 
## American Dead

### pw cooper
Copyright 2012 - pw cooper

All rights reserved.

Table of Contents

### Part I: Beneath the Screen

### High Gorge Park - Spring

He had been proud to be an American. Living in the Land of Opportunity. A hopeful world. He had been hopeful. He had believed in America.

He had waited so long.

His body was in the gorge on the edge of town, out there past the shaggy old screen of the abandoned drive-in, out past the trailer park where the old homes were sunk like tombstones in the mud. They still hadn't found him. They were not looking for him. All the children, his friends, had gone to their distant lives in the cities of America. There was no one left now to search out the dead. How long until they came home again? How long until they found him?

The trailer lot where he had lived was once a drive-in movie theater, though he'd never known it as such. The theater had gone out of business long before his time. A man named Charles Conner bought the lot in 1987. He built a house up on the hill over the empty lot and the broken screen and he waited there for the town to die. People gradually migrated to the trailer park when they could no longer afford to keep their houses.

And now the house on the hill was quiet, all the lights dark. A limp cloth flag hung in one frosted window. The door was the color of old blood. The town was called Verden.

The movie screen at the border between the park and the wood had always looked to him like a ruin of some long-vanished age. In the quarter-century since the theater had shut down nobody had ever bothered to tear it down. He'd wondered if maybe they were afraid of it. Large sections had decayed, slabs of flesh left to rot on the bone, and the pines beyond pushed their ruffled limbs into the gaps like thieves reaching for the lock through a broken window. The wilderness was growing over the world, and the people of Verden no longer possessed the strength to cut it back. The only other remnant of the drive-in was the re-purposed marquee by the roadside. The signboard which had once declared coming attractions to both lanes of traffic now read on each face: _High Gorge Park: American Homes_.

Deeper through the pines was the trailer park's namesake, a ravine torn in the earth like a broken seam. Gnarled roots curled lazy along its edge, furtively grinding their wizened fingers at the stone. His body was deep below, invisible in the shadow.

It was not the first time that somebody had died there. People still talked about Tad Harris, who'd been found there in 1972. The story was that he took his girlfriend to a midnight showing of _Dracula_ so they could fool around without their parents bothering them. She – made uneasy, perhaps, beneath the bloodshot gaze of the Count – refused his advances. He pleaded and demanded and finally bashed her skull against the window of his father's truck. She opened the door, staggered out, vomited and was gone. When he could no longer bear to watch her blood running in the radial crack he too left the truck and wandered towards the screen, towards Christopher Lee's colorless face and scarlet lips, onward into the mouth of the woods where the deathless pines stirred. They found Tad's girlfriend the next day, gazing wide-eyed up at the empty screen with eighteen hairline fractures in her skull. She remembered nothing of herself except for her own name. She never quite recovered. He'd met her once years ago, seen her wandering the frozen foods aisle of the grocery store. She'd looked old to him, had a blankness in her face and a slackness to her mouth that had made him think there was a strand of drool there about to slide out.

Two more days passed before they found Tad, his neck broken in the gorge half a hundred yards north of the drive-in, completely barefoot. His socks and shoes were never found. The police decided that it had been an accident. Most of the town considered justice to have been done, either by some dour judgmental god or by the twinge, perhaps, of a primeval karmic instinct. A few people thought that he had been murdered by his girlfriend's older brothers – and some others that he had been cut down by some dark spirit of the woods – but most accepted the explanation that he had simply slipped in the dark. They put up a guard chain along the edge of the gorge and were satisfied. Nobody, as far as he'd heard, had ever considered the possibility that Tad could have thrown himself into the gorge, fulling expecting to die when he landed. He just wasn't the type, they said.

They knew suicide there. Such acts were common in that place. The Finger Lakes gouged into the crust of the world like the marks of some great cosmic hand. The cracked earth and the maze of gorges, all those dizzying tumbles into cold water rushing over black rocks. Those ravines had all seen their fair share of dead. He'd read about so many suicides that they lost their sting, lost their excitement. Just another body, not a person, only a vessel broken on the stones.

High Gorge had lain dormant in the years since Tad's demise, the river running quietly through the deep woods on the extreme edge of Verden. Waiting and eating at the earth, its teeth watery and slow.

His was a twilight village, the population of less than two thousand people dwindling steadily. After the aluminum plant closed in the late seventies it had all started to fade away, piece by piece until there was nothing left but a meager few farms and shops, most of them trending towards the red side of solvency. Nobody had any delusions: Verden would be dead soon and all of its as yet unwritten history surely concerned a slow and quiet demise. He'd seen it even in his own lifetime, watched it happen and recognized it when he was a child. Every year the town looked a little shabbier, a little poorer. Death had a familiar stench.

It was now two years into the new millennium and February snow fell like scraps of wet paper torn from the gray sky. Twenty-seven trailers were scattered on the lot like abandoned toys. His corpse waited in the gorge, blue ice creeping across gray skin. He had waited so long. He waited for America to find him.

The trailer park was sleeping.

### Edward Smith

Edward threaded the flimsy plastic tray into its slot atop the projector. He stroked the uniform heads of the slides, his finger like a nightstick across prison bars. He switched on the machine. Angry sparks of electricity ate through the coils of intestinal wiring. Light flooded out against the dirty white sheet he'd thumb-tacked to the wall; the sudden glare of it stung his eyes, accustomed as they were more to gloom than to light.

Photography had been the first great love of his life. He'd worn ragged the corners of his father's National Geographic collection, dreaming of the sights captured on those glossy pages. His camera hung now on the wall from an iron hook, black plastic lens cap tightly in place. The odor of mildew and rot permeated the old trailer; he had long since ceased to notice such smells.

The controller for the slide projector sat beside the machine, wire coiled so tightly that the thin black cord looked like a scribbled circle penciled over many times. He unwound it and dug his fingernail into the rubber button. The projector advanced the first slide into position, making a sound as though it were chewing, flat machined teeth crunching plastic into splinters. The first image splashed up against the wall, not a picture but these few words neatly printed in his own cramped hand: _High Gorge Park, 2001_

He pushed the button again.

_January 4, 2001_. A distressingly out-of-focus shot of his own trailer. The road-salt which Mr. Conner had so haphazardly spread shone brilliantly where the cut edges of the crushed stone caught the hard glare of the sun. A potted plant – hydrangeas – stood in the open window of the trailer, squat and unambitious, reaching out its thin leaves like flat fingers unfurling. It had died months ago. He pressed the button.

_February 8, 2001_ : A portrait of the house on the hill. Michael Conner was sitting on the porch of his adoptive parent's home. There were holes worn in the elbows and knees of his clothes and a Yankee's cap perched over his sandy blond hair. He squinted at the camera, a vaguely ill expression on his face. Charles Conner stood in the doorway of the house, hands shoved deep into the pockets of his slacks, his face buried in shadow. Michael had moved away only a few weeks after the picture was taken. It was strangely disconcerting to see the house now, knowing that Mike was no longer there. Time ran on so fast, children grew up in a blink, the world emptying and filling like a human lung.

Edward pushed the button.

_February 22, 2001_ : A picture of Nathan Riley brushing snow off the windshield of his station wagon. The old wood paneled doors were lacy with frost. The headlights glowed yellow in the pale dawn light.

He pushed the button.

_March 3, 2001_ : Two women, Kimberly Burke and Adelaide Anderson, sitting together on the steps of Adelaide's trailer, cigarettes in their pale fingers. Their breath was a thin fog in the chill. Kimberly seemed to be laughing at something the older woman had said. Her curly red hair was swept messily about her face. Their noses and cheeks were flushed.

He pushed the button, and left them behind.

_August 28, 1964_ : A picture, older than and immediately distinct from those which had preceded it. The color was washed out, the image grainy. This slide, this outlier, showed a young woman at the drive-in. She sat in the passenger seat of a car with pale leather seats, stripy popcorn carton in her left hand. Her blond curls were gathered up and held back with a pair of red hair-clips. She was blushing at the attention of the photographer. Her lips were very red, her face round and soft, her fair skin silver in the wan glow of the screen.

Edward pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. He looked at the picture for a long time. How long since he'd last seen her face, her true face? So many years had passed and all that was left was the photographs. They were the only proof of anything – memory eroding and ebbed. The theater where he had worked as a projectionist after all his attempts to find work as a photographer proved fruitless no longer existed. He supposed that he was no more than a few dozen yards from where the picture had been taken. The screen remained, slowly collapsing, but everything else had changed. The whole world in motion. The world in the photo was altogether unfamiliar. It was not supposed to be here.

He turned off the projector and removed the offending slide from the tray. It looked just like all the others, maybe a little more worn. He parted the curtains and held the slide up to the light of the pale gold morning. There were stacks of boxes in the closet, all meticulously labeled. Three of those boxes bore the simple label: _Samantha_. How had this one slide found its way out? Perhaps he was going senile in his elder years. That thought which had once been so terrifying filled him now only with a sense of resignation.

He returned the slide to its proper place in the closet and went back to his projector. He sat in his chair and took up the control.

The order had been interrupted by his fiddling, a picture from somewhere in the middle of the set was projected against the wall.

_September 17, 2001_ : Another picture of the park. The trees across the street were resplendent in their autumn dress, leaves turned vibrant red and gold. An American flag hung in every window, like mourners at a military funeral, all the rusted trailers adorned in the full blush of patriotism.

Edward remembered that day, remembered wondering and wondered still why it was that so many of the flags were made of plastic rather than cloth. Disposable plastic flags that stretched, warped in the heat as though melting. All the color ran out of them.

He pressed the button to go to the previous slide. Then again and again. He took the long trek back towards the beginning of the collection, towards the beginning of the year. The last snow on the ground outside was fading in the sunshine.

High Gorge Park, 2001

### Adelaide Anderson

She held the empty cigarette carton between her thumb and forefinger. She read the Surgeon General's warning, printed along the side of the box in small black letters like the dense wriggling trail left by the feet of an ink-dipped bug. The thin paper and plastic lining crumpled like cling-film in her fist. She dropped it with a clatter into the empty metal garbage can.

Adelaide sat in front of the dead-static television with a clay ashtray in her lap. Her husband had brought her the ashtray – though she'd not smoked at the time – from the gift-shop of a Native American museum in California. A tawdry remnant of a vanishing people, of a distant American past, it was painted a glossy enamel blue with off-white buffalo skulls ringing the edge. The inside was the burnt red color of western clay, stained dark from years of snubbed ash. A box of wooden matches sat inside the bowl.

The match snapped angrily when she lit it. The flame sputtered a moment before going contently silent, trembling.

She lit the cigarette and shook out the match until it left behind an arc of smoke. The match was shriveled and black and hot. She smoked without thinking, drawing the foul heat down into her lungs. The tip of the cigarette glowed in the darkness, she held it away a moment and looked at it.

This was the last time. She was done after this. Smoking had been his vice, not hers. Never hers. The curls of habitual smoke rose like sun-stroked dust from between her fingers. Every Friday for more years than she could remember she went to the corner store, a half-hour walk both ways, and she bought her husband three packs of cigarettes. Always the same brand; the packaging and of course the price had changed, but the brand endured. An American lineage. The brand was here before us and it will be here after we are gone. The brand is the soul of America, enduring.

Joe had been a smoker to the last, to the very day of his death. He'd used to joke about it: my coffin nails, he would say, a note of sarcasm in his strained voice. She remembered the way he would hold them, almost timidly between his thumb and forefinger, and watch her through the dense gray haze.

She so missed the sound of his voice, would have done anything to hear him again. So much of what he'd said to her had been cruel. His spite pouring from his worn throat. His rough tongue, her mother would have said, tongue rough as sandpaper to wear your heart smooth.

Those details were all slipping away. The venom lingering in his eyes, the way his smoke used to make her throat tighten and her eyes water when he came home and to stare mindlessly into the television screen with a cigarette between his lips. She had forgotten all those things. His identity sloughed from him like a crust, eroding with time until what was left seemed almost to shine. The name, Joe Anderson, it didn't really mean anything anymore, just an arrangement of sounds she no longer had any reason to speak.

Fragments of him lingered in her mind, relentless as the cancer which had eaten through his body. She knew his smell better than her own body, could still hear the echo of his voice in her head. All those days spent waiting for him to come home from work, all those nights spent limp beneath his plunging body, emotion swelling inside her. And always the disappointment when he came, when he came home.

She remembered the wedding, remembered that hope-filled child wrapped in white who seemed now to be another person entirely. She remembered their first house, remembered abandoning it for this place not long after, the both of them hoping to leave behind the red-marked notices and the seemingly endless stream of bills. Joe hated the trailer park almost as much as she'd liked it. The days hadn't seemed nearly so long or so lonely when there were so many people around her, so many friends to be made. Of course her friends were all gone now, gone or dead. And then her husband left as well; the sickness and the hospital and the slow wasting removal of Joe Anderson from the world like he'd sprung a leak and hissed down to an empty pile of skin draped over suddenly frail bones. She remembered sitting at his bedside and looking down into his eyes, those gray eyes staring silently and hopelessly from a shrunken skull. She remembered finding the pack of cigarettes in the pocket of his pants, hung up for good in corner of the hospital room, remembered going outside and lighting one, trying to forget that hollow look in a haze of brand-stamped smoke.

And when she could bear to remember no longer, she switched on the television. Coils of acrid gray smoke rose about her as she listened to the burbling voices of the newsreaders, to their voices only and not their words. She had no interest in what they had to say.

The world they spoke of was strange and unfamiliar. A world of terror and fear. It meant nothing to her.

### Nathan Riley

His fingers were twisted together behind his back, wrists chaffing against the rope. She pressed him against herself. His tongue against her folded pink sex, moaning into her scent. Her eyes closing, her fingers winding through his thinning hair, her lips opening to draw a strand of saliva across her wet mouth. She wrapped her thighs around his head, dug her heels in just below the shoulder blades and held him there while he kissed at her.

His lips pressed against the grape-vine tattoo winding round her thigh. He knew her better than he knew himself, could touch his fingers to each violet cluster in the absolute dark.

"You want this don't you?" she asked him, tearing at his scalp with her sharp hands. Her voice was breathlessly light, clenched in her throat. One strand of her toxic-white hair was down across her face. She stared at the ceiling, eyes open and glassy with tears. She cried only when she was happy, never otherwise.

He kissed her harder, hard enough to make her groan and clutch her thighs about him.

The curtain was open a crack. There was a cardinal in the frost-whitened feeder outside the window. Nathan heard the sound of its chirping over the growl of the cars on the highway. The wind pushed relentlessly against the side of the trailer. Was the bird an omen? The red bird, blood and despair and terrible beauty.

His mind emptied itself, all pouring out into her.

Her lips curved, her body arched and tight. Her face glowing and eyes shut as if she were lying in the sun, caressed by heat and verging on unconsciousness, standing warmed like a basking reptile on the edge of a childhood dream. The ice hanging over windowsill was melting clear tears down the glass.

He filled his eyes with her body, her taut pale belly, her breasts drawn gently down to her armpits, heavy flesh pulled flat by inexorably gentle gravity. Her sharp chin and her curved mouth.

"You're nothing to me, Nathan, nothing at all."

"I know. Nothing." He kissed her softly between each word.

He had no understanding of life without her. How many years now had they been married? Every day with her seemed a lifetime. She was forty-two years old, and he was only a few months away from forty. Did that mean they'd grown up? He didn't feel forty. He felt young still, felt like a child still.

He'd entertained the idea of suicide throughout much of his youth. When he was a boy he'd been convinced that he would kill himself before his twentieth birthday. It had seemed inevitable. That age came and went, and then he met her, and then he gave himself to her. It was a kind of death, and it agreed with him. He drank life from his wife's slick cunt, and all the while the pain of her hand twisting tighter and tighter through his hair.

Nathan thought of his daughter. His little Gena. God, she'd grown up so fast. She was old enough now to figure things out for herself. How much did she know? He had hidden himself for so long; it had become a kind of skin. Cut through and it stings and bleeds. He could feel his embarrassment like a sickness inside of him.

She'd been babysitting for one of the neighbors yesterday, had come home wringing her hands with a solemn faced little girl, bare knees raw and cut. The blood was shockingly red on her pale legs, dark with embedded gravel. The little girl's lower lip trembled and her cheeks were damp with tears. "I only left her alone for a _minute_." Gena had said, sounding like she was on the verge of tears herself.

Jessica had cleaned the girl's cuts in the bathroom. Brackish water was running from the corroded faucet, and Gena sank down against the wall, her hands shaking. He hadn't known what to say. He hadn't known how to talk to her. Who are you who came from me?

Jessica and he had stood by the door and watched them go, shoes scuffing, back out into the park. "She's so young." he had said.

"Sally?"

"Gena."

"She'll be grown up soon."

"God, I hope not."

Jessica had pushed him aside and shut the door.

* * *

He touched the lighter's eager little flame to the tip of joint. She breathed in. Exhaled. Pale smoke flowed from her mouth. It disappeared into the colored light which bled in through the drawn curtain. Nathan pulled it back and looked out at the dark sky, at the hazy gold disk of the sun suspended in black cotton clouds.

He lifted himself onto his side and looked at Jessica. Her skin shone, slick with perspiration. Her hair was tangled. She closed her eyes, blowing smoke out her nostrils. "Where are you, Nathan?" she mumbled the words around the cigarette.

He stared at the ceiling for a long while before he spoke. "I was fired yesterday... well... 'let go' is how he put it, but... you know."

She laughed a little. "Jesus Christ, Nate, you wait until _now_ to tell me this?"

"I'll find another job."

"No, you won't," she said, and rose above him. She grasped his jaw and forced open his mouth. Casually, she stabbed the tip of the joint down onto the wet surface of his tongue. He twisted in her grip, wincing as she extinguished the hot point. Involuntary tears ran down his face. She stared down at him, her expression inscrutable.

The pain swam through him, lifted him. "I will," he wanted to say, but he could not speak. Smoke rose between his teeth.

She shrugged on the lacy white robe that he'd bought her for their tenth anniversary and she left him lying there on the bed, naked in the dusky half-light with the taste of ashes in his mouth.

Nathan stared at the ceiling, transfixed and elated by the unexpected pain, the communing heat of it. His tongue seemed still to burn, like there was a coal sitting there and working its slow way through. Tears rolled down his cheeks.

He shut his eyes, and he thought he could feel the little house moving beneath him. He sometimes dreamed that the trailer was rolling away, was moving slowly down into some vast green valley, wheels floating just over the ground. He let his feet hang out so that the soft grass lashed at his heels.

Whenever he woke from that dream, in that upended moment between consciousness and sleep, it was always the lack of motion which surprised him most. But of course none of the trailers moved anymore. They were all up on cinder blocks now, settling into the soft mud. He'd been living here with Jessica for longer than their daughter had been alive. They'd promised each other that it was only temporary, that they wouldn't be here long. That had been nearly twenty years ago. Gena had never known anything else and he had long since forgotten.

None of them were going anywhere.

### Kimberly Burke

The alarm clock blinked at her: _12:00 12:00 12:00_

She sat up with a start. Had she slept that late? She couldn't have! Twelve. The power must have gone out again? God damn it!

She groaned and lay back down on the bed. It took her a moment to remember where she was. The dirty-copper taste of old blood ran between her teeth. It was as though she hadn't slept, she was still so tired. She was always tired. She wiped her lips and turned to look at the man lying beside her.

He resided in a deep and easy sleep, that uniquely male sleep which held no fear of violation. There was no worry on his dreaming face. One leg tangled in the bed-sheet and the other hanging off the edge of the mattress like a marionette's twisted limb. The black hair on his chest was thick and his beard trimmed to a scrupulously narrow strip down the chin. His dick was limp on his belly and, for an instant, she wanted to bite it, bite right though.

Kimberly looked at his face. "Hello?" she said, and the word came guttural from her dry mouth. She reached between her teeth and felt at her tongue. It seemed too big, swollen and tender. She could taste him there, and fought the urge to force her finger down her throat, to vomit up his seed from within her.

There were half-moon marks on her breasts, angry pink bites bound to no memory in her power to recall. She yawned and got out of bed. There was a moment of dizziness when she got to her feet. She put one hand against the wall and took a slow breath in through her nose. She pushed the heels of her palms against her eye sockets. Her pillow was smeared with makeup, like a chalk drawing of her face.

Kim sank down and felt about the floor for her clothing. This was her trailer, she knew, though it felt alien and unfamiliar to her. She gathered the underwear knotted just under the bed. It was the last day of her period. She peeled off the soiled panty liner before she slid her thickish legs into the lace-bound holes. The bra-strap itched at her shoulder blades. She felt so ugly. So very old.

How long had she slept? She went to the window and parted the blinds. Sunrise red light crested beyond the pines, spilling down on the park.

The man in the bed seemed vaguely familiar. She crawled to the corner and felt at his crumpled jeans. His wallet was buffed black leather so smooth and artificial that she could hardly believe it had once been an animal's skin. She rubbed her thumbs on it and thought of cows chewing stupidly in a green field, of young farm-boys running their clutching hands over the cow's tough hide.

His name was Kevin Peterson, his address somewhere across town. A younger version of his face stared from the license photo, eyes oddly wide, as though he was stretching his lids to their maximum tolerance. His hair, so neatly arranged now, had once been wild and long, all the way down to the shoulders.

A Polaroid photo fell from the wallet when she opened it. Kim reached down and picked it up.

_Kimberly Burke 4/7/02_ stared blankly up at the camera. Her mouth slightly open, red-rimmed with smeared lipstick, her eyes black with mascara. Her breasts were held up in her hands, blue veins showing through pale skin, the flesh gone soft with age – she had to support them so they didn't droop so much. Her bones seemed to have turned to jelly, all that remained was the loose flesh, seized up and proffered. She sat like a child on the floor, her legs bent at the knees and tucked beneath her body so that her thighs looked much wider than they really were. Her dark red hair was tied behind her head in a loose pony-tail, held back with a pale green band.

She looked at the picture for a long time, and wondered why Keven had taken it, dated the night before.

She knew why, of course. She'd had her picture taken like this before. But that was over. She remembered now who the man in the bed was, someone out of her past, someone she'd not expected to see again. She had Dan now; Dan was a regular boyfriend, and he would be coming for her soon. She couldn't let Dan see her like this.

She and Dan had met at one of the substance abuse meetings she'd been compelled to attend by that judge. He'd been clean now for six months, showed no signs of backsliding. She still used, but not so much that she couldn't hide it from him. She didn't _need_ it like some people did. Giving it up would be easy if she ever decided to do so.

The camera was on the floor beside Kevin. She picked it up and found it surprisingly heavy. She pointed it down at the sleeping man and took his picture.

There was a flare of colorless light and the picture printed itself into her hand. There was nothing at first, a blank space waiting for Kevin to fade into focus. The flash-illuminated bedroom seemed gaudy and unnatural in the sudden burst of captured light. The faux-wood paneling and the plaid bed-sheet made the picture look like something out of its time.

She compared the two photos. Somehow he wasn't as vulnerable as she. What was it about women that turned them so weak in pictures? She hated to see her face, hated to be captured like that, bent to the will of the viewer. And yet she could not bend Kevin. He slumbered on, undisturbed.

She returned the camera to its place on the floor. There were wet tissues and a crinkled licorice wrapper in the little garbage bin by the door. She tossed both Polaroids in.

She dressed quietly.

The man groaned in his sleep and turned onto his side. He brought his fingers to his mouth, and she thought for a moment that he looked like a child. His face was blank with the thoughtlessness of sleep.

She reached down and gave his foot a shake. "Kevin? You have to go now, Kevin. Come on." The man in her bed groaned, one eye flicking open, gummy and watering. "Come on," she said, "You've got to go. Tell him that I'm not interested. Tell him to leave me alone."

Kimberly left him fumbling for his clothes; she knew better than to stay within reach of a waking man. The trailer was eerily quiet. The kids must still have been sleeping. The sink was filled with crusty dishes. There was food rotting on the counter, flies buzzing at the scraps. She stood there looked down into the drain, pushing her fingers idly through her long tangles of hair. Her head felt as though it were splitting open, like a cracked egg broken and poured out.

Her arm itched. She scratched at the little marks there, pink marks like bug-bites along the vein. Outside the kitchen window the April sun was spilling gray fire.

This was it: the end of the world. She had been waiting so long.

Everything changed when she first got pregnant. Her father had just about killed her. "Only fourteen years old!" he said, rage in his eyes, hatred for her and for all women. Glared at mother as though it was her fault as well.

"Did he force you?" her mother had asked later, cheeks wet with tears, her eyes empty and bovine. "It's all right if he forced you, Kimberly. It wouldn't be your fault then. Is that it?"

And that was when Kimberly truly began to hate her mother. She had seethed, had convinced herself that it wouldn't be long until He rescued her from this _thing_ , this family-thing which had grown up around her like lattice-work. A beautiful prison behind the white picket fence and phony smiles.

That night her dad beat her, worse than ever before. Mom had to take her to the hospital. She told all the people there that Kimberly had been raped by a strange man. What could she say? She'd had to go along with it. A woman from Planned Parenthood came to talk to her but Mom wouldn't allow it. They wouldn't stand for an abortion. That just wouldn't have been Christian.

The months crawled by, and she'd sat there in her bedroom, clutching little baby Alice to her breast and waiting for Him, but of course He never came. What man would? Twice betrayed, and her life began.

He was dead now for all Kim knew. Anyway, she found someone new soon enough, someone to take her away from that place, from those people. He put his baby in her and he put heroin in her and he left her. She used on and off during the pregnancy, whenever she could afford to. Anything to take away the sting: she had been abandoned again, betrayed _again_. Junk was the river and the sunlight. She could live without it, but there was no motion, no color. Living sober was like building a house in a desert, and just over the ridge an oasis.

She named the baby Jeffrey, and discovered soon after that she could trade sex for money, for heroin directly sometimes. At least Jeffrey's father had left her the trailer when he left, left it in her name even. Bastard. Trapped her in this place of his, left her there to rot in his memory. Even those times when she gave up using for a week or a month, there was still never enough money for anything, and two kids to feed! Those had been bad years. Hard years.

She'd had three more kids since, none of them deformed, thank god. She'd seen that happen with the children of other users, they came out all messed up, had to be destroyed sometimes. She'd tried not to use when she was pregnant, had tried _hard_. She only slipped up a couple of times, though nothing bad came of it, thank god. Pregnancy, she'd found, the whole process of childbirth, it was its own kind of high, the ultimate cure for loneliness. She felt so empty when she didn't have a baby growing inside, didn't have a baby suckling from her body. It just wasn't the same once they started to grow up.

She walked the length of the trailer. Her children were sleeping behind closed doors. She put her ear to the wall and listened to them breathe. She opened the door a crack: Garret and Sally down on the floor, wrapped in blankets, Walker sleeping with his face to the wall. Sally's corn-silk hair drawn across her face.

Kimberly left them. She found herself in the bathroom mirror.

She saw the face from the photograph there in the glass: her copper hair tangled, mascara bleeding darkly from under her eyes. Her lips red and soft as overripe fruit. The eyes, abyss deep and muddied green. Face of the dead. There was something beautiful about a dead woman, she thought.

The phone rang, sharp and dissonant and urgent. She jumped. Hurried across the trailer to answer it. "Hm, hello?" she bit off the words through the chattering of her clenched teeth. The telephone frightened her. The last time she'd spoken to her father had been by phone, the last time she'd spoken to HIM, the last time she'd spoken to the man who left her the trailer. Phone calls meant someone was leaving you. Her father, dead five years ago and she hadn't even gone to the funeral. Why should she have gone? What had he ever done to earn it? _Bastard_!

"Hi, Mom."

"J-Jeff?" She bit down on her tongue, tears welling in her eyes. Oh god, not her son. Not today.

He sighed heavily, the sound of it twisted and mechanical through the telephone line. "It's me."

He was tired of her, he despised her. She knew that, she could hear it in his voice. She didn't care; she didn't need _love_ from her children. Children were to be loved, nothing in return. They were a part of her, what did she care what they _thought_? What did she care if they hated her? She was used to being hated.

She drove her fingers deep into her hair. "I'm sorry... it's... I'm not really awake yet. Are you alright?"

Jeffrey was her second, her beautiful child. Eighteen or nineteen years old now; she couldn't remember exactly. He'd been away almost a year, away at school. College! She was so proud of him, missed him so terribly. Even before he left, those years of semi-residence. He'd spent so much time working that she barely saw him! But it had all paid off. A child of hers, going to college! God, she was so _proud_ of him.

For a moment there was only the hissing of silence over the phone line, and then: "I'm fine, I guess."

"Is anything wrong?"

"Not really. I just wanted to let you know that I'm coming home."

"Home?" Kim blinked, confused. She didn't understand. Wasn't he at school? Hadn't he gone away? Was it Jeffrey on the phone or was it his father, that man who had left her the trailer in her own name and vanished with no more than a phone call? Jeffrey sounded so much like his father; she couldn't bear to hear the voice, to be reminded that he was not wholly hers, that he belonged also to that man.

"Yeah." His voice flat, revealing nothing.

"Are you... staying long?" She gnawed a strand of her hair.

"I don't know," his voice sounded strange, flattened out. "A while, probably."

Kim clutched the phone. Her head was throbbing. "When are you coming?"

Kevin stirred in the next room. The faucet in the bathroom came on; she heard splashing water. She hoped that Jeffrey couldn't hear it. He'd always hated it when she had men over.

Jeffrey didn't bother to answer her question. "You haven't talked to Alice, have you?"

"Not recently." Kim felt a dull ache along her spine. The pain of bearing a child never really went away, not completely. And then they left like a limb tearing itself off, left phantom pain in the womb. Poor Alice, poor lost child.

"Is she doing alright?" he asked.

"I think so."

"I heard she was coming back."

What time was it? Kim wondered. Didn't she have to be somewhere? Wasn't somebody waiting for her? "Is that why you're coming back? Just to see her?"

"I'll see you too, Mom." His voice so brittle and sarcastic, so terse. His father had never been terse, he'd said everything on his mind without evocation or evasion no matter how good or bad it might be. Even that last time, over the phone when he called to tell her that he was leaving her and leaving her the trailer. He spoke calmly and beautifully across her tears. Sixteen year old with two beautiful babies, left twice. She still didn't know how she'd survived it all.

The line was dead. Jeffrey was gone too.

Dan would be here soon. She had to get rid of Kevin before Dan arrived. She hadn't had many boyfriends, not really. Most of those she had she'd met when she was working. Anyway, she didn't do _that_ anymore, she had a job now. A real job. Last night had just been... nothing. It had been nothing.

Kim went back into the bedroom, looking for the man.

There were folded bills on her dresser wrapped around a little clear-plastic baggie, still half full of a dirty-white powder. Just something to take the edge off. A parting gift. No, not a gift. A payment. She sat down on the edge of the bed and she looked around the room. The silence was heavy, voices in her head crowding about like chattering ghosts arrayed: her children, her boyfriend, her boss, her parents, her friends. She thought about her children. She did not know how long she sat there.

She heard the front door open, heard Dan's raggedly warm voice calling to her.

The pictures were gone from the garbage can. _Her_ picture was gone. Kevin must have taken them with him when he left. She took a quick hit of the stuff in the baggie and grabbed the folded money off the dresser and crammed it into her pocket, fighting back a yawn and rubbing her nose.

It was going to be a long day.

### Jeffrey Burke

Jeffrey's head rocked against the window of the Greyhound bus as it rattled down the old highway. He stared out at the shoulder of the road. The pavement was crumbling, the edge running ragged – no more than a haphazard blur as the vehicle sped along the twisted road.

It felt like he had been traveling for days. The rumble of airplane engines still echoed in his ears, all those planes drawn down to the tarmac like circling carrion birds. It was in his nostrils still, the sterilized reek of the airport terminal: a smell like a toilet stall that had just been cleaned, sickness of the body drowned in the odorous choke of sanitary chemicals.

Jeffrey had seen the trailer park from the air. It had looked unreal from such a height, the array of homes like matchboxes scattered in a muddy sandbox. He'd felt very small looking down at it. Sitting there in the cramped airplane seat, trying to ignore the wet snores of the man beside him, he had looked down and seen the nation through scraps of cloud, spread out like a vast collection of decrepit dollhouses, all arrayed with haphazard pride on the barren earth.

He was coming home. He'd expected to feel something. A pang of regret, maybe. Disappointment. Shame, perhaps. The first in his family to go to college, and he was coming home. Giving up not even a full year in, everything he had worked for turned to chalk in his hands. It should have destroyed him, but he felt nothing. Felt curiously empty.

He stared out the window of the Greyhound. The trees drooped under the weight of season's final snowfall. Beyond were the rolling brown hills, damp and hunched, their sunless northern faces pale with frost.

Nothing had changed.

Jeffrey looked at his hands. Cream-in-coffee brown, a white scar across one palm. He remembered the cut. He'd got it climbing the old screen, years ago when he was still young. His big sister had dared him, and of course he'd done it. Jeffrey had never learned how to say no to Alice. He was halfway up the blank white face when he grabbed onto a folded bit of sheet-metal, curled inward through one of the gaps and black with corrosion. He hadn't made a sound, hadn't let go. Alice was staring up at him, both hands shading her eyes against the harsh summer sun. Without a word, he started climbing back down. Blood ran down the white screen where he put his hand against it, shocking red palm-prints like a series of crimson finger-paintings. He had to use both hands to climb, tearing open his palm every time he gripped for a blood-slick handhold.

Mom yelled at them both the whole way to the emergency room. Alice cried when they gave Jeffrey a tetanus shot. She'd always been afraid of needles. On the way back from the emergency room she put her hand on his knee and told him that she had never seen anything so brave. That had made it all worth it. He'd smiled at her. The pain meant nothing, not if she thought he was good.

Jeffrey Burke was one of five children, though Alice was the only one of his siblings he knew well. As far as he knew, none of them shared the same father. Certainly none of them shared his. Once he had asked his mother, his lily-skinned red-haired mother, why no one else in their family was the same color as he. She kissed him on the cheek and said that he was a child of the earth and told him not to mention it again. For months after that, he spent his nights lying awake wondering what she had meant, feeling as though there were something terribly and fundamentally wrong with his very existence and sick with fear at the thought.

When he was in middle school a black couple moved into the park. They were the first dark-skinned people he'd ever actually seen in Verden, people like him. He couldn't remember their names, only their faces shining as though illuminated by some inner light. They left the park after only a few months, moved to Utica, he'd heard. He still thought about them sometimes, about what his life might have been like if he could only have been _their_ child.

It was the thought of them which got him through high school, got him to drag his grades up just high enough to get into a decent college, got him to work like a dog for five years until he'd actually raised enough money, with scholarships and loans, to send himself to college in San Diego for a degree in architectural engineering.

And now he was coming home and he didn't know what he was going to do. There was nowhere else for him to go.

He caught sight of his reflection in the smeared window of the bus. There were shadows beneath his eyes – those big brown eyes that he'd always felt were a bit too wide, always looked surprised about something. His curly hair was bleached blond, the dark roots just starting to show. He didn't know why he'd dyed it, couldn't think of an explanation. He didn't much like the way he looked, he supposed.

They passed the sign. _Verden New York: Population 1,970_. His sun-tanned California classmates wouldn't have even believed that towns that small existed.

He was close now.

The bus rumbled to a halt at the familiar stop. A crooked sign on the edge of a shaggy wood. The door yawned open. He was tempted to stay on the bus. He could be happy here, he thought, just drifting in the stream for the rest of his life, never leaving, never arriving, only traveling. At least then there was always hope, always the chance that what waited beyond the next hill would be better than what he had known. A ragged woman climbed up the stairs, black plastic bags crinkling in her bony hands.

Jeffrey got off the bus. He set his bags down on the damp earth beside the highway and watched the bus pull away, turn back to the road. It left him standing in a memory. The forest, the trailers, the old movie screen, it was all just as it had always been. There was a letter missing from the old matinee sign. _High G rge Park_ , it read. Broken English.

His mother's trailer was right there across the road, still that raw amber shade of rotten fruit. Cobweb clotheslines laced across the space between trailers, like veins or wires connecting each home to the next. Now that he saw it right in front of him like this, so _real_ , he knew that he couldn't go back. Not right away.

There was a bar just down the road from the trailer park. A stand of dark-barked old sycamores spread their naked shrouds between the two, as though in an attempt to shield them from one another. He picked up his bags and started towards the slouching dark building, his shoes squelching in the cold mud.

The bar didn't have a name, not a proper one anyway. In a former life it had been the _Pastoral Diner_. That place had closed down not long after the movie theater. Now it was just _Harry's_ , called so after its owner and proprietor. Harry was a man with little imagination and even fewer scruples. He served to anybody who would pay, regardless of age or ID. The police didn't seem to care, possibly because they drank for free, possibly because they simply couldn't be bothered to concern themselves.

Jeffrey went inside. The paint on the door was peeling off in long strips. _Harry's_ was the sort of place which was only bearable in dim light, and so it was kept, foul in the murk. The walls looked like they were made of cardboard, though much of their surface was hidden by glossy posters of airbrushed women draped over chrome motorcycles, their figures endowed to the point of obvious surgical enhancement, their skin all white and their hair all silk-smooth platinum blond. A glass-mouthed country song was slithering from static-heavy speakers. There weren't many radio stations with clear reception in Verden, clutched as it was at the foot of the low looming Upstate hills. You had to take whatever you could get.

Jeffrey bought a beer and retreated with his bags and bottle to one of the shabby booths along the wall. He drank, swallowing the watery alcohol down with a grimace. The bottle shone with condensation. He wiped the glass clear with his thumb.

He'd started drinking in high school, mostly just because everyone else was doing it. Scott and Michael and Andrew and Molly and the rest. There hadn't been much else to do. Even after Jeffrey started working there was still time to be killed, so much time he was sick with it. They took turns sneaking cold bottles out of their parent's trailers, smuggling them to those dark secret places where they could suck together at the round glass holes in peace. They drank with superior smiles tugging at their lips, knowing that they had tricked their parents, tricked the world. They had passed the test, gained admittance into something beyond adolescence. They smashed the empty bottles against the walls of abandoned buildings, against the wide mouths of concrete culverts lapped in dirty drain-water, smashed them just to watch the green and brown glass shatter and rain down shards onto the smooth wet rocks.

In high school it had been an adventure. In college it was a requirement, it was survival.

Jeffrey drank, staring blindly at the bare wall as the light through the drawn curtains grew dim.

He was spinning his third empty bottle listlessly on the table surface when the door opened. A splash of light fell the scuffed wood floor and the little bell above the door chimed.

The man who entered had short brown hair and a narrow chin-strap beard. He wore a brown uniform shirt and slacks. His features were rounded, youthful despite their owner's best intentions. Jeffrey knew him.

"Andy!" he called across the room, and gave a lazy wave when the other man looked at him.

A smile spread across Andrew Follis' wide face. "Is that you?" he asked.

Jeffrey just grinned and shrugged.

"Goddamn, man. Been a while. What's up?"

Jeffrey nodded to the bar. "Get a drink, I'll tell you about it."

Andy slouched into the booth, eying Jeffrey across the table with a tall glass cupped in his hands. He looked down into his beer, like he was searching for a message in the foamy surface. Andrew hadn't changed a bit in the year since Jeffrey had last seen him. That was odd. It seemed to Jeff that a great deal of time had passed since he'd left Verden. Only nineteen years old, he felt ancient sometimes. Weary of life.

"You're working." Jeff nodded at his friend's monochrome uniform.

Andy shrugged, pulling a face. "Eh. It's a job."

They talked, and it seemed to Jeffrey that there was a great distance between them which had not been there before. It was like he was shouting across a void, trying to remember how it had once been. They had been children once, not so long ago.

He didn't say any of that, of course.

They talked about high school, mostly. Their last common point of reference. The last time Jeffrey's life had made sense. There had been eight of them once, the children of High Gorge Park. Jeffrey asked where they all were, the friends he had neither seen nor heard from in the past year.

"Huh," Andy frowned, licking the foam from his lip. "Molly and Trevor are in college, same as you. Not back for a few weeks though, I think. You just here for the weekend?"

Jeff shrugged uncomfortably. "Nah. Got out early."

"Oh yeah?"

He forced a grin. "Well... you know... California." It was easy to say that. California. The other. Anywhere but here. Americans were all the same, on that coast just like this one. So afraid of what was outside.

Andrew laughed. He seemed unconvinced, but not especially concerned.

"What about Scott? He still around?"

Andrew shook his head. "Deployed."

"Deployed? Christ." Jeff chewed at his lower lip, peeling bits of skin away with his teeth. It was a nervous habit of which he was fully aware, but unable to stop.

"Yeah. Middle East." A muscle in Andy's cheek twitched.

"No shit?" Jeffrey gave the empty bottle another spin. "What about Molly's cousin, she still in school? About to graduate, right?"

"Far as I know." Andy finished his beer with a slurp, wiping a bit of foam off his mustache. "Hey, what about your sister? You heard from her?"

"Not since the wedding."

Andy's expression soured. "The wedding. Yeah."

"I hear she's coming back, though. Any day now, actually."

"Divorced?" Andy asked, unable to disguise his glee at the thought.

Jeffrey just shook his head. They'd all been desperate to escape, all of Jeff's friends from the park. None more so than his sister Alice. For her it was everything. To stay would have been death for her. She married an old friend of Mom's the day after her eighteenth birthday. Jeffrey hadn't seen her since. Two years ago now. None of them had been happy to see her leave like that, their mother least of all.

There was a moment of awkward silence in the bar, the space filled with a wealth of unspoken recrimination. Jeffrey tried to break the silence, "And Mike? What the fuck is that guy getting up to these days?"

Andy looked into his cup, as though hoping that it had spontaneously refilled itself. He scratched the back of his neck. "Eh... I don't know. I mean... He's fine. I'm sure Mike's fine."

"What the hell does _that_ mean?"

Andy shook his head. "I don't wanna get into it... Mike is... he's not exactly... Well, we don't keep in touch."

Jeff sat back, "Jesus. What happened?"

"Nothing _happened_. Things just change, is all. You know how it is. I mean, you remember what was like after he dropped out."

"Yeah. I guess so." Jeffrey spun the bottle again.

They talked for almost an hour before Andy rose from the booth, saying that it was time for him to be getting back. Back to where, he didn't say. Then, at the last minute, added almost as an afterthought: "You can crash at my place, if you need to."

"Yeah? Where's that?"

"Shitty apartment out in the city."

"In Ithaca?"

"You need a place or not?"

Jeff nodded. Anything was better than going back to the trailer. "I guess I do. Thanks." Only for the few nights, he said, than he'd find his own place.

Andrew turned back expectantly at the door, waiting for Jeffrey to get up and to follow. Jeffrey knew that he should leave, should follow, should go out the door. But he couldn't rise; he sat as though frozen, staring across the dimly lit bar, unable to move. It was like he was still on the plane, still on the bus. Still moving.

The bottle on the table was spinning, green glass whirling, twisting the light into terrible shapes on the table. He knew that he needed to go.

### Gena Riley

Gena was smoking behind the high school. She was surrounded by rusted dumpsters; overfull hulks spilled fast-food wrappers and crumpled notebook paper on the salted asphalt. The heavy steel door beside her was locked, strictly for janitorial use. She'd come around from the front entrance. Nobody had seen her leave. Nobody had cared.

There were two boys fighting in the parking lot, brawling like dogs with their tongues lashing and their fists clenched. She watched them idly, like she might watch a nature documentary on TV. She stood with her bag held in front of her like a flimsy polyester shield; it made her feel invisible, and safe. She stood up and crossed her legs, wobbling on her heels, unsure if she should keep waiting or just go back inside. Molly had said that she would come by...

Gena turned the cigarette in her fingers. Dirty smoke streamed lazily from her mouth. She could feel it rising across her face like the caress of ghostly hands.

One of the boys across the parking lot pushed the other with a snarl, knocking him against Mr. Fredrick's station wagon. The math teacher's car-alarm began to shrill and the lights to blink. The boys scrambled away, startled into a momentary cease-fire.

She flicked her cigarette to the ground and twisted out the smoldering butt under her shoe. She looked around. The world was gray. Nothing but gray within the high school's borders. The Verden high school building was the color of a chalk board which had never been wiped clean. The raw dirt which surrounded the high school building made it look as though it was rising up through the earth's crust, forcing its way towards the sun. She lit another cigarette.

Three cigarettes later a pale blue convertible turned into the lot. Gena couldn't help but grin. The car pulled up right in front of her. Trevor Allocco rolled down his window and leaned out, smirking cheekily. "Hey girl," he drummed his fingers on the outside of the car, "what's up?"

Gena's cousin Molly leaned over from the driver's seat, "Jesus," she giggled, peering over her sunglasses. "Sweetie, what are you wearing?"

Gena looked down at herself. Tight black jeans with white flower patterns sewn into the back pockets. Pale blue barrettes in her black hair. Gray jacket over red t-shirt. "I don't know. What should I be wearing?"

Trevor sighed dramatically. His curly dark hair fell over his eyes. "Ignore fashionzilla, you look great."

Molly punched his shoulder. "I didn't mean it like _that_!"

"Ow! Shit, that hurt!"

Molly gasped. "Shut _up_ , you bitch! It did _not_! Don't listen to him, Gena; he wants you to hate me."

Gena couldn't help but laugh. She reached into the car to give Trevor an awkward hug. Molly took the opportunity to pull herself against the seatbelt and plant a wet kiss on Gena's forehead.

"When did you guys get back in town?" Gena asked breathlessly, the stale taste of the cigarette hot in her mouth.

"Yesterday," Molly breezed, "I was done with my finals on Thursday. Trev finished on Tuesday; he just took his sweet time getting back."

"Yeah, but you know Molly. She had her bags packed before she'd even _taken_ her last test."

"Fucking right!" Molly pushed her sunglasses up onto her forehead. "Wanted to get back and see my cuz first thing!" She grinned at Gena, her bright red lips flashing. "How's Verden High treating you?"

Gena shrugged. "It's okay. Kinda sucks now that all you guys are gone, but it's been alright."

"Senior year," Molly said. It was a phrase both congratulatory and empathetic.

For as long as she could remember, Gena had idolized her older cousin. They'd grown up together in High Gorge Park, their trailers on opposite sides of the lot for years before Molly's family had moved away. They'd always been friends – but of course Molly could make friends with anybody, seemingly without trying. She knew every kid in the trailer park, and so they became Gena's friends too. She'd been like the big sister Gena never had.

Her senior year at Verden High, very nearly over now, had been almost unbearably lonely without them all. She was the last of the trailer park kids, the last still at home. Scott joined the army. Alice got married, Andy moved to Ithaca. Molly and Trevor and Jeffrey had gone to college. And Mike had... well, he was just _gone_.

Trevor snatched the burning cigarette from her fingers. He peered at it like a TV detective studying a bit of crime scene evidence. "When did you start smoking?" he asked, his soft voice quietly recriminating.

Gena shrugged. "I dunno. Last year, I guess."

Trevor flicked the cigarette away with a grimace. "Yeah, well... don't make it a habit."

Gena reached into her coat pocket and took out another from the pack and lit it almost without thinking, her motions automatic. "Sure, sure."

Trevor rolled his eyes.

Molly leaned back into the conversation. "Hey, you seen Jeffrey around?"

Gena frowned. "What do you mean? Is he in town?"

"Has been for, like, three weeks now. You didn't hear?"

Gena's heart was in her throat and she couldn't quite understand why. "Didn't hear what? Why is he here?"

"I have no idea, sweetie. He's just _back_. And you haven't seen him?"

Gena tried to hide her disappointment. "No."

Molly sighed. "Typical Jeffrey. He should start a club with Mike; the two of them could sit in a basement together and pretend that none of the rest of us exist."

"Do either of you guys know what's up with Mike?"

Trevor grimaced. He seemed to be trying to disappear back into his seat.

"Not sure," Molly shrugged, "Nobody seems to know where he is or what he's doing. I take it you haven't heard from him, then?"

Gena shook her head, an odd feeling stirring in her gut.

Far above the high school there were wisps of cloud gathering themselves into dense black shapes, cumulus auguries spilled out against a bloody sky. She could feel it, something bad was coming.

* * *

A soft rain pattered on slick black branches. The forest spoke to the wind, rustling soft arms and murmuring wordlessly. Gena walked with her hands deep in her pockets and a shiver between her lips. The frosted ground cracked beneath her boots. It had been a cold spring.

She could see the back of the old movie screen through the woods. All those dreams and horrors of the human mind still sloughing off it after all those years, Hollywood memories like pine sap stuck to the boards. She hated it. Hated just to look at it. It had towered there over her entire life, useless and broken and faceless.

Gena went a little further into the woods, towards the gorge.

She loved High Gorge, both loved and feared it, that deep black gash cut through the rocky ground. It was the inverse of the screen: raw and natural and subterranean, all mystery and wilds. Heavy growth curtained the walls of the gorge like shaggy green hair, crusted over now with white frost like the pale points of dead stars. There was rusty guard-chain strung along the edge of the gorge, supported on iron poles at six foot intervals and tangled with dry brown vines. The chain had never stopped anybody; its purpose was strictly symbolic. _Here you are_ , it said, _on the edge of the world. Beyond this point you are on your own._ The trees were thick and dark on the far side, out across the chasm.

A young man was sitting just beyond the chain, his legs dangling over the edge of the gorge. He picked apart a small red flower with his quick brown hands. One by one he released the petals into the abyss, watching them cascading down into the slimy dark. The trickling water below echoed strangely in the depths.

Gena approached without a word. She wrapped her hands around the chain and leaned out, peering into the chasm.

"Is that a real flower?" she asked.

Jeffrey Burke held up the carnation and looked at it as though seeing it for the first time. It was half-plucked, naked on one side. "Fake. Plastic." He shook it, as if to demonstrate the illusion. "I was going to give my mother... I can't think why." He grinned tightly, "Maybe it means something. You think?"

She shrugged. Rain tumbled through the furled pines above. The warm air rose from the gorge black and silver, all twisted together like a braid of cooling ephemera.

They'd spent a lot of hours at High Gorge when they were growing up. The whole gang would waste away the sunny summer hours out here in the woods, climbing trees, throwing rocks across the gorge, running half-naked between the pines. It felt like another time, like another girl's memories in her head. Nobody else seemed to miss it the way she did. Had they all forgotten?

"I almost didn't recognize you," she said, struggling for conversation. Jeffrey seemed content to keep staring quietly down into the gorge. "You changed your hair."

"Yeah," he grimaced self-consciously, putting his hands up to his curly blond hair like he was trying to hide it from her. He frowned, "You're Molly's cousin, right?"

Gena blushed. He didn't even remember her. "Gena."

He still hadn't looked at her. "I remember."

Gena's toes dug in the dirt. "Didn't your mom like the flower?"

He shrugged. "I never gave it to her. Haven't seen her yet. I... meant to, I guess. I don't know..." He played with the cuffs of his heavy gray jacket, tore another petal.

"I get it. Does anybody really _like_ their parents?"

"I guess some people probably do."

Gena pushed her knuckles against her mouth, breathing on her hands. It was far too cold for May. "Do you like Kim?"

Jeffrey savaged the petal in his hand. "How well do you know my mother?"

"A little. I babysit Sally and Garrett sometimes."

"That's brave of you."

