Letter from the Editor
Matt Bell

FICTION

High Frequency Words
Susan Daitch

When Our Bodies
Jaclyn Watterson

Home'n'Homer, Portmaneau
John Domini

The Apartment
Aaron Burch

EXCERPTS

The Skin Team
Jordaan Mason

Happy Talk
Richard Melo

POETRY

Operator's Manual
Water Skiing with Robert Creeley
Christian Anton Gerard

Battle at Biak, New Guinea
April Naoko Heck

How to Confess an Affair
How to Be a Prophet
How to Make a Red Velvet Cake
Alicia Jo Rabins

To Drive a Lover Mad
Benjamin Garcia

NON-FICTION

All Our Pretty Songs
Gabe Durham

BOOK REVIEWS

The Exiles by Matthew Kirkpatrick
reviewed by Lauren Perez

Balloon Pop Outlaw Black by Patricia Lockwood
reviewed by Carmen Giménez Smith

Our Man in Iraq by Robert Perisic
reviewed by James Orbesen

The Next Scott Nadelson: A Life in Progress by Scott Nadelson
reviewed by Tyler McMahon

CONTRIBUTORS' NOTES

Welcome to Issue Forty-Seven of The Collagist: In fiction this month, we have new stories by Susan Daitch, Jaclyn Watterson, and John Domini, plus returning contributor Aaron Burch, as well as novel excerpts from Richard Melo's Happy Talk and Jordaan Mason's Skin Team.

In poetry, we have new work by April Naoko Heck, Alicia Jo Rabins, and Benjamin Garcia, plus returning contributor Christian Anton Gerard. This month's non-fiction also comes from a returning contributor, Gabe Durham, whose first book Fun Camp is out this month from Publishing Genius. 

Our book review section contains coverage of The Exiles by Matthew Kirkpatrick (reviewed by Lauren Perez), Balloon Pop Outlaw Black by Patricia Lockwood (reviewed by Carmen Giménez Smith), Our Man in Iraq by Robert Perisic (reviewed by James Orbesen), and The Next Scott Nadelson: A Life in Progress by Scott Nadelson (reviewed by Tyler McMahon). 

As always, thanks to all of the above contributors for being a part of this issue, and thanks to you and all the rest of our readers for visiting us this month.

Sincerely,
Matt Bell
Editor
The Collagist

Aaron Burch's debut collection, Backswing, is due from Queen's Ferry Press in 2014. He is the editor of Hobart: another literary journal.

Susan Daitch is the author of three novels, L.C., The Colorist, and Paper Conspiracies, and a collection of short fiction, Storytown. Her short stories and essays have appeared in Conjunctions, Guernica, Tablet, Tin House, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship and two Vogelstein grants. Her first novel was the recipient of both an NEA Heritage and Lannan award. Fall Out, a novella, will be published in May 2013 by Madras Press in support of Women for Afghan Women. Susan lives in Brooklyn with her son and can be found at: www.susandaitch.com.

John Domini's latest novel is A Tomb on the Periphery. He has a selection of poetry, The Grand McLuckless Road Atlas, coming in 2013, and a selection of essays and reviews, The Sea-God's Herb, in 2014. This story is part of a developing sequence he's calling MOVIEOLA! 

Gabe Durham's debut novel, Fun Camp, just came out from Publishing Genius Press. Pieces of the book have appeared in over 25 journals and magazines, including The Good Men Project, Corium, and Necessary Fiction. Gabe lives in Los Angeles, tweets @Gabe Durham, and holds it down at Gather Round Children.

Benjamin Garcia, originally from Albuquerque, New Mexico, received his MFA from Cornell University and now resides in Auburn, New York. A CantoMundo fellow, he has received scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference and the Taos Summer Writer's Conference. His work has appeared in Poet Lore, torhouse.org, and as part of the 200 New Mexico Poems anthology.

Christian Anton Gerard's first book Wilmot Here, Collect For Stella is forthcoming from WordTech Communications in 2014. He's the recipient of Pushcart Prize nominations, scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and an Academy of American Poets Prize. His recent poems and essays appear in Redivider, Pank, B-O-D-Y, Apt, The Rumpus, and The Journal. Gerard lives in Knoxville with his wife, Lucy, and their son. He is editor of Grist: The Journal for Writers and an English Ph.D. candidate at the University of Tennessee.

April Naoko Heck was born in Tokyo and relocated with her family to the U.S. when she was seven. Her first collection of poems, A Nuclear Family, is due from UpSet Press in fall 2013. A Kundiman fellow, she works for the NYU Creative Writing Program and lives in Brooklyn. 

Tyler McMahon is author of the novel How the Mistakes Were Made (St. Martin's, October 2011) and a professor at Hawaii Pacific University. His short work has appeared in The Antioch Review, Three Penny Review, The Rumpus, and The Nervous Breakdown. His next novel, Kilometer 99, will be released in 2014. More information is available at www.tylermcmahon.net.

Jordaan Mason is a filmmaker, musician, and writer. His writing has appeared in UNSAID, The Scrambler, Everyday Genius, NOÖ Journal, and red lightbulbs. He lives in Toronto with his husband and his cats. Find him online at http://globeandmale.tumblr.com/.

Richard Melo is a novelist in Portland, Oregon, and the author of Happy Talk and Jokerman 8. A graduate of San Francisco State University, he is also a book critic with reviews appearing in The Believer, Publishers Weekly, and the Oregonian.

James Orbesen is a writer and adjunct living in Chicago. His work has appeared on or in Salon, The New Humanism, Jacobin, Midwestern Gothic, Bookslut, PopMatters, 215 Ink's Ignition anthology, and elsewhere.

Lauren Perez is a graduate of USC with publications in The Alarmist, Bartleby Snopes, and Corvus Magazine, and she still hasn't figured out what to put in these statements. She's hoping that's what she'll learn in her MFA program.

Alicia Jo Rabins is a poet, composer, performer and teacher based in Portland, OR and Brooklyn, NY. Her poems appear in Ploughshares, 6x6 and the Boston Review. She holds a MFA from Warren Wilson and has received fellowships from Bread Loaf Writers Conference and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. Rabins tours internationally with her band, Girls in Trouble, and is currently completing her first manuscript of poems. 

Carmen Giménez Smith is the author of a memoir, Bring Down the Little Birds, four poetry collections— Milk and Filth, Goodbye, Flicker, The City She Was, and Odalisque in Pieces. She is the recipient of a 2011 American Book Award, the 2011 Juniper Prize for Poetry, and a 2011-2012 fellowship in creative nonfiction from the Howard Foundation. Formerly a Teaching-Writing Fellow at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, she now teaches in the creative writing programs at New Mexico State University, while serving as the editor-in-chief of the literary journal Puerto del Sol and the publisher of Noemi Press. 

Jaclyn Watterson's work has appeared in Fringe, elimae, PANK, and elsewhere. She lives in Salt Lake City and works as a fiction editor at Quarterly West.

The Next Scott Nadelson: A Life in Progress

By Scott Nadelson

Hawthorne Books
March 2013
978-0983477563

Reviewed by Tyler McMahon

In a recent New Yorker piece entitled "Cry Me a River," Giles Harvey describes the rise of the Failure Memoir, a new genre in which (mostly male) writers document the implosions of their literary aspirations, often with accompanying breakdowns in their personal relationships and mental health. "The formula is simple," claims Harvey: "when all else fails, write about your failure." 

The Next Scott Nadelson: A Life in Progress somehow escaped Harvey's notice, despite meeting most of the Failure Memoir's requisite criteria. Nadelson is indeed a male fiction writer, the author of three previous story collections. The breakdown in Nadelson's life occurs a month before his wedding, when his fiancé leaves him for someone else. That someone turns out to be another woman, a drag king who cross-dresses as "Donny Manicotti." Donny, it turns out, bears an uncanny resemblance to some New Jersey adolescents who once tormented the author's teenage self. The moment he's done explaining this matter to his would-be wedding guests, Nadelson's car breaks down. His cat develops a terminal illness. Barely getting by as a composition instructor, he moves to a cheap attic apartment and looks to the Internet for dates. In his own words:

I'd always prided myself on being someone who appreciated the absurdity of life, who didn't take it too seriously, but there's an enormous difference, I discovered, between reading a Kafka novel or watching a Woody Allen movie and living inside of one.

A collection of autobiographical essays, The Next Scott Nadelson isn't a strict chronological telling of the author's journey to rock bottom. It includes tangents into childhood memories, classroom episodes, and moving tributes to Nadelson's favorite writers and musicians. One of the most interesting pieces recounts the author's obsession with the web-presence of a teenager who shares his name. Still, there is a decidedly strong, if downward-bound, narrative arc that runs from beginning to end.

The principal difference, it seems to me, between Nadelson's book and the set described by Harvey, is a matter of humility. The authors described in "Cry Me a River" all have grandiose expectations regarding the life of the writer; most go to New York to pursue them. Their central failure is that of not making a full-time career of their writing. (A notion that now seems as anachronistic as it does brazen.) It's the trappings of literature that have so disappointed them, more so than the literature itself.

This isn't so in the case of The Next Scott Nadelson. An author of short fiction who long ago abandoned the East Coast for Portland, Oregon, Nadelson's ego doesn't have as far to fall. In fact, his story is made all the more gut-wrenching by the fact that his broken dreams were such humble ones: to write, to teach in his discipline, to live in a small city with a loving wife, a healthy cat, and a car that runs. Is that too much to ask?

It's true that the book draws its title from frequent comparisons made—both by bookstore denizens and by reviews in Jewish newspapers—to Philip Roth.

No one would ever come up to a young Jewish writer from New Jersey and say, You're the next fucking Scott Nadelson, no matter how many books I wrote, no matter how successful I was...This other young Jewish writer from New Jersey would just be the new next fucking Philip Roth, one more in a long series of next fucking Philip Roths, all of us lined up from now to the end of time, or until New Jersey was swallowed up by the rising sea, and none of us would really be the next fucking Philip Roth, because there was only one fucking Philip Roth, now and forever.

However, Nadelson is not one to wallow in self-pity, and he never confuses writing for a path to fame and fortune. If there's one note that rings out clearly and convincingly throughout this memoir, it's the author's genuine passion for books, for stories, for films, and for music. He writes beautifully about his heroes and inspirations, from Isaac Babel and Anton Chekhov to David Lynch and Townes Van Zandt. While art may no longer be a viable career, Nadelson proves that it is still more than capable of moving its audience, and of easing their pain.

In this way, The Next Scott Nadelson has valuable lessons for the writers and artists of the 21^st century, the authors of the post-career age. For one thing, he manages to put his finger right on the pulse of our anxieties, to draw a convincing sketch of what so many of us fear might become of our lives: stringing together sections of freshman composition in order to survive, spending all we have on vet bills and whiskey, finding cold comfort in a skill set that's as hard-earned as it is irrelevant. But his story also shows the redeeming qualities of a life in letters: genuine praise from a stranger on the street, fleeting moments of inspiration in the classroom, fellowship with other writers. Most importantly, Nadelson reminds us that to give up writing is—in most cases—simply not within our abilities.

Giles Harvey describes the lack of commercial reception from one's fiction as, "a decidedly First World problem." He is correct. But in the case of Scott Nadelson, his bigger problem is that the person he loves doesn't return his feelings—an awful plight in any place, or any age. Perhaps this is why it's so easy to root for him. With a voice that's smart, candid, self-effacing, and immensely likeable, Nadelson's memoir is a complete success.

Our Man in Iraq

By Robert Perisic

Black Balloon Publishing
April 2013
978-1936787050

Reviewed by James Orbesen

I remember sitting in my high school Current Events class (Hi, Mr. Giebel!) sorting through newspapers, all of them advocating an invasion of Iraq. For the papers, it made sense. Saddam Hussein was A Very Bad Guy. Despite my shop teacher's proclamations that we, the students, should all pay more attention and, possibly, fear a forthcoming draft post-9/11, the war perpetually remained in the background. I was insulated, many, many miles away from the front line. With the recent translation of Robert Perisic's Our Man in Iraq, I cannot help but reflect on that war, which not only influenced (and maimed) a number of those from my generation, but also seems bound to repeat itself, given the Sunday morning talkmongering on the threats Americans face.

And sense is the most important thing. Even in war, it's incredibly important. Sense. You have to grasp for every scrap of sense, you just have to, for every propaganda of sense, for every lie of sense. When there's no sense, you go round the bend, madness comes out of your ears, so you have to believe in sense, particularly in war, you have to believe in sense fervently, and even after the war you have to believe with the faith of a fanatic if you want to make any sense, otherwise it doesn't.

These aren't the words of an American reflecting on Iraq, but a Croatian. Robert Perisic's Our Man in Iraq takes place in 2003. The invasion has already begun. The narrator, Toni, is a cocky Croatian reporter making his way in a country straddling the past's Soviet-style socialism and an uncomfortable future of Western-style market capitalism. His employer, a newspaper-cum-tabloid, battles for its life against a much larger news conglomerate. Preoccupied and under stress, Toni absent-mindedly sends his cousin, Boris (author of the above passage), east to cover the invasion, an invasion that he has no interest in beyond the resulting headline's ability to increase sales. As Toni tries to make sense of the cosmopolitan changes gripping Zagreb, Croatia's capital, Boris's articles become indecipherable. Toni assumes he is slowly succumbing to madness (or is he?) amidst the sands and armored columns of the Middle East.

