Way out in the desert east of El Paso the light can’t bleed in. You can see the stars, but not your hand. The light can’t span the gap. The sand in the wind tears it up. The desert’s had enough light. Plenty by sunset.

In the darkness of the desert there are trailers. I’m speaking of one. The trailer is like a giant shoebox. It has sun bleached siding, like most. It has a short set of rough-grained wooden steps leading to a small landing of the same kind of wood. The steps and the landing are the same as most trailers’ steps and landings. The trailer has a screen door with a plasti-glass window turned the color of burnt sugar. The trailer also has a satellite dish. It’s a gray matte-plastic satellite dish bolted to a metal plate on a corner of the roof of the trailer. A thing of relative beauty and seeming purpose, as if the trailer was dropped there to hold it. The satellite dish, and its relative beauty, are common trailer sorts of things.

To get to this trailer, you’ll have to go way out. Take Montana Avenue east past where the trailers come in clusters around convenience stores and carnicerías and dollar stores and adult theaters and strip clubs. The skeleton frames of suburbs yet to be will loom black behind you, unlit but promising change.

Keep going.

Go past the clusters and the trailers spread out, as if one of those clusters exploded and scattered itself across the desert. The road will still be paved, but your neighbor’s house will look like an actual, normal-sized shoebox and you’ll have to drive awhile before you get to a convenience store or carnicería or adult theatre or strip club. It will be hard to find a pizza place that delivers.

Keep going.

Out farther, where your neighbor’s trailers are little more than pixels. Go until you sweat it because you forgot to fill your gas tank and you might not make it back. Drive where pizza delivery drivers will not go. Go until the amber streetlights along Montana Avenue disappear and you’re left floating in the dark with your glowing dash gauges and the pillars of your headlights. You’ll find company on your trip. Balloon bodies of dead dogs will greet you with their stiff-twig legs pointing the way. They’ll flare up in your high-beams then disappear. Sometimes they won’t be balloons. Sometimes you’ll find one spread out like a busted sack of beans. Dry beans, because you won’t see the slick gloss of gore you’d expect. Blood dries quick out here.

Keep going.

There’s a dirt road you’ll have to take marked on either side by metal stakes with round, red reflectors like cherries on top. The dirt road is named Calcott, but there’s no street sign to gleam green and bare the name. The mail man knows, the Calcott dwellers, too. No one else knows. No one needs to.

Keep going.

Follow Calcott. Kick up dirt like silt on the bottom of an ocean trench. Go until you see a trailer with sun bleached siding and a rough-grained set of wooden steps with a rough-grained wooden landing that leads to a screen door with a plasti-glass window turned the color of burnt sugar. If the trailer appears to be a giant shoebox pedestal for a gray matte-plastic satellite dish, you’re at the right place. There should be a man inside. His name is Ian. He’s taking a shower. It’s going to be a very long shower, and you’ve just missed the story.

Ian is in a carnicería.

He strains his flat hand into his back pocket for his billfold and works it out from the tight lip and takes a five. Ian breathes hard through his nose and sweat trickles from his scalp and curls around his eyebrows to sting his eyes raw pink in the whites. He wipes with his forearm. More sweat. Ian takes the hem of his shirt in hand. He bares his belly and wipes his face and waits.

The carnicería gasps burnt pork and Pine-Sol and Ian curls his nostrils and waits behind a guy in Dickies with paint splatter like bird shit behind the knees. A faded Che Guevara on the olive-drab back of the guy’s shirt stares at the Coke in Ian’s hand. The guy thumps his Bush quart on the counter and asks for lottery tickets. He asks for the ones with the boots.

The clerk nods and hunches over the roller full of tickets of all sorts and tears off the ticket with the boots.

Ian hates Texasy things: toothpicks, ten gallon hats, snuff can circles in the back pockets of Wranglers, big belt buckles, and especially cowboy boots. Ostrich, snake, alligator—he hates them all. Ian hates Texasy things and he hates guys that waste his time on a day hot as hell for a lottery ticket with the boots that won’t win anyways, and waste his time in the heat and the burnt pork and Pine-Sol vapor with his eyes sweat-stung when he could have what he needs and be on his way.

He wonders how he’d draw this guy in his Dickies and his Che shirt, waiting slack-jawed for his lottery ticket: mouth stuffed with tickets and all of them the ones with boots and none of them winners and stuffed until his jaw is unhinged and his eyes bulge and maybe a quart of Bush shoved up his ass for good measure. Maybe two, because Ian can draw whatever he wants. Ian is an artist. He has fingers that can make what forms in the dim place between thought and sight where Ian reforms the world in the spiral-bound notebooks he keeps in his closet. Years of notebooks, piled in the dark, where he can boil you in acid or make you spontaneously combust. If you’re a man he can draw you with tits and a pussy. If you’re a woman he can draw you with a dick and a beard. He can sodomize you with a beer bottle or make you fuck a pig. He can make you gay if you’re straight and straight if you’re gay. He can bare your innards to open flame and split your dick like a hotdog. He can make you a pedophile, a necrophiliac, or a talking tube of feces. Ian can do whatever he wants on paper.

Che-guy pays for his beer and his ticket, and Ian takes his place.

The clerk says que paso and calls him Mr. Ian.

“Nada, Mr. M,” Ian says.

The clerk is a husk of a man in an oil-smeared jump-suit. On the breast, embroidered in tight, white stitch: Mickey. Mickey has one finger bent at the smallest joint like a hook. Arthritis and redundant use. Mops and hand-trucks. Deep, dirt bearing parenthesis of wrinkles spread from the smile set side-cocked in Mickey’s face. Ian puts his Coke down on the counter and doesn’t say anything about the Marlboros. Mickey has them scanned and ready and he recites the price they both know like a joke they never finish.

Ian puts down the five and Mickey pinches two dimes between his thumb and bent finger and makes to hand them across the counter. Ian waves the change away. Mickey drops the change back in the register and tells Ian adios.

“Later,” Ian says.

Ian walks out of burnt pork and Pine-Sol into gasoline, dust, and distant road kill. His eyes wither in the light before they pull tight and adjust as he walks across the bone-bleach gravel to his pick-up. It was a maroon pick-up, in some place apart from time and the sun. It’s pink as a wound with rust spots and mud along the wheel wells. A man’s truck despite the pink. Loud and deep and no AC with the suspension broken in and given to complain like a mattress under hard fucking.

Ian hops in the cab. The suspension creaks. He turns the ignition and pulses the gas as it catches so the engine won’t sputter out. It roars into a grumbling idle and shakes Ian’s guts until he’s numb. It’s a good enough pick-up. Old and familiar. Good enough, but it’s not really Ian’s. It’s his brother’s.

Ian’s brother George wears Wranglers with snuff circles in the back pocket and a big belt buckle with two pewter cowboys roping a pewter steer in the middle of the flat leather face framed in coiling pewter. George owns alligator, snake, and ostrich skin cowboy boots and is Ian’s older brother.

Put them side-by-side and you’d think George had leached all of Ian’s potential for height and strength through his hand placed on their mother’s swollen belly in some obscene blood rite while Ian was still in the womb.

It’s not that George is huge; it’s that Ian is small. George eats steak and Ian eats Cocoa-Puffs.

Sometimes George calls Ian ‘Peein’ Ian, Art-fag Extraordinaire’. Flip through one of Ian’s notebooks to find headless-George, transvestite-George, sheep-fucking George, dog-shit-eating George, and rotting-husk-being-devoured-by-vultures George.

Not that Ian doesn’t love George. He does. George lends Ian the pick-up. George bought Ian’s cigarettes until he turned 18. George is Ian’s brother, and that counts for something. Ian’s mother told him that George used to feed him strained squash from a rubber-coated spoon. Ian would fall asleep on George’s chest watching the Disney Channel through an illegal descrambler late on Saturday nights. George stuck his fingers in Ian’s mouth and pulled his first loose tooth like a thorn from Ian’s gums. George wore baggy pants with the bottoms stuffed in his shoes into a 7-11 and walked out with Ian’s first beer jutting against the denim like a broken ankle. George built a bonfire of dried mesquite and yucca husks to keep Ian warm while he drank it.

Ian grinds the gears and gives the truck gas. The rear wheels snake on the gravel before the pick-up lurches and limps onto Montana’s smooth asphalt. Ian squints out across the cracked dash and into the fading road to where the distance between his eyes and the end of sight is condensed and drawn thin as a razor’s edge. The edge wavers in the heat.

Ian tears the shrink-wrap from his Marlboros and flips it out the window. He pulls off the silver tab that covers the cigarettes and flips it out, too. Ian pinches a cigarette and steadies the wheel with his palm and digs his flat hand into his front pocket and gropes for matches. No matches. He forgot the matches. The pick-up’s push-in lighter doesn’t work.

“Fuck me,” Ian says.

Ian tries to put the cigarette back in the pack, but it doesn’t want to fit. He sticks the cigarette behind his ear instead. There’s a lighter in the trailer and if not there’s the stove with its circles of ash from Ian lighting cigarettes on the spiral coils.

Ian’s nic-fit tweaks his jaw and nibbles at his stomach while he drives the five minutes to Calcott. Ian opens his Coke and puts the mouth to his lips and fills his cheeks with the Coke and pumps it down his throat. He slows to forty-five on the 400 yards of pebble-dirt that leads to the trailer and the truck jolts hard on the furrows and bottoms out from time to time with a hollow metal thump. Pebbles ping in the wheel wells and ping sharp in Ian’s ears and through his jaw to tap in his teeth. He drinks his coke and the creosote on either side of Calcott blurs and seethes as he passes. The wind comes hot and stale from the window and Ian’s shirt sticks to his skin under his arms and stifles him so he raises his elbows to dry them out.

The truck slides and grinds gravel before it stops outside Ian’s trailer. The engine shudders before it dies. Ian is a short walk and a screen door away from fire. Ian hops down from the cab and the suspension creaks and the cigarette behind his ear weighs heavy like a whisper and the sun’s light murmurs but the stove’s red coil will be there and so will Leanne.

Leanne spent the night, and most days when Ian gets off of work after she’s spent the night she is up and dressed and waiting to go home.

Ian is off early and so Leanne will be asleep and he can lift his blanket and feel Leanne’s warm air and he can get under the blanket and be in her warm air and he can put his nose in her hair and smell it and it will smell like candy, sweat, and cigarettes. He can feel the thin hairs on the nape of her neck against his lips and if he wants to kiss her all he’ll have to do is pucker and her neck will not be warm like her air. Her neck will be cool because Leanne’s skin burns cool. And maybe today she’ll let him inside her, past the cool burning skin into the warm inside. She gave him her hand, once, when he kept kissing her shoulder and pulling her towards him in the dark. She gave him that, but Ian wanted more. Maybe today. And when they get up, slicked in mutual sweat, he can make pancakes while she’s in the shower. Maybe he’ll watch her in the shower, the shadow of her figure through the plastic shower curtain, the ghosts of her hands on her shapes in the shower while she thinks he’s cooking pancakes in the kitchen.

Ian bites his lip. He closes his eyes against the murmuring sun to see her in the space between where he can see her shapes. He has drawn her. Bent her arms and legs on paper, stretched them long and sinuous. Ian has made her anew in his dim space and even when she sat there and posed in plain sight he made her there instead, where she belongs to him. Where everything is his.

Ian met Leanne through Dave. Dave takes over security at the Longhorn Petroleum Pipeline when Ian’s shift is done. He’s Leanne’s older brother. Nothing much happens at the Longhorn. Ian drives back and forth. Sometimes he sees the shining eyes of a stray dog in his headlights. It’s not important, and neither is Dave. Dave likes to talk about work. Nothing happens at work. Dave, mostly, has nothing to say. But Leanne’s not like her brother. Leanne’s important– Leanne’s something.

When Ian first saw Leanne she was dirty and she walked across the dim hallway of Dave’s trailer and the bottoms of her feet were black and her skin was dull as if it was covered in a second skin of dried sweat. Her hair was flat on one side and slept in. Her eyes were rings of smudgy eyeliner and Ian saw smudgy bruises on her thin calves, little girl’s calves. He saw three-day stubble.

Leanne is Ian’s girlfriend, sorta. She says she is ‘seeing’ Ian. Leanne lives with her older brother and her younger sister, Neli. Leanne told Ian that their father lives in New Mexico and sends them a check for two hundred dollars a month, sometimes. Leanne told Ian these things, but there are things she doesn’t have to tell.

Leanne is thin and pale, except for her shoulders which are bronze knobs. If she gets sun anywhere else she just turns red. Leanne has a scar just above her pubic hair. It’s about three inches long. Ian touched it, once, and she turned her hips away from his hand. The scar was hard and thin, like a piece of wire just beneath her skin. Leanne told him it was ectopic.

Leanne wears black satin nightgowns under her kid sister’s shirts. It makes her long and narrow. Leanne wears surplus army boots, lots of eyeliner, and scowls. She dyes her hair black and she wears lots of pewter rings with skulls and spiders and shit like that. Leanne looks as if she’s mourning her own death. It makes her seem desperate and lonely, the kind of girl who will hop into pick-up with Ian so that they can run away from El Paso forever.

