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Author: Leonydes  Matis

Driving Away

Written by Leonydes  Matis. Posted in Poetry. 

I bend to kiss my mother goodbye.
"Are you going back to work?" she says.
"I'm going home," I answer.
"Work?" she says. "No, home."
"Work?" "Home." "Work?" "Home" "Work?" "Home."
She finally just shrugs, as if home 
were a ridiculous place to go at 7:15 
in the coming dark of a cool evening
in the middle of October.

Driving west, I watch the last vestiges
of pink and orange slip into nothing.
I try to visualize my mother's brain,
filled with blood 18 months ago,
now struggling to make connections.

Is it the size of an egg in the chicken house? 
or of a walnut fallen in the front yard 
of the house in Claysville, Alabama, 
where her family sharecropped— 
the happiest days of her life,
she once told me, months before the morning 
when she came to breakfast and asked me 
if I had found the sheets in the bathroom?
I had already fetched the towels from the dryer 
and managed to let her know this.

In the car, my daughter, wide-eyed, said,
"Daddy, she said, 'sidelake.’”  I know, 
I said, driving away, taking her to a swim meet 
and a graduation party and then home, 
only to return the next evening
to pick my mother up off the bathroom floor, 
dress her, and take her to the ER.

Are the neurons a frayed network 
where the ends don't quite meet?
A sixty-year-old Star Flower quilt 
with the stuffing exposed?
A dress worn too many Sundays?
A coat that has seen 
too many winters, stretched thin 
in the interest of shoes, books, corn?

What does it feel like to hear the words 
leave her mouth, different from the words 
in her egg-shaped or walnut-sized mind?
To have this fool just keep repeating "home,"
as if that were a place one could go.

Is it like trying to communicate 
with a 20-year-old son who knows it all, 
who just comes home on weekends to eat 
wash clothes, show off his newfound 
college ideas, use words like "social constructs,"
"hegemony," "deconstruction," "Derrida"?
This son, who is always already driving away.

Season of Death

Written by Leonydes  Matis. Posted in Poetry. 

Spring always played the trickster 
in a mumbled darkness, so it 
will never be apparent what she might 
make happen. I reject my forebears 
as best I can. 

                       As the emergency grew 
ever more global, more of our lives 
evaporated. And what remained 
grew dusty.
Then dustier still. 
My right knee creaks open 
and all the ashes of all my past lives
sift out. All the books we made, all
the lines written and revised. 
The wind scatters our pasts 
into someone’s present, and our presents
into someone else’s
future.

            I sat at my window
facing a wall of other windows,
each a private show for me. 
I plugged the slot with coins 
and spent years rapt 
in a fascination both 
onerous and 
unavoidable.
Every show in that hotel 
required enormous
effort—voyagers suiting themselves 
up for ages. Or unsuiting themselves. 
Often their pregame
was my game. Blue
electronic lights shining upward
toss jerking ghostly shadows
up the walls and ceilings. 
How many times will I replay this?
A man pulls the drapes closed so
slowly
that we have time to study each other.
My window reflects now in his,
my face not discernible. 
I see sex
and unsexed nakedness combine
with sleep and television, desks
and tasks, thrown 
towels and messy suitcases full 
of cloth in an impressionistic 
slow-motion blur. I see all. 
The people are unable
to see themselves stacking, unwilling 
to settle themselves, better themselves,
refusing to picture themselves
exposed 
near the windows’ 
hermetic frames. 

                              The hotel 
emptied out in days, but refilling 
all those windows with bodies 
and more views of those 
entertaining shadows
took years. 
And on it goes, it drained,
it pools, it filtered, it swells. 
Now the tourists again have 
something
unknown in familiar looking
bags. But the house staff show up 
less often than before, 
and since the emergency 
the professionals 
just haven’t returned. 
And yet 
I’m still here, watching those
who come and go come and go,
these neighborly guests
who comb their hair
or drink from soda bottles
or masturbate when they think
they are alone, and who
sleep alone or with their 
people, in their skin 
or in soft pajamas, restlessly 
they turned the past 
toward dreams of
something else. Two
dress-stockinged feet 
perched on their heels 
atop the bed, 
dirty New York City pigeons 
flicking sideways 
in rhythm 
with some unheard music. 

                                              Then 
the unmade bed dialed down 
for room service, 
the laptop spreadsheet 
splayed itself wide.
The bathrobe puddles 
on the floor, my curtains too.
Long-term I dreamed of living
in hotels, cities passing, my
countenance 
a plain retired exhaustion,
sated though, and fine.
Passports and city maps
pile up on a sill four floors below.
I love the infinity 
of brick
disappearing up toward the sky
and down 
toward the street, though
here in my medium highrise
I saw neither. I can see only
the vertical arrangement of horizontal 
building blocks fitted with pipes 
and grout and stuck with glass.
Earlier, engineers worried
their efficiencies right out of
these ducts and shafts. Now
they, too, lie quiet or just garden
their own spaces, regrading
gravel driveways and demolishing 
everything 
in sight.

              The air conditioners will
rattle down to stillness, and then 
everything went quiet. 
The emptiness spread
as quickly as the emergency,  
and with haste all was halted and
crashed fast. The stores and
the offices quickly closed
and restaurant kitchens wrapped
their warped dishes to go. 
Supermarkets filled with empty
shelves witnessed winks and nods,
fights and false-modest
timidity. No one 
is to be trusted. 
The sky 
will go blank
and heavy at once, impossibly
huge and overbearing.
My dark apartments whisper
to me, through filtered lips, 
welcome home, 
and then, never leave,
and then snapped into creaking 
silence. They will never speak again. 
I existed 
as my own weight, 
my wooden feet 
stomping, my wooden floor 
whomping back. 
And the leaden legs
of gravity pushed its knees into
my back—do it, push me forward 
through my tepid trepidation. 
Then curtain walls
slammed shut 
and we never look 
outward again, despite
our windows on the world. 
Just to see
such a void was to be spun 
down the spiral whirlpools of 
pasts never lived and futures 
called into question by simple 
blunt mortality.
Let death death me, a poet
once said. I mean it now,
I meant it then. 

*

Or else 
I sat at my computer, 
another window filled with 
more windows. The emergency 
morphed that view 
into an infinity mirror. It wheezed
its breaths like an accordion, 
gasping and contracting.
And so it gasps, it collapsed,
it spills, it flickered, it fills. 
A friend’s disembodied
voice
fills me with pixelated dread
and I will log off over
and over only
to find the machine had
taken me
elsewhere. Fast forward
through disorientation
and crawled along the 
unfamiliar. Will fly unaided
if need be. 
I distracted myself
with anything analogue: Papers
and candles, books and
cables, clothes, chocolates,
all this stuff stuffed into place
in a cacophonous accumulation
that itself will defy 
time and seasons and sense. 
Inventories tell me stories—
poems, photo strips, 
podcasts, flicks. I was perpetual-
ly scanning, inventorying, 
my library’s call
so distant 
it faded from memory. 
And the voices
kept up their squawking.
The video faces are blank and
not hopeful—just 
empty and full
of potential and patience.
I reach my limit
at forty minutes. I quit it,
slammed the lid on it,
and defied the deities 
by leaving the house. 