Perisic paints a picture entirely familiar to many Americans. The Croatia Toni exists in is overwhelmed with capitalist speculation and excessive consumption. There, artists are more concerned with their reputation in the papers than the quality of what they produce. The press, Toni's sphere, is hopelessly caught up in a constant battle of one-upping rivals in order to just stay afloat. The role of the media has been skewed. More attention is paid to who gets the story first, rather than who gets the story right.

Boris's dispatches from Iraq become more and more cryptic (Croatia is a non-participant in the conflict.) Simultaneously, perhaps because of his cousin's descent, Toni's life slowly unravels. He pushes away his girlfriend, loses his job, and tries to live more and more in the past despite his advancing age. Somehow he blames his cousin for all this. True, Boris is a bit of a family odd-ball. Cosmopolitan Toni only shipped him off to get his country bumpkin cousin off his back. But, despite his lack of sophistication, Boris seems to get everything right. He just can't get his voice heard. Toni takes it upon himself to edit Boris's communiqués. The real story from the frontlines—well, as close as the hapless Boris can get to the frontlines—is rarely heard.

More Boris:

Terrific, terrific, terrific! The Tomahawk missile introduced during the First Gulf War is still a terrific miracle of technology that flies, flies, flies just below the speed of sound, follows the terrain and hits a programmed target with a 450 kg warhead up to 1,600km away. How beautiful it is to write that? Nothing hurts!

Overwhelmed at the murderous beauty of warfare, his senses trick him, and us. Remember those otherworldly night vision clips, aired like clockwork on the network news, of the air assault on Baghdad? Perisic does and invokes them with Boris's frantic prose. They're haunting, the placid green filter with glowing orbs of projectile death raining down from on high. These images are the sublime of the 21^st century.

The US Navy has around 1,000 Tomahawks and each one of them costs $600,000, so I can tell you, it's simple: you gotta have a good fucking reason to want to hit someone with it, I mean, to fire at someone with a thing worth $600,000, you have to have a damn good financial reason, otherwise it's not worth it, cuz. It's no good if a missile's worth more than what it hits.

What could make more sense than the raw numbers of warfare? We've all been lectured, usually on the news, about the sophistication and elegance of our guided munitions. But Perisic pulls back the curtain. His language is breathless, like a reporter running alongside a camera crew, looking for cover. Try as one might, it is hopeless to make sense of war. It'll make one mad, just as it did Boris.

And therein lays the pull of Our Man in Iraq. Although published almost five years ago, and only recently translated into English, Perisic's latest is a provocative look at the mentality of the home front during a time of global war. Boris relates a story from Iraq about a villager named Saddam. The villager is hard up and his home lies in ruin. His name alone makes him suspect to foreign troops. What can he do? Boris asks. Saddam can only pack up his goats and head to greener pastures, if there are any, before the Americans begin their sweep.

Toni, a member of society's essential Fourth Estate, shrugs off this, and every other, anecdote, edits it down to something concise and easily processed, something easily made sense of, before heading out to enjoy, and be seen enjoying, Zagreb's nightlife. Toni gets drunk, regularly. He fucks in bathroom stalls and his biggest worry involves whether moving into a new apartment with his girlfriend will make him too old, too respectable. His life seems a constant battle of one-upping the competition, of proving he still has it.

Every quip about salvos of gossip killing as easily as rockets denigrates those actually under fire. For all his success and self conceived martyrdom, Toni is vapid. Boris, despite his oddness (filtered through Toni, of course) gets it. His cousin is clueless. Like Iraq, Croatia is in a state of transition. It, too, is celebrating an anniversary, that of the breakup of Yugoslavia. The brutality of that war was equally senseless and has left a deep scar on both Boris and Toni. However, while Toni has been able to move on, Boris remains deeply troubled. His trip to Iraq only compounds the underlying damage expressed in his frenzied and rambling emails.

Perhaps Boris isn't the mad one. He seems deeply attuned to the senselessness of warfare. His advice to Toni sounds more like a call for help: "you have to believe in sense, particularly in war," or "madness comes out of your ears." Perisic turns the incompetent fool into a sage. Easily dismissed, Boris is far more attuned to the ways of the world than many would give him credit for. The coldness of the after action report can't smooth over what he's seen and knows, has been told, and believes.

Balloon Pop Outlaw Black

By Patricia Lockwood

Octopus Books
October 2012
978-0820343297

Reviewed by Carmen Giménez Smith

In an interview with Chris Randle, Lockwood described conceiving of her first poetry collection while watching the Presidential Inauguration. "I'm looking at Barack Obama," Lockwood said, "and I'm perceiving that I'm seeing a man being flattened into a symbol at this very moment." In Balloon Pop Outlaw Black, Patricia Lockwood uses the template of animation to consider how we construct our lives on and through screens, interfaces, and surfaces. Contemporary literature and art (image fiction, Pop Art, lowbrow, etc.) have already layered cartoon characters with irony and capitalism. Lockwood rehabilitates one such character, Popeye, as a contemporary folk hero who emerges—vulnerable and corporeal—from the sluice of postmodernism. Many of the poems in this collection refer to or study what we have all become in this flattening process, not what's beneath the surface, but how that surface is often all the depth we have.

Three long poems inhabited by cartoon characters are the centerpiece of this collection. Popeye is announced as the protagonist of "When We Move Away from Here, You'll See a Clean Square of Paper His Picture Hung," and the other long poems make reference to a boy and a mother, who could possibly be read as Popeye's backstory. Lockwood performs an ingenious and bloodless embodiment of animation, Popeye and the empire of hammerspace: the interstitial world from which cartoon characters pull giant hammers and anvils, the space "where a wrecking ball swings out of nowhere" to describe the metaphysics of how we straddle IRL and the construction of identity online.

"Although he is 'drawn,' and although he is 'a place,' he is not a map," Lockwood announces in the book's first poem. Moments like this one echo in the book. With the surrealist backdrop of the banal, characters like Popeye push (and are pushed) against the surface of their image and of the poems they inhabit. Lockwood still writes in the style of her lacerating yet poignant tweets—a nostalgic and subversive 80s American pop culture ekphrasis—but this book also establishes an austere mythos for a generation of readers bored with irony. The book's affect is flat, but its deceptive surface astutely frames a new poetic subjectivity in a state of constant reinvention.

Lockwood also celebrates the material life of this world in poems like "The Church of the Open Crayon Box," where "you are building the home/ with hand-drawn Log Cabin Font…[y]ou are hoping a man can be really/ alone there…" The poems make frequent reference to the artist's intervention and how the characters act in resistance to her. "The dimension is a coat," she writes in one of many of her allusions to a universe under construction, and from that space, "she brings a detonator into the world."

A poem like "The Salesmen Open Their Trenchcoats, All Filled with Possible Names for the Watch" reminds us that this collection is, in part, a descendant of James Tate's trenchant surrealism. The poem veers back and forth between the familiar and the unfamiliar by presenting the marketplace's array in the form of insistent traveling salesmen who set briefcases open, "…they gleam with rows/of what could own us…" As a political allegory, this collection makes a case for a more politically orthodox use of surrealist imagery and rhetoric. 

Popeye makes an early poetic appearance in John Ashbery's poem "Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape." In Ashbery's poem, the cartoon character "sits in thunder,/ Unthought of…" Ashbery adds a Shakespearian Technicolor to the animated paradigm of Popeye's artificial world, complete with cameos from Wimpy and Sweet Pea and a complex life we don't perceive because of the surface's constraint. In Balloon Pop Outlaw Black, Popeye is Lockwood's "Every (Cartoon) Man" and represents our complicated relationship to production and agency. She uses the cartoon environment to describe the ways we exist as the flattened image on the screen. The book only makes oblique appraisals of what this model of representation means. "A person made of paper is only as fat/as her file," she writes in the poem "The Cartoon's Mother Builds a House in Hammerspace."

Ultimately this book should be read as an incisive examination of how we take contemporary modes of expression for granted. With the same political grit that surrealism brought to fine art at the turn of the 20^th century, Balloon Pop Outlaw Black describes today's multimodal world. The affect is occasionally opaque, but the world building is exquisite and strange and Lockwood adds surprisingly moving depth to the cartoon dimension.

The Exiles

By Matthew Kirkpatrick

Ricochet Editions
March 2013
978-1938900020

Reviewed by Lauren Perez

The Exiles by Matthew Kirkpatrick defies brief summarization. It's about a boy who lives with his mother and sister trying to figure out what has happened to his father; it's about a girl trying to escape the gaze of others; it's about a monster in the basement; it's about the hidden violence that shadows the everyday; it's about the way memory warps and fades; it's about what narratives we choose to live by, what myths enclose and enfold us.

The world of The Exiles is a blurred line between the realistic and the fantastic, a family photo warped by water and light. James, a boy just beginning to edge into his teens, believes his father has been locked in the basement. He doesn't know why or by whom, but his father is in a labyrinth built out of cardboard boxes filled with baby clothes, the cast offs and memories of the family. In his father's place, his mother presents a "new" father, a man James cannot really see. Neither James nor the reader know what is real.

Across the street another family drama is unfolding. The neighbor girl James watches is plotting her escape from her family. Her parents, emergency dispatchers, are so afraid of the world they won't let her leave the house for anything except school. She spends her time running up and down the porch steps, trapped in an eternal loop, and locked into the house at night when her parents go to work.

The prose is so shadowed it is hard to resist the temptation to hang weight from every word, to read lines like, "He shows her his hammer and his coffee can of nails and screws," as sexual. James plays with a "horse head doll," a nebulous toy that could as believably be an actual dead horse's head as a broken toy. The lines between animal and human are necessarily blurred—and not just by the minotaur in the basement. The neighbor girl's fitness-obsessed parents become a single animal on the treadmill, "the soft thumping of her parents' four feet running in rhythm." There is something predatory about all the characters. James's mother locks him in the closet for investigating the basement. His sister discovers the skeleton of their cat. The father of the girl across the street beats a boy, and that boy stalks the girl across the street, breaking into her room to watch her sleep. As the neighbor girl realizes: "Every man or boy she knows is constantly watching." Someone is always watching someone else, stalking through the suburban lawns.

Of course the half-man half-beast exiled to the basement labyrinth inescapably brings to mind Theseus and the Minotaur—or Dante's minotaur, standing at the gates to the seventh circle of hell. The minotaur is not defeated, and James' story never quite becomes the hero's journey. The neighbor girl across the street is locked up every night by her parents, her father cautions her not to "fuck or huff glue." She is allowed only as far as the front steps, where she runs up and down, caught in a time loop. Hard not to think of Danae, locked in a tower by her father because he was afraid that her son would kill him. The neighbor girl's father fears the eventuality of his daughter's sexuality, and is as incapable of guarding against it. A boy from her high school follows her home, is her first flirtation, and, like Zeus' shower, he slips into her home uninvited. When James's sister gets lost in the basement, she thinks of Hansel and Gretel before deciding that she will not share their fate, "she will not go far."

But Kirkpatrick does not expect the myths to carry the weight of the book, and each of the characters in this slim volume have depths beneath their surface, human behaviors and humor. They bend and distort their stories, slipping the noose of their expected endings. Each section is a different story, and a different point of view: the boy hero, the princess in the tower, the sister in the woods. Depending on the perspective, even the worst tragedy and horror can be relegated to a subplot, even to invisibility. Kirkpatrick puts pressure on the stories we think we know, troubling them, leaving behind only the uncanny sense that no one is who they say they are.

The Skin Team

By Jordaan Mason

Magic Helicopter Press
June 2013
 978-0984140640

I had a vision of her giving birth to the horse. I was standing in the stables and she was shaking, violently, as if to remove her skin in slices. Her water broke into the hay, glistening, then. And the dead horse came out of her. He was holding her arms and telling her to breathe. She was screaming: My mother's dress is ruined. Between two horses.

I dug my hands underneath my t-shirt and felt at the three long scars going vertical on the right side of my stomach. The horse, dehydrated and shriveled, moved its hind legs in the dirt like it was trying to get up, limply. He pulled her arms back so she couldn't touch it; she shook harder, trying to escape him, trying to hold the horse. It looked up at him and then back towards me, and said: It was him.

I held the horse's head against the knives on my stomach. There, it tried to suck blood out of me as if milk, but the wounds had already healed over, and nothing came out of me. He put his tongue in her ear and she started singing very quietly: The room just filled up with mosquitoes they heard that my body was free.

What was left of the treehouse was also burned with the Power Company Building, because that's where we left it, except a few of the lamps, which I had kept in the attic, and which were infected now. Daisies tried to grow out of them from where the wires ended. I asked them both if they had kept any of the lamps for themselves, and they both in unison lifted their clothes to show me three tally mark scars on the right sides of their stomachs.

We put the horse back in her for the night. We all moved in and out of stables, stability, horses. She was bursting with more of them for days, we couldn't stop them, couldn't kill them fast enough. All of them drained of water, all of them dead. Yearning for milk we did not have. And they came out of her, of him, me, each other, full of bullets, full of bleach, covering the floors of the barn, trying to walk out into the wilderness alone looking for mothers impossibly in the arced shapes of trees, crop circles, lakes, ash.

