ABSTRACT 
 
 
 
 
Title of Thesis: A VIEW OF EARTH FROM DISTANT SUNS  
  
 Jason Smith, Master of Fine Arts, 2019 
  
Thesis Directed By: Professor Howard Norman 
Department of English 
 
 
 In keeping with the title, this collection of nine stories trains its lens on a 
broad range of human experience. What has resulted from this perspective is a 
cocktail of divergent genres, geographies, voices, and emotional registers. In spite of 
their differences, these stories come together to create a somewhat novelistic arc by 
following a basic trajectory of human life. The trajectory navigates certain 
representative stages of human development, focusing on late childhood and 
adolescence in Part One of the collection, early and middle adulthood in Part Two, 
and finally, advanced adulthood and confrontations with death in Part Three. The 
collection hopes to suggest ways in which we ourselves, in all our irreducible 
complexity, are nonetheless unified by similar psychosocial needs, by yearnings to 
connect with and bring order to our environments, by our failures at the precipitous 
edges of language, and by our common alienation. 
 
 
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
A VIEW OF EARTH FROM DISTANT SUNS    
 
 
 
by 
 
 
Jason Smith 
 
 
 
 
 
Thesis submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the  
University of Maryland, College Park, in partial fulfillment 
of the requirements for the degree of 
Master of Fine Arts 
2019 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  Advisory Committee: 
Professor Howard Norman, Chair 
Professor Maud Casey 
Associate Professor Randy Ontiveros 
 
 
 
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
© Copyright by 
Jason Smith 
2019 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
Dedication 
In memory of Brett Foster, Benjamin Smith, and mi tío Sergio Salés Reyes 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 ii  
Acknowledgements 
For grounding the theoretical with the human center in literature, my thanks goes to 
Martha Nell Smith, Gabrielle Fuentes, and Randy Ontiveros. Thanks also to Lindsay 
Bernal, whose commitment to students in the program is an inspiration.   
 
With special gratitude for Emily Mitchell, Maud Casey, and Howard Norman, who 
taught me, in their own way, to hold my craft decisions’ feet to the fire.  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 iii  
Table of Contents 
 
Dedication ................................................................................................................................................ ii 
Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................................ iii 
Table of Contents ................................................................................................................................... iv 
 
Part One 
 
El Nahual ................................................................................................................................................. 2 
A Roadmap to the Last Kingdom of the World ................................................................................. 54 
 
Part Two 
 
The Conquered...................................................................................................................................... 59 
X/Y ......................................................................................................................................................... 83 
The Masterwork.................................................................................................................................... 85 
Cabin Road .......................................................................................................................................... 123 
 
Part Three 
 
The Wilderland ................................................................................................................................... 147 
Entropy ................................................................................................................................................ 171 
A View of Earth from Distant Suns .................................................................................................. 174 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 iv  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Part One 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
1 
 
 
El Nahual 
 
I’m called Estéfano. Or that’s how my family expects me to introduce myself. 
Which, in my early childhood, confuses me because they call me many other things. 
Like when mother calls me cielito. Or my father calls me mijo or travieso, and when 
he’s really mad, escuincle. He sounds old and small-town in ways I have yet to 
understand, until the time I yell escuincle at a boy who bullies me at my new school 
and everyone laughs. My older brother Felipe calls me tonto, even though I’ve always 
gotten better marks. Sometimes Felipe’s a jerk, like when he and his friends tamp me 
down into the barrel which the neighbors use to burn trash in. The barrel’s not hot 
when I’m in it or anything, but rainwater pools in the bottom when it’s not in use, and 
your nose goes crazy with the smell of vegetable rot and melted plastic. Twice, they 
roll me down the dip in the road that comes to a smash against the wall of the tiendita, 
where we buy cokes for Sunday lunch. Felipe lifts me out of the barrel on both of 
these occasions, bruised and weepy, to his shoulders. Then his friends chant my name 
and cheer, as if my scrapes were all part of a clever prank that comes off in running 
water. But part of me welcomes it afterward because for a whole afternoon at least, 
I’m one of the big kids, and they take me into the tienda to buy me a Boing and 
maybe a bag of Sabritas. Then my brother calls me cabrón in a way that makes me 
feel like I’m bigger and tougher than I am when he just fluffs my hair and calls me 
‘manito.  
What I really don’t like is when the kids at my new school call me campesino. 
At the time I think it’s a little my father’s fault because he really is a campesino, or at 
least a ranchero. But then, it’s also my mother’s fault, because it was her idea for me 
2 
 
 
to go to a secundaria where kids’ parents work in businesses and factories instead of 
on farms. She tells me that since my grades were so high when I finished primaria, I 
have a chance one day to have a better kind of life. “A life that’s bigger than this 
place,” she says. “It’s important that you go to a better school, mijo.” She explains 
that there are more students at San Fernando than the school in Tlapeco, our village, 
so the government gives it more money. “Your brother went to Tlapeco for primaria 
and secundaria. He was such a bright boy. ¿And now? He got bored and like 
everyone else in his class he never went to prepa. You know well that he’ll be doing 
the same thing your father does for the rest of his life. ¿Is that want you want, too? 
No, not for my cariño. You’ll go to San Fernando. It’s better. And it’s not so far 
away.” 
Or so she says, though before, I had only to walk a short way to get to my 
school. Now, I have to pay the motor taxi to ferry me across the lake, then climb into 
a combi, which drives fast but stops a lot to let people in. And the number of people 
that can cram inside a combi will rattle your head. There's a whole montón of people-
-people until there are no more seats, people packed to the ceiling, people probably 
stuffed under a seat somewhere, and parts of people sticking out a window or two. 
My brother goes with me to school that first day. On the combi he keeps telling me, 
“Don’t be nervous cabrón, no pasa nada.” No pasa nada, over and over, like my dad 
said just before I got a big needle jabbed into my arm for an infection in my blood. So 
now on top of worrying myself over a big new school with more kids than we have in 
our whole village, my brother has me thinking about needles.  
3 
 
 
But he does what he can to distract me by pointing things out as we speed by. 
Like the safari park where they have elephants, and where the wild cats are bigger 
than motorcycles. I’ve never been inside the safari, but in the mornings and 
sometimes at sunset, there’s a series of roars that goes up like lowing chants over the 
lake, which my father tells me is from the lions. A minute longer and the road makes 
a big T where it meets another road. Felipe points beyond the T to the plateau with 
the pyramid hidden on its top. There are rings of stone there, by the pyramid, and in 
the center of the rings, an altar. 
We veer hard to the left and there opens up to the combi a view of the two great 
volcanos, stretching the horizon up, up, until it covers almost half the sky. The 
mountains seem so big they’ll make you fall off your feet if you look at them, but this 
is not because they’re close because really, they’re so far away, they look almost 
blue. As if there's so much sky between here and the mountains, the sky is beginning 
to soak them up.  
The volcano on the right is called Izta. “You know Izta hasn’t erupted for over 
a hundred years or something like that,” Felipe says. I know that he knows exactly 
how many years it’s been because he's told me before. I also know he doesn’t want to 
look like a nerd in public. I itch to tell him all of this in front of everyone, but he’s 
trying to keep my mind off of my new school so I stay quiet. “The volcano’s asleep or 
maybe dead,” he continues. I think about how Izta’s four summits are supposed to 
outline the form of a woman sleeping. But no matter how I crook my head I can never 
make Izta look like anything other than a big white mountain which levels into a sort 
of table instead of a peak. It’s not until years later, when a heavy snowfall works with 
4 
 
 
the sun to put the shadows in the right places, that I see for the first time the woman at 
rest under a white sheet.  
To the left of Izta is Popocatépetl. This morning, like each morning for many 
months, the volcano oozes a little column of steam. I can see Popocatépetl from the 
top of the hill that Tlapeco is built on, but even if I’m all the way down by the lake, I 
can almost always see the steam blooming out of the horizon. The ice of 
Popocatépetl’s summit is patchy and streaked from avalanches. Its surface returns the 
light from the rising sun, so that the whole top looks to be on fire. Maybe it has 
something to do with the sudden turns the combi takes, but suddenly I get dizzy with 
the thought that what I’m looking at is a lunar surface which has fallen out of the sky 
to rest in the mountains.  
I know my brother points out all these things to distract me. But for some 
reason I don't yet know, the more he talks the more uneasiness I feel. All his words sit 
heavily in my head and I know that if I had the same queasy feeling in my stomach 
that I have in my brain, I’d lose my breakfast. When my brother looks over and says 
that we’re close, I begin to understand why all of this is. I can't form it into words, not 
even to myself at the time. And yet I have a half-understood feeling that, hiding 
inside everything my brother points out, there’s something wild and unknown. Like 
the safari park that keeps monsters from all over the world just a few kilometers away 
from where I sleep.  
And then there’s the pyramid hidden on top of the plateau, with the altar and 
stone circles nearby. What my brother didn’t mention was how one of my father’s 
friends discovered the remains of some kind of animal sacrifice there, only last week. 
5 
 
 
The pyramid gets me thinking about the altar and then about the brujos that live 
around there and in the mountains above my village. 
When I try to imagine what my new school might be like, it looks like a big 
blank full of unseen dangers. Then I try harder. What comes to mind are jaguars and 
elephants, and brujos standing over altars, and other dangers I don’t know about 
which hide and look out at you from the shadows, until the moment comes when 
you’re close enough for them to touch.  
 I take one last look at Popocatépetl before it disappears behind a hill that 
we’re about to turn onto. It’s smoking these wheezy little puffs of steam, the way it 
does for a few months more or less, until a couple days in late fall or winter when you 
can see it go off like a mushroom cloud many times bigger than the mountain itself. 
And in the night there’s lava and volcanic bombs that light up the whole mountain-
top, and then the next morning, everything around you is covered in ash so the school 
gives out masks for everyone in the town to keep their lungs from getting sick.  
By this point, it’s not just things like volcanoes or altars--everything around 
me is a possible source of danger. We pass a stretch of road where mechanics work 
out of open garages, their yawning bay doors hungry and cadaverous. Then there’s a 
quarry in the side of the hill on our left. I don’t know what a quarry is yet, but it looks 
like God or probably the devil took his hand and gouged a big fistful of rock and dirt 
straight out of the hill. We drive and drive until I feel sick with the combi’s fast turns 
and the sudden stops and the smell of what I’m sure is gas leaking out, though when I 
try to warn my brother he just rolls his eyes and says in a low, pained voice, “Ya guey 
¿will you stop embarrassing me? It’s just fumes from the engine or something.” Then 
6 
 
 
he leans towards the driver and says, “En la esquina por favor,” and because we are 
about to stop, my guts feel hot like a clay olla with something boiling inside.  
I think about how when I hope deeply for something good to happen, it 
doesn’t. So now I think that maybe if I worry hard enough that the new school will go 
badly for me, it will really go well after all. All that's needed is the right amount of 
worry. The combi stops and the big sliding door flings open. My brother tells me to 
get out. I tell him, “Wait. I’m not done worrying.” 
But he shakes his head and says, “¿What did I tell you about embarrassing me 
guey? Come on.” 
I step down, out of the combi and into the gravel and dirt on the roadside. I’m 
uneasy on my feet, like I’ve just been dropped out of the sky and onto an alien planet, 
maybe a planet with more gravity than I was made to stand up in. I remember that on 
the combi I constructed some kind of thought process, something about worry, which 
would ensure my day would go well. But there were many thoughts and my mind 
could barely hold them all together at the time I was thinking them. Before I can 
climb back inside them, the thoughts shut in my face and the combi speeds away.  
All I’m left with is the shape of those thoughts and the dread in store for not 
remembering them.  
While my brother leads me across the street and towards the school gate, I’m 
struggling to remember, but the school is getting bigger in my vision, taking us up in 
its cool shadow, until I have to stop walking for a moment and tell my brother that I 
need to breathe. Felipe tells me to stop acting like a dumbass and I begin to breathe 
harder.  
7 
 
 
“Listen cabrón,” he says, and he’s trying to talk quietly but he’s angry so it 
comes out kind of like a low growl. “I’ve been nice to you and everything this whole 
time, but I’m about up to la verga with your shit. Stop acting like you’re getting your 
teeth out because I swear I’m about to hit you on the back of the head.” I look at him 
and even though I know it’ll make him angrier, the tears force themselves against my 
will, like those fish that swim forever upstream and I begin to sob. “Oh my God,” he 
says. “You’re killing me cuate. Come here.” And I think maybe he’ll hit me, just hard 
enough to fulfill his threat. Instead, he steps up to me then puts his arm across my 
shoulders. He tells me to turn away from the school, so no one sees I’m crying. 
I try to get my mind off of the school walls behind me, so I look around. It’s 
been a few years since I’ve been to San Fernando, but it’s really not so alien as I felt 
it might be. Of course, the homes and buildings are bigger than in Tlapeco. Some of 
them are brick or cement with rebar sticking out of the top, like maybe they’ll build a 
third floor, someday. But I look down a couple of the little roads and see smaller 
houses, too, and there’s the sound of chickens, someplace I can’t see. From where I 
stand, the street begins to slope down and I can see little flecks of houses far away, 
out of town, and I think what I’m looking at is the city of Puebla. 
Felipe looks at me again and says I’m going to be late. He wipes my face on 
his shirt and walks me to the gate, which looks like adobe but is probably fake. The 
gate stands open for the kids to stream in before classes begin, and around the gate is 
the wall school that encloses the school. In Tlapeco, there were three little 
schoolhouses behind a metal fence. In San Fernando you walk through the gate and 
8 
 
 
then you’re in a courtyard, surrounded by buildings. They’re built on two levels with 
balcony walkways and stairs on the outside of them.  
A woman with a clipboard stands there in our path, smiling but her eyes look 
far off, like she’s looking at something far behind us. —Good morning —she says. 
She looks at me, then turns to my brother, and because she’s looking at him I notice 
for the first time that he’s wearing a t-shirt with the sleeves cut off and Rage Against 
the Machine printed across the chest. She talks again, but now her voice is as far 
away as her eyes. “¿What’s your name and what grade are you in?” 
I tell her and she says, “¿You know where your classroom is?” 
I don’t, so she asks if either of us brought the orientation packet, “¿The 
folder?” which she says I was given when I registered. I don’t know what she means 
by this, so my brother explains that neither of us was here when Mother made the trip 
by herself to register me. She came in the summer when I had to help all day long 
with the animals to let my dad rest. The woman looks disappointed, asks for my name 
again, and flips through some notes before saying that I’ll be in room 227 on the 
second floor. She points to one of the buildings and sends me on my way. I look back 
on my brother. He tries a kind of thin smile then says he’ll see me soon.  
The first thing I decide while I’m looking for my room is that I’ll keep to 
myself, at least until the school feels less strange to me.  
In the classroom, I take my things to the back. Then everyone stands up and 
the teacher asks us to join her in singing the Himno Nacional. Together, we extend 
our fingers and touch our thumbs to our hearts with our palms to the ground, and I 
feel something unifying with the kids in front of me, who I swear all saluted at the 
9 
 
 
exact second I did. Then we sing. I’ve entered into this new classroom full of 
strangers, but just like that our voices become fused together and like a flock of birds 
veering or pitching with one body, the bright cadence surrounds us all and lifts us up 
into its warm current. Or that’s how I feel about that moment because there’s an 
instant camaraderie which comes from being made to sing that song as a class, though 
the memory’s more or less a lie. I remember well how we sing the Himno Nacional 
on other times, and in every class I’ve ever been in there’s no veering or pitching like 
one single damn body, and absolutely no kind of bright cadence. It doesn’t matter 
what kind of rockstar voice the cuate next to you has because we’re kids and once we 
give the salute and begin belting out “¡Me-xi-ca-nos, al gri-to de gueeeerra!” every 
kid in the room might as well be your drunk neighbor on New Year’s. But what 
matters here is that we all sing the same song, our voices equally bad, together, in the 
same way we sang the Himno Nacional in Tlapeco, so I think that maybe these kids at 
this better school will never know I’m from a village in el campo across the lake--and 
that maybe these kids aren’t so different from me and the classmates in my old school 
after all. 
But when I use the bathroom after first period, something happens that throws 
me off. I look at myself in one of the big square mirrors they have on the walls above 
the sinks. The image of myself standing there in a San Fernando uniform gives me a 
moment of shock because for half an unguarded second, I see that I’m not wearing 
the dark blue I was used to from Tlapeco’s primaria. I must be out of uniform, but 
this feeling goes in and out of my head like a flash. I almost have to remind myself 
that I’m in secundaria and in another school. Yet the shock of seeing my different 
10 
 
 
uniform doesn’t go away but instead, it simply changes shape: now I see the pressed 
white collar sticking out of the green vest and the proudly embroidered patch over my 
breast pocket with this better school’s name and crest.  
I want to feel pride that I’m wearing the same uniform as these children. Yet 
something about what I see in the mirror seems wrong. A group of boys comes in, so 
I pretend I’m just walking up to the sink now and begin washing my hands while I 
look at up at my reflection. Then I feel the water hit my sleeves and it jumps out at 
me how I don’t seem to fit in that uniform. Later I learn from my mother that she 
ordered my uniform a size too big because she says I’m growing like a beansprout. It 
must be clear to everyone from half a kilometer away. Maybe I was too nervous 
before to notice how the sleeves came up almost to my fingers. How my frame’s too 
reedy and slight to fill out the vest’s broad shoulders.  
Also, compared to many of my classmates who have hair that’s tousled or 
combed to the side in a sharp sweep, my hair looks flat and dry, like straw that’s 
fraying apart in the sun. And the skin below my mouth is smudged with dust that has 
clung to the moisture, from where I must have been nervously chewing my lower lip. 
I wipe my mouth and look away from the mirror. 
As much as my reflection makes me flinch, it terrorizes me to think how the 
other students see me. ¿How do I look to students who were made for this school, 
whose school was made for them, with their squared-off jaws and spiked hair which 
never strays out of place, even when they play fútbol. There are other flat-haired 
students, but their parents probably make enough money that they can carry 
themselves around like little gods who don’t have to prove their place in the school. 
11 
 
 
And a couple of older students are gueros, so it probably wouldn’t have mattered how 
they prepare themselves for school because their hair looks to be made of gold.  
I see also how the fine uniform doesn’t smooth out my rough edges, but 
instead makes them pop out even more. I look into that mirror and my body begins to 
lose shape under the fabric. Lumps form against the seams of my vest. I see myself 
and it’s clear that I don’t fit within the walls of the school. It’s not like I’m too big, of 
course, because I’m still small. It’s more like I’m the wrong key for the lock. It’s 
weeks before I dare look at another mirror again. 
I leave the bathroom then follow my fellow students across the courtyard. 
They’re trying to find the classroom for natural sciences, conferring with each other 
while looking off of little maps they were given, no doubt when they registered. I stay 
close, but keep far enough behind them to not draw their attention. While we walk 
down the galleries, I look through open doors and see more books in a single room 
than were contained in my whole primaria. Another room I see is full of televisions 
the size of crates, which I later learn are computer monitors. Finally we come to a 
room with polished microscopes arranged on tables. Again I find a place in the back 
of the room to sit. With only one person sitting near to me, I think that maybe I can 
get by without being noticed too much today.  
Then about halfway through the period, something happens. The person 
sitting next to me—a big girl with bright lipstick—looks over at me crossing my legs 
and holds her hand over her fruit punch colored mouth, yelling that the new kid has 
shit all over his pants and shoe. I think she gets in trouble for saying a grosería 
because she gives me wounded looks all the next week. Although I can’t be sure what 
12 
 
 
happens in school the rest of the day because I’m not there to find out. After a 
moment for it all to sink in, the science teacher says she just had everything in the 
room sterilized. By the way she says it you’d think she’s just about to perform 
surgery on someone’s face or something. Now she walks towards me, her head bent 
low so I know she’s going to say something meant just for me to hear. I can tell she’s 
trying to smell me, too, which is uncomfortable because she’s looking directly at my 
pants. After a moment, the science teacher whispers in my ear that my clothes are 
dangerous to students’ health and I’ll have to go home early.  
I tell her, loudly because I want everyone to hear my defense, that if 
something’s on my shoes, it’s just from the goats, which I had to feed that morning. 
But at the mention of the word goats, students scrunch their eyes shut and yell. “¡Que 
asco!” or “¡guácala!” as if I’d brought an actual goat in to take little dumps on all 
their feet. The science teacher purses her lips sadly and says, “If it were just on your 
shoes that would be one thing. But your pants…” 
If I keep looking at her, I know I’ll cry. I look down and shuffle my things 
into my backpack and as soon as I’m out of the classroom, I leave in tears. I wish 
with everything I am and everything I’ll ever be that I never came to this new school. 
That if I had to come all this way across the lake and up these twisting roads, it had 
only been to get another big needle jammed under my skin.  
The science teacher sends one of the two school janitors to stand beside me 
while I wait outside. My brother must be back home at the farm, or else on the other 
side of San Fernando at his favorite lean by the zocalo clock, but the janitor (who 
takes up his new post with a sense of unswerving duty) doesn’t let me look for him. 
13 
 
 
And my parents don’t have a phone which the school can call, so we have to wait on 
the side of the street for the hours to inch by before my brother will come. Or even 
better, for a car to lose control and smash me flat, or maybe for the ground to open up 
under my stupid soiled shoes.  
The janitor might have let me go home by combi, but says he’s not allowed. 
My parents will have to sign a paper that says I can get home by myself and that my 
travel back from school was their responsibility. And so I wait with the janitor, 
watching while street loads of combis and buses roar by me, and I wonder which of 
them would take me back to the lake and to my home. 
Since that first day in San Fernando, I am just a farmer to them. I am 
“Campesino” when students call me, or more often, “el campesino” when they talk 
about me. Of course, I try to loosen the name’s grip. To keep my uniform clean, I 
make sure to feed the animals before dressing for school. But even though I keep my 
face washed and everything, the name has me in its teeth. I am el campesino for the 
goat shit on my clothes that first day, el campesino for the way I eat my food, 
Campesino for the crude slur of my words, el campesino for my unadorned, even 
spread of hair. 
Sometimes I overhear them talking about me. One of the times, it’s about my 
hair and I look over to see a boy with a proud coif saying, “No mames guey, it's like 
he flattens it under a farmer sombrero.”  
But the thing that’s so unsettling is how he catches me watching him and instead of 
going quiet or looking away, he finishes out his thoughts without breaking eye 
contact with me, for even a moment. While he watches me, there’s a dim light that 
14 
 
 
goes up in his eyes like a barrel fire flaring up. And though it’s a fire, it has somehow 
left me robbed of all my warmth when a chill flushes through me and makes my 
cheeks ache under his gaze.  
When I return home, I quickly change out of my uniform and button up my 
guayabera. The guayabera doesn’t fit me as well as it did last year when I first pulled 
it on, but now draws itself in tight creases across my chest. I get outside where the 
wind slips over the lake and up the hill to claw at me through the wide slots between 
my buttons. There, I meet Felipe and my father at the edge of the field where they 
have the goats out to pasture. I’m late, I know, and though my father waits for me 
with his fists on his hips and eyes punching holes through me, he says little when I 
reach him, like he’s storing it up for later if it becomes a habit. “Apúrate chavo, I’m 
getting old waiting for you,” he says. I know he depends on me to relieve him after 
school because by this time of day his feet are always so badly swollen. He leaves to 
give the goats and chickens their feed, then he rests his feet, which are always 
swollen by this time of day. 
Felipe and I herd the goats to the edge of the lake. In their corral during the 
day and in their pens at night, they have tanks to drink water from. But before coming 
back from the Molinas’ pasture, their habit is to stop by the water’s edge for a drink, 
and refuse to climb the slope with us until they do, threatening mutiny and even 
violence if we prod at them before they’re ready. Even so, I feel uneasy this time of 
day, when the sun bends low to the ground and shadows crawl out from the trees and 
houses. My eyes grow wary for the lake edge and the surrounding mountains above 
us. My brother used to frighten me with stories of nahuales, skin changers who would 
15 
 
 
come from caves deep in the mountains to appear in villages as wolves and panthers. 
My father says some of them are good, like many brujos and even some duendes.  
But my brother doesn’t like talking about the good nahuales. “Some are evil 
brujos who come to feed on livestock or young children. And sometimes they come 
for sacrifices that they’ll take back to their altars to burn and eat.” Another time he 
said, “I’m sure you know well that crocodiles don’t live in the lake. And yet one 
Saturday, ¿you know, when the women go down to wash clothing? This huge 
crocodile sprang out of the water and ate one of the women, just down there.” 
Frightened, I told my mother this story and asked her if it was true.  
She said, “No mijo. Your brother just needs a smack on his head.” 
I felt suddenly relieved and said, “¿So there wasn’t a crocodile that ate a 
woman?” 
“Oh, well that part is true mijo. But it was no nahual. Felipe just said it was to 
scare you.” She told me how a crocodile had escaped the safari across the lake back 
in the old days when the enclosures were not as good as they are now. Escapes 
weren’t that uncommon back then, so when my father would see a gang of small 
monkeys besieging a family in their own parked car, or once even a rhinoceros, as big 
as a combi, charging through the fields with her calf, he had felt afterward as though 
he’d been expecting to see such things all along. My anxiety must have shown on my 
face then because I saw the light in my mother’s eyes become suddenly soft. “But 
there’s no need to fear that kind of thing now,” she said.  
“Everyone says the safari is safe. Nothing escapes anymore.” 
16 
 
 
Even so, all these stories about nahuales and monstrous creatures from far-
away continents gave me my first understanding that there are places in the world, 
places crushingly close by, with terrors that at any moment might break loose.  
And lately, there are rumors in the village of a nahual roaming the mountains 
nearby. When three of our chickens vanish one night, my brother’s stories start to feel 
alive again. Though in all we are lucky. Other people have lost pigs and even calves. 
An old goatherd was telling my father how he was out tracking the nahual’s prints. 
But when he heard the screaming of goats, he saw how the tracks took a sudden turn 
that would lead him to his own corral. He made it through the gate just in time to see 
the flash of a white-coated puma. One of his young goat bucks was dangling from its 
jaws, and yet the puma cleared his two-meter fence like it was nothing. 
 
Now when I’m late home from school, my dad chastens me with a scowl and 
an “¡escuincle!” quick off his tongue like a fleck of spit, or a spark. I understand 
because his hair is silver and his legs are old. Though he needs his rest, he can’t leave 
the herd with just my brother to watch them, he says. Not this close to nighttime when 
you need two sets of eyes to guide the herd safely to the water and guard the rear 
from the wilderness that might come stealing down the hill with the lengthening 
shadows. My father says I’m not doing my share. It’s that new school I’m going to. 
He says he won’t add more to my workload as long as I do the work I’ve already been 
given.  
“And I don’t give you all that much to do,” he says. Which is true enough. In 
primaria, I had to get out of the house so early it hurt to help out with the goat 
17 
 
 
milking, for the delivery men to buy and take across the lake to Oasis, where they sell 
it fresh to the people in the colonias. But in secundaria I have to get ready for school 
much earlier, especially because you don’t know if the combi’s going to come late or 
not. 
All the time he’s fretting about the goats, maybe more than anything else we 
have. “You don’t have much work anymore, but the responsibility to keep the goats’ 
health up es tremendo, ¿me explico?” 
I know he fears that something might kill one of the few goat bucks we have. 
Without bucks, there’d be no more breeding and we might lose the herd. Already, 
we’d lost four bucks last mating season. A businessman who sold onyx and owned 
farms in Tecali was trying to grow his goat herds. He found out my father was one of 
the few cabreros left with the Spanish goat breed. Of course, our goats aren’t the 
purebred European kind, but they have enough in them to make the toughest brush-
and-thistle eating kids there are, and they mate all through the year. The businessman 
sought them especially because they were tough for the terrain and would breed well 
with his dairy goats. For the use of our goatbucks on his property through mating 
season, he promised my father a fair sum, plus a percentage of that for every kid that 
was to come from the deal.  
The goat bucks he rented were never to return. Towards the end of the season, 
his own goats began to go limp in their legs. Then they began to die off. A vet he 
brought over found they had a disease that he described as “goat Aids,” and every 
goat had to be destroyed. My father never heard from the businessman. The news 
18 
 
 
came to him from one of the businessman’s goatherds who was forced to move to 
Tlapeco as a farmhand.  
Now, the ordeal of losing our bucks before have carried over into our fears of 
the nahual.  
In a zoology unit we took in my science class last year, there was a week 
where we’d watch a short video clip each day, which showed animals from around 
the world. We saw a crocodile that snapped up a gazelle that was trying to cross a 
stream. The gazelle thrashed around a little before the crocodile pulled it away into 
deeper water, where they both vanish.  
Since chickens first began going missing, with the mesh fences torn up at the 
corners to allow an intruder in, I’ve thought more about the escaped crocodile and 
about wolves or white pumas stalking through the night. But today I come home from 
school with the thought of the older boy’s unblinking eyes, hot on me while he makes 
his attack. Something begins to tip inside me. Today, it’s not fear I feel when I think 
about school or walk the goats to the water’s edge, but anger. Fury. And from out of 
my fury, there’s this kind of strength. The thought of being there when a crocodile 
makes its attack, of fighting the monster back, boosts me with power. I imagine the 
past crocodile attack at the lake edge, though instead of a woman now, the crocodile’s 
after one of our goats. And there I am, quick with my prod and the little fold-out knife 
I keep on my belt after school. I stop the crocodile mid-lunge, my prod swinging 
expertly into its gaping maw and knocking it back to the water’s edge. I leap high and 
land with my blade jammed between its eyes. The crocodile convulses suddenly 
before returning to human form.  
19 
 
 
Then there comes a late afternoon when I look up the hillside and see 
something in the distance. And this isn’t some fantasy of mine. I really see it there, 
walking with its head bent to the ground like it’s following a scent. I’m guarding the 
rear of the heard when I catch the movement on the hillside. When I look at it 
directly, the figure stops, then begins to creep down the hill at us. It could be a puma, 
or maybe a large street dog, though the truth is that twilight is coming so it’s hard to 
see against the gray of the hill. Our bellwether is alert to it, too. His head fidgets on 
its neck and he bleats at it, and the rest of the herd turns to join the bellwether. Here, 
the figure comes maybe forty meters away when I make a show of bolting a rock at it, 
just like I do to street dogs when they show their teeth. Again, the figure goes still. 
Then, when the danger seems to pass it by, the figure drops down lower on its 
haunches and slides down the hill. “Estefano. ¿What’s the herd looking at?” Felipe 
says, and the way he sounds just a little too bored and calm-headed, I know even he 
thinks something’s up. 
“Shhh,” I say, then pick up a rock and lob it with all the force in my body so 
that I fall on one knee. The rock falls short of its mark by at least ten meters. The 
figure picks itself up and runs. Pebbles scatter down the hill as it reaches the ridge 
and disappears. I whip my head over to my brother. “¿Did you see it Felipe?”  
“Yeah. I did.” He’s looking grimly up the hill, then he says, “¿You mean did I 
see how your rock missed that rat?” But with my conquest so fresh in my mind, I’m 
on a cloud Felipe can’t touch. When we return home, I’m suddenly bigger than I was 
just hours ago when I ran out the door. My guarabera seems to pull more on my 
shoulders, and my feet chafe in shoes they are quickly outgrowing. All that has 
20 
 
 
happened at my new school seems to lose its edge, made remote by my decisive 
victory over the nahual. Of course, the memories do not fade altogether, but I no 
longer feel their teeth under my skin. I look back on my first day in secundaria at San 
Fernando, how the mirror in the bathroom blanketed me with fear and unease. At how 
unlike my schoolmates I was, with my campesino-self filling the uniform of children 
who lived their whole lives in a big town by the city of Puebla. But when I reach back 
to the figure on the hillside, I return to the present with what feels like strength.  
 
