You might be a person of letters, but has an internationally renowned body deemed you the “ambassador of gibberish?” If not, you have something to work toward. The honorific was delivered to children’s author Michael Rosen from poet Raymond Antrobus, who was on the judging panel of the 2023 PEN Pinter prize, which honors writers in the UK, Ireland or Commonwealth who “define the real truth of our lives and our societies,” per the award’s namesake Harold Pinter.

Rosen is the author of We’re Going on a Bear Hunt—flibbitygibber that marches through your subconscious even as the rest of this sentence plays out—as well as the poignant but low-key Sad Book, about the emotions he felt after his son Eddie’s death; Don’t Put Mustard in the Custard; and the more recent Many Different Kinds of Love, set in an NHS hospital during COVID.

Students at Goldsmiths, University of London, currently get to enjoy Rosen in his capacity as professor of children’s literature. Rosen gave a keynote speech for the PGCE Primary Children’s Literature Conference at Goldsmiths College in 2021 in which he talked about the power of literature that “asks more questions than it answers.” Children’s lit in particular, he said, involved the reader in the story:

“We might put ourselves in the shoes of that character or—metaphorically—those characters might hold our hand, so we go through the literature as it unfolds being a companion … an imaginary comparison, an imaginary friend of the imagined character in a book.”

Please join me in a celebratory swish swoosh swish swoosh.

[h/t The Guardian]

Pat Rathigan left Skerries at 23:50. A group of men tried to hail him at the edge of town but he ignored them, double-checked the light on his roof sign was off and picked up speed as he drove the coast road towards Balbriggan. The Irish Sea was quiet, the moon high and bright.

He pulled into the small lay-by at the Lady’s Stairs, the sea hidden by large trees. Reversing and parking next to the bottle bank, he kept the road in his sights, then took out a yellow microfiber cloth from the glove compartment and wiped down the dash, meter and ID. He left the key in the ignition and his door ajar, and shivered when the cold air hit him before taking a deep breath through his nose. From the boot he took a cardboard box of empties, all rinsed: vodka, beer and wine bottles, two jars of sauce and a small bottle of Calpol. He looked around after each drop, winced at the sound of the glass echoing in the quiet night, then put the box back in the boot.

The odd car went by. Pat kept an eye on the road, checked the time on his phone and opened the back passenger door. It was five minutes after midnight. He walked to the base of the stairs. The gate was locked, but easily hoppable, the streetlight beside it a harsh orange. He blinked hard and looked down the overgrown path leading to Barnageera Beach and whistled twice. He heard rustling, then a return whistle. He rushed back to the car and started the engine. A few seconds later, Mick Rathigan scuttled across the tarmac, head low. He dove into the backseat and pulled the door closed as Pat spun left out of the lay-by, taking the first right under the railway bridge.

—You’re a lifesaver, Pat, a fucking lifesaver.

Mick reached through the front seats and grabbed Pat’s left arm.

—All right, Mick, all right. Lie down.

—I won’t forget this.

—You’re shivering.

—It was fucking freezing down there.

—There’s a blanket and some food beside you.

—Thanks, Pat. I haven’t eaten all day.

Pat beeped at the bends as the road wound up towards the Blackhills, while Mick scoffed the roll and bag of King crisps.

—Which way are we going?

—Through the hills. Stay down.

—Let me know where we are.

—Climbing now. Ardgillan coming up.

—Nice one.

—Did you manage to sleep?

—I drifted off but was too nervous. I got a bit of shelter in the old changing spot.

—Was there anyone about?

—A couple of people walking dogs and one swimmer, but I was well hid.

—I can hear your teeth chattering.

—I’ll be grand once I warm up.

—I’m taking the left here at Ardgillan.

Pat turned up the heat and put the foot down on the straight stretch of road as they passed the new cricket club on the right.

—No Elvis, Pat?

—Not tonight, I can’t enjoy him in this mood.

—Fair enough.

Passing Saint Mobhi’s graveyard, Pat blessed himself, reduced his speed, dropped to third gear and glanced at Mick over his left shoulder, who was lying flat on his back, his legs twisted down behind Pat’s seat. They made quick eye contact before Pat refocused on the road.

—Passing Milverton now.

—We’re flying.

At the T junction Pat turned right onto the Skerries Road.

—How’s everything at home? Mick asked.

Pat looked in the rearview mirror but couldn’t see any trace of Mick.

—Grand, given the circumstances.

—Has Lilian been sleeping through the night?

—Don’t talk about Lilian, Mick.

—Fair enough. I was just asking.

Pat ran his left hand through his thick white beard and opened his window to let in some air.

—Does Lorcan know about this? Mick asked.

—No one knows and I plan to keep it that way.

—What did Butsy say?

—He has it sorted.

—I knew he was the man to ring.

—The ferry’s at four from Belfast. You’ll get to Cairnryan at seven and should be in Inverness by lunchtime.

—Amazing, he has a bed and all in the truck.

—I know.

Pat coughed hard a few times and closed the window. They were on the road to Lusk and passed the new estates on the left.

—He’s a dodgy fucker, but he’s always been a mate. Remember what he was like in his twenties?

—Don’t, Mick.

—What?

—I’m not in the mood for remember when. We’re coming into Lusk, stay down.

—Anyone about?

—A few stragglers.

—I always thought Lusk was a kip.

The lights at Murray’s Lounge took an age. Pat kept looking from left to right, scratching his beard while they waited.

—Here we go, at fucking last.

—Many Gardaí around tonight, Pat?

—A few more than usual.

—Did you pass the house?

—A couple of times, yeah.

—And?

—There’s tape still around the gate.

—Was there anyone outside?

—No, the place looked dead.

They were out of Lusk and on the old Dublin Road, passing farms and glasshouses.

—Where are we, Pat?

—Nearing the turn for the estuary.

—I shat myself every time I heard a siren.

—What did you do with your phone?

—I fucked it in the sea after I rang you. If they trace the calls, they’ll think I drowned myself.

—Did you call Mam?

—No, she wouldn’t understand. If they question you, just tell them I was saying goodbye.

—Grand. We’re getting a good run at it now, coming up to Blake’s Cross.

—I’ll miss it round here.

—I don’t wanna hear it, Mick.

—I appreciate what you’re doing for me, Pat, I really do.

—I just wanna get you out of this car.

Pat took a left at Blake’s Cross. There was a little traffic on the R132, the road dotted with factories, warehouses and garages. He opened his window and changed to fifth gear for the first time.

—Have you heard anything about Sara? Mick asked after a long silence.

—Yeah, I was in with her earlier.

—Where is she?

—Beaumont.

—And?

—She’s in a bad way, Mick. A bad fucking way.

—Has she talked yet?

—The Guards are waiting for her to come around.

—I fucked up.

—You fucked up?

—Yeah, I fucked up.

—Fucked up? Fucked up? Pat screamed.

—All right, Pat, calm down.

He slowed the car, dropped to fourth gear and looked back at Mick.

—Fuck off, Mick, it’s barbaric what you did to that girl.

—Okay, it’s just—

—Don’t try to explain yourself.

—Watch the road, Pat.

A car beeped and overtook them. Pat regained his composure and looked forward again.

—You did that to your own daughter. What sort of fucking animal are you? Pat hocked and spat out the window.

After a long silence, Mick spoke.

—Where are we, Pat?

—Turvey, swinging left. Two minutes.

—My heart’s beating out of my chest.

—This is it for us, Mick, I’m telling you. Don’t contact me again.

—What about Mam?

—Leave Mam to me.

Just off the main road, Pat indicated left into a house. A man with an Alsatian on a leash was at the gate and nodded at Pat as he turned in. He brought the car to a stop and the Alsatian barked and jumped at the door.

—Hush, now, good boy, hush.

—All good? Pat asked.

—Grand. You know where you’re going?

—Yeah.

—Go on so, Butsy’s waiting for ye.

—Good man.

Pat restarted the car and moved down the long, potholed driveway.

—We’re here.

Mick sprang up. There were cars on breeze-blocks and the garden was full of scrap metal and pallets. Butsy’s truck was parked beside the bungalow, its cab blue, with “Butler Transport” printed on the side in black lettering. Butsy and another man appeared at the back door of the bungalow and stood under a bare bulb as Pat parked next to a Jeep and trailer. Butsy had a plastic bag in one hand and with the other was holding his Dogo Argentino on a lead. Mick was looking around frantically, his head in between the two front seats. Taking off his belt, Pat switched on the interior light and faced Mick properly for the first time. He could smell Mick’s breath and noticed how filthy and unkempt he was.

—Do you have everything?

—I have fuck all but I have it.

—Good, all right, let’s go.

—I’m sorry to ask, Pat, but did you bring that money we talked about?

—Of course.

Pat fiddled in the glove compartment and took out a wad of notes and handed it to Mick.

—I’ll pay you back, I promise.

—C’mon, Butsy’s waiting.

Mick took the notes with his left hand and with his right grabbed Pat’s wrist and planted a kiss on his knuckles. Mick’s nails ran along the back of Pat’s hand; Pat could feel their length and looked down to see the dirt on his brother’s fingers. He pulled his hand away, wiped his knuckles with the sleeve of his jacket and scratched his beard with both sets of nails. Mick stuffed the notes into his right-hand pocket and got out.

Dogs were barking nonstop from behind the bungalow. Butsy called the men over and took a step towards the car.

—I’d say you lads could do with a strong drink, am I right?

—Am I glad to see you, Butsy! Mick called.

Pat closed his door. Mick spat on the ground and began walking towards Butsy. Suddenly, a man appeared from the darkness on Pat’s left and swung a bat cleanly and swiftly at Mick’s head. He fell instantly and the man gave one more solid strike to the back of Mick’s skull. Butsy and the other man were running and before Pat had moved, they had Mick bound and gagged and were lifting his body away. The Dogo Argentino growled at Mick before Butsy quietened it with a few strokes to the head. Pat opened the car, took out Mick’s blanket and dropped it on the ground. One of the men had a grip under Mick’s armpits and the other was holding his ankles, the body floppy and loose. Pat fished into Mick’s pocket and retrieved his money.

—Go on, Butsy said to the lads.

Butsy put his hand out and Pat shook it. Together they watched the two men carry Mick towards the sheds at the back of the property. Butsy got on his hunkers and scratched his dog behind the ears, then stood up, interlaced his fingers and cracked his knuckles.

—Scumbag. He won’t be missed, Butsy said.

Pat was staring at the ground, shaking his head.

—Fucking savage.

—How’s Sara?

—Bad, Butsy, bad. He perforated her bowel. She’s having colostomy surgery in the morning.

—He’s a fucking animal. Don’t worry, he’ll be disappeared within the hour.

—I don’t wanna know, Butsy.

—It’s over, Pat, you’ve done your bit. Will you come in for a drink?

—Not tonight. I should get going, I’ve to swing by the ma’s.

—Fair enough, we’ll sort him out, then I’ll hit the road myself.

—Is it an overnight?

—No, I’m back here later. It’ll be a long day.

—For sure.

—How are the roads?

—Dead, not a crisp bag blowing out there.

Butsy smiled.

—January, what?

Pat nodded and kicked the blanket.

—Would your dogs sleep on this? He was lying under it in the backseat.

—I’ll burn the fucker.

—Thanks, Butsy.

—It’s nothing, Pat. Give the car a decent scrub in the morning.

—I’ll bring it in for a valet.

—Good idea.

Butsy raised his hand for a high shake and Pat took it, and Butsy then placed his left hand on Pat’s shoulder for a couple of seconds.

When he was settled back into the car, Butsy knocked on the window and Pat rolled it down.

—Are Lorcan and his family still living with you, Pat?

—Yeah, the lot of them are in the spare room.

—How old is the granddaughter now?

—She’ll be six months in March.

—If you ever want a pup for her just let me know. No charge, chipped and all.

—Nice one, Butsy.

—I’ve always got a couple of pregnant bitches about to drop.

—Thanks, I’ll say it to Lorcan and Elaine.

Butsy nodded.

—A bit late to be going to your ma’s, no?

—Blocked sink. I told her I’d sort it. She hardly sleeps, that woman.

—Sinks are a pain in the hole. Tell her I was asking for her.

—Will do.

—Go on, Pat, I’ll be in touch.

—Thanks, Butsy.

The man and the Alsatian were still at the gate when Pat swung right out of Butsy’s and drove towards Blake’s Cross. Mick’s smell was in the car so he kept the windows open. The roads were almost empty. He gripped the steering wheel with both hands and kept his eyes forward. Before he hit the Five Roads, he turned for the Man O’War. He passed the GAA club, Oberstown detention center and the pub, took a right at Kennedy’s Corner, the left turn at Killary Grove, right again onto Darcystown Road, then onto Baltrasna and the second left into his mother’s cottage in the Blackhills.

Using the torch light on his phone, he checked the inside of the car. On the backseat was the cling film from Mick’s roll and the bag of crisps. He shook the crumbs and few remaining crisps onto the grass and stuffed the rubbish into his back pocket. He found a bit of bread on the floor. There was no ham or cheese left, just a crust with a thick spread of butter. He walked to the ditch at the side of the cottage and threw in the bread. He looked around, unzipped, and pissed into the brambles and bushes, then wiped his hands on his pants. From the boot he took out a mini hoover. It made a low whining sound as he went over the seats and floor thoroughly. He sucked up gravel, sand and crumbs from Mick’s food. Filthy prick, he muttered to himself. He emptied the hoover into the ditch and returned it to the car. He sprayed some air freshener, left the windows open and locked the doors.

The sensor light came on outside the back door. He knocked twice before unlocking and entering the cottage. His mother was lying the full length of the couch in the kitchen–cum–living area, the radio blasting near her head, the fire fading. She looked to be sleeping but her head shot up when Pat entered. Without saying anything, he filled and turned on the kettle. He grabbed two eggs from the fridge and put them in a saucepan. She was taking her time to sit up, yawning and stretching, as Pat leaned over her to turn off the radio.

—Any news, Pat?

—No, nothing.

—What about on the phone?

—I haven’t heard anything, Mam.

—What time is it?

—Nearly one.

—Many out there?

—Very quiet. An airport run delayed me.

—Grand.

—Are you hungry?

—No, I had a sandwich a while ago.

He put some kindling and a briquette on the fire, took her plate and cup from the coffee table and left them on the counter.

—I’d say he’s long gone at this stage.

—Who knows, Mam?

—I just have a feeling.

—We’ll see.

—Did you dump the bottles?

—I did.

Pat checked the sink. It had been spat in; gray, green and speckled with blood. He put on a pair of rubber gloves, lifted the bucket of bleach, stepped into the garden and poured it down the drain at the side of the cottage. There was a frost in the air. He picked out the S trap and ran cold water through it from the outside tap. Under the sensor light, he poked around the pipe with his fingers, removing grease, eggshell, potato peel and rasher fat. When he came back in, he put the empty bucket underneath the glug hole and ran the tap. The water ran through the spit and he had to rub with his baby finger until it dislodged. He looked over to his mother. She was watching him work. Outside again, he emptied the bucket on the grass, then went and filled the saucepan with the boiled water and set a ten-minute alarm. He fiddled around with the pipes under the sink and got the S trap back on, tightening and securing it.

—Is it fixed, Pat?

—We’ll know tomorrow. I got a fair bit of gunk out of it.

He poured water from the kettle slowly down the sink. There was a gurgling sound and some spurted back up before disappearing.

—I’ll be back tomorrow to check it.

—Okay. Will you bring Lilian with you?

—Of course.

—Your sister rang.

—What did she say?

—Sara is in a bad way.

—I know, she has surgery in the morning.

—Nine o’clock, Deirdre says.

—That’s right.

She started to weep and blew her nose into a hankie. The eggs were tapping off the side of the saucepan. He checked the time on his phone. From the press he took out vinegar and baking soda and added them to the glug hole before pouring in a bit more water.

—Mam, don’t put anything down here and please spit in the toilet or on the grass.

—It’s the dentures, Pat.

—I know, but I’m the one has to fix it. Just throw the food into the garden.

—I don’t like encouraging those birds.

—Well, in the bin then, but not down the sink, please.

He checked the time again and reduced the heat.

—Has Mick been in touch?

—He rang and tried to talk but I hung up.

—The Guards will be onto you.

—Why?

—Ye are brothers.

—They’ll be onto all of us so.

—Did you not notice anything?

—I knew it was an unhappy house. We all knew that.

—He’s lost his way since Margaret died.

—He never had a way, Mam. There are no excuses.

—I’m not excusing him, Pat. I’m just trying to understand.

—I’m finished with him.

—It’s different for me. They’ll destroy him inside.

—They’d put him with his own, they always keep the pervs together.

—Don’t call him that, she wailed.

—Okay, Mam, okay, calm down.

His phone beeped. He turned off the eggs and poured the boiling water slowly into the sink. It flowed smoothly down the glug hole. He refilled the saucepan with cold water, then placed his two hands on the counter, dropped his head and stared at his shoes.

—Go home, son, you’re dead on your feet.

—We should have protected that girl more.