Unresolved: I woke up with certain amounts of fluid in my mouth that came from nowhere, that came from something during sleep. As in: I was pulling something directly from another source into me, which I then swallowed and heaved the next morning. As in: where did it come from, how am I sharing it, how is it being transferred to me. I knew that I had metal in me because there were constant alarms and warnings of this. My mouth was always filled with silver saliva, my whole head caving. The metal in my stomach stung like I had swallowed all of the bees I could find and let them have the honey and peanut butter sandwiches sitting inside me, too. I asked them if they would remove the metal, but this was impossible for them to grasp. I woke up in remote parts of town with no shoes on, my feet covered in my own blood from bad road work, from walking hours lingering unconscious. I said to the doctor, I told her: I looked into North like he told me to and that's what's doing it, but why these gifts, why now. She said: Has anyone noticed you doing this, you know, this walking off while you're sleeping. I said: No one else has said so except North, which is trying to get me to follow it. Is north a codename for one of your friends, she asked, and I shot her a glance so hard I almost knocked myself over.

A holy moment happened between us in one of the public restrooms at the park. He had just come back from the woods, sticks still in his hair, scrapes on his legs, and said he had them in him, as many as possible for all hours of the night, but he couldn't feel it anymore. He could no longer be hunted was how he put it. He said: The only thing I can feel anymore is the energy, and you, and Sarah. He admitted to me what had happened between them. He whispered: We were almost one, if we hadn't kept so many secrets, it would have been possible. I asked him about the fire. I wanted to know why he had done it. And, leaning against the wall enclosure of the bathroom stall, he told me: I thought maybe I could cure us all, I really thought I could do it, you have to believe me.

The three of us stood in the middle of the generators. We spoke volumes without words. We told each other all of our secrets with the only language that we knew: the energy, the sickness, the sleeplessness, the slipping away of identities, our individual selves. I asked her about blind spots, if she had them. Could she see everything or were there parts, just small spaces of things, missing, lost in between transitions from one organism to another. I could see the dresses she had discarded all over the floor, yes. And her belly, full of blizzards, scorching against my legs and inner thighs, and the piercing sound of an entire flock of birds trying to enter me through the ears. Her mother's dresses were levitating above the other ones somehow. The pockets of his pants were overflowing with extra lightbulbs. Yes, I see everything, she said, looking at the two of us, trying to figure out whose pair of what was whose, all of our clothes tangled on the same floor, of the same house, with the lights off and no one wishing they would be on, our eyes adjusting to the darkness, barely, all things around us coming apart. Parts of his t-shirts becoming her legs, my jeans his skull, her dresses my forearms. And sometimes I was him and she was me, and the three of us were in the bedroom, which was flooded, and the three of us were in the attic, which was burned, and the three of us were filling up the houses with lights left on while everyone fell asleep watching television.

She took me night fishing on her father's boat without his permission. It was dangerous because the boat didn't have any lights on it. From where we were out on the lake, we could see just tiny dots of light in the distance, and the moon and stars above. Like someone cut holes in my head to see them. Fortunately, she didn't know any constellations or where the North Star was, so she couldn't point them out to me. Instead, we invented our own. One of them was the Power Company Building. Another was the river. Another was the three of us as fish, scattered among other space debris. She tied our feet to the boat and said: If there's a storm we'll both go down together.

We threw the fish that we caught back. It was easier at night because we didn't have to see their faces. There was just the sensation of their wet skin on our hands, flipping around everywhere in the boat, splashing water.

Hundreds of living organisms were beneath us, all living in the darkness, all blind most of the time, feeling out their food with smell. The two of us were blind fish also. The three of us were caught fish released back into the ocean. He was fucking whales in the woods.

I was seasick once we got back to the shore. I blacked out. I woke up and they were both on one of the mattresses next to me, her with most of what he carried between his legs in her mouth, him biting down hard on a stick to keep quiet. I kept quiet, too. I located my own body attached to me and looked back up at the stars, interrupted by the branches of trees. One of them was the North Star. One of them was all of the fish we threw back into the lake. All of the stars were looking for me as if I could be found.

Each of us was a constellation of dead fish. Each of us was stuck in the sky, which was really just water. He was all of the suns that made the plants which fed us grow. I collected my belongings from inside of her stomach. She had stolen them, over the years, without my knowing. Some of these belongings were the words I'd been trying to say. Others were the ones I was able to conjure. The rest of my language was somewhere between the Power Company Building and North.

She was sharks tattooing the two of us slowly. I absently joined the two of them on the mattress, knowing very well that nothing more could be made from our meat. All of our fluid had been spoiled, anyway.

I went to the Power Company Building again after they had started to rebuild it. Even though it had been a while since the fire. The trees had barely grown back. I lay between the two main generators, except now it didn't seem to do anything. I adjusted several times, trying variations of the position and location I used to know well, but the stomach ache wouldn't go away.

My stomach was full of hard metal and fire. I held the lightbulb gift between my teeth and waited, but it didn't charge up. I thought maybe that the lightbulb had just been burnt out, so I went home and hid in the attic with one of the lamps from the old treehouse. I put the lightbulb into the socket. It lit up. I covered all of the windows in the attic so that no one would know what I was doing. I waited for the light to burn out but gave up after thirty-seven hours when my mother called me for dinner.

Sarah knew well enough to know what I had been doing. She asked me if I had been eating lightbulbs. I accused her of eating the horses. He held the ladder that both of us were on, and we handed the lamp from one to the other, back up and down from the house to the attic.

I wasn't hungry for anything. The doctor asked me if I was sleeping better with the pills she'd been giving me. I said I couldn't remember.

All three of us built a house that we lived in. All three of us at the same time. It was made mostly out of the things that both him and her had saved, documented, of us. When my voice came out of me, it was hers and his was mine. Hers was his. This exchange happened for a while. None of what came out of us was words, just voices. Just singing. No songs.

There were no lamps in our new house. We wanted to keep the lights off. In the dark, it was easier not to know anything. To have to look one another in the eye would have been impossible.

We found him there again, near the broken bricks, with his head wide open. His skull was full of insects and breadcrumbs. Sarah was oscillating between charred rocks where we had left pieces of our knee scrapings, our kites that flew away. I put the lightbulb into his open skull. I waited for it to light up. I waited for the trees to bend down to the ground and scrape away the grass from the lawns. None of this happened. When I realized this, I collapsed. I didn't throw up, even though my stomach felt like I had swallowed rocks. And the insects crawled between her arms and mine, the grass fell lower, all of the electricity scathing across the water. He handed me the blood from his head and said nothing. Down to the lake we went, again.

A subject in a room for a portrait by the nude wall with extra skin around the body, tight. I imagined that Sarah had batteries in her spit, and when I pulled them out, they were warm again like I knew they were inside of her, and I arranged them with the eggs and bacon. Pull them three by three, recharge them. Catching her in the shower singing, I put the batteries between my toes, with the wrong muscles, all of them scattering from me, like insects to the walls.

She masturbates to 1995 electronic dance music. He has gasoline ready for college down. I am changing the bedsheets to make the room colder.

I hold the glass of milk in my bare paws, trying very hard not to spill it, not to get it on the rugs. Calcium this and calcium that, my bones were still breaking, I can't stand up.

I keep the lights off when I enter her and then I cannot tell the difference. Between him and her. The distance between two subjects posing by the nude wall, symmetrical, leaves me. And this is only a violence to myself, and it does not matter. The batteries rolled left on the floor because of the slant and stuck there. Both of the firepits are lit, all of the snow in the kitchen sink is molasses, all of the liquor in the basement is linen. She hides the saxophone in the closet behind the ladder to the attic. I am sitting at the top of the house imagining what the bottom would look like if I reversed it. He is panting ice cream drool onto my knuckles as I rub his bones clean of any harm. I tell him: I am sick, can you see it, and the doctor doesn't know what I should do. He gives me an Oxford Dictionary and tells me to look up the word: North. The definition said that the three of us were sleeping in the same room even though we had our own, that we all shared the same refrigerator, we were all out of milk. I looked for it between rooms.

She says: If I am positive of what is in my lungs, can I give it to you. I say: I want it anyway, you don't have to ask. He holds her head up from the garden and says: These weeds, why do you keep the weeds. We swim in the pool even though it is drained.

We change the lightbulbs at night to get rid of gathering moths, leaving dust on the light, clouding it. The basement is filled with telephone wires, and all of the milk is stale in our mouths. Two subjects in a room are trying to be solid. When I look in the bedroom, they are putting their bodies back together, and I am putting my own into books. They ask me if I can go out for more milk, and I say: Dad will do it.

A subject in a room is me pushing myself against the wall and waiting for the wall to allow me to be inside of it, to accept that I have never been one solid. They put their bodies back together, and I put my body back into the books. I recite them aloud while they enter me, then, in response.

Three subjects in one room are too many to fit into one room. And three is not symmetry? Three subjects in three rooms doing all separate acts from one another's subjectivity. The violence between him and her and I. The volumes between him and her and I as identities, shouting all through the house. From the top of it, I look down and see her saxophone, her singing.

He is carrying all our clothes down into the laundry room to clean them. There are welts and open places in his head, walking. She is filling his head with the liquor, the linen. And trying to get inside of the refrigerator to make his skin colder, to freeze it into ice, but he leaves and turns the stove on, putting his empty head onto the burner.

I pull the mask off my face in the backyard and bang my head against the bottom of the pool until the milk comes back out of my stomach, all white and thick chunks of it coming out of me. I imagine that it was once warm inside of me and arrange it with the eggs and bacon, throw out the old cartons, fill up the house with sand.

Happy Talk

By Richard Melo

Red Lemonade
June 2013
978-1935869177

1953. P.F.C. B.J. Roper-Melo is the lone, lost Marine from the 1st Guadlacanal Division, a self-exiled holdover from a bygone American invasion of Haiti, maintaining his post, casting a watchful eye, mindful of any danger to American interests inflicted in the Haitian theatre.

There is a saying among Haitians that all Americans look alike, and here in the Nord Department, Roper-Melo is the only American many of the outskirt characters have ever seen. Yet in the eyes of other Americans, the P.F.C. bears little resemblance to the Modern American Man. Roper-Melo's style of mustache, a throwback to the days of the War Between States when such whiskers were more fashionable, gives him the look of a Scottish Terrier. He casts the air of the type of younger man who seems like an older man, while it is just as possible that he is the type of older man who seems like a younger man who seems old.

His vigilant surveillance of the sky over Cap Haitien leads him to witness firsthand the skywriter's distress.

Following the parachute as it plunges from the sky, Roper-Melo high steps over uneven ground, leaping across short crevasses and dry stream beds, climbing piles of jagged rock, and throwing himself down the other side, all in the name of rescuing the fallen flying ace.

Culprit Clutch's parachute catches in a tall tree. The unconscious and remarkably unbroken pilot dangles by his shoulders from the parachute's cords. The P.F.C. unsheathes his machete and scales the tree.

In perhaps not the best of rescue plans, he begins to hack away at the cords that are keeping Culprit Clutch from falling to the rocky ground like a heavy sack of bones.

The angels are ringing their little bells. Behind a white, semi-transparent curtain, they circle his bed, ghostly apparitions, more like convent sisters clad in white than small-town American girls in Haiti learning to become nurses. Angels or not, it is all the same to him. He cannot feel his body, but he feels his heartbeat, his heart pushing to maintain blood flow through so many swollen extremities. The beat itself is loud enough to wake the dead in the next room over, if only there were dead in the next room over.

A switch is thrown and a lamp casts its scorching light down on him; it is so bright that he can see the skin pores on his arms, his hair follicles, blotches from the sun, blotches of unknown origin. It is stage lighting, although these were the physical traits you would never want to show off on stage.

With scissors, the Nightingales snip away at the last of his trousers, his undershirt, careful not to cut him, fat chance he would feel it anyway. They photograph him without clothes, hands propping his broken body in various positions to get the shots they need. They poke their fingers in his gut, feeling for cancer, not that they know what cancer feels like any more than what a kidney feels like, but figuring that as long as they have him here, they should check him for cancer.

All the while, one student nurse holds his hand. They are wearing masks and hats and look the same to him. He can neither tell whose hands are whose nor whose hand is holding his. He thinks it is that one there, but then again, it couldn't be, because she walks away and the hand is still holding his.

They find a blotch and cut off a piece of mottled skin. (—We ought to have that checked.) They snip a fragment of muscle. (—Let's get that checked, too; we can send it out with the other samples and film.) There is one last bodily sample they need. They roll him over, and a Nightingale sticks a long needle into the base of his spine and draws the milky fluid out. (—If there is anything wrong with you, anything, we'll find out what it is.)

—You've come all the way to Haiti, and you still get the best medical care in the world, the same exact care you'd get back home in the U.S.A. We've run a battery of tests on you, and we'll send your samples back to Washington, and when they write back and tell us what's wrong with you, we'll know how to treat you.

—In the meantime, we'll set your bones in a plaster cast. It looks like you broke a few.

He's unable to reply, nod, or even open his eyes. They can't be sure he's listening.

—Samantha Sound says you have 400 bones when 206 are all you need.

—Which bones does Samantha say are broken?

—I think it's fair to say they all are, or pretty close.

—Let's set even the unbroken ones for good measure.

—Poor thing, let's at least give him morphine.

—Shhh.

—Why? I know the protocol is only to administer morphine to dying soldiers in the field of battle, but since we are at peace, and he probably feels like he's dying, it's fair to give him a few cc's.

—We're out of morphine.

—How can we be out of morphine?