In the mornings when I’m in the bathroom, I hold the mirror my mom brought 
back one day from the market. It has a handle on it so I can hold it and move it the 
way I need to without fear of it slipping my grasp. I am no longer so afraid of the 
mirror as I was before. After all, I’m stronger now than I was at the start of 
secundaria. Stronger and grown. And now when I look into the mirror I begin to 
smile at what I see, at the face which seems to have aged in ways that for now are 
indescribable yet certain. I smile at my extended limbs, and in that smile I notice for 
the first time something a little fierce looking back. It feels now that I am someone 
who can contend with my new school, with the mountains above the ranch, with any 
other place where the monsters lurk close.  
Before secundaria, I’d look at my reflection only when mother told me to 
wash my face, or when father said I needed to clean the inside of my nose. I didn’t 
think much about it then. But now I use it daily and it has become a mysterious thing. 
It is less and less a mirror, the more I look at it. And the more I look at it, the less I 
feel like I’m looking at myself, until the moment comes when the boy watching me 
21 
 
 
from the glass begins to look strange and separate. At any second, I expect him to 
turn away from me or maybe to wave.  
I don’t know how long it lasted, but when I was small there was a time when 
every night or so I’d have dreams of disappearing. In one I remember clearly, I was in 
a room full of men. They were tall men in guayaberas so white they were luminous in 
the same way a guayabera makes a farmer glow in the sun many kilometers off. But I 
felt that my shirt did not shine, and when I looked down there was nothing there to 
see. I asked them all where I was but no one seemed even to hear me. 
The first time I remember having one of these dreams, I woke up and held my 
hands over my eyes until all the world around me disappeared and there was only me 
left. Then I ran outside to look at a window because my mother didn’t let me use the 
mirror she had back when I was small. Outside, my reflection in the window returned 
me to myself, I felt, and each morning after a bad dream of any kind after that, I’d 
look for myself and see that I was there.  
I don’t know just what I thought about in those times, but when I think about 
it now, it helps to remember that I am not everything else, that I am separate, I am 
me. I am not father or mother or my brother. I am not my family or the farm, the 
town, the tepetate soil on my pant cuffs or the goat shit on my shoes. I am not the 
names people choose for me that I don’t choose for myself, I am not mi corazon, 
‘manito, baboso, tipo, chavo, cabrón, chamaco, escuincle, or even hijo. I am each of 
these things in different measures, and I am more than all of them. I am something 
else, I am Estéfano, I am something in search of a name.  
22 
 
 
Before secundaria, and before I begin to spend several minutes looking in the 
mirror each morning, I began dimly to feel these things. Now I have the words for 
them. Now my language begins to unfold with me as I grow, now it comes into 
flower. In the gaze of Mother’s mirror though, I begin to see how I am separate. But 
also, how I could be more separate still. 
The mirror no longer feels like a mirror at all, but rather a window I’m using 
to watch a boy on the other side of. A window into an invisible home, which I could 
carry with me, all through the day if I should choose to (though I never take it far 
from the sink). 
I look with my face pressed almost to the glass for traces of the campesino in 
me. What I want is to look like someone who doesn’t have to take care of animals 
before and after school, or get laughed at by other students for not being born with the 
same life they had. What I want is to look as indomitable and strong to my class as I 
was against the figure on the hill.  
And yet when I work my fingers through my hair and try to fluff some life 
into it somehow, but it falls slack on my forehead. I whisk and brush and hold it up 
until my hands go tired.  
I don’t want father to know and say I’m acting like a woman or some kind of 
fresa or my brother to come in and call me a “metro.” But one morning, my mother 
opens the door and sees me holding her mirror. I almost drop it into the sink, but 
instead of yelling at me she closes herself in the bathroom with me and asks what I’m 
doing. I look at her for a long quiet moment until I realize she isn’t going to go away 
until I answer her. I tell her about my nickname and my hair, that it won’t stand up by 
23 
 
 
itself unless I slept on it a certain way, and then I can never get the look right no 
matter how I tried to sleep on it the night after. The whole time I talk, her eyebrows 
bend down like she’s mad, but when I finish, her eyes clear up. She glances at the 
mirror shaking in my fist and suddenly she looks like she might laugh. “I think I can 
help,” she says. “Mi amiga’s boy, Rafa uses gel for his hair. I’ll see where I can buy 
some.” 
Two days later, she’s back with a bottle of gel which she tells me to keep 
under my bed. It takes a little practice, but when I learn to use just enough so that my 
hair stays up the way I want, though not so much that I become a walking fly trap, I 
begin to sit taller at school. I am still el campesino. But in the three months since I 
started secundaria, I’ve grown into my uniform. Now in the school bathroom, I no 
longer avoid the mirror but look on the San Fernando schoolboy standing there with 
his hair lightly spiked in the front and his button-up shirt draped evenly across his 
square shoulders. I welcome the changes I see. My arms have lengthened, too, and 
my eyes appear less like a child's, thinner now and cunningly sharp, like they might 
cut you if your finger strayed too close. And though I don’t notice any markable 
change in my nose, it seems to have grown, just enough to center my face and to 
organize the features around it. It’s also true that hair grows in tufts between my legs 
and under my arms, but unlike some of the other boys, my voice skips over the 
scratchy limbo stage and into an adolescent baritone.  
My peers notice the changes too. I can tell by the kind of resentful acceptance 
in their eyes, which says that no matter how they try to see it, I look like I belong in 
that school. And in the way they speak about me, there’s a change to their voices that 
24 
 
 
I have to re-tune my ears to fully believe. Not that they’ve made any move to invite 
me into their circles or even their conversations. But neither do I see them talk about 
me with smiles molding their words, like my name is the punch line of all their jokes. 
Around this time, Popocatépetl’s little putterings of smoke become a constant 
stream until one day when I’m at school, the mountain erupts. Buildings and trees 
interfere with our view of the mountain, but during computer science our teacher has 
us look up a site airing the volcano live. There’s the mountain on the screen, just a 
couple dozen kilometers away, rocketing up a cloud which later covers the whole 
eastern sky with enough ash to sheet over everything from my house in el campo to 
Puebla and all of Mexico City on the other side of the mountains. The cloud chokes 
out the afternoon daylight so that dusk falls early. But when the sun finally slides 
down behind Popocatépetl that evening, enough light gets around the mountain to 
project its shadow on the screen of ash above it. The shadow taxes my pre-geometry 
brain because instead of showing the mountain right-side up, it casts it upside down, 
with the summits of the volcano and the Shadow-volcano meeting to form the shape 
of an hourglass.  
The next day we sing the Himno Nacional through surgical masks. We get to 
the line Y retiemble en sus centros la tierra/ al sonoro rugir del cañón, and all I think 
about is the core of the earth shuddering up through the mouth of the volcano. Then I 
don’t think about anything, or about any one thing exactly, but begin to feel like I did 
the first day of school, with the think that something’s building up inside the guts of 
the world and that someday it’ll all come hurtling out at once. Though I’m not as 
afraid of this feeling as I was on the first day, and this makes me wonder if maybe 
25 
 
 
I’m not as afraid as I should be. Of course, maybe that’s because the feeling comes 
from all these changes at work in me. And in spite of how the other students no 
longer dismiss me, my changes still haven’t really collided with the outside world. 
Maybe the feeling comes from something more mysterious, on the horizon or below 
it, which I can do nothing about but wait for. 
There’s a new kid in my class one day. He’s slick and rolls on the balls of his 
feet like a breeze down the hallways. All day he’s learning people’s names. I cramp 
with fear for the moment when he’ll ask me mine, when someone will tell him before 
I have the chance to. Then just after lunch, the moment I feared comes. It’s his first 
day and already he’s lounging on top of a desk with his feet down in the seat, like he 
himself has built this school for his own amusement. I’m poking through my 
backpack, exchanging my books for my lunch when he looks at me and holds out his 
hand, palm-up like he’s expecting me to give him money. I walk over to the hand and 
look at him for a moment. No one has ever addressed me in this way, especially in 
San Fernando where I’m used to being greeted with muffled laughs and pained, 
doubtful glances. And in my village any greeting more bombastic than a light 
handshake could be mistaken for aggression. 
“Chócala,” he tells me. His hand waits, unmoved.  
I’m caught off guard, so that when I slap down I almost miss his hand. Still, 
the smack has a satisfying sting, the way his hand accepts my own. I feel something 
hitch in my throat and I cough to hide how I swallow it down.  
“¿So what’s your name?” he says. The big girl with the bright lipstick—the 
one who broadcasted that I had goat shit on my shoes—is the one to answer. She’s 
26 
 
 
been mooning over him all day. It shows in her lips, whose color somehow pops even 
more since he first made introductions.  
She leans towards him from her seat and says, “No one calls him by his name, 
but his apodo is el campesino.” 
The new kid looks me over once, then says, “¿El campesino, him?” like he 
thinks the girl somehow got el campesino confused with a local politician’s son.  
The doubtful ¿him? continues in the air a long time after he says it, like the 
moment somehow expands beyond itself to swallow up the next moment, then the 
next, and then the whole minute after that. A feeling, like a long warm breath under 
my skin, goes swilling all through me. And at different times through the rest of the 
day, the moment returns suddenly and in a way that renews the surprise every time I 
remember it, with the gratifying shock that comes from a gift you didn’t expect.  
But more amazing than how this moment is able to grow in time is how that 
moment, which took place in my home classroom, gathers up space, too, so that other 
rooms in other parts of the school seem to grow charged with an awareness of it. In 
what seems like a couple days, my peers and even some of the older kids are looking 
at me with something like envy in their gaze, which makes them begin to look soft 
and yielding before me.  
In the halls between classes, also, the new kid Jair (even though he’s in the 
grade above me) holds up his hand, for me to give him a choca. Or he tilts his chin up 
in a half-nod while we cross paths on our way to lunch. There are times when he even 
talks to me. He always calls me Efraín, though. He must have forgotten that I was 
27 
 
 
really called Estéfano, but I don’t want to correct him because he’s the first student 
since day one of secundaria to call me by a name other than campesino.  
Within a month after Jair came to school, other kids begin to call me Efraín, 
so that I begin to answer to the name like your knee answers a mallet. When I look at 
myself in the mirror, with my fitted uniform, it begins to feel natural to think of 
myself as Efraín and to reject (privately, anyway) the name I was christened with. But 
it’s equally jarring when I go home after school and overhear my father or somebody 
using the name Estéfano. It takes a moment before my brain works up a response. 
Hearing both makes me unsure of myself, like I’m two people at once and have to 
figure out which person I'm supposed to be in that moment. Yet as Efraín, I believe 
I’m becoming most comfortable. I look into my mom’s little hand mirror at home, 
and there he is, sharp and confident, looking back at me. A boy who can’t possibly be 
mistaken for the son of a ranchero, with his embroidered vest and a face so polished 
by his mother’s pumice stone, it glows with the life of the fresh coat of skin that was 
always there, hiding just beneath the worn layers, which has been scaled off in the 
bathroom sink.  
 
On one Friday, I come home from school to find my father waiting for me at 
the edge of the Molinas’ pasture like he always does, but already from a distance I 
can tell something is wrong. Maybe it’s because I’m late again. The boat didn’t leave 
on time and when I finally reached my house, I had to strain and fret my too-small 
guayabera over my shoulders (which is becoming more and more like trying to fit a 
drum skin over a frame that’s made too big for it) before running to relieve him. 
28 
 
 
There’s something in my father’s posture that makes my breathing feel strained. ¿Is it 
how one foot sticks out in front of the other one, or maybe how he keeps his hands in 
his pockets?  
But as I walk towards him, I can’t imagine why these things or anything else 
should give me fear. There he is, leaning on the trunk of a dwarf oak, fatigued but 
relaxing as he always does when I come to take his place. Still, I can’t loosen the 
tightness from my lungs. It’s like a small part of me notices something the rest of me 
doesn't, which warns me of a danger I've experienced but don’t fully remember. Or 
maybe I’m wrong to worry. I have no reason to ask for trouble where none exists, so I 
walk up and say in the lightest tone I can get out of my throat, “Hola papá.” 
My father stops me. “I found the goat pen opened today,” he says. His voice 
reaches down into his chest to dig out the gravel he saves for moments when he needs 
most to show his command. But even now, he holds the gravel back a little so that his 
voice is a low cautioning rumble, like the sound you hear if you ever pass too close to 
a puma den. “¿You know where the goats were?” The gravel from his voice somehow 
draws lumps up into my own throat, though instead of making me sound strong 
enough to match his anger, the lumps just plug my voice up and leave me struggling 
to get a full breath in. I look to Felipe, but he quickly turns his face away and shifts 
his weight from foot to foot. “¿Do you know where the goats were?” he asks again. 
“Me and your brother found them scattered over the far ridge. And we got them all 
back, gracias a Dios, except for one, which we never even found. ¿Know what we did 
find, chamaco? We found blood and hair. And I'll tell you there was enough blood to 
clot all the dust you ever saw in your life, pendejo.” 
29 
 
 
At the word pendejo, I feel like I have to bend my knees a little to keep my 
legs from crumpling under me. This is a word no one has called me before, no matter 
how angry they might have been. It's a word I hear my mother use when she talks 
about (and maybe when she talks to) my brother’s friends. I also hear the word when 
my brother’s friends talk about anything at all, but then I think maybe saying pendejo 
all the time like that is part of what makes you a pendejo. But to hear my father call 
me pendejo makes me feel almost foreign to myself, like I’m suddenly not his son, 
but something hateful he found stuck to the soap. 
I think my father can tell I’m shaken because he says, “Don't go thinking this 
should be a nice conversation because what I'm talking about isn't pretty. I think 
something ate the goat’s throat open. And then the goat was dragged and dragged, 
until the tracks and drag marks and everything disappear over a cliff and down a 
canyon. We tried looking over the edge. But there was nothing dead at the bottom.” 
Here my father’s voice sounds afraid and even distant and hushed with a kind of 
reverence. It’s clear without him telling me what he thinks killed our goat.  
“¿Were you supposed to shut the gate this morning?” my father asks me.  
“Yes father.” 
“Did you shut the gate this morning?” 
“Yes father.” 
“Then why are we missing a goat?” I can find nothing to say. “Just last year 
the Contreras family lost their farm. For them it was a crop plague. They couldn’t pay 
their debts for the farmland, so they had to leave to the United States. We got through 
it, ¿why? Because we raise livestock. But then we lost many bucks and on top of it 
30 
 
 
all, something’s getting at all the rest of them. I mean our goats, our chickens, 
everything mijo. ¿Do you want us losing our land? ¿Do you want to live like some 
kind of fugitive and never see your home again, just so we can survive? Dios mio, 
you still don't understand. It was one of the bucks, mijo.” He’s breathing hard now, 
though not fast. His breaths are deep and plodding. “Now we have only one. Just like 
that. And after what we lost from last year, we can’t just buy another buck. So again. 
¿Why are we missing a goat, joven? 
Each time he asks, it feels more and more like the whole weight of my family 
and their future is leaning on me. “But I always shut the gate,” is all I can say now. 
Which is true, though my voice is quieter this time because I can no longer be sure it 
was true of this morning. I’d woken up late, so that as soon as I’d finished with the 
goats, my mind had already jumped ahead. I was thinking about my hair, which had 
already started to bead with sweat from running to the goat pen to make up lost time. 
“Are you listening to me?” my father continued. “¿Why was the gate 
opened?” 
“I told you I don’t know.” 
“But you also said you shut the gate.” 
“Yes.” 
“¿Then why was it left open?” My father’s becoming red in the cheeks 
because he’s yelling now, but my own face goes cold like the blood’s been flushed 
out of it. All this time I’m talking to my father, the tightness around my lungs has 
gotten worse and worse, and I feel the pressure building up inside, dense and hot. 
31 
 
 
In science class a couple weeks before this, we learned about atomized 
molecules that heat up when they collide under pressure. Maestro Ruiz, who was 
substituting for a few days, made a fake volcano that was supposed to show what 
happens when a hot pressurized gas finds a vent to escape from.  
Out of Maestro Ruiz’s volcano came a jet of steam, hotter and sooner than 
even he expected. He got burned before he could pull his hand away. The next day his 
hand was bandaged up. He showed us a picture of his skin peeling off on the 
underside of his fingers. There was something hiding underneath those layers of dead 
skin which looked alien, like a whole other creature lived there inside him, and maybe 
had been there all along.  
But what I really want to say is that when my father asks one more time, 
“¿Why was it left open?” 
All the pressure inside blasts through the lumps in my throat to find its way 
out of my mouth. I squeeze my fists so tight my hands probably shake and I let out a 
growl as I say, “Ya campesino, ¿what have I been telling you this whole time?” The 
words come out so easily, it’s like I’ve been rehearsing them. Which in a sense, I 
have been. I’ve thought words like this many times while I look up at our tin roof and 
the cinderblock walls that become like bricks of ice at night or in the early winter 
mornings before dawn when it gets so cold, ice sheathes every blade of grass around 
the lake. Yes, I’ve thought about these words and others I never say to anyone. I’ve 
imagined what it would be like to call my dad a campesino, as if by laying that name 
on him, I’d no longer have a part in it.  
32 
 
 
Without fantasies like this, I never would have been able to talk back to him, 
or especially, to use campesino, a name that bunches together a lifetime of work and 
struggle—of whole generations before him even—and with that single word tell him 
that it’s worth the shit on my shoes.  
Even though I feel like these thoughts were ready to come out from 
somewhere in my chest, from the same part of the body where my father gets all his 
gravel, what I’d said still shakes me almost as much as it must surprise my father. His 
eyes become wet and red like open sores. His face gathers up around his eyes in a 
way that makes me think about tides that go chasing after twin moons.  
I think he’s going to stripe a belt across las pompis, as he tells me he will many times, 
and as my mother does to my brother when he comes home drunk Sunday mornings 
from a night with friends. But my father’s not like my mother. It’s true that his voice 
kicks up gravel, but his hands wouldn’t lift even a pebble against either my brother or 
me. And yet his voice, though it would maybe not lash my skin, is enough to chew 
me down to my bones. I’m sweating so much I think my shoes are filling up while I 
wait to hear what he’ll say next. 
I see the raw sores of his eyes, while they look back on me for what I’m sure 
is half an hour. He’s swallowing a lot. But instead of speaking he just sucks his lips 
in. Then, he leaves my brother and I at the edge of the pasture, too shaken to say 
anything ourselves, or even to breathe. 
All the rest of the day and into the night a guilt gnaws away at me from the inside. I 
go out of my way to avoid my father, except once when I try to apologize and he 
leaves again in silence. When my guilt begins to subside there comes another feeling 
33 
 
 
in its wake, which I try to push down and find I cannot. Each time I try, it springs 
back again. It feels like relief for having survived my father, and then a sense of 
conquest for having withstood him. It buzzes through my skull like a heightening, in 
that very specific way that I feel physically taller after taking a long run in physical 
education class. The next day, I’m certain I’ve grown at least two centimeters and beg 
my brother to keep measuring and remeasuring me until he finally gets the 
measurement I’ve been waiting for.  
 
Of course now I’m more careful with the goats than I’ve ever been with 
anything. I look three times each morning and another three times before bed that 
they’re all locked safely away in their pens, and I also check the fence daily for weak 
places and for signs of digging under the gate.  
But when I’m at school, I give all my fantasies and preoccupations to a future 
which I begin to feel destined for, after secundaria, it feels clear to me that I’ll go to 
prepa. And then to university. I lean hard into my English studies, which gives me 
real status, at least among the older grades, where the most popular kids start to use 
more English than Spanish. 
All this time my mother, who was the first to push me towards a life that 
would take me out of the village farmland, begins to look at me differently. She 
doesn’t say anything, but I can tell she’s uneasy. I feel it in her gaze and in how her 
voice cuts off when she talks to me about my day at school. Sometimes I catch her 
looking at me with eyes that are round with worry or maybe with sadness. Then 
another time I look at her and see how her eyes are not round but thin, almost pinched 
34 
 
 
shut. It makes my skin tremble because I feel that, though her eyes are on me, she’s 
looking at something else, something strange and malevolent.  
But if life’s becoming more complicated at home, it’s actually improving at 
school. Jair and I talk together more in the halls between classes. He shows me the 
watch he wears under his sleeve, which his father gave him. He's not supposed to 
wear it when he’s at school though. At least not until he starts university because it’s 
so expensive. I don’t know what it means to have an expensive watch. Still, before I 
can stop myself, I touch it. My fingertips tickle the glass part, which feels solid yet 
inexplicably smooth. I’m most surprised to feel how it bubbles up like a dome. Jair 
snatches the watch away from me and says I’m not supposed to touch the crystal. 
Then he looks down and says he does it all the time. A moment passes, then almost 
before I realize, both of us are running our fingers over the crystal dome. I peer inside 
the watch to see that, just as the crystal bubbles up, the watch sinks down into itself 
on three levels, black like obsidian rings. The rings terrace down, deeper into the 
body of the watch with each level until you get down to a circular platform just above 
the center. It’s kind of like I’m looking at an old Greek theater from above, but one 
where the stage is totally encircled by three levels. On each level are separate dials 
with different numbers. Jair tells me how to read each of the dials to get the time, 
date, and even the moon phase. It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen or felt before. When I 
ask him how much it costs, Jair says, “It’s a Stahl,” which he says like Shtal. “Do you 
know what that means?” I try to make it look like I do, but my confusion probably 
wins out over my expression because he says, “Stahl's the guy who created this 
watch. He designed it and everything. That makes it more expensive than a new car.” 
35 
 
 
I ask him how much money that is and he says he doesn’t know and changes the 
subject, though I also want to ask him how anything so small could cost so much.  
At least every week, Jair and I take the same combi home from school. His 
parents are divorced or maybe they’re separated. Back then I don’t know the 
difference because in my village, there’s only one couple we know who got a divorce, 
and everyone talks about them like they eat cat meat.  
Jair’s father lives in Puebla. They only see each other on weekends. The rest 
of the time Jair lives with his mother and her parents in a big house with a gate and a 
garden. It's down in Oasis where I get the combi to school and get off the combi to 
catch the boat home. Jair’s mother works in a good job out of the house, though 
sometimes she works late so she can’t always take him home in time. On those days, 
he catches the combi with me.  
Even though we talk more at school, as soon as we board the combi 
something changes between us. It's the same change I notice that falls on everyone 
who enters the combi. The friendliest guy you’ve ever seen gets in and suddenly, he 
just pulls into himself. I learn to look for this change to come over other people who 
climb into the combi. Though the combi packs them in tight, every passenger, even 
friends drift far from each other because they know they’ll end up in different places, 
in homes which their minds have already begun to occupy.  
It turns out that the silence works alright in my favor. I don’t know this on our 
first couple trips together though. All the time, I’m so scared, all I can think about is 
jumping straight through the passenger window in the event Jair starts asking things 
like where do I live, what do my parents do, how many people live in my town, and a 
36 
 
 
whole jumble of other questions that might seem devised to embarrass me all the way 
out the back windshield and into the next life. Jair gets off the combi a few stops 
before I do, so it would be hard for him to find any of this out without asking. No one 
in school knows me well enough to know where I’m from either, or even whether or 
not I’m actually a campesino. All anyone knows is that my family has enough goats 
to soil at least one pair of shoes. 
The silence in the combi also gives me comfort because I know that when I recognize 
people from Tlapeco who stoop in with their sombreros and patched up jeans, I don’t 
have to worry too much that they’ll give me away.  
But one afternoon this confidence begins to erode. A small birdlike man my 
dad buys animal feed from hunkers into the combi. Before I even recognize him or 
anything, the imbécil starts talking to me. He finds the tiniest slip of standing room to 
wriggle himself into. Then he turns his head sideways at me and looks on with one 
eye, big and excited at the sight of me there. The eye darts around in his skull like 
he’s a crow that’s just spotted larva or something. “Orale chavo, ¡look who it is!” he 
says. “¿And how’s your father been feeling?” He turns his head so I see both eyes 
now, and laughs with his head back as if the crow-impression was a special joke 
between us, but I decide this can’t be the reason he laughs because he still looks like a 
bird, just that now it’s a bird with two eyes.  
I focus on a bunch of scuff-marks and try to make myself wonder how they 
got up so high on the combi wall. I can feel the heat of his eyes zipping all over the 
combi, all over me. I try my best to let him know I can’t talk right now. I lie and tell 
him sorry, that I’m trying to review history notes in my head for a test tomorrow. But 
37 
 
 
then he begins to talk about history and launches into the Cristero War which he tells 
me his great grandfather fought in. It takes minutes of giving him half-answers to his 
questions, before I notice that his body begins to turn slowly away from me. I risk 
glancing at Jair, who’s sitting in the back. He looks bored and unaffected, like he’s 
oblivious to anything happening outside the reach of his fingers, which maybe he is.  
But when I say hi to Jair the next morning, a chill comes off of him. He’s on 
the floor of the classroom where I have my first and third periods, crawling on his 
hands and knees. I say hi to him from across the room and he sort of tosses his head 
up. It’s almost like he’s still carrying the combi’s silence around him like a bubble. I 
say hi again, this time closer to him, and he stops what he’s doing to look. His eyes 
go stony. I feel suddenly cold with him watching me on all fours like that, then I 
leave the room until class begins.  
I look for him at lunch but can’t find him anywhere. Once I’m seated, Jair 
comes up from behind. Instead of joining me to eat like he’s done sometimes in the 
past, he just asks me if I know where his damn watch is. He’s standing really close to 
me, so close I feel like getting up, but instead I only sit there, feeling as if at any 
second, he’ll grab me by the neck and pull me off the bench. Even though I know the 
correct answer to his question, I don’t know what to say. All I can get out is, “No, I 
haven’t seen it.” 
“¿Remember the classroom I was in this morning?” he said. “I’m in it the 
period before you are. That’s when I lost my watch.” My hands begin to shake so 
much, I have to keep them in my pockets to still them. I imagine Jair never finding 
the watch. Maybe someone else gets away with it but it’s just my word against this 
38 
 
 
rich kid’s and I’m kicked out of school. I’m kicked out of school and locked up in a 
jail somewhere, then all the goats die because I wasn’t there to feed them or fight off 
the nahual. Then all I can do when I get out of jail is make a living by washing 
windshields at traffic lights or begging around the Puebla zocalo with the other 
campesinos and villagers who tried to make a better life for themselves in the city.  
Jair must see that I’m seconds away from crying my eyes out of my face 
because he takes a small step back and says, “If you see anything, you have to let me 
know. You keep your eyes wide open.” 
It’s not until the next day that I see him again. I’m walking across the 
courtyard when I hear him whistle from the second floor walkway above me. “¿Que 
ovo Efra?” I look up at Jair, who seems warm—I mean, like he’s genuinely happy to 
see me, even if he is still calling me Efraín instead of Estéfano. I want to ask if he 
found his watch yet, but I’m too afraid to bring it up so I wait for him to talk. “Oh, 
there’s something I wanted to say,” he tells me. His voice gets a little quiet. “About 
yesterday guey. Sorry. Osea, I wasn’t mad at you, only nervous ¿you know? If my 
dad found out I lost that watch, he’d probably bite off my face.” 
I ask him what happened. He tells me, without any shame or even a lie to 
cover for his negligence, that he found the watch in his backpack, under all his 
textbooks. “I took it off before art so I wouldn't get paint on it.”  
Then he holds out his hand and says, “Chócala,” and I slap my hand down 
into his palm.  
Jair feels more like my friend now than he did even before he lost his watch. And not 
just when we pass each other between classes, but on rides home, too, where he 
39 
 
 
begins to carry some of our friendship from school along with him. It hangs over him 
like a warm bubble that fills up the whole combi. For a moment at a time, I allow 
myself to feel this warmth and take it in, where it radiates like a glow out of my chest. 
But I never let myself enjoy the feeling long before I grow fearful that our closeness 
will lead to questions which will take us apart again.  
This far, I’ve been lucky. Jair doesn’t seem interested in my life outside of 
school and almost never talks about his. Mostly we talk about where we might go to 
prepa, somewhere better and closer to Puebla, the girlfriends we might have there, 
and the lives that will be ours after.  
Also, because Jair has to dismount the combi a few stops before I do, there’s 
no chance he’ll be able to see where I get out. He can’t watch me jump down and take 
off like a bolt across the gravel lot, down to where the paved street gives way without 
warning to cobblestones then to the grassy beach, where I can see the motorboat 
waiting to conduct me across to Tlapeco.  
Even so, I feel that with the right amount of time my secret will come out. 
That if he gets too close, I'll no longer be able to keep him from. When I step out of 
the combi, I feel his eyes on the back of my neck. I get the idea that from his stop 
he’ll suddenly be able to see around the sharp bend in the road and through the walled 
stucco properties that stand between our stops. He’ll know about the boat waiting for 
me in the shallows, the goats, and the little ranch my family keeps. It feels that the 
moment when he’ll figure it all out is waiting for the right people to jump into the 
combi on the right day, and with the right mood to open their mouths and use the 
right arrangement of words. In this way, life begins to remind me more and more of a 
40 
 
 
combination lock, like the post office box my father keeps in San Fernando. Like my 
secret needs a combination of things to line up, and then I'll crack open and spill my 
insides all over the combi floor.  
What ends up happening on one of our rides home brings these fears to life, 
and yet in a way that’s more fearful because while they’re all that I fear, they’re 
nothing like I imagined. 
Jair and I are sitting next to each other in the one seat which faces backwards. 
We’ve just passed the rock quarry that’s been clawed out of the hill by our road, 
when the combi pulls over suddenly and stops. The door slides open and a very old 
woman heaves herself inside. She cradles against her body a stack of baskets she 
must have been weaving for sale by the San Fernando zocalo, where the traffic is 
slow enough for out-of-town villagers to peddle newspapers, and all kinds of wares, 
too. What she’s doing this far from the zocalo, here by the quarry I don’t know, 
though it’s possible she got a ride from someone who could only take her part of the 
way home.  
I recognize her instantly. She used to live on the edge of Tlapeco. Even when 
I was little, I thought she had to be the oldest woman in the world. I remember her 
face with its depthless creases, which so reminded me of a walnut that I couldn't look 
at her without getting a nutty flavor in my mouth. This might also be because she 
used to invite the children of parents she knew to her home for Día de Reyes, where 
she’d have atole and cracked walnuts for us. We’d take off our shoes to put under the 
only Christmas tree I knew of in town. She’d stuff clean new socks into all our shoes, 
filled with candies. I thought nothing of it as a very small boy, but it surprises me 
41 
 
 
now that, though there were many children and we only talked to her once or twice a 
year, she always remembered us by name. Even stranger is how her own name 
remains a mystery to me.  
Of course, there are many people like this, people from my village and from 
my past who sometimes share the combis I take. So it could be that, along with all the 
rest of them, I'll forget about this woman boarding my combi this afternoon, if not for 
everything that happens soon after.  
She doesn’t say anything to me in the combi, which I expected. What I didn’t 
expect was her lack of recognition. Even the people who are the most folded up into 
themselves have something on their face which lets me know they recognize me, even 
if they probably don’t mean to show it. Yet when she looks at me there's nothing to 
light up her eyes to my presence, nothing at all that stirs in her face.  
She just heaves herself up the footboard and into the combi. Her eyes pass 
over me slowly as she looks for some standing room. You can see she’s strong 
because her sleeves are rolled up and her muscles look to be made of steel chords 
tensing under her skin. She holds onto the ceiling bar for stability, but she has to stand 
on her toes to reach it. I feel like I’d do something about it like offer her my seat or if 
she refused, at least hold her pile of baskets. But her back is turned to me and there’s 
someone else standing in between us anyway, so I clench my jaw and try not to think 
about her slipping off her toes and cracking her head on the floor.  
My mind drifts out of the combi window to the world skidding by. Then 
there’s a sudden sound inside the vehicle’s cabin that brings me back to my seat. It’s 
the sound of nearby voices. I look over. Then I’m almost knocked out of my seat 
42 
 
 
because the voices are coming from the old woman and Jair. Their talk sounds fast 
and lively, like they’ve spent the last thirty minutes getting acquainted, and have a 
long time to go yet before they’re done. At first, I can’t pick up much of what they’re 
saying. But as I begin to tune my ears to them, I hear that almost the entire 
conversation is being filled out by the sound of Jair’s voice. 
He talks to her in the confident but still deeply laid-back way he has when he 
talks to anyone. Her answers, though, come out short and quiet. Judging by the way 
he’s talking to her, you’d think she was a schoolgirl in his class rather than his elder. 
He sounds malcreado and the words he uses are crude. Even worse, he uses the 
informal tú instead of the more respectful usted. It gives me the urge to cringe. I don’t 
want to think badly of him, so I wonder if maybe he’s trying to be friendly, familiar 
even. To show her that even though they have very different lives, they’re not all that 
different. But I look at the anciana and I’m rattled by what I see. She looks at him 
with an aghast breathlessness, the same look you’d expect to see if Jair had just boxed 
her ear. Only later will I understand how false intimacy where there should be respect 
becomes a kind of violation. And even though I can’t explain it with words back then, 
I see this violation spreading like a shadow over the anciana’s face. The shadow 
moves through her wrinkles like a sort of warning passed down through wires. The 
warning reaches her mouth, which she mashes together before turning her head. 
My senses are now fully opened to Jair and the anciana. “Have a seat,” Jair 
says in a kind of host’s voice I bet he’s borrowing from his dad. She steps uneasily 
aside as he stands for her. 
43 
 
 
When the woman accepts his seat, Jair says, “So how much for the baskets 
anyway.” But the sentence is flat and straight, like a kind of lance stabbing out at her 
rather than asking her a question. I know Jair doesn’t want to buy a damn basket from 
anyone, but the shadow lifts off of the woman’s face and just like that she’s no longer 
a bone-worn anciana on her way home, but a businesswoman hoping for one last sale 
before the day ends. 
I think she’s making up the price right there. “Pues…” she thinks out loud and 
I know she’s running calculations, which I’d bet the world are based around the way 
Jair holds his head up, how he keeps his hair, the way he talks and everything, which 
might tell her he’s some sort of rich little malcreado. She opens her mouth, then 
closes it again. Maybe her pause is supposed to make him think the basket will be 
more expensive than it ends up being, to dull the edge off the actual price when she 
tells it. Or then again, maybe she’s rounding the price up for Día de las Madres, 
which is coming up in a couple weeks (¿what else would a schoolboy want with a 
basket?). Finally, she says, “60 pesos, each one.” 
Jair smiles and it doesn’t even look like one of the fake smiles you give an 
older person to make them think you’re listening. He looks thoroughly pleased by her 
words, as though knowing that one of her baskets is worth 60 pesos fills him with 
sudden and unshakeable joy. Then the smile slowly fades and he looks right past me, 
to the window like he’s forgotten all about the old woman sitting where he himself 
had just been. 
The woman looks like she’s unsteady in her seat now. She shifts and kicks her 
legs out as if to stabilize herself against some unseen curve which the combi’s about 
44 
 
 
to zip around. She leans towards Jair. Her voice is quieter now and she says, “Joven, I 
can give it to you for 50 if you’d like.” 
Jair looks over at her. “Seño. I only have thirty-eight pesos with me.” 
Such little money must be out of the question for her, because now she’s the one who 
turns her head to look out the window. Then Jair tilts his chin up in a way that’s 
supposed to get my attention. His eyes are bright and impish in a way that makes him 
look especially travieso. It’s just a look, but its meaning feels so clear to me then, it 
comes with an almost audible, “Watch this,” attached. Then Jair rolls up his sleeve 
and there’s his watch. He holds it up to the window light, which is flicking around 
like crazy through streetside eucalyptus trees. “This watch is a Stahl,” he tells her. He 
makes sure to really pronounce the “Sh” in Stahl, which makes it sound like he’s 
wearing a Rolls-Royce on his wrist. The next thing he does leaves me biting my lip to 
keep me from gasping. Jair unclasps the watch’s sangria-colored leather strap and 
slips it off his wrist. Then he hands the watch over to the woman.  
“You can have it,” he says. “For that whole stack of baskets.” 
I look at this watch, this exquisite, alien thing made for a world which the 
woman has probably only seen from a distance, or with sidelong glances through the 
estate gates meant to keep people like her out. I look at the way the watch is just 
sitting there, with its domed crystal and three obsidian tiers, nested now in an 
anciana’s palm, which moments before had been holding a tower of baskets she’d 
been weaving to make a living by. The image is too much for my brain and I actually 
see my vision flicker and strain so that I’m wondering if my eyes are about to go out 
like bulbs. I wonder all this because I realize that I’m seeing what it must look like 
45 
 
 
when two worlds pass by each other, so close, they could end up swapping moons 
with each other if everything lines up in just the right way. 
The combi bucks over a tope and now I’m thinking about the watch and the street 
below us. I look at the watch bouncing around in her palm, like a tiny perfect egg. I 
expect at any moment that Jair’s going to reach out and snatch it away, or in the very 
least, throw his hands under hers to prevent it from cracking on the floor. But he just 
stands there, with that little smile, like he’s watching someone play with his new 
puppy or something. 
For my part, I feel more bumps than I ever remember existed on that drive 
home. It’s to the point where I feel the whole crazy map of the road under our wheels, 
the topography running up into my feet so that I could draw it with my eyes closed, 
each bend and pock and bump, down to the patch of gravel that spills from the truck 
bed in front of us.  
The woman looks like she's s wondering how to say no to a thoughtful, but 
inconvenient dinner invitation. Her lips move to give shape to some kind of soundless 
thought before she says, “Thank you joven, but I learn the time from the big zocalo 
clock when I need it, over in the quiosco. Or when I’m somewhere else I can usually 
keep time well enough by the sun.” She looks apologetic as she returns the watch to 
Jair. He clasps it back on his wrist and gives me a quick look. He’s still smiling and in 
his eyes I see the kind of thrill of someone who gambled with the most valuable thing 
they had—and got away with it. Though still I don't know what he stood to gain.  
Then Jair looks back to the woman and starts to talk. This time, I’m surprised 
because his voice sounds soft and even respectful, but as soon as you let the words 
46 
 
 
sink in, you find they come studded with barbs. He says to her: “I knew you weren’t 
going to take it. I actually let you hold it only because you had no idea how much it’s 
worth.” 
The woman blinks fast at him a few times. She’s been more or less quiet this 
whole ride, and I think she might not know what to say. But I’m wrong because she 
sits up and says to him: “By how you treated that watch I would have thought it was 
fifteen maybe twenty pesos. So okay, maybe I don’t know the price of your watch. 
But then, you don’t know the cost of money.” And then she sits back again and her 
mouth is closed like she never said anything at all.  
Her voice was easily drowned out by the reguetón pumping through the 
speakers, the engine cranking, and all the people packed out the windows, whose 
bodies alone dampen the sound of everything in the cabin. If all those people could 
have heard her then, I believe her answer would have knocked them on their heads. I 
imagine them stomping and cheering away years of the combi's accumulated silence, 
and her legend would be so celebrated, there'd be no silence again for years after. But 
they don’t hear her, and the reguetón keeps chugging, and if you were sitting or 
standing in the back, you never would have known that two worlds from entirely 
different solar systems were slamming together, right there on your way home from 
work.  
I can see that for his part, though, Jair hears every word. The anciana's voice, 
which is shaky and reminds me of tissue paper getting blown in the breeze, hits Jair 
with a force that jostles his insides. His breathing deepens. The simplicity of her 
argument clarifies what I'm sure I've known all along: never in his life has Jair had to 
47 
 
 
understand the value of anything. Of course this means he can’t understand, not 
completely, what she means by her argument. But what he does seem to understand is 
that he’s been outwitted. 
It’s obvious that he isn’t ready to be beaten by an old woman from el campo. 
He looks over at me quickly. Maybe he hopes I haven’t been paying too much 
attention. But before he looks away I can see that there’s no light or slyness or 
anything in his eyes. Instead he has the look of a wounded animal. Nothing too 
serious, like a wound that would sap his strength or anything, though bad enough to 
give strength to his anger.  
He looks back at me again and I can barely stand it because now he’s not 
looking away but just holding my stare with his eyes. I see that they look all 
imploring or maybe even demanding. It’s like he’s expecting me to step in and defend 
him. I don't know what I should do. Before I can do anything, a pop goes off 
somewhere inside his face and he’s moving his jaw around like it’s stuck. I decide 
he's buying himself time to work up a response because I see something flicker in his 
eyes again. Then he chokes back a laugh when he turns again to look at the woman. 
He says, “Seño ¿con todo respeto? That watch was worth more than anything you’ve 
ever held before in your life, or anything you’ll ever hold again.” Then he’s looking 
at me again. “Oye Efraín,” he says. “¿How much does my watch cost?” 
My mouth hangs open, maybe from fear or maybe because I know I should say 
something, but I don’t know what I should say or whom to say it to. So much of me 
wants to find some way for Jair to be the good guy in all of this. The rest of me, 
though, wants to take his head in my hands and clunk it against the window. As much 
48 
 
 
as the different parts of me want to do something, none of me can do anything, so that 
all I can think about is jumping out of the combi like it's on fire. I feel both Jair and 
the woman looking at me. Their eyes feel like sets of needles that drag all over my 
skin. It doesn't last long but in those seconds it feels like whole eternities bloom open.  
I say nothing. I can’t even open my mouth and so I look away.  
When we pass under the shadows of homes and roadside cedars, the window 
grows dark enough for moments at a time to become a mirror, which I think I see 
flashes of myself in, until the light hits the window in the next moment and the face 
disappears. Then we pass through a long shadow and the face appears again, dim like 
it was before. Now, it's looking in a different direction from me. Not at the window 
where I’m looking, but rather at its feet. I look closer and see it belongs, not to me but 
to Jair. He’s avoiding my gaze. I can see his disappointment. Maybe his 
disappointment comes because of me, or maybe he doesn’t think of me at all, but is 
still shaky from everything else.  
As for the woman next to me, I can feel how she’s tensed up; her arm is rigid, 
her breaths guarded, but neither she nor Jair say anything else until the door slides 
open and I realize the combi has stopped. Jair slips out. His eyes have lost their defeat 
or any kind of disappointment they might have carries before, like he wants me to 
forget that anything worth remembering ever happened. Out of the combi now, he 
begins to walk down the road towards his colonia a block away, when he says without 
even looking back at me, “See you tomorrow.” 
The combi kicks up, but before it can really get its momentum back, someone 
asks it to stop. “Aqui bajo, por favor,” the anciana says.  
49 
 