"Not really. I get paid for it."

"Probably not enough." He tossed out another petal.

Gena shuffled from one foot to the other. Rainwater drizzled down her collar. "What are you doing out here anyway? It's cold. And wet."

"I'm fine," he muttered, "I don't mind the rain."

" _Sure_ you don't," she rolled her eyes, teeth chattering.

He shrugged. "So what about you?"

"Huh?"

"Why are you out here?" He studied his fingernails.

"I was looking for you." She blushed. "I... Well, I saw you walking out this way."

"Oh," he said.

She watched him. He still hadn't looked at her, his eyes darting and nervous. His hands were shaking. "Is everything okay?" she asked.

Jeffrey was silent for what seemed a terribly long while. She was about to say something when, at last, he looked at her. "There's something down there. I've been wondering... you know, what to do about it..."

Gena looked back at him, their eyes locked together. There was something awful in his voice. She stepped over the chain, edging towards the drop. She knelt down beside him and leaned out, gazing into the depths, vertigo swooping through her.

Jeffrey grabbed her arm. She flushed at the unexpected touch, quivering. He pointed to what seemed to be a tattered pile of clothing down in the bottom of the gorge. "Looks like it's been down there awhile," he said.

Gena studied his face. "I don't understand..."

"Just look," his said, his voice soft.

She looked again into the murky blackness, so thick it was almost liquid. The little stream running through the rock was like a strand of woven silver. When her eyes had adjusted to the gloom she saw a shape inside the clothes. A figure, human yet inhuman.

"I think it's a body," Jeffrey said, his voice oddly quiet.

Gena lay at the edge of the gorge. Her hair hung down. The shape below, clad in sludge, splayed in the river and surrounded by a heavy layer of sloughing foliage. A terrible breathlessness rose up in her.

"Who is it?" she asked, her voice choked in her throat.

"I don't know."

Gena's head swam. She felt nauseous, felt strangely excited. She clung to him, feeling as though the gorge were drawing her very slowly out towards its edge, pulling her down into that darkness.

"We have to tell somebody." Jeffrey helped her to her feet and the two of them stepped, very slowly, back over the old chain. There was a red plastic petal caught in a fold of his coat; the wind caught it and swept it away, out across the gorge, out over the trees. Gena froze. She stood perfectly still with one foot still beyond the chain, and she watched the artificial petal dancing into the silver rain.

### High Gorge Park – Summer

The body fell to pieces when they brought it up out of the darkness. They all watched: the medical technicians in their clean blue clothes, the police with arms folded tight across their chests, the residents of the park frozen like statues. The body-bag was laid before the decaying movie screen like an offering to some neglected god, and the congregated people of High Gorge Park stared out from the windows and doorways of their homes like timid worshipers.

The re-assembled body lay in the wet new grass, waiting for the last of its components to be retrieved from the frozen stream. An EMT watched it from a distance, standing on the edge of the forest and fighting the urge to vomit. The emergency was long since passed, and the corpse had made a lie of her title. Its decayed hand seemed to be reaching out from the sagging mouth of the glossy black bag, as though eager for life, eager to rise apart and be carried away upon the digits like spider's legs across the spring mud. She looked up at the screen and thought about the zombie movies her brother used to make her watch. She couldn't understand why anybody would set out to create horror when there was already so much of it to go around.

The dead never really died until they were buried, she thought, they only rotted. She'd read that in a book, she thought, but of course she couldn't remember which. She didn't have much of a memory for that kind of thing, when people's birthdays were or which actors were in which movies. She stood there, waiting for the final pieces of the corpse puzzle to be carried up, the final parts to be fed into the black bag, and she tried to remember.

The sun dropped noiselessly behind the low blue hills. Summer was only weeks away, yet the air still tasted of winter, bitter on the tongue. It had been an odd spring.

* * *

It was dark when they finally took away the body. The swirling police lights flashed luridly across the somber faces of the residences that had come out to stand and watch. The body's identity had been discovered late that afternoon, taken off an old school ID in the pocket of the jeans. There had been no announcement, as further examination would be required to verify the news, but somehow everybody knew, everybody had heard.

Adelaide Anderson stood in the open doorway of her trailer, smoking a cigarette. She held one arm across her hips, fingers working idly at the denim waistband. There was a distant sort of hardness in her eyes, a glazed-over anger. She took slow drags, the glow of the cigarette flaring on her face when she did.

Jeffrey Burke watched from inside his mother's trailer. His half-sister Sally laced her little fingers through his. She asked him, quite solemnly, if anyone had died at college. He told her no, and she nodded. The little girl he scarcely knew picked herself up and climbed onto his lap. She laid her head against him and told him that people died in the park sometimes, but that he should stay anyway, because she would take care of him. He smiled, and brushed her hair away from her face.

Nathan Riley watched his wife. She stared out the window, her eyes agleam with suppressed anger, with grief. The flashing lights washed across her features, spilling deep shadows in the contours of her cheeks and her glistening eyes. Her slim fingers were twisted, the first and second fingers intertwined as though she were praying for luck. She looked at him briefly; their eyes met across the narrow space. She said nothing, but he knew what she was thinking: Now that he was dead, would the secrets all come out?

Kim Burke felt a horrible sort of resigned dread as she watched the black bag borne away. She felt as though she were standing on the edge of an abyss, staring down into a malevolent underworld. The world seemed full of angry darkness. She shivered, imagining a cold set of claws running up and down her naked back, and she told herself to stop being so over-dramatic. It would only make things worse.

Edward Smith sat on a folding chair in front of his trailer. The greasy porch light above him was filled with bodies. In the summer it supported a swirl of minuscule gray insects, endlessly hurling their bodies at the light and burning out on the filament, like children flinging themselves thoughtlessly into heaven. He cried gently, pressing his fingertips to his temples. He wanted to take a picture, but he couldn't bring himself to raise the camera.

Gena Riley's eyes were red-rimmed. She wasn't crying anymore, though she found it very hard just to keep breathing. Nobody she'd known had ever died before. She'd never lost a friend. She trembled, and she watched them taking him away.

Michael Conner left the park in a glossy black bag, left it in pieces. His face once so familiar, now warped and twisted and mortified, was scarcely recognizable.

Spring crawled limply after him, creeping pale and sightless from the shadow-clad forest, as slick and dripping and bloody as a newborn child.

### Part II: After the Fall
### Being Children Again

"What do you think this is?" Edward laid his hands flat on the Formica table. His palms were scared, the fingertips stained a faint purple as though they had long ago been dipped in ink and never properly cleaned.

"What do I think _what_ is?" Adelaide set aside her tea and leaned across the table for a closer look.

"This here." He pointed to a slight discoloration on the back of his wrinkled hand. There was a faint darkness beneath the skin, subcutaneous night-flower in full bloom. "What is this?"

"I don't know. One of those ink-blot tests?" She smiled indulgently, lifting the steaming mug to her curved lips.

Edward made an irritated sound in the back of his throat. He rubbed at the spot with his thumb. "It's cancer, I know it."

Adelaide laughed. "It's not cancer, Eddie. You're just getting old."

He glared at the treacherous limb, clearly still suspicious. "I don't know..."

They sat in the dim glow of late afternoon, sipping tea under a naked lightbulb. Cool sunlight pooled through the window pane. The kitchen area in Edward's trailer was so narrow that Adelaide could touch the walls to either side of her. Almost like being in a coffin.

There was a police car parked outside the Conner's house. It had shown up about an hour ago and disgorged two uniformed officers. Adelaide had watched them through Edward's window as they went somberly up the well-trod path to the house and knocked on the door. It had seemed a very long time before they were let inside.

She studied her tea. Adelaide's grandmother told her when she was a child that you could see the future in tea leaves, could see the curve of your life along time's broad arc. Even when she was a girl, Adelaide never believe in any of that nonsense.

"What do you suppose happened, Eddie? To that Conner boy, I mean."

Edward paused, his mug poised in his hand. His lips opened like he was going to say something, but closed again still silent.

She couldn't bear to think of it. The poor boy. "How can a person just... die?" She know even as she spoke how ridiculous the question was, but she could not but want for an answer.

He didn't meet her eyes, didn't seem to want to acknowledge the subject. "Do you want to go out for a walk?" he asked. Edward was one of those who believed that simply by walking regularly a person might prolong their life almost indefinitely. A beating heart summoned in the chest as though for proof of life.

She shook her head. Adelaide was almost seventy-two years old. She didn't need to walk to know she was alive. Sometimes she lay awake in the darkness and listened to the insects bounce fatally against the lights outside, wondering if she had lived long enough.

She took a heavy swallow of hot tea. Everybody had gotten a bit morbid now. Just stepping out of her trailer these days felt a bit like walking into a graveyard. Everybody felt it when they heard the news. They'd all known Michael; all watched him grow up in that house up on the hill. Many of them had known him since he was first adopted by the Conner's, fifteen years ago. They had observed from a distance, their lives intimately entwined at a remove from their trailer park royalty.

And now the crown prince was dead.

There had been rumors, of course. He'd dropped out of high school, some said. Others that he'd been arrested for drug possession or been thrown out by his parents for burning his father's bible. There were always stories. The only _fact_ they knew was that Michael had left the park. Of course, that wasn't such an uncommon occurrence; everybody was _trying_ to leave. In the end, though, even that supposition had proved false: he had never left. She shivered, thinking of the jagged gorge out there in the woods grinning like a crooked mouth. She pictured him laying down there in the throat of it, staring up at the dripping black rocks rising above him on both sides, crying uselessly for help, broken and bleeding, his body shattered in the stream.

It simply didn't do to think about such things.

She set her mug down. "I think you're right, actually."

Edward's eyes wide with fear, his thumb touching the discoloration. "Cancer?"

"No. We should go out. Come on. Let's take a walk."

His eyebrows twitched, brushy and gray above his milky eyes. "Alright then."

They drove north in Edward's car. He shuddered, hands trembling on the wheel as the old convertible rattled across every pothole in Verden's crumbling streets. The town was gray in the sunless Saturday afternoon. Half the buildings on Main Street had _For Sale_ signs in the windows and those that were left were mostly drab office buildings, their inner workings a mystery to Adelaide.

They drove past the gas station convenience store where she bought her cigarettes and lottery tickets. There was an out of order sign hanging on one of the pumps, black marker scrawled on torn cardboard. Edward fiddled with the radio dial, searching for a station clear of static. The weary voice of an old singer murmured through the hum, fading at every turn. Edward switched it off in disgust, and silence poured in after.

They drove by the public library, a shaggy gray-stone building. Reading gave Adelaide a headache these days, and anyway there didn't seem to be much worth reading. Every once in a while she picked up a mystery novel, losing herself in the unwinding knot of some inconsequential post-mortal riddle. Such books seemed perverse to her now, after what had happened. Still, she'd been a member of the book club for too long now to simply _stop_. She would have to keep going.

Neither she nor Edward spoke for the entirety of the cross-town drive.

The parking lot at the trailhead was deserted, and there wasn't a soul in sight. They walked out along the path which traced the sinuous coast of the too-generously named Gardenview Lake. The so-called lake was little more than a long and shallow pool, brackish and murky along the shore. Further out the water was clear and dark and in constant motion. There was a stream which eventually fed into High Gorge, splintering off the main water like a vein from an artery.

The soft black gravel crunched under Adelaide's shoes. The trail traced long-vanished train-tracks, and the path was black with the ash and coal remains of stream-belching machines gone now for nearly a hundred years. Edward walked slightly behind her, looking out at the water. They didn't talk much. They had known each other so long now that speech was no longer necessary. Silence was enough.

It felt good to be away from the park. She could breathe properly out here. Water dripped from the budding tips of the damp black boughs laced overhead. There was a fresh and clean smell in the air, like that which followed a rainstorm.

They came to a clear place in the trees where they could see out across the glossy water and Adelaide felt her breath catch in her throat at the sight. The sun was beginning to set, sinking down into the heather-tufted hills and spilling gold and scarlet light on the lake. She could feel the moody heat of it on her face. A copse of trees on the far hill stood out black before the setting sun, their silhouetted forms reaching like twisted fingers from the earth to the sky.

"Look at that," she said.

Edward nodded. "Wish I'd brought my camera."

They watched the shimmering red disk sink down beyond the crest of the hill, and only when it had submerged completely did they continued on their way in the gathering dusk.

"You wouldn't have believed it," Edward said, his hands deep in his pockets and his eyes on his shoes, "last time I went to get my film developed, the guy, this kid, he gave me a whole speech about goddamn digital cameras. I kept telling him I wasn't interested, but he wouldn't shut up. What am I supposed to do with a _digital_ camera?" he said the word with a sneer, as though it was a mild curse.

"Hm." Adelaide tuning out, more or less, his increasingly incensed defense of traditional film. He didn't seem to need much encouragement, plunging ahead about the degradation of the art form and the technical inferiority of digital film:

"And it's _too_ damned convenient, if you ask me," he said, gesturing wildly, "No one even bothers to put any effort into taking a picture. They don't have to! The cameras practically work themselves these days. It's-"

And then Adelaide saw something which stopped in her tracks. She caught his arm, a sudden panic running through her, and she pointed at the muck off the edge of the trail. "Eddie," she said, "what is that?"

The two of them went together and looked into the shallow ditch:

It was a swan. The long and elegant neck was awkwardly twisted, its face pushed down in the soft mud and filthy water. Its great white body was dark with filth, wings wrenched back, feathers scattered. Something had torn into its body. Garishly bright organs pooled out, oxidizing in the muck. The mire was stained with blood and the creature's snowy wing-feathers were spattered with it like red ink on blank paper. Flies buzzed thickly around, hundreds of them crawling over the body, dense as static.

Adelaide stared at the bird, unsure how to react. She had never seen a swan before, never even heard of one in New York. _Where did swans live?_ she wondered. They didn't seem like they belonged in the wild, seemed almost too perfect to be naturally occurring. And how had this swan died? It seemed to have died violently, but surely there was no creature which would have killed it and then left it practically untouched.

She could feel her insides churning horribly, a bilious taste rising in the back of her throat. She could smell death. The flies were unbearably loud, buzzing in a horrible whirling frenzy about the corpse. The sight was almost more than she could bear, and yet – even in death, torn open and bent into a lifeless heap – the swan remained somehow beautiful. There was a desperate grace to its brokenness.

The sun had gone down now and its metallic sheen upon the water had given way to a misty gray twilight. Adelaide felt unbidden tears streaming down her face. She wrapped her arms around herself, wondering what she was supposed to do now, trying to understand.

It simply didn't make sense to her, seemed _wrong_ on a fundamental level, illogical. She didn't want to accept it, but the fact was simple and inarguable: the swan was dead.

* * *

The park was quiet when they returned. The police car was gone.

They both got out of Edward's car without saying a word to each other. She looked out into the blackness of the pine forest on the border of the trailer lot, and wondered if it could have been her imagination somehow, if she could have dreamed the dead bird. It had felt like a dream.

Edward went silently back to his trailer, keys jingling as he worked the lock. He left her with a curt nod and shut the door against her.

Adelaide wandered aimlessly through the park, searching vainly above for a star in the clouded night sky. She stopped at the edge of the lot and looked up towards the house on the hill. It stood over the trailer park like a fortress, second story lights burning. She hesitated, her feet twisting indecisively in the gravel.

And then, without realizing that she had even started up the slope, she found herself at the door. It was only a dream, she thought, and struck the brass knocker.

Minutes passed before the door opened and Patricia Conner peered out into the gloom. "Oh," she said, her usually-boisterous voice reduced to a murmur, "Miss Anderson. Is there something...?" she trailed off, never to finish the question, as though she had forgotten what she'd meant to say.

Patricia was a tall brunette woman in her late forties. She favored rich colors, clothing that hung in folds of drapery from her slim frame. Tonight her makeup was smeared and her clothes wrinkled. The heavy rings on her fingers were turned at odd angles, inset gems tilted haphazardly. Her eyes were dry, puffy and wreathed in red.

Adelaide found herself dumbly open-mouthed, waiting for something sensible to come stumbling out her mouth. "Yes, I... I just wanted to know if there was... anything I could do. Anything at all. I'm sure that everyone else has already been here, but I just wanted to do whatever I could. To help, I mean."

Patricia's mouth took on a wan curve. "Oh. How very sweet of you. Won't you come in for a coffee?" She withdrew without waiting for a reply, leaving the door hanging open behind her.

Adelaide followed. She'd never been inside the Conner's house before. It wasn't quite what she'd expected. The house seemed curiously bare, as though even after all those years they still hadn't properly moved in their things.

"You're wrong, you know," Patricia called back over her shoulder, leading on towards the kitchen. "There haven't been any others. I suppose they're all too frightened. My friends..." She laughed harshly, "I don't blame them, of course. Can't imagine what I'd say in their places. And it's not as though I actually _want_ to talk to any of them, the vultures... Best all around, I suppose... My mother hasn't even called, can you imagine that?" she turned on Adelaide, her eyes blazing with sudden fury, "Imagine not calling your own daughter. Of course, she never did approve of... but never mind that. You didn't come here to listen to my problems."

The kitchen was oddly spotless, full of chrome and plastic that looked like it was right out of a catalog. Patricia sat at the far end of a long mahogany table. "Easier to just pretend that nothing's happened," she murmured, reaching for the coffee pot, "Do you take sugar?"

"Decaf?" Adelaide asked, sitting across the table from her landlady.

Patricia laughed softly. "I should think not, Mrs. Anderson... I have no interest in sleep."

"No?"

"Isn't it obvious?"

"I'm sorry. I don't mean to pry."

"I can't sleep. There are things that I don't want to dream about."

"No sugar for me."

"All right then." She poured the steaming liquid out, first into her cup then into Adelaide's. "Black."

They drank silently. Adelaide sipped timidly at the scalding coffee, but Patricia drank it as though it were cool; she didn't seem to notice the temperature.

"You will tell me if there's anything I can do?" Adelaide asked.

The other woman looked at her with an expression of bemused surprise. "Oh... there's nothing, really." Patricia looked pensively around the kitchen, seeming to make a mental catalog of the plethora of doubtless expensive appliances and tools, many of which betrayed no sign of ever having been used. "I just..." she started, then let out a burst of sudden laughter, "I feel like a little girl again!" There were tears welling up in her eyes even as her laughter subsided, "It's funny. I... I just want someone to come and make it all better." She looked across the table, meeting Adelaide's eyes for the first time. "You don't have children, do you?"

Adelaide shook her head. "I never did."

Patricia's cheek twitched. "Hm." She took a long sip of her steaming coffee.

They drank together, waiting.

Her husband Charles wondered into the kitchen, as though he'd sensed their aimless anticipation. He held a crumpled tissue in one hand. "A spider," he said, lifting the tissue as evidence, "was on the wall." The broken creature's legs thrashed weakly. "It's the biting kind," he said, his foot pushing down on the petal which opened the lid of the garbage can, into which the tissue and arachnid were together deposited. That task accomplished, Charles wondered out. Patricia stared at the garbage can, a sort of horror in her eyes, such a desperation that Adelaide couldn't bear to look at it.

The digital numbers on the microwave clock glowed a cool and lifeless blue, immaculate in their place. She stared and stared for what felt to her like hours, but they never changed.

### Graduation

"Shit!"

The bottle seemed to fall in slow motion to the hardwood floor, spilling out amber fluid as it tumbled. Everybody started to rise, much too slowly to do anything. The bottle shattered. The green glass flung itself out; foamy beer poured into the cracks between the floorboards.

Andrew was up off the couch in an instant, cradling his own drink protectively. "Jesus Christ, Trevor!"

Molly laughed, then hiccupped loudly, prompting another round of hysterics. Todd, her new boyfriend, laughed obligingly along and ran his hand across her back. Todd, Gena had observed, liked to keep his hands on Molly as much as he could, like he was afraid she'd run off if he didn't maintain constant contact.

Trevor winced. "I'll clean it up, where's your towels?"

Andrew waved him off, stomping towards the kitchen nook. "I got it, I got it. Nobody step on the damn glass, alright! Just don't anybody move, okay?"

Jeffrey lifted his heels lazily off the floor. He was already on his third beer of the night. Not that Gena was policing him or anything. Or even paying him any special attention. It was none of her business, she knew that! She swallowed. The spreading pool of beer looked like it was going to start soaking into the shag rug any second now.

"So how's it feel?" Jeffrey leaned towards her, a predatory curve to his spine. His eyes were sharp, locked onto her face.

"Huh?" She flinched. God, she sounded so stupid! He must hate her. It was so different now that they were all together again. The Jeffrey she'd spoken to there on the edge of the gorge was either gone or else so deeply submerged that she could not see him anymore. She did not know this new person who had taken his place. "How's what feel?" she said, blushing despite her best efforts.

"Having graduated," he said, and leaned back.

"Oh. I... I dunno. About the same?" She looked at the floor, her cheeks hot. Jeffrey had been in a weird mood all night. They were all a bit on edge, more than a bit.

The ceremony earlier that evening had been surreal. The gym where it was held seemed horribly empty, as only a handful of their none-too-large graduating class had bothered to show up. Those who were there, draped in their dark purple robes and stirring in anticipation as the speakers droned on, quickly came to regret their decision. Gena had felt like an insect in a little hive, dizzy and lightheaded as she watched the principle's mouth forming words which seemed to make individual sense, yet somehow didn't fit together into any sort of meaningful logic: _responsibility, commencement, accomplishment, pride_. None of it seemed to make any sense. Was she was going crazy? She listened harder.

"When you're out there, never forget that you can count on what you have learned here?" Principle Brock's voice had a horrible lilt to it which made nearly everything she said sound like a question. "You will remember your time at Verden High for the rest of your life? I know that you will treasure those memories, and I know that you will all succeed beyond your wildest hopes, because I know you? It has been my privilege to be your principle for these past years. I know that you will all make us proud? And I wish you the best. Let's have a big hand for the Verden High class of 2002!" She stepped back from the podium, her pale hands leading an applause that seemed to die out before it had even begun.

Gena's parents offered to take her out for dinner to celebrate. She refused, thanking them all the same. A few hours later, Molly pulled up outside the trailer, Trevor and Todd in her backseat, and said that she was taking Gena to a party. Gena wanted to argue, but she knew better than to try and convince her cousin of anything. They went together to Andrew's apartment in Ithaca.

To be entirely truthful, it didn't feel much like a party. They all sat on Andrew's couches drinking Andrew's beer, hardly talking. Gena kept expecting to see Mike come walking through the door, a sloppy grin on his face and a bottle in his hand. There were so many people missing! Alice was God-knew-where with her so-called husband. Scott had been deployed almost six months back. And now Mike was gone too, gone for good.

Everybody was leaving. They would never be together again, not like they'd been back in the old days, back when they were children. It was over now; lonely adulthood was all that remained. She felt hot tears forming in the corners of her eyes. She brushed them fiercely away. Oh, they would tease her if they saw! They'd always picked on her, she was a youngest. She'd never minded it, though; she knew that they all loved her.

Andrew returned with a ragged towel and a glossy black garbage bag. He started picking up the chunks of glass and tossing them into the bag. Trevor stood behind him, insisting that he should be the one to clean it up, though he made no motion to help. Gena watched, and shivered. The trash bag looked eerily like Mike's body bag, weighted down with shards of glass.

Molly was making out with Todd. She'd always favored well-groomed guys with big arms and tight stomachs, the kind of guy who put out but wouldn't get too clingy or take the relationship too seriously.

Jeffrey wasn't talking to anybody, but he watched them all, drinking quietly. The little table beside the couch was crowded with his empty bottles.

Molly climbed up onto her boyfriend's lap. Her hands clutched at his shirt, fingers circling the faux-ivory buttons. She straddled him tightly, pressing her lips against his like she was trying to climb into his mouth. Soft music was playing on the stereo in the corner, too quiet for Gena to make out any of the words.

Gena moved away from her cousin, crossed her legs. Jeffrey was watching her.

She tried to smile at him. "So, you're staying here with Andrew?"

He shrugged.

"This is kinda awkward, isn't it?" she said, glancing around.

"What, because Mike's dead?" Jeffrey's voice was flat, slightly slurred.

Molly broke away from Todd. "Jesus Fucking _Christ_ , Jeff!" She glared at him, mouth twisted.

"Something wrong?" His voice had turned to an acerbic sneer, every syllable laced with venom.

Molly snorted with disgust, disentangling herself from her companion. "What's your fucking problem, anyway?"

"Problem?" he rose unsteadily to his feet, jabbed a finger at the man on the couch. "Who is this _fuck_! We don't even know this guy, why did you bring him here! You think we wanna watch you get _fucked_ by this shithead, huh? Well, we fucking _don't_ , you pathetic whore!"

"Hey man," the guy on the couch started to rise, but seemed unwilling to fully commit, "why don't you watch your mouth, eh?" He settled for shifting to the edge of his seat and setting his mouth into a stern line.

Jeffrey just rolled his eyes and took another swallow of beer before tumbling roughly back into his seat.

Andrew and Trevor stood on the edge of the conversation, their bag of glass jangling.

"Jesus Christ, Burke," Molly gave Jeffrey a withering glare, "you're fucking wasted. You've been drinking since we got here like it's goddamn oxygen. Is this why they kicked you out?"

Jeffrey narrowed his eyes suspiciously. "What the hell does that mean? Kicked me out where?"

" _School_ , Jeff, what else would I be talking about! It's not like San Diego gets out two months earlier than everybody else. What did you think, we wouldn't notice?"

"Well you didn't notice the fucking corpse in your own damn backyard, did you?" he snarled. "And they didn't fucking kick me out. I _left_."

"Yeah? Well don't let us stop you doing it again. Actually, you know what? I think _I'll_ leave." Molly reached down and grabbed hold of Todd's hand. She yanked him up off the couch and dragged him towards the door, spitting an icy goodbye out of the corner of her mouth as she stalked past Andrew and Trevor.

Jeffrey watched her go, his expression caught somewhere between regret and satisfaction. The door slammed behind her, and he slumped back down onto the couch.

"What the hell was that, Jeff?" Andrew shook the glass in the bag.

"She was being a bitch and you know it." His face was sullen and stony.

"Maybe she was right about you drinking too much, though," Trevor added, bending down to retrieve a bit of glass.

Jeffrey turned his bilious gaze on Trevor. "Maybe you should shut your fucking mouth, faggot."

Gena sunk deeper into the couch, wishing very fervently that she could turn invisible. The irony, of course, was that nobody seemed to be aware of her presence. She started to cry. None of the guys noticed, of course. Or, if they had then they were too busy with their own feelings to care. She wiped her eyes dry, sniffling.

She wanted very much to go home. It was far too late now though, she knew that. She couldn't go back, she had to go onward. She had graduated.

### Accelerating Entropy

It was raining. Nathan could hear the wind hissing outside. It was going to be a cold year.

Two weeks had passed since they brought Michael up out of the gorge. Everything had changed. Nobody spoke beyond terse pleasantries, and everything seemed to have taken on an air of foreboding significance. The bar across the road was full almost every night. Around closing time he got up and looked out through the blinds to see dark inebriated shapes slouching like zombies towards their trailers. Some of them hurled their last bottles into the prison-like ring of trees which surrounded the park. The shattering glass cracked in the night like the breaking of stars.

His family hadn't escaped. Gena was often sullen, always alone. She didn't have friends over anymore, hardly even left her room. He didn't know if the change was the usual advance of adolescence, or something different. Jessica had become unpredictable, her moods shifting without warning. You could see it around the eyes, one moment blazing with directionless fury, the next as lifeless as a doll's. She talked about Michael a lot, recounting little memories brought on seemingly at random. Times she'd saw him, times they'd spoken, those little quirks of his she had noticed. She shared these remembrances, it seemed, whenever they occurred to her.

As for Nathan, he felt sometimes that he alone remained unchanged. It was like those terrible days after the attack on the World Trade Center all over again.

A lightbulb flickered above his head, humming as though in a forgotten electric language. He kept expecting the bulb to burn out, perhaps flare up for a brief moment before dying. Stubbornly, it endured, one strobe-light heartbeat to the next. Nathan removed the screws which held up the light fixture, working his way one by one around the bowl's foil throat. The glass was warm on his fingertips, almost hot.

The cover was full of dead insects, flies and spiders and ladybugs and other less-familiar species, all lying tangled together with their thin legs curled upward and inward. The shells of the beetles had lost their luster long ago, colorful red faded to a dull brown. There was a large mosquito-like creature with lacy wings and legs like long stiff threads. The dead insects shuffling wistfully about the bowl as he carried it to the kitchen garbage. Where could they all have come from?

Ever since he was a child, Nathan had been terrified of finding rats in the walls. There had been cockroaches in his family's apartment when he was a boy. He remembered pouring dozens of the squirming thing out of a box of breakfast cereal one morning. From that genesis, fear took hold in the furtive darkness of his imagination, and grew.

He shook the corpses out into the porous garbage. They vanished beneath crumpled papers and moldy scraps of food. He rinsed the bowl in the sink, soapy fingers slipping over the dusty concave surface. The naked light flickered behind him, still spitting begrudged light. Rain lashed against the window. Outside, the gray-green world was turning to silver.

Jessica and Gena were curled limply before the television in the next room, bathed in streams of colored light. They stared together at the screen, at a man in a suit and a woman in a tight skirt and surgical mask standing over a body set up on a sterile lab table. The characters traded innuendo-laden quips and flirtatious looks as the woman pushed her bone-saw into decaying flesh. The woman reached a gloved hand into the gaping cavity she'd opened in the corpse's chest.

"This isn't right," she said, brow furrowed.

"What's not right?" replied the man, leaning anxiously forward and lifting his tie to keep it from dragging over the mortified flesh.

She said: "There's something missing."

Nathan went back into the hallway. The new bulb glowed when he put it on, shining hot as he lifted the newly cleaned glass back over it, and fastened it in place.

* * *

"Jessie?" Nathan stared at the low ceiling above, straining in the dark to make out the spider web pattern of cracks running through the off-white paint. The rain had stopped, leaving a damp chill in its place.

She shifted beside him, her every motion tugging and dragging at the bedspread. "Yeah?"

"Do you think I'll ever do anything... great?"

"What does that mean?" she growled irritably into the pillow.

Nathan's eyes were wide open. A tingling energy coursed through him. Fear, perhaps. "Like a book. I mean, _Wreckage_ was... Well, some people thought it was good. Am I ever going to be that good again? Or was it a once in a lifetime type thing? Once it's gone it's gone for good?"

Jessie groaned. "Some of us have to work in the morning, Nate."

"Sorry, sorry."

"We'll talk later, okay?"

And so he lay there, listening for what seemed hours to the rhythmic sounds of her breathing. Ideas burned in his head, searing, white hot with potency and yet never fully cohered. Just after four o'clock he threw back the covers and slipped quietly from the bedroom. He took his battered old laptop computer to the other side of the trailer, settling in on the tattered couch. He sat there, bathed in cold blue moonlight as he waited for his computer to come to life. The book was standing open on the self across the room, where it had always stood. _The Wreckage_ , by Nathan Harrison, a name no longer his own. He could barely stand to look at the thing. The pages were beginning to yellow with age.

In retrospect, the book hadn't really been that big a deal. At the time, though, it was probably the most amazing thing that had ever happened to him. Validation, at last. For years he had been too embarrassed to tell anybody that he wanted to be a writer. "A writer?" he imagined them all saying, "you?" He had lived in fear that the world was going to punish him for his arrogance. The book had been proof, proof that he could do it, proof that it wasn't a pipe-dream, it was tangible.

He turned back to the screen, and his hands fell to the keys.

He wrote for hours. Deep into the morning, after Jessica had awoken and gone, he was still writing. He wrote about himself, about his marriage, about the vermin-infested Syracuse apartment where he'd grown up, there on the banks of the Erie Canal. He wrote about _The Wreckage_ , a book he'd written just out of college, nearly twenty years ago now.

He wrote about walking into a bookstore and finding blood dripping from the spines of the novels there. Row after row of detective stories, each of them four hundred pages wrapped around a human life created for the single purpose of being destroyed. The simplest sort of logic to it, an easy catharsis when the curtain was pulled back and the investigator deconstructed the murder into its component parts: motive, means, opportunity, execution. Drag the killer off the stage, watch the prose world right itself. Watch the book write itself, again and again and again, and America never tiring of the experience.

He wrote that true art was an aberration in the texture of American mythology. The real artistic legacy of the nation was in the refinement of death. After all, he wrote, our greatest generation dropped the atomic bomb, our greatest artists churned out endless reconfigurations of Cain and Abel for the hungry masses. We have embraced destruction, he wrote, we have absorbed it into our very soul. Death animates American culture.

He wrote about the first time he saw a dead body.

1975. He was twelve years old. His brother William fifteen and his sister Katrina nine. They still lived in Syracuse then. His father still worked at the steel mill, still came home every day smelling of smoke and decay. His mother worked at a bakery just down the street from the house. Sometimes they let her bring home the stale bread. Other days, there was no bread, and they were hungry.

It was the year that William stopped going to church with the rest of them, first expressed his independence. Dad fought him on it for the first few weeks, but William was stubborn. Eventually, they stopped fighting, and he stopped going. The rest of the family would drive away together and Nathan would look back and see his brother watching from the apartment window. He never dared to ask William what happened while they were gone.

He saw the body on a Friday in March. He knew that it was Friday because Friday was the day they got rid of the old bread at the bakery. He remembered the look on his mother's face when she saw it, remembered her dropping the stale bread at the door. He remembered walking across the room, dizzy with confusion. He remembered picking up a loaf of hard French bread and sitting there in the open doorway, holding it, knowing in some primitive corner of his mind that he must protect it from the rats that lived in the walls.

William had always liked to choke people. From a very young age, perhaps even from the first sparking of his forming consciousness, William had been inclined towards sadism. Nathan was his first and primary target. The first time it happened, their mother found William standing over Nathan's crib, wrapping his hands gently around his infant brother's throat. He was only four years old at the time. Their parents wrote it off as youthful foolishness, just as they wrote off the next ten years of bruised throats and black eyes.

It wasn't that William was a violent person. It was just that, sometimes, he changed. Sometimes he shut out the world, shrank without warning into a blind and miserable rage. He worked very hard to hide these rages from their parents. Before it happened, Nathan and Katrina were the only ones in the world who had ever witnessed that part of William. In the years that followed, he regretted that he'd never done anything, never told anybody. Maybe if he had, things would have turned out differently.

Nathan remembered everything. The weight of the heat, that unusual heat that drove the cockroaches out into the open. William had drawn all the blinds and closed all the windows and shut off all the lights. The three of them sat at the kitchen table, listening to the crawling all around them and feeling the sweat run down their faces. Katrina and Nathan knew better than to try and argue with William. They sat quietly together, playing checkers and trying not to notice the scurrying shapes in the corners of the room. William read a book by Robert Lewis Stevenson, a library book which was, afterward, never located.

And then Katrina and Nathan began to argue. There were so many things which Nathan remembered, even all these decades later, with absolute clarity: the look on his mother's face, the sound his sister made when William wrapped his hands around her throat, what he had eaten for lunch at school that afternoon. He could even remember the smell of the cardboard checkers box when they opened it. But he could not remember what he and his sister were fighting about that day.

William told them to shut up, but they barely heard him. He said it again. Then he screamed at them to shut their fucking mouths. It was the first time Nathan had ever heard that word, _fucking_ , and it frightened him, the cruel way it tore from William's lips. It only made Katrina more indignant, and she turned her high young voice on them both.

William threw his book on the floor. Pages folded awkwardly, spine bent open. Before either of them knew what had happened, he was standing behind Katrina's chair, wrapping his thick fingers around her neck. His face twisted and red with fury, her face twisted and red with fear.

Nathan just watched.

He stared for a very long time, frozen with terror. A cockroach crawled up his pant leg. At some point he called the police, said nothing. He had no memory of picking up the phone. They arrived just after his mother came home.

After that day, everything changed. Katrina couldn't be resuscitated, though they tried for what seemed hours before giving up. William was taken away. Father lost the twinkle in his eye. Mother never spoke to Nathan again, save when she had no other choice. Where had they taken William? Nathan never knew, never asked. What if he was still out there today? Waiting somewhere in the outer dark.

Everything changed. Everybody around him changed. Just like they changed when the planes hit the towers. Just like they changed when Michael died. Yet through it all Nathan remained the same. Watching fear kill empires, feeling nothing, sitting rooted in place while parasites clawed up his shin.

* * *

There was a service for Michael later that week. Everybody in the park was invited, though only a handful came. Most, it seemed, were uncomfortable with the idea of setting foot inside the house. It was marked by the dead, grim as an old fairytale castle.

It was dark there when the Riley's arrived. The empty foyer seethed with dusky second-hand illumination. An assortment of damp coats hung in the front closet like bulky hides put up to cure. There were pictures of Michael just inside the doorway. Michael at age six, wearing a bow-tie in the photo center at the mall. Michael at age nine, wearing a baggy little league uniform and resting a baseball bat against his shoulder. Michael at age seventeen, dressed in a glossy tuxedo and a mortician's smile, arm around his equally ill-at-ease prom date. The pictures seemed to have been hung quite recently.

Gena touched his arm. "Have you ever been in here before, Dad?" She looked concerned, her brown eyes open wide under long lashes, her small mouth set in a tight and worried line.

He shook his head.

She held herself, "Feels _weird_." She kept her coat on.

Nathan wondered if she had ever been inside a real house. She must have, of course, but he couldn't remember. He felt a sinking sense of parental dread. Had he made a mistake? Had he ruined her somehow? "Never mind," he said, "we won't stay long."

Gena nodded. She followed him reluctantly out of the foyer.

The Conner's house was eerily sparse. It had the air of a house which had lost something. The walls were bare. Houses turned empty without children in them. He put his arm instinctively around his daughter. She usually would have shrugged him off, but this time she offered no resistance. They followed Jessica into the large room where the others were gathered for the service.

Nathan saw Kim Burke standing by the refreshments table, by the arrangement of store-bought chocolate cookies spread into a flower-shape on a glass plate, the pale red punch in a silver bowl next to a stack of Dixie cups. Her boys were running wild; her little girl sat in a wicker chair beside the door munching on a cookie. She looked up at the Riley's when they entered, her eyes round and her mouth full. He saw Stephanie Mae Burgess talking quietly on her cell phone in the hallway. He saw her husband Joel speaking with the painter Richard Ewan, the two men standing beneath a framed photo of gray fog rolling across one of the Finger Lakes towards a dull morning shore. He saw Taylor Lesher and Roberta Perez sitting in the corner of the room, as far as possible from the general crowd. The two women were holding hands and eying the congregation nervously.

"I don't see the Conner's." Jessica stood up on the tips of her toes, peering out across the crowd. "They are going to be here, right?"

Nathan shrugged. "I would think so."

" _Jesus_ , look at that!" she hissed, eying something at the far end of the room.

Nathan looked. There was an empty coffin there, standing open and blackly inviting, dark mahogany wood polished to an obscene shine. He could see the room dimly reflected in the varnished surface, the people there looking as though they were deep under water. He felt a sort of magnetic attraction to the yawning box, an automatic desire to crawl inside and look out from it. He thought of the pictures of Michael, and imagined all those faces staring dead-eyed back at him.

"Kind of ghoulish." he said.

" _Kind of_?" Jessica scoffed.

They waited for the Conner's, waited until Nathan lost track of the time. He stared at the glossy dark wood of the coffin, hypnotized almost by the shifting images reflected in that smooth surface. The people became restless. Jessica began to click her tongue quietly against her teeth and there moved through the room a low grumble of sublimated impatience. A few people left, slipping quietly out without having ever seen their hosts.

Eventually, Jessica made her way over to Roberta and Taylor. "Are you guys doing okay?" she asked, smiling hungrily, "I haven't seen you in _months_."

Roberta smiled back, a bit guardedly. "Hello, Jessica." She was the older of the two women, early-thirties, Nathan guessed. She had a thick Hispanic accent which had always struck him as somehow exotic.

Taylor grinned, waving timidly.

Jessica smiled back. "You still in school, honey?"

Taylor nodded. "One more year."

"Grad School?"

"That's right. Ancient Languages."

Roberta smiled. She reached down to take hold of her girlfriend's hand, running her thumb over the back of Taylor's wrist. "She's brilliant."

Taylor blushed, "Well, maybe I could be... if I ever finish."

"You'll finish, honey," Jessica said, "Just wait. Two years from now it'll feel like a lifetime ago."

Nathan leaned back. He couldn't think of anything to say, any way in which he could participate in the conversation. He found it difficult, sometimes, understanding the rhythms of natural speech. He'd always felt that he was only repeating what he had learned, never really understanding how it fit together. He'd found that he couldn't trust himself to simply say what first came to mind. He had to work it all out in his head: what he would say, how they would respond. It was a tight skin, covering himself in the Nathan-thing he'd created, sewn up from borrowed bits of personality. He turned away from the conversation. The dark coffin seemed to be sucking all the light out of the room.

"What about this?" Roberta lowered her voice to a whisper. "Can you believe it?"

Jessica brushed back her short hair. "I _know_. I never thought anything like this – you know... Not here. I mean, I know it's happen before, but..."

Taylor frowned. "What's that mean? What happened?"

Jessie's voice turned dark with concern. "Suicide, honey. Been a lot of people before Michael. These gorges, they should just wall them off or fill them in or something."

"Suicide?" Taylor squeaked, turning pale. Her mousy brown hair seemed to be curling at the suggestion. "Do you really think he... he did that?"

"What else?"

"I... I don't know. I just never thought. I mean," Taylor pushed her fingertips against her eyelids, "I _knew_ Mike. He always seemed so happy... Not like a person who would kill themselves..."

"What's the alternative?" Jessie said, arching an eyebrow.

Roberta shook her head. "Don't even say it. It's too horrible. I can't think about that right now." Nathan stared at the woman's fingernails. Deep red lacquer, a sort of bloody russet color.

"Does anyone know what the police think?" Taylor asked nervously.

"The Conner's, maybe." Jessica gave them one of her _oh those poor people_ grimaces. "Where are they, anyway? I haven't seen Charles or Patty yet. Wasn't the service supposed to start twenty minutes ago?"

Taylor cocked her head towards the door at the far end of the room. "They were out here earlier, when people first started showing up, but... uh, Patty needed a minute alone. I think Charles is going to say something when they come back."

It was, in fact, a full fifteen minutes before Charles and Patricia Conner finally appeared. Patricia clung to the wall, her flesh raw. Charles Conner's short brown hair was turning gray at the roots; his face sagged. There was no life in him, Nathan thought, not a drop. Patrica's face was streaked with tears, her eyes so red and puffy that she looked sick. They stood in the doorway, very close together but not touching each other. Everyone got very quiet when Charles began to speak.

"Thank you all for coming. Any support is... Well, we appreciate it." He stood there with his hands opening and closing uselessly at his sides. He stared at the people gathered before him, grasping for something more to say. Patricia just shook her head, not looking at anyone. Charles struggled on: "I guess you all know why we're here. A lot of you knew my son since he first... and... The police haven't told us much. Apparently he's been... apparently it happened a while ago, when he went missing, I guess a few of you knew that we were looking for him. And, God willing, we'll all be able to... move on, I... Sometimes people... children... just lose themselves. You try to teach them, to show them the right path. Sometimes people just don't listen. Sometimes they lose sight of God; they lose sight of what makes them..." He trailed off again, and shoved his hands into his pockets.

Nathan looked back over his shoulder. Everyone was frozen in place, eyes locked on the bereaved couple, flowered paper cups of bright red punch clutched in their hands. They could have been posing for a painting, their finer features melted away in blurred impressionist oils, leaving only the raw grief, stark in their faces.

* * *

After the service, Jessica was angry.

"It was _bullshit_ , Nathan!" She yanked off her shirt and tossed it blindly at the laundry basket. She turned away from him, fishing in the dresser for another. He sat on the bed and watched the way her tattoos rippled when she flexed her shoulders. There were wine-red words spelled out above the narrow black strap of her bra, tracing across her back in a flowery script.

"What was?" he asked.

She turned on him, incredulous. "Jesus Christ, Nathan you were there, weren't you?"

"Yeah?"

"The Conner's! I just can't _believe_ them! They didn't even _know_ him, Nathan! Michael _meant_ more to us, we loved him better. Those fucking holier-than-thou assholes just adopted him to make themselves feel better! They didn't want the responsibility; they didn't give a _shit_ about Mike! Never!" Her voice was stretched, on the verge of breaking.

Nathan caught himself chewing his fingernail, and looked at the ragged cuticle with surprise. He hadn't bitten his nails since he was a child.

Jessica came to him and sat on the edge of the bed. She brushed his thin hair back from his forehead. "We did love him, didn't we? We really loved Mike?"

Nathan nodded.

She wrapped her arms around his head and drew it down to her chest, laying her cheek against his thinning crown. "He was a good kid," she murmured, her voice back under control. "Unhook me."

Nathan undid his wife's bra strap. His hand brushed along her side, caressing the bare warmth of her skin. She smiled at him, caught his hand to kiss at his knuckles. "Gena needs a ride, do you mind?"

"Where's she going?"

"Visiting a friend in Ithaca. Trevor Allocco, you remember him." Jessica got back up off the bed, the tip of one breast brushing against his cheek as she rose. Nathan felt himself stirring.

"Yeah, okay. I'll take her. About time she got out of here." He crossed his legs uncomfortably over his erection.

She patted him absently, sliding her watch onto her wrist. "Talk to her, would you? About Michael, I mean. They were friends, right? Or... schoolmates, I guess... maybe she needs to talk about it?"

"I'll see what I can do."

Twenty minutes later, he was drumming his fingertips on the steering wheel and trying to think of something to say to his daughter.

The trees to both side of the road were draped in heavy green vines, all spring's foliated clothing drawn modestly over naked tree trunks. The atmosphere was thick with fog, dense as marsh air. The road curved upwards, out of the mist and into a cruel sunlight.

Gena had her feet up on the dashboard. She had long smooth legs. Loose strands of black hair whipped about her face, those few wisps that had escaped from under her hairband. Nathan found it hard not to look at his daughter's legs. His wife hadn't shaved since she was seventeen, years before he had known her. He'd gotten used to that. Gena's smooth legs, though, skin waxy in the summer sun, seemed artificial and almost pornographic. He wanted to cover them, tear at them, caress them. He hated himself.

He pulled his eyes away and looked into the dense tangles of foliage wrapping about the pine trees.

When they turned onto route 81, he asked her, "Is there anything you need to talk about, honey?"

She gave him a blank look. "Is there something we're supposed to talk about?" Then a suspicious knitting of the eyebrows, "Is this why Mom wanted you to drive me?"

"I don't know how well you knew Michael..." he started, "but if you need to talk about it, we're-"

"I didn't." Her voice was flat and brittle. "I didn't know him."

Nathan shrugged. "Okay." She was lying, but he didn't push. The truth was, he didn't really want to know. What would be the benefit? She could deal with the grief in her own way. No point in him digging into anything raw. The last thing he needed was a hysterical teenager around the house. He wouldn't get a single word written.

The car hummed on the road. He reflected on that great advantage which came from being married to a mechanic: the car was always in excellent condition. It was good to be with someone who could fix things. He'd never been handy with machines himself, though his father had been something of a tinkerer. There had been this old silver VW Bug that he'd spend his evenings and weekends refurbishing. He never seemed interested in driving the car, only in fixing the thing, as though the point of the machine had been to generate work rather than to serve any vehicular function. Nathan, of course, had not been welcome when Dad was working on the car. He might get in the way, his mother told him. After what happened with Katrina and William, Nathan hadn't felt welcome anywhere. Neither of his parents seemed able to stand the sight of him. They moved to a tiny little house out in the country and didn't talk about anything that had happened before.

Well, he thought to himself, that was just something kids had to deal with. What boy in America wasn't afraid of his father? Fathers and sons could only interact on a purely superficial level, that was just a fact of life. As for fathers and daughters... well, that was a more delicate matter. It seemed so much simpler just to avoid one's children. His writing wasn't too far removed from his father's Volkswagen in that way. It was just a distraction, a shield between him and that grinding female psyche assembling itself down the hall. What he was doing wasn't so different from what his father had done. No matter what promises they made themselves, all sons eventually turned into their fathers.

The rest of the drive passed in silence. Silently beyond the mall, between the craggy rocks through which the highway had been blasted, down along the high ridge over Cayuga Lake, onward past the high school and into downtown Ithaca. And there he left her.

* * *

He did not return to Verden for some time. It was nearly dusk when he finally did.

Jessica was curled up on the couch with a battered paperback. She didn't ask him what had taken him so long, didn't ask where he'd been, didn't even look up when he walked in. Never mind that, he had things to do anyway.

Nathan fetched his computer and retreated with it to the darkest corner of the trailer.

He still hadn't decided on a title. For now, he was saving the bits and pieces in a folder titled _Murder: An American Story_. He liked that more every time he saw it, and was beginning to think that he might just keep it. He cracked his knuckles once, and he wrote about what had happened in Ithaca after he'd dropped off Gena:

I left my car and walked out onto a bridge. The iron span arched out across the deep gorge. This was a broken city. I stood at the railing and looked down into the abyss. Thick growth filled the crumbling canyon, gnarled trees clawing at the soil. Down at the very lowest point the silver-black river twisted in the rock, like a vein of precious metal through the stone.

People die in these gorges. They kill themselves here. At least once every year, usually more often. Every once in a while there's a big to-do about it. The New York Times comes down to interview students about their depressed classmates. The College faculty makes speeches. Everyone gets very nervous for a few weeks, then they all go home and everybody forgets until next year when it happens again.

Some say that the gorges hold a certain power over the doomed. I think I did feel an urge, standing there looking down into that swirling darkness, felt a desire to lean out and let go. There was something beautiful about the idea of suicide. The eerie silence of that tumbling nothingness.

I remember how scared I was when Jessica first got pregnant. We'd only been married a few months and we barely had two pennies to rub together, as they say. I kept asking myself, how can I possibly be a father?

_I finished_ The Wreckage _three months before Jessica was due and the first publisher I sent it to bought it. All the right people praised it when it came out and, for about twenty-four months, I was rich and famous – felt like I was, anyway – and I had a new baby to show for it._

I'd think to myself, having children is just something that people do. And of course I could do it too. I was, and am, the worst sort of fool.

Nathan stopped writing, and he read back what he had just written. A feeling of grotesque unease crept up on him, more with each word. By the time he came to the end his head was throbbing and his hands trembling. All the words meant nothing, there was nothing there. No matter how much he wrote, it did nothing to stem the drifting of his life's meaningless slide into obscurity. Nothing he made had any value. He was a fraud and a fool.

He'd meant to write about September 11th, about the destruction of the Towers and all that had happened. Everybody was writing about it now, the venerable artists and the eager hopeful; they all had a spin to put on it. It was the new literary vogue, a fresh new holocaust upon which they could build all their stories and have them granted an immediate potency.

But Nathan couldn't quite manage it. No matter how he tried to force it, he shied away at the last minute as if by instinct. Maybe he'd be better off leaving it alone.

But no. No, it was too good an opportunity to pass up. This was his _chance_ , he could make use of it, twist it into something that people would look at and respect. They would look at it and they would see only him, only Nathan Riley, rising from the rubble.

Maybe he should write a story about a firefighter...