—This is a nursing school, not a dispensary. Who do you think we are? We never practice on live patients.

—What do we have here then? Chopped liver?

—Opal, what happened to the morphine?

—I get a headache every month, and morphine is the only way to kill the pain.

—But we had so much.

—Sometimes, the headaches come more than once a month.

—What should we tell our friend here?

—Tell him I'm not the only girl around here who gets a headache.

—Why don't you explain it to him yourself.

—Consider yourself lucky you're not a woman, Mister.

—Miss Penny has gone to get doctors Millidieu and Bast. They'll know what to do.

Every two hours a pair of Nightingales come to check on Culprit Clutch. At daybreak, they bring him a bowl of cereal, spoon feed him, and wipe his chin. The cereal is too hot; she blows across the top to cool it down. Her breath smells like cinnamon. It might be the cereal.

They scooch him one way, then the other, changing his sheets without moving him out of bed. They brush against him, lean into him. He loves them all, and even more since he can't tell them apart. Even their voices sound the same, as do the things they say. Take any one of them, and before long you'll see only her flaws. Take them all, and you have the perfect woman.

Over time, they come to check in on him less often. His vital signs are always the same. They leave him alone at night, knowing his bed pan can wait for morning, and that as long as the windows are closed, flies won't come in the room.

SAMANTHA SOUND

These are the good old days, now that Culprit is here, and I sleep so much better knowing there is a man in the house, even if it's a man in such condition.

PEGGY JEAN

A fine figure of a man he makes encased in full-body plaster across all but his eyes and mouth, his arms and legs elevated and dangling from straps. He creates the impression that he is bouncing off his bottom like a rubber ball.

—What is that expression Sally had for him?

—Comically infirm.

—Comic is always better than chronic.

The doctors, Bast, Millidieu and Hockey, come to see him once he's patched up.

—Serves you right, Ace, taking a plane up without learning how to fly ahead of time, says Doctor Millidieu.

—I think Mr. Clutch did an admirable job of flying. He even wrote words in broad pen strokes across the sky, Samantha Sound says. —His penmanship is very neat.

—Better than his flying, that's for sure, Doctor Hockey says.

—That's nothing. Let's see him try skywriting in the creyol, I bet he can't spell anything in the creyol, Doctor Millidieu says.

—The pain must be killing him, says Gwen whose sense of Culprit's pain is due to the orange aura surrounding him that only she can see. (—If I can take his pain on myself, she says under her breath, —I would do so, which is more than these other so-called Nightingales can say.)

—He actually feels much better than you or me right now, Doctor Hockey says.

—Even with all those cracked up bones?

—Morphine is good medicine and will take care of him fine for the next few days until the worst of the swelling goes down. (Doctor Hockey leans in over Culprit and adds, —You're lucky to be getting morphine. Protocol says you need to be dying.)

The bat-wing doors of the examination room are swinging. The three doctors are gone, back to sipping cocktails by the swimming pool at their swanky hotel in Le Cap.

—You didn't tell them.

—Tell them what?

—That there is no morphine.

—Of course not, do you think I'm stupid?

—What's the worst that can happen if the doctors find out? They send you home. Isn't that what we all want?

—They could send me to Diego Garcia.

—Sounds more exotic than this place.

—It's an atomic graveyard.

—What was in the shot they gave him?

—Simple sugar syrup.

—Poor Culprit! You'll have to tough it out for a few more days, my love, she shouts to him, patting him on the chest and acting as if the wires keeping his jaw shut affect his hearing.

Down the stairs and to the left, through an open door and long hallway, Sonia finds a small gathering of Nightingales gathered in the Great Room just as they hear knocking at the door. It is a strong rat-a-tat-tat-tat, a pause, and then another.

They pull the door open to find a man standing there. He is dressed all in black with a white shirt, a tuxedo it turns out, with a tail and a cane and his hat is in his hand pressed against his chest.

—He must be hungry.

(This is how they talk, as if he wasn't there.)

—He looks hungry something awful.

—What are we having tonight, what is Henry Greathead preparing for us?

—Chicken and rice pilaf.

They take his hand and guide him through their school toward the dining room where they seat him and tie a napkin around his neck.

—Bring him a drumstick and thigh.

—Henry Greathead is a wonderful cook.

—What is Henry supposed to be anyway?

—He's our butler.

—That doesn't make any sense. We're not rich, and this is not an estate or plantation.

—He can't be our butler because we never receive visitors.

—He's our pastry chef.

—Don't you wish!

—He prepares our meals. That's good enough for me.

—I'm glad he's here.

—I didn't say I wasn't.

—You must really meet Henry Greathead, Samantha Sound says to the stranger. —I think the two of you will get along famously.

—I'll tell you what Henry Greathead is if you promise to keep a secret, Hedy whispers to the Haitian. —He's a spy.

—You think everyone is a spy.

—Henry Greathead really is a spy, no lie!

—That's the most ridiculous thing I ever heard.

—Who's he spying on? Us?

—Them! She points at the wall as to indicate she means the people who live on the other side of the wall. For a moment, it's as if the wall turns transparent, and she can see right through it, the dense thicket, the glowing eyes of small nocturnal creatures stacked on top of each other.

—There's nobody out there.

—When it looks like nobody is out there, the Communists are out there. That's why they are so dangerous.

—If Henry Greathead was sent to spy on Communists, why is he always here?

—He's not here now.

—That doesn't make him a spy.

Upstairs, the Nightingales on the evening shift do rounds, meaning they pay Culprit a visit and leave just in time to pay him another visit. They bring him aspirin and change his bed pan. They smell their supper downstairs and decide to call it a day.

—Do you want your light on or off?

He gives no indication. His jaw is wired shut, and his extremities are encased in plaster.

—Off it goes then.

Once the light goes off, it sends the message to others that he's sleeping, and sleep is what's best for him, don't you dare turn on a light and wake him up. We should all go downstairs and let him sleep.

—Help me.

No one hears him.

—Help me.

No one hears him.

When I left for work Thursday morning, the CD player picked up St. Vincent's Strange Mercy where it had left off the day before, about a minute into track 5, "Northern Lights," in which Annie Clark repeats,

I saw the morning northern lights
convinced it was the end of time,

a lyric that batted my attention to the Mayan enthusiasts who thought we had just one more year here together before the apocalypse, a topic I filed under Things We Laugh At to Distract Us from the Many Authentically Looming Apocalypses. The track I'd often found myself humming all week, though, was the album's catchy and subversive single, "Cruel." I liked the way Clark drew out the word "cruel" in the chorus, softening the "oo" to an "ah" so it sounded like "crawl," and I especially liked the ethereal interludes that preceded each verse, the way those interludes resisted the mid-tempo pop thump of the drums.

Liz and I had been given the album by friends who'd bought the record on vinyl, which came with three digital downloads. I was not sure whether it was legal for someone other than the purchaser to use the downloads, though I guessed probably not. What record companies never admitted about music piracy was that it was not stealing in the traditional sense, it was duplication—a miracle, technically—albeit one that further obliterated the viability of Musician as a career path. Like Christ with his loaves and fish, anyone with a computer could rip the tracks from a single disc—a single flash—and feed the multitudes.

Today the Illinois Department of Natural Resources tried to convince the multitudes that Asian carp made a delicious entrée by holding a public carp tasting. The carp was ruining Great Lakes' ecosystem, eating too much plankton and growing too large, and it was also high in protein and low in mercury and one teen said it tasted like salmon, so the state figured it'd be win-win if people got hooked on it. Unfortunately, the very thing that kept locals from wanting to eat the carp was its bad PR—they preferred to eat meeker creatures, ones not so prone to proliferate. The more rare a fish was, the more special it became, like gold and oil and water and oxygen.

Today Congresswoman Chellie Pingree (D-ME) spoke on the House floor against the TRAIN Act, a bill that would indefinitely put off clean air standards in the coal and oil industries. She pointed out that since 1970, the Clean Air Act had caused a 60% decrease in air pollution and saved hundreds of thousands of lives.

Pingree was in the minority. A new and influential strain of conservatism had taken a foothold in the House of Representatives called the Tea Party Movement, which was founded and funded by billionaire brothers David H. Koch and Charles G. Koch. Born into business as the sons of a genius engineer who came up with a new, more efficient way to refine oil into gasoline, the truth the Koch brothers most believed in was deregulation: They wanted the government out of the way of business.

This philosophy often found itself at odds with the Environmental Protection Agency, a major government agency charged with keeping Americans alive through environmental regulations that was today far less powerful than it had once been, and thus having a difficult time reducing emissions of mercury, sulfur dioxide, arsenic, and ozone, pollutants that cause asthma, birth defects, heart disease, lung disease, and premature death. Always most affected by air pollution are children, whose lungs have not yet fully formed.

Of the TRAIN Act, National Petrochemical & Refiners Association President Charles T. Drevna said, "Many of EPA's costly regulations threaten America's economic and national security and job creation, while providing little or no significant environmental benefit," adding, "Existing regulations also need to be examined so those that do far more harm than good can be eliminated." Jane Goodall asked a USA Today reporter, "If we're not raising new generations to be better stewards of the environment, what's the point?" and in the number one song in America, Adam Levine sang,

You say I'm a kid
My ego is big
I don't give a shit
and it goes like this,

and the next day, the House voted 249 to 169 to approve the TRAIN Act, which was especially good for certain old coal plants like Virginia's Potomac River Generating Station, which polluted at such high levels that it would have been shut down, cutting jobs.

What we'd been learning about ourselves in recent decades was that we almost always tended to play the short game as a species. We wanted one marshmallow now instead of two marshmallows in ten minutes. We preferred for the Gulf of Mexico not be flooded with 4.9 million barrels of oil, but we had to do risky deepwater drilling to get the oil we needed. We preferred for our grandchildren to be able to breathe in forty years but we needed to pay the rent today.

The good news, some agreed, was that we were not absolutely sure that air pollution kept us from breathing or that our actions had caused the earth to heat up. Or if we did "know," we knew because of science, and we weren't sure we wanted science to complicate any of the truths God had already gifted us. (The most persistent argument against the existence of global warming: If it was a real thing, God would've mentioned it.) And while the Southern Baptist Convention agreed on this point, today they disagreed on whether they ought to drop the word "Southern" from their name.

Other Christians liked science just fine and tended to say things like, "I just think it's awesome how much we're discovering about God's world," and my mom's local paper, The Acorn, said today that soon Rev. Michael Dowd would come to Thousand Oaks, CA, to deliver a lecture based on his book, Thank God for Evolution: How the Marriage of Science and Religion Will Transform Your Life and Our World, which posited that anti-science theories like intelligent design "trivialize[d] God and dishonor[ed] science," and Dowd cited the success of books like Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion, as evidence of intelligent design's bankruptcy. "No one would write a book… called, The Life Delusion, or The Universe Delusion," he said. "Why? Because 'Life' and 'the Universe' are not trivial concepts—they are undeniably real. 'Do you believe in water?' is an absurd question precisely because water is real, not imaginary. The truth is that it doesn't matter whether you 'believe in' water or not. The demonstrable fact is that we are each 50-70% water. Without water we wouldn't exist, whether we believe in it or not. In the words of Phillip K. Dick: 'Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.'"

A poll conducted by the Public Religion Institute found that 57% of Americans believed in evolution and 69% of Americans believed in climate change, and the two groups that least believed in evolution and climate change were the Tea Party and white evangelicals. Evolution did not need people to believe it, but continued to exist in nature with or without our say so. Climate change, on the other hand, existed more the less we believed in it.

The rain picked up as I drove 91S toward Longmeadow, and I slowed and merged out of the left lane, where the water had begun to pool near the median. Liz and I shared a red Mazda 3 hatchback, a gift from her parents to Liz just a couple months after we met. It was a good car but a light one, unfit to chance higher speeds in heavy rain. When we'd moved back to Massachusetts from Nashville, we'd elected to only take the Mazda with us and left our white Taurus in my dad's driveway to save on gas and insurance, but this was a mistake. We often needed both cars.

The Taurus had been a loan from my grandmother the previous year in the stretch of months between when everyone but my grandmother knew that she needed to stop driving and when it she herself knew. In the end, it was a doctor's authoritative, "You shouldn't be driving," that convinced her, and so she signed the Taurus over to me. On one window remained a sticker voicing my grandmother's support for the South Carolina Police Department, which I imagined might one day get me out of a ticket. "I'm glad the car has stayed in the family—I'm not going to use it," she would tell me on our frequent visits, but then occasionally she'd forget, telling the neighbors in her posh Nashville retirement community, "My grandson took my car. And now I have no way to get groceries."

I switched to the radio and caught the tail end of a "Morning Edition" story about Ebony, the African American news and entertainment magazine founded by John and Eunice Johnson in the fall of 1945, just after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed 246,000 people, or maybe only 150,000, and ended World War II. Ebony and its smaller counterpart Jet's circulation and ad revenue had begun to dip in recent years until they slashed prices, outsourced circulation, and sold an equity share to JPMorgan Chase, a multinational banking corporation and one of the Big Four banks, which in the last decade acquired Bank One, Bear Stearns, and Washington Mutual, and paid government fines for using biased research to deceive investors (2002), for pushing through a derivatives deal by making undisclosed payments to friends of the county commissioners in Jefferson County, Alabama (2010), and for their role in financing Enron, a corrupt corporation that in 2001 collapsed in disgrace.

