted by his own grandmother, the place where many a Rizzo had graced a meal with a pile of complaints. He looked around the house. The desert landscape paintings of uncertain origin. The little crucifix hung beside a wrought-iron star. Envelopes stacked on the counter beneath a cordless landline. Rizzo now began to feel these objects no longer belonged to him but rather to the house itself, this collapsed version of a home with its low ceiling and an open kitchen and a single hallway, a structure identical to those owned by neighbors he had never spoken to nor seen but whom he knew existed by the infrequent grating lift from their garage doors. He was the rare year-round resident in a community of second homes. Rizzo ashed his cigarette in a plain mug his wife for some reason had liked, staring through the dust-streaked glass of the slider door at the yard of decorative rock.

It would make sense to worry if he had no plan. His thirty-year-old son, back again, marooned in the house, and no plan? His business, his stupendous debt, and no plan? But there was no need to worry because he knew he would come up with something, a way to save his gun shop, his son, himself. There was no need to worry because, the last time Rizzo checked, this was still America, and in America there would always be hope.

*

So then why was Rizzo crying?

Why?

Mere hours after he had been so certain, and yet here he was outside, as far away as he could be from his son—who sat like an idiot at the kitchen island, hauling cereal to his face—in a corner of his backyard, poorly obscured by the drooping mesquite, crying?

Crying, in what was officially the palm tree twilight?

Beneath the mountains streaked in a brittle green? In a backyard so new, so ready for use, with fake flagstone, a propane grill, and heat-cracked wicker chairs? Why?

Who cries in paradise?

__________________________________

Excerpted from Last Acts by Alexander Sammartino. Copyright © 2024 by Alexander Sammartino. Reprinted by permission of Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, LLC.

Get there: the day after Jay committed suicide, Coral had a brunch date with her friends and did not cancel. We believe in confronting danger unblinking, face to the flames, teeth bared to bullets. We do not wince at pain unless that is the practice of the hour. To wince is to acknowledge the potential for defeat, five for flinching. We are unsure where the danger fell for Coral, in the face of her friends or in the judgment at her absence. Coral had stayed at Jay’s apartment and did not head to her home in La Brea until after sunrise. She owned a bungalow with a yard in one of a thousand overpriced neighborhoods in Los Angeles. The sky was bright and blue, light reflected from everything that morning, the shine in the washed cars of her neighbors, the glimmer of dew on the shrubs. Finger succulents, velvety and swollen, which everyone used to replace grass, studded the front lawn. It was a beautiful day.

Where she was: Coral approached Il Fornaio feeling as if her throat were turning to steel, all the veins and muscles hardening, the blood squeezing through clogged plumbing. It was the same feeling she had after eating a family-sized bag of chips. She wanted to expel whatever was in her body through every possible exit port, but relief was not possible. The thing inside her was not going to come out. It was hot. There were misters running at the entrance under a green awning. Coral walked through the veil of mist and jumped back as if spit on. She remembered that the devices were supposed to be a luxury. She walked through a forest of people, big people and small people at tiny tables with barely enough room for their bread baskets, saucers of herbs and olive oil, and eighteen-dollar mimosas (not bottomless). The friends were on the patio in the distance. One waved her over. A waitress backed into her suddenly. Liquid hit the top of Coral’s left foot. A dog barked, then was silenced. The restaurant was flooded with the clatter of voices, so many that it seemed quiet. So much noise that there was nothing to hear at all. Coral suddenly realized it was all meant to be pleasant.

Where she wanted to be: The friends appeared, talking all at once, greeting her all at once, their heads seeming to spin like coins, she was unable to discern a face or mouth, just the knowledge that there was one amid the blur. Coral wanted to be somewhere quiet where there were no heads unwinding like rubber bands; somewhere her own throat felt soft and pliable and she could turn her neck without pain; somewhere with water stretched out in front of her or heavy in the sky above, about to be squeezed out; somewhere even the insects knew not to make too much of a sound, because something special was about to happen again, something they didn’t know they were looking forward to until it arrived and now there was nothing more important anywhere in the world. The unique relationship to water among the living was incomparable to any other. It was more than sex, murder, food, or faith. It was their god and their whore.

