make it one story

He says, "thought it was the bitch,” –our grandma— “you walk so slow.” But his voice is calm.
I say nothing, come down the last two steps and go to the couch, some silent thing ka-booming in the bottom of me. It's warm and it refills the part of my that was empty. Safety often feels like happiness; the way a threat can sometimes feel like pain. That morning I’d woken up to yelling.
It’s bad rage. It's dangerous because it hardly belongs to the person anymore, it shot out its veins and became a separate being.
Whenever this happens, an apology follows. Each emptier than the last, and each rage worse than those past. We learned not to trust things to easily spoken. Apologies had the far away airiness of a radio with bad reception. The static buzz of memory.
Hearing anger keeps your eyes open even when you’ve gotten no sleep.
I hear malice, so strong for someone so old. They have learned how to be cruel to us, they know the things to say. I hear a child hurt in the upstairs room, I hear desperate fumbling, he’s trying to cover his wounds because they’ve opened again and they're bleeding. I want to run to him and take him away from here. I stay in bed, my stomach muscles tightening, a strange reaction to this sort of thing.
My brother leaves and doesn’t come back and I go on, estranged. I cannot go in his room because his presence fills it and blocks the door. I cannot sleep. Down the hall, they are loud and lost in sleep, and I despise them for it. Each morning they wake up and their faces show all the years they’ve spent suffering, and except when I catch a certain pain in their eyes, I believe they deserve it.
This is the third night. Some quiet, past emotion echoes inside. The house is empty, and the furnace in the basement growls like a hungry caged thing, knocking in the pipes. I wander into the dark of the kitchen. Eddie was broken from the start, but he was always the strong one. You did not know the way he watched you when you moved too close, the way he held still when he sensed danger. You did not see him cry. I hate it so much when he cries, I think that’s why I can hardly remember it.
This is the third night and I am restless. Three a.m. is loud inside my head, and the house is unmoving. Then I find him, he is in the living room, sitting at the computer, and it’s like he’d been here the whole time, like he’d slipped downstairs from his room the way he does most nights, like he had never left. The disturbance in my head quiets.
He says: “Thought it was the bitch, you walk so slow,” and something inside me smiles hugely. I sit down on the couch, curl up and pile the overstuffed cushions on top of me. He is playing a game with the volume on low, I can hear the far away sound of shooting. The computer screen pulls his face out of the darkness; and it looks so familiar to mine in ways I don’t think anyone else would recognize. I know him too well, the way his hand holds the mouse, the set of his shoulders in that chair. Sometimes his lips move incoherently. I asked him about it once, he said he’s forming the words that are in his head.
“You want this?” He pulls a plastic container out from under his chair. Half a cherry pie. He throws it over and I grab it out of the air. “And wait, here,” he throws me a fork, one from the kitchen. Shifting under the pillows, I open the top and eat the rest of the pie. We talk around what needs to be talked about, laughing as they sleep upstairs.

