Taihu’s dense clouds roll along its shores like mini roiling hurricanes, their unfriendly eyes trained on Sengru, who hops nimbly from one flat stone to the next, his own eyes scrutinizing the ground, searching for gongshi. Visibility along the lake is poor today, but he is intimate with these paths, could even leap the rocky perimeter blindfolded if he didn’t need his full sight for gongshi—the thin, the pitted, the perforated, the wrinkled. Stones that the gods’ tears and breath have eroded into myths. Those that rain and water have transformed into birds, beasts, mountains, waterfalls. Those depicting strange tales on their surfaces, serving as muses for poets and scholar-officials.

Sengru’s left eye itches from the dampness. He comes to a standstill, scanning the bank with his right eye, his gaze using more ferocity than the fist rubbing his left. Taihu’s water is colored gray today, reflecting the weather. It will rain soon. He frowns. His hair sticks to the back of his neck while his toes ache from chilly moisture. Wildly uncomfortable, he wants to go home, and begins to turn back when he stops himself. 

Not yet, he thinks. Can’t give up yet. 

He hasn’t found good gongshi in months. Before, he could pile gongshi in the belly sac of his shirt like a kangaroo pouch, his abs revealed to the healthy Taihu air; lately, only small pebbles and smooth stones without even a dimple have presented themselves. He doesn’t allow himself to accept the possibility that Taihu has been picked clean, that he and hunters just like him had removed any worthwhile gongshi long ago. It doesn’t help that in recent years, Taihu’s gongshi reputation has skyrocketed, in no small part encouraged by Sengru himself. He knows reputation must precede worth. The marketing was helpful then, harmful now: newcomers arrive at Taihu dreaming of gongshi fortune.

Sengru hates these new hunters. They pluck stones with potential from the shore before nature can sculpt the flesh. They search for their quick fix, their easy jackpot, without understanding true value. 

He scans the banks for the fourth time, but the rocks are as unbroken as the horizon. Sengru fights his rising panic, forcing himself to scrutinize again—perhaps he missed something, anything—but then he catches sight of neither myth nor money, but something animate, moving in the background. He blinks. 

A trick of the eye? 

Sometimes, when he stares too long at the ground, everything begins to wiggle and blur, his eyes overstrained. Juyi, one of the few authentic gongshi hunters he considers a friend, begs him to get glasses and a headlamp, but Sengru refuses, believing that gongshi will only reveal themselves if he hunts naturally, without manmade supplies. Only then would the hunt be fair.

No. It is not a trick. Something is moving. Sengru rubs his eyes, squints, furrows his brows. Through the fog, there’s something indistinct with four legs, pacing back and forth, a distance away from the lake banks and closer to the woods, where the trees stretch and thicken. Not a human, and not a gongshi. 

A beast? A gongshi myth come to life? 

His curiosity piqued, desperate to latch onto something other than his failure to find gongshi, he leaps toward the shadow. He swipes through the fog curtains as he nears, occasionally losing sight of his target when tendrils drift in front of him, his balance unsteady atop slick stones. He is less familiar with this path, rarely venturing down—the stones near the woods are never as beautifully battered as they are by the water. 

He arrives where he thought the shape had been. Finds nothing. Only hard-packed dirt below his feet and an imposing line of menacing tree trunks. He scans the branched shadows for something animal-like, concentrating so hard that he doesn’t hear the approaching footsteps until their owner calls out.

“Hey! Sengru!” Juyi walks towards him.

While Sengru is gangly, bodily excess melted off from his energetic hunts, Juyi has a heavier build, loving to indulge in food with the money from his gongshi sales. During his hunts, he does not hop atop rocks burning calories like Sengru, but chooses to sit on them, moving stone seats every other hour, letting his eyes travel for him. While Sengru believes he must proactively search for gongshi, Juyi, like a mature lover, believes the gongshi will come to him when they are ready. 

Juyi pants as he comes to a halt in front of Sengru. Juyi’s facial hair is uncombed, untamed, his stringy beard quivering with each heavy exhale. Juyi tires easily, for he is much older, sometimes treating Sengru as a son, sometimes as a peer. 

They incline their heads together. 

Juyi breaks his face into a grin. “How have your days gone by?” He asks.

“I’ve been okay. How about you?”

“Everything is fine. No problem.”

“Good.” Sengru turns back to the trees.

“I haven’t seen you out in quite some time. I thought you might have been trying some new location,” Juyi says.

“No. Though the fog has been dense lately. We may have passed by each other without noticing,” Sengru responds. His gaze darts around a suspicious-looking tree trunk—perhaps the beast had hidden behind it?

Juyi snorts. “Doubtful I could miss you and your hopping.” 

“Where else would I go? Where else will reward us the way Taihu has?” Sengru gestures toward the lake.

“True. But it seems Taihu has given up on us. She does not yield her gongshi easily anymore.”

They fall quiet as they contemplate their past pickings and current failures.

Juyi leans in conspiratorially, his voice hushed. “Apparently, even glossy Lingbi and bubbly Yingde have been picked clean. Have you heard how the newer gongshi hunters have either given up or have begun to carve into the stones? The audacity! They must think of themselves as gods, as powerful as nature, to enhance stones with sculptor tools!”

Sengru has heard of these rumors. Of how the naive gongshi hunters he despises manipulate pockmarks onto otherwise smooth stones with chisels and mallets. He shakes his head in disgust. “If scholars are actually stupid enough to be tricked by these crude methods, then they deserve the fakes.”

Juyi chuckles. “Classic Sengru. Knew you would have some sense. Too bad there’s no more Auspicious Cloud Peaks laying around, huh?”

At age fifteen, Sengru had stumbled upon the gongshi that would change his life, fortune, and career. When he had found Auspicious Cloud Peak on a walk around the lake, it was not yet an Auspicious Cloud Peak nor a gongshi. To young Sengru, it was but a large stone in a unique shape, with indented lines and shallow holes that transported his imagination into mirages of clear broth with twisting noodles, flowy robes made of the softest silk, shimmery scales of darting fish, wagging tails of wild dogs who would follow him around his village because he fed them his dinner scraps. He loved the dog with the floppiest ears and wrinkled skin the most, the one he named Zhou. In this stone, Sengru saw the simple pleasures his youth had granted him so far. It was only after he had run back to his parents, hollering about this magic stone, that he had learned of gongshi and what they were supposed to evoke: mountainous landscapes, gods-struck lightning bolts, fabulous birds with wingspans longer than human bodies, myths about which the ancient poets waxed poetic. His mother had dutifully explained these supposed scholarly visions as he clung to her leg, sobbing because his magic stone had been taken away. His father had sold it to buy a new house in the city and to save the rest of the fortune for Sengru’s future. 

Sengru followed his parents out of their village. He grew older and went to college, the ever-dutiful son of parents who died when that new house caught fire during his junior year. As a student, he had searched for his lost treasure online using the university digital library passwords. He learned from a museum article that his gongshi was wildly famous for its rare shou and lou qualities, and had been bestowed the name Auspicious Cloud Peak by the Chinese classical literature scholar who had purchased it. He returned to Taihu after graduation, unable to shake the visions prompted by the gongshi he had found as a child. 

He had come to Taihu to find more Auspicious Cloud Peaks, but no gongshi bounty had ever given him the same sense of wonderment or level of profit as the first.

Juyi raises his eyebrows. “So, I’m correct in assuming you haven’t scammed any scholars, yes? Even though they do not know the difference.”

Sengru twists in his face in disgust. “Have you?” He asks.

But Juyi deflects. “My wife has been so hungry lately. She’s getting bigger than me!” He laughs and pats his belly. “We are planning to visit Shenzhen soon. The city is booming. My wife’s brother’s family just moved there with great prospects. We’d like to scope the landscape for ourselves.”

Sengru grunts. 

“Maybe your future wife is in Shenzhen,” offers Juyi. “I’m sure we can introduce you to some pretty ladies. My wife’s brother probably knows a few. It’ll cheer you up.” 

“No thanks.” This is not the first time Juyi has tried to convince him of the delights of love, but Sengru has no interest. He’d rather spend his time finding gongshi than finding a wife. When he had first arrived at Taihu, he had been lonely, but Sengru doesn’t feel it any more. What is loneliness but an ache made aware? When ignored, aches dissolve into dull weights that a man’s muscles can strengthen to bear.

“Sengru.” Juyi says his name, watching him. 

Sengru shifts uncomfortably, breaking some of the packed dirt under his feet into morsels. 

“Sengru, consider leaving the trade. I am making preparations myself. I can help you. This futility is no way to live. Soon, there will be no stones left.”

“I’m staying right here. And fuck the people who fake gongshi.”

“You stupid child. Do not look down upon those who seek their fortune in ways you do not understand. Do not think yourself better. You’ve been merely lucky so far.”

Sengru shivers. The icy fog has settled onto his clothes.

“The old gods are dead. New gods mean new rules,” Juyi advises.

Sengru spits onto the ground in disgust. “That’s what I think of you and your new gods,” he hisses, wiping his mouth with his hand, a trail of drool leaking from his lips. 

Juyi only laughs.

Fuming, Sengru trots away from Juyi without a goodbye.

Sengru! Come visit us before we leave for Shenzhen! We’d love to see you,” Juyi calls.

*

The next day is still foggy, but the temperature is warmer, as if promising an imminent future of summer. But Sengru does not like when the sun shines directly overhead, for the sparkles of sunlight against water distract his sight. Nevertheless, he appreciates the warmth, and though he is still angry over Juyi’s words, he bounces with a bit more pep, his stomach’s knot of dread slightly loosened. 

His eyes catch something in motion again by the trees. His hopes jolt—there may be no gongshi today, but perhaps he could discover some other treasure. 

Sengru approaches differently—he tiptoes instead of runs, careful to not displace any pebbles that could make sudden sounds. In a sign of respect, he bows his head as he nears, holding his arms closely to his sides to avoid windmilling and startling the four-legged creature. 

Sengru finds a brown short-haired dog, with a black snout and abundant amounts of flesh folding over its legs and face, obscuring its eyes. The dog is heavily wrinkled, its body resembling a Chinese folding fan. It sits on the ground, waiting for him to approach.

He stretches a hand out to pet it, but it flinches, growls, then runs into the forest, barking maniacally. Sengru watches it disappear, wondering why everything he wants, from gongshi to dogs, flees from him like he’s poisonous. He has not touched anything he values, has not been touched by anything he values, in so very long.

*

Sengru opens his freezer and removes the raw meat he saves for dumpling filling, placing the marbled chunks into silver mixing bowls to defrost overnight. He resolves to use it as dog bait tomorrow—Sengru is not hungry for food, but for companionship. Seeing the dog flee from his touch has awakened his monster of loneliness. It rears its ugly head and claws at his sad tender heart, battering his rib cage. 

After washing his hands, he leans against the kitchen counter and looks around his single-room house. His oversize refrigerator has space for more food even after grocery shopping, and the plates he keeps in the kitchen cabinet are dusty because he never uses them, instead endlessly reusing the same bowl, rewashing and redrying—Sengru never has dinner parties. He cooks for one. Eats for one. And his bed is made for one too, with one pillow atop a twin size frame, the long side pushed up against the far wall—Sengru is the only one who has ever needed to get out of his bed, so why waste space to keep the other side free? Inside his house, everything is as he left it, from the books to the houseplants to the lamp, because he’s the only one who’s ever picked up and put down his possessions. He wouldn’t mind disorder if caused by an acquaintance, a lover, or a pet—none of which he has. He is alone.

*

Sengru skips his daily routine of hopping around the lake perimeter and heads to the woods. He clutches the bag of bait, flinching whenever it brushes against his calf—the meat is slimy and stinky.

When he arrives, he dumps the meat into a makeshift doggie bowl, a cradle atop the dirt formed by protruding overlapping tree roots. 

He tucks the damp bag into his pocket. He steps back. He waits. 