                                     Who will monitor 
these news reports for deaths
of my friends? A dread and
loneliness set in me,
and it keeps settling. 
Then came the sirens, beautiful 
and beautifully alluring
and as endless as the rising oceans
who so noisily call us
up towers
to the empty sunshine
of our roof decks, 
the unfinished floors of 
the towers of our rebuilding.
The sky never changed but
it heard us banging 
pots and pans
and singing ancient songs
of the changes 
we put ourselves through,
songs of the selves of the ruined,
songs of nurses and their bad news,
the grief stricken aides, the strike
of heavy metals piercing
the blank corners of our minds.
But
the disappointments added
up for stricken souls, slowly,
and the sky slowly learns 
the new languages
of never figuring itself out. 
It just stared down at roofs
and mocked us in our
waffling deliberations and 
our cloudy visions. The roof
edged toward its edges,
and every suicide I’ve known
rises now within me 
to torment me with how much
I forgot. So
over and over grief
drives me over that roof’s edge,
plummeting
through dozens of stories—
through the siren calls, plummeting 
through my own pasts, to
old tales of days I lived
closer to the ground.
Again and again I keep
flinging myself 
over the ledges
of alarm and panic—.
Sleep it off.

                    I kept 
dreaming of disappearing
under dust clouds puffing
up from my duvet, 
my pillow enveloping my head,
my head filled with quicksand
and lead, the heavy
metallic taste of blood
coagulating
at the back of my throat
as I gasped for air.
Please help me!
I raced the empty streets
at the base of the vertical sky,
panicking on the avenues 
while they answered back with 
silent stasis. 
A deaf and deafening quiet 
rose through the canyons 
of Broadway,
and I alone walk alone—
the last tiny 
living witness to 
Times Square’s unnatural majesty. 
Its closed-captioned signs were 
flicking through programmed sequences
with no one there to see them.
It will be me who tells the tale
of robotic insistence upon 
moving on. I will
say the signs didn’t care
and that the pulsing proved
nothing. These pliant billboards
stretch themselves over 
armatures of nothing, so 
they snapped themselves back
into memories of nothing. 
Over and over again once again. 
I blinked rapidly 
to see them more closely.
I too felt 
some kind of nothing then
flicking around the end 
of the spool, old film stock clicking
in the projector machine of my heart. 
The unforgivably elastic 
silence of my dream state 
ruins the sounds
of the rest of the world.

                                         But ruins
are notoriously silent. The wind 
spinning through Verona Arena,
or the darkness surrounding
transatlantic phone lines 
buried in silt and mud
at last reduced to the benign 
antipotential 
of their own pasts’ buzz. 
Radio City was crippled and mute, 
Central Park allowed 
only the sound 
of springtime buds
pushing their way out of branches—
and nothing else. Rambling,
I will find the void
on Park Avenue—the blood coursing
through the veins in my inner ear
is the only traffic to be heard there.
Someday I may 
remember this hell
as poetry, as lines lined up
to tumble over themselves
in an avalanche of despair. My
old age was also a ruin, I might
someday muse. 

                          But oh
my early days, my early gaze
fell upon the wondrous sights. 
I became the city I will become. 
Let the city fuck me,
thy will be done. Let us
rot the days and burn
the nights like the young
adults we were. But I am not now
on my way to Florent,
not on my way to Club 82
nor Downing Street Bar. 
Not on my way to meet anyone
anywhere.
The zygote
became the woman,
the man, the whole society
bruised and killing itself
by killing each other.
Are we going to weigh one life
against another? Did we
break any chains when
plunged forward into history?
I asked myself
these questions
while the riots and the whistles
rang up from the street
twenty-seven stories below. 
The police station one block away
hides behind its barriers.
Risk and reward in an emergency.
The fighters will fight while
some of us
just listen at our windows.
I will cry for this. I wept.
People will scream for themselves
and for the basic 
matter of their lives
when a boot will heel their faces
into the ground.
A fascist dictator used the news. 
They all did. We do. I will. 
My own guilt was
caged in gilt.
And I still have so much 
to learn. 

               Meanwhile 
the garbage bags
of bodies piled up
outside the ERs. Will we smell
the stench through our TVs?
Eventually those few
were millions of dead,
the stacked clean bones
winding through catacombs,
the memento mori hung
on a velvet wall uptown,
across the oceans, in heaven.
This surface-level earthquake
stretches open a few 
cracks and people
will start falling through.
But we hear no sound
punctuating their fall, no
call emanating 
from their masked mouths.
The dying crying silently slide
blindly through time.
These travelers were weakened.
These condemned will be damned.
The dead only suffered
while alive, someone said.
That’s living—brutal suffocation
and muted cries, someone cries.
Blackout. 

                 I survive 
and kept surviving. 
I survived the fallen and
the falling, live through
the weak and the strong
who passed through us as thick 
as the worst cough did wrack 
body bones down 
to a dusty erasing exhaustion,
as cracked as the mosaic wail
of those sirens stupidly
calling us through
a narcotic pain—
high-pitched and silent at once.
It ends and it will never end,
this remote call to 
come see. But empty pixels?
Dead stars? A sky emptied
of hope? For a man like me,
drawn on stability
with permanence and ellipses,
everything was suddenly
and destabilizingly
uncertain. Everything will be
fractured. It splinters, it failed,
it wins, it cratered, it breaks. 
For all the times
someone spit in my face—
for all the times I will beg for that—
now dry reticence finds a way
to erase me or parts
of me more permanently. 
I want to rant against 
this void with all the power
and force I can muster.
I just let go instead. God,
how many people will jump 
from your bridges to fly off 
into sunsets of their own devising?
The foot slips off the salted girder.
The sunshine infected each soul.
My hand
slips off the doorknob
slippery with antiseptic spray,
spitting each one 
to its highest polish,
and every delivery
cost us. And the cost
like god itself
is great.  

*

First
we hung all the art
my parents 
had accumulated—
layers of years and frames
sketching their own patterns
on freshly 
painted walls, in front
of hidden fireplaces, 
over stacks of scholarly 
art books rotting
in a humid North Carolinian
apocalypse. Hurricane
of contagion pounding 
up the river
through the wetlands,
here it came—
a strange god of destruction 
winking its one eye lewdly 
one subdivision at a time. 
It will turn left
off the bridge—the other side
of the river hiding its driveways
in fear. 
But the traffic is fine, now
everyone huddled at home 
and kept their cars garaged
and quiet. Stasis loses
its definition in times
like these. 
But then
what’s anything anymore?
Is anything more
than a memory of an art house film
shown in precise projection
at the repertory theater
on Race Street?
The projectionist turned the camera
on his wife 
with love and a deranged disregard
for her feelings, her
jet black hair, and all
the mysteries that would
eventually
grow back 
as mousy brown roots.
Decades later he
and his son will swim
through channels of history,
through the storm of present 
illnesses, their immunities
will cling to their naked bodies
like armor, shielding them
from the icy current and 
the rocky past.

                          Any single thing—
sudden poverty, sudden death,
even for some
sudden wisdom and hope—
pushed us to mystical
calculations. My pockets
were as light-headed as
a moonshot. My friends
and I, it turns out,
were chrononauts all along.
We had simply never
realized
that sometimes
we were moving backward
through time. Death
is somewhere behind me
now, lurking in a space 
somewhere above.
Then my bank accounts 
and my stamina will both
run dry, and I starved my soul
with poetry. More poetry.
More unpaid work for
unchecked cynicism. More
homelessness for unpaid
rent. More demise for
unlived lives. The unhoused
subway riders side-eye me
with surprise. I hissed right back
through my N95. The super-
powers my friends have stored
up were now being spent. Mind-
reading visionaries spewing
uncomfortable challenges
to the gathered crowd. Now
with nothing to do, I will
scrounge for crumbs 
from days spent splurging—
crumbs of Italian 
pastries and crumbs of memories 
of visits to Milano and Torino—
and rue the insolvency
of the months ahead. 
I hung my head, lowered 
my lids, deepened my 
shallow breath. And finally
I slept. I will dream
about my empty days in 
my empty rooms. I leapt from
the unused and lonely bed, leapt
through the window emptied 
of windows,
and for a parachute I have only 
my empty heart.