She was always bitching about small things, we hated her for that. Sometimes we would take it quietly because we knew it was just another short-lived tantrum, and we would laugh about it afterwards. But she was vicious today, and she was spitting poison, so this was not going to happen like that, I could tell from the start. He was going to explode back at her. When Eddie raised his voice he could sap the breath from her, and he could say things that wounded her unspeakably. I remember how quick he broke her down.
He told her to shut her fucking mouth. She withdrew, like she'd been smacked, her eyes went glassy like a dead thing. He sensed her weakness and went at it again like an animal devouring its prey; it had ripped the throat and smelled blood, and then it couldn't stop. The instincts wired into him fired up, and he was gone. I couldn't do anything.
She started to cry, it came shaking out of her, she opened the closet door and his her face. She leaned in and buried it in the coats, and she was trying to speak but she could only weep. Eddie went upstairs. I hesitated and followed him. It seemed the wrong thing to do, but little else was the right thing to do in this house.
I don't want to explain him to you because you will think you know him. You cannot know him. But I will tell you some of the things I remember.
He was violent. That’s what the world had prescribed him with. Behavior issues. I can tell you though, there wasn't a thing wrong with him. No one took the time, they just looked at him and gave him shoes to fill, and he was young and had to be someone, so he filled those shoes, became that person, and went on living.
First it was my neighbors, who my family loved, who I loved, but who never seemed to love us back. In the summers when we were still young, me and Sarah were always in the stream. Little mosquito clans buzzed in the air. The water ran sharply around our ankles. We went back and forth all afternoon, exploring and charting the small creek in my backyard. Sarah had unruly dark hair, always falling in front of her face, and she was slower on the paths than us. Me and Eddie could move deftly from rock to rock without looking down. I would turn back to help her across. Most of the time, Eddie stood atop the rusted tunnel that reared out of the ground, like the ridged hide of a giant worm, prodding things in the stream with sticks, throwing stones. When he threw the stone and it struck Sarah’s cheek, a shock radiated through the air. Eddie felt it, he caught the glitch in the air. And I was cornered. It took me a long time to start standing up for my family, so I turned away from Eddie and went to Sarah. They would hate me for this. I would hate myself for this. Sarah was quiet, maybe she understood, but she would tell her parents otherwise, she would tell her sisters the exxagerated, generalized version. They would all look at him the way the doctor looked at my family in group therapy through her guilded smiles. So I left Eddie there, his eyes round and startled, silent because he hadn't meant it and knew he'd never get to explain.
The next summer. He threw a stone, just a pebble, and I turned and saw him throw it so I knew he hadn’t meant it. It hit my left eye just below my eyebrow. I turned away and kept walking, glad that no one else had seen.
So many years later, nothing much has changed. He is still so harmless, and still so dangerous. I am still so angry at people for not seeing this. High school, and a teacher comes to me, tells me how he is rude and unnecessarily violent. Can you speak to him? he asks me, and I say I can, I am the only one who can. I try to make him understand but he forgets all his strategies once he’s thrown into battle, that’s the kind of man he is. He forgets how to handle a wild thing though he studies it.
Eddie is not vicious. He tests you to see if you are worth his time. He will break you if you let him. He can stare at you like he knows your secrets, then make you walk with him, and make you wait for him, and if you fall he remembers the way you fall.
I have a picture of him, from a disposable Kodak, he is maybe only eleven or twelve and still pale from winter but he smiles wickedly from under the rim of a blue plastic hat, flashing his poker hand, and I know at the time I thought he could’ve been a king.
I know you don’t believe in him.
I remember once I was pleading, trying as always to make them understand, but they are old and spite has sewn them shut. They do not listen anymore. Eddie came outside and told me to run. Just run, Emy, go. Fuck them. So I ran, just that once.
He grew up fast and left so much behind, so much that still lies dormant inside him. I can see it when I look over at him across the dinner table; he is always looking back at me. When I walk in the front door at night, him at the computer or sprawled out on the couch, I can see it. Nothing spoken. Something stirs, a consciousness, a wordlessness, when we find the other looking back. There was a time when he let it be. Now he has become a boy of the world. The same way I must always greet friends with words, something explicit, he now expects so many words... I like to think he understands me the way he used to but he does not. I look at him and see the same child. He looks at me and feels me spinning away from him, in silence and in distance; perhaps he never understood the way we knew each other. Perhaps he is afraid I don’t know him anymore, just the way I am afraid he doesn’t know me. In small ways I bring him back to me, I remind him of the way it was and can be. I know he is tugging at me in his own way. I want to tell him to stop because I’m right here. I want him to stop running.


11.08

Glen Road crawls deep into the mountainside, the only human fingerprint for miles. When a car comes through, it’s always moving too quickly to catch the faint creaking of the trees, the forest’s meek greeting. This quiet goes unnoticed.

On the first of July, a white Mercedes with tinted windows swung through the forest and sped down towards Mountain Lake. The doppler rush briefly disturbed the hush of the forest, then fell away. Simon watched the trees streak past, tall, thin, branchless, the late afternoon sun spiking through them like searchlights.
Aria slept on. He glanced back at her, stretched out on her back. The sun hit her face sharply, whiting out half of it.
Last Monday, her brother had disappeared. Aria lived with her aunt and uncle ever since her parents went missing sixteen years ago. Benjamin and Marina wore furs and brilliant silks every day of the year and lived in a vast stone house that smelled of marzipan and wine. They smiled and smiled at Aria, never speaking of her parents’ death until it slipped from her mind to the deepest chambers of memory. But Max was plagued by what had happened.
Visions began to surface in dreams and he would wake convulsing, his eyes saturated with fear. Aria remembered running to him and hugging him until the shaking stopped. “But then he would slump in my arms, turn away and close his eyes. I would let him go, and his face would stay blank,” Aria had said. She had never told Benjamin or Marina about those nights. Eventually Max slept silently again, but the silence permeated his waking life. It was as if he had been muted by some unspeakable horror. Years passed and he grew very, very quiet.
Max’s behavior was unsettling, and because no one else noticed, it was concentrated and directed at Aria. He would say things to her, as if trying to explain. Eandom, incoherent memories and she never understood. It was one summer evening in the laundry room, when he had came down the stairs and blurted out, “we were walking, Aria, a big walk, through trees…these tall trees—” and then turned to go upstairs again. She had stared after him, confused by the desperation, and then disappointment, that had suddenly possessed him.
Aria knew he left, but Marina insisted he was too good a boy.
Aria shifted in her sleep. A ghostlike full moon was sliding through the canyon of branches that flanked Simon’s car. He’d been driving for hours now. Miles and miles of road trailed out behind the car like a thread.