Ian is close to the coil. The rough-grain steps up to the trailer’s landing creak and bow beneath Ian’s weight. Ian tilts the Coke up and closes his eyes and waits for the dregs. He swallows and throws the bottle out into the sand and opens the trailer’s plasti-glass door and leaves the white-bright light behind. It’s dim inside. Ian pauses and closes his eyes to adjust before he goes to the stove and turns it on high. He hears a thump. Ian waits for the coil to glow. No good pressing his cigarette till it’s red hot. He hears a thump from the back of the trailer. Ian turns toward the thump. The trailer thumps again, and Ian follows the noise.

The first door he gets to is his. He sees his bed unmade and empty. Sees the towel from the morning’s shower. Leanne’s not there, in his bed, under his blanket with her warm air where she ought to be. No running water from the bathroom. Across the hall, the bathroom door is open. Dark inside. Ian hears a thump and moan. He follows the noise to the end of the hall, to George’s door.

The door is cracked. It swings open silently before Ian’s careful hand. From the doorway Ian sees George’s ass hover and fall. Leanne is on her belly and her flesh ripples away from George’s hips in waves and her arms stick straight back to hold her ankles in her hands, glowing pink against the pale, as if she’s trying to turn into a human wheel. Her forehead is an inch from the wall. When George falls, her head meets her shadow and thumps against the wall. Leanne moans from the inside out. The room smells of beer and sweat.

Ian tries to think of what he’ll draw for this. He tries to think of what he’ll draw but he can only see George and Leanne there, on the bed, glossy with sweat. Ian tries to think, but nothing comes. Ian grabs a lamp.

The lamp is marble. It belonged to their grandmother. It’s heavy with a shimmering satin shade and little yellow tassels. Ian feels the cord pull tight and then come free of the wall socket. The dense marble absorbs the impact when the corner of its felt-bottomed base hits George in the back of the head. Ian doesn’t feel the blow in his arms, just the weight of the lamp.

George falls forward as if he’s trying to swan dive and Leanne gets out of her human wheel. She rolls over and closes her legs and screams and her scream shakes in Ian’s eyes but Ian can’t hear it. The base of the lamp comes down between Leanne’s eyes and the room gets still.

George has blue sheets. On the sheets the blood is purple. On Leanne it’s red. On George it’s red too, but darker because George has a tan. Ian drops the lamp. The base comes down corner-first between the bones of his foot.

“Fuck,” Ian says.

Ian hops on one foot. George and Leanne go up and down.

“Oh, fuck,” Ian says.

Ian goes back into the kitchen. His foot is forgotten. His fingers fumble the cigarette from behind his ear. It shakes between his fingers above the spiral coil, glowing red now in the dim. Ian puts the cigarette in his mouth. The heat makes his eyes water. He sucks on the cigarette, smells his eyebrows singe, and the end of the Marlboro flares.

He smokes his cigarette. He uses the orange ember at the end of the filter of the first to light the second. He smokes the second until it’s a filter with an ember at the end. He uses the second to light the third as he thinks about burying them. He knows how to bury things in the desert.

Ian had a dog named Jasper. Jasper died beneath the trailer.

Jasper was a good dog. He loped to Ian out of the desert on long goofy legs. Jasper was a desert dog. Hips like axe heads, a spine of giant pearls, a tongue like a thick slab of bologna.

Ian used black plastic garbage bags rolled up around his arms and cinched at his wrists with rubber bands as gloves. Jasper was stiff like a rocking horse when Ian pulled him by a hind leg from under the trailer, dragged Jasper a few yards away from the house, and started digging.

Digging holes in the desert is hard. Sand fills in what you dig out, but if you keep at it you can make progress. Ian dug three feet deep by sunset. It was a nice sunset, a perk of the desert. The sky was all orange at the horizon and above the orange horizon it was purple like the middle of a fresh bruise. The mountains in the west were flat and sharp-edged shadow like the cracked edge of an eggshell cupping the world.

While Ian was digging George brought a big white toolbox from the pick-up. It was the kind of toolbox that you install on the back rim of a truck bed, right next to the back window. George sat on the toolbox with a silver can of Coors Light and watched Ian dig. Ian had paid thirty dollars so that George would let him use the toolbox as a coffin. George thought it was a waste, but he needed the money for beer and dip and he didn’t have any tools to put in it anyways. Ian needed the toolbox. Desert dogs would migrate in the night from miles around to dig up Jasper and eat him. Some of them might be Jasper’s own children, if Jasper had any. Jasper probably had lots of children because desert dogs are never fixed.

By the time Ian got to four feet the top half of the eggshell had settled back over the earth. Ian picked Jasper up and the half-digested kibble still caked in Jasper’s hair felt like frog skin through Ian’s garbage bag gloves. Ian put Jasper in the toolbox and the awkward weight almost brought Ian tumbling in but he caught himself with his palm on the edge of the toolbox and stood and closed the lid. He locked the toolbox with a tiny silver key and shoved the toolbox off the lip of the hole and let it slide down on the sand to the bottom. George smirked with the silver beer in his hand. Ian put the key on his Budweiser Promotional Bottle-Opener key chain. George laughed at him and asked, “What? You’re going to maybe want to dig him up sometime?”

George wiped beer spittle from his lips while Ian shoveled sand back in the hole. He used a blown tire to mark the grave when he was done.

Ian flicks the spent filter into the pan under the coil and digs his flat hand into his pocket and gropes for his key ring. He gets it out and holds it up before him. The silver key dangles, but who? Only one can fit. Ian considers a coin flip. He considers enny-meeny-minny-moe. Ian decides to save the decision for later. Either way he’ll need another coffin.

Ian takes off his shirt and goes outside.

Outside it’s bright and the ground is bleached and glaring and the bumper of the pick-up is a silver explosion. Ian walks in the desert with a shovel. His eyes are closed to slits and his feet sink in the sand and the bones of his right foot still hurt. Ian will find an appropriate coffin. It’s a matter of looking.

The desert is a dump. Garbage from decades past lies buried beneath the sand like fossils. The desert is full of naturally occurring soiled mattresses, tubeless television husks, Beta-max cassettes, Beta-max tape players, cracked and bent aluminum siding, headless dolls, bodiless doll heads, rusted swing-set skeletons, stray dogs, and plastic flowers.

There’s a cemetery ten miles to the west of Ian’s trailer. It’s the Evergreen Cemetery. It’s a patch on the desert like some secret garden granting entrance to an underworld, and it’s always green. The cemetery sprinklers hiss at sun sets. The bodies float in their coffins. In the morning, when the bodies settle, the caretakers place plastic flowers on the markers. The flowers migrate in the wind. Eventually they get stuck in the branches of the creosote around Ian’s trailer.

Ian walks toward a dark glob in the sand. It’s too solid to be chaparral. It’s a thing and it’s big. Big enough for a body. Ian walks and the thing resolves. The thing is an oil drum. It’s intact except for small rust-rimmed .22 holes. The oil drum’s mouth gapes too small for George’s shoulders, but Leanne should fit.

The oil drum is half-full of sand and Ian can’t lift it. He scrapes out sand, green and brown pieces of broken bottles, and an ice cube tray with his shovel. Ian can’t get all the sand out, but he doesn’t have to. Ian grabs the rusty edge of the drum and pulls. The rough edge cuts into his palms, but the drum rises and spews streams of sand from the .22 holes.

Ian puts his shovel in the barrel and drags it back to the trailer. He picks up plastic flowers and throws them in along the way. Sand gets mixed with sweat between the metal and his palms and scours his skin. The drum leaves a giant snake’s trail behind it.

Raw palms and the snake’s trails or no, Ian is thinking about what he’ll tell Dave. Dave will see him at shift-change and ask him if he’s seen Leanne and Ian could say he dropped her off and hasn’t seen her since or he could say that he caught George and Leanne in bed together, which is true, and that they professed their love and ran off together, which isn’t. Two birds, one stone, but Ian has the pick-up. If Ian has the pick-up then that leaves George and Leanne to run away together on foot through the desert. Improbable. Ian decides to deal with them one at a time. He practices his line:

“I dropped her off…”

Ian is the monkey with his hands over his ears.

“I dropped her off at the mall…”

He is the monkey with his hands over his eyes.

“I dropped her off at the mall and I haven’t seen her since.”

He is the monkey with his hands over his mouth.

Ian is the six-handed monkey.

Ian leaves the barrel by the trailer in the shadow of the satellite dish. Ian needs to cool off. He can feel the grit of sand in his sweat on his skin. The gloom is heavy in the trailer. It’s dark but not cool. Ian goes to the freezer and opens it and sticks his head inside. He rests his forehead on a family sized bag of chicken tenders. It makes his forehead numb and helps him think and he thinks he should clean the blood off the lamp. Ian thinks he should wrap Leanne up in the sheets and drag the bodies outside before they make a smell inside the trailer that will never clear out.

Ian gets the lamp. The shade is clean. It fell off when Ian picked it up. The marble base is caked with dried blood like dark chocolate. Ian takes the lamp to the kitchen and puts it in the sink. He leaves the cord dangling over the side and glosses the marble with yellow Palmolive gel.

Ian turns on the water and the soap mixes with blood to make warm, pink foam in spirals down the drain. Ian leaves the faucet on until the water and foam spinning down the drain goes from pink to clear. Clean the lamp: done.

George and Leanne are naked and dead on the bed. Leanne is fetal. George is parallel with the far edge of the mattress on his stomach. His eyes are closed and soft like sleeping. One arm hangs from the side as if he’s reaching for something under the bed. The other arm ends with George’s hand still holding his boxers. Ian grabs George by an ankle and pulls. George’s own weight takes him over the edge and onto the floor. George didn’t bleed bad. There’s a stripe down his back that ends an inch below his shoulder blades. Ian leaves George on the floor and turns to Leanne.

A triangle of blood starts between Leanne’s eyes and paints the bottom-half of her face. Ian can see little white bits of bone like baby teeth in the red, wedge dent between her eyes.

Ian doesn’t linger on Leanne. He pulls the elastic at the corners of the sheets free from the mattress and wraps Leanne in the sheet. Ian tries it like a burrito first. He folds one side over and puts his hands on her back. He feels her, firm and warm through the cotton. Ian pushes against her back so that she’ll roll. Leanne will not roll. Ian pulls the sheet back, bearing her flesh again. He bites his finger, grinds his palm against his forehead, and nods to himself. Ian grabs a corner of the sheet. He folds it over Leanne. He folds the opposite corner: top-left to bottom-right. He folds top-right to bottom-left and ties the corners together. Leanne is in a giant hobo’s handkerchief sack.

Ian gets his flat hand in the hollow between Leanne’s arm-pit and the floor. He shoves his arm in. He gets his other arm under, behind her knees, and lifts. A threshold carry for Leanne: a crumbled up mannequin bride in a purple wedding dress. Her arms stay out and bent, like she’s holding an invisible beach ball.

The arm under Leanne’s knees does most of the work. It burns by Ian’s third step. Leanne hits her head on the doorframe. Leanne drags her feet along the hallway wall. In the living room, Leanne catches a corner of the television in the eye socket. Ian sways to keep her weight afloat. When he gets to the landing he takes a blind step towards the first stair. He over shoots and his heel comes down on the edge. Leanne and Ian fall to the sand.

Leanne hits first and Ian comes down hard on Leanne’s hipbone just below his ribs. It digs up and under, crushing his air out just before his nose comes down on her knee. Ian smells copper and his eyes flood. Inside the trailer the phone rings.

Ian gets to his feet and tries to fill his lungs again and bends over with his hands on his knees. Everything is blur through the tears from his sore nose. He can feel warmth building in his sinuses. He gets to the phone on the fifth ring. He feels as if he’s going to sneeze and the desire not to hear a sixth, seventh, eight, or ninth ring picks up the phone.

“Hello?”

Ian’s mom says, “Hi, hon.”

Ian’s mom is 49. She is a medical assistant in Phoenix Arizona. She is divorced, has been divorced, since Ian turned 18. She carried Ian for nine and a half months, she gave birth to him at the tail-end of the 1970s, and she’s on the phone. She calls every Friday. It’s Friday.

Ian’s mom says he sounds like he has a cold. Ian sniffs and smells more copper.

“Allergies. Mom, I’m —”

Ian’s mom asks how he is doing. Ian is preparing to bury his brother and his girlfriend on a Friday afternoon.

“Fine. Mom I —”

Ian’s mom asks how his brother is doing. He is dead on the floor in his bedroom face down on the carpet.

“Fine. Mom —”

Ian’s mom wants to know how work is going. Ian can taste copper dripping into his throat. His nose is bleeding. He is beginning to get nauseous.

“Fine. I’m —”

Ian’s mom asks if he’s busy. The copper taste is replaced by Coke and bile. She asks what he’s making. He sees a note on the refrigerator. A yellow post-it note he left for George.