The gloom of the woods slowly reveals a black nose, then a black snout, then brown folds hiding eyes. Then the dog fully emerges from the shadows, so heavily wrinkled it seems it had draped itself in fabric before arriving, resembling the most elusive of gongshi, eroded with lines carved from wind and water. It trots toward the meat, sniffs, then begins to slurp like a horse at a watering hole. Sengru grins, watching his new friend feast on his offerings, the meat juice glistening on its black snout. 

When the meat is finished, the dog sits down and observes Sengru, who sighs with relief when its tail starts to wag. He steps forward and places a tentative palm upon the dog’s head. The short-bristled folds are warm, alive, thrumming. 

The dog pounces, startling Sengru, but it does not attack, it simply butts his head against Sengru’s thigh, then rears upward onto its two back legs, placing its front paws on Sengru’s chest. 

Their eyes meet. Sengru’s well up with tears. 

The dog sticks his tongue out and laps Sengru’s cheeks, replacing the salt water with itchy dog saliva. 

Sengru laughs. He pats the dog with both hands.

“I shall call you Zhou,” he whispers.

*

Every day, Sengru brings raw meat to Zhou, who meets him at the tree line eagerly, tail wagging behind its haunches. 

Leisure with Zhou is more pleasurable than fruitless hunting, and so Sengru spends his time laying on the dirt, shaded from the sky by tree canopies, patting Zhou, who rests his head on Sengru’s stomach after he polishes off the meal. They idle quietly, Sengru’s shirt wet from Zhou’s saliva, Sengru occasionally vocalizing how lovely the air smells, how fluttery the snow falls. Their intimacy blossoms during pauses in between speech, like flowers that bloom when the gardener isn’t looking, until night falls and the moon unmasks itself, and Sengru navigates home with the stars. 

Sometimes, when the fog is heavy and the sky is weepy, the suffocation of his stories becomes too much to bear. On these days of seasonal depression, Sengru has no choice but to allow his sagas to burst free. He whispers to Zhou of his childhood, of his family, of Juyi, of the gongshi he found but sold and can therefore no longer cherish. His tales spin wilder and wilder, yet truer and truer, a blanket of bravado woven out of Sengru’s lonely pride.

“Zhou, I know I’ve told you about Delicate Moon Crescent Stone and Plum Blossom Branch Stone, but have I told you about the Paradise Bird Stone I found the year I came back to Taihu? It wasn’t as big as Auspicious Cloud Peak, but it was pretty huge, probably three times the length of your body. You can’t even begin to imagine its immense power. I tried to lift it up and carry it home, but back then I had the spindliest arms ever, even spindlier than now. I couldn’t even wrap my arms around it all the way. I had to call a rig and pulley to even move it an inch! I sold it to an art museum in America, for their scholar garden, can you believe it? My reach is truly transcontinental! They offered to fly me over the ocean to see the installation and give a speech at the opening ceremony, but I declined. What was the point of all that revelry? I just wanted to find another gongshi, even bigger than Paradise Bird Stone. I didn’t dare leave the lake, in case somebody else found it first.”

*

Sengru hops to the forest line, ruminating over how many more wooden planks he’ll need to finish the doghouse he’s been building in secret. He plans to take Zhou out of the woods as soon as the surprise is complete. He’s impatient for his house of one to become a home for two. 

He absentmindedly swings his bag of raw meat, no longer noticing when the slime brushes against his legs, when Juyi suddenly blocks the path. Startled, Sengru loses his balance, and Juyi quickly grabs him by the shirt collar, helping him upright.

“Woah there, Sengru, watch out! Why so distracted? Where are you headed?”

“None of your business,” Sengru says, brushing his shirt indignantly with one hand, hiding the bag behind his back with the other. He doesn’t want Juyi to find out about Zhou, in case Juyi became interested in adopting the dog for himself.

“Wha—” Juyi recoils when the rancid odor of raw meat hits his nostrils. “What is that smell?” Juyi wrinkles his nose, lunging around Sengru to investigate. “Why do you have raw meat with you? Is this some kind of new gongshi hunting method? What’s going on?”

“Again, it’s none of your business,” Sengru insists.

“Sengru, I—” Juyi seems unsure.

“How was Shenzhen?” Sengru asks, fumbling for a topic to avoid more nosy questions.

“That’s why I’ve been looking for you,” Juyi says, gently. 

“Okay, well, tell me,” urges Sengru. The faster the conversation, the sooner he can meet Zhou.

“The city is lovely. So much opportunity there, as is my wife’s family, which will make it easier on us. So, we are officially leaving for Shenzhen. We’ve sold the house here and have already begun to move our belongings.”

Sengru’s mouth drops open. Agog, he stares at Juyi, and suddenly sees the differences: the beard replaced by a fine-twirled mustache; his roundness expansive rather than burdensome; his cheeks plumper, filling out wrinkles. This is a new Juyi, one rejuvenated and replenished by predictions of fortune in a new city.

“Happy for you,” Sengru says, scuffing his shoes in the dirt, wishing he could throw the raw meat in Juyi’s face and watch it mess up his perfectly tailored facial hair.

“I wanted to tell you that you are welcome to join us. I care about you, and I don’t want to leave you. The apartment we plan to rent has an extra room. You can stay there until you find your footing.”

“Don’t worry about me,” Sengru mutters.

“Sengru, you can’t stay. How will you survive? Your savings from past gongshi sales won’t last forever. Open your eyes, son! Taihu is completely depleted!”

“That’s what you think.”

“Sengru—”

“I’m not leaving Taihu.” 

Sengru pushes past, making sure to brush the raw meat against Juyi in revenge. As he hurries away, he can feel Juyi’s gaze boring into his spine, but he doesn’t look back. 

When he arrives at the tree line, Zhou does not head straight to the raw meat like he usually would. Instead, Zhou goes directly to Sengru, butting its head into Sengru’s dangling free hand, recognizing Sengru’s sadness and offering comfort in the way it could. 

“Thank you,” Sengru whispers.

He throws the raw meat aside and plops onto the ground, his legs crossed at the ankles. Zhou climbs into Sengru’s lap and licks his ear. Sengru wraps his arms around Zhou’s body to bury his face into its fur coat, his tears running in rivulets bordered by each of Zhou’s wrinkles.

“Zhou, I could never trust Juyi. Now, there’s nobody left but you.” Sengru howls like a wolf, and Zhou joins in, their voices baying together into a melodic song of sorrow. 

“What can we do? I haven’t been able to find new gongshi for a long time. Juyi’s right that my savings won’t last forever.” Sengru cries some more, then sniffles and wipes the tears from his cheeks. Speaking about practicalities like money revives his resolve. He wrings his hands, laughing in a pathetic chuckle. “What’s the point of being so upset?” 

He stands without warning, Zhou yelping in surprise.

“We can’t keep feeling sorry for ourselves,” Sengru says to Zhou. “We have to keep trying.”

Zhou barks. Wags his tail.

Sengru nods. “Yes. You get it.”

In response, Zhou trots off.

“Hey! Where are you going?” 

Zhou ignores him.

“Wait!” Sengru scrambles to race after Zhou. 

Zhou looks back and barks, wagging his tail. Follow me.

They travel for hours. Sengru loses sight of Zhou, the fog and shaded gloom making vision difficult, but he can still hear the breaking of fallen branches underfoot by something four-legged. He follows the sounds as he ventures deeper into the woods. Sengru has never been aware of this trail, his feet stepping unsure. He swipes at his skin, inflamed from mosquito bites.

“Zhou!” He calls. “Zhou!”

Only the trees echo back.

The night descends. The air is chilly; he tucks his arms inside the torso section of his shirt to maintain body warmth, his empty sleeves rippling as he moves forward. He trips over roots and boulders; he concentrates on the ground to avoid falling, but he forgets to pay attention to what lies ahead, and he bangs his face against a tree trunk, bouncing backwards, his nose throbbing. Moaning, he massages his nose, trying to discern if it had broken or not, when he spies a shadow with a wagging tail, sitting between two far tree trunks—Zhou! 

Sengru runs toward it, bursting between the trunks into a circular clearing, the debris of nature replaced by soft grass and delicate pink blossoms illuminated by a yellow moon, half obscured by swirling clouds of the ceaseless Taihu fog. The silhouette with the wagging tail has disappeared. 

Sengru gazes around, confused. He’s not unfamiliar with this type of scenery. He’s seen similar in the grand backdrops of advertisements and television dramas, but those were obviously edited, and what lies before him is alive, vivid, and very real.

“Zhou? Zhou, where are you, come out, please?” Sengru whispers.

A gentle wind blows among the peach blossoms, bringing a faint honey scent. Sengru pulls his arms out of his shirt torso into its sleeves, for he isn’t cold anymore—somehow, though his exhalations are visible and clumping snowflakes drift downwards, Sengru feels as if he’s watching the scenery through a window, from inside a warm cozy home with a crackling fireplace.

Sengru walks closer to the clearing’s center, and at the same time, the moon breaks free from its cloud barrier to cast its full light onto Earth. Sengru gasps. Framed by peach blossom branches is the largest gongshi Sengru has ever seen, much larger than Auspicious Cloud Peak. 

The gongshi is so thin it doesn’t appear solid, more like an iridescent sheet of sea glass, like the rippling of a river from a thrown stone, like the translucency of Sengru’s puffs of breath; its surface is marked with open pores, pocketed surfaces, and intense wrinkles, creating an illusion of four stems protruding from the upright section of its body, a fifth stem curled around it like a tail, two extra juts at the top resembling ears, and a deep perforation, blackened in shadow, in the center of what would be its face if it were an animal, not a gongshi, and Sengru nearly chokes with bittersweet anguish when he realizes this gongshi looks like Zhou, is Zhou, or perhaps it was Tian Gou all along, the wrinkly dog guard of the lunar gates. 

Sengru throws himself to the ground, kowtowing, and with each smash of his forehead he murmurs thanks to the gods for this befallen prosperity. Yet beyond his spoken words, inside his thoughts, he declares he would give up this gongshi and all its promised wealth if Zhou would come back to him instead.

I’ve been followed around by a younger version of myself since I was sixteen. She wears a pink cotton dress, white, buckled sandals, and a Ghostface mask she cycles blood through using a piping mechanism in her left hand, making the white face drip red. As we trudge down Inkberry Avenue, I ignore the breath-like huffs of the pump she’s squeezing in her pocket. 

“What if he kills you?” she asks, shivering. “What if he’s a predator?”

We’ve been walking since before sunrise. Four hours ago, I was on the floor of the emergency room with tears and snot on my face, wailing “fix me” over and over. The nurse emerging from the bathroom didn’t know what to do with me. When he turned to pick up the intercom, I panicked, as if suddenly realizing where I was, the eyes that were about to be on me. I fled in the direction of my hotel. 

I ran until my feet ached and only stopped moving when my phone vibrated on my hip. A bright blue notification from my dog-walking app—I had been hired by Petyr Ivanovska who lives about seven blocks east on Inkberry Avenue.

It’s a long, pebbled road walled in on either side by well-manicured gardens. On my left, goldenrod and witch hazel, like orange-yellow spiders, flourish in the shade of tall wooden fences. Trumpet honeysuckles, skinny and coral, resemble deflated versions of the balloons clowns twist up into animals. To my right, dewy-wet holly and wild strawberries cluster at the base of a cast stone birdbath. 

I still feel raw, vulnerable to the world, but I haven’t cried for a few minutes now. My younger self looks in the water, pricking the pristine surface with a finger. The reflection of the mask ripples, stretches, and dances at uncanny angles. 

When I get to where the fence ends, my legs ache. The cottage sits behind a white picket gate covered in holly. Even through the trees and shrubs, the place looks worth over a million with its three levels, rustic stone walls, and massive, steepled entrance covered in climbing ivy. It’s isolated, no noise from cars or people. Any neighbors must be hidden along Inkberry at least a mile down.

The doorbell is like a gong. I wait impatiently, ripping my nails with my teeth as my younger self watches the door.