Who she was: Like most people less than fifty years old and more than nine, Coral was a curated exhibit, carefully constructed in the presentation of self. First, she wore dresses because children in the 1980s were treated like peach pits where the body was the seed and the resulting fruit a voluminous array of ruffles and lace. Then came two decades of Sunday services in a Baptist church. Then came various declarations of gay followed by estrangement from her parents, mostly her father, the burial of those parents, and the duplicitous sensation of suffering and relief forever after. Ultimately, Coral met all expectations of gender, race, politics, education, and diverted from those expectations only when appropriate for a change in audience. She did

so consciously and subconsciously, as was the norm. In a slight deviation from normal, Coral became a successful artist, writing and drawing fantasies into reality, and luckily found more audiences with money as well as a curious community of peers, competitors, and patrons.

Who they are: The friends would’ve eaten her. If promised anywhere from a hundred to a million dollars for tearing off a bit of Coral’s flesh and swallowing it down, those friends across the table with half-chewed omelets and drops of vodka and tomato juice lingering under their tongues would choose the money. In the Clinic for Death from Loneliness, we study the idea of friends. We distill friendship to the fibrous root where people have no expectation except time; it is easy; there are no transactions, no obligations, just memories and the desire to do it all again one more time. Sometimes blood families can be friends but not always. We’ve concluded that friends are discovered through chemical compatibility, like lovers but with less genital contraction or bonding through experiences, especially trauma and triumph. A single devastation or victory can sustain a friendship for a lifetime. One of the spinning heads asked Coral a question in a low voice, as if it were a secret. How are you, she asked. Coral thought about the answer briefly, the one she would give and the one she would keep. My brother is dead. He was not dead and then he was dead. Who are you and this place? Why have you kept me here? The head stopped spinning and Coral could see eyes, dark brown and alert, the eyeshadow, low lids, signs of ptosis from aging, and a mustache painted in foundation. Bad date, Coral actually said, or good one. They’re all the same to me. The head spun again, disappearing into laughter.

She had slept on her brother’s stripped mattress in the humid apartment, waiting for something.

Who she wanted to be: Present. Coral wanted to be acutely aware of her feet on the brick patio, the drying drops of liquid on the top of her foot, the individual conversations taking place around her and in front of her, the person she used to be and the person she would be from then on, and to be able to choose between them like items on a drive-thru menu. Today she would be seventeen-year-old Coral, drinking wine coolers with friends in the back of a Toyota coupe before going to the mall to steal cheap jewelry. Tomorrow she would be Coral seven years from now, safely through the grieving process and managing an almost happy life.

Who she wanted them to be: She wanted the friends to be themselves but not with her. Let them exist where they needed to but not with her. She wanted them blind, transformed into beautiful bats with too much lip gloss, hanging upside down from the restaurant ceiling, free to shit on the other patrons and gnaw on handfuls of overripe plums. She wanted them to be that kind of happy, if that kind of happiness were possible.

Who she would be later: Later, Coral would be a fish, when the force of death has dismantled the atoms and sent them into the bellies of other things more than just a few times. First she would suffer, then wonder, then for a brief moment be healed, then start over.

A phone rang. The spinning heads looked at Coral’s bag. The ringtone was odd. It was Jay’s phone.

Jay’s phone rang again and a plate of ahi tuna tartare appeared under Coral’s face. She didn’t remember ordering it, and no one seemed alarmed. Coral excused herself to the restroom.

Texting: Good restaurants have bad restrooms. It has been documented. It is a fact. In a good restaurant the restroom is small and poorly ventilated. The line is always long and full of terror. People are not able to do more than one thing very well at any given time.

The terror comes from not just waiting but being alone with one’s body and thoughts in a hallway too cramped to lift an arm without touching someone’s shoulder or ass. Coral seized Jay’s phone and let the vibrations of it roll through her palm a few more times before opening the messages.

Kai: You’re a no show! Never in nineteen years bro what the fuuuuuuuck

Kai: Im worried what’s up

Kai: is it K? She cool?

Kai: Vicki brought in Rjay but she flipping out threw half the smoked sausages away in the break room lol

Kai: yooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

Jay: I’m in the hospital.

All that fucking punctuation, Coral said aloud.

