My office is on the corner of North Hampton and 56th, what some people might call Hampton Heights, and others consider a slice of urban decay. I call it cheap rent, and I share the building with shadows and silence. The neighborhood thrives on secrets, its inhabitants and the patrolling cops alike keeping their business to themselves. Not a place a young girl should loiter in the small hours of morning. Which is why I was more than a little surprised to find a 14-year-old Asian girl sitting outside my office one chilly Friday morning.

“A little early for a visit,” I said.

“It’s 10,” she said. She was a slight girl, a hair over five feet with long black hair and the ramrod straight back of a teen trying to make a good impression on an adult.

“Aren’t you supposed to be in school?” I slid the key into the lock and opened my office door.

“Winter break.”

“Huh.” I walked inside. “Come on, it’s freezing.” I waved her to follow me. She did.

I’m pretty sure my office was zoned as a studio apartment, but the owners had been too excited about having a tenant to put up much of a fuss about how I used the place. It smelled as musty and old as it looked. I put my coffee on the walk-through kitchen counter, hung my coat on the rack, and crossed uneven hardwood to sit at my desk. She was still standing near the doorway.

I wondered what I must look like to her. I was stocky, shorter than average, but still a head over her, with the wide-shouldered build of a linebacker. My hair and beard were long, tangled messes because I had skipped the morning shower. I would have smiled at her, but I’ve been told by more than one woman that my smile is more off-putting than my stern face. I had no clue how to put her at ease. For someone whose job it is to find kids, I’m pretty damn bad at talking to them when they find me.

“Do you want a coffee or something?” I asked. “I don’t have any of that Monster or whatever you kids are drinking these days.”

She smirked. “It’s Celsius now. But no, thanks.”

I nodded. “Take a seat. Might as well tell me why you’re here.”

She took a seat in the padded accent chair in the corner. It was an awkward several feet from my desk, but it was the only chair in the room. I’d meant to purchase actual office chairs but hadn’t gotten around to it in the last few years.

The girl sat primly in the chair, like something might jump out of it and eat her. She was trying her hardest to give an impression of someone professional and unbothered, as if any teenager ever could. There was desperation in those eyes. If she had a hat, it would be in her hand. The poor girl was terrified.

“Let’s start with your name,” I said.

“Chee.”

“Hmong?” I asked.

She nodded, surprised.

“I have a doctor colleague who helps me out on occasion. He’s Hmong.” Truth was, Fong was a good friend. He was also my cultural bridge to the neighborhood Hmong community. Being white had its advantages in many areas; communicating with minority community in-groups was not one of them. He helped me pick up a few words and understand the culture where I wouldn’t otherwise. That being said, after doing this for a few years, I had picked up a few things myself. Like common names.

I rummaged through my desk drawers for a fresh notepad, settled for a half-used one, and wrote Chee at the top.

“Okay, Chee,” I said. “Tell me why you’re here.”

“My sister’s missing and no one is looking for her.”

Chee laid it all out for me, and I scribbled the pertinent bits on my notepad: 16-year-old older sister named Bao, went out after dark two nights ago, hasn’t come home.

“What about the cops?”

“We tried. They say she is probably a runaway. But she’s not.” There was more desperate fear in her eyes than before. Maybe Chee was better at staying proper than I gave her credit for.

“I believe you.” I did, for the most part. At least, I didn’t take what the cops had to say as proof of anything. It was a rare day the boys in blue made an appearance here. Even rarer was the day they would help find a near-grown Hmong girl. “What about your parents?”

She shook her head. “My mom is too old to do anything to help. And my dad… Well, he’s gone.” She said it with the uncertainty of someone still trying to figure out how to tell people. “I don’t know where else to go.”

“Nobody else in your family will help?”

“My dad was the clan leader. Without him, no one has any obligation to me or to Bao.” She paused.

A teenage girl whose dad recently died loses her sister and has nowhere else to turn. Call me a sucker, but how could I say no?

“Any idea where to start?”

She beamed. It might have been the first genuine smile I’d seen on her. “My uncle. My mom and I live with him. I overheard him saying he saw something to the police, but I couldn’t hear what. They didn’t let me out of my room.”

“Your mom’s then.” I stood up. “You coming?”

She blanched, started to say something, stopped, and finally said, “Yeah.”

I grabbed my coffee and coat.

“I can’t pay…” she said, then added, “much, yet.”

Of course not.

Chee’s mother’s house was a few blocks away, but we still drove. The sky was a clear blue and the sun hung up there like a big lie. Not a single ray of heat reached the earth today. It was early enough in the morning that the temperatures hadn’t climbed above single digits. They likely wouldn’t all day. Even with the heater blasting, my fingers were numb on the steering wheel.

I stepped out of the car and the air bit at my cheeks. Why did I live where the air hurt my face?

There were no cars in the driveway, and the garage door was open to an empty workshop. Did she walk to school every day?

Chee’s mother was a stout woman who appeared to have had Chee later in life. She wore her age with the bearing of someone who had earned every wrinkle and spot. She greeted us at the door and, with a fuse equal in length to her height, began yelling at Chee in Hmong.

The conversation flew past me like I had front row seats at the racetrack: loud and fast. I tried to keep up, but the few words I recognized were “Bao” and “meeka”, which had something to do with being white. Hang around enough Hmong folks and you’re bound to be talked about.

After a while, I started to shiver, the cold creeping into my bones. The mother-daughter yelling match was oblivious to the cold, however, and blocked me from entering the door. I considered returning to my car and wiping my hands off the whole business. But I’d already promised Chee I’d help. Damn principles. I really needed to work on those.

A stooped, elderly man appeared in the doorway, appeared to scold Chee and her mother, then turned to me.

“Come in before you freeze your asses off,” he said. That I understood.

The inside of the house was bare, save for a large and comfortable couch. There was a large empty space on the other side of it, as though the room was meant for hosting many guests who hadn’t been seen for some time. Once we settled in, and my teeth had stopped chattering, the old man, who Chee explained was her uncle, spoke again.

“You’re supposed to be in school.” He was a tall man, bent under the weight of his age. Still, he commanded a presence of authority in the room that the women deferred to.

“It’s winter break,” she said under her breath.

The old man scoffed. “It’s January. I’m not that old.” Boy, did I feel dumb. He turned to me. “We’re very sorry for the trouble our niece has caused you. Thank you for returning her to us. However, I have to ask you to leave so we can address this family matter as a family.”

“Wait…”

The old man stood up. “To your room Chee. Sir, I can escort you out.”

Chee stood. “He’s here to find Bao.”

Her sister’s name blanketed the room. Everyone fell to silence. Chee’s uncle flushed. That interested me. It was one thing to be shocked by the mention of your missing niece, another to get angry.

“The police are looking for her,” Chee’s uncle said.

“The police are doing nothing,” Chee pleaded. “No one is doing anything.”

Her uncle snapped at her in Hmong.

“He will help,” Chee said. “He finds people. That’s his job.”

“It’s also the police’s job,” her uncle said. “Go get ready for school.”

Chee opened her mouth to protest some more and looked at me. I nodded my head towards the hallway that I assumed her room was down. Finding no allies, Chee stormed away. I felt a little bad for the kid, but I needed her uncle alone.

“If you’d please leave now, sir,” her uncle said. “I have to call the school to see if someone can pick her up.”

“I’m afraid I can’t do that quite yet.”

“Excuse me?”

“Chee’s a child, you’re right about that. But she’s right about something else.”

His eyes narrowed.

“I told her I’d help. As far as I’m concerned, she’s a client and I don’t abandon clients until I’ve done my part. Right now, that means trying to find Bao. Chee doesn’t know much, but something tells me you know more. So you’re going to spill and then I’ll save you a call to the school and drop her off myself. Fair trade?”

The man studied me for a long moment, features hard. Maybe bursting into someone’s house with their teenage niece and yelling at them wasn’t the best for building rapport.

“Thov, kuj xav pab koj.” My Hmong was not perfect, but even the attempt softened his features. He continued his study of me. Whatever he found, he appeared satisfied with.

“What did you say your name was?”

“Owen. Owen Ashton.”

“You’re Fong’s friend. He talks about you. Says you found his cat.”

I sighed. “A long time ago, yes.”

He nodded. “Do you have a business card?”

I paused.

“I’d rather not send my niece off with a stranger. I’m sure you understand, given everything.”