“I bet he doesn’t even have a dog,” she says. “What if he’s gross? What if you bleed through your pants?”

“I won’t,” I say.

“What if?”

“We’re coming!” He sounds normal through the door. When it opens, the collie bursts out. She sniffs down my jeans while her tail thunks hard against the doorframe. The man steps out—mid-30s, messy blonde curls, brown eyes, trimmed beard. Caucasian cherub. 

“Hi, hi,” he says, holding the leash. “Petyr. And she’s Circe.”

I get on my knees, shaking my hands in the collie’s mane. I notice he’s offering me the leash, but as I stand and wrap it in my hand, Circe’s snout is in my crotch. 

“Molly, right?”

“Right,” I say. 

Circe is insistent when it comes to exploring. Do I smell that bad? I ignore the judgmental stare of my younger self. She thinks I deserve this. Sometimes, I wonder if she knows we’re the same, and whatever happens to me is going to happen to her. She’s a little cunt, actually.

“Where is it you’re from again?”

“Complicated,” I say, turning my hips to avoid Circe’s nose. “My mother is from Uganda. My father was born Scottish but moved to London at fifteen. I was born in London, but we moved to America when I was three. And then back to Scotland two years ago. And then I came back here.”

Petyr pushes Circe’s head to the side, freeing me so I can tug her down the steps.

“So, you’re an American with an accent.”

I want to argue, American is an accent, but I’m thinking about how much I wish the sun would explode and swallow everything so that he’s not thinking about what my pussy might smell like.

“Your bio mentioned you’ve got a month here. Right?”

“For a film project,” I say. “Grad school.”

I don’t mention that I got ‘removed from the project’ three days ago by my classmates for being hysterical. I don’t mention that I screamed at them and threw things. They could have the movie, since the script wasn’t mine anyway. No one had been interested in my submission for the final project. My script was not funny enough, and it was too ambitious. But I was determined now to stay the month and do the project using my own screenplay, supported by people like Petyr and other monied dog-owners. Paying for the roundtrip flight was the only good thing my university ever did for me. I was not going to fly back early using my credit card. I was going to make my movie.

I don’t want to talk though. I just want to walk his dog. I think he senses that, because he nods and goes inside.

After walking Circe, I return to the cottage and relinquish the leash to Petyr at the bottom of the steps. He digs in his pocket and pulls out his phone. My app notifies me of a new transaction, and I feel guilty when I see the tip amount. He seems to notice my face and insists. Glancing at the size of his house, I slide my phone back in my pocket. It’s enough for basic props and a few buckets of fake blood.

*

With the money from Petyr, I get a cheap suit, a scarf, a gown, the blood, and food coloring (for the 32 drops of green that go into each gallon). Being back in my hotel room feels less like a failure when I’m dressed as someone else. In fact, it’s exciting.

For the first scene of my short film, I dress as The Woman, a succubus that walks the night, then preys on men who are awake in the early morning hours. Instead of men returning home from bars, their ankles crumbling under the weight of their drunken stupors, The Woman sees only flesh and the promise of meat, bone. She looks girlish, with long, soft hair and a cheeky smile. She has cat eyes now, because those are the only contact lenses I brought with me.

After fitting myself in the white velvet gown and applying the yellow contacts, I set up the tripod and camera. The shot is simple, but stunning. Slivers of light are being projected onto the sepia-toned wall from the blinds and the sheets are crumpled messily at one end of the bed. 

Just before I sit on the bed to record, the room glows with the light from my cell phone. Fifteen missed calls from Kenneth. I don’t call him back, because he’s my father. I want to shake off his presence and be enveloped by the scene, but my eyes are wet and stinging. In costume, I sit on the bed, staring at the fuzzy blur of car lights through the window. My young self sits next to me, swinging her legs and bouncing her butt on the mattress.

When I stand up, a speckle of red is on the blankets. I go to the toilet and sit, yanking out the tampon to insert the new one. The first time I got my period, I thought I was dying and I told no one. My parents had never mentioned my ‘changing body’ before. Was it called a period because it was the end of something? The end of innocence?

Once you see blood, is that ‘it’?

*

When I pick up Circe the next morning, she leads me excitedly onto the avenue. I notice as we walk that Petyr is grabbing a wool pea coat from a hook behind his front door and, instead of getting into his car for work, he’s following us. I can’t help but look at my young self, confused. 

“You don’t want me to walk her?” I ask.

“No, I do. Mind if I come along?”

I nod, not sure if I mind or not. Every few steps, Circe glances back at her master, awaiting his movements and commands. It’s sweet. And annoying. Because why the hell would he pay me to walk his dog when he can walk her his damn self? 

“If you see any birds, you’ll want to grip the leash,” he says and pauses thoughtfully. “Your accent changes every few words, it seems like.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“When you were talking yesterday, I noticed.”

“It depends who I’m talking to,” I say. “If I’m on the phone with my mother, I mimic her. I don’t know. I got a lot of it from movies, I think.”

 “I know fuck all about movies. I don’t even own a TV. Not a working one, at least.”

“But you live in a house like that.”

“Like what?”

He sidesteps a bike rack, brushing a straw basket on one of the attached bicycles. I stop to let Circe pose among the bluets bunched in gray-blues and gray-purples at her feet, each one’s pale petals twitching around a burst of yellow at its center. Circe’s fur separates and wisps around her face, whipped by the wind.

“Ever seen a horror movie?” I ask. “Carrie? Night of the Comet? The Slumber Party Massacre?”

“No.”

“Slumber Party Massacre II?”

“Who likes getting scared? I mean, genuinely?” He seems perturbed as I start down the avenue again. “Oh. You do. I can tell.”

“I like movies.”

“They’re gratuitous.”

“I like when they’re gratuitous.”

“It’s just murder,” he says. “Naked women being chopped up.”

“It’s catharsis with blood and boobs. A lot of people like boobs.”

“That’s fair. I’ve heard of those people.”

“Why pretend we don’t think about sex and blood and all that?”

“I don’t know. To be a productive society, maybe?”

“I can’t be productive if I’m thinking about boobs?”

“I mean, I can’t.”

We walk another mile, saying nothing. It’s a comfortable silence. Petyr is warming his hands in his pants pockets. My younger self kicks pebbles down the road, sighing with boredom every few seconds. I breathe into my knitted scarf, smelling my mother, before we all turn around. 

“Do you not have work today?” I ask, glancing at him.

“I know it’s weird to walk with you. To be honest, I don’t get to talk to a lot of people.”

“Is that why you hired a dog walker? For the talking?”

He shrugs. I suppose people with big houses tend to keep small circles. I wonder if he goes to therapy, or if he needs it. 

“I stay in my office at work, stay in my room at home. Not much of a life, I think. But I keep on doing it every day.”

“You should get a hobby.”

“Like horror movies?”

“Whatever wakes you up.”

“I guess fear does that. Although, if you like being scared, that’s not real fear, is it?”

“Maybe not.”

“Then what scares you?”

It takes me a moment to notice my young self is tugging at the end of my scarf.

“Check your pants,” she says.

When Petyr gets ahead a few feet, I turn to check. No stains. I glare at my younger self, who makes a fart sound with her mouth behind the mask.

Resigned, I admit Petyr is nice to look at. At the very least, I prefer walking with him to my own company. Anything to draw me out of myself and into the fresh air. Then again, I’ve known myself for a long time. There’s only so much we can argue about anymore.

*

For six hours, I am locked in my hotel room poring over my script. I haven’t stopped since I got back from walking with Petyr. After a month of letting it sit in my backpack, scribbled over with notes from multi-colored pens, I run through with a red marker and check over the dialogue, making sure my newest revisions are consistent: two characters instead of four, both played by me, every shot in black and white.

We open on a split screen of The Man and The Woman, only one a monster but both monstrous. An establishing shot—The Man, drunk, leaves his favorite bar at the end of an alley. There is a sound of ripping flesh from the shadows. That sound continues when The Man exits the bar at sunrise and stumbles down the alley and offscreen.

The Man has narrowly missed fate. The Woman prowls, eats, enjoys.

Over and over, The Man frequents the bar, just out of The Woman’s reach. Every morning, The Woman devours another man with another secret. We aren’t sad, because their families are no worse without them. They are as absent dead as they were alive. 

The music rises each time. It holds a high pitch as The Man finally stands in the alley, and his wife speaks offscreen. She begs for him to look at her. Just once, look at his children, be a father.

The Man turns into the bar. The Woman watches, waits, as the sound of the wife’s heels clicking on the pavement fades away.

When The Man leaves the bar again, he comes face to face with The Woman—the final moment. We flash between each of their faces. Fate finally catches up. Blood sprays.

My phone lights up, and I blink away the daydream. A text message from Mother.

Please call him!!! 

She’s never understood my relationship with my father. I don’t think I ever understood hers either. 

He was never involved with me like he was with my brothers. With them, he was overly bonded. They all turned out just like him: stoic, masculine, soulless. Knowing how warm they were when they were young, they might as well have died. I had to mourn them just the same, and so did Mother, even if she tried to hide it.

*

Walking to the cottage down Inkberry feels duller today, more one-note. I wonder if, a few days into this arrangement, there’s a possibility for sex. My younger self thinks I’m the only person in the world who’s bad at reading people, at sex. I like to think I’ve outgrown that idea and that she won’t glare at me while someone’s inside me like I’m doing something unnatural. But maybe she’s right. Maybe yesterday was a fluke and now, Petyr will be the faceless rich guy from the internet who wants a dog walker when he isn’t at home.

In front of the white-painted gate, beside his brick mailbox, he’s flicking through a stack of envelopes. In the yard, Circe is rolling through the grass, gathering burrs. It’s strange, almost creepy, and maybe charming that he’s at home again. I decide it’s nice, actually. 

“Morning,” he says, waving me over. “Sleep okay?”

“I did.”

“No nightmares?”

“Aside from the one where I’m naked and chopped up, not really.”

“See?” He points at me with an envelope, making his face grave. “It’s all the blood and boobs. And you’re not even fazed. You’re desensitized. That’s the worst bit.” 

With Circe, Petyr and I walk down Inkberry. He goes all two miles with me, where the avenue is interrupted by a busy street. He and I shoot the shit, avoiding topics like love, childhood, family, and the soul. Instead, we talk about the basket on the bicycle, now yellow with pollen. About his job as a computer technician. About Circe’s need to chase birds. About how Roger Ebert didn’t actually hate horror movies.

On the way back, when my finger is in my mouth, I realize my nails have grown. Did I not bite them yesterday?

He says goodbye casually. We are both in this routine together, and he is assuming I will be back tomorrow. I will be, but I don’t often meet people who think of a future with me in it.

I smile at him, but it’s fake. On the brink of leaving, I am suddenly thinking about the missed calls, then my childhood, and my mother’s blood. I look forward to seeing him tomorrow. 

All of this happens every morning for almost a week.

*

I should be sleeping, but instead I sit in the bathtub with scissors in my hand, and I wonder if it’s worth it. Between two fingers, I stretch out the front portion of my hair. The blades hover near my forehead, but I can’t make myself do it.

Kenneth hasn’t called since yesterday, but I can’t stop thinking about him.

Everyone used to say I look just like my father. I would look in the mirror and see his nose, his chin, and his eyes on my face, and I’d fixate on it until all I could see was Kenneth. As a child, I thought it was strange but tolerable. When I was thirteen, after my mother slit her wrists in the kitchen, I let my nails grow out and bit them into points. When I was in front of my father, I’d claw at my face. The doctor said I was seeking attention, which I think should have been a sign to give me more of it. My father took it as me being hysterical and distanced himself even more. My mother, despite being loving, got so emotional I couldn’t take it. They started to tape up my fingers with duct tape to keep me from scratching. 