—You can’t save people, son.

—She’s your granddaughter, my niece.

—We’re on our own out there, you should know that by now.

—Maybe. Maybe not.

—He’ll be out in a few years. If they catch him.

—I don’t know, Mam. I’ll peel these and head off.

—Thanks, son.

—You go to bed. Do you want anything on?

—Mendelssohn.

She had her own route around the cottage and he didn’t offer any help. She gripped the arm of the couch and from there grabbed her walking stick and clung to the radiator and then the door handle. He stayed behind her in the hall and guided her to the edge of the bed until she flopped inside. He put on the CD.

—My purse, Pat.

He found her purse under the cushion on the couch and handed it to her in bed.

—There, Mam, all sorted.

—When are you going to shave?

—Soon. I haven’t had time to bless myself this week.

—It makes you look old.

—I am old.

—You know what I mean.

—Good night, Mam.

He did a quick cleanup of the living room, peeled the eggs and put them on a plate in the fridge. He set the coffee table for the morning and refilled the kettle, dropping a tea bag into her cup. He emptied his back pockets and held Mick’s cling film and crisp packet in his hand. He opened the hall door and listened. He couldn’t hear his mother but Mendelssohn was clear. Throwing Mick’s rubbish on the fire, he watched as it crinkled and burned. He put on the fire guard, tapped his jacket for his keys and looked around. He called goodbye but she didn’t answer, then turned off the lights and locked the door behind him.

Instead of taking the direct route to Rush, Pat went right towards Balrothery and into Balbriggan. He didn’t switch on the radio or any music. The streets were empty as he turned right at the hotel, crossed over the train tracks and picked up speed once the town was behind him and the coast road opened up. The Lady’s Stairs and lay-by were empty. There was little wind and the Irish Sea was dark and still, the lights of Skerries Harbour visible in the distance. A blue flashing light hit him as he took the last bend into the town. He bit his bottom lip, slowed down and scratched his beard. A fluorescent yellow and blue Garda Jeep was parked in the middle of the road and two guards in full uniform were chatting outside their vehicle. He didn’t recognize either man. The guard on Pat’s side put his palm out and the car was brought to a stop. Pat’s knees shook as he wound down the window. The guard nodded at Pat, took out his torch and scanned the car’s tax, insurance and NCT. The guard’s breath was visible in the air as he leaned down to speak.

—How’s it going?

—Grand, guard, just heading home.

—Where’s home?

—Rush.

—Are you local?

—All my life.

—What’s the name?

—Patrick Rathigan.

—Many out?

—No. A few airport pickups but very quiet.

A car pulled up behind Pat and the guard gestured for it to stop.

—Okay, can I see your taxi license?

—No bother.

Pat removed his driver ID from the dash and handed it over. The guard checked the details and registration plate. He took another look at the license before handing it back. There were two cars backed up behind Pat now.

—Okay, safe home.

—Thanks, guard, have a good night.

Pat left the window down and drove off. Stopped at traffic lights in Skerries, he exhaled deeply and took a second to compose himself. He put the foot down when the lights changed and met only one car on the road to Rush. A group of lads tried to hail him outside the Yacht Bar but he increased his speed and arrived home in ten minutes. He checked the time—01:42—then put his phone on airplane mode.

He sat in the car for a few minutes until his heart rate settled. The houses in the estate, lit by the orange streetlights, looked small and shabby. The green in the center of the estate was patchy and wouldn’t be cut now till February at the earliest.

He went in through the side door, his hand shaking as he fiddled with the keys. As he walked, the sensor light came on and he stood on the patio, watching the end of the garden. The light went off then on again then off and he unbuckled his belt and loosened the top buttons of his shirt. He looked at the spot the fox had been digging every night and pissed on it.

In the extension, Pat kicked off his shoes and left them by the door, slid out of his belt, then took off his socks and threw them in the direction of the washing machine. His phone torch navigated him through the debris of toys and baby paraphernalia. He switched on a lamp and the cabinet lights, then lit a single candle and placed it in the center of the island. He turned on the heat for an hour and put on the kettle. At the bottom of the stairs, he stopped to listen to the house. In the front room, he turned on the lamp in the corner, then looked at the street and his car. Nobody passed. He removed his jeans and shirt and put on his house pants, T-shirt and jumper, which he’d left on the couch. He turned on the TV and muted the sound straightaway. He pressed play on the DVD and while it was loading went back to the kitchen and made a pot of tea, leaving two bags in the water. He collected all his clothes and put them in the washing machine, added a few more from the basket and left it ready for the morning. The time on the cooker was 01:56.

Pat cleaned his hands and face in the jacks, filled his nostrils with water, then blew hard into the sink. He hocked out some phlegm and spat a few times into the toilet. Back in the kitchen, he added milk to a cup, grabbed the pot and brought them to the windowsill in the front room. He stacked two cushions at the end of the couch and laid out a blanket. The curtains were open and through the mirror above the fireplace the reflection of the streetlight could be seen. He skipped some scenes till he was where he’d left off the previous night. He unmuted the sound and set the volume to three. In black, with a high collar and open-necked shirt and surrounded by four musicians wearing red, Elvis sang “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” in the round. Scotty Moore was to his immediate left. The faces of the people in the crowd could be seen clearly. Pat smiled and nodded along. He poured his tea and stretched out on the couch, but halfway through the song he heard his granddaughter crying upstairs and the eventual shuffling of feet. The cries got steadily louder and the movements more frantic.

Pat climbed the stairs, knocked on the bedroom door and waited on the landing. Lorcan came out.

—Howaya, Da?

—Here, I’ll take her, son.

—I think it’s the teeth.

—C’mon, I’m off tomorrow, get a few more hours.

—Are you sure?

—C’mon.

Pat followed Lorcan into the bedroom. A lamp was on in the corner and Elaine was propped up on pillows trying to calm Lilian.

—Elaine, love, I’ll take her.

—It’s not fair on you, Pat.

—It’s fine, I won’t sleep for a while yet. G’wan, get a couple of hours.

Elaine held out Lilian and he took her in his arms.

—Are you just in, Da? Lorcan asked.

—Yeah.

—How was it?

—Dead, a few stragglers but nothing going.

—Any news about Mick?

Pat glanced at both of them but fixed his eyes on Lilian.

—No, nothing. Yous go back to sleep, I’ll sort this one out.

—Thanks, Da.

—Yeah, thanks, Pat, you’re a lifesaver.

—I’ll chat to yis in the morning.

Lilian whimpered and jiggled in his arms until he got his grip right and she settled, but he felt something off with her. In the kitchen he switched on the warmer and popped in a bottle from the fridge. He tried not to talk or make eye contact with her, but she was fully awake and pawing at his face. While the bottle was warming up, he changed her on the floor. The nappy was dry, but she had a bad rash. He wiped her carefully, removing some lint from her belly button, and applied cream. With another wipe he cleaned in between her fingers and toes, behind her ears, her mouth and nose. Her nails were long and jaggedy and she had a few light scratches on her face. She didn’t like her nose being touched but he held her head as she squirmed and got rid of the dry snots. She cried a little, a sort of heavy wail, but he gave her a plastic toy and she brought it to her teeth. Leaving her on the mat then, he filled a syringe with Calpol and took the bottle off the heat. He checked the time again: 02:17. She hadn’t moved from the changing mat but was attempting to flip over. He took the dodo out of her mouth and with two shots gave her the full 5 mg.

In the front room, he propped her up on the cushion with her head raised and fed her the bottle. She drank half in frantic gulps and he put the dodo back in. He sat her forward and rubbed her back until she let out a strong burp. He skipped back on the DVD, pressed play and kept the volume low. Her eyes fixed on the screen. Pat gently sang “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” to her. She squirmed a little so he returned the bottle to her mouth. She took another 20 ml, then drifted off to sleep without being burped. He placed his baby finger in her palm and she instinctively made a fist around it. He stayed like this for a few minutes watching Elvis. His tea was lukewarm, and he drank two cups in a row. He leaned close to her and kissed her on the forehead. Her head was tilted slightly to the left. He picked up his phone and was about to check his messages but instead turned it off completely.

Lilian began snoring, a gentle purr. Pat wrapped her in the blanket and laid her on the floor, surrounded by cushions. He went quickly into the kitchen and grabbed the packet of baby wipes. In the drawer he found the nail clippers, scissors and mirror and returned to the front room. He cut his own nails first. He took his time, stopping to watch Elvis and look at Lilian. When he finished, he cleaned his hands with a wipe, then knelt on a cushion, took Lilian’s right hand in his and cut each nail with one strong clip, ensuring not to nick the skin. When the hands were finished, he fished her feet out the bottom of her babygrow and did the toenails, then rubbed both hands and feet with a wipe. She squirmed a few times but didn’t wake up. He refastened the babygrow and secured her tightly between the cushions. He collected all the nails in his empty cup.

Standing at the door, he watched Elvis. He skipped forward to “If I Can Dream” and turned it up a little. Elvis was now dressed in a white suit and red tie and sang in front of a giant screen, his name in lights. He was holding the mic in his left hand while his right arm gestured and swayed wildly. Pat noticed the rings on Elvis’s fingers. He moved along to the music and when the song finished he shook his head a few times. He repeated the song and while it was playing put the mirror on the couch, knelt down and began trimming his beard. When the song ended again, he restarted the DVD and kept cutting until the black leather of the couch was full of his white hair. He added the trimmings to the cup and poured in the dregs of the teapot. He went into the kitchen, put on the kettle and washed out the pot. He took the cup and rushed out to the garden.

He poured the clippings and trimmings onto the foxhole, running his finger around the inside of the cup to make sure he removed everything. He listened to the house. He could see a lit attic skylight next door. He breathed in through his nose, arched his neck back and looked at the sky, then yawned deeply. The kettle was coming to the boil and blocked out every sound. Suddenly, he dropped the cup on the grass and hurried back to Lilian, leaving the back door open. He found her as secure as he had left her, but she had moved her arms, and they were splayed above her, outstretched. He was panting and took a second to compose himself. Kneeling down, he ran his knuckles along her cheek and listened to her soft breathing. After a few seconds, he went back outside to pick up his cup and lock the back door. He made fresh tea, blew out the candle and switched off all the lights. He left the cup in the front room and crept upstairs. All was still on the landing. He took the duvet and pillow from his bed, brought them downstairs and placed them on the couch. He tucked Lilian in, switched off the lamp, closed the door and drew the curtains fully. The TV screen now illuminated her face, and with a heavy sigh Pat stretched the full length of the couch and let his head drop onto the cool soft pillow.

__________________________________

“The Blackhills” first appeared in The Stinging Fly. Copyright © 2021 by Eamon McGuinness. Reprinted by permission of the author.

It is dark in the whale and hot. The air is difficult to breathe. Ira is coated in gunk, sweating in his black Speedo. The whale’s heartbeat booms and echoes like a giant drum. It’s intimidating. It sounds tribal, ritualistic, as Ira wades through the animal’s stomach in shock, up to his knees in liquid goop.

He hears water gurgling and rushing. Mournful moos that go unanswered. Eventually his eyes grow accustomed to the dark. In murky gray scale he can make out the swaying surface of the goop, spotted with mounds of algae, dying shrimp, stray squid tentacles, and the occasional fish head. Surely, somewhere, there is a throat that presumably leads to the mouth, but Ira can’t find it.

It must be a magical whale or the biggest whale of all time because its stomach seems infinite. Ira wanders for hours, passing sights he’d remember if he saw them again, but nothing repeats. He sees one of those intricate camp chairs floating in the muck. A Mercedes hubcap adorned with the gnarled skeletons of…Ira doesn’t fucking know. He’s just a graphic designer trying to get laid on Fire Island. In summers past he’s visited with friends, but this time he’s alone.

Liquid rains down on Ira and he closes his eyes and mouth. His body is bruised but still intact. He longs for his cigarettes—which are under his sun hat on his towel on the beach, near a hairy man in a tube top—but what he really needs is water. He wonders how long he can live without it. He dips his finger in the goop and touches his tongue. It’s so bitter it burns.

The initial panic has dissipated and bleak reality is setting in. He’ll never make it back to his Airbnb, which looked exactly like the pictures, only half the size. He sees his headstone—his name in a cold, boring font chosen by his parents. He’s forty-four. His life has been average. It was his childhood dream to live in New York City and become an actor. He moved there for college but gave up on acting after one class. He still lives there, though he doesn’t love it the way he thought he would. He shuffles between work and home, squandering his paycheck at a gourmet supermarket—the others depress him.

Ira has been single for much of his life. His hookups disappear back into the Grindr pool, rarely to resurface. He only likes a certain kind of man. They must be as tall or taller than him. He doesn’t know why. And he doesn’t like guys who are effeminate. Or overly masculine. They must know what’s going on politically. No one religious, but he also doesn’t want the lecture-y atheists or 24/7 activists. He wants someone he can make dinner with side by side while Schumann plays from his Sonos speakers.

Something catches his eye. Fabric from a…beach umbrella (?) has been stretched around a piece of coral, reminding him of that artist, the French guy who loved nothing more than to wrap things. Ira wonders for an insane moment if he is seeing art…but then remembers he is trapped in a whale and will die alone. He feels dizzy. A half-digested octopus floats by. This is, hands down, the grossest place he’s ever been. It smells like rotting fish and vomit, with hints of mildew and Band-Aid.

He wonders how many notifications are accumulating on his phone. Flirtatious responses to the rare selfie he posted on Instagram last night. He imagines the picture—blown up and pixelated—greeting visitors at the funeral parlor across the street from his parents’ house. As a child, he was mesmerized by the goings-on out his window, how wood boxes carrying corpses were delivered and received at a side door marked flowers.

If he can’t crawl out, maybe he can cut himself out. He passed a few sharp objects earlier—broken coral, giant crab claw—but now that he’s looking, he can’t find anything except an oar and some fish bones too small to do damage. His thirst is an unending tragedy. He feels like a child lost in an evil kingdom. Dizziness sends him stumbling.

Ira wakes up floating in the muck with a taste in his mouth like rotten strawberries. A bare-chested man is violently shaking him. Another man! It’s a miracle! Ira is elated. “Hi,” he says, his mind racing. What are the odds of two men being swallowed by the same whale?

It’s difficult to see in the low light but the man looks to be in his thirties. He’s wearing goggles. His bathing suit is in shreds. He’s built, but not excessively so. Wet strands of dark hair stick to his forehead. Ira steps closer and stares at the man’s face. He’s…handsome. Ira wants to touch him. Hug him or rub his shoulder. Run his hands through the man’s thick hair.

“You’re alive,” the man says coldly. He isn’t tall but it doesn’t matter. The air feels humid with desire. Ira imagines them fucking in the whale. Sex inside a body! That’s crazy. The whale’s heart thumps. Everything tilts and Ira grabs on to the man to catch his balance. The whale is on the move. When things level out, Ira waits a moment before letting go.

“I’m Ira.”

“Austin.”

Austin seems checked out as they compare stories. Austin saw the whale and swam toward it. Ira had been looking at a turtle, or maybe a rock shaped like a turtle, when he was covered by a massive shadow, then had the surreal sensation of tumbling down what felt like stairs. Austin seems like he’s lost hope, but maybe Ira can restore it. Escaping the whale feels possible. “We can just break out, like in a prison movie.”

Austin holds up a jagged piece of wood. “There’s a hole I’ve been working on since I got here, but the skin’s really thick.” He stares at Ira like he’s sizing him up. “Wanna work on it?”

“I thought you’d never ask,” Ira says. He wades through seaweed, struggling to keep up with Austin. He fixes his eyes on Austin’s muscular back. Austin doesn’t seem gay, but still, Ira has to ask if he’s here for Pride. Austin scoffs.

“You’re looking for Jake.”

“Who?”

“There’s one other guy, but he’s probably dead by now.”

A third man! This can’t be. Ira wonders if he’s hallucinated Austin. That would be so Ira, to hallucinate a straight guy. “There’s another guy in here?” he asks.

“He was gay. He made sculptures. You’d have gotten along.”

“How do you know? You just met me.” Ira needs water. His eyes burn. He notices sores on Austin’s skin, then spots some on himself. It’s probably from stomach acid. If he doesn’t die of dehydration he will dissolve, slowly, painfully. Bile jumps up Ira’s throat and he swallows it back down. He breathes shallow breaths.

It feels momentous to reach a wall, but the hole looks pitiful. It’s more like a dent. It’s hard to see. Austin jabs the hole with the piece of wood a few times, then hands it to Ira. Ira jabs it for a bit. The wall feels elastic.

“Use your whole body,” Austin says. Ira leans into it. He gives it all he’s got.

“No, like this,” Austin says, taking the wood from Ira’s hands and stabbing the hole with new vigor.

Ira thinks of all the straight men who have corrected him in gym class, at pool halls, at Home Depot. Smirking IT guys at work, disgruntled AAA men changing his flat tire. Ira’s crush evaporates. Even if they work nonstop on the hole, Ira doubts they’ll break through. And even if they did, they’d have to somehow puncture the whale’s outer wall, which will be even thicker. They need a laser. A high-tech laser.