Jay: my foot is smashed and had to have surgery

Kai: oh shit bro you sound bad you shdilsai sksldiof ksiewoic

nwiocnv alsienf Vicky wont iandios hgh wes h aohs duakbn

Kai: vodiuah doaf how long ueshoudhf ouenbs

Kai: aweh xncow ealzosidn better bnusbbud bfus

The job: Coral lost her language-translation energy again as the air became more carbon dioxide than oxygen around her in the bathroom line. She began to scroll through past messages with this Kai person to understand many things. She learned that Jay possessed terrific grammatical sense, whereas Kai had almost none. There was a running joke/obsession with sausages in the break room that Coral thought might be a euphemism for something male and sexist, but knowing Jay she believed it was sincerely about food. Coral felt compelled to understand Jay’s job better, an essential tactic for infiltration of enemy territory.

Line at the restroom: The line for the restroom moved by a single individual. Everyone shifted forward with the assumption that more than one person would move along, but that assumption was replaced with despair and resignation. When cattle were slaughtered for food, the process involved arranging the animals in a curved or zigzag line because the end of the line was the end of their lives, and it was important that none of them could see that far in advance.

Small talk: Coral put down her phone and looked up to find a pair of eyes fixed on her. The body those eyes were attached to had an awful intention. It wanted to talk to Coral, and she could’ve looked away, could’ve willed herself into a coughing fit that everyone would back away from politely or otherwise. Coral had no defenses at the ready, so would take the first blow unblocked.

Is it a birthday? Your friends are so happy at the table.

Yes, Coral replied. Not mine.

Coral often lied to strangers. During small talk with anonymous individuals you can be anyone. Most people lived unconscious lives, surrendering their thoughts to the inventions of the day. Thinking was dangerous. Thinking as someone else would think was something other than dangerous: risk-free, yet thrilling.

The stranger took a pose of lamentation and said,

They don’t sing for birthdays here.

Thank God, Coral declared.

The stranger laughed. Coral smiled.

My birthday is in the winter, Coral said.

Holiday season. That’s great.

It was like a double party every year as a kid. Christmas pie and birthday cake. Some people hate it.

Oh, I know. My daughter’s is in December. She’s always cranky. In fact, she really is always cranky.

Oh no.

Yes, she’s having surgery this month too.

Is it serious?

No, no, it’s not at all.

I had a thing with my liver, Coral lied. They did a biopsy.

She liked this twist in the conversation very much.

Oh my gosh, everything good?

Well, it’s to be determined.

The stranger reached for her phone. Coral had inadvertently ended the conversation by threatening further discussion of medical ailments with a woman that possessed the emotional capacity of a fern, craving only sunshine and moist air. Coral felt almost victorious and very, very alone. She wanted more.

What was your daughter’s surgery?

Vicious. In an unsolicited attack Coral returned to what was known as small talk with the wounded woman in line. A man approached the hall, observed the density of bodies, and immediately retreated.

She left the country for the procedure.

Oh, for a specialist?

For a better price. BBL.

BBL?

Coral feigned ignorance. She wanted to hear the words. She wanted to be above vanity. She wanted to be above the bone and tissue and blood that gravity pulls so relentlessly to keep them knotted to the dirt. The woman aged suddenly. The tendrils of blond hair frosted her brow and cheek. The rouge seemed heavy and unabsorbed. Lines like the Mississippi Delta branched out from the points of her eyes. She gestured to her ass.

Oh!

Mmm-hmm.

Jay’s phone buzzed again and Coral gave it her attention. The woman whose daughter was having her buttocks enhanced sighed in relief.

Kai: when do you plan to be back?

Kai: Vicki been quiet now.

Jay: Tomorrow for sure

Kai: coo

Jay: have some get well flowers ready

Coral stared for a minute until the phone turned black in silent mode. Flowers? she thought. Fuck. Coral checked the message list and saw four unread texts from Vicki. The line moved. She wanted to say more. She had more to say. She looked for the woman, but she was next and the door opened. Coral reached for the woman to tap her on the shoulder to say, My brother is dead today. I’m not used to that, and I don’t know anyone to tell. All of the women at my table are strangers to me and I’ve seen their faces for years and years. I knew better people once maybe, but I did not keep them or I was not kept. How do we get to places like this? Can we go back the way we came and begin again? Are mothers always thinking of their daughters like you do? What is that like? How do you not implode from being that in love?