He buried his face in his arms, bent low before the sickly glare of the screen. He was nearly asleep when he felt Jessica's hands on his shoulders. Her fingers worked deep in his muscle, soothing to the bone.

"How's the job hunt going?" she asked as she massaged his neck.

"Fantastic," Nathan mumbled into his sweeter sleeve, "everyone's just desperate to hire me. They've all been sitting around waiting for just this sort of washed up wreck."

"Oh good. I'll go ahead and buy that yacht then."

Nathan sighed. He was tired. He shouldn't be this tired; it wasn't even fully dark out. "I can't believe I'm turning forty next week."

"It's not so bad. Trust me, I speak from experience." She bent down and kissed the back of his neck. She was smiling, he could feel it.

"What have I got to show for it though? Everything I thought I would have accomplished by now... I wanted to make people think, Jessie, you know? Wanted to make them _feel_." _I wanted to make them love me_. He left that unspoken. He looked up at his wife. "Did you know that I've always wanted to change the world?"

"Don't we all?"

"I mean it."

"I know you do. Everybody means it." She kissed his forehead. "Come to bed, Nathan. Just sleep."

* * *

_Forty_.

He was going to be forty years old. There were only a few days left now. He felt like he was trapped in his adolescent nightmares: getting older and older and older and accomplishing nothing along the way.

He'd seen this future, hoped that if he could ignore it than it might simply disappear. He got married, he had a child, he wrote a book, and when he couldn't write another he got a freelance job writing fluff for the local paper. It wasn't everything he'd dreamed of, but he thought that he'd escaped. And somehow his life had become everything he'd feared; he hadn't even noticed it happening.

Where was he going to end up? There was nothing before him now, only the great emptiness of irrelevance and old age.

The night was dead, the hot air so humid that his clothes clung to his body. He was parked on the wooded shoulder of a lonesome road. It was the road out of town, and he'd gone further than he had ever gone before on this particular stretch of highway, deep into the unfamiliar. His headlights poured out on the alien pavement, on the dirt of the shallow embankment, on the shaggy rust-red pine boughs hanging in the muggy darkness.

Nathan ran his hands along the wheel.

He'd dreamed about places like this. Empty roads, wind animating the surreptitious movement of rustling trees. There was something about the wildness of the night which both frightened and excited him, the idea that anything could be out there in the shadowed places. The forest seemed to gleam with the dripping claws and teeth of those unnamable creatures which surely stirred there.

Jessica didn't like sex. That was an oversimplification, maybe. It may have been more accurate to say that she didn't like sex with _him_. That had been the understanding from the very beginning, and it had always suited Nathan just fine. To be perfectly honest, he'd never really _enjoyed_ fucking. He liked sex well enough – the sounds and smells and feel of it, and especially the _idea_ of it – but when he was inside a woman and she was looking up at him and he was sliding himself around down in her warm wet parts... it made him nervous on a profound level. He preferred to watch. It had always been that way between Jessica and he, and it had always been enough for him.

Until they met Michael, at least. That had changed everything.

Nathan lay against the reclined seat-back. The night was turning cold at last, and his breath fogged before his eyes. With a twist of the keys, he shut off the car. Everything went dark. For a moment, as his eyes adjusted, there was nothing but the faint green glow of the digital clock on the dashboard. He stared down the stretching emptiness of the highway, and he waited.

It was almost twenty minutes before a car finally crested the hill. First came the sound of the engine, groaning like a great animal. Then the lights, spilling violently on the road in harsh white streams. The wheels thrummed smoothly on the road, carrying the vehicle swiftly towards him. He could feel the vibration of the passing car shuddering minutely through the entire frame of his vehicle.

He was going to be forty years old soon. He couldn't leave Verden; no matter how he tried he simply could not leave. All his accomplishments turned to nothing in his hands, all his hope had withered in him. And Michael was dead.

He lay back, shut his eyes, and listened the quiet of the insects, to the stillness of the encroaching night. And he left himself far behind.

* * *

"So tell me, if you don't mind, why did you leave the _Courier_?" The man behind the desk steepled his fingers. The top button of his stained white undershirt was undone. A handful of minor academic accolades were proudly displayed on the temporary walls. There was a cheap looking nameplate on the edge of the desk: Thompson Greer.

Nathan shrugged. "Downsizing. Streamlining. This and that. Print isn't... you know... it's not what it used to be." There was a window down the hallway; Nathan could see cars moving slowly through the community college parking lot. "All the old things are dying out now... sad, really."

The other man stared at him. "Hm," he said after a moment's consideration, then returned to his list of prepared questions.

Nathan left the building an hour later with Thompson Greer's assurances that the paperwork would be in the mail by Friday. Nathan was going to be working as an adjunct English teacher. He would start in the Fall Semester. He wasn't particularly looking forward to it, but his options were limited.

_Adjunct_. Just an accessory, an ancillary cog in the machine. The word left a bad taste in his mouth.

There was no one home when he got back to the park. Jessica was at the garage, and God only knew where Gena had gotten herself to.

He sat heavily on the couch and stared at the wall for nearly three hours.

He had to force himself to get up and move to his computer desk. He tried to write, fingers tripping slothfully from key to key. After a few false starts, he sat back from the screen. His brain seemed to be too big for his skull, bursting painfully with ideas and images, none of which he'd managed to translate into words.

He had felt it once, that white heat of creation. It had once meant so much to him, more than oxygen once. Everything had grown out of that impulse.

He thought about his senior year at Cornell, the student magazine he'd edited that year. There was a little release party at one of those hole-in-the-wall bookstores that littered downtown Ithaca. Page-Turner's, it was called. It had been years since he'd last gone there. The place probably didn't even exist anymore. He never did find out if the name was a pun of some kind. It must have been, all those places have blandly clever little puns for names.

They were just a bunch of posturing pseudo-intellectuals back then, all sorts of big ideas with no way to back them up. They were all stewing in self-congratulation, assured of their own genius. Then she came inside, and right away they all knew that there was something different about her: she was someone real.

Her long pink hair was braided on both sides and buzzed close down the middle but for three long spikes. Her leather jacket was too big for her, her cut-off jeans too small. She had more piercings and tattoos than he'd even seen in his whole life. She wore a silky violet scarf wrapped around her neck – not the most practical in the New York winter – and her make-up was slathered on so thick that she hardly seemed human: purple eyeliner you could see from across the street, black lipstick that made her three silver lip-rings stand out like strands of wire in a pool of ink. Next to her rather unimposing friends, she looked to be about six and a half feet tall.

He remembered sitting behind his little table, knees knocking while everyone in the store gathered around her. She didn't even seem to notice that she'd become the center of attention, perhaps she was simply so used to it by then that it no longer seemed strange. She wandered through the store, popping her chewing gum and eying the overcrowded shelves dubiously. There was no pretense, none of that polite blandness to which he had become accustomed. When she finally came around to his table, his hands were shaking and his tongue felt thick and dead. She picked up their little paper-bound collection of short-stories and poetry. She cocked one eyebrow, and he knew right away that everything was wrong. Those people who'd been telling him all night how talented he was, how visionary his work was, they were all wrong. He saw at once how pitiful he was, how small and undeserved his ambition.

She flipped through the little book. And then she looked at him. "You wrote this?" she asked and he just nodded, his throat was too dry even to attempt speech. She turned to the index. God, what had he been thinking? All the titles flashed through his mind. How had they ever seemed so clever and elegant, so beautiful? He realized that they were all silly, all pretentious and awkward. He couldn't bear to face her.

"Oh, hey," she said, pointing to one title with a hooked nail. He looked up, eyes shining with a feverish desire, a desperation. "I think I read that one before... you wrote it for an English class, right? I think my friend was in that class, she showed me."

He nodded weakly. One of his stories. "What did you think?" he asked, deflating, prepared to be disappointed. She would tell him how incredible his writing was, would offer some of blasé praise, meaningless and self-effacing. She would say it, and the spell would dissipate. He was almost relieved. She seemed too real to exist. It was easier to be disappointed by the expected.

But that wasn't how it happened. She shrugged. "I didn't really like it, to be honest. I don't know, short stories aren't really my thing."

And that is when he fell in love with Jessica Riley.

He reached out his hand towards her, wrist limp and palm sweaty. "Nathan Harrison," he said, his voice an awed murmur. There was engine oil on her knuckles.

She grinned. Her grip was firm. "Jessica," she said.

"Do... do you want to... go somewhere?" It was like they were the only two people in the room. He realized, for the first time in his life, that he didn't care how he looked, didn't care what they thought of him. She was the only one who mattered. If she said yes that what did they matter?

"You got a place in mind?" she asked, cocking her head.

He couldn't remember where they went that night. Everything after they left the book shop was a blur to him now. He remembered, only vaguely, walking down a gleaming sidewalk with her, having to run almost just to keep up with her long stride. He remembered crossing a footbridge over one of the mossy gorges. He remembered music, remembered dancing, his body touching hers like two leaves tumbling together towards the earth.

Where had that gone? How had he wound up _here_? He couldn't stop thinking about what it would be like, putting on the suit, packing up his briefcase. Going to work, to _teach_. For how long? Perhaps the next best part of his life. Creation had failed, and he was just another failure, an empty shape.

He rubbed his eyes, fighting back a yawn. All his adult life he had dreamed that he might someday _make it_. His definition of "making it" had been drastically altered over the past twenty-five years or so, scaled back with every failure. Right now, he thought, he could be content with very little.

But he was tired.

He deleted everything that he had written over the past month, dragging the files one by one onto the trash icon. He shut off the computer. The screen went black and, for an instant, he saw his own face reflected back at him.

The lightbulb in the next room was dying again. The new light fluttered, threatening to burn out, flaring as angrily and insistently as a squalling infant. He shut down the computer, and he went towards the dying light.

### Piano Wire

The piano teacher's face is a map of his particular past. Webbed with the lines and scars of life, it sags as morbidly on his skull as an ill-fitting Halloween mask. She knows what hides behind it. There are secrets and desires behind the faces of all men that are alien to her, to all women. When a man sees a woman, there is something in him that comes alive, shimmers with the desire to pull her open. Sometimes it shows on their faces, in the hungry wet smiles and the soft bovine eyes and in the set of the jaw. Most of the time it is silent, stirring in their loins, coiling hot up in their guts. She can feel it when their eyes touch her, she can feel the tearing, the ripping, the raking of their fingernails on her skin. She knows that they want nothing more than to peel away the skin and watch her bleed on the floor, more naked than naked, utterly bare and utterly subject. Nothing so beautiful as a dead woman's body, pale sallow thing devoid of thought. A thing to be used. They all want it in some part of them, it is their disease. You can't blame someone for their sickness. She endures their eyes because she knows that they are helpless, just little boys screaming for the distant memory of mother's torn body.

She knows what thoughts hide behind that fleshy mask, and she keeps a wary eye on the Piano Teacher whenever he sits on the long stool beside her little Sally. She watches the mask when he picks up her chubby pink hands in his leathery gray hands and puts her chubby pink fingers to the soft plastic keys beneath his leathery gray fingers. She watches the mask when he smiles at Sally, tells her in his softly lilting European voice that she's doing so very well, and pats her on her blonde head. And she watches the mask when he is making Sally's fingers dance gaily across the black and white keys. She sees the flickering of masculine revulsion rising in his ancient features, and she is afraid for her little girl.

Kim's father often wore the same look, and she learned long ago how to protect herself. She leans forward and lets her breasts hang heavy and pendulous and she purrs at the Piano Teacher in a voice like dripping honey and she says words which are soft and weak and admiring:

"You played that beautifully."

"You're magnificent, she's doing so well."

"I could _never_ do that, you're amazing!"

And his eyes find her mother's milk in the warm dark of her shadowy cleavage and he lights up his savage desire to tear her apart and push his thing into all the squirmy bits of her ripped self. She feeds her pieces into the fire of his maleness, stoking the flames so hot that they sear away those angry thoughts of little Sally which are pushing their ugly fingers into his mind.

She shoves out her tits and her ass and she wears her shortest skirts and she wears her heaviest make-up and she lets her every fraction of self shout out to this man in its desperate fragile woman's voice that she is his if only he will take her: _Yes yes, take me! Fuck me! Desire me! Put your hands inside me and rip me open, but only just don't look at my little darling Sally._

The black keys, they depress.

She prefers to look at the white keys anyway, like a vast row of emotionless teeth, unbroken and flat. Not like a child's mouth, a mouth full of gaps and weaknesses and penetrations and smiles. Children's mouths are full of lies. Full of filth.

Mother must scrub all that away, must strip the filth off like peeling back skin. Mother must protect daughter, draw all those eyes that burn and prick and let them prick her and let them burn her because she has tougher skin. Mother will keep you safe, little darling Sally child, if you will only just trust me.

* * *

"Sally is coming along very well," Mr. Hephenkemp said, his thick accent musically indistinct.

"That's wonderful news." Kim smiled. "It does sound so lovely."

The teacher smiled back. He rubbed the tips of his long fingers together as though gathering a sort of electricity there. "She really must practice, though. This is _essential_. All of music, it is _practice_."

"I know," Kim sighed. "We're just looking for the right instrument, you understand?"

Not two weeks ago she'd found her daughter drawing on napkins that Kim had brought home from the restaurant. Sally drew keys on the paper and spread it out in front of her and she played it, poking at the empty spaces with her fingers. "I can hear it, Mommy!" she said, her eyes screwed shut and her broken smile filling her mouth, "I can hear music!" It just about broke Kim's heart to see. Some children were too perfect for such a world.

Mr. Hephenkemp leaned close and said in a lower voice so that the mother of the little boy whose lesson was after Sally's wouldn't hear, "If the problem is money, you might look at a thrift shop? Maybe you'll find an old keyboard. Something to let her get a feel for the fingerings."

Kim's back went stiff, but she made herself smile and she said a whispered thank-you. As though he'd given her access to some great secret, as though she hadn't tried the thrift store a thousand _times_ already!

Practice or no practice, Sally was _going_ to learn the piano. Kim had decided. She'd taken piano lessons once herself, for a very short while. She had so wanted to learn, but her father refused to allow her to continue, had burned the books in the fireplace so that not a single note remained. But Sally would learn. What were children for, if not to correct the mistakes of the past?

Kim couldn't afford to pay for Sally's lessons, not really, but she had made do. She had gone weeks without anything from her black case. Of course she had some methadone from the clinic still, but that could only dull the edge, couldn't take it away. She'd considered going back to Robert, but the thought of that horrible picture Kevin Peterson had taken was enough to dissuade her. She wasn't going back to that, back to taking money for it. If you let a man pay for it, he could take off the mask, and you'd know what he was really like underneath it all. She couldn't stand to look again.

The lesson was over. Sally gathered up her books – how _expensive_ they'd been, Kim could scarcely believe it! – and she let Kim guild her from the Piano Teacher's house. They had to walk past the boy whose lesson was after Sally, as they did every week. Every week his mother was there with him, and every week Kim thought she heard a voice from inside that other woman's head. _Slut! Whore! Shame! Shame!_ And every week Kim resented it. That woman didn't know what it was like to have a darling little daughter. Boys were different. Boys were safe.

_But boys will turn on you_ , whispered Kim's little voice, _boys will grow up and they'll look at you with a man's eyes one day, just wait. I do what I have to do._

It had already happened with Jeffrey. Her little niggerchild, she had called him, only ever in her head. Only in that little voice that couldn't hurt feelings or offend the gentle ears of children. She had loved him. She loved to run her fingers through his curly dark hair that was so unlike her own, and she had loved to press her palm against his skinny baby chest and look at the way her skin seemed so pink and blood-filled while he laughed and kicked his chubby brown legs. Oh how she still missed Jeffrey's father! That man who had left her with nothing but the trailer and the memories and the little baby who so resembled him.

But babies grew up, especially boy babies. And now Jeffrey had come home looking just like his father. And he wouldn't _talk_ to her anymore. And when he looked at her there was anger and hurt in his face, and there was also a desire there that frightened her. He looked too much like his father, that man who had wanted to swallow her whole.

Kim stood on the sidewalk outside the Piano Teacher's house. The sun was hot above Verden. The street was unpopulated outside those blank-faced houses which lined the road on either side. Verden rustled its trees and shrugged its broad cement shoulders and settled into the lonely earth. Kim reached down and wrapped her fingers through Sally's. "Danny's going to pick us up today. Won't that be fun?" She looked down at her daughter, trying to read her face, always trying to read her. Oh, but how could you _know_ what a person thought? Her boys were still a mystery to her, not only Jeffrey but Walker and Garrett too. "Don't you want to see Dan?" she asked again, prodding her child.

Sally smiled. "Uh-huh!" she sing-songed, swinging Kim's hand around.

Kim was relieved. Sally still liked Dan. That was good. Men sensed it when children didn't like them, and men were jealous creatures. Kim's father had been jealous, and just look what had come of that.

They stood together on the side of the road, mother and daughter, and they waited for Dan's shiny car to turn down the far road. Sally hummed the pieces she'd been playing inside. They were simple little songs, Kim even recognized some of them. _Twinkle Twinkle Little Star_ that her own mother had used to sing to her, cradling hands warm and soft and dusted with flour.

Kim didn't like to think about her mother. Her mother had been like that woman inside the Piano Teacher's house. Her mother hadn't known what Kim knew, she hadn't known how much you needed to _protect_ daughters. Of course, Kim had made her share of mistakes. She tried not to think about her oldest, about Alice. She found she couldn't help it though, and when Dan pulled up onto the side of the road in his shiny car and rolled down the window to take in the sight of her, she was crying. She put on her sunglasses before he could see, and she put her daughter in the car.

"You have a good lesson?" Dan asked, turning around to check Sally's buckle.

"Yup," Sally nodded.

"What did you learn?" he asked.

Sally shrugged. "I guess nothin'."

Dan's eyebrows shot up. " _Nothing_? Jeez Louise!"

Sally giggled helplessly at that. Words were funnier when you hadn't heard so many of them.

And then Dan was looking back at Kim. Good, make her laugh and then look away! Look back at Mother's tits, don't pay any attention to my beautiful little daughter, my unspoiled treasure. Kim buckled her seatbelt, pulling the strap tight between her breasts in a way that had long since become automatic for her. And just as automatic was the burning of his eyes on her. Dan wore the mask better than most. She had never felt so safe with a man before. He took that twelve step shit so seriously. Dan was a man in control of his self, as much as a man could be.

His dark hair was cut real short and he had lots of tattoos that he liked to show off by wearing as little clothing as possible – shorts and a t-shirt in November, that kind of thing. He asked her if she wanted to go anywhere.

Kim looked at him. Those little piano songs were dancing in her head. The black keys, she thought, they depress. _Ba Ba Black Sheep_. She needed to talk to Jeffrey before he vanished. Before he was gone like Alice was gone. Or worse, like Mike was gone.

She shook her head. "I think we should get home."

Dan shrugged. "You're the boss." The shiny car turned back to the road, and the Piano Teacher's house in the mirror fell away behind them.

### High Orbit Over a Distant Planet

Gena shrugged on her jacket and stepped down off the porch. "You got money?"

"Yeah yeah, I got it," Trevor was trying so hard to look in every direction at once that he seemed like he might tie himself in a knot with all his twisting around.

"What, are you worried we'll get robbed? Give me a break, Trev."

"You never know."

She rolled her eyes. "Shut _up_. God, you're so paranoid!"

"It's not paranoia if it's, you know, real."

"Whatever. Let's _go_ already!"

The sun shone angry hot and dim through thick cloud, flooding High Gorge Park with defused light and illuminating the dust thick in the air. A pile of old chains were coiled like rust-red entrails in the scrub grass behind the Riley's trailer. Gena gave the raspy steel a kick as they passed, cursing it for the thousandth time.

Trevor shoved his money back in his pocket. "Where's this guy at, anyway?"

"Down that way."

They threaded their way through the sprawled array of trailers, treading familiar paths through the waste. How many times had they walked together in this place? Gena had missed him so much, missed them all. She ran her hands lightly over the side of somebody's trailer. When they passed the window the curtain inside parted and a yellowed eyeball pushed into the crack.

"Somebody's watching."

Gena just shrugged. "Fuck them. I don't care." She wasn't afraid of being watched. People didn't scare her. Being alone, being unwatched... now _that_ was frightening. She lit a cigarette and tucked it into the corner of her mouth.

Trevor grimaced. "You shouldn't do that."

Gena laughed. "You _hypocrite_! Did you forget what we're doing?"

Trevor sighed dramatically. "Nicotine is _addictive_ , Gena."

She laughed again. "So's caffeine. Who cares?"

"You don't wanna be dependent, Gena."

"You'll be alone forever with that kinda attitude, Trev."

"Maybe, but at least I'll be healthy."

Gena wrinkled her nose and blew capricious smoke into the air. Trevor coughed, waving his hand in front of his face his face.

She tapped her knuckles against the sides of the trailers as they walked, daring something to happen. The park seemed dangerous to her now, as though anything might happen. She'd seen a story in the newspaper a few days ago about a rape-murder in Cortland Country. Bad things were happening all over, not just here in Verden. There was a picture of the killer in the paper, and nothing of the victim but her name and age: Vanessa Jenkins, 15 years old. Gena wondered what she'd been like, if she'd had friends. Did anybody miss Vanessa Jenkins?

Richard Ewan's trailer was on the far edge of the park. The curtains were drawn and the door locked. Gena pressed the doorbell button with her thumb. It seemed to be broken, so she gave the door a hard knock after what felt like an appropriate interval.

Trevor and she stood there for several uncomfortable moments, waiting for some sign of life. The door creaked open and a thin face peered out. The lights were all off inside the trailer, draping the man's face in shadows. He had a thin black beard, sort of patchy and sick. "Yeah?" His voice was oddly distant, as though it were coming from deep underwater.

"We need something," Gena said

The thin face, Richard Ewan's face, twisted. "Yeah? You selling Girl Scout cookies or something?"

Gena made a face right back. "No, I mean we need _something_." Trevor pulled a roll of bills out of his pocket.

Richard looked at them a moment longer, then he laughed, an eerily high-pitched sort of laugh, vaguely rodent-like. He looked Gena up and down, "Shit... I know you. Okay okay, come in already." He eyed the money in Trevor's hand. "And put that crap away, right? Come on now." He shook his head at them, sort of paternally dismissive. Why did everybody still treat her like a child?

Gena and Trevor followed him inside the trailer. There was an foul, faintly acrid smell, like dirty laundry and chemicals. Filthy dishes were piled in the sink and garbage strewn across the floor. Leaning against the wall beside the television there was a small painting of a nude woman with empty eye sockets, holding the bloody orbs in her upturned palms like a pair of pitted cherries. Gena stared at the painting, unable to tear her gaze away.

"You like that?" Richard asked, following her gaze back to the blinded woman. "I did it back in art school."

"It's... interesting," Gena managed, struggling to keep her stomach steady. There was something about the painting which struck her as inexpressibly grotesque. There was a perversity there which she could not clearly define.

"Anyway, I'm in the middle of something. Give me a second, okay? Sit down or whatever." Richard nodded at a couch covered in half-folded newspapers and food wrappers before he disappeared into the rear of his trailer.

Richard Ewan, it was said, was the disowned offspring of some ludicrously wealthy Long Island family, living here in self-imposed exile. He had no job to speak of, aside from dealing pot from his trailer on a scale so small that nobody could quite figure out why he went to the trouble. Gena had only come once before, and truth be told, she'd been too frightened to return without company. Evidently, Richard didn't remember her very well.

Gena pushed aside a crumpled newspaper and sat gingerly down on the filthy couch. She still couldn't stop looking at the picture of the woman. It gnawed at her, like a buried memory fighting to surface. _Why_? What did it mean? Why paint it? Why did it bother her so much? Her skin crawled.

A moment later Richard came back into the room. Trevor gave him the money, and he gave Trevor a little bag which Trevor immediately stuffed deep into his pocket. Richard frowned. He pushed his shaggy hair out of his eyes, pressed two fingers to his temple. "You kids have fun, right?" And with that he drifted back out of the room, like they'd already gone and he was alone again.

They wasted no time leaving. Gena looked at the painting once more before they went out the door. She almost thought she saw the eyes in the woman's hands blinking. Only the light playing tricks.

Fifteen minutes later they were back in Gena's trailer, alone with an ounce of reasonably tolerable weed.

"Do you ever think about killing yourself?" Trevor stared at her through the haze of pungent smoke. He was stretched out on her bed, his head propped up on her pillows.

She looked back at him, her back up against the wall.

"Do you think about killing yourself?" he asked again.

She shrugged. "Sometimes."

"Why?"

She could feel the dope kicking in. Her brain felt untethered inside her skull, like her head was growing larger around it. "I guess I don't know."

"What do you think happened to Mike?" he was still staring at her.

"I think he fell."

"Just fell?"

"Just fell." She nodded heavily.

"What if he didn't just fall?"

"I don't _care_ , Trevor! I mean, it hardly matters anymore, does it? I can't think about that shit!" She felt a sudden swelling of anger. Goddamn Michael! Did everything have to be about him? She hated him for dying, for leaving her, for changing everything. She couldn't understand why everyone cared so much, why they all seemed to want to talk about it. Even her Dad had felt the need to bring it up. Couldn't they just let him be _dead_?

"I care. I do care about him." Trevor hardly seemed to be talking to her anymore. His eyes were glazed over, staring sightlessly towards the window.

"Good for you, I guess."

He wrapped his arms around her pillows, drawing them to his chest. He spoke into them, his voice getting muffled and soft. "He was the first one."

"The first one what?"

"Huh?" Trevor stared at her, like he had just notice that she was in the room with him. His lids were heavy.

"What does that mean? About Mike being the first one?" Gena closed her eyes. The room was revolving slowly around her. It was making her a bit dizzy.

Trevor didn't seem to have heard her. "I think about it sometimes. Suicide, I mean. I think I'd want to do it really simply. I used to wonder about how would be the best way, you know, so everybody would miss me after I was gone. Now... I guess I'd just want it to be over quick." He looked back at her, his gaze eerily open, eyes bloodshot. "I think I'd hang myself in my basement. You know, from one of those like... water pipes..."

The wind moaned outside, soft and guttural.

Gena lit a cigarette, trading off the two and feeling like she was drowning in smoke. Her parents would smell it when they got home for sure. Maybe she wanted them to know. "I'd want to be run over by the train," she said, "I've always wondered what it would be like. What would happen to my body... if train would jump the tracks. I think I'd like it, just lying there real still on the rails feeling the earth shake beneath me."

Trevor's eyes were wide open, the pupils fully dilated. "Really?" He stared at her all owly and ruffled.

Gena burst out laughing. She slumped over, giggling so hard that her gut hurt.

Trevor laughed reflexively along, "What? What? What's funny?"

The carpet was getting in her teeth. She waved him off. "You. You're funny."

"I'm _funny_?"

Gena bit her tongue until she stopped laughing. She stared at the dark space beneath the bed. "I wish I had a boyfriend," she said, the thought suddenly occurring to her.

"Me too," Trevor muttered, and Gena started giggling again. The laughter bubbled painfully in her chest, driving the breath from her lungs.

"Just think about it," Gena said, pulling herself up onto the bed, "think how good it would be. To have somebody who would... buy you things. Love you. Want to be with you all the time. Somebody who... cared enough."

Trevor took a long hit. "Don't forget sex." He groaned.

"Right, sex too."

"You ever do it?"

She shook her head. "No. I told you that. What, you think I'm a whore?"

"No!"

"You _do_! You think I'm a whore, Trevor!"

"Shut _up_." He waved her off, giving up.

"What about you, have you done it?"

"Not really."

"Seriously? Not even once?"

"Well... No, I guess I haven't."

"So, uh... how do you... you know... How do you know? If you're gay, I mean?"

Trevor gave her a look which was half-indulgence and half-annoyance. "How do _you_ know if you're straight?"

"Shut up! I just... know."

"There you go."

"Have you told your parents yet?"

Trevor rolled back onto the pillows. "What, about smoking pot? No way. Not that they'd give a shit, long as I'm still doing okay in school, they're happy."

"That's not what I meant..."

He rolled his eyes. "I know what you meant. Nah, I haven't told them about that yet."

"Don't you think you should?"

"What's the point?"

"I don't know. Don't you want them to know... you know, who you are?"

"They're my _parents_ , Gena. As far as they're concerned I'm still just a kid. I don't think they want me having sex with _anybody_."

"They're gonna find out eventually."

"I guess so." There was a sort of regret in his voice, an untempered resignation. "Maybe they already know. I mean, everybody in High School knew."

Gena nodded. It had been crazy, Trevor was the first person "out" in the whole school – first ever, as far as Gena knew. It hadn't been easy for him, to say the least. When he wasn't getting teased he was getting beat up, and when he wasn't getting beat up, he was simply excluded. His list of friends that year had dwindled fast, until it was only the trailer park kids, and none of them ever seemed too comfortable with it, Molly and Gena excepted.

"I still think it might have been better not to tell everybody," she said, "I mean, it was really _brave_ and all, but it-"

Trevor was frowning at her. "What are you talking about? I never told them. Do I look stupid?"

"Well... then how'd they find out?"

Trevor shrugged, slumping back into the pillows. "I guess Mike must have told them. I mean, some of them probably just figured it out on their own, but..."

Gena stared. "Mike? Mike Conner? When the hell did he find out you were gay? Did you _tell_ him? I thought _I_ was the only person you ever told..." She felt a bit hurt, even though she knew it was selfish of her.

Trevor groaned, rubbing his eyes and waving at the smoke hovering in his face. "I didn't _tell_ him, really, it just... fuck, I don't wanna talk about it."

Gena went and sat on the edge of the bed. "Come on, tell me." She grabbed Trevor's big toe through his sock. "I always tell you everything..."

He laughed. "You do not,"

"I do _too_!" She thwacked his leg. "I told you about getting my period in math class, didn't I? And that's the most embarrassing thing that's ever happened to me. I didn't even tell _Molly_ about that."

"Fine, fine. I'll tell you about me and Mike, but you have to tell me something first."

"Something like what?"

"Something that I don't know. That nobody else knows." He propped himself up on his elbow.

Gena thought about that for a while, then she got up and lay down next to him on the bed. She could feel his eyes on her. "Okay," she said, "I'll tell you something you don't know."

### Frame – Gena's Story

"Is that _it_?" Molly peered over my shoulder. She laughed breathlessly, pressing her fingertips to her lips.

I held the picture by the sharp corners, like it was a heated shard of metal. "I guess that's it." I was thirteen years old.

My father in the picture didn't yet look like himself:

His hair was thicker and darker in the picture than it is now, his face more narrow. His chest and arms and legs were covered in fine black hair. His cheeks were unshaven, and between his legs there were thick pubic curls glistening with sweat. His chest narrow, his skin pale, his arms hanging limp at his sides as though he was unsure what to do with them. I recognized the room in which he stood. It looked new in that picture, just as my father did – nude as birth.

Molly reached out to touch the picture with the tip of one painted fingernail, and she laughed again, her brassy deep-in-the-throat laugh.

I looked at _it_ , hanging between my father's legs, and I felt queasy inside. I didn't want to look, but I could not look away. I had seen them before, of course, hidden away in school encyclopedias, scarcely more than outlines, just an innocuous nub like a misplaced finger, just black ink on white paper. This was real. I could see the color of the skin, could see the way the shadow formed around it, could see how it looked as though it was in the process of uncoiling, like a lazy reptile lifting its long neck from sun-scorched dust to gaze up at you.

We stared at the picture. We hadn't set out to find it. I don't remember what we were looking for in my mother's dresser drawer, but it wasn't that. We found the smell of old wood and old perfume, and we found the picture stuck in the far back corner of the faux-cedar drawer.

Molly and I were alone in the trailer, listening to its empty body creaking around us like the straining ribcage of a digesting beast, listening to the maddening silence like a tick inside the brain. We strained our ears for the crunching sound of a car in the drive, for the snick of a key into the lock, for the moan of the door hinges. My fingers tightened like a vice-grip.

I turned the photo over. There was a date written in smeared pen-ink, beneath that an illegible caption in scrawled cursive. That date, 1985, it was the year that I was born.

Molly sat beside me. The bed springs creaked like a dirge and I turned the picture back over. I blushed, dropped it to the pale green carpet. I couldn't bear to look at it again, not at _that_ , not _him_.

Molly picked it up. "This is really him?" she asked, and pushed it back into my hands.

There was a boy in school, a grade below me, who used to sit away from the rest of us at lunch and, in some dark corner of the cafeteria, he would spread across the table his collection of the glossy pictures he'd cut from his father's magazines. The other boys gathered around him and leaned over the table, lips curled and limbs taut. Whenever one of us girls walked by the boy would snatch back his jagged-edged photos and hold them secreted against his narrow chest, corners bent or folded out to show a creased shoulder or a torn leg or a curl of retouched hair. The boy's voice cracked angrily, ordering us away, a child's voice breaking into adolescent baritone. And he watched us walk from him, unbearably slow while the women in his hands burned. The others watched us go also, and their eyes were so hungry that I wondered if they actually saw us or if they saw only the women from the magazines.

I looked at my cousin. I couldn't bear to see my father's body again. "Let's get rid of it." I said, my tongue dry, my cousin's body pressed against mine.

Molly grabbed my arm. Her fingers were cold. "We should put it back, Gena. We should at least just put it back."

I shook my head. It couldn't go back, not ever. The picture didn't tear easily. It felt plastic, invulnerably malleable. My father's image warped in my hands, tormented and, finally, ruined.

### Crush – Trevor's Story

I remember thinking as the school bus left Verde that the town was swallowing itself, we were all caught in its closing maw.

I pressed my face against the smeared window of the school bus and imagined that the rumblings of the vehicle were death spasms running through the earth. As we drove out of the town I saw the sign on the roadside: _Welcome to Verden, a little bit of heaven_. It terrified me to see those words, I don't know why. My head sank down against the seat and I felt the bus through my skull, sound through to the bone drowning out the chattering of the Verden High Senior Class. The grinding gave way to a low hum when we got onto the highway, and I lifted my head.

We were going to Washington DC; others had gone before, and now it was our turn. Mike Conner was sprawling on the seat beside me, bored with the world and picking at a scab on the back of his thumb. It was early September of the year 2000.

By six o'clock the last light of summer was glaring hard and bright through the sectional windows. We were all burnished in the sunset and looking like we were about to catch fire, looking as god-like as we felt. Two girls – both of them on the lacrosse team, I think – sat across the aisle, their legs like those of wild animals, like they were designed for sprinting bare through tall grass, for running down and cutting open, for murder. They looked like they had come to rest at the bright end of the world.

The odor of the bus was heavy and acrid and stinking with machine smells. I'd always loved to smell things. I could shut my eyes at any moment and call up the scents of my family: Dad, his coffee so strong that it almost covered the metallic scent which followed him home from the shop, clinging to his hands no matter how he scrubbed them. Mom, with her sugar and garlic palms and her chemical-flower hair. My little sister Toni, lavender soap and fruity chewing gum and the clean athletic smell of teenage girl sweat. The smell of our trailer in High Gorge Park, decaying wood and corroded metal odors masked by vanilla candles kept burning all day long.

Mike had a scent all his own, musky sweet and subtle. Most of the guys I knew stank. Mike always smelled clean.

"I hate this shit," he mumbled, kicking at the ratty seat-back in front of him. Foam bled in puffy yellowed chunks from the slit red vinyl. He picked idly at it, his mouth set in a line of firm dissatisfaction.

"What shit?" I cocked my head, fearful as always that his displeasure might be in some way traced back to me. I couldn't bear to think of him hating me, blaming me, dismissing me.

"I mean _this_! This field-trip bullshit." He looked at me, blue eyes half-lidded and the last of the sunset's golden light drenching his perfect face. "I get carsick, Trevor. You know that, you asshole." He drawled out the obscenity, stretching it an extra syllable and grinning his easy grin. Not many people could be so charming when they were insulting you.

I had nothing to say. I would have gone anywhere if it meant being with Mike Conner, and gone happily.

The Washington D.C. trip was ostensibly about instilling us with a sense of national pride and ambition before our last year of high school. The PTA got an earful of fascist garbage about how it would make us all all into model Americans. From what I'd heard, though, it was more about getting to stay in a hotel six states away from your parents and figuring out new ways to screw or get high without the chaperones finding out.

All in all, it sounded like it was going to be an interesting weekend.

* * *

I guess that the story actually started earlier that year, right on the cusp of our first millennial summer.

I'd known Mike Conner for pretty much my entire life, but we'd never been especially close. I don't know how it happened, but there was a part of me that had always loved him, a part of me that I tried to deny for a long time. The truth is, I didn't really know I was gay until I fell for Mike.

Here's how it started:

The Verden High locker room was, I guess, a lot like any other. There were olive green lockers, rows of showers over ugly gray tile, eerie drains in the floor with gunky hair caught in them, big metal vents running along the ceiling, all of the familiar sights and smells and sounds. There wasn't really anything special about it. Of course, as they say, looks can be deceiving.

I came in through the clear glass doors with my bag slung over my shoulder, taking in right away the smell of musty air and damp clothing. I could hear sounds of motion in the vast space of the pool coming from down the long hallway, echoing with a subterranean ambiance through the locker rooms.

I changed quickly, stepping out of my shorts and into my swim trunks with the minimum amount of exposure. I'd always been a fairly circumspect child, conscious from a terribly young age of my body and of how it was perceived by those around me – always quite, always calm on the outside. My Dad was one of those guys who swaggered around locker rooms without anything on, all long and flabby in the worst places and swinging his junk like it was the most natural thing in the world. I'd like to blame his lack of modesty on some kind of generational excuse, but the truth is that I have no idea where it comes from. An overabundance of confidence, perhaps. I only know that I will never be like him, nor would I want to be.

The sign hung at the end of the short hall: _Pool Users Must Shower Before Swimming_. I could see the water beyond, constantly in motion. A man brushed passed me, coming from the showers. He was in his late forties and thickly bearded, a teacher probably. I recognized him, but I didn't know his name. He was tugging and brushing compulsively at his clothes, and seemed to be in a great hurry to leave. He gave me only the briefest of looks on his way past.

There was a long bench against the wall outside the showers. A folded white towel lay there, and a wet shirt wadded up beside, dripping chlorinated water through the bench slats. My brain didn't connect the dots until after I'd rounded the corner. I was not alone. The teacher's footprints echoed, then the heavy shutting of the door as he fled, rattling like a gunshot.

Mike Conner sat hunched over in the corner of the showers, wearing nothing but a tangled swim suit. He looked up when I entered, and there was such an emptiness in his face that I scarcely knew him at first. His eyes red, his mouth red, his body pale and lips trembling. He wiped his mouth, his cheeks coloring. "Trevor?"

"Hey, Mike." I blushed at once. Just talking to him made me terribly nervous. I went at once to the nearest shower and cranked the knob. The water spat out, far too hot. I stood beneath the scalding water, paralyzed with embarrassment worse than any pain.

Mike gathered himself up, rubbing his nose. He stretched his jaw, massaging it with his hands. "Swimming?" he asked, his voice curiously blank, weary as though emotion were a luxury of which he felt undeserving.

I nodded. My hands were turning red in the heat. If only I could have burned away those feelings beneath the water. If only I could have been free of them. "Who was that guy?" I asked, cocking my head in the direction of the departed teacher.

"Mr. Quinn, you remember him. I'm in his honors class."

"Oh, right." I blushed again. Honors class? Did he think I was stupid? Math had never been my strongest subject. "What did he want?"

Michael shifted from one foot to the other. "He wanted to talk about my grades, is all... No problem." And then he turned away from me, rubbing furiously at his eyes. He turned on the shower opposite mine and stepped into the water, like he was trying to disappear into it.

It was too late, though, I'd already seen: Michael Conner was crying.

That was when I knew I was in love with him, when I saw him crying in the locker room, crying and trying to hide it. And why not? It was easy to fall in love with Mike, most people did, sooner or later. And, as for me, I poured myself out.

* * *

The bus hit a pothole going down the on-ramp and we were all jolted against our seat-belts. One of the chaperones stumbled to her knees in the middle aisle, the bump having upset her in the midst of a lecture on safety and etiquette that none of us had been listening to anyway.

The sun was down and the sky outside was a dusky blue beneath the thin fog. The headlights of the other cars on the road wheeled like pale searchlights as they played on the road signs beyond.

Most of the students were talking together in low voices, their eagerness to be _away_ conquering any social antipathy. I was staring at the window, eyes glazed-over, deaf to the world. Molly and Jeffrey were arguing about something, as usual. Scott had his big boots up on the back of the seat in front of him, his toes bobbing to the rhythm of the music from his portable CD player. Mike was reading a paperback novel by the light of the glossy blue florescent bulbs which lined the bus. I pretended not to watch by looking only at his reflection in the window. He had the cutest way of furrowing his brow and leaning in close to the tattered pages when he was focused.

"Have you've ever been to DC before?" I asked, desperate to break the silence between us. It made me nervous when he was quiet around me. All I could think of were the harsh judgments which were no doubt filing his head.

Mike licked his finger and turned the page. I thought for a moment that he hadn't heard me. "Yep," he said, finally.

"Yeah? So you've like... seen everything already?"

He held the book against his chest and gave me a look of restrained annoyance, "We went to the Museum of Natural History, but I didn't see any of the monuments or anything. I was eleven."

"With your Dad?"

Michael's cheek twitched, a muscle in his jaw tightening involuntarily. "I... yeah, with my foster Dad." He waved the paper-back at me, "Not worth talking about, really."

I could tell that I was getting on his nerves, but I hardly cared. It was such a rush, just talking to him, I couldn't stop. "What are you reading anyway?" I asked.

"It's about reincarnation," he said.

"Yeah?"

"Yeah."

"Do you believe in reincarnation?"

"Sure, Trev. Reincarnation, tooth fairy, Santa Claus, all that shit." His voice oozed sarcasm.

"I don't."

"No?" Michael smiled, that half-delighted half-predatory grin of his. He loved to argue, even if he never seemed especially invested in the position he was arguing. Alice used to say that he talked like a lawyer sometimes. Of course Alice was gone now, vanished with her new husband. I still wasn't used to it, the idea that she was gone. It felt sometimes like we were growing up too fast.

"I just... I don't think that souls work that way."

Mike laughed. " _Souls_? Jesus, Trevor, you're such a riot sometimes."

"You don't believe in the soul?"

"You _do_?"

"I guess I do, yeah."

"Why?"

"What do you mean?"

"I _mean_ , Trevor, that you're full of shit. I mean that you don't have any idea what a soul _is_ , much less what it means to have one or not have one. I mean that you're only clinging to the backwards ideology of Stone Age cowards so frightened of their own mortality that they actually convinced themselves that their existence was so special that it would be preserved for eternity. Seriously, Trevor, if there _is_ a god, do you really think that it cares about _us_? Do you really think that the spirit of these degenerate fucks populating our miserable planet are so worth preserving? Face it, we're nothing but debris waiting to happen. We're fertilizer, and that's all. There's nothing to us but this shell and the fact is that it'll break down one day. It'll die and be gone forever. Anyway... it's still a good book." He turned away from me, his attention returning to the battered paperback in his hands.

I sat back uncomfortably in my seat, unable to think of how I could respond. I don't know if he actually believed any of what he'd said, with Mike you never could tell. Sometimes he just said stuff like that because he liked the way it sounded. I looked again at his reflection, and through it into the mysteries of the night beyond.

* * *

Something happened between us that day in the showers. I couldn't say what it was or what it meant, but something was different. We started seeing each other more often, it seemed at random. And then we saw each other intentionally. He was always going somewhere, out to the movies, to eat, to shop, and he brought me with him more often than not. He always seemed to have money, even though he complained all the time about how he didn't get along with his foster parents, and that they never gave him anything. It was strange, he'd always seemed ashamed of being from a comparatively rich family, always seemed nervous about letting any of us see it. Something had changed though, just between the two of us.

In July, we took a bus out to Syracuse. He showed up outside my trailer with a wad of money in his hand and told me that I was coming with him somewhere, didn't even say where until it was time to get off the bus. The Carousel Mall, that sprawling complex, towered up above us. We walked through the immense parking lot, and he talked, shouting sometimes over the rumble of the cars:

"Do you ever think about what's going to happen? To America, I mean. I've been reading about the end of the Roman Empire, you know. Fucking barbaric. They fell apart from the inside out, you know. It wasn't the invaders, the Celts or the Mongols or whoever the fuck – I don't remember. It was corruption from inside the empire. I wonder sometimes if we're ever going to get what we deserve. Americans, I mean. We deserve to suffer. Fuck me, I don't know what I'm talking about! Christ! I'm not a religious person, you know, never have been. If there's a god out there, then there's going to be a reckoning someday soon. I swear it."

I stopped, standing just outside the glass doors of JC Penny's, and I grabbed his shoulder. "What in the world are you talking about?"

He looked at me and he laughed. "Jesus, Trevor, just look around you." And then he grabbed my shirt in his fist and pulled me close to plant a hard dry kiss on my mouth.

I stepped back, stunned, electricity coursing through my body. He smirked and ducked inside the store. I turned in a daze, the wind cold on my face, and I looked across the parking lot. The clouds were low and gray, the city gleaming with dirty light. There was a fire burning low in the distance, a blaze from beneath the hood of a broken down Sedan. The owner of the car was shrieking at the sky, so far away that his cries were no more to me than the cawing of the wheeling gulls. A child stumbled across the cement lot crying for her mother, tears rolling down her face and a broken toy in her arms.

* * *

I was dreaming about life on other worlds when he shook me awake. I woke gradually. His hand was on my bare forearm, fingertips pressing into my skin. I could feel the downward slope of the road, and I looked out the window expecting to see the flaring city lights of the Capital.

We had come to rest in a parking lot, dark but for the faint illumination of the high and weak lights. Cars flickered by on the highway, as distant and faint as half-imagined ghosts.

"Where are we?" I asked, fighting back a yawn.

"Still about two hours out, I think." Mike was standing impatiently in the aisle, his fingers drumming on the seat-back. "Come on, everybody's getting off the bus."

Most of the class had already gone outside the pale artificial luminance of the bus and into the darker artifice of the poorly lit sidewalk. They were all talking in low sleepover voices, the mass of their conversation building to a whispering din. One of the chaperones walked down the aisle, waking all the students who were still sleeping with their faces pressed against the cold glass windows, their mouths neatly agape. All my life, I was the sort of person who got woken up by the teacher. And now Mike was standing in the aisle, impatient to go, but waiting. The thought made my chest hurt a little as I followed him out into the cool darkness.

There was a straggling line of students heading down the long sidewalk towards the bathrooms. A few trucks were parked along the sides of the road, their silver faces eerily lifeless with the lights shut off, like bent skeletons in chrome. We walked past a family piling back into a station wagon filled with crumpled blankets and empty juice boxes – all the accumulated detritus of a family vacation spent too much on the road. Out beyond the light there was an old man and a girl walking their dog in the wet grass. The dark creature whimpering for attention, yelping happily as it nipped their heels.

I swallowed the urge to take Mike's hand in mine. I knew he wouldn't like it.

There were dark shrubs on either side of the low stone building, two doors leading into bright rooms. The featureless male silhouette looked naked beside the skirted woman, like he'd been stripped bare. There was a soda machine between the two doors, spilling crimson light on the black sidewalk.

I went into the men's room but it was full so I walked back out. Didn't really have to go anyway.

Mike and Scott were smoking around the corner of the building. Molly was stomping out her reflection in the murky little puddles of water just below the sidewalk. Jeffrey sat at one of the picnic tables, not looking at anybody. Scott put out his cigarette and spat in the grass. We stuck together, we trailer kids. Even those of us that didn't like each other managed to get along. We were the fuck-ups, the problem kids. We were the trailer-trash and, whether we wanted to or not, we had to stick together.

I asked Mike when he'd started smoking. All summer long I'd never seen him do that. He took the cigarette out of his mouth and offered it to me. It made me cough, and I blushed. He licked his front teeth. "You'd better not tell anybody." Then he smiled and he blew smoke towards the black sky. We watched it disappear into the darkness of the heavy night.

* * *

It was a miserable August that year. Rained almost every day and by the end of the month the ground at High Gorge Park was a sucking mire that would swallow your foot ankle deep in places. I saw less and less of Mike as the month dragged on. He hadn't said another word about his apocalyptic predictions in the parking lot, nor about the kiss he'd given me.

One day, when the rains were coming down especially hard, I was sitting in my room thinking about him. I heard a crack of thunder so terrible that it seemed to shake the ground, and I rose to look out my window. I saw him there, as though summoned by my thoughts. He was standing at the edge of the pine forest, head bare in the downpour. He wasn't alone. There was a man, an older man it seemed, though his face was shadowed beneath his hat-brim.

Mike seemed to be shouting, his hands curled up in fists at his sides. The older man didn't look particularly concerned about it, his posture was quite relaxed, almost bored. I stared, mesmerized, as the two of them spoke. The rain was coming down so hard that it stood between us like a gauzy veil. The older man stuck Mike across the face, knocking him down on his knees in the mud. I cried out, gripping the bare wood-frame windowsill so hard that I drove a splinter up into the soft flesh of my index finger. Mike got slowly to his feet, and the older man patted him roughly on the shoulder. Mike nodded. Then, with a gesture of something like surrender, the older man handed something to Mike, some small bundle which Mike slipped under his coat.

The two of them parted. Mike stumbled his way through the sludge, back towards the house on the hill. The older man started up road. He was coming right towards me; he was going to walk past our trailer. For a moment I was stuck by the contradictory impulses to rush out at him and to hide beneath the windowsill. I did neither, frozen with my nose to the glass as he came steadily closer.

I thought as he passed by our trailer that, even through the shadows about his face and the curtain of thundering rain, I recognized his face. It was absurd, I know, but I thought for a moment that it was Alice Burke's husband. Of course that was impossible, she'd moved away right after graduation and none of us had seen her since. There was no reason for him to be here in Verden, much less talking to Mike. Anyway, I'd only ever seen him once or twice before, and then only at a distance. Of course if wasn't him!

Even so, there was something familiar about the man. I wanted to ask Michael about it, tried a dozen times over the course of the summer to work up the courage to ask, but I never did manage to get around to it. Some things, I decided, were better left unknown.

* * *

By the end of the first day my neck was sore from staring up at the monuments.

We slumped our way to the final stop of the tour too tired to pay any attention to where we were. I remember seeing framed papers on the walls and portentous bronze-cast busts ringing the room like guardsmen. The building was all white stone, like all the rest of them had been. At the foot of the long wide stair was a winding footpath which led from monument to monument. Tall marble columns surrounded the stone courtyard outside the building.

Michael Conner and I sat together between two columns, watching the sun set over the capital lawn. It was nearly dark, and starry pin-heads of light were beginning to peer down through the gray sky.

"Everything is so old in this city," I said, looking up at the cracked stone roof. Everything was the color of dried bones. There were dead men's faces everywhere. The postcard monuments looked in person more like gravestones.

"I love this place." Michael said, his voice more subdued than I'd ever heard it.

I looked at him, surprised. "Why?"

He shrugged. "I don't know. Just feels like home somehow."

