Willy Conley

It’s sunny at the end of the world. Maude wants to tell someone, but she has no one to tell. The sentence ticks through her mind as she settles into one of the many empty chairs in the cruise ship’s glass-walled library, surrounded on all sides by the roll of forty-foot waves. Yesterday, she stood at the stern with the other passengers and watched the familiar greens and browns of Argentina recede into a monochromatic, blue-on-blue view. Now, seemingly every other passenger is stuck horizontal through this lurching loop.

Most endure the nausea in their cabins, only occasionally emerging, pale-faced and wobbly-legged, for oatmeal and mashed potatoes. It’ll take the ship three days to get through the Drake Passage, on its way to the Antarctic Peninsula. Maude plans to take advantage of the nearly empty ship for as long as she can. Maybe writing as the ground seesaws beneath her will finally force her unbudgeable writing project to budge. She watches the froth of water as the ship bucks through the waves—cresting, dropping, cresting, dropping. She can’t decide what is worse: the relentless view or the blank document open on her computer. The cursor blinks, taunts.

            She types and deletes: The molar jiggled; a tectonic plate shifted.

            She tries again: They incinerated her teeth with the rest of her bones.

            Dana would have made fun of her––don’t be so maudlin, Maude––but Dana wasn’t here. Maude missed her, but she also hated her. She hated Dana for that early-morning phone call from Dana’s dad, hated Dana for letting her SUV roll on her way to a weekend retreat. She hated Dana for the conversation Maude had with Dana’s dad after the funeral, when he explained about the tickets to Antarctica and he knew Dana would still want Maude to go. Maude hated Dana because she knew she couldn’t cancel, not with Dana in her ear, whispering, Don’t be such a baby, you bitch.

            For years, Maude had been developing an idea for her second novel, an idea she only told Dana about in fragments. Tooth Rift would be about an iceberg that was slowly cleaving from the continent and a woman who realizes this rift exists in her mouth as a loose molar. Whenever she presses her tongue to the dental crown, the rift grows wider. Dana glommed onto the idea because, she insisted, they would need to go to Antarctica for research purposes. She had her family money; she’d buy their tickets; Maude didn’t have to worry about that part of it. They’d go together and they’d vacation in parkas. Dana would drink martinis and Maude would write. Dana insisted it was a perfect plan, but Maude refused. She didn’t want Dana’s charity, and she knew that, even if the publisher of her first book was interested in this next one, any advance she got would only end up being equal to whatever she still owed the IRS from the year before. Over drinks, Maude would mention a new plot point she’d come up with––how, if the woman’s gums bled, the blood would taste like salt and metal and ice––and Dana would pull out her phone and say, “Great, I just have to book it.”

Maude wishes she knew what finally made Dana purchase their cabin on this particular trip, if it was something Maude had said or done or if Dana had just gotten drunk one night and thought, “fuck what Maude wants.” She always thought she knew Maude better than Maude knew herself. Probably, she did.

The ship tips sideways and Maude is brought back into the library, into her body. A body she resents because it’s still here, whole, still demanding food and care, even though all Maude wants is to disappear beneath the weight of Dana’s absence. The words aren’t coming. She slams the computer shut and, using the rope tied up along the walls for support, slowly makes her way back to her cabin.

At dinner, Maude finds an empty seat at a table in the far corner, next to guests she doesn’t recognize. As a bowl of bread circulates, a middle-aged woman with box-dyed red hair talks about how she’s slept through the last two days thank god and a man sitting next to Maude says that he had to go get a scopolamine patch from the doctor and there was a woman down there, puking into some poor guy’s boot.

            Across from Maude, a man says, “Oh yes, that’s me. Thank you.” It’s like her radio has been switched back to the table’s channel. The man is talking to a woman with long silver hair and a turquoise statement necklace. In a glass-thin voice, the woman says, “You know what, I thought so. I loved your book and then I saw you do an interview with Good Morning America and I thought, a man that handsome shouldn’t get to be good with words, too.”

            Maude blinks. She blinks again. She knows who this man is. His blond hair, that slalom bend in his nose, the butt dimple in his chin, and that same humble frown she recognizes from the author photo published alongside every glowing review of his debut novel. Matthew Carruth. One of “America’s Great Novelists,” if you believe any of the interviews he gave after the release of Amniotic, a family saga told from the perspective of an unborn fetus. Maude had read it and considered it fine, pretty readable, but definitely putdownable. The publisher knew what they were doing when they led publicity with Matthew’s face. Amniotic came out two months after Maude’s debut, a novella with an independent press, which maybe a hundred people read. Feral, about a boil growing on a queen’s inner thigh.

            The woman is still talking. “I was just so impressed. Who knew someone could be capable of capturing the voice of an unborn baby, but golly, you did it!” Matthew’s face is twisted into a version of gratitude. “Are you here for research? You must tell me.”

            “Sort of,” Matthew says. He looks askance at Maude, who does her best to keep her face neutral. She doesn’t want him to know that she knows who he is.

            “I can’t imagine a writer coming here and not writing about it,” the woman says.

            Matthew scratches at his chin. Maude recognizes this move. He regrets that he’s about to make the table uncomfortable. “My dad died in June. We’d talked about coming down here together. The last great frontier, all of that. He obviously didn’t make it, but. And, well, here I am. I guess I will probably write about it.” He gestures out through the windows. “It’s a grossly idyllic place to mourn.”

            Maude follows the table’s gaze, out toward where Matthew gestured at the snowcaps bobbing through the low roll of waves. She tries to think of the crayon colors for all that blue—indigo, bluebell, cornflower, denim—but grows bored with the sameness of it all. Where are the browns and reds of her loss? The green and orange of grief? Anger shivers across her skin, under her fingernails. She says, “Do you really think writing about him would help?”

Maude wants to swallow her words as soon as they’re out. The woman with the turquoise necklace looks furious, maybe in Matthew’s defense or maybe because Maude has shifted Matthew’s attention. Matthew is the only one who doesn’t seem shocked or appalled. He’s smiling.

            “It couldn’t hurt, could it?”

            “Too much too soon.” Maude pushes a potato into her mouth and chews.

            “Well, I’ll take that into consideration.” Matthew sets his knife on the rim of his plate. “Can I ask what brought you here?”

“I won a raffle.”

            “That’s a pretty generous raffle.” Matthew’s looking across at her and Maude understands what that gaze means. She looks away. The woman with the turquoise necklace glares in Maude’s direction. Maude wants to snap the necklace off her neck, wants the clasp to pinch at her skin, wants this woman to understand the sting of loss. In response to the woman’s question, “You have to tell us about your next book,” Matthew asks which expeditions she’s the most excited for. Maude bites into a butter-slick square of steak. A string of meat wedges itself between her back teeth. 

Maude dips her paddle through the clear water and looks down, trying to discern some shape, some movement, but it’s like the water’s clarity is so complete, it swallows itself. She weaves her way between the brash ice that peppers the cove. Water slaps against the kayak’s fiberglass hull. Sun bounces off the bright white of the untouched snow, so Maude has to squint in order to look around her at the other guests in their kayaks taking selfies with the ship behind them, then at the sheared-off faces of icebergs looming above. At a naturalist’s lecture yesterday, Maude learned that the bluest faces are newly calved, still fresh and dense and unbleached by the sun.

         A couple years before, Dana sent Maude an email with the text, “reminded me of you,” and a link to a video. Two scientists stand at the top of a bluff, next to a camera they’ve set to record an ice field. They’re recording a time lapse, so there’s space for them to wander around, take their own photos, sink their boots into the snow, open their mouths and taste the chill air. One of them is on the phone and the other says, “It’s starting, Adam, I think. Adam? It’s starting…” The way the ice cracks down the middle like an egg, revealing centuries of hidden snow. A boom. A break. An entire city-sized chunk: cleaved.

          Now, Maude pictures Dana as her calved bit, how much the cold air stings at the fresh face of that loss. She rows her kayak backward, keeping the big iceberg in her view, hoping it’ll break apart right here, right now. Knowing it won’t.

Maude is sitting in one of the lounge’s corner chairs, a visual history of dentistry splayed open on her lap and a wide view of that uncalved berg in front of her. Dana’s here, even if she isn’t, sitting in the empty chair at her side, wincing at every new illustration of extractions and long-rooted molars. Dana hated teeth but loved being creeped out. Once, after going to the dentist, she’d returned to their apartment and dumped a bag full of floss, lollipops, and one mold cast of a perfect row of teeth out onto Maude’s bed. Dana could afford whatever she wanted, and still, she stole little mementos wherever she went. “I deserve a reward,” she’d said before popping a lollipop between her lips. What she really meant was that she needed control, and taking these mementoes was the one real way she’d found to have it.

         A man’s hand descends into view, his pointer finger tapping at an illustration of a gaping mouth and mold-spotted teeth. “How it feels to write, yeah?”

         Maude watches Matthew put down two glasses of wine—one red, one white—on the small, round table between them, next to a clear bud vase with a single purple flower poking out. If Dana were here, she’d carefully pluck up that bud vase and lower it into her purse “for safe keeping.” Instead, Matthew lowers himself into Dana’s empty chair. He pulls his ankle up to rest on the opposite knee. His nose and cheeks are a burnished red. He gestures at the wine glasses. “Didn’t know which you’d prefer, so got both.”

         Maude picks up the glass of red, even though she prefers white. She can hear Dana telling her to hit on Matthew, to touch his elbow, go on, don’t be such a wuss. Just see what would happen. Men: another way Dana found control. As much as Maude hates Dana not being here, at least it means she doesn’t have to pretend to listen to her bad romance advice.

         “So, I have something to confess.” He clears his throat. “I, uh, knew who you were. Have known since before we left. I recognized you from that interview you gave last year to Bookforum, from that photo they took of you posing in the middle of Atlantic Avenue. Then I read Feral and—I haven’t read a book like that in I don’t know how long. Thank god she’s here, I thought when I saw you. I’d been feeling like such an outsider, and then, there you were! Another outsider.”

         Maude tries not to let him see her surprise. Matthew Carruth read her book. Matthew Carruth recognized her before she recognized Matthew Carruth. She shivers with discomfort and wonders what she’d been doing, when she didn’t know that someone was watching. She says the first thing that comes to mind. “I’m sorry about what I said at dinner.”

         “What? No. It’s okay. I loved the look on Lisa’s face.” Matthew scratches at his chin with the back of his hand. “I’ve been thinking about what you said. And I still disagree.”

         “Maybe you should think about it some more.”

         Matthew’s high trill of a laugh startles Maude. “Yeah, okay,” he says. “I’ll get back to you.” 

Back in her cabin, Maude pulls the room’s long, black desk until it faces the window, places the green bud vase with its purple morning glory in the corner—she hadn’t bothered hiding it in her purse, like Dana would have, just picked it up and walked out of the lounge with it—and opens her laptop. Dana bought these tickets so Maude would finally write her book, so Maude’s going to force herself to finally write her book. She’ll write with the view of floating floes and sunny, cold-bright sky. She’ll write with that absence like a growing maw beside her.

         At the top of the blank page, Maude places the tip of the character’s tongue against the molar and pushes. Nothing happens. The sentence is empty, cold. She deletes it and tries again. A description of roots burrowing into gums. A flaccid attempt at letting chunks of ice break off from the continent. A body that feels wrong, claimed by every country, not claimed by anyone. All of it is bad. Maude deletes, types, deletes, deletes, deletes. 

         Two truths and a lie.

         Dana’s voice, again. She scratches behind her ear like she can flick the voice away. But maybe she needs to exorcize Maude before she can turn her attention to that fictional, fickle molar. She’ll play this game that they played until they knew too much about each other. Before it became ‘three lies and no truths’ or ‘one truth and two lies’ or ‘no truths and no lies.’

         Okay, Maude thinks, I can start there. She puts her fingers on the keyboard and types, “Dana.” That’s all she has. She puts a full-stop after her name. At least that part feels right.

         Come on, M. I’m bored up here. Humor me. Two truths and a lie.

         Maude can’t not respond. She never ignored Dana, no matter how much she wanted to, and that can’t change now, even if Dana is just a voice in her head.

         I can’t play with someone who isn’t here.

         Sure you can. Try. Here, I’ll go first. Okay, two truths and a lie: I’m dead, I’ve slept with Clint Eastwood, and I have a birthmark shaped like Italy.

         That’s too easy.

         Just because I never showed you the birthmark doesn’t mean I don’t have it.

The boat passes through the Lemaire Channel at 6 a.m. and over the Antarctic Line at 11 p.m. The sun won’t set again until they turn around and head north. Passengers crowd into the bridge to watch the boat move from one side of the invisible line to the other. A waiter walks around with champagne to refill glass flutes. The captain rings a large bell and announces that they’ve passed over the line. When nothing else happens, the bridge empties. Passengers filter back into their cabins, pull their curtains against the bright, steady sun, and tuck themselves into bed.

         Maude doesn’t bother going back to her cabin. She knows she won’t be able to sleep. Exhaustion feels as far away as grass and trees and dirt. With her book, she heads to the top of the ship, sure she’ll have the library to herself and her memory of Dana. But then there’s Matthew, bent over a table, folding a blank sheet of paper. Before she can turn to leave, he’s saying, “Oh, Maude! Hi!” and “Guess I’m not the only one who couldn’t sleep.”

         Maude takes a seat and looks at the mess of papers across the table. She can only sort of guess what he was trying to do, based on the crumpled balls around his feet. A triangular, wrinkled thing sits on top of a stack of papers.

         “Not quitting my day job,” he says.

         “This seems pretty expert to me.”

         “My dad used to do origami all the time. I never asked him to show me how, and now.” Matthew picks up the deformed crane and flicks it through the air. It doesn’t fly far, isn’t even halfway graceful, before it tumbles, bounces off the table, and lands upside down on the carpet.

         “What was your dad like?”

         It’s not so much like Matthew had been waiting for someone to ask, but more like Maude’s question interrupted an inner tally he’s been keeping, just waiting to vocalize it. Matthew describes his father’s garden first, how it grew down the hillside behind his house, how his father spent every morning out back, checking on the flowers and the blueberry bushes and the hydrangeas. The orchard was his favorite, a small square of earth at the far end of the property, where he grew Asian pears and lemons. “He was the best librarian that high school had ever seen,” Matthew says. “When he retired, they threw a party for him at Applebee’s and then renamed the library in his honor. I haven’t been back since. But I’ve seen pictures.”

         As Matthew talks, Maude compares his dad to Dana. Dana refused to go into their school’s library because, she said, it smelled like old ham. Matthew’s dad loved watching Law & Order in the morning with his coffee; Dana watched episodes of SVU muted so she could make up her own dialogue. Matthew’s dad’s favorite meal was mushroom risotto; Dana’s was box macaroni and cheese with extra cheese stirred in.

         “I thought I knew what it’d be like to lose someone. But you don’t know. Not until you do.” From the expression on Matthew’s face, Maude can tell he thinks he’s giving her a warning, not describing her life back to her. It takes everything she has not to throw her book in his face.