The front room is wide and bare, with high ceilings and rafters from which falls a heavy, dusty light that gives everything the static look of an old photograph. There is hardly any furniture. Just a large, mahogany desk, two high backed and intricately carved chairs, and a rustic loveseat, its velvet fading. The staircase is massive and drops steeply from an upper hallway that remains visible, despite the deep shadow resting in it. The only light is a low hanging lamp in the center of the room.
The whole place looks like it’s been emptied out.
A man appears at a doorway under the stairs, coming in from out back. He is tall and muscular with an gaunt face, his chin sharp and his eyes blue and slight. They curve up when he smiles, coming forward. His red hair is cut short and he is clean shaven, but his clothes display no such neatness. A dirt-stained plaid shirt, half unbuttoned, hangs over faded and torn jeans, and he pulls off gardening gloves as he steps up to them.
“Francesco Crowbane,” he announces, shaking their hands. He has an accent Aria can’t place. “This is a very big surprise,” he continues, “business has been quite slow lately, and people rarely arrive before the fireworks and celebration. That’s when the tourists come flocking in—nasty bunch if you don’t mind my saying.”
“We’re not tourists,” Simon says absently, eyeing the room.
“Yes…so, you really are unexpected, please do excuse the condition,” he waves a hand at the room.
“Of course,” Aria answers, “we weren’t expecting to stay here either, it’s just that it’s late, and we got los—”
“A little off track. Figured we’d start off again in the morning.”
“I see,” Francesco smiles widely again. “Yes…these are quite the winding roads up here, and especially in the dark, they become a sheer labyrinth.” Aria thought to tell him they’d actually been on the same road the entire time, but he started talking again. “Well, you’ll be right at home here tonight, I’ll give you the biggest room, of course, since you’re the only ones here, staying here…I’ll get you a key.” He goes quickly to the desk, jerking open drawers, none of which seem to have anything useful for the running of an Inn. He retrieves a key and briskly slams all the drawers shut right as they come over.
“Here you are. And your names? Again, please excuse this informality…”
“Simon.”
“Aria.”
“Wonderful, well nice you meet you, Aria, Simon” he says, shaking their hands again, “now just follow me.” They climbed the stairs, which were steeper than they looked, echoes slamming against the walls and ringing up to the ceiling. Francesco walked mechanically, as if he was counting out beats in his head and making sure all his movements correspond. Every door Aria expects him to stop at, he goes swiftly past. Room 6, the master suite must be number 7. Number 8. Number 9. Number 10. After three corners she begins to feel like there was a long way to go.


“Would you two like some dinner? I’d be glad to make you some creamed corn, it’s always been my specialty…or some cornbread…or we always have more regular meals like a hamburger or something?” His smile grew eager. Something made Simon pause. He said they were alright.
ARIA CAN’T SLEEP. WANDERS DOWNSTAIRS, TALKS TO FRANCESCO, HE MAKES HER TWO CUPS OF TEA AND SHE BRINGS THEM UPSTAIRS, SHE AND SIMON FALL ASLEEP. BUT……….