                             What some
lamented as stagnant time,
others will cherish as growth.
The truth, it turns out, 
is not fixed, and time
like everything old
is broken. Yesterday
became the day years ago
that we abandoned an office,
tomorrow is the day we took turns 
teaching algebra, today 
we will grab haircuts, bread, 
nostalgia and new policies
—anything—
right out of thin air. 
Fly to Texas behind another mask 
to see your dying mother.
Wonder if your wife’s embrace
is the last you’ll know as 
you check yourself into 
the hospital,
as you check yourself into
the first luxury hotel to at last reopen. 
Fight me on the phone,
on the streets, in the pages
of a national newspaper.
And because it was
no longer necessary to agree
about anything, we will never
agree again. Everyone did,
however, rush themselves
through living sequences only
to learn later that the sequence
has no end. But life is not everlasting 
even if you look at it 
backwards, 
and so hurrying
may be quite important
or quite pointless.
How much time and money
could I spend
to hold back Mr. Death,
stall that elevator 
one floor down on 26?
What locations can I scout
in order to fuck up the housing market
for my landlord?
Who did I screw with 
to screw you over? When will we
sleep if not yesterday morning?
I learned
to wake over and over
through closed eyelids. 
As the fortieth waking hour goes by,
the burden
of staying awake
worsened and I will finally crack. 
As the third day comes, 
I slap it flat.
Jump back, sack me,
just jack yourself up to be
just like me. I just 
collapse.

                My history is less
the moments accumulating
than the whole of my body
blowing apart 
over time 
and geography, every map 
outdated, every vein 
on my body popping bright blue.
In one memory,
my legs will go out
from under me, and
the only thing 
protecting me from the fall
is that gravity has also failed.
We floated there together
in our legless silence,
patients without pain,
cities without states.
And once I was in a desert
I might trip
on your shadow, face
planted in the sand, back
exposed to the cancerous sun,
heat running up my spine,
and the tingling feeling
of colors and sounds vibrating 
together, music and goose flesh,
a new shimmering sprouts forth, 
like the iridescent feathers 
on the back of a pigeon’s neck,
I was danger in a closed environment.
I am decorated in organic patterns
I could not recognize.
I will be doomed
in someone’s empty Staten Island Ferry,
in everyone’s empty sky.
Dull pain became slowly
visible, mostly in motion,
a rollicking seasickness
of security strobes
terminally pulsing 
out of sync.
The airport fire alarm 
will be
the loudest chirping cricket 
I ever heard. 
The plane waffles 
between the tarmac 
and the gate they have yet to build.
I’m coiled so tight I prep
my snake bite for
the god I never believed in.
We spring sprang sprung—
four years clinging
to a calendar no one 
recognizes anymore. And
when the medicines arrived
we pumped them
into our veins for a high
we’d never regain. 
Let us pray 
to find our balance, to find 
truths anew, to find the energies 
to splinter into harmless shards
all the current emergencies—
smaller poxes for lesser primates 
like me, 
purer plagues for greater men 
than we. 

*

So was spring a trickster—
or a murderer? Will it be
chaos, or pointed destruction?
Are the flowers hopeful,
or funereal?
Where the answers lie
we lie too. Looking up,
we pondered, we pout, we
will suckle, we shouted.
Sing a round of gambling songs,
some winners, some losers.
The pop star waves
a questionable hand, pointing 
right at me from an Aspen stage—
When are you from again?
The emergency was a misery game—
the last person left alive loses. 
Your face reflects
in the last sips of your cocktail—
as watery and salty 
as your tears used to be.
The last person left on his stool 
loses. The bartender glares.
The night menaces you 
even though
this is the safest night
for quite some time. You
walked home, or some part
of the way, weaving into
shadows the streetlights will create
for decades to come, assuming
anyone 
lives to once again walk this street.
I can never forget 
the blown-kiss/nod combo
some villain head-tossed to me
decades ago, somewhere
on seedy Eighth Avenue. 
Will he kill me?
Or kiss me? Does he know
what I’m doing here, gathering
lines for an emergency-era poem
thirty years in the future?
Through those memories
we swam, we upstream, 
we will fly in our dreams.

*

You lay in bed 
and it was not
the end of the story
nor the end of your life.
It is just
the end of one day. 
And the ghost
will appear then 
to innocently 
ask you, 
               What happened?
And you laugh a short burst.
Or scoff.
You shake your head,
and then you will pull
the covers up over your ear. 
And you say, 
                       I don’t know what happened.

You sat at the bar 
and it was not
the end of the story
nor the end of your life.
It is just
the end of one day. 
And the bartender
will appear then 
to innocently 
ask you, 
               What happened?
And you laugh a short burst
and scoff.
You shook your head 
and then you will pull
the glass rim up to your lips. 
You sip and say, 
                            I don’t know what happened.

The things of the world—
food, furniture, fondness—
everything pleasureless 
and colorless,
blank and white,
an impressionist’s 
snow on the roofs in the distance,
lovely but low.
Everything in the distance—
the memory of the circled word 
in the draft of this poem,
the realities of families, a sigh
before sleep, 
sand, symphonies, emergencies.
The world itself, the unreality 
of undone pleasure, of mechanical 
motion, of an emptiness beyond 
the sudden realization that 
now last call was called, 
now the lights are on,
now will be the time to go.

•

Imperative Mood

Written by Leonydes  Matis. Posted in Poetry. 

Listen. Sit down. Have a glass of
water. Okay? Good. Now lean back
and remember how you got here.
Don’t speak, just think. Go ahead, drink,

wet your whistle. No need to look
sullen. More ice? Here’s a towel.
Wipe your hands and clean the grime off.
Does it cling to your skin, even

now? Remember why. Leave out no
detail. Breathe in, breathe out. Feeling
comfortable? Water still cold?
They say water purifies, but

cold can, while in midleap, flash-freeze
an electron’s quantum bounding.
It erases nothing, cleanses
only to preserve. Please try to

understand. Unfurrow your brow
and drink deeply. I can hear ice
clinking hard against your glass. Your
hand is shaking. You remember.

Don’t you?

The Coldest Continent

Written by Leonydes  Matis. Posted in Fiction.

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.

The Bitter End

Written by Leonydes  Matis. Posted in Fiction.

​            Alice felt brackish being back in the city. She was seasick from the stinking, lumbering bus from Boston and standing in the throat of Port Authority. That and everything: the three hundred level philosophy and psychology classes; 2 a.m. wake-ups in the library; summiting 25-page papers; the long dirty winter of ramen noodles, and rounds of sweltering and freezing, inside, outside, all the time, took her down to the studs. Spring didn’t feel like release or renewal. It felt like a dated rerun. All she could think about was lying on the twin bed her mother surely put in her new bedroom in the latest apartment—Better views! Higher ceilings! More light!—two blocks from the last one. She drifted toward the usual meeting point, the ghostly sculpture installation of “The Commuters,” forever frozen while somberly waiting to board a bus. Supposedly a tribute to the commuting masses, Alice saw herself in the dull monotony of their slumped bodies and blank faces. People swerved around her, clicking their tongues. A man smacked into her. “Idiot,” he hissed, “this whole thing is about keeping moving.” Alice glared at the back of his head. “Idiot yourself,” she muttered, looking for a clock. This could not be the first time in eight years the meet up failed. She came through the heavy doors, flipping her dark, glossy hair back and mirrored Ray Bans up. Alice exhaled. No one felt more like home to her. Elena, solid ground and bright sky.
            Their hug was long and hard. “To make up for the fact that you’re leaving for the summer again,” Elena pulled back and stared into Alice’s eyes, “we will jump into having fun.” She sighed. “Once we get you fixed up, of course.” She took a bulging bag from Alice’s shoulders. As they walked out onto the sidewalk, Elena chirped about people and things. It was a frizzy day, warm for early May. The city, too, was winter-worn, gray. As they walked, Elena’s warm, familiar warbling picked Alice up and carried her the rest of the way off the front lines and onto the life raft that was her best friend since kindergarten, driving her crazy, and loving her madly, since circa 1973.