Maude puts the poorly made origami crane on her desk and opens her computer. Still, that same page, blank except for “Dana.” Matthew didn’t worry that putting his dad to the page would erase pieces of who his dad had been. Maude wishes she had that confidence.

         Maybe the thing Maude is having the hardest time squaring is the before and the after and how that schism should look on the page. It feels false in a way fiction never does to Maude. The disarticulated accident would look like: Dana, driving; Dana, crashing; Dana, empty-eyed; Dana, gone. And then what?

         In the document, Maude starts to list the things she remembers Dana stealing: three petri dishes, a ceramic frog, a stack of metal condiment cups, a book of hymns from her lab partner’s mom’s memorial, two Planned Parenthood pens, a butterfly hair clip.

         Maude deletes the list and goes into the bathroom. Beneath a steaming shower, she worries at her back tooth. She wonders what her tongue might dislodge.

On shore, a naturalist named Tomas, a forty-something Argentinian, leads Maude’s group toward a rocky crag at the top of a steep hill. Maude does her best to keep her gaze on the colonies and mother penguins they pass, and not on the red patch of Matthew’s parka, just a few people ahead of her. When they reach the top, Maude drops her parka onto a round of snow. It’s warm and bright so high up. The wind has dropped off. Matthew settles on the rock and Maude sits beside him. Red mites swarm over the exposed rock between them.

         To their right, a glacier stands tall and long over the cold, clear water. “You know,” Matthew says, “calving is a form of ice ablation.” Matthew presses two fingers against his parka’s front pocket, as if pointing at his heart. “The ice separating from the glacier. Every time I think of that, I think of my dad, getting a cardiac ablation to fix his a-fib.”

         “Ablation with the double meaning. Like cleaving,” Maude says. Matthew rubs his palms down his thighs. Maude wants him to look back at her. She’s about to tell him about her project—the ice rift, the cavity—when Tomas kneels on the snow next to her.

         “Good,” Tomas says. “I think I’ve timed this right. I was hoping.” He gestures for the other passengers to gather round and points at the glacier. As they watch, the glacier face cracks. It happens slow, and then all at once. Already, Maude can sense the blue behind it, the ice that hasn’t seen air in decades. The glacier’s break ricochets through the bay.

*

Maude’s list of things that Dana stole—an ex-boyfriend’s work ID card, a shawl from a boutique where the clerk had yelled at her for tracking in mud, a set of wax taper candles, two air plants that she immediately (accidentally) killed—becomes a list of every word that’s made Maude feel closer to the landscape outside— bergy bits, air bubbles, cataclysm, glaciation, erosion, katabatic, tectonic, rookery—becomes a cavity, a growth, a semi-colon, an ellipse, a blank page.

“Hold on!” Thuds, muttered curses, the soft pattering of feet across carpet, and then the cabin door swings open and Matthew is there, wearing a loose white t-shirt and flannel pajama pants. When Maude sees his heavy blinks and the soft slouch of his shoulders, she takes a step back. “I’m sorry,” she says, “I just. I couldn’t sleep, and I thought. I should…”

         Before Maude can turn, Matthew reaches out, wraps his large hand around her forearm, and pulls her inside. His cabin is three times the size of hers, with its small living room that opens out into a bedroom and tall windows that frame the banks of brightly lit snow the boat drifts past, headed toward its morning mooring. 

         “I would’ve cleaned,” Matthew says. Maude is about to protest, but his hand takes hers and wraps it around a rocks glass he’s just filled with a finger of whiskey. He grabs his parka and long johns from where they’re piled on the couch and gestures for her to sit. There’s enough room for him to join her on the couch, but instead he pulls over a chair from the dining table.

         Now that she’s here and he’s there, looking across at her, waiting for her to say something, Maude doesn’t know what she was thinking. She leans forward and grabs the book next to his heel, expecting a nonfiction history of the sociology of whales, but instead it’s a ragged copy of a Clive Cussler mystery. “My dad’s favorite,” Matthew says. His voice sounds hoarse, tired. Maude flips through the pages. Some of them are marked up with a ballpoint pen—a star here, an underline there. Remnants of Matthew’s dad.

         “Dana was an Agatha Christie girlie. Read all of them twice, I’m pretty sure.” Maude traces a line of pencil across the page, not realizing she said Dana’s name out loud until Matthew leans forward and asks, “Who’s Dana?” She wants to take it back immediately, but there Dana is, out in the open. Dana would’ve loved that. Maude slaps the book closed and says, “My best friend.”

         “Where’s she, then? She make you come here alone?”

         “Something like that.” Part of Maude wants to tell him the truth, wants to tell him about the car crash. But a bigger part of Maude feels like a black hole. She tips the whiskey into it, then crosses the room for a refill. She offers the bottle to Matthew, but he shakes his head.

         “Did you go to the lecture yesterday?” Maude asks. She paces in a wide circle, tracing her finger over the pieces of him strewn around the room. She feels him watching her, but he doesn’t make a move to stand or ask her to stop. “I didn’t see you there.”

         “I had a hard one yesterday. Decided to stay in.”

         A slick of hatred coils around Maude’s heart. He claims his grief so easily. Yesterday at the lecture, Tomas had talked about how rising temperatures meant centuries old snow was melting away, revealing long-preserved unknowns. Scientists had unearthed a mummified colony of penguins; their eight-hundred-year-old corpses looked like they’d just died, their feathers still sewn to the penguin meat. Traces of a supernova had been found near a German research station––ancient cosmic dust. A satellite recently mapped a mess of tectonic plates beneath Antarctica, revealing what the naturalist called a “graveyard of continents.” Part of Maude loves all these stories bobbing to the surface like bones. Part of her wishes they’d stayed hidden, like maybe there are some stories we’re not meant to know.

         Maude reaches a sideboard, where a dozen malformed origami tumble in an open box. She pulls out one yolk-yellow creation that looks like a giraffe or a boat, when she feels Matthew standing beside her. “Please,” he says, taking the origami from her and placing it back in the box.

         “You’re getting better.”

         “I’m not.”

         For the first time since meeting Matthew, Maude senses an edge in his answer. A small spark she’s been waiting to feel grows in the base of her belly. He’s standing close enough for their arms to touch, for her to smell his cologne—Cedarwood? Bergamot? Dana would’ve known—for her to see the outline of his muscles beneath the plain white T he’s wearing. It’s enough. She takes a step toward him. His nostrils flare, but he doesn’t step away.

         The kiss is soft, nice. Maude opens her lips, teases her tongue against his. The first thought Maude has is that they should’ve been doing this a lot sooner. The second is that she can’t wait to tell Dana about Matthew’s technique—nice, sloppy, could use some work. She reaches her hands forward to clasp at his shirt, surprised to find that her body is eager to feel itself flush against his, but her hands meet air and Matthew’s standing a foot back, his chin lowered into his chest, his ears a bright, hot red.

         Every self-protective nerve in Maude lights on fire. He holds up his hand and shakes his head. “I’m sorry,” he says. From the lilt in his voice, the soft drop of each syllable, it’s clear that he is. Maude hates him. “I’m not really myself right now. Maybe later? When things aren’t so fresh.” Matthew cups his palm over the back of his neck and looks up at Maude through unnecessarily thick eyelashes. She stops herself from rolling her eyes.

         “I get it,” she says, even though she doesn’t. She wants to yell at him that she’s raw too, that’s the whole point. They’re both lesser versions of themselves, and wouldn’t sleeping together fix that for a little while? But he’s already retreated, pulled on a linty sweater with a faded college logo on the front, grabbed a water bottle from the mini fridge. 

         “I can’t trust myself right now, and my feelings.” He’s still talking. Had he been talking this whole time, and Maude had just stopped listening? “And I don’t want you to get caught up in the wreckage of grief.”

         “I don’t mind wreckage,” Maude says. She hears how weak the words sound. The chuckle Matthew allows her is small and wet. They stand like that, looking at each other from across the room, for a minute. Maybe longer. Maude wishes she knew what Matthew saw when he looked at her. If she seems as pathetic and weak as she feels, standing there, less than she’d ever been before and getting smaller every day.

The ship’s gift shop is bright and gaudy and heavy with merchandise: ship-branded pullovers and fleeces and vests and gloves and t-shirts, gourmet chocolate, stuffed seals, stacks of postcards, even cufflinks and necklaces with whale fin charms. The cashier is busy flicking through a gossip rag and smacking on her gum, thoroughly ignoring Maude as Maude trails her hand over mugs printed with maps and maps printed with cartoon penguins.

         Maude stops in front of a display of leatherbound journals, embossed with the outline of Antarctica. She presses her thumb over the peninsula, trying to smother the area where the ship is now. Dana would’ve bought this journal for Maude, would’ve wrapped it up and written a nice note on the first page about filling the journal with all of Maude’s “brilliant thoughts,” and Maude would’ve thanked her and quietly deposited it with all the other unused journals that Dana had bought her.

         Dana’s absence gapes, widens. Maude picks up an iceberg-scented candle, rolls it from one palm to the other.

Over the intercom, the captain says, “Get your jackets on. Get your boots on. Come meet us in the mudroom.” Maude glances outside––it’s still morning or it’s midnight or it’s noon––and sees a cove, which has frozen over into a wide tract of ice. Somehow, the ship has wedged itself into the thick layer of ice, like a pick lodged in a slab of stone. Maude’s not eager to be around the other passengers and the idea of seeing Matthew makes her shudder.

         The passengers fan out across the ice in clusters. Some take photos of mountains in the distance, some take photos of the boat, some train their cameras on the lumbering ice at the other end of the cove. Maude moves off to the side, jumps a few times to test the ice beneath her, then sits and crosses her legs. She likes being at this distance, being able to see the threats well before they approach. At least Antarctica has that going for it––mostly, you see your predator as soon as they see you.

         Of course, until Maude hears the crackle of a radio to her left and Tomas lowers himself to the ground beside her. He tells her that the ice sheet they’re on is an acre wide and will be gone within the month. He lists everything he’s seen that he doesn’t think he’ll see again: huge glaciers that have vanished between trips, receding ice shelves, ice slabs covering the water. He says he misses the continent already, even while he’s here, standing on its snow, looking up at its mountain ridges, breathing its air. She wonders where that loss lives in his body and if it aches like Dana’s loss does in hers.

         Maude fills her palm with a crackle of hardened snow. She wishes she could take it back onto the boat with her, tuck it into a glass bottle and keep it. She wishes so many things.

Maude loves scotch. She thought she was a gin girl, but turns out, she loves how gross scotch is. She loves how three glasses of scotch make her feel. And she’s fine with Tomas’s hand, squeezing her upper thigh.

Maude tells Dana if she just goes on the blank page already, Maude will only write good things about her. She’ll describe Dana’s luscious long locks. She’ll write about all the community service Dana meant to do, about the demand for Dana on the four dating apps she rotated through, about Dana’s commitment to her skincare routine. Maude won’t write down any of Dana’s jokes that didn’t land or about the burnt rice probably still stuck to the bottom of the pot in Dana’s sink. But the cursor blinks and the page stays empty.

         Maude rearranges the trinkets on her desk—the champagne flute, the origami, the ratty Clive Cussler book, the iceberg-scented candle, the silver cufflinks—and then rearranges them all again. Dana’s being too quiet. She knows what Dana would say. Something about having a body. Something about needing to stop overthinking.

Tomas is leaning against the frame when Maude opens the door. He’s wearing a pair of stained jeans that look one size too tight and a loose t-shirt whose hem dips below his collarbone. He hands Maude a crinkled water bottle, half full of what looks like fifty dollars worth of scotch.

            “You weren’t in the lounge,” he says. Maude can’t tell him how seeing that shelf of ice grow smaller through the windows in the library made her feel compacted and impossible, how it made her realize that her time on the ship was coming to an end and all she’d managed to accomplish was blaming her best friend for an absence that couldn’t be helped. But Maude doesn’t want to say any of this, so she accepts the water bottle, and then somehow it’s not scotch in her mouth, but Tomas’s tongue. He presses her back against her open door. It’s not awful—it’s something—so Maude doesn’t push him away. She opens her mouth beneath his.

While his tongue presses against her gums, Maude imagines syringes and aspirators, incisors and root canals, enamel and milk teeth. She pictures how his skull must look beneath the skin, his tongue like it’s part of a plastic model kit on display in a dentist’s office.

            The door slams shut behind them. Tomas backs Maude up against her desk, one finger playing at the waistline of her jeans, when he stops and takes a step back. Maude’s body floods with relief, until she sees that he’s looking at the objects lined up along the back edge of the desk. The way he says, “cufflinks?” she knows that he knows they didn’t come wrapped up in tissue paper in a ship-branded gift bag. His gaze flicks over the champagne flute, the candle, the cutlery.

            “It’s an accident,” Maude says, not knowing exactly what she means.

            Tomas shakes his head, even as his thumbs rub circles over her hipbones. “The captain should know.”

How can Maude explain to Tomas that she was trying to fill the absence, plug it with anything she could find. Doing what Dana would’ve done was the only way Maude could remember that she was here, in a body, and Dana wasn’t, and eventually that was going to have to be okay.

Instead, Maude says, “I’ll return them,” and pushes Tomas out the door.

With the candle, the cufflinks, and the origami placed to the left of the keyboard and the journal, the two forks and one knife, and the champagne flute placed to the right, Maude opens the empty Dana document and begins to type.

For the first time in Maude doesn’t know how long, the words flow. Everything Maude puts to the page feels both urgent and true. First, Maude writes about the summer she and Dana became friends—realizing they shared a boyfriend, angrily sipping lemonade from glasses as sweaty as their furrowed brows, comparing notes on his sex techniques, agreeing to break up with him and move in together. They’d lived in that mouse-infested Bushwick apartment for five years, before Dana moved to Tennessee because her nonprofit work needed her more than Maude did.

After she’d gone, Maude kept finding gaps in her belongings, dustless rings on her shelves where an award or a jar or a vase had been. Like Dana had insisted on continuing to remind Maude of her absence, even as Maude got more and more used to the silence every day. Now, Maude places that vase and jar and award back onto the shelf in her memory, alongside the afternoons she and Dana spent eating General Tso’s chicken and hate-watching Gilmore Girls; mornings when Dana made Maude the worst french toast she’d ever had, but she’d never had anyone make her food before, so she couldn’t complain; and late nights when neither of them could sleep, so instead Dana told Maude stories about her childhood, which Maude chose to believe, no matter how many absurd turns they took.

The necklace. The candle. The champagne flute. They’d worked. It was like they’d brought slices of Dana into the room, the slices that Dana had once taken away, all those years ago. Maybe they hadn’t been working because no one knew what she’d done. But now Tomas knew. And now Dana was on the page.

When they pass back through the Lemaire Channel, headed north again, finally, no passengers gather on the bridge, no bells are rung, no bottles of champagne popped. It’s two days until they’re in the Drake Passage. Four days until Maude can get off the ship, get away from everything, fly home.

            The boat sets down anchor at Port Lockroy. Groups take turns visiting the outpost, a black house that stands stark against the thin scrim of snow around it. Maude runs her fingers over the Port Lockroy–branded items for sale inside—paperweights, coin purses, trinket dishes, and hip flasks. She steps around the other passengers, crowded into the small room, and sends a small “thank you” smile toward the two cashiers before stepping outside.