One night, I went into my oldest brother’s room and put on the Ghostface mask I found in his closet. Kenneth threatened to put me in a box and send me away if I didn’t take it off, but by that age, I was wise enough to know he was a coward. I wore the mask to every event for months. Mother tried coaxing me out of it at first, but it got me to stop clawing, so she let it go. It didn’t come off until I got a therapist at sixteen.

My young self sits across from me in the bath, her tiny hands trembling around the blood pump. She knows I want to cut my hair to play the part of The Man in my film, but she won’t stop talking.

“You’ll look just like him,” she says.

“Shut the fuck up.”

“You’ve got his eyes, and his nose, and his chin, and you don’t feel anything.”

I put pressure on the scissors. The blades force their way through, and the hair falls and floats down, dark and curled on the white porcelain between us. I take another piece and cut, then another. The hairs, finally freed, tickle the goosebumps on my naked thighs.

“Fucking stupid,” she tells me.

*

On the eighth day of knowing Petyr, I explain my haircut to him. For some reason, I feel the need to be ashamed.

“I’ve been working on a short film,” I say.

He nods, as if intrigued. I’ve run out of outfits to wear on our walks, but I try to mix and match what I have stuffed in my suitcase at the hotel. Petyr seems to have an endless array of beautiful coats, sweaters, and button-downs, all of which complement the beard he is growing and maintaining on his jaw. 

“My guess is… comedy?” he says, snapping his fingers.

“Gratuitous fuckery and violence.”

He feigns surprise.

“Well, what’s it about?”

“A succubus,” I finally say. “And a man. I play both parts…”

“But what’s the story? What’s its reason for existing?”

I toy with the idea of talking about my past. My chest hurts.

“You’ll never watch it anyway.”

“Why not?”

“You don’t have a TV.”

“I have a friend with a damn good camera,” he says. “I think he worked in commercials. I could pass your name along?”

“Is he rich like you?”

Petyr chuckles, unoffended by everything. “If I’m rich, sure.”

“Are you a trust fund baby?”

“When my uncle died, he left me the house. Not much intrigue, I’m sorry to say.”

“I don’t know. You could have a wife or two hidden away in there.”

My younger self leaps out from behind Petyr, almost making me jump. She always follows closely behind us, but some mornings, like today, I forget her.

“I’ve got to tell you something cool,” Petyr says suddenly. It sounds like he’s been thinking about it. I realize with this change of subject that we might be breaching new territory, maybe a new relationship. “I’m related to Shakespeare on my mom’s side. I’ve got a painting of him in my foyer.” He looks at me seriously. “I’m not kidding.”

I don’t know if my urge to laugh is from my doubt, the fact that he thinks this is an acceptable explanation, or the fact that I want to believe him anyway. I still don’t quite know when he’s joking. 

“You’re sure?”

“I’ve got records and everything.”

“I believe you.”

Petyr smiles to himself, looking content as we approach the house. He unlocks the front door, letting Circe inside, but the door is half-open behind him as he stands in front of me and fiddles with his key ring. 

“We can go inside?” he says.

“It feels nice out here, actually.”

He nods. Then he snaps his fingers, as if with an idea. His hand rests on my arm, brief but not brief enough to be nothing, before he steps into the foyer. I hear him greet Circe as the door shuts behind him.

My younger self kicks the bottom step over and over. She hasn’t taken her mask off in years. Some days, I hate to admit, it makes me sad. All I know of her anymore is the ghostly face wet with Red 40 dye and the soft thump-and-fizzle sounds she makes by squeezing the pump in her hand. 

“He’s not gonna have sex with you now,” she says. “He gave you the in. You didn’t wanna do it, coward.”

I start down the steps to walk back to the hotel, but the door opens. Petyr has shed his coat. He has a backpack on his shoulder with a bottle of wine in one hand and two glasses balanced in the other. He sets the bottle on the stone and unfolds a tiny corkscrew from his keychain.

“Do you drink?” he asks. I nod as Petyr yanks out the cork and fills each glass halfway. 

We walk down the avenue, taking our time. About half a mile down the road, Petyr points out a cluster of holly, which hides a wooden bench shaded from the sun by two fenced-in trees. He sets the backpack containing the wine bottle on the grass. Sitting this close to him, I smell cologne and pine and a hint of sweet honey. 

“Your cheeks are red,” he says. The brown of his eyes looks more amber in this light. “I hope I’m not making you nervous.”

I want to make a joke. Instead, I’m honest. “I’ll get through it.”

My younger self tosses rocks over the fence on the other side of the avenue. The sound distracts me, but I force myself to keep eye contact with Petyr. We sit in silence, listening to the sudden birdie-birdie-birdie call of a cardinal somewhere in the thicket. I feel the wine becoming a reason for me to say what I’m thinking. The more I’m truthful, the more my younger self seems to fade away, or at least gets easier to ignore.

“I’m not good at this,” I mumble. 

“What’s ‘this’?”

“I mean, I’m not good with sex.”

“Like, you’re not okay with it?”

“No, I’m not good. At. It.”

“Ah.”

“How many people have you been with?” I ask.

Petyr shrugs. “I could fill a church.”

“Yeah?”

“It’s just something. I’m not really proud of it, but I’m not ashamed of it.”

“I had a boyfriend in high school who called his dick the Jawbreaker.”

“Are you saying that’s why you’re not good at sex?”

“I’m just saying it’s pretty funny.”

As Petyr pours a second glass, I look in mine and pick out a spikelet of witch hazel. He stops talking, opting for quick, big gulps. I realize he thinks he needs the drink. Maybe he does.

A red cardinal flutters and lands on the edge of the birdbath. The crest on his head tilts in the wind. My young self approaches it, close enough to touch its wing. At that age, I was curious why the females were less beautiful than the males. But what makes the color red so beautiful? What makes it masculine? I know now it all means nothing, and the cardinals that are red just happen to be male, and I can still be red if I want to.

After Petyr’s second glass, I see his movements slowing. Still, I pick mine up from where I set it in the grass and offer it.

“Getting me drunk is naughty, naughty,” he says. Still, he takes it.

“You seem like you want to get a little wasted.”

“I don’t usually drink like this. For Circe.” He says it matter-of-factly but gulps down the rest, then hands me the glass again. “You’re gorgeous.”

“It’s weird you waited until you were drunk to say that.”

“If anything, my mind’s much clearer.” He swirls his fingers over his temples. “You’re right. I’m done pretending I don’t think about boobs.”

I smile, watching him slump back to watch the graying sky above. He swallows hard enough that his Adam’s apple jumps.

“Just relax,” I say. I lean back too, like I’ve known him longer than I have. “I’ll be here.”

*

The sun is leaving fast, and the air is cool. The bottle is empty. So are the glasses.

Petyr leans against me as we walk back to the cottage. His backpack dangles on my back as I use all of my weight to keep us steady, and even then, it isn’t quite enough.

“Petyr, you’re going down,” I say.

“What?”

He starts crumbling, so I bend my knees, letting him slowly down on the grass to prevent a violent fall. Still, his butt hits the ground hard. He rocks a little.

“I’m gonna teach you how to fuck,” he says, eyes half-lidded as he nods to himself.

I smile despite myself, holding his biceps to keep him sitting. “Maybe when you’re sober.”

His hands explore my hair, ruffling and mashing it against my face, and brush my nose and eyelashes. I sniff hard into his hands. He chuckles, clumsily taking my forearms as he falls backward, pulling me down in a loose hug. As he starts to breathe steadily with sleep, I breathe in, forgetting for a moment about the mask, the movie, the inevitability of death.

*

The next morning, in the hotel parking lot, I mount the camera on the tripod. My cropped hair is matted, and my suit has been drenched in fake blood for the second part of my movie’s climactic scene, where The Man and The Woman finally meet. 

The rising sun makes everything orange. As I turn the camera on, I notice my reflection on the screen, the short hair and my father’s chin. When I think of my father, I think of the blood. I was twelve when I got home from school and found my mother on the kitchen floor. At first, there was so much blood, I didn’t know where she was hurt, but as she reached for me, I saw it was her wrists. I remember the nausea, my vision rushing sideways as her wet hands ran slick down my face. 

Kenneth was the one to call an ambulance when he finally got back from his favorite bar. Once the paramedics got to the house, I went into the bathroom and saw her blood streaked down my face. I worried if she died, that would be all I had left of her. So, I refused to wash it. I left her blood on my skin until my father came into my room that night with a wet rag, held me down, and scrubbed it from me.

When he left, I looked in the bathroom mirror. My skin was pink. I pulled down my shorts to sit on the toilet, and there was blood in my underwear. I didn’t know if it was mine or my mother’s, or if she and I were tied together and we would both disappear if she died.

My mother was treated and transferred to a mental hospital for two weeks. When she came back home, my father ignored her. When she asked a question or offered him dinner, he didn’t even give her the courtesy of a look. He didn’t speak a word to either of us, only my brothers. I can’t remember how long that lasted. I remember Mother alone, crying, while her husband shut her out. I remember grabbing for his arms before school, asking why he hated her, but there was nothing in his face. I wanted his anger, because at least it meant he felt something. It was worse. It was like we weren’t worth any feeling at all.

The suit is strangling me. I want to rip off the jacket and tie, but I’ve waited for this scene since I first wrote it. I sit on the pavement, legs crossed, and breathe. I count the seconds, like I used to do in therapy, but it isn’t working. My heart makes my chest feel thin with its pounding.

I give up and bring my camera inside when the sun rises high enough to ruin my scene.

*

A few hours later, I sit on the curb at the end of Inkberry, watching the busy street, still covered in fake blood. I wipe the residue from my eyes. My young self and I don’t look so different for once. 

I know Petyr must be waiting. It’s selfish, but I want him to worry. I want someone to care and show it. I remember how we woke up at the edge of the road, tangled together like ribbons on the wet grass. He kissed my forehead, nose, and the bow below. It felt warm and normal, like ‘bliss’, like what adults do, yet he pulled away. I didn’t pursue it, and I don’t know why.

Several cars slow to ask me if I’m okay. One man tries to get out. I realize I look heinous, and their concern doesn’t suit me anymore. It makes me feel bad.

I stare at my phone. No new missed calls. No more texts from Mother.

He must have finally died. In my mother’s eyes, he was a father, if not by love then by blood. The past didn’t matter, because he had a heart attack and might not make it. But the past was where I grew up, and sometimes, I still find myself there.

I type out a message.

You’ve got Shakespeare’s nose

I send it, and I see Petyr immediately typing back.

You aren’t the first to say it

Finally, I walk down Inkberry. Then, I run. There is something inside me that is organically me, not my father, or even my younger self. It’s a hunger. I shed the bloody suit jacket and tie I’m wearing, then my undershirt, and toss them on the bench as I go by. Even though my bra is stained red, I think I might look less crazy. Maybe.

I barely notice the house as I go through the gate and leap up the steps. The ring of the doorbell reverberates.

“Molly?” Petyr is crossing the yard from the driveway, his keys jingling in his hand. “Is that blood?”

“Fake blood,” I say. “I’m sorry I didn’t show up.”

“At first, I thought you took the money and ran.” He looks content as I descend the steps. “Or I scared you, which…I guess you do like being scared.”

“Yeah. I do.”

When I get close, he touches my forehead, which I think is sweet. I see his nails, now coated in the greasy red blood still matting my hair.

“So, fake blood. Are the boobs real?”

I almost give him a line, but I remember my shirt discarded on the bench down the avenue and suddenly feel stupid. I see out of the corner of my eye that my young self is beside me. As Petyr talks, she tries to interrupt, to change my mind or to confirm how ridiculous I look, but I ignore her.

As we walk again, Petyr reaches for me, and I decide to take his hand.

It’s raining, and I’m in my car because there’s somewhere for me to go. The sound is nice for me, and nice for my car. She purrs, and I purr back to her. It’s funny that I describe us this way—we are going to get my cat. She’ll be my cat now, although she has been someone else’s. I found her last week in a newspaper ad, or something like it. She looked so cute, so withered and ready for me. I named her immediately, after someone named Michelle. I cut out the picture. And the picture purred, and I purred back. 