Aria wakes in the night. Haunting, shapeless terror poisons her dreams. Her eyes open, she finds herself in the brass bed, buried under the covers, her heart skipping. She breathes for a long time, until the panic in her lungs is gone. Then she tries to throw back the covers and something tugs at her wrists. Twisting around, she sees the two lengths of rope tied around them. She is bound to the brass bed.
A nerve jolts somewhere near her heart, she forces it down. It’s Simon. He’s joking with me. He’s found a way to leave, he’s joking with me, he’ll come in a minute and untie me and we’ll go. But he doesn’t answer when she says his name. She says it again, and again and again until she’s screaming. Straining against the ropes, she pushes forward as far as she can and sees the door. Open.
Francesco is hauling Simon down the halls.
He drugged the tea. But the cups were sitting in the room, unfinished, when Francesco came an hour later. They were both knocked out, but he didn’t have time. Simon’s limp body bumps down the stairs, Francesco’s gloved hands gripping his collar.
“Crows, a murder of crows, murderous, absolutely merciless creatures,” Francesco
wails drunkenly, “what can you do anymore but make scarecrows, one, after the other, after another, it’s an inescapable task, Simon, and look at all this corn, this huge field I must tend to? What can anyone do but make scarecrows? It must be done, to keep away those bloody crows,” he laughs, “those black flocks, those murders,” he pauses for a long time. Then he drops Simon’s body in a slump on the floor and goes to his desk. He jerks open two drawers, smiling his eager smile again. “Absolutely murderous!” he bellows, and it echoes sharply in the rafters.
The drawers are full of nails. Long, gleaming nails, piled into all the drawers, rusted and bent.
He grabs a fistful and drags Simon out back. Out back is the cornfield and it goes on and on, standing erect and motionless like some patient and furtive army. The stalks climb six feet and then disappear into the dark.
Aria has gnawed out one rope, and untied the other. She bolts from the room, down the stairs, and outside. The road is very still. There is a sign on the door: Closed.
Francesco is singing distantly. A very familiar tune, she knows it somehow. She moves along the side of the house, through the tall grass, ands stays pressed against the wall to listen. This cornfield spans out straight to the mountains.
Francesco stops singing. Aria stiffens, and then flees back to the front. She holds very still at the doorway, listening for him, cursing the loudness of the blood in her ears. Then she hears him inside, trying to go unheard. She runs back to the cornfield, her heart stammering, her feet heavy. Simon is somewhere inside. She slips down the rows, and almost immediately sees his body, shifting slightly. She throws herself at his feet, or rather collapses, and begins explaining in a rush. “He’s mad, Francesco, he dragged you out here, and I was tied up in the room, I was tied to the bed and I thought it was you but you were gone, and he must have drugged the food because, because now you’re here, and he’s back inside, I think he heard me—” Aria sees the nails thrown in the dirt beside him. Her eyes widen. Simon is staring at her, then demands, “we get to the car, and hide.”
They moved back along the side of the house; he held her tightly against his body to stop her shaking. The panic has returned to her lungs.
Francesco is in a rage upstairs, he has found the ropes without the girl. He stomps down the stairs and outside, and Simon and Aria jump away from the door and crouch behind a huge bush.
The madman stalks past them. Aria’s skin burns with fear, she positively liquefies and forgets to breathe.
Simon grabs her and they dash upstairs, barely touching the ground. The door to their room is ajar but the room is emptied. No keys. They come down, quietly, and step outside.
He is up on the roof, watching. He jingles the keys. They can barely see him; three a.m. shadow is all encompassing.
Simon stares up. "You’re crazy. And I'm not afraid of you."
The answer comes smoothly, like wind. "Well, I know one thing scarecrows are afraid of." Then a dark shape lifts and disappears in through a window.
Simon goes after him, to make sure he doesn't escape. Aria screams for him to stay, but her words aren’t heard. For a moment she is rooted to the spot. The silence is unbearable. Abruptly, Francesco appears at the far corner of the house, in back, a tank of gasoline in one hand. He pours the rest of it into a puddle at his feet. "I know one thing scarecrows are afraid of," he repeats. His eyes slide into visibility as he walks toward her.
He tosses a match back into the puddle and smiles, not looking back as a streak of fire roars up and into the house. “FIRE,” he screams, his voice maniacal.
Aria screams for Simon. The building shrieks inside the flames, the enormous woodwork snapping and collapsing in the heat.
Francesco’s eyes flicker red. “No one will hear. No one will come.” She bolts. He doesn't try to stop her, merely turns around and slowly follows her.
She runs into the cornfield, the stalks whipping her in a silent gauntlet, she keeps running until the paths disappear. The cornfield still goes on for miles and miles. She runs until she sees someone in the distance.
"Thank god, oh thank god, thank you, thank you," she yells breathlessly, "Hey! Hey, help, I’m here," she calls, running toward him. Then she sees two more, and more and more, their hats showing over the stalks. Her heart explodes from relief. People are coming to rescue her.
Then she sees them.
They loom above her, limp and dangling. Their arms swung out and nailed to wooden posts. Their clothes in shreds. They are not only dead, but decaying. Aria chokes. Three of them she recognizes. Her father, her mother, her brother. Her heart shudders and halts. Her jaw drops open, she gags, she staggers back moaning.
She knows why this place is so familiar. This is the place. She came here, she must have been three or four, with her family. Her parents were murdered here. She remembers Francesco’s face. Her mind reels between memory and reality. She hears someone singing faintly behind her and she knows the song, because it is the song her father sang to her, his very last night, it is the only lullaby she knows. She turns.
Francesco is striding toward her, smiling warmly, and fully dressed in her father's clothes. She smiles back. Her father, finally, she will be saved. She will be saved. She will be saved. She runs to her father and throws herself into his arms. The house collapses in the cavernous blaze behind them. Francesco is singing lightly in her ear.