“Sure.” I reached into my pocket and produced a business card. It was plain beige with my name and contact info under the words Private Investigator in bold lettering.

He took it and sat down.

“What do you know?” he asked.

“Bao was out late two nights ago. She never came back. That’s about all Chee told me.”

He scoffed. “Of course it is. Did Chee tell you Bao was a little whore?”

“No, she didn’t.” I held my poker face.

“She was all around town with these boys. Not Hmong. Not even Asian. Whites, Blacks, Mexicans. Everything but Hmong. She was trying to shame our family. Mao and I,” he gestured to Chee’s mother, “we tried to stop it. Scolded her. Grounded her. Forbid her from seeing them. But she was so determined to ruin us.” He spat the words like rotten milk. I got his meaning.

“I get your meaning,” I said. “What happened to her?”

“What do you think?” he said. “A damn boy. I went to check on her one night and she was gone, her window open. It was two days ago now. First night of this cold. I couldn’t let her be alone out there, so I went looking for her and found her. Then, I saw her.”

“Bao?”

“No,” he whispered and leaned in. “Poj Ntxoog.”

I didn’t recognize the name.

“A little ghost girl,” he added.

“How did you know?”

“Her clothes. She was wearing rags, almost nothing, but she didn’t look cold. It was below zero, but she wasn’t shivering at all. And she wasn’t wearing shoes. Her feet were bare and they were…” He choked up. There was honest terror in his eyes. “They were backwards,” he said when he had gathered himself. “There wasn’t anything else it could be.”

“What did you do?”

“I ran. I didn’t know which way I was going but I just ran.”

“And what about Bao?”

He shook her head. “Bao isn’t the first girl to go missing around here. There’s been five children in the last three years who haven’t come home. All girls. All around Bao’s age.” He looked up at me, his eyes red and watery. “All of them turn up dead sooner or later. And the Poj Ntxoog is there every single time.”

I drove Chee to school. When I parked out front, she paused and looked thoughtful.

“Not embarrassed by your old private detective, are you?”

She looked at me, uncomprehending. No one gets good humor these days.

“What’s on your mind?” I asked.

“Uncle was wrong,” she said.

“About what?”

“The first girl, Mai Neng. I didn’t know her that well, but I know people who did.” She looked at me. “No one saw a Poj Ntxoog around her.”

After I’d dropped Chee off at school, I made a phone call. Fong was a doctor, which meant there was as much a chance of him being on rotation as not when you called. Thankfully, he picked up.

“What can you tell me about Poj Ntxoog?” I said.

“Hello to you too, Owen. I’m well, thanks for asking.”

“Hi, sorry. I’m on the job and need some quick info.”

He sighed from the other side of the line. “We have to work on your people skills.”

“After I find the missing girl.”

“There’s always a missing girl.”

“Fong…”

“I know.” I pictured him raising his hands in defeat. Fong and I had been friends since middle school when we bonded over our love of detective stories. We were cool, okay. Though only one of us ended up following the path. “What was it you needed?”

I let out a strained breath. “Poj Ntxoog?”

He laughed. “I just like making you pronounce it.”

“Fong!”

“Yeah, yeah. Poj Ntxoog. It’s like a little girl ghost. Long hair, bad clothes, whole Asian ghost girl nine yards.”

I scribbled some notes.

“Supposed to have backwards feet,” he continued. “Can I ask why you’re asking?”

“Missing girl,” I said. “Hmong. Uncle who saw her last says he saw Poj Ntxoog there too. Says a bunch of girls have gone missing and this thing is there every time.”

“Weird.”

“Why weird?”

“I mean, Poj Ntxoog is sort of a trickster. Like in the stories, men will be walking alone in the forest, run into one, and fall victim to her. She’s not usually associated with missing kids.”

“That is odd.”

There was a long pause as I wrote some notes. Then Fong spoke up.

“Owen, you don’t think there’s a serial killer or something going around, do you?”

“I can’t say the thought hadn’t crossed my mind. But it’s too early to say. Could just be coincidence.”

“You don’t believe in coincidence”

“I don’t believe in ghosts either, but I know better than to rule them out.”

Milwaukee Public Library’s Capitol Branch is a small, one-story brick building across from a McDonald’s that gets a lot more traffic. I was never much of a library guy myself; I sourced most of my cheap romances online, but this particular branch was home to one of the best resources in this part of town I had — Doug Shirley.

Doug was a middle-aged black schizophrenic. Which meant he was also homeless, on and off medications, and in and out of jail. He never kept a phone number for more than a month. When he’s not in cuffs or a locked unit of one of Milwaukee’s hospitals, Doug can most consistently be found at the library.

When I walked into Capitol Branch, Doug was in his normal corner chair by a window with a large stack of books beside him.

On his meds, Doug was one of the most articulate, well-read, and well-informed people I knew and trusted. He read everything, talked to everyone, and heard every bit of gossip the Hampton Heights homeless community had to offer. And he liked me, which was a plus.

Days he was off his meds, though, Doug was as unpredictable and scatterbrained as his criminal record would suggest.

He was bald up top except for the sides. When he’s in bad places, he keeps his hair about as well as a bird’s nest. Today, the sides of his head were cropped short, the white-gray hair almost a layer of dust. A thick five-o’clock shadow was apparent even though it was noon.

I sat in the chair beside Doug and plucked a book from the pile: Disappearance at Devil’s Rock.

“What’s the theme this week, Doug?” Doug’s reading spells always had a theme, though they could range from as simple as dinosaurs to as esoteric as written by a Sagittarius.

He grunted a greeting but didn’t look up from The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon to answer. I hazarded my own guess.

“Missing girls?”

He raised an eyebrow at me. I was close. I took a peak at a third title. The Adventure of Johnnie Waverly.

“Missing kids.”

Doug smiled. “How you doing, Mr. Ashton?”

“I’m great, Doug. How are you?”

“Perfect. Weather couldn’t be better for some mysteries.” The wind was howling. Goosebumps rose on my skin. Sometimes cold was a mindset.

“Speaking of,” I leaned in. “I’ve got one I could use some help on. In fact,” I tapped the top book on his pile, “I think it fits your theme.”

“For real?”

I nodded. “What have you heard about a little Hmong girl? Went missing maybe 3 days ago, lives on 54th.”

“Hmong?”

“Asian.”

“Oh.” He thought about it for a moment. I let him. “I don’t know nothing about Asian, but I know a girl was supposed to have been out too late by the creek a few nights ago. Damn cold.”

“Lincoln Creek?”

He nodded. “Richie saw her. Said it was damn cold out. Too damn cold for a little girl. Said he wanted to help her, get her home, or warm or something. Tried to go up to her, but…”

“But what?”

“But Richie got spooked.”

“Spooked?”

Doug shook his head. “Says he saw a ghost.” Then he shrugged. “I figured he was off his meds.”

“What happened to the girl?”

“Don’t know. Richie says he got so scared he ran off and forgot all about her ‘till he was at the tent.”

“Thanks, Doug. I’ll let you read some.” I slipped a ten into the book I was holding and put it back on top of the pile. “That’s a good one.”

I got up to leave. “Oh, Doug.”

“Yeah?”

“How’d Richie know it was a ghost?”

Doug shook his head. “Said something about long black hair and dirty clothes. Sounds like he’s watched too much J-horror to me.”

Sometimes being a detective is about following people, sometimes it’s about talking to people, and other times it’s walking through the freezing cold along 21 square miles of urban watershed looking for clues.

From where Chee’s uncle and Richie had seen the girl, I managed to narrow my search to the few miles near Hampton Heights. In the hours it took me to search, the sun descended below the horizon. As soon as it did, the cold crept deep into my bones. I was wearing a heavy wool overcoat and a sweater underneath. Even still, I could not stop my teeth from chattering. My nose stung as if the cold was its own scent.

Without the sun, a few streetlights lit the neighborhood in a dull fluorescent glow. It was not the best to search for clues under, so I pulled out my phone’s flashlight. My fingers, numb even through my gloves, struggled to keep the light stable.

The ground was a frozen block of snow. Nothing fresh had fallen in the last few days and, even with the wind, the snow was too frozen to have shifted much. Which meant, after a few hours of looking, I noticed what I would not have been able to if there had been fresh snowfall or even low enough temperatures to melt: two sets of footprints headed into a dense cluster of trees at the water’s edge.