 
We pull over into the sort of half-wilderness that grows up into heaps of scrub 
and thistles just down the block from Jair’s gated neighborhood. I guess the woman 
must live in one of the single room, brick houses across the street from the overgrown 
lot.  
With the anciana still in the combi I can’t even begin to think about or make 
sense of what happened so I’m relieved now that she’s leaving. But before she gets 
out, the anciana turns to me. She looks for a few seconds while everyone’s waiting 
for her to get out and let them get moving, and then she says, “That boy called you 
Efraín. ¿Is that your name?” I nod yes but can’t bring myself to respond. Her eyes get 
a faraway, sort of disappointed look. But there’s a lot of things she says, or might be 
saying, with that look so it’s hard to read it all at once. She smiles briefly and I’m not 
sure if her eyes are watering or if I just imagined it. Then she says in a way that 
doesn’t tell me one way or the other: “Perdón joven, I thought you were someone 
else. But now I have a better look at you.”  
She turns slowly away and tries to brace herself against the near wall of the 
combi while she lowers herself down. I’m nervous because her hands are really 
shaky. I’m about to stand up to help her down, but a middle aged man steps in to hold 
her baskets in one hand then he helps her down with the other one. As soon as he 
passes the baskets to her, the door slides closed and we speed away.  
The last stop the combi makes is a big stretch of dirt and pebbles where the 
drivers park until they have to drive back through San Fernando again and on to 
Puebla. The pebbles crunch under us as we swing around. The combi stops. I get out 
and look down to where you’d think the street takes a dive into the lake because you 
50 
 
 
can’t see the cobblestone or the rocky beach over the dip. A motorboat will be 
waiting in the shallow water next to the docks and boathouses. I don’t go down to the 
boat yet but look over my shoulder. This time, it’s not because of one of my crazy 
fears that Jair’s watching me, but because of another thought that’s no less crazy. 
Now, I look back as if I’ll be able to see the woman. As if I’ll be the one who can 
wind my eyesight around the corners and bends in the road to the semi-wilderness a 
few combi stops before my own. But I’m also looking back into the combi until the 
driver begins to ask me if I left something. I don’t answer him because I don’t know 
what he’s asking until after I realize he’s gone. If you want the truth, what happened 
in the combi left me unsure of the world and the rules that are supposed to keep 
everything working in certain, predesigned ways. And everything that happened feels 
so fresh, so close it's almost like it’s still happening, like it’s always been happening 
in some way. I feel it’s so fresh in my mind that if I look back into the combi, I might 
see it all happening now. Yet in another way, it’s so fresh I can’t even begin to see it 
clearly. What I mean is that I don’t understand the sunken feeling in my belly or why 
I am, even before I realize it, running towards the old woman’s combi stop. My feet 
have broken free from my volution and are propelling me up the hill. They have to 
slow to a walk once before they pick back up again. Then I find myself at the 
overgrown lot. Only when I stop do I feel the blood surge against the walls of my 
skull. I look down the little side-road that runs through the ramshackle houses across 
the street, but there’s nothing to see. I get the idea that she physically vanished, as if 
she's been reconstituted into the scrub brush around me. 
51 
 
 
When I see I’m alone, what comes to mind is the woman's eyes, which I 
remember look eternal and careworn. And I remember the way she looked at me 
when I told her my name was Efraín. I think about my mother’s own eyes, which 
carry a look of wary pride at the many ways I’m changing. I think that in the way the 
anciana struggled to recognize me, she might have been my own mother, in a far off 
future. Like my mother when she’s long been old and I’ve left the home of my birth 
far behind, so that when I return home to see her, she has to strain her eyes to see if 
the man standing in front of her, with his warm-colored chinos and calfskin bag, 
could have really been her son, once.  
I also wonder about my refusal to answer Jair. At the time I had myself 
convinced that my silence was virtue. But now I wonder if my refusal to help Jair 
really was meant to protect the woman. Or if, by not speaking against him, I was 
really protecting myself. What I hope had been virtue in the combi now begins to feel 
like some mortal vice.  
Guilt like a stone settles inside me. Although, guilt might not be the right 
word for it. I don’t think what I feel can be given any one name. Maybe the feeling 
instead has to be named with a description. What I’m saying is that there’s guilt in the 
way I feel, but there is relief too, and also there is fear. Guilt for not defending the 
anciana. Relief that I didn’t attack Jair. And fear that I didn’t help him.  
There might be a better part of myself somewhere inside that feels only guilt 
and wants to find the woman and somehow make amends. But the truth is that even if 
I found her here on the side of the road, I don’t know what I might say to her, or if 
anything I say will ever be enough to undo my silence on the combi.  
52 
 
 
By the time I make it back to the lake, the boat is gone. In the distance, I can 
see the upside-down V the boat plows through the water as it races for Tlapeco. I 
have maybe fifteen minutes before my dad will decide that I won’t be back in time to 
guide the goats to water. He’ll have to take the rear, but he’s getting older and by now 
his eyes will hang like weights in their sockets, and his feet and ankles will be plump 
with blood for the lake mosquitos to gorge on. And the nahual might be there, too, 
watching from a distance for the day when I don’t come ready to fight off an attack 
from behind. 
All I can do is wait for the boat. Without another combi likely to come for half 
an hour, it will be in no hurry to return. I squat down on my heels and bend over the 
water, where the boat had been waiting probably two minutes before. I look down at 
the surface and there’s the face of a boy looking up at me. It hits me for the first time 
that his face is beautiful. But his eyes are haggard. Dark half-moons under his eyes 
give him a crazed look. His hair also looks a little worn, so that some of the style he 
worked into it that morning has begun to shake loose in a way that seems intended, 
like he comes from a world that’s extravagant and vicious.  
Somewhere in the water there’s movement. The surface ruffles and the face of 
the boy looking up at me grows misshapen. I feel watchful looking down at him like 
that. But now I also get the sense of being watched. It’s clear that there’s something 
under the surface of the water, just behind the boy’s face. I feel suddenly that it will 
come for me. Soon. That when it does, it will spring out of a place where all things 
wild and nameless watch, waiting for the moment when they can no longer be 
contained.  
53 
 
 
A Roadmap to the Last Kingdom of the World 
It’s clear what I have to do. My tensile strength’s maxed out and I’ve had 
enough. Never in my life have I been so sure of anything. Today, I’m going to quit 
my job.  
Of course, I can’t just quit my job. That would be too good for them. Sure, I 
might have been spared from the Company’s restructuring. But what was I spared for, 
exactly? To be saddled with all the responsibilities of those who were not spared? To 
be denied overtime when I’m expected to log 60-plus hours a week because I’m “on 
salary?” So, this is what I’ll do: I’m going to walk up to my boss’s desk, tell him off, 
then I’ll quit my job. No, no. I’ll walk up, stand on top of my boss’s desk, wave my 
arms from side to side, beat my chest a little. And then I’ll quit my job.  
But I am kind-hearted and know that the others who were spared from 
restructuring have it just as bad. Do I just leave them there? They must feel the same 
as I do, after all. No, I must convince them to leave with me. I’ll give a rousing 
speech. I’ll wow them with acrobatics. They’ll follow on my heels.  
In the days to follow, the Company will scramble for survival. We’ll pull out 
and watch how the building will rattle and sway in our absence.  
Yet this in itself won’t be enough. The Company may tank, but the conditions 
that made the Company remain. And there are others out there who’ve been dealt 
worse cards, I know, people who would have overthrown a stable country for a shot 
to work at the Company. My revolution is benevolent and I see their suffering. Their 
cards didn’t come from a corporate office, but from power structures, landlords, from 
54 
 
 
kingmakers and power brokers. It won’t be enough to overthrow the power structures. 
We must take on multinational corporations. We must subvert the government.  
All I must do to get my revolution started is search out the others like me. The 
quiet, languishing legions of others who (like me) have had it. It’ll be obvious to 
them, too, what must be done. They’ll revel in my epiphany. They will take one last 
look at what they’ve been dealt and understand. One last look at the cards cut from 
the deck, just for them. And they’ll understand that the cards themselves aren’t the 
problem, but symptoms of a defective deck. That for the cards to change, the deck 
and the deck factory and the deck shareholders and the deck board of directors all 
must go.  
I’ll search them out, all these others like me. I’ll find them everywhere. 
They’ll be in police precincts and broom closets and national guard squadrons. 
They’ll be hunkered down behind rocks. They’ll live in holes hidden by hedgerows. 
They’ll be watching handheld television sets behind table skirts at restaurants, down 
where diners and restaurant staff don’t see. They’ll live in nation-states sprung up in 
fennel fields and on the sides of mountains. In nation-states whose independence their 
host nations and states refuse to recognize. I’ll find their citizens, who live in mud-
brick homes and in forests of hollowed-out trees, where they amass weapon caches 
and hum mantras and march to cadences.  
They’ll come. They’ll understand: we must make a world where it is 
impossible for oppressive power structures to exist. 
To do this, of course, we’ll first have to conquer the world.  
55 
 
 
It is within the realm possibility. But if we are to be successful, we must reach 
them all, those languishing legions, wherever they may be found. And they’ll be 
found on Wall Street, on trans-Pacific airlines, on advisory boards. They’ll be on 
cold-call sales jobs, on commission, on copious amounts of low-grade schedule 1 
drugs.  
They’ll be busboys and busgirls. They’ll be senators’ aids and senators’ 
interns, and two of them at the start will be senators, so sick of the whole thing they’ll 
leave everything behind to join our cause. They’ll leave everything down to their 
senators’ clothes and undergarments and flee Capitol Hill on foot with the sun 
warming their bare flesh before being snatched up by a police cruiser, which will 
transport them quietly to our headquarters. We will give them detailed instructions. 
We will tell them to return to Capitol Hill where they are to await more instructions.  
We will number in the thousands. No, the millions. We will number in the 
tens of millions. There will be no stopping us. There isn’t a corner of infrastructure or 
governance that will exceed our reach. All at once, we will rise up and take the world 
by storm. The militaries of the world will fold into chaos, divided, stricken. Now, no 
one said it would be pretty. The abusers of power must be made examples of. And 
some of our own will become martyrs for the cause.  
But after the examples are made, and the martyrs martyrized, the things we’ll 
accomplish in our global reign will outspan the wonders of any previous age. 
Language will never again be the same. There will be new words for things that 
didn’t exist before speaking them. We’ll speak these words and they’ll come 
flickering to life in our palms. Their wings will twitch and test the air for possibilities. 
56 
 
 
When we speak, discrete and continuous structures of space-time will vibrate and 
sway, their accepted logic threatened. Floors and ceilings and walls will converge 
around our flickering creations.  
Potent new music will animate buried regions of our minds with emotions we 
never would have thought possible. New visual art forms, painted by negative space 
on canvass and negative space on the walls between canvasses will scratch parts of us 
we didn’t know had been itching. In the light of new literatures, we will understand 
regions of our being we never knew existed. We will become suddenly aware of our 
many additional appendages, of wings, of our third and fourth eyes. 
We will cast nets to the sky and snare stray planetary bodies, and from them 
create new habitable worlds. We will string ice moons and comets like pearls. Stars 
will follow in our train. Superclusters. We will reconfigure firmaments. 
 
 The world has no idea what’s about to hit it. It could have all gone a different 
way. Now my boss sits there, smug, heedless behind his desk while I plot the ruin and 
renewal of all things. All humanity needs is for me to set events in motion. The time 
is right.  
 
 
 
 
 
 
57 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Part Two 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
58 
 
 
The Conquered 
 
And so Alexander kicked the horse-feed out of the Pisidians, who made head against 
him, and accepted the quiet conquest of the Phrygians, who did not. Then at Gordium, 
the Phrygian’s chief city…he had it out with the famous Ruler’s Knot, where the 
tradition goes that whosoever unbinds its chords will inherit the empire of the 
world… 
—Plutarch, Alexander 
 
After weeks of making just about every earthly provision to welcome 
Alexander of Macedonia, Phrygia’s Lord Governor was out of his mind for 
something else to distract himself by. For look! How young Governor Ashkan sat 
grieved to the floor over his beloved’s recent departure. With nothing more to do 
before Alexander’s arrival than twiddle his thumbs, he began to wonder what the 
twiddling of thumbs was actually supposed to entail of him, movement-wise, and 
whether now might be the time to revisit other coping strategies—a sorry state to see 
the Lord Governor in.  
At least from a political standpoint, it’s true he had no right under the heavens 
to complain. Ashkan was one of the youngest governor appointees in recent memory. 
And though he came from a less-than-noble line, he had worked his way through the 
ranks under two previous governors.  
On the wider political front, too, Phrygia and the greater-Persian Empire were 
all but sure to greet the sixth year of Darius III’s clumsy reign by watching it come to 
a smashing end—a reign whose incompetence and corruption had Darius’s own 
Persian generals wagging choice fingers at him in a show of mutinous solidarity 
before strapping up with Greek armies.   
And Ashkan had it on good authority, straight from other recently conquered 
(“liberated!”) satraps and lords loyal to Alexander’s campaign: the transition of 
59 
 
 
power from Darius to Alexander was kindling a collective spirit of hope for growth. 
Growth on a scale not seen since Persia first conquered Gordium and revitalized the 
whole cultural scene, now many generations gone. And the hope was not without 
cause. What conqueror was as quick to forge alliances and economic treaties with his 
conquered subjects as he was to bowl over their kings?   
Ashkan would have to keep his gloom in silence. The best thing for him 
would be to gird up and put his strong foot forward. Let him store his sorrows up until 
a time of national mourning, when a leader’s personal tears could be mistaken for 
collective grief.  
In the week after Hamed (the governor’s beloved) announced that he was 
leaving Phyrgia’s capital of Gordium for the Persian interior, Ashkan struggled to 
keep all the positives at the center of his attention. Outside of sleep, he knew he 
couldn’t afford a stray minute of unscheduled time. For no sooner does the man swept 
out to sea begin to rest than he sinks. Ashkan caught himself begging the gods, 
Persian and Greek, for some eleventh-hour hiccup to interrupt his grief. A 
thunderclap. A fire in the royal grain store! And if not that, there was still time for the 
servants to leverage a well-timed strike to renegotiate wages. But Ashkan was 
blighted with misfortune, for he found his day woefully short on crises. Today, for the 
first time since Hamed told him that they were to part ways, Ashkan had enough free 
time to give dangerous thoughts legroom. He wondered, for instance, if obsessing like 
this might be good for him, from a certain perspective. That it might even be better to 
sink at rest than to float on in exhaustion.  
60 
 
 
Before Ashkan, the governorship belonged to Hamed, just one month gone. 
But with Alexander coming in and shaking up all levels of government, there was real 
opportunity for enterprising leaders loyal to Alexander. As for Hamed’s portion, he’d 
be moved to the Persian interior where he would lead diplomatic efforts between 
Persian subjects and new Greek leadership. And Ashkan, as Chief Advisor, was 
Hamed’s natural successor.  
Yet it wasn’t so simple as accepting their new appointments. What was soon 
clear to them both was how tangled up this decision was with the future of their 
relationship. Both Ashkan and Hamed had set the course of their entire lives on 
securing their offices. Yet now, where Ashkan and Hamed’s careers might advance, 
their love would surely die. For if Hamed left to Persia, Ashkan would stay behind to 
take over governing duties in Phrygia.  
Ashkan nestled his head in Hamed’s lap and asked him to stay. Hamed, who 
was both older and more calculating, looked down tenderly and said, “It’s just not to 
be, Ashkan.”  
There was little doubt that even while hearing of his new appointment, Hamed 
was clear-sighted enough to look through his excitement and see the tangle of 
problems that would come as a result. Hamed told him what would soon happen: he 
was going to accept the offer and leave Phrygia. And rather than attend him to the 
Persian interior, Ashkan would choose to take the governorship.  
Ashkan shook his head and tried to look wounded at the suggestion that he’d 
take the governorship rather than follow his love, yet he couldn’t find the words to 
refute it. 
61 
 
 
“Yes, Ashkan. You will. I know your ambition. And I know mine. If I stay, 
I’ll stay as governor. But who’s to know how many years or decades it might be 
before I retire? I’ll only hold you back here. But Ashkan, if I leave we’ll both 
flourish.”  
Ashkan tried to fight it, of course. But how could he argue with someone like 
Hamed? What might convince someone whose devotion to the pragmatic was so 
absolute that he’d cast himself into exile if a cost-benefit analysis foretold that all 
parties would prosper by his absence?  
But in moments like this, Ashkan found he didn’t have the even-tempered 
luxury to even see the futility of his arguing. And why shouldn’t he be outraged? 
Here stands Hamed, speaking of his departure as if he’s considering adding a fountain 
to the Court of Midas. Even more infuriating was just how extreme Hamed’s level-
headedness was in moments of conflict. Now it was as though Hamed drew the force 
of his long-suffering from Ashkan’s youthful impetuousness. By the sing-song calm 
of his voice, one might believe he was talking a toddler down from strangling the 
housecat. And it galled him how Hamed so readily assumed that Ashkan would throw 
off love to fulfill ambition--and more, that for his own part, Hamed was willing to do 
just that. To make the comedy of their professional lives the tragedy of their love! 
“Why do we have to give up our love, for our careers?” was what Ashkan said to him.  
“That’s a fair point,” Hamed said. “Why must we? Then why don’t you be the 
one? Come with me, Ashkan, and leave the governorship.” 
“Wait there, why must I be the one to make the sacrifice?” 
62 
 
 
“If you disagree with me about giving up our relationship, it’s most 
reasonable for you to be the one to give up your job.” Ashkan looked at him 
disbelievingly, his mouth opening but without a response. Emboldened by his silence, 
Hamed pressed the point. “If you really want to give us the time we need to save our 
marriage, leave the governorship.” 
“That’s not a reasonable request. You know that.” 
“No, it’s not.” Hamed’s voice broke suddenly--startlingly at the end, with 
more of an outpouring than Ashkan ever thought he would get out of him. Then 
Hamed drew Ashkan against him and held him fast. He spoke in his most unbearably 
knowing way, which in that moment, Ashkan realized he’d look back on with 
fondness and longing. Hamed said, “I don’t think we can expect a reasonable solution 
for an unreasonable problem.” 
It hounded Ashkan in the weeks after, that of all the things Hamed had said, 
the whole thunder-shock of his leaving, the greatest surprise was Ashkan’s own 
inability to pull the linchpin out of his governorship. 
Now his thoughts turned, again and again, to an expedition he’d taken with 
Hamed, not two months deep into their relationship. Hamed and his retinue were to 
tour Persia’s Aegean fleet on state invitation from a Phrygian-born admiral. For the 
better part of a week, they joined the crew of a trireme: two masts and two decks of 
sea-craft with 160 paces to a deck. One might imagine a more romantic excursion 
than retching side-by-side over the rail of the world’s choicest naval engineering. But 
he was never to forget when, on the third day, Hamed volunteered Ashkan for what 
he called a special assignment. With the retinue gathered around, Hamed asked the 
63 
 
 
captain if he and Ashkan his advisor might be allowed to look down over the world 
like gods, from the top of the main-mast. He explained that they could later recount 
the experience to their subjects in the Court of Midas, to seed a sense of pride in their 
naval might.  
After a dizzyingly brief lesson on knots which Ashkan would have been glad 
to see extended into half an hour, Hamed squinted up the grain of the mast then said 
they were ready. The boatswain supervised Hamed as he used a bowline to tie the 
halyard to a crude rope seat. A senior ship-hand pulled up the slack. Then he began to 
ratchet the line through a deck winch.  
Ashkan was in awe to see how, as soon as his feet left the deck, what had 
always been Hamed’s characteristic calm melted into a boyish giddiness. Swinging 
with his feet out against the mast, he felt his own guts clench up as the sails caught 
the wind and the ship lurched over a swell. But it was Hamed’s infectious delight 
(how he pushed himself away from the mast and laughed, how he pumped his arms 
over his head to rouse his retinue to cheer for the Aegean fleets) which made Ashkan 
feel as though hanging defenselessly above a turbulent sea with Hamed was not only 
a sound decision, but the most exhilarated he’d ever been.  
Today in his court chamber where Ashkan kept his governing seat, he 
couldn’t help but luxuriate in the sweet sting of his memories, his eyes distant, 
straining against time to see days past.  
He was so busy nursing Sharbat from a reed straw protruding out of the side 
of his face that he didn’t notice his chief advisor, Tyro, open the doorway of his 
chamber. “Lord Governor?” Tyro said. Ashkan jolted in his seat with the shock he 
64 
 
 
might have experienced if the halyard line holding him to the mainmast suddenly 
given out.  
As intently as his mind had been focused inward, his awareness of his 
surroundings returned to him with an equally sharp focus that made the band of light 
through his window look bronze-edged, menacing even, so that even the ledger table 
in front of him seemed to him strange and chthonian with its three legs and squat 
dimensions. Then he saw Tyro taking his ease against the doorjamb, affecting that 
falsely pitying smile he used when he wanted Ashkan to know that he was running 
late to a new moon ceremony, or that Ashkan hadn’t ordered enough amaranth cakes 
for the Gordian officials’ weekly council.  
“Tyro, ah!” Ashkan said as if he himself had sent for Tyro. “Come in, please. 
Hope you weren’t waiting there, in my doorway too long?” 
Tyro’s smile grew. “I just came to tell you that the King of Macedonia will be 
arriving soon.”  
Ashkan looked to the band of light on the far wall. “I’m sure you’re mistaken. 
Mark that light? It’s not a second later than noon, and we weren’t expecting him until 
early evening.”  
“He’s about three minutes out, Sir, yes,” said Tyro. “Emissary just arrived. It 
caught me off guard too, let me tell you. So shall I round up the welcoming party, 
or…”  
“Yes. Of course.” There was a panicked moment when Ashkan considered 
that in minutes, the King of Macedonia and his warring armies would come marching 
through Gordium and into the Court of Midas.  
65 
 
 
But this panic soon fell out of memory and was replaced by a kind of 
unexpected gratitude. Alexander’s early coming meant a sure distraction from what 
would otherwise be the mental equivalent of a skin-flaying.  
He stood at his ledger table and said to Tyro, “Make sure my retinue’s 
assembled in the Court of Midas. Get the seats ready for Alexander and his guards. 
And be sure to bring the best bottles of retsina!” Ashkan followed Tyro out the door, 
then through the gallery and into the Court of Midas. There he ensured all members 
of his retinue were accounted for and in position.  
When the Macedonian emissary had entered the Court weeks ago with tidings 
of Alexander’s upcoming arrival, Ashkan thought how to best receive the 
Macedonian king. Having the good judgment to consider how the Persian soldiers 
garrisoned in Gordium were outnumbered by Alexander’s court musicians alone, he 
thought it wise to show that whatever Phrygia lacked in might, it made up for in 
hospitality. But Alexander wasn’t coming to Gordium to flex his military muscle. 
That, he handled by vanquishing Persia’s central forces at Gaugamela, in an 
astonishing 5-to-1 upset. No, Alexander’s emissary made it clear that his intention 
was now to conquer the hearts and minds of his new subjects. It seemed that what 
Alexander wanted was to make his new subjects feel liberated rather than conquered. 
The idea was for Alexander to symbolically establish his right to rule by 
making use of a legend, housed in Ashkan’s very own Court of Midas. For Alexander 
would attempt to solve the legendary Ruler’s Knot.  
Over a century since, long before the time Darius’s predecessor appointed 
Lord Governors, the Gordian king died without an heir to the throne. Gordium’s chief 
66 
 
 
priestess decreed that the first person to enter the Court with a riddle none of the 
priests could solve would prove the right to rule. There came a night shortly before 
sundown when there came a peasant from the field. To the delight of the court 
officials, he came dragging a yoke, cross-beamed to an oxcart shaft. He said he didn’t 
have a riddle, so much as a puzzle. He proposed that if he could tie a knot they 
couldn’t undo, would they agree to instate him as ruler? Laughingly, they agreed. 
Over the course of an hour, the future King of Gordium tied the yoke and shaft to the 
Court’s central pillar, where it remained these many years hence. The Sibyl made her 
final decree: that whoever was able to unbind the Knot would not only prove rightful 
rule of Phrygia, but of Persia, Asia, the world.  
When Ashkan learned of Alexander’s plan, he warned the envoy that as 
undeniably impressive as it would be to solve the Knot, it would be equally 
devastating to Alexander’s image if he failed. Generations of Gordians and foreigners 
alike tried without success. But Alexander was hotheaded as he was clever. He meant 
to put on display his ability to unravel the paradoxes and gridlocks that come with 
ruling an empire. In Alexander, after all, the Gordians had not only a brilliant warrior, 
but Aristotle’s personal pupil. Here was the javelin-wielding heir apparent to war 
gods and Socratic philosophers alike.  
 
And so Ashkan stood waiting in the Court (thumbs atwiddle), for what 
seemed half the afternoon. The Counselor of Historic Guardianship had long finished 
brushing the Knot clean and ensuring the yoke and crossbeam were dry from the coat 
of preservative lacquer he’d applied the day previous. As for the retinue, they were 
67 
 
 
growing increasingly more uneasy. Ashkan was down three attendants before the 
hour broke. One young man collapsed and had to be carried off. Then, one of the men 
carrying the fainted attendant lost his footing on a loose tile and turned his ankle. The 
other attendant carrying the young man, after seeing these mishaps as harbingers 
foreboding Alexander’s arrival, fled the court, leaving his fainted and injured 
companions on the floor behind.  
Ashkan considered Alexander’s delay. If the Macedonians had already 
crossed the city gates at the time that Tyro notified him, they should have arrived at 
the Court a full hour earlier. It seemed Alexander was touring the city, as if to make a 
point that meeting the Lord Governor and solving the Ruler’s Knot must only be 
afterthoughts for so great a man. 
His arrival was suddenly presaged by a crowd of Gordians who poured into 
the Court through the main gate and every available side door. The smell of 
caramelizing leeks and spitted lamb from the meat markets outside followed the 
Gordians like a cloud through the Court. The crowd folded and refolded in on itself, 
as people shuffled around each other for the choicest view of the Knot, which they 
took to be Alexander’s destination. Yet even these Gordians, who had likely followed 
Alexander’s forces throughout his tour of the city, seemed to have misjudged his 
arrival time and as the minutes passed, they too grew restless. The walls began to 
buzz with half-whispered chatter and a sudden uptick in catcalls.  
Then, there came a furious applause which galloped down through the ranks 
of townsfolk. Two broad-shouldered brutes in bronze breastplates pushed through the 
crowd. “Listen you, make a hole. Make a hole, dammit,” they said. The crowd parted 
68 
 
 
uneasily before them. The two men stopped just short of the pillar where the Knot 
held the yoke fast to the crossbeam.  
Then in the gateway, he was there. Alexander, King of Macedonia, decked in 
full battle gear. His armor was impressively light: a lion’s head helmet of bronze, and 
nothing more than a plated fabric cuirass for his body. On his appendages were 
leather greaves. His belt was weighted simply with his sword, the Greek kopis. More 
than anything, what stirred Ashkan’s wonder was how young Alexander was. It was 
jarring in a way, that someone as young as he himself was wielded more power than 
any Lord Governor, or ruler of any kind may ever know again. Alexander made no 
move to enter the Court, but just stood between two of his guards for a long, steady 
moment. He surveyed the Court, though Ashkan got the impression that as much as 
Alexander wanted to see, he wanted more to be seen.  
Then, with an easy, though surprisingly coy smile Alexander entered the 
Court of Midas and made his way to Ashkan’s retinue. A small train of some fifty 
soldiers followed close behind.  
Tyro was the first to bow, but Ashkan quickly stepped to the front. “My 
Lord,” he said. “As Governor, I speak for the city of Gordium and all of Phrygia. 
Thank you for letting us host you and your company. ”  
Alexander regarded Ashkan with an imperial smile that seemed to say, in 
approximate terms, that while Alexander accepted his welcome, Ashkan occupied the 
part of Alexander’s mind reserved for things like whether to trim his nails before or 
after bathing.  
69 
 
 
“No, Governor,” Alexander then said in an oratory voice. “The road has been 
long, yet it’s still longer ahead. So the thanks is all mine because you welcomed me. 
And also for not making us have to crush you by force.” Alexander’s generals 
laughed hearty, grieving laughs that shook their breastplates. The Gordians thronging 
closely around were quick to follow the generals’ lead. Then Alexander closed the 
space between himself and Ashkan and at a more intimate volume said, “Actually, do 
you think your retinue could set us up with some seats?”  
Ashkan felt his breath seize in his lungs. Did he not tell Tyro to handle the 
seating? But before Ashkan could so much as turn his head, Tyro stepped forward.  
“I hope you’ll forgive us, your Kingship,” Tyro said. His expression managed 
the unlikely balance between contrition and amusement. “I just want you to know that 
my Lord Ashkan truly means well.”  
When Ashkan saw how Tyro sought to upstage him, he realized that he 
probably should have seen it all coming, five stadias away. From the moment Ashkan 
assumed the governorship, Tyro had all but trumpeted his disapproval. From his 
accumulated eye-rolls and pitying smiles, it was clear Tyro, chief adviser of two 
governors prior to Ashkan, thought himself better equipped to govern Gordium. It 
must have seemed inevitable to Tyro that he should one day be governor himself, 
until he came into disfavor with Hamed over a road construction project Tyro 
presided over. Alas, the project ended with more of an aqueduct than a road, which 
left at least one royal caravan up to the axle in mud. He continued on in the retinue, 
but after trying to weasel the blame onto the internal minister, Hamed saw to it that 
Tyro’s position would forever dead-end him from public office.  
70 
 
 
In spite of everything—his outward disdain, and pocked track record—Tyro 
had always been more useful to Ashkan than threatening. But this was something 
else. This was the kind of once-in-a-career shot for Tyro to break out of his dead-end 
and have an audience with the King.  
Alexander gave a curt smile. “What’s your name, attendant?” he asked Tyro. 
“I’m Chief Advisor, Tyro of Argos, my King.” 
“Good enough. And who’s the chairman around here?” 
Tyro craned his neck forward like he failed to hear Alexander. “Well our titles 
might be a bit different in Phrygia, but—” 
“Who’s the chairman, Tyro of Argos? Who is the chair-man?” 
“I’m sorry, I don’t—” 
Then, in a divested manner, Alexander rolled his eyes up at the vaulted ceiling 
where they remained fixed on some unknown point of interest. “Is it your Governor’s 
job to lug out the furniture? Do you even know what your Governor’s job is? Okay. 
Let me put an easier question to you. What is your job, chair-man Tyro? A country’s 
a little bit like an army. I like to tell my liberated subjects that an army can’t function 
when the pawns are in revolt.” Alexander brought his gaze down from the ceiling and 
leveled it with Tyro’s.  
“Maybe there’s been a misunderstanding,” Tyro said, “What I—”  
“I’m your general now soldier. And I need you to clear out of this Court.”  
It was some time before Ashkan could put together what happened next. By 
all appearances, Tyro really lost it. But what Ashkan later decided was that Tyro had 
seen his long life’s work going up in a flash. Ashkan watched Tyro tremble as he 
71 
 
 
turned dejectedly away from the assembly. Then something like a gurgling came 
from his mouth. For a moment Ashkan thought Tyro might smolder and burst into 
flame. But in the next moment, Tyro unsheathed a sword from one of the temple 
guard’s belts and pivoted towards Alexander, the blade making a swish for the king’s 
back. Alexander hadn’t so much as looked over his shoulder when a young Greek 
general intercepted the attack. There was a clash—and Tyro lay disarmed amid a 
confusion of limbs that made him look like a beached squid.  
What most impressed Ashkan was not the urgency of the general’s response, 
but that as urgent as he was, the general had the restraint to keep Tyro whole-bodied 
and (for all intents and purposes) unharmed. The general’s fear-stricken face as he 
leapt into action remained in Ashkan’s vision for a minute afterwards, like the 
phantom left in the eye by gazing at embers. He had seen mothers with less 
motivation to catch falling babies than this man had been to throw himself between 
Alexander and the mad assailant. Alexander’s own personal guard, who simpered 
over him now or loosened the perimeter of Gordians from around Alexander, had 
seemed unmoved and slack-eyed by comparison. The young general’s lips contorted 
now over the bundle of robes at his feet, as if he were talking himself down from 
making diced work of Tyro right there in the temple. 
Ashkan’s governorship allowed him to be close enough to the action to see it: 
in the middle of the commotion, Alexander shot the young general a glance that 
seemed full of apologetic thanks and a yearning sadness. As quick as the glance was, 
to Ashkan it seemed unmistakable that the two were joined in love, and perhaps, had 
72 
 
 
been for a long time. They grew solemn and, it appeared, sorrowful. The moment 
passed and the lovers were once again a general and his king.  
It bewildered Ashkan that of all the tidings blowing in, he’d heard not a 
chatter about this love. Though verily, not all peoples permitted men to love as 
Persian men loved. It wasn’t out of the question for Persian generals to make love to 
each other—or even with lords and kings. Yet the Assyrians, it was said, made 
eunuchs of any warrior men who were found sleeping together. As for most of 
Greece, a man’s relations were saved for women and boys. Love between men was a 
short season you’d better grow out of in youth, in the way barley sprouts were 
expected to leave the soil for the air above.  
But here was the king of Macedonia. The conqueror of emperors. Could it be 
that even he was the subject of his people’s will? Was he so marshaled as a boy by 
the expectations of his elders, his mother and his late father, to stand as no more than 
the living representation of their own ideals? 
 