It says, G: Out of milk. Will pick up OMW from wk.

Ian forgot to get the milk.

“Cooking. Mom, I’m cooking. It’s burning —”

Outside, Ian can see the bottom of Leanne’s foot sticking out of the sheet. It looks oddly lavender against the glowing sand. Ian’s mom asks if she should let him go.

“Yeah. It’s burning. Sorry mom. Call you back, love you.”

Ian’s mom says she loves him too. Ian hangs up the phone.

When the phone hits the cradle, Ian runs to the bathroom. He has to slide on his knees to kneel before the toilet. He can feel solids in his throat and more solids rising. Ian vomits.

When the heaves subside, Ian gasps. He breathes hard into the bowl and closes his eyes with his cheek on the cold plastic toilet seat and listens to his breath, dying into a fading hush in the bowl, but beyond his breath he hears something drone. An engine. There is a corpse at the bottom of his front steps wrapped in a purple sheet and, somewhere out there, an engine.

Ian hits his knee on the toilet getting up.

The engine belongs to a mail truck. It is white with a blue postal eagle on the side. The mailman is wearing his blue uniform with short-shorts and dark socks pushed down around his ankles. Ian waves from the landing to see what the mailman will do, to see if he has seen. The mailman waves back and his smile is a melded blotch of harsh white in the darker blotch of his face across the distance. The mailbox is about fifty yards away from Ian’s trailer and it serves everyone who lives on Calcott. It’s a big aluminum cube on an aluminum pedestal. It has a blue postal eagle on both sides. It has nine locked compartments. The mailman has the back of the cube open so he can see all nine compartments at once. He takes nothing, puts nothing in, gets in his mail truck, and makes a U-turn.

When the truck turns into a white pixel, Ian gets the shovel from the oil drum and leaves it in the sand. He leans into the barrel and grabs the plastic flowers and drops them in the sand next to the shovel.

Ian covers the foot that escaped the sheet and dead-lifts Leanne. He dumps her headfirst into the barrel. Her shoulders stop her against the side of the barrel, so Ian grabs it by the rim and shakes it. Leanne inches down while Ian wobbles the barrel until her head hits the bottom. Leanne’s legs are sticking out of the drum from her knees up to her feet. Ian wraps his hands around her shins and pushes. Her legs are locked in L’s. He feels them give a little but they spring back as soon as he stops pushing. Ian kicks the drum. He uses the drum’s rim to pull himself up backwards to sit and bounce on Leanne’s shins until something in her legs snaps. The stiff muscles release and Ian falls inside. His ass is wedged in and he can feel Leanne’s toes. Ian pushes with his palms on the lip of the barrel and the small of his back scrapes against the wall of the drum. The drum tips and Ian is free. He grabs the shovel and swings. The blow jolts up the handle and stings Ian’s palms.

“Fucker,” he screams.

He swings again and the blow stings his palms and he says, “Fuck.”

Leanne is in the barrel. Ian starts to dig. His skin spreads tight and dry across his back in the sun. His nose throbs and he sucks back copper-and-bile-tinged snot as he digs with robotic persistence against the sand that tries to rush back in to fill his hole. The sun sinks towards the mountains. Ian digs until he’s done.

Ian rolls the barrel into the hole. The barrel rolls like an egg. Leanne’s odd weight fights against the rolling and then speeds it up. Covering the barrel is easy work. Ian scrapes sand and caliche back in from the pile he made. When he’s done, Ian plants the thin green stems of the plastic flowers in the shallow mound of displaced sand and stands with his hands on the small of his back to see the grave in the round shadow of the satellite dish bolted to the corner of the trailer’s roof. Sleek and grey and relatively beautiful, as if the trailer was put there just to hold it. A pedestal of sorts. Ian judges the flowered grave good enough for Leanne. He judges it fit and wipes his brow and heads inside for his brother.

George is still loose. It’s as if he’s made of rubber. Ian drags him across the floor because George is almost twice as heavy as Leanne, and Leanne had been difficult. The carpet makes the dragging difficult, but Ian has his hands wrapped tight around George’s ankles and gets him to the front door. George is naked. Ian is tired of seeing his penis. Ian grabs George’s boxers from his half-clenched hand. They’re green boxers with monkey heads on them. Yellow bubble print says Monkey Business. Ian kneels before George and slides the boxers on with his head turned. He is very tired of seeing George’s penis. He forces the boxers under George’s ass and pulls hard on the elastic hem and the penis is gone.

Ian drags George until his legs are out on the landing. He hooks his arms under George’s and props him on the doorframe. Ian’s forearms come away wet with George’s sweat. Ian tries to make him look natural. He crosses George’s arms across his lap. He bends one leg and lets the other one hang off the landing. George looks as if he’s resting after a long day’s work, watching the sun set.

There’s a tire sticking out of the ground just a few yards from the trailer. It’s a blown retread tombstone. A couple of feet beneath the tire there is a white metal toolbox. It’s the kind that goes on the back of pick-up trucks. There’s a dog inside. It takes Ian three seconds to pull the tire up. It takes him an hour to hit metal with the spade of his shovel. The toolbox looks the same as before it was buried. Rust damage on the right corner, a dent in the middle of the lid where George sat. Ian unlocks it with the tiny silver key and opens it to find that Jasper is little more than bones. Not just bones, because there are still tendons like dried strands of wood glue and patches of skin like sandpaper with hair still intact. Jasper is a mummy dog. His teeth are very white.

Ian can’t work anymore. He’s drained. He is sticky with dried sweat. He doesn’t even want a cigarette. Ian leaves the toolbox and Jasper to get George’s last Coors Light from the fridge. The cold burns his throat and Ian can imagine himself drinking Coors Light after Coors Light until he bloats and passes out next to his brother. There is only one Coors Light though, and Ian takes his time with it. He sits down next to George, puts his arm around George. When he’s not sipping his Coors Light he rests his cheek on George’s head. Ian smells George’s familiar smell: sweat and Irish Spring. Ian tries to say he’s sorry. What comes out not of vocal chords, but of other, deeper innards. An animal sound. Ian has his mouth open with his lips on George’s head and he can taste the sweat on the prickling hairs while he makes this sound.

Ian cries and tears roll down through George’s hair to wet the dried blood so it runs in thin pink lines down George’s back. Ian rocks his brother back and forth in his arms on the landing of their trailer and, for the first time in this long day, he has time to think. Ian knows they’re nowhere, now. Knows there’s nothing left of Leanne because he saw the wedge he made, the bone and blood wedge between Leanne’s eyes, as if there used to be a gem there and Ian worked it out with a pocket knife. There’s nothing left of her. Nothing left of George either, anymore. Only sand. Sand to hide them like it hides all kinds of secret trash.

And it wasn’t fair that the lamp was so heavy and so close to his hand when he saw them and he wishes it had been a normal plastic, or aluminum, or ceramic lamp. He wishes he had worked his full shift. He wishes the pick-up truck had blown a piston on the way home. He wishes he had remembered to ask for matches. He wishes he had stayed in the living room and watched TV until they were done.

The milk. If he’d gotten the milk he wouldn’t have grabbed the lamp. He would’ve hit them with the milk instead, busted the container on George’s head and spilt milk all over the bed—just milk.

And through his tears, Ian sees his brother’s scalp, the pattern and purpose and chattering frenzy of his brother’s hair.

There are bugs in the desert, hidden in the creosote. They hum. The noise spreads to the horizon like the desert around, staring blank-faced up at the sky. Not the sky before with others, people, beneath it—Ian’s own hideous sky, now, hideous for it’s nothing because it’s not even blue but grey as something vast and black erased, telling him how he’s alone and he can sit on the landing of his trailer with his dead brother in his arms and no passerby will ever gasp at the Cain and Able scene. He can sit on the landing for days, rocking his brother until the body begins bloat and bruise, its face becoming the face of some gargantuan, asphyxiated infant before a vent opens in the decay and the body begins to waste and fall apart in Ian’s arms and no one would ever know. The bugs won’t care. They won’t care and Ian can mourn as he sees fit. He can scream and no one and nothing will care.

Ian props his brother against the trailer and strips down to his boxers. The air feels good on the sweat on his legs. The sand is warm on his feet. He screams at the big sky. His scream isn’t much. Ian’s mouth is open and his teeth are barred but what comes out is a whimper from his dry throat. Weak, but it doesn’t matter. No one’s there to hear it.

Ian pushes off with his right leg. He jumps and turns in the air and lands in the sand on his left foot. It buries itself and he pushes off again, kicking up a trail of dust. Ian picks up speed. He turns in a wide circle and jumps and flails his limbs as if he’s on fire. His feet sink into the sand, but he pushes himself free, over and over. Sometimes he falls to his knees, but he gets up and keeps going. Sometimes he lands wrong so that it feels as if one of his toes might pop out of its socket. He keeps going. He is silent and his tongue is moist against his upper lip. He can’t catch his breath long enough to scream, so he does it in his head.

Ian lands on rocks sometimes, sharp bits of gravel kicked from the road. His weight grinds them into the soft flesh of his arches.

Ian feels his sunburn rise and feels the blisters bubble up. He feels the skin on his shoulders pulled tight and numb. It won’t be numb for long, but it doesn’t matter.

Why’re you dancing, Ian?

Because the hot, hot sun.

His limbs burn. The dry air hurts his lungs and his pulse beats hard and loud in his temples, his neck, his chest. He keeps going. His muscles cut shadows across his back and limbs, surging tense then lapsing to surge again to keep Ian going, to pull each foot in turn from the soft sand. The chattering frenzy of his brother’s hair is pulling away like clouds fat with rain from his circle where he turns and works his body and drives memory from the desert.

You’re not an Indian, Ian.

Do I have to be?

Sweat stings his eyes and congeals on his skin. The big sky and his dead brother and the trailer and the creosote and the mountains come and go. He keeps going.

You’re dancing like an Indian.

Indians don’t dance anymore.

The horizon heaves and tilts. Ian stumbles and his shoulder slams into the door of the pick-up.

They don’t?

I don’t know.

The metal gives and bounces back. Ian is reflexive. An outstretched arm keeps him up, keeps him going. Ian’s pulse and breath beat time in his head.

Are you still dancing, Ian?

Yes.

Ian can feel his body struggle and his body moves without his mind to keep him going.

Why’re you still dancing?

The hot, hot sun. The hot hot mother fucker.

Ian sees the obvious way.

But it’s almost gone now, Ian.

The sun sets while Ian dances. The light simmers and the mountains to the west become flat and grey beyond the clumped grids of streetlights which twinkle in the bruised distance. To the east, a false horizon like a welt before the Huecos. Close at hand the creosote casts bristling shadows where the pick-up and trailer come and go like relics of some failed venture abandoned and forgotten for shame. All in passing. In glimpses. Ian keeps going.

I’m dancing till it’s gone.

No. It won’t. Not for me.

Ian is not alone. There’s a dog, a brown mutt desert dog watching with dull eyes. The dogs plods down from a dune and anchors its confounded shadow beneath its haunches. Its bologna tongue lolls and retracts in time with its breath. The long mouth smiles. It pants and laughs and watches Ian dance. It barks, tilts its head and watches and waits. Ian screams. There is no voice in him. The dog gets off its haunches and retreats a few steps with its tail between legs. It comes back. It sits and lolls and watches and laughs – it waits. It will eat George. It will dig up Leanne and eat her, too, if Ian can just keep going. If Ian can just keep going, the dog will eat him, too. A little bit longer. It will close in and everything will go back to normal or go on to nothing. If he doesn’t stop the dog will eat him and eat the whole damned desert if he can just keep dancing: because it’s waiting and hungry, because it’s almost over now. The sand at Ian’s feet is marred but patient in his wake. The sun is almost gone.

What about the milk?

G: Out of milk…

He forgot the fucking milk, and Ian’s right knee buckles. He falls at his brother’s feet and feels the sand on his gums and in the spit on his lips. He has sand in the snot that runs down from his nose and sand in the sweat all over his body. Where Ian is wet there is sand. He can feel it. His hamstring cramps and spasms and there is a pain in his side like a hard, solid thing driven deep in his flesh and under his bones. Ian can see what’s left of the sun through the skin of his eyes like a blood-veined yolk, pulsing with his pulse. Ian opens his eyes and sees his brother’s toes swinging back and forth. The trailer swings, too. The mosaic of sand with its light and dark grains, so close to Ian’s eye, swings back and forth. He sees the empty Coke bottle, close in the sand. It swings like the sand and the trailer and George’s toes. Before was the Coke. It slows and slows and stops. Ian tries to stand, but falters and winces at his leg’s quiet pain. His arms work, though, and he hauls himself up like a seal. Ian sees the dog. It watches. It cocks its head and turns to trot behind the dune. It disappears. Ian forgot the milk. From the Carnicería, he forgot to get the fucking milk. The last words between them, the last promised thing, and he failed. He forgot the milk.

Why’d you dance like that, Ian?

I forgot the fucking milk.