Coral looked behind her to the line of tense faces all suddenly gazing her way at once, and for a moment she felt transported to a stage speaking before a hundred guests, all of them brilliant and gorgeous as half-gods, suspended out of time, peering into the edge of the universe, waiting for what was promised, for salvation, for mercy.

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From Dead in Long Beach, California by Venita Blackburn. Published by MCD/FSG in January, 2024. Copyright © 2024 by Venita Blackburn. All rights reserved.

I’ve done it. I’ve finally done it. Here it is: truth itself, written down on the musty old motel stationery I found in a drawer in this rented room. All night long I’ve been telling the truth in a scrawl so scrawling that it nearly rips the pages. I’ve written by the light of a garish neon sign shining in through the window—and I feel so peculiar. I feel weightless. I might go flying up into the air at any second. My mind is buzzing from so much truth-telling. I feel blessed. I feel absolved.

But then—just that quickly, even before Poor Deer has the chance to tell me what I’ve gotten wrong this time—I begin to doubt. I’ve been telling made-up stories for so long that the unadorned truth feels ugly and ungrammatical and the facts feel like borrowed broken things picked out at random from a jumble of hearsay and old gossip. Once I tried to tell my mother the truth about the day of the schoolyard flood and she slapped me and said: “MARGARET MURPHY, YOU WILL NEVER REPEAT THAT AWFUL LIE AGAIN!” and I never did.

That’s when the old familiar voices in my head begin to speak to me, the way they always do. They’re trying to talk me out of what I remember about the day of the schoolyard flood. You were four years old. You were too young to remember. It didn’t happen that way. Your mother says you were with her all day and never left the house. She says you never stepped foot in that old toolshed. You’re remembering it wrong. What you call truth is nothing more than Ruby Bickford’s made-up story—her slander of a story—the lie she felt compelled to tell, because she couldn’t admit that she had killed her own child, through selfish neglect, and had then tried to blame the girl next door for her own, criminal negligence.

I’m innocent.

Maybe I’m innocent.

Poor Deer has tucked herself miserably back in her dim corner of room 127. She has gathered her raggedy blue robes about her and covered her head with them. She is peering out at me with one moist eye. More of your lying lies, she says. There was no tumult of color and light in that cooler. That girl died in the dark. When they found that girl, she was blue in the face. Her nails were split from trying to scratch her way out—her toes were clenched—you could have run for help—it should have been you in that box—

I was four years old. I was afraid.

You wanted her to die—you hated Agnes Bickford—

No. I loved Agnes Bickford.

But Poor Deer persists in harassing and haranguing me until I’m almost ready to say—I give up—you’re right about me—

And then, from behind the curtain, the first light of dawn begins to seep through, and I feel the creature in the corner diminishing. She is transubstantiating in reverse, from something supernatural, into something ordinary—a pile of old clothes, a shadow on the wall—until she is nearly transparent, and her voice is no more forceful than soft tears, when she says to me: Margaret Murphy, I am nowhere near done with you—

And then? There is no imaginary beast in the room with me.

Poor Deer has been defeated by the day.

Now it’s just the three of us in room 127 of Little Ida’s Motor Lodge.

Penny, Glo, and me.

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From Poor Deer by Claire Oshetsky. Copyright © 2024 by Claire Oshetsky. Excerpted by permission of Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

Walter Benjamin sits on a bench scratching his elbow and staring at the sea. He does not stare emptily: images and memories of other seas he has stared at in his fifty-five years on this earth (as a child, the Baltic; as an adult, the Mediterranean) pile on top of each other as he notes how similar and how different they were to the one he now stares at. He is disappointed in himself when after observing qualities of blueness, stillness, and size, he can come up with nothing better than noting that this one is, after all, more pacific.

Walter Benjamin stares at the sea and wishes he had something better to do. Sitting still and staring is something he does often, and is good at, a rare moment of time freed from capital, but he cannot deny that it is, quite simply, boring. Time has never been his friend, but never before has it felt quite such an enemy. He is on the edge of comparing the sea to time but blocks the thought before it turns banal. He thinks he should set out on another book, a long one, but even though he stares peacefully at the Pacific Ocean, he cannot settle for the time needed to concentrate on even the idea of a book and thinks he should instead try to finish the many things he has started. The big book about Paris, for one, but Paris is so distant now. A book about Los Angeles, perhaps, where he currently, unexpectedly, finds himself, staring at the sea, fascinated and bored in equal measure.