The glass whale paperweight is cool and slick against Maude’s palm, where she’s tucked it into the front pocket of her hoodie. She walks to the far edge of the rocky beach, on the other side of a dingy that looks rotted through, its hull ragged and darkly bare-boned, and lowers herself onto a medium-sized, flat stone with a view of the cove and the anchored ship straight ahead.

Maude sees Matthew leave the small hut. She sees him see her, and then decide to walk in her direction. He pauses a few feet away, his jacket folded over his arm and his hands pushed into his pant pockets. “You didn’t have to leave the other night.” Before, Matthew had always seemed overly confident to Maude. Now he just looks small and silly, shifting his weight from one leg to the other like a wobbling dashboard hula dancer.

“You didn’t want me there.” Maude can hear how taut the words are.

“I didn’t say that, did I?” The sound of the rocks scrabbling against each other as Matthew lowers himself to the ground next to Maude makes Maude wince. She knows it can’t be comfortable. He clears his throat again and says, “It’s just been hard to think about anything else, with my dad still so present for me.”

He shakes off a handful of pebbles that have pressed themselves into the heel of his hand, then pulls his knees into his chest. He reminds Maude of an oversized tween. She’s surprised he hasn’t grown a constellation of acne across his cheeks overnight. It makes her want to pat him on the head and tell him everything will be okay.

She thinks about Dana’s first kiss—a pimply twelve-year-old named Dylan who had a collection of My Little Ponys, one of which Dana stole after the kiss. “You don’t have to feel like that, you know,” she says. “You can choose not to.”

“Excuse me?” The words come out as prickled as the pebbles he just swept from his palm.

“I felt that way after Dana died. Like the ground had become quicksand and everything I tried to grab at help burnt my skin. Nothing was safe.”

“Dana, your best friend.” He says this, dropping his chin into his chest, as if carefully rearranging some pieces in his mind.

“That idiot died and now I’m here without her, and the only way I’ve ever felt okay is—” Maude pulls the glass whale out of her hoodie pocket and places it in Matthew’s upturned palms. She looks down at Matthew, expecting something like gratitude but only finding a veiled sadness as he rolls the whale over and picks at the price sticker, still pressed into the left fin. Maude pushes forward. “I never understood why she did it, but then I took your origami and it was like the world solidified, just a bit, around me. It stopped being this treacherous jello. Not because I was molding myself back into the world, but because the world was molding itself to be more like me. The world was learning loss alongside my loss, was holding some of my loss for me, and that pressure on my heart became just a little more bearable. You get it, right?”

“I don’t know what to do with that,” Matthew says, his words a blurry mutter. He pushes himself up to standing, careful to keep the whale from touching the rocks, and Maude scrambles after him, grabbing for his wrist, convinced that if she can just get him to understand, it will make both of them better. Matthew flinches backward at her touch.

“You should try it. It’s like finding a back door through the grief.” Maude’s not completely sure she knows what she’s trying to do, but part of her thinks that if he could only understand what she means, things would be okay. They’d fuck and she’d sit next to him in his oversized cabin, writing about Dana while he wrote about his dad. They’d grieve together in a linear way that made sense.

But when he says, “Try stealing?” and she can hear the drip of malice in his words, she knows it’s all gone sideways.

“No, I—” Maude’s thoughts are all knotted up. She knows she’s losing him. “Whatever your dad would have done. Try that. It’ll be like he’s here with you again. Like before.”

Matthew tugs his arm from Maude’s grip and rubs his opposite hand over where the skin has gone white. “I don’t need your advice.”

“It’s not advice. It’s just something that’s working. And I think—”

“Working is probably a strong word.”

“I know you miss your dad.”

“Fuck you.” Matthew’s already walking away when he spits this over his shoulder at Maude. The words are filled with a vitriol she’s never seen in him. She wants to take it all back, but part of her knows that she can’t. She did the right thing, explaining herself to him. No matter what he chooses to do with it.

Maude watches as Matthew walks back into the gift shop and, a few moments later, emerges empty handed.

Dana is a geomagnetic pole. Dana is a gale. Dana is hoarfrost, sleet, and sea ice. Dana is white-out. Dana is wind chill. Dana is disappearing.

It’s the last formal dinner on the ship. By the time Maude makes it into the dining room, there’s only one chair left, opposite Matthew and flanked by passengers Maude vaguely recognizes. Waiters come around with wine. Tables are released one by one to go to the buffet, where steam rolls from silver food warmers filled with potatoes and steak and chicken. Maude had been hungry, but now that she’s here, she only has an appetite big enough for one cut of meat and a heap of salad. She notices Matthew notice her plate, but he doesn’t say anything. The salad crunches loudly as she eats, letting the conversation continue around her, without her, until she hears her name, a cough, her name again.

            “Maude, right?” The woman to Maude’s left asks. “Matthew says you’re a writer.”

            “Oh.” She’s surprised Matthew mentioned her. She wants to know what else he said. “Yeah, I mean. Yeah.”

            “What brought you on the trip?”

            Maude tries to remember how she answered this question before, at the beginning, when Matthew asked. She can’t remember, and she finds her body settling into an exhaustion too big to come up with another lie. She makes eye contact with Matthew across the table and says, “I’m afraid sometimes that if a tooth loosens, Antarctica will float away.” Everyone at the table frowns, so she keeps going. She tells them about the slab of continent that’s been eroding and the fissure that runs through it like a promise. And then she tells them about the molar, how loose it is in the gums, and how easy it would be to ruin everything: the mouth, the continent, the ocean.

            The faces around the table all twist in different permutations of confusion, including Matthew’s. Maude doesn’t mind. She’s lost her molar, her continent, her ocean.

            “Just one jiggle,” she says. “That’s all it takes.”

The last time Maude saw Dana, it was through a computer screen. Dana’s face pixelated and lagged as they talked about family and meal prep and reality TV. It was a slow, quiet conversation. Neither had many updates. Work was fine. Home was fine. What else was there to say? They carried their computers from room to room as they folded clothes, put the dishes away, read through the mail. And then Dana’s face froze and the call cut out. Neither bothered to call back. They had so much time. They’d try again later.

The boat is empty again. They’re back in the Drake Passage—only one more day until they reach land; reality; browns and reds and greens. Tomorrow, Maude will step on solid ground and the return to stillness will feel like a different form of destabilization. She’s so close to home, she can almost smell the stale air in her apartment, feel the scratch of her in-need-of-washing cotton sheets. How far she’s gone only to have nothing change.

Today, the stern bucks against the waves. Maude follows a rope down the hall, up two flights of stairs, through a heavy door, out onto the empty deck. She’s not supposed to be out here, but what she’s here to do won’t take long. It’s late and she’s chosen a spot on the deck that the bridge can’t see. She’s sure she won’t be caught. The sky has darkened to a cobalt blue—the darkest it’s been all week—and water lashes up from below, spraying over Maude and making her thin pajamas heavy.

            Maude doesn’t have enough space in her suitcase for everything she’s taken over the last week, but she refuses to return them. Matthew, the ship’s owner, that woman with the box-red hair—they don’t need to keep their origami, their necklace, their snowglobe. She hopes they’ll be able to feel the moment the items they go underwater. She hopes she’s not the only one who has to learn the art of loss. Who has to figure out what to do in the after.

            The origami catches in the wind, fluttering and flailing before disappearing. The necklace, the candle, the racecar, the journal—all drop quickly and cleanly into the water. Maude watches for the moment they hit the wake, but it’s impossible to tell the small splash they make from the boat’s much larger scrape through the forty-foot waves.

            Maude doesn’t know if letting these items loose will also loosen Dana from her page. The thought of that opens a fresh ache inside her chest, the width and texture of a pinecone. The water bottle, the sunglasses. They’re all molars that have come unrooted, entire continents that Maude is saying goodbye to, until all that’s left in their place is freshly calved flesh.

            Maude lets the snowglobe roll off her palm. She watches it drop. She thinks she sees a splash when it disappears.

I still have hands and feet and eyes – this will serve me well. I am somewhere in a winery. The vines hang and hands work to pick the grapes: frantic, moving, cloth-like hands. I am looking out at the expanse of the Western Cape. I can see the lights of Stellenbosch in the distance where the students are. Where, possibly, my son is studying – it would be helpful to still know these things.

I don’t know exactly where my feet are heading. Those scampy stumps have a mind of their own, one I can never control. What drove me from the Atlantic seaboard to here was the pure instinct of these two feet. They brought me to this strange country in the first place. 

Herbert would be at work. He wouldn’t know for hours that I was gone. So run. Feel the magic, the heat dripping. Think of summer holidays running through the sand dunes in Gullane, the North Sea ice still clinging to your body, draining the Scottish soul before it had the chance even to be half-filled. Here, the wind blows but the earth is silent. Nothing moves but working hands, whistles in the distance, the occasional rumbling of a jeep engine. It could mean war, or it could mean nothing. 

I am not here to interpret anymore. I never was. I was here for love – something like that. That word felt awfully heavy but, then again, Herbert was a destiny laid out. When I met him in that dusty bar in Chelsea – was it 1970? – I knew in a second that he was a man I wanted. Oh, the way he talked to the staff: controlling, barbed but polite. The deference of the others there. The opulent wealth that he was never obtuse about. To a young model making her way through London, Herbert seemed like the perfect conduit to the inner circle. Back then my accent was mocked – it was the only part of me that appeared unconventional. Herbert liked that, back then. He bought me a drink before anybody else in the room had even sat down. 

Now, we must keep moving. If the jeep is the war, tanks coming in, if the townships are burning, then we must keep moving. I have time, but the Cape is not a safe place to linger too long past nightfall. Herbert’s goons will soon be swarming, needle-eyes looking for white amongst the black – a woman amongst the men. In this country of division and classifications, to be invisible was impossible. But I will try; God, I will try. Maybe I will cross a border. Maybe I will reach Durban or East London and pay a man to take me across in his boat to a new reality. 

Among the vines I think, Soon these words, this language, will mean nothing to me, I’m sure. Soon it will be a memory, lost to me. Me and June, my old English-speaking companion, mocked it in the tearooms, for it was an ugly way to speak, we thought. English is much more serene, we thought, but since independence it is now the second language in a country which has over thirty. Herbert would laugh and say, “Afrikaans is our heritage.” And later, while watching the news: “Look at how the Africans speak with all their clicks – so far away from anything a dictionary could document.” It was foreign to his ears, but it just made me think of something in the wind blowing through the veld: ringing, ringing, ringing. The voices of ancestors ringing, ringing, ringing. The voice of the country ringing, ringing, ringing. I was hearing it more and more often now. Even the maids would speak it to their children in their quarters, where they used to speak only broken English for their education. 

A long time ago, when you were out shooting in the country, I heard the same whispers of the language these wine workers are speaking now. It is different from the ones I usually hear. I don’t know the names but I have heard it only once before, spoken by the boy in the corner, huddled under the bushes – a long way from the Cape Flats or wherever he had come from, out in the wilderness.

Can you remember the voice that haunted these valleys? They had shot an eland, Herbert and his friends. The black boy watched the bullet so intensely and analyzed the death of the animal as though it were a human experiment. I think I was the only one who saw him. He had on a ragged Manchester United strip, a pair of shorts, and a tatty leather jacket. I let him stay hidden. I thought he may be with the terrorists, but still, this seemed like something to do.

The boy whispered to a figure who was obscured to me. He spoke in this language, this strange tongue. He seemed to be looking for something. I thought it may be a militia, and I thought it was a deep irony that the police commissioner might die being hunted like sport. I could imagine the blood leaving his body and saw him dying on a hilltop like a Voortrekker. He was born in the city and knew nothing of the farms, but to die like a farmer protecting his land like the Boers of old seemed to be every white man’s dream. We will die here as folk heroes and be remembered as villains. 

He didn’t die and the boy disappeared soon after. Later that day, it was discovered, some wiring had gone missing from an animal’s cage.

I must stop looking at this woman now, in the vineyard, for she looks scared. I always hated that look of fear. It’s why I don’t look at Black people very often; even my maid must turn away when I enter. Herbert likes to stare right into their eyes. 

First, before I move, I will go into the farm and ask the owner for some water. I will then ask him for directions to a shop where I will buy what I need. It is early enough in my escape that this holds little risk, but I need to get plenty of supplies while I still can – as many supplies as I can carry. To deal with the man at the farm, I would need my wits about me. Indeed, he would think I was trouble out here all alone; then he would see me and think I was in trouble, then lastly he would hear the surname ‘du Plessis’ and think he was in trouble. 

I have to work out how to get to the farm from his wineries without immediately being labeled a thief, or worse, a worker leaving before they were permitted. I can see the white facade of his house, the well-maintained green garden patch outside, a pond like a moat, a fence, guard dogs. The vineyard’s centerpiece surrounded by those cloth-like hands: picking, picking, picking. You can’t stay here, though, lying amongst the vineyards. The man will find you eventually. Maybe the police will know by then, maybe your picture will be on the TV.

Better to go now while I’m still invisible. So stand up, look at the workers and ask for their silence. They will listen to me, for I look official, like the wife of the vineyard owner. Hell, they probably can’t tell the difference. I probably am her, just as the voices here probably sound like the little boy in the football strip to me. When I make the ‘ssshhh’ gesture towards them, they say nothing. I creep around the bushes, around the back of the house to the front. I start to imagine the landscape as a chess board and me as a piece, with the liberty to move in any way I want. I approach the house, ring the bell, and watch a young man in his checkered shirt come down. 

“Tannie, what is it? Are you okay?” 

Checkmate. 

“Come in for a tea, Auntie,” he says to me. “Come in and we will be safe.” For outside, the hands are still moving and the workday is not yet over. The curfew had not yet been imposed, the military jeep was not yet an enforcer, just an observer. But wait until night falls. Maybe I will see the flames and hear the sirens we read so much about. This would make me happy. I would like to see a little bit of destruction. I don’t hate this country, nor do I love it, but to watch something burn is exhilarating – even an inanimate object such as a piece of paper, lit alight by a schoolboy until it is cindered ash. That’s how I feel about dear old Suid-Afrika: a piece of paper slowly smoldering. Now I was a jumping ember.

Scotland burned for me a long time ago. Now, it is a place of memories as opposed to a country, but maybe that’s all a country is. And if the memories are different for everyone, then everyone has a different country. That means there are six billion countries; that means this place doesn’t exist. This is why, Herbert, your memories are useless, your heritage a sham, because this land is a land is a land is a land, just like Scotland is a land is a land is a land is a land; and feet walk and different faces smile and cry, bodies buried underneath rot and time’s needle moves. Stay stagnant, for the land doesn’t.

Oh, I used to talk about these things in cafes in London. That seems like a long time ago, when the world had no passport and no tramlines; when there was no signs to say, “You can’t step here”. Ot if there was, I barely noticed them. Now, I tend to stick to home and to cooking. Herbert doesn’t mind what I do as long as I cook for him and let him have sex with me twice a week. These are the two constants of our marriage; they keep the wheels of his life spinning, his business booming. 