Alexander turned to Tyro, who by then had been lofted to his feet by the 
guard. “What fool’s spirit possessed you to pull a thing like that?” Alexander said. 
“Here I was in my beneficence, letting you go, free as a diddy from Orpheus’s own 
damn harp—I mean by the gods, man.” Now lowering his voice, he said, “Look, 
execution doesn’t set the kind of tone you’d want on a day like this. But you did try to 
hack out my lung, so what can I do?” Alexander sent a detachment of two Greek 
guards to escort the attacker out of the temple, along with a Gordian priest to ensure 
the body would be disposed of after Phrygian code. “Farewell, oh chair-man Tyro.” 
73 
 
 
Alexander said after the detachment had left. He seemed immensely pleased with his 
pun, but Ashkan’s retinue was too shaken to humor him. Ashkan sensed their 
collective relief when he sent them out of the Court to scratch up some benches and 
lounging cushions.  
He wondered about how unhesitantly Alexander was to decide a civilian’s 
future. He marveled that in the first few minutes after his arrival, the unflinching 
Alexander had solved a problem Ashkan should have had the steel to fix years ago.  
He looked to Alexander with gratitude. Yet instead of showing any sign of 
ruling-class camaraderie, or sympathy for Tyro’s insubordination, Alexander returned 
his gaze with the same lofty edge he had reserved for Tyro at the moment of his 
sentencing. As if Ashkan himself were complicit in Tyro’s dangerous 
insubordination.  
After the retinue returned to seat the Macedonian Guards, Ashkan took care to 
note how Alexander scanned the Court from left to right, instead of the right-to-left 
sweep that studied Persians learn to read with. His eyes settled as if by accident on 
the ancient ox yoke and crossbeam, exhibited unmistakably at the Court’s center. 
Alexander looked on for some time before casually approaching the ox yoke. “Oh, so 
this would be the Ruler’s Knot?” he said, as if disappointed.  
Ashkan opened his arms. “Please, feel free to have a closer look.”  
Alexander laced his hands behind his head and, smiling, turned back to the 
Knot, but took no step towards it.  
74 
 
 
Ashkan was no military man, but he thought maybe it was something like a 
reconnaissance mission. Alexander would learn everything he could from a distance 
before shifting perspectives and closing ground. 
Murmurs and muffled laughter vented the audience’s tension as he studied the 
Knot in silence. Ashkan had never seen so many people in the Court. When Gordians 
felt the perverse urge to bask in someone else’s humiliation (often a hotheaded noble 
from Greece or the Persian interior), they came to gawk at the soon-to-be-outdone 
and to place bets—not on whether these nobles would vanquish the Knot, but on how 
long they’d try to. Those who came to undo the Knot were more often than not 
unraveled themselves before the end. Ashkan had observed before that the longer 
they wrangled with the Knot, the greater their embarrassment, and as a result, the 
greater their need to take yet more time. Indeed, some were known to actually 
collapse from exhaustion, while others had to be physically dragged away when it 
came time to bolt up the Court for the night. Watching these failed struggles carried 
all the gravity and heartache of Sophocles’ great tragedies, combined with the 
lowbrow satisfaction of a dancing marionette, or watching someone with an armload 
of squash run madly away from a rampaging goat.  
Today, the turnout was so terrific, there was hardly room for sweat to gather 
between bodies. Alexander wasn’t quite the mid-level noble with half-conceived 
aspirations to a throne. This was the King of Macedonia, who was fast on his way to 
claiming the Phrygian peninsula, to toppling the Persian Empire, and marching even 
to the edge of the world.  
75 
 
 
The actual progress he made on untying the Knot, though, wasn’t quite as 
overwhelming. “Think he needs directions to the Knot?” someone in the audience 
called. “You can’t win the lady by gawking at her,” another voice said. 
Ashkan hoped that in his concentration, Alexander had somehow failed to 
register these jeers, but at some point in the past minute he noticed that the young 
king traded his easy smile for a scowl, like someone who was trying to undo the Knot 
by the powers of concentration alone. Alexander tried to affect a leisurely swagger as 
he made his final approach, but Ashkan saw the first traces of concern dimming his 
eyes.  
Then he fitted the knot to the curvature of his palms and inner fingers. A 
cacophony of cheers and whistles hummed off the Court’s tiled walls. Alexander 
worked his thumbs into the grains of the chords, but they were unyielding, bound 
tight as wires or shrunken leather over a drum frame. By now any illusion Alexander 
might have had that the Knot was anything more than a game to poke and prod at 
appeared to be gone. It was clear that the physicality of the struggle caught Alexander 
off guard. He really had to put his brawn into it. The yoke and beam shook and 
creaked as he fought to gain the slightest finger-room.  
Ashkan felt a twinge of disappointment when Alexander’s hands broke free of 
the Knot, and he was forced to step back in retreat. As the pressure began steadily to 
build, Ashkan found he could no longer depend on Alexander's struggle with the 
Knot to distract him from his grief. Something in the pit of his stomach was churning. 
In the Knot’s unyielding coils he began to see the convolutions of his own impasse. 
76 
 
 
He thought about how neither he nor Hamed was willing to give up their 
careers for one another. It wasn't too late to leave his governor's seat to follow after 
Hamed. But why give up his career for someone who wasn’t willing to do the same 
for him? If Hamed wouldn't stay with him, was he even worth following? Yet if 
Ashkan failed to follow, would Ashkan be worth staying for?  
He was learning to hate the Knot’s self-canceling solutions. To try to loosen 
one thread would mean tightening the others.  
He couldn’t help but nourish the tempting thought that there must be 
something he hadn’t considered yet. Some unexamined thread, which might be teased 
up, prised apart, and pulled free. Time and time again, he looked at the Knot and 
replayed a vision of Alexander wrenching it loose between his hands. Alexander 
would roar from the strain of it. Then the Knot would begin to unravel, spinning apart 
like an uncoiling ball of yarn until a single limp strand remained to Alexander’s grip. 
But Alexander seemed no closer to solving it than he had been when he 
started. He now gave his helmet and cuirass to one of his attendants before returning 
to his task. “Not today boy,” an elderly woman said. He drew a quick, sharp breath 
before inclining his head to the pillar and massaging his fingers once again into the 
riddle of cordage in front of him. 
There was a moment of sudden levity then, when Alexander managed to slip 
one cord over another. Ashkan wasn’t sure if he’d ever seen someone gain purchase 
of any kind whatever on the Knot. So in that moment, it seemed to him that moving a 
single cord might as well be a half-step away from solving the Knot altogether. Even 
the Counselor of Historic Guardianship looked troubled. 
77 
 
 
Now, the lion’s share of the jeers earlier had come from a mere handful of 
loutish Gordians. Before this point, many in attendance had yet to weigh in. To 
Ashkan’s understanding, this was the moment where the struggle over the Gordian’s 
confidence might be decided.  
The moment was cut short, though, when the cord popped back into its place, 
where it clamped tight over-top Alexander’s finger. The King sucked air through his 
teeth but said nothing. He struggled to free his hand, but didn't have so much as a nail 
pairing of slack to avail himself with. The walls of the Court vibrated with jeers and 
stamping feet. From the pulse of the crowd, Ashkan could sense that this was the 
moment when Alexander underwent the transformation in the Gordians’ eyes from 
the hopeful successor of Heracles himself to yet another overly-privileged youth 
whose eagerness to bite off a chunk of the world was mismatched by the small 
capacity of his stomach.  
With his hand still lodged in the Knot’s cordage, Alexander shot his quietly 
stunned gaze across the crowd. His senior officers looked no more hopeful. The 
generals themselves couldn’t have worn their concern more openly, short of ripping 
tufts of hair out of their skulls and casting them into flaming piles at their feet. 
Ashkan felt for them. From a public relations perspective, this was a catastrophe. And 
to make it all worse, they couldn’t risk offering their aid, lest Alexander lose what 
standing he had, nor did they wish to stand idly by while their King had his hand 
jammed in a local relic. Ashkan wouldn’t even begin to know how to clean up after 
such fallout.  
78 
 
 
Layers of Alexander’s imperiousness were stripped away now and lying 
miserably at his feet. Even the young general, Alexander’s own secret lover, turned 
his head. Though it seemed to Ashkan that this was not from shame. For though his 
head was turned, the general’s gaze leapt to and fro, bandied between the desire to 
offer Alexander his support and the presumed need to turn dutifully away from the 
sight of the king’s failure, just as the other generals had done.  
For his own part, Ashkan thought this was as fit a time as any to contemplate 
the tessellated tiles at his feet. Looking down, he thought again of Hamed. He didn’t 
wonder now about his departure, or even how they might keep the fraying ends of 
their love together. This time, what he thought about were Hamed’s molten amber 
eyes. To Ashkan, they were animalistic and potentially fierce yet, it seemed, wholly 
under his control. They had the mysterious property of aligning everything in his 
proximity to the contours of his mood, from his retinue to the very lighting. In 
Hamed’s presence, festive sandstone reliefs might grow sober and meditative. But 
when they closed the doors of their personal chambers, Hamed’s eyes grew tenderly 
ravenous in a way that could call down the sun. There were other unguarded 
moments, too, when a sudden smile would break over Hamed, and it would seem to 
Ashkan a new light had dawned over the world. Like the sudden rising of an 
unknown moon--and in a moment, everything seemed bathed in the soft, honeyed 
glow of Hamed’s eyes. Ashkan remembered then how freely Hamed had surrendered 
himself to the wind and sky aboard the trireme. How if for but a moment together, 
they had shared the world. 
79 
 
 
Ashkan was cut loose from these thoughts by a sudden, anguished cry. 
Ashkan looked just in time to see Alexander’s sword flash above his head. At first, he 
couldn’t get a handle on what was happening. Was Alexander taking out his 
frustration on some hapless armor bearer? Already, he could hear the sound of steel 
plunging through human flesh. But it was no armor bearer below the blade, but the 
Knot.  
Everything in Ashkan demanded that he put a stop to him. That he cry out, 
leap forth, catch Alexander’s arm, and hold it fast. But in that dizzy moment, Ashkan 
found himself inexplicably shielding his own head from the falling blade. Alexander 
scarcely took a moment to calculate how to make the cut without involving his 
jammed finger in the process. As soon as the sword reached its crest, he brought it 
down with devastating force.  
An explosion of twine hissed in every direction as layers of once-taught chord 
twanged apart with the violence of a thousand bowstrings cut at a full draw. An 
attendants’ neck was running with blood and more than one Court official ran or leapt 
in crazy circles, scored across the cheeks or brows. With a long, gargling howl the 
Counselor of Historic Guardianship clutched his chest and sank to his knees as if 
mortally wounded, though nowhere on his body could Ashkan see sign of injury.  
Ashkan staggered on his feet. A pang pressed against the walls of his lungs. 
The weight of some irrecoverable loss pulled at him. He looked at the flaccid twine 
littering the Court floor. It hit him like a neural impulse, or a static shock through an 
atmosphere made thick with fibrous material: impressions of Hamed, the twin orbits 
80 
 
 
of their pathways, how they ensnared each other. The myriad ways their lives wound 
together, and the one way they could ever come free of it all.  
The Greek generals, some of them wet with blood themselves, converged on 
their victorious King, slowly, like a lung sighing in congratulatory relief. And there in 
the midst of all of them was the young general, his manner matching the enthusiasm 
of his peers, but mindful not to exceed it. 
The general met Alexander’s eye and braced his hand. “My lord,” he said. He 
made to turn away but Alexander held on if for only another second. In this way, they 
looked on each other achingly, almost pleadingly, yet before the moment grew 
overburdened with watchful eyes, Alexander, growing once again imperious, released 
him and turned coolly away. “My Lord,” the general said. 
It seemed to Ashkan that in this short interaction a window had opened in the 
air before him. He saw then how they must have carried themselves in days of far 
greater moment than this—the murder of Alexander’s father by Darius’s own spies, 
then the staggering vengeance they exacted on Darius together at Gaugamela. The 
injury suffered the day of Alexander’s marriage to a woman. Ashkan saw or felt he 
had seen how it must always be for them: girding themselves back from each other, 
never to let the world in on their love, but instead keeping it cloistered and withering 
in the dark. In their most debilitating sorrows or their most stunning 
accomplishments--in moments when they ache most for the clasp of the other’s arms 
around them, they will never have each other fully.  
81 
 
 
In time, generals, attendants, and spectators alike fell away in retreat: the 
Greeks into celebration and the Phrygians to their homes. Yet Ashkan and Alexander 
remained standing amid the Knot’s ruins, alone in the silence of their private griefs.  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
82 
 
 
X/Y 
 
She rushed to make it to x on time.  
She didn’t have to be at x. She decided to go to y.  
She was doing nothing and had nowhere to go. 
 
She carried a pen and a legal pad to x.  
The people at y’s faces might warm to her if she brought wine, she thought. 
She had nothing to drink.  
 
She wished to skip x. She thought about the y happening that night. 
She told herself that y would be good for her.  
She foraged her brain for something to do.  
 
She spent the time at x taking notes and keeping to herself.  
Fetching the wine made her late for y. 
She tried to play scrabble with herself. She found the z and kept fishing out a’s.  
 
She wasn’t called on or noticed. She made an excuse to leave x early.  
She talked to him at y and he talked about his position at x. 
She held onto her z for the points but had nowhere on the board for it. 
 
She exchanged x for y.  
The guy at y wasn’t who he said he was. She left with her wine.   
83 
 
 
She traded her z for an h to make the word aha. 
 
She went home. She didn’t answer his call. She played at her kitchen bar until she 
spent all usable letters, stopped playing, and again found herself alone. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
84 
 
 
The Masterwork 
Even in the throes of mid-breakup, Pierce was struck by how bitingly clear it 
all came to him, the how’s and why’s of everything, and through this clarity, it caught 
him like a surprise uppercut to his chin when he considered how the same thing that 
once enthralled Tasha with him now had her running. For years, she had been an 
admirer of his luxury mechanical watch designs. Which may not be the sexiest 
aphrodisiac you could hope for but it helped that Tasha had been a longtime collector, 
whose fine watches included every model Pierce had ever created.  
Now that their relationship was ending, the discontinuity of his watches 
having anything to do with it took on a shape in his mind’s eye. A shape that came 
with growing asymmetries, punishing angles. Of course, maybe it wasn’t his watches 
so much as the obsession needed to create them. What she didn’t say was: “this all 
happened because of your obsessive work-life.” She instead blamed him for things 
like “emotional unavailability.” About his being “unavailable to talk.” His “time 
unavailability.” Unavailability, it turned out, was the big one.  
 Which was fair. Pierce was accustomed to spending ten hours in his 
workshop, where he nurtured watches through conception, drafting, and CAD 
software-simulated models. He then supervised all stages of the watches’ production, 
from the hundreds of hand-crafted components to the final enameling. 
 When he just started his company, his throat used to hitch up in a low-grade 
panic, before he learned to fully trust the other members of his small, exclusive team. 
Now, designing was where Pierce spent the majority of his time and energy. It was in 
this role that he gave new watches their personal flair, where he decided what the 
85 
 
 
watch could bring to the world beyond keeping mere hours and minutes: with 
complications like a perpetual calendar, tide gauge, planetarium, multiple time zones, 
all without batteries or smart displays, powered entirely by purely mechanical organs 
like springs and gears.  
 Sometimes Pierce still thought that if he could personally rear the watches 
through every stage of their upbringing without taking a hit on production speed—
even if it meant working eighteen hour days, six, seven times a week—he’d do it. But 
second only to design, he harbored a special affection for the final phase. There was a 
comfort in the impossibly elaborate, yet intimately rehearsed ritual of it. A comfort in 
the focus required to hand-machine the damaskeening, etched with such hairline 
precision and ornamental density that the shifting way the patterns catch and deflect 
light makes them appear iridescent, even crystalline. It was a focus that could drown 
out a world of unquiet. 
 Pierce especially loved the watch movement’s final assembly, leading up to 
the last moment when he tweezes the balance wheel out of its sterile protective 
casing. The coil of the wheel’s hairspring bounces against the needled tips of the 
tweezers until he drops the balance into place. Then, like a heart, the wheel palpitates 
to life, the spring expanding, constricting, the wheel spinning at drill speed—and in a 
flash, every inanimate gear flicks and whirls with life. In the moment Pierce beds the 
balance into its wheel well, a mega-comet might shriek down to obliterate the species, 
just outside his workshop. The Atlantic may rise up in a superheated sonic explosion, 
and he’d never know.  
86 
 
 
 By the time Pierce emerged from his focus, he’d typically find that night had 
fallen, that he was the last one in the workshop, and maybe that he’d missed a dental 
appointment. That Tasha had called three times and left a voicemail.  
 What she didn’t say now was: “your obsessive work-life made you 
emotionally, communicationally, and temporally unavailable.” Nor did she blunder 
into the minefield of his childhood, or talk about how his parents seemed to thrive on 
dysfunction. Which, being a therapist, she might have gotten away with. She also 
didn’t say, for example: “It’s obvious you want to reconstitute a well-ordered ego 
from the clutches of a chaotic upbringing. It’s all there in your need to design world-
class precision watches. It could also be basic overcompensation for your childhood 
inability to win your mother’s affection.” Or were therapists past blaming the 
mothers?  
 The words might not have been spoken, but she had a way of making them 
felt nonetheless. Hiding under the glare of her omissions. What she had to her 
advantage was a worrying supply of tact. He felt that maybe this should be counted 
against her. That it was disingenuous, maybe. He thought her tact might be 
considered less tactful and more tactical. How she handled the situation with just the 
tips of her fingers, held at distance. It was like she was trying gently to lead him to the 
revelation that instead of giving her two unwavering years of his life, as he’d 
believed, what he’d actually been giving her all along was a collection of inexplicably 
spoiled eggs (and could he take them all back now, please? Thanks!).  
 Of course, in the end this could turn out okay for him, he thought to himself 
after she moved out. It could be like those survivors of boating accidents who later 
87 
 
 
tell interviewers that losing their limbs and the whole right side of their bodies was 
actually the best thing that could have happened to them. “It could be like that, 
exactly,” Pierce said to himself and wept.  
 At his workshop, Pierce’s ten hour days became eleven, twelve. He thought 
maybe his inspiration would flourish. Like the sting of Tasha’s absence would 
supercharge his productivity. He thought maybe the pain would be sublimated into a 
new, earth-shaking prototype. He made sketches. Notes.   
 He drafted ideas for a watch that would suggest the entire narrative history of 
timekeeping. A functional sundial would needle up under its domed lens in the lower 
half of the watch face. Simple hour and minute hands would occupy a larger upper 
dial, along with the more complicated double chronograph hands. To the sides there 
would be a gyroscopic tourbillon, spinning like a metal vortex, and a moon phase. 
The crown of the watch would be occupied by a calendar-accurate dial that tracked 
the time of sunrise and sunset—a hearkening back to the origins of timekeeping.  
 He envisioned another watch that could even evolve on the owner’s wrist. 
He’d create a train of reduction gears which would take years to turn even a single 
degree. Then, when the designated time elapsed, and the degree turned, a spring 
would activate and mount a clutch wheel into place, bridging a previously dormant 
gear train with the rest of the watch movement. This gear train would then come to 
life and a model of earth that was once merely ornamental would begin to rotate and 
revolve, keeping the months and seasons along a calendar dial as it passes on an 
adjusted planetary track. Transcendence, he’d call it. Yes. It would be an invitation to 
88 
 
 
the wearer to take stock of the changes that had come into their lives in the time since 
they first wore the watch to the moment their watch began to flicker with new life.  
 Pierce counted on his new developments to nurture him, to call order to the 
melancholia and unrest his fiancée sent spritzing through his nerves when she left. 
And for a couple of weeks, it worked. But then, production for a recent watch release 
hit a supply-chain snag. A hole seemed to thumb its way through the sterile 
quarantine of his workshop, so that the air began to run out of everything. He lost 
focus. The most routine setbacks daunted him. It reached the point where, to even 
think about his design, his thoughts had to first wind through a tangle of neural 
circuitry devoted to the way his engagement came to a swift and unceremonious end. 
Watch release dates had to be delayed. His new ideas were filed away, maybe even 
abandoned completely. In place of anything new for collectors, he resorted to 
customizations for old watch releases.  
He turned to meditation. He drank cleansing milkshakes that made his breath 
smell like glue and chewed grass. The thing to do, he decided, was to train his 
energies, his heartache, towards self-improvement. He started small. His life was 
badly in need of decluttering. There was his house, his closet space. But it wasn’t 
until he started trying to throw out everything he associated with her that he realized 
just how deeply engrafted she was to the fiber of his daily life. He was left with this 
feeling jammed down the pit of his chest that if he replaced all the thread count of his 
wardrobe which owed its existence to her savvy, or got rid of the collection of steak 
knives they pilfered from dozens of fine restaurants over the course of a decade—if 
he purged his life of everything that had a part of her in it, he knew that what 
89 
 
 
remained would be gutted hollow, his flesh pocked or flaying away at the ribs, an 
alarming number of body parts gone missing.  
Order to stave off the chaos? A well-ordered self? Was that the expression his 
fiancée hadn’t (but might have) used to explain his watch designs? Maybe having a 
stable relationship had been his talisman against the chaos. Or a sign at least that he 
had the chaos beat. But when both his watchmaking and relationship shuffle out of 
the picture, well where does that leave him? What he wanted, what he felt he so 
desperately needed, was a radical self-transformation. Something like a reinvention or 
a rebirth.  
It turned out that recreating his life from scratch played to his strengths. On a 
basic level, it was all a matter of design—and one that he worked feverishly over the 
coming months to make a reality. Being someone who’s used to fashioning watch 
parts within a tolerance of one hundredth of a millimeter, his life was bound to 
become a meticulous clockwork of its own, with all the embellishments of his finest 
watches: regimented by a train of hand-chamfered components, jeweled with ruby 
bearings, its pivot shanks burnished—virtually every mechanism of his waking day, 
from the car he drove to the way he now scheduled time outside of work to the 
quarter-hour, was destined to be replaced, fine-tuned, innovated. 
 
The changes came imperceptibly, at first. It was only later on, in retrospect 
that Pierce realized how wildly the improvements spun out of his control. How much 
the components of his daily life came together to create a machinery—gears whose 
teeth were enmeshed in an unbroken causal chain, so that you wouldn’t be able to 
90 
 
 
turn the first wheel without also turning the center wheel—down the line to the next 
two gears, followed by the escapement. He realized, too, that by enacting the first 
improvements, he had animated a machinery with the mechanical pulse of a new life, 
a life he was powerless to stop.  
 That first wheel in his new life turned when he cleaned out his old Volvo 
Wagon. By the time he was done, Pierce had filled two-and-a-half trash bags with the 
remnant clutter of fast food stops, and with clothes that had accumulated more or less 
mysteriously on the floorboards. He took the car in for a wash. It made him feel 
renewed later when he inspected the car, like he’d taken a hose to his own insides. 
Yet the car itself hadn’t changed. With its tawny copper and boxy dimensions, it 
seemed at home with the trash piled around it. Pierce thought about how marketable, 
how used-car-lot ready it seemed then: vacuumed, dusted, pressure washed. And so 
like that, he sold the Wagon, and in its place bought a Bentley, the first car he owned 
whose price tag was comparable to one of his watches. 
 These first turns set other gears in motion. For example, he couldn’t bring 
himself to park a Bentley in a garage that made any car more indulgent than a 
minivan look like it must have been stolen. He took a weekend to organize the 
garage, but even before it was complete, he anticipated the sharp disconnect between 
a clean garage and a home that, if he was honest with himself, looked like the proving 
grounds of a recent nuclear event. As naturally as one gear turns another, so his 
remodeling program moved room-to-room and eventually took over his floorplan. 
When he began to update his kitchen to match the rest of the condo’s chic aesthetic, 
he was forced to reconsider his culinary know-how, which up to that point had been 
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devoted to a nuanced understanding of the differences in quality between various 
frozen microwavable entrees. He enrolled in a fast-paced cooking course that 
demanded plenty of practice in his own home kitchen. But now he was making more 
time for himself to eat well. To keep up his project self-improvement, Pierce started 
going to the gym three nights a week. He sat higher. His arms and legs began 
gradually to tighten, and in time, the edges of his arms and legs would become 
redrawn in bold, tense shadows.  
All these new components of his life came together to form an image of a man 
aligned with the nexus of cosmic order. Someone realized and transfigured, a kind of 
ideal self. Though sometimes he felt, or maybe imagined he felt, something like the 
actual presence of this ideal self, there in the car with him or lurking over his 
shoulder when he assembled watch movements. The presence became a gold standard 
to measure himself against. He’d lapse back into the tailspin of some old habit 
(checking his pulse after standing up too fast, say) but when he compared his action 
to the presence’s cool poise, he found that often he could shut the habit down, mid 
pulse-check.  
But occasionally in the late afternoon when his jammed schedule came to an 
abrupt stop and his head continued to swim dizzily forward, he found that his endless 
comparisons between himself and this ideal self began to have a disconcerting effect 
on him. It was here in the crawlspace moments between work and leisure when he’d 
feel as if the presence of the ideal Pierce was beginning to occupy space, somewhere 
around him—behind him maybe. Sometimes around the rim of his periphery he 
thought he saw the brush of a fleeting shadow run over the carpet before vanishing.  
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Of course, at this point in the day his nerves were wearing through his skin. 
And in general terms, he felt held-together. There was a sense of calm exerting its 
firm, even pressure on all sides. Post-workout, or at the peak of some new personal 
victory, there’d be a fizzling he felt in his fingertips. It came with a sensation that his 
head was deepening. A reaching inward. But it was also an expansiveness. An 
unfolding, like he would grow and grow until he’d just split in two. His life had 
become a clockwork outgrowth from an old, wounded self, complete with newly 
guilloched components to cover its scars and lacerations. A mechanical arm where 
there had been a stump. It came with a quickening in his skull, that expansiveness, the 
exhilaration of growth all adding up to the sense that something was emerging, 
unfolding out of him, as if soon it would be there, next to him.  
Then one night, it was. Pierce looked over, there at the kitchen wall, and saw a 
shadow where there wasn’t one before. His first thought was that the shadow seemed 
to be watching him. He raised his arms over his head. He let them fall against his 
sides. What he found was the shadow didn’t reflect his movements, so much critique 
them with smug little variations. When he raised and dropped his hands, the shadow’s 
arms flapped with marionette-grade theatrics against its sides. He tested the shadow’s 
footsteps against his own clopping feet and found the shadow walking with a hobble. 
Chastened, he let his feet glide. The shadow seemed pleased with this and rode high 
on the balls of its own feet.  
Pierce found that his surprise was double: one, that the presence was there 
with him, and two, that it hadn’t appeared to him sooner. Only after these surprises 
had time to sink their teeth in was he struck by a third: that for all the shadow’s poise, 
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the harmony and flow of its body parts, there was something faintly halting in its 
movements. Halting, as if an uncertainty crept into its joints, or like it was something 
newly born, still in search of its legs. When Pierce came close to the wall, too, he 
could see that the edges looked muddied somehow—blurred and slight.  
Pierce went to the local farmer’s market the next day. He tried to ignore the 
lean faces of the plaid-scarfed patrons around him, but found himself checking to see 
if they noticed the shadow scuttling on the ground after him, making a scene of 
flailing limbs and mock trepidation. But the lean faces carried on with looks of 
cultivated disappointment, scanning the heaps of figs and yams.  
He turned his attention to the produce (he was adding fried plantains with 
cream to his latest cooking efforts) when he heard a voice calling his name behind 
him. The shadow’s talking now? was his immediate thought. Even though the voice 
was a woman’s (and he’d assumed the shadow would follow suit on that), his 
consciousness had been so entirely wrapped up in the shadow at his feet, the call of 
his name seemed unlikely to come from any other source. He turned to find Tasha 
there with an empty basket dangling off the crook of her arm. What he said was, 
“Tasha? Wow, hi!” But she wasn’t looking at him, not his face. Her eyes were cast 
lower. He followed her gaze but before he reached the floor, he saw that he was 
gripping two plantains, poised threateningly in his fists like boomerangs ready to take 
on a sudden aerial threat.  
She said, “Is this a holdup?” Then he saw how the plantains might also look 
like drawn pistols.  
“Oh sorry,” Pierce said. “I’m taking a cooking class.”  
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Tasha gave a quick, encouraging smile. “Oh that’s good,” she said. He felt the 
air deaden between them and thought a crust was beginning to form over her eyes. 
Then she said, “Really. That’s great.” He caught her scanning him from his head-
down in a way that made him feel she was taking inventory. A doctor of the mind 
running down a mental checklist of worrisome signs that her patient might be unwell. 
Is patient getting sufficient sleep? Are the sclerae of his eyes white? Shave lines 
clean? Watching his physical health?  
Tasha’s eyes caught for a beat too long on his arms and tightening midsection, 
which must have been expressed through his fitted white Henley. Are his clothes 
clean? Wait, are those all new clothes? All checks. “It’s good you’re taking time 
outside of your work,” she said.  
She looked him in the eye now, mystified, intrigued maybe. The components 
of his new self seemed to elude her, deliciously, like a jigsaw puzzle whose 
kaleidoscope pieces offered themselves to her view while at the same time 
withholding their gestalt secret. 
Pierce felt his breathing deepen, digging for extra lung space. He imagined 
what might come next. He thought of Tasha sidling up to him and saying in a low 
voice, “I’ve been wondering if I was too hasty to leave.” The thought caught him 
unsuspectingly from behind. The mere possibility that she was taking notice made his 
nerves sing, taught with high amplitude currents. This came as a shock—not the 
voltage he felt charging through him, exactly, so much as the fact the voltage was 
there at all.  
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But no, he wasn’t ready—couldn’t be ready for a relationship, let alone with 
the woman who’d broken off his last one. He’d hold out, stand his ground. “What’s 
done is done,” he’d say, his voice stoic and long-suffering.  
Then Tasha looked at him, and he felt genuine warmth coming off her smile. 
Yet Pierce was relieved when she said, “Hey, I have to get going, but it really was 
great seeing you.” Smiling still, Tasha turned and left Pierce suddenly alone with his 
plantains and a shadow preening its hair at his feet.  
He was relieved, wasn’t he? And yet what he also felt was a stab deep inside 
somewhere. Everywhere. What he wished to do was stomp on his own feet. Both of 
them at once, if he could. It was an outrage how his mind kept circling back to how 
much he wanted a real conversation with her. A conversation that would take them 
places. How the places their conversation would take them just might wear the sheen 
of a new beginning.  
Was he really, after all the energy he’d expended towards self-renewal, not 
over her, still trapped in the ruins of his old Pierce life? He’d learned not to feel it 
before, but now he couldn’t ignore the aching cavity she left in his life. Seeing her 
again, the cavity felt so natural, he began to think it must have been there all along, as 
indeed it was. Then he wondered if the same feeling, or one like it, had been with 
Tasha, too.  
Still, it seemed inevitable that any future encounters with her would be 
disastrous. In him was no longer the confidence he’d worked up with her, the je-ne-
sais-quoi impression of having oneself together. All of it had melted, leaving him 
feeling like a puppy in a puddle of its own making.   
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For the rest of the day, Pierce tried to keep his thoughts from sinking into the 
morass of what the interaction with Tasha could have possibly meant, anyway.  
Instead he decided to peel plantains. He cut them lengthwise, then threw the 
lengths into sputtering oil. He burned the back of his hand. He beat sugar into cream. 
The shadow wasn’t doing caricatures anymore. It wasn’t doing anything. While 
Pierce busied himself around the kitchen, it just lay, sprawling against the wall. Pierce 
found himself wondering how an idealized version of himself would handle all this, 
assuming it was awake. If the shadow could take his place, how would it manage? 
What should Pierce do? Contact her? Equip himself with a comeback to her, “I have 
to get going Pierce”? A comeback-monologue explaining why they should at least try 
getting back together again? Should he crouch in wait behind the plantains next 
farmer’s market, ready to deploy the monologue when she came within range?  
Watching her go, Pierce felt the blooming of old wounds, and thought they’d 
stay that way, forever. The unhealing blooms looked like they’d prove him right, at 
least until a few days later when incredibly and against all hope, Tasha called asking 
if he’d like to meet up.  
“Wait. Really?” was what Pierce said. 
“I know this goes against everything I’d tell someone else in this position. But 
I just feel like before we dated, and actually before anything else, we were great 
friends. And I was thinking, does that really have to end? Just like that?”  
Pierce allowed himself to feel the first pangs of something between love and 
longing for Tasha. And yet, with Tasha missing his company, inviting old wounds to 
open up to her warmth, it’s true that he also couldn’t help but to feel again like a 
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puppy. But this time, a lost puppy, which she’d found blithely chasing a scent across 
four-lane traffic. The problem with this was, Pierce didn’t want to be a lost puppy. 
Something existed in the human-to-puppy metamorphosis that made him think that 
things might not turn out well for him. Yes, she’d take the puppy home. She’d bathe 
and feed the puppy. Get it checked out at the vet. Vaccinated. But how far could he 
possibly expect it to go? As a sad, neurotic puppy? Would she come to profess 
undying love? Would she want to marry, live with, and give the best years of her life? 
His instincts told him no. Someday, something would fall out between them. Then it 
would all come back to her and she'd remember the puppy was, in fact bipedal, 
prematurely balding, quivering out of its skin for the chance to mark out its territory 
on the world of fine watchmaking, then on his newly refurbished kitchen, on shag. 
No, He knew what to expect. Best case scenario, she says that this isn’t easy for her 
either, you know, and then delivers him to a no-kill shelter.  
He’d made progress since she left. No longer did he depend on his 
watchmaking for his confidence—or her input for his wardrobe. If he could manage 
to let his newfound self shine through, close the wounds, and at least house-train the 
puppy inside him, maybe he’d have a shot at a life with her.  
She said, “I mean, what says we can’t go back to where we started, and just be 
friends again?”  
He’d need to keep his interest low key, of course. He’d be cool about it. He 
could do that—play it cool. What he said to her was, “No.” Then, “No, I mean yes. 
Yes. Let’s be friends.” 
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There was a beat before she said, “would you maybe want to go for coffee 
sometime? How does tomorrow at lunch sound?” 
 