"I really wanted this business to grow," Johnson Publishing's Company Chairman Linda Johnson Rice said on the radio, "and I really stopped and I thought, you know, if we really want to expand, and we want to expand Ebony and Jet and Fashion Fare cosmetics as brands, right now we just can't do this alone."

Soon Liz began her own journey to work, a short walk through light rain to the bus stop on Route 9, exposed to the elements because she'd left our sole umbrella in the car with me. She ducked under the bus stop awning and waited alone until a UMass student named Walter arrived and (likely failing to notice the ring on her finger) introduced himself. She said, "Hi, I'm Elizabeth," which was not the name I usually called her but was the name with which she most closely identified. They said nothing more, though Walter did sit behind her on the bus, which stopped several times—Wal-Mart, Hampshire Mall, UMass (bye Walter)—before dropping Liz off at the end of the line: Amherst College.

With a bit of extra time before work, she doubled back and bought a bagel at Bruegger's and an umbrella at CVS. What Liz knew about umbrellas was that she could buy as many as she wanted and I would do my best to abandon them in the libraries, coffee shops, and friends' cars of Western Massachusetts.

The next story on my radio, as the rain's assault continued, was on the break-up of the Georgian rock band R.E.M., who had released 15 albums over their 31 years together. The announcement that they had "decided to call it a day as a band" came yesterday on their website along with thanks to "anyone who ever felt touched by our music," and today the media exploded with brief and often dismissive band retrospectives, most of which punned on either "It's the End of the World as We Know It" (a roundup of these puns was collected tonight for The Daily Show's "Moment of Zen") or, as NPR chose, "Everybody Hurts," with the lead-in, "Some fans of the band R.E.M. may be relating to this song today."

"I don't know how that band does what they do," rock musician Kurt Cobain once said of R.E.M. "God, they're the greatest. They've dealt with their success like saints, and they keep delivering great music."

We were two days from the 20^th anniversary of the release of Nevermind, the breakthrough album of Cobain's band, Nirvana, and when I arrived on the small, manicured campus of Affluent Suburb College, NPR had a segment on them too. Butch Vig, Nevermind's producer, told host David Greene of a Nirvana who'd been rehearsing every day for months leading up to the Nevermind recording sessions in Los Angeles, and who was enormously excited to be recording these songs they'd learned so completely. Vig cautioned against buying too much into Cobain's accidental superstar mythology—he was ambitious, Vig said. "He wanted that golden ring."

In a separate retrospective interview, Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl said, "My entire life is pre-Nevermind and post-Nevermind. When it came out, my whole [expletive] world was changed forever," and the expletive Grohl used was almost certainly "fucking."

Blogs today shared old photos of Cobain with his baby daughter, Francis Bean, and then also of an adult Francis Bean in a series of recently-released brooding and sexy black and white photos, and the blogger of  "A Loveless Day" wrote of Francis Bean, "Growing up & into her own. She's working on Art & Modeling. Not sure there is anyway she can go wrong. The sperm that made her simply says it all."

By the time I parked the car before my first class, the rain had let up. The Affluent Suburb College parking lot was emptier than usual, and I had my pick of spaces. Instead of the space closest to my classroom, I chose a space out of the way where I could listen to Butch Vig hold forth for a few minutes longer without feeling watched by students.

Vig, in the interview, told of popping a copy of the unreleased Nevermind into a boom box at a 4^th of July barbecue, and how everyone stopped talking, crowded around the boom box, and listened to the album all the way through. "And when it was done," Vig said, "there was silence for about 20 seconds. And somebody said, 'Oh my God, play that again.'"

Vig went on to say that fans often didn't understand the lyrics to songs like "Lithium" and "In Bloom," though it's unclear whether he was referencing the fact that "In Bloom" is itself about a gun-toting rock music fan who sings along to "all our pretty songs" without ever understanding the lyrics.

The Barron's SAT box sits on our kitchen table, neglected, despite our intentions to barge through it every morning at ever increasing speeds as the days tick by: twenty, fifty, seventy-five words a day. A person or a committee at the Barron's offices in Hauppauge, New York (population 20,882, average age 42.5, median income $97,214, way mostly white) has selected these five hundred words out of the approximately 1,013,913 words in common English usage. These are the five hundred thoroughbred racehorse words, the high frequencies found most often on the college entrance exams, the SATS. What does SAT stand for? The truth is no one knows. But why these words? Who decides? Who sits at a desk in a small town on Long Island and honors atrophy with a place in the blue and yellow-orange box, but anthropomorphic is turned over and over, and finally the sample sentence, In Animal Farm the anthropomorphic pig suppresses his homicidal impulses, failed to impress, and a line was drawn through anthropomorphic. Definitions found on one face of the cards are the standard dictionary explications, but the sentences printed just below the standard definition which are meant to present an example of how the particular word is used, these must be written by someone, and the sentences are revealing about the writer(s) in devious ways. Usually these kinds of assignments are jobbed out to a freelancer who might only make a dollar or less a word, and so he or she must work quickly to make the task worth the effort. Certain words in the sample sentences appear with some frequency which makes me think the writer is a vegan Christian interested in the American Civil Rights movement. 

We will relegate meat-eaters to the dustbin of evolution.

Christmas has become far too commercialized.

Those censorious of Rosa Parks are remembered with shame.

Let X = X

As with Scrabble tiles, not all letters are created equal, but their value is, in fact, the reverse of the value ascribed to letters in Scrabble. Even a cursory glance at the two lists reveals that a letter which has a high value in Scrabble is a second-class citizen in the Barron's box. The 8 point Scrabble X has not a single representative among the golden five hundred, while the A which in Scrabble is worth a paltry single point and there are many of them (9 tiles), is the first letter of 56 words in Barron's, more populous than any other letter, as if the person doing the anointing got tired after A, went out for a cigarette or coffee break, and figured he or she was never going to break the median income for the average household in Hauppauge, Long Island, and so what if the remaining 444 words are chosen according to a more random system. The pay is the same. It's worthwhile to note the ranking isn't absolutely ironclad. There are some exceptions to the data, but in general, large numbers of tiles of low points in Scrabble indicate a letter is common, while rarity is honored with a high score. With the SAT, another kind of game, rarity hints at linguistic obscurity, a letter rarely in first place among English words, therefore, why bother?

Scorecard

SAT                                                       Scrabble

Words per Letter                                 Number of tiles and points per letter

A: 56                                                     A: 9 tiles, 1 point

B: 10                                                     B: 2 tiles, 3 points

C: 46                                                     C: 2 tiles, 3 points

D: 55                                                     D: 4 tiles, 2 points

E: 52                                                     E: 12 tiles, 1 point

F: 16                                                      F: 2 tiles, 4 points

G: 9                                                       G: 3 tiles, 2 points

H: 11                                                     H: 2 tiles, 4 points

I: 51                                                       I: 9 tiles, 1 point

J: 2                                                        J: 1 tile, 8 points

K: 2                                                       K: 1 tile, 5 points

L: 13                                                      L: 4 tiles, 1 point

M: 16                                                     M: 2 tiles, 3 points

N: 9                                                       N: 6 tiles, 1 point

O: 15                                                     O: 8 tiles, 1 point

P: 46                                                     P: 2 tiles, 3 points

Q: 6                                                       Q: 1 tile, 10 points

R: 35                                                     R: 6 tiles, 1 point

S: 30                                                     S: 4 tiles, 1 point

T: 12                                                     T: 6 tiles, 1 point

U: 5                                                      U: 4 tiles, 1 point

V: 10                                                    V: 2 tiles, 4 points

W: 1                                                     W: 2 tiles, 4 points

X: 0                                                      X: 1 tile, 8 points

Y: 0                                                      Y: 2 tiles, 4 points

Z: 1                                                       Z: 1 tile, 10 points

2:00 Appointment

The sample sentence writer dreams of the five hundred, and ticks the letters off as they're completed. Since she has no insurance, she's sitting in a clinic's waiting room with a chronic migraine headache. Blank cards fill her pockets because time is money, and she can't stop working, even here where the long wait at the clinic represents time to be utilized. A girl of test-taking age sits to her left, her leg in a cast, covered with the names of her friends and classmates who dot their eyes with flowers and smiley faces. The man to her right has a tattoo of shark jaws on his elbows, so when fist meets shoulder, the fish bites, and he strikes up a conversation with the girl, talking across the sample sentence writer, as if she weren't there, making it impossible to concentrate on her work. The waiting room is crowded, and there is no empty chair to move to. The sample sentence writer caps her pen and stares at a benign abstract painting, a classic waiting room painting, of scattered shapes: tangles of blue lines, razor wire, tumbling like tumbling tumble weed across the canvas, a shaky house-like icon, a bowling pin shape, a possibly humanoid form, though limbless, that she takes to be the resident of the house icon fleeing through the razor wire, looking for comfort in the cumulous mass in an upper corner which, if you look closely, you can make out another bowling pin-like figure. Here is a visual language, as if cuneiform and hieroglyphics have yet to be invented, and so these symbols, begging for interpretation, race across the surface of the canvas. The bowling pin couple search for one another, threatened by the razor wire screeches. All shapes are slanted as if blown by a strong gust. The shark jaw man is called into the back of the clinic. Finally, silence. She pulls out the M words, M the exact middle of the box. 

The Story of M

A malicious mercenary and his unit, spurred on by the exigencies of their own materialism were methodical and meticulous as they stalked the property. Their mission was to eliminate the leader of an underground network that was known to be subverting and sabotaging authority in the small but oil rich fiefdom. The man was said to be a misanthrope, but clearly this was a misnomer. In order to run a hidden system charged with serious disruption, he needed a network of support, and he was not miserly in the remuneration he provided to his devoted followers who risked their lives to join his cause. Yet to those close to him, the man was a tyrant. One would think he wanted to mitigate the suffering of others, that was how he advertised himself, in so far as he was able to do so, but in reality, he was not a munificent soul. His loyal followers tried to mollify him without success. The atmosphere at headquarters was morose, and disgruntled employees voiced their complaints in secret. He belittled them in a myriad of ways from shouting insults to shoving them against a wall, yet many continued to worship him and see the man as their only hope. The marred and frightening world outside the compound walls was, they suspected, even worse. When the commandos stormed his headquarters, his last sentence was, it's all a metaphor for something. The sound was lost in gunfire, the exact word was never actually heard with clarity, or perhaps he never got it out before bullets piercing his ribcage cut off any possibility of further speech. The underlings would have welcomed the relief offered by the soldiers, but they knew, when the dust cleared, they were simply trading in one dictator for another.

The Universal Leave Me Alone

Meanwhile, back in Hauppauge, the meter that measures the frequency of repeated test words could be beeping and spitting out new vocabulary candidates, replacing morose, for example, with moribund, luminous with lambent, ebullient with effusive. Millions of potential test-takers put their obsolete boxes up for sale on ebay, but with revisions, the old words are becoming worthless, chased out of the house. Their ultimate destination may well be the landfill. 

My son flees the five hundred. He runs out the door, and why not? The five hundred words contain the keys to the universe, they have that reputation, that rumor surrounding them, that's how they are advertised, but as the door clicks shut, you might ask, as other sixteen-year-old boys and girls ask, accidentally knocking the cards on the floor, whose universe do these cards unlock exactly?

According to statistics there are no registered sex offenders in Hauppauge, New York, tornado activity is above the state average, but earthquake activity is below the state mean. The likely residents counted as self-reported same-sex unmarried-partner households are listed at 0.2%. Sixty Hauppaugians live in halfway houses for drug/alcohol abuse, fifty-four citizens live in homes for the mentally ill. It doesn't appear to be a town which would house saboteurs or subversives, so the sentences which proclaim, in standard accepted English, that a tirade is hurled by a committed smoker, frustrated by restrictions imposed on his or her wish to light up, and antipathy is felt by fans of one baseball team towards fans of an opposing team, mark out the territory of example and usage, a geography of relative peace and harmony, the home of the high frequency five hundred where itinerant is bracketed by hackneyed on one side and irreproachable on the other, each disconnected alphabetically-arranged representative immune to the tyranny of selection that they, in fact, signify. The meat and potatoes of the testing system itself.

The sky is solid dark gray. Overcast, dreary, it bleeds down from the sky, covering everything. It would seem depressing but it's been like this so many days in a row, it doesn't really feel like anything anymore. Every day, I wake up and it's the same: already nearly as dark as I left it the night before, already pushing day into night before it even had a chance to get started. I fall asleep, wake up, it's overcast and dreary grey. It feels more nothing than depressing, every day the same as before.

The parking garage is underground, below my apartment building. I circle around, down one floor, then another.  I've never before parked in the garage instead of in the outside lot. I don't know why today. Five months ago, I moved in, parked outside two days in a row, and two days became every day. Five months of parking in one of the three closest-to-the-stairwell-exit parking spaces, five months of not so much cloudy days as solid-smudge-of-charcoal days, a constant threat of rain but only ever an empty threat. Maybe today will be different. Maybe today I'll park in the garage, maybe today the sky will finally spill itself out on us, rain at least a change from nothing, from the ever-present possibility of rain. I park, follow the signs to the elevator, take it up to the 3^rd floor.

When I moved in—carrying from moving van to elevator to room, my mattress, and TV, and bookshelves, and boxes and boxes and boxes of I-don't-know-what, most of which I still haven't yet unpacked—I had the thought that the hallway reminded me of The Shining. But that isn't true. This hallway is shorter, more clinical. I'd confused blandness with creepiness, wanting it to remind me of something. Creepy seems at least more interesting than bland, forgettable, nothing.