Before was Coke and a cigarette, but no milk. Ian forgot the milk so now is the heavy lamp and skin sacks of meat and guts. Before was George alive between hate and love and wanting Leanne alive under his blanket with kisses and pancakes and a shower. Could have been was the milk, but Ian forgot the milk, so now is dead George and dead Leanne with no souls or thoughts, between hate and love, because they are dead and all the sand and a shovel for hiding now. But it could have been milk. He forgot the fucking milk, so everything is now. And before and now and then could have been nothing, but his legs won’t work and he can’t dance and since it’s all not nothing it has to be now. The dog is gone to chase rabbits.

What’re you going to do now, Ian?

…

And now is horrible, and now becomes a horrible then when the bodies get under the sand. And under the sand is where it’s very simple, and that’s where Ian decides to put George so he can just act like it’s all before, for himself, because what else can he do?

What’re you going to do, Ian?

Bury him.

Ian rests his head on George. He hugs his brother’s legs while his own legs spasm. He wishes the mountains to the east and west would come in around him and hem in the sky, be close enough to have depth and mass, to hide him. Ian coats George’s shins with snot and tears. His cheek slides against the slickness.

Ian punches the sand. His fist sinks in. Ian wants to roll under the trailer where it’s cool and smells like wet stone, to rest and prepare to put his brother under the sand. He forgot to get the milk and his legs were weak, but none of that will matter if he can just get his brother under the sand. Under is cool and dark and quiet. When George is in the tool box under the sand that’s all there’ll be. All that needs to be.

But George groans.

Ian tries to stop crying. It shakes inside him, tries to convulse its way out. Ian heaves. George groans and opens his eyes.

Ian lets go of George and rolls away. George can groan and George can speak. He tells Ian he can’t move.

“George?”

George says he can’t move.

“I’m sorry, George. I’m sorry. Oh, fuck.”

Ian’s eyes ache and George asks what the fuck is going on. Ian rubs the back of his leg, he digs his fingers deep and kneads his flesh. The muscles there convulse against him. He gets on his knees. He stands and winces.

“I forgot the milk.” Ian can’t catch his breath and his legs shudder and threaten to bring him to the ground again. “Oh, fuck.”

George asks Ian what he did.

“I forgot the milk.”

George’s eyes roll around and land on a mound of dirt covered in plastic flowers. George asks Ian where Leanne went. Ian takes a deep breath.

“You can’t move?”

George says no, he can’t. George says it feels like he’s trapped inside his skull. He says it’s like he forgot how to use his body.

“But you can talk. You know how to talk. Try moving.”

George looks at his hand as if it’s a spoon he’s going to bend. George’s hand doesn’t move. Ian limps closer to George, reaches out and touches his cheek. It’s a tender touch. Ian has caught his breath, the nausea has passed.

“You can’t move.”

George asks what happened. He asks it angry.

“I hit you with the lamp.”

George‘s eyes roll back to the mound. He asks if Ian hit Leanne too.

“Yes.”

George tells Ian it’s okay. He says he won’t tell. George tells Ian to call an ambulance.

George is dead. Ian hit him with the lamp. He hit him and left him dead in the bedroom while he smoked a cigarette. He was dead when Ian went out to find the barrel. He was dead when Ian pulled him off the bed. He was dead when their mom called. He was dead when Ian buried Leanne. He was dead when Ian dug up the toolbox. He was dead when Ian broke down and cried like an animal and hated the sky and felt too alone for words. George is dead, has been dead. Dead is dead, and can never be alive again.

“But you’re dead.”

George says he isn’t dead. He says it angry.

“You’re dead, George.”

George says he isn’t. Ian puts two fingers on George’s neck.

“No pulse. You died George. You died hours ago.”

George’s eyes bounce around and land on a white metal toolbox. George says that Ian put his fingers on the wrong place. He says Ian missed the vein. There’s a muscle on the left side of George’s neck that ticks. Ian thinks it might snap and writhe at him like a snake.

“No, you’re dead. I caught you fucking Leanne and I hit you with the lamp. I didn’t mean to hit you, I meant to say something, I just wanted you to know I knew but instead I hit you with the lamp and then you died and Leanne screamed so I hit her, too.”

George says he’s sorry. He says she came to him. He tells Ian to call an ambulance. He asks it desperate. George says he’ll say he fell. George says he’ll go with whatever story Ian wants. George tells Ian to please, just use the phone.

“No, I can’t. No ambulances.”

George says fine, says to put him in the truck instead. George tells Ian to drive him to a hospital so the ambulance doesn’t have to come. George says Ian has to. He just fucking has to.

“No hospitals.”

George is a zombie. He has risen from the dead after six hours of non-life. Ian thinks it must be a progressive condition. If George can talk now in a few hours he’ll be able to walk. If he can walk he can grab and bite. Zombies are incredibly strong. Zombies want revenge. That’s what makes them. It spreads slowly and animates. George is a zombie, and he wants to eat Ian. It is because of the boots. George has no boots on and he wants his boots, must have them to be buried and rest in peace. Boots because they will always fit because the flesh rots and the clothes fall off but the boots stay on the bones that will never rot. George’s boots—his snake-skin and ostrich and alligator boots. It’s because the boots, but it’s too late for that now.

“You’re a zombie, George. You don’t need boots.”

George’s eyes are still on the toolbox. He asks Ian what he’s going to do.

“Don’t have time to fuck with boots.”

George says he is not fucking dead, says he doesn’t give a shit for boots. He says it angry and loud.

Ian nods. The sun is setting. The mountains are like the broken edge of an ebony eggshell. George says he is not a fucking zombie. George says Ian is fucking nuts.

“You’re a zombie, George.”

George says fuck you. He screams it. Ian locks his arms under George’s. George tells Ian don’t do it. George tells Ian he can’t. George’s feet dig trenches in the sand. The sky moves above him. George’s eyes roll to see behind him and he screams, talk to me. Say something, Ian. Speak. George tells Ian to stop, to look. Just listen.

Ian stares at the toolbox. He judges the gloomy space fit for his brother. George tells Ian to just stop, listen. Just for a sec.

Ian looks at his right index finger. It’s dirty. He can see the ribs of his fingerprints full of black dirt and rust from the oil drum. He smells his finger, the rust and sweat. There is a tang to the smell, chemical-lemon, from the Dawn soap.

George tells Ian he has to listen. Just one fucking minute. There have to be other options. There’s got to be something else.

Ian picks up the shovel. He stabs it into the sand and a splinter slides into his palm. Ian looks at the tiny blur-line of dark wood beneath his skin. He chews at the splinter, trying to catch some tiny piece between his front teeth so that he can pull it out. The splinter is stubborn. Ian resists the urge to bite deep and leaves the splinter. He wipes his hands on his jeans and runs his hand through his hair to bring it off his forehead. The sweat stings his palm.

George says Ian has to hear him. Look, listen. George says Ian owes it, for what he’s done. George says say something. Say something. Speak you mother fucker.

“Shut up, zombie.”

George says he’ll lie, that he’ll help make sure Ian never gets caught. George says that once he lies about how he fell he can never tell the truth. George says they can fix this, escape it, together. He says they’ll get their story straight, get it smooth and flawless. Ian turns away at looks up at the satellite dish looming on the corner of the trailer’s roof like a blank-faced witness.

George says fuck you. George calls Ian a fag. He calls Ian a pussy. Cunt. Motherfucker. A bolt of spittle flies from George’s mouth and a tail tethers it to George’s lips. The bolt dribbles down George’s chin and reminds Ian of a spider’s egg hanging from a strand of silk. Ian limps around the toolbox. George softens.

Ian stares up at the satellite dish. The edges are smooth and perfect-molded and unmeant for the desert. Ian turns to face George.

George tells Ian not to do it like this. He tells Ian to hit him with the shovel. He says that if he’s a zombie then Ian has to. Ian paces and stares at the satellite dish. George calls Ian a pussy. Ian turns away. George says no. He tells Ian not to bury him in the toolbox. George says it crying. George tells Ian not to do it. George says please. He shuts his eyes so tight they flicker. George tells Ian that he can’t fucking do this to him. George says we’re brothers. Brothers, Ian. Talk. Fucking say something. Ian.

“Shut up.”

George calls Ian a fag and Ian stares at the satellite dish.

“Shut you’re fucking mouth.”

George calls Ian a cunt. Motherfucker. Fucking pussy ass. George calls Ian a murderer. Ian slumps and stares at the satellite dish. George calls Ian a murdering fag. Ian grabs a handful of his own hair and pulls. His grip wrings a drop of murky sweat.

“Shut up.”

Murdering fag.

“I’ll brain you.”

White trash mother fucking fag. Murderer.

“Shut up. Stop it.”

Ian grabs the shovel and holds it high above his head and stumbles toward the trailer. He swings the shovel at the satellite dish. The spade hits the dish and cracks it. Ian swings again, the plastic bends, and the shovel bounces back. Ian falls to a knee but he pulls himself up with the shovel. He stumbles to stand above George with the shovel in his hand.

“I swear to God I’ll brain you.”

Ian’s face is furrowed and red and his lips quiver as he stares down at his brother in the sand. George is silent.

George will find a way out of the toolbox. George will dig his way out from the sand. George will come into Ian’s room while he is sleeping days or months or years from now. George will grab Ian and eat him alive.

You cannot suffer a zombie to live. They are unnatural things. When you see a zombie, and it was someone you knew, it is not the person you knew is gone. They can’t hold jobs, they can’t go to the movies, they can’t chew a pinch or drink a beer and they can’t be your brother. Ian’s brother is dead. The thing in the sand is a zombie. There’s only one thing a living, breathing, human should do with a zombie. When you find a zombie you have to kill it.

George lies with his legs straight in the sand and his hands above his head, as if he’s being stretched at both ends. He is wearing Monkey Business boxers. Ian raises the shovel. George waits for the blow with his eyes pressed shut.

In the desert east of El Paso Texas, out on Montana Avenue, there’s a trailer. Inside this trailer is a man. His name is Ian. Ian is taking a shower. He is almost done. His story is over. It is Friday night and the sun is finally gone. There’s a blown out tire that marks a grave. Beneath the tire there’s a toolbox. Inside the toolbox there’s a dog’s skeleton and a dead zombie that used to be Ian’s brother. His skull is crushed and he will never rise again. There’s a mound of dirt with scattered plastic flowers too, beneath a cracked satellite dish, beautiful for its crack so that nothing can desecrate the satellite dish’s sacred space. The plastic flowers look like offerings to the satellite dish, but they’re not. The flowers are for Leanne. You can’t see these graves in the darkness but they’re there, and in a hundred years they will be buried under tons of migrating sand.

When Ian is done with his shower he wants to sleep. In the morning, he wants to move to someplace where there’s trees and green stuff everywhere. He’ll be twenty-four soon. He can get financial aid and go to a community college somewhere and take art classes. Ian wants a place where the sky isn’t so huge and the sun isn’t so bright. He wants a place where strange shit can’t happen because there’s too much life. Strange shit has no room to breath. Ian wants to leave the desert and the memory it keeps in the sand just as well as it keeps bodies, the only things it keeps aside from junk. Ian will leave them behind. His story can’t follow him where he’s going, there’s not enough sun, but he will draw it all in a notebook and take that with him. He will change the story a little. His brother will be in it, alive and well in full Texan glory. Leanne will be in it, with full breasts, a curving ass and a pulse. Ian will be in it too, and they’ll all live together. Maybe he’ll set it up so that George and Leanne were always together. Ian’s not sure. There will be no marble lamps and no zombies. He knows he might get caught. It’s so likely he’ll get caught. He deserves to get caught, but maybe he won’t. He’s going to keep going. He’s going to leave in his pick-up with nothing but money, clothes, a spiral-bound notebook, and the satellite dish, because it’s beautiful and because maybe, without a reason to exist, the trailer will just blow away.

But it must be that if you wait long enough even the worst wounds scar over because here she was at her grandson’s engagement party in a part of New York they used to call Hells Kitchen but had now been renamed Clinton.

With an off-hand e-mail from a realtor’s blackberry generations of squalor erased, she thought. The Girls would like that turn of phrase and she reminded herself to use it when she told them about the weekend at next Thursday’s Mah Jong game.

“You could be Parisian, Sasha,” the woman next to her said.

“Parisienne.” The woman’s daughter pursed her lips and fake kissed the air.

Who were these women? She didn’t recognize anyone at her table. Not that she would. It’d been what? Thirty years since she’d left? Packed her stuff in a slim black case while Isaac was at work and Susan at school. She’d boarded the train at Penn Station mid-afternoon and traveled south until she hit the hometown she’d once been so desperate to leave. God what a homecoming that had been.

The restaurant’s dining area was divided into two camps: Susan and her people along the north wall and the fiancée’s family huddled in the side corner behind Stella and whoever this mother-daughter duo were next to her. Only a few members of the French bride’s family could afford to fly in from Marseille for both the engagement party and the wedding at the end of the summer. Still, Susan was making as much of an effort as she could to make them feel welcome.

Which was the right thing to do. Susan was good about things like that. The niceties. Where she’d gotten that, Stella had no idea. Not from her.