I’m trying to remember the sounds being made by my car and the weather outside of it. It’s hard to remember something while it’s happening, and I wonder how talented at that a cat might be. This one is, probably. I did a lot of reading on what a cat and her body might like. As I’m driving now those pieces are floating in my head, wet food and toy mice and windowsills.

I’m nervous to see her again because I really want her to like me. When I first visited her, I drove up with fantasies of instant attachment. Instead, she turned her back to me and purred to the wall. Her now-owner said she was a bitch-cat. She never lets anyone pet her, the owner said. She thinks she’s too good for me and all my other cats. When she had babies she avoided them, and when they suckled, she didn’t move or want them. And she pretends she’s blind, knocks into things, and when she looks straight at you, she acts like you aren’t there.  

The owner thought I might change my mind and not want the cat, who she called Celia. I’ve considered the dangers of renaming an old animal, but my hope is that it will signal to her my dominance and attentiveness, and turn her affection. She looks more like a Michelle. I’m ready to love her. There is nothing else to love but my car. My parents are very far away, in another state, where it’s not raining.

Michelle is waiting on the porch of the house. The house is on the left side of the street, at least it is when driving the direction I am. And the house is blue and the porch is white. I’ve seen plenty of houses which are blue with white porches. They look good in the rain, like all houses. Michelle is waiting on the white porch, sitting up. She’s very still and she doesn’t look at me when I climb the stairs. She has a note taped to her, and it says Here is the cat. So there the cat is. She doesn’t seem cold. I pick her up, which she accepts. And I put her in my passenger seat and buckle her in, sitting the same way she was before. We make turns in my car, and are silent. The rain stops, which bothers me and Michelle, because the sound had been nice for us. But we are grateful that at least it’s still gray. 

At home I open the cat door for her, but she doesn’t go in. I tell her it’s ok and I go inside alone, through the regular door. She faces the house for a while, and then I stop paying attention to her so I don’t know what she does after that. The house is ready for us. Michelle’s bathroom items are by the laundry, and her food by my food, which is in the kitchen. I can’t tell if my food is wet or dry, like sauteed spinach, is that wet? Wet with oil. I love things that are wet with oil. I think a good way to love a thing is to make it wet with oil, but you can’t do that to a cat, their hair would be an obstacle. I could shave her. That would be funny but there’s no one else around to laugh at it.

I tape the note onto the fridge, so she feels at home. It’s funny to me because it says Here is the cat, but it’s on the fridge, so it’s like it’s saying that the cat is in the fridge. I hope she never goes in there. I had a friend in high school who was from Taiwan, and she used to joke about eating cats and dogs. I send her a picture of the fridge. She says something back in Chinese, so I don’t understand. I think about putting it into Google Translate or consulting a dictionary, but then I remember that I don’t care very much about anyone other than myself. I hope now I will also care about this cat. And then if she sends me texts, I will read them carefully to make sure I understand. I could also teach her Chinese, and then we both might end up caring about Chinese.

There is no food in the refrigerator. That is lucky; if there were I would eat some. Instead, I make a list of food I might buy later on. On the list I put almonds, tuna fish, fuji apples. I never did know which kind of apple to prefer until somebody taught me. Fujis are crisp and they have a nice streaking to their skin, which is the exact red that red is supposed to be, when you make red in your mind. I will not feed Michelle apples or almonds, I vow to myself. But tuna fish anytime. If I eat it next to her, she could think I am a cat too. Maybe that’s what she needs to soften. Her previous owner told me she loved to eat tuna, but I bet they never ate it together. I go into the living room to use it for a second. I see that Michelle has come inside. I’m relieved because if she hadn’t, she would still be outside.

I sit on the couch, which is brown but in a clean way. My knees just touch the glass coffee table, a feeling I sometimes like. Today I like it, and I use my hands and the coffee table to roll two cigarettes. I light one and offer the other to the cat, but she turns her nose up, which proves to be very cute. It looks so good on her I decide to try it myself, and then there we are, two perched, opposite noses, pointing to that wet ceiling.

*

After a few mornings have passed, I’m beginning to identify the cat’s routines and personalities. She’s awake when I crawl through the halls to reach the coffee maker, but she ignores the padding of my knees. And she ignores my coos and mouth sounds, which want to entice her into my love, into my lap. She responds only to the smell of tuna fish, as far as I can tell. Her eyes change shape when I open the can. Sometimes while I’m pouring out the fish water, I think I feel her tail brush my legs. This isn’t happening physically, because Michelle is across the room, sitting by her bowl, but ghosts from the future encourage me nonetheless. 

On a hot day I take us on a hot walk to the library. I’m not allowed pets in there, so I tie Michelle’s leash to a bike rack. Inside, I head straight to Reference and ask for books on pets. The Reference women point to the stairs and say the number three and shrug. I climb the stairs twice and begin my search. The big shelves hold Cooking Gardening Crafting. At the back there is Pet-Rearing. I look for titles that have the words Cat and Food. After crouching awhile and crawling through the aisles, because the best books are always at the bottom, I get satisfied. The book is called Wet or Dry: Your Kitty’s Little Stomach by Hannah Gavin. The book is huge. I tuck Hannah into my sweatshirt, which I brought because the library has air conditioning. Downstairs I wave to the Reference women, and say, You have nothing on pets! They look away. From what I understand, working in Reference does not involve the kind of relationship to individual books that might lead a person to ask about the lump under my sweatshirt. I untie Michelle and show her the book. It has a picture of feline stomach anatomy on the cover. I think she likes it. We walk home slowly, and she peers carefully at all we pass.

At home, Michelle goes straight for the cigarettes. I sit cross-legged and lay the book out on the coffee table, with my notebook in my lap. Most of the information in the book I’ve already found on the internet, but I’m struck by a delicious sounding recipe: Salmon Delight.

I put Michelle back on her leash because we need to shop for ingredients. She’s a little huffy about it but then it starts to rain, so we both perk up. She can tell I’m doing something for her, and her tail rubs on me for real this time. She gets to come into the market with me. I put a bunch of stuff into a basket and pay for most of it.

In the kitchen, Michelle goes straight for the tuna fish. She must be hungry because making this food is taking more of the day than I told her it would. I put a cup of salmon into boiling water, and turn the heat off after five minutes. I preheat the oven and mix 1/2 cup of cornmeal, a cup of rice flour, 1 1/2 cups of whole wheat flour, 1/2 cup of wheat germ, 1/3 cup of yeast. I use an applesauce masher on the cooked salmon and mix in a tablespoon of canola oil and one of sesame oil. Then I put 2 cups of water into the dry ingredients. I knead this dough for a bit and then add the salmon mixture. I roll the dough out and cut tiny diamonds. The diamonds bake for 25 minutes, enough for three games of Cat Chases Rat with Michelle. This is a game where Michelle scurries like a rodent and I prowl like I’m her. I think this is so cool, something Freud would like. Michelle came up with it all on her own. When the oven dings, I call her to dinner. She sits up straight and proper. I tuck a napkin into her collar and bite into a Fuji apple. She likes the food, but she vomits it back up into her bowl. 

*

I have to go to school at some point, which means leaving Michelle alone. I have decided that the cat cannot be the only thing in my life. In school I take notes on paper I have already used. On one side it says Tuna Almonds Apple and on the other it says Anecdote: Rabbi Yohanan had an advisor, Resh Lakish, who responded to all his declarations 24 reasons why he was wrong. When Resh Lakish dies, Elazar ben Pedat is sent to replace him. When the rabbi declares, Elazar ben Pedat says, There is a ruling that supports you. Rabbi Yohanan feels his mind decaying because he’s being denied his one human need, which is antithesis. The rabbi tears his clothes and keels over, etc., and the other rabbis pray for mercy upon him and then he dies. 

I look at the people around me. They are all one, a gloriously empty gelatinous structure, a cavernous other. I love them, and they look forward and down. They write Talmudic study is disputatious. I practice disputing myself. 

Another time, I go to the café. They are having one of those nights that cafés have, with music, to encourage people to come in and buy coffee. Darla, the barista, is in my Religions class. She was absent when we talked about Rabbi Yohanan, so instead of paying for my coffee, I trade her my notes. She glances at them and says they seem very usefully detailed and narrativized, and she’s excited to read them. I put some Irish cream in my drink. I’m allergic to it, which is exhilarating, and makes it taste better. The place is very empty. There are musicians and me and two older men who are listening and two older women who are not listening. Darla comes to sit with me because she has nothing to do. 

She says, I have nothing to do, what are you doing? She has a rag in her hands. We play gin rummy, which I’m not good at even though my father taught me, and Darla beats me. She’s delighted to, which is very sweet. I give her a kiss on the cheek to congratulate her, a small wet one. She blushes and I blush too. It’s fun that both of our faces are hot at once. It’s extraordinary to be one in our temperature and color. She takes a small stumble as she stands, and wipes the rest of the tables with her rag. She brings me a pastry without looking at me. The music is slow. One of the musicians is doing something discordant, but it’s not his fault, the café has a very weird post near the corner of the alcove they’re performing in, and depending on where you stand in the room you will hear an error in the reverberation of his notes. I hope that Michelle has remembered to eat dinner, and I spend some time making horrible little sketches of the musicians, and some of my room at home.

When the concert ends, I wait for Darla to clean the place. I help her by sorting sugar packets, and slip a couple of the fancy ones into my jacket pocket. Then I sit at the counter and work on a list of all the songs I know. Over time I’ve made it to the D section. Don’t Go Breaking My Heart. Don’t Let Us Get Sick. Diamond Day. I don’t know of any songs called Darla, but I know there has to be one, so I write Darla.

I stand against the brick wall outside while she locks the door. I smoke. Her car is right there, on the street. It’s dark but I know that in the light the car is brown. I ask her to turn the heat on.

Okay, she says, but it doesn’t work very well. She kisses my cheek this time, and we both get hot again. 

Even though it’s cold in the car, we take our shirts off, we’re so brave. I push her into the backseat quickly, and she shrieks. Our bodies are weird together, smushing, slapping. We get wetter and wetter, she is as wet as my mouth. We touch and touch. My hands cradle her skull, my body pushes onto her. Her voice is touching her breath, a modest noise, she’s a lady. I’m so good with her, and so we go forever. We push into each other selfishly. We spread each other open and put ourselves in our mouths, and we make and touch things, light and dark. When she cums she says my name as if I’ve woken her from a backseat nap. And I am satisfied but not as satisfied as she is. 

*

I remember that Michelle isn’t capable of feeding herself; I have to do it. I leave Darla, sleeping sweaty in her car under the streetlights. She is naked so I lock the doors and I hope that in her sleep her body gets rowdy, knowing it can be seen. I write a note on the back of my song list and attach it to her steering wheel with spit. The note says I have gone; See you soon. The walk home is stiff. My body acclimates to the air, abandoning its languid state. I breathe on my hands, which turns me on again, hands, breath, mine. They need a bit longer than normal to get the door open, but they can do it. Michelle is sitting in front of the door. She’s not angry, but she expects dinner. I provide, from the cabinet to her shining bowl. She eats with her pride next to her. I am her god. I go to sleep. 

In the morning, I sit across the table from Michelle while we smoke our breakfast cigarettes, and I confide. Michelle, I say, I was with a woman last night. 

I fantasize that Michelle is jealous, but she tells me she’s actually just nauseous. 

I was with this woman, I continue, and you know I could be in love with her. Michelle, it was so strange in the café. I was all alone, so I had to do it. If you come to the café next time, we could drink together, and then I might not have to see her again. 

I’m lying for no reason—Michelle doesn’t speak English.

After her nausea passes, we have a dance party in the hallway. Michelle just taught herself to dance, and kept it a secret from me until she was performance-ready. I’m amazed at her choreography. It’s something I’ve never seen before from a cat. She moves jerkily and trips over herself, gyrates, pulses, making eye contact with me the whole time. I pirouette, I trip the light fantastic. I clap and whistle, and she gives a shaky bow. 