This boy will be the death of me, Monica thought, peeling off her white glove finger by finger. The pockmarked man grew restless waiting as she dug through her purse, he started picking at the plastic covered counter. His office was a little cavity of a room; the lights crawled out of the ceiling, wire skeletons of coppery creatures, and the warm smell of sugary cigarette breath saturated the air.
Monica found the little worn Polaroid and handed it over.
He took it in his pudgy hands and inspected it, deliberately slow. Monica eyed him and thought he looked sad. A sad little toad man.
"We want them all over the city," her husband was saying.
The toad glanced at him, and his large eyelids flipped up. It was easy to see where his eyes paused—the pressed white shirt, the sharp gold watch, and then the eyes, blank and somehow wounded.
"On every street corner,” he continued.
"Absolutely." The toad eyes were fixed on his face.
Monica slipped her hand back into the glove. "So chilly." The words fell from her lips and felt like vomit. She caught a strange reaction in her husband’s face, a contortion around his eyes.
Her son was cold to the bone, lost in the grunge of Chicago's inner city.
She snapped her purse shut.
"Do you have another picture, a larger one?"
The husband started but cut himself off; he raked a hand through his hair, embarassed.
"No.”
"This'll cost, more to make it larger, more to enhance it—"
"Anything." Her husband pulled out his wallet. She turned away.
The faces lined the walls. Candid shot at a birthday party, second grade portrait, smiles and unknowing eyes, fingers half the photots, tacked up haphazardly, spilling over onto blocking the lens. The bulletin board overflowed with the unpainted walls. It was a massive orphanage of abandoned lives. Her heart was mute, it did not react as a mother’s should. She stood, stunned, and shoved her hands in her pockets.
She was not looking for these children, not even her own. There was no aching, no mother instinct, no desperate fight to recover her son. He would join the scrapbook, the discarded missing ads, he would remain only in the quietly fading light of this place.
There would be no search.
Her husband left. She followed him, watching the rain soak his shirt. He didn't feel it, she knew that. He had shrunk out of his skin, a small, mournful creature somewhere inside, his heart numbed by grief. He was forging an immunity to anything potentially harmful. He used to cry all into the night; she would lay quietly beside him and pretend to be asleep. But it would resurface all day long, at a news stand or a café, and he would choke on the tears and she would take his hand and pull him along. The crying stopped last week. He reacted to almost nothing, nothing but her. Her accidental, crude comments. She disturbed him.
His watch threw stripes of light out into the downpour.
For a moment she felt guilty but it passed. The eagerness to arrive home with no one to cater to but herself could not be smothered. It was a tragedy, she decided, that she couldn't have her husband to herself, too. He had been stolen.





I stand at the window, flipping the Venetian blinds. The bath fills slowly behind me.
The sun burned
to the sound of water.
The steam had reached the mirrors.
I shut the faucet off with my toes. Steam curls off the surface of the water. I step in, and instantly recoil. The water seethed at my escape.
I step in, crouching, and watch the steam wrap around my limbs, Under the surface things were quiet.
Muted pound of vesicles as they open, close. The blood rushes through the channels I come up again. The phone is ringing.
I surge out of the tub, grab a towl and stomp out of the bathroom, dripping water all over the creamy hotel carpet. I snap down the Venetian blinds, grab the phone with my left hand

swings open the door, bowing and sweeping out her arm in mock cordiality.
"Welcome," she coos, beaming at her visitor.
Room Service is a short, taut woman in black orthopedic shoes with her dark hair pulled back in a bun and lips that have the smarmy gleam of cheap lipstick. She putters in behind the breakfast cart and stops at the foot of the bed. she commences with her required small talk.