That was Isaac’s baby sister over at the table by the window. Jesus H. Christ she’d gotten fat. Last time Stella saw her, in ’88 or ’89, she’d been on an aerobics kick even though she’d been pushing 50. Headbands and wristbands and candy-colored leotards. Just goes to show you some people just don’t age all that well.

She should probably go over and say how-do but just the thought of it sent her stomach into spasms. Who knew what they’d all said about her over the years?

Stella scanned the room for other familiar faces, but other than a 70-something bottle-blonde by the door who might have been Isaac’s second or third wife she was coming up with a blank.

That’s right, two wives since she’d left. Which didn’t surprise her all that much. Isaac was a looker and smart as hell but Christ. What an ass.

Not like Stan. Now Stan sure wasn’t anything like Isaac but Stella had known by then that kind of passion just wasn’t her thing. Too much drama. Stan was more stable. Plus, he brought her coffee and oatmeal every morning. Granted he invariably left coffee grounds scattered across the counter and the pot of oatmeal simmering on the stove so she always had to soak it a good hour or two before scraping the brown scabs off the bottom, but it was the gesture that counted. His bleary-eyed cranky face morning after morning, carrying that tray across their bedroom, coffee sloshing over the edge of the mugs onto the napkins. Every goddamn morning for the past—what was it now? Ten, fifteen years? That was something.

But Isaac? He’d made a mess of things, that’s for sure. Even more than she herself had.

“You’re not going to eat that, are you?” the woman (who Stella had just remembered was named Cici) asked.

“No,” her daughter replied and dropped the fried calamari onto her plate.

“Those are at least 100 calories each, Sasha.” Cici reached over to wipe grease from her fingers.

That poor girl—woman, actually—couldn’t be more than 100 pounds so what the hell was her mother on her back like that?

Why had she come to this thing again?

Oh, yes. Susan.

When Susan called and said she was throwing an engagement party for her son and would Stella please come she hadn’t hesitated even though Stella hadn’t been to a single event in her daughter’s life since she’d left. Not the high school graduation nor the college graduation nor the wedding, or even the baby shower or first birthdays. She’d made it to Isaac’s funeral, though. She wouldn’t have missed that.

Stella agreeing to come this time had surprised them both.

For a long time, you see, whenever she talked to her daughter she’d get that same sinking feeling she’d felt when she lived up here. That suffocating sadness. Somehow she couldn’t ever be warm enough, loving enough, for any of them. A cold fish, Isaac had called her.

Except how could she be a cold fish and still feel so much all the time?

“Mommy’s going to buy me a dress for the wedding,” Sasha cooed to Stella.

“You want to fit into something nice, don’t you?” Cici asked. “Eat that.” She gestured to a plate of celery.

Her friends had insisted she go. You’ll regret it, they’d pointed out when Stella had been on the verge of calling Susan up and saying she couldn’t make it after all.

Stella tucked a lock of frizzy curls behind her ear and smoothed her slacks over her belly.

The way these women looked. So thin and just about all of them with a full face of makeup and their nails done. Not that her friends down south didn’t make themselves nice for parties like this, but. Well. Old women were supposed to have a little to grab onto and these woman were so stick straight you’d think they all gave each other liposuction for Christmas instead of good old bath salts and lotion.

“We’re going to Saks, right Mommy?”

“Whatever you want, baby.”

She was staying with Susan and her husband in their Brooklyn Heights condo. Three bedrooms but it still felt so cramped Stella was already antsy to get out of there after only two days. Somehow Susan had inherited Isaac’s mother’s obsessive cleaning habit. Yesterday afternoon Stella had gone into the bathroom to blow her nose and dropped the used tissue into the empty trashcan only to find, fifteen minutes later when she’d gone back in to get some hand cream, that it had already been removed. Just to test her out she’d dropped another tissue, and then another an hour after that, and sure enough they were both removed just as quickly as the first. Now that was weird.

Stella gazed across the room at the ornate floor-length mirror propped against the wall.

The thing was angled in such a way that she couldn’t see anything right in front of her but rather slivers of action on the other side of the room. Amid the gangling of limbs she saw her daughter’s chin jut into view. She’d recognize it anywhere: it was her own jaw, the way it had looked before that waddle had crept up on her.

The longer the moment drew out, the more seconds that ticked by as she stared at that sliver of her daughter’s face the more she thought of something she hadn’t thought of in 43 years—how, in the stunned brightness of the hospital room she had looked down at the bloody squalling infant lying on her chest and realized with a horrifying thud that it wasn’t going to work, that this girl could never drown out the silence left by the dead son, that she would never be able to love her, not really.

“Grandma Stella, its so wonderful that you came up from Virginia for this.”

Cici smiled expectedly at her.

There was no getting around the fact that Stella had left. Not only that: she’d never, not once, wanted to come back.

She’d liked her life just the way it was. Her job as a teacher at Free Union Elementary; her friends; her crafts projects. It wasn’t as lonely as you’d think. She had television, after all. And Stan.

“Oh I wouldn’t have missed it,” Stella finally said. “Not for the world.”

And nothing to remind her of Ben anywhere.

There are certain memories a person carries with them and for Stella one of those was that beautiful September afternoon fifty three years ago.

She’d been standing at the top of the stoop, fumbling with the mail and the stroller and trying, at the same time, to wrench that front door open. The landlord had never fixed it even though it’d been sticky for months now. Isaac had finally threatened to get it fixed himself and just deduct the cost from next month’s rent. A lot of good that had done. Three weeks later and he hasn’t done that either.

It was a warm day and Ben was wearing his favorite green corduroy pants. Three little girls, sisters, who lived down on the corner were playing with a bunch of dirty Raggedy Ann dolls on the sidewalk and Ben was peering through the railing at them, reaching one grubby fist out to grab at the blonde’s hair.

“Stop it!” the girl had wailed.

“Leave them alone, Benny,” Stella had said distractedly. She glanced over her shoulder at the group. The bossy redhead was trying to get her sisters to place the dolls in a circle around a pile of sticks.

Red and yellow and orange leaves sifted over the sidewalk. Maybe she’d make warm cider when they got back from the library later that afternoon.

“I want I want I want,” Ben had squealed and lunged forward, his shoes scuffling against the point where the railing and top step met.

Stella jiggled the door again and leaned into it. This time it gave. She un-strapped Ben from the stroller and hauled him and the bag of Red Delicious apples she’d just purchased up the three flights of stairs to their apartment. The far window was open and the lime-green curtains she’d sewn the first year of their marriage billowed in and out with the wind. She dropped Ben in the center of the bed where he rolled onto his back and reached out his chubby hands to grasp at the fabric.

Her purse. She’d left her purse down on the stoop. She rushed to the window and called down to the girls playing on the sidewalk. All the cash they had left for the week was in that wallet. How could she be so careless?

“I’ll be right down,” she’d shouted. Her hand rested on a loose bar in the window rail and reminded herself to tell Isaac to bill the landlord for that repair, too, when the time came.

She looked back at the bed one more time. Ben’s eyes were closed and he was breathing softly. His left leg tucked under his right and one of the little socks had bunched down around his ankle. It’d been a hard day. Three of his favorite little boys had been at Carroll Park and they’d played in the sandbox for over an hour before the oldest mother had headed home to begin preparing lunch.

So she closed the door behind her and ran down the stairs.

She’d done that dozens of times during the two and a half years of Ben’s life: to get the mail; to open the door for visitors; to grab a few daffodils from the small patch of green out front. This day was no different.

Except it was.

She was standing on the stoop, talking to the red-headed sister.

Tell your mother there’s going to be a party in the park on Halloween, she’d said. If she wants, we can make candy apples together.

There was a scraping sound from above and she’d looked to see Ben’s plump arms flailing against a cloudless sky. She heard her own soft exhalation then a whooomp and a thwack that echoed up and down the block.

Silence. For what Stella now remembered as a sickening eternity but in reality had been just a few seconds. A heartbeat. Maybe two.

And then she’d opened her eyes and looked down at him lying there on the ground.

The loose railing.

“He’s bleeding,” one of the girls had said in the softest voice possible.

But he’d been asleep on the bed. She was sure of that. Even now, after 53 years of turning the scene over and over again in her mind, she was still sure of that one glaring fact: “He’d been sleeping, ” she’d whimpered to the gathering neighbors. “Sleeping, ” she sighed as she moved blindly among them, holding her son’s limp body in her arms.

Stella had worn a black dress to the funeral. She’d bought it months earlier for Isaac’s upcoming office Christmas party and for some reason the memory of the afternoon Ben died and the day she’d bought the dress were forever linked. She never thought of one without thinking of the other and so those twinned recollections played over and over in her conscious life like some sort of montage horror film every day since.

She’d seen the dress on the rack from the store’s aisle and she’d removed her gloves to touch the fabric. Other shoppers flowing around her and Ben strapped into his stroller. It was too expensive, she’d told herself, but she’d rolled the child into the fitting room all the same. She was only going to try it on. Just to see.

But then after she’d stepped into the dress and seen the way that satin fitted so nicely across her waist and chest and that little flare in the hem… Well. She never indulged, especially since Ben had been born. She conserved even dish soap: a trick her mother-in-law had taught her—cutting the Palmolive with water.

She looked at herself in the mirror and realized that she really was beautiful, in her own way. Despite what her own mother had said. And behind her image there had been Ben’s serious little face reflected in the glass. She’d watched the boy flick at the end of his nose with just the tip of his finger, staring up into space…. Thinking.

Susan was doing it now, here in the restaurant: that quick flicking coupled with a spacey stare.

Are gestures genetic, too then?

Stella gripped the edge of the table.

Ben lying on the sidewalk, one tiny leg angled to the left. It looked like he was playing.

“Get up, Benny, get up,” she’d pleaded. “Get up.”

In the present, Sasha and Cici whispered heatedly among themselves for a few seconds and then Cici called the waitress over with an irritated wave.

“Ma’am? My daughter would like a glass of water.”

At the other end of the room Susan and her son and the fiancée were opening presents.

God they’re young, she thought. But then Susan’d been too.

“I don’t know where they’re going to put all this stuff,” Sasha said. “They live in a studio.”

What was it that Ben had said that afternoon before they’d left the apartment?

“Mama?”

They’d been talking about his upcoming birthday party and she’d asked what he wanted. Ah. “I need some guys, Mama, I need some guys.” Only later did she realize he’d meant those plastic action figures he’d seen advertised in the Sears catalogue.

“Mama?”

Stifled guffaws billowed behind her.

“Stella. ” Cici poked at her upper arm and pointed to the front of the room where Susan was waiting.

“Don’t you want to help with the presents?” Susan called over the rows of perfectly coiffed heads and balding pates.

And there it was, again, in her very glance: Stella had failed her daughter, failed the lot of them, not only in the glaringly obvious ways but also in infinite subtle failures she wasn’t even fully aware of. Like not hearing her calling just then.

“No,” Stella said, more sharply than she’d intended. “I’m--. I’m. My feet are hurting.”

Susan flinched but recovered her composure so quickly Stella was sure she’d been the only one to notice.

She’d wanted to get pregnant again right away. Isaac had wanted to wait—give yourself time, for chrissake—but every time Stella passed a woman with a baby her heart just clenched. The apartment was so empty. Ben’s crib in the corner and all those toys still stacked in the entryway closet. And so she’d tracked her cycle, marking the first day of her period and counting back 14 days to when she was most likely to ovulate. Those nights she’d make something nice for dinner and wait to shower until four so she’d be fresh and pretty when Isaac came through the door after work but the months slid by and still: no baby.

Until one late June day, a week after her period was late, the doctor told her she was due at the end of February. For a brief time she and Isaac had been happy again. But then the worst morning sickness she could have imaged set in, her ankles swelled, she gained over fifty pounds and the birth, with its 33-hour labor, sapped any sort of excitement she’d mustered. Susan had looked so much like Ben even in those first few days. The same large blue eyes and deep dimpled chin it broke her heart. Except Susan wasn’t Ben and how could Stella forgive her for that?

Stella had breastfed Ben for a full year. He’d latched on right away and it had been easy--but Susan! She’d screamed and squirmed from that first morning and this in the days before enriched formula. She’d had to keep trying no matter what, both of them frustrated and sleepless and the baby’s face so godamn red, her body stiffening like she was having seizures except it was all just fussiness. Or willfulness.

And so when Stella had developed a sore on her right nipple after only three months and the doctor told her to wean right away she’d been relieved. It wouldn’t heal if she kept nursing. Susan’s mouth would have prevented that.

In the restaurant, the happy couple opened their presents one by one. Susan held each object up to the crowd for a few minutes so everyone could oooh and ahhhh before handing it to one of the bridesmaids to pack into waiting shopping bags. The bride’s mother catalogued names and gifts in a spiral notebook for Thank You notes.

After about half an hour Sasha went to the bathroom. Then for a cigarette.

“I can’t stand sitting still like this,” she said under her breath when she returned, reeking of nicotine and sweat.