That’s where I found the body.

I was far from the streetlights, so I only had my phone light to see by, but I could tell he was not Bao.

He was a young man, maybe mid-twenties, white, slight of frame, with large eyes. He had been dead for a few days. How many was hard to say. The temperature had preserved him and his wide-eyed, mouth-agape expression. His pants were down to his knees. A set of frozen imprints in the ground suggested he had been kneeling when he pulled them down.

A girl goes missing three days ago. She’s last seen near a park. A boy, dead for about that many days, is found in the same park. There was a chance this dead boy had nothing to do with Bao; that he was a coincidence. But Fong was right. I didn’t believe in coincidences.

I wasn’t a woodsman by any means. I wasn’t about to track a deer through the forest by tracks and tufts of fur. But what even I could do was see there were three sets of footprints here: two sets of boots walking into the trees, one set of boots walking out the other way and ending by the road. Beside it, another set of bare feet walking towards the trees. Three people here? The wind rattled the branches above me.

I looked back at the boy and grimaced. A dead body is a little above my paygrade. With a surge of good decision-making that often eludes me, I took out my phone and dialed the number of Sergeant Laity, my usual source of insight into Milwaukee PD. He picked up on the 5th ring.

“What do you want, Ashton?”

“Nice to hear from you too, Laity. I’m doing swell by the way.”

“It’s fucking 11 at night. I left my pleasantries in my dreams.”

“Old man much?”

“I work odd hours. Look. Why are you calling?”

“Dead body in the woods by Lincoln Creek. Looks like it might have been here a while.”

“Jesus Christ, Ashton. Call 911 with that stuff, not me.” He was awake now.

I shrugged, even if he couldn’t see me. “He’s dead, Ashton, and not going anywhere. Didn’t seem like much of an emergency.”

“For fuck’s sake, stay put. I’m calling it in.”

“No can do.”

“What do you mean no can do? You found a dead body, Ashton. Stay by it.”

“Can’t. Missing kid might not have the time.”

“God Damn it, Ashton…”

I hung up the phone. I’d already started to follow the boot prints out of the trees and towards the road. The bare footprints stayed beside them the entire way.

The footprints faded away much before they neared the road, but I followed the direction they pointed me towards: to an old, single-story apartment building with boarded windows. It looked how I imagined my own office building would once I left.

One window was shattered inwards into a pile of glass and snow. I glanced around. No one was out—too cold and late—and slipped through the open window.

Inside was not much warmer than out as the wind howled in behind me. My breath still puffed out in front of me. The tips of my ears burned, and I wondered if I was dumb enough to have given myself frostbite. I pulled my jacket tighter and walked deeper into the building.

Whatever the layout had been before, the building was now stripped to its skeleton. Gapped hardwood floors groaned under my weight. Beams and the remaining dry wall shrieked in protest as the wind outside threatened to rip the building apart. The boarded windows offered little light. I pulled out my phone’s flashlight again. It cast dark shadows that moved as I walked like the figures at the edges of my vision. The moist scent of mildew itched at my nose. The air was heavy with dust and who knew what else. My skin crawled with the imagined grime.

Maybe I should have waited for Laity. Hell, I’d settle for Doug right now.

I turned one corner, holding my breath, praying not to see a dead little girl, and found empty space. It happened again and again as I moved through the labyrinth of indiscernible rooms until I was sure I had been mistaken and the girl was not here.

I came to a wide, high-ceilinged room that I figured was the lobby. Where there should have been a staircase down was a gaping, black hole in the floor. I stepped away from it.

I passed my light over the room one more time and froze. A dozen feet away, in a shadowed corner of the room that still managed to elude the light, a figure was curled into a ball. A young girl. It was hard to tell from where I stood, but I thought there was a faint rise and fall of her chest. I let out a sigh I hadn’t realized I’d been holding.

I took a step forward, but stopped.

At the edge of my phone’s light, a length of black hair shuddered as if blown by the wind, and vanished back into the darkness. My mouth went dry. Blood thundered through my ears. My breath came short and shallow. My legs tensed like springs ready to burst at the slightest movement.

Whatever it was remained cloaked in blackness an inch out of sight. I crept the phone light over, unable to keep it from shaking, to reveal another figure. Another girl. Short. She stood still and silent. Her features were indistinct under a blind of long, black hair. Her arms hung limp at her sides. She wore clothes so filthy, they may as well have been wrapped in rags. Pale skin betrayed scars and bruises over most of her body.

I told myself this was a normal girl, a scared girl, maybe even an abused girl. She was probably just as scared at that moment as I was.

I almost believed it.

“Are you alright?” I took a step forward. The girl did too, her backward feet landing toe first before flopping onto her heels. Nope, not normal.

Bao was still in the corner, shivering and taking shallow breaths.

“I’m not going to hurt her.” I said. “I’m here to help.” I took another step towards Bao. The Poj Ntxoog took another step to stay between us. It was silent the whole time, save for the sick slap of sole against floor.

Whatever it was, it did not look strong. I thought I could take it in a fair fight. But I also remembered the boy, dead in the park. Frozen in place mid-movement. I had never put too much stock in ghost stories, but I wasn’t an idiot either. Still, Bao was in the corner, shivering and presumably starving. For all I knew, she had moments left.

I began to take another step forward.

“Wait!” a girl’s voice said from behind me. Chee’s voice.

I didn’t take my eyes off the Poj Ntxoog. “Aren’t you supposed to be at school?”

“It’s almost midnight,” she said. “I saw you outside and…” She trailed off, her eyes wandering towards the Poj Ntxoog.

“Looking for your sister? Didn’t you hire me for that?”

“Is now the time?” she said and walked forward toward Bao.

“Wait.”

She didn’t. “Mai Neng?” She whispered. The ghost girl said nothing. Chee advanced. “It is you.” Chee spoke to the Poj Ntxoog in Hmong. Though the ghost didn’t speak, it relaxed. Chee walked past it to her sister and shook her awake. Bao stumbled to her feet and put her full weight on Chee’s shoulder. They staggered towards me. I didn’t dare move until they were past the Poj Ntxoog and had reached me. I put my coat over Bao.

“Can you make it outside?” I asked.

“I think so,” Chee said.

“Good. Go. The police should be here soon. There’s something I have to check.”

Chee gave me a questioning look. Her sister moaned and shifted on her shoulder. “Be careful,” Chee said, and she half-carried Bao out of the room.

I looked at the hole in the floor where the stairs should have been. It held wide like a gaping maw eager to consume. I felt eyes staring back at me from within. The Poj Ntxoog still stood where Chee had spoken to her. I couldn’t see any eyes under the mop of hair, but I felt her regarding me.

I didn’t believe in coincidences.

The Poj Ntxoog did not move to stop me when I approached the hole. Within the hole, I made out the tops of washers and dryers against the wall. This must have been the laundry room. I could fall on top of them without too much trouble. Probably. I gripped the edge, slid over, and toppled onto machine tops.

What I found there was a matter for the next day’s paper.

I stood outside, coatless, and shivering after I had given my statement. A lanky cop strode over to me from the abandoned apartment complex. He was about a foot taller than me and, even with being rail-thin, cut an imposing figure.

“Laity,” I said. It was all I could do to keep the shivering out of my voice.

The sergeant nodded. “Ashton.”

“And didn’t make a single dime on it.”

“Another pro bono?”

“What can I say? I’m a bleeding heart.”

Laity looked over to the ambulance where Chee and Bao huddled together under a paramedic’s blanket and my coat. Chee was crying. He sighed.

“I don’t think I can give you shit for it this time,” he said. “But keep it up and we’ll see.”

“I’m not in any danger of getting evicted,” I said.

He nodded. We stood in the cold for a long time.

“They called the cops, Laity.”

He grimaced. “I know.”

“They talked to the same Uncle I did. The footprints were right there for everyone to see for days. All they had to do was look. And now five dead girls, going back who knows how long.”

Laity’s wide, mustached face was set in deep thought. He was silent for a long time. “The guys did what they thought was best with the information they had.”

“When the hell did you get so political with me? It’s Owen. Don’t bullshit me.”

Laity went stern. Anger flashed through his eyes. For a moment, I wondered if my friend was going to hit me, or worse, arrest me for condemning cops. My chest tightened.

I was saved by another cop I didn’t recognize approaching us. “Sarge,” she said to Laity. “Kid’s mom is here. She won’t let us take her to the hospital.”