IT IS SEVENTH SUN CHILDREN.
Spike’s voice shot through the Dome and did not echo. The children streamed out of the spike. Separated and drilled out in lines toward the offices.
REPORT TO MORNING POSITIONS.
He watched from his window. His palm against the glass, he waited for the vibration of 7:01. The giant hand swung. The vibration rushed into the newly found tributary, thundering under his skin, and was sucked back out. His hand met his side.
A STORM COMES WITHIN THE HOUR.
The silver walls stared at him with cold metallic eyes.
JADE REPORT TO OFFICE 64—
The floor jerked. One violent tremor.
He was thrown at the window, his face hit the glass and his gaze plummeted two miles to the platform.
His voice had stopped.
Lines had scattered, every head tilted up. The Dome had halted. Nothing moved, nothing breathed. Then the floor fell and he fell with it. The Spike caved in on itself and slammed down towards the platform. The crash splintered its framework, sent huge shards of it spinning across the platform and hundreds of children flying. Silence, then a high-pitched screech as the entire dome was ripped from existence. Silence came again, and did not end.
He believed he had gone blind. It was intensely dizzying, terrifying, to see nothing. He had opened his eyes to complete darkness. It was not like the darkness behind his eyelids, where the shapeless black bloomed and warped and swirled in his mind’s eye. Nothing moved. It seemed he had been set down in a blind desert and if he could see, he would see miles and miles of barren pavement, running from him in all directions. Panic became suffocating.
The platform gaped with holes, ripped open by the enormous debris.
A saffron girl was watching him from a distance. A rigid boy, rooted to the spot, staring white-eyed. She glanced down at the child, convulsing against her leg. She took his hand and moved toward the boy. He did not react when she stood before him. Then she noticed his leg. His thigh had been split open, a gash as large as a fist seemed to be pouring velvet. The children had never seen blood, never encountered pain. The boy stared blankly ahead. She nudged him. He shifted, a thousand years later. Lowered his eyes.
“I know a place we can go.” He felt her voice skimming through the air, miles back, trying to reach him. “The houses are close,” she said, and her voice jumped towards him again, scrambling against tides of silence. He looked out. Blurs of color, heaps of robes and limbs and hair, the steel bones of giants. Sharp depths screeched at him from below the platform. This he did not understand. This was Ground. Nothing existed below. Yet here was something: spaces large enough to swallow night, dark enough to ink the day. The girl glided into the wreckage, curving around blockades with disturbing monotony, gripping the hand of the child. As he followed, he began to notice the roofs.
Sheathed in the dark, they were not metal, their bones were thin and scratchy, not the steel bones of giants. When she paused at the rim of a crater, he came up beside her and stared down.
“You’ve heard of them.” She whispered and motioned for him to stay quiet. Sounds whirred off her tongue, pearls and open sky. Another language, maybe. Maybe just sounds. Down below, creatures were moving.
Ached of unease
The room swam in ocher light





10.08
We met at the Drifting Tree.
“You got the sign?” He asks.
I pelt him with the two burs and say, “I got the sign.”
Twos means the Drifting Tree. Singles in Jackwater and triples is urgent, like a stray caught in the briars, or a new trail in the woods. In which case, we run to the other’s house, and usually collide in the middle. This particular morning I’d leapt out of bed and discovered twos. Two burs stuck to my sock. So I lifted Peach, who snarled at me and whipped her tail, dropped her out the backdoor and ran off toward the hill where the Drifting Tree stood solemnly in the quiet.
He leaps up into the tree, crawling onto a branch below me, and says, “Get those off.” Gripping the smooth branch with my legs, I drop upside-down and pick them off his faded shirt. The Drifting Tree is white and silky and shaped by the wind that rolls over this hill all through the summer. Its branches all lean to one side. It’s gotten used to our company and curves to fit our bodies. We’ve scratched our named into the bark closest to the sky. The Drifting Tree is our refuge in the heat. We lie like jaguars with out eyes closed to the sun and our bodies stretched out on the thick, ribbon branches. Sun breathes below me. Sun is short for Sonny. It’s what came of his first attempt to write. Three thick, crooked letters in blue crayon. I think it fits him. He has blonde hair, straight but restless from play, and skin that shines like shifting grass in the afternoon sun.
“Penelope.” Penelope is my full name, what my mother calls me, because it’s what God calls me. But Sun calls me Elle, and that is my name. So I don’t answer.
“What,” he says in that slow way of his, “are you afraid of?”
“I don’t know yet,” I answer, squinting, out the sunshine burning through the watery clouds.
“I’m not afraid of anything.”
I flip over on the branch to look down at him. “Me neither.”
“Would you be afraid if this tree caught fire?”
“Caught fire from what. Driftwood can’t catch fire.”
“Yes it can.”
“No, it can’t. It’s from the ocean.”
He hesitated, “This tree isn’t real driftwood, Elle.”
“Well…how do you know?”
“Because water doesn’t flow up,” he said, incredulously. His smile tweaked his lips.
“What about rain. You forgot about rain.”
He was looking into my eyes. His eyes are the color of wood when it’s soaking wet, like the docks after dinner. They’re so hard to see into. He can probably see straight through mine. It’d be like looking through a cloud.
“Did you know that rain isn’t any color?”
I think.
“Your eyes are something like rain,” he tells me.
“Your eyes are like soggy wood,” I snap, drop my leg down to kick him.
“Hey, rain isn’t so bad. I didn’t say it was bad.” His eyes are hard like glass.
“Oh.” I lift my foot away. “Yeah, rain is nice.”
This is how Sun is. His words are all tests. He speaks to me until he I misinterpret him. Until he gets me angry over something false. He just won. I flip over on my back and close my eyes again.
“Open your eyes,” he says, “or one day you’ll go blind.”
I open my eyes.