*

I remember how I used to get dressed in my room before she lived here. In a cloud of some splendid melancholy. An empty space where my thoughts became wordless, which never happens anymore—the cat is hyperverbal. I was always aware of being alone, and every day I would consider those natural containers of my body, house, self. Now I am always kept above that, I always think of her. I hear her mewing or she stumbles in. She does look at me now. And I am with her. It is so sweet to be with. I wonder if this is that reward of motherhood. That great secret about it. Even in the café I am wordy, I am a person. I have context.  

And some other context could replace it. This moment I’m in—when there is a note on my fridge and I smoke with Michelle—could become fossilized, could be recast as another discrete point in life, instead of the boundless now that it is. If this were to happen, and I were to stretch out into the next interval of time, how sad would I be then?

* 

Darla comes over. I invited her. She turns up with a plate, and on the plate is plopped a can of tuna fish. Into her ear once, wetly, I told her that Michelle enjoyed cans of tuna fish. (‘Can’ is a metric here. She has dumped it out so now it sits upside down, a naked, gray-pink cake. A perfect mound.) Darla sets the plate on the glass of the coffee table. It makes a clattering sound because she did it imprecisely. She raises her eyebrows, hoping I will laugh. I don’t, because the coffee table is special to me. I don’t scratch or hit it, but I guess Darla will have to learn to respect my stuff. I lead her by hand around the house. I show her the note on the fridge, and the stuff inside it, and the sink in the bathroom, and my little bed. She likes the bed. She sits down on it. I do hope I can love Darla, and I do wonder if she hopes to love me too.  

Darla likes the bed. We get sweaty, she puts scratches on my rough skin. (My skin is not rough—I am just overly imaginative.) Michelle wanders in, and immediately slits her eyes more than normal. She watches us and licks herself. I take her cue and lick myself. Darla goes wild for this. She asks if the cat always watches me. I say Yes, she likes to know what I do, and to set down her judgments. Darla licks herself too, which I don’t go wild for. I pin her arms and lick her armpits. Michelle coughs a hairball onto the carpet. I stick my finger, wet from my own mouth, in Darla’s asshole. She hates this. She squirms and then learns to love it, like every time.  

We attack Michelle. We think it will be fun, that she will wriggle and howl. She becomes limp instead. It is actually harder to shave a limp cat than a rigid one. Razors don’t take well. But we manage it, and don’t nick her. We leave all the hair on her head. She is naked, with a mane, a sickly lion, and she accepts a celebratory shot of whiskey, shared. The lion pads proudly into the living room, raises her body onto the coffee table, and attacks the tuna. I rub her tummy while she coughs bits of it back up, into my other hand. I tuck these bits under the couch cushions, for safekeeping. 

*

I rub oil on Michelle every day now. After she eats her breakfast, I take her in my lap as you should take a baby into a lap, and she relents. I use jojoba oil I get from the store with the cash Darla gives me. Her skin is stretchy and foldable, it makes me remember that she’s pretty old. I purr through the oiling and she purrs back, her sour breath landing on me. 

One day when I rub her she feels mealy, her skin looks yellower. She looks at me, our eyes right on each other’s. I oil her slowly, then pick her up against my shoulder. We sit swaying on the couch and beat together. Michelle asks me to call the vet.

*

I know that Michelle is making me crazy. I see things I’ve never seen before, like a cat smoking a cigarette. There’s something that lives in her stomach that can drive a person crazy. And this is why in Egypt cats were deified. Michelle has more control over my mind’s reality than I have had for a long time. I like it like this. She moves my body, tells it how fast to chase the cat and which curtains to buy. She especially is in charge when I fuck Darla. She sits on the carpet and I have to mimic her gestures. 

Darla is making me crazy too. She’s been texting me one word at a time, about her own cats and how they can teleport. She does it to make me feel insecure, because Michelle can’t do that. I tried teaching her but she just stared at me. I’m not good at teaching teleportation.

It’s a worm in Michelle’s stomach, and I draw pictures of it and give it eyes and name it Adam. When Michelle throws up, I root through the matter to see if Adam has come out. But he never does.

When Michelle throws up she looks straight at me. We make sweet eye contact as she retches. Sometimes I retch too, but I don’t throw up because there’s nothing in my stomach, not even a worm. 

*

I ask Darla to drive us to the vet in her brown car. I have a car but I want the human support. I figure we can fuck in her backseat to take my mind off Michelle’s little fate. It’s a raining day, gorgeously somber. Michelle shits blood all over the seat. I look at Darla emptily. If she were to get mad at me for this, I would kill her. Darla waits in the car while I carry the cat in, curled again like a baby. The veterinarian does her work in a wooden house, and walking up to it, I imagine it to be falling down, weak boards slapped together in the shape of a teepee, wet from the rain. The rain falls on Michelle’s bare skin, her favorite thing now. I’ve been taking her for rainy walks on her leash, bringing her in the shower with me. But she prefers cold water. The doctor has no name, at least that I know of. She takes Michelle from my arms, and is not surprised by the texture of her skin. It makes sense that she would have touched bald cats before, I think they are often shaved before surgery.

Darla gets out of the car to open the door for me. She slides me into the passenger seat like a baby, so I suck my thumb. It’s just an instinct that I have, but then she puts her arm around me, so I wonder whether I did it because I feel vulnerable or as a joke. She says, I made you a playlist, and starts playing it. I stare into the rain past her windshield. When she plays a song I like I say, I like this song, what is this? And she says, Oh, I thought you knew it. It was on the list of songs you left me. 

Darla thinks I wrote her a special love list of songs and stuck it on her steering wheel with spit, but it was just the only paper I had. Darla, I say, I made that song up. There’s always a song for a girl’s name. But she doesn’t hear me. She is stroking my arm all this time, kissing my head. She has learned that great secret of motherhood. I fall into it, into the secret.

 I’m not worried about Michelle. I know she’s in there glaring at the vet, looking at the cats framed on the walls, past patients. She is prettier than all of them, even when bald and sick, and she knows it. When she is all better, she will go on the wall too, another testament to the doctor’s talent. And her picture will go up even if she dies, she knows I’ll make sure of it. She knows I have plenty of pictures to put up all around the world. I’ll put them up as posters of her, of a lost pet, the way people do, with her name and my phone number on them. And the people will call the number and say, I don’t think I’ll be able to find this lost cat, she seems dead. And I’ll send them the reward, because they figured it out. 

I wonder if Michelle’s children will know the secret when their mother dies. Her past-owner told me she had four sons, and they’ve been scattered through the county. When she meows deeply, I feel them turning their heads, coming, crawling toward us. I think I hear her meowing deeply inside the walls of the shack. 

*

I am grieving so heavily and silently that Darla has to take care of me. She feeds me tuna fish and almonds, and oils me after my sullen baths. She throws balls of yarn at me and I bat them away with pathetic glares. The self is long decaying. I shrivel each morning; life squeezes itself from me. I made the dirt loose in the yard and buried Michelle there, a lion-crone, more than halfway to China. 

Darla drags me to the café. She lines up mugs in front of me and pours things into them. One of the musicians pats me on the shoulders. He’s drawn a drawing of Michelle, in a coffin, with hearts in the sky behind it. I let him pin it to my back. I feel very strongly and tightly the bonds around me, the bones around me, other people.

Some other time, at home, I make a batch of Salmon Delight. We’re out of vegetable oil so I use olive, which is better for you anyway. When it comes out of the oven on my cookie sheet, in my bare hands, I arrange it in spirals on all the plates in the house. I clatter one of the plates onto the coffee table and light a cigarette. I hum while I inhale so it doesn’t feel like I’m breathing. 

The next time Darla comes over, I’m on all fours, chasing pretend rats. I make her draw whiskers on her cheeks with eyeliner and scurry from me like a mouse. When I catch her, I bite her. I catch her every time. I’ve made her a new sign to wear around her neck. It says, Here is ‘the cat.’ 

I try very hard to get into bed with her. I imagine that when we’re naked and she touches me, my skin crumbles off in her hand like streusel from a cake. If that were true, then I would be the cake, and Darla would plop me onto my coffee table, but I wouldn’t have any knees to press against it. 

*

I have nothing to read and nothing to eat. When I try to read, I have to hold the books very close to my eyes because I have the sensation that my pupils are growing thinner. This makes me think I should eat more, but I’m afraid of the nauseous ghosts prowling in the kitchen. Darla gave back my notes from class. They were very well-written, and they talked about how when Resh Lakish died it was because something shameful had happened, and when he was gone Rabbi Yohanan felt that he was all alone, martyred in a long fight against stupidity. 

I hold the Pet-Rearing book’s diagram of feline stomach anatomy close to me and try to figure out something very complicated. The doctor told me that mercury is not really a planet. It is a thing that kills little old cats, shrivels their dignified hearts. I am staying in one moment now and feel as though I have threads connecting me to other women; I am as afraid as other women. I have tucked all of us under the couch cushions for safekeeping. Darla is here, and she weaves cat’s cradles on her fingers. She’s good at weaving—she knows how to sink her mind into all the angles and points of contact, so that they are full-bodied and soulful. The couch smells like old tuna, like death. She suspends me in the points she has sunk into, catches me when I’m not paying attention, and tangles me—unprotesting, inscrutable—in the yarn. Cradles my rigid mind, my unsinkable self.

The event is in thirty minutes. You don’t really know what it is. The leader of your Erasmus group said something in Spanish about a trip to a traditional Moroccan venue. But did he say the place is a restaurant or a themed bar? Your Spanish isn’t great, but it’s good enough to make out the dude’s suave accent, which is so much more intelligible than the Andalusian tongue in Seville, where you’re studying abroad this semester. What happened was earlier on the bus a French girl was chatting with you when the announcement was made. As you guys giggled and touched, you were wondering if she could indeed be into an Asian boy like you. If your appeal was in part indebted to K-pop. If you might have a shot with her tonight. And she’s French. The first French girl you’ve flirted with. 

You’re in your hotel room. Your two roommates are nowhere in sight. One of the guys is your best friend here. He’s from Munich. Not a very tall man. You can embrace him from behind and have your chin rest effortlessly on his cap. He always wears a hat for some reason. His hair is not bad. Short and black just like your Chinese hair. He’s easily the nicest dude you’ve met in Erasmus, the group that organized this trip across the Mediterranean for a couple dozen international college students studying abroad in Seville. What makes you appreciate him, though, is that he always fantasizes about getting girls galaxies out of both your leagues. He’s probably in the gym right now, getting that final flex. The other roommate is Swiss. He’s from some French-speaking region whose name you’ve forgotten. He’s also short, and you guys have only talked like twice. You don’t know much about him apart from the fact that he’s boning the hot Peruana who sat behind you on the bus.

There’s a fly the size of a thumb on the skin-colored wallpaper next to your bed. It makes an annoying buzz even when it’s resting. You wonder how many more big bugs are lurking in your hotel room. But still, it’s a nice change of scenery to be here. It feels refreshing to leave Europe after being in Spain for three months. So far, your group has visited the beaches of Tangier, where you played frisbee with the program leader. You two bonded over the backhand toss, which you both agreed was the only proper way to throw a disc. Forehand throws are for noobs. In Asilah, you showed off your music skills on a street piano near a narrow boulevard of markets. One Italian guy, a third-year music major, joined in for a duet of Daddy Yankee’s “Gasolina”. Then came the trip to Chefchaouen, where you snapped pictures of your peers exploring the historical blue stairwells and alleys. In the process, you swapped contact information with several photography enthusiasts from Mexico. Now, it’s day three of your trip, and you guys have just arrived at the city center of Tétouan. You’ve caught everyone’s attention by introducing yourself as an American even though you’re like the most Chinese-looking dude ever. And you just flirted with that French girl on the bus. The last thing you want is to have some big-ass bug in your hotel room to ruin your momentum. 