Austin answers Ira’s questions as if they’re an inconvenience. As if this asshole’s got someplace to be. Ira loathes the straight people clogging up Fire Island during Pride. Didn’t they get the memo? Did they just come to gawk? “Where’s the other guy? The gay guy,” Ira says.

“Probably decomposing somewhere.”

Ira picks up some kind of bone and stabs the hole with it. He and Austin fall into a rhythm, alternating jabs, but it isn’t clear if they are making progress. Ira’s hungry. Only an idiot would starve in a stomach, his father scolds in his head. Ira makes a face—he hates seafood. He feels like he’s about to pass out again. His eyes are on fire. “Can I borrow your goggles?” he finally asks. “Just for an hour?”

Austin shakes his head no.

“I need water,” Ira whines. Austin ignores him. Ira drops his bone. “I’m taking a break.”

“No time for breaks,” Austin says. Ira hates being bossed around. It took him a decade to find a boss he could tolerate. “You’re gonna die in here,” Austin says. “Do you wanna die?” Ira says nothing. “Well, I can’t die in here. I won’t. I’m fucking engaged.” Austin jabs the hole. Bits of whale flesh float away in a bloody clump. Screw him and his hole, Ira thinks, wading away.

“You’re weak!” Austin shouts after him.

“You’re trash!” Ira screams back. He can hear Austin cursing at him and it gives him a strange satisfaction. I’ll just take a short walk, he decides. Hours pass. It dawns on him in short painful moments that the wall was a good place to be. He should have kept wading along it. The wall led to somewhere, and in his haste, he’s wandered back into infinity.

Fuck it. He’ll just die. What does it matter? He’s already lived the best years of his life. Getting old is depressing. He wades with his eyes closed but they still burn. When he opens them, everything looks dreary and endless. His mind flickers off and on. His body will never be found. His friends and family will assume he drowned, which is embarrassing because he’s actually a decent swimmer.

Ira passes out and is shocked to wake up still in the whale, delirious from the heat. He thrashes around in a burst of energy that only lasts five minutes. His skin has the awful texture he saw on Austin. He thinks of his parents sorting through his apartment, finding the bottle of lube in the back of his sock drawer. To live is humiliating but to die is worse.

He thinks about his first real crush—his socially awkward junior high Latin teacher. In high school, he kissed a boy at a Gay-Straight Alliance dance, but then nothing else happened for years. Ira remembers his first boyfriend, George, whom he lived with the summer between sophomore and junior year at NYU. George was super tall, kinda fat, slightly stupid. They watched action movies, ate pizza, had sex—that was their routine. They always got pizza from the same place. The mushrooms were from a can, the peppers small green squares. They relished the homoerotic moments in the movies—a man hanging from a cliff, grabbing another man’s strong hand.

It seemed like their relationship could have gone on forever, but it didn’t—it ended the following semester. It seemed like it would be the first of many relationships, but it wasn’t. Ira usually lost interest after a few dates. After the first fights. Whenever he became serious about a guy, he started noticing their little tics. Everyone proved to be intolerable up close. But all the men he’s ever been with now seem wondrous and unique. People who will never live again.

Ira has gotten used to the whale’s heartbeat and can go long periods without noticing it, but he sometimes becomes fixated on it, waiting for it, listening to it, terrified of it. He craves water, air, sky. He hears a distant droning melody. He’s going crazy, his mother tells his father. He was always crazy, his father says. A jellyfish swims by, grazing his leg. Ira leaps away, tripping face-first into the sludge. A putrid taste fills his mouth. The warm liquid oozes into his ears. He lies at the bottom of the stomach in misery. He’ll just die and get it over with. He tries to will himself to stay under, but he rises back up. He tries twice more and stays under longer but surfaces again, sputtering and dripping with goop. He’ll just have to die the slow way—waiting for it to overtake him. It could be days.

He sits down, up to his shoulders in muck. He feels pressure to have deep, sincere, leaving-this-world thoughts, but decides that’s just homework and fuck homework. He tries to think of the best sex he’s ever had. He recalls various encounters but can’t wring any pleasure from them anymore. When he thinks of his friends, he feels anxious. He’s been meaning to call them back.

Ira zones out. He sees his fourth-grade classroom. The Burger King logo. A photo of Guns N’ Roses he masturbated to as a teenager. His lungs ache. There isn’t enough air in the air. Probably he’s hallucinating the droning melody, but he finds himself wading toward it. The goop is thigh-level. He limps past the remains of a seal. His legs seize up with cramps. He sees movement ahead and keeps wading. His eyes burn but he must see this. A blur, possibly a figure. It has to be. He wants it to be. Are those its legs? It has a head. Yes, it’s a figure, and he can tell by the way it moves that it’s not Austin. It’s a man trudging through dark wads of seaweed carrying what looks like a basket.

Ira’s heart races as he wades toward the man, who moves in rhythm to whatever he’s singing. He’s thin and pale. His flaccid penis bounces with each step. His pubes are bushy. There is something familiar about him. He is either the flamboyant man who single-handedly got the dancing going at Sip·n·Twirl the other night, or just the same kind of man, who is rare in life but in abundance on Fire Island. Men like this have always captivated Ira but he’s sometimes felt jealous of their freedom. Watching the man, it seems obvious that his joy is irreverent and radical, that someone who can create fun from thin air is a magician.

The man sees Ira and stops in his tracks. “Oh my god,” says the man, swinging his basket. “Who are you?”

“I’m Ira.”

The man shakes his hand. “I’m Jake.” His voice is high and spirited but not annoyingly so. It’s amazing to see another face. Jake has small features, a prominent forehead, and short, thinning hair. His skin is more decomposed than Austin’s, which makes it hard to tell his age, but he looks older.

“Are your eyes burning?” Ira asks, squinting at Jake.

“Yes. Can barely see a thing.”

“Austin said you were probably dead. I was working with him on that hole.”

“That stupid hole! I spent hours on it,” says Jake. “It’s never gonna give. The skin is too thick! I told him so many times. But he didn’t like my idea.”

“What’s your idea?”

“To get pooped out the butt.”

“What about the throat?” Ira asks. “Can’t we climb it?”

“Maybe. If we can find it. I’ve been looking for days, but this place goes on forever. I’m just trying to eat as well as I can and entertain myself when possible.” He pulls something out of his basket.

“Sushi?” He drops little bundles of seaweed into Ira’s hand and Ira stuffs one into his mouth. It tastes terrible, but he makes a show of enjoying it. Jake looks proud.

“We need to find the throat or something sharp,” Ira says. “Which way?”

Jake shrugs, then chooses a direction. As they wade side by side, Jake plucks shrimp from the surface and eats them. His voice is lilting, musical. His stories take unexpected turns. His line of questioning is natural and thorough, and Ira talks about himself for longer than he intends. Their taste in books is pretty different, but they like a lot of the same movies. Ira has never kissed a woman, but Jake once had sex with one. It’s thrilling to have a real conversation. A couple of times, Ira catches himself forgetting where they are.

Jake is convinced they’re in a blue whale, but Ira is sure that blue whales are extinct. Occasionally they pass one of Jake’s sculptures. All are in disarray except for a spiral of shells pressed into a dolphin carcass, which Ira compliments. Jake seems pleased. He asks Ira questions about design and Ira tells him about the font he made this past year, called Ethics—with narrow o’s and robust r’s—and how his coworkers never responded when he emailed it to them. Jake asks Ira what his favorite logo is and Ira says it’s still the Nike swoosh. Jake’s is the NBC peacock.

“That’s so gay,” Ira teases.

“It really is.”

“What does a peacock have to do with TV?”

“A peacock displays, baby.”

Ira is too light-headed to keep talking but happy to listen, so he asks Jake to tell him “everything.” Jake says he grew up in Virginia in a big house with a big family. He studied drama in college and acted in a few plays, then entered a career in customer service, first in department stores, then in hotels, where he grew restless. He became a flight attendant on boring short-haul routes, eventually working his way up to be the head steward in first class. For many years he traveled all over the world, until his drug habits, which he’d always had, grew in scope and intensity, becoming a madness that disassembled his life, costing him his job, his husband, and his West Village apartment. His sister pretty much kidnapped him and drove him to a treatment center where he suffered and played board games. Now he lives alone deep in Queens, head of customer service at Target.

Beams of light flutter over them. Ira shivers in excitement. His eyes dart frantically from one beam to another. “Did you see that?” Jake asks, grabbing Ira’s arm. The light comes in thin waves, illuminating, for the first time, the ceiling, which is bluish black and dripping. Jake goes wild, screaming and dancing. They must be in the throat! Ira rejoices. He’ll live differently this time! He’ll go places and he won’t spend so much time on his phone.

They must be in the throat, but Ira can’t see it. As far as he looks there is only the ceiling. Maybe the mouth is still hopelessly far away, and the light is just traveling as light often does. A beam passes over Jake and for a fleeting moment, Ira sees his face in remarkable detail. It looks full of humor and intelligence, though prematurely ancient.

“We have seen the light!” Jake shouts with what’s left of his voice.

“But where’s the throat? The walls?” Ira demands, desperately throwing out his arms.

“We must be really close,” Jake says. The light suddenly vanishes. Ira’s stomach feels like lead. “Come back,” Jake pleads. They wade around in the dark, waiting. “It’s going to come back,” he insists a few minutes later. “Any second now. I just know it’s going to come back.” But it doesn’t. Neither speaks for a long time.

Jake concocts a plan to make the whale cough them up, but none of the ingredients are available to them. They begin bargaining with God or whoever might be watching. If they escape the whale, they promise to spend the rest of their lives volunteering at charities. “Or at least a good portion,” Jake adds.

“At least fifteen hours a week.”

“Really? Fifteen?” asks Jake.

“Too little?”

“Fifteen is a lot,” Jake says.

They are disintegrating. Jake looks half-dead, but Ira keeps telling him he looks great. Ira is forlorn. His legs ache with each step. His skin burns. Eventually he gives up praying for light and just focuses on Jake’s voice. It’s a beautiful voice, though it has been weakened by hours of talking and is now a whisper.

They find a floating island of seaweed and plastic. Jake crawls onto it and lies down. It bobbles but supports him. Ira crawls up too. Plastic bags, plastic cups, huge spools of knotted nylon ropes, a calcified surfboard, jagged pieces of kayaks. The seaweed stinks like rotten eggs. Ira lies next to Jake and drifts off. He sees a night sky or large expanse of water. He dreams they are discovered by the flashlights of scuba divers. Ira wakes up and sees Jake’s eyes are closed. He jostles him but Jake is unresponsive. His friend! He’ll never get to talk to his friend again. He’ll just have to lie here, next to Jake’s dead body, until he dies too.

Liquid rains down. “I hate when it does this,” Jake says, lips barely moving, like a ventriloquist. Ira bursts out laughing. “What?” Jake asks, inching closer. Ira feels happy and then faint. He closes his eyes. Jake holds his hand.

A voice breaks the spell. “We’d be free by now if we’d all worked together.”

“Austin,” Jake murmurs, but it can’t be. Ira sits up and opens his eyes. His vision is obscured by pulsating shadows.

“We’d be out by now!” Austin yells. Ira’s stomach tightens.

“Why is he here?” Ira mutters to Jake.

“Because his fucking hole was a failure.”

“Fuck you,” Austin says.

Ira focuses his eyes on Austin, who is standing right in front of them. His bleeding face and deteriorating skin look like a gruesome Halloween costume. His dark goggles look like bug eyes. “It would have worked if we all had worked on it,” Austin insists. “But no, you guys had to do your own thing. What exactly were you doing?” His tone is infuriating.

“You look like shit,” Ira says.

“You look like roadkill,” Austin says.

“You were initially very good-looking, let that be said. But now you look like a pizza the cheese fell off of,” Jake says.

“Well, you look like a bird with all its feathers plucked off.”

Jake anxiously puts his hands to his face.

“Did you start a restaurant?” Austin asks, holding on to the edge of their island. “Can I get a reservation at your fucking restaurant? Did you build a castle with a moat?”

“Your hole wasn’t even a hole,” Jake says.

“I got it deeper after you left.”

“Then why are you here?” Ira demands. He can’t believe Austin crashed his deathbed.

“Where do you want me to go, Ira?” Austin sounds deranged.

“Anywhere else.”

“I can die wherever I want to,” Austin says. He crawls onto the island and sits across from them. The island bobs and drifts. Goop splashes onto their faces. No one says anything for several minutes. Ira can’t take the tension.

“Why do straight people come to Fire Island during Pride?” he blurts out. “Are they just bored? Or do they long to be seduced under the boardwalk? Chosen and then convinced, gay for one night, under the cover of darkness…”

“My family owns a house here and has for fifty years.”

“Whoop-de-damn-do,” Ira says. Jake laughs.

“Go fuck yourselves,” Austin says.

“With pleasure,” says Ira. He scoots to the edge of the island, wanting to leave with Jake.

“Where’s the house?” Jake asks. He seems genuinely curious.

“Fifth Walk.”

“That’s on my morning stroll,” Jake says. “Which house?”

“One. It’s right on the beach.”

“Is it the one with the wooden pillars?”

“Yeah. The gray one.”

“It’s got double decks?”

“Yeah. Actually, triple decks, if you count the very top, but it’s not up to code.” Ira feels trapped. He wants the conversation to end.

“It’s right by Stone Trail,” says Jake.

“Yeah.”

“One summer I stayed on Pepperidge Walk, but as far from the beach as you can get.” Jake wipes his face of gunk and sweat. “Your grandparents bought it fifty years ago? They must have gotten it for a song!”

Austin nods. Ira crawls back to Jake’s side. Austin and Jake discuss the post office off Dune Walk, some guy named Mike at the Casino Cafe.

“What do you do, Austin?” Jake asks. Ira feels jealous.

“I’m in advertising.”

“Oh, really? Ira is a graphic designer.”

“Huh. I’m mostly on the business side.”

Ira lies down again and closes his eyes while Jake and Austin talk about vacation days and office dynamics. Their grating human voices chip away at the black sky of his mind. But as the minutes pass and Ira feels more and more out of it, their chatter begins to soothe him. Little phrases slip into his consciousness—“double major,” “fourth-floor walk-up,” “destination wedding”—and linger for a moment, detaching from and reattaching to their meanings.

                                                               “Solar panels.”

“Couples therapy.”

Warm goop is spilling over them again. Ira dreams he’s in a dilapidated movie theater. He dreams he’s watching Austin and Jake play tennis. They look incredibly sexy. Austin’s muscles glimmer in the sunlight. Jake dances merrily around the court, the ball flying past him.

The dream shifts and they’re all living in a loft overlooking Central Park.

Everything is slow and dim.

You’re dying, his dad says.

No, Ira thinks.

He wants more minutes.

He wants whole years.

Lifetimes where he lives as a woman.

As an outlaw.

A street musician.

Lifetimes where he really learns Latin.

Where he’s a king.

A benevolent king.

The images stop.

He can’t leave himself now.

To die will be like tearing the music out of a song.

It’s wrong.

His mind is slipping away.

He doesn’t even have to live, he just wants to keep thinking forever.

He won’t even say anything—he’ll just think!

He’ll just watch!

A wave of panic

a wash of relief

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“Ira & the Whale” first appeared in The Paris Review. Copyright © 2022 by Rachel B. Glaser. Reprinted by permission of the author.

I
They were ten when the plane crashed. Binyelum saw the blackened remains in his father’s Sunday Times, they always read the Sunday paper together, passing pages between each other. Just look at this rubbish, his father would say, frowning at yet another headline about Hisbah (“Kano State’s Hisbah Cracks Down on Private Schools, Enforcing New Hijab Rule,” one headline had said), or, Sharp observation, my boy, which made Binyelum’s head swell. The day of the crash, his father did not sift through the pages, deciding which he wanted to read first before sharing with Binyelum; he went straight to the page with the story, shaking his head as he read, muttering under his breath. Binyelum leaned against him, reading at the same time, the way he used to do when, littler, he would sit between his father’s legs, asking what this or that word meant, how this or that word was pronounced. This is tragic, his father said, turning to him. Later, Binyelum ran to Somadina’s house, waving the paper and saying, Look! It was evening, the sun, huge and yellow, rolling into the belly of the sky. Somadina followed him outside, to the dogonyaro tree across their yard under which they often sat, watching birds. Binyelum caressed the pictures, his eyes like a dreamer’s. One day, he said, he too would fly, and he would not fall.

Binyelum and Somadina and the other neighborhood children used to sit under this tree and sing to the birds—Chekeleke, give me one white finger, they screamed skyward. Every evening, the birds erupted in noise as though, having returned from wherever they had traveled since morning, they could not wait to regale one another with stories about their day. Binyelum believed that he could tell each one apart, and he gave them names even though Somadina told him this was impossible: there were just too many, and they all looked the same, clear white feathers, pale yellow beaks, and long broomstick legs. See, Binyelum said, Sarah had a way of flapping her wings, like a thing about to reveal itself, regal and wild, but Rose was timid and loved the branch hanging close to Baba Ali’s fence. That made no sense, Somadina said, and they fought, sometimes with silence, a few times with their bodies, rolling in the sand, over dead leaves, pulling at each other’s shirts. By morning, they were friends again, playing catch, watching the birds.