She sat between Stella and her mother, fidgeting.

Fifteen minutes later: another bathroom break.

The last time she discreetly ran her hand under her nose when she returned and wiped it along a discarded napkin.

“You got a cold, sweetie?” her mother asks.

“Yeah. I’m having digestive problems, too,” the girl smirked and patted her abdomen. “Can I have more Champagne?” She grinned at the beleaguered waitress.

“I love your lunettes, ” a French woman at an adjacent table crooned.

Sasha fingered the bubble sunglasses perched on the top of her head

“Thank you.” She smiled softly. “They’re Dior.”

“Ohhh,” Susan cried and thrust a quilted white wedding album above her head for all to see. “How precious!”

All those years ago, that last weekend before Stella had packed her clothes and left she’d come into the back bedroom with a basket of laundry. Susan was perched on her twin bed, her hair in giant curlers and a shoebox filled with the family’s photos scattered across the bedspread. A black-paged photo book and paste lay beside it.

Ben as an infant in his crib.

Ben as a toddler in a red snowsuit.

Ben in Isaac’s father’s arms and Susan was carefully trimming the white frame from a shot of Ben in the tub.

“Who said you could touch these?” she’d hissed at the girl, snatching the scissors from her hand so quickly the blade cut a swath across her palm.

At the table Cici told her daughter, “I’m going to wear that Dolce & Gabbana dress.”

“Oh, you’ll be so sexy! Wear your hair down, though.”

How close they were, these two.

“Yeah, right?”

“I still need something, though, Mommy.”

“Well, we’ll see what’s at Saks. If they don’t have anything we can go to that boutique out on Jericho Turnpike. She’ll give me a deal. The amount of business I gave her back in the late 90s? Makes me sick.”

Stella and Susan had never gone shopping like that together. Used to be she’d take Susan over to Sears and they’d pick out whatever she needed. But Susan’d never even shown an interest in Stella’s appearance, even as a child. Her father was the one she’d adored, right from the beginning.

“Someplace in The City. Something special,” Sasha said.

For a few seconds Stella allowed herself to imagine it: herself in a new red dress, twirling before a seated Susan and a trio of mirrors. Stella putting a black skirt back on a hangar while Susan slipped into a blue version of the same item. The two of them snacking on a chicken salad at the Food Court afterwards, shopping bags by their sides. She glanced at the front of the restaurant at Susan, who was carefully folding a sage green tablecloth.

“We’ll find something, baby.”

This distance between them was her fault. And she didn’t have the faintest idea how to breach it. Did she even have the energy to try?

“Did you buy a dress yet Stella?” Cici asked politely.

“I bought a dress 53 years ago.” And in that instant she realized that that was precisely what she would wear. The black dress she and Ben had bought. She’d probably need to have it let out, though. “I bought it for a Christmas Party before Susan was born.” God her voice sounded so stilted. She almost didn’t recognize it as her own.

How was it that she could detect an emotion in this sudden silence? But she could--the current of tension snaked through the cold air as it shushed past the air conditioner vent behind their table.

Funny, how much the statement shocked these women.

“Stella,” Cici said in a voice people normally reserved for puppies and babies. “You can afford something new—it’s your grandson’s wedding!”

But how could she tell her that a thing’s newness was relative. That each time she’d worn that dress she’d felt the same thing. The same adrenaline rush and once more she’d feel young and strong. A whole lifetime stretched out before her. So much possibility and promise woven right into the fabric. Even the day of Ben’s funeral. Even then.

But you couldn’t explain that to someone if they didn’t already, deep down, just know. Sometimes the truest things sounded the craziest when spoken. Which was only part of the whole tragedy of life, as far as she was concerned. You could never tell anyone the things that really mattered. Each time they had to find out on their own. Over and over.

By five o’clock most of the guests had left and only a handful of the bridesmaids and a cousin or two remained to help pack up the gifts.

Stella’s feet ached. The shoes that had seemed to fit so perfectly when she’d bought them at the Belk sale last Sunday were tightening around her ankles like a leather band. She slipped them off and rubbed her bare feet against the tile floor.

Waiters moved quietly among the tables, removing plates and resetting for the night crowd.

“Mama,” Susan said. “You’re tired.”

Stella wasn’t sure but it sounded like an accusation.

“We can drop her off. She’s staying with you guys, right?” Cici asked.

“Oh no,” Susan protested. “That’s too far?”

“Give me a break, it’s right off the BQE.”

“Mama,” Susan said, “you want to hang around for me? I’m going to be here for a while….”

If Stella went now, she’d have a few hours to herself in the apartment. She could make tea and sit at the kitchen table by herself. Whenever Susan or her husband were home they invariably put on the TV or the radio. Silence unnerved them.

“I’d like that,” she said to CiCi. “You’re very kind.”

Stella felt a growing pressure on her bladder. All that Diet Coke. So while CiCi went to fetch her Lexus from the valet out front, Stella headed to the bathroom.

In the back of the restaurant there were two doors marked Toilette. The door on the left gave a little then caught and so she pushed again and this time it swung open with a thud.

Sasha sat fully clothed on the toilet seat, bent over the tank. She held a rolled up dollar bill in one hand and pulled her sleek black bangs away from her face with the other. There was a small compact open and three tiny lines of powder on its mirror.

“Oh, I—“ she gasped.

My god. Well, that explained the thinness.

“Grandma Stella!” Sasha scolded, “I’m almost done.”

Flashing that megawatt magazine grin at her as if Stella were retarded.

Standing there in the doorway, Stella thought about Susan and herself in an imaginary department store dressing room and poor Ben crumpled at the bottom of the stairs. All it rushing over her, the generations cresting like waves: mothers broken against daughters and daughters twisted into their mothers’ shortcomings. All of it an ancient and unending knot she couldn’t figure out what to do with.

So she took a step into the bathroom and locked the door behind herself.

Sasha looked up. “Please don’t tell Mommy,” she whispered even though they both knew she would.

John would never admit to Dorie why, but he likes Auction Guy, thinks he’s like a cartoon. He’s somebody’s grandpa, or at least wears somebody’s grandpa’s old checked suit. He comes on cable Friday and Saturday nights.

“It’s the best of Bargain City,” Auction Guy says. “Just look at everything we have for you tonight, folks. If you like what you see, call the number on your screen and be the first to bid.”

There is no number on the screen. It’s someone on the stage holding a poster board with a phone number written in Magic Marker. John can see the person’s hand holding up the board.

John knows Bargain City’s set. It’s the stage at the community theater. He’s delivered for Coke there. It’s not his regular route, which is the best one in the Great Plains district, the one with all the convenience stores on US 81. It pays and it pays good for this part of Oklahoma, but John knows all he really does is stock groceries and drive in circles.

Auction Guy is wound up tonight. His toupee is a more cock-eyed than usual. The show raises money for charity, but John doesn’t remember which one. He’s never called the poster board number. He just likes watching Auction Guy’s energy, the way the old man is never slowed when he gives the wrong prices, mispronounces the names of donors. He doesn’t stop even when he breaks things. Tonight he stands in front of a folding table stacked with purple shot glasses, old boxes of hair dye, and dolphin figurines made of genuine porcelain. When Auction Guy bumps the table, the dolphins ring together like bells. “Whoa there, fishies!”

John laughs.

Down the hall the bed creaks. John mutes the tv and listens. Dorie doesn’t move again, but John leaves the sound off. Auction Guy motions his viewers to follow him to some items hanging from a pegboard at the back of the set. The camera jerks and shudders as it follows Auction Guy. He’s already pointing to item in the row, but the picture blurs to refocus as it moves to each one. It looks like something Christmasy, but the camera is too out of focus for John to tell. He leans forward, hopeful. The bed creaks again. John turns the tv off.

In bed he works the pillow, looking for a cool spot. It’s warm for October. Everything feels slightly off. Dorie sleeps like a child. She’s very clear, John has observed, in her wants and her ways. Life is not the mystery to Dorie that it always is for John. She’s good at lots of things, especially playing house and having someone to take care of, and John feels pained sometimes that she’s as good as she is. He had a fantasy once of telling a girl how they’d be partners. That was the word he’d said in the picture in his head: we’re partners. He thinks Dorie might even like that he is the one she takes care of. But he’s not sure if she’s that specific. He hasn’t asked her to marry him, but she seems to assume he will. She gave him a bracelet she made, a leather cuff with two strings that tie. It has silver conchos and looks faintly Indian, and Coke won’t let him wear it while he’s on the job: non-regulation uniform. She says she loves him, and John has never asked for details, like why, for example, but he’s wondered. He kneads the pillow some more, trying to shape it into something he hasn’t found yet.

In the morning, when it’s light and Dorie is already moving in the house, John wakes on top of the covers. He figures he’s slept about three hours, what has recently become normal. He stares at the clock on his dresser where it sits aligned with his wallet, his watch, and a small black bowl for his change. Dorie brought the bowl when she moved in, and the aligning of his things is all her.

“You’re up?” she says from the doorway. John smells green apple soap and dryer sheets. She holds a laundry basket parked on her hip.

“I’m alive.”

“That’s good news. You got anything you especially want washed today?”

John wears red and tan pinstriped shirts and tan pants everyday, sometimes shorts when it’s hot. It’s the same uniform all the drivers in the Great Plains district wear. He owns little in the way of clothes of his own, but Dorie keeps all he has washed, ironed, and hung in coordinated rows: a-these-shirts-go-with-these-pants kind of thing. She gets most of it done when he’s not looking. He misses doing his own laundry.

“I’m good,” John says.

“Yeah? You don’t look all that good. Maybe vitamins.” She zips through the bedroom checking for items to add to the basket. She has the energy of Auction Guy, but she has all her own hair.

“Vitamins?”

“Maybe if you started taking vitamins. I saw some on tv the other day. Ones for men. If I see the commercial again I’ll order them for you. Okay?”

Dorie stands at the side of the bed and looks down at him. John feels heavy, cemented there. “Thanks,” he says.

Dorie smiles. “Sheets. Get up so I can wash the sheets.”

When John shaves he looks at his face in the mirror for longer than he probably ever has. He is 32 and looks old-man tired. His father would have said “Son, if you was a gas station dog, somebody’d done shot you.” That’s the look John has now.

He doesn’t know why he doesn’t sleep anymore. It’s just this thing that started one night, a few months ago. He lay awake in bed, in the room overstuffed with the dark bedroom suite, in his house that felt so full. He tugged on the sheet, and Dorie tugged back in her sleep. It meant nothing. But he felt the fabric pull from his hand, the slight ripping sound it made. He’d laid there, suddenly restless. Panic had trickled through him that Dorie would awaken and ask why he wasn’t sleeping and he’d be dumb about what to say, how to say it. He’d gone to the couch every night since.

Now of course Dorie knows he doesn’t sleep. She worries. She has bought him teas from a health food store, played soft music when she cooked. She changed all the light bulbs in the house to ones she says give off a diffused glow. She offered to give back her side of the bed. John has okay’ed all of her suggestions, tried each one though he has known all along they would not work. He has assured her she is not the problem, and he doesn’t believe she is. He just thinks about things he can’t put into words.

John craves home and good coffee. He wants to see to the end of his world, but not the end of his life. He wants a day off, but he can not name from what. He wishes keeping a cooler of beer next to his porch swing didn’t make him a redneck. He wants peace and quiet. A book that makes all the sense in the world. His name said out loud, always at the ends of things.

The day is Saturday. Chris arrives early in his pickup. John doesn’t know where they are going, but he has already said yes.

“I gotta go see a guy in Charlie,” Chris says when Dorie asks.

“Charlie?” she says. “Texas?”

“Charlie, Texas. Yeah, I think that’s what they call it.”

“That’s like fifty miles from here.”

“More like a hundred.” Chris places his palms together and makes an arrow of his hands. He looks down the length of his fingers like he’s sighting a deer standing just south of him. “See, Texas—“ he pauses in a way that John knows irritates Dorie, “Texas is all the way down in Texas.”

Dorie looks at John. “What is there in Charlie?”

“This guy I’m going to see. I told you,” Chris says. “And peaches.”

“Peaches? In October?”

“No, there ain’t no peaches in October. There’s peaches in the summer time.”

“Then why did you say peaches?”

“’Cause you asked about them They’re the best peaches down this way. Everybody goes to Charlie to buy their peaches.” Chris pats himself down, looking for his lighter. “’Cept for those who go to Stratford. Now Stratford’s got some good peaches.”

“Just stop talking,” Dorie says. John watches as her forehead scrunches tighter and tighter. She sorts clothes on the kitchen table. She makes a pile of her panties separate from John’s boxers. “So?”

“I’m going,” John says. “He might need me to help him with some stuff.”

“Stuff?”

They talk as if Chris isn’t in the room.

“I don’t know. I didn’t ask.” John stands up. He takes his jacket from a hook by the door.

Chris lights his cigarette. He’s set his Zippo on the highest setting. The hiss crackles in the cool air of the house.

“Outside,” Dorie says. John’s notices she no longer adds “please.”