But now I have gone. Now that I have slipped, I can’t recover that reality. And the reality of the passion I had in the past with different men, young men, is a bygone one. It is not a question of returning to London, it is that the 60s are a time I can never have back – they were freedom, music, hash; I don’t know if they existed in the same way here. I had an image which could be captured irrespective of whose arm was around my waist. My disgraces were all still ahead of me, and to be disgraced seemed then like the greatest thing ever. Now it just seems like a headache. Could you imagine your figure in a bikini now, or a tight-fitting Dolce & Gabbana piece? It would make you laugh.

I’m accepting the young man’s offer. He called me “Auntie”. I’ve never learned to love that particular Afrikaner deference to age; it just makes me feel old. The house is large but ramshackle. And who is the boy? He looks to be in his early twenties; he has an unkempt beard and a tired look. It is clear he is not the owner as he takes me through to the kitchen. 

“You want tea?” he says.

“Tea would be lovely,” I smile politely.

“Sit down on the sofa; make yourself comfortable. My dad will be back soon and you can tell him what’s going on.” 

He is heating up water in the stove; the back door is open and the dogs roam, patrolling up the edge of the barbed-wire fence. I don’t know what to tell the owner when he comes. I need to think of a good reason for pitching up at the door of a random vineyard that doesn’t make me seem dangerous. The boy pours the hot water onto the teabag but doesn’t let it settle; for two seconds he swirls it around and then quickly takes it out and puts it in the bin. The tea tastes ghastly when he brings it to me. He offers his hand.

“Johan.” 

“Pleased to meet you, Johan.” 

“You too. What brings you here? Are you okay?” He looks me over with a sense of politeness, respect, and concern – the holy trinity.

“I’m fine, just lost.”

“Oh well, we are just outside Stellenbosch. Where is your accent from?” 

“Scotland.” 

“A Brit. Oh, my dad won’t like that,” he chuckles. “What brings you here?” 

“I’ve lived here for 18 years. I’m married to a South African in Cape Town.” 

“My dad will give you a lift back to the city if you’d like,” he says kindly, smiling. “It’s not safe to make the journey alone, with the current situation. My dad knows the route; it’s a little longer than usual but –” 

“I don’t want to go back to Cape Town. I’m heading to Durban.” 

He looks at me inquisitively. “You’ve got a long way to go, tannie, a long way. Do you not have a car?” 

“No, but I need to find a friend of mine. It’s important.” 

“Well, okay. What’s your name again?” 

I pause. “Linda. Linda Clark.” Don’t tell him you are Sarah du Plessis and he will trust you more… 

“Well, Linda – my dad will be back soon. Until then, please make yourself comfortable.”

But all I could see was the mess, the heat shining through the windows illuminating the stub of a rifle. 

*

When the owner returns, he turns out to be a man whose stature does not match that of his farm. He is much smaller than his son and he wears a white shirt and brown trousers. Still, he commands the kind of respect I only hold for Herbert, and even that is now fading. He talks to the boy outside and then introduces himself. He says very little.

“Hello, Linda. You should stay with us tonight.” 

“Oh, no, it’s okay. I’m just looking for directions to the shop –” 

“Curfew is coming soon; you shouldn’t be out.” 

“But I need to –” 

“No, lady, I won’t take no for an answer. We can’t have the good women of this country out alone when the place is burning. You will sleep, and tomorrow we phone your husband, ja?” 

I don’t want to stay, but I know resistance is futile. I know he won’t listen to those words; and I know what he said is right. He continues, taking my silence as a yes: “We have a spare room, please take it; Johan will show you.” That is all he says, and then he disappears again. Before he does, he picks up the rifle – this is the main thing I notice. 

When Johan shows me the room, I see that it is a farmer’s room. I haven’t slept somewhere so small since the 60s – since London squats and, before those, Govan tenements. I was poor then, poor as can be, but now I hardly remember it. Now for one night again I will sleep like a member of staff; a high-ranking one with her own room, but still staff. I guess it will have to do. I guess I will need some food.

Johan says, “Is this okay for the night? I know it’s not perfect, but it is safe. Pa makes sure.” I’m sure he does. I’m sure the fence keeps you safe. I’m sure the expanse of the Cape, though, harbours many shadows, and some shadows are smarter than others. Smarter even than the blunt instruments used by your father. His gun and his fences can’t hold out forever – or maybe they can, I don’t know. As long as they work for the night, nothing else matters. I will leave early in the morning before the phone call can be made, before I can provide him with a number I don’t have.

“I’ll leave you to get comfortable. I’ll be here if you need anything.”

“I’m terribly sorry, Johan, but I am quite hungry.”

“Ja, ja, of course you are,” he grins. “I can make some chicken? Or I might have some boerewors?”

“Chicken is good.”

“Of course, give me half an hour.”

I sat there for forty minutes, watching the walls. There were three books and only one in English: an Agatha Christie murder mystery. I read it with intrigue until he called me, knocking on my door.

“Let’s have some chicken then, eh?” He smiled. I was starting to like this boy – polite, well turned out, and funny; kind of like my son. They were both army skippers as well; they must be.

“So, Johan, why aren’t you out there with the SADF?”

He looked at me, worried. “I’m just back.” 

“So, you have already served your conscription? You don’t look old enough.” 

“Ja, ja, well, I have a youthful face, but I was out in Angola.” 

“Okay, enough said.” 

“Yes, better not to talk about it. I might go back out if I can’t stay here.” 

“What, to the townships?” 

He shrugged. “You know this is the last chance for us in Africa. I have to fight. What happened to Rhodesia can’t happen here, you know. Anyway, let’s not get started on politics. An English and an Afrikaner, eh? Never ends well.” He laughed. “But we must be united. Tell me about your life in Cape Town.” His eyes lit up. “What does such a beautiful woman do with herself in the city, huh? I bet you have such an exciting life.”

“Not really, Johan. I’m a housewife.” 

“Ah, the domesticated woman! How many kids? Who is your husband? What does he do?” 

“You ask a lot of questions.” 

“Who doesn’t? You just turned up here like a ghost.” 

I couldn’t help but laugh and smile at his youthful arrogance. Oh, the boy was sweet; he had fight and candor and passion – all misdirected, of course, but when had that ever not been the case? “I don’t have any children, and my husband is a businessman.” 

“Oh, a housewife with no kids? How come? What do you do all day?” 

“It’s quite rude, Johan, to ask a lady why she doesn’t have any children.” 

“And it’s quite rude to turn up unannounced and make me cook you a meal, yet here we are.” His grinning, contemptuous face – I realized he had stopped referring to me as tannie or auntie.

“Well, I never wanted any. And I cook and clean and keep my house for my husband.” 

“Oh yeah? And why aren’t you there now? What’s your business in Durban?” 

“Well, it’s part of a business deal.” 

“Oh, okay.” He winked. “A business deal. What are you really running from?” 

“None of your business.” 

“Oh ja?” He smiled.

I scraped the rest of the chicken around my plate. “Do you have any coffee?” 

He grinned. “No, but we can have a cigarette.” He lit one and passed me the packet. 

“Sure.” I took it and smoked. I don’t smoke often now; I used to back in the day. Who didn’t in Glasgow in the 60s? And who didn’t in London in the 60s? Indeed, who didn’t smoke anywhere, at any time, in any place, in the 60s? 

“So, Linda, I don’t care what or who you are running from.” He sighed and exhaled the smoke in an almost erotic manner which surprised me, as he leaned back against the chair, eyes measuring my body inch by inch. “It’s good to have some company here. Since the barracks, I’ve just been here.” 

“You don’t have any friends? Girlfriends?” 

“No,” he grinned. “Nothing like that. I’m alone on the farm. All alone.” 

“Well, you should come to Cape Town. You know, study and –” 

He laughed. “Study what? Eh, I don’t have any qualifications, and I’m good on the farm. I have my staff. I’m a good manager.” 

“I’m sure you are a good manager.” I roll my eyes. Yes, I’m sure you are, with no education and no qualifications. 

“Ja, I am. They respect me and I respect them; it’s simple.” He scratched his chin. “In the city, though, I would love to hear the music.” 

“Not much chance of that anymore.” 

“Well, it must still be more exciting than here. Tell me, how is England?” 

“England is England. I am from Scotland.” 

“Ja, but the only difference is the rugby teams.” 

“You may think that.” 

“I do. So, how is Scotland then?” 

“It’s okay. Different from here.” 

“Everywhere is different from here.” 

“Most places are more like it than you think.” 

“You travelled a lot then?” 

“No, I’m just saying –” 

“Just saying what?” His grin was starting to annoy me no end. 

“I just mean … Oh, it doesn’t matter. Let’s stop the heavy stuff for tonight. I’m tired; I might go to bed.” I try to sound resigned to bed. 

“There is still more wine,” he says. 

“Well, you can finish it.” 

He pours me a glass then says, “I’ve already poured you a glass.” 

Ah youth – terrifying, backbreaking youth. “Fine, I’ll finish the glass.” 

Johan talks about music and then cricket and then he talks about Dallas. I tell him, “I don’t watch TV.” He tells me I’m old and that I really must. I don’t have the heart to tell him that the SABC would never show anything that interests me. I know he would then, no doubt, ask what does interest me, and I don’t want to answer that because I don’t know – and even if I did know, I think the answers would worry him.

As we are sitting there, getting drunk, and the wind shakes the house gently, we are slowly moving closer. First he touches my hand and then my leg. I haven’t felt the touch of another man in a long time, and he is so much younger than me.

“I could be your mother, Johan.”

He chuckles, “But you’re not,” and leans in to kiss. I feel his unshaven skin bristle against my chin. At first, I pull away and keep my mouth firmly shut, but then I open and allow him to push me towards him, submitting to the vineyard, submitting to the Cape, falling down into the boy’s hands. I wonder how often he gets visitors. 

“Do you want to go to your room?” he whispers, now gently moving his hands up my top, feeling my breasts. I don’t know, but I nod and follow him. It is over in 10 minutes. Johan is still laughing, as if something about sex amuses him, while we sit beneath the covers of my bed. We are not touching. After he cums, we do not kiss. He just puts a cigarette to his lips.

“Hey, tannie, that was nice, wasn’t it? I wish more ladies got lost out here.” He chuckled. “Wow, I haven’t felt that way since Angola.”

“What does that mean, Johan?”

“Ah nothing, nothing. I wish I could sleep next to you, but my dad will be back soon. I’m going to have a bath and let you sleep.” He doesn’t kiss me again before he leaves. He turns off the light as if commanding me to sleep. 

I wake up at 4 a.m. and think of how to leave. The first step is simple: I climb out of the window. But then how do I get over the fence? That is the big lingering question. I can’t scale it. So instead, I decide to wake Johan. I stand in his room, shaking his sleeping body. “Johan, Johan,” I whisper. I look at him at this moment and see a child. Earlier seems a long time ago now; a different person almost. He wakes up.

“L-Linda, what is it? Are you okay?”

“How do I get out the gate?”

He switches on the light. “Are you leaving?”

“Yes, yes, please – I need to, you don’t understand.” 

“Well, make me understand and then I’ll help.” 

“Well, I just can’t go home.” 

“Where will you go? Durban is too ambitious; you’ll never make it.” 

“I don’t care where I go.” 

“Well, I’m coming with you.”

He stands up stridently, suddenly putting his stuff together: four pairs of pants, two shirts, and a book in an army rucksack slung over his shoulder. 

“No, you’re not.” 

“Yes, yes I am. Come on, I need the excitement.” 

I think I could let him believe I could be with him just so he can get me out of here. “Okay, okay, fine.” 

“Really?” He grins. 

“Yes. Now, how do we get out?” 

“Oh, easy, I have the key.” He takes it from his bedroom drawer. “I can open it.” 

We are out in the fields. It is dark. We do not have torches. I can barely make out anything but the guiding lights and sounds from the townships; the armored cars in the distance that endlessly move towards it. What lies in front of me, though, is empty.

I take Johan’s hand and let him guide me through the winery. It feels quiet without those voices, with only Johan whispering about where we can go next. I’m not listening. I let the words wash over me, but I am used to humoring men and know what to say so he believes my sincerity. It’s very easy with men; they tend to believe what they want to believe.

When we are through the gate, Johan says, “Where should we sleep?” I point out those glittering lights and walk towards the motorway, in the direction of the township. Johan looks at me as though I am insane. “We can’t go down there.” 

“Are you coming or not?” 

Johan just freezes. He doesn’t come. He sits and watches me walk down, confused. I can hear the ringing of something. I sense my life could very soon be over. I wonder where my son is; I wonder what is happening in Scotland right now; I think of Herbert’s goons out looking for me; I think of blood and Manchester United.

I look back at Johan as he gets smaller and smaller, and then toward those lights – the shacks, the fires that glisten ever bright.

After months of confusing applications and automated interviews an offer finally came in. They were a small, nonprofit team working off grant funding to study how wildlife adapted to climate change in urban environments. They needed someone to transcribe a year and half worth of field notes the rest of the team was too busy to deal with. The contract was only for six months and not very well paid, but no questions were asked about the twelve year gap on Claudia’s resume or her lack of science background. They only told her not to worry about dressing up when she started on Monday.

Claudia still arrived wearing the only dress slacks she owned that still fit right and old dress shoes that clicked loudly as she walked. She rode the train, something she hadn’t done alone in a number of years. People rushed around her, going this way and that. Elbows of blazers and wafts of strong cologne blended together and she got off with the flow, letting herself be carried up and out of the station into a new stream of strangers. She walked through an old, cement neighborhood filled with old, cement buildings. Inside of one, she clicked her way across an art deco floor made of polished tiles and was greeted enthusiastically by two people who looked somewhat out of place among the lobby chandeliers.

Jewel and Lenard were the lead researchers. The two of them nearly matched in their faded jeans and sneakers, graying ponytails frizzing at the tops. They all traveled upstairs where the elevator wobbled at the top and opened to a dark attic space covered in wooden paneling and steely exposed tubes. The echoing of air being pushed through along with the creaking and clicking of wood and Claudia’s shoes overshadowed the brief tour where Lenard pointed where each shadowed, labyrinthine hallway led to, but she nodded along anyway. They ended at an alcove filled with makeshift computer desks and small windows, flooding the dusty space with a soft light. Her space was set up along a wall with a boxy donor laptop and metal, folding chair piled high with notebooks and accordion folders. They left her to get settled without much fanfare and Claudia shifted the pile to the floor next to her. She grabbed the top notebook and flipped it open.

The drawing that greeted her was done in pen, stains that looked like raindrops blurred the angles of a bird’s wing. A beak bled through the page underneath. Talons, eyes, feathers were all drawn in close detail. The figures were accompanied by smudges of lost observations. She flipped through the book and tried another one. Similar scribbles of messy pen greeted her. Book after book offered only the same, undeniable circumstance. It was all pigeons.