“God damn it.” Laity made to storm away.

“Wait,” I said. “I might have a way to help with this.”

When Fong had finished examining Bao, we stopped by my place for a nightcap. Or a morning cap. It was nearly six by then. My place was small and a mess, but Fong didn’t say anything. He was short, bald, and had gained a lot of weight since graduating from medical school, but Fong was good people.

“How was she, if I may ask?” My curiosity was burning.

Normally, I would expect my friend to stonewall me with some spiel about doctor-patient confidentiality. Today, however, he sighed. “She’ll be fine. Malnourished and dehydrated, obviously. Some bruises on her wrists. But other than that, she’ll live.”

“Nothing else?”

“No sign of other injury. She wasn’t raped, Owen.”

I let out a tense breath.

“Cops figure out who the dead boy was?” he asked.

I nodded. “Boyfriend. Ran off one night for a romantic evening, only he wanted it a little more romantic than her. Things got rough. Report will say Bao defended herself, knocked him out, and he froze to death by the creek.”

“And what do you say?”

I thought about it. “Boy didn’t have any bruising to suggest how he was knocked out. He was bigger and stronger than her. She was too disoriented to even make it home. Something else knocked him out.”

“Poj Ntxoog.”

“I don’t think it was that either.”

“Come on, Owen. You’re telling me you don’t believe? After all this?” He gestured around the room with his whiskey glass.

“It’s not that. I don’t think it was a Poj Ntxoog. I think it looked like one. You said Poj Ntxoog isn’t associated with missing kids, right? They’re tricksters. Which goes to reason they wouldn’t be protectors either.”

He nodded.

“Chee didn’t call it Poj Ntxoog when she saw it,” I continued. “She called it by name. Mai Neng.”

“The first girl.”

“Exactly. And there was something about the bodies. What this guy did to them. He turned their feet around, Fong. Turned them backwards.”

“Jesus christ,” Fong said. “This is fucked.” He downed his whiskey, and I poured him another one. He stared at it thoughtfully. “They’re going to catch him.” It sounded like a statement, but it felt more like a question.

“I don’t know.” We sat in silence, waiting for the sun to rise on Milwaukee.

“John, just shut up and give me the fucking gun!”

He was screaming his taunts, unable to translate physical reactions into verbal communication.

“All right, I’ll give it to you,” I said to my close friend Carl, as I pulled my weapon from my side and pointed it at him, just before hearing the blast. Then the infinite swirl of stars and colors and life burst into our existence, and once more all of us were merely subservient victims of these things called physics and reality.

Always Back to Monday

“You’ll give what to me?” he asks over Monday morning breakfast.

“The maple syrup,” I grasp for words as I grab the bottle. “That’s what I’ll give you… because it’s only a Monday morning.”

“What day did you think it was?” Carl asks.

“It could’ve been Thursday,” I say. “Long weekends rarely end early.” My ears focus on the fading buzz of electrons and spatial plasma as my mind begins to assert control over the present situation and its numerous undecided aspects.

“You joke around breakfast time all you want,” he tells me. “Come Wednesday, if you aren’t prepared, if your memory slips a half second, if your reactions are worse than theirs, that means that you, and probably the rest of us, will be their victims; instead of them being ours.”

I’m reciting this conversation in my head, out of practice, while avoiding the important task at hand — to understand the bank heist we are about to perform. But it’s not like that really matters on Monday. You see, I’m the only one who goes back to Monday.

For Some, It is Always Back to Tuesday

“Oh, my god,” Joseph screams. “The lights! The fury! You all experienced that, right?”

“For god’s sake, Joseph,” Carl responds. “We’ve all experienced it together multiple times. Problem is we need to figure out, again, why everything went wrong. Why do we keep getting phased back in time with memories from the future intact?”

“You see that?” Rutger says in his vaguely unbroken German accent, “My hand, look at it.” His fingers go through acrobatics in the air. “That bullet surely ripped my palm in half. And yet it’s back to normal, like nothing happened.”

“We’re not going to make any progress here if you keep behaving like children,” Carl tells us. “You think we’re going to get back to a normal, linear flow of time by playing these ridiculous tricks?” He wipes a layer of sweat from his forehead and then turns to me. “What about you, John? Any new insights? You seem to be the only one coming up with clever ideas.”

“No, actually,” I reply. “Nothing new on my end.” I’ve decided not to tell them what I know. For now anyway.

Or, Is it Always Back to Wednesday?

Wednesday. Polished rubber clicks against a marble floor with its own particular resonance when you are wearing steel-toed boots. When we, as a team, initially entered the bank that afternoon, there was just one thing we kept in mind: we had come here to conquer.

That was our attitude the first time we broke into the bank. After we were sent through several cycles of the bank robbery, it became an event that was almost formulaic. “All right, you fucking assholes!” Joseph enjoyed repeating this particular line for some reason, every single iteration. “Put your fucking hands up!”

The rest of us could tell you what was going to happen by rote memory. I might angle my weapon differently in one cycle, watch the security guards react to the sheen of light in a slightly different position just to see if I could get an advantage. But Joseph would be just as taunting, Carl would be just as commanding, and Rutger would be just as professional. That was our team.

When someone places the barrel of a gun behind your ear and asks whether you are willing to cooperate, you tend to evaluate your choices. As a rite of initiation to professional bank robbers, there is little else that can make you question them. Even if that little thing taunting your confidence is a sudden, random time travel loop.

So, Why the Time Travel, Then?

The first time we looped, Carl actually wanted to check to see if the time travel was added as an insurance option to guarantee our success. We all figured out that we go back to Tuesday while the rest of the world was oblivious; I kept my Monday secret to myself.

But we were raiding a bank, not a quantum physics laboratory. We were hired red-bloods, mere mercenaries with mostly up-to-date intelligence. Astrophysics and the Taoist Master standing behind the all-encompassing Universe — all of that was something we stumbled upon in our duties, and definitely not something we expected upon signing up.

So, what caused us to travel back in time repeatedly? None of us really knew. Having an extra day to research while the others were blissfully ignorant did nothing to help me.

A bank is the least busy on a Wednesday afternoon at lunch. We realized this as an opportunity. Insurance companies make the same bet. We just figured that a team of angry, skilled soldiers would be a bit more intimidating than a department of pencil-pushing administrators and their facon bacon cops. But every Wednesday, the same thing happens: we lose and go back in time.

To Fire The Gun Randomly

“Pack the bags with as much cash as you can.” Carl was always thorough on this point, every time the bank robbery occurred. It seemed to be the line with which he had most success and one he was most willing to rely on.

“Please don’t hurt us,” one of the tellers screamed as she struggled with the equipment. “We’re going as fast as we can.”

“Did you see him yet?” I asked. “Are you fucking looking?”

“Shut the fuck up,” Carl responded. I rescinded any doubts about him. “No, I didn’t fucking see him, but I’m fucking looking.” Sweat traced his hairline.

“You’re still looking for The Ghost?” Joseph asked, “I’ll tell you if I see an exorcist.” He turned around and moved out of vision forever. The next thing I heard sounded like the cracking of wood. By the time I looked, he was on the ground and there were an infinite number of assault rifle bursts. The Ghost had struck again. I was eliminated with the others.

To Fear Others Randomly

I loop back in time to Monday. “Give me the fucking maple syrup,” Carl handles his line quite well. He doesn’t know yet, and if I try to explain, he’ll just forget what I tell him, and I’ll go back to Monday again without gaining anything. I keep it to myself. No use having the same conversation for infinity.

So, it’s a quiet Monday. Tuesday comes. “You get a look at The Ghost, this time?” I ask.

“Holy fuck, I’m alive again!” Joseph screams out.

“Shut up, Joseph,” Rutger rubs the more circular parts of his shaved cranium. “You say that every time.”

“That fucking Ghost is always there,” Carl yells, finally showing his irritation. “Every time we prepare for every move he is going to make, and every time he kills every last one of us. I mean, after I saw red, I assumed the same happened to you all again, right? You were all blown away?”

“To the hilt,” I chime in like I might’ve been expected to. But that’s the thing, I did die again, just like them. You see, we don’t know who the Ghost is, but at the last moment of our robbery, this person suddenly appears, draped in black and cloaked in silence. What follows is a blood bath with our veins as the main pipes into the tub.

“To the hilt?” Carl counters. “You mean, like your lover?”