            “Obviously we’ll go to Joan’s new place first…” Since middle school, they’d been referring to Alice’s mother by her first name. “…then we’ll grab a bite, a nap and a shower, in that order,” Elena said. “Good plan?”

            Alice nodded. “Thanks for coming to get me,” she said. “I’m fried.”

            “No shit! You’re like one of those hot dogs we used to eat on Coney Island!” Elena laughed. “What are they called again?”

            “Coneys, I think,” Alice said, prickling, while Elena shouted, “rippers!”

            Had it been so long that Elena didn’t catch herself anymore, didn’t give Alice an apologetic glance, bringing up Coney Island?

            After a class she took on spirituality in the modern world, Alice had been secretly working on “saying yes” to life. In her wallet, she kept a Rumi poem, “The Guest House,” about welcoming thoughts and feelings like visitors entering a guest house. She was a work in progress.

            That night, after each of the promised steps and Q & A with Joan, her real estate broker mother, Elena insisted on going out for just a drink. “We are twenty-one,” she said.

            Waving and smiling at strangers as they walked through the dark bar, Elena pulled Alice up a set of sticky stairs to a balcony with stools lined up at a counter on the banister, facing the stage. Through shafts of spotlight, they had a clear view of the blue-lit stage below.

            “I see you’ve been here before,” Alice shouted to Elena over the house music, watching a group of fake ID holders with glowing white teeth spool out of one of the back corners, fiddling with each other’s miniskirts and poufy bangs.  

            Elena waved a peace-sign at a guy behind the long bar on the main floor. “The band is really hot. I mean the music. I wanted it to be a surprise!”

            “Wanted what to be a surprise?” Alice said, but Elena’s attention pinballed. Her usual buoyant energy had been consistently escalating. By the time they walked into the Greenwich Village bar wedged between a window featuring a giant plastic pepperoni slice and another crammed with grimy bongs, she was babbling about the drummer and the bassist like they were her brothers.

            Two glasses of electric blue liquid appeared on the table in front of them. Elena bent back, twirling the mini paper umbrella at the scruffy man whose bandana showcased a broad, shiny forehead.

            “You’re always the best, Marty!” Elena cooed.

            Marty winked. Alice sipped the fruity florescent drink. Elena leaned over the table, scooting Alice’s elbows into her palms. Her dark eyes sparkled with mischief.

            “You love it, right? Marty calls it Sex on the Driveway, an urban twist on the usual Sex on the Beach,” she laughed, raising her cup. “Let’s toast! May we jam the whole summer into the next three weeks!”

            Alice tilted her cup to Elena’s. “No one has a driveway in the city,” she said. Elena rolled her eyes and sipped through the tiny plastic straw.

            Two hours, two drinks, and multiple assurances from Elena later, the house lights went down and a band appeared. Elena shot up, whistling through her fingers. During the first songs, top 40 covers, Alice watched her friend unfurl like a flag in the wind, arms waving, hips swaying. She herself still felt underwater, or maybe just dispassionate and detached, like an anthropologist or a surgeon. But no, something watery rinsed through her.

            The fake IDs tossed their hips and projected their chests at the bassist, guitarist and singer, who played into their groping by toeing and backing away from the edge of the stage. The music was crisp and accurate, but the scene, including Elena, was teeny bopper.

            “You Shook Me All Night Long” was a favorite. Alice closed her eyes and was suddenly watching herself run Smoots along the Charles River, Walkman cranked. When a crooning ballad rolled in, she opened her eyes to see if it was the same singer. It was. The guys romped around the stage like idiots, but their rawness morphed from dirty to glamorous, loose and easy to strutting and defiant. She felt the live music wanting to hook her, to pull her in, and was not about to be tied up and thrown over a shoulder. Not her, not here, not tonight.

            She studied the guys with steely distrust. The drummer’s mouth contorted to the beat, his gaze a lightning bolt of concentration. The bassist’s long, sickle-shaped trunk curled over his instrument. The guitarist’s high cheekbones and spiky bleached hair. Were they ridiculous? Or so in thrall to the music that restraint and self-consciousness disappeared?

            The front man’s chameleonic voice was Clapton, Jagger, Springsteen, Bono—a mixed tape in a boom box. What was that bit in the spirituality class? Something about “no equilibrium without facing the music.” She parsed his details: thin, blond hair; compact legs in tattered, acid-wash jeans; a long, hairless torso beneath a rumpled, mis-buttoned black shirt. Piece by piece, nothing remarkable. And yet, as he twirled toward the guitarist and lurched back to the microphone to belt out lyrics, her breath caught. When his fist shot up, she almost followed. He marched and leapt and skipped and dipped and shimmied and bent over the microphone like it was a child, or a lover. Loping across the stage, left to right, from the front edge to the back shadows, winking at the bassist, throwing a peace sign to the drummer, squatting and jumping up to taunt the fake IDs. She watched Elena responding effortlessly, gracefully to the band’s amplified, hyperbolic performance. But Alice only felt overheated and exposed, with something like Pop Rocks exploding in her chest.

            Finally, the stage went dark and the band disappeared into the back. “That was fun!” Alice shouted in Elena’s ear, more volume than enthusiasm.

            “Come meet them!” Elena squealed.

            Alice stood up, light-headed, her legs as unsteady as a knock-kneed fawn. “What the hell is in that drink?”

             “Alcohol!” Elena hooted.

            According to Joan, this was the last real summer, meaning the only kind of summer Alice knew. After she graduates, there would be no more three month summer vacations or days off for “everything under the sun.” Her mother called herself a realist. Elena’s phrase was mano dura—a firm hand, which she said was in line with, but more respectful than, Type A or battle axe. Alice believed Joan’s screws tightened when she became the only parent. If her mother managed the family’s basic needs, her father was free to show Alice the firehouse where he was captain, the Tenement Museum, the Transit Museum, Ellis Island, Governors Island. He wanted to show her how culture, history, thought all pendulumed through time. Once Alice overheard her mother crap on the head of her father’s mission. “If you really want to support our daughter’s education, you would teach her a musical instrument, a second language or a practical skill.” Mano dura, indeed.

            Maybe this dissatisfaction was why Joan decided they’d go Coney Island that Memorial Day weekend. Alice was eleven and unenthused. Her dad’s understanding smile persuaded her not to complain. That morning, a real estate deal blew up and her mother stayed home. Once out of the apartment, her father promised fried Oreos for lunch after riding the Cyclone as many times as they wanted. Five, it turned out. Alice would have gone again, but her father had a headache so they ate funnel cakes while he drew a roller coaster in the dust at their feet, explaining the effects of gravity, momentum, centripetal force, and friction. She asked her dad if he was sad that her mother didn’t come, but he laughed and said, “Your mother is a marvel.” Alice remembered little else until she found herself at the Rangeley Lake Camp for Girls the day after fifth grade ended, except that her father’s headache was caused by a fractured vertebrae in his neck, and two days later, he was “gone.”