How they nested, traveled, mated, ate, lived among city residents was laid out across notebook after musty notebook and folders of scribbled writings and hand drawn diagrams. Claudia looked around her desk. No one was watching her. If she got up and left right now no one would likely notice, she hadn’t even signed any paperwork yet. Because while Claudia could deal with a dark, attic of an office and waking up at the crack of dawn to pack lunches for her and Ben before an hour and half commute into this dirty, industrial maze, she could not deal with pigeons.

She’d always hated them. Their loud flapping and inability to respect personal space had always elicited the same panicked sprinting as far back as she remembered. The way they sounded, their germs, their pointy little bird faces, all of it horrible. Claudia spared another glance around. She still had no idea what she was supposed to do with all these notes and their smudged, indecipherable handwriting and no one else around seemed to care about that.

The whole team appeared to work out of the same small area. Claudia only caught flaps of arms and backs with names rattled off too fast to catch, she thought maybe there were five of them. She desperately tried to memorize any defining features, but the haze of rumpled, untucked shirts on long-haired men and hiking pants might as well have been copied and pasted across each one of the bodies that flew by. None of them had even spared her a nod.

            “Don’t mind them,” Jewel said. Claudia realized she was at a desk station across the small space from her. “Feathers are just a little ruffled around here with our deadlines looming.”

            Claudia nodded. She half debated excusing herself to the bathroom and running but she didn’t remember where the bathroom was. Claudia turned back to the notebook she’d opened with Jewel still looking on encouragingly, reading the top most notes describing how pigeons appeared to be built well for evading buildings and fast moving vehicles. They were fast themselves and sturdy, apparently keeping them out of more trouble than other urban species, or so the notes highlighted with a hefty underline and a few question marks. Claudia read on with the image of a large pigeon swooping down, wings spread, beak open, and talons poised for attack stuck in her head on a loop. She read assuming she would stop when someone came to tell her what to do and ended up reading until everyone else packed up for home. She followed them, adrift, and marked where the bathroom was on her way out.

            And Claudia returned the next day, only getting a little lost on the way up. She was greeted by Lenard slapping an onboarding form on her desk and giving a quick rundown on the master document she’d be adding research notes to under pre established tabs of different categories. All the software was unfamiliar but Claudia nodded along. He recommended they schedule weekly meetings to check in on her progress and told Claudia to book some time on their digital calendars. After struggling to figure out how to locate his own schedule she saw he was fully booked for weeks out and turned back to the notebook pile instead.

Hesitantly, she opened one and began to type what she saw. Pigeons were small. Pigeon feathers were water resistant. Those could go under physical attributes. Gross and dirty would also suffice. Pigeons were territorial, that could go under behavior. Pigeons were freaky with little beady bird eyes. Claudia typed and drifted. She would need to finish laundry when she got home, Ben’s shorts were stinking up the garage. They were almost out of eggs and sandwich bread too. Pigeons could extract food from narrow spaces by using their feet and beaks; that one came with a little drawing done in smudged pen of a pigeon’s clawed foot gripping a bag of potato chips.

Lenard appeared back beside her desk. “I can’t help but notice some creative interpretation on your end of things.”

“I thought I was meant to summarize?”

            “Only in instances of repetition. Try to keep to the words as they are written. If something is unclear just tag me in the document.”

            “Yes, of course,” she nodded. She wanted to ask him more questions. She’d wrote some down last night at home, alone in bed and unable to sleep. They were things like, Who do you all work for? What is this project for? What exactly is the point of all this? But Claudia couldn’t think of the right way to ask.

            “Do you always type like that?” Lenard pointed down to where her index and middle fingers were still hovering on the keyboard. He shook his head. “Anyways, just think of these field notebooks as a style guide and keep to that.”

            Claudia tried to ask what that meant, but he’d already walked away. She was alone again in her little corner, the window above her offering only a strip of bare gray sky. She began to type again. Pigeons weighed between 220g and 340g from birds lured onto a scale near State and Madison, average 227g. Birds weighed near the Riverwalk trailhead averaged closer to 330g. Did the river yield a more consistent food supply —whoever wrote these didn’t think so. Pigeons were not well suited for fishing but did seem to enjoy a swim. Claudia used to visit the Riverwalk with Ben, they frequented a wine bar one of his college friends owned. She always got nervous sitting outside in the evenings with all the pigeons that would circle the outdoor tables begging for scraps. They were everywhere. Claudia’s trip back to the train last night she had passed a flock of pigeons picking at someone’s abandoned takeout food. She had edged around them and ignored the stomach churning chorus of cooing and scuffling. Claudia had reminded herself they were fast and nimble enough to chase after her if she stepped on one accidentally.

The team invited Claudia out for drinks at the end of her first week. She agreed, bashful and excited as she trailed behind the group of hunched shoulders and crossbody bags. They all walked so quickly, perfectly in step with each other. Claudia was lost in the tailwinds and sped up to reach Jewel who was back a ways talking with Lenard. She reached them in time to see him scratch a hand across Jewel’s lower back, saying something that made her slap his shoulder and laugh. Claudia debated changing course but it was too late. Jewel saw her and swooped, linking their arms together and marching her away from Lenard towards the bar, half prize and half prisoner.

            Jewel did not let Claudia stray far for most of the night, ordering them a flight of fruity beers in little round glasses to share. Claudia had not drank beer in a long time. It had  improved since the days of her sharing a six pack of whatever Ben picked up at the store on his way home from work, back when the two of them lived in a small apartment in the city and were still in school. Jewel placed her hand on Claudia’s arm when she spoke and squeezed it when Claudia replied.

Someone else cracked a joke, Nish she thought, and Claudia laughed along without hearing it. She was slowly observing how to tell her flighty officemates apart. She catalogued who had a handsome nose and who wore the reddish glasses versus the gold, who bit their nails and whose wedding rings gleamed on hairy hands. Jewel wore her nails long, the slightly wrinkled skin on top of her hands dotted with freckles and bare, ringless fingers just like Claudia’s.

*

            When Jewel asked Claudia to step into her office one morning a couple weeks later she thought it was a joke, but then Jewel was leading them both through hallway after twisting hallway back past the out of order bathroom and to a closet that she opened, waving Claudia inside and shutting the door behind them. It was a spacious closet but still a closet, dusty wooden shelves empty aside from a couple boxes. A small window at the back was propped open with a door wedge stuck in it.

            “Lenard is always leaving this open,” Jewel said. She reached into her bag and pulled out a pack of cigarettes, extending one towards Claudia who just stared at it, her head tilted and shoulders stiff. “Not a smoker then,” Jewel laughed and put it away.

            Claudia stayed and watched Jewel light her cigarette, breathing in and exhaling smoke back out towards the window where it escaped in rivulets back into the sunny, stagnant air of downtown. Soft sounds of traffic poured inside and filled the silent, stale air between them. Claudia breathed carefully, afraid to cough or look too disgruntled. She could have left but it seemed like that time had come and passed so she stayed, rocking on her heels in the sneakers she’d swapped her dress shoes for that looked more like the ones Jewel wore. Ben had been a smoker when she first met him and always hated the way the bitter smell clung to his shirts. She wished she had something to do with her hands too.

Making up her mind at last, Claudia moved closer to the window to lean against it and heard soft cooing. Barely visible on the roof, pigeons were lined up under the window. They were basking in the sun, wings fluttering gently. Claudia jumped back.

            “What’s wrong?” Jewel asked.

            “Nothing, just some pigeons out there.”

            “Oh, yeah. They love this spot too. They’re creatures of habit, have you seen that in the notes? The same pigeons will return to their favorite resting spots over and over again regardless of weather or construction or anything.”

            “Hmm.” How many days had Claudia made the same path from bedroom to kitchen and back again or to back yard, to grocery store and back again? Enough to wear the carpet in her hallway down probably if she didn’t steam it regularly. Enough for there to be greasy spots on the handle of her fridge she always forgot to wipe away, and holes in the patio where she’d stand in the afternoon and watch her flower pots struggle to bloom. There was a bit less to do now, with Ben gone there were no longer coffee rings left on the counter. She still wiped it down out of habit.

            When Jewel was done smoking she offered Claudia a spritz of perfume to cover up the smell of smoke. Claudia nodded her thanks and Jewel crept close to spray her own wrist and pressed it to Claudia’s neck, one side and then the other.

            Now that Claudia knew to look she saw Jewel go back to the smoking closet frequently. Sometimes alone, sometimes with Lenard. She never disappeared for long and always came back smelling freshly of perfume.

Claudia started going back there by herself too. It was something to break up the endless scrawl of scratched out notes and marginal asides as she went through notebook after notebook, although she was disappointed when she arrived to find it empty. Two months had passed in a blink without much notice from Lenard or anyone else. Claudia’s days passed evenly. She packed lunch for her and Ben. She rode the train in and back home. She cooked dinner and tidied. She went to bed. Even this new commute soon became another easy, carpeted path.

She passed by more pigeons in a day than she’d ever really realized. The ones drawn over and over again in the field notes were fragmented, a wing here, a nostril cere there. That’s how she tried to see them in real life too. There was nothing scary about a foot. Pigeon’s leg muscles had evolved to be sturdier to keep up with human demand. Their powerful breasts perhaps emerged by preening under human guidance generation after generation for thousands of years. Pigeons today still strutted chest first, two different muscle fibers making up the largest and most important flight muscle. Their chests depressed the wings at the shoulder, where attached to the deltopectoral crest of the proximal humerus. Claudia tried to sit up straight in her desk chair and felt her own chest stretch, odd joints popping and cracking in a way they never did before.

            It was pouring rain and Claudia headed straight to the smoking closet when she saw Lenard leaning against her desk waiting on her. He had an annoying habit of checking on her progress first thing in the morning when he had to know she hadn’t started on anything yet. She clambered inside the closet, dripping from her jacket onto the floor. She pried open the closed window as far as it would go and peered out, balanced up on her toes making her rain boots squeak loudly.

The window led onto the roof, sun bleached concrete dark gray with the downpour. Another gray shape moved into her view. A soaking wet pigeon looked at her with a tilted head and sad bird eyes; a shiver coursed through its little bird body. Pigeons regulate their body temperature by tucking in their heads and feet. They have downy feathers that helped to insulate them, pulviplumes she believed they were called. Claudia thought of the birds she passed outside the train station, the ones huddling next to buildings to avoid the scuffle of feet and how she’d stopped shuddering away when they ruffled their feathers to settle. She thought of Ben in his little puffer coat all weighed down by water, drips pouring off his curly hair. How his cheeks used to get so red and how Claudia used to wrap a scarf around his neck before sending him off with a kiss.

            Claudia pointed at the window, “You want in?”

The bird shivered again.

Claudia reached her arm through the narrow space to try and beckon the bird inside. It backed up and puffed up its chest. Claudia pushed at the window harder and its old wooden latch snapped. She hauled the heavy glass pane up. “Here you go.”

            The pigeon hopped its way inside and Claudia dropped the window closed with a loud slam which must have alerted the bird to its new surroundings because it began flailing, squawking, and pooping all at once. It flew back at the window and banged its body against the glass.

            Claudia sprinted out of the closet, shutting the bird in behind her. She heard it yelling frantic bird calls in her absence. She shakily maneuvered back towards the office area where Jewel was now seated, tiny drops of rain clinging to the ends of her hair.

            “There’s, umm, a bird in the smoking closet,” Claudia said.

            “Really? How’d it get in?”

            Claudia shrugged.

            “Probably Lenard,” Jewel rolled her eyes. “Let’s go.”

            Claudia followed her back to the closet again. At first the bird was nowhere to be found, then Jewel spotted it wedged between a shelf and the wall. She tried to grab it, but the thing flapped its wings rapidly and growled an indignant, pigeony roar the closer she got. Jewel instructed Claudia to close the closet door and she did so, reluctantly.

            Jewel backed up and squatted down while Claudia pressed herself back against the door, hand poised to open it and run if she needed to. Jewel opened her hands, arms half raised off to her sides. She cooed at the bird, softening her voice into a low drone that washed over the closet, barely audible over the rainstorm.

The pigeon stopped fighting, cranking its head and bowing instead.

Jewel returned the gesture, bowing low and popping her shoulders up like wings. Her chest came next as she rolled her body back up, cooing louder. She twisted her head side to side stepping forward.

The pigeon shook itself loose and hopped down onto the floor. The two of them closed in, circling each other as Jewel whispered, “Go open the window,” just before she lunged and grabbed the bird, closing one hand around its head and another around its middle.

Claudia ran over and shoved the window open. As she did, Jewel reached out and thrust the bird out of her grip, pulling Claudia’s hands out of the way as the glass dropped closed again. Back outside, the pigeon squawked indignantly then shook itself off and flew away.

“There, that wasn’t so hard,” Jewel wiped her hands on her pants.

“What was that?”

“Mating signals,” she explained. “Typically a male initiates but more aggressive females can as well. There’s actually a lot of homosexual coupling in feral pigeon populations, I mean, you’ve seen the notes. The dance is all in the neck and chest. They puff up like this,” she rolled her shoulders back again, stretching her neck out to the other side. “And the bowing and shaking comes with a song they sing to each other.”

Jewel dropped down again, shaking her head slowly, her still damp hair flopping about her shoulders. Claudia dropped as well, trying to mimic her movements. She felt stiff and awkward, pulsing out her shoulders in disjointed movements. She braced her hands on her thighs to rise back up and stop, but then Jewel strutted forward, bowing her head down, waiting for Claudia to reply.

She did, stepping forward again and ducking her head down still in her pigeon squat. Claudia’s head was almost in the other woman’s neck, their feet slotted together like a dance. She could smell Jewel’s perfume, felt some of her hair curled from the rain gently brushing her cheek.

Jewel’s lips pursed as she made a soft cooing sound. Claudia leaned closer to copy her, tilting her head and cooing right back against her ear. Jewel placed her arms on Claudia’s shoulders and squeezed gently, her thumbs rubbing over the fabric of her shirt. Claudia bowed her head low one last time in a nod and Jewel turned. She pressed their lips together, soft pigeon sounds getting lost between them.

*

            Jewel and Claudia made cooing noises at each other from their desks when no one else was paying attention. Claudia worked quicker now, her eyes had grown used to the styles of handwriting and the transition from reading to typing. She was only interrupted by frazzled clucking of the others searching in her pile for something they needed or by Lenard swinging by her desk periodically to question why she’d put all the notes about pigeon’s communally grooming each other into the behaviors area when it should clearly have gone with relationships. Claudia always heard him coming before she saw him. The shuffle of his feet and quiet muttering as he squabbled on his bluetooth gave him away.

Claudia knew there was something between Jewel and Lenard. It was the way they dragged each other off sometimes beyond the normal smoke break. They took lunch meetings out together and arrived at the same time almost each morning. Jewel hadn’t asked Claudia back with her to the smoking closet again and they had not been alone since the window incident some weeks ago. Only Lenard, who looked over Claudia’s shoulder, emailed her pages of edits to make and reminded her frequently to refer back to her ‘style guide’, was led off personally by Jewel.