To Question Randomly

“What the fuck are you talking about?” I ask. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“This is a heist, not a fucking charity dinner,” Carl says to me. “We’ve been in that bank at least twenty times by now, and so far I haven’t had a reason to question your abilities.”

“And you’ve given me plenty of reasons to question yours,” I respond.

“I’m with John on this one,” Rutger adds. “Killing civilians is sloppy. It makes the police want to hunt you all the more. It’s pure logistics. Do you want the money in the vaults, or do you want to commit some terrible act to prove you have a right to it?”

“Why can’t we have both?” Joseph asks.

“Because you are either weak and victimized by the situation, or you are strong and you overpower it,” Rutger says. “It is an anomaly to be both.”

“That’s not exactly what I meant,” Carl adds. “No, John. I wasn’t criticizing you for being a bleeding heart. I think you knew the girl at the bank — from before we planned this heist.”

To Die Randomly

“What makes you think I knew her?” I ask.

“I saw you talking to her,” Carl replies. “You were speaking almost as though you knew some very intimate things.”

“Go fuck yourself, Carl,” I respond. “For all I know, you’re the one who was talking intimately to her.” And that’s just the thing — I did see him talking to her, and very closely. But it was several cycles ago. I’ve been trying to piece it together, fragment by fragment, moment by moment, but have gotten nowhere. The unexpected counter punch was enough to get him to shut up. I don’t need him quiet for the rest of my life — just until the next day will be sufficient.

Wednesday. Another blazing through of rent-a-cop uniforms and the bank suddenly fell within the sovereignty of our domain.

“You, Joseph and Rutger, you break the vault seals,” Carl handed out his orders. “For this time anyway.” The bank tellers gave each other quick perplexed looks.

“I’m on lookout with you, John,” he added, pointing to the front. “I’m on point, you stay back. I want to at least get a look at this thing when it kills me.” No more than a smile before his head exploded. His blood got in my eyes and I could not see. Struggling to get to Rutger and Joseph, I saw one of the teller girls, the one from before, with a faint whisper on her lips, “Carl…”

To Misunderstand Randomly

“Give me the fucking maple —”, I interrupt him, grab the bottle, and place it directly in front of him. Being resurrected in a rooftop restaurant with an infinitely warm sun may seem ideal, but it might not be enough if you can still see your nightmares right in front of you.

“You’re getting a little jumpy too soon, aren’t you, John?” Carl knows how to bother someone right at the moment they least need it. He’s good at being a boss.

Tuesday. “What the fuck, John!” his tone suddenly changes. “I told you to hang back. And not one fucking bullet of suppressing fire?”

“It was another bloodletting,” Rutger says. “We were all doomed, once again, without more than a half impulse of willingness to defend ourselves. I wonder, what are we after now? To get the money, or to end the time cycles?”

“Both,” Carl and Joseph chant together, before their seriousness subsides into non-threatening chuckles.

“Then maybe you should tell us,” Rutger replies.”About the girl. You went down first, then John, then Joseph, but, knowing my fate, I hid and waited. I listened to The Ghost walk straight up to the teller. He asked where you were, Carl, by name. So, why don’t you tell us what you really know?”

To Lead Randomly

“She’s just a fuckin’ girl,” Carl tells us. “Just one of the bank workers. I may have pushed her around, or I may have used force on her, or I may have demanded information from her. You all saw how I behaved with her, there should be nothing to question.”

“It’s the exact opposite,” Rutger replies. “Everything is up to question. Here we are, twenty or thirty time cycles later, and we’re still going through the same actions. I want to find a loose end, and so far, you’re the closest thing to it.”

“He makes a point,” Joseph mindlessness seems to dissipate when he can be made to finally recognize his own self-interests. I agree.

“So, what do you all have in mind?” Carl starts to panic. “Are you going to torture me? Beat the answer out of me?”

“No, that won’t solve anything,” Rutger says. “I want answers, not tears. Begin by telling me her name.”

“Angela,” Carl blurts it out. “It’s Angela. But I know nothing else about her. Not a fucking clue.”

“Next time around, then,” Rutger says. “You, John, are going to sit out, until the last minute, to enter the bank. Then you can tell us what you learned when you go back.”

To Follow Randomly

“It’s fucking impossible to take on a bank with only three heistmen,” Carl complains on Wednesday morning.

“Oh, yeah?” I look to Rutger’s lead.”And so far, it’s also been impossible to take it on with four heistmen, so things can’t be all that much worse for us.”

“Which one is Angela?” Joseph asks. “There were six bank tellers, four women, two men.”

“The one with the green earrings,” Rutger replies.

“Oh, the beauty, eh?” Joseph says. “I guess infinitely reliving the last, most painful days of your life would be at least worth her.”

“You’re all making a mistake, you’ll find that out when we go back to Tuesday again,” Carl protests.

“That’s all I ever wanted,” Rutger responds. “To find out. Let’s hope that’s what we get.”

To Kill Randomly

Watching the bank from a block away was like watching it through a time rift. The distance was alarming, even if I was armed with one suitcase containing sniper rifle components and another containing a submachine gun.

Just another Wednesday, where I was ready to kill, except this time there were toxic jet streams just overhead and an urban deli just beneath my feet. It was a nice contrast to marbled granite in every direction.

Our van showed up, just as scheduled. The three soldiers stormed the bank, there were shots for about one minute, and then all went silent. Everything must’ve gone without a hitch.

Three minutes passed, and I saw a black, armored vehicle come to a halt just out back of the bank. The time frame fitted The Ghost’s past behavior, so I slid down the nearest fire escape ladder. Running across the street, I heard a series of shots, from automatic to semi-automatic fire until I finally put my foot down on that first step up to the bank — then there was only one weapon that I could hear.

I dodged to a side entrance for employees, fired at the door’s locks, and kicked in the door. The Ghost was caught surprised, but not too surprised. Next to him was a woman, a bank teller. She was holding a brown briefcase. I heard a gentle whisper from her lips, “No.” I made out the numbers on the briefcase, ‘AX-4007’, and then, once more, I was basking in sunlight at a rooftop restaurant on Monday. She didn’t have green earrings, though — they were blue.

To Think Randomly

“Give me the fucking maple syrup,” Carl says.

“What do you think she meant by that?” I ask the air and beg the sky.

“What, that she turned you down?” Joseph breaks my concentration. A mild glance of irritation, as I think to myself, “Just wait till tomorrow.”

Tuesday. “Holy fuck!” Joseph screams, “We were brutalized by The Ghost. Not a fucking chance. Never a chance in goddamn hell!”

“John, did you find out anything this time?” Rutger says, “Did you get any information?”

“AX-4007,” I tell them, “I could only see that The Ghost entered through the back of the bank alone, maybe with a driver, but the opportunity of a clear shot never presented itself. When I broke in after The Ghost finished you all off, I saw him in the back, with a bank teller and a briefcase marked AX-4007.”

“The girl with the green earrings, right?” Rutger asks, “It was Angela.”

“No, it was actually the girl with the blue earrings,” I reply. “Angela wasn’t with The Ghost at all.”

“What the fuck does that mean?” Joseph asks.

To Be Ignorant Randomly

“So you, Carl, know the girl with the green earrings,” Rutger says out loud. “And The Ghost knows the girl with the blue earrings.”

“Angela and our second mistress,” Joseph adds.

“The second girl is Patty,” Carl tells us, to the surprise of the rest of us, and then with a few grains of reassurance, “They all have name tags, you know.”

“And the briefcase? AX-4007? That could mean anything,” Rutger says.

“I know, but it’s an ocean of information compared to the few drops we’ve been able to squeeze out of the situation,” I reply. “At least we know that The Ghost is in the loop before the bank robbery actually starts.”

“We need more information,” Rutger says. “It’s information that is the key. Next time, I want you, John and Carl, to stay back and watch the bank. The Ghost can’t escape two snipers. Joseph and I will get what information we can from Patty and Angela while we’re inside.”

“What? Two heistmen against a bank full of security guards?”

“I’ve memorized the patterns of their footsteps and the time frames each one puts in between shots,” Rutger says. “I think we’ll be a bit more successful. Do you have any better ideas?”

To Be Consumed Randomly

Wednesday. I gave a very slow wave across 400 meters of urban sprawl to my comrade in arms, before gesturing a thumbs up. Carl repeated the wave, but finished it up with a middle finger.