But this was before. Before the plane fell from the sky. Before all Binyelum wanted to talk about was how he would be a pilot when he grew up. Before Hisbah seized the truck full of alcohol and ruined his father’s business. Before the evening when, after playing ball, the boys formed a circle around him and he took down his shorts to show them he’d begun growing hair down there. They were all a little shy, until Nnamdi, who was the most senior, said, You be man now o, you fit give woman belle. Binyelum, no longer shy but proud, glanced at Somadina and smiled, as if to say, You see? The next day, they both climbed the short fence into Baba Ali’s compound again and went into one of the discarded old cars littering the yard. It seemed ages ago, and not only yesterday, that they used to have their bath together outside, under the eyes of the entire world.

They returned there most days after school, making up excuses to wander off from the company of the other boys. Baba Ali’s was the perfect spot, that yard with the dark, quiet house whose windows seemed permanently shut to the world. Baba Ali was never in town, and there was no wife cooking dinner in the corridors, no kids running around outside under the mango tree with branches that stretched to the dogonyaro tree, forming a vast canopy for all those abandoned cars. Who taught them to hide? They never wondered. They were only curious fingers in the mild dark. You like it? Somadina said, not in the voice that he would use with the girls and women years away, he’d not yet learned to treat pleasing someone else as an act that affirmed his power over them. He asked because he wanted to know, and Binyelum said yes, and it was not a performance of surrender at all; this was not a game of owning and being owned, not yet.

Had they been older, and cannier, had their minds been tainted early by the world’s caprices, like the mind of a boy like Nnamdi, orphaned at three and passed around from one close relative to another distant one, they would have known how suspect they looked, two boys abandoning the gang almost every evening and wandering off on their own. But they knew nothing about the shrewd, untrusting nature of the world. And so there they were, alone in each other’s company, shorts pulled down to their ankles, and suddenly there was sound, and light, and they were no longer alone: they lay there, awkwardly, all around them eyes gawking. I tell you, Nnamdi said, turning to the other boys, smug and knowing. They all stood there in silence, Nnamdi smirking still, and maybe it was that smirk that made Binyelum start begging. Abeg, he said, abeg no report us. Somadina looked from his crumpled face to Nnamdi’s smug one, and to the wondering faces of a dozen sweaty, grimy boys, and it dawned on him how much trouble they must be in for Binyelum to plead that way. He, too, began to beg.

For days, Nnamdi hounded them like a potent cloud, taking their break money, sending them on errands, making them race each other so that he could see who the man was and who the woman. One evening, he pulled them aside and made them scale the fence. There were five of them, two other boys whom he’d brought along to look out, and this would become Binyelum’s second lesson in growing up, having already learned shame the evening they were found: to always watch his back. Pull your knicker, Nnamdi said, and they both stood there and gaped at him, confused, until he frowned and said, Quick. Good, he said, now do that thing wey una dey do before.

In the same backseat as the first evening, it did not feel the same, did not retain that thrill of discovering something sweet. Binyelum looked down, crying. I no tell you to stop, Nnamdi said from his view in the front seat, and now Binyelum’s crying made his body shake, and it made Somadina incredibly sad, he too began to cry. They disengaged, and no matter how many threats Nnamdi barked at them—I go tell your mother, I go report to your class teacher—they did not return to each other, did not look at each other, could not.

That night, Binyelum’s mother brought out the belt she hid in the same trunk in which she locked her most expensive lace and Georges and Hollandais. Your body will tell you today, she said, as she whipped him on his back, his buttocks, his legs. She’d never beat him, nor his sisters, like that; in the past, she’d ask them to stretch their hand and spread their palm open, and it had been better because he could close his eyes and anticipate the sting, count the rest before the belt came down, one, two, three. This time, she flogged him all over, chanting that his body would tell him. He could hear his sisters crying in the other room. When his father returned, he woke Binyelum up and they sat together in the living room, the girls asleep on mats spread out on the floor, saying nothing, his father’s head bowed for what seemed like eternity, his bald spot round and gleaming like the moon. Finally, he lifted his head. You are a man, he said, calmly, shaking his head—you are a man, Binyelum, my son. Binyelum sat there and cried: it was the strangeness in his father’s voice, as though he could no longer recognize the boy with whom he read the papers on Sundays, swapping pages, laughing over the cartoons, solving puzzles, as though Binyelum had intentionally misled him all those years and now that he’d been exposed, there was nothing else to feel but crushing disappointment.

Somadina, on the other hand, went out and came in, not quite like before, but almost. When Nnamdi came to Somadina’s house with the news, his aunt, Mma Lota, was there. And why are you only telling us this? she said. She spoke Igbo to Nnamdi, persistently, even though he responded in pidgin, and she stared him down with a fierceness. Somadina stood in a corner, watching. The next morning, smug and bouncy with triumph, he waited by the gate to tell Binyelum what had happened. How he told his mother about Nnamdi, about the backseat of the car in Baba Ali’s compound. How, seething, his mother said, Ị sị gịnị? You say he made you do what? How Nnamdi stuttered, then fled the room. How after she opened her Bible and showed him the wrong in what they had both done, she’d bought him ice cream. He waited until he almost missed the school bus, until his mother came outside and asked what he was still doing there.

At school, Binyelum stayed far away, as though Somadina had a smell about him, and the next morning Binyelum walked past him on his way to the bus stop, and no matter how fast Somadina walked, he never caught up with him, and no matter how hard he called, Binyelum never turned.

II
The Christmas Baba Ali returned home with a woman, they were teenagers, seniors in secondary school. Somadina’s father had gotten a job with AP Oil, and they had moved to a nicer house on a quiet street far away from Sabon Gari, a street where the taps spat clean water and the boys were gentle—that was how Somadina’s mother had put it, where the boys were gentle. Somadina liked a girl in his class, Kamara, who was always beating him at physics and math, and Binyelum continued to play on the same field, with mostly the same boys. He’d let Dave, a boy from school, suck his dick a couple of times, always at Dave’s house when his parents were at work, the doors bolted shut, the curtains drawn, an awkwardness between them. Outside the walls of that house, they did not speak to each other, did not act like they had ever spoken to each other.

Baba Ali’s new woman stayed, night after night, month after month. She set up a light-yellow kiosk under the dogonyaro tree. MTN, Everywhere You Go, it said on the body of the light-yellow kiosk from which she sold recharge cards and milk and soap and egg rolls that were soft and sweet, and when the children congregated under the tree to sing to the birds, she shooed them away, the children; in the mornings and afternoons and evenings, women gathered there, talking, laughing, sometimes quarreling loudly, so that people rushed out of their compounds to gawk at them and point fingers. Baba Ali became a face that people saw every day, standing under the electric pole with the fathers and bachelors, a lean, clean-shaven man in the whitest singlet talking politics and football and smiling at the children as they walked to school.

It was Saturday morning, and the husbands had played a football match against the bachelors. Binyelum’s father returned home, flopped down on the couch, his red Arsenal jersey around his neck like a towel, his round hairy stomach glistening with sweat. Binyelum got him a cup of water, which he gulped down, Adam’s apple rippling.

Binyelum returned to his phone. Dave had texted, Come to the church. He’d recently started attending choir practice with Dave. Last week, in the parish’s bathroom, which smelled of Izal, he had been more worried that they were doing this in the house of God than he was about the fact that Dave was kneeling on the bathroom floor, on tiles that looked brownish with accumulated grime futilely scrubbed. It was one thing doing what they did at Dave’s house with the windows and doors shut, there, it was secret and safe; in church, he felt the eyes of God on him, blazing with condemnation. Sometimes—especially on those nights when his father, cursing and staggering, had to lean on him to make it home, the entire street staring at them—he wondered if he was the cause of his family’s misfortune, if his secret desires were too abominable for God’s grace.

Before Hisbah seized the truck full of alcohol, ruining his father’s business, his father’s bar was the happening place. People went there for his special drink combos, and because whenever a dedicated customer asked for a brand of cognac they’d had on a business trip somewhere far away, he made real efforts to have such a drink in his next consignment. Whatever you call your business, son, his father used to say, be proud of it and aim to be great at it. After his goods were seized and destroyed, he became a silent person, sleeping all day and drinking all night. But something about Baba Ali’s return had awakened him, making him join the men again at their football games and their early morning banter about the news.

Ị ma, his father said, looking out the door where the wind was lifting the yellow curtain. I was just there, looking at Baba Ali, e nekete m ya anya, and I hailed him, Odogwu!

Whenever his father got this way, he slipped into an elevated Igbo, untouched by English and garnished with the occasional proverb, the occasional unfamiliar word. Binyelum knew the story about Baba Ali. It had been whispered in the street ever since he was a child: how his wife had woken up one morning, dragged her bags outside, Baba Ali begging and crying behind her, how she’d gotten into a taxi and left. They had even made a song about it at one point, Baba Ali, clean your eyes, no dey cry / Pluck mango from your big tree, chop life, but the adults had scolded and whopped the song out of their mouths. Was he odogwu, Binyelum asked, because he brought home a woman?

His father looked at him, eyes yellow, sprinkles of gray hair on his chin and on his head, lines at the sides of his eyes; it struck Binyelum like a punch, his father was getting old. Baba Ali and his wife, Aina, had been very close, some people even said they were cousins—a detail he could not confirm, his father said—but love can do that to you. His father paused, eyes trained on the picture above Binyelum’s head, a framed photo of his sister, Ngozi, standing behind a birthday cake with one candle in its middle. There was hardly a Sunday, his father continued, that they did not go to church dressed in matching clothes, hardly an evening that Baba Ali did not desert the men to go sit with Aina in the kitchen. Their life, already domed in joy, would have been perfect at the birth of their daughter, but they soon learned, after several illnesses, that she had sickle cell. They watched their child suffer, knowing that the suffering was a direct result of their love. After their daughter died, Aina left. The story went that she loved Baba Ali still but could not risk bringing another child into the world just to suffer, that Baba Ali had tried to convince her to stay, the two of them alone in their marriage, But, I guess, Binyelum’s father said, face bright with contemplation, that not even they could survive the blow of such a tragedy.

He fell sick for months after, and we thought he might die. We had to rush him to the hospital one time because he could not move, had not eaten in days. Your mother and some other women had to care for him after he was discharged. And then he closed down his shop in Kano, which was doing very well, moving everything to Kaduna, to a branch that was only just starting out. But he kept the house, he’d lived there since he was a boy.

His father took a deep breath, released it slowly, his stomach rising and falling. You see, my son, he said, many people break after something like that, or they become bitter and hateful. But not Baba Ali, not the man I talked to and played ball with today, so eager for life. That is something.

Binyelum knew the story and all its embellishments, was used to his parents retelling tales with as much vitality as they’d told them the first time, but there was a solemnness to the way his father told it this time, a tenacious optimism, that saddened him. His father was trying to motivate himself, he realized, by lifting Baba Ali as evidence of the possibility for life’s restoration. Binyelum was not sure if he felt the same way, he’d begun recently to think that the forces of life were capricious and fickle; why, he wondered, did some people spend their lives struggling to scrape by while others wallowed in abundance?

At school, Dave had started to sit beside a boy, Somadina’s cousin Lotanna, who seemed to have everything, staying back in class to talk to him at break time, holding his hand in the corridors. Dave’s husband, their classmates teased him, but he laughed at the name, and soon everybody said it without accusation. Binyelum watched Lotanna talk to Dave, Dave’s head thrown back in laughter—it annoyed him, how easy it was to fool people. Lotanna, polished in his school uniform that was always crisply ironed and in the way he spoke, without hurry, as though the whole world were his audience, and good as he was at playing midfield, at tennis and chess, and loved as he was by the teachers, was someone for whom trouble was glamorous and safe, someone for whom the world would bend.

Mma Lota, who was at the house most Sundays, came with the news that Baba Ali had died. When his mother poked her head into his room to tell him, Somadina looked up, grunted, and she said, What, it’s my house, and sat at the foot of his bed, glancing at everything as though she wasn’t in there every day.

You should come out and sit in the living room, she said.

Moving had been her idea, and though Somadina no longer hated her for it, he could not understand why she continued to be invested in gossip about their old street.

Did Somadina’s mother know, Mma Lota said in the living room, that Baba Ali’s new girlfriend left him as he fell sick? The poor man, had he not enough heartbreak, his mother lamented. May affliction not rise to us a second time.

I took food to him on Sundays, she continued. Mma Ayo did on Fridays, you know, small gestures here and there—it was the most anyone could do.

What happened to him? Somadina asked.

People say he had AIDS, his mother said. But you know how people like to make up stories. The poor man must have died of loneliness.

Loneliness does not kill people, Mummy, Somadina said, shaking his head.

She rolled her eyes at him. What do you know? You have not seen anything yet.

It had seemed, when they first moved out here, that he would never be able to breathe again. There were no boys his age playing football on the street, and his classmates spoke Hausa, which he did not understand, at break time. He wanted to go back home, he’d told his parents. This is home now, they said. Now, though, he had friends who sat on the living room couch, on the floor, drinking Coke and eating chin-chin, playing PS and arguing in loud voices about Merlin or Greek or whether the guy in that video had actually put it in her ass; friends who thought his mum—the few times she’d dropped in from her shop to get something at home—was cool, the way she did not frown at them like most of their parents would have done.

And he had Kamara. His mother said of her to Mma Lota, She’s a wonderful child, so smart and so mature, and the nnwa amaka. I did not know Somadina had big eyes like that.

Mummy! he said, raising a pillow above his head as though to throw it at her.

Kamara had only just started talking to him again. JAMB was around the corner, she’d been studying a lot and so hadn’t gone with him to the party where he had a can of Star and large puffs of Faruk’s blunt. When his friends dared him to kiss Mary, the only girl at the party, he did it. His friends cheered. When the bottle spun toward Mary, they dared her to take off her blouse, an earring, her skirt. No, she said.

It’s the game, Faruk said. Don’t ruin the fun. And then he said something else in Hausa, which made the other boys laugh.

The next day, Kamara showed up while he was shooting hoops and stood in the middle of the basketball court, arms crossed. Somadina walked toward her but she lifted her hand, halting him. Her friends appeared at the other end of the court, watching. Come on, he said, is all this necessary?

You tell me, she said.

I’m sorry—you want me to kneel down? ’Cause I will. He began to roll up his trousers to avoid staining them, but she said, Please don’t embarrass me.

Binyelum scored 268 on JAMB, and his mother cooked his favorite, coconut rice, to celebrate, and his father was sober that evening, and they sat outside, shirtless in the heat, and talked aimlessly about things that had happened and things that were yet to come. With a score like that, his friends told him, he would surely get in somewhere. At the screening for the Defence Academy, Binyelum did not run into Somadina, and Somadina did not run into him. They took the written parts of the exam in the same hall, Somadina in front, Binyelum behind, the hall full of sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds in an assortment of school colors. Binyelum passed but did not get in. Ibadan released their list, and then Nsukka, and he was not on either.

It rained on the evening he got the Daily Times to look up Nsukka’s list. He sat outside Mama Ayo’s shop with the boys, heads huddled together, as they went through the names. Wait, is this the Somadina we know? someone said, pointing at a spot on the paper. They could not believe Binyelum had not gotten in, the boys said, and talked about how rigged it all was, patting his back, making encouraging speeches. It began to rain, the first rain of the year: it began with a whirlwind, dust rising and swirling, making everyone disperse, and then the sky poured down on everything. A neighbor brought out buckets and lined them up under the roof. Binyelum watched from the window. Did she not know not to fetch the first rain? he wondered.

He got a job washing bottles at a pharmaceutical company a few blocks away, stopped attending choir practice. You have to understand, he thought of saying to Dave, but instead stopped picking up his calls. Dave showed up on his street for the first time ever, breaking an unspoken agreement. Wetin? he asked, putting on his harsh voice, aware of the guys’ eyes on him. Nnamdi stood up. You hear the guy, he said, who you dey find? Binyelum saw Dave’s eyes, darting toward him, confused and a little brave, and looked away. Just go, he thought, just go. Binyelum, Dave said, but Binyelum simply glared at him—all those eyes, he thought, all those suspicious eyes.

Nnamdi laughed, putting his arms around Dave’s shoulders. I just dey play with you, he said. See as you dey shake. Why you dey find my guy?

Choir practice, Dave said.

A week later, outside Baba Ali’s compound, Binyelum and Nnamdi argued over Messi and Ronaldo, and everyone who asked could not believe that a boy like Binyelum, quiet and unproblematic, would throw the first punch. Day after day, his heart ached more, and he often had an urge to cry that could not be tied to anything in particular.