I count off the apartment numbers as I walk by—320, 318, 316—before realizing I am counting down, not up toward my 342. I look one way down the hallway, then the other. I turn around, go back toward, and then past, the elevator. I realize my apartment is to the left when I come up the stairwell, as I always do, but the elevator is on the other side of the hall. I should have turned right. Curse all left turners, she used to say.

At the end of the hallway, I stand in front 342, shaking my head at myself, my confusion. I take out my keys, do a double take at my neighbor's. There's a welcome mat where I'm sure I've never seen one before. But it's dirty, age-worn, not new. My key stops halfway into the lock and won't go in further. I take it out, turn it over, but it won't fit in the lock at all that direction. I turn it back to its original position; again, it stops half-in.

I look down at the welcome mat, back at my door. The copper hamsa that a co-worker gave me as a gift upon returning from her trip to India is missing. I turn, look around. I pinch the bridge of my nose, where the beginnings of a headache are starting to crawl from my temples to somewhere below and behind my eyes.

I walk the hallway back the other direction, past the elevator again, continuing in the direction I'd first started. At this end of the hallway, my neighbor doesn't have any welcome mat, but there is a home sweet apartment door-hanging. My door here doesn't have the hamsa either, but now I'm wondering if I didn't take down the palm-shaped amulet at some point and forget. Or somebody could have taken it? When was the last time I remember seeing it on my door? I try my key and it surprises me by sliding all the way in. But the key doesn't turn, the door doesn't unlock.

I take a couple steps back, try to think it through. I'm glad nobody in either apartment opened the door, hearing me try to let myself in. Glad no one has been in the hallway at all for me to have to explain myself to. Are the hallways always this empty, this quiet? Have I ever seen someone else walking to or from their apartment, ever given a neighborly nod or wave? Ever seen anyone going up or down the stairs, had to maneuver around other cars in the parking lot, arriving or leaving home sweet apartment? I can barely remember ever previously walking these halls, being in this building; can barely think of anything other than the droning pain in my head.

A sharp ding! echoes down the hallway, then the slight sound of the elevator doors opening. I walk toward them, prepare to wave, get ready to ask how's it going? Prepare to act as casual as possible, like I'm not confused, lost in my own apartment building. The elevator is still open when I get there, no one having exited or still inside. I again look down toward one end of the hallway, then the other. 432, I think, repeating it in my head. 432, 432, 4—. I look up at the numbers above the open elevator. I'm on the third floor.

I've never before lived in an apartment complex. I lived with my parents, then a dorm, then a house with college friends, then another house with different friends, a duplex with a girl, with my parents again, briefly, then a small house with one of the college friends from my first house, then a different duplex with a different girl, then the basement of a married friend, and now this, my first apartment. There are two towers, each nine stories, the tallest building for miles in any direction in this small town. A river runs nearby, with a nice trail to a park. There's a small convenience store in the building, and a cafeteria-like restaurant open for breakfast and lunch. Actually, what it reminds me of, if anything, is my dorm, the first place I lived, before all the others. That building has been used in a couple movies, as a European hotel where Olympic athletes stayed and an empty warehouse that nobody can escape from in a B-horror movie I saw the trailers for but never the movie itself. Sometimes, I lie on the couch in my room and imagine I'm in one of those movies. Any movie. Sometimes I lie there and don't imagine or think of anything at all.

The fourth floor is the same as the third. I again turn left outside the elevator, but take fewer steps before again realizing my error. Turning around, the numbers climb: 418, 420, 422. I put my key in my door and it slides all the way in, and I pause, surprised, though unsure why I should be. I can feel the door respond to me opening it, but then it stops. I've never once locked that deadbolt when leaving the apartment. Sometimes I lock it when home, inside the apartment, though just as often I don't. The door itself locks automatically when I leave, and the apartment building is locked as well, so I've never stopped and taken the time nor precaution for the extra lock of the deadbolt. I try my same key in the second lock—it fits, but won't turn. It won't unlock, but I knew it wouldn't. I stand still and silent, listening, wondering again if someone inside heard me trying to let myself in. I try to think of as simple an explanation as possible, should someone open the door, though who might that be? Who else would be in my apartment, why would they open the door?

What if the person who opens the door is me, some alternate version? Would the alternate look just like me, or be slightly, subtly different? Would each of us recognize the other as ourselves, or only one of us? Would we not look alike but still recognize ourselves, some dream logic version of it making perfect sense?

No one opens the door.

I'm unsure what to do now. I'm sure I haven't transposed my numbers again. This neighbor's door is free of welcome mat and door decoration, as is my actual neighbor's, as is this door in front of me, my door, as are more doors than not, I see, looking up and down the hallway. The decorated is the exception not the rule. The door in front of me, room 432, doesn't have a hamsa hanging on the hook below the apartment number, but hadn't I remembered having taken that down? Or having noticed it missing in the previous week? I'm suddenly overcome with the feeling that, by hanging the amulet that was supposed to ward off evil, I've accidentally invited some kind of evil into my life. A dull pain pulses somewhere deep in my head that I can't quite place—the headache from before returned, or there all along but newly noticed.

I sigh. Close my eyes, thinking I might reopen them to find this has all been a dream.

I return to the elevator, take it down to the garage. I'll go eat and come back, and this will be like it never happened. Or I'll go stay with a friend, or I'll just drive around the block and return to normality and it'll all be just a funny story. The longer I'm in these hallways, the more confused I get, the less sure I am of which apartment's mine, the worse my headache gets.

The dark of the garage is as dreary as outside, the concrete bland and claustrophobic as the sky, the forever looming weather, the hallways inside. Everything is ugly grey.

I see the sign that had previously directed me from car to elevator, but I also see another, under it. north tower. I roll it over, wondering if I'm misremembering, same as transposing apartment numbers. My apartment is in the south tower, I'm sure of it. I walk back toward my car, confused, head drumming, and see another sign around the corner. It directs me outside, down a short, covered walkway, into the lobby. I follow the path, a worn foot traffic trail in the carpet from door to elevator. Inside, the elevator looks and feels identical to the north tower's, but also more familiar. More right.

I push the button for the third floor, then also the fourth. I smile, feel a little relieved. At the third floor, the doors open, wait, close. I start putting the story together to tell friends—describing the weather, my headache, how I'd never parked in the garage before. How I'd been staying up late, all night some nights, watching the kinds of movies that, looking back, this all felt like. Turning left, then right; forgetting my apartment number. The hamsa on my door, the crazy alternate versions of myself I'd conjured. I smile again, then let myself actually laugh at the complete ridiculousness of it all.

The button for the fourth floor lights up.

The elevator doors will open, and I'll turn left on purpose, stop myself, laugh, turn right, and go home.

The elevator doors will open and it'll be all wrong—the carpet, the paint color, the length of the halls. It won't be my floor, maybe not my tower, perhaps not even my apartment complex.

The doors will open and I'll be staring at myself.

The doors will open and it will be my childhood home.

The doors will open and it'll be every house and dorm and duplex and basement I've ever lived in.

The doors won't open—stuck between floors, or the door itself stuck.

The doors will open to outside. It'll be night, raining, a storm of rain like I've never before seen.

The doors will open to pitch black, pure nothing, the complete absence of light that eyes can't adjust to.

The doors open.

A blank wall, I ask you, how's a girl supposed to act against a blank wall? How's she supposed to brandish a sword and growl an imprecation, when all she's facing is a big square sound-absorbent nothing? Alya realized she worked in the Dream Factory. She was hanging in, at any rate, and long familiar with the improbabilities of the business, such as fighting to the death in club lipstick. Such as this soft-porn version of the Ionic chiton (KIY-tuhn, insisted the dialog coach, KIY-tuhn). Years ago, on her first project, Alya had learned to brandish her cleavage as well as a weapon, give the fanboys what they want, even the S-&-M tease of struggling in chains (latex, no heavier than one of her kid's toys). But for this project she had to work with a wall. A convincing scream can be an actress's worst challenge, people didn't understand, but the only threat before her was the shadow of an X, a cross-hairs projected on beige matte, a placeholder for a monster. X marks the monster—and this when the fear was supposed to be primal. The ogres under development, over in GGI, were supposed to loom up out of our muckiest pre-rational sediments. Out of the dawn of Western Civ.

Alya had every right to know where the killing blow might come from. She had every right to a plausible fight choreography, even if it meant taking time from the shooting schedule. Her director however handled her as if he wasn't much more than a fanboy himself. One silver-tongued devil of a fanboy: An actress of your caliber, he'd murmur, of your stature.... all beside the point, especially when you considered that flattery was in the job description, for a director. His sweet nothings included the project's tagline for the press: Part nano-tech 3-D action-adventure, part date-night, chick-friendly.

Okay, but Alya was the chick in question, she could still play nubile, hanging in, and a week into shooting she got her director to admit he hadn't read the book. Come on, he grumped, an adaptation. Okay, but if he'd known the original he could've provided a clearer sense of the dangers facing Alya and her romantic lead—and that guy was no help either. Seven years younger, a former Disney androgyne buffed up for the role, her co-star remained a cuddle-toy. In skirt and sandals, no less. A week into shooting, she had no option except to exercise what was left of her starpower.

CGI lay just across the lot. Felt like another planet, granted, a world in which the sentient beings bore only a rough resemblance, pocked and untucked, to the men on her side of the galaxy. The nerd who opened the "Oddeyes" file for Alya was just such an otherworldly creature, his comb apparently mistaken for a garden tool, plus this Zachary couldn't hide his crush on her. He couldn't even begin to hide it, his stare like the full moon, and beneath the moon curved its golden reflection, his wedding ring. You couldn't help but notice the ring, the poor guy didn't know what to do with his hands, and for a moment there the actress worried that the studio's go-cart had carried her back to high school. Was she going to wind up contending with an octopus, all grope and nibble? But as Zachary tweaked his software preferences, he regained his motor control, and Alya could suss out how, here on the Planet of the Function Keys, this get-together was a demonstration of his power. His wonkpower. She knew an invidious look when she saw one, and hadn't she seen more than one here in the labs, sharp looks, transparently invidious? The Morlocks had spun on their stools to watch her pass.

Then the man had the mockups open, the claws and wings and the wings with claws, plus the beaks and tentacles, and besides that a no-neck head on which, above a boxer's flattened nose, there bulged a single red-veined eye—and with all that popping open, on the biggest screen in the room, Alya left off fretting over the state of the guy's marriage or the degree of his Asperger's. This was about the work. About facing off against a critter as if you knew where the killing blow could come from, and she made a point of getting the names straight; you couldn't very well develop a decent choreography if you didn't know the enemy's name. Kharybdis, kay-RIB-dis, was that it, and what did you call this hulking one-eye over here? Pah, Polly, Polyphemus? One hellacious beastie by any name, that one, and she did wish she could see it move, she told her CGI-guy, meantime indulging in feminine wiles, a dimpling, a simpering. She came up with a name for him, "Zak-Man," and with that he worked up further animation. She got to see how the wings would unfold from the shoulders, the claws unfold from the wings, and when one troll unleashed its triple-spiked tail, whipping it around a horned carapace, Alya tried out a bit of Thai mixed-martial, maneuvers she'd picked up two or three projects back.

She came nowhere near her chaperone, but he was startled off his stool.

See but..., he said then, see but, I won, I wonder about a movie like this as a career move.

A movie like this? 3-D, CGI, FX? Cartoon action adventure?

On the level of the career, see. I wonder, an actress of your caliber...

Don't you remember Meryl working with special effects? She did a whole scene with her neck in a spiral like Rubber Woman. Didn't you see that?

Meryl was Rubber Woman?

They've all got a movie like this. Meryl, Sissy, Uma. Cher, Goldie, Sigourney.

See but, the Aliens thing...

That was Sigourney, her franchise, totally.

I, I do get how this project is special. It's only part 3-D nano-tech ...

I know, right?—because has anyone done a movie like this? Think about it. Has any actress gotten a stretch like this?

The woman who wrote the Odyssey. The Awe, Authoress of the Odyssey.

The authoress of the Odyssey. Her secret has lasted a thousand years, three thousand, but now at last the truth comes out. We rip away her disguise.

Her one-man Geek Squad, averting his eyes, clambered back on his stool. Alya bit back a smirk: Rip away her disguise?

Aloud, she went on: Plus there's a mystery, right, a natural MacGuffin.

See but, that you even know that expression, "Macguffin," see...

Who wrote the greatest poem in history? Who's the blind old cripple? Turns out it was a young Greek noblewoman!

Zachary kept his eyes on the screen, the latest hell-spawn.  You, you've read the book?

The two of them had met hardly half an hour ago, and already he sat there telling her about his dyslexia. Zachary could never make his way through a text so slow and antique, with words like "authoress"—but he assured her he was long familiar with the monsters, he wasn't that weird, and, see, hadn't Alya said something about getting a stretch? See, how about his stretch? His team was on board for the full gig, right through to any pickup scenes post-production, because in their corner of the industry, who wouldn't want to romp with terrors that were part of the, see, the cultural inheritance? Bad craziness, out of the pre-rational originally, yet now, like, cardinal freaks?

Plus a project like this, like action-tech, you, you know how they pay...

Yet to bring up the money sent him into diminuendo. Alya's new friend dipped his head, frowning, silent, and twisted and twisted his ring.