After the phone call, he felt an anxious joy shiver through him. He knew that 
as robust as his program of self-renewal had been, he couldn’t afford to sit on his 
hands now. If he was going to move beyond friendship, he’d have to put in more face 
time with her. This time around, he’d be available. And there was still the shelter-
bound puppy to worry about. He wouldn’t be a rescue project for her. Now more than 
ever he needed to push himself. He’d have to be obsessed, but without seeming 
obsessed. Not only would he be more available to her, he’d also double his efforts to 
realize his newly-improved self, too, and all while making it seem effortless. 
But the thought of meeting Tasha at some cafe almost sent him into hiding. 
Pierce knew he wouldn’t meet Tasha the next day. Something would come up at the 
last minute, he decided. He’d make the call on the drive to work.  
But when he shuffled into his Bentley the next morning, the meeting became 
all but inevitable. In spite of his decision not to go, even in defiance of this decision, 
it was like he found his emotions hurtling along a predetermined course, powerless to 
put a brake on his missing her. That he would end up at the coffee house where Tasha 
agreed to meet became suddenly clear to him, as clear as it would have been had his 
car been a flash away from colliding head-on with something fast and unavoidable. 
Pierce later remembered that morning as if the entire drive, from garage to 
coffeehouse, had been the orchestration of one drawn-out crash, thirty minutes in the 
making.  
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Their first two “meet-ups” (Tasha’s tactful phrasing) were light and decisively 
unromantic, yet Pierce had left both of these with a surprising satisfaction. It all felt 
natural, like she suggested it would over the phone. Like their previous engagement 
had been a curtain between them, and when they drew it back, they found that all this 
time it had been hiding dear old friends. Though he wanted something more than 
friendship with her, he learned to fall in love with her friendship again. Not only was 
it enough, for now, after the breakup it was more than he ever expected. 
They began to have lunches together every other week, and occasionally even 
dinner. As the months carried on, he allowed himself to feel more romantically 
connected to her, even if the connection was possibly one-sided.  
It was rare that he saw the shadow at the beginning of a meetup, but it was 
easy enough to summon—and most of the time, impossible not to. Something would 
pass between them to jumpstart his confidence, (maybe Tasha’s eyes would soften to 
his gaze), something just big enough to make him feel he was a step closer to 
embodying the best, most idealized Pierce. 
He would wonder at how, for the first time he’d seen in years, Tasha laughed 
so hard at his stammering wit that her head tilted to the side, like she’d dislodged a 
laugh whose absence left her charmingly out-of-balance. Pierce felt he could hold her 
interest in ways he was never before able to. Him, the same person whose voice a 
university debate coach once described as a flatline that tempted audience 
participation. She’d simply mouth something about the check from across the table, 
which had the strange effect of making him feel conspiratorially close to her—then 
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suddenly, there it would be, the shadow. Like it had come to feed. Even a 
suggestively well-timed, “Like another drink?” could be fatal to his oneness.  
And yet, though it gave him a benchmark for how much he was improving, 
Pierce never felt at home with the Shadow. There never came a time when its 
appearance didn’t rattle him a little. And whenever there was a meetup, it was almost 
always sure to join them. Only rarely, when a meetup was uneventful and they felt 
out of joint, would the Shadow fail to appear. Which left Pierce in the uneasy position 
of wondering whether to feel relieved when Tasha couldn’t make it, or roused when 
he saw the Shadow straightening its cuffs or poking through Pierce’s medicine 
cabinet.  
While this might have unnerved him by itself, there were other, more tangible 
drawbacks to designing a life as well as he had. By this point, Pierce’s day-to-day 
consisted of waking up an hour and a half early to get his exercise routines in (five 
mornings a week now), working hours on end in the ergonomically masochistic 
posture of a watchmaker, hunched over watch calibers or hairsprings. More and more 
recently after work, he’d meet Tasha at his apartment, where on any given night he 
could expect to spend the next few hours mixing cocktails, cooking tartiflette, dining, 
flambéing apples with brandy for dessert, maybe playing a few hands of cards.  
When she left for the night, Pierce cleaned. On nights when Tasha didn’t join 
him for dinner, Pierce often had people over who did. He’d bake for a younger couple 
he’d befriended from cooking classes. And, once a week, he’d attend those classes. 
He’d read. Play online games called “Acorn Trove” and “Busy Bees” which were 
said to improve recall and mental acuity.  
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Before he reached a breaking point, he found a way to offset some of these 
drawbacks: he slotted post-workout yoga classes into his schedule. He’d learned to 
rely on the recalibrating effects yoga had on his mind and body.  
At the yoga studio, he met an older Buddhist man named Ricki, who was not 
the yogi but appeared to know more than the yogi. At least, Ricky’s form was better. 
Yet he never used his proficiency to undermine the yogi in any way. Ricky simply 
performed his lotuses, his downward-facing dogs, his vertebrate crunching 
kapotasanas with a look of total acceptance, almost as if the poses he struck weren’t 
of his own doing, but were being performed through him by invisible strings, and he 
had merely to allow their guidance.  
Pierce and Ricky were always the first to arrive at the studio—behind the 
yogi, of course, though they never saw him until a couple minutes before the start of 
class. As soon as he changed shoes, Ricky prepared himself with what to Pierce 
looked like a tai chi routine, his knees buoyant and his limbs marionette-like with 
their fluid, yet mechanically-precise thrusts. Ricky looked potentially lethal. But in 
their hushed agility, his movements spoke of some endless reservoir of power which 
he could draw on at any time, though he demonstrated all the more power by 
disdaining to use it.  
Pierce had taken to following along with Ricky’s routine, in his mind at least, 
where he’d create a mental recording to try out later in the solitude of his condo. 
Pierce and Ricky talked little. Even so, Ricky seemed to take a genuine interest in 
Pierce. In his few words, Ricky had a way of making direct cuts to the heart of things, 
though the heart of what, Pierce wasn’t prepared to say. He felt vaguely that Ricky 
102 
 
 
was trying to tell him something about himself. Yet his words, embedded deep inside 
him, were too close to get the full picture of. All the same, Ricky was like the fortune 
you wish you got from a fortune cookie. He’d say things like “I’ve always said that 
the tree which stays standing is the one that bows,” or “The best carpenter could 
never fashion the beauty of uncarved wood.” Pierce didn’t know what Ricky’s 
proverbs meant, not fully. But after talking with Ricky, he always felt like he had half 
of an extra yoga session under his belt. He was lifted out of himself. Improved.  
And anyway, the shadow seemed pleased. Yet as Pierce continued to improve 
on the design of his life, the shadow began to undergo actual physical changes. This 
wasn’t something Pierce expected, though when it happened, he realized that perhaps 
he should have. He didn’t know when it happened exactly, but sometime over the past 
several months, the shadow’s edges, which before were blurred, had come into focus. 
Its presence was more immediate. More defined. Pierce felt the shadow itself had 
taken on new dimensionality. That it was deepened somehow, its form emerging from 
off the wall to inhabit real airspace. He could almost touch it. It wouldn’t be long, he 
knew, before the time came when Tasha couldn’t help but notice it—assuming she 
hadn’t already.  
Then the day came when Pierce felt its weight dragging behind him. It took 
conscious effort just to walk room-to-room through his condo. You couldn’t begin 
imagining how much Pierce itched to pump up his blood pressure monitor. Tasha 
wouldn’t say so, but she was concerned. Pierce could tell. Finally, he asked her. “Can 
you notice it?” 
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“What do you mean, exactly?” Tasha said. She looked uncomfortable. “Is 
there something wrong, Pierce?” 
He furrowed his brows. “I don’t know. I don’t want you thinking less of me.” 
Tasha made a show of rolling her eyes. “I had a patient who used to ingest 
worms through his nose,” she told him.  
Pierce sat up and said, “Okay. It’s just, my shadow’s been a little heavier than 
usual lately.” 
Tasha took this in, nodded, said, “Oh.” She told him that a colleague of hers 
was a neo-Jungian therapist who devoted his practice almost entirely to shadows. “He 
specializes in all kinds,” she assured him. “I shouldn’t work with you, exactly. But I 
could always have a look in the meantime, at least while I’m here?”  
Pierce squirmed in his seat. It could be she wouldn’t like what she saw in the 
shadow. Maybe she’d be able to discern his obsessiveness at its root—the obsession! 
They’d say their goodbyes and she’d leave all over again. But telling Tasha no would 
be more disastrous. It would mean he had something to hide. He’d say no, and what 
she’d hear would be: “I’m a walking repository of neurosis and violently unstable 
pathology.”  
Pierce nodded at her but saw a detached, clinical look come over her like a 
mask, which told Pierce she was already scanning the shadow. Tasha walked up to 
where the shadow stood against the wall. It was still, even compliant, a patient 
yielding himself to a doctor’s examination. Gradually, her clinical mask fell away. It 
was replaced by a look of frank fascination that made Pierce uncomfortable. “Did you 
find anything?” Pierce said. 
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“Shadows aren’t normally good signs,” Tasha said. “This might be an 
exception, actually. You wouldn’t expect to see a malignant shadow without other 
signs that something might be wrong in a subject’s life. This isn’t my specialty and I 
encourage you to get a second opinion if the shadow gives you any kind of 
interference. But honestly, I see it as a sign of improvement. I think it’s like a mental 
artifact of your past self. Like when you leave a job or move from a place you lived at 
for years, then you begin dreaming about it. It could be your unconscious just trying 
to process the change, or catch up to reality. I’ve seen it before.” Pierce wanted to feel 
relieved that her evaluation hadn’t trawled up anything incriminating. The fact she 
wasn’t diving for cover Pierce considered a personal victory. And though he knew the 
shadow had more to do with the design of his ideal future, rather than his past 
deficiencies, he found himself tempted to agree with her evaluation. Either way, she’d 
been right to think the shadow wasn’t a cause for alarm. It indicated progress. That he 
was becoming the embodiment of his designs. Surely, this was good. Tasha had seen 
the good that had come of his lifestyle changes.  
In her presence, he couldn’t fail to notice how her laughs represented a wider 
span of the audio spectrum than before, so that her head cocked at a more 
dangerously sharp angle, which one might reasonably fear would precede 
spontaneous internal decapitation. Pierce’s relationship with her had grown so 
comfortable and intimate, he had begun to allow himself to believe their friendship 
would follow the course it had previously, that they’d fall in love.  
Of course, none of this diminished the fact that his shadow was taking on real 
weight. Or that it was becoming more and more a felt thing. And it didn’t do him any 
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good the next night when he awoke to the bed shaking and found the shadow perched 
in a crouching position on the headboard above him.  
During a meetup with Tasha at an art exhibit, Pierce found himself faced with 
a sculpture so shocking, it would have sent his pre-shadow self fumbling for his blood 
pressure cuff. The installation was composed on a more or less Euclidean plain by 
dozens of antique clocks and naked clock parts that were, if the haunting words on the 
plaque could be believed, “charred to varying degrees of disfigurement in a series of 
controlled fires.” A hallowed breathlessness hung over the installation. Pierce got the 
sense that he was looking down from a great height on a city, whose clock houses and 
clock buildings had been gutted by a firestorm. There was almost a haze one could 
see, like a smoky residue hanging in low translucent bands between the clocks and 
their viewer.  
 The plaque elaborated that the installation was meant to amplify the 
destruction brought on by time, by using fire as a sort of time-accelerant. The 
timepieces themselves recorded how long they functioned before succumbing to the 
flames, with their hands remotely set to 12:00 at the precise moment of ignition. As 
soon as their second hands stopped moving or the clock face became unreadable, the 
flames were extinguished. Hideously, Pierce noticed that one of the clock’s second 
hands continued to tick on in spasmodic fits that made one jump forward on the clock 
face, only to bounce back to the previous second, like some hellish Sisyphean cycle. 
Pierce thought of dismembered reptilian tails that continue dutifully to wriggle, 
minutes after detaching from a lizard’s body.  
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The installation shot Pierce’s mind into frenzy. He was scandalized. 
Astonished. But when the initial shock of it all had worn off, Pierce found that more 
than anything else, he was shaken with a sort of envy. Something about the frenzy of 
redesigning himself resonated with these inert clocks, these mechanisms at rest. He 
tried to imagine breaking free of a life governed by cycles and continuous motion. He 
longed to open himself up and expose the precision gears that wheeled under the skin 
of everything he’d struggled to be since the breakup. To wed his spinning gears with 
the motionless, heat-warped gear trains housed inside these clocks. He’d simply stay 
that way, until his own clockwork seized up, sprung apart, and finally, took its place 
among the still wreckage of the clock city.  
But there was some mechanism in him which worked against this desire, and 
which kept the machinery of his new life in perpetual motion in spite of himself. It 
seemed that the more he struggled to stem the chaos, the more he energized it.  
He might have noticed this first in his watchmaking. Pierce was thirteen when 
he began disassembling pawned mechanical watches. He often holed himself up in 
the renovated attic of his home, where he presided over solitary pursuits. There, he 
could forget the large disheveled house under him, along with his mother and father, 
who had a mutual, maybe even pathological dependence on dysfunction. In the 
summer before high school, Pierce pieced together his first movement from the ruins 
of old watches.  
After college, he studied watchmaking in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, then came 
back with an investment from his parents large enough to finance his own watch 
company, or at least the start of one. Through the design phase to the final, hand-
107 
 
 
manufactured creation, it was almost a full year before he and his team of two other 
watchmakers saw their first timepiece. Then, in just another year, Pierce’s watches 
were being featured at exhibitions in Geneva and Hong Kong.  
Without his awareness, watchmaking had become a way for him to bring 
about order, to create a living microcosmos from out of inanimate chaos. Yet Pierce 
had made sacrifices. He’d neglected himself, and later, he’d neglected Tasha. The 
disarray of his unlived-in condo began to vaguely reflect his own childhood home.  
After Tasha left and his designs lost their spark of life, it seemed clear to him 
that he needed to train his creative energies on himself. But even this personal 
ordering—and maybe even this especially—came with a kind of unforeseen 
maelstrom of consequences. His pursuit of physical health put him in danger of 
injury. And any injury, however slight, unleashed a chain reaction of additional 
consequences capable of wreaking havoc on all the other parts of his life. A strained 
rotator cuff in the gym one week meant dropping a hot plate of tapas in a 
Mediterranean cooking class, then burning the underside of his finger at home. A 
burned finger translated to more frequent breaks at work, agonizingly slow watch 
assembly, failure to make deadlines.  
Even trimming his workday down to a reasonable eight hours came with a 
hitch. The ten-hour days of his previous, pre-breakup life allowed him to wait out 
work traffic. Now, Pierce found himself confronted by the mind-numbing slog of 
brake lights, which made his commute time double—and all while trying to blink 
away the myopic fog caused by staring through a magnifying loupe too long. When it 
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finally came time to entertain and cook for Tasha, he sometimes wondered if he had 
enough of himself left over just to open the door to allow her into his home.  
Yet it was precisely this havoc, the unpredictability brought on by his efforts, 
which pushed him not to stop striving for control over the chaos, but to strive all the 
harder. He’d make alterations to create more livable conditions for himself. He’d 
shapeshift his schedule. There were ways, surely, to correct the unpredictability. It 
wasn’t that his lifestyle design was inherently flawed; rather the flaws had to be 
designed out of the lifestyle. 
But changes in his schedule cost him a missed doctor’s appointment for his 
rotator cuff. And when he recovered from the injury, he’d have to make up for lost 
time in the gym and kitchen. On and on it went. The chaos would mount up against 
him. And he’d overthrow it, only to find his victory tainted with misrule and unrest, 
which would impel him once again to redraft his self-design, to tackle some other 
accomplishment, more towering and flawless in its execution than any he’d tackled 
before.  
The back-and-forth between chaos and the attempt to control it became a kind 
of self-winding mechanism which kept Pierce’s new life going, sometimes in spite of 
his most sober intentions. His life design’s self-winding ability worked like one of his 
own watches. How the wearer’s movements caused a rotor to swing, back and forth, 
which would then wind the watch’s mainspring with enough power to keep it all 
going: cams flinching open in search of a new gear to latch onto, additional trains in 
his life to achieve, unlock, bring to life.  
109 
 
 
Sometimes he could feel the whorl of air off the clockwork’s hairspring as it 
palpitated near his fingertips. He heard the pulse of the pallet fork with the escape 
wheel’s measured click-click-click. It became more and more tangible until the day 
Pierce realized that not only were these sensations real, they were coming from the 
shadow. Though looking at it now, calling it a shadow no longer seemed right. Since 
it first appeared to him, the shadow had acquired mass. You could tell there was real 
substance there, just by looking. But now Pierce saw the clockwork that ran it all. 
There were pulleys, linkages, sprockets, levers. In its spine was a column of stacked 
cams.  
He believed he could identify features in the automaton that reflected the 
elaborate design of his own life. Its motion was now almost imperceptibly halting—
only when Pierce looked close could he see the most minute stops, which were so 
slight and frequent, it gave the illusion of fluid movement. Pierce pressed his thoughts 
in a bid to guess what might come next in the shadow’s development. What the next 
stage would look like, possibly. Yet he found he either couldn’t, or couldn’t dare to 
imagine, what it would mean when he and the Shadow became indistinguishable.  
Pierce thought that now was the right time to schedule more yoga into his 
week. Before class, Ricky the Buddhist told him that “In movement, we do. At rest, 
we learn how to do.” Pierce didn’t know what made Ricky say it. But then, Pierce 
didn’t know what made Ricky say anything. He never thought he gave Ricky 
anything to go on. And yet, Ricky seemed to know. Or at least, he seemed to know 
that there was something to be known. That there was something Pierce was in need 
of. It was as if by his words, Ricky was telling Pierce that it would be okay, you 
110 
 
 
know, at least in the end. Once, Ricky struck a pose he called the wounded peacock 
and, with his body held up in midair by a single hand, he looked up at Pierce and said 
between strained breaths that “Every house needs doors and windows. The holes 
make us a complete house.” Yoga classes seemed to be holding the dizzy assemblage 
of Pierce’s components together—a gravitational field that kept the whole mass of 
things from spinning apart, and at the calm center of this gravitational field, there was 
Ricky.  
Unfortunately, this was to be the last of the nice things Ricky said to him. 
Pierce couldn’t identify when it happened exactly, but sometime after he first noticed 
the Shadow’s clockwork, Ricky began to change. His presence, which before had 
been calming and full of warmth, had grown erratic. He began to practice yoga 
positions with names like the scorpion and the tangled cat. Ricky’s words, which had 
been strangely personal yet welcomed were now probes under Pierce’s skin. His 
observations crossed the threshold from the familiar to the alarmingly personal.  
Even his pre-yoga routine had changed: Ricky’s movements were more fluent, 
though Pierce began to suspect his tai chi adulterated. Sometimes, for instance, Ricky 
would stop mid-routine to perform a killer mantis position. And Ricky had taken up 
flying kicks, too, which came unexpectedly and often. He’d be in the depth of a 
meditative flowering of the arms when from out of the dead center of nowhere, he’d 
let out a howl. All Pierce had to do was blink and there’d be Ricky in flight across the 
studio. He was beginning to doubt Ricky’s Buddhist credentials. 
 
111 
 
 
Once Ricky stopped his routine to study Pierce for a long, heavy moment. 
Then he struck a formally perfect destroyer of the universe position and said, “There 
are forces we have no power over, which nonetheless determine who we become. Do 
you think you’re the product of your own choices? Or could even your choice be an 
illusion? What I’m saying to you is, do you believe in fate, Pierce? No-no-no, don’t 
think about your answer, just tell me.” Ricky was almost yelling at this point, and 
Pierce all but expected a flying roundhouse to land on his sternum. Then he brought 
his face close. His eyes looked strained and urgent. “Please Pierce. It’s for your 
good.” Pierce felt exposed, like Ricky had seen the Shadow and saw something 
worrisome about it. He felt as if the shadow was some newly discovered form of 
nakedness. Like Ricky the Buddhist noticed everything—from the shadow down to 
the kernel of chaos at the core of every highly ordered structure—everything Pierce 
was trying to flee from, and everything from which he couldn’t, despite his bravest 
efforts, escape.  
Pierce considered his options. The first was to give Ricky an answer. But what 
would he say? What did he believe about that kind of thing? The subject wasn’t new 
to him, yet he was no closer to arriving at an answer now than he was when he first 
wondered if he, like his watches, might be some highly elaborate clockwork meant to 
imitate something like life or agency. In short, he didn’t know which side he fell on, 
and was even less sure which answer would satisfy Ricky. 
Rather than engaging with the thought processes any more than he already 
had, Pierce decided the most reasonable option was to turn away from Ricky and flee 
to the men’s restroom, where he bolted the stall. He waited until class was in full 
112 
 
 
swing before he emerged again. Then he dashed back through the hall, across the 
studio, down the stairs, and out the door to the street. He didn’t stop running until he 
reached the lot where he’d parked. Before clicking his seatbelt, Pierce swung a look 
over his shoulder, where he half-expected he’d find Ricky in the backseat saying, 
“Well? Do you?” 
At home, Pierce became ill. The experience with Ricky precipitated him into a 
daze. He hadn’t been sleeping well the last several nights as it was, and his throat had 
begun to pool with congestion, but until this morning he felt he could keep illness at 
bay, or at least contained. Activity would fortify him against illness, as it had done 
against the invasion of other forms of disarray before. But something had come 
uncorked in the world. He felt the sickness sluicing against the walls of his sinuses. 
He decided finally to rest. And yet the moment he brought his activity to a stop, he 
felt the train of his previous activity catch up to him—and Pierce was out cold the rest 
of the day and through the night.  
He called out of work the next day and canceled his meetup with Tasha. 
“Pretty bad?” She said.  
“Could be worse.” He wanted to sound chipper but felt faint. Diminished. 
Aches under his skin made his movements lumbering and painful.  
Tasha didn’t sound so chipper herself. The past few days, Pierce noticed a 
distance settle into her face. This was something that could be explained, he thought, 
along with her guardedness over the phone. Though when she came to bring him cold 
medicine and tea the next day after work, the distance was undeniable. Several times, 
he’d catch Tasha out of the corner of his eye craning her head at him, her brows 
113 
 
 
scrunched like she was peering at some newly discovered species of slime-secreting 
beetle. Her responses were clipped. At one point while playing cards Tasha set her 
hand face down and said, “You really should see a therapist about this.”  
“A therapist about what?”  
Tasha looked at him for a long moment, in disbelief maybe. Then she sighed 
and said nothing. But he suspected that whatever she said nothing about had 
something to do with the shadow. More and more it drew her attention away from 
him. Her simple ability to keep eye contact seemed to be in jeopardy. They went an 
entire conversation where Tasha didn’t look at him once. Over a round of Black Jack, 
she dealt his cards directly to the seat next to his. And more than once during some 
dispute, her gesticulating hands caught the side of his head or prodded him in the 
face. Pierce quickly learned to stand clear when she delivered her closing arguments. 
Each meetup it seemed Tasha’s gaze (along with Tasha herself) drifted farther from 
Pierce, until the night came when he realized she’d taken several minutes out of 
dinner to address the wall over his shoulder. When he followed her line of sight, he 
saw the shadow standing. Of course, it wasn’t quite right to call it a shadow, but he 
didn’t know what else to call it. Its form had been fully fledged now into three-
dimensional space. It’s possible the shadow still contained wheels and gears, though 
if it did, Pierce couldn’t have seen them for the layers of clothing and fresh new skin 
that fitted over its form. He couldn’t even think about the shadow in these terms—as 
something that had been assembled, then sheathed in skin. When he looked at it he no 
longer saw a shadow or a machine. Whatever mechanical uncertainty it once had in 
its movements was gone.  
114 
 
 
Pierce saw, not something, but someone there. Considering the shock of its 
humanness, it was almost incidental to Pierce that the person standing behind him 
looked like Pierce himself. And in fact, of all things, this part surprised him least.  
 The sound of Tasha’s voice came to him and he realized that since the 
moment he looked over her shoulder, he hadn’t heard, or remembered hearing, a 
sound. “I’m sorry, could you repeat that?” 
 “What part?” 
 Pierce wasn’t sure what part to say. “The last part?” 
 “Okay…” Tasha took a moment to gather herself before she said, “So you 
know how I was worried about the shadow before?” 
 Pierce did not know. Not exactly. “But I thought you liked the shadow,” he 
said. “You told me it was a sign of growth.” 
 “I did like the shadow. I mean I do. At first I wasn’t sure where I stood on the 
whole thing. I know the case studies. But I should have thought less about the 
shadow. I think I should have been more worried about you.” 
 “I don’t understand,” Pierce said. Though he had a plummeting sense that he 
already understood more than he wanted to.  
 “Pierce, when you turned blurry on me I couldn’t help but feel that, you know 
as a therapist at least, I’d failed.” 
 “Wait a minute, I turned what?” Pierce said. “I’m not blurry. Since when have 
I been blurry?” He looked at her, eyes sharp with accusation. 
 “Oh. You didn’t know?”  
115 
 
 
 The next few moments weren’t to be remembered as Pierce’s best. He shifted 
back and forth in his seat, trying to intercept Tasha’s gaze, but she simply continued 
to chat, all without any word of concern for his fever dance or for the way he resorted 
to increasingly greater extremes of bad behavior to get her attention. It all culminated 
with him standing on the table and polishing off the Chianti straight from the 
bottle. Pierce knew he had lost it here but what could he do? He wasn’t really sure, so 
he draped himself across the table. Not only had he grown a shadow, but now he had 
to compete with the thing for mere visibility.  
 Before they parted ways for the night, Tasha said “It might be a good idea to 
just get some perspective on everything. I think you need some space to work things 
out. 
 
 
 There was a lot she needed to tell him, Tasha said. “The problem is that I just 
don’t know what exactly, or how.” Then she gave a forced little hopeful smile, as if to 
say “You may be an irremediably balding, house-soiling puppy, and while we may 
have to discuss the possibility of changes tomorrow, I want you to have one more 
night where everything’s right in your world.” How far he’d sunk from an idealized 
version of himself to a shelter-bound puppy was unthinkable. A muted detonation 
went off somewhere inside him and there was the collapse of something small yet 
possibly vital.  
 What was especially unsettling was how none of these blows to his confidence 
seemed to have any effect on the shadow. As he withered into his bed the following 
116 
 
 
week, the shadow continued to press on unfazed. Pierce found rest impossible. Rest 
became something that flitted around the edges of his mind, without ever coming in 
to land. The shadow, which was looking decreasingly less like a shadow and more 
like a man, had him on edge. He’d hear its footsteps now. A sudden click before the 
dishwasher would start its cycle on the other side of the condo.  
 For long periods of time, the shadow disappeared. When it returned, showered 
and in a fresh change of clothes, Pierce realized that it had just been at the gym. He 
came to realize that it no longer fed off of Pierce’s achievements or wilted under the 
blaze of his failures. As much attention as he devoted to the shadow, as much as his 
consciousness—and really his whole being—converged on every creak or blip that 
registered on his sensory radar, the shadow itself seemed no longer to notice him.  
 What Pierce also realized was how unnecessary it became to do anything. Or 
at least, how necessary it was to do anything consciously. While the shadow kept 
working at the gym, for example, Pierce’s muscles became more defined.  
 The shadow was still him after all, wasn’t it? A redesign of himself, maybe, 
but him nonetheless. A lifestyle so well calibrated and synchronized, it continued 
without his conscious thought. An organism of its own.  
 When he pressed his mind, Pierce could even wring out memories of his 
working out in the gym, of pouring over some new watch design, experimenting in 
the kitchen. He had a memory of yoga, how one of the plated mirrors was dressed in 
blue tape. Yes, it was coming back to him now. When he asked the yogi about the 
tape on the mirror, he said it happened the day before. It had been the older guy in the 
class. “We were doing our warmup so he had to do one of his kicks,” the yogi said. 
117 
 
 
“He almost took someone’s head off. I told him he can’t do kicks anymore here. Then 
he took one of the chairs and just lost it man.”  
“Wow, Ricky?” 
“I don’t remember his name.” 
“Older Buddhist guy?”  
“Buddhist? No, I don’t think so.”  
Pierce didn’t remember what happened the rest of that day. Everything he did 
remember seemed hazed-over. Dreamlike. A series of fugue states. While he 
continued to benefit, outwardly, from his life’s design—from his shadow’s 
accomplishments, Pierce himself felt diminished and slight. His awareness of the day-
to-day was fizzling out, as if his very presence in his own life was only partial. Like 
he’d designed the components of his life to function perfectly and without thought, on 
autopilot. A fate of his own making.  
 
 Tasha called Pierce to ask if they could talk. The next day they met at the 
marina near Pierce’s workshop. They watched fishers draw their vessels in and haul 
one catch after another to shore. After a couple minutes, Tasha looked over at the 
empty space next to Pierce and said, “Are you still there?”  
 “Yes, I’m still here.” Pierce may have been blurry to her—he had his doubts 
whether she could have hit him with a sawed-off shotgun if she felt the need. Still, he 
felt somehow exposed. Like the precision gears were left open to the dust storm to 
come. Like she saw him more clearly in his blurriness than she had in his clarity.  
118 
 
 
 A group of fishermen and beachcombers coalesced around a man-sized 
bluefin tuna, winched up at the pierhead. Pierce went silent as the fishermen huddled 
and laughed. An opening in the crowd allowed him to see the tuna return the 
fishermen’s gaze with a big, wet eye that seemed to translate their cheer into a look 
which Pierce could have only described as total resignation.  
 Tasha said, “I had everything planned out. I was going to walk you through 
what was going on and by the end, you were going to see that what used to be your 
shadow was now Pierce. Then you were going to admit you were the shadow. But 
then I realized that you know all that.” Pierce realized he had known, though before 
hearing it in words, he hadn’t known that he knew it. “I guess I should thank you for 
knowing. For the first time in my life, I just don’t have the energy to go through that 
anymore.” She sounded haggard and resigned. Pierce got the impression that they had 
come to the point where all she needed was a convenient excuse, the right ‘out’ from 
their friendship, to find a “One Way” sign pointed in any direction at all and she’d be 
gone. Out of his life. She’d say she had to take a call or use the restroom, and as soon 
as she was far enough away, she’d make a run for it. She’d leave him to his sad and 
blurry self, just Pierce and the men and the big dying fish.  
 What he didn’t know was that the possibility of Tasha hightailing it for the 
second time would have been the better case scenario. She looked around then said, 
“Pierce and I started seeing each other. You know, I mean your former shadow.” 
  “Pierce? You’re calling him Pierce now?” 
 “I wanted to tell you everything last week. But then you became sick, and you 
went blurry…the timing wasn’t right.” Whatever she might have said after this, 
119 
 
 
Pierce never knew. It felt like the pier lurched precipitously under him so that he had 
to physically stagger just to keep himself upright. Pierce righted himself, yet his feet 
continued to move—a continuous staggering-forward that would not stop until he left 
the marina behind him and entered his workshop.  
There he’d confront the Shadow. Maybe they would come to blows. To kicks! 
He imagined the Shadow there in his workshop, creating drafts in the design studio 
maybe, or poised over his workbench. His precise image now, or at least the image of 
what he used to be, duping his whole team. Perhaps it would be doubled over a watch 
movement, its attention focused entirely on magnified wheel pivots, vulnerable. 
Unsuspecting. Or, it would be at the lathe, machining carbon steel, with its head tilted 
just so. All it would need is one good shove. A jostle. It could be an accident. Pierce 
could accidentally jostle its head into the pinion! 
 He began to feel dizzy. A peripheral kind of haziness ran over everything, and 
the world itself seemed to ripple in the wind as he ran. Would he be capable of 
something like this? What would this be anyway? Murder? Manslaughter? Could he 
convince himself that shoving something named Pierce (something lifelike enough 
for his therapist ex-girlfriend to date) headlong into a pinion drilling away at 1,000 
RPMs would simply amount to the disassembly of a clockwork, which didn’t turn out 
the way he’d hoped? 
 That’s when Pierce saw himself, or what looked to be himself, standing 
outside the workshop and he thought that the last thing he wanted was violence, sure, 
but what could he do with his shadow standing there like that? He had painstakingly 
assembled the components of a life designed specifically to claim some kind of 
120 
 
 
control over the small slice of the universe thought to be his—only to find the life he 
created was not controllable. That the life he’d so desperately wanted, so obsessively 
needed could never be his. Now on top of everything else, this imposter, this illusion 
of balance and well-adjusted life had Tasha convinced.  
 It occurred to Pierce that he might be spotted. Would the shadow somehow 
know he was close? Yet he’d gotten this far, close enough to examine the lines in the 
shadow’s neck as it turned towards the harbor. Pierce saw his throat go tense as the 
shadow plucked a cigarette from its pocket, then slacken again when it perched the 
cigarette in its mouth and brought a lighter to it. When had it taken up smoking? 
Pierce hadn’t smoked in many years. Otherwise, the shadow seemed to be in good 
health. The shadow let the cigarette fall, half-smoked, yet it didn’t return inside, but 
seemed to take pleasure from the break, from the wind feathering his hair, as Pierce 
made a point of doing a couple times a day. Pierce allowed himself to creep closer. 
Maybe he’d never taken the time to look this long or as carefully as he did now. Or, it 
could be that before he didn’t have the emotional resources. But it was clear to Pierce, 
crouching close enough to taste the smoke coming off the discarded cigarette, that the 
shadow’s creation was somehow complete, with its ability to enjoy and pursue 
pleasure, with its self-direction, and the way flashes of life ran through its facial 
muscles. Or could even this have been an illusion? And if so, was that just another 
way of asking whether the appearance of Pierce’s life was itself an illusion? If 
Pierce’s life was as much an illusion as the shadow’s, it seemed clear then that the 
shadow had an equal share of life as Pierce.  
121 
 
 
 What was also clear to Pierce was that soon he himself would be the shadow, 
just as the shadow was now Pierce. This is what he had wanted? To put his old Pierce 
aside and create himself new? For a moment, Pierce wondered what to do to make his 
transition final. Yet his life was taking its course, he thought. He saw that was okay. 
There was nothing left to do but wait. He would grow fainter yet and the haze of the 
world would grow thick. Soon, he’ll cling to the new Pierce, and trail mutely in the 
unlit spaces behind him. Then Tasha will meet the new Pierce after work and it will 
be okay. Sometimes she may offer a fleeting glance to the shadow on the floor and it 
will catch something wistful in her. Wistful but resigned, accepting. Together they 
will live out their lives this way, all three, and they will be happy.  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
122 
 
 
Cabin Road 
 Mack was at work when he got the call. It was Vicky, the retiree with the 
houseful of exotic birds and the clay everything (pottered herself), whose property 
neighbored Mack’s family getaway. “There was this huge crash in the middle of the 
night,” Vicky said. She sounded winded. “Out of this world. I thought for sure a train 
hit a school bus down in the valley or something. Of course, it was 4 in the morning 
and we don’t have trains here anymore, but that’s the kind of crazy-sounding shit you 
come up with when you’re woken up like that. And you just know it was maybe two 
hours before my goddamn birds settled down again. Not that the storm’s done 
anything for their sleep. The poor dears.”  
 There was a flutter in Mack’s right temple, which he’d come to recognize as a 
sign that he needed to cool off. Just outside his warehouse distribution office, a stack 
of pallets had toppled over, and now the foreman was getting into it with the forklift 
driver responsible for the collapse. Mack shut his door and cupped the phone against 
his ear. “Vicky, did something happen I should know about?” 
 “Well I just woke up, but as far as I can tell from my kitchen window, you 
have a big tree in your sunroom.” As soon as she finished, Vicky’s birds took up a 
somber squawking, like an avian chorus. The throb in Mack’s temple slowed to a halt 
as he let the air out of his lungs, then he inhaled and it came back to him with a 
mallet. “How bad is it?” he said. 
 “Where do you even begin with a question like that? It’s a big tree.”  
 Mack felt like flinging the phone with Vicky inside of it. “Try one to ten.”  
123 
 
 
 “Okay. On a scale of one to ten, you should be glad that tree didn’t hit the rest 
of your cabin.”  
 Mack said he had to go, but asked Vicky if she could call the local fire 
department to make sure the gas line hadn’t been damaged.  
 It was Friday, and the other warehouse supervisors were getting together after 
work, at a bar where their shuffleboard league came to practice and compete. Mack 
would have to miss it if he was going to beat interstate traffic up to the cabin. By the 
time he got into his Pathfinder, he found traffic grudging and sporadic. Visibility was 
bad. The last of the rain had fizzled out, but in the rain’s wake was a dense, unmoving 
fog and an endless stop-and-go of brake lights, that with enough time began to look 
like a procession of eyes. Everything else on the drive to the cabin looked just as 
unseated and hard to place, though nothing had really changed since he and his wife 
bought the cabin more than ten years ago. It was the same world he’d always known, 
but the feeling of its being the same, and of being able to depend on directions and 
mental maps taken from his past, had shifted. Like the land had grown legs in the 
night and rooted itself somewhere else.  
 Mack called the insurance company. The representative told him they had 
assessors in the area, but the branch was tied up with car lot accounts forty miles east, 
where they had hail the size of lemons. He pulled his Pathfinder off the interstate then 
carved through a series of byways. When he came to the unpaved road leading up to 
the cabin, he pushed his Pathfinder as hard as he dared. Two days of uninterrupted 
thunderstorms had turned the world around him inside out. The hills, glutted with 
rainwater, bled down the valley in chutes, to leave behind a batter of debris and 
124 
 
 
subsoil clay where there had once been a forest road. Naked poplar roots strutted the 
near embankment against further erosion.  
 Some kind of weight seemed to be crunching down around him. Like a 
pressure which he received into his body and down through his leg before he 
discharged it into the gas pedal, which he was pumping a little too hard. This 
wouldn’t be the kind of planned getaway he needed now, the kind he once relied on 
the cabin for when he’d take the family out of the Davenport suburbs for a long 
weekend or summer party. It had been several months since their last cabin getaway, 
which had ended badly, the way many of them had recently—with tears from the 
youngest child, a sullen wall that had grown thicker around the oldest, and with more 
stress than any of them had before coming to the cabin.  
 Yet somehow before every getaway Mack felt they had the chance to 
recapture the days when all the parts of them clicked into place, when it seemed that 
even the occasional spat had a part to play, like a needed rest from the smooth 
operation of their family life. In later years when that operation began to hitch up, the 
cabin became a fixing place, where memories and shared history could be drawn on 
to patch up any cracks that had grown between the family’s members. Mack felt that 
even now, if only the family were there in the Pathfinder with him, the kids might 
soon be back to cleaning lures and snapping pictures of wrens or coyote tracks. That 
his wife Jenna would settle into a book in the sunroom.  
 It was disorienting, going there like this without them all, as if his mind were 
vibrating between two geographies in an attempt to puzzle out what might have been 
left behind and whether it was too late to turn back for it. Taking his family’s place at 
125 
 
 
the cabin would be the fire crew, someone from insurance, maybe a building 
inspector to see about any structural damage the rest of the cabin might have 
sustained, and what he’d have to do to have it fixed up again.  
 His tires started to lose traction in the deepening clay. A couple big trucks, or 
maybe more, had plowed through there not long before then. Rather than compacting 
ruts for Mack’s tires to bite into, the trucks only seemed to churn the clay and 
rainwater into a mixture that slipped like grease on ice. Mack felt the Pathfinder dig 
in, then skid to a stop. Slings of mud whipped up from the tires, but the SUV didn’t 
budge.  
 Mack shifted into reverse and drove forward again, this time rocking the 
wheel while keeping his pressure even on the gas. A whir came from the crankshaft 
and he felt the tread lugs begin to grip. There was a gratifying jolt as the Pathfinder 
startled forward. An elevation began to break over him, which at first he didn’t 
understand. He liked how it felt the way his wheels milled the pulp of the road like 
raw material, then processed it into forward momentum. Then he thought about how 
his steep insurance policy was finally going to pay off, how things find a way to 
balance out after momentary crisis. Mack felt his hopes suddenly affirmed. When 
Kyle, his oldest, finished up the Marine Youth Camp, he could return with discipline 
over his rage, and with the steadiness he’d known as a young boy, sure, but also with 
the confidence, the self-respect which Mack feared he himself had been part of taking 
away. Kyle would come back, his sister Sammy would want to see him again. Both 
Kyle and Mack could start over, and they would fix this. 
126 
 