III
Nobody believed it would happen in Kano, Somadina’s father said over the phone, and yet here they were, in the middle of a curfew, the entire city still and uneasy, waiting to see if there would be another bomb. Binyelum called his mother and asked her to give the phone to his sisters. Don’t go outside Sabon Gari, he said. Be careful. Distance made him helpless. His presence would do nothing real for them, he knew, but he could not shake off the feeling that if he were close, somehow he could keep them safe.

He missed them, that was what it was, a homesickness made urgent by worry. For a whole year he’d been away from home, in Lagos, serving Oga Lawrence. He had balked at the idea at first: learning a trade was for dull students and village boys with no hope of another way. But after three years of waiting, his JAMB score getting lower with each try, his friends getting into small schools in Katsina and Kogi, he had begun to feel useless. In the company of his friends, he felt unreal, nonexistent, as though life were not happening to him, even though all he could feel was its force: his father always reeking of alcohol, the talk of the neighborhood; his angst about never getting into the Nigerian Defence Academy and becoming a pilot; his worry about his sisters.

In many ways, the apprenticeship was like being in school: after four years, he would be given a shop, goods, and some money to start up his own business. He could always go back to school, he would tell himself at night, lying exhausted on the mattress with the other first-year, Innocent, assailed by his scent, his snore, both of them shirtless, both of them sprawled under the insistent whir of the fan, their shorts rumpled, their thighs golden in the soft light of the appliances. The job was hard, it involved lots of walking under the sun, unloading trucks, sweet-talking often surly customers; it involved, for him and Innocent, starting the generator every evening, going to the main house to help Lady B in the kitchen, sneaking into the living room, spacious and high ceilinged, to peek at episodes of Grey’s Anatomy or whatever Oga Lawrence’s children had decided to watch, Lady B’s voice raised in scolding—Useless bush rat!—or little Mary-Ann saying no she would not move her legs so the boys could sweep the floor. Do you know that my smallest sister is older than you? Innocent said to her often. Binyelum liked him, his nightly smell of bitter lemon and fresh bath; his limbs, of a boy who had spent his childhood weeding and tilling; his accent, the l’s that rolled into r’s, so that “rubber” became “lubba” and “love” became “ruv.” There was a softness about him, though, that made Binyelum wary, a gentleness in contrast to his hard face, a way of moving and being that was too familiar for comfort.

Innocent, having served a former oga who in the end did not settle him, was always ready with advice. Nothing we say or see among ourselves gets back to Oga, he once said, but you never can tell when a Judas might appear, so don’t join the other umu-boy in openly bad-mouthing him. The last thing you need is for Oga to get it in his head that you’re disloyal, life can get very hard then.

Binyelum wondered how much harder it could get, he felt already like someone walking on broken glass, his life dreary—a necessity, he believed, Growth flourishes in stillness, he’d written in his notebook where recently he’d begun leaving himself reminders, goals, motivations—sometimes he imagined breaking Oga Lawrence’s curfew, imagined getting on one of those hookup apps and finding someone to sneak into the boys’ quarters, the way the seniors did with their girlfriends. You don’t have to do everything Oga says, Innocent told him. There are ways around these rules. Binyelum listened eagerly but told himself that he would break no rules, he had huge plans and narrow options: he could not afford the cost of recklessness.

The bombs were followed by shootings: a sixteen-year-old boy seeing his friend off after a visit was shot and killed as they both stood at the junction, chatting. The men were driving an okada, the gunman in the passenger seat behind, the driver speeding away, cries of Allahu akbar lacerating the night as they zoomed off, as the spared boy froze and then fell on his knees beside his friend. They must leave Kano, Somadina’s mother said to him every time she called, they simply had to—but his father, his father was stubborn, talking all the time about his job, could Somadina believe it! That boy could easily have been you, she said, and then what would a job mean? What would it mean?

This is the first major fight my parents are having, he told Kamara, holding her. It was dark in the room, there was no power; they had left the windows and door open to let in some breeze, the night crackling with the noises of crickets and toads and with the occasional caw of a nameless bird. He pressed his lips to Kamara’s hair, wet and smelling of shea butter. Funny, he thought, how fond he now was of a scent that used to nauseate him.

My parents argued all the time, she said. This one time, my mother threw a plate at my dad and it missed him and hit my little brother on the head.

He placed one hand on her breast and the other on her stomach, twirling his finger around her navel. We will never fight, he said.

She backed into him and he held her tighter. His father had been furious when he chose to go to Nsukka: Who chooses Nsukka over NDA, gbọ? Do you know how many phone calls I had to make to ensure they didn’t dash someone else your spot? But Somadina did not care for NDA nor anything else for that matter, did not know what he wanted to do with his life. He was good at many things but perfect at none, liked many things but was passionate about none; he could go wherever the wind blew him but why should he, when he felt, with Kamara, such profound happiness, when he could simply follow her wherever she went?

Was he not tying her down? her friends had argued when they moved in together. Men were already knocking on her door, her parents’ door, prosperous men, some of them handsome and nice too. Her mother introduced most of the men to her and she talked to them merely to satisfy her mother. Lying in Somadina’s arms, she read their text messages aloud, and they laughed together at these desperate men and their outmoded ways. God, you’re an expert at nonchalance, he said to her, this man basically says he cannot live without you and all you say is aww. After a while, they became serious, and he told her he loved her and this was it, the two of them together until death. Here was the plan, he said, here was the plan, she agreed: they would both get a job in Enugu after graduation, find a room at Ninth Mile, and then a flat; they would save up, get married, have two or three children, ideally more girls but boys would also make them happy, wouldn’t they?

Sundays were for church and football. Oga Lawrence and Lady B did not approve of girlfriends, because to have a woman was to need money—for dates, and Valentine’s Day, and birthdays, and shoes and handbags, and shawarma—and to need money was to steal from Oga Lawrence’s business. That was, however, not the speech they gave after morning devotion. Don’t get a girl pregnant and derail your life, they said instead.

Don’t get a girl pregnant and derail your life, Innocent said as they walked back groggily to the boys’ quarters, rolling his eyes. As if they care about us.

Binyelum laughed. In their room, he picked up his phone to find his father’s missed calls. He called home every other evening, to speak to the guys, or to his mother and sisters, rarely ever to his father. You never call your old man, gbọ, he said when Binyelum called back. He laughed, and maybe if he hadn’t the hurt wouldn’t have stuck out so much, like a bone jutting out of torn skin, it made Binyelum queasy.

Haba, Daddy, he said, and laughed, too, and then they both waited in silence.

Did you hear about Nnamdi? his father asked.

Yes, Binyelum said. He’d heard, from his friends back home, from his sisters, from his mother: a nine-year-old girl had named Nnamdi as the reason she was injured down there, and her father, a retired army man, had stormed the street in a vanload of soldiers, dragged Nnamdi into the middle of the street, beaten him until his eyes were onion purple, and then thrown him into the back of the van and driven away.

A shameful thing, his father said.

A shameful thing, Binyelum agreed.

They waited, again, in silence.

How is work? his father said finally.

Binyelum gazed out the window, at the milky harmattan haze hovering over the conspiratorial cluster of roofs, at the people, bright in their Sunday jeans and gele and agbada, trudging up and down streets and alleyways, vibrant even in the cold, their noises—of laughter and greetings—rising and merging with the rumble and clatter of drums, with the brash songs and prayers blasting out of the speakers of the Mountain of Fire church down the road. It was so much like home, the riot of everything, the splattering of crumbling, brown-roofed bungalows around that one compound ringed by flowers, the compound in which he now stood, looking out at all these people: Iya Ibeji, whose tomato-crushing machine made so much noise; Baba Bolu the police officer, Bolu who always accosted Binyelum and the boys on their way from the shop, chanting Broda mi until Innocent handed him his PSP for the evening. Binyelum wanted to be the person looking down at everything from the house ringed by flowers. He wanted to be the person who, when his sister texted him saying there was nothing to eat at home, didn’t immediately fall into a hole of depression and helplessness. He wanted to be the person who told others when they could date and when they could not. The plush couches in Oga Lawrence and Lady B’s living room, the huge TV that started from the floor and rose nearly to the ceiling, the endless rows of Cerelac and Indomie noodles for the kids, the crates of eggs, the cornflakes: he wanted to have all that, a life of ease and plenty. Downstairs, Innocent was washing Oga’s car, whistling to Osadebe, his arms, his bare back, shining with sweat. Binyelum wished he could stay home, skip church today, but service was compulsory. If he were in Kano, he’d be seated outside Mama Ayo’s shop after football training, staring idly at the churchgoers. How he missed having nothing to do.

For Easter, Oga Lawrence took the family to visit his brother in Ibadan, and Binyelum went with Innocent to his first Lagos club. Walking in, he was frightened by the mass of people—everybody was beautiful, or had mastered ways of making themselves appear so. He felt self-conscious in the ordinariness of his black T-shirt and blue jeans, but a few bottles of Heineken later, he was in the middle of the dance floor, bodies pressed together, people floating from one dance partner to another, it made him think of folks trying on clothes at a boutique. A woman wrapped her arms around his neck, twisting into him. She smelled of sweat and perfume and looked into his eyes as though she’d known him all her life and loved him with a sad, quaking love. He wondered what her story was.

Outside the club later, he stumbled into the street with Innocent, arms around each other’s shoulders. It was past midnight. A car sped past them, men sticking their heads out of its windows, spraying the street with champagne and yelling, Na we get Lagos!

Your papa! Binyelum yelled back, then turned to Innocent, laughing.

You’re wasted, my man, Innocent said, laughing too.

They got on the same okada, Innocent seated behind, his body warm against Binyelum’s back. In their room at the boys’ quarters, Binyelum collapsed on his mattress, his shoes still on, he felt sleepy yet wide awake.

Next time we go out, Innocent said, sitting at Binyelum’s feet, I’m going to take you somewhere different.

Binyelum looked up at him.

He smiled. It’s not as big and flashy, but I’m sure you’ll find what you need there. At least you’ll dance with someone you actually want to fuck.

Binyelum hesitated. Perhaps it was a ploy: get him drunk, ruin his life in the presence of everybody. But the silence felt heavy with potential. He sat up; slowly, he took off his shirt. They were now seated side by side. He hugged Innocent. How terribly he’d missed it, the warmth and solidness of a man’s body. Innocent sat there, letting himself be hugged. What am I doing? Binyelum muttered, chuckling into his shoulder.

You’ve been alone too long, Innocent said, guiding Binyelum’s head onto his lap, where he cradled it like he would a sleeping child.

IV
There were birds in the trees outside the Enugu Premier Secondary School, where Kamara broke up with Somadina over the phone, and in the trees under which Binyelum stood, months after his settlement, scrolling through Facebook as he waited for his bus to arrive. Somadina sat on the bench outside the ash-and-oxblood building, head bent, hands covering it. To a passerby, he would look like a man suffering from a terrible headache. One moment a city is still, he thought, the next there are bombs; one day his father was stamping tickets for independent oil contractors, building a house in Enugu, another at the village—and the next he was struggling to get his tickets signed, could not finish his house in the village, peace giving way to strife.

And one moment, he was telling Kamara he loved her and she was saying she loved him too, and the next they were graduates and she had a dream job in Abuja and he had a shabby one in Enugu, a graduate of physics teaching mathematics to junior students and physics to seniors, and soon she was telling him, over the phone, that she wanted to start a family, could no longer wait, It’s complicated, you have to understand, you have to understand. All those years, eight years, had those promises meant nothing to her even as she lay beside him? How could she, he wondered, how could she. The voices of students at play drifted toward him; watching them at break time, the junior boys and girls running after one another, dirtying their school uniforms, the seniors standing in corners, whispering, plotting, being dignified, he remembered his own secondary school days. Suddenly, it was all over, his years of carefreeness, it made him pity them. He felt it in his palms, the wetness, and squeezed his eyes shut to force it back in—what a sight he would be, a twenty-three-year-old man crying publicly, in the glare of the sun.

Finally home, Binyelum collapsed on his bed, exhausted. Today had not been his day: he’d woken up much later than usual, run after several buses before finding a seat and, at the shop, had lost a major sale to his neighbor. The elation he felt after his settlement had long since faded, now when he took the bus to work, he thought of the day ahead with hope and apprehension—would customers flock to his shop, he worried, or would he sit idly all day?—and on his way back, he thought only of his bed.

It was raining, and his room was dark and cold. He’d pulled the drapes; something about the street soaked in water, the rust-colored roofs dripping, people clutching umbrellas as they skirted puddles—something about all this made him terribly homesick. Perhaps it was the ordinariness of rain, the way it subdued people anywhere and everywhere, so that the woman clutching an umbrella down the road would remind him of his mother rushing home in the rain, clutching her old yellow umbrella that said The Taste of Goodness.

His phone tinkled with a notification: Somadina Obi Accepted Your Friend Request. Scrolling through Facebook earlier as he’d waited for the bus, he’d come across Somadina’s profile in his People You May Know. He went back on, looking at pictures. The face, bearded and grown, smiling teeth white against a face so black and smooth, not the boy he had known all those years ago, but boyish still, and familiar. Binyelum scrolled through the page, more pictures: with a girl in front of a water-spitting lion, his arm around her waist, her head on his shoulder. My World, the caption said.

He imagined messaging Somadina. He would be effusively familiar, Longest time, my gee, he would say, and Somadina would respond as enthusiastically. He imagined their friendliness evolving into flirtation, that on the loneliest of nights, such as this, Somadina would say to him, I have been thinking of you all my life.

He chuckled to himself, how wild, his imagination. He messaged Innocent about a party they were planning, then went on WhatsApp, where his fuckbuddies were. Wyd, he typed to Yomi and Ferdinand, who lived closest to him. It still surprised him, the leeway they allowed him. He rarely ever texted them back outside of sex, and he lied to them all the time—I am an only child, he once said—lies that he told not to make himself appear in a striking light but to avoid being known, because to be known was to be invested. Sometimes, after they’d fucked, they would cling to him, and the slightest moment would present itself in which he wanted to hold them, too—and then he would feel only encroachment, the air suddenly too soft with feelings. He would hurry into his jeans and say, E go be, like he always did, and leave. In his apartment, he would wash his face in the bathroom sink, looking in the mirror, his hair spiky and tangled, his beard trimmed into a funnel, his eyes, red from smoking, looking back at him, saying, Who is this stranger, who is this man? Twisting the faucet, he would lower his head again, cup his palms under his face, cold water hitting him. Every day he lived, he felt less like himself. Growth, people called it; he thought of it as estrangement.

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“Happy Is a Doing Word” first appeared in the Kenyon Review. Copyright © 2022 by Arinze Ifeakandu. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Story collections are the country cousins of the American publishing landscape, tolerated with benevolent condescension while their authors are urged to produce that more glamorous product: novels. A novel might find a broad audience, even become a bestseller! Whereas—as a writer friend once put it—“You tell your agent you’ve written a story collection, and she looks at you like you farted.”

Yes, stories often represent a first foray into fiction—but for many authors, they remain the preferred genre. Gina Berriault, whose collected volume Women in Their Beds won the National Book Award shortly before her death, confessed that, were it not for pressure from her publisher, she never would have penned her novels. It’s the rare few, like Canada’s Alice Munro, recognized with a Nobel Prize in 2015, who go global based on their short fiction.

Danielle Evans, who followed her lauded debut collection not with a novel but with the 2020 award-winning novella and stories The Office of Historical Corrections, has said that the multiplicity of the story form allows her to “shape-shift,” freeing her from being “the voice of your community, which is a fraught place to be speaking from.”

Others who prioritize stories find themselves celebrated on a smaller, if no less notable scale. All three books by Amina Gautier, winner of the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story, are prize-winning collections, each issued by an independent or university press.

Still the assumption persists: readers aren’t interested in stories. If a collection is fortunate enough to be picked up by publisher, the advance is usually small—and without a significant investment, there is less pressure to earn it back, meaning less money or attention from Marketing, meaning that fewer readers hear about the book, meaning fewer people buy it… supporting the conviction that short stories don’t sell.

Really there are readers and writers for whom short stories represent perfection. Perhaps the first to formulate a theory of the short story, Edgar Allen Poe declared stories—in describing which forms of writing “best fulfill the demands of high genius”—second only to poetry:

We allude to the short prose narrative, requiring from a half-hour to one or two hours in its perusal. The ordinary novel is objectionable, from its length … As it cannot be read at one sitting, it deprives itself, of course, of the immense force derivable from totality. Worldly interests intervening during the pauses of perusal, modify, annul, or counteract, in a greater or less degree, the impressions of the book. But simple cessation in reading would, of itself, be sufficient to destroy the true unity. In the brief tale, however, the author is enabled to carry out the fullness of his intention, be it what it may. During the hour of perusal the soul of the reader is at the writer’s control. There are no external or extrinsic influences—resulting from weariness or interruption.

Of course, Poe’s readers were not reading on smartphones constantly bleating notifications—yet his concept of “unity of effect” (sustaining a tonal, emotional consistency for an entire work) remains apt.