She could suss things out. Behind her storklike companion she could spy the room's 800-pound gorilla. The man was thinking of her divorce, to bring up the money brought up the divorce, the irreconcilable differences, everybody on the lot had heard, and on the next lot too, and the next and the next, and anywhere the news spread, anyone with half a brain could figure it was costing a bundle. Simply to return to her own home, this evening—that cost a bundle. That made a role as action-tech eye-candy look like a career move.

Now Alya could softpedal her goodbyes, dimpling again for the Monster Wrangler. She could text her assistant a bland reminder about morning makeup. But both these people, like most of the players in town, kept the same gorilla on a leash. They knew what it cost to maintain a spread-wing home while at the same time grappling in the mud-pit of child custody. The ex too could throw around some power. Nevertheless, once she got home, she enjoyed again the melody of the new security code. She could find the zen in throwing dinner together (tonight, pasta primavera) and eyeballing her pour (Falanghina), keeping it under six ounces. So too she got her warm'n'fuzzies with the kid, though tonight they only spoke on the phone. At least with Caller ID the ex didn't butt in, and afterwards Alya crossed the house to the gym, thinking yoga but slipping, instead, into mixed-martial. You go, girl. You got some moves, for those homunculi. Scaly old homunculi, they can't handle your moves. By the time the actress tottered back into her office, she might plop down at her desk and pull out some financials, she really needed to check those financials, but she couldn't make her way through a single transaction. She couldn't handle any computations more difficult than the pros and cons of sleeping in yogawear. As for her pour of Grey Goose, the shot was a tad enhanced, the glass a gift from On The Rox, and later on, thinking back, trying to make sense, Alya understood she'd drifted off before her papers and laptop, there in the Aero-Chair, before the monster hopped up onto her desk. She'd woken to find the creature scrabbling through a couple of quarterly statements.

Later on, thinking back, she recalled the vague notion that this must be a prank—sophisticated as all get-out and vicious beyond belief, a prank cooked up south of Satan—and yet she'd had that notion, a flicker of false illumination: this bastard on her desk could only be someone's idea of a joke. A rat-tailed, hook-nailed bastard, also mantis-armed, plate-faced, terrier-toothed, all no more than a foot high and scrabbling through her papers. One good eyeful and any better thinking was out the window, off along the migration lanes, and Alya was left with vague and impossible notions, or flashes of indignant aggro (those papers were private...), nothing in her head so potent as her screams, an office-full of screams, a double-wing-full, so that if she were getting punk'd she gave the joker just what he wanted, the total scaredy-cat, though nothing so nimble as a cat, rather maybe a marionette in the hands of an epileptic. Her top rode up, her pants slipped down. If this were all a mean trick (and she wouldn't put it past her babyfaced lead, he'd never seen a piece of scenery he couldn't chew...), then Alya gave them such a bellowing funkadelic hop-scotch, with so much skin showing, that the video would go viral before the echoes faded. At some point her screams cohered into threats: she'd call 911, she'd call the service, she had Mace, she had a hammer, a poker from the fireplace, and then her head cleared enough for her to find the biggest kitchen knife, a cleaver longer than the critter itself. Her panic relented enough for her to throw in a couple of moves, if she were on video she might as well show some moves, roundhouse from the left, from the right, not too shabby, at least it got the attention of the ogre nosing through her stuff. The little abortion hunkered down, there on the latest bank statement, you might even say it cowered, ducking behind its claws with its tail coiling around its, its ankles or whatever they were. Ugly little animule or whatever it was. Still it waited out her threats, her Thai aggro, it squatted over deposits and withdrawals like the worst nightmare of an audit, and finally Alya returned to her right mind, more or less. She could recognize the notion of a prank as insipid, totally, another insipid dream of how your real life must be elsewhere. The dream in which you're under observation and earning good grades.

Then came the low comedy with the neighbor.

Alya had neighbors, part of the script that she and the ex had been following. No ranch in Montana for them, no compound on Virgin Gorda, they lived in a neighborhood, they walked to the store, even if it what they bought there were saffron and morels. Once in a while, too, they could gab over the fence. They could share a sack of tomatoes or a peek into another soul, and come a night when somebody sent up screams powerful enough to set the spoons and wineglasses tinkling, well, that person had neighbors.

Thank God—or, considering Alya's current project, the gods?—the face at her door turned out to be phlegmatic. Decidedly phlegmatic, deeply wrinkled, the face of the widower who lived uphill, an industry longtimer who could always say he'd heard worse. He could play it like a trump: he'd seen so much back in Da Nang, everything else was No Thang. He'd caught a magic carpet to the States, he'd swooped down amid the other Vietnamese in sets and costume (they ran the union for years), and tonight was just another ripple in the ride. Just another white girl gone bat-shit, and never mind that she was wearing VC pajamas and a face that called to mind a napalm victim. As for the monster, it'd gone scoot. The gargoyl-ino had shown off its leap at the first long syllable of the doorbell, ahnnng-, and it leaped, -gehlll-l, and it caromed farther, lamp to divan, legs dangling, you thought of a wasp with jet propulsion, and Alya might've been startled but she was done with screaming. As the creature scuttled behind the divan, she only let go a long, low syllable of her own, a sigh out of doo-wop.

After that, as she stood in the doorway before the refugee-made-good, well, talk about sets and costumes. Alya cloaked herself in a story. She kept her back to her house.

The neighbor took it quietly, his wrinkles staying put, through from time to time he brushed his thumb across his iPhone, keeping the screen aglow. You could see he'd brought up the speed-dial, one touch would summon the police—and it was kind of the man that he'd come to her first. It was kind of him to think how it would look if she had a black'n'white show up at the house. The paparazzi had a sixth sense for this, a star with her head on a pike, but Alya lived alongside the local sachem, an industry sachem.

Thank God, or the gods. Yet even as she told him so, her smile genuine or almost, the actress stuck to her story.  She insisted that tonight was about the work.

A convincing scream, she said, people don't understand, it's work.

Now it was his turn to sigh, more Delta than doo-wop.

You've been there. Never enough rehearsal, the budget is such a, a bogeyman. Now, tonight, here, I'm sorry, but, where else?

 I've heard worse, he said.

The screen on his phone had gone dark.

A comedy, that encounter, call it The Beggar At the Gate, except Alya came away feeling as if she'd been the beggar and her neighbor had brought just what she needed. A cup of apathy, he'd brought her, because now as her creepy stowaway re-emerged, wasting no time hopping back up on her desk, she went on past without breaking stride, making for the guest bath. In there she fished out the stub of a spliff from the baggie at the bottom of the ibuprofen jar, her assistant had a dispensary permit, and as she got her first toke she came back into the room and stretched out on the divan. If she'd had a feather boa she would've draped it around herself. She sipped on her spliff and sized up her new house pet.

And vice-versa, insofar as she could tell where it was looking, this hybrid of rat and crab and hornet. Its triceratops-head hung above the bookkeeping, long enough for the reluctant host to stop picturing herself with her throat torn open, or with dæmon larva in her belly. Rather she fretted about her wrinkles. At this hour her dimples lost their charm, and the smoking didn't help, especially not month-old weed, stale enough to send her into a fit of coughing. By the time Ayla got her next level breath, her hideous guest had returned to its invasion of her privacy. Pawing once more through her financials, its movements almost polite, it appeared to be concentrating. It extended a longer claw into a desk drawer and pincer'd out her checkbook. Alya was old-school about the checkbook, too, she kept her own set of figures, and the drawer might've popped open during the earlier ruckus. In any case it was time to quench the spliff and drop it back in her baggie, time to fold the baggie back under the ibuprofen and run the bottle back into the guest bath (where a guest might've left it, see...). If there were any psychedelia stranger than a monster in your house, it was a monster with a CPA.

Its movements were almost polite, delicate with the check register, and the actress saw no reason not to draw nearer. No reason not to study how the limbs and torso, if about ten times their size, might strike a killing blow. And look, lo—what was prophesied by Zacharia did come to pass!

Today's mockups, ka-ching! Look, lo, the wings, their veins and texture. So too the tail, the flex of the unused claws, these had an ugliness entirely familiar, as did the ribbing and abdomen. Alya fell into a bob and weave, her offense, her defense, taking full advantage of the synchronicity, her swami-nerd who'd seen the future. Because didn't every actress have a story like this? A career move that would never have happened without some mad synchronicity? They all had a story like this, some gift freak they'd known better than to look in the mouth, and Gwyneth had ended up with an Academy Award. A gilded dingus without hair or genitals, now there was a household monster Alya could use, and so tonight she parried and kicked, she skipped and threw jabs, and she came up with questions.

Is that all you got?

The wee mooncalf once more raised its head.

Don't you want to rip out my guts, gnaw on my bones, and leave me nothing but a spot on the floor?

Its mandible retracted, almost sheepish.

Not that Alya could go on trying to read the thing's mind all night, not with the medical MJ burning in the throat and weighing on the brain. That Grey Goose in the freezer was calling: time to migrate. As for her ugly nocturnal emission here, she had plenty to keep it busy, a couple of scary notices about her investments for instance. And how about that photo album from before the breakup? She and the ex had kept a photo album, sure, printouts and stickum were part of the narrative, and now she dug the book from its hiding place and opened it across the mess on her desk. The shots from the Maldives, why not, she'd rocked that bikini. When some scum with a telephoto lens had caught her topless, when he'd sold the pics to TMZ, well, she'd rocked that too.

Through some miracle she made it to the far end of the bedroom wing—I know, right?—and after that insured herself hours upon hours of unconsciousness, setting her Droid on mute. She figured she retained starpower enough to keep the studio from sending a gofer, for one morning anyway. And when Alya showed up on the lot, it was refreshed and without apology. She hid the chill of what she'd seen before leaving the house, the nips the bastard's claws had made in the photo album. The book wound up back where she'd buried it, of course, but before that she couldn't help but notice: divots, nibbles, nips, along the edges of a page or three. Also on a bank alert about a recent withdrawal, itty cuts and slashes, as if her life were a whittle-stick. The recollection gave her a chill, but she could hide the chill, she had enough to contend with right here on the sound stages, in particular her romantic lead. Her solicitous pretty boy: Got your beauty rest? You feeling it, now? If the kid had his druthers, she'd sleep longer than Snow White. He'd prefer just one name above the title, one set of abs flaunted against that blank screen, and come to think, wasn't that the worst of what Alya had to contend with? Wasn't that the fission core, that rectangle of dumb pale matte? High time she stood up on her hind legs and showed off her chops, what had she been doing since yesterday if not the work, the chops, and before the boy lost his concerned pout (adorable, Brando goes Disney), she was back in her chiton and cleavage. She had her dialog, that had never been the problem, and the actress got her sword out, she began sketching Z's before a spot on the wall, and at that point the director had his nose in the latest budget report, but in half a minute he let the papers drop. He nudged aside the principal cameraman. The director needed to see this, a girl and her monster soaring to a height from which they could peer into the very goop of the Unconscious, and choreography wasn't even the word, not any longer, not the way Alya was feeling it, not the way she was hearing it, the director's new pitch to the press, another dream of another life taking shape as a murmur in her head, a burst of movieola patter, the words all insect-segments, like "postapocalyptic" or "Pixar-Matrix­," "splatter-saga" or "aggro-buzz" or "B.O.-whammo," or maybe "S-&-M-Whack-a-Mole," or then again "myth-o-matic," "freak-smack" or "Clyteme-nation," way past the old school like "thumbs-up" or "topline," instead perhaps "nano-alchemy," "wanna-palooza," "blog-catnip," "retro-viral," "widget-able," "gawk'n'gag," or then again "Oscar-prime" or "Oscar-pimp," or could be "3D-world," "world-boff," "world-preem," "world-whammo"...

When she came out of the scene the director got her eyeball to eyeball. Loudly he announced that, next, they were doing a full dragonslaying. A Scylla-slaying, and as for the romantic lead, he should dial down.

What?, asked the boy. You want me to play sidekick?

His pout soured. Alya wanted to tell the kid the bile did him good, it was his ticket out of the Mouseketeers, but she didn't feel like getting her head bit off.

Besides, it wasn't any second-line player she needed to speak with now. After the Scylla was slain, after she was back at the makeup station getting the gore scrubbed away, she had her assistant call over to the Geek Ghetto. This time the nerd would get the go-cart, and wouldn't you know it, just talking with Zachary left Alya's girl with supernatural powers. Suddenly she could read minds. After the call the assistant handed over a folder in which, stashed among the documents, there lay a fat spliff fresh from the dispensary.

As his cart pulled up, her bad-hair boy was on the phone, the conversation intense. He had to use Alya's name twice before he could ring off.

Awe, awesome, he declared. They're into a whole 3D-redo.

He kept hold of the phone, perhaps to keep from grabbing her.

They're back to the storyboards, he declared. Xena-rific, they're saying. 

The guy wasn't a director, and this made his sweet-talk that much more tasty. The folks from makeup were still in earshot, too.

Warrior Princess Queen of the Underworld. Franchise-ready.

Also Alya knew what the computer jockey got out of being seen with her, and why not indulge him? Why not soften him up?

Finally: Zachary, I ask you—where do you get your ideas? 

Overhead, the floodlights had come on, and against the tarmac, the trailer siding, his shadow lengthened and hooked.

See but, Al, Alya, what? I told you I haven't read the book.