He watches Chris go out the screen door, puffing smoke through the mesh.

“I don’t mind you going,” she says. “It’s just you’re gonna make yourself sick. You don’t sleep. Then you run around with that one. You can’t be healthy like this.” She moves the clothes into their assigned piles. “Just don’t stay gone all day. Come home before supper.”

“Yeah,” John says. He watches Chris through the screen, shaking his head no.

“Y’all be careful.”

“Harmless fun,” Chris says through the door and smoke. “I’ll bring him back in one piece. Honest, Ma.”

“Not likely if you’re driving.”

“One sheep,” Chris says. He tosses the cigarette into the yard. John watches it pitch into the gray. “I run over one sheep and suddenly I’m the world’s worst driver. Wasn’t even a big one. I’d’ve swerved if it’d been a big one.”

Dorie looks at John. “Just be careful,” she says into his chest.

Chris’s canoe is still tied to the roof of his truck, there since the one trip he took to the river in July.

“You ever going to take that thing off?”

“Nah. It’ll be spring again in . . .” Chris looks at his watch.

The view from the truck’s cab features a triangle of the yellow nylon rope that holds the canoe secure. John stares at the apex of that triangle as it disappears into the hull. He likes the way the rope seems to hold the truck steady when Chris swings onto the road, and the way the hull curves into a point and sails on. Chris has a brown paper bag of beer on the floorboard. John takes one. He doesn’t drink it. Right now he just likes holding it. “Where’re we going?” he asks.

“Hell if I know.” Chris looks in the mirror as if to check all the rest of John’s world stays behind them. “You want to go to Charlie?”

They arrive close to sundown. The exact distance and direction from John’s house in Oklahoma to Charlie in Texas proved more difficult to remember than either man has anticipated. A two-hour trip has taken the entire day. It is past supper time when Chris pulls them into town. Most all of the 109 population of Charlie mill the few blocks that make up the main drag. Long tables and awnings sit outside the storefronts. Church women sell apple butter and chances on a gas grill.

“Well, if it ain’t Sunday-go-to-meeting,” Chris says.

“Fall Fest.” John reads from the banner strung between streetlights. Rain sprinkles the windshield.

“Looks like we got here just in time.” Chris parks at the end of Main Street and they walk back. John thinks how happy all this would make Auction Guy. He sees pottery, horse blankets, shot glasses in just about every color. A man sits in a lawn chair at the side of a van, its doors thrown open, a brown and white cow hide displayed over the open doors. They pass tables covered in music boxes, necklaces made from rolled strips of newspaper, the same dolphin figurines John had seen on tv last night. Most of the sellers are stowing their things. Wind blows the rain a little harder. A sign, “Hides $295,” hits against John’s leg.

“You boys are late.” A lady puts rag dolls in a white Stroh’s box. “Should’a been here before the weather.”

“That’s us,” Chris says. “Always a day late and five dollars short.”

The lady waves her hand at Chris and they laugh like old neighbors. Chris stops, takes a doll from the box. John walks on to the end of the block, to a blanket spread on the sidewalk. Row after row of paintings on black velvet. They’re all of Mary, Jesus, bullfighters, cowboys, mountain men with pelts. They all look stark and defined against the velvet. John doesn’t know anything about Jesus, but he likes Jesus’ eyes in the picture at the end.

“All pictures ten dollars.”

John notices a woman in a coat so puffy she seems swallowed by it. She sits on the sidewalk next to the portraits. She motions John to look on.

He goes straight for the Jesus picture. He holds the frame loosely, feels the velvet hurriedly tucked and nailed, sees the dust in the pleats. Solid and square and warm and light.

“That is the scariest thing I’ve ever seen.” Chris stands behind him now.

“Come on.”

“You come on. You can’t be serious, man. Why would you want that thing?”

“It says something to me.”

The way the fabric holds the paint, the fibers matted underneath. The muted, earthy colors, nubs raised on the surface.

“You know, I ain’t gonna be the least bit surprised if that thing does start saying stuff. Look how its eyes follow me where ever I go.” Chris sways back and forth. “OOOOooooo.”

“Shut up. I like it.”

“You would. But you can’t think Dorie’s gonna let you keep that in the house. She don’t even let you smoke in the house.”

“She doesn’t let you smoke in the house.”

“Same difference. She’s got a lot of rules, is all I mean. When the dog can come in, no shoes on the carpet. She picks your clothes out for you.”

“What do you know?”

Chris taps his temple with one finger, squeezes one eye almost closed. “Ol’ Chris is always paying attention. You think I don’t notice? Chin plowing the ground. Hell, man, your house don’t even smell the same. Something wrong with that.”

Chris turns from the wind and lights a cigarette. John concentrates on the portrait. He spreads one hand across the fabric, pushes in with his fingers. He likes the weight and strength behind Jesus’ eyes.

“I’ll get her to like it.” He reconsiders. “I can explain to her why I like it.”

“Good luck. You’re married to a funny girl, that’s all I can say.”

“We’re not married.”

“You sure about that, man?”

John isn’t. Dorie has a way of shaping his life for him when he isn’t looking. She could have gotten them married and he not know it. She could have his life written out on paper somewhere.

Chris is gone. Johns looks around. A squatty whitewashed building with a red door, The Crack-Up Lounge painted in gold letters, stands across the street. All of the other booths are closed now. He looks back at the painting.

“You buy?” the woman asks. She has packed most of her stuff. Two Mexican boys arrange cardboard boxes like a stacking puzzle. The woman leans in, pretending to admire the portrait. She pats the frame. “Pretty,” she says.

“Yeah.” John stands thinking until the woman shuffles around him. He wants his decision to be clear. He could think clearer if the woman weren’t waiting on him. He holds the last of her pictures to be sold or packed. One of the boys says something in Spanish that makes the other boy laugh. Maybe they are her sons, John thinks. The woman snaps her fingers at them. When John looks up, the three of them stare at him.

“Yeah,” he says again and passes some money to the woman.

She sweeps the cash into her puffy coat somewhere. She and the boys are gone before John makes it to the Crack-Up’s door.

Inside the Crack-Up is shaped like a spaceship, with red carpet and a domed ceiling. The walls curve down toward the outer rim of the room, and John has to duck to keep from scraping his head when he comes through the door. There are fewer than a dozen people in the Crack-Up. Chris sits a table near the bar, a beer mug already in front of him. When he sees John he says “Oh, Jesus, it’s Jesus,” and laughs.

John feels too noticeable in the small bar. No music plays, but the chatter of the few patrons echoes in the round room. He sits across from Chris and leans the picture on a table leg. A group of old farmer-types watches them. They are strangers here. Chris is too loud for the Crack-Up, and John is too tall with his funny velvet Jesus. He is embarrassed and slides the picture under the table with his foot.

“Man, of all the ways to waste ten bucks,” Chris says.

“Just shut up about it.”

“Fine. You’ll catch enough shit at home, anyway.”

“Shut up about that, too.”

Chris shrugs and smiles. “Fine for that, as well. I’ll just sit here with my mouth closed. I’m shutting up starting now.” Chris points his index finger at the tabletop as if to mark the moment in history.

John gets that feeling again, the one he got the first night he couldn’t sleep. It grows fast. Panic creeps up his chest from his stomach. He places a hand over his jacket, as if he can stop it, then thinks he must look like he’s saying the pledge of allegiance, and puts his hands back on the table. He looks around. There are gold sparkles sprayed onto the low ceiling. Dust is collected over them, dimming their effect.

Chris hums.

John sees a woman with long brown hair. She sits several tables away but looks up when Chris starts to hum. She looks right at John and smiles. She points to the ceiling, then to Chris. “Echo,” she mouths.

John nods, and she looks away. He’s sweating. He thinks the brown-haired woman must be waiting on someone. She seems like she’s waiting, he thinks. But calm. Her face is so clear.

She looks at John again, but John looks away this time.

“I’ll be back” he says.

“Yeah, man,” Chris says.

John walks fast toward the other side of the room. A dark narrow hall extends off the circle and probably is where the restrooms are. He feels a little stupid, and like he wants to leave, but like he doesn’t want to go home. The ceiling curves down again and he feels much too large for the room. He stands out.

Just now, like the brown-haired woman, he hears the echo of Chris’s humming. Only now Chris is half-singing. John gets a funny urge to tell the woman. But this is stupid, too, he thinks. She’ll think he’s crazy. He feels crazy. He should not say anything. He looks over his shoulder but too fast to see her, or anything, in focus.

What John does see, and all too plainly, is the sign posted over the little hall. It is about eye-level to John. HEY, DUCK! it says. There’s even a little red duck smiling at him. But he sees the sign, takes it all in, a split second too late. About two years ago, John had locked the keys in his Coke truck. And the funny thing was, he knew he was going to do it. It was that same split second, the one before he let go of the door handle, that he saw in sharp detail exactly what was going to happen, the keys swinging from the ignition, the click of the door closing. And he’d liked it. That’s how clear it had been.

And just like that, John smacks into the duck sign. He can’t draw a breath. A tinny-feeling pressure ripples through his brain. There is suddenly a lot of noise in the Crack-Up. A roar of sound sweeps up from the floor and over John’s head. It falls like rain from the sparkling ceiling, right down on John.

“Oh, man, oh man. That was something. You should’a seen yourself, man. You went down like a rock.” Chris demonstrates by whacking fist against palm, then sliding the fist down his arm. He laughs.

John only now hears what Chris is saying. He remembers seeing Chris’s face but not hearing him. It was dark. Were they singing? He remembers laying against Chris’s shoulder a little before now, maybe just a few minutes ago, but he thinks it was far away from here.

“You should keep your head tilted back. I think.” It is the brown-haired woman. John can’t see to his left without turning his head. The woman moves too fast for him. He feels heavy. She unwinds yards of toilet paper off a roll she’s pulled from her purse. She makes a huge ball. “Is that right?” she asks Chris.

“Hell if I know.” Chris squats down next to John. From one eye John watches Chris study his face. Up close, even in the dark, Chris looks much younger than John. They are the same age. “Man, you busted it pretty good. That’s a lot of blood.”

“Thanks,” John says. His skin feels warm and thick.

“Here.” The woman holds the wad of toilet paper out to Chris while she starts another one.

“It’s cold,” John says. No one answers. They both study his face. He realizes they are outside, in the grass lot next to the Crack-Up.

Chris tosses the wad of paper to John, the ends fluttering in the wind. It has stopped raining. “Well, you’re in good hands for the time being.”

“What?”

“Where’re you going? I don’t know what to do,” the brown-haired woman says. She winds and winds more paper.

Chris is standing, already walking away. He grows tiny in John’s vision in just a couple of seconds. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

“Okay,” the brown-haired woman says. She pushes the first of the paper into John’s hand, tries to help him make a fist. “You should,” she starts to say but doesn’t finish.

John’s entire body except for his head hurts. He thinks that’s weird, and probably a sign of something bad. He holds the toilet paper to his nose with one hand. The woman flinches when the wad meets his face, but John does not feel it land. With his other hand he touches his lips. They feel fine under his fingers, but when he moves his hand away his lips throb like demons.

“I’m gonna lay down,” he says.

“I don’t think you’re supposed to do that.”

“No?”

“I don’t think so. I don’t know, really.” But she sounds to John as if she does. The woman shifts to his right every time she talks.

“Am I leaning?” he asks.

“It’s your eye.” She points. John’s left eye doesn’t open.

“I’m gonna lay down now.”

The woman puts her hand on John’s, the one holding the toilet paper, and draws his arm toward her. He sees the paper. It looks black in the dark. When he drops it, she puts a newly winded ball in his hand, a couple more in his lap.

“I don’t think this is gonna be enough,” she says.

“I’m okay,” John says. “Really.” He puts the paper balls in his pocket.

“You sure?”

John stretches his neck to one side, then the other. He imagines each part of his body before he moves it, unsure which parts of him work and which don’t.

“Can I get you anything? Call somebody?”

“No. Really. I just need to sit.”

John looks at her. She is pretty. The more he moves and talks, the less worried she seems. The broken thing inside his head lets go just then. He starts to float. “Do I know you?” he asks.

The brown-haired woman laughs. “No, sweetie. You don’t know me at all.”

She sits next to him, hands him the last of the toilet paper from the roll.

“Then you know me.” He doesn’t know why he says this. Whatever has broken is letting out words John didn’t know he had.

“Maybe,” she says. “Maybe I do know you. John.”

He feels something slip away from him. It’s okay it’s going, he thinks. Whatever it is. Close to him like this, he smells her flowery shampoo. He feels warmth from her body. He thinks maybe he should tell her he’s not that loopy, that he knows what’s going on, that she can leave him there. But he’s not sure that he does, so he doesn’t say that. He just sits.

“It’s okay if I keep an eye on you for a while?”

He thinks about saying an amen. Something inside John is spinning away, leaving his body. “Yeah,” he says.

“All right. I think I’m supposed to ask you questions.”

“Sure,” he says, not catching on.

“Okay. Do you know what day it is?”

“Yeah.”