Short stories also tend to translate more satisfyingly to full-length film format. While adaptations of our favorite novels often disappoint—entire characters or plotlines necessarily omitted or compressed—emotionally complex short stories like Annie Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain” or Alice Munro’s “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” become fully contained, without losing their profundity, in the hands of Ang Lee and Sarah Polley (Away From Her). And with space to fully display, even expand upon, their brilliance, more conceptual stories, like Philip K. Dick’s “Minority Report,” Daphne du Maurier’s “Don’t Look Now,” and Ryūnosuke Akutagawa’s “In a Grove” (Rashomon) become even more vibrant on screen.

Educators like myself also appreciate short stories as compact teachable units that can be thoroughly discussed in a single class session. It is in this mode—as both author and teacher—that I have come to note, over the years, the fiction collections and individual stories that deeply move not only me but also my college students.

When I consider the qualities these “favorite” works have in common—beyond students naming them as their favorites—I find myself thinking of a book I once bought based purely on the cover. It was a poetry collection by Les Murray called Poems the Size of Photographs. The cover image, a sepia tint outdoor photo, showed two jolly looking men from another era (perhaps father and son?) bearing huge, strange, even more ancient-looking axes. The combination of the men—their relationship, their expressions—and the axes made the photo arresting and odd, and the book itself was very small, square rather than rectangular, the poems, too, small on the pages.

The title suggested that even brief “snapshot” poems could encapsulate whole worlds while simultaneously interrogating them—urging us to contemplate their possible meanings, just as the cover photo had. And while I am not suggesting that the most powerful, memorable, or resonant short stories are necessarily “snapshots,” the title of that little book returns to me as I try to put into words what I mean when I consider the salient qualities of the short fiction that my students and I return to.

I mean that the stories in those collections, too, feel “the size of photographs.” There is a sense that one might regard them again and again and each time discover something new: a narrative that expands while preserving that essential air of mystery.

In the same way that a photograph asks us to dive, even momentarily, into a world and perhaps emerge with new questions, a good story conveys a sense of more going on in the background, more to be discovered. We choose to return to them because something in them—honesty, clearsighted wisdom, a sense of humor, surprising turns of phrase, depth of character—lingers, expands. In their indelibility, they become “big” as photographs—or, I might add, as novels.

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Daphne Kalotay is the author of The Archivists: Stories, available now from Northwestern University Press.

“I was away from Korea for a long time,” he said.

We were having tea at a downtown café. I tried to recall the last time I’d seen him, but couldn’t. When I made some offhand comment about the tea timer on top of our table and how pretty it was, he reached for it at once and stuck it deep inside my purse. Shaped like an hourglass, the timer contained blue ink that flowed in reverse from bottom to top.

“This is stealing,” I whispered, glancing around the café.

“I’m good at it. On my travels in the past few years, I’ve stolen many things.”

He kept the things he’d taken in a glass cabinet in his living room. A silver fork from a Paris café, a teacup saucer from a London restaurant, a bamboo basket that had held orchids from a New Delhi bed-and-breakfast, and a pen belonging to a worker at a museum information desk in Berlin. There had also been an ashtray from an Osaka hotel (though he was caught red-handed and had no choice but to return it), as well as a cat from New York.

“Wait, you stole a cat?”

“Actually, that was the first thing I ever stole.”

*

He began to talk about the New York apartment he’d lived in after his divorce.

“It was a run-down building, but clean. Across the hall from me lived a man in his early sixties named Emerson. He lived alone. Well, not exactly alone. He lived with his cat Debbie. He was an old, overweight man living alone with his cat.”

Because of his weight, Emerson tottered comically when he walked. Surprisingly, he had an extremely soft voice. They talked in the hallway now and then, and each time he had to strain his ears in order to understand what Emerson was saying. Emerson had never been married. They even joked about their marital status, calling themselves “the divorcé and the bachelor.” Perhaps because of all the joking, they became quite comfortable with one another.

One weekend, Emerson invited him over to his place for a few beers. “And there she was—Debbie. She was all black, except for her white belly and paws. Until then, I hadn’t known he owned a cat. When we’d been smoking and chatting for a while, I noticed she was watching us from under the couch, with just her head poking out. I’d never seen a cat so close up before. I tried to pet her, but as soon as I raised my hand, she dashed under the couch. It was only then that I realized all the framed photos on the walls were of her. In other words, Debbie was Emerson’s only family.”

After that, he and Emerson got together every so often. They joked, drank, and smoked together, and Debbie would stare at them for a while and disappear under the couch. He found his life satisfactory in its own way. Objectively speaking, though, it would have been a stretch to call his life satisfying.

He had followed his American girlfriend to the States, despite not knowing a single soul in the country, but after being married for less than three years, she had left him. Then due to various overlapping circumstances, he was forced to quit his job.

“Because of her, I had my life stolen from me. Don’t you think?”

Still, he didn’t think his situation was all bad. Happiness and boredom, abundance and loneliness filled his life with order, as if these emotions had been woven together in a plaid pattern, and as a result, his life felt strangely balanced. To top everything off, he’d made a friend named Emerson. However, while he was intoxicated by this sense of equilibrium, his bank balance lost its equilibrium, which then unraveled the woven balance of his life.

“Luckily my old company called me. They said if I wanted to keep working for them, they could transfer me to their Philadelphia branch. I no longer had any reason to stay in New York, so I decided to leave. But first, I wanted to say goodbye to Emerson. The night before I left, we got sloshed at his place. I may have cried. He may have patted me on the back, who knows. Then I passed out on his couch.”

In the middle of the night, he felt a stare and snapped awake. Something in the dark was watching him. It was Debbie. She was sitting elegantly before him and Emerson, who had also fallen asleep on the couch. He got up, carefully moving Emerson’s arm that was splayed across his feet. The entire time, Debbie kept her eyes on him. When he stepped into the hallway and was about to close the front door, he realized Debbie was still watching. She walked slowly toward him. She then sat on her haunches and gazed up, stretching her front paws up toward him.

“It was as if she was saying, ‘I want to leave, I want to leave this place. Please take me with you.’ All of a sudden, it seemed wrong to leave her behind. I don’t know why I thought that.”

Debbie’s eyes glittered in the dark. He picked her up. He walked out of the building and left New York.

*

“That was a very bad thing you did,” I said.

“About two weeks later, I went back to New York with Debbie. I had to. Since I didn’t have the courage to explain my actions to Emerson, I planned to secretly drop her off at his apartment. But his place was completely empty. When I asked the property manager what had happened, he said that Emerson had committed suicide.”

“Suicide?”

“They found him a week after I’d left. He’d hanged himself.”

“Where’s Debbie now?”

“She’s home, back at my place. Why? Do you want to meet her?”

I hesitated for a moment. “No,” I said at last.

He nodded.

We talked about other things after that and had many good laughs. Yet, the whole time, I was thinking, Murderer! When a little more time passed, that thought faded from my mind, and instead I was picturing myself back in my own home, peering at the tea timer and the blue ink making its way to the top.

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The preceding is from the Freeman’s channel at Literary Hub, which features excerpts from the print editions of Freeman’s, along with supplementary writing from contributors past, present and future.

It was nigh upon dusk when I drew close to the Great Marsh, and already the white vapours were about, riding across the sunken levels like ghosts in a churchyard. Though I had set forth in a mood of wild delight, I had sobered in the lonely ride across the moor and was now uneasily alert. As my horse jerked down the grassy slopes that fell away to the jaws of the swamp, I could see thin streams of mist rise slowly, hover like wraiths above the long rushes, and then, turning gradually more material, go blowing heavily away across the flat. The appearance of the place at this desolate hour, so remote from human society and so darkly significant of evil presences, struck me with a certain wonder that she should have chosen this spot for our meeting. She was a familiar of the moors, where I had invariably encountered her; but it was like her arrogant caprice to test my devotion by some such dreary assignation. The wide and horrid prospect depressed me beyond reason, but the fact of her neighbourhood drew me on, and my spirits mounted at the thought that at last she was to put me in possession of herself. Tethering my horse upon the verge of the swamp, I soon discovered the path that crossed it, and entering, struck out boldly for the heart. The track could have been little used, for the reeds, which stood high above the level of my eyes upon either side, straggled everywhere across in low arches, through which I dodged, and broke my way with some inconvenience and much impatience. A full half hour I was solitary in that wilderness, and when at last a sound other than my own footsteps broke the silence, the dusk had fallen.

I was moving very slowly at the time, with a mind half disposed to turn from the melancholy expedition, which it seemed to me now must surely be a cruel jest she had played upon me. While some such reluctance held me, I was suddenly arrested by a hoarse croaking which broke out upon my left, sounding somewhere from the reeds in the black mire. A little further it came again from close at hand, and when I had passed on a few more steps in wonder and perplexity, I heard it for the third time. I stopped and listened, but the marsh was as a grave, and so taking the noise for the signal of some raucous frog, I resumed my way. But in a little the croaking was repeated, and coming quickly to a stand I pushed the reeds aside and peered into the darkness. I could see nothing, but at the immediate moment of my pause I thought I detected the sound of some body trailing through the rushes. My distaste for the adventure grew with this suspicion, and had it not been for my delirious infatuation, I had assuredly turned back and ridden home. The ghastly sound pursued me at intervals along the track, until at last, irritated beyond endurance by the sense of this persistent and invisible company, I broke into a sort of run. This, it seemed, the creature (whatever it was) could not achieve, for I heard no more of it, and continued my way in peace. My path at length ran out from among the reeds upon the smooth flat of which she had spoken, and here my heart quickened, and the gloom of the dreadful place lifted. The flat lay in the very centre of the marsh, and here and there in it a gaunt bush or withered tree rose like a spectre against the white mists. At the further end I fancied some kind of building loomed up; but the fog which had been gathering ever since my entrance upon the passage sailed down upon me at that moment and the prospect went out with suddenness. As I stood waiting for the clouds to pass, a voice cried to me out of its centre, and I saw her next second with bands of mist swirling about her body, come rushing to me from the darkness. She put her long arms about me, and, drawing her close, I looked into her deep eyes. Far down in them, it seemed to me, I could discern a mystic laughter dancing in the wells of light, and I had that ecstatic sense of nearness to some spirit of fire which was wont to possess me at her contact.

‘At last,’ she said, ‘at last, my beloved!’ I caressed her.

‘Why,’ said I, tingling at the nerves, ‘why have you put this dolorous journey between us? And what mad freak is your presence in this swamp?’ She uttered her silver laugh, and nestled to me again.

‘I am the creature of this place,’ she answered. ‘This is my home. I have sworn you should behold me in my native sin ere you ravished me away.’

‘Come, then,’ said I; ‘I have seen; let there be an end of this. I know you, what you are. This marsh chokes up my heart. God forbid you should spend more of your days here. Come.’

‘You are in haste,’ she cried. ‘There is yet much to learn. Look, my friend,’ she said, ‘you who know me, what I am. This is my prison, and I have inherited its properties. Have you no fear?’

For answer I pulled her to me, and her warm lips drove out the horrid humours of the night; but the swift passage of a flickering mockery over her eyes struck me as a flash of lightning, and I grew chill again.

‘I have the marsh in my blood,’ she whispered: ‘the marsh and the fog of it. Think ere you vow to me, for I am the cloud in a starry night.’

A lithe and lovely creature, palpable of warm flesh, she lifted her magic face to mine and besought me plaintively with these words. The dews of the nightfall hung on her lashes, and seemed to plead with me for her forlorn and solitary plight.

‘Behold!’ I cried, ‘witch or devil of the marsh, you shall come with me! I have known you on the moors, a roving apparition of beauty; nothing more I know, nothing more I ask. I care not what this dismal haunt means; not what these strange and mystic eyes. You have powers and senses above me; your sphere and habits are as mysterious and incomprehensible as your beauty. But that,’ I said, ‘is mine, and the world that is mine shall be yours also.’

She moved her head nearer to me with an antic gesture, and her gleaming eyes glanced up at me with a sudden flash, the similitude (great heavens!) of a hooded snake. Starting, I fell away, but at that moment she turned her face and set it fast towards the fog that came rolling in thick volumes over the flat. Noiselessly the great cloud crept down upon us, and all dazed and troubled I watched her watching it in silence. It was as if she awaited some omen of horror, and I too trembled in the fear of its coming.

Then suddenly out of the night issued the hoarse and hideous croaking I had heard upon my passage. I reached out my arm to take her hand, but in an instant the mists broke over us, and I was groping in the vacancy. Something like panic took hold of me, and, beating through the blind obscurity, I rushed over the flat, calling upon her. In a little the swirl went by, and I perceived her upon the margin of the swamp, her arm raised as in imperious command. I ran to her, but stopped, amazed and shaken by a fearful sight. Low by the dripping reeds crouched a small squat thing, in the likeness of a monstrous frog, coughing and choking in its throat. As I stared, the creature rose upon its legs and disclosed a horrid human resemblance. Its face was white and thin, with long black hair; its body gnarled and twisted as with the ague of a thousand years. Shaking, it whined in a breathless voice, pointing a skeleton finger at the woman by my side.

‘Your eyes were my guide,’ it quavered. ‘Do you think that after all these years I have no knowledge of your eyes? Lo, is there aught of evil in you I am not instructed in? This is the Hell you designed for me, and now you would leave me to a greater.’

The wretch paused, and panting leaned upon a bush, while she stood silent, mocking him with her eyes, and soothing my terror with her soft touch.

‘Hear!’ he cried, turning to me, ‘hear the tale of this woman that you may know her as she is. She is the Presence of the marshes. Woman or Devil I know not, but only that the accursed marsh has crept into her soul and she herself is become its Evil Spirit; she herself, that lives and grows young and beautiful by it, has its full power to blight and chill and slay. I, who was once as you are, have this knowledge. What bones lie deep in this black swamp who can say but she? She has drained of health, she has drained of mind and of soul; what is between her and her desire that she should not drain also of life? She has made me a devil in her Hell, and now she would leave me to my solitary pain, and go search for another victim. But she shall not!’ he screamed through his chattering teeth; ‘she shall not! My Hell is also hers! She shall not!’

Her smiling untroubled eyes left his face and turned to me: she put out her arms, swaying towards me, and so fervid and so great a light glowed in her face that, as one distraught of super-human means, I took her into my embrace. And then the madness seized me.

‘Woman or devil,’ I said, ‘I will go with you! Of what account this pitiful past? Blight me even as that wretch, so be only you are with me.’

She laughed, and, disengaging herself, leaned, half-clinging to me, towards the coughing creature by the mire.

‘Come,’ I cried, catching her by the waist. ‘Come!’ She laughed again a silver-ringing laugh. She moved with me slowly across the flat to where the track started for the portals of the marsh. She laughed and clung to me.

But at the edge of the track I was startled by a shrill, hoarse screaming; and behold, from my very feet, that loathsome creature rose up and wound his long black arms about her, shrieking and crying in his pain. Stooping, I pushed him from her skirts, and with one sweep of my arm drew her across the pathway; as her face passed mine her eyes were wide and smiling. Then of a sudden the still mist enveloped us once more; but ere it descended I had a glimpse of that contorted figure trembling on the margin, the white face drawn and full of desolate pain. At the sight an icy shiver ran through me. And then through the yellow gloom the shadow of her darted past me to the further side. I heard the hoarse cough, the dim noise of a struggle, a swishing sound, a thin cry, and then the sucking of the slime over something in the rushes. I leapt forward: and once again the fog thinned, and I beheld her, woman or devil, standing upon the verge, and peering with smiling eyes into the foul and sickly bog. With a sharp cry wrung from my nerveless soul, I turned and fled down the narrow way from that accursed spot; and as I ran the thickening fog closed round me, and I heard far off and lessening still the silver sound of her mocking laughter.

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From Damnable Tales: A Folk Horror Anthology, edited by Richard Wells. Used with permission from the publisher, Unbound. Copyright © 2022.

The little careless gods hefted their plastic rifles and aimed their orange tips at the bucks. They slipped coins into the slot to shoot together. From inside the game they were gargantuan, each of their eyes the same size as the O in COIN, and the window refracted the smears of pizza grease on their chins into rainbow sheens. As they squeezed the triggers, a robotic voice echoed across the landscape. “Nice shot! Reload!” When a few bucks lay bleeding on the dirt, the little gods slid away toward the Skee-Ball machines, where rows of light bulbs cycled yellow to pink; or to the rows of chrome pinballs, which gleamed under glass; or to the leather steering wheels in the stationary cars; or to the swishes of basketballs through nets. To them, we of Big Buck Hunter III werenothing but a temporary distraction.

KEEP PLAYING? INSERT COIN (0/2) crowded the sky above the dead bucks in a funereal benediction. The slain rotted. Each one had an identical brown suede nose, dark fur, and a blank expression. Occasionally, I stumbled over a carcass and watched the pixels at the edges of its body change colour one hex code at a time until they matched the landscape. When one of their own was taken by the little monster gods, the other bucks gathered over the body. They stood on their hind legs and walked counter-clockwise, howling.