* * *

It was a long walk up the hill to the Conner's house. It was the first day of September, and everything was changing. It was the beginning of my last year of high school. I could already feel it all slipping away, Mike included. He looked tired all the time now, his eyes red-rimmed and his skin waxy pale. His fingers twitched with nervous energy, and he had a hungry look to him.

I knocked on the door, and Mrs. Conner answered. She looked me up and down. All my life I had known her, and yet she looked at me as though I was a stranger, looked me up and down as though taking a measure of my character. "I suppose you're here for my son," she said, her tone strained.

I just nodded, and was let in without further interrogation. She followed me with her eyes as I went out onto the patio where Michael was waiting for me. He was looking very thin, slumped in a deck chair wrapped in an old blanket. The sun beat down, and he shivered. He made no reaction to my arrival. He looked sick.

"Hey," I called out.

One eye rolled open. "Trevor."

"It's me."

"Sit down."

I did as I was told, sitting in the chair beside the grill. There were dead leaves from last fall still caught in the canvas folds of the grill cover; it stank of old rain. Michael watched me, so devoid of any expression that I couldn't tell if he was actually aware of me or not. We sat like that for a long time.

I peeled back the edge of the clinging grill cover, like stripping away skin from bone. A heavy black fly buzzing fatly up at me from beneath the cover. There was an old plate which had been left on the grill arm, slick with congealed grease and raw meat. Little insects swarmed on the slick gunk, scuttling beneath the raised edges of the plate. The fly crawled on the dirty ceramic surface, stopping every few inches to rub its gleeful legs. I thought of a story I'd read in the newspaper about a woman who had accidentally taken abortive drugs further into her pregnancy than intended. Out slithered the dead fetus, far larger than she'd expected. She put it in a shoebox and set it on the grill. I'd been unable to finish the story, and so never found out why she put it there or what had ever become of her.

Michael looked at me, and I thought that he could somehow hear what I was thinking. I knew then that something terrible was going to happen.

He rose without a word and he took me to his room. I followed him up the stairs, trembling with anticipation. I was afraid and excited. I wanted to hold him in my arms, feel his warmth against mine.

He sat on the bed. I just watched from the doorway, unsure of what to do with myself. "  
"This is where you sleep?" I asked.

"Yeah," he said.

"Neat."

He stared at me. I stared back, wondering what happened next. "This is a dream," he said.

"I'm sorry?"

"Don't be sorry, Trevor. It's just a fact, is all. It's how the mind works, the firing of synapses, the connections between neurons and all that. Just the release of chemicals. We're more machine than spirit."

"Are we?"

"We are. I read an article about the moments before you die. Your brain releases a rush of chemicals, all those pathways collapsing in on themselves... It's a rush, like a high. You know the expression, 'life flashing before your eyes?' It's like that. It's like a dream, those last moments."

"What does that have to do with right now?"

"We're _always_ dying, Trevor, every moment of every day. Just think about it. Cells dying, memories eroding, the body breaking down, it's happening all the time. It's happening _right now_. I think I'm looking at you, but all there is to see is reflected light, just an illusion. I think I know you, but it's just chemical reactions."

"That doesn't mean anything, Michael. It doesn't make it less real."

"Of _course_ it does! Don't you _get_ it?"

"Not really."

He sighed, holding his head in his hands. "I think I'm losing my fucking mind, Trevor." He looked at me, and his eyes were wet with fear. "I'm in trouble."

"What kind of trouble?"

"Every kind."

"Can I help?"

He shook his head. "Forget it."

"I wanna help, Michael."

He smiled. "Some things can't be helped."

* * *

We went back to the hotel. Everything there was made to look like it was brand new, though the use showed through regardless: starched sheets spread tight over stained mattresses, packets of wrapped soaps in showers that were discolored around the drains, a dusty television hidden in a faux-wood cabinet, the symbols on the remote control buttons worn away.

Mike was in the shower, and I was dying with love. I sat trembling on my bed, listening to the falling water and to his feet slapping on the floor. I sat there, trembling and listening, and in my mind there were a thousand scenarios bubbling and spilling out and hissing and boiling.

The shower curtain was pulled back with a muted rasp of steel rings. Water dripped onto the bare floor. I heard the little closet door open with a wooden groan, heard him taking out a freshly laundered white towel to wrap around himself.

He came out and he said: "Do you ever have trouble telling the difference between what you remember and what actually happened?"

"What are you talking about?" I couldn't understand why he was talking. What was there to talk about?

Mike frowned. "I don't know, exactly. It's just... like... hard to tell what's _you_ and what's just stories you made up about yourself."

"Uh... I guess that people want... to remember things a certain way."

"Yeah, I guess so." Mike sat on the edge of his bed, shaking out his damp hair. He looked at me, and there was a kind of expectation on his innocently beautiful face.

He was looking at me like he wanted me to do something, and I had been _waiting_ so long to do it. My teeth had been aching all summer long, jaw clenched tight for months to halt the chattering.

I was not me when I got up off the bed and started walking towards him. Trevor had ceased to exist. Whatever I was before, I was moving so fast that it was more inertia than intention which drove my mouth down hard against his mouth. After so many weeks of watching and thinking and wishing and fantasizing and devouring Mike until there was nothing of myself left, kissing him felt suicidally liberating. Like falling from the bridge towards black water, clear and cold and clean. And for the moment when my lips opened and I felt another person's teeth I thought that Mike was kissing me back. And I fell though the ice.

Mike pushed me away. His towel was gripped in my hand somehow and it pulled away from him and he tripped and fell naked to the floor and stared up at me with the strangest expression of surprise and hurt and confusion that I have ever seen on another person's face.

He didn't say anything. He crawled away from me. I had made him pathetic. Was it me? Or had he always been like that? Even after he broke me and made me want him more than I wanted to live. Now I'd made him crawl and that was my revenge for what he did to me and wasn't he supposed to love me _back_?

And then I was myself again. "I... thought... thought you..." I spoke in halting fragments. I was ashamed. So ashamed my insides felt hollowed out, a gaping gravitational void inside my chest swallowing everything.

He didn't say anything. He didn't look at anything except the floor as he gathered his dirty clothes off the chair where he'd left them and he hurried naked out the door naked into the hallway with his jeans and shirt held against him.

He shut the door behind him.

* * *

Two days later, we all got back on the bus and went home. Mike and I don't sit together, didn't look at each other. Everything had changed.

We went back to High Gorge Park, back to school, back to our friends. It was our last year of high school. The rumor started going around school that I was gay, and people started to bully me even more than they had before. It was nothing to me, I barely heard the things they shouted after me, barely felt it when they shoved me against the lockers, barely noticed the disgusted looks. None of it mattered anymore. We moved out of the trailer park that November, moved into a house. A real house. It has always felt empty to me.

Time passed both too quickly and too slowly. Mike dropped out a few weeks before Christmas Vacation and never came back. Since I wasn't living in the park anymore, I never saw him again. I heard some rumors, but nothing that made sense. Jeffrey and Molly both got accepted to colleges, Jeffrey in California, Molly to a local community college, an hour outside Verden. I had planned to get as far away as possible, but I couldn't work up the energy for it and ended up going to the same school Molly had picked. Scott joined the army. He left just after graduation for a training camp in Mississippi, never having said a single word to me since it came out that I was gay.

Molly and I weren't in any of the same classes, but we kept in touch. It was made easier by the fact that we were both living in the dorms. About a month after classes started, the planes hit the towers. I sat there in the rec-room with a bunch of people I didn't know, staring wide-eyed as the smoke billowed out and the air filled with paper. Everybody was crying as they watched it happening, clinging to each other, strangers in the arms of strangers. I couldn't bear to touch them, or to be touched by them. I felt so horribly alone that I was sure I would die of it. I looked out the window. The morning light was breaking over the horizon, and I thought about Michael Conner. Nine months later, Molly told me that his body had been found in the gorge outside the park.

That's when it really hit me that I was alone in the world.

### Come On Down

Gena stared through the haze of smoke. She looked at Trevor. "Did all that really happen?"

Trevor nodded. His eyes fluttered lazily, his mind dipping in and out of dreams.

"I never knew that... About you and Mike, I mean."

"Yeah..."

"It wasn't your fault. You didn't know how it was all going to turn out..." she trailed off, unsure what else she could say. She felt like there was something, something she was _supposed_ to say. Nothing came to mind.

"I never thought that I would tell anybody..." Trevor murmured, clutching at Gena's teddy. She swallowed down the urge to grab the stuffed bear out of his hands and cuddle up to the stupid old thing. She'd meant to throw it away years ago.

Gena lay down beside him and put her arms around his chest. "You're not alone, Trevor," she whispered.

"I know that," he murmured. His eyes closed again and, for a while, they both slept.

### Matrimony

All the lights inside the Riley's trailer were off, and it was as quiet there as it had ever been. Jessica sank into the dusty couch and stared at the dead television. The room was reflected back in the black expanse of the blank screen, curved and warped and dim and there she was, cast as the lopsided centerpiece of a dreary piece of domestic surrealism.

All she could think about was Michael Conner. Mike, gone now.

Not gone. _Dead_. Such a hideously final word. The secret had died with him. Nobody knew now but Nathan and her. All that they three had shared together, all that they had been, it was all gone. She found herself thinking of her father. What would he have said, if he'd known? He wouldn't have understood, of course he wouldn't. How could he?

And Gena... Gena would be destroyed if she ever found out what her parents had gotten up to. Maybe that was why Jessica had gone alone with it. It had been her chance to tell the world that she wasn't going to lie down. But of course nobody knew, and now the secret was dead.

_God_ , she missed him!

Take what you want from life, that had always been her philosophy, get what happiness you can before it runs out. But now she wasn't sure anymore _how_ to be happy. She'd lost it when Michael left, and she forgot it when they found his body.

She felt an emptiness inside herself, a voided space filling with anger and disappointment. She wished she could direct it all at Nathan, but there wasn't much satisfaction in punishing a masochist, so it tended to fall entirely on herself.

Jessica waited in the silence for what seemed to her like a very long time, thinking about the past.

Her old friends had all been shocked when she'd married Nathan. " _Such a normal guy_!" they said, like he was Jimmy Stewart in a turtleneck. She hadn't told her parents about him until after the papers were official.

Jack and Vivian Riley. She missed them both. Her father was dead and her mother didn't speak to her anymore. All those years in Verden, growing up with grease on her nose and dirt on her knees, Jessica had never once imagined that she would end up living here for so very long.

She'd been a clumsy child, lanky and awkward and ashamed of her big nose, her acne, her dull brown hair always in tangles around her face, the silver braces on her teeth capping a lopsided smile. She'd studied business administration at NYU. Her first two semesters there she went in long skirts and hair-clips and never once lifted her face, never once spoke in class unless she was called on. Then she spent her sophomore year abroad. Nine months in London, circa 1981, and mousy little Jessica came back punk rock to the bone. She had found herself there.

She could only imagine what her parents thought when their little girl came home in ripped leather and studded collars and a blood-red mohawk. She dropped out of school that summer and got Dad to hire her at the garage. He hadn't wanted to, but she was good at it, better than he was though he would never have admitted it. He left her the business when he retired in '83, only a few years before he passed away. She kept the name, kept all the staff, kept pretty much everything on the surface the same as it had always be. Six months later, she met Nathan Harrison at a little bookstore in downtown Ithaca.

What a marriage it was, nothing like the unshakable and icy alliance which her own parents had shared for so long. Nathan and she had reached the point that they were no longer sure if they were actually in love anymore, and she wasn't sure if she had _ever_ actually liked him.

He seemed determined to disappear in her, to burrow in her gut like a parasite. Like it would be better to see the world from the corner of her eye than head-on from his own. The irony of it was, she'd lost herself somewhere along the way. She had followed Nathan unquestioningly down into the warm interior of his desires, set her own aside to do so. He had been so eager to submerge himself in _Jessica_. She stopped being herself and let herself become a receptacle for his sexual neurosis. It was funny, in a sick sort of way, how his submission had come to dominate her life, how his yearning to vanish had left her feeling so faded.

He'd been the one to bring Michael into the marriage. She said no at first, said no a hundred times before she ever said yes. Eventually it did happen, and the first time she made love to Michael it changed everything. She'd remembered that night what it was like to be with somebody real, somebody whole and present. He was young – too young, maybe – but he was more complete than either of them. There was an odd distance to Michael Conner, an emptiness behind his eyes which she found both tragic and enticing.

She could remember it so clearly. The footsteps scraping in the gravel outside the trailer, that first tentative knock on the door.

Every time she had sex, Jessica thought of her first time. He had been thin and strong, his skin wound with images of twisted human bones drawn black, like he'd decided to wear his skeleton on the outside. When he put his arms around her, his sun-licked hands had made her own skin look as pale as milk. She'd felt naked next to him, and she was, but he had seemed clothed by his ink-marks. The next day she'd made him take her to the tattoo parlor and she had a coiled vine drawn on her left thigh. It stung for weeks, itching like the desire between her legs.

She remembered leading Michael towards the bedroom, through the light of dusk spilling from the window, that rosy light which lifted dusty fingers in the air. She drew him after her, and he followed. His body was languid, relaxed like a man facing death who no longer cared for the disposition of his earthly body.

Jessica lay down on the bed. Nathan watched from the dark corner of the room, his eyes glittering in the green-filtered light which came in through the emerald curtain, eager and jealous.

She separated her knees, her thighs. Her short fingernails clicked against the little metal button on her shorts.

Michael lowered himself onto her very slowly. He put his hands gently on her hips, lowered his mouth to her breast. The weight of his body rested between her legs. She had to lift herself up to kiss him. His lips were numb and trembling and closed and when he opened his mouth to her it was cold.

In that moment, staring into the quieted face of a boy she hardly knew, Jessica had felt the world falling suddenly out from underneath her. It had come to her then, the words written across her mind as though in fire: _I want my life to change. I don't want this_.

She had seen the hurt and loss and confusion buried deep in Michael Conner's eyes, and she had seen herself reflected there. And there was Nathan in the corner, his gaze holding them both prisoner. In that moment the three of them had been closer than any three people had ever been. They were a single whole, warring and hating and loving and despairing.

She was still thinking of that moment, even now months later, when the door opened and Nathan walked into the room. He looked at her, misery in his pitiful face, and he stared at her. "I'm sorry, Jessie," he said.

She was up before she knew what had happened, and she struck him across the face so hard that he stumbled. She pushed him to his knees, trembling with a fury which she could not bear to feel. She stared down at her husband, disgust and loathing building in her, directed as much towards herself as to him.

Nathan looked up at her, a bewildered expression on his face. A thin trail of blood slipped down his cheek. He laughed once, a confused snort, and he started to cry. Tears ran from his injured eye as the flesh began to swell and turn to black.

Jessica straightened her clothes. Neither of them said anything. The words didn't seem to exist which might put the moment back into some kind of recognizable shape.

She looked down at her husband, and she felt something change between them. Her thumb went instinctively to the smooth familiarity of the plain gold band on her ring finger.

Cool green light filled the room.

### Procedural Breakdown

05:31 am, July 1st, 2002

Jeffrey Burke woke up.

* * *

05:43 am, July 1st, 2002

Jeffrey sat upright. Andrew Follis' couch was as stiff and hard beneath him as it had been every other night. He shoved his crumpled blankets aside and held his head in his hands. Static buzzed in his skull, throbbing with every heartbeat. The beer-taste in the back of his throat clawed back up the root of his tongue. He swallowed hard.

He hadn't slept very well, or for very long. A few hours at best, less than fitfully. Everything was bleary through the haze of evaporating sleep. He rubbed his eyes. It was dark in the window; the sun was just beginning to crest the hills outside, spilling white light across the horizon.

* * *

05:58 am, July 1st, 2002

He'd been wandering last night.

He had walked aimlessly through Ithaca. He wandered across the commons around six o'clock. The streets had been glowing with that particular ambiance, a russet light filtered through fog. This was a rural sort of city, trees twisted their wet black roots into cracked sidewalks and thick green vines creeping silently over aging brick walls. There was an old look to the buildings, as though they too had grown out of the earth.

It took four stores to find a place that didn't ask for ID, but he bought a case of beer and brought it with him back to the commons. He slumped down at a park bench across from the Dewitt Mall, where the ivy-clad walls were low and dark and the entrance framed under an elegant maroon canvas.

He drank without thought, watching the people walking by and thinking nothing of them. By the time he had finished the case the streets were dark. He went back to Andrew's apartment and he slept.

* * *

06:03 am, July 1st, 2002

Jeffrey stared into the glowing innards of the toaster, at the thin red filaments burning angrily.

This was not his real life, he was sure of that. He felt old, as though he'd lived too long. His life had somehow started without him, without warning. He realized as he watched his toast burning that he had stumbled into adulthood still a child, totally unprepared. The bills, the loans, all the expenses – it was more than he could bear to think about. He had to be at work in an hour. It was his second week on the job. They were tearing down a building, scraping clear the ruins of a burned-out wreck. Two hundred miles away, people just like him were probably doing the same at Ground Zero.

He didn't want to think about that.

* * *

06:12 am, July 1st, 2002

Jeffrey chewed without thinking. He stared at the newspaper without reading it. He swallowed, but he did not taste.

He'd lost his virginity three years ago to a girl named Caroline. He'd been thinking about her a lot recently. He hadn't really known her, not on any genuine level.

A few select moments of that night were crystallized in his mind, the rest of it faded. He remembered the clean scent of the sheets, the feel of her body against his own, the way Caroline's brow had furrowed and her mouth opened in a sad sort of gasp when he first entered her. The sour taste of her mouth, the color of her bedroom wall and the noises she'd made when he had touched her. He remembered nothing beyond that. Only those fleeting images, like the memories were paper dissolved in a hard rain and there were only a few scraps and half-phrases floating sodden on the surface.

He wondered if she remembered him at all. If she ever thought of him.

Jeffrey finished his toast and went to take a shower, still thinking of Caroline. He hadn't felt any sexual urges for some time now. It was as though that part of him had simply died. The truth was, he'd never been comfortable with it. He knew some men who talked about their genitals like they were a separate creatures, unique souls operating of their own volition: the animal self, free of guilt or conscience, always hungry and never satisfied, the unfulfillable void. He felt that way sometimes. He stood in the shower and looked down at himself. He couldn't remember the last time he'd had an erection. Nothing excited him anymore.

* * *

06:26 am, July 1st, 2002

Andrew was there when Jeffrey came out of the bathroom. He sat at the table, sleepily stirring the soggy brown mush of his instant coffee. The dark liquid sloshed in the off-white mug as it dissolved.

"You got work?" Andrew asked, fighting back a yawn. Andrew worked night shifts mostly. The two of them hardly saw each other, despite having shared the same space for weeks now.

Jeffrey nodded. "At seven-thirty, yeah."

"Hm." Andy nodded. He looked at the couch, his expression clouded. He looked up, seeming to have come to a decision. "You know... I told you that you could stay here for a couple weeks if you wanted, Jeff."

"Yeah?" A puddle was forming beneath Jeffrey's feet.

"It's been like... two months." Andy shrugged and turned back to his coffee, leaving the words hanging there in the air.

"You want me to go?"

"I didn't say that." Andy sipped at his beverage.

Jeffrey got his clean clothes out of the bags which he still hadn't properly unpacked and he took them with him back into the bathroom to get dressed for work.

* * *

07:52 am, July 1st, 2002

His shovel bit into the black ash. Sweat ran down Jeffrey's back. The bright orange vest made his skin itch. He lifted the shovelful of charred detritus and tossed it into the back of the hulking truck. A car flew past on the lonely highway, traveling into the distance along the highway. There was nothing beyond the rubble, only the sweeping empty hills of Upstate New York, sparsely wooded and gray.

The shovel bit into the ash. And again and again.

It was hard work with the road crew, left his limbs aching from the strain for hours after. They had been clearing away the rubble for the last three days, trucking away the blistered remains to some unknown wasteland. The house had burned down in April. The man and woman who'd once lived there had been trapped in the upper floor, unable to do anything but scream out the window. They might have lived if they'd only had the courage to jump. By the time the fire was reported the wreck was already cooling, and it fell to the State to clear away the wreckage.

It wasn't the sort of job which Jeffrey had imagined for himself, but it was all he'd been able to find. There didn't seem to be any _real_ jobs within reach, nothing that he wanted. This was what had been left for him.

He stopped shoveling for a moment, putting his hands to the ache at the base of his spine. He looked out across the waste, at the other men toiling in the sun like worker insects below the blazing eye of God.

A man was raked the debris out to the edge of the desolate foundation, smoothing it flush with the blackened concrete. He was worn as old leather, beaten dark by the sun. Under his mesh vest was his stained white t-shirt; it showed a cartoon drawing of a full-chested woman with fat red lips and long straw-blond hair, dressed a tiny red bikini and bent down over a beer-gutted trucker with a bottle in his hand. She massaged his feet with her thin fingers, standing atop the words: _Man's real best friend_.

The shirt made Jeffrey feel queasy. Every time he saw it pulled tight over the man's wide belly, he felt a momentary surge of disgust. He turned back to rubble, and tried not to look at it.

Later that day the man introduced himself. Ted Hemingway, he said his name was, and Jeffrey said, "Oh, like the writer, then."

Ted laughed, a horse chuckle like the gasping of a dying giant. "What the hell are you talking about, kid?" He clasped Jeffrey's hand firmly in his own. "Gonna be a hot one today," he said, and spat a thick dark wad of off-color saliva from his mouth.

Jeffrey shrugged.

* * *

12:14 pm, July 1st, 2002

The road crew had stopped for lunch. Jeffrey sat across the far ditch from the others and watched his laconic coworkers pick at their lunches of processed foods and sour warm fluids. He felt a growing sense of dread. The idea which had occurred to him that morning – that he was trapped in a perpetual adolescence – raked at his insides. He took a bite of his peanut-butter sandwich. It stuck thickly to the roof of his mouth. His mother used to make him this sort of lunch to take to school. Eating it reminded him of her.

There was a little graveyard behind him, just on the other side of the rotting wood fence against which he was resting. He turned his head. The safety helmet clacked against the soft wood. The gravestones clustered in the shadow of the hillside were like a creeping gray cloud low on the earth, the human dead eating the world out from beneath its surface.

One of the workmen across the highway tossed aside an empty chip bag and the silvery plastic fled out into the emptiness of the grass, skittering desperately as a rodent and flashing in the sun.

He didn't want to be buried, Jeffrey thought. He didn't want to end up decaying in the ground, purifying beneath the weight of his gravestone. He wondered if there was some way to kill himself that wouldn't leave anything behind. Maybe burning, turn the bones right to powdered ash, disappear from the world on the anonymous wind.

He chewed his sandwich. It would be time to get back to work soon.

* * *

05:42 pm, July 1st, 2002

Jeffrey found his things on the steps outside Andrew's apartment building. He picked up his duffel bags, looking up at the stone-red face of the brick building. He considered for a moment going up to talk with Andy, imagined all the viscous things he might say. It was an empty fantasy, however; he knew that.

He didn't really blame Andy for finally kicking him out. They'd never liked each other much, anyway, not since High School. Friendship in entropy. He was glad that it was over, even if it had left him without a place to live.

The bus stop was just down the street, and all the possibility it promised stood before him. He could go anywhere in the world, could do anything he wanted. He could go anywhere he wanted to go.

* * *

06:34 pm, July 1st, 2002

Jeffrey put his bags down on the side of the road. The sign had lost another letter: _High G rge Pa k_. The curtains were drawn across the windows at the house on the hill. The screen in the distance rotted.

He was home.

* * *

06:37 pm, July 1st, 2002

Sally and Garrett were playing in the dirt outside the trailer, bent intently over a handful of old green-plastic army figures which had once belonged to Jeffrey. Their skin was scabby and dirty, their bodies as scrawny as those captured in the depression era photos he'd once found in an American history book at the school library. Sally sat with her skirt stretched between her legs like a trampoline, an old doll lying atop the tight-drawn cloth.

Jeffrey dropped his bags beside the door. His two siblings looked up at him, squinting against the sunset. The two children glanced at each other, looking to each other for guidance.

"What are you doing out here?" Jeffrey asked.

"Playing," Sally said.

"Why don't you play inside? It's dirty out here." Jeffrey scraped his heel on the bare dirt. The ground was rough around the trailer. It hadn't changed.

"Mommy wants us to be outside," Garrett muttered, his eyes sliding away.

"Yeah?"

"She said we needed to get out in the sun." Sally grinned her gap-toothed little smile up at him.

Jeffrey smiled back despite himself. "Did she?"

Sally brightened, clutching her doll against her chest. "She said that Alice is coming soon. She's coming tomorrow!"

"I heard that."

The Park was quieter than he remembered. He thought of all his old friends who had now moved away, drifted off to their new lives. He could hear their ghosts running through the trailer park, whopping and hollering in the high heat of the summer. He remembered being banished by his mother to scrabble in the dirt, and she drawing one of her boyfriends into the warm darkness of her bed.

"I'm gonna go inside." he said.

Sally blanched. "No, you _can't_. Mama said we can't come in."

He ignored her. The door was locked, but he still had a key.

Sally and Garrett exchanged a look as he fumbled with the lock. "But... she's resting..." Garrett whispered. His little sister looked up at him, her eyes round a green and open. He shook his head and stepped up into the trailer.

The smell hit him at once, immediately familiar. Decay, neglect, the scent of dust so thick that it turned the air silver. He walked past an overturned garbage bag and went inside the room which he and Alice had once shared.

There was nothing familiar there. It was a young person's room now, strewn with leftover school papers red-inked with dismissive criticism. There was a ragged baseball glove in the closet beside a pair of second-hand ice skates and a tennis racket which couldn't have been less than thirty-five years old. A tangle of twist-limbed action figures lay on the floor, their accessories scattered. Ragged clothes were draped on the backs of chairs and piled in corners and stuffed madly into an over-full dresser whose drawers were all open and gagging on wrinkled colors.

It wasn't Jeffrey's room anymore. It belonged to someone else now. There were two cots beside the bed. He wondered if all three of his little siblings shared the room. He remembered staying up long nights with Alice, talking in the darkness. The little ones had used share the room across the hall; they slept with Mom when she let them.

He went on, deeper into the trailer. His mother's door was closed. He heard a wordless murmuring from inside her room and leaned close. "Mom? I need to talk to you, Mom," he said.

Her bedsprings sighed. She coughed hard, a deep cough from the back of her throat. The mattress groaned as though she were trying to rise and failing.

Jeffrey retreated to the couch across from the kitchenette. Even now, as far removed as he was and as grown up as he tried to be, it still frightened him. It had _always_ been terrifying when Mom got high. Like there was a second person inside her, a person who not only neglected to love him, but seemed to actively despise him. He'd learned to recognize the signs. He thought about Garrett and Sally, playing in the dirt outside, afraid to enter. How much did they know? He wanted to scream.

The blank television set seemed to be sizing him up with its single dead eye. The remote was nestled in the couch cushions, greasy with fingerprints. He turned on the television. The set was black and white, tuned to junk and crusted with static. He shut it back off.

* * *

06:48 pm, July 1st, 2002

His mother stumbled. Her hair was tied back and her eyes red. She came down the hall with both hands against the walls for support. She came towards him, practically crawling. He wasn't sure if he was afraid of her or angry at her. Both, maybe. She had on a mossy cotton bathrobe, cord tied limply about her waist; it hung off her body like rotting skin. She smiled and tried to embrace him, track-marked arms reaching blindly.

His breath stopped when she closed around him. Her damp and greasy hair lashed his face, sticking against it like strands of oily taffy.

"Where have you been?" she asked, the muscles in her face twitching. "I tried to call, but I didn't know where to find you..." Her green eyes glowed, a manic ferocity buried deep in them, deep down. Her pale face was tight, the lines in the corners of her eyes like cracked glass.

He tried to remember how old she was, had to do a bit of math. Thirty-four? She looked too old for her age. Her hand stroked his cheek. She wasn't all that much older than he was, really. He felt sick.

"Are you awake?" he asked. He'd meant to sound cold, but his voice came out quivering.

Kimberly bit her lower lip, blinking slowly. "What?"

"This is why your kids are out playing in the dirt? So you can... do _this_?" He bit off each word, voice shaking and teeth set hard.

She sighed, slumping into the moth-eaten couch. "Go on, tell me again what a terrible mother I am. Don't you get tired of this, Jeffrey?"

" _Tired_? No, Mom, what I'm tired of is seeing the way you treat those kids! It isn't right!"

Kimberly rubbed her arms. "We've had this argument before, Jeffrey. Anyway... you and Alice turned out just fine... You weren't so scarred, now were you? Just leave the guilt trip for another time, okay? I'm... tired..."

" _Fuck_ you!" Jeffrey burst to his feet. His hands clenched uselessly. He wished there was something around for him to hit.

"Don't talk to me like that!" she snarled, her eyes bulging horribly in their sockets. For a second, Jeffrey didn't see his mother's face – he saw the skull beneath, he saw what she would be when she died. And then, as quickly as it had appeared, the angry light faded. She sank back into herself, buried under the dull green.

He looked around the little room. The paint on the walls was faded, peeling away. "This is just... this is too fucked up. I gotta go."

She watched him, motionless but for the slow rolling of her eyes in their sockets.

He shook his head. "I gotta go." He was moving, away from his mother and through the door. The sun glared on the horizon, light slivering in the screen door. She didn't say anything to stop him.

Jeffrey stood on the top step. He looked out at the trailer park. He couldn't stay here, he knew that now. But where else _was_ there?

Sally looked quietly up at him from in the dirt. Her arms were wrapped around one of his bags. He wondered how much she'd heard. She hugged the bag tight. "Where you goin', Jeffy?"

He looked out at the pine forest beyond the old movie screen. Where he'd found the body. He didn't think he could face that again just now. "I dunno."

"Are you coming back?"

He passed a hand across his eyes. Visions of his childhood seemed to be creeping relentlessly through the park. He couldn't bear to look at them. He was so tired. "Yeah. I'll probably be back."

* * *

10:59 pm, July 1st, 2002

The air in the hotel lobby had a sterile and mechanical edge to it. The woman behind the counter frowned at him. Her name tag said that she was Susan. He didn't think he knew anybody named Susan. There had been that one girl in a drafting class at San Diego, but he hadn't known her, not really. This Susan had long blond hair, the kind of perfect hair that ended up in shampoo commercials, flowing in the soft caress of the wind machines. "Are you alone?" she asked, her voice clipped and professional.

He nodded. "Yeah. Just me."

She gave him a key connected to a plastic tag with the room number embossed on it in fading gold paint. He'd expected a card; it seemed oddly antiquated, a hotel that still used actual metal keys. He put the key in his pocket.

"Enjoy your stay," Susan said, and turned back to her computer.

He picked up his bags and dragged them towards the stairs.

The hotel had seen better days, that was clear. It stood alone in an empty cement lot alongside the highway. The old wallpaper was peeling, like a fine skin torn from ancient flesh. The carpet on the steps was worn bald and the luster on the handrail faded.

He'd known kids in High School who came here to hook up, the after prom special, they called it. There was something sad about that, all those hard-faced young gnawing at each other in the befouled autonomy of a hotel room. Not as sad as being there alone, though.

Jeffrey started up the stair, dragging his baggage behind.

* * *

8:23 am, July 2nd, 2002

Jeffrey blinked. The pillow beneath him smelled fresh, he buried his face in it, breathing in the clean odor.

The alarm clock beside him glowed. He'd forgotten to set it. He rubbed his palms into his eyes. What day was it? Tuesday. Fuck. He'd missed work. Hardly slept either, he'd spent most of the night staring at the clock.

A part of him wanted to go back to San Diego. All those scattered pieces were waiting to be picked up, begging to be put in order. He knew he would never go back. School was over, his time there had come to an end.

He'd been so frightened in those last few weeks before he'd left. The pressure had been unbearable, like his skull was in a slowly tightening vice. Every survival instinct in him had been screaming: _Get out! Get out while you still can!_ And so he had come home, back home to this desolation and despair which he'd worked so hard to escape. It was easier to be in pain.

Jeffrey groaned into his pillow. He shut his eyes and tried to force himself back down into the warm oblivion of sleep.

* * *

10:11 am, July 2nd, 2002

The dining room was nearly empty by the time he got there. There were only a few crumbs and cold strips of broken bacon left on the wide table in the center of the room. A few people were still eating, still sipping coffee as they read the morning paper. The sign outside the doorway read: Continental Breakfast, 7:30-10:30.

He hadn't slept well.

Jeffrey picked at the remnants, wobbly scrambled eggs, damp pancakes and French toast, greasy sausage, bacon, hash browns, chewy bagels, a slimy tin syrup pitcher, an assortment of pastries still wrapped in their individual plastic. None of it was especially appetizing, but he was too hungry to care.

He didn't look up until he'd reached the pastries. There was a small woman standing there, staring down at the stale-looking Danish in her hands. Her fingers were bruised across the knuckles. Her wedding ring gleamed eerily in the florescent light.

"Alice?"

The woman flinched, her eyes darting and her hands closing over the little pastry. Her skin was snowy white and smooth, her eyes fragile blue – as cold and vast as the ocean. She had delicate features, and almost avian bone structure. She wore a fuzzy blue sweater and dark jeans.

She looked at him, and seemed confused for a moment. Then she smiled. "Jeff?"

"Hi. You okay?"

She nodded, not altogether convincingly. The two of them embraced. Jeffrey held her gently, afraid he might hurt her somehow. Marriage had changed her. She'd always been small, but she seemed _fragile_ now. That spark of strength she had always carried had gone out.

Alice held him at arm's length, smiling weakly. "You came to meet me?"

"Not really. I didn't know when you were getting into town."

"But..." She frowned, "you're not staying here?"

Jeffrey shrugged, unsure how to answer.

Alice laughed. "But you can't be living in a _hotel_! I mean, doesn't that get expensive?"

"I just got here last night."

" _Why_?"

He started to answer, but she cut him off: "No no, come on. You don't have to tell me. Let's sit down. We can talk." She led him to her table back in the sunny corner of the room. There was a ragged paperback book on the table. _Call of the Broken Heart_. It looked like a cheap romance novel. The cover was of a field dotted with small bright flowers, and beyond the hills the luminous sunset glowed warmly in the sky. She swept the book onto the seat beside her, blushing a little bit.

They spoke around each other, around their circumstances. She asked him about his job, and about his living arrangements. He ate, shrugged, mumbled a yes or no here and there, and tried to change the subject. She in turn conspicuously avoided replying to any of the questions he asked about her husband Robert.

"Oh... he's fine. We're fine," she said, chewing her lower lip and twisting her fingers together. "We're here looking for a house, you know. He's thinking of buying one here in town."

"You're moving back to Verden?"

"Oh... I don't know, maybe. He hasn't decided." She looked out the window, watching the cars wheeling through the parking circle outside.

Jeffrey tapped the dull tongs of his fork on his syrupy plate. "We should do something then. You and me. I mean, if you're not busy."

There was a distant melancholy in her smile. "A little brother/sister outing, you mean?"

Jeffrey shrugged. "You know, if you want to."

"Sure I want to. We'll do something this afternoon, get dinner together, maybe?"

Jeffrey nodded.

She grinned, and her keen blue eyes were shining with excitement. "I'll call you at one o'clock."

"Fine." He nodded.

"Great. I'll see you then. I... uh... I'd better head back up to the room, though. Robert might need me."

He watched her go, dragging the tip of his fork across his plate as his eyes followed her out of the room. Metal scraped over porcelain, squealing faintly. When he got up a few minutes later he saw that she had left her book on the chair. He picked it up. The pages were dog-eared. He looked on the first page. Property of: _Alice Burke, age 15_ , written in her tight cursive. As long as he could remember she had always followed her signature with a declaration of her age, as though it were constantly being called into question and required verification so as to remain a reality. He wondered if she still did that.

The book was part of a series. _The Broken Hearts Club_. He'd never heard of it, not that that was any great surprise. He wasn't much of a reader, to be honest.

He tucked the book under his arm, he'd return it to her later. Across the room, the hotel staff was clearing away the remains of the meal. Lunch would be coming out soon. The endless cycle. He left them to it.

* * *

11:25 am, July 2nd, 2002

Jeffrey was watching the local news, his eyes glazing over. The newsreader seemed to be staring directly at him, her shocking green eyes boring through the flickering television screen. Some sort of special report on rising levels of crime in the county.

The body of Michael Edmond Conner was discovered in May by a Verden resident, she said, her voice as coolly dispassionate as if she was describing the pattern of a rather dull sweater. The Verden Police Department's investigation, she said, was ongoing. They had not yet ruled out murder, she said, just one of the many recent atrocities which had rocked the county.

It took him a moment to realize that the woman had been talking about him. He was the "resident." For a moment the thought crossed his mind that he should call up the TV station and correct them, tell them that, no, he didn't live there anymore, he hadn't lived there for some time.

The telephone rang. He picked it up automatically.

"Did you see that?" It was Alice's voice, tense and breathless.

"What?"

"The _news_! There was something about Michael, it was just on on, uh... channel eight?"

"I saw the end. What was it about?"

"Jeffrey! They said that someone _murdered_ Mike! No one even told me that he was dead, Jesus! We grew up together. Don't you remember?"

Jeffrey muted the TV. "Of course I remember Mike."

"But... why didn't you say anything this morning?"

"Honestly, Alice, I haven't thought about it."

Alice seemed at a loss for words. He would have thought the connection had been broken had he not heard the hissing sounds of her breath on the line. Finally, she said, "How did it happen?"

"No idea."

"Am I still going to see you later?"

"Yeah."

"...Okay. Uh... that's good then. We'll talk." She hung up.

Jeffrey held the receiver. He stared at the ceiling for a long while.

* * *

1:03 pm, July 2nd, 2002

"Let _go_ of me!" There was a crashing sound from inside Room 216, like something had fallen and broken on the floor. The walls of the hotel were filthy. They had once been eggshell white and were now a sickly yellow. Jeffrey knocked on the door.

"Jesus _Christ_ , what _is_ it?" said the gruff voice on the other side of the door. It was a voice that Jeffrey had hoped never to hear again.

He swallowed hard. "It's Jeff Burke."

"Who?" The man's voice again, then a quieter voice, probably Alice's.

"Get in here!" he bellowed, cutting her off abruptly. Jeffrey did as he was told. The door wasn't locked.

Alice sat in the sofa chair beside the TV, rubbing her wrists and glaring at her husband.

Robert Summers stood at the far end of the room, framed by the open balcony door. He wore a cheap gray suit, the coat draped over one shoulder and the sweaty undershirt sticking to his broad chest. The glass in his hand was half-full of an amber liquid. There was an open bottle on the bedside table, the crumpled aluminum cap scrunched awkwardly back on over the cork. Jeffrey tried not to look at it. The sight made his throat feel dry.

Robert was about six feet fall, powerfully built. He had an angular face, all cheekbones and jawline. His eyes were deep-set, shaped in an expression of constant mourning which was made to look grotesquely perverse by his sneering mouth and sharp features. His dull brown hair was plastered roughly back on his skull. He eyed Jeffrey with naked distaste. "I keep forgetting." his voice grated, always sounding like he needed to clear his throat. "You're one of those... shit, whatta ya call 'em, melano?"

"Mulatto," Alice said quietly, studying the arm of the chair and looked terribly uncomfortable.

"Yeah, that's it." Robert pointed to her when he spoke, like he was hosting a TV game show. "She knows what I mean. Huh. If only all mothers were as inclusive as Kimberly." He laughed. "Come on in, Jeff. How the fuck have you been?" He stretched out his hand towards Jeffrey.

"I guess I'm okay," Jeffrey shook his brother-in-law's hand. He'd half expected a fight. A moment ago, he'd wanted it, had been ready to hit someone. The feeling drained out of him when Robert took his hand. Now he wanted nothing more than to go back to bed and sleep for the rest of the day. He didn't want to see any of this, didn't want to hear it or think about it. Robert's skin was cool and dry, like old paper.

"So, you're the bastard who's stealing my wife?" Robert's eyes glittered with coiled mirth.

"Alice said you were working today and-"

Robert cut him off with a slashing hand motion. He downed the remains of his drink and went to pour another. "I am working. I'm working all day today."

Jeffrey watched the other man drink. Robert tossed the liquor back with a bird-like snapping of his neck, like a chick choking down a worm.

"Oh." Jeffrey said.

"Where you taking her?" Robert tossed the empty glass on the bed. A few drops of dark liquid spilled on the white sheets. There was a note of accusation to everything Robert said.

"We hadn't really talked about it yet." Jeffrey had done his best to avoid the other man, before and after the wedding. He wondered what side of the man his sister saw. He thought of her bruised fingers.

"Well, take good care of her, alright. I want her back the way I send her out, you got it?"

Alice nodded, her eyes turning listlessly to the generic lake-scene paintings on the walls. "We'll be fine, Robert, I promise." The mallards winged motionlessly from the surface, their long green necks straining towards the autumn wood on the banks of a great black water.

Robert Summers smiled tightly. "You kids have fun now, alright?"

* * *

1:42 pm, July 2nd, 2002

"I don't want to go in there." Alice stood obstinately on the sidewalk, squinting up into the sun. The day spilled white light around her, drawing out her long shadow across the road.

"I want to show you something." Jeffrey stood in the shade, one foot on the stone steps.

Alice shook her head.

"It's only a church. And it's Tuesday, it'll be empty, I swear."

Alice shaded her eyes, looking again at the old stone building. "What do you want to go into a church for anyway? You didn't get religious in California, did you?"

He ignored her. The building was cool inside, and dark. Stone buildings were always cold, heavy with a sunless portent. He liked the feel of it, like going underground. The huge doors were ribbed with corroded iron.

Alice followed reluctantly, holding herself against the chill. "Okay. What am I looking at?"

It was a traditional catholic design, a long nave leading towards a raised pulpit. Stone statues lined the walls, watching over the hard wood pews. Colored light fell through stained-glass, painting blurry images on the floor like reflections seen in an oil slick.

"This is one of the oldest buildings in the city." Jeffrey stared up into the high ceiling. His voice echoed. "It's almost a hundred and fifty years old."

Alice crossed her arms. "It's... big."

"People built this place with their hands, you know. One stone on top of the other." Jeffrey turned in slow circles to take in the whole of the building, "We could build something like this today so easily... No one wants to. Buildings today just don't..." he trailed off, searching for the right words.

"Don't what?" Alice sounded impatient.

Jeffrey's lip twitched. "They don't _mean_ anything." He looked back down at the floor. Smooth patterned stonework, thick with dust and tracked dirt. "There aren't any old things in this country. Everything's just passing on. Disposable shit, it's all made to break."

"Are you okay, Jeff?"

"I should ask you that."

"So ask me."

"Are you okay?"

"No."

"I'm sorry."

Alice sat on the furthest bench from the pulpit. She pulled her feet up underneath her. "What's going on between you and Mom?"

"What do you mean? Nothing's going on."

She scoffed. "Give me a break, Jeff! You're living in a hotel for Christ's sake. She kick you out or something?"

"I'm not going back there."

"Why not? Is it something to do with Michael?"

"No, no... not Mike. It's nothing to do with that. It's Mom, the way she lives. I just... fuck, I can't take that again. I mean, you couldn't _wait_ to get out of here." He rounded on her, "That's why you married that creep, isn't it?"

Alice was crumpled in her seat, arms folded tightly around her legs. "Don't talk about my husband that way," her voice was small, her objection purely obligatory, conditioned.

Jeffrey shook his head. "Anyway, she's got a new boyfriend. I can't deal with the shit anymore. I'd live on the street first."

Alice looked away, her eyes narrowing. "Can you believe that we ever fell for that?"

Jeffrey slumped down at the edge of one of the pews. "What?"

Alice let go of herself, unfolding. "You know what I'm talking about."

"Not really."

"You know, Mom's ' _boyfriends_.'" Alice rolled her eyes.

"Huh?"

She frowned. "Are you serious?"

"What the fuck are you talking about, Alice?" He felt a stirring in his gut. Like a part of him knew already what she was going to say.

"Mom's a whore, Jeff." Alice turned her head quizzically, her lips curling. "You didn't know?"

"Just because she's... been with... a lot of guys, that doesn't mean-"

Alice laughed. "No, Jeff, she's a whore because she takes money for sex." It had been a long time since Jeffrey had heard his sister laugh. It was an unfamiliar sound, ringing in the old church building like the cawing of some dark-feathered carrion bird. This wasn't the cowed woman he'd seen in the hotel, neither was it the girl he'd grown up with. This was a new Alice, as bitter and cold and hard as the stone church in which they sat, just as ancient somehow.

Jeffrey leaned back in the pew. He looked up at the statue above him: the Virgin Mary. The marble woman held an infant in her arms. Her stone drapery flowed like frozen water. He had a sudden horrid image of Mike's body in the gorge, freezing down there all winter long, slowly decaying in the snow.

They have not yet ruled out murder...

"Where did you think we _came_ from?" Alice went on, "I mean, did you ever ask her who your father was? Any of our fathers?"

Jeffrey shook his head.

"That's because she didn't _know_ , Jeff. They were just _guys_. She didn't _care_ , I doubt she even _remembers_." Alice leaned towards him, her small bruised fingers wrapping around the pew in front of her. "We're nothing to her."

"You don't know that." His voice echoed sadly in the dark building.

"Yes I do. And you do too." Alice got up and walked back out into the sunlight, leaving Jeffrey alone inside with the Virgin Mother.

* * *

6:01 pm, July 2nd, 2002

"Kinda dry, isn't it?"

"Mine's alright." Alice dabbed the strip of chicken in the pale yellow sauce and lifted it dripping to her lips. The meat was a dark red color, heavy with spices.

The whole restaurant suffocated in a dense aromatic haze. Jeffrey wanted to sneeze.

"Are you working?" she asked, licking her lips.

He nodded. "More or less. I mean... it's just road work."

Alice shrugged. The tips of her fingers were oily. She licked them off one by one. "Better than nothing."

"I guess."

"Trust me," she said, "it's better."

Jeffrey shrugged.

She laughed, an awkward forced laugh. "Don't look so _sad_ , Jeff. Things are gonna get better for us. Trust me."

He forced a grin. There was a sickening emptiness in his gut. There was no reason for anything to get _better_. No matter how bad it got, it could always get worse.

* * *

3:57 am, July 3rd, 2002

Jeffrey was awakened from a terrible dream by the sound of the telephone ringing. He picked it up automatically, grateful to have escaped his dream. Something had been chasing him...

"Hello?" his voice cracked.

The numbers on the clock were burned red into the darkness of the room, digital scars burying their reflections behind the dust on the TV screen.

He could hear breathing on the other end of the line, a labored and dog-like panting. "Who is this?" he asked, sitting up against the headboard. He'd left the window open, and cool air blew through the hotel room.

"Did you touch her?" the horse voice moaned, desperately plaintive.

"Who is this?" Jeffrey asked again.

"It's _Robert_." His brother-in-law's voice was faintly slurred. "Don't you know me?"

Jeffrey looked down at the receiver in his hand. The cool plastic was as white as polished bone in the dull moonlight. "Why are you calling me? It's the middle of the night."

"What? Oh... You're right, aren't you? You're right. It's dark. I didn't think it was so late." he laughed, "Or is it early, maybe? Is it day yet?"

Jeffrey licked his lips nervously. "What do you want?"

"I want to know what you did."

"I didn't do anything."

"You touched her. I know you did."

"Robert, would you just..." Jeffrey thought of the marks on his sister's hands. He wasn't sure if he was afraid or angry. "Just leave me alone!"

"We're family, Jeff. Family should stick together."

"Jesus." He groaned, dragging the sheets up to his chin. "Are you drunk?"

"You're coming to dinner at Kim's house tomorrow night.... Tonight, I mean. Whatever. You're coming with Alice and Me."

"I am?" He couldn't remember what time he'd gone to bed the night before.

"Yeah," Robert's voice coiled, drawing back all its sneering potency, "You're fucking coming."

And the line went dead.

Jeffrey sat in the darkness for a long moment, holding the lifeless telephone to his ear and listening to the hum of the dial tone. He imagined an immense beast spreading through the whole hotel, stretching electric fingers down copper wires and out beneath the rain-slicked highway outside, tying everything into an immensely complex knot.

He hung up the phone and tried, unsuccessfully, to get back to sleep.

* * *

7:28 am, July 3rd, 2002

Jeffrey looked at the yellow helmet in his hands. _Town of Verden_ , the words were stenciled across the plastic in flat black. Stamped there like a brand, a mark of ownership. Verden owns you now, it said, owns you forever. Jeffrey bent his back to the shovel. Clean sweat ran down his face.

Ted Hemingway was similarly stamped. He stood beside a pile of gravel, leaning on his shovel as he looked at the mound of broken stone, as though considering its place in the universe. Ted's pants were pale with rock dust.

Jeffrey nodded at the other man, and he nodded back.

"You alright?" Ted asked, spitting a wad of brown saliva.

"Fine."

"Didn't see you yesterday."

"I talked to the supervisor already," he said, brushing aside the implied question. Ted's tone had been curious rather than accusatory, but it still put up the hairs on the back of Jeffrey's neck. He didn't want to explain himself, didn't want to talk to anybody. All he could think about was the dinner. He wasn't prepared to see his mother again, never mind Robert. _Whore_ , the word echoed in his skull. How could he not have known?

"None of my business." Ted shrugged and picked up his feet. Gravel rained down off the tops of his boots.

* * *

6:13 pm, July 3rd, 2002

Jeffrey watched his mother eat.

"It's so nice to be together again," she said. Her expression was unreadable, giving nothing away.

Alice smiled. "We're so glad to be home, Mom." She put her hand on Robert's elbow, and he put his hand over hers. They looked like two people in love. It made Jeffrey feel sick, like he'd put his hand into the cavernous warmth of an open wound. How did she do that? How did she pretend like that?

Robert looked at Sally. "Did you help cook?"

Sally nodded.

"Do you want to be a chef someday?"

" _No_!" she laughed.

"Why not?"

"They wear big hats!"

"They do?" Robert laughed, "Don't you want a big hat like that?"

"Nope, not me."

"Well, what do you want to do?"

Sally seemed to think about that for a moment, then she brightened and said, "I'm gonna be a senator!"

"A senator? Where did you hear that word? You heard that on TV?"

Sally shrugged.

"But you don't want to be a senator, Sally! Don't you want to do something that girls do?"

"Girls can't be senators?" Sally eyes got round.

Robert patted her on the head. "Wouldn't you rather have kids for some handsome man?"

"Oh." Sally smiled. "I'd like that too."

His mother was staring at them, her fingers white-knuckled around her fork. There was something between Robert and she, he knew that. He didn't really want to know, though. Some things were better left a mystery.

Sally grinned her gap-toothed little grin, and Jeffrey couldn't help but smile back. The whole trailer was filled with the smell of seared meat, hot and bloody as a slaughterhouse. He looked at Robert and his smile faded.

He shouldn't have come here.

* * *

7:10 pm, July 3rd, 2002

The long pine needles beneath his shoes were as soft as a rust-red carpet. He flexed his toes inside his shoes, wishing he could take them off. He stood up on his toes, staring up at the sky. Dusk was creeping across the park, though there remained still a few rosy red rays of sunlight. It was always night under the trees.