After another morning watching Jewel and Lenard disappeared together, Claudia decided to take her lunch break outside. She circled the block and found a small park. More a smudge of green space and some benches but it was still nice. Pigeons were splashing away in a fountain, more running after each other in the grass clicking and chirping in a way that sounded like laughter. Ben and his friends used to run around in her yard like that. He used to lay on a blanket in the grass and read with her, and share peanut butter sandwiches. Claudia really needed to mow the lawn. She’d been reminding Ben to do it next time he came by but was close to giving up hope on that. A couple of pigeons approached where Claudia sat and stared at her with their beady bird eyes. She cringed back.

Feral pigeons demonstrated the highest intelligence for social cues both within their own familiar units and when interacting with birds of other colonies. Claudia had never realized pigeons had colonies, or families as some of the notebooks called them. Pigeons were tightly knit creatures, returning not just to the same places but the same flocks season after season. They mated for life. They raised their young communally.

Claudia wondered where the birds went when they couldn’t be at home. Did they miss each other when they were away? Did pigeons dream about old friends? Make plans for pigeon family vacations? Did they feel sorry when they’d disappointed one another? Claudia stood and the bird closest staggered back, chest puffing up and wings beating. She almost apologized for startling it.

When she was left alone, her work wasn’t all that bad. Four and a half months had flown by. Every day was a repetitive read, type, click click click, brainless work that allowed Claudia to forget about the pigeons as best she could. It was easier than she anticipated to focus instead on words as standalone clumps of letters and waterlogged handwriting. Pigeons have been noted with higher success in adapting their diets. The proventriculus glandular part of their stomach rested around a 4.8 ph level. They were able to eat larger amounts of refined grain and processed food items without getting sick. Pigeons enjoyed a grain and legume based diet which matches up to the urban scraps of human food waste many of them sufficed on. They stored excess food in their crop sac for conserving nutrients or to give to their young, crop milk. Claudia really needed to buy milk. She needed to do laundry again too. Ben had shrunken her nice sweater when she’d asked him to handle it last time. She’d even shown him how all the buttons worked.

Claudia started taking all her lunch breaks in the park. She tossed most of her corn chips away to the fountain pigeons, unsalted of course. She delighted in how they all returned to her for more, longing for her to notice them, nurture them. They cooed at her and bowed their heads. She ducked her own back and hoped they’d reached an understanding.

Claudia couldn’t help but notice it one day as she ascended to the attic with one month left on her contract. She’d come to view the space as her own little roost, up high and plenty of nooks and crannies to cuddle up away from the elements or any predators. And once she put it all together she couldn’t help but laugh, loudly, right at her desk drawing an unimpressed glare from Lenard across their cluttered alcove.

Her coworkers’ gray, mottled heads bobbed in agreement with whatever Lenard was saying. Her coworkers, gray molting pigeons with their receding hairlines, who nested with their stacks of books and overheating computers. Each one of them was an arm-flapping, shoulder-stretching squabbling bird running back and forth all day ignoring any questions she had or emailing her passive aggressive comments about keeping her spreadsheets tidy.

When Lenard prattled on to her later about editing one thing or another, all Claudia saw was a large pigeon, gray remiges all puffed up and little glasses perched on pale ceres. Claudia pressed fingers into her temples and flexed her fingers sore from typing. She listened to the flutter of academics pecking at each other and daydreamed about throwing french fries and watching them scatter.

*

Pigeons came in more colors than Claudia ever realized as she spent a day scanning and archiving a pile of photos, a favor Jewel had asked with a kiss to the top of Claudia’s head when she agreed. Pigeons were not only grime-matted gray but blue, green, and purple. She noted the rainbow of them on her walk back to the train. Jewel too, favored these colors and the scent of her perfume had lingered on Claudia’s sleeve all the way home.

Jewel hadn’t been around as much, their conversations limited to her runs between meetings outside the little alcove. Jewel always left with a lingering hand squeeze, a comforting scratch across the shoulders. Claudia wondered if maybe she was just a very affectionate person, Ben had a cousin like that. She looked over at Jewel’s empty desk.

Claudia noticed how the sun caught on a pigeon’s tailfeathers, the bright green hue of it. Pigeons’ beaks have been getting longer over time and so have their legs. To better rifle through trash or maybe to fight or flee as different accounts had hypothesized. The pigeons Claudia passed outside walked down the streets, heads held high, defiant in their rhythm as they circled ankles and dodged purses.

Pigeons related to each other verbally and physically, each vocalization a signifier to a world of meaning that Claudia could swear she was able to tell apart now that she was listening. A growling rumble when a bird got too close to someone else’s lunch. A soft purr to a friend to check in. Pigeons must have ways of greeting each other, there was nothing to differentiate a friend from a lover in the notes. What was the right caw for, Hello, how was your day? How are you? Claudia cannot remember the last time she had any such conversation with someone. Only Jewel, who hummed at her when she saw Claudia stretching out her shoulders at her desk. She came behind her with warm, perfumed hands and offered to rub them for her, pressed in with strong fingers and clicked her tongue at her. Claudia couldn’t find it in herself to ask if she’d had lunch already, only cooed back in thanks, bowed her head to let her work.

Jewel was the only calm one among the cast of unruly birds. Unflappable, she languished at her desk, occasionally putting in headphones for video meetings where she said nearly nothing but nodded intently. She filed her nails habitually. She ordered the others around in her pigeon-toed orthopedic sneakers, tapping her feet all day under her desk like she’d rather be somewhere else.

Claudia finally invited her out on a walk around the park. She’d packed an extra sandwich so they could eat together by the fountain. She’d practiced at home, tilting her head and popping her shoulders, humming under her breath and twitching her chin. Feral city pigeons copulated on a less strict schedule than wild birds, spring and fall mating seasons mere suggestions of how to pass the time. Pigeon birth rates have only increased through urbanization. There were two pigeons together in the fountain when Claudia and Jewel took their seats, the rest of the birds scattered about, some watching and tittering and others pecking at the ground.

Jewel declined the sandwich, citing a gluten allergy Claudia hadn’t known about. Claudia ate hers quietly, cycling through thoughts of interesting conversation. She’d like to know what Jewel went to school for, what Jewel liked on her pizza. What kind of shoes she wore. If Jewel kissed all her friends, if Jewel had time to see each other outside of work, when this was all over. If Jewel knew how a woman was supposed to make friends now when all of hers were still married or out of state or both.

She tried to think of a way to explain how funny it was that the birds and their coworkers were essentially the same. And that she had been thinking about pigeons nonstop since working here like, that Claudia felt for them and how this job had taught her so much. Humans had abandoned pigeons back to the wild and expected them to figure it all out on their own. Of course they walked with us, acted like us, ate our food. They wanted to be with us.

Claudia wasn’t sure if all that domesticated human DNA baked into pigeons still mattered like the field notebooks debated. She wondered if Jewel thought it was only a pantomime now, a shadow of someone else’s dreams teaching them to chase binned scraps after a taste of something old and comforting. She wondered if Jewel thought of them like children, if she worried after them and wanted them to do well on their own. Or maybe, they looked at us like big, strange birds, bumbling our ways through the scrap-filled nests of the world, fighting our way against the cold.

Instead, Jewel turned to her first. “So, do you have any idea what you’ll do next?”

Claudia’s gaze tracked a pigeon flying overhead. “What do you mean?”

“You only have about a month left with us. Have you been looking at other positions?”

“Oh, yes. Of course.”

She had not been. Claudia’s time at home had been whittled away to making meals and taking out the trash. Sometimes she and Ben watched a show together in the evenings but most of the time they didn’t. She’d ask him about his day and he’d reply in vague gestures and clipped replies, opting to spend most evenings with his friends. Claudia slept alone and woke up alone and rode the train alone and walked to the office alone, only flanked by pigeons and the hundred other people who waddle and chirp and shimmy into their assigned dovecot holes. She tried to find the right words to tell Jewel that she was not meant to fly solo, that she needed this place and the company it gave her, that she was starting to feel like a pigeon too.

“I’m looking for something back in education, maybe,” Claudia said. “I used to work in an elementary school’s office. One time, I had to chaperone a field trip to the zoo and a bird pooped on the third grade teacher.”

Jewel smiled, nodding along to Claudia’s story the same way she responded to floating heads on her screen. “I’ve heard that’s supposed to be good luck.”

*

            At home, Claudia ate dinner with Ben. She drove him to the park and stayed to watch his soccer practice. She sent a picture to Ben. Other Ben, she wanted to call him. Worse Ben. Irritating Ben. Ben Who Probably Didn’t Even Know His Son’s Jersey Number. Claudia’s traitorous mind had considered renaming her son, but that was hard to do when they’d reached a certain age and she thought Ben might have some grievances about it.

Out in the grass the boys ran back and forth, sometimes knocking into each other just for fun. There were pigeons running around too, just yards away chasing a hamburger wrapper across the parking lot flanked by some smaller sparrows. They lived outside of the city too, she’d been noticing more and more the birds stalking grocery store parking lots and sleeping on the post office roof and taking refuge under front yard shrubs. They looked the same out here as they did downtown, sleepy and a little aimless until they were startled by something into high alert.

Baby pigeons are born pink and featherless. They are fed by the crop milk of their parents, tucked safely away from any potential threats. But feral pigeon babies grow up fast, they need to be tough to exist in a world where danger comes for them constantly.

            Did pigeons ever feel jealousy? Did they ever throw other pigeons out of the nest when they got annoying? They hissed, they argued in fits of feathers and clashing beaks, but there was nothing in the field notes about how pigeons made up. When they soothed the other’s ruffled feathers, rubbed out the tension in their hackles, what about that? Did pigeons ever call each other in the middle of the night informing the other pigeon they’d rented an apartment across town? Did they name their pigeon children after themselves and then fly the coop? Claudia wondered what happened to the birds who got left behind. They probably had their pigeon friends, the other members of their colony to help with chores and cooking and helping their pigeon sons apply to high schools and traveling sports teams. Pigeons probably didn’t even notice someone left.

Everyone went out for drinks again at the end of the week to celebrate a successful deadline, a portfolio project or something else crucial to the ‘big picture’ that Claudia still only vaguely understood. They sat at the bar and Jewel leaned against Claudia’s shoulder, whispering jokes in her ear about how Lenard’s drunken pacing reminded her of an owl she saw once that had eaten part of an edible.

A dark haired, handsome man came in and walked over to their table to greet Jewel with a kiss. He introduced himself to Claudia like he already knew her, patted Lenard on the back and waved to the others. She didn’t catch his name, only watched his muscled arm where it draped over Jewel’s shoulder, the one that had just been resting against her shoulder. Jewel left shortly after with him, kissing both Claudia’s and Lenard’s cheeks goodbye.          

            Claudia stumbled up to the train platform an hour or so later, tipsy and off kilter. She was alone on the platform except for the clusters of pigeons. Some were cuddled under benches while others courted each other, strutting across worn wooden boards. Around and around they went, Claudia’s eyes traced over them as her vision spun at the edges.

The birds were all perfectly at ease here. For the feral pigeon, a city was a playground of hiding spots. An endless food buffet. A beautiful, stinky, concrete paradise that wild pigeons could never appreciate. Jewel had said that once. She thought the feral pigeons, the ones descended from abandoned, domesticated ancestors, had gained an advantage when it came to urban living. The ones with memories of lost comforts baked into their DNA now the best survivors.

            A pigeon’s optic nerve was about five centimeters long emerging out from the eye’s posterior hole. They had a nearly full 360 degree view of the world. They could see around themselves entirely. Pigeons bobbed their heads not just to communicate but to gain perspective, shaking their soft nerves to zoom in and out on the world like a camera. But the wulst of their brains that allowed for stereoscopic vision gave them little overlap compared to other birds. They had bad depth perception. Their rock dove ancestors didn’t need it. They only ever had to find a hole along a rocky cliff or mountain edge to call home. These pigeons moved premeditatively, choreography plotted out through generations of knowing this world was not built for them. The cone photoreceptors of their eyes held oil droplets that let pigeons see more color. Pigeons were drawn to bright colors. They liked to fill their nests with shiny plastic wrappers and scraps of fabric. Pigeons recycled. They took what others discarded in evolving claws and carried them into their homes, trusting old instincts to tell them how to shape it into something warm and safe. Their inner ears had electromagnetic cells that allowed them to trace direction, hone in on magnetic fields from the earth. The way home was built into pigeons’ bodies, even now, as they scavenged it from the slate gray holes of a new and strange wilderness. Claudia followed one pigeon as it flew up into the covered platform ceiling. It hopped daintily across a row of bird spikes zip tied to a beam, squawking when they pressed into its legs. It disappeared. Claudia climbed up on the bench, her dress shoe heels wobbling in the cracks, and looked up at the bird spikes, reaching out to prod their surface. They felt springy, softer than she’d imagined. Behind the spikes, more pigeons were crammed into the empty ceiling space nesting in pink insulation and dead leaves. Claudia gripped the beam to get a better look.

One of the birds puffed out their feathers at her, letting out a displeased rumble. Claudia tried to chirp back, twist her head side to side and bow. She cooed to it just like Jewel had cooed at her.

The bird flapped forward and Claudia fell back, crashing to the ground as her weight shifted, pulling the whole row of spikes she’d been holding down with her. She laid on the dirty ground with the wind knocked out of her. Startled pigeons flocked down from the ceiling. Their formless, spinning bodies hitting the ground sounded like applause. She closed her eyes and let the hard press of wood seep into her shoulders, soothed by the sounds of beating wings. The birds settled and when all was quiet again she looked to find them peering at her as if to help her back up.

            On Claudia’s last day Jewel brought her a cupcake and Lenard gave her a gift card for a bookstore she’d never heard of all the way across the city. They both hugged her and wished her luck with whatever came next. There was expectant twinge to the wish, a question buried in the lead. What was she going to do now? She imagined telling them the work here inspired her to go back to school and study ornithology. Or that she was returning to administrative work at another office, one with bigger windows and less confusing style guides. She nodded to her coworkers and accepted a final shoulder squeeze from Jewel. There was no exchanging of numbers, no offers to stay in touch.

Claudia left the office early, completed notebooks left stacked in her seat and the donor computer returned to Lenard’s desk. The sun was out and she headed for the park instead of the train. Pigeons still filled the fountain even though the spouting water had been turned off for the season, leaving only empty basins. Claudia perched herself on the fountain’s concrete edge and toed off her shoes, letting her socket feet touch the cold ground. Around her, pigeons flapped and pecked at old algae, their shining silver and purple crests gleaming in the sun.

Tomorrow, she would drive Ben to school instead of sending him on the bus. Ben would pick him up for their weekend together. She’d finally vacuum under the couch. Change her bedsheets. Do the laundry. Pull weeds in the garden. When Ben came to drop her son off back home, she’d invite him in for a cup of coffee and he’d decline as he always did, and her Ben would run out to the backyard with barely a word. Later they’d eat dinner together and she’d take him back to another soccer practice and Claudia would watch him, send a message to a friend who lived six hours away, and wait a week to hear a reply. Pigeons flocking beside her were unbothered by the cold breeze. The train’s all encompassing rumbling didn’t phase them one bit. Claudia’s own shoulders crept towards her ears with a shiver. When the wind washed over her again Claudia leaned into it, feeling it curl the ends of her hair and creep into her fingertips. She kicked her feet out in the air and flexed her toes like talons to crack them. Her arms opened wide as she could stretch and her mouth followed in a yawn, the air rushing through her as though she was nothing at all. Something inside unfurled. Pigeons huddled in the sun, heads glittering.