A large car pulls up alongside the bench next to him. A man get outs, takes a small black suitcase from the passenger seat, puts the case on the bench, then sits down next to it. Walter Benjamin likes to observe but does not like to engage so does not attempt to strike up a conversation with the man who, in any case, is, like him, staring out at the sea, though in a noticeably more agitated fashion. After a few minutes the man gets up again, returns to his car and drives off, leaving the suitcase on the bench.

Walter Benjamin briefly considers taking the suitcase, as if to replace the ones he has lost, but swiftly dismisses the idea. He no longer wishes to be involved in other people’s lives. He stares at the sea and wonders if anyone thinks of him anymore. If they did, he thinks, they would imagine him exactly as he is: sitting on a bench, unmoving, staring at the sea. He doesn’t talk to many of the old lot anymore. Max, Teddy, Bert. He never really had that much time for them, really, nor they for him. They’re trying to make a go of it out here, but Walter thinks he has come as far as he can and can go no further. He stares at the sea. Everyone, said someone, has one big idea or lots of small ones. He stares at the sea and thinks that he had lots of big ideas.

Another car pulls up, and a woman gets out and sits on the bench next to the suitcase. She is wearing sunglasses and has a scarf pulled around her head to protect her hair from the insistent breeze. She looks out at the sea, then looks over to Walter, but Walter does not meet her gaze. She picks up the suitcase, gets back in her car, and drives off. He thinks again about the suitcases he has lost, and who may have claimed them.

He stares at the sea and cannot stop himself from thinking of what brought him here and remembering the journey variously, perilously. After the scramble over the mountains and the switch in the grubby hotel, he could have taken another long walk to Barcelona and from there boarded a ship bound for safety, or he may have taken a train to Madrid and from there one to Lisbon and stood on a hopeful quay, or a train farther south to Algeciras, then a boat to Tangier, from where he would have travelled to Casablanca and waited, or maybe he never took that route at all, and had got out earlier with an exit visa from France and an entry one to the US, but however he did or didn’t get here, slipping away into crowds with documents and papers and passports forged or real, he is here now, sitting on a bench, quite alone, staring at the sea.

Walter Benjamin decides to make use of his boredom and go to the cinema. He goes to the cinema often, and alone, and he loves it. The Picfair, the Movie Parade, the Hollywood, the Vista, the Million Dollar, El Capitan, the Egyptian. The cinema is, as Gorky said, the kingdom of the shadows and the best place to vanish for a while.

The walk is long, and no one walks in this city but he will not learn how to drive. He has no ability, no interest, and is far too old. There is no bus service he can discern. As he walks, cars occasionally slow and either regard him warily or offer a lift. The latter he waves away. He wants no charity from strangers.

He loves the cinema but often hates the films. The only ones he likes are the crime films, though not the ones with gangsters but the ones about lonely and desperate men or women trying to find a foothold in life, taking risks, disappearing then remaking themselves. He should write something, he tells himself, about these films, though he knows he never will. He walks into the movie theatre even though the show has already begun. He enjoys watching films this way, walking in halfway through and not leaving at the end of the screening but waiting for the programme to begin again. In this kingdom of shadows everything has already passed, and not yet come.

A woman comes in and sits near him. She puts a bag on the seat next to her (a suitcase, notes Walter, thinking about how all suitcases look the same but never are), then fidgets and looks over her shoulder as if waiting for someone to arrive. No one arrives. The woman opens the case, takes some things from it (Walter cannot see what they are), then leaves in the direction of the restroom. A few minutes later she returns, a different woman. This woman is dark-haired, whereas before she was blonde. This woman is heavily made up and wears a scarf around her neck. She waits a few more minutes, then leaves, not taking the suitcase with her.

Walter Benjamin stares at the screen and thinks he should be a detective. Every corner of this city, he thinks, is the scene of a crime.