The book, well, a smart guy like you doesn't need to read it. Smart guy like you, you can imagine what it's like, for this woman. A gifted young woman.

You, you can tell where it's going.

You can tell a mile off, no MacGuffin about it, where the girl got her ideas.  

The way he gripped his phone, you noticed his wedding band.

The author too, Alya went on, he's no mystery, one of those old Brit polymaths. If anyone were going to rewrite the Odyssey... But then there's you.

Behind him, his crooked shadow might've come out of a horror-show.

Where do you get your ideas? Do you just close your eyes and, where are we, another world? Everyday you face that blank wall.

Uhh, a blank screen...

She went on staring, narrowly, avid, while with his free hand the nerd found his other, he cradled his phone and fingered his ring, and though he'd switched the Droid to mute it kept blowing up, its message-lights blooming across his narrow chest. When at last he spoke, what came out was distracted and clueless: Cultural inheritance?  Nonetheless the actress let it go. What further clarity did she need, when she had the guy's own breastbone, aglow with its Bat-Signal? He didn't want to talk about it, her Zak-Man, he couldn't chase down that pill, because it led back behind the bones, into that breathless, bloody darkness, with its throbbing omnivorous hulks, and after Alya had once more made her goodbyes, after she'd negotiated the traffic and the alarm and she was once more alone in the house, she knew just how to bring her night caller around. She knew how to get her papers scratched and gnawed on, her interiors tagged with rowdy graffiti. She might've started growing a claw herself, she had such a grip on her spliff while she dug for the sex tape. She didn't want the tape she was using to threaten the ex, no, but the one he'd never been able to find, the tape with her previous ex, plus a dose of X, not to mention an extra, a girl from On the Rox. That ought to interest the little troglodyte more than her financials, and she had better paperwork for it too, like the receipts for her abortions. She had the mugshot from when they'd busted the escort service. Alya had taken care of herself a long time before she had to take care of a child, indeed before anyone had called her Alya, and in the photo from the bust, the stare she was giving the officer in charge, she was making sure he got the message—if he gave her the mugshot, she'd be his freak—and she had the shot now, didn't she? She had rags and offal enough to occupy her nights for a lifetime, and with it, no end of outrageous promise.

The year we lived between the floorboards was the year we saw Mom's breasts for the first time. We had been.

Another year, we worried about our pee, and spent hours on the toilet. Willing it all out before bed. Pee did not come, and time and verbs will slide between sheets, up a hallway, away to school. And we'd wake in our bed, scared to move and scared of the hallway, but most scared of drowning there, from within.

Finally scarier still were our own breasts, not still at all but growing like disks of cancer. We were the only girl, and the rest of you were boys—penises unfairly always present.

Formula fed.

We were. And seeing Mom's breasts was an accident of sneaking. All before Hank, Sylvia, and Shirley Silver.

We saved frogs. We did it like this: in a tank in a bedroom we keep the frogs from water for many days, and then we ladle it onto their smalled, cracked bodies. They grow again like slow-motion popcorn, shape-changing. The ladle was a stainless steel spoon.

We killed a turtle. Accidentally. Once we fed her tomato and then pretended to think she had her period or a miscarriage—the seeds stand in for turtles that would never be. Dead eggs. The turtle was alive then, but after we forgot to make her up, and then she is dead because we forgot to feed her too. She liked lettuce more than carrots.

Scary movies make us touch clitorises. Our own or not our own. Only penises call this lack. We go camping, and we feel like white people. We are white people camping just like white people. We spot a bald eagle and someone throws up.

The house contained nipples for all of us, but now mine were swelling. And where were you? It was the year we lived between the floorboards. Where were you?

There also was the problem of Ruby Jones, Ruby Jones quiet and polite. Her nipples were not swelling. She had not caught cancer, she did not have a penis, all she had was good.

There are a lot of kinds of frogs, and we don't know about any of them. Our parents say, What. Frogs are frogs. We bring a guinea pig home to die. We choose it because it's the quietest one. It's so quiet because it's dying. Later we see frogs on TV, raping other frogs. Like ducks, or men.

Mom's breasts, I worried, could be cut off. But when I told my brother, he said, She keeps them secret. No one will cut them off. I asked if someone might take my nipples, pointing as they were now, but you said they'd take your penis first.

Ruby Jones said later, I can't believe you talk to your brother that way.

So I start talking to the nipples, who didn't seem to judge though they were intent on growing. I said, I don't want you. The nipples seemed long, and they didn't say anything, but I thought I saw them crying.

Of course I didn't. My nipples were strong.

Ruby Jones, still flat-nippled, showed me her pubic hair. I brushed it with my mom's brush, but when I told my brother he didn't laugh. He said, You're so rude. Ruby Jones didn't have pubic hair yet, so this was harder than it is.

My mom, with her big, secret breasts. My mom who does not look for us between the floorboards. My mom who would not have happy hour with Ruby Jones's mom. Ruby Jones's mom who saw me and said, By spring you'll have cleavage.

My nipples said, You'll never have cleavage. I crept from between my floorboards and took Mom's bra. It is too large, and I was scared, thinking of my cancerous nipples filling the whole thing. Cleavage could not be worth it.

We had leapt from the back of the couch, pretending to be white people sky-diving. But we are just white kids jumping off the back of a couch in a white neighborhood. And then my nipples start to tingle or bleed, stay behind or jump ahead. I quit jumping and my nipples and my brother go on without me. I didn't know how to pronounce brassiere, wasn't ready to wear one.

Between the floorboards, I stopped wearing a shirt. I let my nipples hang out with everyone else, and they kept getting bigger. Soon I had breasts.

My breasts had big nipples and my nipples liked to feel—a little breeze or the tickle of the floorboards. And I liked to feel the nipples, surrounded by a fat that quivered.

My brother said, It's getting weird, hanging out with your nipples.

Ruby Jones said, I wish I could use a straw to blow mine up.

I said, Ruby, do you want to feel mine? Maybe it will help.

Ruby Jones kissed my nipples.

My brother kissed my nipples.

My nipples kept getting bigger. They were fat. They were my favorite part of my body.

I stopped worrying about cancer and cleavage. I loved my fat nipples. Ruby Jones loved my fat nipples. My brother loved my fat nipples. They were so fat.

We stopped living between the floorboards. By then we were vegan: people who are white, we thought, should not eat flesh. My brother went to a new school, and I began to keep my breasts secret. Ruby Jones didn't use a straw as far as I know, but her breasts grew. My brother kissed her nipples even though they weren't as fat as mine.

We save frogs. We take them from the muddy stream and put them in the water jug in the fridge. No one drank them. Dead in the cold like that, they were like tumors we can pretend to share. We listen to bluegrass music, shaking our frogs and tumors like we're dancing, and we have no idea what year it was.

I started keeping my breasts secret. I lived between the window and the wall, and laid carpet down in my room. I met Chris Forney. We rubbed our bodies on the carpet. I licked Chris Forney's nipples. He blew on mine.

My mom asked me if we were using protection. I said, I keep my breasts secret. My mom said, let me see them.

My mom licked my nipples.

Chris Forney licked my nipples.

My brother and Ruby Jones came in, and they licked my nipples. My nipples kept getting fatter. I wanted everyone to lick them.

My brother started to nibble. Ruby Jones started to nibble. Chris Forney started to nibble. Even Mom started to nibble.

Now I have no nipples left.

Another year what I was afraid of was the soft skin under my fingernails. What if the nails should fall off and expose ten little vaginas, ready to be fucked? To say nothing of my toes. That year I lived like smoke at the ceiling, and discovered my other brother, younger.

We were in the womb together, once. Twins. But I grew stronger and flattened you. And then, eight years later, you grew back. Inside Mom. I was fourteen and undressed in front of you, and you wore stripes. We were twins, left-handed. And you were such a baby, even your nipples were fat.

High school? Breathing was hard. But we left the oxygen tanks between the window and the wall—they were heavy and expensive. We did not have the grades to get to Posterity, and were stalled. Spanish and English teachers alike say I do not understand tense, yet they do not know about living between the floorboards. I tried Latin, but that conjugation makes no more sense to my breath.

We wiped our noses with paper tissues, and mud came away. On the risers where we practiced standing and singing, there was a lot of dust, and we breathed it in. I meet Shirley and Hank Silver, who were not interested in being white. Shirley Silver ate the mud. Hank Silver put it on his body and calls himself Sylvia. We had left the oxygen tanks.

Sex had been clandestine, whispered about in basements. Accomplished only between a boy and his girl. But on the risers, we talked sex a lot. It was accomplished with great frequency, between many boys and a great number of girls and several other people, often in unsafe automobiles.

Hank Silver was not enjoying high school. Hank Silver is not my brother, who went to private school with Ruby Jones. Hank Silver is not my other brother, who lives between the floorboards now. My mom didn't look between floorboards. My mom said private school was for people who got grades. I hooked up with Hank and Shirley Silver. We are public.

We saved frogs. We found them in a barrel of oil behind the garage, and we filled a kiddy pool instead, transferred every last slicked but breathing frog. We give them fresh hose water, place them in the sun. And by morning they are all belly up dead, and shrinking.

Shirley Silver didn't like history or health. She said the climate here suited us. But for the dust, she was right. Breathing was hard, but the oxygen tanks were heavy. We left them and we got canned meat in the cafeteria. We were no longer vegan. Chris Forney? He got work-study and slopped the meat on our styrofoam plates. We inhaled the meat and made our way to the risers to practice graduating. We arrived in the morning and Hank Silver said, Call me Sylvia. Shirley Silver and I obliged, like we always do.

We guzzle milk after school and have sex in unsafe automobiles.

Shirley Silver eats mud like it's pie. She is full of clichés and more. By the time I made it to the risers, I longed for the days we spent lugging oxygen tanks on wheels like Hoovers. Saving frogs. To be so able. Of course Posterity is not about surprises, but I have expectations, as I'm sure Ruby Jones does, as I imagine my brother does.

The guidance counselor said I was so obliging because my mom, with her big, secret breasts, had succumbed to the difficulty of breathing. That was also why Shirley and Hank Silver hooked me, the counselor said. The counselor was not a doctor. She asked me what I had to say for myself. What? Unlike a frog, I cannot breathe through my skin. Like some frogs', my skin is white. I have another brother, though I have lost my nipples.

On the risers, Shirley and Sylvia Silver left me puking candy and vodka. Breathing even harder through the vomit, but what's worse is there won't be anyone to photograph my body when I am dead. My dad and me, we waked Mom. Then my dad disappeared, as men are wont to do, as my brothers did later. By and By, everyone looked like my dad, who looked like my brother. I never had sex with him.

For graduation, the Silver girls get a pet guinea pig; they get a lot of money too. Sylvia and Shirley Silver afford surgery to ease their breathing or shrink their penises or swell their breasts, and they gloat and gain weight, but I wheeze and look in the bottom windows of their raised ranch. They watch soft-core at night, while their parents do drinks or fellatio or arguments. We are stalled, in love, seventeen. This could be worse, like when Chris Forney kept blowing after my nipples were gone.

Always when my brothers or my mom or dad came home, I was there. Never I was in bed with someone else. I hope they will remember kindness like that. Breathing, after all, is hard.

Ruby Jones was not my sister. We watched scary movies, and we were going to be veterinarians. Fat as my nipples grew, her breasts were petite. And then she went to private school. I never even pretended Shirley Silver was my sister, and when she becomes pregnant, she screens my calls until they stop. Once I planned to breathe and wheeze with great difficulty if she should answer, but I didn't get the chance.

No one hit me.

We had been.

Hank Silver did not like my brothers, and Sylvia Silver told me about the vaginas under my nails. Everything is something else, but brushing my hair, I feel a lump nestled to my skull. A rock—a tick—a tumor—it was white. We had saved frogs. We had been formula fed. We hated it when our bodies were not the same body. It makes breathing so much harder.

I hold various headshots I've cut from my own photographs over your face
just to feel the wind blowing a few of your curls,
that little outboard's vibration under your hand on that lake
(at least I imagine it a lake) when I take your Selected Poems off the shelf.

Isn't power a weird thing? The boat's wake suggests some decent speed.
Sometimes I imagine if you sneezed right as Bruce Jackson snapped that photo
and your head bent down, I'd be back there in the middle of the wake
slalom skiing, waving one hand in the air.

People would wonder if I was waving at the camera or to you and Bruce.
Maybe I'd be about to put a thumb up or down as if to say speed on or slow now,
the water's rougher than it looks but nobody can tell because
Robert Creeley's driving a boat, having his picture taken, and probably writing

a poem in his head or at least thinking to himself this experience will become
a poem. I mean, really, how often does anyone drive a boat without looking, while posing
and pulling a skier? Nobody I know's ever done it. And I know a lot of people.
I'm sorry that I'm writing this to you in a present that is and isn't yours.

But I wasn't smart enough to know you before now. I'm still not, but Art Smith was
smart enough to tell me to buy your poems because he knew they would be good for me.
Like William Carlos Williams saying "there, and there" to you
because "what one wants is / what one wants, yet complexly" as you say he said.

When I read your poems, especially the early ones, I feel like I'm skiing behind you
into a whale's mouth. What a stunt it is to live, you say, when I climb into the tiny boat.
You pat my back, hand me a pen, paper, and bottle. Nobody'll believe us about this whale,
you say, and the paper's not waterproof, but trust'll get it where it needs to go.