 
 Before continuing up to the cabin, Mack wanted to check on the fishing dock, 
which he’d built on the outlying property a little before Kyle was born. After a storm 
like the one they had, it was easy to imagine fugitive lumber littering the stream 
down-current, or even the entire dock hoisted away in the flood. But the pilings were 
still firm, Mack found. The dock itself was in good shape overall, though the joists 
could have used a couple new coats of water repellant. He was about to turn back 
when he saw something flash in the sun. It was a fishing lure snarled in the branch of 
a nearby tree which bent over the water. He thought it must be the handiwork of a 
young fisher, remembering how Sammy used to cast and release the line several yards 
behind her shoulder, or when Kyle hooked his first fish and in his excitement slipped 
off the dock into the water. But the lure couldn’t have belonged to one of his kids. 
 Though Mack occasionally used the dock to get some time alone in the 
morning before everyone else got up, the rest of the family hadn’t gone fishing in 
years. Their last time together ended with one of Kyle’s episodes: a fishing rod 
snapped in two, the reel smashed under Kyle’s heel.  
 Mack and Jenna didn’t know where the hair-trigger rage came from. As far 
back as preschool, Kyle had been noticeably serious for his age, even a little somber. 
It would have been easy to look back on Kyle’s early life through the lens of his 
teenage volatility and think he had always been like this. But as serious as he was as a 
child, more than anything else, Kyle was affectionate and warm. And he had a 
strangely sensitive barometer for other people’s emotions. Jenna would tell her 
friends how she’d sometimes not even know she was stressed out about something 
127 
 
 
until little Kyle would crawl up on her lap and ask her what was wrong. He’d tell her 
not to be sad, then look up with that unblinking way of his into her eyes.  
 More than a few times, Mack would pick Kyle up from kindergarten to find 
him crying quietly to himself. Sometimes it was a party he wasn’t invited to, or kids 
stopped wanting to play with him. His unpopularity mystified Jenna, but Mack was 
the one who saw him with the other kids after school. He’d watch them stick their 
rubber centipedes to the gym walls or chase dodge balls across the floor, while Kyle 
sat doling out markers to imaginary recipients from the sidelines.  
 He was almost six when they had their daughter. Sammy seemed to come 
prepackaged with everything that Kyle’s temperament seemed to lack. She’d gurgle 
breathlessly at anyone who so much as looked in her direction. Where Kyle was 
moody, she was preternaturally happy. Mack worried that Kyle would get lost in his 
little sister’s shadow, that he’d grow to resent her, but like everyone else, Kyle was 
immediately enveloped by Sammy’s charm. She was so ready to validate every little 
quirk of his, every fumbling word. In Sammy’s presence, Kyle’s confidence began to 
find its footing. His words became more fluid, more certain of their rightful place in 
the world. He jealously guarded Sammy and began to lash out at anyone who tried to 
share her presence with him.  
 Mack felt he should have known how Kyle would change when Sammy grew 
old enough to bring friends home after school. How he’d later lock himself in his 
room or smolder with a quiet rage in his seat at dinnertime before the smoldering had 
nothing left to feed on inside himself, before it turned its blaze outward, in great 
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plasmatic flairs seeking out the closest targets—tables overturned, friends chased out 
of the house, Sammy left sputtering into her mother’s collar.  
 Mack left the dock and climbed into the driver’s seat. He was driving up the 
incline again when the phone buzzed against his hip. He answered but couldn’t make 
out a response from the other end. He glanced at the caller I.D. and saw it was Vicky. 
“Vicky? If you’re talking I can’t hear you.” The sound of big, flapping wings batted 
his face away from the receiver.  
 “Mack! My God, are you there?” Her voice came through, and though Vicky 
was just up the hill, she sounded distant and tremulous, as if calling down to him 
through a drainpipe. “Mack, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry—” She was crying now.  
 “Vicky, what’s wrong?” 
 “I called—” she took a breath. “I called the fire department. To check the gas 
line, like you asked. Oh Mack, I think they just pulled someone out of the rubble.”  
 His heart stuttered. An image of muddied limbs bolted through his 
consciousness before he could make it out clearly. But it left the impression of 
something hazy and devastating, a crater after a sudden detonation in his neural 
tissue. 
 Mack hung up on Vicky then summoned up Jenna’s number from his recent 
calls. He waited until the call went to voicemail. “I’m sorry I can’t come to the phone 
right now…” The voice was Jenna’s, but he had trouble connecting her face to the 
recorded message, which sounded remote and listless.  
 His mind raced over possibilities. Jenna had taken Sammy on a long weekend 
the night before, but their destination was not the cabin, but a water park resort, they 
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told him. Mack had opted to stay behind to save his time off for Kyle to come back, 
when the family could take a short vacation together. He hung up and dialed again. 
Neither Jenna nor Sammy said anything about going to the cabin. Maybe there had 
been some mistake. It occurred to him that Jenna’s phone was working. He was sure 
that her phone wouldn’t have stood up to the torrential rain sheeting through the 
smashed sunroom. Vicky, with the distraction of birds braying in both ears, could 
have seen anything through the trees. But what? What had she seen? The voicemail 
tone sounded. Mack said, “Jenna, where are you and Sammy? I need you to call me 
back right away.” He turned onto the gravel road and scaled the hill towards the 
cabin. He cradled the phone in his lap and called again.  
 When he crested the hill, the first thing he saw at the end of the stretch of 
gravel was the fallen tree—at least sixty feet of hardwood tonnage, which was now 
eclipsing the cabin. A firetruck and two red fire medic ambulances were idling in the 
weeds just off the road. Their warning lights were off. A small crew foraged in the 
shadow of the fallen tree. Two of the firefighters seemed to be digging gingerly at 
something pinned under the trunk. The rest stood off to the side, their gaze lost in the 
rubble.  
 Then he saw them. Without the commotion of emergency personnel, they 
might have been two sleeping bags out there in the wooded distance. Mack stamped 
down on the gas pedal and broke through a line of caution tape that had stretched 
across the road. Then there came a metallic thumping against the side of the 
Pathfinder. “Hey hey hey!” A man was running alongside the truck, knocking on the 
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passenger door. Mack hit the brakes. “I don’t know how in the hell you snuck up on 
me like that,” the man said as he closed in on the driver’s side window. 
 Mack was only dimly aware of the firefighter waving his arms at him, 
instructing him to take the key out of the ignition. He focused on the space between 
himself and the black bags on the lawn ahead. “I have to get through,” he said.  
 The man put his palms against Mack’s door. “Not unless you’re with me you 
don’t. But if you’re trying to get back on the highway—”  
 “That’s my cabin ok?” 
 The man craned his neck forward. He seemed to be studying Mack through 
the tinted window. “Give me a second.” He pulled the radio off his belt. “The guy up 
here says this is his cabin. Over.” 
 The man lowered the volume on his radio, but Mack could hear another voice 
crackling through: “It looked like we found the whole family. Over.” 
 “That’s what he’s saying.” He turned back to Mack. “Sir, my name’s Sergeant 
Clark. Could you tell me how many people were inside?” 
 “I didn’t know anyone was at the cabin.” Mack jabbed his big toe into the 
floorboards under the gas pedal. “I just got here—it’s a vacation home. I’ve got to 
call my wife.” 
 “I understand that. We combed the cabin, but I’d feel better knowing 
everyone’s accounted for. I mean, in case there’s someone we haven’t located who 
needs help. How many people are there normally, when you’re here?”  
 Mack dialed Jenna’s number. “Four,” he said.  
 “Just you and three others? You sure?” 
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 The sergeant’s radio crackled again. “Pulled out number three. Over.” 
 Mack got Jenna’s voicemail again. “Dammit, dammit.” He clapped the phone 
down on the dash, then turning to Sergeant Clark he said, “They’re my family and 
this is my house. So yeah, okay? I’m pretty damn sure.” They were interrupted by a 
sudden buzz as Mack’s phone skittered over the dash. He nabbed the phone and 
brought it up to his ear. “Mack? Just saw you called.”  
 It was Jenna. He sprung up, rigid in his seat. “Jenna, where’s Sammy?” he 
said.  
 There was a pause on the other end. “With me in the hotel room,” she said, 
drawing the “room” out into a question. “What’s going on?” 
If they weren’t at the cabin, he couldn’t imagine who was, until he thought 
about Kyle. It hit Mack that Jenna’s parents could have taken him out of camp for the 
weekend. It could be Kyle in that bag.  
Before he was aware of it, Mack jumped out of the Pathfinder. Sergeant Clark 
held out his arms. “Easy, easy,” he said. 
 Mack pressed the phone against his ear while trying to maneuver around or 
through the fire sergeant. “Then who’s at the cabin, your parents? Did they take Kyle 
with them?” 
 “Mack? No one’s at the cabin, okay? Kyle’s not on leave for another week. 
What the hell’s going on?”  
 Mack sighed into the receiver. “Jenna, I’m sorry. I have to go. I’ll tell you 
more when I can, okay?”  
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 Sergeant Clark stood next to Mack and together they watched the crew at 
work. “You know those people?” the Sergeant said. Mack dug for a response but 
came up empty. Fears that his family had died in the cabin, coupled with the remote 
strangeness that his family still lived canceled each other out, leaving Mack 
suspended in that canceled space, reeling and wordless.  
 There was a bustle of activity under the tree. Two members of the 
fire crew were using a jack to prise something out from under the center beam of the 
fallen roof. The sunroom’s skeleton was a relatively lightweight aluminum 
construction, but the tree would have intersected the roof’s beam to bring it down like 
a blunt-force guillotine. Something caught his eye which seemed to Mack intimately 
recognizable and yet, somehow unidentifiably alien to him. It entered his 
consciousness gnarled and branchlike, but smooth, like all of its bark had been 
stripped. He didn’t know he was looking at a hand until one of the firefighters jostled 
it with a stray heel. It seemed the hand was reaching out of the center beam. What he 
thought about then was the size—it had been a child’s. 
 “That’s number four. Over,” the voice said from the Sergeant’s radio.  
 “So who was in your cabin?” Sergeant Clark repeated. He looked closely at 
Mack. “Oh man. You really have no idea.” This seemed to please him. Mack lowered 
the phone and looked to the bodies, four of them now, their profiles roughly outlined 
in plasticine. “You can’t go into the house. But go ahead and look around. My guess 
is you’ll see signs they’ve been using the property while you were gone.” 
 “Wait, you mean squatters? In my house.” Mack said.  
 Sergeant Clark shrugged. “I mean, unless you have a better idea.” 
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 His family was alive. Now that he was armed with a way to explain the 
bodies, Mack felt a surge of relief finally hit him. “Squatters,” he said again, this time 
to himself. He was surprised by the sudden tears nettling up to his eyes.  
 The Sergeant appeared to look past Mack’s emotion. “I’ve heard about some 
foreclosures on the outskirts of the city. Down-valley, too. I wouldn’t be surprised if 
we see more squatting going on in the future. Look I know it’s a lot to think about 
and everything, but we haven’t been able to find any identification on the woman and 
my guess is it’ll be the same story with the man. Would you mind seeing if you 
recognize these folks?” 
 Mack thought about the hand straining lifelessly out of the rubble. It seemed 
closer now, created larger in his memory than it had been when he saw it. The 
contortion of stiff fingers, purpled webs against the white flesh. “We don’t know 
anyone around here but our neighbor, Vicky. You know, everyone’s so spaced out 
around here. And if they come from the valley anyway…” 
 “Yeah. Well, I don’t blame you.” Sergeant Clark smiled, like a little apology 
on his lips which he didn’t know how to say. Mack said nothing. After the sergeant 
left, Mack watched as the crew loaded the bodies into the two red ambulances. When 
the emergency personnel finished wrapping up and the lumbering vehicles began 
moaning away down the road, Mack felt their absence fall through him with a chill. 
The last thing he wanted was to be alone in the shadow of the fallen tree, without 
anyone else there to shoulder the weight of what had happened. He didn’t know what 
to feel. When he saw the hand in the rubble with its small, reaching fingers, what had 
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been the sweet sting of relief suddenly became overripe in his mouth: pustular and 
spinning with flies.   
 Mack caught himself fumbling for his phone to call Jenna. He got her 
voicemail and left a message. He didn’t tell her what had sent him into a blind panic 
earlier. He didn’t mention the bodies, the flood-wash of emotions or any of the things 
that made him pick up the phone in the first place. All he could bring himself to say 
was that the property had been damaged, and that he’d tell her more when the 
assessment was complete.  
 When he got a hold of the insurance company after a forty-minute hold, he 
was given a case number and told that someone would be out to see the property the 
next day. But work traffic would be bad going home now, and he wasn’t about to 
weather it out alone. It seemed wherever he turned, he couldn’t get out from under the 
cabin’s following presence, its heat-seeking gaze. 
 He scanned mental maps for a place he could get away to. What his mind 
settled on wasn’t a motel down-valley or a shopping center where he could be in the 
anonymous presence of strangers, but Vicky’s house, just up the way. This surprised 
Mack. He always thought, and Jenna agreed, that Vicky had a chafing quality, and 
made a habit of interrupting family meals. She’d appear, ghostlike at their bay 
window with an unprovoked tirade about the price of new snow tires—and did they 
have any heavy cream she could borrow? 
 But when she opened the door to Mack that afternoon and said in her husky 
voice, “Hurry in before the cockatoos get out,” it felt suddenly natural to him why he 
had wanted to join Vicky, there among her shelves of glazed pottery and wood 
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figurines, her riot of birdlife. He found comfort in her coarse frankness, which felt 
mysteriously reassuring.  
 They sat over sweet tea at her coffee table, where she asked without any 
formality, “It wasn’t any of your people. So what in the hell was it?” 
 When Mack told her about the family, a faint tremor passed through Vicky’s 
lips, but she didn’t break down like he thought she would. Instead she looked 
probingly at Mack’s face, as if she had trouble sifting through the alluvium of 
emotions drawn up by his story and was hoping he’d give her a cue. Then she sat 
back against in her chair and said, “If that’s not the worst best luck there is, well 
then—shit.” She didn’t sound sad, so much as angry. Outraged. Then she said, “You 
hear about earthquake victims that live for days under fallen buildings. Then a tree 
falls over here and boom. Dead? Just like that?” 
 “Yeah. The tree’s width filled most of the sunroom I guess.”  
 “Mack,” her lower eyelids began to droop to expose fleshy red crescents 
under her eyes, as if heavy with the tears Mack thought wouldn’t come. “You don’t 
think if I had checked outside when I heard the crash—”  
 Mack waited for her to finish, until it was clear she was waiting for him to 
jump in first. He shook his head and told her no. “They would have died when the 
tree fell, I’m sure.”  
 Her voice seemed to clear, but her eyes were still weepy. “You know it’s the 
strangest thing. How they were living there and I never saw a sign of them? I mean no 
lights, nothing. Of course, maybe I did. Probably, I would have mistaken whatever I 
saw for you. But just so you know, if I had even the slightest idea you had squatters, I 
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would have marched over there and run their asses out myself—God bless them.” 
When they’d finished their tea, Vicky took their cups and disappeared into the 
kitchen, where the sounds of her fussing through cabinets jabbed occasionally 
through the chirps and clacks coming from the cages and perches around him. Mack 
let himself sink into the sofa where he sat then leaned his head against the backrest. 
 He woke up suddenly, before knowing he’d been asleep or without knowing 
why he’d awoken.  
 He had the feeling that there had been a bang just a moment before while he 
slept, like the slamming of a door. Still, there was no sign of Vicky in the house, 
except for a quilt draped over his chest. He thought about getting back to sleep but 
found himself alert and unsettled. He looked outside. There was still plenty of 
daylight, though the sun had begun to pitch low slabs of light through the trees.  
 He looked past Vicky’s driveway and through the woods, where he saw the 
fallen tree under the cabin’s lengthening shadow. Mack was suddenly moved with the 
urge for something to fix. What he wanted to do more than anything was go inside 
and check out the rest of the cabin. But before the fire crew left, the captain came up 
to him and explained why that wouldn’t be possible. “Not unless you want to fall 
through to the basement.” With the sunroom gone, the cabin’s flooring had been 
exposed to vast amounts of rain over the course of several hours.  
 Mack would have to wait for a home inspector and construction crew. He 
made calls. Every contractor he could get a hold of had similar stories of how they 
were tied up with someone else’s property damage, which would prevent them from 
coming to his cabin for another day or two.  
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 Questions of what remained and what would need to be fixed flickered around 
his mind with an almost audible buzz. With no indication of Vicky nearby, Mack 
found himself heading to his vehicle. He drove back down the road to inspect the rest 
of the property.  
 On the other side of his house, down the incline and at the base of the hill, he 
found that a swath of riverbank had given out. The bank, which before had been 
rounded and gradual, now sheered away to a five-foot drop, where floodwaters had 
undercut the bank to cause its collapse. Mack turned and found his gaze drifting, 
inadvertently up the rise where it settled on the back of his cabin. Fits of undergrowth 
and low-hanging foliage prevented him from making out the fallen tree, but he could 
sense its location. He could tell without more surveying equipment than memory and 
blind intuition that the tree was in a straight line on the hill above him, a line that 
would run perpendicularly to the riverbank.  
 For a moment that he’d quickly dismiss, he imagined that whatever rot or 
deterioration might have caused the tree’s root system to fail connected underground 
to the collapse in the riverbank. He imagined a subterranean channel beneath his feet, 
whose erosion would precede a slow reconfiguration of the hill’s landscape. With 
more rains, the channel would cave in to form a runnel, then a gully that would one 
day threaten to wash out the cabin at the top of the hill. 
 Mack’s feet began to follow his gaze through the trees and up the slope. He 
stopped frequently to examine root systems laid bare, fallen branches, bits of debris 
snagged in the brush. As he adjusted to his surroundings, human objects began to 
present themselves from the forest. A foam football lodged in the cleft of a tree. 
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Scraps of charred foil washed downhill from the fire pit. A rudimentary lean-to fort 
with surprisingly little storm damage, sheltering a mud-caked family of dolls. 
Everywhere seemed haunted with the fresh signs of people inhabiting the grounds 
around him. It seemed inevitable that he’d soon hear voices through the trees, or that 
a figure would coalesce from the bushes.   
 He caught himself looking not for the faces of strangers, but of his own 
family, strolling among the trees. Like they had come down from the cabin to find 
him. What he found around the property could have been plucked directly out of his 
own memories of a time when his family had genuinely been happy. He remembered 
the fishing lure in the tree above his dock and thought about the family sitting 
perched along the edge of the dock, the kids swiping at the water with their toes.  
 As he continued his search, Mack got the sense that he was hot on the trail of 
people who always managed to evade him just at the last minute. It occurred to him 
for the first time that they would have had a vehicle, that a vehicle must exist 
somewhere on the property. Though they would have probably kept it a little downhill 
on the far side of the house, opposite the sunroom, where it would remain out of sight 
from the road and all other sides of the hill. They would have had a contingency plan 
to drive around the back of the cabin. There would have been drills they’d go over 
together, practice. The strains and the bonds these conditions added to their family 
life must have been extraordinary. Mack thought about how they would have huddled 
together at the fire pit, their eyes bright with faintly kindling wood, their voices kept 
low and ears attentive to the sounds of engines gunning up the hill, of crackling 
gravel in the driveway.  
139 
 
 
 Mack reached the fire pit, where the hill leveled off like a terrace. The ring of 
stones was splattered with wet ash. A single half-burned log from the woodshed 
remained in the center of the pit, evidently spared from the fire by rain. Mack opened 
up the charcoal grill, which he kept adjacent to the fire pit. It had been almost a year 
since he’d last fired it up, yet now, he saw two butternut squash medallions looking 
up at him from the bottom of the grill basin where they’d slipped through. Unscraped 
proteins and a tomato skin were left on the grate. He unscrewed the lid to the bear-
grade garbage can. When the lid came off, the trash bag inside contracted like a lung 
pumping air, and a long, cloying breath wheezed out of it to recall the smell of 
caramelized apple-cores. It was then Mack realized he hadn’t eaten since early that 
morning.  
 There was a little water in the bottom of the bag. The family must have been 
there at the fire pit just a couple nights ago. They probably dashed back to the cabin 
just after the rains started. The smell of fire roasted apples began to bind with the 
smell of charr in his nose. The residue of the life they made here was all so fresh and 
immediate. He could almost feel puddles of heat left on the ground under him, on the 
fireside stumps which they would have sat on. Their last days together were spent 
here, like this, playing cat-and-mouse games downhill, cutting and carting wood 
sections inside for a fire, where they’d go to wait the storm out.  
 Mack had refused to look at the bodies. And yet, this family seemed so present 
to him now, their unsolid forms pressing in around him, so that he felt as if he’d told 
the fire captain yes. As if he’d looked at the bodies to have his memory seared by 
140 
 
 
their faces. If he peered long enough around him he could summon their faces out of 
the thickets, their features achingly familiar, but rearranged over swollen flesh.  
 Mack looked in the direction of the sunroom. From where he stood now, he 
could just make out the misplaced foliage from the fallen tree. He’d never bring 
himself to rebuild the sunroom. In place of glass and aluminum, there would be 
timber or logs. The idea of changing not just the wall, but the whole interior design of 
the cabin came easily now. More than likely, from all the water damage it would need 
to be done anyway. It felt clear to Mack that a new environment could help give them 
a fresh start when Kyle returned. Since the last time his own family had stayed there, 
the cabin had a shadowed feeling that pervaded every corner of the interior. Since 
then, he couldn’t think about the cabin without remembering how spectacularly he’d 
failed the night before leaving. It started out small. This was almost six months ago, 
the night after New Year’s, he remembered. He also remembered the sky had been 
clear and luminous that night, with the best visibility they’d had since Christmas 
when Jenna and Mack gave Kyle the computerized telescope he’d asked for. Kyle had 
shown an interest in amateur astronomy, an interest which Mack and Jenna thought 
would give him the kind of grounding hobby he needed. But by Christmas, his 
interests had been absorbed by a new gaming console his uncle had sent him as an 
early present. Mack hoped that Kyle’s enthusiasm for the telescope would return once 
he spent some time breaking it in. But Kyle was unmovable. He was lounging on the 
couch in the family room.“You said I could play after dinner,” he said. “It’s after 
dinner.”  
141 
 
 
 “It’ll just be half an hour, then you can go back to playing this.” Mack was 
aware of how tender the balance was. He tried to sound both relaxed and brightly 
convincing. “Ready in five?” 
 “Dad, it’s after dinner.” 
 “Ooh, I’ll go,” Sammy said from the sunroom behind them, where she’d been 
playing with her mom’s tablet. She joined them in the family room and looked at 
Kyle expectantly. “Come on,” she said, “Stop playing your dumb game and come 
with us.” 
  “Really Sammy? Since when do you want me around for anything? Okay? It’s 
after dinner, this is my time, and I’d appreciate it if everyone just left me alone. God.”  
 Sammy looked bruised. “That’s because you’re sad and lonely,”  
 “Sammy?” Jenna said with a cautionary tone.  
 Kyle paused the game and turned to her. He looked at her. “No,” is all he said. 
 But Sammy pressed on. “You’re lonely and we don’t want you with us 
anyway.” 
 “Sammy, stop it,” Mack said, but Sammy was already reeling backward, hard. 
She stumbled back a little before losing her feet and skidding onto her back.  
 Sammy sat up. No one moved until she said. “Kyle…shoved me.” Her voice 
was breathless and distant. She sounded more disbelieving than pained, though she 
was pressing her hand to her lower back. Kyle himself appeared stricken. He looked 
at Sammy, then side to side at Jenna and Mack, and though his mouth opened, it 
seemed that all he could do was breathe.  
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 Mack dropped the telescope and bounded across the family room. He’d like to 
think that he did it to defend Sammy. But in that moment, he felt the buildup of all the 
chaos Kyle had caused them and everything he took away: their vacations and cabin 
getaways, their meticulously planned holiday celebrations. It reached the point 
recently where any time they were together, the family all but expected one of Kyle’s 
cloudburst-episodes. Dinners and birthdays were noticeably quieter, suffused with a 
muted, waiting dread. Their happiest times together came under suspicion, as though 
at any moment the clouds would break open, and the sky itself would spill out and 
come crashing down over them.  
  It all set off a rage in Mack, an animalistic craze which even then he 
recognized as having belonged not to himself but to Kyle—so that in the moment he 
became most identified with his son, he attacked him. Mack remembered hoisting 
Kyle off his feet by the collar. He remembered shaking him and feeling the threads of 
his shirt seams popping. He grew faint. The room grew hazy. The periphery of his 
eyes began to tighten over his vision. It all felt so necessary at the time, so justified, 
until it felt like nothing at all and the world went blank. He later learned that he’d 
shaken Kyle by the collar until his shirt ripped off his body. When the room came 
back to him, Jenna and Sammy were pulling him back, and Kyle was whimpering 
quietly to himself on the floor.  
 
 Mack and Kyle agreed to go to joint counseling together. After a couple 
months of biweekly sessions, the therapist decided it would be best for them to take 
time apart that summer. “Sorry, like a military camp?” Mack said. 
143 
 
 
 The therapist, a surprisingly young man with a background in mediation, said 
it was important for Kyle to go somewhere he wanted to go, rather than to a program 
meant to discipline him. But at the suggestion of a military camp, Kyle lit up. Mack 
warned Kyle it wouldn’t be like his shooting games. But the more Kyle looked into 
his options, the more set he seemed to be on a Marine youth camp, which even came 
with the therapist’s recommendation. It wasn’t a corrective hellhole for troubled 
teens, but a camp designed to introduce the military lifestyle in what was promised to 
be an upbeat, constructive environment.  
 
 There came a point when Mack felt less like he was looking at the cabin, so 
much as being watched himself. They were there next to him, yet separated, not by 
distance so much as by time. They were there, behind the cabin’s windows, in the 
bushes around him, right where he stood, so close, yet forever unreachable.  
 But his own family—Jenna, Kyle, Sammy—would find their way back to the 
cabin, together. Kyle would be home before the end of summer and there’d be signs 
of change in him. There would be a change in Mack, too, and they’d all be together, 
soon: next week, in a month. They’d seal and stain the dock, untangle the reels and 
string up trout on a line. They’d return to patch over the river bank, to clear out the 
massive stump at the top of the hill and fill in the crater left behind. They’d skewer 
meat and tomatoes and pearl onions. They’d pump the basement, finish treatment for 
mold, install a new floor and drywall, rearrange the whole interior. They’d return, 
taking care not to let their eyes linger too long on the new, unweathered logs that’ll 
wall over the seam where the cabin once joined the sunroom. It would all be new. A 
144 
 
 
cabin without memory, where pasts could be built over and started again. They’d 
smile easily together, blank-eyed and hopeful, and pretend never to notice the ghosts 
gathered among them.  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
145 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Part Three 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
146 
 
 
The Wilderland 
I 
 It was called Calmore, that char town where Boe kept his home, and though 
he was hemmed in by houses and a railroad close enough to scrape your eye on, he 
was the only living soul there or anywhere else on the mountain. He cobbled up a 
good enough living from wood game, and from the rock tripe and all variety of 
mountain crops besides, which he grew or sometimes found, there in the woods out 
back.  
 He hadn’t always been alone. Growing up he had his ma who pulled out from 
the valley to root herself on the mountain, fearing the newcomers who distrusted her 
folk healing. When she died and Boe was grown to manhood, there were other souls 
whose lives cut across his own. It seemed to Boe that they had all plunged into the 
dark of the forest paths, valley-ways, never to return to the mountain, but before they 
did they left behind the sticky threads of their memory for Boe to get spun up in. Now 
an old man, hobbled over with malady and solitude, Boe looks to those forest paths, 
or down the steel road that will never again scream under the freight of passing 
railcars, and he waits for the disruption of boots through the wilderland, come 
stamping up for a sight of him.  
 As a boy his mother passed her knowledge to him as her own ma and pa did 
for her as a child. It was from her Boe learned how to harvest wildercrops, make rope 
from cattail leaves for snares, and if the wells soured, how to draw water clean out of 
the air with pit stills. She told him to be wary of folk kind, too, but though he never 
147 
 