            Alice became a ward of her mother’s efficient, methodical planning. Watching the blurry river whirr by from the backseat of a rental car, she feebly tried to imagine herself as a camper. Her mother promised she’d start to feel better after a few days of fresh air. Being outside all day and evenings around the bonfire did help her sleep. But the counselors—younger, cooler, more attentive parents, especially the Director, Ben Waterman—made the real difference.

            Alice had a twice weekly appointment in Mr. Waterman’s office. “It is very difficult for a girl to lose her father at a young age,” he told her. “It will take time to feel normal again.” Those first weeks, Alice clung to the soft, muffling shroud that had wrapped itself around her weeks before. When she complained that her mother was too busy to visit, Mr. Waterman said she was also grieving.

            Thankfully, the band was in the mysterious off-limits “back” by the time Elena and Alice got down the stairs and up to the stage. The fake IDs, who had turned into a pack of jackals during the set, had returned to more docile pack activities.

            Alice faked cramps to go home. But Elena heard none of it. The crowd started chanting for the band to return. “Free Bird!” they shouted. “Stairway to Heaven!” The band returned to the stage playing the first notes of “Livin’ on a Prayer.” The crowd roared. If it was pleasure that Alice felt, it had a thread of restless agony. She opened and closed her eyes, stood up and sat down, put her attention on the things nailed to the wall—a blue bucket, two fishing poles, a net of dozens of yellow rubber ducks. The house lights came on. Elena was drenched, pink cheeked, and grinning unbearably. Alice could not stand another second of near-rapture. It was time to go.

            As they picked their way out, Elena gushed at Marty, back-slapped roadies, and nodded to the fake IDs. Finally, Alice pulled her the rest of the way out to the sidewalk.

            “I told you, didn’t I?” Elena’s wide eyes were an inch away.

            “Yeah,” Alice swallowed, unable to pour out her confusing feelings. “I’m starving.”

            “Pizza!” Elena shouted.

            They plopped down at a greasy table in the buzzing blue fluorescence of the giant pepperoni slice place. A waitress dropped the slices down between them. With pink grease dripping down her forearms, Elena cooed at her slice, praising the gods of cheese and bread and sauce. Alice, too, felt somewhat better. Her twin bed was howling for her. Holding open the door for Elena, Alice clucked, and the band walked in.

            At Foxleigh, the boarding high school that was the next great idea after summer camp, Alice attended Hot Pot mac & cheese parties with so-called friends, but only on the hall phone with Elena did she share her actual life. She felt bad complaining about boarding school, and later about Northeastern, but Elena always swore she was thrilled to be getting an inexpensive associates degree before matriculating—with a full scholarship, mind you—to Barnard. Even if that was just a dream. “I’m a first generation college student,” she loved to say. “I’m already a colossal success!”

            Joan shook her head about Elena—such a bright girl, if only her parents prioritized her education—which Alice learned from her college social worker was a subtle way to pat herself on the back. Psychology courses gave her terms to privately name the world she lived in since then: dyadic, merged identity, conflicted, enmeshed, disruptive attachment, trauma-bonded.

            The singer was twinkly, shinier, up close. Elena joked and giggled with them, then with a yelp, remembered to introduce Alice to Joey, the drummer; Colton, the guitarist; Rex, the bassist; Billy, the singer. Billy with brilliant blues; Billy with blond hair under a backwards Mets hat; Billy with the soaked half-unbuttoned black shirt. He was shorter on the ground than on stage.

            He said, “bring your friends to Kenny’s on Thursday. You might get to be there the night history is made!” The guys grabbed their slices, nodded and walked out. Elena and Alice followed less than a minute later, but the sidewalk had already swallowed them.

            On Thursday afternoon, Alice picked out the slate blue sundress with spaghetti straps that left her shoulders and back exposed, put on mascara, tiny gold hoop earrings, and drew dark brown eyeliner into the lash line of her top lids. Her mother raised an eyebrow when she came out of her room, but only mentioned that Ben had called from Maine. Alice said she’d call him back tomorrow. She played it cool.

            At the West 4th Street Station, Elena smiled in approval. In her jean miniskirt, pink ribbed tank top and shimmery pink lips, she got away with sweetness because she was witty and smart. She didn’t need Alice’s approval. Like gum-snapping agents, they walked south on Sixth Ave., cut in on West 3rd, right on Sullivan and left on Bleecker, passing tables of used books, leather wallets and silver rings. The bouncer nodded them in. In the dim, malodorous bar, a half block from the first, Alice let out a two-day-old breath. They were early, properly timed to get a table and start on their two-drink minimum. Elena gestured to the bartender, and two milky drinks arrived at the tiny wooden table. She had already laid tracks here, too.

            Tomorrow, Alice promised herself, she’d focus on Maine. Ben Waterman called to confirm she was coming because at the end of last summer, she told him she wasn’t.

            As the band warmed up, Billy pointed at people and palmed his heart, occasionally blowing kisses. The songs unspooled. Though this new universe was light, spongy, more effervescent than Alice enjoyed, she didn’t want to be anywhere else.

            They started “Every Breath You Take.” An electrical storm flew into her chest, crackling and sparking. Billy locked eyes with a woman in front of the stage who held her tattooed forearms out, swaying and smiling like an idiot, belting out lyrics. “Oh, can’t you seeeee… you belong to meeeee?” It was like she was feasting on Billy from an arm’s length and five feet below him. Alice laughed. As if he belongs to you! As if!

            Something clicked. She laughed again, at herself this time, realizing she was acting jealous! She glanced at Elena, who beamed back, oblivious to the exposing neon light of what Alice felt. On stage, the woman was gone, and Billy, singing, locked onto her for a little eternity. The electric light orchestra inside her body swelled to a juddering, breathless, suspended crescendo.

            The house lights came on. Alice ran to the bathroom. Her pulse was racing. Her heart exploding, her head pounding. She splashed water on her face just like in the movies. This was all absurd. She went to find Elena. It took a second to register that Elena and Billy were talking, leaning close to each other’s ears. Elena arched an eyebrow at her. “After party?”

            In what seemed like a few minutes, they were in a paneled basement studio three avenues east. Some of the fake IDs, Marty the bartender, and two bouncer-types came in. Billy handed out beers, Rex ordered pizza, and Joey went for beer. More people came, but not the tattooed arms woman. Alice settled herself on a sinking couch, next to a giggling Elena, as the parade of pheromones flowed inside her. She did not want to appear to be looking for Billy.

            “Hey,” a gravelly voice whispered behind her ear. “Wanna see something? You’re gonna love this.”

            He was so close. Close enough that if she turned her head, her lips would graze his cheek. He aimed a remote at the TV set on the wall. “Pizza!” yelled Joey from the hallway, and people got up. Elena pinched Alice’s thigh, hard, before leaving the room. Bouncy orchestral music and concentric red circles appeared on the screen, centered around a bullseye tunnel.

            “Bugs Bunny is a genius,” Billy said.

            They watched Elmer Fudd tiptoe through the woods with his shotgun, and Daffy Duck warn Bugs, only to get out-pranked. “Isn’t he great?”

            Alice tried to watch with fresh, new, guest house eyes. After the first episode, when no one changed, no one succeeded, and no one died from the many bullets fired at close range, she turned to Billy.

             “I loved cartoons when I was a kid.”

            He laughed. “Bugs is just a regular dude trying to stay out of the way. He just does his own thing, then all of a sudden, someone throws an anvil at him.”

            “Then he’s probably not innocent,” Alice said.