With your friends out of the room, you want to lie back and chill on your bed, which is really just a pull-out couch. Your German friend and the Swiss roommate took the only two legitimate beds while you were trying to pick up a few words of Darija from the sweet hotel receptionist in the front lobby. You didn’t mind though. The couch is near the window and close to the bathroom. It feels tempting now to take out your phone, put on some porn, and wank. Or maybe listen to Jay Chou’s new single and imagine yourself as him, selling out stadiums. Surely at that level, you wouldn’t need to care whether a particular French girl is into you. But at the event, which you think might be at some snooker parlor or sheesha hide-out (after all, the Erasmus leader sounded like he was joking when he said “traditional”), you want to make sure your English comes out properly—as American and normal-sounding as possible. You stare at the flavored tea bags by the microwave. They look enticing in their maroon and shiny packaging, and you want to give them a try. Don’t. At least not now. Tea does something funny to your mouth. You’re not sure how to describe it. It’s like there’s something in it that inhibits saliva and forms a thin layer of tannins over your tongue so your English doesn’t come out right, making your accent all the more obvious. Also, resist the urge to brush your teeth. Toothpaste is like tea. Bad for the tongue. The cheap hotel toothbrush hurts your gums anyway. Don’t find your German friend in the gym. Working out leads to dehydration, which can in turn lead to a dry mouth. Plus, last-minute training won’t get you anywhere. You should’ve gone to the gym ages ago, lazy ass. You reach for the pack of Doublemint in your pocket. There are still twenty-seven minutes till the event. It’s too early to start chewing. Really, you should’ve gotten the hard candies. They keep your mouth watery longer and don’t require you to keep the little wrappers in your pocket like some loser. Whenever you chew gum at a party, you always end up finding a bunch of shiny and sticky clumps in your pockets two weeks later while doing laundry. For now, sip on your ice water and maybe eat a Pop-Tart to get your jaw moving.  

As you stare out the window into the busy Tétouan streets, you wonder if drinks will be available at the event. Regardless, you don’t plan on drinking a lot tonight. You wish for something sweet and tame like watermelon juice or pineapple slush. You want to stay sober and get to know the French girl a bit more. Talk to her like you’re in full control. Countless nights out in Seville with your American friends come to mind: at the bars over there, you always go hard for liquor, ordering before anyone else. A rum and coke usually. Sometimes a tinto de verano if you’ve had a long day. The goal is to down the drink as fast as possible without seeming suspicious or like an alcoholic and then blurt out some British English for laughs. You suck at the British accent, really. A Spaniard could probably do it better than you. But that’s beside the point. The point is to hide your real accent altogether. Your American accent sounds weird in a loud venue like a bar. When you raise your voice, you sound like a FOB, an international Chinese student. You never want to sound like that. It’s not that you don’t like international Chinese students or anything. But you’ll always remember the time you first immigrated to the US and a kid in your third-grade social studies class asked you about ration stamps and fake milk powder. This was before either of you knew anything about the world. By the time you went abroad to Spain, you’d already lived in America for twelve years. That’s the only home you know.

Outside the window a group of Asian tourists pass by the street beneath your hotel. They’re carrying bags of souvenirs in their hands, walking in a hurry as they hail a taxi. Due to all the noise on the street, they raise their voices. But the taxi driver seems to be having a hard time understanding them. He shakes his head, drives on. You think back to your professor’s office in the US. A quiet place like that and your bedroom is where your accent sounds nice. There on a good day it’s better than the accent of some Asian Americans born in America, even. It’s soothing and posh, like the voice of a narrator from an audio book. It made you more confident when talking with your professor about his summer trip in Rome. Not that you really cared, of course—you just wanted to pave the way for a letter of rec. It also made you more attractive when talking philosophy to the Asian girl you finally brought home after twenty boba dates. That’s the kind of place you wish the event will take place at tonight. Your professor’s office. Your bedroom. A bar without the music. A place where nobody talks except for you and the French girl. 

The Asian tourists try to hail another taxi. They’re now on the street across from your hotel. This time also to no avail. You let out a sigh. You’ve been talking to the French girl in Spanish. Bad Spanish that is, purposely enunciating the er and o endings of words the American way like a sassy bitch. But she’ll want to practice her English with you at the event. After all, you’d told her you’re from California. She’ll want to test you out. To see if you’re a true American. Born and raised. 

The door opens with a thud. Your German and Swiss friends come running in with two bottles of Coca-Cola. Listo dude? they say. They grab you by the arms and lead you out the door, into the hallway painted in red, humming “Con Calma.” You check the time on your phone. Still fifteen minutes to go. You pop a slice of Doublemint in your mouth anyway and start chewing. 

*

It turns out the event is a visit to an old Moroccan apothecary. You three and your Erasmus group sit on rows of long benches facing the front of the room, where racks of herbs and cream jars stand by a podium. The Swiss guy is sitting next to you. From the peaceful grin on his face, you know he’s done it. You scan the room to find the Peruana with her friends in the second row. She’s changed into a black sweater and sweatpants. Man, can’t these two just keep their hands to themselves for one damn minute? Then the French girl turns to wink at you from the first row. She’s still in the knotted crop tee and denim shorts from earlier on the bus. You wink back with a nervous smile. Staring at her curvy back, you realize how sleek her auburn hair is. If you guys were together, you could caress it all day. 

The shop owner walks up to the podium. The guy looks both Moroccan and Latino and is slightly taller than you. He introduces himself and shares an anecdote about the Seville Erasmus group from last year. You can’t help but stare at the black mole by the corner of his mouth. It’s almost as big as the fly in your room. 

His voice sounds strained, like he’s forcing himself to be enthusiastic, as he says, Ahora, dónde están mis italianos? A wave of hands pop up in the back row. Out, he says, pointing a finger at the door. The room bursts into laughter. You turn back to see your Italian friends cracking up, too. You don’t get what’s funny but know that if the same joke were made about los chinos, the room would be dead silent, dry as a winter morning. The French girl turns around and shoots you a glance. You fake a smile. She smiles back. 

Affirmed by his audience, the owner starts to speak with more energy, calling out every nationality in your group. Y mis franceses? Oui, your French girl and her friends clap in unison. Bonjour, says the owner, bowing his head like a gentleman. Tenemos alguien de Peru? he goes on. The Peruana raises her hand high up in the air, proudly representing like a Congress woman. Ah, siempre temenos una Peruana, siempre, the owner shakes his head in mock disapproval. People start cracking up. The French girl looks back at you again. She’s mouthing something. Bonjour. Or maybe Bordeaux. But why the hell would she mouth Bordeaux to you? You smile and whisper, Bonjour, under your breath. Alguien de los Estados Unidos? he continues. You raise your hand along with the three other Americans. There’s the Mexican American girl whose last name is Garcia. According to your German and Swiss roommates, she looks more Latina than half the Latinas from Latin America on this trip, though she claims to be only a quarter Mexican. You’d spoken to her once in a restaurant in Chefchaouen. There’s the African American guy. He’s twenty-eight and tall as a superhero. He’s really too old for Erasmus. You wonder if he’s on this trip just to bone, too. And then of course there’s the white guy from the Midwest. He’s half an inch shorter than you but in general not bad looking. The owner scans you guys for a good second and points a finger at you. Pero tú no, he says. The crowd goes wild. The loudest wave of laughter yet. You feel your face grow hot. You wonder if you look as red as when you get Asian glow. Where are you from originally? he asks you. It’s his first full sentence in English, and you hate to admit his accent is decent. Mis padres y yo somos de Beijing, you whisper like a mute. Now that everyone’s attention is on you, you’re too afraid to respond in English. All you really need to say is you were originally from Beijing but grew up in the States. It’s a simple statement, and you could’ve spoken it perfectly with or without your accent. But your confidence has already disintegrated.

Vale. Now let me introduce you guys to the Moroccan mint tea, he says with a huge smile. He pulls out a bag of leaves from the shelf. It’s obvious the dude has achieved his intention of warming up the crowd. Now he can go on advertising his products. You love Moroccan mint tea. You’ve had it for breakfast the past two days. You would love to hear the history behind it and grab some for your host mom in Seville and your real mom in California. But your mind is not here anymore. You keep on telling yourself it’s all right. Imagine if you were actually born in the States, how much more would that innocent joke have hurt? Plus, everyone is paying attention to the dude now. They’ve probably already forgotten about your embarrassment. But the French girl. She’s not turning around anymore. No more winks or smiles. All you can see is her back. Her gorgeous auburn hair.

 Almost as an afterthought, you wonder how things would’ve turned out if when the shop owner asked for the Americans, you didn’t raise your hand. The French girl probably wouldn’t’ve even noticed. And if he goes on to ask, Dónde están mis chinos? you could proudly raise your hand and say, Ya sabes donde estoy, soy el único. Maybe the crowd would cheer you on. And you’d be the originator of a joke instead of the butt of one.

There’re still two days left in the Moroccan trip. Tomorrow you guys will be heading to see the beach and golf resort near Martil. You don’t have to sit next to the French girl again. You can sit toward the front of the bus, next to the Erasmus leader. He’s a nice guy who won’t judge you for anything except the wrong way to throw a frisbee. You can still volunteer to be the group’s photographer and relish the beauty of the country that stunned you when you first arrived in Tangier.

The shop owner says something else that cracks up the room. This time you laugh too, even though you have no idea what he said. You think about the minutes you’d just spent in your hotel room preparing the perfect American accent only to speak Spanish. You can’t help but laugh again, for real now. It isn’t the first time you’ve been rejected, and it won’t be the last. Tonight, you’ll go to bed early to prepare for the long day tomorrow. You’ll want to wank, except your roommates will be in the room as well. 

The orchard is beautiful. Meets the postcard standard of picturesque, as promised. Lines of foliage haloed by the rising sun, shades of green and brown and golden red, and for a second Maggie slips, imagines her and Brendon and a child that won’t exist. A little girl—no, a boy, a little arrogant boy, a mini-Brendon. She imagines Brendon lifting their phantom son to pick an apple, round cheeks dimpled by matching smiles, and thinks, yes, God, wow, the orchard is so beautiful. Too beautiful, really, because nothing hints at the section in the far back, the bodies curled deep in the dirt beneath.

Maggie turns from the orchard, looks at Brendon still in the passenger seat of their car, one of his long legs thrust out into the gravel of the parking lot, the other limp in the footwell. She reaches for his bowed head, runs her fingers through his thinnest patch of hair. “Jus’ a min’,” he says, panting through syllables. He leans forward, and Maggie doesn’t know if he’s leaning into her, if he wants her hand on his scalp, or if he’s just trying to get his head between his knees to gasp through nausea. But he doesn’t say either way, and Maggie can’t bring herself to ask.

*

It’s not a day for jokes, but once Brendon manages to stand, he can’t help himself. He grins, he chuckles, he pretends to gag when Maggie holds her palm out to a cow. While they wait for the owner of the orchard to meet them, Maggie circles strawberry scented hand sanitizer into her skin. Brendon says, “Can you imagine if I just dropped dead right here? That’s a discount, right? Just toss me in a wheelbarrow, save on gas.”

Her therapist suggested he makes people uncomfortable as an assertion of control, a way to cope, but when Maggie asked what it meant that he tries to make her uncomfortable, that he laughs about dying as if she should join in, that he’d make her drive two hours to visit his bio-grave, her therapist said, “What do you think he expects from you? Both now and then later, after he’s gone?” But Maggie still has both sets of grandparents, the tabby she rescued as a teenager: she’s never known death this intimately. The last year’s been nothing but stumbling, trying to keep her chin high even as Brendon started considering arrangements like a child marking up a Christmas catalogue. 

To her therapist, she said, “I think he needs me to be there for him,” and last night, to Brendon, as she threw a book so hard at the living room floor its spine split, Maggie yelled, “Do you always have to ask for so much?”