He didn't know why he'd come back, what it was which kept drawing him towards the gorge. It seemed wider than he remembered, dark and vacuous, a wide laughing mouth of stone and water and moss. The trees above him were quivering, waving their long arms together so that they rustled like paper. They'd moved the same way that day in May when he had seen the body. What secrets did they have? Had they watched Michael falling into the darkness?

Jeffrey walked to the lip of the gorge, ignoring the yellow crime-scene tape which the police had strung up. He looked down. The light of the cool summer night had faded, and he saw nothing now but the gleam of water brushing over the rocks below.

He crossed his arms. It would be so easy to let himself fall. He felt himself sway on the edge, felt himself getting dizzy.

"I know that I shouldn't come here." A woman's voice came out of the darkness behind him, and Jeffrey spun around. The soft earth on the lip of the gorge crumbled under his heels.

Patricia Conner stood behind him wrapped in a long gray fur coat the color of ash. Her thin face had been aged by more than years, heavy lines had inscribed themselves on her features in the last two months, carved there as deep as letters in rock. Patricia Conner, her skin pale as ivory, insubstantial as any ghost.

"What do you mean?" He asked, after a moment's hesitation, "Why shouldn't you come here?"

She didn't look at him. Her eyes, like flecks of polished black stone, were locked on the gorge. "This is where he died."

"I'm sorry."

She moved like a spirit drifting above the ground, moved towards the edge. "It's worse not to come." She looked at him. "I know you."

"I'm Jeffrey Burke." He thought about extending his hand to shake hers, but it didn't seem quite appropriate.

"You're the one who found him." Her voice was brittle, as though she were on the drowning in a fiercely restrained emotion.

Jeffrey nodded.

"I wish you hadn't," she spat out, and all the breath seemed to rush out of her when she said it. She turned her face away from him, eyes glittering with gathered tears which never fell. She said, "I've come here every night. Every night since you found him. I thought... I thought not knowing was worse. When he was missing, I used to think that it would be better to know, once and for all, what had happened. That if I just _knew_ then maybe I could get on with my life." She laughed, wiping her eyes. "Guess not."

"It must be hard for you."

Patricia didn't seem to hear him, didn't see him. She stared down at into the gorge and spoke, her voice a forced monotone dragged from deep inside and directed at no one. "There were things about Michael, you know... In a lot of ways he was the perfect son. We thought it was such a blessing when he came into our lives. It was like..." she smiled glibly then, "it was like God was finally apologizing for what he did to Emily. He was finally making things right."

Jeffrey watched her lips move. They were blue-black, like her mouth was smeared with blood. He'd never heard anything about the Conner's having a daughter before. No one had told him. He wondered what had happened to her. He was used to children dying. Most of his brothers and sisters had died, some of them inside his mother, some before they even had names. Some had lingered just long enough to make him love them. _Whore_ , he thought again. Goddamn Alice for telling him!

Patricia seemed quite blind to his inner conflict: "There were things, though... I knew that something was wrong, but I just... couldn't bear to know... I think about asking him, you know. Finding out for myself, even if it is too late."

Jeffrey bit his tongue, but he spoke anyway. "...You've thought about asking... Michael?"

"No." Patricia Conner's voice was cold, devoid of emotion. "Your brother-in-law. He's the one. He'd know."

"Robert? What would he know about your son?"

Patricia looked at him, and it was like she was seeing him for the first time. Her eyes were black as jet. "You shouldn't be here," she said, "It's dangerous."

And, with that, she returned to the park, pushing her way through the thick pine boughs barring her path. Needles showered the ground in her wake.

Jeffrey looked once more into the gorge. A thin mist had risen with the night; it filed the gorge like the tattered robes of the long dead. He could see them moving in the depths, darting playfully in the shallow stream.

* * *

1:13 am, July 4th, 2002

Jeffrey stared at his reflection in the sliding glass door. His arms were wrapped around his knees. The posture of a frightened child, he thought. His reflected eyes were two white points peering from a surrounding darkness. There was nothing in him but shadow.

He couldn't sleep.

What had happened to High Gorge Park? He tried to remember it as it had been, an exciting place full of secrets and adventure. When he was a child the woods had seemed to go on forever. There had been no ugliness in the world when he was young.

Michael's parents gave him a bicycle on his twelfth birthday.

None of them had ever owned a bike before, except Trevor once – but that had been stolen before he'd even had the training wheels off and his parents couldn't afford to replace it. So when Michael got a bike, they were all excited. A bit jealous too, but they were used to being jealous of Michael. After all, he was the rich one.

They never talked about the fact that Mike lived in the big house on the hill while the rest of them were stuck in the cramped trailers scattered below. It simply didn't occur to any of them to question it, Mike was in the big house and they were below and that was just the way it was. Jeffrey couldn't quite remember when it was that he'd started to wonder why there were people out there with _more_ than him, but he remembered very clearly the way it had made him feel: like he'd shrunk in the world. He knew then that he was not important. Not as important as Michael Conner was, anyway. Would anybody care if it had been Jeffrey Burke dead in the gorge? They would have been upset, but most of them probably would have forgotten by now.

Of course, he couldn't blame Mike for any of it. Mike had always been sensitive to the fact of his superiority. If you wanted to fluster him, all you ever had to do was make a joke about it: _Hey Mike! You're rich, why don't you buy it for us!_ And Mike would flush red and stammer angrily while the rest of them laughed and dug down into their pockets for loose quarters. Mike was acutely aware of the fact that he was an outsider in the group, and been perpetually worried about being set apart. It was a feeling Jeffrey was all too familiar with, being the only black kid. None of the others ever brought _that_ up, but they didn't have to. He could smell it on them. So he had understood the way that Michael acted during his birthday party. It was at the big house that year. They never played at the house, Michael had always made sure of that. Nobody ever told them they _couldn't_ , but he'd always had an excuse if somebody suggested it. Eventually, they all accepted the fact that it was a one-way street: Mike came down into the park, they didn't go back up.

But that changed on his birthday. Jeffrey remembered how awed they had all been when they went inside. They'd stared up at the high ceiling, watched the sun streaming down through the skylights as though directly from heaven. Michael's expressions were guarded, but he was obviously irritated by their reactions. He'd been subdued, never laughing, never really joining in. He blew out his candles very solemnly, and accepted each gift with a quiet little thank you. And when his parents brought out the bicycle he went white as a sheet and buried his face in his hands, seeming near to tears. Nobody else even seemed to notice, they were all busy fawning over the shiny red vehicle. Mike had given Jeffrey a pained look, as if to say: _I don't mean it, I don't want it_.

He looked sick. Patricia laughed and said that he must have eaten too much cake – though in fact he'd barely touched his first piece. Molly and Scott insisted that Mike try out the bike right away, and more or less pushed him out the door. Jeffrey had never seen anybody look so unhappy about a birthday present.

After the party Michael shoved it in the garage and left it to languish there, rusting and gathering dust. He hardly ever rode it, not until Trevor and Gena both got their own bicycles, almost three years later. Their bikes were second-hand of course, but Mike's had been in the garage so long it didn't even look new anymore. He rode his bike practically every day after that.

That was the sort of person he was.

At least, it was the kind of person he had once been. He was dead now.

No matter how he tried, Jeffrey couldn't figure it out. _Why_ had it happened? Something must have gone wrong, he was sure. Life wasn't supposed to be like this: You were a child, then you grew up and everything which had once been frightening and confusing made sense – that was how it was supposed to work. You weren't supposed to get lost like this. You weren't supposed to be so afraid. Life wasn't _supposed_ to be like this, now his, not Michael's, not anybody's. Jeffrey was sure of it.

But he didn't know how to change any of it. He couldn't think of any way to make it _better_. So he sat. And he stared. And he wondered.

* * *

2:36 am, July 4th, 2002

Jeffrey woke with a start only moments after having drifted off. Someone was knocking on the door. It was a hesitant sound, barely there.

He opened the door a crack. The still-fastened chain rasped as it pulled tight. His sister's face was pressed up against the door frame. Her lipstick was smeared across her mouth like a bloodstain. There was water dripping through her clenched fingers. Her voice was hardly more than a breath. "Can I come in?"

Jeffrey undid the chain and pulled open the door, and he saw that she was not, in fact, wearing lipstick. It was blood.

She slipped inside and sat on the edge of the bed.

Slowly, she turned her hands palms-up and opened them. There was ice melting in her hands, the cold water running between her fingers like dripping glass. "I told him that I was going to get ice..." she whispered.

Jeffrey stuck his hands deep into his pockets. He could feel something teeming inside him, anger or guilt or maybe fear. He took his hands back out of his pockets, clenching and unclenching them impotently at his sides.

Alice coughed. She wiped her lip and her hand came away smeared with blood. The brilliant red of it ran though the water on her palm, spread across her hand like a vein of crystal put under ultraviolet light. She said, "I thought everything was going so well... He seemed so happy tonight. Like everything was normal." Her eyes were puffy and red, black streaks of mascara running down her cheeks like deep cracks. "Did you see him with Sally? He was so _good_... it was like back when we first met..."

Jeffrey shuffled his bare heels across the carpet. He could feel the electricity rising through his legs. "What do you want me to do?"

"He _knows_ things, Jeff! About what's going on in the park. I think..." She took a long slow breath. A dark wet spot was forming on the carpet beneath her dripping hands. "I think he's done horrible things." She came abruptly to her feet, looking for a place to dispose of the ice. Jeffrey offered her a plastic cup from the bedside table. She dug in her pockets and come out with a little brass key. She held it out to him. "Here. It's the spare key to his room, I got the girl at the desk to give it to me."

"What do you mean, 'his room?'" He looked at the number on the key. "This isn't your room number."

"It's _his_ room," she said, annoyed at his interruption, "We'll both be gone tomorrow. He wants to show me a house, so we'll be gone for a while. Long enough, I think."

He took the key. "What do you expect me to find?"

"He has _secrets_ , Jeff! I know you'll find something in that room. He never lets me in there, I've _tried_ , but he's so suspicious. I know there's _something_ there."

"Alright alright. I'll do what I can."

She wiped her nose on the back of her damp hands. "Thank you, Jeff. Thank you so much."

"That's okay."

"I mean it."

He looked at the clock, and a strange thought came to him. "Do you know what day it is?" he asked.

"What do you mean?"

"It's July forth now."

"So what?"

"That's Independence Day."

" _So what_?"

He shrugged. "I don't know. Just thought I'd mention it."

Alice looked down at her hands. "Do you have some ice? I don't want to go back without any..."

Jeffrey nodded. He went to the mini-fridge and fished out a handful from the little icebox. The oblong cubes stuck to his fingertips when he plucked them out. He passed them wordlessly to his sister.

There were tears in her eyes; she wiped them away and she left, cradling the ice in her hands. He shut the door after her, but stood there a while longer, listening for sounds in the hallway.

He was so very tired.

* * *

11:46 am, July 4th, 2002

Jeffrey watched from the window of Robert Summer's hotel room as his sister and brother-in-law crossed the parking lot. Robert led his wife firmly by the arm, the way a parent would lead a child.

He had waited. Waited for what felt like a lifetime, and all the while the thin metal key biting into his sweaty fist. He'd watched the hands of the clock tick the day slowly away, and felt a growing sense of desperation, a sickly unease in his stomach. He tried to rest, but sleep remained beyond his reach.

He had begun to think while he waited, began to wonder. Every day since he had come back to Verden, there seemed to be less and less of his life remaining, like the shreds of it were being pulled ceaselessly through his fingers. Ever since he'd come back it had been like a dream almost, like he was still at school and asleep in his dorm room. He would wake up any minute and see that he was late for class, that he had forgotten to write the big term paper, that the world was _normal_.

That thought seemed somehow worse than anything. It had felt like a cruel joke when, after having tried so _hard_ to get there, he'd knew almost at once that it wasn't going to work at San Diego. It had all felt so _wrong_ , like he was intruding on a world in which he had no place. His semester and a half at the university had left him with little more than a sense of overwhelming and pervasive dread, the feeling that nothing he could ever do would be enough and that there would always be one critical detail which would be always outside his reach no matter how carefully or how long he searched.

He had the same feeling now, standing in Robert Summer's hotel room.

There wasn't a lot to see. Robert traveled light, apparently. His clothes were neatly folded in the dresser. They were starchy and clean as Jeffrey flipped through them. They smelled like laundry detergent, and the dresser drawer faintly of pine. Jeffrey tried not to touch them too much.

There was a weighty metal wristwatch on the bedside table. The leather band was stained with sweat, the dial on the side worn smooth. He ran his thumb over the scuffed glass cover. There was a set of car keys on the table, and beside them lay a small flat key, a sort of machine-pressed metallic luggage key. He left them undisturbed and went back to his search.

The bed was made. There was a single toothbrush beside the bathroom sink and little tube of toothpaste along with a razor and a mini-bottle of shaving cream.

He stared at the bed. The sheets were pulled tight over the mattress, tucked in at the corners and folded over the pillows.

One night when they were kids, Kim had left them without a word, had stumbled out into the night. He'd started to cry, but Alice stopped him. She gathered all the pillows and blankets in the house and made him help her build a sprawling labyrinth of tunnels through the trailer. Boxes with blankets stretched tight across the tops made tunnels, just wide enough for them to wriggle through on their elbows. It was a tight, sweaty place under those blankets, small enough to feel safe from the world. They curled up together in a passage just below the window. They sat there, their cheeks pressed against the cool glass, looking up at the night sky, not saying anything, just sitting together and looking out at the stars. Kim tore it all down when she came back the next morning.

Jeffrey knelt down on the floor. The hotel carpet was rough on his hands. He peered under the bed. There was something gleaming in the darkness. A leather suitcase. He reached for it, found the handle and pulled it out. It was heavier than he'd expected. The suitcase was sealed with chrome locks. He picked up the case and laid it on top of the mattress.

The key on the nightstand unlocked the case. Jeffrey threw back the lid and looked at what was inside:

There were two big packages of white powder wrapped in bands of duct tape. Jeffrey took them gingerly out of the case and set them aside.

There was a cobalt blue revolver in a vinyl-web holster. He put it beside the powder.

There was money, a wad of fifties wrapped in a wide blue rubber-band like the kind they used on vegetables in a grocery store.

Finally, there was a stack of Polaroids. The first picture showed a young woman in lacy black lingerie. Her lips were bright red and her unfocused eyes stared blearily up at the photographer. The concrete floor on which she knelt was stained and littered with cigarette butts. _Tammy, 5/21/02_ was scrawled in loose lettering across the bottom of the picture.

Jeffrey leafed through the pictures. They were all about the same: women – and a few scrawny boys – undressed and posed languidly for the camera. _Alexis, Petra, Dominique, Alex, Roberta, Connie, Shawna, Carla, Tommy, Olga, Jackie, Ava, Yvonne_ and, finally, cupping her bare breasts in her fingers, _Kimberly_.

Jeffrey looked at his mother. She looked back, offering herself to him.

There was a faint scent of gasoline from the inside of the suitcase.

He thought of the Virgin Mary statue he'd seen the day before, the blank stone face so serene and empty, so very ageless. Kim looked old. There pooled in her gray-green eyes a sort of yawning decrepitude. A dependence, a need which he found repulsive. Who had she been looking at with those dazed, intoxicated eyes? Robert, most likely.

Jeffrey tossed the stack of pictures back into the case. He stood there for a moment, looking down at the items on the bed and flicking his tongue against his teeth. There was one more picture still in the case, separate from the stack, tucked into the corner. The face was familiar. It was Mike Conner. Jeffrey picked it up. _Michael, 2/14/01_. He felt a queer turning in his stomach, like he was going to be sick. He turned the photo over. There was an address scrawled on the back. He put the picture in his pocket, and as he did so he happened to look out the window. He saw Alice stand motionlessly beside a dirty gray Camry in the parking lot. Robert was nowhere to be seen.

_Click_. He heard the scrape of a key entering a lock and the metallic scratch of its turning. And Jeffrey's blood went cold.

"Come on! You don't really believe that." Robert's voice came through the door.

Jeffrey moved automatically, shoving everything back into the briefcase, the powder, the pictures, the money. He snapped the case shut and pushed it back under the bed.

The gun!

No time to get it back in the case! He snatched it up and dashed into the bathroom, preying his footfalls weren't too loud. He slipped behind the bathroom door just as Robert entered the room, cell phone held to his ear.

"Yeah, I'll be a few more minutes." Robert laughed. "No, she's waiting for me outside."

Jeffrey heard the dresser drawers opening one after the other. His nose was itching horribly, but he didn't dare move, didn't dare breath. What was Robert doing? _Goddamn_ it!

"No. Look, it won't be a problem. Just trust me. Because I _said_ so, Kevin, that's why."

Jeffrey stared at the gun in his hands. Cold blue metal. It burned against his skin. He squeezed his eyes shut, trying to picture the room. Had he left everything the way he'd found it? Would Robert notice if he hadn't?

"He did? I didn't think he had the balls."

There was sweat gathering on Jeffrey's upper lip. He stepped out from behind the door and reached for the shower curtain. Robert was facing away, kneeling at the foot of the bed and feeling along the floor. Jeffrey pushed back the curtain. The stiff plastic crinkled ever so slightly, not too loudly, he hoped. He crept into the shower and sank down against the smooth wall. His knees were shaking.

"Shit! Where the fuck are they? No no, I just... never mind."

Jeffrey stared at the drain. He listened to footsteps coming towards to him, coming into the bathroom. There was a long blond hair caught in the drain. His sister's? It wasn't dark enough to belong to Robert.

Robert's shoes clicked on the tile. He stopped just on the other side of the curtain. Jeffrey slid the pistol out and closed his hand on the black rubber grip. It slipped noiselessly from the holster. His finger caressed the trigger. The metal was cold.

The faucet started running. Jeffrey heard splashing.

"You checked out his place then? Anything there I need to worry about?"

Jeffrey swallowed. Blood was throbbing in his ears. Why was it so loud! How could Robert not hear it? He tried to quiet his heartbeat.

"Fine, fine. Just leave it alone then."

Robert shut off the faucet, flicking water from his hands.

The shower curtain wasn't completely drawn. There was a certain angle from which Robert would be able to see him, crouched there with the gun in his hand. Robert would see.

"Well it's not like he's coming back for it anytime. We don't wanna be anywhere near this shit. Not with the police involved."

In that moment, for reasons which were not entirely clear to him, Jeffrey understood: his brother-in-law had killed Michael Conner. His grip tightened on the pistol. It was loaded, wasn't it? The possibility suddenly occurred him that he was about to be discovered there in the shower with an empty gun in his hands. The urge to squeeze the trigger was nearly irresistible, even if only to find out if there were any bullets in the gun.

Then the sound of footsteps moving away from the shower, across the room to the bed. A clatter of something metallic against wood, then more footsteps, then the door opened. Jeffrey shut his eyes, holding the revolver against his cheek, and he let out a trembling breath. Robert had come back to the room for his car keys. Just the keys.

He didn't know how long he sat there, holding the gun and shaking in the damp shower, listening to the empty room. Eventually, though, he got back to his feet.

* * *

2:29 pm, July 4th, 2002

Jeffrey looked up at the disheveled apartment building. This was it. He checked the address scrawled on the back of the photo once more.

The road curved sharply down towards Ithaca. It was a narrow and almost alpine sort of road, like many those in that city. Bent trees lined the street, like shaggy men in ragged green clothing, dragging their long limbs on the sidewalk. Most of the windows in the face of the rust-colored apartment building were boarded over. The handrail on the stair was twisted. Every building on the street was the same, old and broken. The city was a living ruin.

He went up the crumbling steps and pressed his thumb against the doorbell. Bare wiring hung from the light fixture above him. The naked wires glistened angrily in the dull afternoon light.

A pale gray car rumbled down the road, thumping music spilling from the rolled-down windows. The wind groaned audibly through the trees.

Jeffrey rang the doorbell again.

A narrow driveway ran alongside the apartment building. Crabgrass scrabbled amid thin-spread gravel. At the end of the drive there was a rusted-out junker sitting in a wreath of broken glass; it didn't look like it had been on the road since Reagan had been president.

Jeffrey rang the doorbell one final time before he stepped inside.

The lights were dim. There was a long hallway, the walls some kind of dark wood, mahogany or walnut. A set of worn stairs lead up to the second floor. At the top of the stairs he found a door. The apartment number was printed beside the door in worn gold paint, stenciled directly on the dark wood. _Four_.

Michael Conner had lived here. What was inside? Jeffrey pressed his hand against the old wood. His fingertips followed the swirling grain, looping in ever tighter circles. The building seemed almost to have been carved, hallowed out rather than built. The near-black wood drank away all the light from the few bare bulbs recessed in the ceiling. It would be a depressing place to live, he thought, ancient and beautiful and fearful. There was a sense of permanence to old buildings, the sense that they would go on forever, stand erect against the weathering centuries long after their occupants had died.

An old man in a bathrobe stepped out into the hall, his woolen eyebrows beetled and coarse as gray wire and his expression fierce. "What are you doing there?" he demanded, his voice a hard rasp from deep in his throat.

"Who are you?" Jeff asked, pulling his hand away.

The man grimaced. "This is my building, that's who I am. Who the hell are you?"

"I'm looking for a friend of mine. I think he lived here."

"You think?" He spat the word like it was an offense to his tongue.

"It's been a while."

"Well, what'd he look like?"

Jeffrey tried to remember. All he could think of was the decayed body in the gorge. "Shorter than me. Blondish hair, nice face? Sort of thin?"

The landlord took cigarette from of his breast pocket and lit it. Smoke leaked from his nostrils and the corners of his mouth. "Sounds like the guy." He took his jaw in his hand and pushed it from side to side so that his teeth ground together. "Haven't seen him around. Would have rented out the room to someone else, but the money kept coming so I left it alone."

"What do you mean, the money kept coming in?"

"Came in the mail. Brown envelopes, like, uh... like grocery bag paper. No return address or anything." He shrugged, plucking out his cigarette and looking about for somewhere to drop the ash. Not finding any, he let the hot ash fall on the thick carpet and ground it out with his slipper-clad heel. The carpet was covered with dirty black stains. Jeffrey wondered if the dim lighting was intentional.

"What name did he use?"

"Used his _real_ name, far as I know. Had all the paperwork. Eddie Conner."

_Conner_. Well, that was his name, of course. Eddie... his middle name? Edmond, was it? Something like that.

"What did he use the apartment for?"

The man gave Jeffrey a scornful look. "The hell does that mean? He _lived_ here. And now someone else is gonna live here. That's how it works."

"Someone else? I thought you said the money-"

He cut Jeff off with a wave of his hand, the cigarette between his fingers leaving an arc of smoke in the air. "That stopped a while back. Month or two. I would've cleared out the crap, but there no point doing it before the college students come back."

Jeffrey looked back at the gold painted number. _Four_. "I'll take it," he said.

The landlord squinted at him. "Hm? Take what?"

"The apartment. I'll take it. I'm looking for a place to live. I'll take it." It felt right to Jeffrey, somehow. That he could take Michael's place...

The man looked at him with a mixture of suspicion and relief. "I can get you started on the paperwork. If you're serious."

Jeffrey nodded.

"Fine then. I'll have his junk cleared out by the end of the week."

"Couldn't I move in sooner? I don't care about the stuff. Just leave it, I'll take care of it."

The old man massaged his chin. "I guess we could work something out. Not like he's likely to be coming back for it, really."

Jeffrey touched the wall again. What looked so smooth and polished was actually, now that he'd felt it, quite rough, worn with age. He shook his head. "Nah. He's long gone."

* * *

6:13 pm, July 5th, 2002

It was raining. He hurried inside the apartment building, one arm held up over his head in a feeble effort to keep dry.

Miss Erickson greeted him at the door. He'd met her earlier that morning when he'd come back to give his paperwork to Mr. White – which he'd learned was the landlord's name. Miss Erickson, he had gathered, was the receptionist at a dentist's office downtown. She hadn't known Michael, but she _had_ heard some strange things from the other tenants about the young man who'd lived in apartment four.

Jeffrey hadn't had a chance yet to meet any of the others. But he was in no hurry.

He brought the last of his bags up to his new room. It wasn't much of a place, three cramped rooms and a closet, the only toilet a communal unit down the hall. A narrow bedroom adjoined the main living area on one side, and a tight kitchen on the other.

Michael's things were still scattered about the room. He hadn't owned much. There were a few threadbare clothes in the dresser. The food in the kitchen, what little there was, had all gone bad a long time ago. Jeffrey found a half-empty milk carton that reeked of decay and poured out black and green when he emptied it down the sink. There was nothing else in the fridge but a few spherical fruits, now unidentifiable. There were boxes of cereal and a half-empty bag of tortilla chips in the cupboard.

There were a couple of CD's in a stack beside the old black-and-white TV set. Nothing too interesting, a couple of alternative rock albums that had been big in the nineties. The clear plastic jewel cases were scuffed and cracked, and the discs weren't much better. Michael had either had them a long while or else bought them used somewhere. Jeffrey didn't see a CD player anywhere.

The bedroom was a bit cluttered. Jeffrey took a halfhearted survey of the items there, his investigation having had, by this time, taken on a feeling of glazed automation. A few articles of clothing, so thick with dust that they all looked like they were made of gray cotton. A pair of winter boots beside the bed, tongues spilled out dog-like and laces tangled. A stack of mail, most of it opened, and none of it appearing to be of any significance.

There was a pile of paperback novels on the bedside table. Murder mysteries, thrillers, a few romance novels. He read through the titles: _Call of Innocence, The Virgin Eclipse, The Bear and the Tiger, Unanimous Sanctions_ , and _Mirror of the Broken Heart_.

Jeffrey stared at the last book. There was something inside the cover, written in neat little letters on the upper right-hand corner of the title page: _Alice Burke, age 14_.

He put the book down. How had it gotten here? What was Alice's connection to Michael? He tried to remember how well the two of them had known each other, but couldn't think of any time when they'd been especially close. He put the book away.

He looked inside the little table's top drawer. A half-empty box of condoms, a pack of mint chewing gum, a small book of crossword puzzles which appeared to have had most of its pages torn out, and a bottle of Astroglide personal lubricant. He shut the drawer.

Jeffrey sat on the edge of the bed. The springs groaned under his weight, and sagged low.

From his perspective at the far edge of the room, the short and turbulent life of Michael Conner seemed a sad small thing to witness. And there was his own life, neatly packaged in three gray bags slumping formlessly beside the door. It was then that he realized that the apartment had no windows.

* * *

11:44 pm, July 5th, 2002

The old TV flickered and, with a static-choked roar of canned applause, the late night talk show host waved the audience off toward the next commercial break. Jeffrey muted the television with a push of a button on the remote. Colorless images of steam-bathed fast food slid by him.

Jeffrey gazed up at the screen, eyes half-lidded and heavy.

His bags were vomiting their contents onto the floor, half-unpacked. Already he'd grown restless, eager to move on. Unable to think of anywhere else to go, and lacking in any sort of alcoholic or narcotic means or relaxation, he'd turned on the TV. He watched, toying with a small bronze medallion hung on a white and green cord. It was all he had left. The tacky souvenir was all that remained of his high school years, that and a piece of stamped and signed paper in a faux-leather cover. He dangled the medallion against his nose, holding the cord stretched tight between his thumb and forefinger.

_Money_. How much money did he have?

The rent was absurd, of course, but he had enough money for a year or two if he kept his expenses down. Though there were student loans from San Diego still to be dealt with.

He'd spent the morning begging for his job, yanking out every excuse and apology he knew. The supervisor eventually relented, with the warning there would be no more chances, and no more leniency. Ted Hemingway had said nothing when he saw Jeffrey, just set his mouth and cast his eyes back down towards the shovel in his hands. He hadn't made any friends, but he still had his job. At least he still had that.

At some point in the past year, he couldn't say exactly when, Jeffrey had realized with a kind of horrible certainty that he wasn't as smart as he wanted to be. He wasn't lucky enough or talented enough or driven enough to do anything of worth. He wasn't special, he was just another person falling into the great pattern of things. He was not going to be what he wanted to be. There was only this. He took out the picture of Michael and he looked at it. He stared at the boy's face in the photograph. What had he been thinking about? What was behind those eyes? He let his gaze drift back towards the television set. Jeffrey stared at the flickering screen before him, hardly seeing it, and he wondered.

He lay his head back, closed his eyes and, eventually, finally, he slept.

### Someday When We All Grow Up

The rainwater ran down the glass like hot wax along the side of a candle.

Gena Riley watched the rain fall on the stone steps of the Verden Public Library, watched dirty water pooling in the crease of each step and in a wide arc at the foot of the stairs. She tapped her fingers on the old oak checkout desk and stared at the door, waiting for something to happen. She looked once more at the clock, wishing the hands faster around the impassive face. Still another hour to go.

The name-tag pinned to her breast itched horridly. _Hi! I'm Gena_. She felt like she was a new person, standing there behind the desk which she'd so often stood in front of as a child. Books had been her escape when she was a little girl and she still regarded the old building, all its musty stacks and well-worn volumes, with great affection, though she'd not read for pleasure in years. Books were too slow, too disconnected. She could no longer find herself in them. Books were nothing more than another way to obliterate the self, to pour it out into a fictional simulacrum – someone built for life, someone with an arc and an ending and not just _going on_. She couldn't bear the lie of it.

Of course, none of that had stopped her getting the job. It had been easier than she'd expected, the whole process of it. And now she was employed. She was "at work," and felt a terrible comfort in that.

A car flashed past in the street outside, red and white lights spilling in the reflective sheen of the rain-slick pavement.

* * *

The tires hummed on the road. A hot wind rushed through her hair.

Gena laughed. She'd never ridden in a convertible before. It was exciting and more than a little terrifying; she felt like she might tumble out at any moment. They sped along the crest of a low hill, and the green valley below rolled like a postcard of some lost European highland. The sun burned low in the sky, billowing hot and bright and red as it fell slowly towards the horizon.

Welcome to the New World.

She let out a whoop and undid her seatbelt, feeling drunk on the car's naked velocity, feeling invincible. She stood up in her seat and grabbed hold of the windshield's edge, hollering at the wavering black tongue of the road as it spilled out before them.

"Jesus, Gena!" Trevor snatched at the back of her shorts, hooking his finger through a belt-loop and yanking her back down into her seat. "You wanna fall out?" he shouted.

Molly twisted in her seat and pushed down her wide dark sunglasses and laughed. "Spoilsport!"

"Yeah!" Gena stuck her tongue out. "You know what you are, Trevor? You're a stick in the mud!"

"And _you're_ a crazy bitch!" he shot back, hanging on to the edge of the seat in front of him, white knuckled.

Molly laughed again, and pushed the petal down. The car growled, and they speed up, racing wildly towards the falling sun.

* * *

Her mother shouted: "Would you just drop it!"

Her father snapped back: "Jesus! That's your answer for everything, to just forget about it!"

Gena turned the pages of the newspaper. She ignored her parents. They'd been fighting all morning, more than usual. She wrestled with the newspaper, forcing it flat out on the table with a sweep of her forearm. Her cereal bowl was nearly empty. She hated it when they fought.

There was a review of an Ithaca theater's performance of a gender-switched version of _The Taming of the Shrew_. She looked at the black and white dot-matrix image of a man and a woman in cheap flannel semblances of Elizabethan garb. The man's mouth was open, his arms thrown out in oratory posture. The caption read: _Alan Johnson excels as the gender-bending Katherine_. She skimmed over the article, skipping down the page to the movie reviews.

"Look, just _leave_ it, alright! I'll take care of it!" Mom said, biting back a mouthful or resentment.

"Fine! _Fine_! I don't know why I even bother!" Dad dumped his armful of papers on the table.

" _Very_ mature, Nathan!"

"Oh, why don't you just fuck off!"

Gena's eyes flicked up from the paper. Her mother had her hands on her hips, her mouth open in shock. Her father's face was red, flushed with either embarrassment or anger or both. They glared at each other – looking daggers at each other, Gena thought, finally realizing what that expression really meant. "Would you _please_ stop fighting!" she burst out, unable to stop herself.

They looked at her, as if noticing her presence for the first time.

She pushed her chair back with a scrape and rushed out of the room, dumping the milky remains of her breakfast in the sink as she fled.

* * *

The rain slashed down the stone walls, threading through the mortared cracks between the heavy gray blocks. And inside, all those books like a grand storehouse of man's answers to the first scribbled Neanderthal paintings.

The books on the shelving cart were standing with their spines up. Her fingers walked across them, stepping from title to title, tilting each book back in turn so that the cover showed itself to her. _C is for Corpse, Death in the Parish_ , several books of the _Primrose Sister's Murder Club_ series, whatever that was – she pictured a pair of elderly ladies in floral print dresses creeping into some vast dark house through the garden window, shining knives in their bony hands, and she grinned.

Those sorts of books seemed mostly to go out to older women, who took them in blocks of at least half-a-dozen. How they found the time to read them all, Gena couldn't say, no more than she could account for whatever it was that had made them so bloodthirsty.

"You know, you could shelve some of those if you want."

Gena started. The Assistant Librarian was watching her from across the room. His name was Carl.

She nodded, gathering up an armful of books. "Sorry."

Carl shrugged, "Whatever." He leaned against the counter opposite her. She found herself unable to look away. His curly blond pop-star hair didn't seem a proper match for his angular features, but the affect was nevertheless striking. Looks aside, though, there was something that didn't seem quite right about him. She just couldn't put her finger on it.

He followed her back into the stacks when she picked up a stack of books for shelving. "What kinda name is Gena, anyway?"

"What do you mean?"

"I dunno. Gena. I've never heard that name before, is all."

"Well... you heard it now."

"I guess I have." He smiled at her. Carl had an easy smile. He took the book from her hands and returned it to its place on the shelf.

She stared at him. "How long have you been working here? If you don't mind me asking."

"Why would I mind?"

She shrugged.

"About two years. Ever since graduation."

"Graduation from what?"

"Cornell."

"Wow. What was your major?"

"Engineering."

"What does that have to do with working at a library?"

"Nothing at all." He grinned.

She grinned back and found her eyes caught up in his. The book in her hand missed the shelf and fell to the floor. She yelped, trying too late to catch it and in the process dropping the whole armload of books. She blushed, putting a hand to her mouth. "Oh God..."

Carl laughed. "Jeez, Gena, where are you going with that?"

* * *

"Where's she going?" Trevor leaned out over the side of the car and peered into the woods.

Gena reached back and slapped him on the arm. "Shut _up_ , Trevor!"

"What?" His eyes found hers in the off kilter mirror, his face a mask of innocence.

Gena rolled her eyes. "Just sit back already. She won't be long."

He groaned dramatically, kicking his legs up to hang them over the door.

Gena scanning the treetops. She found that, if she flicked her eyes back and forth quick enough, she could almost fool herself into thinking that she was still moving. The silence had closed in on her the very minute that Molly had shut off the engine. The tires crunching on the gravel shoulder, the rasp of the key turning back and sliding out, then that gaping silence. Molly had hopped out over the side, not even bothering with the door. She'd thrown a quick "Be right back, guys," over her shoulder, and disappeared into the dense patch of shrubs and scrabbly ironwood trees which filled the dip in the hills. That had been just a few minutes ago.

The sunset painted the greenery in lush reds and yellows. The tops of the trees waved in an imperceptible wind.

Trevor groaned, bending one leg back so his knee nearly touched his breastbone. "Ugh, it's getting late."

Gena looked at her watch. "Quite _whining_ already. It's barely even eight o'clock. The sun's not even down yet."

"Yeah? Maybe I've got stuff to do."

Gena snorted. "Like what? I'm the one with the job."

Trevor stared vaguely upwards at the darkening sky. "Does that really count as a job? Part time at the library..."

She laughed. " _What_? How dare you!"

"Oh, you think it is?"

Gena made a face, "Well, they're paying me, aren't they?"

He made a small noncommittal noise, "Hardly."

Gena pressed her face against the headrest and looked silently back at her friend. He'd changed so much in the past year. Being away had done him good. He'd been so quiet when they were both in High School, when there had been all those rumors about his "orientation" going around. She remembered one day he had shown up for class with a bloody lip and the collar of his shirt torn. She'd seen people giving him nasty looks in the halls, like he'd done something to them, betrayed them somehow. He'd gotten so quiet, hardly spoke to anybody, not even to her. Some of her friends had started dropping hints, insinuations about what it meant for her to be seen with "someone like Trevor." She hadn't even known how to respond. She'd barely been able to stand going back into that dull gray building; every morning when she stepped through the doors she felt her disappointment with the world gathering around her. _Why did people act the way they did?_

She reached back and poked Trevor's leg.

He lifted his head off the seat and looked at her, brows knit. "Yeah?"

"Nothing."

He poked her back, right on the forehead. She grinned, and batted his hand away.

Molly came trampling back through the brush, kicking and thrashing and cursing at the tangling undergrowth. She flopped back over the door, once again declining to open it, and let out a heavy exhalation. "Jeez," she groaned, "what a fucking jungle."

Trevor pulled himself back upright. "What the hell were you doing out there?"

"I had to _pee_!" Molly said, quite dramatically, flicking her zipper up and down.

"Ahh!" Trevor pulled a face, "I _so_ didn't need to know that."

"But you did ask," Molly shot back, her voice a sing-song chant.

"Ugh, why do girls always talk about peeing?"

"Uh... 'cause girl are gross?" Gena stuck out her tongue.

"Oh, right. How could I have forgotten." Trevor rolled his eyes.

Molly righted herself in the driver's seat and slid the keys back into the ignition.

"Where are we even going?" Trevor asked.

Molly pushed down her sunglasses and pointed towards the sunset. "That way."

* * *

Gena stared up at the ceiling, listening through the dark to raised voices. She brushed the hair away from her face, spitting out a bit that was stuck on her tongue. It was a miserably hot summer night, the crushing sort of heat which wormed down your throat and seeped in under your doorway. She'd stripped down to her panties, but still felt like she was roasting. Her blankets were tangled and clinging to her bare skin.

The voices again, louder. She couldn't understand what they were saying. She didn't have to. She knew the tone well enough not to need the words.

She stripped away the clinging blankets caught about her and crept to the doorway. The knob was cold on her hand – she pulled the door open a fraction, just enough to put her ear to the crack.

Her father's voice. He was angry.

Her blood ran cold, as it always did whenever her parents really got into it. She opened the door a little more, putting one arm across her breasts and pushing her face into the space between the door and the frame. There was light coming from the far room, flicking out whenever one of her parents stomped past the lamp.

Her mother's voice, just as angry.

Their shadow-selves writhed on the floor.

Her father said something. He sounded bitter, his voice seething. Mom snapped back, venom dripping from every word. Something was happening, Gena could feel it. This wasn't just another fight.

She snatched a t-shirt from the open dresser drawer and pulled it on over her head. The cotton clung to her skin. She took a step into the hallway and waited there – wanting to go out further unable to move. Something crashed against the floor and the front door banged open. The voices moved outside together, so muffled that she could hardly hear them.

A car started, wheels grinding on gravel, headlights shining into the trailer windows as it turned away. She was gripped with a sudden terror. Oh God, they were leaving her...

Then the door opened and she heard footfalls on the front step. She heard somebody come back inside. She shut her bedroom door and crept back under the covers, unnamable fear running like ice-water beneath her skin. She felt terribly cold all of a sudden. What was happening?

Gena lay there and tried to sleep. Her mother was in the next room: either laughing or crying, Gena couldn't say which.

* * *

"How old are you anyway?" Carl asked. He was leaning against the shelving cart, watching her, as lazy as a predator that is sure of its next meal.

"What?" Gena blinked.

"I'm just curious. You seem kinda young is all."

She answered hesitantly, "I'm seventeen."

Carl whistled, looking her up and down. She shivered; almost able to feel his eyes peeling back her clothes, like clammy hands pressed against her skin.

"Aren't you in High School, then?"

"I skipped a grade."

"College?"

"I don't know. I'm thinking about it."

"Well, don't rush into it. Look at me: my parents would have killed me if I hadn't gone to college. Never did me any good, but I went, got nothing out of it except a bunch of loans that I'll be paying off till I'm thirty."

Gena shrugged.

"Besides!" Carl laughed, "you can always marry some rich guy. I know I would, if I looked like that."

Gena face twisted. She glanced self-consciously down at herself, then back up at the Assistant Librarian. She felt a surge of incredulous anger, but she didn't say anything, just slumped back against the edge of the check-out counter and glared.

* * *

Molly was kneeling at the edge of the ditch, her arms wrapped around her legs. There was a murky sludge pooled in the lowest point of the ditch where slimy black stones poked up like shipwrecks in the thick mud.

Gena and Trevor stood in the road, in the spilled brightness of the headlights. The thin pool of blood grew out like oil welling up from the blacktop. Trevor's hands were thrust deep in his pockets, his gaze studiously avoided the mangled thing.

Gena, however, could not look away. She stared. The crushed body lay broken and twitching in the middle of the road. There were clumps of blood-matted fur caught in the impacted front end of the car, where the bumper was twisted like a bloody nose between the glaring headlight-eyes. The animal's thin limbs spasming with increasingly infrequent kicks, its urgency waning with every motion. The pool of blood spread like a liquid halo, growing ever larger.

Trevor scuffed his heels. He looked at Gena, biting at his lower lip. "What should we do"" he mumbled, "What are we going to do?"

Gena looked out into the gathering darkness. There was nothing. No houses up against the gray-blue horizon, no power lines stringing their cobweb wires up in the air, no trees protruding full and shaggy from the earth. Nothing.

When Gena failed to give him an answer, Trevor turned to Molly. "What are we supposed to do, Molly?" he asked.

She just shook her head, rocking gently, her hair hanging down over her face. Her mouth started to move, working noiselessly for a moment before Gena heard anything, "... was when I was seven. We were coming back from walking Jane in the... you know... the park. We used to go there when we were kids. There was that marry-go-round thing that looked like some kinda beetle. You remember that, Gena? Anyway... we were coming back, walking across the parking lot and this big car, like a pickup truck or something. It was just backing up and Jane saw another dog or a squirrel or something and she went running towards it. And the pickup just backed right over her. I remember the driver was really angry at first, 'cause we were all shouting at him. Then he saw what happened and he looked really... I don't know. Like he was going to puke or something. He kept apologizing. Mom was crying, Dad just kept shaking his head like he couldn't believe it, like he didn't know what he was supposed to do. I wanted to kill the driver. Run _him_ over, see how he liked it." She stopped suddenly, turning and looking at Gena. Her eyes were dry and wider than usual. "Do you remember that dog? Calamity Jane. It's a stupid name, I know. They let me name her."

Then she turned away. She kicked the gravel along the roadside, sending it clattering across the pavement. "Fuck!" she swore, and kicked the road again, "Fuck, fuck, _fuck_!" She stood there, arms crossed, looking back out at nothing.

Gena found that she couldn't remember Molly's dog at all, couldn't remember ever knowing a dog. The Riley's had never had any pets, for one reason or another.

"Check the collar," Trevor suggested, "maybe the owner's name is on it."

Gena nodded. She bent down over the dog. One sad brown eye rolled in the broken skull; it looked right at her. The mouth slipped open and the tongue slid out. The dog was smiling at her.

It whimpered when she reached down under its neck. Her fingers shook, fearful adrenaline-fueled trembling. The dog's fur was warm and damp, sticky hot. There were two tags, a vaccination marker of some kind and a silver name-tag with the letters stamped onto it. Thin crimson liquid filled the indents: Toto. _No place like home, there's no place like home_. The phrase ran unbidden through her head. Judy Garland's plaintive voice and wide innocent eyes. Shiny red slippers clacking. What kind of person named their dog _Toto_?

"It doesn't say," she said. "No address or anything."

She stood up and looked down at the broken thing at her feet. Her hands were wet. The half-darkness of the late summer night turned the liquid on her palms to a black sheen.

Trevor muttered, "We should, uh, we should put it out of its misery, I guess."

Molly was standing just outside the range of the car's lights. "What?"

"It's... it's in a lot of p-pain." Trevor's voice caught on the word.

Gena looked at him, then back at the dog, then to Trevor again. She felt curiously calm. "How?" she asked.

Trevor shrugged. Molly gagged, she crumpled back down on the side of the road. Gena looked down at her shoes. Her white sneakers were turning red. Ruby red.

* * *

"But when are you coming home?"

"I don't know. Soon." Her father's voice came weak through the telephone, frayed and electric.

" _When_?" Gena's fingers were tight around the receiver. The cord was twisted about her arm.

"I said I don't know. When your mom and I have a chance to work things out, I guess."

Gena wanted to scream. She bit down on her lip. "Where are you staying?"

"Oh... I found a place."

" _Where_?"

"It's, ah, it's a place, baby. Look, don't worry about me. I'm fine. How are you doing? How's school?"

"What do you mean?"

"How was your day at school, is what I mean. What do you think I mean?"

"Dad... I don't _have_ school. It's summer. And I graduated."

"Oh, shit. Yeah... Sorry. I'm just... I'm a little out of it, is all. Forget it."

"Okay."

Silence hummed on the line. Gena squeezed the cord between her fingers. It felt like he was worlds away, in another time. Gone.

"I'll see you soon, okay sweetie?"

Gena nodded. "Okay Dad. I love you."

For a moment, he said nothing. His voice was thick when he spoke again, like he'd just swallowed something sticky. "Love you too." And then he hung up the phone.

Gena sat there for what felt like a long time, winding the telephone cord between her fingers. She was still there when her mother came home from the garage. The two of them sat in the darkness, neither speaking, neither moving.

* * *

The three of them sat on the hill, staring out at the emptiness beneath.

Gena wove her hands through the wild grass. The soft blades slid easily through her fingers. She lay back; her hair spread beneath her. She stared up at the starry night. Thin white pinholes in the sky, like holes burning slowly into the inky curtain. It was one of those nights when the earth seemed very small and space so close. Her father used to take her to see the fireworks on the Fourth of July. She'd loved nothing better than to lie back in the grass and watch the lights flare in the darkness, like stars exploding above. She could lay back and leave the ground. Her parents hadn't gone together to the fireworks for years now.

She closed her hand on the black dirt, driving it deep under her fingernails.

She thought she could feel the whole world turning beneath her. The sky revolved, her fingers closed on handfuls of grass and tore them from the earth. Life ended so easily. And the sky swallowed the world when you stared up into it. You just floated away.

She turned her cheek against the soft spines of grass. Molly sat at her left, plucking the petals one by one from a wild flower.

"What do you want to do now?" Gena asked.

Molly threw the plucked dandelion out down the gently sloping hillside. "Nothing. I don't care. I just wanna be here a while."

Just over the hill was the rough patch of bare dirt where they'd buried the dog. Gena looked back up at the sky. It was a hot night. The warm air caught her, seemed to lift her effortlessly towards the stars.

* * *

"How was your day?" Her mother looked expectantly across the table, her hand poised over the open pizza box.

Gena just shrugged.

"Yeah? What did you do?"

Gena shrugged again. She tore at the rubbery crust with her teeth. It stretched. This was the third night in a row that they'd eaten leftover pizza. Mom kept bringing it home. She'd never been much of a cook, Dad had always taken care of it. It had been five days since the fight, and she hadn't seen her father since, hadn't heard anything except what little he'd told her on the phone.

Jessica put a slice laden with pale green peppers onto her paper plate, hissed and sucked her fingertips. "Have you thought anymore about college?"

Gena scratched her nose. "Yeah. A little, I guess. I don't know..."

Jessica looked at her again, her eyebrow twitching. "What about a job then? Full time somewhere. Or are you just planning on sitting around the house doing _this_ ," she mimicked her daughter's shrug, "for the rest of your life?" She tried to smile.

Gena blew an angry puff of air out her nose. "Cut it out."

Jessica laughed harshly. "Cut it out? Cut _what_ out?"

"Just leave me alone, Mom! _Jesus_!" Gena shoved back her chair and rose, tossing down the remainder of her pizza on the flimsy plate.

Her mother's eyes flared. "Goddamn it, Gena! You're worse than your father!"

"Well, then maybe you should throw _me_ out too!" Gena's voice trembled with anger. At that moment, she hated nothing like she hated her mother. Her whole body was quivering inside. Her hands tightened into fists.

Jessica pushed her hands through her short hair. "That's _not_ what happened, sweetie. It's... more complicated."

Gena scoffed. "Right. I'm sure it is."

"Look, your dad and I-"

"Stop calling him 'my dad' will you! He has a name doesn't he? You're still _married_ , aren't you?"

Jessica pursed her lips. "We're just... taking some time off, alright? Frankly, Gena, I'd appreciate it if I could get a little more support right now. It's not like this is any easier on me-"

"Yeah. I'm sure you're really broken up about it." Gena felt her mouth twist. She knew she should just shut up, but it was as though a faucet has been turned on inside of her; she couldn't stop the words gushing out, no matter how loudly the voice in her head kept screaming for her to stop. "Maybe if you weren't so goddamn controlling-"

"Be _quiet_ , Gena! You don't know what you're talking about!" Jessica's face tightened, hurt or anger drawing her eyebrows tight together.

"You hate us both, don't you? You wish I'd never been born, don't you?"

"Don't _say_ that, Gena, you know it isn't true." Jessica seemed to sink a little in her chair, and Gena felt that stinging excitement, the simultaneous satisfaction and shame. She knew then that this was her last chance. She could still turn back, or she could drive the knife in up to the hilt. She knew which she should choose, but it was too late now to stop herself. The words needed to come out, like bile rising in her throat the moment before vomiting, she knew that something foul was coming up and could not be stopped.

"Anyway, what do you care?" she snarled, "You've never cared about either of us. You only care about yourself! That's why he's gone _,_ you drove him away!"

Jessica flinched, a sharp intake of breath. She looked away from Gena, lifting a hand to her face and wiping her cheek. She sniffed softly, pathetically, and Gena knew that her mother was trying not to cry. Gena blinked, shocked into silence. She'd never seen her mother _cry_ before.

She wanted to go to her, crawl into Jessica's arms and beg for forgiveness. She wished she could take it all back. It was out now, though, couldn't be reclaimed. She left the room without another word, almost turning back at the doorway, almost looking back, almost saying something more.

* * *

Gena stood on the street corner underneath the twisted oak tree and watched an old man stagger blindly into the silvery rain.

She looked up, blinking against the raindrops. The green leaves were black in the darkness, whirling in the turbulent wind. The long limbs lashed violently, like the tree had woken up and was shaking out its arms in a desperate effort to stay dry.

Gena was soaked through, hair plastered down and shoes squelching. Her coat was more-or-less waterproof, but the rain had gotten in under the collar and at the cuffs and soaked into her shirt. She stood there, shivering, just outside the pale radius of the street lamp.

"Come _on_ , Mom," she pleaded to the night. It had all been arranged, Jessica would pick her up as soon as the library closed. But they'd closed ten minutes ago, and she was still waiting. Gena wondered if her Mother was still angry with her. She wouldn't take it out on her like this, would she? Gena was sure that she wouldn't. _So what had happened?_

The sparse traffic hissed over the rain-slick roads, one vehicle after the other, none stopping.

She was about to start walking home to the trailer park when a car slowed and pulled up to the curb. She didn't recognize the vehicle; it was a dark red station-wagon with the first signs of rust corroding the edges. The wipers flicked swiftly back and forth, sweeping the windshield with a clacking sound.

The driver turned on the lights inside. It was Carl. He rolled down his window and leaned out into the rain. "What the hell are you doing out here?"