            “Maybe.” Billy chuckled. “But he always comes out on top.”

            He slid over the back of the couch, sinking down beside her where Elena had been. They were alone.

            “I’ve been watching you,” Billy whispered. With the tip of his index finger, he slowly traced her lips, eyebrows, cheekbones. Her skin sparked where he touched. “This okay?”

            Ribbons of color pulsed behind her eyelids. Vague, passing considerations sank into the quicksand of her eagerness. It was more than okay. It was astonishing. Why didn’t Rumi just come out with it straight? Say yes when opening the door because who would ever want to miss this? Her whole being subtly shifted, right there under his gentle touch, from aquatic to terrestrial. Her lungs filled with phosphorescence. She was becoming something new. In the complete dark of the basement, she was like a bird or a flower; weightless, oxygenated, bursting with life. 

            Alice woke in the gray dark and shot her legs over the side of the lumpy pull-out couch. She felt around for her clothes, a thread of panic coiling in her throat. What time was it? She gazed at him, soft, gentle boy. Their legs were entangled when she woke. His cheek on her chest.

            Billy’s arm snaked out from under the afghan. “Don’tch,” he mumbled.

            She kissed the side of his face. “See you tonight,” she whispered, the wheel of fortune and misfortune spinning in her chest: the hour, her mother, Elena, her vibrating body, his hands, her legs, his salty tongue, the lyrics of “Heaven,” he crooned after they finished making love.

            Later that day, having successfully avoided her mother, taken a morning-long nap and a long shower, Alice played with the bowl of fake seashells on the eat-in-kitchen table. Her mother’s summery heels clicked up to the door, opened the locks, and clacked inside. Alice braced herself for her professional mother’s taut, poised, pre-closing energy. She wasn’t wrong. In a trim, taupe linen skirt and fitted white blouse, her mother stood on the other side of the table.

            “Ah ha,” she said, “here’s the mystery party girl. Ben left another message. Haven’t you sent in your forms?”

            “I meant to,” Alice said. 

            Her mother sighed. “It’s probably your last summer there,” she said, draining the last of the coffee pot into a lidded mug. “It was right for you back then, and I’m forever grateful to Ben Waterman for taking such good care of you, but you do have an adult life to get on with.” 

            “I’ll sort it out,” Alice said.

            Her mother’s head tipped a little to the side. “You’re okay?”

            “Just tired,” Alice said. And baby…so gently he sang last night, this morning… you’re all that I want / When you’re lying here in my arms / I’m finding it hard to believe / We’re in heaven. Elena would think it too high school prom, so that bit of ecstasy she would keep to herself.

            “The re-do is nice,” Alice added, a little ego petting to steer away from questions about last night.

            “I rushed to get it done for you,” her mother said. “You like the palette, then?”

            “Sure.” Moving and redecorating, when she was making good money, was a way her mother showed love. Elena thought it sweet. Alice thought it a slightly softer more mano dura.

            “But?”

            “A little bland.”

            Her mother smiled. “Pale Earth. That’s the scheme. Homier than all white, still good for resale.”

            “Can we mix it up for my room? Something like aquamarine?”

            Joan screwed up her mouth. “Predictable.”

            Her mother’s gaze stretched out. “Let me see you,”she used to say, taking her in before they parted.

            “Well, I’m off to meet with the Maiden Lane buyers,” she said, grabbing a striped purse on the way to the door.

            “Dumb street name for one of the world’s major metropolises,” Alice called after her.

            “But not a dumb paycheck!”

            Night after night after night, the music sizzled. Alice, weightless and sure, slid in before dawn and out again after dark, crammed with adrenaline. Every night there was more energy, bigger audiences, more anticipation. Elena remarked on Alice’s enthusiasm, her stamina for the night life, and something about her new attachment. Alice smiled and laughed and clinked her beer against Elena’s. Maybe a touch of jealousy, maybe nothing at all.

            The string of late nights loosened Alice’s grip on time and day. Life felt like a revelation—no structure, no responsibility, only anticipation and the dawning present. She and Elena had dinner with the band before gigs, hours in full and empty bars, and afterhours in the basement studio, his grandparents’ rent-controlled apartment he had for a year while trying to “make it.” Something was up with Elena, but Alice figure she would find out when it was time.

            Maine was hanging over her. It would be bizarre to be a no-show after so long, even when, last August, she’d said she would not be returning. Ben had accepted her statement without question, and in the spring, longing for tiny wild blueberries and the private, salty refuge she found nowhere else, Alice called to change her mind. “Wonderful,” Ben said, and laughed his big hearted, welcoming laugh.

            Next to the To Do list on the dresser, a note from her mother: IF YOU DO NOT CALL BEN WATERMAN TODAY, I WILL. Alice dialed.

            “I did tell you I was coming up,” she said a tiny bit curtly.

            “Yes,” he said.

            “I had finals,” she said, remembering the messages he left on her machine at school. “And I’ve been busy since I got home.”

            “Here too,” he said. “We just finished rebuilding the big dock.”

            He had a way of changing her mood. “With a diving board, finally?”

            “You’ll have to see for yourself. We look forward to seeing you, Alice.”

            “Okay,” she sighed, and hung up.

            Sprawled on her bed with the top half of the pineapple phone to her ear, Elena twirled a lock of light brown hair around a pencil. Alice gazed at the photo triptych museum of their growing up: in oversized mortar boards for kindergarten graduation, as a pair of dice for 5th grade Halloween, knobby kneed in white lace for 8th grade dance, as dates in matching chartreuse georgette for junior prom. With a gift certificate that Elena won at the science fair in 7th grade, they re-decorated her room in island paradise. Curling around a coconut pillow on the palm tree comforter, Alice whispered, “I’m considering not going to Maine this year.”

            Elena’s eyes widened. She whispered into the pineapple and clapped down the phone. “Seriously?” 

            “Debating,” Alice spluttered.

            Elena stared at her longer than necessary. “Tell!” she finally squealed.

            “I just realized I’ve been stuffing myself into the kiddie swing for way too long.”

            “Would it have anything to do with a guy who’s addicted to Bugs Bunny cartoons?”

            “That, too.” Alice blushed.

            “You know,” Elena said, “There’s something I wish I told you already.”

            “Okay…” Alice tensed, hoping to hear why she left that first night at Billy’s with a big pinch and without a good bye, or what has been bothering her in general.

            “The scene, the guys, the band, the music, the whole thing—it’s not exactly a gentle environment.” She took a deep breath and blew it out. “Maybe it’s too late, because you’re already in with Billy. I should have warned you. The scene can be kind of brutal.”

            “Oh,” Alice said. “Well, I’m not that sad little girl anymore. I can take care of myself.”

            “Okay then,” Elena said, smiling falsely. “I just worry. But if you’re good, then I’m good. So, what are we wearing?”

            The cocktails tasted metallic. The music blasted through Alice, not filling her with bright color, but clawing and scratching. She sat in the back where Billy couldn’t see her and was not looking. In fact, he seemed drunk before the first song. They hadn’t done dinner before the gig, something about Billy seeing his grandmother.

            An hour later, tiny knives pricked her throat. Alice told Elena she didn’t feel well and had to go home. Elena didn’t try to get her to stay, or insist she go too.

            Twisted in the sheets, she dreamed: lying on the bottom bunk in the cool, humid cabin, Mr. Waterman’s face bent under the top bunk, turning a damp washcloth over on her forehead. He lifted her head to give her sips of water from a metal cup. He touched his cheek to her forehead. He smelled briny, like seaweed. Mr. Waterman stayed a long while. She might have been twelve.