Walter Benjamin sometimes wonders what he is doing here and other times if he is here at all. As he leaves the movie theatre and begins the long walk back to his bench overlooking the sea he passes the precinct police station and thinks he should go in and report himself missing. I am Walter Benjamin, he will say, and I am a missing person. There will be the usual confusion, and the desk sergeant will register him as Benjamin Walter. He will then leave and remake himself as Ben Walter, a private detective, or a photographer, or a newspaper drudge, a hack writer of pulp novels or screenplays. Ben Walter could smoke lots of grass and listen to jazz. He could wear a hat.

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From Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea by C.D. Rose. Used with permission by Melville House Publishing, Copyright © 2024 by C.D. Rose.

He’s pleased to meet you underneath the horse.
—Elliott Smith, “Speed Trials”

Carol my caseworker vouched that I was reliable enough for carry privileges, so they let me have a week’s worth of methadone to take home, instead of driving every day to the pharmacy across the island, especially since I had my boy to take care of. Carol knew I wouldn’t sell the meth, knew those days were over.

Back in the days—way back—my buddies were salmon fishermen, buckets of money, growing on trees back then working mildew fishboats way up the rainy green coast. Lost cedar inlets with host springs and bleached totem poles. Too much cash flying like loose leaves through marina bars and government wharves, and the fish piled in dead heaps in the mist, in icy holds and bilgewater that smelled of money and diesel.

No needles at first. We only snorted heroin, a sport and a pastime, the conventional wisdom being that it’s not addictive when just snorting. I planned to stop after a few lost weekends and get back to normal, but something failed me, old school words gave up the ghost, crackers in soup, and new vague words clouded through me like trained white mice.

Those Vietnamese boys in Nanaimo had that good pure stuff, stepped on with a little lidocaine to keep you lining up for more.

Just a taste, I insisted, that’s all.

Those skinny Viet boys almost giving it away, points of China white going for ten or twenty bucks, deliver it by discreet courier, so the train kept arolling, and then a year or two later you’re boiling up ammonia on the stovetop and the car has an expired temporary permit in the back window and your Swiss cheese brain is pawning your father’s sax and you’ve spent enough to buy a space station.

Here’s the funny thing: I always despised junkies, shunned their inhabited hectic arms, sleepy syllables, and sybarite synapses. Look at those bozos, I said, can’t see a hole in a ladder. I thought I was smarter than the rest with my hornet-hive head. My earthly powers I believed to be manifold, special, hard as teeth on a chainsaw. I knew I could handle it, knew.

I mix my meth with the sweetest orange juice I can find, because the meth is so bitter. It’s really gross. A strip of masking tape on my juice, where I wrote in big felt pen: DO NOT DRINK! I knew my boy loved OJ. I put it in the door away from the regular milk and juice and Kool-Aid containers.

I said, “The stuff in the door is my special medicine.” I said, “Don’t—touch—anything—in—the—door.” I made it very clear. I could not have made it clearer.

My boy is a light sleeper. My boy wakes up in the middle of the night, our little house quiet. My boy loves orange juice, would say, “I need a dur-ink, Dad.” He wakes up thirsty, a thirst like me, a night owl like me, like me his glasses folded on his nightstand, the night sky violet, quiet as a pyramid in the desert, no one up in our little house, kitchen clock ticking like an IV drip.

Maybe he’s half asleep, floor cool, floating in pale pyjamas, ghostly, across our kitchen floor to the fridge, hesitates like a blank tape.

I couldn’t inject myself at first. I needed help. Others helped, they fixed me, my costive pals summoned it up. Like a good Catholic I grew to love the ritual, admire the finely engineered syringe poised above like a needlenosed hummingbird waiting for you, so precisely tooled, the tiny opening rent, opening.

The door open, fridge light on the lino like blue light by the sea. The salmon are gone now and the boats are quiet and chained to the dock, and Carol and the College of Physicians knew I was OK to take a week’s worth home.

The Nazis developed methadone in World War Two; but they called it Adolphine, thought it sweet enough to name after Adolph. Up to eighty mil a day. It’s not the real thing. I tried to join the Pepsi generation, but they said I failed the physical. Outside in my yard is a pileated woodpecker, a baby. I don’t know if it’s going to make it through the night. Now I hear things at night, or when I’m down in the crawl space, hear my boy walking the floor to the white fridge: this is my new addiction, my crown of thorns, my Jones I can’t kick. Like him, I wake up and need a drink.