             Sobriety: Day 0

I don’t know why this time was different
other than time, air & light that it is, was
filling less of me. For fifteen years I was a tick
that if pulled would pucker the skin before
the neck severed, head still buried & sucking
a last second or two, unaware the wine-red
blood had nowhere to go.

The Rioja In the back of the pantry had aged
since our first year of marriage. Like equity
& intimacy, so easy early on, we’d kept it wrong.
So when we opened the vinegar it had become,
you stopped at a glass while I finished the bottle.
On principle, I told myself. Tomorrow
I’m quitting. I’m quitting tomorrow. 

Physical
              Sobriety: Day 77

My doctor holds a vial of my blood up
to the light like a kaleidoscope, turns it,
shakes it, then hides it in his fist.
He makes a finger gun with the other hand
and shoots it. When he opens his fist,
it’s gone. He pulls it back into the world
from behind my ear and pours my blood
into a dutch oven which he bakes for
a few minutes while he waves a divining rod
around my torso. “How’s your spam
filter?” he asks. I put my hand on my side.
“I can’t really feel it anymore.”
The timer dings and when he lifts the lid
the whole clinic smells like goulash.
“Your late autumn light has stabilized,”
he says, my improvements perplexing him.
I inform him that I no longer partake.
“Ah, that would do it,” he says.
“You should also limit your intake of flattery.”
Not really a problem, I tell him.
“I can order a CT of your lusts if you want
but check with your insurance first.”
Here, he turns serious and meets my eyes
with a practiced air of pity.
“I’m afraid this means you’re probably
going to live quite awhile longer.”
I tell him I understand and begin rehearsing
how I’m going to break this to my family.

Islands 

             Sobriety: Day 84

Driving home from outpatient, a cry from nowhere pierces the hum. It’s my own gut-shot voice trailing blood across the windshield & dash, but I’m still surprised by it. Anxiety controls my sounds and movements like a cordyceps fungus controls an insect. More cries rush the hole made by the first so my throat becomes a fountain filling the cabin with locusts that die in mid-air and pile into drifts on the passenger seat. I’m alone, but I imagine someone watching my breakdown like I was a character in a show, because I can’t seem to process my emotions without involving someone else. This observer is more human-scale than twenty years ago when my wailing would have been prayer. I think the shape of these sounds is holier. Not supplication so much as islands erupting from an ocean. They will one day be habitat. The maps will need changing.

Freeze Tag
              Sobriety: Day 90

You’re told it's a benchmark. Like a toddler
pointing. Practically developmental. 
A sign the brain is knitting together,
picking back up where it left off. 
“Maturing stops at the point of addiction,”
as if the brain had been caught and rooted in place
in a game of freeze tag, waiting for someone
to crawl through its legs. You shouldn’t be so
offended. You’re the one who would look at
your wife and tell her with solemn sincerity,
uncapped marker still in your hand,
that you didn’t draw on the wall.
And like a child, you need recognition
so you text “90 days!” and when she texts back
a single emoji—meager scrap for the gaunt street dog
your soul has become—the anger you’ve nursed
in dark rooms burns its way out. You complain
that no one is praising you for what you’re not doing,
and are caught off balance when she gives it right back,
telling you how long she’s been running,
circling your unresponsive statue,
watching for any chance to unfreeze you. 

Pink Cloud
              Sobriety: Day 146

It was supposed to happen by now.
The dopamine fields strained to collapse
were supposed to flare and blossom to life,
if only briefly, like a wildflower bloom in
Death Valley after the rarest of rainfall.
Not a sustainable harvest, but a promise
of something worthwhile. The clouds are
gunmetal gray and the field crunches under
foot but if I just keep walking the
moisture regime may eventually change.
Topography may be more forgiving. 
The coins in my pocket more lustrous.
The people I meet will still care about coins
and none will remember the things I’ve done.

The second to last time Ellis saw Kat was as unexpected as the last.

The night was like any other in his young life. Having spent much of his middle school years the gangly odd one out, Ellis was late to the game and already beginning to feel hopeless having only just turned 18. Ellis had developed an unruly anxiety that manifested as a deep and abiding fear that he would leave for college without the secret code that would make him normal, the thing that made his older brother Neil a beloved member of their community whose homecomings filled their house with friends and girlfriends and parents and cousins all eager to see how the old sport was doing.

Ellis didn’t understand what Neil had that he didn’t. Why, when Ellis’s friends came over, did his parents never lavish them with attention? Why, in fact, did his friends rarely come over at all? Neil’s friends were like foster brothers, big men in North Face jackets whose booming voices carried up from the unfinished basement to rattle Ellis’s second floor bedroom and whose appetites could never be sated by the pancakes and nachos and pizzas his mother happily served up. After their visits the fridge would remain barren for weeks, Ellis left to fend for himself. If he ever complained, his mother would scold him for his lack of hospitality. 

This secret code, Ellis had come to believe, was what life was all about, and the fact that Ellis did not possess it was a sick joke played by the universe. Ellis stayed up late at night thinking of it; he thought about it during class, twisting it around in his mind like a math equation he couldn’t solve.

Why him, he could not tell. Ellis didn’t understand why his words always came out wrong. He didn’t know why he would find himself standing still at the edge of a gathering with nothing to add. He didn’t know why he sat alone each night paralyzed by some rootless anxiety coursing through his system.

All this Ellis could’ve weathered easily were it not for the virginal status his problems had caused. Once the hormonal olympics began, his stilted affect became conspicuous. When Ellis’s best friend Rick started ‘hanging out’ with Lauren, the cute girl in their AP Stat class, the one with the dimples, Ellis knew his days of peace were nearing an end.

Ellis tried to decipher what differentiated him from Rick. On any metric he could calculate, they were equals. They wore similar sneakers, they lived a few streets from each other, Rick’s house wasn’t much bigger or his parents more loving (in fact, if anything, they were worse, in Ellis’s estimation). They both drove hand-me-down cars with terrible mileage and stuffy seats. Even their hair were similar mops of dirty blonde curls.

Why, then, did Lance and Leon never bro around with Ellis the same way they did with Rick?  Why did Rick always have someone pushing to get his attention? When Ellis found himself spending his Sunday idly watching reruns of Ice Road Truckers, he didn’t know why he had not been invited to the lake trip Rick had posted on Instagram.

But it was the girls that stabbed his heart. As he watched his friends begin to return triumphantly from after-school hangs with tales of wet mouths and warm thighs, Ellis was left to nod along silently. They were being inducted into the world of the adult. They held secrets Ellis could barely imagine. He felt the gap between himself and his friends grow and grow until he felt like a childhood stuffed animal about to be thrown out in the spring cleaning.

Ellis made the pact one particularly dark evening as Rick posted Instagram stories from Lauren’s hot tub where Rick had brought the crew to drink, Ellis’s heart ripping open with each notification as he sat in the dark, waiting horribly long minutes for the next update. 

There and then Ellis decided, if it wasn’t going to happen naturally, he would force himself to change. He could torture himself forever about the ‘code’ he didn’t have but it wouldn’t change the fact that he didn’t have it. He decided to take his brother Neil as his model. Even if he didn’t understand it, he would now live as his brother did.

Ellis began to lift weights and joined the soccer team. He cut his hair, started drinking, and found ways to make the boys at school laugh. Ellis was a bit shocked how easy it had been. All he had to do was repeat their own jokes back, never disagree and nod along. Pretty soon he was at the parties, he was in Lauren’s hot tub.

Even after his success with Rick’s crew, Ellis still ended every evening of hard drinking crashing on the couch with Tommy Anderson while everyone else paired off and rushed to claim bedrooms. With the boys, he could simply mimic their behavior and it always seemed to work. But girls demanded more from Ellis. Their eyes asked for something he didn’t know how to offer.

It was a few scant weeks before graduation when Ellis, Tommy, Lance, Leon and Rick drove up to a party in the neighboring ‘burb, Liberty Village, which, while only 25 minutes away, felt worlds apart, for it had its own school district and strip mall.

Liberty, with its high-end boutiques, sit-down restaurants and fancy dine-in movie theater, was spoken of in equal parts loathing and desire by the residents of Commack Falls. Ellis never really understood this obsession as he had lived in Liberty before Ellis’s father, an electrician, had been pushed out of Liberty by the competition from a nationally franchised home improvement corporation and they’d been forced to relocate.

Ellis didn’t remember much about Liberty. This would be the first time he had been back since he was a kid. All he could really remember was green, exuberant green; massive lawns, parks that never ended.

They arrived fashionably late, the party was packed and they didn’t know a soul. Ellis noticed the clothes first; boutique athleisure and Travis Scott tees and even an Off White shirt he’d only seen on Instagram before.

Ellis and Rick pushed their way to the kitchen. The kitchen was stacked with high-end bottles of liquor and racks of beer. Ellis drank a Hamm’s, a High Life and a Bud in quick succession. As the alcohol warmed the edges of Ellis’s mind, he fell into a conversation with a girl whose name sounded like Jane or Jean; he hadn’t really been listening. Ellis nodded along as Jane or Jean talked about school, her friends. When Jean or Jane said goodbye without a second glance, Ellis felt more relieved than disappointed.

The night wore on and the boys drank more and more. Tommy dragged Ellis into a conversation with two block-chested bros with long curling blonde hair pulled tight under identical ball caps. Ellis began to imagine who he would have been if his family had stayed here in Liberty. Perhaps he would be one of these bros. Perhaps he would still have come to this party, wearing a designer tee and wandering home down well-paved streets to a house full of frozen pizzas and gourmet snacks.

As his mind wandered, Ellis noticed a girl staring at him from across the room. The eye contact sent a jolt of panic into his heart. He tried to focus intently on the two boys in front of him, feeling inexplicably guilty. He peeked back at her. She was still staring. He quickly averted his gaze.

Ellis turned back to Tommy’s conversation but couldn’t find a place to jump back in. He snuck a look back at the girl. She sat between two energetic friends, all three dressed in a gothic hippie style Ellis had never seen in Commack.

Was she checking him out? Was that what that looked like? Was that what that felt like? What was he supposed to do? Ellis decided that the only thing that would truly curse him now would be to ignore her and set himself up for a lifetime of cowardice.

So Ellis stepped towards her. As he got closer, the girl waved to him meekly. This confused Ellis. They faced each other across the room for a moment before Ellis remembered his mission and set out toward her once again. But before he could think of anything to say, the girl leapt forward and embraced him. She pulled away and asked him if he’d moved back to Liberty and exclaimed how excited she was to see him. 

This was not what Ellis expected. He stammered that no, he lived in Commack Falls and was only here for the party. He tentatively asked her name. An imperceptible shudder came over her face as if all her energy had dropped into her chest.

“It’s Kat.”

The name took a moment to sink into Ellis’s alcohol-slogged brain, falling smoothly past layers of thoughts and memories, landing, with a thud, in the pit of his stomach. Little Kat Werner. He’d almost forgotten her. Or in fact he had forgotten her, forced her out of his mind, along with all that didn’t fit with who he had become.

“Kat. Oh my god. Hi.”

“You didn’t remember me.”

“I just didn’t expect to see you.”

“Me neither.” Ellis felt sweat pouring down his face. He waited for her to say something else but she simply stared at him with those piercing eyes.

“How are you?” He finally managed to squeak out. Kat smirked slightly.

“I still live here so how well can I be?” If Ellis was older, he may have thought he was having a heart attack.

“I kinda thought you’d left Commack and moved somewhere far away… I don’t know why I thought that.” Ellis knew why she thought that, that he had never been back, never called, never opened that door ever again.

“No, I was still here. I just got… busy.” Ellis wanted to kick himself.

“Sure, we all got pretty busy in middle school. Big tests.”

“I really didn’t expect to see you.”

“Clearly.”

“Are you off to college? I’m going to Indiana. Accounting.”

“I’m supposed to. Not sure if I’m going to go or not. I think the whole thing is a bit of a scam really. I mean, what kind of education could we possibly be paying for that we couldn’t find on our own?”

Ellis remembered the drive to her house. It had been short, just down his street, over a little bridge, up that steep hill. He could remember the feeling of his head pressed against the cool glass of the car window waiting to arrive, the world spinning in front of him. The uncomfortable silence was punctured by Kat’s squeal as she grabbed Ellis by the shoulder.

“Oh my god. Did you ever finish Raccoonauts?” Ellis would sit behind Kat watching her play that game for hours. They’d hole up in her room and only come out when Ellis’s mother would call. Ellis remembered being told he could sleep over at Ryan’s house but not Kat’s, a boundary he never understood. He loved that room and especially loved Raccoonauts. He had felt something very close to happiness then, watching her curly head shaking with the ferocity of her button pushing. He had peed his pants once, desperate to hold onto that feeling as long as he could.

“Oh my god. I forgot about that. We were obsessed.” Ellis felt like he would be sick.

“You play the second one?”

“I don’t really play many games anymore.”

“That one was… fun.”

Ellis felt a strange clarity as he studied Kat’s face. He knew this was the moment he’d been expecting all night, all year, maybe all his life, and that whatever he did now would determine the path of his future. He felt sure of this in a way he couldn’t explain. And really, if he thought about it, his choice was already made for him, he was only following a trail that had been built long ago.

A howl built in Ellis’s chest. He wanted to grab hold of her shoulders and plead that he never meant to leave, that he never meant to lose her, that they could go back and play Raccoonauts again if only they could escape this party, these boys, this code. If he could just say something, anything, a new life would open up before him, a life full of warm breath and love and feeling, far from the icy Commack winter that had settled on his heart.

But Tommy was calling from the living room and the words evaporated the moment they touched the hot air of the party. Ellis was aware, even as he mumbled that he’d be right back, that he would never see her again, and that the door to that life was shut for good. Ellis walked back to Tommy, Rick and the girl with the pukka shell necklace Tommy was chatting up, who might have a friend Ellis can talk to about school or soccer or tv and who might, if he tries hard enough, let him kiss her.

Ellis didn’t look back, knowing that if he did, he would not survive it. 

The last time Ellis saw Kat would be the last time anyone saw her.

Ellis had kept track of her life somewhat. It was hard not to, in the way that any successful once-upon-a-time citizen of a small town is a never-ending source of pride and envy. Ellis would never admit it but he followed her a bit more than most. He read her profiles, he watched her interviews, he enjoyed her work. To his wife Annie, Ellis’s interest in Kat was an easily understood affection for an old classmate. Ellis still looked for her name in the paper every Sunday and often looked wistfully out towards the cul-de-sac where she had once lived.

For Ellis had settled in Liberty after all. He’d spent his college years in Indiana, then a few years in Chicago. But the city was more trouble than it was worth and when Annie took his hand one day and nodded yes she did want kids and sooner rather than later, it was to Liberty that he took her.