*

Maggie remembers when cancer became tangible, when it took on shape and morphed into something that looked like her husband. When the doctor spoke and Brendon nodded, when Brendon took off his hat to put it back on, when Brendon pulled and pinched at the navy brim until his hand collapsed, knuckles tented over his eyes. As he cried, Maggie pressed her fingers to the back of his neck and felt neither of their bodies.

Her first thoughts had been practical: the warehouse was always desperate for workers and Brendon was their best. They’d take him back when this was all done, no problem. Of course, she’d had no idea what sick leave would look like, and that was something to consider in their budget, what with the new house that wasn’t new at all, with its faucets that constantly spat water and wiring that slurped electricity. The empty room just off their bedroom would stay barren despite their plans the year before, but that was alright, that was fine. There’d be time to regroup. They would change, the both of them, because treatment attacked more than just the illness, and chemo took hours, the clear and brown bags draining slowly above their heads as they flipped through fuzzy cable on a tube TV, but it wasn’t all terrible. Brendon said, “Lemonade out of some really shitty lemons, huh, babe? We have dates scheduled every other week now, no excuses. You bring the champagne flutes; I’ll swipe the ginger ale. Maybe I’ll feed you some pudding, yeah? All sexy like? Here comes the airplane, baby.” Maggie loved that, his warm stupidity, his optimism. He sat in the cushioned recliner with her next to him in the stiff-backed chair, and they laughed as chemicals roiled through his body, bickering in good spirits over what to watch. Brendon protested that Cheaters wasn’t a romantic choice, though Maggie disagreed, saying, “It puts our life into perspective! We’re here, together, Joey Greco nowhere in sight—isn’t that promising? Look at us, so good at being married.” Everything would be okay, she thought, because thirty-year-olds get cancer, sure, but they don’t die.

Now, seated in the back of a golf cart, the owner of the orchard jostling them over root and gravel, Maggie keeps her palms flat on the vinyl cushion under her thighs. She wonders if there’s a world where Brendon left her out in the waiting room for that very first doctor’s appointment, where he smiled at her with dried eyes, where he lied, where he said everything was fine and then valued her needs over his. Where he packed a bag in the middle of the night, kissed her forehead sweetly while she slept, then disappeared into a spill of moonlight and started a new, temporary life. It’s silly—if he’d done that, she would’ve tracked him by his credit cards, would’ve still ended up here, in this orchard, this would-be-graveyard—but the imagined gesture makes her feel the most loved she’s felt since… Well, she doesn’t know, because feeling loved isn’t as important as proving the depth of her own.

Today, she’s doing her best, though the sway of the golf cart curdles the breakfast in her belly. Last night’s fight lingers. She wants to nurse her anger, but that’s not allowed anymore, so she keeps it behind her teeth, swallows until her tongue tacks to the roof of her mouth.

At their last chemo session, after they spent two long hours waiting for the magnesium to drip, after they shared a tuna sandwich and giggled at the knitted hats passed out by a survivor with an abundance of glitter-speckled yarn, Brendon pronounced, “I’m doing this for you.” And Maggie felt loved, she did, because the newest formula bubbled in red welts on his face and ate at his stomach, left him miserable for the teeny stretch between doses, but still, he smiled as he sat in the vinyl recliner next to her. He said, “I’m doing this for you,” but as they walked out, he dropped her hand to lean over the cluttered counter of the nurses’ station. He rang the bronze bell that meant a patient had finished their last treatment. Maggie tugged him away, saying, “Stop, B,” because people tethered to IVs cheered, because some of the nurses who didn’t know Brendon or his medical records punched the air and yelled, “Congratulations!” 

In the car, Maggie cried. Ignored him until he vomited out the window and then apologized until he did, too. But his apology didn’t change his decision: Brendon was done. Though the doctors had already warned that best case was judged in slivers of time, she hadn’t thought stopping chemo was really an option. The bell signaled an end she didn’t understand, one she hadn’t agreed to.

*

The orchard has barely opened, and it’s mostly silent, just the sparse chirp of birds and the familiar grinding of tractors. Brendon says, “It’s real peaceful here, quieter than home. And not as much dung in the air, so, y’know, there’s a point in its favor.” Maggie looks down at her bare nails, curls her ring finger to pick at her thumb. She knows cornfields—cried in them when hide and seek stopped being fun, screamed as a monster chased her with a toothless chainsaw,  unbuttoned her shirt in one, as Brendon, a nervous boy with a pack-a-day habit even at sixteen, laughed before he choked. But she doesn’t see much in this place, this orchard that’s left Brendon so obviously impressed. He’s gone wide-eyed, and Maggie wants to say something like, You can’t be serious, or, I’ll be buried next to you, someday, so my opinion matters, too, but after last night, after his selfishness, she knows her words aren’t worth much at all.

In the golf cart, Brendon sits with one arm wrapped around his stomach, the other braced on the metal bar that runs behind the front seats. Under them, the cart’s engine whines, deep and constant. When the owner tentatively asks how Brendon’s feeling, Brendon says, “Ah, not too bad. There’s a, uh, constant baseline now of just general shittiness. Nothing to be done.” He coughs as they double back around the wooden gift shop, past strings of apple garland that hang limp off the mint awning. The orchard owner glances over his shoulder, says, “Remind me to give you folks a voucher for a pie.” Maggie looks at Brendon and Brendon looks at the horizon. He says, “Oh, wow, that’s so kind, thanks.” She wets her palms with the hand sanitizer from her purse. The sweet smell of strawberry hangs in the air for a handful of breaths, just long enough to close her eyes and pretends she’s home.

*

Brendon kisses the drop of her jaw, the weak spot under her ear. He likes to kiss her there, said once that it reminded him of a dog’s belly, soft and warm and covered in down. Maggie stared at him until he said, “What?” She hit his shoulder. She said, “You’re so lucky I talk to you,” and then laughed while he backtracked, as he sputtered over the virtues of dogs, their beauty and sweetness and loyalty. Today, when Brendon kisses the drop of her jaw, she ignores him. The orchard owner stops the golf cart to let a riding lawnmower pass. Maggie says, “Oh, the grass is so green here, wow,” and then, inexplicably, “I like grass.” Though she wasn’t trying to be funny, Brendon roars. The shift of muscle funnels the hollows around his eyes to down under his cheekbones, thins his chapped lips. Giggling, he taps her shoulder, waits. She says nothing.

They’ve seen most of the orchard, the gift shop and the pens of goats and cows and chickens and the blank fields of dirt that will eventually be dotted with pumpkins and the pockmarked earth where campers can toast marshmallows and the thigh-high hay maze. It’s an odd sort of pussyfooting—Maggie knows, and obviously the owner of the orchard knows, that they’re not here to see the actual orchard—but for the past fifteen minutes, the golf cart has been gliding up and down wide lanes bordered by apple trees. Still, Brendon taps at her shoulder, grins, says, “You’re the apple of my eye,” and waits for her to scoff, eyebrows raised so high his gaunt face stretches mask-like. Maggie scoffs. She rolls her eyes, smiles, laughs. Brendon says, “This place is almost as pretty as you.” She kisses his big head, and he folds their fingers together, squeezes once as if to confirm his presence. He says, “I’ve still got it,” and then, “I’ve still got you, huh?” Maggie’s response falls, easy and gentle: “Obviously.”

*

Memory Fields is as far away from the parking lot as the orchard goes, sectioned off by a tall black gate, long past the wooden gift shop and disappointing pumpkin patch, opposite the barn with the lazy horses and feral cats, parallel to the neat and endless rows of carefully spaced apple trees. When they finally get there, Brendon checks his watch, taps Maggie’s purse, and she thumbs open Thursday’s morning half of his pill organizer, watches as he swallows dry, as he winces. “We don’t let anybody but family and employees in here,” the orchard owner says. He stops the golf cart at the edge of a gravel cul-de-sac, right in front of the first row of fruit-less trees. “You’d have a lifetime pass to the orchard, Mrs. Miller, and you’d just let the folks at the front know when you visit. Somebody’ll always be there to take you back.”

Brendon leans into her. He puts his left hand on her right thigh, makes her bear his weight. She wipes the sweat off his forehead with her fingers as the orchard owner says, “We use biodegradable material for the pods, durable but still good for the soil. The bodies, the people, you know, they break down in a contained way, in the pod, so the sapling gets the nutrients. It’s really something, let me tell you. It’s beautiful.” And it is beautiful, Maggie can’t deny that: a hundred or so trees, mismatched in height, some no longer than her legs, some so tall her eyes sting with sun, all sturdy, all wrapped with a delicate silver chain from which a palm-sized plaque hangs. Underneath, she imagines, the tangle of root and corpse is umbilical.

“I don’t think I can get up,” Brendon says. “Maggie, would you go look? Let me know if it’s as good as the pictures, huh? For me, baby. Please.”

There’s a graveyard ten miles from their house. The internet has told her how she can arrive by car, by public transit, by foot. Before they got in the golf cart, the owner of the orchard pulled her aside, said, “It’s a pricey thing, I can’t lie, but I’ll give you some paperwork that discusses monthly plans,” and Maggie appreciated that he said this to her, not Brendon, because Brendon plans without planning, deals in arrangements without the permanence of documentation. No will, no signatures, nothing but, Oh, wouldn’t this be nice. She wouldn’t want the orchard owner to trust her husband’s words—they’ll mean little once he’s gone.

Maggie holds Brendon’s hand still on her leg. She will do this, will leave him behind in the golf cart to kneel in front of a tree that’s sprouted strong from death, will stay silent, keep her shoulders high and her mouth softly curled, solemn but fond. She’ll think of nothing deeper than the spongy press of grass beneath her knees, how the earth steals her heat and in return seeps cold wet through her jeans. She won’t look back at Brendon because it’ll ruin this indulgence, the easiest thing he’s asked for yet. 

*

Maggie curls an arm around Brendon’s waist to open the passenger door. He stands in front of her, hands on her shoulders, breath metallic under her nose. Panting, he says, “Like we’re dancin’.” She says, “I don’t dance with geeks,” and shuffles him back until his ass hits car. His hands slide from her shoulders, to her ribcage, to her hips as he descends. She asks, “Can you do your seatbelt?” He sighs, shakes his head, throws his arm across his chest to try. Eventually, he gets angry, gives up. In that way, he’s become reliable. Like last night as she tried to read but mostly stared at the ugly paneling in the living room, wondering which color they’d paint the walls if they could afford it, if they had the strength, when Brendon looked up from his laptop to say, “Let’s have a kid. I’m serious. We can do it now, or you can freeze my sperm.” And Maggie said, “No. Jesus Christ, no,” so violently that her thumb twitched and she lost her page. 

She would wipe vomit off his face and hold him while he cried and she herself wouldn’t cry when they learned the cancer had its eye on his brain and she’d be with him every second at the hospice and she’d kiss his lips when they purpled and she’d polish his tombstone weekly for six months at the cemetery close to their house and she wouldn’t marry again—either because she loved him so much or because once was enough and nothing was worth such risk—but this, a child, a living monument to his life, to her grief, was not something she would do. “Maggie, listen,” he said, and she threw her book, yelled, “Do you always have to ask for so much?”

Brendon lets her buckle him in without complaint. Two years ago, he would’ve made some stupid grab at her chest, would’ve nuzzled her neck, would’ve complained about his natural right to drive. Now, he closes his eyes, melts into the seat, head curled on his shoulder, hands twisted in the too-wide stretch of space between his skinny thighs. “Thanks, baby,” he says. The words are so tender that she can almost forget him saying, “Fine, whatever. Why would we have a fucking kid anyway? I’ll be dead, and you don’t have a caring bone in your goddamn body,” and then, even worse, “What makes you think any of this is about you, Maggie?” She kisses his head again, holds his cheek, says, “Of course, B.”

Brendon says, “Ready whenever you are,” and Maggie shuts his door. She presses her fingers to the roof of the car, metal sun-hot, blistering, and doesn’t let herself look back at the orchard and the spaces they could’ve fit.