We were both armed with Dragunov sniper rifles, effective and efficient, with a magazine clip big enough to make it an almost foolproof weapon. We were positioned such that one of us would have a decent shot when The Ghost emerged from his vehicle. And since that vehicle originally approached from the Northwest, that is where both of our sights were aimed.

I looked up from my scope and checked my watch. The Ghost was two minutes late. I saw Carl waving at me across the bank plaza. He pointed to his eyes, and then to the scope, closing the end of the rifle into his shoulder. Following suit, I stared at the road leading to the bank, until I heard the explosion.

A loud roaring blast of a car horn distracted me, as a bicyclist stopped short to scream at a driver and then pedaled away. I checked my watch. This hadn’t happened the last time; my time on the rooftop hadn’t lasted that long. I looked across the plaza to where Carl was positioned. He was gone. I pulled up the scope and zoomed in on his position. I didn’t see him, and I didn’t see his weapon.

I dropped the sniper rifle and fell back behind the parapet, pulling a pistol out from inside my jacket. A hand lifted itself up from the other balcony, dropping a grenade in front of me.

To Be Heroic Randomly

Tick, tick, tick — as the grenade bounced against the concrete, I pulled myself over the edge, holding on with just a few fingers, until the blast knocked my grip loose and sent me falling through to the unforgiving steel of a fire escape. I was completely unarmed.

I hoisted myself up and made my way to the ground level as fast as I could. I lunged through traffic to the bank. The grenade had made whatever weapons I had on the building useless, and the apparent absence of The Ghost from the bank had made it, for the time being, the safest place I could go to.

“Hey!” I screamed, coming through the bank entrance. “Rutger! Joseph! Carl’s dead!” I fell to my knees while catching my breath in an empty marble bank, with bodies of security guards scattered throughout. Silence. I was still alone.

“Please don’t let them come back. Please don’t let them come back,” I heard quiet whispering coming from one of the office rooms. I took a pistol from one of the dead guards and followed that soft scratching. Then I found her — another one of the bank tellers, but she didn’t have green or blue earrings. It was not Angela or Patty. It was… Lucia, I discovered from her name tag.

“Who don’t you want to come back?” I walked up to her, “What are you afraid of?”

Slowly, quietly, she took her hands from her eyes. “Well, nothing anymore.”

I looked down. It was Joseph. He was shot through the skull. Then, I heard the front door to the bank open.

To Be Sacrificial Randomly

Being a mouse to a cat is a lot easier if it’s the mouse that discovers the cat and not the other way around. I rose softly and sneaked through an office hallway to another office. I heard the clicking of a firearm, but there were no shots. That made me more nervous than bold.

In the next room, I stumbled on a body. I hardly had to look down to realize that it was Rutger. Security guards don’t die rushing through doorways; they die crying to themselves in a pool of blood while hostages are sacrificed. I looked past the body to the wall, and there she was: Patty, the girl with the blue earrings, Angela following close behind. Except, unlike Lucia, she was not terrified. She was standing, rather unintimidated.

“He’s in here!” she screamed.

I turned towards the rapid footsteps long enough to calculate their distance. Then I turned to her and raised my pistol for one final shot.

“No, don’t kill my best friend,” Angela stood in front of Patty. “You’ll have to kill me too.”

If confusion had distracted me, then it could also work on The Ghost. I fired one shot at the table in front of us into a vase, sending glass shards flying. It was enough for both of them to dive to the ground.

The Ghost entered the room with a lowered weapon. My arm was around Patty’s neck, the pistol firmly to her skull.

To Be Angry Randomly

“I want answers!” I screamed.

“You dumb, ignorant shit,” I heard The Ghost finally speak. It was a woman, “You were never supposed to take a hostage like this. You were never supposed to be on your own.”

“When you have no choices, then you have no choices,” I could hear Patty wince as my nervousness translated into a tighter grip.

“Now we’re going to have to do this thing all over again. You know that, don’t you?” The Ghost told me.

“Yeah, I do, but what I want to know is how you know,” I said.

“You mean you really understand the time cycles that have been going on?” My heart skipped a beat.

“More than you could possibly imagine,” I lied.

“Then you’re dumber than I thought. The government files on AX-4007 are explicitly clear. When a time loop is set up, the results repeat until the cycle has reached its nexus point, where it contradicts the setup.”

“What do you mean by that?”.

“Isn’t it obvious? What I mean is that the gun you’re holding doesn’t have any bullets left.”

To Be Dead Randomly

“Give me the fucking maple syrup…”

I can’t turn away from the glint of sunshine in our safe rooftop haven. “The time loop has not yet reached its nexus point.” There’s a moment of silence.

“What?” Joseph asks.

“I’m just thinking about why she said no,” I walk the line between reality and fiction.

“Typical idiot,” Joseph replies. “You mention time travel and nexus points to a girl, and she’ll walk away from you like the weirdo you are.”

“You’re quite sure of your abilities,” Rutger speaks. “I hope you don’t fail us when it finally matters.”

“Don’t worry about me. My talk comes with a delivery,” Joseph says. “Whether it’s with the girls at the club or plying my trade.”

Carl looks at each of us, and then without hesitation, reaches across the length of the table to pull the maple syrup closer. He doesn’t say a single word.

I don’t trust Carl.

To Be Suspicious Randomly

I make up some excuse for breaking my engagement that afternoon at the restaurant. A few calls are made, some equipment is acquired at a hefty credit rate, and by evening, I have tracked down Carl to a low-profile but classy restaurant downtown.

Since all I want is information, binoculars and an audio surveillance device are all that I need. But just in case, I bring my peace of mind.

“You want me to put the diamonds into your bag?” she says.

“Hush hush,” Carl mutters, using a cigarette to cover his mouth. Finally, after a few moments have passed, “Use words we have agreed upon.”

“The glass goes into your bag, the one with the blue sticker on the bottom,” she says. “And then the green goes equally into both bags.”

“That’s right,” Carl says. “The bangs we have set up, they’re going to take out the bolting mechanisms for all of the containers in the building, so it will be easy pickings”

I look closer. I see green earrings. It’s Angela. Carl is trying to sell us out.

To Be Curious Randomly

All he is trying to do is get a bigger cut. The antagonism and frustration he’s been showing as a leader isn’t because of an actual block he’s running up against; he’s just venting his inabilities.

I listen to their conversation some more, but I get no good information out of it. I see the stud in town taking out his lady so that he can tell her how he’s going to rip his friends off. But I don’t see or hear anything about time cycles or loops.

Angela — she jumped in front of her friend, Patty, to save her. I saw her at one point talking with Carl in the bank, but I wasn’t able to follow up my questions on that.

My suspicion that Carl was lying has been proved. But the fruits of this proof are worthless. If I walk away from that bank with hundred million dollars instead of a hundred and fifty, I’d be almost just as satisfied.

Carl’s secret is self-interest and greed. I can contain him. But The Ghost’s secret — that one still eludes me — and she still escapes containment.

AX-4007? Maybe my credit’s still good enough to get some more information about it.

To Be Desperate Randomly

There are all types of midnight phone calls. “I need some information, government related, high confidential levels,” I say.

“Yeah, hold on,” I hear as the line goes blank. Thirty seconds pass. “You know where to meet me?”

“I do,” I reply.

“Be there in an hour,” the phone clicks.

Never doubt what you might find down an alleyway near an underground computer cafe. Maybe some acne-riddled teenage losers; Maybe acne-riddled teenage geniuses. I miss the days when I could commit crime in such a carefree manner, with the attitude of ‘I’m a juvenile; they can’t do anything permanent to me.’ But now I need help from someone like that.

I have enough time to order a coffee and sit down at a computer that is just sufficiently visible to anyone looking for me.

Someone is going around the room placing sticky notes on broken computers. They place one on the desk in front of me. I lift it up, seeing the warning about a broken machine, and then flip it over. “Traveling through time? Look around. I’m watching.”

To Be In Need Randomly

I look around the room and catch the gaze of one person watching me intently. Casually I walk up to him, “You know what time it is?”

He smiles, “Any time that you want it to be. Let’s talk outside.”

I follow him to the back alley, in between dumpsters with rotting food and trashcans overflowing with garbage and dirt.

“What you’re looking for doesn’t exist,” he says.

“What do you mean?”