"I'm just waiting." Her teeth chattered uncontrollably when she spoke.

Carl laughed. "Jesus. Come on, get in, I'll give you a ride home."

She hesitated, then shook her head. "No, that's okay. She'll be here."

"Yeah?" He made a show of looking up and down the street. "You sure about that?"

Gena nodded.

He rolled his eyes. "Come _on_ , she'll figure it out. You have a cell phone with you?"

She shook her head.

"Huh, I left mine at home. Look, it's not a problem or anything. I can take you anywhere you want, just get in." He leaned out towards her, and the light from inside his car fell on his face in such a way that his eye sockets filled with shadow; his features turned vaguely skeletal.

"Uh..." Gena's fingers twisted together. It was something she did when she was nervous. She'd only noticed it recently, and was trying to keep from doing it. She stuffed her hands into her pockets. "I'd better not. Thanks, though."

Carl leaned back into his car, laughing incredulously. "You're really going to just stand out here in this? Jesus! You'll look like a drowned rat."

"I told her I'd be here."

"Look, how about this: I'll park here for a few minutes, and you can wait in the car, okay? I'd feel really guilty if I just left you standing out here in the rain. Come on, get in."

"I guess..." she stepped towards the car. "Just to wait?"

He nodded, rolling his eyes with exasperation, "Yeah yeah, just to wait. Come _on_ already!"

Gena bit back a curse. The tree _was_ proving to be quite ineffective as an umbrella. On the other hand, though, there was something about Carl which made her nervous. Something about the way he looked at her.

She went quickly out into the road, trying not to let her feel splash in the puddles, and she got into his car.

Carl rolled the window back up. He turned, and he smiled at her. There was no sound but the airy murmur of the heater. He drummed his fingers on the wheel, beating out the rhythm to a song in his head.

"So," he said, his voice artificially level, "who was supposed to pick you up anyway?"

"My Mom." She twisted her hair in her fingers, wringing out thin rivulets of water that ran down her wrists.

He laughed, "Ha!" He leaned close to her, as though sharing a confidential morsel of information, "My mom was absolutely _incapable_ of being on time for anything. It was unbelievable! My dad used to say that she'd probably be late for her own funeral." An ingratiating grin split his face.

Gena just nodded, and focused intently on the window. Carl went back to tapping on the wheel.

"So, how are you liking it here, anyway? On the job, I mean. You seemed like you were getting the hang of everything."

"It's alright."

"Hey," he reached over and touched her leg. Two fingers brushing across her thigh along the seam of her jeans. "It'll be better once you got the hang of it." He rested her hand on her knee, fingers spread. "It's just like anything else: the longer you do it, the better you get at it." He smiled again.

She stared at his hand. She wanted to hit it, or bite it. _Don't touch me_ , she wanted to say, but she only nodded. She did nothing. There were crumpled receipts on the floor and candy bar wrappers in the back seat, all sorts of rumpled scraps of paper, crinkled magazines, a half-full bag of corn chips rolled tight.

Someone walked past on the sidewalk. She couldn't see the person's face, only the darkness beneath their heavy black raincoat and hood. He – she thought that the shape under the coat was man – held a slick purple umbrella with a curved rubber handle.

She drew further into the seat, sliding against the door and as far away from Carl as she could manage. Her heart was pounding in her chest. Was this how it had been for Michael?

Then Carl's hand was held in front of her, and dangling between his fingers was a tiny little plastic bag filled with what looked like crushed glass. She looked at him, and he lifted one eyebrow at her.

"You ever try it?" he asked.

"What is it?" she asked.

He smiled, and his hand tightened on her knee.

The whole world seemed to be closing steadily in on her. She felt a surge of claustrophobia rising in her chest. She shut her eyes and tried to breathe slowly.

The rain pattered on the roof, the wipers flicked, the heater hummed. She tugged her coat tight around herself and stared out into the darkness, waiting for the lights of her mother's car to break through the slithering gray rain.

* * *

They drove endlessly into the night. Trevor was in the driver's seat, his thumbs hooked loosely on the rubber-clad wheel.

The air was still warm, even now long after the sun had gone down.

Molly and Gena sat together in the back seat. Molly's head lay on her cousin's lap, her arms tucked into her sleeves and held against her body. Gena sat and stared into the wind.

"What time is it?" Molly asked. Her eyes were closed.

"Twelve-thirty." Gena glanced at her watch. The numbers glowed, drawn in soft-edged digital shapes.

"It's tomorrow... That's good." Molly fought back a yawn. "I don't really like how today turned out."

"It wasn't all bad." Gena ran her fingers through her cousin's long hair.

"I guess not."

They drove on, on to where the road and the night met. They went further and further away from the world, entering into something new and special and alien.

Gena wrapped her arms around her cousin and watched the road bleed away.

* * *

Gena walked through the empty house, listening to the sounds of her own footsteps echoing around her.

She closed her eyes, and she thought that she could almost step into the past. Smell her father cooking in the kitchen, hear her mother working on the car outside. She reached out and buried her face in her father's chest, the coarse itchy fabric of his wool sweater rough against her nose and her chin, her cheek. She could feel his arms around her. She could smell her mother, her earthy warmth like grass after a misty rain. Her mother looked at her and she smiled, her face burning with a fierce pride and her mouth soft and alive.

Where has my family gone?

She opened her eyes. The lights were off in the trailer. There was a layer of thin gray dust on everything, as though she saw it through a smeared window. She could feel Gena the child slipping away, and all that was left was Gena the in-between thing. There seemed to be no way either forward or back; she was stranded in a gray place while the ground under her feet crumbled.

She could barely stand. Gena slumped onto the couch. Her knees were weak.

She lay back and stared up at the close ceiling, tracing the lines and cracks.

She picked up the crumpled newspaper on the floor and tried to read. The headlines blurred before her.

She turned the page. There was a short notice about Mike. Something about the police having found some kind of forensic evidence which pointed towards murder, though they couldn't release any definitive information at the moment.

She turned the page. There was an editorial about increasing troop deployment in the Middle East. Impending war. The cramped black words swam before her. She couldn't read, couldn't focus. She threw the paper across the room. It came apart in the air, scattering across the room like a retreating figure in a miserable and terrifying cloak.

She went to her parent's bedroom and collapsed on the bed and she breathed in their smell from the bed-covers as though it was the only thing keeping her alive.

### American Families Are All Alike

Alice Summers stood alone in the grass, her eyes shut as she listened to the chattering of the songbirds and the wind in the oak trees and the murmur of clear water cascading over eroded rock. She breathed in deeply, and she could smell nothing of humankind, nothing but the sweet bitterness of the natural world.

A smile tugged at her mouth. She was not used to feeling so happy. She turned her blind face up to the light of the sun, and she saw it clear in her mind: there was the little glass house nestled in the shadow of the stony escarpment, shining in the sunlight, each window like the facet of a precious stone. She heard a car door shut. Robert came up behind her and caged her in his embrace. He kissed the back of her neck and he slid his hands down her sides, tracing the curve of her hips.

"Well?" he asked.

She allowed the moment to be. Sometimes, in rare moments, she could remember what it felt like to love him. Those rare moments when she could almost let her guard down, when she could let herself forget everything, where they two were real people, loved, and not such red-blooded monsters.

We are just two people in love, and life loves us back.

"What do you think about it?" he asked.

"What do you think?"

"I want to hear what _you_ think, baby. Tell the truth."

"It's lovely," she said, and she meant it. Couldn't she be happy here? She opened her eyes. There was the world, rushing in around her. She looked at Robert and made herself smile. He was so _beautiful_ , it made her chest hurt to look at him. How could anything that beautiful be so terrible? She wondered again if it was all somehow her fault, and none of his after all. "We're really going to live here?" she asked, "In this house?"

Robert laughed. He took her hands and spun her about under his arm. _Like Fred Astaire._

When she was a little girl she had loved nothing more than watching old movies on the TV. They didn't have a television in the trailer until she was older, so she'd used to go down the street to the laundromat and watch the little black and white TV hanging from the ceiling. There was no sound, but she still liked to watch the people dancing on the screen. She would sit there for hours, surrounded by the thrumming laundry machines, lost in that gray-shaded fantasy world. The women were so beautiful, like swans in their flowing white dresses, soft as silk and weak in the arms of their partners. She had never been beautiful, she knew that, knew that she didn't deserve anybody as beautiful as Robert.

She held onto him, turning slowly beneath him in a kind of dance. She shut her eyes again and made herself ignore his tight claw-grip on her fingers, made herself bite back the discomfort and just let herself turn beneath him. She was not her own person, she and Robert were one being. That was what they had promised each other, wasn't it? Standing there at the alter while the old man read from the book and her mother daubed her eyes in the front-row pew. There was no Robert anymore, no Alice. They were one.

Sometimes she thought it was all worth it, anything to be able to stand in the sun and see your reflection in the glass windows of the house that you owned. The place where you were safe from everything, that was yours and yours alone and couldn't ever be taken away or moved out from beneath you. And there were no other houses nearby, she liked that best. They were alone here, nobody to take him away from her, nobody to make him hate her. Only the two of them, as it was always meant to be.

It was such a beautiful fantasy, she could hardly keep the tears from her eyes. She wanted so badly to be _happy_. She was so frightened now, so very miserable. Who was going to protect her, if not him? And what would become of her if there was nobody to protect her?

"Come on," he said, "let's go inside."

* * *

Alice sat at the bay window, looking out through the glass at the waterfall spilling down into a bubbling rock pool full of clear water. It wasn't very big, really, just a drizzle of cold water into a shallow pond, just a fragile thing. She was sure that it wouldn't take more than a few maliciously placed stones to block the stream and dry it out forever. Already she loved it as dearly as though she had always known it. It was like a fragment of memory always just out of reach, like something from a fairy story.

The countryside around the house was a nest of gnarled rock formations, gorges and waterfalls and rippling rivers running down towards the lake.

There was a certain place nearby called Treman Park. The river there wound through a deep-mouthed canyon, falling off at intervals over spectacular falls, whitewater spraying the hawks where they roosted on the craggy walls. You could swim down in the mouth of the gorge, and there was a place where you could stand on the wet rocks and look down into the swirling black eye of the world dropping endlessly into nothing. It was been years since she'd last seen it, but she could still recall it clearly: the gnarled trees along the sides of the road, the slapping sounds of feet on wet black rock, the dusty trails leading up towards the falls, narrow walkways carved out from the rock.

Her mother used to take Jeff and Alice there all the time, just the three of them. Alice remembered lunches in wicker baskets, cool sunscreen rubbed on her shoulders, the way the sun's reflection caught in her mother's round dark sunglasses. She remembered Jeffrey's body sparkling wet as he clambered alone the rocks below the falls, she remembered strange children's voices raised to a wordless din, she remembered smooth-voiced men with gray streaks in their hair eager to sit beside her mother, she remembered jumping hand in hand with her brother into the cold mystery of the waters below.

How many of those memories were real, she wondered, and how many were just wishful imagination sprung from sepia-tone children's novels. Sometimes she forgot where the Anne of Green Gables or Nancy Drew ended and where she began. It would do no good, probing too deeply. She was deathly afraid of discovering that all her beautiful childhood memories were nothing more than imagination.

And then Robert was beckoning her wordlessly from the doorway, and then she was following. And then they were driving, and the house and the waterfall dwindled behind them in the mirrors.

* * *

Robert hummed to the music in his head. She knew better than to ask where he was taking her. Alice had stopped looking at road signs a long time ago. Wherever she ended up, that's where she would be. What did it matter how she got there? There was no point knowing which way she was going when she couldn't change her direction. Knowing only made it worse.

She watched her husband. His eyes seemed to be eating up the road as it came at him. He was always hungry to _get_ somewhere, to _be_ somewhere. His face was taut, fixed but for those eyes of his always flicking to the mirror, to the sign on the side of the road, to the speedometer, to her.

Alice had never driven a car. She'd been barely old enough to get her learner's permit when Robert had come into her life. Sometimes when they were driving places he would promise to teach her, take her hands in his own and wrap them around the steering wheel of his car. Teasing her.

But a car meant freedom, meant escape. There was nothing as American as an automobile. Freedom, opportunity. To be alone with the road, that was what it felt like to be in love. He would never trust her in a car. As well he shouldn't; if she ever did drive away from him then she might very well not drive back. So he never taught her. Just another broken promise.

Like the first time he hit her. Just hours later: "I'm so sorry, baby." His eyes had seemed honest to her then, had seemed open, "I don't know why I did that. It won't ever happen again. I promise." And he drew her to him, drew her face against his shoulder like parent cradling their child. "I love you?" he had said, sounding unsure of it.

The next time it happened she was so angry that she hit him back. That had made him angry. He had to take her to the hospital afterwards. Three stitches along the jaw where her chin had caught the edge of the stove. The nurses had been so kind to her, like angels in their white uniforms. But they had kept hinting at things, lawyers and police. One of them put a domestic abuse brochure in her purse. Robert was so angry when he found it, he didn't speak to her for almost a month. It had almost been a relief at first, but the silence became unbearable, and his refusal to speak had said so much through the quiet.

She saw a green road-sign pointing out the number of miles remaining to Syracuse.

"Did you ever read Anna Karenina?" she asked, blurting out the question just as it came into her head and immediately regretting that she had spoken.

He glanced at her, eyes twitching from their cycle for just a moment. "Who?"

"Anna Karenina. It's a book. I read it when I was a little girl..."

"Alright. What about it?" his voice colored with annoyance. Robert didn't put much stock in books, nor fiction in general, really. Movies seemed to bore him, and she had learned early in their marriage that she must shut off the television if he came into the room. She'd never seen him reading anything longer than a newspaper article, certainly never anything fictional.

"Have you read it?"

He said nothing. _No_.

She turned her eyes back to the floor of the car, watched thin trickles of water roll off her boots.

"What about it, this book?" Robert pressed. "Why would I have read it?"

"I don't know. In school maybe."

"Karenina, what is that, German?"

"Russian," she said quietly. Robert liked to be right. He hated it when she knew something he didn't, not matter how insignificant.

His face twisted. "Russian. Why the hell would I have read Russian books in school? What's wrong with _American_ books, huh? I'm telling you, that's what's wrong with this country today. All these fucking teachers filling kid's heads with _shit_. I'll bet that teacher of yours was Russian. Was he Russian?"

Alice shook her head. She tried to picture wispy little Miss Dubaunt from Mississippi spitting out lines from Dostoyevsky in a thick European accent and she smiled. School had been hard for Alice; nobody seemed to like her, though she hadn't ever been able to figure out why. At least she'd had her friends from the trailer park. She missed them so much...

Robert grunted. "Maybe not. Sympathizer, though, no fucking doubt. Like the war never even _happened,_ sometimes. Let me tell you, twenty years from now, we'll all be reading the goddamn Qur'an in schools. That's how they do it, you know, it's not the attacks. It's the schools. Once they get in the schools, that's where they do the real damage."

They drove. The wheels throbbed on the road.

"What war?" she asked. She hadn't had a conversation this long with Robert in months.

"Huh?"

"What war are you talking about?"

"The fucking _Cold War_ , Alice, Christ! Don't you know anything?" he laughed, amazed. "Did they actually _teach_ you anything at school, or was it all Russian novels and sex ed?"

"I'm sorry." She hated how small her voice had become. She could only speak in little sounds, like each syllable was a struggle to get out.

"So what is it about this Russian book, huh? What's your point?"

Alice shifted in her seat, propping her chin in her hand and lifting her eyes to the window. She looked out at the green earth flying by, at the city beyond belching black fumes to the sky. "There's a line in it. The first line... I don't really remember it, but it, uh, it's something like: 'Happy families are all alike, and, uh, unhappy families are all unique.' Everyone's troubles are different, I mean, is what it's about. I think."

He didn't say anything at first. She could see his hands turning on the wheel, white knuckled, black hair sprouted from his skin, his nails wide and flat. He cleared his throat. "What made you think of that?"

The empty New York hills were all around them, green and brown and fading to blue, like clouds brought low to the earth.

She shrugged. "I don't know. It was so long ago, I hardly even remember what the book was even about."

"And us? What kind of family are we?"

Alice looked at her husband. His eyes were tight, locked on the road. His body was taut, she thought she could see every bone in him, locked like a steel joint.

_We're not like anyone else._ The words rose in her throat, forming a hard lump there. But she did not speak them.

She put her hand softly on his arm and she let the silence descend. And the car carried them onward, hurtling ceaselessly into a great nothingness.

### Fractures

"But I just don't understand why she would _give up_ like that. It's not very good storytelling if you ask me. She should have _done_ something!"

"I think it's a case of... I mean, what choice does she really have?"

"Oh, for God's sake! She's just a character, she doesn't have a choice because the writer didn't _give_ her one. I think he's just selfish, making everything go wrong for her."

"I had a hard time relating to her."

"You know, mothers don't always love all their kids the same. I know, nobody wants to admit it, but it's _true_ , isn't it?"

"Not me, I love all my children just the same, and all their children too. It's not about favoritism, after all. I remember my little grandson Abraham, my daughter's son – she lives in Maine you know, they had to move because of her husband's job – my little grandson comes up to me one day when I'm out in the garden weeding my rosebushes."

"Oh, I _love_ those roses of yours."

"Aren't they lovely? Of course they're a pain in the hinder."

" _Really_? I always thought they were very hardy."

"It's the animals, dear. Rabbits, I'm sure!"

"Oh, I don't _believe_ that! Rabbits? That's so strange, I never would have thought."

"Your grandson, what did he _say_?"

"Oh, I'm sorry, I've gone off topic again, haven't I?"

Adelaide looked quietly around the circle of elderly ladies. They all wore the same clothes, all wore their hair the same way, all had the same book, all with their same tea cups clenched in shriveled fingers. And all of them looked just like she did. She looked down at her own hands. They hardly seemed a part of her. It had happened so fast, so invisibly: her once smooth fingers had turned into these decaying things. They couldn't be her hands, they just couldn't be! Those horrid mummy fingers _couldn't_ belong to her.

She hadn't read the novel. It didn't seem very different from the last book they'd read, nor the one before that. The same stories over and over, always the stories of the tragic middle-class, broken families and the unexpected dead pushing the characters over the edge of some mental abyss, just so that they might be watched crawling back. If that was heartwarming, Adelaide could do without.

Isabelle Wernick leaned close and murmured, "Did you read this one, Addie?"

Adelaide shook her head very slightly.

Isabelle covered her smile, "Me neither."

Adelaide wanted to smile back, felt obligated to do so, but she couldn't manage any better than a tight grimace. Isabelle was one of those ladies who was ceaselessly insinuating herself with anybody who would listen. Adelaide had never had the patience for her sort. She turned her attention pointedly away.

The library beyond the book club's meeting room was slouching along, inching towards closing time. Adelaide recognized the Riley girl, surreptitiously clearing away the dirty coffee mugs from the table at the other end of the room. Adelaide had heard rumors about the Riley's. Something about a divorce. She found it difficult these days to be muster up concern for other people. The book club ladies were in the habit of confiding secrets to her – usually secrets not their own. Gossipy old women. She'd hated that when she was younger, hated seeing the hungry gleam in their eyes when they whispered confidentialities to each other, vicariously sated in the telling. She had always wondered if they were talking about her. There was something dismissive about the way they shared the pain of near strangers, like vampires pointing and laughing at the foibles of mortal children.

What a morbid thought _that_ was! Adelaide supposed that she was getting a touch grim in her old age. The book club ladies were all laugh and nibbling at their carrot cakes. Adelaide forced a smile and sipped her tea.

* * *

Several weeks later, in the dead of night, her telephone rang.

Adelaide woke with a cry, pulling blindly at the bed-covers. She felt a surge of panic coursing through her as the tight sheets wrapped about her legs. She tore her hands free and clawed down her black velvet sleeping mask. The street light outside her window glared in, harsh and blinding and white hot. She had been having the nightmare again: the one where she was drowning.

The buzz of the phone bell clanged through the trailer, shattering the stillness of the night.

Adelaide squinted at the clock on the far wall. The thin dark fingers on that round white face were indistinguishably blurred, long and narrow as the legs of a spider. Either three-twenty or four-fifteen. Still nighttime.

The headlights of a passing car streamed between the blinds, printing bar-code shadows on the wall.

The phone kept ringing.

Adelaide tugged her mask off and crawled out of the bed, straightening her nightie. She glanced at her reflection in the window: her hair was a mess, a grayish tangle all caught up around her face. She brushed at it, fighting the impulse to fuss with her appearance before answering the phone. There was a time when she hadn't been able to answer the phone without putting on lipstick first. Silly, maybe, but that's how it was. Vanity had been the first thing to go with age, by necessity. It was survival instinct, making herself not care about her appearance. It hurt her to be looked at, to be seen as she was. She'd been beautiful once – beautiful to him, anyway, and that had been enough.

Her bare feet slapped on the plastic tile floor. The phone was just inside the kitchenette, cord looping down dangerously close to the trash can. Every time she saw it, she thought to herself that she ought to find a better place for the garbage, but of course she hadn't ever done anything about it.

She picked up the phone, wishing for the thousandth time that she owned an answering machine. "Hello," she yawned, "who's calling, please?"

"Addie?" the voice on the other end of the line was weak, broken to a mechanical rasp. Female.

"Who is this?"

"It's me, it's... it's me."

Adelaide hesitated. "Isabelle?"

"Isabelle," the person on the other end of the line parroted softly back, "I can't remember where my keys are..."

"Isabelle, what's the matter? Why are you calling? Is something wrong?"

The other woman breathed slowly, her exhalations hissing over the phone line like moving water. "...I'm on the kitchen floor. This number was on the paper by the phone..."

Adelaide felt her voice raising an octave, her grip on the receiver tightening. "Isabelle, are you hurt?"

"...I can't get up..."

"Are you in pain?"

There was a sound from the other end of the line. A hesitant sound, a panicked sound. "No," Isabelle finally answered, "no, it doesn't hurt. I can't feel anything. I... I think I fell in something wet, can you imagine that? There's something wet in my hair..."

"Isabelle, I'm coming over there, alright? I need you to hang up and call 911, okay?"

"Oh _no_ , I couldn't do _that_. Please, Addie, it's nothing... Just come over. I'll be _fine_ , I promise. I just... oh, I'm so embarrassed..."

"I know, Isabelle, I'm sure you will be. But do me a favor and call anyway, understand? 911, Isabelle. I'm on my way over. I'll be there in ten minutes."

"Oh, thank you, Addie. You're a good friend. I'm so _sorry_ to be a bother, it's just that-"

Adelaide squeezed her eyes shut. " _Shh_ , Isabelle, _shh_. I'm going to hang up now, alright? I've got to leave the phone."

Isabelle moaned wordlessly. Then the familiar click and the dial tone.

Adelaide's knees were shaking. She wondered if she should find someone else. No, Isabelle had called _her_. She could do it. The receiver trembled, cold in her clenched palm.

On her way out the door she shrugged a down jacket on over her nightie and pushed her feet into a pair of soft slippers. Her car keys jingled ominously in her hand, tinny little death bells. She felt her way through the darkness, out into the chill of the wet summer night.

It was beginning to rain. The first cool drops spattered on the steps and across her face.

The park was glowing around her, a glimmer held against the dense black. The pine trees were shuffling in an invisible wind, animated to a slow thrashing anger. All those restless spirits under a moonless sky. She shivered, tugging her coat tight about herself. It was cold for August. All summer long it had been cold.

Her slippers squishing in the cool mud. Her fingers trembled as she pushed the key into the lock, shaking almost uncontrollably. Raindrops rolled down the window. The keys slipped from her fingers and fell in the mud.

She hissed at herself, crouching down in the mud and feeling for the keys, fingers scrabbled at the moist soil. The key's serrated edges were rough on her fingers as she clawed them out of the muck. She straightened and slid the key into the lock. It bit in with a satisfying click. The rain was coming down harder now.

She looked up and gave a heart-pounding start. There was someone looking back at her, an indistinct shape standing on the other side of the car, motionless in the rain.

The figure lifted one arm. "Hi." A man's voice, slurred and cold.

"H-hello?" She could feel her hair being plastered wetly down over her forehead, and wished she'd taken the time to get a hat.

"Are you alright?" the man asked, "it's awful late."

She nodded stiffly, her body gone rigid and numb. All she could think of was the news report that Michael may have been murdered and that someone in the park must have done it. Across town, Isabelle Wernick was bleeding to death on her kitchen floor. Adelaide's heart struggled to beat in her chest, tightening as though there were a fist closing around it. Was this how it felt to die?

"I said it's awful late." The man repeated. He came no closer. A black rubber hood covered his face. The wind howled between the trailers, groaning eerily over the tinkling sound of the light rainfall.

"I suppose it is," she said, and swung the car door open. The light inside sprang on, illuminating the scuffed interior of the vehicle. The man turned away, throwing up a hand against the light as though it were too bright for his eyes. He shuffled wordlessly out into the night. Adelaide stared after him until he was gone and, once she'd gotten into the car and shut the door, she was no longer entirely sure that he had ever been there. His voice seemed familiar somehow, though she couldn't quite place it.

Her tires squelched wetly in the soft mud. She could feel the car pulling roughly free of the clinging muck, then shifting to a smooth whir as it went from the soft gravel of the trailer part to the hard asphalt of the pavement. There were no other cars on the road. She brushed the rain from her eyes and blinked out at the twisting black-gloss asphalt ahead of her.

She'd done it wrong, she knew. Isabelle was in no shape to call 911.

She could see it already, the scenario sprung full-formed into her mind. She would get there and the house would be dark. She would go in the front door, and she would find the woman lying on the kitchen floor, telephone in hand, her face a pale white and the tile floor below her washed in blood. It would be Adelaide's fault, because Isabelle had called her, had _trusted_ her and no one else.

But why?

She'd known the other woman for only a year or two, only through the book club. Could Isabelle's life really be so empty that she had no one else to call but Adelaide Anderson? The thought then passed through Adelaide's mind that, were she in Isabelle's position, she didn't know who she would call. Who was there? Who was _really_ there for her?

And then it hit her. The man in the black rain slicker, he'd sounded like Joe, just like her husband. It had been so long since he died. She'd gone to the hospital, driving there as his life slipped fractionally away, driving just as she was now, under-dressed and unprepared and fighting a knot that twisted so fiercely in her belly that she was sure she would have to pull over and be sick on the side of the road, down on all fours in the wet grass while Joe's cancer ate him away in a stark white hospital bed.

She remembered standing over his body, wondering what he was thinking about as he died. What did a person think about when you know you aren't going to wake up again? _Could_ you think? What about? People? People you loved maybe? People you wish you'd been closer to? Did you think about your regrets when you died, or do you think about the things you got right? Had he regretted marrying her? Was there somebody else that he'd secretly been wishing for when he was looking up at her from that hospital bed?

Adelaide could feel tears sliding down her face. She sniffed hard, furious at herself for crying. She gripped the wheel until her pale hands turned bone white and the knuckles seemed near to tearing through her thin vein-webbed skin.

She was seventy-two years old.

What did that even mean, really? Just a number, when it was all said and done. She wasn't so old, was she? Still, every year that went by changed the world a little more, and she stayed the same, drifting further and further out into a future which had no use for her, no place set aside for Adelaide Anderson. Every year she forgot a little more of the life she'd once had, forgot more of that bright shining person she'd once been, and every year that bit of lost memory was replaced by a catalog of disappointments and failures, reminders that she could no longer do everything which she had once been able to do. And every year there were more tragedies piling up in the world. Last year the towers burning, this year Michael Conner carried past her trailer in a body-bag. She was not who she had been, and the world which she had loved no longer existed. No one grain of sand felt especially heavy on its own.

The houses on Isabelle's street were all dark, empty faces with windows like black-glass eyes staring sightlessly across the street, doors like yawning mouths.

But which house was Isabelle's? Everything looked different now, in the predawn gloom. She drove slowly down the street, squinting down driveways for a glimpse of her friend's gray-blue station wagon. She only spotted it after she'd already gone by the driveway, and she put one tire over the curb when she jerked the wheel to the side. She hobbled to the door and pushed her way inside. Her hair was damp from the rain, her clothes wet through. She shivered, but scarcely felt the cold. She peered into the darkness of the house. There was a light on at the end of the front hall.

"Isabelle?" she called out.

There was something frightening about being alone inside another person's house. Even knowing she had been invited, Adelaide couldn't shake the feeling that someone was going to step out of the darkness and demand to know why she was there. Or that she would stumble upon some hideous secret, something she'd never been meant to see.

She found Isabelle in the kitchen, propped up with her back against the cupboard. The cupboard door behind her was shiny wet, and on the floor a trail of smeared blood. Moonlight spilled in the window, and the streaks of water running down the glass threw refractive shadows on the kitchen tile.

Adelaide fumbled for the light switch, hands brushing blindly against the smooth walls. The light came on and spilled garishly through the kitchen, and she saw it all: Isabelle's leg twisted under her nightgown, the harsh red color smeared all over the mauve tile, the off-white telephone slack in Isabelle's hand. And Isabelle's face, frighteningly peaceful, eyes closed, lips slightly open.

Adelaide bent down and took the phone from Isabelle's trembling fingers. She pressed the three buttons, her hands shaking so much that it took her four attempts to input the emergency number correctly. She held the receiver to her ear, her breath shuddering in her chest.

"Hello? What is the nature of your emergency?" The voice on the line sounded robotic, practiced and inhuman. Adelaide sat carefully down beside the unconscious woman and spoke, hardly aware of the words coming from her mouth.

The rest of the night slipped away, the way a dream faded when you woke up from it. The colored flash of the red and blue lights on the rain-slick driveway, the white uniforms of the EMTs, the weight of the man's fingers closed around her arm as he helped her to her feet, the rocking of the ambulance, the man taking her blood pressure while she watched Isabelle breathe into a mask. Finally, the hospital, where they gave her a bed and left her.

She fell asleep in the hospital.

* * *

The steam rose in pale waves of heat. She swirled her coffee so it lapped tentatively at the lip of the white Styrofoam cup, always shying back from spilling out on her hand.

There was an eerie murmur in the hospital cafeteria. People came and went, some in rumpled overnight clothes, clothes that, like hers, were never meant to leave the house. They all shuffled together through their new routine, lifeless, all dead-eyed. Parents with bags under their eyes, spouses with puffy red faces, children staring silently at the faceless tile floor, their collective gaze locked on their collapsing futures.

She took a sip of her coffee. The bitter liquid was course and grainy on her tongue. She swallowed reluctantly and set the cup back down.

"Not good?" Edward took it from her, breathing in a deep sniff of the tepid beverage.

"Terrible."

He shrugged. "Oh well."

"And they charge me three dollars for that." She sighed.

"Can you believe it?" He shook his head.

"Unfortunately."

Edward pushed his fingers through his thinning hair. The thick spider-web veins on his hands showed dark. "Are you feeling alright, Addie?"

She traced the crisscross table-top pattern with her fingertips. The wire mesh of the chair and table seemed to have been dipped in a soft sort of green rubber. Like flesh over thin steel bones.

"Addie?"

"I want to leave here."

"Can I drive you back to the park?"

"No. I don't want go home. Not yet."

"Okay."

"Let's just go somewhere."

"There used to be a coffee shop a ways down the road from here."

"Is it still there."

"I don't know."

"Let's find out. You remember how to get there?"

"Yeah. I remember."

She dropped the half-full coffee cup through the swinging mouth of the garbage can lid.

The hallways of the hospital were all white and glass, covered in braille-augmented signs pointing this way and that. _Recovery_ , and an arrow pointed at it.

Edward pushed the button for the elevator. They stood there together, watching the downward arrow glow.

"Have you heard anything about your friend Isabelle yet?"

"Broke her hip."

Edward winced.

"She got a concussion when she fell. Hit her head on the kitchen counter."

"Is she going to be alright?"

"They think so. Given time." _Given time_. Time healed all wounds, she thought, until it didn't. Given free reign, time would tear apart everything.

"Well," Edward tapped his foot anxiously on the tile floor, "that's good."

The elevator door opened. She got up off the bench.

They stood together in the subtle vertigo of the slow falling elevator, each gripping with one hand the greasy metal handle that ran along the back and sides of the surprisingly spacious hospital lift. _They've got to be big enough for a body_ , Adelaide realized, her grip tightening. She looked across the close space at Edward. He was watching the number above the door.

"Eddie?"

"Hm?"

"I just wanted to thank you. For coming here. I... really appreciate it. Knowing that I can count on you, I mean."

He smiled. "No thanks necessary."

She smiled back. "Still."

The elevator door opened with a soft chime.

They went out by the lobby, then though the swinging glass doors and into the crisp summer morning. The streets of Ithaca were coming to life, a rare sort of organic life: more bicycles than cars in the road, thin green saplings along the sidewalk clinging to life in the gray expanse. Thick green ivy clung to the brick walls about them.

"Which way is it?" she asked.

"Over there." He nodded along the road, to the sidewalk twisting slowly upward into the guts of the city. "It's not far."

They walked. The city breathed around them, dense and arboreal.

"Something odd happened last night." she said.

"Hm?"

"I saw somebody in the park just before I left, out in the middle of the night. Standing right by my car. He didn't say two words to me, but..."

Edward frowned. "Did he threaten you?"

"No no," she shook her head, "nothing like that. It's just... He reminded me of Joe."

Edward had no reply for that. He pushed the smooth round button on the pole beside the crosswalk. Across the road there was a red hand help palm-out at them, blinking. They waited for the familiar silver figure, caught mid-stride, to take its place.

"Does he have family around here? A nephew or something?"

"No, nothing like that. It was _him_ , Eddie."

"Him?"

"No, not like that. I don't know... Do I sound crazy to you?"

"Never."

"I wonder."

There was a tree, a single tree out of the dozens that lined the road, with wrinkled brown leaves, a scattering of them crinkled on the ground. She looked at Edward, eager to change the subject. "Look at that, turning already! In August... Do you think that's a sign, maybe?" she asked, half joking.

"It's not turning," he said, "it's dying."

"Oh." Adelaide looked back at the thin gray tree.

The sapling seemed to tremble in the wind. One frail brown leaf fell; it caught in the breeze and rushed away, dancing softly across the road fifteen feet off the ground. One leaf flown away, and dozens more stirring restlessly on the sidewalk, like they were waiting to be borne up after.

Something about it made her nervous, something about the sight of that dead tree, dead so young... She didn't like it.

The sign across the road changed, the little figure stepping boldly out into the light: _Walk_. As soon as it turned she stepped obediently out onto the road, suddenly desperate to be back inside.

* * *

She is lying on the road, and she's having trouble breathing. She blinks up at the sky. She feels a terrible pain in her chest. She hears it after it happens, like an echo: the screeching of breaks applied too late, the meaty thud of vehicle hitting human flesh. The dazed thought swims murkily through her mind that Edward must have been hit by a car. She needs to help him!

She cannot stand.

She sees his face above her, eyes wide, mouth twisted with fear. She hears a car door open, and Edward turns away. She hears him kicking the body of the car and cursing. She hears people shouting. She hears a young woman's voice: "Is she okay?"

She hears a voice, unfamiliar, strained. "I – I... I didn't _see_ her. I just – I mean – I came over the hill..."

And then she hears Edward's voice again. Edward is alright. She is very relieved to know that. It's important. To know that he's safe. She knows that this is important, though she's not quite sure why. It's difficult to think, hurts to look. Adelaide stares up at the sky. There are dead leaves dancing above her, dead leaves like puppets dangling from invisible strings.

It's getting dark. How strange, that it would turn dark in the middle of the day.

She tries to stand. For a moment she thinks she has, but then she realizes that she hasn't even begun to move. The raised voices swirling around her are growing dim. She wants to ask them why they've started whispering. She hears her husband's voice again, getting louder as the other voices grow quieter and then stop altogether, and an early night falls without a sound.

### Come Home

There was blood on Scott's army fatigues. He brushed at it, brow knit with irritation. The blood was still wet; it spread. He looked at his hand. There were three fingers missing, the thumb and the ring-finger and the pinkie. He sat down hard in the sand. The ringing in his ears was unbearable. He squeezed his eyes shut tight.

The robes of the dead Arabs fluttered in the wind. Women and men tangled together as though spent in coital exertion, now laying still and glistening wetly.

Later in the hospital where the army doctors dressed his wounds, Scott had a dream about his father. He dreamed that he was back home in Verden, back in High Gorge Park. His father was beating him.

His father who had flat broad hands stained as black as those of an old Negro, his father who had worked at the foundry since he was a boy. The foundry had closed down years ago and every day that his father was without work he beat Scott. Scott remembered one time that his father had beaten him until his lips were split and his left eye was swollen shut. And then his father had snapped his pinkie like a dry twig. Scott didn't go to school for a week and when he did he told everybody that he'd been attacked by a pair of immigrant workers. They'd probably all known the real truth. The finger never set properly – he supposed at the time that he'd probably be better off without it. The memory of that made him smile years later in the military hospital in the hot desert country and the smile cracked his broken lips as his father's fists had once done.

He didn't let anyone help him onto the airplane. It's just my hand, dammit, he protested, I can still walk. And he'd glared at them until the pity slid from their faces and the disgust beneath showed through. Show me your true face. When the plane took off his throat closed shut like someone had wrapped their fingers round his esophagus. He'd always been frightened of flying.

He slept and when he woke the person in the seat next to him was shaking his shoulder and asking him if he was alright. His hand was bleeding through the bandages. He shoved it under his coat and said that he was fine and he turned back to the window and tried to sleep but he could still feel the hot liquid leaking out, working its way down his belly like hot worms creeping across his skin.

People looked at him differently when he was in America. Some of them came up to shake him by the hand, and they recoiled when he reached automatically to take their offered extremities in his mangled own. And he colored with embarrassment and snarled in their faces, his hate for them coiling like smoke in his mind. He took the bus to Verden.

The park was just as he remembered it. He went first to his father's trailer, wandering the familiar path.

The trailer was gone. He stared at the empty patch of worn earth and his phantom fingers twitched maddeningly. He sat down on the hard gravel and stared at the bare earth, his insides sinking and his belly clenching.

He looked up, eyes filling with tears. His father was coming down the steps of the trailer, coal-blacks hands cupped plaintively before him like a cripple's beggar-bowl, his craggy face twisted with sadness. He reached down to push his iron fingers softly into his son's hair and he stroked it back from his son's forehead and reached down to cup his son's face in his callused hands and raise it up to his own and smile proudly at him. His father put his hands gently over the mangled afterthought at the end of Scott's arm and he patted his son firmly and proudly on the weather-beaten shoulders and the two of them hunched together in the dust like a pair of gray-bearded old men.

Scott wiped his eyes and he stood up and he kicked angrily at the dirt where his father's trailer had once been. That old bastard. Let him burn in hell for all I care. That fucker.

He walked aimlessly through the park. He'd been wrong: _everything_ had changed. Sun-browned children ran naked in the long grass on the edge of the field, darting like nymphs in the mottled shadows. All the familiar filth had bred ten-fold throughout the park. Refuse slopping from torn bags, spilled from overfull trashcans, piled in every corner. The stench of soiled diapers and rotten food assaulted him. Broken glass glinted in every rag like cruel lures for the barefoot children.

All his friends were gone. Molly was gone. Andrew was gone. Trevor was gone.

He went to Jeffrey Burke's trailer. One of Jeffrey's brothers was playing in the dirt at the foot of the trailer, driving a broken plastic car on empty axles through the thick dirt and across the shards of gravel. His clothes were stained and his too-large shirt slumped off one shoulder. He stuck his tiny pink tongue out and spat an ugly imitation of a car engine from his throat.

Scott called out to him. "Hey kid! Your brother home?"

The little boy had reddish hair and dark eyes that looked sort of empty, like two pools of oil. He shook his head. "Are you a army-man?" He cocked his head like a dog, squinting up into the sun.

"Something like that."

"Can I see your gun?"

"I don't have a gun, kid."

"Why not?"

"I don't need it now, I guess."

The kid looked at his hand. "Is that hurt?"

He shrugged. He'd forgotten it for a moment. He kept forgetting it, like it was more a terrible dream on the edge of his conscious than a reality. "I guess it does a bit."

"Did that happen in a war?"

"You could call it that, I guess."

The boy nodded, satisfied. "I thought so."

"Your brother isn't coming back soon, is he, kid?"

"Why are you calling me kid?"

"Well I don't know your name do I?"

"It's Garrett. I'm seven."

"So is he or isn't he?"

"I don't think so. He fought with mommy."

"Yeah?"

"Uh huh. She cried."

"That's too bad."

"Are you going back to the army?"

"Maybe. I don't know."

The little boy smiled. There were gaps in his mouth, too wide and dark to be natural. "I wanna be a army-man when I'm grown up."

"Great."

He left the kid there and walked around the trailer, eying it as he went, half-expecting to see something leap out at him.

Scott had never liked Jeffrey, but you couldn't help but feel sorry for the guy. Whore-son, they called him behind his back. Some people made sideways jokes about it, but everyone knew better than to come out and say it. Some things you just didn't tell a friend. Anyway, Jeffrey was an angry guy, and everyone decided that it would be best not to bring it up. Most of the blacks Scott had met were angry at something or other. Better angry at someone else than angry at him, had always been his policy. He left them alone and they did the same, for the most part.

He'd been older than the rest of the kids from High Gorge Park. Held back twice was why he was in their grade. But he wasn't _dumb_. School just wasn't _for_ him. And it hadn't been easy, with Dad the way he was.

Scott had known a guy in the army who used to pray every night with his gun in his lap and it was almost like he was praying _to_ his gun, and the gun stuck up between his thighs like a big steel prick. He'd been all kinds of nuts, even more than the usual praying sort. He used to kiss his gun and say that he hoped God would let him kill some Muslims.

Scott had always shared his father's impatience with religion. Never seen how it was worth a goddamn in the end. Either you wound up in the good place or the bad place, and it didn't matter worth shit if you said a bunch of prayers or not. At least if you never prayed you wouldn't risk saying something to piss God off at you. The way Scott figured it was, God must be a pretty touchy bastard. He treated God the same way he had treated his father, just kept his head down and hoped not to be noticed.

God would probably fuck you up good if you gave him an excuse.

Scott went trudging up the hill towards Mike's big house, his bags still slung over his shoulder. He'd never much liked Mike. Lucky fuck like a kid out of one of those books where the orphans always got adopted by the richest family in the story. And what had Mike done to deserve it? Just luck. Why was one person lucky and another person not? What had Scott done to deserve the life which had been given to him? Nothing.

He knocked with his good hand on the door of the big house. The wound had opened again and it was bleeding pretty badly. He wondered if maybe he should go to the hospital, but he didn't know what he could say. He'd been taught not to tell the truth to doctors. The doctors all wanna take you away from me, his father used to warn him, and if they take you, you know I'll come after.

He didn't know what he could say now that Dad was gone.

Mike's mom opened the door. She wasn't wearing any make-up and she looked old and ugly. He thought that women should have to wear make-up all the time, even the ugly ones. That way you'd always know.

"Scott?" she said, and he was surprised that she knew his name. Her voice kinda shook, like Dad's used to do when he was drunk, when his breath was hot and his hands were clutching and hard. He hated her now, he realized, though he had thought he was in love with her once. But surely this tired old creature couldn't be the same person he'd once dreamed of undressing.

"Hi, Mrs. Conner."

"Oh, _Christ_ ," she said, "your hand..."

"Yeah." He shifted so that it was behind him a little, but not so much that she would know he didn't want her to see it. "Is Mike here?"

She blinked at him. "I- I don't know what..." she sounded like she was going to say more, but the words just died in her mouth. Her lips were pale and weak looking. He wanted to push her down and smear red lipstick all over her face. How had she ever fooled him into wanting her?

"Is he coming back?"

She started crying. Old women's faces got so bloated when they cried. He'd noticed that. She sort of sank down and she didn't answer him. She shook her head. She tried to talk, gasped half-formed words out through her weeping. He wanted to hit her.

He backed off. He went down the hill and she didn't follow him or call after.

He walked out to stand in the road and for a while. He wondered if a car would come and run him over. He hoped that there was no afterlife or anything. He just wanted to sleep. His missing fingers twitched and bled. He gave up waiting and he crossed to the shoulder of the road.

He stood there a while with his bag over his shoulder, then he started down the road and he just walked. After a few good miles, his hand stopped bleeding.

### Independence

Kimberly was shivering. The bus stop glowed with soft neon ambiance. She sat on the bench and watched the traffic moving through the sleepy town, the break-lights smeared red through the glass.

_This is the last time_ , she told herself. That determination had over time become a part of her ritual, a necessary step in the process. She didn't even pretend to believe it anymore, but she needed to at least think it. _This is the last time_. She stared blankly through the glass, at the street glow, at the far pine trees shiver and sway. Her fingers trembled. She could feel every bone in her body rattling. Her black bag felt like it weighed a thousand pounds at her side. She couldn't just _wait_! She gnawed her lower lip, waiting for the bus to come.

It seemed strange: she'd fucked Charles Conner not twelve hours ago. She'd done it for money. Hadn't she promised not to do that anymore? She didn't want to be like that anymore, did she? Why had she done it?

She had been making breakfast for the kids when he came to tell her that she was more than three months behind on her payments. She'd been standing at the kitchen counter watching the light on the waffle-maker while her youngest children ran aimlessly about the kitchen, their bare feet paddling on the fake plastic tile. The light had been glowing a dim, angry orange. When it was green, the waffles would be done. _Turn green_ , she had urged the machine, _turn green_. The amber light had gnawed, like a mocking eye turned restlessly on her. And then the doorbell rang.

She ground her palms roughly against her eye sockets. How long had it been now since she'd last gotten high? She could feel herself starting to shake just thinking about it. She hardly even felt methadone anymore. Where the fuck was the bus?

She had to work tomorrow, her miserable hostess job at the _Garden Grill_. She couldn't bear it anymore: standing there at the counter smiling through her teeth at those assholes. She hated watching them eat, hated drowning in the wordless chatter of their inane conversation, shivering and sweating and thinking about just how long it had been since there was anything in the black leather pouch.

She would call in sick at the restaurant. The thought of working before she'd had a hit was unbearable.

When Charles Conner had come to the door, she hadn't recognized him right away. She had stared at the trailer park manager a moment, wondering why there was a stranger at her door. Behind her, Garrett pinched Sally and Sally kicked Garrett back. Walker just hunched over at the table, glowering at nothing.

Her skin crawled.

Charles had been apologetic, said that he'd put it off as long as he could, but there just wasn't anything he could do. She _did_ have some money – not three months' worth, but enough to satisfy him – but her skin had been crawling, she'd needed a hit so bad! She _needed_ that money. And, anyway, she'd seen in his eyes what he really wanted.

She'd payed Charles with her body before. Once upon a time, when it was all she'd had. She leaned close to him. His eyes were red, as though he'd not stop crying in all the time since Michael died. She touched her lips to his ear, and she whispered something there. The waffle-maker light was green when she'd gotten back inside, waffles burnt black and beginning to fill the room with smoke.

She met him at the hotel a few hours later. It had all been so familiar, coming back like muscle memory:

When it was done she sighed. She shut her eyes, let her hands slid down off his back, let her legs untangle themselves from around his torso, let him slip out of her. Charles was breathing heavily into her mussy red hair, panting like a dog, the breath searing and ragged in his throat. She rolled off him and lay still on the bed.

"I'm sorry," he said, "I can't..."

"Don't be sorry," Kim said, snatching a tissue off the bedside table to wipe herself between her legs. The tissue came away damp and warm. "You're doing just fine."

"Am I?" Charles laughed weakly, still struggling to catch his breath. "Thanks for saying so, anyway."

She turned towards him, resting her hand gently on his arm. "I mean it."

He slid his arm away from her, rubbing his wrists. "I'll bet you say that to everyone."

She brushed her knuckle along his shoulder. "I don't _do_ this anymore... Not for anyone else."

He lifted an eyebrow. "You expect me to believe that?"

"I don't care what you believe. It's true. You know me, Charles. Would I lie?"

"Yes."

She laughed.

He stared at the ceiling. "But... thanks, anyway. This was... I needed this. Patty hasn't... I mean, she isn't..."

"You can tell me." She was used to this. Sometimes they needed to talk. Fucking was simple, you could get fucked anywhere. Talking was harder, finding somebody who would really listen. She would kill to have somebody like that. She couldn't tell Dan things, not the things that she really needed to say. It was hard to talk. But listening was easy enough, once you knew how.

"Since it happened, you know. She won't even look at me."

She kissed his shoulder. "I'm sorry. That must be hard."

"I think she blames me."

"For Michael?"

"Don't say his name. Not you... just don't say it."

Her breath caught in her throat. She wasn't surprised; she was used to hearing things like that from men. She wasn't surprised. What was surprising, though, was that it hurt this time.

"I'm sorry." He wouldn't look at her. "I shouldn't have said that. Shouldn't have even _come_ here. This isn't... I can't do this anymore..."

She ran her hand over his shallow chest. It bristled with wiry gray hair. She liked the feel of a man's hair between her fingers, it reminded her of being young. She let her hand stray down his belly, down to the thick tangle of pubic hair between his legs. His penis was pale and semi-erect. There were more pills on the bedside table. "Maybe if I was on top?"

"I told you I can't do this."

"You've said that before. You don't mean it." That was his ritual, no different from hers. She was used to it by now. She brushed her lips across his cheek. "Come on, let's try"" She straddled his belly and, slowly, she lowered herself onto him, guiding his hardening phallus inside with one hand. She settled herself on him, and began gently to rock her hips.

He shuddered, and reached up his right hand to touch her breast. He caressed her skin, very gently, scarcely touching her. He brushed his thumb over her nipple. "I miss him, you know. I never thought I would. Never even... liked him all that much. God... I miss him, though..."

She bit her lower lip. His hands were rough, but she was used to that. "Don't talk," she murmured, "stay with me." She liked this part, liked to feel them inside of her. It didn't matter who it was, they were all the same. They all felt good.

She looked down at the man between her legs. There was nothing there in the darkness, just the shape of a face against the white pillow. He could have been anybody. He was nobody to her, just money made flesh. She felt a sneer forming on her lips. There was a fire in her, starting in her loins and burning up through her belly. She looked closer at him. Something glimmered on his face, a wetness reflecting the faintest light. She slowed, "Are you alright?"

He nodded. "Sorry, I- I'm just..."

"Charles?" she reached down to touch his face, "Are you crying?"

He was choking on his tears. "Just don't let go of me," he choked, clutching her body, digging his fingers into her flesh, "don't let go!"

Kimberly read the bus schedule again. She wondered how much her children knew. The younger ones, anyway, they might still be unaware. She'd never regretted them, exactly, but there were times... It would have been so much easier on her own. But she couldn't bear to be alone. She needed children around her, needed their innocence like the stars by which ancient mariners charted their way back home. They would show her the way.

Her fingers drummed on the metal bench. There were spiders building complex webs inside her eyeballs; she could feel their lacy feet. She needed a hit so bad. She would rather die than go on like this. Her fingers curled, fingernails biting into the palms so hard that it drew blood.