Once I bought my boy a hot dog at the zoo and he dropped the hot dog on the ground and I hit him on the stomach and said, “What the hell are you doing?!” and now I wish I could tell him that it’s OK to drop his hot dog, that there are worse things I know of now. I wish I could say to him admirable things, buy him that booster pack of Japanese Pokémon cards that he was always asking after or that full-colour book on Egyptian mummies, or take a spin at Island Go-Karts.

Start out chippying, but later you need three bags just to be barely all right. You just keep shooting it in, you give and you give, many hoofprints going in, but, none coming out. You think of the boy’s blonde mother, a singer from Montana. She moves through the fair, moves through the airport with balloons of it hidden in her stomach, praying they don’t burst.

I was waiting for her in the bar. Tight as the bark on a tree, I was waiting and waiting (but she didn’t make it) at the ersatz Tudor pub by the piers. The inside décor was Mexican—an uneasy Tudor-Mexican alliance.

“The code is so brutal I can barely edit it,” some tech said to a vibrating table of drinks.

Exactly, I thought. No more stuttering white thrill, no golden robot vibe, no leaping the garden wall. Instead you just want to not feel sick. That’s what your meeting with God turns into. And you want to change before it’s too late, want to change your outfit.

After he drank my orange juice he wouldn’t wake up in his bed, open those eyelids, no longer a light sleeper. Meth is a slow-acting narcotic, shuts down the respiratory. I knew the symptoms. I called an ambulance to carry him to the hospital.

I knew the hospital because three years ago a policeman shot me in someone else’s backyard. The intruder, locks on your backdoor, the tangled squares of night. One moment standing, next a flash, and it felt like a wheelbarrow hit me, knocked me down, but my hat staying on my head the whole time. I flipped to the ground in the rich careful houses (I found my boy crumpled), the sky on mute, hat still on my head.

The policeman claimed I pulled knife, so he shot me. I had no knife.

An ambulance came to visit my lamentations. The paramedics with their equipment ran bent over as if there were chopped blades cutting above us. I wanted to be witty, make a good impression, didn’t want to be on someone’s patio crying.

The police sealed off the yard so they could look for the knife in daylight. They needed that important evidence. Next morning nineteen knives lay in the grass of that small yard. Every cop in town must have driven by and flipped a knife over the fence.

I don’t blame them for taking care of their own. I should have taken better care of my own. His sleepy eyes, spotting my OJ in the fridge door, forbidden fruit, my small boy in PJs, peering around with a ghost of a smile. We decide things lightly, pursue our pleasures.

At first the paramedics tried the kiss of life, tried driving in a needle of Narcan. How fine he looked in his pale pyjamas. His eyelids. The driver drove and I rode in the back of the familiar ambulance, thinking of that Neil Young line: An ambulance can only go so fast.

We got to the hospital but it was no good. Locks on the door, but I brought the intruder into our little two-bedroom bungalow. We decide things.

At first I just snorted. Nothing serious. A little pick me up, like ten-cent suicide wings, the good kind, dry as kindling. Now I hear him walking.

My boy was smart, loved yacking while I drove him around logging roads. He took first place in spelling bees at school, was fascinated by his library books on ancient Egyptians and their mummies and pyramids, their journeys to the underworld.

The embalmers pulled out internal organs but kept them in beautiful containers with lid handles the likeness of the pharaoh’s head.

We drove around together, and I had a decent car. We were putting my life back together.

Egyptians washed the dead body with oil and spices, but they didn’t keep the brain, didn’t seem to value the brain. Why is that, he wondered.

We were driving in the Electra, flathatting it to a lake up in the clouds. My boy was in the backseat so he had room to play and read. He didn’t get carsick reading there. From the backseat he told me all about the Egyptians preparing the body for safe passage to the afterlife, how the spirit was in two worlds—one world during the day, but at night, travelling back to the body. They worked over the body, made it hollow. With a long hook, they removed the brain through the nose.

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Excerpted from Burn Man by Mark Anthony Jarman. Copyright © Mark Anthony Jarman, 2023. Excerpted with permission by Biblioasis. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.