The women lounged near the window in camo cut-offs and string bikini tops. When another little god inserted coins, the women winked andnodded; they swayed side to side with their hands on their hips and glazed smiles on their faces. Though they waved to me every time we saweach other, I kept my distance from them, unsure whether they were individually conscious or merely the humanoid fruit of game-brainmycorrhizae. They might rip out my throat with their long, gleaming teeth and leave me to disappear into the landscape, too. Honestly, given my boredom, that fate didn’t sound so bad to me. I missed my friends and my life before Big Buck Hunter III. The last thing Iremembered was cleaning a dabb lizard habitat at a friend’s house, my towel squeaking against the inside of the aquarium as I listened to the television show Rogue Repo. On the show, the owner of a window dressing store begged in a Scottish accent to keep her heirloom wainscotting. The lizard skittered over my hand and knocked the heat lamp into his water bowl. When I reached for it, I felt a big buzz and blacked out. I woke up here. The question of whether or not this game was an afterlife troubled me at first. I searched the whole perimeter and found no way out. I tried deleting myself—jumping in front of the bucks, or off the biggest boulder I could find—and each time, a pixel layer stayedbetween myself and the ground, between myself and some rest. As far as I could tell, I was trapped.

I stared at the ground as I walked, surrounded always by the same landscape, the same people, the same weather. As I climbed a small boulder to avoid a corpse, I noticed a latch underneath a scruff of moss. I stopped and balanced myself between two near-vertical walls as I fiddled with it.

“Trust me. Doesn’t work.”

One of the women stood behind me, her arms folded. Gooseflesh rose on her bare shoulders. She beckoned, and I followed. Maybe this was the game’s way of reaching out to me, or maybe she was a person, too. Either way, I had nothing to lose. We passed through the field, over boulders and through thickets, to a flickering patch of gnarled trees I had not yet worked up the courage to enter. In the thicket was a tent I had never noticed before. Silvery wires winked through the fabric. As we stepped in, she held back the tent flap for me.

Inside, more women with camo jackets and caps layered over their bikinis stalked back and forth and leaned over computers with purpose intheir movements. Up close, they differentiated into individuals with distinctive features—a wide nose here, freckles there—rather than multiples of a single body type.

The woman who brought me here took my elbow and led me to a rough table at the side of the room on which sheets of birchbark teetered in piles.

“What is this place?” I asked.

“Far as we can tell, it’s real, though of course, none of us knows for sure. None of us remembers who or where we were before.”

“I meant the tent,” I said. “Oh,” she said. “Our hideout.” “Who are you hiding from?”

She shrugged. “Them,” she said, making air quotes with her fingers. “Not sure who they are. They punish us if we don’t look pretty for the players.”

“Punish you?”

“A hook comes down from the ceiling, spears her, and reels her away. We never see her again.”

I imagined spurts of blood staining camo cut-offs in a deranged claw-crane crossover game as I searched for something to say.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

She shook her head. “Don’t be. You’re stuck in here, same as us. The others wanted to keep you out of our plans, but I saw something in you.I don’t think you’re a spy for the game. We’ve seen those before. They always move the same way and repeat themselves.”

“Plans?”

“We built this interface,” she said. She moved the table aside to reveal a rock. No, it wasn’t a rock—it was a screen built to look like a rock. Light-green text scrolled down over a black background too fast for me to make out individual words.

“Built to look like a rock?” I said. Maybe it was chiselled out of a rock. In the low light and with my bad eyes, I couldn’t be sure.

“It’s fake,” she said. “Got a virus inside.” She tapped a French-manicured fingernail on the glass, and the scroll rate of the text increased.“Here’s our problem: we need to physically embed this rock into the game. We’ve tested a few different areas, and we believe the best place is in the glass at the front window. But whenever one of us gets close, there goes the hook, and she’s winched away. That’s why the rock looks so banged up.”

“You want me to try? I can definitely carry that thing. I mean, it seems pretty light,” I said. I wanted them to be impressed by my ability to heft heavy objects, by the way I inhabited my new-to-me masculinity. Collectively, the women smiled. I wasn’t sure whether they knew how much they made my heart race. They probably did. That was probably why they’d asked me. And I was a sucker for it. Helping gorgeous women through a demonstration of my ability to lift was the pinnacle of gender euphoria.

“What will it do? Let us out?” I said.

“Where would we go, honey?” she said. “No, we want privacy. I mean, sure, maybe we can get out, but none of us is holding out hope for escape. We want the game to power down, even for just a moment, even if it means that’s it for us. Get some peace and quiet up in here, whateverit takes. We’re sick of the performance, of the constant noise, of the claw, of pain. We’re ready.”

I bent to lift the rock, which was the size of a soccer ball. I loved its grey-green, sparkling heft. For the first time since I’d arrived in the game, I felt useful. I was helping someone. I was helping us all.

I came out of the woods and into the diffuse sunlight. Same weather as always. A patch of gray rolled over the sky and replaced KEEP PLAYING? INSERT COIN (0/2). I felt watched, so I sped up. I stumbled with the uneven weight. Behind me, I heard a hatch retract and a winch lower. The hook. I did not look back. When I heard it just behind me, close enough to touch, I jumped into a crevice. The hook missed me by inches and sailed up and away.

When I came close to the glass, more pixels prevented me from getting right up to it. I threw the stone as hard as I could. It wedged into the glass, which splintered outward from the hole in a spiderweb pattern. Each glass fragment glowed neon yellow before it went dark. Around me, the landscape began to disintegrate. The sky fuzzed. A buck pawed at the ground nearby. The huff of his breath moved from three dimensionsto two, and his antlers became the outlines of antlers, his muzzle a sketched version of his face. The trees flattened to brown

blocks. Behind me, the women howled.

White text in a sans-serif font appeared on the dark front screen.

> ERROR

> FATAL ERROR

> FATAL RUNTIME ERROR

On the other side of the glass, the Skee-Ball lights turned yellow, then a white so bright it burned through the dark. The lights burst one by one like fireworks.

__________________________________

Excerpted from Queer Little Nightmares: An Anthology of Monstrous Fiction and Poetry, co-edited by David Ly and Daniel Zomparelli and published by Arsenal Pulp Press.

Lauren Hough may be known for her spar-ready online presence, but in real life she’s pure warmth: years ago, she overheard us talking about the Insider Prize—American Short Fiction’s annual contest for incarcerated writers—at a coffee shop in Austin, and she walked up, and proclaimed, “I want to help!” So, this year, we asked her to be the judge.

This year’s submissions capture the uncertainty, loss, and despair so many of us have experienced in the past two years. But they also capture self-reflection, hope, and a desire to escape to a new world—whether to a post-pandemic future filled with millions or clones, or to a more humane existence for those living within the confines of our criminal justice system.

Though writers often specify which category they are submitting to in their cover letter, this can be difficult to determine when reading submissions on their own: surreal details of prison life can make memoirs feel like dystopian fiction, and fictional characters who carry immensely heavy loads often make short stories feel like memoir.

Hough writes that the winning memoir, “The Execution,” by Michael John Wiese, is “a heartbreaking, visceral exploration of the humanity one must lose and bury to survive an inhumane world, and the humanity we desperately cling to in order to maintain the hope we can survive.” For the fiction category, she selected “Falling Up” by David Antares, “a delightfully creative story,” with an “occasionally dry, often silly humor [that] is reminiscent of Vonnegut at his most playful.”

The runners-up were Jacob Rowan for his short story, “Life is Lonely, But at Least Together We Liveth,” and John Adams for his memoir, “Beautiful Meaning.”

We hope you enjoy these winning pieces as much as we did.

–Emily Chammah and Maurice Chammah

*

MEMOIR: Michael John Wiese, “The Execution”

“The Execution” is an absolutely stunning work of storytelling and reflection. I had to read it again after I stopped weeping. I wanted to take it apart and see how he’d done it. But like the best essays, there’s no way to figure it out. It just is. And what this essay is, is a heartbreaking, visceral exploration of the humanity one must lose and bury to survive an inhumane world, and the humanity we desperately cling to in order to maintain the hope we can survive. It’s powerfully written—switching from a detached voice, showing the learned detachment necessary to stay silent while witnessing a horrific murder and while explaIning the systems of violence that not only allow but encourage this brutality, to a deeply personal voice detailing the human cost of bearing witness to such violence. The Execution, as an essay crafting the profoundly painful into something exquisite, is perfect. And I am in awe.

–Lauren Hough

The Execution

by Michael John Wiese

In prison you learn a sixth sense. It is difficult to explain, but you can feel a change in the air. I liken it to a parent who suddenly realizes it’s quiet in the house; too quiet. This one day, as I read, I felt the hairs on my neck stand and there seemed to be an oppressive weight on my eardrums, like I was too deep in water. When I looked up, there were three men entering the tank. I had never seen them before. They were there to “smash someone out,” to beat someone to death.

I sat on my bunk and watched them beat this man, as he begged for mercy; I did nothing. This is the price I pay to stay alive in prison, the one overriding rule, “mind your own business.” I watched as a man was beaten so badly that he had few teeth left in his head, and I raised not one finger to help him. I heard his pleas, the whimpering moans, and gurgling breaths as he began breathing his own blood.

I was again helpless, like that three year old me who watched his parents walk away, and once again there was nothing I could do. I watched the prison system destroy yet another life and I knew soon a phone would ring somewhere and another family would be torn apart. A mother would weep for a child she could not help, a father would feel as though he may have done more, and a child would grow up never knowing the person his dad could have been.

After an eternity, there were guards beating at the Plexiglas and screaming for the men to stop. They did not stop. Finally, bloody and broken, the man drug himself to the exit. A guard in the picket popped the door so he could and get out of the tank. Totally terrified about what was happening in front of them, the guards outside the door slammed it shut again.

The man’s hope was shattered and his head sagged as one of the men grabbed his pants leg and drug him back into the middle of the room to continue his punishment. When “A-response” arrived, the man was no longer moving. Tear gas filled the tank and breathing became difficult. The toxic fumes, combined with the 100 degree temperatures, made the air sharp and it was hard to imagine I could take even one more breath. The three gang members were exhausted from their work and offered little resistance to the officers as they hand cuffed them. My eyes burned from the spray, but it was the event I had witnessed that had damaged the way I saw the world.

If I am going to be honest with myself, it’s the tooth that still messes with me. I am no dentist but I think it was a bicuspid. Gleaming white, it stood out against the grey concrete floor of the tank. One end was pointed and the other was covered in traces of blood turning it pink, such an odd almost feminine color in such a dark sadistic place. It sat under a metal dayroom bench for a week.

I thought about the man it belonged to. A man with hopes and dreams. A man that had made a mistake, perhaps even a terrible one, but that had not been sentenced to death. A man who was executed for possessing a small amount of cocaine. Life went on in the tank, but this lost piece of his humanness haunted me. It became a testimony of the humanity that would leak, at times pour, from me as I morphed into a strong enough animal to survive. It brought to mind all the lost men in prison, who may as well have been a bloody tooth under a bench for all society seemed to care.

After looking at the tooth for a week, I scooped it up in a piece of toilet paper. That night I brought it out to the recreation yard, and off by myself, I buried the tooth. I don’t know why I did this, maybe because I hoped someone would remember me when I was gone. When they came for me, I hoped against hope, a piece of me wouldn’t be left in that place, being kicked around for weeks until someone finally swept it up into a make shift card board dustpan to throw away.

THE END

____________________________________

FICTION: David Antares, “Falling Up”

“Falling Up” is a delightfully creative story told in captain’s log form when the world is ending and our last hope is the resurrection of our greatest scientific minds to save us before we disappear into a black hole, and Albert Einstein, who just wants to sleep. Schell’s occasionally dry, often silly humor is reminiscent of Vonnegut at his most playful. “Falling Up” is a deeply irreverent, wickedly funny story expertly told.

–Lauren Hough

Falling Up

by David Antares

PHOENIX LOG: 0900, 29 March, 2029
One year ago, astronomers confirmed the awakening of the devilish black hole at the center of our galaxy. In other words, it started feeding again. With an appetite nothing short of, “We’re dead, Fred.”

Since we reside out in the boonies of the Milky Way, we have a little time before doomsday. But not much because it doesn’t have to eat us to destroy us. The deadly disruption of the orbits of centrally located stars and solar systems will soon ripple out to encompass our own.

Futurists have proposed only three scenarios which allow for the possibility of human survival.

Scenario 1. We migrate to another galaxy by way of generational space travel. This generation embarking on space arks with our great great to the umpteenth power grandchildren arriving sometime in the far future at our neighboring galaxy, Andromeda. Plausible, but not for me. Never had kids. Don’t want any.

Scenario 2. Using advanced teleportation devices, much like the fictional transporters of Star Trek fame, we transport as many humans as we can to an Earthlike planet in the aforementioned galaxy. Pros—instantaneous arrival and survival for the “Me Now” generation. Cons—transporters have been in development for decades. A working model capable of operating at the scale we need and for the distance we need is, frankly, about as viable as figuring out cold fusion or creating a perpetual motion machine. In my opinion, not going to happen. However, my opinion is not the opinion of hundreds of companies who are suddenly funding transporter development projects. A fortune, astronomical in size, awaits the winner.

3. Last scenario. Our black hole goes back to sleep. Naturally, or we play Dr. Snooze.

Because of our past successes exploring the frontier of space, it was determined by the powers that be that space arks would be our best hope for survival. As I write this first log entry, intergalactic ships of various propulsion designs are being constructed around the globe.

Some branches of the military have opted for other strategies. Scenario 3, or whatever works, is mission goal for my baby, a top-secret scientific project known only as PHOENIX. Its method of reaching mission goal is currently roundabout, but rather ingenious. Genetic regeneration of some of the greatest minds in history.

Lt. Col. Julie Claymore, U.S. Army
Genetics Research and Development Lab

LOG: 0600, 31 March, 2029
The following subject samples confirmed acquired. 1. A. Einstein. 2. N. Tesla. 3. N. Bohr. 4. B. Franklin. 5. I. Newton. 6. L. da Vinci. Samples 5 and 6 are simply amazing. I cannot confirm or deny rampant lab rumors suggesting black ops and Vatican relics.

J.C.

LOG: 0630, 16 August, 2029
Successful regeneration of four subjects! In life pods of my own design, they remain in suspended animation. Brain scans confirm abundant activity in their cerebral cortices. It is only speculation now as to whether or not they will be, when awakened, the intellectual giants they were in times past. If so, there is hope.

J.C.

LOG: 0715, 28 August, 2029
Tesla, da Vinci, and Newton are awake. And very curious. Einstein remains asleep. REM confirms dreaming.

J.C.

LOG: 0600, 31 August, 2029
Our three conscious luminaries all understand who they are, where they are, when they are, and why they are. Newton said, “We need to fall up.” A bit strange coming from Mr. Falling Apple. Of course, all are eager to help. And tests show our awake subjects have retained all of the knowledge acquired during their lifetimes. A bonus, but quite honestly, what I suspected all along. DNA, after all, is an information storage system. Who’s to say it is limited only to chemical and biological information. Consider instinct. Innate knowledge. Examples abound in the animal kingdom. The source of this knowledge must be deeper than memory. Beyond thought. The only viable suspect—DNA.

J.C.

LOG: 0500, 10 September, 2029
Virtual reality learning is bringing our trio up to date in science, technology, theoretical physics and world history. It may take Newton and da Vinci a bit longer than Tesla to catch up. Stubborn Einstein dreams on. Some of my colleagues have suggested pulling the plug on his life support. Their time, they say, could be better spent on Leo, Newton, and Tesla. I’m leaning their way, but something holds me back. Women’s intuition?

J.C.

LOG: 0920, 19 September, 2029
In all matters energy, Tesla, already ahead of his time during his time, is proving to be also ahead of our time. After a few crazy-looking additions to our emergency generators, he’s taken our facilities completely off grid. These dynamos were installed at the very beginning of the Cold War and he’s got them belching energy seemingly right out of thin air. Not a single drop of diesel inside them. It’s beyond amazing. And the man appears to be a dynamo himself. I swear, he donned a pair of glittering gloves this morning which looked as if they were made of aluminum foil. Sounded like it too, crackling as they did when he slipped them on. He then rubbed his hands together as if warming them and a ball of blue light appeared between them. Baseball sized and bright as the sun. He threw it sidearm into a bank of computers. Old IBM tabletops taken offline years ago. They came to life instantaneously, screens rolling with complex equations and undulating geometrical shapes in mortal battle for digital supremacy. Newton said, “Wowza,” a modern exclamation of amazement the old Englishman has taken a liking to. He sat himself down before one of the screens and took notes for several hours. Leo missed it all, having opted to seclude himself in a private room. “To catch up on the arts,” he said. From the man who painted the Mona Lisa, it seemed a logical pursuit, even an urgent need. He requested brushes, paints, and sheepskin canvases. As many as we could find. The sheepskin proved to be unavailable. We substituted stock canvases from the local Walmart. Leo said, “Whatever,” in Italian.

J.C.