Charles hadn't wanted to leave after they were done. Some guys were like that. Most of them, really. They didn't really come to her for sex, even if they thought they did. They really came because they needed somebody to be close to, a body to pull tight against their own. Someone who would listen to them and not judge or dismiss. She could understand that, she supposed, but there was always a part of her that just shut down after they'd finished, an untouchable part of her which retreated into that warm post-coital glow and could not be coaxed back out by any show of misplaced affection.

She only wanted the sex and the money. Maybe that was wrong of her. Maybe she was messed up somehow. She'd often thought so. But she only had so much love to give, she couldn't spare any for them. They were only business.

He ended up giving her extra. She resented it, of course, but not so much that she wouldn't take it. "I just want to help out," he said, bills sliding against each other like sandpaper. He counted them out from one hand to the other.

She took the money. Two hundred dollars, ten twenty dollar bills that looked like they'd come straight from the hands of a banker. "That's very generous, Charles."

He put his hands in his pockets. "You're worth every penny."

She smiled, resisting the urge to shove the money in her pocket and run out the door, and she leaned forward to plant a gentle kiss on his wrinkled cheek. "Anytime," she murmured.

He brightened. "You'd come back then?"

She hesitated. "I mean, of course..." She ran her thumb along the edge of the folded bills. It didn't count if it was just him, did it? She could allow herself that much. As long as Dan never found out.

"Right," he nodded, trying to disguise his disappointment, "I know. Of course."

That was the part of it she hated most. The look in their eyes when it came crashing down on them, the realization brought home that they had only purchased a fiction, the simulacrum of love, nothing but bright lip gloss on a bought-and-paid-for semblance. She hated that look, she hated the men who gave it to her. Why did they always try to make her feel guilty for not falling in love with them? "This was your choice!" she wanted to shout it in their faces, "What did you expect!"

They left the hotel together, he even held the door for her.

Kim sighed. The bus was never coming, she might as well just _walk_ home. Maybe there had been an accident. She wondered if she would read about it in the paper the next day, a bus overturned on the highway or something like that. Maybe she was just misreading the schedule...

There was a McDonald's across the street. The gleaming reflection of the yellow arches was caught in the dusky half-light, scattered on the glass like sunlight. A man stood on the corner in a dirty wife-beater. He wore a dog collar and barked at the passing traffic. He stared at her, tongue hanging from his mouth. She looked away, up at the bus schedule, her toes curling inside her shoes. She couldn't quite make sense of it, the arrangement of letters and numbers, every time she tried to focus on one line it slipped away from her, like dust through her fingers.

It was irrelevant, though, as the bus finally did arrive just a few minutes later, pulling up out of the night like a great roaring beast. She got on in a hurry, clutching the precious black pouch to her chest.

She'd had to go to Robert for the stuff. She hated doing it, but there hadn't been any other options. Usually she got it from Kevin Peterson, but she hadn't been able to reach him. That left Robert himself.

He told her to come to his new house, which was strange. He was usually so careful.

She'd found herself standing on the lawn of the lonely house just before nightfall. The waterfall shone in the sunset light like broken crystal. She put her hands in her pockets, digging at the turf of the meticulously cared-for lawn with the toe of her shoe. Her breath misted before her, gathering on the cool air like smoke. She tried not to breathe. The black pouch bulged awkwardly in her pocket.

He came outside to meet her, the light at his back spilled his shadow across the lawn; it crawled there, vast and formless and black. He lit a cigarette, and the flare of the lighter illuminated his face with an eerie glow. The forest beyond his property was lurching and murky.

He held out his hand without a word. She gave him the money, all that she'd gotten from the park manager and most of what she'd had saved. She didn't want to have to come back.

He reached into the pocket of his jacket and handed her a small parcel. She shoved it into the pouch, clutching it in both hands, already deathly afraid that it would go missing somehow if she didn't keep in contact with it at all times.

Robert smiled, his smile forming around the cigarette between his lips. He blew smoke out his nose. "You're looking good," he said.

She felt dead sometimes. Like she was a stitched together bag of nothing, a red-lipped smile sewn on and big bright eyes perpetually open. She put that smile on now, stretching it across her mouth like her face was a rubber mask. She stood there, wiping her damp palms on her flanks, desperate to leave. She didn't want to be near him anymore, on that lawn watching him smoke, listening to his waterfall burbling. Her daughter was inside that house. How had that ever happened?

"Thanks," she said.

"You want to come inside?" he shrugged in the direction of the house.

"Why would I want that?"

"We're family."

"We're _not_."

He held the cigarette out, turning it in his fingers, studying it. "Don't say that."

"Why shouldn't I?"

"Because it isn't true. We _are_ family."

She scoffed. "Oh _please_. Is she in there? Is she here?"

"Alice?"

"Of _course_ Alice! Who else would I be talking about?"

"I don't know."

"Is there anyone else?"

"Only you."

She stared at him. She could feel the tears in her eyes. It was difficult to breathe. "Oh, fuck you. Fuck _you_ , Bob!"

He laughed gently.

"Is that why you brought me here? So you could... could... Oh, I don't even know the word!"

"Fuck you?" he echoed her, still grinning. His teeth gleamed horribly in the rosy light.

" _Goddamn_ it, Robert! How _can_ you?" Her toe tore a little chunk of sod away from the lawn, peeling it off the at the place where the driveway met the grass.

He tossed his cigarette into the damp gravel and ran his tongue between his teeth. "Is this the part where the degenerate junkie who can't keep her legs shut tells me what a _bad man_ I am, and how dare I?"

"Why are you doing this to us?"

"Who's _us_?"

"My _family_!"

"I am your family."

"You fucking left me, Bob! You left me and you married _her_. Just to... what, just to punish me?"

His smile slipped away. "You don't know what you're talking about."

"Don't tell me I don't know what I mean. I know exactly what I mean. And I know you."

"Don't start pretending to care about your children now. I know better."

"I _couldn't_ do it, Bob! I couldn't have another one!"

His eyes flashed. "We're not fucking talking about that."

"Maybe we should. That's what this is all about, isn't it? That's the _reason_ , isn't it?"

He narrowed his eyes. "Get over yourself, Kimberly. Get back to your fucking trailer and explain to Sally why you'd rather shoot up than be her mother." Without another word, without even giving her the chance to answer, he went back into the house.

Kim couldn't do anything but watch him leave, breathing fog into the night air. She couldn't follow, couldn't let Alice see her here, especially not like this. Her hands were closed tight around black leather bag, her skin already clammy with anticipation.

A half-hour later she was getting onto the bus, waiting to get home. She stared out the window at the sidewalk sliding away outside, at her reflection shimmering formlessly in the glass. Her hands shook. She looked at the bus full of people and knew that she was utterly alone.

She couldn't wait. Why should she wait?

The bus stopped, and she was on her feet without thinking, climbing down onto the cold street, crossing the road under the pale light of the street-lamp, pushing through the doors of the grimy gas station on the corner.

Her breath was coming fast, her limbs trembling. There was an overweight man in a scruffy vest scratching tentatively at a lottery ticket. He watched her go into the bathroom.

The door swung shut behind her, and she was plunged into a sudden silence, a quiet that was broken only by the hum of the florescent light and the moan of the plumbing.

She put the toilet lid down and locked the stall door. For a moment she stood there, looking down at the black U-ring seat on the well-worn gas station toilet. The thought filtered through her mind that she didn't really like what she was doing. But it was too late now to turn back; she was in the grip of it.

Her fingers were unzipping the little black pouch, trembling as they did. She knelt before the toilet. Slowly, carefully, her hands shaking, she took out the contents of the bag and laid them one by one on the toilet lid: two sterile hypodermic needles, a handful of cotton balls in a zip-lock bag, a worn and discolored spoon, a heavy metal cigarette lighter with the image of a Chinese dragon stenciled on the side, and then the little parcel which Robert had given her. All her works.

She arranged the contents of the pouch neatly on the toilet seat, laying the needles parallel, the bag and the spoon and the lighter beside them. The plastic caps on the needles were made of hard cloudy plastic that smothered the needle-tips beneath. She took one off and held up the needle, staring at its fierce silver length, narrow as a pin all the way to the wicked point. She shivered with excitement.

She'd always been frightened of needles as a little girl. Still was, actually. She remembered her first time, the way her hands had trembled, the way she'd bit down on her tongue when the sharp tip brushed the soft skin of her inner arm, bit down hard enough to fill her mouth with the coppery taste of blood. He'd been with her then, Jeffrey's father.

She'd tried talking to Jeffrey, tried so hard. He didn't want anything to do with her. The one time she did get in touch with him, the conversation had been short:

"Are you doing alright?" she'd asked.

"What happened on April seventh?"

"What do you mean?"

"I saw the photo, Mom."

"What are you talking about?"

"The picture. The picture Robert has."

"Jeffrey? What are you talking about?"

"You don't even remember, do you?"

"I guess I don't."

"Why did you ever do that, Mom. Why would you do that to yourself?"

"I wanna see you, Jeffrey. I wanna be part of your life."

"Don't dodge the question."

"But I don't know what you want me to say!"

"Just tell me the truth! Why is it so fucking hard for people to just say how things really are?"

"You should stay away from him, Jeffrey."

"Who?"

"You _know_ who! _Him_. Don't get yourself in trouble. You have no idea how bad it can be."

"I know what it's like to be in trouble, Mom."

"No you don't. You wouldn't have to ask me _why_ if you knew what it was like."

"Why what?"

"Why I ever did it."

"I can't talk to you anymore."

"Please don't... don't shut me out."

"Goodbye, Mom."

Remembering it now, she wanted to cry. But she was too excited, and anyway there seemed to be no moisture left in her body.

The heroin into the spoon, shavings in distilled water, the lighter held beneath the silver metal, the bubbling, the needle prick, the cotton swab held against her inner arm. Then the blissful all-consuming stupor: all those feelings of guilt and regret and fear and self-loathing and hatred and betrayal and unhappiness, all those feelings vanishing, spilling towards the drain in the floor like so much waste-water.

* * *

Eight hours later the sun rose like a furious red god, lifted its great head to look down in silent judgment on the world. And all the people were scurrying about, frantic as insects, all clutching blindly to their hard-won flecks of necessity.

### Burial

The day of the funeral, Edward went for a walk. His shoes left heavy prints in the giving earth. He stopped and looked back along the twisting path, traced his route as far back as he could. Lonely footfalls in the fog. There was mist rising from the surface of the lake, wrapping about the shaggy trees which ran along the bank and enveloping them in pale cloud.

He'd come down the trail many times with Adelaide; it felt wrong to walk it alone. She'd had a determined way of moving, swiftly from one point to the other, never mind the fact that they were just going to turn around and come back the same way again.

He didn't like walking alone, he decided. The silence seemed to peel back layers of hideous noise. He heard the dark water lapping quietly at the bank, brushing feather-light and scraping the ground very slowly away. He heard the birds high in the trees chirping and flitting from branch to branch, their desperation hidden behind sweet song. He heard the world eating itself.

The rising sun seared the mist from the lake. There was a pair of ducks paddling silently on the water, every so often bobbing their heads under the surface after some morsel.

His father had taken him duck hunting once, years and years ago, during the war. Dad got his draft notice in the mail, but before he went away he took his son duck hunting. Edward had been ten years old, maybe. The drive out, he remembered, had taken a very long time. They had gone deep into the woods.

Edward remembered crouching on the shore of a boggy pond, clutching a bone-cold rifle in his pale fingers and staring out into the endless tangles of cattails. He remembered the dog's golden fir, matted and damp, remembered its lithe canine body dripping and stinking. He remembered a dead fowl deposited beside his father like a bag of torn feathers. The roar of the gun in his hands, the kick of it against his shoulder. All he could think of was the men who would be shooting at his father, and when the dog brought back the dead thing he had been wiping away tears.

"They'll try and take this from us one day, son." His father had said, gesturing out at the swampy expanse of dirty water. He gave his gun a shake, "They try to take this too."

Edward's teeth had chattered. He'd nodded, because he knew that he was supposed to. The dog brushed wetly up against him, mouth open in an brainless smile.

"Remember, Edward, you've got to fight for what's yours. They don't care about you, none of them. That's why you've gotta fight. Not for them, but for _this_ ," he gave the dirt an emphatic thump with the butt of his rifle, "for this place."

It was the most Edward could remember his father ever telling him at one time. There had been a sort of desperation in his eyes, an overwhelming need to be understood, to share something which was beyond the grasp of his agrarian elocution.

Edward had been so sure that his father would die, was so convinced by his fear that he eventually accepted it as fact, as having already happened. But his father didn't die. He came back from the war, back from those scattered pacific islands with names that Edward couldn't even pronounce, and they never went hunting again, never went back to that swampy killing field which had been his father's whole reason for fighting, as far as Edward could tell.

And now children were raised by computer pornography and Japanese video-games while their parents slaved their lives away in grim office buildings. There was a new war now, though there didn't seem to be a proper enemy. Edward could not remember a time in his life when there hadn't been a war, American men off in some meager little country, dying in their droves while he watched it on the television.

_They'll try and take this from us_.

Edward watched the ducks floating gracefully on the black surface of the water, and as he watched he felt the world shrink around him, blotting out everything but the lake and the mist, the trees and the birds, the soft dark dirt under his feet. He closed his eyes, and he thought he might forget that anything else existed in the whole of the universe.

* * *

He cleared his throat into the microphone.

"Adelaide was..." Edward licked his lips, "a special woman. She meant a lot to all of us. She meant a lot to me. She was... a good person."

A hot August wind cut through the graveyard. The world was still in bloom. That seemed wrong. Edward through of the withered tree on the side of the road where she had died. There were five other people gathered around the grave. The priest, a nephew and his wife, Patricia Conner. Isabelle Wernick was there too, stuck in a wheelchair and neck brace, sobbing gently into a pale white hanky.

The Verden graveyard was a miserable place, sprawling inordinately large along a fenced-in hillside. The wind cut across the dell, and lush grass swayed against the gravestones, shimmered like a green ocean washing up on gray-black islands.

They had asked him to say a few words, and of course he couldn't think of any now. What could he say? It wasn't as though her death had meant anything. It had just been an accident. Blind chance. It didn't _mean_ anything. He hadn't said any words when they buried Samantha. They had all been worried then, his family, her family, their friends, they kept telling to him to open up, to let it all out. They'd all wanted him to bare his soul, when he'd scarcely been able to bear it. He hadn't wanted to open up, couldn't risk giving the grief a chance to escape. Grief was the only part of her he had left. He couldn't just let it go. And now there was another dead, and he felt the grief for Samantha even more keenly.

"I... I loved Adelaide," he said. The late summer heat beat down on the lonely graveyard. "She was a good friend."

* * *

Edward looked up at the imaged projected up on the wall. It was a grainy picture of a ruined canal tunnel. There was a narrow dirt pathway leading through. A thin sludge of water ran still in the bottom of the canal, down into the darkness of the wide mouth. Vegetation hung from the stone, long strands of draped ivy hanging over the gateway. The picture was washed out, tinged faintly a dirty amber. The date written beneath it was July, 1971.

He stared into the mouth of the tunnel. It seemed to go on forever into the blackness.

Edward clicked the button, turning to the next slide, an image of a vast wooden gate in the canal, grown over and rotted out until the abandoned lock seemed more a part of nature than a machine. A woman stood above the lock, grinning at the camera. Samantha. She was in the next picture too, her eyes lit up, her soft blond hair shining in the sunlight.

Edward looked up at the picture, staring into the glow. He felt an emptiness yawning up inside him. She had been gone for so long.

He turned swiftly to the next frame, racing ahead past those images of her face which he could not bear to look on. Eventually, it got to be too much for him, he shut off the projector and went digging in the boxes in the closet, yanking out the stack of tattered letters which she'd sent him, all those years ago when she'd been traveling across the country. They were all addressed to him, return addresses scattered haphazardly across the US.

Samantha Greer, her name printed in neat dark ink.

Edward picked up the letter on top, extracting the folded paper from its well-worn envelope. He unfolded the yellowed page, his fingers moving restlessly across the rough paper. There was an old coffee stain on the bottom of the page, hers not his. Postmark Los Angeles.

Dear Eddie,

I went surfing! You would have laughed, I made a complete goof of myself! Daphne and me had the whole beach in stitches. Every time I tried to stand up she'd panic and grab hold of my board. She must have dumped me in the ocean half-a-dozen times!

_Someone saw a shark in the water yesterday, so we've been keeping to the beach since. I think we both prefer to have a bit of_ soild _solid ground under our feet. You'll go crazy when you see me. I'm so tan, you probably won't hardly recognize me._

_I hope you're getting all my letters. I can just imagine coming home and finding out you haven't got a single one. Fingers crossed! Anyway, I know you'd write back if we weren't moving around so much. Why don't you write something and just hold onto it?_ I'll read it when _You can read it to me when I get back._

It's been such an amazing trip. This really is an incredible country, Edward. I hope you'll come with us next time, I don't think I could stand to be away from you for a whole three weeks again. Maybe next year?

Yikes! I'm already running out of paper, and I've only just started. This is the last of my paper, so I guess I'll just have to wrap this up. I've got dozens hundreds of stories to tell you. Guess I'll have to do it in person.

Daphne says hi! I'll both be back in New York before you can snap your fingers, so just hold on a little longer.

Love, love, love, love,

Sam

Edward folded the letter again by the familiar lines and returned it to the envelope. I'll be back soon. He had been waiting so long.

### Rough, Lovely

Jeffrey lay on the artificial beach and watched his family floating like corpses in the dark pools below. There was gritty sand between his toes and in his hair. The blond in his hair had mostly grown out. Eventually, the person you really were would always show itself.

He had decided to leave New York. Sitting alone in the dark of Michael's apartment, he had worked it all out: where to go, how to pay for it, when to leave, everything. He should have left weeks ago. Somehow though, he just couldn't get up the momentum.

Alice rolled over onto her back. Her bare toes dug in the warm sand. She sighed softly, her eyes shut and turned towards the light. "I hate this time of year."

"Why?"

"I don't know. It's the end of summer. I don't like the cold."

"It's not so bad."

"Tell me about California. It must have been so beautiful there." Alice tilted her face upwards, like a flower turning unconsciously towards the sun, hungry for it.

"I don't know. It was hot."

"Oh _come on_. It couldn't have been _that_ bad."

Jeffrey shrugged.

She grunted incredulously. "Did you see any famous people at least?"

"Nope."

"Too bad."

"Yeah."

"I think I saw someone famous last year."

"Yeah? Who?"

"I don't know their name. I only recognized the face."

"Do they really count as famous, then? If you don't know their name?"

"It still counts."

"Okay."

"I always wanted to be famous."

"What for?"

She sighed again. "Doesn't everybody want to be famous?"

"That's not what I mean. What did you want to be famous for _doing_?"

"Oh. Well... I don't really know."

Jeffrey looked out across the man-made beach. Treman Park. The air there was clean and the damp rocks shone dappled in the filtered light. Pools of shade stretched out across the glassy black water, its mirror surface broken by pale white bodies splashing aimlessly below. They leapt one by one into the water, limbs flailing as they fell. He couldn't stop watching. Every time one of them went laughing and shrieking into the air, every single time they jumped he thought that he saw in their faces a glimpse of Michael Conner. Then they hit the surface, vanished, broke through again from beneath as though resurrected from the depths.

Robert Summers was down there, moving slowly through the dark water with Sally clinging to his shoulders. He grinned wide as a shark, blowing bubbles low in the water. Jeffrey couldn't understand why he wouldn't leave them alone. What could he want from them? It just didn't make sense.

It had been Robert's idea to come to the park. Like most of Robert's ideas, it was more an order than a suggestion. He took Jeffrey first, turning up without warning at the apartment. Jeffrey couldn't say how Robert had known where he was living. His first thought when he'd open the door to find his brother-in-law standing in the hall was that Robert had come to kill him. The idea hadn't been as alarming as he'd thought it might be. But the older man hadn't said anything, only given him a stern look and said that Alice was waiting for him in the car and that he'd better bring along a bathing suit.

They went to the trailer park, and Robert disappeared into Kim's home. A few minutes later he came back out with Sally in his arms. Garrett and Walker were right behind, and Kimberly at the rear, brushing her damp cheeks and looking rather chastised. Robert ignored all questions as to their destination. They had all done as he asked without argument; it seemed natural somehow to do what he told them. When they arrived at the State Park and he told them to "have fun," they did their best to follow that order too.

Kim was sitting on a rock in the shallows, watching through her sunglasses with no apparent emotion as her three youngest children paddled in the cold and seemingly bottomless water. Something was going on between Robert and her, Jeffrey could tell. He couldn't help but be curious, though he knew that he was probably better off not knowing. Alice seemed to know something about it: she wouldn't even look at Kim anymore, and she'd not said two words to Robert.

Jeffrey shut his eyes. The Burke family. It was like a sick joke: five children by different fathers, the daughter's husband almost old enough to be her parent and probably fucking the mother. He felt like an alien among them, though he knew that he belonged there. That's why he hadn't put up a fight when Robert came to collect him. It had felt like going home.

_We're trash. We're the object lesson_.

Jeffrey tried not to cry. He hated crying. Alice was watching him, he could feel her gaze prickling his back. He turned his face away from her. He couldn't let her see him like this.

"Want to take a walk up around the falls?" she asked, standing up without waiting for an answer. "Do you remember when we used to do that?"

He nodded.

"Are you coming?"

"You go ahead."

"Please, Jeff."

He rubbed his eyes and sighed. "Alright. Should we tell them where we're going?"

Alice shook her head. "They'll figure it out."

Jeffrey looked back. His siblings seemed like they were in another world almost, down in the maw of some primordial crater poised to swallow.

Alice was already walking. He hurried after, tugging on his t-shirt. The sand burned beneath his bare feet. It gave way after a few paces to loose black soil. Gnarled tree roots twisted through the dirt, clawing at the beach like the fingers of the earth, feeling at the foreign ground as though clutching for understanding.

Alice cut across the dirt, clambering up a sheer slope and slipping under the raw wood fence. He scrabbled after her, feeling vaguely infantile as he climbed. He was embarrassed at how much he liked it, the freedom, the simple childish pleasure of pulling himself up the soft dirt slope, his fingers sinking into the giving earth. Nostalgia was like quicksand: venture too far out and it would pull you under. He could almost taste the memories rising, tinted gold and bright as the sunrise. Living in the past was a false joy, no more true than a drug high.

Alice was breathing hard, her hands on her hips. "Come on!" She laughed. She seemed to be coming alive. It was like the girl he remembered had been sleeping and had now finally woken up: his big sister.

It was an illusion, he knew. Robert would be waiting for her when they came back down. The world would be waiting to swallow them both. He hurried after her, upwards and away, far far away.

* * *

The last six weeks had melted into nothing. He went to work when he woke up and he fell asleep practically as soon as he came back to the apartment. His few spare moments had been frittered away reading Michael's guilty-pleasure thrillers and watching shitty TV. Most of what he ate came out of boxes and cans; he hardly ever went out. He'd given up hope of finding anything more out about Michael. There didn't seem to any avenues left to follow. If the police had discovered anything, they weren't sharing.

He'd talked to most of the other tenants in the apartment building. Hardly any of them had even known Michael, and those that did were less than forthcoming. There was one guy, an older man maybe in his fifties, who said that he knew Michael "in a professional capacity," but had refused to elaborate. Jeffrey didn't push. He spent a lot of time looking at the Polaroid photograph of Michael. None of what he'd found out had helped him understand _why_. Why would anybody do that? It probably accounted for Alice's old books showing up in Mike's apartment. Maybe they'd known each other through Robert.

No matter how he put his mind to it, however, he couldn't connect the Michael he'd found to the boy he'd grown up with. What could change a person like that?

He thought about the pictures in Robert's suitcase. Presumably, some of the people in the photographs would know Mike, might even know something about what had happened last year. The trouble was that he hadn't recognized any of them, nor did he have even the first clue of how he might go about locating them. The only one he could talk to was his mother, and he was nowhere near ready for that.

He might have actually gotten up the courage to do it, given enough time and frustration. But then he met Gloria White.

She had knocked on his door at half-past-eight on a Tuesday night. He opened it and there she was, standing in the gloomy hall, beaming like a flower in her butter-yellow sundress. "I heard that you've been asking people about Eddie," she said. She had a soft, earnest sort of voice.

"Yeah, I guess so," he replied, twisting the doorknob nervously. Eddie, that was the name Mike had used.

"Why haven't you asked me?" She had soft brown eyes, and the curly dark sort of hair which seemed to be up in ribbons, even when it wasn't. She looked like she was about his age.

"I don't know. Who are you?"

She extended one hand. "Gloria White. My daddy owns the place."

He shook her hand. She had a firm grip. "Yeah? I didn't know you lived here."

"I live with my mother," she said, cocking her head in a direction vaguely indicating a place other than the one they were standing in.

"Did you know him? Eddie Conner?"

"Why are you asking about him?"

"Because I want to know what happened to him."

"He died." She had bright and darting eyes.

Jeffrey clung awkwardly to the open door. "Do you want to come in?"

She nodded, and stepped past him into the room, going straight for the couch and sitting down. She stared at him expectantly. The depth in her eyes seemed in the harsh light of the apartment to be empty, bottomless.

"Why do you think something happened to Eddie?" she asked.

"What do you mean? Something _did_ happen. You said it yourself: he died."

"Where you a friend of his?"

"Sort of."

" _Sort of_?" she parroted back, "Does that mean that you payed him to sleep with you?"

"No! I wouldn't do..." Jeffrey shut the door. "I guess you know what he did then."

"Michael did what people told him to."

"I thought his name was Eddie?"

"We both know it wasn't."

"Do you know how it started?"

She shook her head. "He didn't like to talk about it. Not to me anyway. And not that we were all that close. He wasn't much good at the whole double life thing though, couldn't tell a lie to save his life."

"What are you saying?"

"Nothing. Just saying that it wasn't that big a secret."

"His parents didn't know. Still don't."

"What makes you think that?"

He was taken aback by that. "Well, uh... They don't."

She smiled. "You're probably right. I don't think they would have wanted to notice something like that. _I_ noticed the very first moment I saw him. He had the strangest aura, like he was slipping away right there in front of me. It didn't happen as soon as I'd expected, but it did happen."

"What do you mean?"

"Isn't it obvious? He didn't want to be alive."

"You think he killed himself?"

"Goodness, I couldn't tell you something like that! How should I know?"

"Did you ever meet the man Michael worked for? Would you recognize him if you saw him?"

She shook her head. "I don't know why you're trying to make a mystery of this, Jeffrey. Michael's dead. Just let him be dead." With that, she stood, smoothed her dress, and walked back out the door.

After she left, he decided to stop asking about Michael. Somehow, it just didn't seem important anymore.

* * *

The path above the falls got narrower as it wound its way up. Jeffrey ran one hand along the wall of layered stone, the other on the smooth wooden railing. It was a dizzying drop down to where the water moved below, deep in the crevice.

Alice was well ahead of him. He turned a corner and found her leaning against the railing, seemingly unafraid of the fall. For a moment, he wondered if she was thinking about jumping.

"Are you doing okay?" he asked.

"I'm alright. Just tired is all."

"That's not what I meant."

She buried her face in her hands. "Everything is fine."

He was breathing hard, his legs aching. "Come on. You didn't bring me all the way up here for the view."

She groaned. "God..."

"What's wrong?"

"Everything."

"It's not that bad."

She shrugged.

Jeffrey sat down against the wall. The stone was warm against his back. "I'm thinking of leaving the country."

She crossed her arms. "Where are you going?"

Jeffrey shrugged again, realizing too late that this wasn't really something he wanted to talk about with her. He was a bit embarrassed, like he'd exposed something meant to be hidden. "I... I guess Europe. You know, to look at the buildings. The architecture. It's something I've been wanting to do for a long time."

Alice chewed her lower lip. "Huh."

"I know, it's stupid."

"No, it sounds great," she said, "I think you should go. If that's what you want."

"Really?"

She tried to smile, but she just looked sick. "You can't wait to get away from me, right? I don't blame you."

"It's not like that. It doesn't have anything to do with you."

She looked down again. The waterfall was roaring. "Oh," she said, and her voice was very small.

They started walking again without another word, trudging up the ancient stone steps. They stood at the top, breathing hard, and they looked out with their eyes shaded against the glare of the sun.

She touched his arm. "What do you know about him?"

Jeffrey stared down at the falls below. He trembled. He wished that she wouldn't touch him, and that she wouldn't ever stop. "Who?"

"I know you found something."

"You mean Robert."

"Of course I mean Robert."

Jeffrey shrugged. "He's involved in some something. I can't prove anything, though."

Alice gnawed her lower lip. "What's he doing?" Her voice was tight, strained.

"How can you not know?"

She turned away. "He hides that stuff from me, Jeff! What do you think it's like? You think he tells me about that kind of thing?"

"Well... I don't know."

"He doesn't tell me what's he into, Jeff, so I need you to do it for me, okay?"

Jeffrey thought back to the suitcase in Robert's hotel room. "I think he's got people... working for him. Mike was, I guess. Mom too."

Alice wouldn't look at him. She stared blankly out into the tumbling whitewater. "Do you think he killed Mike?"

Jeffrey hesitated. "I don't know. I think he could have. I don't know. I just..." He took a steadying breath. "I just know that he's... a bad man."

Alice laughed under her breath. "A ' _bad man_.' That sounds so... trite. I mean, what is a bad man, anyway? Sounds redundant." She laughed again, sharply, as though she'd surprised herself.

Jeffrey felt his features freezing into a rictus grin.

She touched his hands again. Her fingers were soft, they felt so fragile against him. "Not you, Jeff. You're one of the good ones."

He had nothing to say to that.

Her mouth opened. She was holding something back. A question. He had a feeling he didn't want to hear it, so he didn't say anything.

"Jeff?"

"Yeah?" He felt his blood go cold. He could still run... There was still time...

She met his gaze, and he found that he could not look away. They stared at each other like lovers on the plateau, deep into each other's eyes. "Will you do something for me?" she asked.

"What?" His throat was dry.

She reached under her clothes and took out a gun. It was Robert's, Jeffrey recognized it immediately. The oiled leather holster gleamed in the high sunlight, the cold metal shone. She just held it there, the muscles in her cheek twitching. He looked at the gun for what seemed to him to be a very long time. "Where did you get that?" he asked.

"I found it in his things."

"Won't he notice that it's missing?"

She ignored him. "He's having a party. He has a party every year. September tenth, it's always on the tenth. Even after what happened, he's still going to... It's gonna be at our house this time, the new house."

"Where did you find it? Won't he check?"

"It's the perfect chance. You know where the new house is, right? I'll give you the address. It's easy to find. He'll be there on the tenth, Jeff. And... and you can leave the country just like you planned. No one will suspect you. There will be a crowd, I'll tell the police something... They'll believe me, I know they will."

Jeffrey swallowed. She'd been thinking about this for a while, that was obvious. "Why can't _you_ do it?" he hissed.

Her mouth opened, but there were no words, not for a while. Then: "I... I love him..." She leaned against the guard-rail and she stared out. She dropped the gun to the hot black dust.

Jeffrey picked it up. The weight of it was familiar in his hand. He didn't quite know what to do with it, so he shoved it into his pocket. "You don't really want this."

"I do. Oh _God_ I want it so much." She started to cry.

"Are you sure?"

"He killed Mike, I know he did, I just _know_. He's gonna kill me too someday... You said it yourself. He's a bad man." She looked at him. Her makeup was smeared, and for a moment, she looked just like their mother.

"Okay," he said. "I'll do it."

She came to him and she wrapped her arms around him. Her knees were smeared with dirt. She lifted up on her tiptoes and kissed him gently on the forehead, and she smiled. Her expression was wistful; it that made his chest ache with regret. Regret on her behalf, he supposed. Sympathy.

He couldn't get out. It was like his fingers were clawing at the edge of a great sloping pit, never finding purchase. Every time he tried to get away he found himself unable. He'd _had_ to come back to the Verden, back to the trailer park. He was tied to them, to Alice. You couldn't leave your family.

She kissed him again, then she started back down the path.

Jeffrey remained a moment longer, staring out at the world below. A carpet of trees was spread out before him, leaves tinged red and yellow as though they were slowly catching fire. Rivers and waterfalls cut through the woods; he could see water shining in the summer light, wet rocks glistening like pieces of a cracked mirror. New York was turning red. It always turned red this time of year, like the hills were washed in blood.

He knew then that he would never leave.

### Everything Ends

She is staring at the ceiling.

Her hands are trembling. She has never felt this way before. She knows now that she has never been truly happy before and will never be happy again without it. That thought wakes some vestige of sadness in her, though not strong enough to break through the good feeling. She clutches for it but it is already gone. He has taken it from her.

The ceiling moves. The floor moves. The sofa-chair moves. She moves.

_Come on. Let me show you the inside. This way. Watch the gate, it sticks. Down here through the garden. Just stick to the path and you won't get lost. Stay to the right, okay? The stairs are at the far end of the path, just stay right and don't leave the path. I'll meet you there, just gotta grab something from the car first_.

His hands are moving down there. He pushes her legs apart and he kisses the insides of her thighs. They are bare. She hates her thighs. Hates to be looked at without any covering. She cannot find the words to make him stop.

She is staring at the ceiling. She has never been happy before.

Now his hands are pushing inside of her. She doesn't look at him, she doesn't move, the _world_ moves and she is perfectly still. She is sitting in the sofa-chair, her fingers clutching for it; it is gone. He has taken it from her. Something is creeping all over her skin, friendly little insect legs that scuttle and wriggle as they troop ardently across her flesh.

_Sorry, I've never been a, you know, a neat freak. Give me just a sec to tidy up and shit_.

She feels like she is sliding her entire body into a warm rubber glove. She pushes her limbs and her thoughts and her body out into the clinging stuff until it is full and tight around her. His hands are working back and forth in her.

She is staring at the ceiling. She has never been happy before this moment.

Happiness has eluded her all of her life. It comes back to her now. When she is twelve years old she rubs her privates with her wrist. When she is thirteen years old she puts a finger inside of herself and slides it back and forth just a little ways in and afterward she lays in bed shivering and sweating for hours before she is calm enough again to sleep. She does it several times. When she is fourteen years old she wraps her thighs around the old teddy which she had treasured as a little girl and she rubs herself against the fuzzy skin which had once caressed her face and it makes her feel ticklish and good in a way that spreads slowly up inside her belly. When she is sixteen she lets her cousin kiss her down there, just once. But none of it makes her feel happy. Isn't that what sex is supposed to mean? Happiness?

His thing is forcing its way into her mouth. She is too far away from her body to open her mouth. He opens it for her and then his thing is filling her up and he's pushing it in too deep and she gags and drools.

She is staring at the ceiling. She is bursting with light, she has transcended her body. There is only happiness.

_Okay then. Here we go. This shit kicks, I'm not kidding. I don't know, I think I read it somewhere. Look, that's not the point. Give me that. And the lighter. Okay, sit back. Yeah, that chair's fine_.

She remembers her first orgasm. The feel of it was so sweet and full, it made her want to turn into scraps of cloud and drift away on the wind. She saw colors in the backs of her eyes, colors dancing in her brain. It felt so good that she became frightened. Frightened that it would never end, wishing that it wouldn't.

He is sliding his self between her thighs and into herself but that no longer matters to her. Her eyes swim and dance and she can scarcely keep them open. She touches him, meaning to push him off but he is so heavy and her arms are made of paper or air and she cannot push him away. Her head is twitching and eager and energized but still she cannot bring her body properly under control. Normally she would worry about something like this, but she cannot worry now. It's too good for worry.

_You should take your clothes off. For your first time. Trust me. Nah, I'm fine. Come on, take 'em off! Look, will you just... Jesus fucking Christ, you'd think I wasn't doing you a favor here. That's better. Shit... you're so fucking hot. Okay, here you go. Just breathe in, all the way into your lungs, remember. That's right_.

He places it back into her hand and she brings it to her mouth and she sucks on the little glass end and the sweet smoke curls in the bowl, curls through the pipe, curls through her body, curls through her toes and fingers and every part of her as she sucks it.

She stares at the ceiling. She holds it in her hand. She has never felt so happy. She is no longer afraid of happiness. She wants to feel this way always, and she is not afraid.

His thing is filling her, but it is not her that is filled, it is another body. Whose is this body? She rises out of herself and she looks down and she sees him using the body and sees his hands clawing at the body's breasts and sees the body's lips peeled back and the body's teeth grinding and the body's eyes fluttering upwards. She hears the word coming out of his mouth, the same word, again and again and again: the name of the body.

"Gena, Gena, Gena, Gena, Gena," he says.

She is so happy.

### High Gorge Park – Autumn

The earth was cold on the last day of August.

The nameless border collie came from the woods in the misty first hours. Her fur was shaggy black and white around the eyes, tangled with burrs and needles. She had bright gray eyes that mirrored the hazy morning light. No one knew if she had always been wild or if she'd once been tame and was now wild again. But she was loose now, and free.

The bitch padded quietly into the park, nose twitching excitedly as it took in the odors of that place. She went silently from trailer to trailer, sniffing at refuse-heavy garbage cans and dead plants in plastic pots, at car tires and old sneakers left out on welcome mats, at laundry hanging on the crudely strung up lines, all the wreckage of assembled human existence.

The sun melted away the fog. Her ears pricked up at the sounds coming from inside the homes: slipper-clad feet shuffling on scarred floors, water rushing down sink drains, the hissing sputter of showers, the whistle of tea kettles and the dripping of coffee makers, the lethargic scraping of butter-knives across scorched toast and the angry sizzle of bacon in cast-iron pans. Doors opened. Men in rumpled second-hand suits trudged out to their cars. Women with their hair tied back walked to the bus stop and stood there with their arms folded, just waiting.

The bitch returned to the woods, deep into the forest where the thick pines let in no more than a few drops of pale sunshine to the needled floor. She went along the edge of the gorge, nose low to the ground. She came to a place that had been roped off, where tattered police tape hung abandoned from the trees, a yellow and black garland left to adorn wild trees. She sniffed the tape curiously, then moved on, further into to the woods.

Night had fallen before she returned to the park, her mouth red and her hunger sated.

She slunk between the scattered trailer homes, moving low to the ground, liquid as a shadow. Her nose twitched at the pungent stink of the park under dusk. The smell of engine oil settled deep into the earth overwhelmed everything else, covering every other smell like a sheen of filth.

The dog sniffed her way across the park to where a tall woman with short blond hair was getting out of a car, talking loudly at a girl, both their voices jagged and barbed. The woman said, "Well maybe you should have thought about that before you-" but then she saw the dog, and she stopped.

The border collie stood below the door of their trailer, her eyes locked on them and her mouth open, red tongue lolling from her mouth.

"Oh my God," the girl said, startled. "Do you know whose dog that is, Mom?"

"Whose?"

" _I_ don't know. I was asking you."

The tall woman stepped closer, her feet grinding over the gravel street that wound from trailer to trailer. "Do you think it's safe?" she asked, reached her hand tentatively out, even though she was still a half-a-dozen paces away from the animal.

"Uh... well, its mouth isn't foaming, I guess," the girl said, "the mouth foams if it's got rabies, right?"

The tall woman stepped closer. The border collie came towards her. They met between the car and the door, and the dog looked up at her with its clear gray eyes. She reached out and touched the animal's head, patting her tentatively, scratching behind her ears.

The dog panted contentedly, arching towards the woman's fingers.

"Aw, poor girl," the woman murmured, "you just need a little affection. Poor baby. Are you hungry, girl? Where's your home, girl? Who loves you, girl? Who's missing you, girl?"

The dog shook herself and trotted away down the gravel path.

The girl watched her go. "Should we do something?"

The tall woman shook her head. "She's probably just going home."

"What makes you think it's a she?"

The tall woman did not answer.

Dusk was thickening into night when the border collie reached the road. She didn't stop, but went on, moving down the hard path away from High Gorge Park, moving relentlessly towards the great nothingness of the American world, into the summer night as the air turned cold, turned again towards Autumn.

### Part III: September
### September First

Nathan Riley stared up into the hissing water, blinded.

It had been a month almost since he'd last seen Jessica. He was sleeping in his car, parking somewhere different every night. The night before he'd slept in an empty lot overlooking Cayuga Lake. The sunrise had come golden through the clouds while he was driving back to the college, feeling that odd sensation of moving very fast and yet not at all, and the lake below seemed frozen in the misty morning air and he'd started crying so hard that he had to pull over for a while.

The showers were open to the public, but if he went early enough than he would have them to himself, almost like they were his own. He felt the hot water pouring down, almost too hot to stand. A cleansing heat, like bathing in fire, like he was burning away everything that he had once been.

He saw Jessica every time he closed his eyes, her face was drawn on the inside of his mind. He hated her, and loved her more than ever before. It was a complicated love. He was afraid of her, and he liked to be afraid. Fear was something he understood, could cut out and hold up to the light and _know_.

And then there was Gena – her voice on the telephone, hurt and confused, enough to break his heart when she talked. He hadn't been able to say any of the things he'd meant to. He had wanted to tell her that he was going to make everything right again, that he was going to fix it all. He couldn't lie though, not to her.

Nathan felt blindly for the soap. There was a hair stuck in the bar, an incised ridge like a black vein in the slippery lime, a fault-line crack. He looked down at his chest, his dark hair. He plucked the hair from the soap with his fingernails. The bar felt smooth when he ran it over his body, up the inside of the arm, down the outside of the thigh, the shin, the bottom of the foot. It was the way he had been shown as a child, standing naked beside his naked father. He'd loved showering with his father when he was very young, standing there in the man's bare shadow, passed through the curtain of privacy and now face to face. That had ended, of course, when Katrina died. He'd never again seen his father naked.

When the last of the suds had been washed down the drain he turned the knob and watched the stream thin to a trickle, to a drip. He was naked and wet and clean with his hair hanging down in his eyes. The damp air filled his lungs when he breathed.

His faceless reflection stared back in the white tiled wall, and he thought again of Michael Conner. He had met the boy at Robert Burke's place in Syracuse, nearly two years ago now. There had been others before Mike, too many, but he'd _needed_ them. Mike hadn't been like them, though. Mike had understood. And Jessica had liked him. Mike was the only one he ever brought home to her.

They'd had a few good weeks together before it all fell apart, Michael and Jessica and he. Nathan never saw the kid again after the towers went down. Everything had been so confused then, everyone so afraid. And the fear never ended, just stretched thinner and more raw. Nathan realized that he'd never really known Michael, and the thought frightened him because he had been so _sure_ once. Maybe it was never anything more than a lie, an illusion.

Michael _had_ taken their money, after all.

Nathan's toiletries bag sat on the floor just outside the shower. A change of clothes, a towel, shampoo, all the rest. He went naked to the bag and removed his razor. He lifted it and turned it about so that the four sequential blades swam with light. Did people still kill themselves with razors, he wondered, or had the obsolescence of the straight blade put an end to that?

He held the blades experimentally against his wrist, testing angles. The razor brushed like a fingernail against his skin. He bent back his hand, pushing his veins out, and he pressed the razor down. It bit deep into his skin, sliding in with a sharp ease that set Nathan's teeth instantly on edge. "Shit!" Blood welled immediately between the blades and ran down to his naked thighs and belly. "Shit!"

He yanked out a towel and pressed it against his wrist, wrapping it around his arm as the nerves began to throb. His change of clothes spilled from the bag to soak on the damp tile floor.

Blood colored the white towel. What if he died here? What would they say about him?

Nathan Riley, bleeding on the floor of the community college locker-room showers, began to laugh. He laughed until the blood was staunched.

### September Second

Theodore Hemingway walked down the long drive. There were toys abandoned on the lawn: a broken rocking horse sinking into the cold autumn mud, squirt guns laying in puddles of stagnant water, stuffed animals with their fluffy white insides pulled out like spilled organs and their beaded eyes torn off. The broken windows of his house were covered by plastic sheeting, the long pointed shards of glass lying still in the dead brown scrub-grass beneath.

Ted's shirt was stained with sweat, the underarms of the white cotton turned a faint yellow. He coughed hard. He'd been sick for months, a cold he couldn't seem to shake. It was like something deep inside his lungs had come loose, now congealed and hacked painfully out. He coughed up a mouthful of phlegm and spat. His work-boots crunched in the flinty gravel chips. There was a dusty fast-food bag crumpled on the front step; he kicked it aside and it spilled rancid ketchup packets across the stair.

A scrawny figure scampered out the door, a boy wearing a rumpled Mets t-shirt and no pants. The boy snatched at his underwear, tugging it from between his buttocks. "Dad's home!" he bellowed back into the house. He turned to his father for a moment, beaming expectantly.

"Hey," Ted grunted, ruffling the boy's shaggy hair. That's what they did on the TV shows, wasn't it? The boy's hair was greasy and thin. He dashed off down the porch steps and around the corner, leaving his father standing there with his hand out.

Ted coughed again and went inside. His other two boys were fighting, chasing each other around the living room and whooping wordless threats back and forth. The older was waving a green plastic gun threateningly.

"Dad's back!" they chorused when he stepped inside.

"Ted! _Ted!_ " His wife Carol came shrieking into the living room.

Carol's threadbare floral print dress left her knobby knees bare. Her skin seemed drawn tight across her scrawny body, like a garbage bag stretched too far, about to tear on her sharp bones. Her black eyes gleaming angrily, inset in her skull. She waved a coffee-stained piece of paper in her skeletal hand. " _Ted!_ " she shrilled, "What _is_ this!"

Ted coughed. He bent down, his hands on his knees. His insides were seizing up, he felt dizzy, cold and hot at the same time, felt like his skull was shrinking around his brain. "I don't fuckin' know, Carol! You just wave something under my nose and I'm supposed to know what it is?"

Carol lips drew back over her rotten teeth. "Don't you _dare_ swear in front of my children! And you know perfectly well what _this_ is!" She shoved the paper at him.

He glanced down at it. His eyeballs felt like they were itching, he wanted to tear them out of his head and crush them like grapes in his fingers. "Okay. Visa bill. So what?"

"So _what_!" She gasped. The boys ran through the room. Ted felt like he was moving in slow motion, all the world racing by at a breakneck sprint. Carol jabbed at a number on the bill, "Maybe you'd like to explain what you were doing spending nearly a _hundred_ dollars at _that_ place! I know what that place is, Ted!" She lowered her voice to a hiss, "It's a _strip club_ , I've seen the billboards on the highway! I've seen them! I know what it is!"

"Oh, leave me alone, will you?" he moaned desperately, pushing the paper away. He should have used cash at the bar of course, he'd known that... God, he wished he was there now, drunk beneath the twisting women. They were so fucking beautiful, like angels. Ted pressed his fingers against his face. He felt like a bear surrounded by buzzing insects, their stingers sinking into his hide again and again.

Carol shrilled, "No! _No!_ We've got to talk about this! We've got to work this _out_ , Ted! I won't stand for this, you hear me! I won't let you _do this_ to us!"

"What _us_?" he growled, trying desperately to extricating himself from her clawing fingers. Somehow, not intending to, he pushed her away. She hit the drywall and there was a cracking sound – either the wall or her skull he wasn't sure – and she slumped down to the floor, holding her head and sobbing, the visa bill fluttering in her bony hand.

Ted groaned. Why did these things always happen to him? He snatched a beer from the fridge and retreated into the den, slamming the door shut behind him.

Silence.

He popped open the aluminum can and took a long drink, like a first breath of oxygen after being underwater for too long. There was a picture on the wall of Ted and Carol, a picture fifteen years old in a dusty wood frame, glass cracked in one corner. In the picture: Ted, Ted the football player, Ted with the clean-shaved jaw and the broad shoulders. Carol, Carol the cheerleader, Carol with the rosy cheeks and the high firm bosom and all her clean white teeth still in her pretty mouth.

The two of them hand in hand, smiling at their friends behind the camera. High school sweethearts, the American dream.

Ted slumped down into the couch and turned on the television. He took a swallow of beer and let the light from the machine wash over him.

### September Third

Gena Riley stood on the rusted bridge and looked out along the overgrown path of the abandoned train-tracks. She put her hands on the corroded iron and thought of all the heavy black coal-smoke which had billowed up from below in years gone by. She wondered when they had torn up the tracks. She wondered what the trains had carried. She wondered what would die out next. Would they rip out all the paved roads in a hundred years, or leave them webbed black on the world like a mangled net in the grass? Left alone to be slowly reclaimed by nature.

Gena threw a smooth stone. It landed with a clatter on the rocky embankment and trundled down into the shallow water with a little splash.

She walked on. There were birds singing against the setting sun, fluttering aimlessly from branch to branch. The world was so green, she felt like an intruder in her manufactured clothing. Her sneakers kicked across the stony ground of the abandoned overpass. On either side of the rusted bridge the world had gone wild, lush green swaying in the breeze, moving with a beautiful menace uninterrupted but for the lightly trodden dirt path snaking lazily away in either direction.

She felt terribly alone.

Trevor and Molly been gone for more than a week now; Andrew and Jeffrey had been gone a lot longer. She hadn't spoken to her father, didn't even know where he was living. She hardly talked to her mother anymore; there didn't seem to be anything left to say.

She'd seen Carl a few times. Well, more than a few, to be completely honest. She still didn't like him, but he was the only one who actually _wanted_ her, even if it was only for sex. She was somebody desired, and that meant something. And he always had something for her that would help her disappear, something to smoke or ingest or inject. She knew she shouldn't, shouldn't let him or his drugs into her body. She told herself over and over again that she would stop. She cried herself to sleep most nights, and woke with the steely resolve to put him aside. But then she'd be getting off work, her brain aching in her skull and her feet sore in her shoes and she would see him standing there, waiting for her, wanting her. He would look at her, and before she knew it she was going to him across the parking lot and getting into his car, and they would be halfway to his place before she'd even realized what she'd done.

Molly had hugged Gena tightly before she left, whispered in her ear that she would come back as soon as she could. Gena had been tempted to ask why, but she'd just smiled and hugged her back. The day after, Trevor kissed her on the cheek and said that it would be over before she knew it, and then he ran back to his Mom's idling car. _It would be over before she knew it_. What would be over? Whenever she thought about those words it left her uneasy, left her shaking and crying and she had to call Carl and get him to pick her up so she could get screwed and get high until she forgot why she had come to him.

Gena walked north, deep into the swaying grass. She bent down and picked a wild raspberry and held it against the tip of her tongue before biting down. She took off her shoes and stood in the little stream that ran crystal clear through the field and she watched the crayfish creeping beneath the rocks and the little fish scattering. She walked back into Verden along the old train-tracks, carrying her shoes slung over her shoulder. The soles of her wet feet were turned black by the coal dust, and the sun set behind her.

### September Fourth

Richard Ewan stared up at the walls of his trailer, listening to the telephone droning. His art hung on the walls, mounted askew like the haphazardly severed trophy heads of dumb animals.

He hated them. He hated the crude paintings, splashes of color thrown recklessly on curling paper the malformed sculptures. He hated the caricatured busts with their mouths and eye sockets turned inside out. He hated it all, hated every one without exception. As he stared up at the three years' worth of art, he realized that he had no talent, not a shred of artistic instinct, and nothing whatsoever to say. He was a fool, he decided, playacting a miserable charade with no discernible point or purpose.

Richard was tempted, not for the first time, to burn his work, or smash it up if it wouldn't burn. Simply abandon hope and give it all to the fire, transform everything into anonymous ash as a final spiteful act of self-destruction.