Ellis had felt like a hero. He was not returning to Commack, where the houses rarely extended past the first floor, no, he would raise his children in Liberty where his neighbors mowed their lawns and he could send his children to play without fear. Indeed, Ellis had succeeded, in spite of what he had begun to feel was his inherent propensity for mediocrity. So Ellis and Annie settled into a modest four bedroom and got to procreating.

The years were blissful for a while. Their daughters were beautiful and carefree, his career advanced in slow but steady increments. Ellis settled into it happily,18 years lost in a blur of early morning coffee, commutes, work, dinners, weekends full of group activities and playdates.

A year after his youngest left for college, Ellis found himself promoted to project management supervisor, which allowed him to buy the new car Annie had been hinting at, but which brought an emptiness to his days he’d never felt before. Ellis spent hours staring at emails and spreadsheets, unsure what anyone needed from him. He made busy work for himself, micromanaging his subordinates and making up excuses. Mostly he just stared out at the industrial car park, listening to the hum of the highway until it was a decent hour to run out the door as if he was late to a meeting.

Ellis had trouble sleeping for the first time in his life. He would lie next to Annie for hours before slipping downstairs to watch the early gray light of dawn rise above the tennis court. In those long mornings, he found himself lost in foggy memories. It was as if he was catching a glimpse of a lost ghost town, the Liberty of his childhood. In those moments, he remembered how every lawn, street and fence had contained the universe, how they had rambled through the world, him and Kat, filled with magic.

One Saturday, Ellis woke to an email from Kat.Werner@Gmail.com. He excused himself from the living room mumbling about urgent work and headed to his rarely-used study where he read the email again quickly, then once more, slowly. Kat was sorry if her email was a disturbance but she’d found his address on a list sent around by the organizing committee of the Liberty school reunion and couldn’t help herself. She wrote tentatively; How was he? Where did he live now?

Kat confessed she didn’t know why she was emailing him, that maybe he didn’t remember her, but seeing his name had awoken memories of their time together and she felt compelled to write. She hoped Ellis was well.

That afternoon, Ellis sat down to compose a response. He had no idea how to start. He spent two hours at the computer procrastinating by playing his daughters in internet chess. Then he turned back to his open tab. Ellis told Kat it was wonderful to hear from her and he of course remembered her. How could he forget?

He stopped, unsure of how to broach the elephant in the email. Ellis feared that Kat would still see him as who he had been that night, fueled by hormones and insecurity, that he had erased whatever Ellis she had known before.

That night. he wrote back. He told her he was sorry too. He tried to explain he had been quite drunk the last time they spoke. But not just that, he tried to explain everything he had been going through then. His explanation became another thousand explanations. Once Ellis started he couldn’t stop. He explained how he was homesick every day of college, that he almost bombed out his sophomore year, and he only got his job in Chicago through the father of a friend. Maybe that same insecurity had led him to marry Annie only a year after meeting her, reasoning that for the first time here was a girl who wasn’t waiting for a chance to slip out the door. And maybe, he supposed, that same need had led him back to Liberty.

Soon enough, Ellis had written for four hours and had a 15 page email draft saved. He couldn’t send this to her. He took out most of the part about Annie and his kids, cut his ‘apology’ to a few sentences, and sent it.

Kat’s reply came less than two hours later. She was glad to hear from him, that she had been worried her email would have scared him off. She feared he had forgotten everything. What had happened after that, she wanted to know. She wanted to know about everything, every detail of his life, every boring anecdote he’d told thousands of times. She wanted to know about his wife, about his children, about Liberty; did the sign still have mold growing over the L or did they finally fix it?

The few details she provided about her life confounded Ellis. She was living just a few hours north of Liberty in Grand Mire, a resort town on Lake Superior where she was living in the basement of an old friend’s house. She was writing her emails on her friend’s laptop in the one cafe with public wifi.

Kat spent most of the email remembering Ellis. She had come to believe their time together was the most profound of her life. She believed they had been two halves of a whole, the only two souls that existed in the world. Her elaborate, looping writing style spun Ellis’s head right round. She must not have edited it at all, he surmised.

In his response, Ellis told her of course he remembered it all.

-Do you remember the games we’d play in your backyard? And that film we wrote?

We made your father play the part of the monster in the woods.

Kat wrote back immediately. Ellis was still in the study and was shocked to hear the ding of his inbox.

-He hated that. Complained the whole time. But he did do it, didn’t he.

So began a month of a free-flowing jagged exchange, a fervent 24 hour conversation. Their email chain grew, dozens of bite sized bits of memory. At first Ellis didn’t hide anything from Annie since there was nothing to hide. But when, one night, he found himself making an excuse just so he could check his inbox once more before bed, he realized he had been hiding all along.

What Ellis felt with Kat was something he couldn’t find anywhere else. Ellis took great pride in being a good father to his daughters, but he had always felt like he was playing a role. He was glad he knew his lines and felt the applause every time he saw the grown-ups his children had become. But his memories with Kat lit kindling in a hole in his heart he had forgotten had once been a bonfire.

So he kept emailing.

When Kat casually suggested Autumn was the perfect time to visit Grand Mire, it felt natural for Ellis to suggest he come up and see her sometime. She didn’t respond for a day. Ellis spent the morning staring out his office window. At noon, he walked to the bathroom and puked up his breakfast. He skipped the staff lunch and went straight home, where he discovered Kat’s email waiting for him.

Kat would love for him to visit but she knew he was very busy and may not have the time. It was short and Ellis could feel the fear in every word. Her fear filled him with relief.

He emailed back that he usually drove past Grand Mire when heading to Milwaukee for conferences (true) and he actually had one coming up shortly that he could extend for a night to swing by (false).

He told Annie that night about the conference sprung on him. They negotiated the specifics over lukewarm rotisserie chicken from Kroger’s. Ellis wrote back that night. He finally ended an email with “see you soon”.

They met at the Bear Tracks Resort & Lodge, near-deserted at 2pm on a Friday. Ellis was shown to her table by the squirrel-cheeked waitress who seemed moderately excited to have two paying customers at once. They embraced awkwardly. Kat patted his arm strangely. Neither spoke. Ellis was vibrating.

“Find this place okay? I know it’s a bit out of the way but it’s the only place to get some real grub around here.” Kat picked up her plastic menu and perused it over-enthusiastically. “They’ve got great breakfast food here. Oh and the coffee! Brilliant!”

Ellis took stock of Kat. While he had seen pictures of her online, most of the photos were from decades ago. Her appearance was different, sure; her gaunt face, her hair cut clumsily short, her hands stained with tar, but it was her energy that most surprised him. She was fidgeting constantly, leg bouncing, eyes fluttering to and fro. She burst in and out of conversation as if pouncing on prey.

As they ordered, Ellis became more and more perturbed. Maybe it had all been a mistake. Maybe the Kat he had imagined, and the Ellis he was sure she had constructed, would never appear.

“How’s your wife? Annie, right? I read it in the database- And you have kids right? Do they live at home?” Ellis had assumed she would have avoided the topic of Annie on pain of death. She looked away, scratching at the back of her ear.

“Annie’s okay. I have two daughters. Both in college. We’re adjusting.”

“Wow. Two kids in college. Incredible. We’re really grown up, huh.”

If Ellis didn’t know better, he’d have said drugs. But she was too conscious for that. Maybe drugs in the past, he wagered. Maybe she was simply another lost soul like Tommy who’d took a turn and started calling Ellis on every drunken night to complain how his life hadn’t turned out how he wanted. Maybe he should get back up, go home, and tell Annie the conference had ended early due to some poorly-refrigerated shellfish.

But then Kat leapt forward, grasped his hand tightly and looked at him with those big sad eyes. 

“Ellis. You’re wandering.” He smiled reflexively, heartlessly.

“I’m still… y’know. Reeling.”

“Me too.”

“I’ve thought a lot about seeing you again. Obviously.”

“Me too.”

“And now here you are. And I realize I had forgotten you’re a real person.” Her eyes grew red as she smiled, holding back tears. “I’m working through it. Maybe I’ll write you an email about it.”

They walked along the beach afterwards, holding their jackets tight against the wind. Kat didn’t have a hat or scarf, her curls bouncing dangerously.

“I never stopped.”

“What?”

“Thinking about you. Obviously I wasn’t thinking about you, more like my memories of you… Sorry, I’m rambling. This is a lot harder in person.”

“I get it.” Ellis didn’t really get it.

“Sometimes I would stop. And I would think… Is this really me? Is this the same girl who ran away into the park behind our houses and lived off berries and Lunchables? Who used to capture little insects with my bare hands? Did she become this?”

“Who did she become?”

“You wouldn’t understand.” They kept walking in silence. “I’m just scared that I may have ruined it already.” Kat shuddered. “I’m sorry. I knew I’d react to seeing you but not this much. Not ever this much.”

Ellis reached out to console her but she recoiled from his touch. For a moment, Kat eyed him, all signs of girlishness gone in an instant. Then a smile rippled onto Kat’s face and she pulled away. “This is so embarrassing, but I have this fantasy that always comes back whenever I’m sad or something bad happens or I just don’t know what. I used to say it was a joke but it was always real to me. Whenever people would ask, y’know, do you have a plan? Are you going to get married? Have kids? Have a family?

‘I’d say ‘well, yeah. I know who I’m marrying. All three of ‘em. There’s my first husband that I’ll marry young and passionately, who I’ll love with my whole body and soul… but that kind of thing never lasts, you can’t build a life on that. So we’ll divorce in some heart-breaking way. But once I’ve recovered, I’ll marry my second husband, an old friend who moved away. We’ve both had our first loves and first heartbreaks. We rekindle our feelings slowly, taking our time. We settle down, we have kids, we make a life… But those things end too. The kids leave, things stagnate, you still love them but you don’t love love them. You don’t think about them in the shower or when you’re wasting time on a lazy afternoon. They’re just facts then, not people, just facts of your life. So it ends but it ends amicably. Then I’m old and alone, and making do. Working on myself, my goals, my career. And that’s when I meet you again.”

Kat turned to Ellis. He felt as if he was seeing her for the first time.

“And we have both lived for so long and we are so tired of life but still living. We’ve gotten into trouble and gotten ourselves out of it and that comes with baggage but we’ve gotten rid of the baggage. We just don’t care anymore. We’re free! And so we meet, and we know that… We’ve always loved each other. From the very first moment I met you, you were mine and I was yours and all this other time was just the in-between. And now here we are, old and together and happy. And we’d get to do whatever the fuck we want.”

Ellis can’t help himself but lean in when she does. The kiss is unlike any he’s felt in years. Ellis wondered if she’ll ever pull away. But she does. And big droopy tears flooded down her face. And she seemed to have barely noticed Ellis’s lips at all.

“And I worry I’ve ruined it, Ellis. That maybe that was once my future and now it isn’t. That along the way it was taken from me. And now we’ll never find each other.”

“We are right here, Kat.” He pulls her in. He needs it. Whatever she can give.

He barely sees her place until it’s all over and the sun has set. Before that it was all just limbs and breath. He knew this was what he came for but it still shocked him when it happened. It had been unlike any of the sex he’d had with Annie. Even in their passionate early days, Annie had always been more interested in the moments surrounding sex than the sex itself. But Kat didn’t want anything from him except his body. Maybe it was different, sex in your middle age, sex without marriage, sex that didn’t have to match up to all the sex that had come for decades before.

He sat on the side of the bed and watched her breath. His heart beat out of his chest. The sunset was a gorgeous blaze of purple and orange on the lake.

Ellis did not want to be here when the sun came back up. After two decades, he’d thrown it all away in an afternoon. He needed fresh air. It was too hot in here, there was no circulation and the heater was blasting.

Kat woke up to smoke, huddling outside in a matronly nightgown. She came back in and wrapped her arms around his chest. He thought about when he will get home tomorrow and tell Annie he’d decided to skip the second day of the conference. He will sit on the couch with her and watch trashy tv before dozing off.

In the morning, they got breakfast at the little cafe in town. They ordered bear claws and coffee and watched the elderly patrons sip oversized lattes. Ellis reminded her he had a conference to get to. She simply nodded.

“Do you have any plans today?” Ellis asked to break the silence.

“I… cleared my schedule. I guess I’ll probably go out on Peter’s boat.”

“Who’s Peter?”

“He’s the only real friend I’ve made here. We go fishing most days. That’s what I do now. I’m a fisherwoman. More of a fisherwoman’s wife to be honest.”

“His wife?”

“Not like that. Just that I haul in the fish, do the busy work, that sort of thing.”

“Sounds relaxing.”

“Very Zen.”

They lingered for a few more minutes before Ellis couldn’t take it anymore and said he should really be going. At the last minute, Kat took his hand and, barely above a whisper, pleaded with him to stay. For a moment, he wavered.

“We’ll see each other soon, okay?”

“Okay.”

He didn’t hear for a few days. It was only in the second wave of the investigation that they found his emails. Ellis and Annie were eating dinner in front of the TV when they called. He assumed the local number was just some robo-caller trying to sell him spamware. Only after the show ended did he see the voicemail.

They’d searched for her body for a week but were calling the investigation off. They’d keep her case open the standard ten years but, the detective muttered into the phone, he shouldn’t hold his breath. The detective confessed that was a poor choice of words.

Peter was adamant she was alive. He said this was the kind of game she always played with him. He told the police that she had brought a strange bag onto the boat with her that morning, which had disappeared, even though she’d left her clothes and backpack on deck.

The police, her ex-husband, the media, and everyone else who knew her thought otherwise. Even Peter admitted the hard facts left little room for hope; he had only been below deck for a few minutes, not long enough for her to have swam very far, and he had looked for her for a half hour, trying to spot a head bobbing in the water.

While Peter protested quietly that she had been happy, it was easy for everyone else to build a case against her. Here was a tragic woman who chose a brutal way out. She was eulogized with the standard amount of passion. She was given the obituaries, the feuding critical re-evaluations, the mourning tweets, and then the slow fade into a Wikipedia article.

Ellis drove straight up to Grand Mire the night he heard the news. He told Annie his oldest friend in the world was gone. He booked a room at Bear Tracks. Every morning, he would eat at the same table they had sat at before heading out to the search and rescue boats.

Ellis told the police everything. He knew he’d just be the cheating bastard to them but he didn’t care. Maybe she had left a secret message for him and if he just cracked it, she’d reappear and they’d embrace again. He hoped to at least find some note addressed to him that told him why it had to end like this. She could explain he had just been part of some sick final game, a last hurrah in the world, a last fuck you to him and to everyone else she was leaving behind. 

He stayed long after the official searches were over and the boats cleared out of the harbor. He told Annie he couldn’t come home. He would wake up before sunrise and head out to the beach before anyone was awake. He’d listen to the waves and the wind and close his eyes and imagine they were Kat whispering just to him. 

Only Peter noticed. He, too, couldn’t sleep, and spent his mornings on his boat, watching the lake for signs of life. After a few weeks, Peter invited Ellis out on his boat with him. Peter took the same route he had taken that day everyday now. Together, they looked into the inky black water and waited for her to appear.