“No, you’re supposed to say what day it is.”

“Oh. Yeah. I know what you mean.”

“Okay, again. Do you know what day it is?”

“Saturday. It’s Saturday night.” It is long time past time for John to go home. It is too late, he knows. “It’s Sunday morning, maybe.”

“Good,” the brown-haired woman says. “I think you covered all possibilities.”

“Maybe questions aren’t good.”

“Why?”

“I’m just saying stupid things.”

“Not at all.” She smiles.

John is surprised when she moves in front of him, almost right into his lap. “Look at me,” she says.

The brown-haired woman has teeny freckles. She wears no make-up but mascara. John thinks that her eyes are pale green. He can’t see this, not really, in the dark. These are details too fine, but he knows they are there. For a second he thinks about leaning forward. He wonders what she will do if he does.

Just then she places her hands on either side of his face, carefully, and asks, “Okay? Well,” her voice has changed. She talks like she’s talking to someone who’s falling asleep. “I don’t think you need a doctor. Or you can wait, at least. I’m pretty sure you’re going to live.”

“Probably.” John almost laughs. “That’d serve me right.”

“Now, why would you say that,” but she smiles at him. He does not mean to be funny. He is, though, dizzy. The brown-haired woman and he sit here, just like this, for an amount of time John can not count. It might be a few seconds, maybe it is minutes. But John wants it and does not move.

The woman’s hands slide away. They stay there while the wind picks up. It rustles the woman’s hair. They each move, pulling jackets into place, and they look at each other. She is safe, John thinks. Not safe like she’s safe because she’s with him. But John is safe because he is with her.

“I think it’d be okay now if you still want to lay down.”

Then she does. John is bewildered that she seems not to have thought about where they are, that she has never even seen him before this night. Her long brown hair spills over the ground. “There,” she says, and points.

“You don’t have to stay with me. He’ll come back. Some time.”

“This is fine,” she says, and John thinks what a strange and perfect answer it is. “There,” she says again.

John looks up. Tiny silver slits of stars.

“They’re changing as we’re looking at them,” she says.

He’s fascinated, but he’s not sure why, or by what. “How?”

“They’re dying. Really,” John watches as she measures a star with one forefinger and thumb, “they’re already dead. We’re seeing their light from a long time ago.”

“That’s depressing.”

“Not really, just the opposite.” She sounds happy to him, like a giddy girl. “Think about it. They’ve been dead all this time, hundreds and hundreds of years. And here we are still talking about them.

He feels like laughing again. “I guess that’s nice. Nice to be remembered.”

“Yeah. Absolutely.”

The part of John that has broken loose and gone spinning is almost gone completely.

“Ruth,” the brown-haired woman says.

“I can remember that.”

Ruth sits up. John watches her scoop a handful of sand from the ground between them. Then she lays her palm open, and he stares at the sand puddled there. He wants to hold her hand. Or maybe just touch it, or maybe it’s the dirt he’s thinking of. He’s suddenly filled with remembering, even though he isn’t sure what he’s remembering. He doesn’t know where to look, or what to say to this woman. He tips her hand down with his fingers and watches the sand slide out.

She lays back down, closes her eyes. Moonlight shows a grain of sand that has somehow landed in the hollow of her throat. The sand trembles when she breathes in. Its color changes from blue to purple to gold as she moves. John aches for that sand. He aches to wet his finger, to touch the brown-haired woman’s throat, to lift the sand from her skin.

“I bought a picture of Jesus today,” he says.

“Really? Why?”

“Don’t know.”

Ruth doesn’t answer. It is something Dorie would ask more questions about. She wants to fix him, make him feel better.

“I just don’t know.”

John laughs. His head hurts now. He feels drunk and can’t think of another word to say. He lays back on the ground, his face on the sheet Ruth’s hair has made. It’s velvet. She puts her hand on his. He feels the sand grind across their skin. “I haven’t slept in months,” he says, and then he does.

****

“You with me, man, or what?”

John opens his eyes. “What time is it?” His face hurts around his eyes when he talks.

“Finally. Jesus.” Chris stands next to John, where he has been sleeping on the ground outside the Crack-Up. Chris leans close. Ruth is gone.

“You are drunk,” John says.

“I was drunk hours ago, I’m just drunker now.”

“How’d you manage that?”

“I got to talking to this guy in the parking lot. He was okay.”

“Who was he?”

Chris shrugs. “Hey,” he says, “I can feel all the blood in my forehead.”

“Get away from me.”

“Come on.” Chris grabs John’s arms and pulls. “Get up, already. I want to show you something.”

“Leave me here.” John’s face feels flat and thick, like he’s talking through water. He looks past Chris to where the stars had been. He closes his eyes. He’s fine, he thinks, just to stay here.

“Get up, man. It’s really cool. You’ll see.”

“I’m tired of this,” John says. He’s fine, so fine with what has let go and left him. “I’m fine,” he yells.

Chris pulls harder. John stiffens like a board, but Chris keeps pulling. He shows remarkable strength for a man as drunk as he must be. John keeps his eyes closed and resists. Chris’s tugging begins to spin him like some bizarre snow angel. He sees it in his mind and laughs.

“Get up,” Chris yells. “Get up, get up, get up.”

Maybe he is too tired, maybe it’s the laughing. John relaxes, and Chris succeeds in getting him into a sitting position. His head, he’s almost sure, is so heavy it’s still on the ground.

“Just get the fuck up already,” Chris says. He’s laughing, too. “It’s cool. I swear. I swear to God.” Chris lets go, stands up. He backs away. “It’s cool, I swear.” He starts to run. “I swear to that freaking Jesus picture.”

John follows. They wind through Charlie, away from the highway, across a bar ditch, through weeds up the their knees. John follows the sounds Chris makes, unable to lift his rock of a head. They stumble up onto a side street. It’s raining again, or maybe still. They are lost, John thinks, but he doesn’t much care. There is a row of small white houses with a church at the end on one side of the street. It’s nearly sunup. Chris points to the church. “Down there,” he says.

“Where’s the truck?”

“Don’t worry about it.” Chris runs again. “Just come on, old man.”

Chris is being too loud for Charlie again. John waits for lights to snap on in the row of houses, for some pissed-off guy with a shotgun to step out on one of the little porches. But none of that happens.

He walks to the point at which Chris has disappeared. The street ends right in the church parking lot. Two giant floodlights are mounted on either side of the church’s announcement board. Without giving a thought to the consequences, John touches the surface of one of the lights and draws back instantly blistered fingers.

“Look.” Chris stands, his arms spread like a welcoming Jesus. “It’s the circus. Cool, huh?”

John sees the parking lot is packed with folded-down carnival rides. There is a Tilt-A-Whirl, a Zipper, a ride called the King of Hearts. “Are you fucking kidding?”

“We missed it. Can you believe, it?”

“Because you have got to be fucking kidding me.”

Chris looks at him like he’s crazy. John thinks maybe he can’t hear him, that talking through his broken face has made him impossible to hear.

“What? You do see it, right? You see all this stuff?” Chris waits for an answer. “Come on.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Ah, just forget it. You ain’t no good time, anymore.”

John walks through the parking lot, twisting around the bodies of the silent rides. They are all covered in fading paint. Half the ones that would be lighted are missing their bulbs. Worn duct tape hides a split in the Zipper’s seat. A dead armadillo is wedged under the bumper of the ride’s tire, and the sweetening smell makes John want to vomit. He presses his face on the cold wet metal a moment.

Chris sits on the steps of the church when John emerges from the dormant carnival. He takes a bottle from each of his coat pockets. “Here.”

“Where’d this come from?”

“Guy in the parking lot. He was okay. Didn’t I tell you?”

“You told me.”

Chris pulls one hand inside his jacket sleeve and uses the sleeve to twist off the cap. Foam spews over the bottle’s lip and spills a dark star onto the parking lot. John watches the star as it bleeds into the cinder. He holds his bottle in his burned fingers.

“You know what your problem is.” Chris states it as fact. “You think too much. Me?” he says. “I’m a purist.”

“A purist?”

“Yep, I’m a purist. I take things as they come. Not you, man. You’re always fucking thinking.”

Slips of paper, chances purchased on the grill, roll across the parking lot. They stick here and there in the rain, one on the star. John watches as a man’s name and address are wiped away in the rain.

“People say shit about people like me,” Chris says, “but the truth is I’m having a very good time.”

“I can see that.”

They sit on the church’s steps until Chris has finished half his bottle. Then they walk to the pickup at the end of Main Street. They flip the bottles into the bushes.

“Oh yeah,” Chris stops. He pulls something from his pocket. “You lost this. That girl gave it me. Must’a come off when you busted your nose.”

Chris places Dorie’s bracelet on the truck hood.

“Thanks.”

They get in. Chris backs into the street. John’s fingers and face hurt only distantly. Dried blood darkens his jacket. He is a mess hard to explain. He stares ahead, the point of the canoe aimed north. For the first time in months, John doesn’t think about anything but what’s in front of him.

Chris misses the shift on the first try. The transmission lurches, then catches. John watches Dorie’s bracelet sail over the hood and out of sight.

One fisherman wore a tee shirt with a slogan that read, “Gone Off the Deep End.” He spit brown juice into a can. Fishermen as a rule kept to themselves, didn’t say hello, didn’t want to be bothered, she was learning. It was just them and the sea and the fish. Judith could respect that need to be alone with nature. That’s why she moved to the Outer Banks—to get away. No more worrying about men and finding the right one and if she would ever marry and have a family. She had finally decided she was going to learn to live by herself and make a good life. Which is why it struck her as odd the first time she saw him—the guy in the orange windbreaker. Were her vows that flimsy? She caught herself wondering what if …

He was staring into the water as if he had lost his soul twin. Maybe he was trying to resolve something. If he noticed her—her wispy hair that required regular lowlights or people said, “God, you’re blonde!” and the way she slouched trying to blend into sand—he made no acknowledgement except a lifting of the head, a swift registering and then back to the tide pool. Still, he seemed friendlier than the fishermen.

Here he is, she thought, sneaking a peak as she walked past. His hair was curly and dark like waves and his glasses reflected water. Keep walking.

The next time she saw him, it was after work. She was trying to accomplish her daily goal of back and forth from the Sunny Dunes Hotel, when she looked down the beach and there he was. She could see the orange dot of jacket, the black tuft of hair, the tint of glasses. She trudged to a certain point. It was a public beach, a wide beach. Why stop--just because that guy is standing there staring at kelp, seaweed, and the tan tops of his feet? Before dating Edward last year, she had confidence in her ability not to attract someone. Now every male seemed dangerous, especially the older, wavy haired ones that liked water. What if this guy came over and talked to her? What if he seemed nice? She refused to enter into any agreements or expectations. She walked past him and made it to the hotel. On the way back, she took Beach Road.

The next day he was in the same place staring and she sped up. She walked past in a flurry of her own narrow footsteps. A few yards up, she slowed and began to notice the rectangular pads of her long narrow footprints with the five jagged points. She scooped up a handful of the damp sand. If he could study pools, she could study granules. Dark and round, or white, quartz-like and jagged, she let the wet clump loll on her palm.

Sand here was rougher than at Virginia Beach where her parents vacationed in an oceanfront house with four bathrooms. They still lived in Richmond but liked that their daughter was “a pioneer” to the Outer Banks. They were already talking about a Thanksgiving visit, wanting to see her one-bathroom place, with the rutted driveway. “Let me get back to you about that,” Judith had said when it was mentioned over the phone.

The other thing she left in Richmond was Edward. She used to think it was possible he was “husband material.” When she kissed him, the insides of her wrists became warm and her mouth naturally opened. Edward led a club called Rapid Riders all over the U.S. and Canada in search of the perfect ride, so he was not around all that much. He did keep in touch by calling sporadically from West Virginia, Colorado, and British Columbia. She might have spent more time with him if only she had not hurt her back last spring when she accompanied him on a Colorado River trip. Now she had to walk a lot to keep her back from hurting, and she was not supposed to sit for long periods of time. Her chiropractor back in Richmond said so.

One of the last times she saw Edward she made dinner and brought it over to his leaky, brick bungalow. They were sitting at his round wooden table, about to taste her homemade turkey tetrazzini—she’d brought it in a casserole dish—when his cordless phone rang. He took the call from his ex-wife in the other room and Judith just got up and left without saying goodbye or anything.

When she tried to break up with him the next night over the phone, he made it difficult. “No, we can’t be just friends,” he insisted.

“I’ve always wanted a brother. Maybe you could be like my brother.” She said, the back of her knees propped up on a pillow and a heating pad beneath her back.

“Nope.” He drove over and spent the night, placing another pillow under the small of her back. The next morning, he kissed her lower spine before he left. “Get better,” he said.

All she had to do was see him and she got sucked back into the vortex of dying her hair again. She maxed out her credit card for 15 streaks. For all she knew, it could be ten years from now, and she would still be trying to look good for him. He did nothing to his short kinky mess, besides shower and shake it dry. It frizzed on top from wearing a rubber skullc