Of course, he had felt this way before, and knew from experience that he would regret such an action, that tomorrow he might feel differently. Tomorrow he could be everything he knew now that he was not. The sun was going down.

He heard Catherine's voice again in the phone. His girlfriend – though their relationship was probably too casual to warrant the word – was apologizing for making him wait. He told her not to worry about it.

He'd become so used to her availability that he really hadn't a clue what he might do if she ever left him. So it was a kind of relationship. It had been two weeks since he'd last seen her, but it was as though no time at all had passed. In a sense, none had. He was standing still, with nothing to mark the time but acts of lethargic self-indulgence.

"No, not really," he told her, and lay back on the ratty sofa. He transferred his gaze from the wall to the blank ceiling. Empty white space. It had a clear simplicity which his work lacked. Maybe that was something to consider...

"No, haven't talked to any of them. Been about a year now, I guess," he said.

"Yeah, Mom's probably pissed," he said.

"Well... I guess that's just how it worked out," he said.

"It's not like they're desperate to have me back," he said.

She shifted topics, started talking about her weekend and he felt himself glaze over. Her voice was like a wordless lullaby, soothing and inane. He shut his eyes and thought of the swaying of a rusty tree-swing beneath lush green branches, of a river running clear and strong through the dusty earth.

Richard wondered if he was a bad person for cutting himself off from his family. Maybe he was, but at least he didn't feel that corrosive guilt anymore. He'd always felt it, whenever his eyes happened to meet those of the gardener or the maid or the chauffeur or the cook or any of those ancillary persons his family felt the need to employ. He had been miserable all through his teenage years, always afraid of the judgment which he'd imagined they must be feeling towards him: Richard, the haughty wonder-child, the infant savant. He'd been shown off at his parent's parties like a circus freak, all the while oozing profound apology from his guilt-widened eyes. How awful it had been, walking behind the driver who insisted on carrying his bags in from the car, knowing that the driver's children would never have half the opportunities he'd already thrown away.

He hadn't been able to help feeling awful. To make any effort was to flaunt his undeserved gift, and to do nothing was to spit in the faces of those who would have given anything to have the luck of his birth. He'd had trouble sleeping, and his work had naturally begun to suffer. None of his parent's friends noticed, of course, they'd been trained to appreciate anything which was pushed under their noses and called Art. The worse it got the more they liked it, as it afforded them more opportunity to study it over their wine glasses and pontificate on the deeper symbolism of spaghetti glued to cardboard.

By age eighteen, he'd begun to seriously consider suicide. He left the art academy (a private school in Maryland which cost more than he cared to know) and was admitted, though only just, into the art program at Cornell University. It was his father's Alma Mater, so he wasn't exactly playing the prodigal son by going there, but it was at least his choice.

It was at Cornell that he met Catherine. She was like him, another disaffected child of wealth and privilege. They'd known at once that they were meant for each other. She introduced him to the stress-alleviating effects of illicit chemical substances, and the two of them began a halfhearted sort of romance which had continued on since almost exclusively under the power of its own inertia. He supposed he must be something of a disappointment – though he couldn't pretend not to take any pleasure in the idea. His parents probably couldn't stand it that he was able to support himself. He didn't think anything would please them so much as his having to come crawling back to them. Well, he wasn't going to give them the satisfaction, not if it killed him.

He picked up the bong which he'd left on the floor beside the couch and held it up to the light so he could watch the refracted sunset through the colored glass. Catherine was going on about _something_. He pondered the possibility that dynastic families produced more black sheep artsy type burn-outs than less privileged families because maybe art, whatever _that_ meant, was primarily the product of boredom, mere ennui, and that the vast majority of the artistic canon of the western world was nothing more than a lark dreamed up in a particularly debilitating bout of generational tedium.

"Uh huh," he said, in a belated response to Catherine's last question, "I'm still here."

### September Fifth

Alice Summers found her brother at Harry's Bar. He was drunk, or at least well on his way.

He'd been drinking a lot since they'd decided to kill Robert, and Alice was starting to worry. Sometimes she thought that every man in the world must be crazy. She sat down across from her brother and folded her hands in her lap, just the way Robert liked her to. When she realized that she was doing it she forced herself to stop, and put her palms down flat on the table. Jeffrey looked up at her, bleary-eyed and bitter. He took a hard swallow of beer; his lip curled back. "Well... here she is. What are you doing here, Alice? Stop in for a drink? You wanna get us caught?"

"Stop it, Jeffrey."

"Oh. Fucking excuse _me_ , then."

"I'm not here to drink. And if anybody gets _caught_ than it'll be because of your talking, so try to keep it down, wouldn't you?"

Jeffrey grinned humorlessly. He spread his arms wide. "Think you might have come to the wrong place, sis, if you're not here to drink."

"Have you been practicing?"

Jeffrey sank into the booth, eyes going lidded and dull. "Yeah. I've been practicing."

"Good. Here." She reached into her pocket and took out a little cardboard box of bullets, the same caliber and make as those in the gun. "I found these in the house. In one of the moving boxes, he hasn't unpacked anything yet."

Jeffrey eyed the box warily. He took a fortifying swig and snatched it off the table. He cramming the bullets into his jacket pocket like he was afraid they might explode in his hand if he touched them far too long. "Oh good. Now we have enough for the whole fucking party."

"Don't say that, Jeffrey." Alice folded her hands again, noticed what she had done, and propped her elbows defiantly on the table edge. "This is _simple_ , it's going to be easy. Just Robert, and it's over."

Jeffrey groaned. "How did we end up here, Alice? Why the fuck did you ever have to marry him? I mean... what were you thinking?"

Alice wound her fingers through her hair. She shrugged, and said, "I don't know. It seems like a long time ago."

But she knew exactly what she had been thinking. She'd been thinking that she was in love with Robert Summers – and she had been. Still was, sometimes. On the good days. She was fifteen years old when she'd first laid eyes on him. He was so handsome she had hardly been able to breathe. She'd never thought that a person could be that good looking and still be actually real. He looked like he might wisp away in a puff of smoke if she reached out to touch him. You didn't see people like Robert Summers sitting on the couch in your trailer, you saw them on movie screens and in magazine pages. And yet there he was, big as life. She hadn't thought about what he might be doing there in the trailer then, and she didn't want to think about it now. She had her suspicions, and then Mom got pregnant with Sally. But Alice didn't ask questions. He said that he liked her and that was all she needed.

She went to the prom with Greg VanDerzee, and when he tried to kiss her she'd slapped him and run home. When she got to the park Robert was there in his car. He looked her up and down in her rumpled silky pink-ruffle dress with the low-cut top and bared arms and shoulders, and he opened the door and told her to get in. She got in, her face flushed and beaming and radiant. She couldn't have helped but to obey.

He drove her away from the park as the sun fell, sweeping down in a lazy arc across the blazing sky, peeling out a black velvet night behind it as still and perfect as any she'd ever known. They drove for a long time, and she was trembling with excitement when he pulled over on the shore of a rocky lake. He stopped the car and he turned in his seat to look at her and his beautiful brown eyes were so big and soft that they outshone the tender moonlight spilling around them. She sat there in his gaze just laughing and grinning and squirming like a bug on a pin.

He reached out to pull down the straps of her dress. She pushed his hands away so he grabbed her wrists and caught them both in one of his big hands and held them tight in her lap and tugged the flimsy little straps down with his other hand. She started shivering and not just because of the cold and she opened her mouth and he leaned across the car to close it with a firm kiss and she sank right into him.

She had her first orgasm that night, and as it passed through her he grabbed her hair and twisted it in his fingers and he looked deep into her eyes. He said: "You're never going to be this happy again, Alice. Every day from now on, every hour, every year, each one will be worse than the one before until you are old and weak and riddled with sickness and begging for death. You'll curse whatever God you have for every moment. When you're finally mewling on your deathbed you'll beg him for just one more pain-racked moment of existence, and you'll realize that everything you have ever done amounts to nothing. You mean nothing and the world will forget you when you're gone. You'll want to scream but you won't be able to, and then you will die. The children you thought would buy you immortality will bury you and they will forget you and it will be as if you never were. Only I can save you. It might hurt, but you'll be alive, I promise you. Really alive."

Or maybe he hadn't said all that. Perhaps he hadn't said _any_ of it. Maybe she'd just been thinking it.

He married her after she turned eighteen, just before her high school graduation, and they moved to Syracuse. They left before the graduation ceremony, so she'd had to have her diploma mailed to their new address. The apartment where they lived was only about ninety minutes from Verden, and he often traveled back that way, but she had never once asked to return with him. That world was gone, as far as she was concerned; all the old things had passed away.

He didn't hit her for a while, six months at least. And when it happened he was almost calm about it, like he'd been expecting to do it sooner or later. She broke a plate in the kitchen and the dinner she had made for him was ruined on the floor. He just stood there and looked at it for a few seconds, then he reached out and, quite casually, struck her across the jaw, hard enough to knock her down to the floor. She cut her hand on a shard of the plate when she fell and started bleeding at once. She'd looked up at him, bewildered, holding her bloody hand in her lap.

She'd lost count of the times since then. Scars over scars, bruises gone black with age, bones broken and set crooked. And now, after only twenty-one years of life, Alice Burke felt like an old woman, aching and flinching.

And yet, the truth was that she was more frightened of what was going to happen after Robert was dead than she was of killing him. There had never been many options for her. It wasn't just Robert's big brown eyes that lured her away from High Gorge Park. If she hadn't gone with Robert, than she surely would have ended up far worse off.

What was she going to do when he was gone? She'd never been all that good at taking care of herself. But she had to do _something_. She couldn't let her life simply continue like this, getting worse and worse as it went on. She knew that there was some way to change it all, to make it better. Killing him would fix everything somehow, she knew it would.

She looked at her brother. He was watching her strangely, like he was waiting for her to say something. She just shook her head and reached out to take the beer bottle from him. She lifted the cold bottle to her lips and tilted it back. There was no taste at first, and then, going down, it was bitter.

"So... we're really going to do this then?" her little brother asked.

Alice just nodded, and drank.

### September Sixth

Roberta Perez looked out at the faces in her classroom, little faces trapped in themselves, and she tasted vomit in the back of her throat.

She held her belly. They said the first trimester would be the hardest. She hoped they were right.

Her mother would have had something to say about this. She was going to say something when Roberta finally told her that was for sure. Mrs. Perez wasn't the kind of lady who appreciated departure from tradition. Grow up, get job, find husband, quit job, have children, raise children, die.

Until the pregnancy, coming out to her mother had been the hardest experience of Roberta's adult life. There had been some phrases thrown around, Roberta couldn't imagine where her stern little mother had ever picked them up: butch, crew-cut softball dyke, turkey-baster lesbian. Would she even want to know her grandchild?

Roberta thought of the fertility clinic, laying there on the bed with Taylor's hand laced through her own, joking with the nurse that it would have been a lot cheaper just to hire that male prostitute.

She felt another wave of nausea rising in her chest. She cleared her throat and turned back to the chalk board. "Okay," she said, "we're looking at multiplication and division of fractions today." The chalk scraped softly on the board, and she let out a slow breath. She understood numbers. There was no uncertainty in math, nothing but right and wrong. The numbers emerged, as though she were uncovering them rather than writing them, and she spoke automatically, words from her lesson plan spilling effortlessly from her mouth.

"Alright, you with me?" she turned back to the class.

Freddy Wilcox in the back row had his fingers spread open in a wide V, like Mr. Spock from Star Trek. He pantomimed with his tongue. The children sitting around him are laughing noiselessly, their hands clamped over their mouths. Laughing at her, she realized. When he saw that she was watching he stuck his hands in his pockets and smirked, his grin tinged with nervousness but utterly without shame.

She stared, everything she'd wanted to say forgotten. She hated them so much, hated their sneering faces and dirty hands, their dull stares and open-mouthed gaping. She hated to be looked at by them, especially the boys. She knew what they said about her, had overheard them before. Fat ass. Lesbo. She hated to feel them staring at her backside, like she was a piece of meat into which they couldn't wait to sink in their gnawing little teeth.

She couldn't remember why she had ever wanted a child.

She finished her class in a daze and drove home at the end of the day, simmering with an anger which turned slowly to despair.

The feeling only got worse when she got home. High Gorge Park, stuck there on the edge of town like a leper-colony, all those trailers like they'd stalled there on the run from some looming apocalypse. She fell into bed and didn't wake up until the sun was setting hot and red through the window, blistering light coming through the pine trees like there was a fire just over the horizon creeping slowly closer, a dull orange glow eating at the sky.

Taylor was pouring over a thick textbook. She chewed on the end of a pencil. "Hey Robbie," she mumbled from the corner of her mouth. Taylor had cut her hair short last week, bobbed it and cut back her bangs, sometimes Roberta didn't recognize her right away.

Roberta fought back a yawn. "Is there anything to eat?"

"Leftover takeout in the fridge," Taylor said absently.

Roberta closed her arms around her girlfriend, bent her face down sleepily on Taylor's shoulder. "What's up?"

"Studying. Jesus, were you sleeping?" Taylor turned away from the book just long enough to give her a skeptical glance.

Roberta nodded. "Rough day, kinda."

Taylor whimpered sympathetically, "Poor baby." She patted Roberta's cheek.

"I'm horny," Roberta said. It was a lie, and she usually didn't like to talk about sex, but there something about what the kid in school had done that had gotten under her skin. She could do whatever she wanted! Who cared what the children thought of her?

Taylor laughed. "Are those your crazy pregnancy hormones talking?"

Roberta nuzzled Taylor's neck. "I'm serious."

"And I'm _seriously_ busy. I got a paper due in a week that I haven't even started."

"You're worse than my students."

Taylor snorted incredulously.

Roberta kissed Taylor just below the ear, where her hair curled in an adorable little wisp.

Taylor shrugged her off. "I _mean_ it, Robbie, I can't!"

Roberta drew away. She touched her belly; she could feel the child-thing growing inside her, spreading in her body like a cancer. For an instant, a flash of a moment that was gone almost as quickly as it had appeared and left only shame behind, she wished that it would die. "Can't or won't?"

" _Both_." Taylor said firmly. "Why don't you go back to bed?"

"I guess I will." Roberta laughed bitterly.

"Good," Taylor returned the pencil eraser to the corner of her mouth.

Roberta crossed the trailer in a half-a-dozen steps. She'd only just sat down on the edge of the bed when she felt the familiar heaving in her stomach. She sprawled on all fours, reaching for the little metal garbage can, vomiting noisily. She coughed. All the saliva in her mouth seemed to have turned to acid.

She turned on her side and lay there on the floor, sweating. She was crying, but could not remember when she had started.

### September Seventh

Jessica Riley rubbed the crumpled piece of paper between her fingers. She turned it in her hand, folding and smoothing it unconsciously. She stared at the car window, not looking through at the street beyond but at the edge of the glass itself, how it seemed to trap and manipulate the light. She had never stopped being fascinated by automobiles.

She got out of the car and, after reading the address on the paper scrap once more, she went up the steel stairs to the heavy gray door. She knocked twice. The city was cold and colorless below her. A harsh light cut through the clouds, light from a sun devoid of any warmth as it washed across the decaying world.

She heard movement inside the apartment, footsteps coming towards the doorway, and she immediately regretted coming. What did she think was going to happen anyway? She shoved the crumpled slip of paper deep into her pocket. The door swung timidly open and her husband's face peered out.

"Hello, Nathan," she said, immediately wishing that she hadn't come. It had been a mistake.

"Jessie..." He smiled; not a happy smile exactly, but the weary smile of a man who was very near to giving up hope. "Do you want to come in?"

She nodded. It was too late to turn back now. She followed him into the subdued gloom of the little apartment. It was tiny and dingy, so cramped it made the trailer look almost luxurious by comparison.

He shut the door and hugged her, warily. She returned his embrace, not without some reticence, and they broke slowly apart. They were like colliding planets spun gracefully out of their orbits and into the vacuity of space. They stood on opposite sides of the cramped little apartment and they looked at each other with their hands awkwardly at their sides.

"How are you doing?" she asked.

"Alright." He scratched the back of his neck and looked at the as-yet unpacked boxes scattered about the floor like he was only just noticing them. "Gena?"

"I don't know. She's working at least... Every time I bring up college she just... won't talk about it, just shuts down. You know how she is."

"Give her time. She'll figure it out."

Nathan cleared off a pile of newspapers from the sofa and the two of them sat down. She couldn't look at him. She almost thought she could feel his breath on her, and she itched to kiss him or hit him or most of all just to leap up and run out the door without looking back. "The place seems nice."

Nathan looked around. "It's alright."

He'd called her a couple of days ago to tell her that he'd found an apartment. She scribbled down the address on the paper and tried to forget about it. She carried the paper with her for three days, like a stone around her neck until finally she'd finally found herself driving, as though in a dream or hypnotized, driving towards him.

And now... She wanted nothing more than to take him back, drag him into the car and bring him home. But something stopped her, some small voice inside her that told her that she couldn't. Not if it was ever going to change, not if she was ever going to be herself again.

"Jessie..." Nathan touched her arm, his voice small and plaintive. She looked at him, and in his eyes she saw that familiar boy, frightened and alone. _Save me, help me, love me_ , he said to her with those soft brown eyes.

She pushed him back against the couch and she bent over him and she kissed his soft lips and she slid her hand down into his pants and she touched him until he was whimpering and sighing for her and clinging tight with his hands around her, hanging like a weight, and she shut her eyes and drank in his need for her until he was spent and limp and his eyes filled with relieved tears.

"I love you so much," he said, his throat closing around the words.

Jessica smiled. She ran her fingers tenderly over his balding head and she held him to her breast and she said, "I know you do, sweetie."

"I need you," he said.

"You don't," she said, and he became once more afraid, clung desperately to her.

He said, a final attempt: "Robert Summers is having a thing... Do you want to go? Together, I mean?" He forced a laugh, like she couldn't see the tears spilling down his cheeks, "For old time's sake?"

She shook her head. The old times were over. Things had to have their end, they had to be allowed to die. You had to let go of things, she thought, and Nathan nodded reluctantly, like he was listening to her thoughts and could not but agree. He wrapped his arms around her and he held her and she let him for a time, until the sun went down beneath the city and there came in its wake a true darkness as deep and long as any that had been known in that place, and then she left him there.

### September Eighth

Robert Summers counted out the bills one by one, setting them in a neat stack on the desk. The repetitive beats of seductive electronica throbbed dully on the other side of the office door. A puppy dog padded across the floor, snuffing at the door frame.

Kevin Peterson was staring at the ceiling, nursing a beer and chewing his lips. His hand left wet marks on the frosted glass, like finger-drawings on a car window. "What's with the dog?" He scratched one ear.

"It's for Alice."

"She asked you for a dog?"

"No." Robert straightened the small pile of bills.

Kevin screwed up his face, desperately confused. His forehead wrinkled and his eyebrows drew close together. The overall effect upon his features was decidedly simian. Then he shook his head, as though bowing in submission to a logical impossibility, and he took a swallow of beer. "Well, what kind is it, anyway?" he asked, pausing to wipe his mouth on his jacket sleeve.

"Golden retriever," Robert answered absently, glaring down at the money like he could pin it to the table with the force of his gaze.

"No shit? I saw something in the paper not too long about one of those. Some guy's house caught on fire and the fuckin' dog dragged his kid out. Didn't even wake the kid up. Un-fucking-believable shit, you know?" Kevin's eyes shone, wide open and filled in black, irises almost vanished.

Robert stared across the table. "Are you high, Kevin?"

He sniffed, scrubbing the back of his thumb against his nostril. "Uh... not, like, _high_ high, but, uh, you know. Why?"

Robert sighed. "For God's sake, I told you not to use here, Kevin. Not where I do business. I don't care when or what, but not here."

"Huh." Kevin seemed to ponder that for a moment. Then he looked down at the tawny puppy sniffed at his shoe. "Do you think you could kill a dog, Bob?"

Robert set the money aside. "What?"

"No, I mean, like, with your bare hands, you know? If a dog was, like, coming at you and you had to defend yourself. Do you think you could kill a dog to keep it from killing you. To save yourself. Like a German Shepard or something like that."

"Jesus Christ, Kevin, why would you even think of something like that?" Robert got up from his chair and stepped around the desk to snatch up the puppy. He sat back down with the little creature in his arms. It smiled up at him, pink tongue hanging from its mouth.

Kevin shrugged. "I've been thinking about it a lot, actually. About, you know, what animals are capable of doing."

Robert pushed the money aside. He stroked one of the dog's velvety ears between his thumb and forefinger. "Did I ever tell you about the dog I had when I was a kid?"

Kevin shrugged, finishing his beer with a noisy swallow.

"She was a black lab. I named her Sally. She was a rescue dog, been abused by her old owners somehow. I never found out exactly what they did, but she was the sweetest thing you've ever seen, not a hateful bone in her body. She never barked or growled at anybody, certainly didn't bite anyone. You could tell just by watching her that she wanting nothing more than to be loved. And everybody did, how could you not?"

Kevin listened nervously. He didn't like it when Robert talked like this, but he'd learned not to interrupt.

"I had this cousin. Hal. He came to live with us one winter back when I was, I don't know, twelve years old maybe. He was older than me, parents just got divorced, yadda yadda. Anyway, I never liked him much. He was just one of those sorts. After he came the dog started to act sort of odd. She was different, more withdrawn, like she was afraid of me. He was there alone with her all day long. I knew something was wrong; it was one of those things, you just know it.

"It turned out that Sally was pregnant. We'd just assumed that she was neutered. Turned out not. Anyway, when Hal found out, he looked like he'd been slugged in the gut. His face actually turned _white_. An absolutely lifeless color. He threw up right there at the dinner table, just leaned to the side and puked on the floor.

"The next day he tried to kill himself. Hung himself in the basement with Sally's leather leash. We didn't find this why until a few weeks later."

"Yeah?" Kevin's face had gone a sort of green shade, though it wasn't clear whether that was a result of Robert's story or the slurry of intoxicants mixing in his bloodstream.

"That asshole sent us a letter, he explained the whole thing, even drew little pictures, like cartoons. It turned out that he'd been fucking Sally. Tied her up and wrestled her down and fucked her. When he found out she was pregnant he assumed that they were, you know, _his_ somehow. Like I said, this kid was messed up. There were these little half-human half-dog things he drew all over it. I don't know, they say the oxygen was cut off from his brain for too long. Not long enough, if you ask me. We all read the card, first me, then Dad then Mom. And poor Sally just sat in the corner, getting bigger every day.

"She started to get nasty after what happened. She'd growl if you tried to pet her, show her teeth. I don't know if it was the pregnancy or the Hal thing, but she didn't even seem like the same dog anymore. My parents were totally unable to process any of it. They'd just stare at her sometimes with these absolutely incredible expressions on their faces. Made you wish you had a camera or a mirror so they could see how absurd they looked.

"They were both real quiet about it. Mom cried sometimes, but she never said anything.

"Every morning my father would split wood for the stove; I'd bring in the pieces while he worked. One day Sally followed us out, went trotting right up to my dad and started smelling his palms. He just stared at her. He had the ax in his hands, holding it real tight. I was waiting by the door, just watching, this horrible feeling in my stomach. I don't know, maybe I'd had some kind of a premonition of what was going to happen. I hadn't been sleeping.

"He grabbed Sally's collar and dragged her over, and he told her to put her head down on the block, the big stumpy hunk of wood that he put the smaller pieces on when he was splitting them. And she _did it_. Did right what he told her, just put her chin down on the block and stared up at him and for a while they were both just looking at each other. Then he killed her and he buried her and forbid me from ever talking about any of it.

"That night, I had a dream that all those little puppies inside of her clawed their way out of her belly and suffocated in the dirt, trying to dig their way back up. I avoided the spot we buried her for years, I just couldn't stand knowing."

Robert stroked the retriever's nose. It yawned sleepily, its rough pink tongue curling and it eyes drifting closed.

"...Shit, man," Kevin offered, "that's messed up, man."

Robert sighed. "Eloquent as usual, Kevin."

Kevin rubbed his red-rimmed eyes. "Was there, like, some kind of point to that?"

Robert picked the money back up, starting once again to count. "The point, Kevin, is that it's _people_ that are strange. You don't need to worry about dogs. Animals are simple. It's people that you have to watch out for."

### September Ninth

Patricia Conner stood in the hallway, her arms folded tightly across her chest. She stared at the framed picture on the wall, eyes narrowed, focused intently on the glass-covered aerial photograph.

The blue tendrils of the Finger Lakes cut through the green earth, not like the soft imprint of the vast divine, but more like the claw marks of some great scrabbling monster. She stared at the picture, perplexed by it for reasons she couldn't explain. It seemed somehow false to her now, the wisps of cloud looked like pulled cotton over the manufactured diorama of the world.

"Charlie?" she called down the hallway to where her husband sat, hiding behind a newspaper at the dining room table, digesting the meal she'd cooked.

"Hm?" he mumbled.

"I'm thinking of taking the pictures down. These ones here in the hallway, I want to get rid of them."

"Whatever you want, dear." The pages of his newspaper rustled.

"Well for God's _sake_ , Charles! Don't be _like_ that. Have an opinion why don't you? Didn't you buy these in the first place? Don't you care what happens do them?" She stood at the end of the hall, looking in.

He bent the edge of the paper down and looked at her over his reading glasses. "You bought them."

"Well, that's beside the point."

"Is it? Hm." He went back to the paper.

Patricia seethed. Like talking to a brick wall... It had been so quiet in the house since Michael had left. They'd never even bothered to find out where he was living. She wondered if there was there something wrong with her. She had tried to talk with Charles about it, but he didn't seem to hear her voice anymore. And anyway, she didn't really want to relive all of the things that they'd done wrong. All that _she'd_ done wrong. Parenting was such a terribly painful thing, she couldn't remember anymore why she had ever wanted it so much.

She went back down the hall and took the pictures down, one by one, piling them in her arms. The sturdy glass and metal frames were heavy and awkward, all of them different sizes.

Charles' voice floated eerily through the house. "Gonna snow tomorrow. Paper says."

Patricia went back to the dining room. "Are you sure? In the middle of September? That can't be right. I don't believe it!"

Charles shrugged. "What it says."

"How horrible." She shivered, and set the piles of framed pictures down on the far end of the table.

She went to the wide bay window and looked down at the trailer park below. The boxy little houses looked like model train cars after a collision. They reminded her of the toys her brother had played with as a boy. Wrecking them had always been his favorite part, watching the physics of the crash play themselves out, the twisting buckling crunching pinball-machine chaos of the little electric cars running up against each other, dragged inexorably by that misguided locomotive, blind and anyway incapable of altering their course.

The sun set over High Gorge Park.

### September Tenth

Jeffrey Burke went into the gathering darkness. He shoved his hands deep into his pockets and turned up his collar. It was frigid cold; he could see his breath before him like a pale and formless ghost leading ever onward. The automatic doors of the bus hissed as they folded shut, and the great machine lurched away. He stood and watched until the red tail-lights had gone over the slope of the far hill and left him, at long last, far behind. Only then did he turn away and begin down the long and dreadful road.

It was half a mile further to Robert's house. He wrapped his arms tight around himself. The cold seemed to breed in the darkness. The sycamore trees turned black and limp and wept. It had been raining all day and the world seemed now too quiet, poised in a state of unnatural stillness as though the earth were holding its breath while it watched Jeffrey shiver. His fingers wrapped around the grip of the pistol down in his pocket. The metal had been cold at first, but it had warmed against his body, had drawn the heat right out of him. He checked the bullets again, for the tenth time at least, and he set his teeth.

The road curved gently, and when he came around the bend and looked up the hill he saw all the lights of the house flickering beyond the tree-line. He bit down on his tongue to stop his teeth chattering. The electric lights danced beyond the web of black trees, urging him upwards. Jeffrey took out the pistol and opened the chamber; he ran his thumb across the backs of the cartridges. When he snapped it shut he did not return it to his pocket but held it tight in his fist, naked to the eerie dark.

The cold was like a weight inside him. It stripped through his clothes and pressed its weightless touch against his skin, cutting with wet metal fingers into his prickling flesh. His thin jacket did nothing. He stuck the gun under his arm and rubbed his hands together; he slapped his cheeks and tucked his nose into his elbow. He did not think he had ever been so cold. He went on.

There were cars spilling out along both sides of the road, enough cars for forty or fifty people. So many more than he'd expected. Jeffrey looked into the tinted windows of a darkened Subaru, almost pressing his face against the glass before he remembered that there might an alarm. There was a child's car seat in the back seat, a pipe-wrench on the floor.

He hopped across the ditch and worked his way back around to the rear of the property, fighting through the brush every step of the way. There was a high embankment behind the house. He went further back into the woods until he'd found a place where the grade wasn't so steep and he scrambled up. The dead leaves plastered to the ground were still wet and slippery; he put the gun back in his pocket and went up the slope on all fours, fingers reaching into the rocky crevices.

There was a narrow stream there that emptied into a little pool below, a waterfall in miniature. He stepped carefully over the water and went on until he was behind the house, so close he thought he might almost be able to jump onto the roof. The light from the house lit the ground like spilled oil shining gold and glossy on the wet grass. He scrambled down and approached the house, bent so low that he was almost on all fours. There was movement in the windows. The back door was just a few feet away. Alice had told him that it would be unlocked. He crept closer, kneeling below a wide bay window. He stopped when he'd reached the far side, and he peeked over the frame in through the glass.

There was a tangle pale white flesh laying on a sofa, wrapped tight together and rocking angrily against itself. A woman's hair thrashing, and through it curled a man's thick fingers, meaty and dark-furred on the knuckles. Her chin was tilted back and her mouth open, lips pulled back to bare her teeth. A slim man in a dark suit sat in the corner of the room with his penis pulled through the zipper of his neatly pressed slacks. He watched the coupling on the sofa, keen interest shining in his damp eyes.

Jeffrey crept on, his teeth down so hard on his tongue that his mouth filled with blood. The hinges of the door groaned in protest. He winced at the sound and shut it softly behind him.

The house was in an organic stupor. Low music played in a distant room, carrying with it the shallow moans and cries which echoed through the building like an erotic mimicry of the tormented. He was in the kitchen. There were wineglasses standing on the counter, empty but for the multi-hued dregs that made colored shadows like stained glass on the counter-top.

Jeffrey took out the pistol and he held it tight in his hand and he went out into the chaos of the intestinal halls. He passed through the crowds of stripped revelers like a puritan ghost, unseen and untouched. The men were all older than he, most of the women too. They worked as a vast machine, cogs locked together in purulent congress, each turning into the next piece of the whole.

There was an energy here that made the hair on the back of his neck stand up. It had an unholy taste about it, as though the communal breeding were the genesis of a forgotten pagan ritual by which something timeless and unknowable would awaken, rise from deep within the earth to somewhere in the apathetic woods out beyond the light.

He looked for his sister, but she was nowhere to be found. He wondered if she was taking part, or cowering in some put-away corner of the house like a child tucking its head between its knees when the train roared by. No one yet had taken notice of the naked gun in his hand.

A bearded man tried to kiss him in the hall, and a woman with thick red hair between her thighs sized him up and arched one eyebrow and spread her knees but he stopped for nothing, forcing his way through the twisting halls while all the way the music grew louder and louder. Finally, he came to the epicenter of the gathering. There were about two dozen people there, all in varying states of undress.

The closest was a firm woman with streaks of gray in her black hair. She lay back on the leather couch with a wine glass delicately cupped in her sculpted fingers, her short silk dress pushed up over her hips and her thighs spread. A pair younger people, children almost, where kneeling before her, timid supplicants to her exposed femininity. A girl and a boy, their hair short and curly and androgynous. Their faces were pushed together between the woman's pale thighs, their pink tongues lapping at the slick opening. Like twins before a primordial mother, begging to be let back inside. The old woman's head lolled back, eyes half-lidded; she met Jeffrey's gaze and held it unabashedly and he felt as though he were revolving weightless around the sun.

He saw Alice at the extreme edge of the room. She was dressed in a long red nightgown upon which were traced inscrutable black lace figures, runic designs of an older world. She wore long black gloves that went all the way up her forearms and a feathery black mask which covered all her features but for that familiar mouth, turned bitterly downward.

Nathan Riley not far from her, stripped to the waist and staring blankly at the far wall. He saw Jeffrey, and he flinched and averted his eyes. Jeffrey held the gun behind his back. Nathan seemed lost, wholly unsure of himself and deeply uncomfortable. Utterly alone.

At the center of the fray, caught waist-deep in twisting bodies like a war god at the slaughter, was Robert Summers. Red wine slipped from the black bottle in his hand like blood across the naked backs of the fornicators about him and he laughed with his head back and his jaws open to the high ceiling. His penis hung heavy between his legs, his pubic hair as thick and dense as a tangle of black wire. He brushed aside the hands of men and women alike as they reached up toward it, as though it were handhold up from the general malaise and he the arbitrator of their ascendance. He lifted his bottle and he emptied the last of it on the people writhing at his feet. He kicked a girl who had licked his foot; she whimpered and was drawn back under the crawling mound of limbs. Robert laughed, sneering as he drank back the dregs.

It was in his eyes, shining there like polished stones set in flesh, the truth: all men were his and all women were his, and summer would last forever.

Jeffrey sunk back into the shadows of the far wall, and he watched what proceeded with his thoughts swimming blindly through his skull. He couldn't do this. He couldn't kill a man. He couldn't do it.

Finally Robert was staggering drunkenly from the chaos, his empty bottle clutched about the neck. Jeffrey waited until his brother-in-law had left the room, then he separated himself from the shadows and followed. He had to at least try. He owed Alice that much at least. He had to try.

Robert went to the kitchen first; he tossed the empty bottle into the sink and immediately took a new bottle from the cabinet above the stove and tucked it under his bare arm. He went on, passing his way jovially through the crowd, pausing now and again to bite at a pouting lip or thread his fingers through the available nethers of his guests, until he at last came to a tall white door with an ornate black handle. He went inside and shut it firmly behind him.

Jeffrey moved through the crowd. Their fingers caught urgently on him, clinging to his chest and groin as though desperate, as though they thought he could save them. His hand lighted on the knob and he found it cool. He lifted the gun and followed his brother-in-law inside.

"Sorry, this room's not..." The words died in Robert's throat when he saw first the gun, then the person who bore it.

Jeffrey wanted to speak, but he couldn't think of anything to say. They were in Alice's bedroom. He saw things which he recognized as belonging to his sister. There was no evidence of a man's cohabitation. The bed was too narrow for two. There was a puppy on the mattress, dashing excitedly from one end to the other.

"What are you doing here?" Robert asked.

Jeffrey just shook the weapon in his hand.

"You've come to shot me? Why would you want to do that?" Robert held the bottle in both hands.

"You killed Michael Conner," Jeffrey said, and his voice trembled.

Robert's familiar expression of disdain crept back, lips twisting and eyes tightening. "You don't know what you're talking about.""

"You killed my friend." Jeffrey shook the gun again.

"Your _friend_ ," Robert's voice dripped contempt, "You were never his friend. Jeff. You barely knew him, not really, not what he was. I was more a friend to Mike than you ever were."

"You?" Jeffrey wanted to laugh, but his throat was too dry.

"Where do you think he was living after his parents threw him out? I paid his rent for a year."

"You _used_ him," Jeffrey spat, "you _sold_ him like a piece of meat."

Robert laughed. "He wasn't some desperate junkie. Mike was just _bored_. He was bored, and that's why he did it. He didn't care what happened to himself. That's why he killed himself."

"I don't believe you."

"Of course you do."

"You're a liar."

"That's beside the point, I'm not lying now. Put the gun down. Is that my gun? Put it down."

"I'm not going."

"Just walk away, Jeffrey, just put it down and leave here and it'll be like it never happened."

"I can't do that." The grip was slippery in his hand, slick with perspiration.

Robert cocked his head. The little dog did the same, as though it were Robert's canine offspring and learning by imitation of the father. "Why not?" he asked

"Because of what you did to Alice."

"What did I do to Alice?"

"You..." Jeffrey had to wipe the sweat from his stinging eyes, "You beat her. You beat my sister."

Robert sighed, and sat down on the edge of the bed. His wide hands brushed at the lacy coverlet. "She made me do that, Jeffrey."

"Shut your fucking mouth, you son of a bitch."

Robert looked at him, and his eyes were damp, but hard. "She asked me to, Jeffrey. She _asked_ me. The way she acted, she might as well have. She wanted it."

"She didn't _want_ that." Jeffrey sneered. He couldn't tell if Robert was being serious or not.

Robert shrugged. "She told me she did. I don't know. I guess she got off on it. How do you feel about masochism, Jeffrey? Personally... I've never been tempted." He bared all his teeth.

Jeffrey struck him across the face with the pistol. Robert flinched, putting his hand to his lip; it came away bloody and a dark trickle ran down his face from the corner of one eye. Jeffrey was shaking and when he spoke, his voice seethed: "Don't _talk_ ," he bit off the words one by one.

Robert touched his bleeding eye again and looked at the tips of his finger. His smile had faded. "You can't do this," he whispered. "You're my brother, you can't do this." He stood up, the expression on his face more perplexed than afraid. "Don't you love me at all?"

The gun went off. It roared in Jeffrey's hand, lit with furious heat.

Jeffrey stared at his brother-in-law. Robert sat cross-eyed back down to the bed, a dumbstruck expression on his face. Part of his skull was open; something wet and pink and dribbling seemed to breathe and pulsate inside the bone-shard nest of smoke and blood. Robert reached up and touched it; he pressed his fingers into his brain and his eyes rolled. He slipped off the edge of the mattress and thumped to the floor, the breath wet and ragged in his mouth. Jeffrey dropped the gun.

The dog hopped up on the bed and lowered its belly to the bedspread. It moaned, and stretched out to lick the blood from the jagged white shards of its master's exposed skull. It bit playfully in, tugging wet pink brain tissue out with its little white teeth, like it was pulling cotton fluff out of a stuffed animal.

There were shouts coming from the hall, feet pounding on the hardwood floor. Jeffrey climbed out the window into the bone-cold night. He staggered across the lawn and fell to his knees by the little pool beneath the waterfall. He threw up and knelt with his head between his legs.

There were cars starting out in the darkness. Headlights swept across the yard and the woods beyond as the more skittish celebrants fled half-nude into the shrouded depths of that Acheronian forest.

He squeezed his eyes shut. All he could see was the quivering pulp of Robert's shattered cranium. He opened his eyes and he saw it still, reflected in the dashed moonshine upon that trembling pool. The air around him was as cold as fire. How had the gun gone off? He hadn't meant to shoot, had he?

Alice approached silently across the grass. She knelt beside him and put her hand on his back. She was crying.

"He said he didn't kill Michael." Jeffrey groaned, his voice ragged. "He said that you wanted it. That you wanted him to hurt you."

Alice choked the words out: "I was only a child, Jeff. I didn't know what was going to happen to me, I was only a little girl!"

Jeffrey looked at his sister. Her eyes were blue as ice and her hair like molten gold spilling forever down her back. "Did you want him to hurt you?" he asked.

She buried her face in her hands, her smooth white hands laced with scars and darkened by angry bruises, fingers crooked with old breaks half-mended. "I thought he wouldn't love me anymore if I didn't tell him... He wanted me to say things, Jeff! Terrible things... I _never_..."

He held her. There was blood on his hands, though he could not account for its presence. She wrapped her arms about his neck and he pushed his hands down under the surface of the crystalline water and it was icy cold and seemed almost to sap the life from him. He was so frightened: everybody would forget him when he was dead.

Alice cried on his shoulder and he buried his face in her long hair. His hands turned numb. The tears fell into the pool. Red and the blue lights flared through the far forest. A gentle snow began to fall from the vast gray sky. It melted easily enough on their skin, white crystals turning to points of colorless water. The distant sirens wailed as though lamenting the ending of the earth, and the siblings clung to one another, mouths slack and drooling like the mouths of fearful idiots. And when they spoke it was as though their words had come from another time, from another being's mind, come spilling from their lips like rain from a strange sky:

"Don't leave me. Don't ever leave me again."

"I won't go. I promise I won't."

"I love you."

"I love you too."

### September Eleventh

Kimberly stared across the park. Yellowed leaves whirled in the air, falling one after the other into the wind, making dismayed pirouettes to the earth. She took a sip of water from the glass in her hand and set it down on the step beside her.

The trailer park hummed with sound. Insects buzzing in the warm dusky air, sneakers and bicycle tires crunching in the gravel, the voices of children.

There was an American flag hanging inside the window of Mr. Smith's trailer; it was worn and faded, threadbare. The pained half-light of the approaching evening caught in the glass like fire, like the flag was burning. She took another drink of water. Her bare toes curled around the edges of the old wooden steps leading up into her home. She sat and watched the little bugs creeping between her toes. She felt... peaceful.

"Kim?"

She looked up. "Oh. Hi there."

Gena Riley's arms were folded over her stomach. She wore a fuzzy down jacket, but she just had sandals on her feet and her toes were bare. She stepped closer, hesitantly. "Hello, Miss Burke."

"How are you doing these days?"

Gena nodded. "I'm fine."

"You going somewhere?" Kimberly asked.

"Just... enjoying the evening," Gena mumbled, shrugging uncertainly.

Kim breathed in deeply through her nose. "I love this time of day. Just between the day and the night."

"Twilight."

"The kids really miss you, you know. Sally asked about you the other day. They'd love it if you came to visit sometime."

"Aww, that's sweet. I'll stop by."

Kim brushed the hair from her face. "Is that job alright then? The library, I mean?"

Gena nodded. "It's okay."

"And how's your mom doing?"

Gena shrugged. "Fine, I guess. She's watching TV right now. That's why I came out here. They're talking about it on, like, every channel."

"Can you believe it's been a year?" Kim exhaled noisily, "Feels like it was just yesterday sometimes." That wasn't completely true, though. Sometimes Kim felt like it had been a very long time. Like years had passed, whole lifetimes. She made room on the porch for Gena to sit down beside her.

"It's like a bad dream," she said.

Kim nodded. "I remember hearing about it on the radio on the way to work, but it didn't, you know... didn't really register. And then I got to the restaurant and all the waitresses were crying. The cook was just sitting there smoking in the kitchen. His hands were shaking. The manager didn't say anything all day, didn't hardly move. He just stared at us with this _expression_ on his face... like he didn't know what was going on really. We all watched it on the television together. We all thought it was an accident until the second tower got hit, and after that, no one really knew what to think." Kim reached into her pocket for a cigarette. She took out a single cigarette and held it between her lips. She let it sit there for a long while before she tore out a match. "You don't mind?" she asked, and Gena shook her head. Kim struck the match and lit the cigarette. She still couldn't quite believe it, that so much had changed that day. That so few people could have done so much. Just a few madmen, a few fanatics. That was all it took to change the world, just one clear voice: Hitler or Jesus or John Brown or Bin Laden. And the rest of them were so terribly... irrelevant. She took a long drag.

"I was at school when it happened," Gena said. "In class, actually. Uh... English, I think. We were reading Lord of the Flies, and we had just gotten to the part where the boy finds the pig's head on the stick. The teacher asked us what we thought about it, and one of the boys in the class made a joke. I don't remember what it was, something about pigs, I guess. He made the most horrible sound, like a pig being killed, I guess. I remember feeling like I was going to throw up. Then they announced it on the loudspeaker."

Kim blew smoke into the cooling air. Gena sat on her hands to keep warm.

"The principle kept making more announcements, like he was repeating everything that he was hearing on the TV. At first, you know, at first we all sort of thought it must be a joke or something. Like, some kid was pulling a prank. The teacher's face was so white, it was horrible. And I sort of figured it must be real. They sent us home early. Everyone was so quiet getting back on the buses, that was the scariest part. How quiet everyone was. It was like we were going to a funeral. I remember... I saw this boy looking out the window, just crying and crying. Not making any noise, but just, his face just covered in tears. And nobody said anything. There were some of us with relatives who lived in the City, second-cousins or whatever. No one wanted to say anything. It felt like the end of the world. All of us wondering if something was going to fall out of the sky and just... wipe everything out. Kill everyone."

Kim tapped the ashes off her cigarette and ground them out in the dirt with the tip of her sandal. She sat there, leaning forward with her elbows on her knees, and she didn't say anything for a few minutes. What difference did it make if she told Gena? She didn't believe in God, but she didn't want to die without having first confessed her sins. Maybe that was just her upbringing. She wondered if she should go see her father's grave sometime, if only just to make sure that he was really dead. "I saw Mike that night," she said. "He came to my house... I don't know when exactly, sometime after dark."

"How come?"

Kim turned her head thoughtfully. "I'm not exactly sure. I knew him, but we weren't close or anything. He just came inside and sat down on the couch beside me. We watched the news together. Of course, it wasn't really news, just footage of what was going on in the City. I remember thinking that it looked like a movie. You know, one of those big disaster movies. And I remember thinking how _sick_ that was, to think like that. That I was so... I don't know... numb. It felt so fictional, I wanted to cry, and there was Mike, his eyes all red and his cheeks wet; he'd been sobbing. And I was just sitting there, taking it all in like I was watching a movie."

Kim took a long drag on her cigarette. She felt her lips curving into a kind of half smile. It felt good to finally say it. She'd been carrying it around for so long.

"I remember, later in the afternoon, after it had died down a little, they were mostly just showing the same clips over and over. Those streets just filled with dust and smoke and paper. There was _so much_ paper! Do you remember that? I remember feeling disappointed that it had gotten so... boring. There was a part of me that wanted something else to happen, something _more_. I wanted everything to burn. And I sat there, feeling this growing inside me, and just hating myself more and more for it. Then Mike turned off the TV and he looked at me, and he told me that he was going to kill himself."

Kim lit a second cigarette. Gena was staring at her, wide-eyed. Kim went on.

"I should have tried to stop him, I know I should have. Should have done something, said something. I don't know what I could have said. Could have just said that I loved... that there were _people_ who loved him, and that he shouldn't do it. But I just couldn't. I wanted him to die. Not _him_ , really... Everybody."

Gena cocked her head. "So you think he did it because of what happened that day?"

Kim shook her head. "It wasn't that. It was more like... What had happened made him realize something. He told me that he was afraid of the future. He said... He told me that he believed in reincarnation, and that he hoped he might be able to work off his karmic debt if he died before he got any worse. And then he took out the cross necklace he wore around his neck and told me that he knew Jesus would forgive him. I don't know, maybe he was joking. You know how he was, such a _dry_ sense of humor."

He had kissed her once on the cheek before he left. God, she could still feel it!

"I never saw him again. I... you know, I hoped that he might have gotten out of here. Gone somewhere and... escaped, I guess. I didn't want to know for sure because it might be bad, and I didn't want it to be. So when people started looking for him, I didn't say anything about what had happened. I just hoped for the best. And then my son found his body."

Her voice had gotten very soft, almost a whisper. Ash dangled off the edge of the cigarette, white paper burning between her pale lips.

"They said that he'd been down there for at least six months. They said that on the news, from the coroner's report. He must have done it that night. Maybe even right after he left my trailer. Who knows," Kim shuddered, blowing hot gray breath into the air, "I might have been the last person he ever talked to."

Gena didn't say anything. There was nothing she could say.

Kim shrugged. "Anyway... I just wanted to tell somebody."

They sat together, listening to mingling insects about them, to the low chatter and electric animation of their ramshackle little village, hidden away in that gray corner of the world.

"Where's Jeffrey?" Gena asked, "have you seen him? I've been trying to find him."

Kim just shook her head. "I don't know. Alice told me that he was leaving the country. He never did say good-bye. I just, you know... hope for the best. Hope he's somewhere good. Hope he's happy." She grinned weakly, and there was a horrible thought in her mind, a gleam of real fear. She'd lost him, just like she'd lost Alice. Would it happen to her other children too? Would they get lost?

Gena nodded. She got up. She walked away, knowing the secret.

After some time, Kim didn't know how long, a plane flew overhead, shooting silently from east to west, rushing towards the burning disk of the falling sun. She heard the roar of it echo over the world. It went like a silver arrow, wings pointed back, long fluffy plume of exhaust spilling out against a dark sky, spreading, dissipating as the stars beyond began to come out, one by one until the sky was scattered with the points of distant light, burning in all the heavens.

### High Gorge Park – Winter

The school bus groaned to a stop. The doors swung open, stairs leading down to the snow-dusted ground.

Children slung their backpacks lazily over their shoulders and clambered down off the vehicle, waving to those friends of theirs who had not yet been disgorged. They split off, most returning to their own homes among the scattered trailers. Two of them wandered on past the frozen flag hanging from a frosted metal pole, past the narrow trailers sitting dark and cold in the lot, past the old movie screen standing naked and broken against the creeping forest. They walked out into the wood, leaving footprints trailing behind them imprinted in the soft wet snow.

They talked in low and urgent voices, laughing and snapping little branches off the trees, grabbing hold of larger ones and swinging themselves carelessly round as they spoke brashly of grand ambition and unrestrained hope. They went on.

They reached the edge of the gorge and they looked down and saw there the wild darkness below. They shouted into it and listened to their voices carry, distorted along the emptiness.

One of them bent low and gathered up a fistful of crusty snow in his bare hands. He squeezed it into a tight sphere; his fingers were red and trembling when he drew his arm back and hurled it across the gorge. It smacked against the hide of a limbless trunk on the other side, the impact marking the black bark with a white circle like a sightless eye. The child who had thrown it laughed and gathered another handful of snow. The other followed suite; they threw snowballs across that silent gulf until the trees beyond were spotted white.

A tattered remnant of crime scene tape fluttered noiselessly behind them, clinging still about the waist of a dying birch tree. The tape had torn in the wind, ragged pieces fallen into the gorge and been carried on by the stream, onward into an endless expanse far beyond.

Over the course of their lives the two children would forget most of what had happened that year. The facts would be hopeless distorted in their minds, the names and faces never more than half-remembered. They would recall only a few faint details about the boy who killed himself. They would remember hearing about another who was arrested, or had perhaps been killed running from the police, they couldn't remember which. They would remember a vague sense of fear, the fear which had consumed that little trailer park in that little town in the years before it vanished, vanished as though it had never been. The remnants of the screen would be torn down, the town would die off, the people would move on, nature would reclaim the garbage heaps and the ruins until only the forest remained, and the ravine.

The two children looked down into that ravine and saw nothing there, nothing but the darkness through which the river was ceaseless moving. And an American twilight turned the gray sky to black.

### Table of Contents

Part I: Beneath the Screen

High Gorge Park - Spring

Edward Smith

Adelaide Anderson

Nathan Riley

Kimberly Burke

Jeffrey Burke

Gena Riley

High Gorge Park – Summer

Part II: After the Fall

Being Children Again

Graduation

Accelerating Entropy

Piano Wire

High Orbit Over a Distant Planet

Frame – Gena's Story

Crush – Trevor's Story

Come On Down

Matrimony

Procedural Breakdown

Someday When We All Grow Up

American Families Are All Alike

Fractures

Come Home

Independence

Burial

Rough, Lovely

Everything Ends

High Gorge Park – Autumn

Part III: September

September First

September Second

September Third

September Fourth

September Fifth

September Sixth

September Seventh

September Eighth

September Ninth

September Tenth

September Eleventh

High Gorge Park – Winter
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