White sun flashes off the hoods of cars. When you look at all of them at once, it looks like cytoplasmic streaming, and we are tiny things inside a tiny cell, moving along a tiny outer edge. There is a loudness to the world, its traffic jammed into a single highway, there is such a roar of machinery. Until all the sound is shook from me.

I am bleeding. There is a screaming of tires.

The car in front of us is white. A white Mecedes Benz. I remember the man who drove it kept adjusting the rearview mirror, his watch throwing sunlight against the glass.

I drop, and smell blood.

press my palms against the pavement, push myself up, my face hot

“Jack,” I try, and it’s the strangest sound I’ve ever heard


The heat came early

in the parlor beside Margaret

slaves to it.

Static. No stations.

“You’re distracting me,” Margaret tells me without looking up.

“I’m checking for civilization.”



He’s pulling over.

The Alpha Correction Home and Estate.

Wide, low stone buildings, and a thousand windows that might as well be barred.

sun glancing off the wide doors.



It was constantly flinging itself off the edge of my bed when I wasn’t looking

Sweet Bob sat down at his little round table by the window and edged a slice of pizza out of the box. Grease landed on the red table cloth. He watched it being absorbed. His mother had given him the table when her diner went out of business. Probably still gum on the underside.
Outside, wind tore at the trees, the streets seemed lined with gold in the white moonlight. His garden was old and bruised, buried under wet leaves. Gardens are hopeless, Sweet Bob thought, that’s why everyone buys perfumed bouquets from Charlie down on Main.
Sweet Bob combed his hair back carefully, set down the comb, then opened his top drawer. An empty onw. He put the comb in and shut it, turned away from his reflection. “It’s nothing,” he muttered, “I’m a man of simple pleasures,” he smiled to himself, glancing back at his reflection, “I’m allowed to have empty drawers.” And he crawled into his small cot and pulled the wool blankets up to his chin.
Black sheep fumbled in his dreams, in the city streets, pushing out deli doors, crowding department stores, clumping around the stray dogs, curious, sniffing. Taxis honked but weren’t heard, and as the sheep accumulated, the taxis shrunk to the size of toy cars.
clinging like loneliness

the TV plays late

Nothing is out of place.

This house is perfect.

Old King brought me inside it, and like a child replaced by another, it became vicious.

Old King stayed with his books and did not come out.

I was alone with it for years.

Alone with the screaming house and the cat.



The dust of his body covers this place,

the air hot electric around me.

The house is trying to hurt me,

but it is only air and memory.

I ignore its violent electricity.

I allow the vile thing its space.

I am moving through it,

a speck in its bloodstream,

and I have never been so alone.

Everything passed.

Such quiet here,

fetus-quiet,

the quiet of the unborn.

A quiet that knows no absence

of anything.



I remember

all their hands staining me.

I remember

that word isolate.

I remember

the streets overrun, the car exhaust,

the land ripped open and wailing,

in pain or ecstasy..



Old King's Castle calling...

an insipid place of exile.



Its perfection stagnant.

After ages of admiration,

it lays thickly in the air.