LOG: 1300, 20 September 2029
I continue to work around the clock. Caffeine energized every few hours, or is it minutes, I find I can stay awake three days straight. By the fourth day, however, I drop dead, and remain so for about 24 hours. I have taken to “dying” quite regularly, zipped up in a sleeping bag next to the life pod of Mr. E=Mc^2. I am thinking of asking Tesla to conjure up a ball of psychic energy and hurl it sidearm through Einstein’s dreaming mind. And right into mine. So I can tap into his subconscious. I’m tripping. I need to sle

LOG: 1450, 21 September, 2029
After reviewing my log entry for yesterday, I have made 8 hours of sleep, daily, absolutely mandatory. For the duration of PHOENIX. This includes everyone from security to our subjects. Especially me. But if Mr. Rip van Winkle ever wakes up, he will be excluded from the new law and expected to pull as many all-nighters as it takes to catch up. What the heck is he dreaming about?!

J.C.

LOG: 1900, 21 September, 2029
Einstein woke up! Yea!!! After being freed from the physical restraints of the life pod, basically a clear dome top, Einstein sat up and his first question was, “Is this heaven?” I wanted to say, “No, you dummy, but we’re on our way to hell because you’ve been SNOOZING!” But I only said, “It’s a U.S. Army classified location, Mr. Einstein. And we need your help.” I know, I know, my guts could use a little backbone. Or my backbone could use some guts. As I’m thinking guts/backbone, Einstein says, “Your gut will save you.” Emphasis on GUT. Huh? So now I’m thinking Einstein must be psychic and a smart ass to boot. But I simply say, “Save me from what?” And without a hint of smartassness (is that even a word?), Einstein says, “The black hole.” So much for my worries about bringing him up to date. Then he says, “Can I go back to sleep?” What?! But he sounded as old as he looks and worn out, as if his few minutes of wakefulness had taxed his intellect to the point of exhaustion. Since time is relative and not a constant, which he proved long ago, I said, “Sure.” I can’t believe I said sure.

J.C.

LOG: 1625, 23 September 2029
When relating the conversation of two days previous to Newton and Tesla, they were amazed. Which is quite remarkable considering their IQs. “Wowza!” said Newton for about the zillionth time. “He means Grand Unified Theory. Or GUT for short. The single solution to all the forces of nature. Strong nuclear, weak nuclear, electromagnetic. And my own discovery, gravity.”

“He became obsessed with finding a GUT before he died,” said Tesla. “Or so history has noted. He must believe we’ve already found it. We must wake him, I think, and let him know we have not.”

“Not yet,” I said. “My gut says, ‘let him sleep.’ At least for now.”

At this point, Leo came out of his room. He carried a canvas toward us. When he got near, he flipped it over and we saw and literally felt his creation. Tesla ignited into a ball of blue light—all of him—sans foil of any kind. He hovered above the rest of us, in total awe of Leo’s masterpiece. Newton dropped to his knees and began chalking complex equations on the floor, sans chalk of any kind. How that worked, I haven’t a clue. And I, I, with all my military training, could not stop Leo’s painting from grabbing me by my G-spot and thrusting me into Ecstasy Central. Ravished mentally, physically, and spiritually, I let Tesla, Newton, and Leo worship in peace, and went to get my 8.

J.C.

LOG: 1725, 25 September, 2029
Brainstorming ruled the day. A dangerous thing considering. Tesla kept sparking amidst such focused thought. So they wrapped insulation around him and proceeded. From that point on, one muffled grunt from Tesla meant YES. Two meant NO. All agreed a GUT would solve everything. With a GUT we could put our chomping black hole back to sleep. Nighty night, Doomsday Machine. But all admitted a GUT was beyond them, and only Einstein had a shot at figuring it out. If only he would wake up.

Thinking about the principles of Newton’s reflecting telescope, Leo promoted the idea of creating a gravity mirror. With a gravity mirror big enough, he proposed, we could bounce our black hole’s gravity back at it. This would create within it a stuffed-to-the-gills feeling which would supposedly induce sleep. Like the ravished-to-the-gills feeling had done to me two days before. Sounded good. However, after realizing Leo’s plan operated on the assumption of a cognizant black hole with a mind we could fool, the rest agreed Leo’s idea didn’t hold any weight.

The mention of weight got Mr. Falling Apple going. He brought up something he learned recently about negative energy. “Proven to exist by experiment already,” he said, “negative energy is unlike dark energy, and the regular energy of the Tesla variety.” At this remark, Tesla stomped a foot, but since no sparks resulted, he was pretty much ignored. Newton continued and made a convincing argument for the existence of negative mass. “If E=Mc^2,” he said, “then it’s quite obvious that NE=NMc^2.” Sounds logical. And mathematically correct. Right? “And the cool thing about negative mass,” said Newton, cool being another modern word he has taken a liking to, “is that negative mass has to weigh less than nothing.” What?! Less than nothing. I said, “How does that work?”

With a finger pointing skyward, Newton said, “Falling up.”

J.C.

LOG: 0900, 15 October, 2029
By latest observation, astronomers estimate that roughly five percent of the core of our galaxy has slipped into oblivion. Sucked into the maw of our dark and hungry singularity. Natural disasters on Earth have increased tenfold. And this after the tenfold increase caused by climate change. The first of the space arks have departed. More are scheduled to leave in the middle of next month. Things are getting urgent and Einstein continues to sleep. Despite being subjected to bang-your-head rock music at 50 decibels above rocket launch. Saturn V. I’m not kidding. If he wasn’t deaf, he is now. Which is why I proceeded to punch, shove, kick, and slap him when no one was looking. On the cool, he looked rather bruised up before I got to him. I started thinking he must be dead, but no, REM confirms he’s still dreaming. Damn. Must be a good one.

J.C.

LOG: 1600, 18 October, 2029
Our three resurrected saviors have been in seclusion since their brainstorming session back in September. Come to find out they have constructed a working model of Leo’s painting. Underneath those titillating, mesmerizing bodies, faces, and groping hands lurked nothing less than a visionary schematic of a negative energy dynamo. Or so they said. NED for short. Tesla was let loose to tweak and modify the contraption as he sees fit. He informed me today it would be ready for a trial run in about a week. And primed for maximum output. Could NED be a viable alternative to the GUT? A Hail Mary fourth down pass connecting us all to salvation? We shall see.

J.C.

LOG: 1900, 25 October, 2029
The combo skylight-ventilation shaft directly above NED got suddenly bigger today. This occurred during NED’s trial run. A huge success by all accounts. We’ll, sort of. Negative energy was indeed produced. In voluminous amounts. Problem was, as NED churned out more and more of the stuff, NED transformed itself into a hunk of negative mass. From the inside out. Now, what is the main characteristic of negative mass? As Newton pointed out it weighs less than nothing. What we didn’t know, but learned by observation today, is that something which weighs less than nothing is immediately and violently repulsed by all things which weigh more than nothing. Ouch! With a velocity instantaneous and akin to warp 9, NED shot up, leaving a great big hole where our skylight used to be. Falling up turned out to be shooting up like a bat out of hell. NED, now, surely resided somewhere out in deep deep space. Exactly where we need to be.

J.C.

LOG: 2300, 1 November, 2029
Yesterday I had sex with Tesla. Two reasons. There’s no denying his touch is electrifying, and I started ovulating two days before. We did it in my sleeping bag on the floor next to Einstein. If Rip van Winkle heard, saw, or felt all the sextricity in the air, he didn’t let on. Maybe he thought it was happening in his dreams. Obviously, I’ve reconsidered my avoidance of motherhood. If I can get knocked up in time, I’m sure I’ve got enough favors owed me to get my kid on one of those space arks. It’s the only way to ensure survival of my DNA. So this morning, for backup, I took Leo by surprise in the showers. :)

J.C.

LOG: 1345, 4 December, 2029
I’m pregnant. Yessiree, missed my period. Always a telltale sign. So, whose is it? I guess if the kid comes out hurling lightning bolts, it’s a wrap.

J.C.

LOG: 2300, 31 December, 2029
Our black hole continues to eat. Planets. Moons. Stars. All I have to do is look at food and I barf. Tesla, Newton, and Leo busy themselves with GUT theories, wormholes, and time-gravity invisibility cloaks. They’ve developed working models of the latter two. At the subatomic level. Whether or not they can make the quantum leave to cosmic scale remains to be seen. But hope is alive.

You know who is still sleeping. Still dreaming. And I believe his condition has become contagious, for we’ve all been sleeping a lot lately. Falling up in our own dreams. Up up and away.

J.C.

THE END

____________________________________

Michael John Wiese holds a Bachelor of Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies English/Business from Adams State University. He has published work in The Old Red Kimino, The Willow Review, The Listening Eye, the online poetry journal Ekphrastic Review, and the anthology Hear Us. He won the 2021 Willow Review Award in nonfiction for his short memoir, “The Inside Kind of Storm.” He is also a prisoner. You can read more of his writing at michaeljohnwiese.com.

A lifelong dreamer, stargazer, and creator of alternate realities, David Antares lives with his two granddaughters in mind and spirit, hoping tomorrow brings us all our hearts’ desires.

Lauren Hough is the New York Times bestselling author of the essay collection Leaving Isn’t the Hardest Thing (Vintage, 2021). She was born in Berlin, Germany, and raised in seven countries, and Amarillo, Texas. She’s been an Air Force Airman, a green-aproned barista, a bouncer, a bartender, and, for a time, a cable guy.

Emily Chammah and Maurice Chammah are assistant editors at American Short Fiction and co-direct the Insider Prize. Emily is a Fulbright Fellow and the winner of the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. Her fiction can be found in The Common. Maurice is the author of Let the Lord Sort Them: The Rise and Fall of the Death Penalty, and a staff writer at The Marshall Project, where he reports on the U.S. criminal justice system.

April 4, 1928

A new era began for me on this date. I discovered something of importance in my life, or, rather, the only important thing that has ever happened to me. It was the account I made of a part of my life. A batch of written tales set aside for a doctor who’d prescribed them. Reading and rereading these, I find it easy to put things in the places where they belong, places my inexperience had prevented me from finding. How alive that life is, and how definitively dead the part I didn’t recount. I look for it sometimes, anxiously, feeling amputated, but it’s nowhere to be found. I know, too, that the part I told was not the most important part. It became the most important because I obsessed about it. And now what have I become? Not a man who lived, but a man who wrote things down. Ah! The only thing that matters in life is collecting one’s thoughts. When everybody else understands this as clearly as I do, they will all write. Life will be literaturized. Half of humanity will devote itself to reading and studying what the other half has put down. And contemplation will take up as much time as possible—time to be subtracted from horrid real life. If one part of humanity rebels and refuses to read the lucubrations of the other part, so much the better. Each person will read himself. And whether each life becomes clearer or murkier, it will evolve, correct, crystallize. At least it won’t remain what it is, undistinguished, buried as soon as it’s birthed, with those days that fade away and accumulate, one identical to the next, to form years, decades, a life so empty it merely serves as a number in a statistical table of demographic trends. I want to start writing again. I’ll put my whole self and my every incident in these pages. They call me a grumbler at home. I’ll surprise them. I won’t open my mouth, and grumble only on the page. I’m not made to fight, and so when they suggest that I’m no longer able to understand things, rather than deny it or try to prove I can still look after myself and my family, I’ll run here to regain my peace of mind . . .

I’ll discover that the person written about here is quite different from the one I recorded years ago. Life, even when not written down, leaves its mark. I think one grows more serene with time. I no longer suffer that foolish remorse, those terrifying fears of the future. How could it terrorize me? I’m living that future now. And it spins by without creating another. So this is not even a real present, it’s out of time. There’s no ultimate tense in my grammar. Yes, I did think the rejuvenation procedure would change things. However, I decided upon it capriciously, and was always ambivalent, confused, forever about to change my mind, with one ear out in case my wife, my daughter, or my son began to insist that I should stop. But no one did, most likely they wanted to witness that amazing operation, which in any case would cost them nothing. And so I went along, suffering and concealing it. First I compromised myself with my wife and my daughter, broadcasting my intentions in an attempt to frighten and punish them; and then on the telephone with the doctor, once again hoping to frighten and punish him, and so I ended up on the operating table entirely against my will. Afterwards came a case of boils that has confined me to my bedroom for a month.

All the same, old age is the peaceful stage of life. So peaceful it’s not easy to record. Where to grab hold, to begin to describe what led up to the surgery? The aftermath is easy. The expectation of the youthfulness the operation was meant to bring was itself a kind of youthfulness, a period of hard suffering and great hopes. I see how my life began in infancy, passed through a turbulent adolescence that one day subsided into youth—a sort of disenchantment—and then plunged into marriage, resignation interrupted by the occasional rebellion, and from there to old age, the main thrust of which has been to cast me in shadow and eliminate my role as protagonist. For everyone, even for me, my life served to enhance the importance of the others—my wife, my daughter, my son, and my grandson. Then came the operation, and everyone looked on me with admiration. I grew excited, returned to an earlier stage of life quite like what my own had been—I mean the life that doesn’t require operations, natural life, the one everyone has—and excitement led me to these pages, which I think I should never have abandoned. Justified though my self-reproof is, it’s not more convincing than the shame of that other old man who felt he had withered because he no longer had women. I’m writing because I must, when once a pen in hand would have made me yawn. I think the operation has had a salutary effect.

*

And so I must begin where I left off. The war had ended in the fashion everyone knows, and to the general victory I planned to add my own particular victory: I intended to show old Olivi how successful I’d been at managing my affairs without him. But the old man, who had never paid me the least notice, went and died of the flu in Pisa so as not to have to admire me—after he’d already informed me when he would be arriving and I had written to say what his duties would henceforth be. That is, he’d be running the office, while I would be managing the business. I awaited him impatiently; if he’d gotten there in time he might have spared me a serious loss, the purchase of all those railcars of soap sitting in Milan, waiting for the frontiers to open to make a colossal killing. The prospect of such a deal stirred my wartime instincts, while Olivi had another type of experience that might, once the armistice was signed, have been useful. I bought a gigantic portion of stock and was in no hurry to sell, as one isn’t, in war. Was there a widespread need to wash? You only had to board the tram in Trieste to notice an intense stink—to me, a heavenly smell that reassured me about the soap operation. When I learned of Olivi’s death I was somewhat irked: he had escaped his downfall! Later, I was glad, for nobody in Trieste was interested in my soap. Did they no longer wash? It would have been a sorry day had Olivi come to find that most of the profits of war had been consumed in a deal made in peacetime. I was all alone liquidating that business. And I didn’t reproach myself at all. The world had evolved so quickly that I had slipped off and was sailing unknown seas. That soap I bought in Milan didn’t have the fat content prescribed by the Austrian law that still governed Trieste despite the presence of Italian troops. So I sold the soap on three-month credit to an Austrian, who then departed for Vienna where it was to be shipped. There, either because it was urgently needed or because it didn’t meet legal standards, the soap was confiscated. The bureau that took charge of it eventually paid full price. But the kronen only got here when it was too late to exchange them and were finally worth only a few lire.

That was my last deal, and I still recall it from time to time. One never forgets one’s first deal, spoiled by one’s naiveté, or the last, a catastrophe because one’s overly shrewd. And I haven’t forgotten mine because there’s a certain amount of rancor involved. Just before I liquidated the shipment, young Olivi came back from the war. The bespectacled young lieutenant’s chest was adorned with medals. He agreed to take up his old duties under my direction. And I quickly got used to the very comfortable role of a ruler who doesn’t govern. Very soon, I knew nothing of my own business. Every day new Italian laws and decrees poured down, written in an incomprehensible language of which the only thing certain was the numeral that designated our king. I let Olivi deal with all the documents and the tax stamps (it was then that the nation began to wet countless stamps). When the man became quite disagreeable, I avoided the office. He was always talking about his merits and his hardships during the war, never missing a chance to reproach me for not having played my part in the victory.

Speaking of soap and the now worthless kronen, I once said to him, “But there must be some way we can go after the Viennese. We won the war, didn’t we?” He laughed in my face. I’m convinced that just to prove I hadn’t won the war, he never did anything to force the Austrians to compensate me.

Otherwise, he devoted himself to my business with great diligence. He was devoted, too, to my son Alfio, who, after he dropped out of the gymnasium, would come to the office from time to time to gain experience. Then he quit, when he took up painting—but it was clear Olivi didn’t mind some supervision.

Nor did he mind being supervised by my son-in-law Valentino. Now there was a worker! All day long pursuing business, and every night more than an hour going over Olivi’s books. Then, alas, he fell ill and died, but thanks to his efforts I place the same trust in the young Olivi that my father and I had in the elder. Indeed, one might say more, because old Olivi was never supervised very carefully at any time in his life. My father knew nothing of accounting, I suspect, while I went into the office from time to time, but mostly to deal with my own affairs rather than supervise someone else. Anyway, I’ve never been good at the books. I can do business—that is, dream up and carry out a deal—but when I’m finished it all becomes a fog and I don’t know how to record it.

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From “The Confessions of a Very Old Man” from  A Very Old Man by Italo Svevo. Translation and afterword copyright © 2022 by Frederika Randall. Courtesy of NYRB Classics.