“The AX-4007 Project,” he says. “It was started five years ago, but just last year it was officially canceled. Budget cuts.”

“What was the project about?”

“To control the flow of time. Not to travel forward and backward, but for setting up loops. To control all time through all the universe is too god-like, they probably thought. May as well start small, the way mankind always has.”

“Can you tell me anything about the current time loop that we are in?” I ask.

To Be In Abundance Randomly

“The project was scrapped,” he says. “So, I doubt anything about it is still working.”

“But it could still be in operation, if someone got their hands on it,” I reason with myself as much as I question his story. “What kind of person would that be?”

“Anyone who was involved in the project. But even then, you’re talking about a lot of teenagers who worked shitty internships and couldn’t do anything competently, and a small handful of scientists in their sixties and seventies who couldn’t explain anything competently. The project washed out just like its workers. I’d tell you more if I knew, but that’s where the story seems to end.”

“Unless the story keeps repeating?”

“There is no story. There’s nobody still involved with it or anyone who could give a fuck about it. What’s there to repeat?”

“Only what was left incomplete.”

“And as far as I can tell, as far as the records say, that’s nothing,” he says. “Nothing is going to keep repeating.”

To Be Neglected Randomly

“You’ve been a great help,” I say. “Bill me what you think is appropriate.”

“That’s already done,” he says.

Tuesday. “Holy fuck, what the fuck!” Carl screams, lashing at his throat. “Someone cut my throat and left me to bleed out to the last fucking moment.”

“I didn’t get too far, either,” Joseph says.

“That’s because you can’t keep your fucking mind on the job and off of the girls,” Rutger says. “You lose focus, you fuck up and you die. Don’t fucking forget that next time.”

“What about you, John?” Carl looks at me. “Did you find anything? You’re usually better at taking apart the information from these cycles.”

“I remember looking across the bank and seeing Carl disappear,” I reply. “After that, I heard a loud explosion, and only remember choking to death on the heat and dust.”

“So, does anyone have a plan?” Carl asks. “Because next time, I think I should be the one who watches the bank. Last two fuck-ups were manned by John. Go with Team Carl and you’re all right.”

To Be Attentive Randomly

“Part one of research is information gathering,” Rutger puts it like it is. “Part two of research is information application. Why don’t we try this whole thing again from the start?”

Wednesday. We went with our original plans, all a bit wiser, all a bit more cautious. “Hey, everyone, this is a fucking robbery.” Carl announced loudly. “Shut the fuck up and do what I say.” He deliberately placed his back to the front of one guard who always hid out till the last moment, and with the quietest slip of rubber against marble, turned around and neutralized his target.

“You, Patty,” I said to the girl with blue earrings, “I need to speak with you, right now. Come with me. Rutger, you’re on lookout.”

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Ending this,” I said. A few muffled screams of help, and she was finally in the quiet solitude of a 3-foot thick, steel cage.

“What is going on?” I asked her. “The others, they don’t know. But you know. You know The Ghost. You’re going to give me information.”

To Be Soft Randomly

“I don’t know The Ghost,” she said. “I don’t know that person at all. How could I?”

“How could you not?” I asked. “I have checked out the story of every other person employed at this bank, but you’re the odd one out,” I half-lied and caught her believing me. “Tell me, or it’s going to be painful for you and The Ghost.”

“The Ghost is immune,” she said. “I know and believe that much. I’ve been in the cycle too. I went from the first cycle warning my manager and the police, to the last cycle where I know that I can’t get out, whether I come into work or not.”

“The Ghost is immune. Yeah, sure, but you aren’t,” I said.

“That is the problem for you,” she said. “I am the Ghost.”

To Be Hard Randomly

“You aren’t the Ghost, I’ve seen you both separately,” I said.

“I am,” she said. “The Ghost is me twenty years from now.”

“And Project AX-4007?”

“In five years, the project is resurrected again, with much of the help of the living members of the original team, but they’re all college graduates at that time.You can’t just bury research and expect nobody to find it.”

“Then what is the point of this? You’re going back in time to stop an old boss from being fucked over by some bank robbers? Really? That is your motivation?”

“I don’t know my other’s motivation. I only know that she is the one who really has power here.”

“I doubt that will be proven,” I said. Then I heard a quick, friendly knock at the vault door, and remembered that the vault acted as a sound muffler.

To Be Insensitive Randomly

“Come in!” I replied to the knocking with a glint of humor, before I walked over and began undoing the lock. It was too late at this point for me.

“John, it’s been so long, I hope you’re not about to blow my brains out,” I heard as soon as a crack of air was able to carry sound.

I disarmed myself and placed my pistol in the back of my pants. “Yeah, let’s keep that even then,” I replied.

Enough of the vault was open so that a human being could walk through it, but I did not see or hear anyone. I kept turning that one-ton door with the force of my body using the principle of levers. How stupid of me. Then I felt it — the metal barrel firmly placed against the side of my skull.

“The nice part about keeping things even is that it makes it so that things are always divisible by two,” I heard The Ghost’s voice.

To Be Strong Randomly

“Against the wall, now,” she said, her words breaking through the blackness of her mask like swords aimed at my heart. “I need to talk to you. This is not going to be simple, but you need to hear this.”

“Okay,” I accepted the situation and her demands.

“You cannot kill anyone in this bank. Not one. You take hostages. You hold them down to the ground with all your fury and might. The fury and might you’d expect of criminals with a plan, but not a slaughterhouse envisioned by a bunch of sloppy criminals who come for one thing and try to take everything. You do that, and we might escape the time cycles.”

“You’re trapped, too?”

“Yes, but not in the same way as you. You’re trapped on the bottom. I’m trapped on the top.”

“And what if the others don’t agree?”

“That’s the other thing, Carl and Joseph may not enter the bank alive, you kill them before that happens. Here, let me show you how.” She raised her weapon.

To Be Weak Randomly

“Give me the fucking maple syrup,” Carl asks.

I look at him. A moment of solitude and quiet goes by as I say nothing.

“Do you need a fucking hand, or am I going to have to walk over there, smack you up, and take it from you?”

I see the bottle, pick it up, and gently place it in front of him.

“Good, that’s what I expected of you,” he says. I turn to my thoughts as I stare at my empty plate.

“Carl, what the fuck is that?” I look up to see Joseph murmuring. There’s a red dot floating around the maple syrup bottle, just before it explodes with the loud burst of a sniper rifle’s gunshot.

We all jump underneath the table at our rooftop restaurant, and at that exact moment, look over to the corpse and realize that Carl’s dead.

To Be Uncertain Randomly

Tuesday. “Holy fuck!” Joseph screams. “I didn’t see that coming, not a bit.”

“Another cycle, another try,” Rutger says. “What are we even trying to do?”

Not a single sound can be heard from Carl. The others are on repeat between Tuesday morning and the evening of the heist on Wednesday. And now I see the repercussions of the previous day.

“This shit wouldn’t be happening if Carl was here,” Joseph argues with himself. They don’t remember about the innumerable cycles where Carl had been with us, and everything went to hell just the same.

“Goddamn, even if we wanted to walk away, we can’t,” Rutger says. “Half of the police department has been bought off, so that they’re going to be busy somewhere when the robbery finally goes under way. You can’t just ask for a refund on a million dollar city-wide bribe.”

If Carl is gone, that means he never met with Angela last night. She may or may not know that he’s dead yet. But I can imagine that The Ghost knows.

To Be Unknown Randomly

Wednesday morning. “What makes you think this will work this time?” Rutger asked.

“Easy,” I replied. “I met The Ghost.”

“You met him?”

“Her. This is the only way. We have no other choice.”

“Kill Joseph? Right after we use him to break in?” he asked, and then began chuckling. “You’ve seen too many mobster movies. This is a team effort. We do this together.”

“We have been doing this together. Over and over and over. In the beginning, the very first time, I had perfect confidence — Carl was ruthless enough, Joseph was crude enough, and you were methodical enough — but now I know Carl was just selfish and Joseph impulsive.”

“What do you mean? Carl’s been dead since Monday morning, and that was another huge bribe to get the authorities to look the other way.”

“You don’t remember that first time? “The very first cycle?” He gave me a blank look. “Just shut up…”

“… and give me the gun,” he completed Carl’s sentence from our first cycle. It had been his response when I had found him talking to the girl with the green earrings.

To Be Unaware Randomly

“But how?” he asked. “How do I remember that, and also remember that Carl was never there?”