            Alice slept and woke, slept and woke. She was in swimming Maine and eating pizza in New York and having sex on a beach and on a driveway and in Billy’s basement, through tides of heaviness and lightness, until Elena jumped onto her bed, startling her awake.  

            “Joey said an agent is coming tonight! Can you imagine? They could get signed!”

            Alice tried to swallow around the pebbly jumble in her throat, to make sense of the details. “Cover bands get signed?”

            “I’m sure there’s a progression, but ultimately, they’d get paid, quit their day jobs and work on their own stuff.”

            “They have day jobs?”

            “You know what I mean,” Elena said. She held up a bottle of Tylenol Flu. “Take this and get better immediately!”

            Alice sighed, dropping back on the pillows. “I’m stuck at the bottom of the deep end. Pressure,” she waved her arms, “everywhere.”

            “Promise me you’ll try,” Elena sighed. “Joey said we need you there. Billy said you’re the Courtney to his Kurt.” Her face darkened. “But in a good way.”

            “I’ll try. If not, tell him break a leg.” She tried to imagine the scene, but he was only a faraway spec in her mind. “In a good way.”

            When she woke again, she’d dreamed of sitting on a barstool on stage in front of thousands, smiling at Billy as he crooned a soft, sweet ballad. Johnny and June. John and Yoko. She got up. Her body was weak, but her head was clear and vigorous, like the shaft of sun bolting through the window and splashing on the floor.

            The kitchen phone rang. In between blasts of the blow dryer, Elena shouted about how the agent loved the band, promised them an opening gig for a big act at a big venue, and told Joey he saw a real future for them if their originals were half as authentic. “He’s coming again tonight,” she said excitedly. “But listen—Billy was MIA after last night. Joey just found him and said he’d be okay as long as you come and bring his stuff tonight.”

            “MIA? What day is it?”

            “Well, not missing, but you know, out of the loop. And, it’s tomorrow. I saw you yesterday and now it’s the next day. Joey said they’ll be at the bar in a couple of hours. And the agent is coming. And you’ll get his stuff, right?”

            “I’m getting in the shower,” Alice said. She felt fresh and new and triumphant. Billy needed her. The refrigerator hummed. On it there was a magnet she gave her mother years ago, a watercolor Maine shoreline of pines and craggy rocks with tiny rope words: I ❤ MY MOM

            She picked the beige phone receiver off the wall, steeled herself, and dialed.

            “Mr. Waterman,” she said. “I am not coming. I know it’s late notice, and I’m sorry.”

            “Alice? Are you okay?” his voice flowed softly over her.

            She took a deep breath, then pushed words out around the spiky remnants in her throat. “Yes. I can’t … I’m not… I just …” Her throat closed around the rest.

            “Okay,” he crooned. His inexhaustible calm irritated her.

            “It’s not okay, Ben. I don’t know exactly why, but I do know it’s not.” Words sloshed around her head.

            He was silent.

            “Goodbye,” she said, conflicted, upset, and relieved.

            At the bar, Elena jumped up to bear hug her, then pulled her down to sit at the table, where she and Joey filled her in on the agent.

            “As long as Billy’s in decent shape,” Joey said. “We’re golden.”

            In two bounding strides, Billy dropped into a chair next to Alice and planted a lippy kiss on her open mouth. He was showered. Shaved. Smiling.

            “Cretin,” Elena whispered.

             Joey looked at Alice: “He’ll be ready in fifteen?”

            Alice nodded, confused by the tone, and by Elena and Joey slipping off.

            Billy’s wide black pupils bored into her. “What happened?”

            “I was sick. What about you? They said you were MIA?”

            “Everything got screwed up,” he said. “I missed you like crazy.” He nuzzled in her neck. “You’re all better now?”

            “All better,” Alice said, pulling back to look at him. He looked bright and clean, but there was something else. Leaning in to smell him, she imagined the worst—girly shampoo, flowered soap, fake ID stuff—but just smelled cigarettes. “You don’t look like you’ve been face-down in a ditch.”

            “I’m good now,” Billy said. She hadn’t told him about Maine. “Did you stop by my place?”

            She held out a cotton bag. “I brought you clothes, and,” she held up a paper sack, “coffee and a sandwich.”

            “Alice my Palace,” Billy said. “Look at me.” She looked at him, his shining eyes. He smiled, held her gaze, stayed with her. “Thank you.”

            As the night went on, the crowd grew and pressed in on the stage. Heat hung in the air. Elena kept a fretful eye on the young, smack-cheeked agent in tight black jeans and a rumpled black t-shirt. The songs were tight, the set list was tight, and for the first forty minutes, everything was seamless.

            Between sets, the agent fed Billy shots. In the second set, he moonwalked across the stage. In trying to swivel the mic stand while jumping over it, he caught a foot, lurched, tucked, and rolled off the stage. The fake IDs pawed at him, stupidly excited by his sprawl, trying to help him gain control of his limbs and whereabouts. He was graceful in his fumbling, got back on stage, and carried on.

            Elena looked at Alice, slightly accusatory. The band kept the music circling while Billy dropped back to all fours, crawled to the edge of the stage, stuck out his hand, and grabbed one of the fake IDs. While shouting garbled lyrics without a mic, Billy bent the girl backward, slipped, and dropped her on her mini-skirted ass.

            Alice dropped her head into her hands. Elena shouted in her ear: “Billy’s fucking everybody over.”

            A thin silence accompanied the two of them back to his basement. Billy was smashed. Alice pulled his arm to keep him from knocking people, but he kept tugging away. She was pissed.

            He was snoring before Elmer Fudd tip toed across screen with a rifle. Alice wiggled out of the couch bed and went home. The note on the counter, held down by the Maine magnet, in caps: MUST SPEAK TO YOU BEFORE MY 9 A.M.

            It felt like two minutes later that her mother knocked, entered and stood by her bed.

            “I spoke to Ben Waterman.”

            “I said I would handle it.”

            Her mother scoffed. “Oh, sure. You waited until the last minute and then you flaked.”
            “I did not flake,” Alice huffed. “And anyway, you yourself said it was time for me to get on with my life.”

            “That’s misrepresentation. You were unprofessional, ill-mannered, inappropriate, and self-centered.”

            A red rage tore into Alice’s tender throat. “Are you serious? It’s a summer camp, not a real-estate-agent-of-the-year contest.

            “Incorrect. It’s Ben Waterman, who has been nothing but good to you. You ditched your commitment at the last minute for an…infatuation?”

            “First, I’m not a child anymore. Furthermore, you are the ill-mannered, inappropriate and self-centered one who has no idea about enjoying life!” Alice had never talked to her mother like that.

            “Oh, is that right? Since you’re such an adult, you should get your own place,” her mother snarled, stopping the door just short of a slam.

            “If only I knew a good realtor!” Alice shouted. Fuming and throwing clothes in a bag, she waited until she heard her the front door close, and left.

            Elena was in an electric mood. She had managed to talk the guys into an Italian dinner near Irving Plaza. Billy, holding the set list on his lap in the window seat while they waited for a table, looked like a little boy. Alice sat down, intending to be soft. Infatuation my ass.

            “When are you going back to school?” Billy mumbled, looking at his hands. 

            “That’s what you’re thinking about right now?”

            His stunning blue eyes flicked to her. “Something’s not right,” he said.

            It could be drugs, Alice thought, or alcohol. She looked for something less serious to say.

            “You’re under a lot of pressure,” she whispered. “But you have a gift, and it might just be that more people are going to have a chance to appreciate it.”

            “You should be a therapist.”