There is madness here, distilled,

still ghosting through the halls.



I stored the darkness and the whispers,

the faces in the curtains and the leaf shadows.

I kept the sky, bruised and healing slowly in the sun.

Dawn surrenders like it seduces,

releasing layers of its pigment like garments.



they wait for the flaw to manifest

i suppress the urge to rip skin and roar

they back away from me on stilts with wild spinning circus eyes,

they are hysterical and raucous

but you look at their eyes and the world is unmoving hard and black.

you look at their eyes and everything stops,

like a wrench was thrown into the machinery.

everything stops.

Insanity. A low place in the forsaken deserts of the mind.

I stop or am stopped.

Anger seethes up inside of me, filling me like chemical suds.

I choke and drown and wake.



Tar the stray is grimy,

the color of grease.

little animal of war, with talons

to announce its every entry

and mark its every path.

Tar comes close and the nuclear explosion on his nose begins to leak acid and

he begins to disintegrate.

those black splinters in his pale green eyes.











Life like that, that floats along the surface like pond scum, is itching to be disposed of

We are exiled inside ourselves

something nested amongst arteries and veins, disguised, that reigns over our decisions pulsing, primitive thing controls the reflexes triggered by pain, shock, thrill,.......... monotony

her tone vaguely defensive

hysteria still hummed in the air

The screen door hammers back and forth and doesnt close

thick, leathery wrinkles invaded by light

too big spaces and the empty seats

my throat closes up

hear Tar coming back to me

Loneliness is a lack of direction, not affection.

Back on the top step.

Autumn is littering the treetops, the horizon is gold and still. I am a thief. Small words read clearly in their eyes. I am the worst kind of thief. I have stolen nothing. But whispers fit like keys into the kingdom of denial. They refuse to listen. Summer came and gave me walls again. Quiet days spent in the labyrinth of father’s house. I tell him we are in Dublin, and this is his castle, but somewhere inside lurks a ferocious creature that cannot be slain. I tell him we must hide from it. Father looks up from his books, smiles at me, and says my name like he hasn’t seen me in a long time. Unspoken, things seem to lose truth.

Heavily, I remain on the step until night.

The moths congregate under the porch light, slamming into the bulb and buzzing frantically. Bigger ones shove the others into the dark, who flutter around blindly until they find their way back. It’s a cruel world, I think, and there's only so much room.

Tar leaves through the rip in the screen, sliding out of the light.

could feel it bumping against my palm, a tiny, hot creature

The watery slant of moonlight illuminates a strip of the kitchen—the two metal sinks, the green counters, the discolored linoleum.

I am complete, and so I lack purpose.

I feel entitled to be angry at such a realization, but I cannot muster any anger.

Instead, a blurry image appears in the slideshow of my memory:

A perfect day, with nothing weather and shifting lights.

I am crouched on the road, the tar bursting open in the

august heat, the sun swelling at my shoulder.

I am forgetting what was lost.

Can hear the water gurgling in the pipes.

the insect excitement that the dark harvests.

The leaves rush against the screen.

Hear the tiny dials in the clock gaining momentum.

In the dizzying dark, memories brighten,

voices clear.

I am suspended



An empty cage is despressing,

the silence maddening.

There is no company in this black place.

Fear streaks through sinew like electricity,

erupts without invitation.

Corridors do not end,

corners shrink to pinholes that swallow you up.

The floorboards grow soft and collapse beneath your feet.

Floods of insects swarm down

over your walls,

the minute become overwhelming.

They trickle in soundlessly;

you feel them first, then you hear them.

Your skin flares and you try to shrivel out of it,

away from the thousand prickly legs and feelers.

You try to wake up.

Wake up.





I can tell 4am from 5am and 5am from 6am. i can tell you what the sky has seen from the flush of its cheeks.

i have gotten to know the world.

i am locked here, by what i cannot tell you, all i am sure of is that this is a resting place, inherited from the dead.

the longer i stay, the worse the threat. the stronger the pull.

dreams flood the mind like chemical insanity.

i am dead.

my green couches, thick wrinkles invaded by light.

the kitchen floors.

the marble halls.

blood pooling.

i am dead i am dead.

the scum in the tub.

the shore in winter.

shots from the forest.

he is out hunting.

big mahogany doors that stay shut.

blood rushing.

i am dead i am dead i am dead.

my childhood screams from the photos on the walls.

my skin burning.

i hear everything as if out of memory.

i am dead.