 
put a challenge to this instruction, he didn’t learn from it either, nor did he learn to 
make his ma’s bitterness his own.  
 When she still lived among townsfolk, she’d shared love with a young man. 
Really, he was a boy though he was just older than she. His family was newly come 
to the valley. They came wary of the tales of mountain witches and of the wilds 
rearing up around their too-bold son, and it wasn’t long before they picked up the 
scent of his relationship with the young folk healer. When they learned of her work 
with toad-bone talismans and charms sung to the wester winds, the family threatened 
to turn the boy out of their home. The while, changes came into her body that she 
couldn’t explain but one way. She came to him with news of the pregnancy. He told 
her outright he wasn’t the father, and he never would be.  
 With no family left alive and a community she no longer recognized her place 
in, she returned to the mountain woods where her ancestors had settled long before 
settling the valley. There, she made a life with her new son in the old abandoned coal 
town. Folk used to sprolick up the mountain trails in search of her curses and 
remedies. They’d pay her not with money as before, when she lived among them in 
the valley, but with food stuffs, supplies, new clothes, and books for Boe. 
 Boe was scarcely old enough to climb a limb when he learned to read on his 
own. A little older and he was learning from books as much as from his ma. He began 
to watch the weather for signs of turning and sewed his first bed of wild carrot.  
 Alone with his ma on the mountain, and with enough time and resources to 
live by, Boe’s mind was allowed to range over subjects he wouldn’t have been able 
to, had he needed to focus himself fully on getting their next meal. Boe learned 
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anything he could find in books, or under the skin of the animals they culled to sup 
on.  
 He made sketches of the innards of bullfrogs, of clocks and a little watch he 
tweaked apart but couldn’t get back together until he found a diagram in a book when 
he was near old enough to be a man. Once he tried to take apart a clock he found in 
one of the other forgotten houses in Calmore and about lost a finger when the 
mainspring, big as a copperhead, uncoiled with a snap that blew the hour and minute 
wheels clear to the other side of the house.  
After years of this searching, he came to feel that he didn’t really know a 
thing, could not shake up a definition, until he found out what made it different from 
all other things. What he prized most was when he found something where it didn’t 
belong, the secret under the skin that made the mountain itself become strange and 
new again.  
Secrets and food he’d find from snaring cottontail and clipping fowl down 
from their willow perches with his fleet of driftwood arrows. There was the pheasant, 
which he found bloated with grouse berries and a trove of polished coalstones lodged 
in its belly. Or the milk-white eye he found, looking on from the musculature of a 
rabbit’s thigh. And also that keyhole in the martin’s sternum. Once, he’d discovered a 
wharf rat with a second heart which hadn’t a sole artery to plunge the blood through, 
but which kept pumping all the same, near a minute after the rat’s death. 
 Boe turned his curiosities to the townsfolk, who’d slip under the pall of night 
to seek his ma. He studied their talk, their clothing. He’d listen through windows or 
from tree perches to the chatterspeak those people brought up to her while she 
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gathered herbs with them and discussed treatments for their family members’ ailings. 
Yet she wouldn’t let him linger with folk. “A word with em here and next you’ll want 
to walk with em there,” she’d say, pointing down-valley. More than once she put him 
to the wall and switched him for trying to get a word with them. Then she’d cry and 
say, “If you want to scamp away from me, go. Go ahead. You’ll only get grief from 
it.” 
Mostly Boe and his ma lived with quiet tenderness towards each other. In the 
woods, after they’d cut herbs, she’d bend down to him and touch his forehead with 
her own. “My Boe,” she’d say then say no more.  
 They were trying to make it back to the cabin during a rain once when her foot 
skid off a boulder and she fell. She had a cracked rib but in spite of his begging her 
to, she refused to go to town for it and instead turned to her rootwork to ease the pain. 
Her rib turned gangrenous. Yet she kept this from Boe. Instead of making the journey 
to town by the railcar she’d pump up and down the tracks, she leaned still more 
heavily on knowledge that would have served for lesser wounds. Her own father who 
taught her the healing ways might have called her a fool for walling out whatever 
help folk might have for her, but she wouldn't hear of going back to the town. She 
stayed holed up in the cabin until a fever took her. In her last hours she clung to Boe 
and neither of them let go until long after she’d gone.  
 He’d buried her clean out of sight in a little meadow nearby where she used to 
take her rest in. When folk came up-mountain in search of his mother’s remedies, Boe 
found he no longer cared whether he saw another soul again. They’d come with her 
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name loud on their lips, and Boe would hide tree-ways or in another house he took to 
sleeping in after she died. 
He was a young man then, or most near a man. Now under no watchful eye to 
keep him hid up in one place, Boe began laying his claim to the rest of Calmore. Was 
a time in his early manhood when Boe had five roofs to duck under. In the dogtrot, 
crossways from the gutted out church, he lived his winter days to stay warm because 
the big window on the east side would let the sun in. At night he made his life in the 
mines and cellars that pocketed the earth heat. He’d taken a home downhill of the 
coal prep station in the summer. The roof there had holes that let the house breathe, 
but in days of rain, he sheltered in his mother’s old cabin or else back in the dogtrot. 
For a time his abundance kept out the cold of his being alone. But on darker nights 
when the light from the town down-valley glistered through the trees, his own 
lightless town seemed endless and void.  
 And it became too much to tote his belongings from house to house. The rail 
handcar he used on the old track connected but three of his homes. Then came the 
weeklong torrents and the landslide, so that the house where he used to summer and 
another whose cellars he prized went to slush down the side of the mountain.  
 There soon came a time when feeling the want of his mother became the 
hunger for other folk. Boe took to watching them from the forest edge at the base of 
his mountain, from the foothills, from his perches on the bluffs above the trails where 
they plotted their walks. He’d draw something akin to intimacy from their voices 
carried windward. And he drew also a feeling sometimes that he could rightfully 
count himself as one of their own.  
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 Sometimes alone in the cabin, a catbird would come to the mouth of his 
chimney to relay the prattling of truck engines it heard from down-mountain, or a 
child’s keening laugh it had filched from out of an open window. Come springtime, 
Boe would always scatter seeds on his roof to receive a near-daily yield of sounds the 
birds collected from towns-folk. 
 The time came when his longing turned brazen. Used to stray into the valley 
at duskfall to watch from high in the tree-spread at the edge of the woods how people 
made their lives yander in Spring Ridge. He’d watch the humblattering trucks that 
smelled of grease smoke, tearing atter each other through the tree-cleared lot, just 
beneath his own perch where the new houses would soon spring up. But he was 
drawn nearer and nearer in by the allure of lit windows. Soon he risked more daring 
ventures on the outskirts of town. Boe took to clambering down his perch to get a 
close look at families eating on sofas and watching television. He coveted the lives 
they kept—not in the houses they kept them in, but with the people they kept them 
with.  
 In time, he learned to mistake the luck of not getting caught with prowess, on 
nights when the darkness fell thick enough to turn meeker hearts than his bold. It was 
in this foolhardy state he turned from mere watching to stealing. And yet he had never 
been needful of anything a townsperson owned, save for books, clothes, and material 
for writing. Yet he searched always for the secrets of other folk: what things they hid 
within their strange, lit-windowed houses, their ways of living, and what they did to 
shake the weariness of living off a body. These things he searched out the way he 
hunted for wildercrops or probed for the secrets of waterfowl and marmot.  
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 Nights when he wasn’t filching or out watching folk, he lived in longing for 
the charged-up feeling he got in other people’s sheds or below-ground pantries, with 
their tight huddle of walls. There were some nights when being in those storehouses 
felt like a whole electric storm was gathering inside him, caught as he was between 
his desire to be surrounded by the fragments of other lives and the carnal pleasure of 
being directly where both his late mother and townsfolk's law forbade him to go. An 
energy humming through those storehouses made them come alive. You could just 
about see the walls swell in the sun, then constrict as they breathed out the warm air 
and settled their planks and beams again in the cool of night. 
From the storehouses he’d find the forgotten pieces of these people’s lives. Things 
he had no name for until he chanced on a description of them in a stolen book or 
magazine. These things he’d take and trove up in his own home: stashes of wildercat 
hides, hand-telephones, books, jars of preserves. Trophies with marbled green 
patinas, parasols the color of wineberry, a corroded fencing saber. He’d collect 
enough objects over the years to create on his shelves and in the cabin’s tater hole a 
kind of storehouse of his own. Used to put lamps to the windows of other houses in 
old Calmore, even light some chimneys to make it feel he had other souls to live by 
on the mountain. 
II 
 On a few of these expeditions, someone would catch a sight of him and 
scamper on after. Had police looking for him once in the late night, but by the time 
they came spurring on their teams of cars, furious in their screech and glister, Boe 
was long into the hills.  
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 Once when he made away with a bounty of head pillows and an old horse 
saddle he found in a storehouse that had once been a barn, back when the land was 
farmed, he heard a voice call out to him. It was a woman, and Boe could see her there 
at the high window of the old farmhouse nearby. “Hey,” she said, but Boe was fast 
through the weed-sprung field until he’d reached the woods and clambered back 
home.  
In the low-light of his home that night, it seemed the voice came to him again, 
though it was only the keening wind tugging at his memory. Yet he thought about the 
voice, how it didn’t strike at him hard-edged like the cries that went up from other 
folk before they set a chase on him. And it wasn’t a call meant to roust up the 
neighbors. It was like she had meant just for Boe to hear her. 
 He returned the next night. There wasn’t a thing more he wanted from her 
barn, yet he hoped that by his rooting around in there he’d again discover the easy 
reproach of her voice. But when he plotted his way through the field, he found 
something there on the ground, set directly in the square spot of light from her 
window. A canvas bag with packaged jerky and a couple pawpaw fruits, which he 
remembered the infirmed who came to his mother sometimes paid with. His hand 
brushed up against a note in the bag, which he pulled out to read under the window-
light. “Hope you can read this. You can have the bag but don’t get into my barn 
again. And please bring back my saddle.” Boe looked up at the woman leaning 
against her windowsill before she turned and disappeared to the back of the room. 
 The next night, he came with the saddle. There was a note in the window-light 
with a pawpaw weighing it down. “You can leave the saddle in front of the barn,” it 
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said. He looked up for her but the window was empty. He didn’t know how much 
he’d been hoping to see her until he found she wasn’t there.  
 For weeks, Boe returned almost every night after that. Most times, she’d have 
a pawpaw or a can of sody water waiting for him. All through the day, when he was 
out harvesting rock tripe or setting snares, he’d think about her. He found that if he 
came in after sundown, he’d usually find her there, walking back and forth across her 
room, straightening up or watching a television screen he saw the flashes of on the 
wall. Sometimes she cast a glance or two out the window. When he came under the 
window-light and she saw him, she’d look down and wave a little before drawing 
back out of sight. After some weeks, she’d open the window and yell out a hey, or 
talk a little and put questions to him. “How do you come by your food, anyway?” 
“Where’d you learn to read?” “You know you talk like mountain folk. But you also 
talk like no one I ever heard.” “What’s life like up there on the mountain anyway? 
Sure it’s lonesome.” He’d say things back to her like, “Planted a fishing trap 
upstream. Deep in a gut-away.” “My Ma. Have old books, too. And I can scare up a 
scrap from old Montaigne for you. If you ever get a hankering for him.” “Don’t know 
about the herefores of mountain folk talk. I’m the only folk I know.” And, “Can be.” 
It felt freeing yet unnatural talking to her, in the way it must feel for a man to walk on 
his fixed leg, months after getting it cracked. It would throw him on his back how 
suddenly their talks ended. And later, how he’d never known that one night’s chat 
would be their last together. He would remember long after how on that night she 
gave him her name. “Samantha. Friends call me Sammy.” 
 He said, “Well what do I call you?” 
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 “What do you want to call me?” She held her chin in her hand and smiled 
until a laugh came out. She looked cunning how she looked down to him. 
 “Want to call you Sammy,” he said. 
 He waited for a sign of approval, but she went on with, “What do I call you?” 
He told her and asked if she was newcome to the valley. She said her grandfather 
used to coal mine up in Calmore, and her family had a cabin in the hills behind there. 
“Which means you and I spent a lot of our childhood just miles from each other. Isn’t 
that weird? You live close to people but it’s like you’re never really in the same 
world.”  
He came the week after and there was a big four-door truck there he didn’t 
recognize, sidled up next to her Jeep. The light in the window was out and there was 
no note or pawpaw on the ground. He saw the man the next night, sauntering by the 
upper window and not looking out of it. On the ground, there was a bag with a first 
aid kit and a flashlight. A note in the bottom of the bag said that her boyfriend wanted 
him to have this. “I can’t get you anything else, but I hope this will help you.”  
 Nights, he’d go to the window still, but she wouldn’t be there, or it could have 
been they kept the light out. The last time he visited the woman’s house, he took a 
digging bar that leaned always against the barn wall and put a hole through the 
boyfriend’s vehicle window before blustering out of there like the devil himself was 
onto him.  
 Boe never again visited Sammy’s window. Nor did he watch tractors chew up 
farmland. He wouldn't creep by windows to look on families gathered to sup. He felt 
himself going weary when he thought of the town-light throbbing against the night, 
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the fury of vehicles that spat down dirt roads. For the first time in his life he began to 
feel his ma’s bitterness at work beneath his skin. There were whole towns like this 
one and cities too that teemed over with peoplekind but with no place for a man like 
Boe. They were worlds that kept themselves like a secret, forbidden and just out of 
his reach. Keeping what you could share, he decided, was a sin worse by far than 
stealing what little joy you needed to keep on in the world. 
 He paid the catbirds no mind now when they brought him the sounds of the 
valley, still frisking around his roof in hopes that he’d chuck feed at them. They 
wouldn’t get off his roof and kept atter him for food. Their fluting going louder, 
issuing bird-threats maybe, until they were crazed with the sounds of the valley—an 
uproar of cats too many to count yowling down the chimney, engines chewing up 
buckets of rock fed into them, children screeching the pulp from his ears. Boe eyed 
up the gravel and acorns from the ground outside and with a mad haller, threw fistful 
upon fistful at those birds until they took themselves, all siren and flitter, down the 
mountain. But for many days after, Boe would walk the woods, and from somewhere 
in the branches high above, there’d come the sound of his own voice hallering down 
at him, then the petering of gravel as the birds dropped seeds and cedar-cones atter 
him.  
 Came a day soon after when he saw an end to his filching, too. Returned fresh 
from the valley one night to hear a couple fellows low-chattering on the path behind. 
He’d known those voices, the wild beast grunts that preceded their laughing, the 
whoops and hog-freaming that had more than once sent Boe’s prey scuttling down-
mountain. He learned also to expect the pop of gunfire when their voices drew close. 
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He’d duck low to the ground in his home, and once a bullet went whipping through 
his door and into the wall above him.  
 Tonight, he heard the voices following him up wholeway from Spring Ridge. 
Sounded like they were closing in, most like. He didn’t see them that night, nor did he 
see the gun, but when he looked back and hollered a hey at em, there was a flash 
against the night. He heard the rage of thunder. The blow ran like a bolt into his body 
and he went double on the path. A whoop rang up like from a screech owl, then 
another voice howling, “Holy shit, you really did it. Holy shit, holy shit.” And at that, 
they were gone on gattling feet.  
 Boe staggered up. As he ran to Calmore with the thunder still hot in his ears, 
the first thing he felt before the firebrand pain whistling through layers of skin was 
the warm slather that wet down the inside of his shirt. He didn’t know before then 
how a gun could bury so many seeds with a sole shot, but there they were, about a 
fistful of em, bedded into the meat of his shoulder and back. Boe kept his wounds 
clean and dry, which his mother first instructed him to do when he tried to pluck a 
walleye out of a river trap and jabbed his palm on its topfin. He used the first aid kit 
as well as he might, but most of the seeds he found he couldn’t tweeze out.  
He’d think sometimes on the woman at the window, about the families he 
studied, and about his mother too. Yet Boe no longer filched, nor did he lay a trail 
anywhere near Spring Ridge. Where once he burned for sight of another soul, he now 
felt something congeal in the meat of his back, then his chest, like a hardening of 
himself against all the slings and arrows the world might send at him, against loss. 
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And against the whole hateful wilderland of jasper-kind, wherever they might be 
found.  
He felt that hardening press deep inside him, down where the metal seeds in 
his back took root after a few years to grow a ravenous thing that swelled up and 
suckled on his body strength. There came a swelling in his back which in the darkness 
at night, he believed he could feel gnaw and worm its way deeper into his flesh. 
 He saw a thing attack an animal from its insides before. It happened to a deer 
buck, old and solitary now, too weak to keep pace with the herd that once would have 
trotted after its lead. Boe had seen evidence of the buck on saplings, antler-scraped 
down to the pulp. Boe waited a couple morning hours on the bluffs which watched 
over that buck’s watering hole until the sun slipped up over the rim of the world. Out 
came the buck. Then Boe let his arrow sing in the morning air. Ran its midbreast 
through. He followed the blood until he found that old deer not a minute from where 
he shot it. Snipped up the skin and there discovered the signs of some dread secret 
that had no rightful place in a deer or any other life in this world. Though the deer 
was dead hardly a minute, the smell of death-rot stung Boe’s nostrils so that he 
thought he could taste it on his palette. There were little piles of droppings left inside 
that body. And he saw how some of the buck's chest organs were crawling with 
wounds and weeping scars where something had spent months, years maybe, sucking 
slowly away at it. Claw marks scrawled all up the insides—the mark of paws he saw 
also in places, stamped into the meat on the inside of the rib gibbet. He didn't find the 
little creature itself until he gutted out some of the organs, and there it was, nestled up 
in between the lungs: long, slender, and naked down to the pink scraggedy flesh, a 
159 
 
 
pair of long fangs carving up from the lower jaw, its tiny eyes like pinholes. Before 
he could jab it with an arrow, the creature slipped out of the deer carcass and 
wriggled into the watering hole.  
 Since the gunblast, Boe kept himself holed up on the mountain, as much as he 
might. And though he withered and ached to have another soul to reach for, he no 
longer ventured anywhere near the valley. He’d keep his eyes wide watchful for 
souls, but then trim those eyes narrow with askance when he scoped one of em out.  
 There was that time after the hardening when the police team come up with 
heavy-speak to ask about a young man that’d gone lost that way. Told Boe they had 
reports aplenty of him getting into sheds and whatnot, and though they hadn’t 
confirmed anything, there were people who’d blamed him for any living thing that 
vanished round those parts. 
 Before the young man, it was a hound, back just a season before. Same day 
the hound pulled loose on a hike, Boe’s woods were crawling with jasper-folk piping 
singsongs after that hound (“Scappy! Scappy, come on!”)—with a couple of them 
sure-seeming that Boe had taken Scappy to sup on—their redworn knuckles rapping 
at his shutters to demand that sonbitch tell what he did with the dog. Boe knew then 
that should he ever find ol Scappy, he’d best put it out and drop it down a mineshaft, 
rather than return it to folk who’d think he’d been keeping it all long.  
 It’d been a couple weeks since the police came and left, when out of the brush 
he saw the young man. It was all but likely the man had followed the towers of 
smoke, which rolled daily out of Boe’s house. He came in the early evening, 
thumping the door off its hinges, near keeling for water. Boe thought he’d have to run 
160 
 
 
him out of there, arms splayed and waving. But then he looked out at him from the 
window and there came a sting in his belly pit. The young man was by now hunger-
eaten to the sinews, but alive to show for it. There was hardly another feeling in Boe 
in that first moment than the need to tuck him into his chest and take him in for some 
water and food. And yet he couldn’t bring himself to go out to him. He watched the 
trees behind the young man, half as much expecting to see a ring of other men 
noosing around Boe, soon as he opened the door to shoot him out of his shoes. He let 
the door sink into the house a crack, then dropped his skin-sack of water on the 
threshold. The words came out hushed. “Follow the rail downhill. Get to it.”  
 
 
 
 
III 
 One day in his old age, when he ranged nearer about his home in circuits that 
shriveled to the mere bones of what they had been, Boe found a spread of hair 
gaumed up with clay, like roots washed out of the earth. Boe crooked low to the 
ground and saw the hair belonged to a man-body (there was the face, all 
blatsmattered, and the limbs balled up), crammed into a runnel with mud-water piled 
up behind. Where the ground ended and the man began was a riddle the eye alone 
couldn’t solve.  
Had it been a grouse, or any other once-living thing, Boe might have zipped 
the chest aflay with a slip of the gut blade to learn what secrets might come piling out 
161 
 
 
of it. But he sweltered himself sick to think of his hands buried wrist-deep in there, as 
if ferreting around under the rib-gibbet of some hog. Of course, critters held their 
secrets one way. He knew with the understanding of one who kept hid himself, as 
much as he might, where one must look to roust up secrets. For a townsfolk, he’d 
learn less under the skin and more above it, so that the deepmost search might put 
him in danger of missing the topmost secrets. He’d have to have a look through the 
man’s jacket and pockets after lugging him home.  
 The body belonged to an older fellow—nearabout Boe’s own age, he seemed. 
Must have broke off from one of those clots of hillwalkers, come stalking up through 
bresh and bracken, with their proboscis lenses looking to steal a glimpse of Boe--
“Boe, the last inhabitant of Calmoore. One of Appalachia’s abandoned sons.” Or so 
Boe had heard a tour man say to a group once. To this group, the tour man also said, 
“Now careful. If you find a mine, he just might be there, watching you from the 
dark.”  
 More often they came looking for him now, these walkers. Up from the new 
houses that he saw rattling into existence in a series of mechanical shakes and fits. A 
time not ten days old, he had to run off a pair of jaspers. He’d come through the door 
to his own home and there they were, a young couple poking through the troves he 
kept shelved up on the wall. He ran atter them and they went blottering out the door. 
 Boe knew the body must be seen to, as he saw to his mother’s body in his 
boyhood, but whether to take it down town-ways or for burial on the mountain he 
couldn’t choose. He thought on what townsfolk might do if he brought the man down 
to them. How they might dismember his kind deed and reconstrue it as a cruelty. Boe 
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decided that whatever course he should take, he’d be best not to be caught with the 
body in the open. There was the mouth of a mine nearby where a jasper could duck 
out of sight long enough for a thought.  
 With a heave now, Boe delivered the body out of the earth, but near dropped it 
back from the shock of finding that the body moved. As the body in Boe’s arms 
transfigured from empty flesh to a living soul, so Boe’s thoughts switched out the 
mine for his home, where he could get the soul warmed and fed. The man was (in that 
way gravely wounded or unwoken things are) both powerless to resist Boe lugging 
him on his back and powerless to ease Boe’s toil in it. And so there he hung, doe-limp 
across Boe’s shoulders.  
 In his home, Boe nurtured the man as well as he might. There was warmth he 
scared up from his coals and a fresh chord of wood. When he had the man’s rain-
sodden clothes peeled to the skin, Boe flapped out his martin robe to throw over the 
man. He held a bowl of venison broth out for him. One of the man’s arms jumped up 
then, as though woken from a fever dream. The other arm hung by like a dead wing. 
Now the man woke, his breath all a panic. He looked on Boe with eyes wild with the 
terror of one who came face-to-face with the same dread he hoped to watch, but from 
a safe distance. He pushed himself up on the bed, but his eyes went turvy in his skull 
and he slunk back to sleep.  
Boe felt the man’s face. It was no longer cold but warmed over. Like the man 
was in the grip of something that ran wild in him. And his breaths burbled up from his 
chest.  
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But then an unsettled quiet stole over the mountain like a fog. Boe left the 
man for the stab of window light above. He slipped to the door-side window, where 
he listened. There were rhythms, he’d learned, which the mountain made: the wind 
that set the branches all clack-calacking; the rattle of leaves. The piping of wrens and 
kinglets, too. And the languid carrion-birds, climbing the ridge-warmed air in their 
turvy helixes. But now all signs of bird-kind had gone out, leaving only the wind, low 
and mournful.  
Soon, Boe was out the door, watching with his head low to the ground. 
Something picked along a path that ran between his house and another. A jasper—
two. The path was bracken-spraddled, but he could see them well enough, no more 
than twenty yards out and heading out of Calmore to take themselves back down the 
mountain. A young woman with raven-black hair that went blue where the light 
glanced off, and a man beside. He was no older, but he was hairless to the skullcap. 
Where she jaunted about and laughed, he dragged in silence behind. “Bet he’s 
looking at us from one of them houses,” Boe heard the woman say. She trudged 
ahead of the man, goose-necked and watchful. Then she stopped, whupped around, 
and yowled a “Boo!” at him. The man jumped then screeched back at her. “Shirl, I 
swear to God,” he said, clutching his chest, until he found that her hand was cupped 
over her mouth. The man said, “Hold up, did you really get scared just now?”  
The woman laughed, still in hiding behind her hand. “Nope. Stop.” 
The man continued, “No hang on. You scaring me made me scare you? Is that 
what just happened?”  
“Nope. Not at all.”  
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They carried on like that, so loud it was a curious thing the trees didn’t pull up 
to waddle after the fleeing birdlife. In time, the hillwalkers made their way out of that 
char town and headed back down-valley. Boe listened until their voices went out in 
the wind like smoke. He stayed that way until the mountain rhythms settled back in 
their place. 
 As a younger man, he would have been harried by the need to follow atter 
those couple hillwalkers now, to watch from the cover of trunks and boulders as they 
lead him up to the town. Even now he smarted a little for another sight of them. Since 
the gunblast, Boe watched townsfolk only from a great distance. Now he let the 
hillwalkers slip by without another thought. For there now under his own roof was a 
jasper he could watch and keep without fear of gunshot. He sweltered at the thought 
of it. It seemed Boe’s thirst for the secrets of peoplekind, all Boe’s aching need for 
another soul, was there now, troved up in this man. Boe turned to his door and 
wondered what else he might learn from him.  
Now inside again, he looked the man over. There was no ring on his hands, 
though one of his fingers still carried the impression of one. It hit him how it seemed 
this man was on his own in the world. He looked more like Boe himself looked than 
like folk from town. His hair and beard were not trimmed in the manner of anyone 
who has someone to clean up for. The two hillwalkers’ coming-and-going set this 
truth up in a sharp light: the man had been lost a full day and still no one had come up 
to find him. Boe knew that in a townful of jaspers, this man was alone. Chance was, 
he had even been looking for Boe the day before the storm. He wondered how much 
time the man spent near to Boe without even his realizing, watching through his 
165 
 
 
camera lenses and his binoculars. He wondered too if the man might have come there 
often, and if he saw a thing in Boe’s life that he saw in his own.  
 He found the man’s clothes were damp yet, but warmed on the hearthstone. 
He looked to the hayfeather bed. The man slept unstirred. Boe stripped off his own 
coat, his long polyester, his britches. Then he balled up his hands and slipped them 
into the sleeves of the man’s s down-stuffed coat. When he was settled that way, he 
regarded the coat clinging over his own body. Felt what it might mean for his life to 
fill in the small spaces in the town which the man might have left empty. Boe 
imagined brushing the hard edges out of his hair and sweeping into the valley at 
morning dark. When the townsfolk would awake the next morning, there the lost man 
would be in these clothes, back before he was missed, a regular old fixture of Spring 
Ridge. A fixture, but one who wasn’t talked to so much that people ask questions. 
Squeezed into another man’s clothes, the feeling returned of squirreling himself into 
the pantries of townsfolk, of beams and cinderblocks pressing the air close around 
him. But no, it was only a fancy. Had the man been dead, and Boe more alive, the 
fancy might have come into reality. Even so, Boe wanted nothing from that town but 
the man it gave up to him.  
 
 Huddled inside that damp steaming coat, Boe took his rest by the man. There 
was no room on the hayfeather for Boe, so he lowered himself on a bank of furs and 
fleece-wear he’d gathered from old folk who still took to laundry lines.  
 Boe woke to find the man, sitting up tense, like his back was braced to a 
plank. The man sent his startled gaze out in all directions, and Boe suspected he 
166 
 
 
would blatter out again. But when the man’s eyes found Boe, his back went supple 
and his shoulders settled into his body. The man struggled up until he got a leg under 
himself, and on this leg trallopped naked to the door, with the other leg dragging a 
little behind.  
 “No,” Boe called to him and made to stand. But no sooner did the man open 
the door than he was easing his bladder into the bresh. The man then hobbled back to 
the bed. He did not go into a panic now, but took the broth bowl and coupled his lips 
to the rim. When he finished, the man crumpled back into himself, a heap of old 
bones pluffing onto the hayfeather. Boe was about to return to sleep when he felt a 
hand nudge up against his arm. 
Boe didn’t move until it was clear the man wasn’t going to shrink away. 
Content in this, Boe pressed himself against the hand, trying for a response. When the 
man still didn’t pull back, Boe reached out slowly and held him. He touched his head 
to the man’s, as his mother had done when Boe was a boy. As he himself had done 
when she lay there, blatsmattered with tears the day before she died, and at that 
moment he felt a surge of desire for this man to stay. He touched his hand with an 
open palm. There was a charge that jumped between skin surfaces, like the sparks that 
scare up out of the bedding at night when he’d adjust the throw covers. The man’s 
eyes flicked open and he pressed his hand into Boe’s arm.  
 He thought about all humankind and the ache he still had for them. To be near 
them, to feel their skin on his. His hands sweltered under the heat of the thought, his 
breath gaumed up in his throat. There was a moment now while Boe meshed his 
hands with the man’s, when he about believed he had molded him out of the mud 
167 
 
 
then shouldered him home for no reason more than to feel the shock of another soul’s 
presence again.  
But there was also confusion in this touch, like a wariness coming out of it. 
He wondered what kind of delirium the man might be in. There was that day he found 
the fatally wounded coyote at the base of the cliff, its head dashed on a rock, ears and 
nose all spilling out. The beast lay whimpering at his feet. He couldn’t help but touch 
the coyote then. His hand pressing into the fringe of its neck in case the beast found 
strength enough yet to whup around and snap. It yelped at first to his touch, but when 
he raked his fingers through its coat, the coyote pressed against his hand and fell 
silent a long while before its breathing went slow and stopped.  
 The man was still now, perhaps sleeping. Though Boe’s hands itched to run 
free over him, he only gathered the man up to his chest and waited. He held him then 
as he held his dying mother, who reeled from the helter pain of her rib gone 
gangrenous. Before she died, young Boe had rested beside her and felt the fevered air 
releasing from pockets under her gown as she shifted. She bowed her neck, as she 
sometimes did to meet her forehead with his. She’d told him before that there was a 
thing or two a town doctor could fix that she could not, yet hateful of the town and 
fevered over, she’d refused then. But now Boe’s senses, like thousands of little 
filaments, wove out of him to feel out the man in his quavering, to listen for the slush 
in his chest. The man was going rigid with cold, and Boe knew then how nothing on 
the mountain could save him. Of all things he could wish, Boe wanted only to keep 
the man there, holed up in his cabin with him. Yet he thought on his mother who 
gathered him up in her arms and kept him with her. Still he might have gone for help, 
168 
 
 
but she shook her head at him and there he stayed with her until she grew rigid 
between his arms.  
Boe knew he’d have to bear the man away, out to the railcar. Then he’d pump 
on down as far as the old rail would take them. He’d heave him down to the forest 
edge where he could give out a haller for someone to call on a doctor. The townsfolk 
would see him with this man and maybe they’d come to help. Or chance they’d take 
their guns and pop him through. He’d have to keep in hiding the while. Boe would do 
what he could, he’d perch up a tree and see that they bore the man away. And he’d 
think on the man, on what came of him, and wonder if the man will ever patter his 
way up the mountain to see him again.  
Boe was out the door with the man limb-splayed across his back. Then there 
came a jolt as he awoke. “No,” the man said, slow at first, uncertain. Then again, with 
a kind of waking terror that put grit into the man’s voice, he said, “No, no, no.” Boe 
felt a hand scattling down over his face. The man’s nails dragged angry red furrows 
into his neck and cheeks.  
 “Stop, stop,” Boe said, but he felt his knees wilting out from under him. He 
slooped forward and the man flumped off of him. There they lay, toiling for breath, 
when the man finally said to take him back.  
 Boe lifted his head to look at him. “You’ll be dyin if you don’t get help. 
Soon.”  
 The man gave a nod. “But not out here. Please. And not in town. Just take me 
where it’s warm. Back to the fire, where it’s just us and it’s warm.”  
169 
 
 
Boe watched the man as if in wait of a sign to tell him the man was struck 
with delirium. But the man’s eyes were clear and hard. He held Boe’s stare. With a 
groan Boe picked himself off the trail. He gathered the man up again and staggered 
back home. There he arranged the bedding to the man’s comfort. He heaped the fire 
high. The man sunk deep into the bed. Then Boe pocketed the man’s hand in his own 
and drifted to sleep.  
There was nothing, no last braying or death rattle or throes of anykind which 
told him when the man died. All Boe had was the moment he awoke next to the man 
to find that, once again, he was alone.  
He thought to listen for the thrum of blood in the man’s chest. But there was 
no breath to rouse the air. And the eyes, Boe saw, had gone to glass. If he looked at 
the man a certain way, he would think how in a time not too far off, he too will die. 
But instead of his own future death, what he saw there was a kind of past. Boe saw 
how there were times in his life when he was not alone.  
He didn’t pull himself away from the body until near dark. Then he noted a 
change come into the air. Boe opened the door to look down-trail. For a moment, the 
rhythms of the mountain broke apart. The birds and the woods and even the wind had 
gone to a hush. Boe’s own breath sluffed down. He waited. And yet there was not a 
soul anyplace to see or hear.  
Then with the sudden whirlopping of a house wren, the other rhythms came 
rushing back to the mountain. The moment passed, and Boe returned once more to his 
house where he pulled the door shut behind him.  
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Entropy 
 He thinks, “Disrepair. Deterioration.” He thinks, trying to recall the word for 
how disorder worms its way into everything, how eventually life and memory shake 
apart, break down, and die. For weeks, he senses the word flitting among the dust 
motes, within reach, but forever evading his fingers. The word almost coalesces on 
his tongue after he trips over his carpeting, which age has turned up at the corners. 
Now in the kitchen, he slumps against his walker. He puzzles over food items left on 
the moldering kitchen counter and stammers to himself about what he might be able 
to salvage.  
 Not long from now, he’ll be shuttled away and dropped off in a bigger home, to 
live among people whose names he’ll have to re-learn daily. Someone (could it have 
been his daughter?) said she’d come by to help scrounge his belongings before 
helping settle him into the home.  
 There was a word for all of this, if only he could remember. A word that would 
help him understand his own slogging mind. A mind that once was sharp. He used to 
teach the sciences to preparatory students. The word he was looking for came from a 
rarified branch of physics, he knew. He also knew that it wasn’t the right use of the 
word, not from a scientific standpoint. But it became the right word for him, the only 
word he’d heard that fully described the movement from order to chaos.  
 He first misused the word decades ago when he found himself fumbling for a 
way to explain to his daughter why her dog could no longer walk--why the old terrier 
was now dragging himself across the floor on his front paws. Then many years later, 
when the pain was no longer fresh, he had drawn something like comfort from the 
171 
 
 
word’s stony logic, its explanatory power, when the flare of his marriage went cold, 
and again after his wife Kim agreed to a divorce.  
 When it became obvious that his mind faltered, when he first realized how he 
was teetering over the lip of a sightless void, he reached for the word to remember 
what he used to have that had fallen away: a house that once came alive every 
morning with the battering of footsteps down the stairs, with omelets spritzing in the 
skillet. The word would reach through that dark, voided space in his mind to revive 
friends who’d grown old with him, friends who’d gone suddenly, without knowing to 
say goodbye.  
 For a moment, the word brought Kim back to him, too. In the year before she 
died, they had returned to each other as dear, aging friends, but with the wistful 
intimacy of friends who might have been more—and who once had been. The word 
reminded him how Kim had told him goodbye in the hospital bed and how he forgot 
for several minutes after she’d gone that he hadn't let go of her hands.  
 The word described the change that came to all things, if only he could 
remember. But it meant more than this. More than he could ever describe without 
using the word itself. Without the word, it’s meaning and all the memories attached to 
it were hostage to a web of imposter synonyms.  
 Now, there’s a break in his thoughts. A woman comes into his house to usher 
him into a two-door, then drives him to the place he is expected to call home.  
 In a few moments, when he is alone in his new room, the word will come to 
him unexpectedly. When it does, he’ll be returned to his memories. He’ll understand 
again how order goes to disorder, and he’ll think about his old house, its wallpaper 
172 
 
 
paring away in ribbons, the kitchen window filmed over by unventilated grease-
smoke. He’ll remember how he held Kim’s hand and wasn’t sure at what point it 
stopped being alive. Then for the last time, the word will return the dead and the 
parted.  
 Now in his new room, he takes in his surroundings and wonders whether the 
walls hemming him in are strange new intrusions, or if they’ve always been there just 
off the edge of his awareness, and were now closing in. He thinks of a time when he 
was once able to contend with such questions, of how his mind once was good and 
now is not, and in this moment, he remembers. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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A View of Earth from Distant Suns 
Sometimes in the patient’s cataleptic stillness which one might have mistaken 
for sleep, she’d hear the medical staff refer to her as “the Nymph:” when rescuers 
pulled her out of the storm surge earlier that day, her wetsuit pared down to her knees, 
she might have been a mermaid sloughing off her scales to walk the earth as a 
woman. The patient was alert by the time ambulance officers wheeled her into the 
emergency department of The Prince Charles, but when faced with the triage nurse’s 
battery of questions, she said nothing. The nurse held up a laminate sheet with the 
words, “Please point to your language. We will arrange an interpreter at no charge,” 
printed in sixty-six languages. The patient pointed to the sheet’s title: “Language 
Identification Card,” then to the English instructions. 
“So you’re Australian, or from abroad?” the nurse said. The patient gave no 
sign that she heard. For hours after being examined, she lay quiet, the pings of her 
cardiac monitor and a twitch in her limbs the only obvious claims to her presence.  
Her prognosis was excellent. It was unusual that a lone, near-drowning victim 
received medical care so quickly—if at all. A lot of victims never know they’ve 
inhaled water before suffocating in their own homes hours later. But this pointed to 
yet another strange feature of her case: before collapsing in the surf beside her SUV, 
the patient managed to call emergency services with a diagnosis that later proved 
correct.  
No one in the hospital heard the unidentified patient talk until she asked if she 
could use a phone. That there was someone who might answer her call, who knew 
this enigma by her human name, must have seemed improbable to the orderly who 
174 
 
 
fell mute himself in answer to the patient’s request to make the call. But within an 
hour after she phoned, someone did, in fact, come.  
The visitor’s close crop of hair might have been chestnut, youthful even, but 
judging by the pleats in his sun-cured flesh, one could tell from a distance that he was 
at least twenty years older than the patient. Around his eyes, too, dendritic lines ran 
through his skin like the conduits of memory.  
“Alex?” the visitor said. He had a sort of unsure look, as if partially 
recognizing her through a fogged window. “God.” He drew himself against her bed. 
“What did you do?” 
“I’m sorry,” Alex said, but her eyes were distant, her apology perfunctory. 
The man turned away to blink into the light of the far window. “Jules, please? I’m 
sorry.”  
Jules, her visitor, stayed with Alex while she continued to improve. Her 
discharge might have come early, but the suspicious details of her near-drowning 
convinced her attending doctor to place her on suicide watch—a vigilance Jules 
decided to continue weeks after her release. As a patient, this precaution was 
understandable. Yet now that she was out of the ICU, it felt oppressive. Alex thought 
about trying to reason with Jules. To find some way to show that his fears were 
unwarranted.  
But she had just pitted herself against the eyewall of an ocean storm. What 
reason could she possibly give to convince Jules or anyone else—the triage nurse, her 
attending doctor—that it wasn’t death she was looking for. No, her great secret was 
175 
 
 
this: the actions she’d taken in the storm didn’t come from a desire to die, but (against 
all appearances) from a breathlessness to live.  
No one could begin to fathom how much life slammed against the walls of her 
chest that afternoon. Just before the storm wall dissolved into cataracts amplitudes of 
wind and rain, she felt in that one moment the weight of weeks--months packed to 
infinite density. Then, when the storm wall crashed down on her, there was a rush of 
heady expansion as the pressure contained in that moment sprang free with a flash, 
exploding to all protocosmic chaos, so that for the first time in her life, Alex felt 
boundless.  
The decision that led her to the storm came as a revelation. This was just days 
ago, when the thought of dying had the constancy of the spasms in her hands—both 
death and her spasms she’d once been able to shunt out of her consciousness like 
background static. Now, she knew better than to think she’d ever be able to wall 
either of them out of her life completely. 
This she learned after years of successfully hiding her symptoms from her 
colleagues at the University of Queensland, from her dive doctor during checkups, 
and as far as she was able, from herself. Muscle relaxants, tucking her hands into her 
back pockets, making unintentional movements appear necessary—these habits took 
on a language of their own, a semiotics of denial that resisted translation, until a 
diving accident drew it all out and spoke with words that (at least to her ears) made 
ignoring her condition impossible. 
The dive was what Jules described on the Dive Plan Form as a “Work-Up,” 
which was supposed to refresh researchers on SCUBA protocol when they’d been out 
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of water as long as Alex had. But today, the “Work-Up” was Jules’s shorthand for a 
dive celebrating the grant they’d been awarded for a new project that would involve 
researching the effects of bacteria strains on the regenerating life cycles of certain 
hydrozoa.  
What happened on that Work-Up, how far beyond her own control she 
slipped, was the kind of thing Alex had known only in students new to diving. It may 
have been a couple years since a project required her to leave a research vessel or 
(more recently) her office, but diving was once routine for Alex. Today, the progress 
that her disease made since her last dive was painfully clear. Where she once 
scissored her feet without conscious effort, she now had to struggle just to keep 
herself horizontal, trim. Any added effort to regain control only aggravated her 
symptoms. It all carried the sting of betrayal, her body refusing to respond to her 
command—or worse, her body making even its obedience to her grotesque, a kind of 
caricature of compliance. Her fins clipped together, her legs buckled.  
But the changes that would transfigure her life really catalyzed with the most 
unassuming action. Alex had simply tried to adjust the goggles on the bridge of her 
nose. There was no way to know to what extent her hand would defy her, how it 
would hammer the breathing regulator in her mouth or thrust her goggles askew. A 
filament of blood escaped her lips then, and enough water pooled into her goggles to 
make following Jules impossible.  
Alex lost direction. She could feel the shock of blood scream through her 
temples. Before she realized that she was hyperventilating, she was at the point of 
177 
 
 
blacking out. Alex jettisoned her dive weights and in a blind panic broke for the 
surface. 
Jules soon joined her. “Get in the boat,” he said. 
They climbed the ladder that the dive attendant lowered for them from the 
deck of the aluminum skiff.  
“Back a bit soon, aren’t you?” the dive attendant said. “Maybe for the best. 
Will ya look at those clouds?” 
“Listen, Danny, go to the radio and see if you can’t get the weather for us,” 
Jules said. He no doubt wanted to talk to Alex with at least the illusion of privacy, but 
his request must have been more than pretense. A bank of cloud crested the horizon.  
When they settled into their seats, Jules turned to Alex. “Just about the 
quickest ascent I’ve ever done. You?” 
Alex shook her head at him. “We’re fine, Jules. We weren’t even seven 
meters down.” 
“You a’right then?” His voice sounded more aggravated than concerned.  
“Just came over ill.” She held her head in her hands and tongued the crack in 
her lower lip. “You know this doesn’t happen to me.” She searched his eyes. “I’m a 
good diver.”  
Later that day she’d look back on these words and hate herself for them. She 
felt like an undergrad intern again, hungry for affirmation. Even as a PhD candidate, 
she began to think of herself as more Jules’s equal than his mentee. She used to flirt 
with him just to prove it to herself, in pubs when she’d take Scotch and Jules would 
order something of his own concoction he called a Martini Dinkum. There was also, 
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undeniably, something else to her flirtation. Jules might have belonged to another 
generation entirely, but he wore his age well, like broken-in leather. He was 
handsome, swaggering, affectionate, coarse. His almost rockstar status in the field 
generated an aura that made the flesh-and-blood man at its center in equal parts hard 
to know and more alluring because of it. 
Jules replaced the dive attendant at the radio and thumbed the volume. Alex 
steadied her hands by hugging her wetsuit to her chest. Her eyes grew hard to shore 
up any weakness she might have shown before. She felt as though she’d left the water 
without her dignity, and would remain incomplete until she returned for it. She told 
Jules to just give her a minute and she’d be ready to go back in. 
Jules hardly seemed to register her request. “The storm’s taken a turn for us. 
Wind’s going to get pretty gnarly here. And there’s something I’ll need you to do 
before you can dive again.” 
“We should have enough time to work with before the storm hits.” 
Jules shook his head. “Alex? Your dive medical’s almost due. Get to the 
doctor and sort yourself out.”  
 