            “It’s just common sense.” Ben Waterman was why she had anything to say. Alice took the set list, and pulled his face toward her. “You got this,” she whispered in his ear after. “Trust me.”

            Billy smiled and sighed. She knew so little about his life, family, and childhood. Bugs Bunny, he’d said, was the best thing about it. Their party was called. His face was lighter. “I’m starving,” he said.

            At twelve-thirty, after six other acts—two great, two horrible, two meh—the spotlights went up again in the massive empty ballroom. Alice and Elena stood on the dance floor, their anticipation long drained. The band came out. Billy shaded his eyes and scanned the scene, found Alice, and pressed his palm to his lips blew her an exaggerated kiss. His vulnerability worried her.

            In tightly wound unison, they rolled into the first songs of the set. Onlookers migrated to the stage. A groove began to take shape. Whether the audience was 200 or 500, by the third song, they were smashed up close to the stage as Billy paced back and forth, jabbing his fist into the smoky air. He moved seamlessly, jumping the mic-stand, crouching on the floor and bursting up to belt out the falsetto of “Sympathy for the Devil.” During a solo, the bassist played the strings with his teeth. The crowd went crazy. Alice followed Elena, letting her hips and torsos loose. The electric current left no one still, no one untouched.

            When the set was over, they collapsed into each other, sweaty and elated. The band was going somewhere! With crisp clarity, the nights in skuzzy bars became the preamble for a bunch of early twenty-somethings who believed in a dream that was actually coming true.

            House music came on as the ballroom went dark. Elena grabbed Alice’s hand. “I have to tell you something!” she shouted.

            “I have to tell you something too!” Alice returned.

            “Me first!” Elena insisted. Alice leaned into her friend, her solid, physical, present friend whose usual vanilla rose smell was cut with musky sweat and cigarette smoke. She draped her arms around Elena’s neck, feeling woozy.

            “You know I love you, right?” Elena chuckled nervously. She spun Alice around and backed her to the side of the stage. “Can you just promise that you’ll forgive me eventually? Please?”

            The spotlights popped up. The band was back on stage.

            “Just tell me!” Alice shouted, her head full of scenarios and apprehensions.

            “We were asked to run a few originals,” Billy rasped into the mic.

            “Oh my God!” Elena screamed.

            The crowd erupted. Billy was gleaming, smiling, no sign of the sad little boy she helped to his seat in the restaurant hours ago. Alice needed him to find her, to connect with her in that sweet space that filled and emptied and stabilized her all at once. But he did not.

            Elena led her back to the dance floor. “After this,” she said. “I promise.”

            The first was a jaunty, almost poppy song, less flush with texture and complexity, but a catchy chorus the crowd seized. By the second song, a rock/punk mix with a raw edge, Alice and Elena were dancing at the front of the stage, arms overhead. Alice didn’t care what she looked like. This is me letting go!  

            The next thing she saw was Ben Waterman’s face, lowered close to hers. What was this? She turned away but could not shake him, his rough thumb tracing her nose… no! she thought, no, no, no! Was this Rumi’s crowd of mutilated dark thoughts? She was dizzy, suddenly, the room spinning, like when her father took her upper arms and spun her in circles. Then she was at the campfire eating, shoving funnel cake and cotton candy in her mouth, then fried pickles, blueberries, and Cracker Jacks, everything falling back out of her mouth. She ate a carrot, shrieked on a roller coaster, jumped off a cliff into a freezing river. She gulped, coughed, choked, spat, vomited, shat her pants, squeezed the hand in hers, screamed and fell.

            Though she seemed like a cartoon version, it was her mother at the eat-in-kitchen table, drinking a very full glass of red wine. “The Maiden Lane buyers pulled out,” she said. Elena mumbled condolences. Joan looked long at Alice, who had no fight, no words, and no way to hide the cracks in her universe. “We’re turning in,” she heard Elena say turning to steer her down the pale earth hall.

            On her back in the dim yellow spray of nightlight, Alice searched for meaning, motive, understanding; something to make sense of why she had a big black smear where the last hours had been. Elena’s cheek pressed into the watermelon slice pillow as she slept. She’d said Alice had fainted. Alice had no memory of fainting, but also no memory of leaving the ballroom, taking a cab, sitting a long time in the lobby, or riding the elevator up to the 11th floor. She did remember Elena twisting the skin on her forearm in two directions as they stood in front of the apartment door and Alice jerking her arm away. “Be normal,” she whispered. “Joan.”

            “Elena,” she said, nudging her. “Wake up.”

            Elena sat up.

            “You were going to tell me something,” Alice said.

            “Oh,” Elena said softly. “Okay. Yeah. Are you ok though?”

            “Ok enough,” Alice said.

            “In the winter, when I first met the guys and saw the band play… there was one night, just one… when I made a mistake. I knew it immediately, or as soon as the alcohol wore off…”

            “You slept with Billy,” Alice said.

            Elena’s face fell. “You knew?”

            “No, but you’re making such a big deal. What else could it be?”

            “It is a big deal! And you’re really mad, aren’t you, I mean, I would probably be, I think, at least for a while—” Elena sucked in a breath.

            “Is that why you pinched my leg instead of saying good bye and didn’t make sure I had a way home that first night at Billy’s? Is that what’s been bothering you all this time?”

            “No,” Elena said, sighing.

            “Well?”

            “Alice, you’re my best friend forever. I love you just the way you are, but then you passed out tonight, and I got really scared…”

            “Get to it,” Alice said.

            “It’s about us.”

            “Please be concise. I could have a concussion…”

            “Stop it!”

            Alice threw her arm around Elena. “Joking. Go on.”

            “In a way, you have always been the center of our friendship. Like, my job is to make sure you are alright. Not only after your dad, but before.” She paused. “Do you know what I mean?”

            “Maybe,” Alice said.

            “After I saw the band, all I could think about was bringing you to see them. I was determined to have fun before you left. I didn’t anticipate that you would get so wrapped up in it all.”

            Alice sighed. “I know what you’re saying. And I agree. So let me tell you this while we’re putting it all on the table. I think Ben Waterman might have been inappropriate with me.”

            “What? Why do you think that?”

            “This whole thing with Billy has given me a new idea of myself as someone who is free to enjoy and feel and be irresponsible and have desires and do things that aren’t about getting somewhere else. I can’t explain it exactly. I don’t know if I’m a breaching whale or a diving dolphin or a soaring bird, but I feel a ton, way more than before, all kinds of things like sadness and anger and even, I know how this sounds, ecstasy.”

            “Either Billy slipped you some of his performance-enhancing drugs or you’re finally ready for that cracker jack therapist Joan has been threatening all these years!” Elena shouted.

            “What drugs?”

            “Yeah, that was the other thing I needed to tell you. Billy disappeared when you were sick because he was on a bender. Uppers and downers both, Joey thinks. He’s gets manic, and then he sleeps for 12 hours.”

            “I see,” Alice said. “Thank you, now I’m clear. And now, it’s set.”

            “What’s set?”

            “Coney Island.”

            Elena raised her eyebrows. “Huh?”

            “It’s time for me to start facing the music. I’ve skipped over a lot. I think I’m ready to start, though. And if you are not tired of me, and I would absolutely respect your decision either way, I’d love for you to make sure I’m alright one more time, starting where my dad ended, and I began again.”

            “Of course,” Elena said. “On one condition.”

            Alice looked at her bestie in the dim yellow light.

            “For our first, last summer, we find new fun.”

            “On one condition,” Alice said. “You also come with me to the doctor. You know I hate doctors.”

            “You don’t want Joan to go with you?” Elena offered.

            “She can come too,” Alice said. “For Memorial Day.”