On Stradbroke Island, where Alex and Jules would soon cloister themselves 
up in research station labs, there was a sinuous line of cliffs along Point Lookout 
where Alex now watched the tropical storm mount the horizon, lurid and crimson in 
the failing light, like the dawning of a savage sun. Her left hand flexed spasmodically 
into half-fists. 
As she continued to lose control over her body, it was as though, little by 
little, she’d simply fade out of being. It had already begun in her extremities, her flesh 
179 
 
 
retreating gradually to reveal something alive underneath which wore her image but 
convulsed against its own monstrosity.  
Alex had first seen this fading-out in her father who had received it as an 
inheritance from his own father. Against her parents’ wishes (once she was old 
enough to make the decision herself), Alex refused to be tested for the offending gene 
mutation. What could she have gained from learning whether the time would come 
early for her to die, or to wake each day attentive to any possible sign of change 
coming into her body? Was everything she saw happen to her father, the whole living 
wreckage of his body, destined to become her own life? She held the tender balance 
of her life’s control by rejecting the question, by living as if the question didn’t exist.  
The moment Jules told her to see her dive doctor, she had already decided 
against it. Now, her symptoms left no room for her to wonder, yet still she eschewed 
official diagnosis. To speak the disease’s name, to give it that breath of life, only had 
the power to paralyze. It would strip her of what control she could call hers for what 
little time she had it.  
At the cliff’s edge now, Alex told herself how she might still redeem the 
work-up dive. Salvaging this one event could mean holding her fragmenting self-
mastery intact. The swim she’d take into the bay days later would be an insurrection 
against her fading horizon.  
Alex toed up to the cliff edge and watched as waves blasted through a cleft 
between two boulders. She imagined what it 
would be to fall. To give herself entirely to the gulf and see what shards of a life 
(fractured yet magnifying) she might snatch up on the journey down. 
180 
 
 
 
Before the worst of the storm winds hit, Alex left by ferry to the mainland 
under the pretense of renewing her dive medical. Jules went with her to gather some 
essentials from his home, but when they disembarked, their paths split. Alex bought 
batteries, water, and a supply of dry food to prepare for power outages. For the next 
few days, she cleaned and reorganized her flat—anything she could do to stanch her 
anxiety. But the night came when these little distractions lost their staying power. 
Alex found herself driving to a club she used to visit as a PhD candidate, on nights 
when she needed to lose herself in a malaise of soundscapes and VJ light displays.  
It wasn’t in her mind to dance that night, but after a few shots, the work-up 
dive and the swim to come melted out of her pores, so that for the first time in a year 
she felt her age again. It was shocking, and at the same time inevitable, that she 
would find herself caught up in the crush of bodies, breathed in by the colognes and 
perfumes made feral by the tang of sweat. Her body lost solid form and her presence 
became ubiquitous, a series of probabilities approaching the moment of quantum 
collapse. She soared—then, at the height of the thunder-clapping drums, one of her 
knees folded under her body and she fell. There was a breathless moment before she 
stood again with a grace that cut through the contemptuous smiles of younger women. 
The fall she conquered; it was a conversation with a young man that would threaten 
to undo her sense of control later at the bar. 
He had alert green eyes and athletic shoulders, which he seemed to be trying 
to accentuate when he breathed. But he had real charm, the kind that comes from 
taking a genuine interest, rather than striving to be genuinely interesting. He 
introduced himself and before long, they talked about Alex’s work, how she was on a 
181 
 
 
dive just before the storm hit. “It was like we were leading this wall of rain back to 
shore,” she told him.  
“So you’re to blame for my canceled tenno match,” the man said. Alex 
laughed in a sudden, unguarded way that sounded surprised at itself. “No worries,” he 
said. “Looks like we’ll be in the cyclone’s eye tomorrow afternoon. Maybe you and I 
could get some tenno in then?” 
“You’re asking me out in a cyclone.” He smiled, but Alex grew solemn. 
Instead of riffing on the drinks in her system, his invitation sobered her. It seemed 
unfeeling, leaving him without explanation moments later—though it was precisely 
out of her capacity to feel that she fled. No doubt, the tennis match would have been 
nothing more than a casual date, but one that would keep her hopes open for someone 
else to come into her life later, whose love she’d one day be unable to return and 
maybe even forget she ever had. The thought of love had begun to feel distant to her, 
a remote abstraction that rarely broke into her consciousness with stabs of desire.  
Before the man could call for her, a power outage left them in a twilight of 
glowsticks and mobile LCD screens. Alex followed a near wall to the emergency exit.  
She left the club behind to see streets guttering with floodwater. A branch of wind-
blown pandanus skittered across the median. Then it struck her with the clarity of 
cold rain that she may never have the chance to feel more mastery over her life than if 
she’d swim into the storm’s eye.  
 
For days after her hospitalization, Alex began each morning at the lab in fear 
that Jules was going to give her hell for her recklessness in the storm, for how she 
endangered their research by keeping her condition a secret. Not only did this tirade 
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never come; Jules worked with the research station staff to arrange little comforts for 
her. Yet in many ways, she found that what he did instead harder to cope with.  
Jules kept the fridge (which they would use to house specimens at the end of 
the study) stocked with cheeses, bread spreads, and a cache of soft drinks. And in the 
event that she needed a midday rest, rather than leaving Alex to trek back to her 
research station “cabin” lodgings, Jules set up a twin bed in one of the corners of their 
lab. Alex felt uncomfortably like a sickly dog being groomed for a quiet death. 
But what stuck most in Alex's mind was how in spite of his many 
accommodations, Jules refused to directly mention the disease at their axis. He 
instead let his words glance off the subject’s rim to leave the impression of its 
looming outline—one with a berth wide enough to draw more attention to the disease 
than it would have been just to name it outright. There was a month of this until it 
was Alex who came to Jules and said: “I want to make sure you’re ready for what’s 
about to happen.”  
 
When Alex first proposed studying the T. dohrnii years before, her vision for 
the project was too out-of-reach to entice university colleagues to join her. Even the 
subject of the project seemed like it had been plucked out of a legend: an almost 
impossibly miniature jellyfish no larger than an eye’s pupil, a creature that in its 
glasswork smallness seemed fey. Yet not only did the creature exist, it proved to be a 
genetic miracle. A hydrozoan whose life existed not as a timeline rushing towards 
some definitive end, but as a wheel that cycled, time and time again, back to youth.  
There was always a moment after Alex explained this phenomenon to 
acquaintances and family when she’d pause to look for signs of disbelief. She’d chase 
183 
 
 
this thought down with the statement that immortality wasn’t as rare as people might 
think. Planarian flatworms, hydra, even lichens don’t appear to age, and under the 
right conditions, they might live indefinitely. But the organism at the center of her 
study was different: the Turritopsis dohrnii does age, but once it reaches adulthood or 
if wounded, the creature reabsorbs its tentacles into its hood, then rearranges its cells 
to start its life anew as a young colony of polyps.  
Transparent aside from the blood-orange bloom of its internal organs, the T. 
dohrnii might as well be invisible in the wild—up until recently, the only time Alex 
encountered the species outside of a laboratory Petri dish was at the bottom of a tide 
pool on Fraser Island, where against all likelihood, she found up to twenty specimens 
at once. There in the stone basin, their colony must have been birthed with enough 
shelter from the sun and tide to remain mostly intact. If Alex hadn’t looked at the 
right time, and if she hadn’t known what to look for, they might have blended into the 
surrounding motes of plankton and whirling debris. The way they emerged was like a 
constellation drawing her attention away from the surrounding stars.  
After her diving accident, the memory of these T. dohrnii came out of a neural 
fog--sumptuous and unbidden. In the wake of this memory, the only thought her brain 
seemed capable of generating afterwards was the way the creatures moved. She had 
no gauge over how much time elapsed watching them. The effect was unworldly: 
how their purling trails unwound with a grace so slow, it was almost as if they existed 
in a time signature unfettered by the laws of a world destined for destruction.  
To her colleagues, the creatures were fascinating, sure, but it all seemed too 
out-of-reach, this idea that studying a hydroid’s genome could one day be used to 
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repair human organs, neural tissue. Jules himself, before a stint at Japan’s Kyoto 
Institute, said he couldn’t commit to a project of that scope, especially one whose 
usefulness doesn't fall tidily under marine research categories likely to attract 
funding. 
Then, months later, he told Alex that he found a way to at least break ground 
on her research. Once she heard his proposal out, she wondered why a study which 
examined whether certain species of invasive bacteria could induce the T. dohrnii’s 
reverse development was more enticing to the scientific community than improving 
quality of life and, perhaps, prolonging it. Of course, it was obvious even to Alex that 
this thought came with the timbre of her bias. Assuming her project was even 
feasible, it's true that it would require extensive time, more funding, and at least one 
geneticist, all without any immediate application. “Classic grant repellent,” Jules once 
called it.  
For the first few months after Alex’s discharge from the hospital, she and 
Jules netted specimens along shorelines and in the shallows. With the naked eye alone 
to help them, it was impossible to distinguish the tiny T. dohrnii from other plankton 
in their nets, so they had to deposit their findings into a bucket of seawater before 
returning to the lab to painstakingly examine every ounce of water under a 
microscope, one Petri dish at a time. They then distributed the specimens into 
beakers, with the purr of fans nearby to create a current over the surface of the water 
to prevent stagnation. Every morning, Alex and Jules fed their charges with shrimp 
eggs, which had to be cut up under a microscope.  
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This part of the task Alex left to Jules. Dicing shrimp eggs demanded an 
almost surgical delicacy which Alex knew she'd ever have again. She leveraged this 
task one morning to tell Jules what to expect as she degenerated. He set his dissecting 
needle and forceps down. “Alex,” he said. “Do we have to do this now?” But she 
continued as though she hadn't heard him. She told him of the complicated, aimless 
paths her arms would take as she lost more control. The false starts and tottering gait 
in her step. How her jaw would hang crooked. She’d work to make it all seem 
intentional, of course, but the corrective actions she’d use to try to salvage her dignity 
would only make her efforts appear ridiculous. 
Jules raised his hands, in supplication for her to stop, but Alex palmed the 
table. “You’re going to hear this. I need you to hear this. Because someday, I’ll no 
longer drive, Jules. Or be able to bathe. And I’ll piss myself. My voice will slur and 
you won’t understand me. And my mind will get worse. I won’t understand you. I’ll 
have tantrums and depression and hurt everybody I love. Then I won’t remember 
what life was before all of this. I won’t have my name or memories, and I’ll die.” She 
spoke at once with the knowing and astonishment of one who had been accustomed to 
seeing a life in similar ruin, yet who comes to realize that the life she saw, long 
before, would be her own.  
They continued their work together that day in almost complete silence. Alex 
then left for the Brisbane mainland to retrieve some needed items, but when she 
found herself alone in her dark flat it was the first time she understood the sense of 
lifelessness she’d been freighted under since her hospitalization. She knew its weight 
only by the weightlessness she felt when it lifted. So much had happened since her 
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near-drowning that it wasn’t until she returned to the familiar reference of her own 
apartment that she had the space to consider her own lack of restraint in the storm, 
that the brazen actions in her memory were her own. 
The swim was supposed to be reasonably safe. She remembered telling herself 
in the cloudbank’s shadow that once the winds returned to stoke the waves, she’d 
simply ride them ashore. But when the storm’s eye turned its focus away from her 
and drew in its train a phalanx of thunderheads, something held her motionless. This 
was how she came to see death that day: there was something within the storm, a felt 
presence, colossal and yet without mass—a kind of void. And her access to the void’s 
power became so acute, her perception so attuned to the annihilation of sky overhead, 
it was as if her mind translated the experience into a visible image that could be seen 
by its absence, a vacuum so total, the contours of space and time bowed to its pull.  
This Alex faced down. She had acted out a fantasy not even reserved for 
dreams, which at the moment always seemed too real for her to risk injury or 
embarrassment—her actions found precedent only in the knowing fancy of daydream. 
The exhilaration didn’t come just from facing death, but from the thrill of 
having survived, from risking everything to come out of it with more of her lost self 
than what she had before. By living out the storm, Alex had clawed through the fabric 
of order she once used to conceal her fear. Now, she tried to imagine a life where she 
didn’t risk death and knew that her swim into the storm was not the last time she 
would.  
Again, Alex was surprised at herself, at how much range she allowed these 
thoughts. This was the kind of recklessness that could destroy her career—possibly 
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her life. No, it was the way she chose to live as she always had—how, in spite of her 
changing life, she continued to dedicate herself to her work—which provided the 
order and routine focus she needed to at least keep the disease out of the forefront of 
her mind. And until she presented her study two years later, this was enough for her. 
She had refused to let her focus stray into any concern for the T. dohrnii’s 
rejuvenation, or how it might be used to help human life.  
But when her study finally ended, there was little left to do but keep the 
specimens healthy and wait for word on renewed funding. Alex soon felt growing 
inside her a gnawing desperation. Her almost daily jogs gave the only moments of 
relief she felt, and even seemed to return some of the lost motor control to her limbs. 
But the relief was fleeting. Her desperation continued to grow until it felt almost 
unarguable that a cavity had to be forming behind her ribs, a deepening hollow that 
wouldn't stop expanding until it consumed her in its gulf. 
One afternoon Alex finished work earlier than she had expected. A gale had 
been whistling daylong through the palm spathes outside the lab windows. When she 
left the lab, Alex was met with a wind so powerful she found herself having to lean 
forward to make any headway. She decided to stop at the cabin for her coat before 
climbing into her SUV. 
Just a few hours earlier when she first left for work, she hadn't known, 
couldn't have known, the risks she'd take later that day. The choices that led her back 
to the cliffs at Lookout Point came to her in a haze of action and broken thought. 
Once she realized the direction of the wind, everything that came afterward fell 
naturally into place. It was dizzying, how precariously removed from herself she 
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felt—how disjointed her own choices were. And yet, she had never been so present, 
her senses so blown open with adrenal immediacy as she was the moment she 
committed herself to the wind.  
The day was intermittently overcast and bright: bands of cloud dragged 
patchwork shadows to shore from across the ocean. The flare of noonday against her 
bare neck, coupled with sudden descents into twilight, left the world shifting and 
uncertain, with a sense of being neither in one place or another, but rather caught in-
between.  
Alex first tried it away from the cliff's edge. She unzipped her coat. 
Immediately she felt the wind catch in its folds. Her coat snapped like a mainsail 
behind her. Then over the brink of North Gorge, she angled her body forward, the 
shearing wind alone sustaining her over the grinding waves. She leaned out as far as 
she dared. More than once, she had to right herself to keep from pinwheeling over the 
edge.  
Then came a sudden lull in the wind and Alex felt herself pitch forward. She 
had no conscious control over her reaction: she doubled over so completely that her 
rear shifted her weight away from the edge. Alex threw herself back and fell. There 
she lay, her breaths echoing the concussion of waves beneath her. A moment passed 
before a sense of sudden release came over her, and she laughed and told herself that 
this would be the last time.  
In the coming months, though, other opportunities presented themselves. 
Some, she defied and soon forgot. But there it was, her gnawing sense of 
desperation—and worse, the fade working its way up her limbs. More than ever 
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before, she felt her control slipping from her fingers when she struggled to sign her 
name at the bank. Her toes began to catch on the pavement on afternoon runs.  
The point when Alex accepted risk-taking as the natural course of her new life 
came when she found herself poised in perfect balance between a growing weakness 
and a health still strong enough to resist it. What Alex had found in the storm and at 
the edge of the cliff was how the risk of death fleeced away the layers of order and 
control that had for so long stood between her and the world, it wasn’t until she was 
free of the layers’ influence that she began to recognize them as graveclothes. 
Without them she could actually feel, not just the raw, unmediated fear of death, but 
with it the life which the layers’ protection had for so long robbed her of. It had been 
the discovery of a world at the edge of some final horizon, where dreads and wonders 
stood amplified by the sure promise of death. 
Some nights she’d park her SUV on the beach and swim blindly into the 
darkness. Once, she managed to convince a group of Portuguese globetrotters to hitch 
her bodyboard to their jeep and tow her in exchange for a tour of Stradbroke’s 
sandboarding dunes.  
Alex took to swimming before dawn into North Gorge where she'd climb 
from the water to scale the cliff. Each climb she attempted, she felt her grip give out 
and she had to push herself away from the wall to safely hit water. It wasn’t until her 
second attempt one morning that she managed to reach a ledge where she could turn 
her body and stand, presiding high above the waves. There she stood like the relief of 
a goddess, soon to break out of the rock wall and glide down to the water's surface.”  
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One evening, Alex looked over her shoulder to see that Jules had followed her 
to the beach. In all likelihood he had grown suspicious or concerned when she left a 
dinner event with colleagues early. When Jules parked behind her SUV, Alex zipped 
up her wetsuit and asked if he fancied a swim. 
Jules clapped his jeep’s door shut. “You do know it’s night,” he said. 
“Is night the one with the darkness and mosquitos?” She turned away and 
stepped into her own broken reflection on the water’s surface. A handful of 
beachgoers, smelling heavily of smoke from a doused bonfire, straggled back to their 
jeep. 
“You’re mad,” Jules called after her.  
“You stalked me.” 
“I was going to update you on a development over the dinner. Before you 
dashed off. Now I might just yell at you.” 
“Can you yell and walk at the same time?” Alex swam parallel to shore, while 
Jules left his shoes to walk beside her. They carried themselves in silence until Alex 
rolled on her back and faced the sky.  
“You shouldn’t be swimming alone,” Jules said. 
“Then join me.” She patted the water. Jules looked at her incredulously, but 
after a moment of hesitation, he peeled off his shirt and trudged into the shallows. 
Prone now on the water's surface, they watched the little remaining daylight recede, 
leaving behind a caravansary of stars, like dust mote islets cut off from the mainland 
by a rising sea. There with the cosmos trembling on the water around them and on 
display above, neither Alex nor Jules felt the need to talk. Alex didn't even register 
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the silence, not until she was startled out of it by the sound of her own thoughts taking 
shape in the cool air.  
She caught herself telling Jules of growing up in southern Australia where her 
parents sometimes took holidays on the Great Ocean Road. One night as a child, she 
tried to run the seven kilometers from their campsite to the Twelve Apostles 
formations, massive limestone columns that reared out of the sea. She was still in 
view of the campsite when her father caught up to her. The next year, soon after his 
symptoms first started, he brought her to the Apostles himself on a night when 
stargazing took on the wonder of sorcery. “We were looking up, a bit like this really,” 
she said. “And he explained to me how every atom inside us came from the stars. It's 
like we’re the remnants of dead stars brought to life.”  
What she thought about then, but didn't say, was how by just looking at the 
stars, they were reaching backwards in time. The image of the stars they saw had 
been traveling for thousands, even millions of years, before making it to their eyes. 
As a girl, Alex imagined people living in those solar systems who had telescopes 
powerful enough to see Earth. By the time they could see Alex’s life just beginning to 
unfold, she would have been dead for centuries. Sometimes she looked up and she’d 
wave at them. While camping with her parents, she pulled a branch out of the cinders 
and scrawled messages in the air overhead.  
Even as a woman, she saw how the residue of these fantasies persisted. How it 
clung like an unshakeable dust or a dew to the way she saw herself in her illness. She 
felt there were moments in her life worth preserving--incandescent moments, bright 
enough to reach someone, family, friends, those who are to be born after she has died. 
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Anyone who might see or come to know of those moments and keep them alive. 
There was a time when she thought of her research in this way, though its connection 
with her struggle was only abstract and tangential. Now when she felt herself slipping 
away from her own grasp, the only moments Alex felt she could hold onto were her 
small insurrections against death, when she pulled back her own skin to let herself 
feel the unmediated sting of her life.  
In spite of the guardedness she had cast up between herself and the lives of 
those around her, Alex hoped that something in her life would break through to reach 
someone else. And yet even as a girl she’d begun to see other lives as out-of-reach. 
After her father’s condition drew him gradually into himself and away from her, 
people became like stars separated from her by great distances: luminous--miraculous 
even. And yet impossible to fully know, and perhaps even to touch. This 
understanding began with her father. But rather than ending with him, it found its way 
to her mother, to school friends, her relatives--rippling outward until her life became 
a cosmos of unreachable suns. It was as if her father's condition, and especially what 
he revealed by his withdrawal from her, had lifted the lid on the night sky to reveal its 
vast, unknowable interior. This understanding was renewed when Alex's own 
symptoms began, when she herself began to withdraw.  
As her condition made greater gains on her, Alex was forced to defer more 
and more duties to Jules. She’d once thought he dramatized his increased workload 
somewhat, when on many nights he refused to quit the lab for the cabin, instead 
choosing to sleep in four-hour shifts on the twin bed before returning to work. But 
from the way he incorporated into his schedule time to take her to the corner shop and 
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to the local chemist for her meds, Alex came to believe it was her declining health 
that motivated his new habits.  
One afternoon, she returned from the lab to find her living space in the cabin 
rearranged to model her old apartment. She could not help but grow in tenderness to 
Jules. At the same time, she knew that it could never be love. To give into love was to 
bind the chords of her life to someone else’s. To feel her joints wrench slowly apart 
with each of the other’s pains. And to watch (as her own life unraveled) how the life 
of her beloved split open at the seams. The fact that her bones already quaked with 
her father’s own spasms testified to more connection than anyone should have to 
endure. Alex suspected Jules’s love for her, but she decided that they’d have to live 
out their time as friends. He’d keep her close, she knew, but like two-dimensional 
beings confined to parallel planes, she’d have to keep him forever just out of reach. 
 
Then one early evening, Jules woke her with a bottle of wine he smuggled 
into the research station. “What’s all this?” she said, reproachful in her grogginess. 
Jules looked hard at the label for a moment, then said, “Wine, I think.” 
“I see that. You know we can’t have alcohol here.” 
“Yet here it is. Though we both know there should be loopholes for 
celebration.” 
What he told her then would forever reset the course of their work. He 
reached into his pack and drew out plans for a new research proposal. 
Recent headway in gene therapy led Jules to reconsider Alex’s first proposal 
for studying the T. dohrnii. In light of this new research, Jules said it was as if he had 
read her proposal for the first time. Mysteries he once considered in league with 
194 
 
 
alchemy became tangible, something he might feel the texture of against his 
fingertips, turn over in his hand. 
 
The next months would find them searching out avenues to explore the T. 
dohrnii genome. Like the minuscule T. dohrnii themselves, Alex and Jules learned 
how microRNAs which are so central to gene therapy enjoy a disproportionate power 
over life and death, by controlling how genes express themselves. To understand 
microRNAs’ power would be to understand how healthy human cells become the 
mutant saboteurs which cause death and degeneration—or, in a T. dohrnii, how 
damaged cells could be reassigned and made new.  
Their search for a geneticist yielded more than either of them anticipated. The 
Institute for Molecular Bioscience at Queensland contacted Jules directly with a 
proposal to partner with them. Two microbiologists would join their team. And yet 
before the partnership could even take effect, Alex and Jules found themselves pulled 
out of Queensland.  
Her mother phoned. Alex feared it was to say that her father had died. In fact, 
it turned out that he was in good health, though something her mother said seemed 
little less grim. One of his friends from years back came to visit. “And well, I don’t 
think your dad even knew the man. He knows who I am, seems to. But I just worry 
that if you wait—” she left Alex to complete the thought.  
Before she told her Alex was already looking up flights to Melbourne. Jules 
pulled out his computer to help cross-reference ticket prices. He stopped to look over 
his screen at her. “Right. I’m going to ask a question. It’ll impose on you, and you’ll 
say no, but I’d whip the cat if I didn’t at least try.” Instead of responding, Alex waited 
195 
 
 
for him to continue. Jules said, “With your father’s condition and everything, I think 
you’ve been doing this alone, what, your whole life? And you still could do it alone, 
and you’d come out brilliant.” He closed his computer lid and said, “You don’t have 
to, Alex. I want to go with you.” 
The proposition surprised her, but she was taken aback even further by how 
ready she was to accept it. It hadn’t occurred to her that he might go with her. Yet it 
felt now as if she had secretly been hoping he’d ask this very thing all along. 
 
Alex booked a flight to Melbourne, where they took a rental an hour and a 
half south, to the coastal home of Alex’s childhood, where her parents kept their 
retirement. 
The T. dohrnii samples had to be packed in lidded Petri dishes. Because the 
specimens were now without a current, Jules decided to keep them in cold 
temperatures to protect them from infection, so the first thing he asked Alex’s 
astonished mother on arrival was whether there was room in her fridge for a 
rucksack-full of jellyfish.  
As for Alex’s reunion with her dad, it couldn’t have been more harrowing. It 
began without incident. When Alex walked into her father’s room, he wriggled his 
head as if to win some latitude over the bedding that heaped between his eyes and the 
woman by the door. He arched his back. A low whine escaped him.  
In the bed was the same man Alex had known all her life. Yet now, more than 
she’d ever remembered, Alex struggled to imagine how the contortion of limbs that 
greeted her once tended the Pinot gris of her mother’s vineyard a few miles inland. 
This was the father who had seen Alex through her first dives, who revealed alien 
196 
 
 
territories by microscope, and on moonless nights, the suns of legion earths. She 
broke from these thoughts to watch him.  
“Ah-eh,” the man said. Then there was a moment, maybe longer, when he 
held himself steady, almost completely still, watching as if he saw something in her 
that went beyond recognizing Alex’s identity. His eyes seemed strained to see her. 
She looked back and wondered how much he could possibly know. 
Her mother stood beside the bed and said to the man, “Do you know who this 
is? This is your Alexis. A-le-xis.” 
“Ah-eh.” The man’s tongue slid between his teeth and tested the air while his 
arms shivered with the rigid excitement of windblown poles.  
“Listen, you.” Her mother sounded pained. “This is A-le-xis.” 
“Mum,” Alex cut her off. “Stop it. Just stop it.” Her hands were shaking hard 
against her body. She thought about hiding her hands and tried to back out of the 
room before her movements were identified, but her head had begun to move. It was 
only a few inches at a time, but it was enough. Everyone in the room could see. Her 
head snapped back a little, then twisted to the side before righting itself and starting 
the process over again. She couldn’t stop, nor could she hide what was happening. 
She was too staggered by her lack of control in that moment to even consider leaving 
the room.  
“Oh, Alex,” Her mother said. She cupped her mouth with her hands. “Not 
you. My God, please. Please not you, too.” 
Alex tried to silence her, but her father watched again now, steady and intent.  
197 
 
 
It began as an almost imperceptible lowing, a sound so slight, yet so 
unearthly, at first Alex couldn’t imagine it came from her father or any physical thing. 
The sound grew as he watched her, until he bleated, his voice shrill and jagged, 
creasing the air over its serrated edge so that the breath from his mouth might have 
cut.  
Jules accompanied Alex out of the room and closed the door behind them. For 
the rest of the day, Alex stayed in her room. It was dark when she emerged again. 
She found her old boating equipment organized on the wall by the side door of 
her parents’ garage. With some effort, Alex managed to hoist her sea kayak off its 
rack and set it down. She used a vacuum and extension wand that she counted with 
her equipment to rid the inside of her kayak of spiders. Her limbs were uncooperative, 
but she remained as methodical as her body would allow. Nearly half an hour passed 
before she was ready to enter water, with the boat in the shallows, her spray apron 
fitted around the kayak’s lip to seal out water. The waves ahead would be punishing. 
They gained height quickly then barrelled back down, ending in spectacular 
detonations of water and compressed air.  
Then in the lull between wave sets, Alex pushed off. An almost vocal groan 
ran through the wind as the ocean reeled her out. Patterns of sound—the dry crackle 
of rain over water, waves capitulating in on themselves, the moaning wind—all came 
together to form the mechanics of something like language, and yet outside of 
language--more felt than comprehended. It seemed irrational to Alex, yet in some way 
indisputable, that something was calling to her from the waves, from the darkness, 
from the convergence of sea and sky somewhere ahead. It felt as if those polyrhythms 
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had begun to resonate with some turbulence inside her, which had been building up 
since that afternoon when she saw her father again.  
The horror of it had been beyond anything she could express, even to herself. 
All that was available to her was the hazy impression that she had brought her 
father’s suffering full-circle by letting her condition reveal itself, by not preventing 
him from seeing what she’d inherited from him. Her guilt was intense, though at the 
same time she felt she was equal parts offender and victim. She understood vaguely 
too that as her father’s memory continued to drift, her sense of him being unreachable 
(along with everyone else) would be complete. That she too would close herself off 
from the world and drift endlessly out of reach. 
The way she could feel something so acutely, while understanding none of it 
completely, brought her back to the void she experienced in the storm’s eye, in what 
must have been a lifetime before. Now she could feel an absence opening up into the 
night. Once again, the feeling of it became something she could almost see like a 
silhouette against the sky, a void darker than nightfall.  
Alex had no time to react before a wave vaulted over the sharp slope of the 
seabed to catch her in its vortex. She let the wave pass over her before rolling the 
kayak upright. She screamed into the wind, defiant, yet already feeling worn.  
A sudden white beam punched a hole into the night. Against its glare, 
raindrops became white embers for a moment before melting into the sea. Alex 
twisted her body to look over her stern. A man on the beach dropped a camping 
spotlight. Jules began to wade in after her. As she shouted for him to go back, a wave 
hitched up and hit her sidelong.  
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She tumbled. Upended now, Alex realized she no longer had her paddle. 
She’d have to use her hands to gain any purchase on the water. Her hands floundered. 
Whatever control she had over her limbs earlier that night was now draining out with 
her strength. Her first attempt to roll failed. Then, Alex joined both hands in one 
concerted pump against the water, then snapped her hips.  
Alex righted herself just in time for another wave to steamroll her back under 
the surface. She could feel the boat dragging her body like a hank of limp rope. 
Something in her lower back popped against the lip of her kayak. She was out of 
breath and could feel a slow blackout stealing over her headspace. Alex was forced to 
pull the spray apron free of the cockpit rim, and she ejected.  
Alex swam to the shallows and let her feet touch bottom. Jules secured the 
errant boat down-current and swam out to meet her. When they met, they stood for a 
minute without words. The water rose and fell in their silence. They became 
momentarily weightless and lost contact with the seabed, then they dropped heavily 
to find the sand shifting under their feet. 
It was clearer to Alex than ever before just how much Jules had aged in the 
years since her hospitalization. She watched his chest heave, his gaping mouth 
framing rictus agonies while he struggled for breath. “What are you doing?” Jules 
finally said.  
Alex told him that if she were trying to kill herself, she wouldn’t have 
bothered with the kayak. “I just needed a bit of a lash, is that a’right?”  
“A lash? Well what is that?” 
She took a moment before saying, “It’s like I needed a lash at death.” 
200 
 
 
“What the hell you mean, a lash at death?” 
Alex growled and thrashed her arms. “That’s what the hell I mean.” 
The moment seemed to catch Jules off-guard; he smiled and threw his head 
back. “What, you just scream into the wind and you say you’re lashing at death?” 
She howled into his face in answer, but her scream dissolved into a laugh. 
“Shut up, Jules.” They bolstered each other against the current until the sandbar gave 
out beneath their feet, then they swam the remaining way to shore. 
 
In the following days, when Jules was not helping bathe or feed Alex’s father, 
he tended to the T. dohrnii specimens and kept up with reading material provided by 
one of the microbiologists. There was a night when Alex walked into her room to find 
him peering at a T. dohrnii through one of her father’s old microscopes. For days 
Alex had tried to coax Jules away from the house to take a walk with her through 
town. Tonight, like each night before, he asked to be alone—for just a bit longer.  
She removed the sample from under the microscope’s lens, and yet Jules 
continued to look into the eyepiece. When she slid the microscope away from him, he 
lifted his head after a moment to reveal eyes red with tears.  
“Right,” he told her. “I didn’t want you to see me like this. It’s just, I always 
thought we might have more time. I guess it all went to the lab.” He broke into a 
strained, urgent laugh. “It’s just that if our study yields anything that could help you, 
it’ll take decades before we see results. And you know that might be longer than 
either of us have.”  
201 
 
 
He seemed fully prepared to comfort Alex with a caress, but she shrugged his 
hand away and reached for him. “Stop,” she said. “Just be still.” She held his face in 
her hands. “Be still with me?” Alex drew his head to her shoulder. She held him and 
thought about a future day when Jules will find her in the warmth of her bed. He’ll 
wonder at the traces of sand in her hair, the smell of brine. He’ll wait for her to lean 
into his touch, but in his arms he will find her cool and still.  
 
He didn’t walk with her that night, but the next afternoon, Jules was the one to 
take them out of the house. Where they were going he kept secret from her. He made 
sure to load their rental with enough provisions and clothes to see them through to the 
next day. At first, Alex was so sure their destination was The Twelve Apostles that 
she almost corrected Jules when he took an early left off The Great Ocean Road. The 
drive, narrow now, was braced on both sides by walls of vegetation, which allowed 
their gaze clear passage of only a few meters before losing itself in a skein of ferns 
and towering messmates. 
By the time they left the car to enter the Otways Rainforest, it was dark. A few 
massive relics of a forest more ancient interspersed themselves among the lesser 
trees, where they stood like remnant giants keeping vigil for a world buried 
underfoot.  
A glow appeared to be emanating from a line of tree ferns just off the trail 
ahead. As they drew closer, it appeared that the ferns were kindled by dozens of tiny 
lights. Glow worms clung to the undersides of fern fronds and beech leaves. From 
each glow worm hung a sweep of silk fibers that looked to Alex like tentacles 
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dangling from luminous hoods. She switched off her torch and sat down on the path. 
Jules followed.  
Stars exploited gaps in the forest canopy. The two human forms reclined to 
watch as the glow worms disclosed secrets quarried from nebulae to the forest below. 
Alex revisited a decision she made years ago. Before the end came for her, she’d 
release the T. dohrnii. Then in the way they’d absorb their wounded tentacles into 
their hoods, Alex would draw more deeply into herself and for the last time, give 
herself up to the tide.  
And what if she started now? What if she retracted her guard, parted with 
enough of her reach to touch someone outside of herself? As she hung over the chasm 
of space, a new decision whispered its possibility into her mind. One risk, one final 
act of insurrection remained, whose light stars which have yet to be born might one 
day see. If only she would close the space between them. If she could just roll over 
and pull him close, there would be a pulse of light to reach into that chasm, where it 
would join the luminaries in their eternal sea.  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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