“I don’t know that,” I said. “Not yet.”

“Are you sure that killing Joseph will end the time cycle?”

“That, and nobody can die in the bank. That’s something I was overlooking, in terms of the professionalism of this team and possible changes to history we were responsible for.”

“You think someone in that bank ends up curing cancer or establishing world peace or ending poverty? It might just end up being the son of some influential politician, ready to bend and pervert the law for their own personal purposes.”

“You know, there’s only three of us. If you’re so worried about contingencies, we can make sure that Joseph isn’t in a position to know about the fact that it was one of us who pulled the trigger. Any shot we fire at him that he doesn’t see, we blame on The Ghost.”

“I’m sick to death of these endless time cycles,” Rutger replied. “We may have entered a particular territory where the experimental method will prove more fruitful than the technical one. I’m in.”

To Be Open-Ended Randomly

Wednesday afternoon. Normally, we just charged the bank and killed anyone who stood in our path. “3, 2, 1…” I counted down a synchronous time established with the others. A small, tin cylinder bounced off the walls with its clicks and tinks, catching the attention of all of the main lobby guards.

And then a sudden blast of noise and light made them all deaf and blind. A flashbang, standard police stormtrooper tactics. In a matter of 10 seconds, we stormed the lobby, forcing guards down to the ground and disarming them. But, no matter how slow those seconds passed for us doing the raid, and no matter how fast it was for our hostages, it wasn’t enough.

“I count 8, er, 9, guards taken,” Joseph said.

“There’s supposed to be 12.” Rutger said.

I saw an arm outstretched from a normally vacant hallway door, pistol hoisted and all, just to the left of my shoulder. Latching on, I grabbed his wrist and, forcing my shoulder into his ribcage, I flipped him over. A single shot was fired.

I grabbed the gun. Nehind him were two other guards, who readily gave themselves up and surrendered, sinking to the marble floors.

I turned around. Rutger was bleeding.

To Be Cautious Randomly

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“Yeah, it’s fine, just my shoulder,” Rutger said.

“The shoulder you use for firing your gun,” Joseph said. “You’re worthless now. Come on John, just you and me now.”

“You, give me your shirt, right now, or I’ll kill you,” I said to a guard. I wrapped a makeshift tourniquet above Rutger’s wound with the shirt.

“Open the vault, right now.” Joseph screamed at the bank teller. It was Patty. She followed his orders precisely, unlocking the vault with the bank manager’s key.

“You’re okay, right?” I asked Rutger.

“Yes, I am fine,” he replied. “I’m left and right handed, I can fire with either shoulder. In Germany, as a child, I had once lost the use of my right shoulder from farming equipment wounds. Trust me, I am fine.” He stood up, looking like he was about to faint.

“You!” Joseph got distracted, and pointed to Angela. “I want to see you in closer quarters.”

To Be Angry Randomly

My vision drifted from Rutger trying to keep standing to Joseph closing in on his prey. I lifted my gun and fired. One single shot, and he fell to his knees and then to the ground. A pool of blood slowly expanded from his where his head rested.

“Anyone fucking moves without my say so, and I will kill you just the same,” I screamed like a man trembling with his only friend nearly dead, and after having executed my only bought-off ally. Nobody questioned my willingness to end a life after that.

“Your money is in the bags,” muttered Patty from across the room.

I helped Rutger lean against a wall as he readjusted his tourniquet and his pistol grip.

“Perfect,” I said, taking the duffel bags and throwing them over my shoulder. An entire security team, disarmed and harmless, lay just below me, each guard feeling the tremors of my footsteps, each of them smelling the friction of the sweat drawing down my forehead.

I took Rutger on my shoulder, and we made our way to the back where our ride was waiting for us. I kicked open the backdoor and saw The Ghost, standing calmly and without worry, as I struggled balancing a human being, a rifle, and two sacks of cash worth up to two hundred million dollars.

To Be Resolved Randomly

“Need a ride?” she asked. “Your getaway contact wasn’t worth the price you paid. Get in now.”

I put Rutger in the backseat and climbed into the shotgun seat, noticing the internal armoring of the vehicle. As we drove beyond the bank plaza, I realized that there were going to be no more time cycles.

By late evening, we had been traveling through the offroads without a soul for miles. Rutger’s wound had stopped bleeding and the near endless supply of water bottles had brought him up to standard consciousness. But for all the water, there still wasn’t a drop of conversation.

“I should’ve explained, but I couldn’t,” The Ghost spoke. “You see, I love Angela. I’ve always loved her. I didn’t know it then, but I have learned it since. And there are decades where she only speaks about the horrible things that Carl and Joseph did to her. No matter how light it appears to criminals, it is oceans deep for someone who can feel. This was the only way I could end her suffering.”

“And, what about AX-4007?” I asked.

“When the project was brought back online, I was first in line for a position. Once it reached its final level of sophistication, I, a former intern, knew what I could really do with it without anyone discovering. It was a risk I took to end the pain of someone I cared about.”

As we drove into the night I looked out at the road and thought about all that had happened over the past few endless days. How do you even count time?

How much money had we spent on bribes, equipment, and how much time? Too much. All of it was too much. If you don’t have the right people for the job, then it doesn’t matter how much money you sink into a project. Make that mistake and it will haunt you until the end of your days. In the worst cases, it may haunt you infinitely.

Kasy prayed the List of Gratitude as she and her mother left the high gate circling the compound and walked the sidewalk to the clinic. Thank you, Lord, for this beautiful day. Thank you, Lord, for my life on Earth. Thank you for my sight, my smell, my ears, my skin, to witness your Creation. It hadn’t been but a few years since He had seen fit to reset the world. The compound sat on Turkey Mountain, where the inhabitants could see the overgrown mess where Tulsa used to be, know that other American cities had had a similar fate, thank God for sparing their flock, and thank Him for punishing them.

They turned at the broken stoplight that swung and spun on its wire. On the left side of the road where the park used to be was an encampment—all snapping blue tarps, smoke. Blanket-wrapped huddled masses queued for soup at a stand near the road. The wind shifted. A moment later, the odor smothered them: unwashed armpit, crotch, ass, and burning garbage and leaking propane. Kasy and her mom stepped into the road to go round the tents rippling in the breeze. Further on, someone lay in the road with a filthy pink blanket over them. Their feet were bare. Further on, a man chopped at the air with a metal spatula and yelled at the empty sky. Each shout gouted cloud-breath into the frigid air.

Thank you, Lord, for leading us out of there. Thank you for leading us to our Shepherd, Robert. Thank you for a roof, for beans, squash, and bread, for hot water at the lift of a handle.

Kasy stopped her silent prayer to look over the line, in case her aunt was there. Her mother put her hand on her cheek and gently nudged her face forward again. Her mother’s expression was sorrow overlaid with determination. It felt like a betrayal of her mom to search for her aunt. Besides, her aunt had chosen to no longer be her aunt when they parted ways. Kasy looked away. They had to focus on those who wanted to be saved.

The clinic was in the strip mall tucked between the pizza parlor and the DMV. A message had been slashed with deep red paint over its mirrored doors: The Shepherds are Wolves that Learned How to Use a Crook. Like you would know, Kasy thought. He welcomed me and Mom into the fold after the Summer of Storms and gave us food, shelter, community, and purpose, when so many people had lost theirs, and never regained it. She prayed God would open their mind, by a transformative event or by crushing open their skull.

The clinic looked like a DMV, a place to process people, rather than a sacred place. The “take a number” ticket machine by the door was empty. So were the eyes of the receptionist. A massive picture of downtown Tulsa pre-Summer of Storms with domino-like buildings colonized a wall. There were women older than her mother, with snowy hair. There were women her mother’s age, with gray-streaked hair. The group Kasy herself belonged to—with people who      could be called women, but her Shepherd called them “on the cusp”—was the largest. One of them had brought a girl, a child, who sang softly to herself and drew stars on her arm with a blue marker. The scent of synthetic blueberry fought the stale, bad-breath smell of the clinic air.

Now, that girl is clearly not a woman, nor almost one, Kasy thought. Perhaps she’s special.

The receptionist slid a clipboard under her window, and Kasy’s mom wrote Kasy’s full name, flock number, and more. The little girl sat on the floor and doodled and sang, and the mother sat in a chair and ran her daughter’s hair through her fingers. The mother was Kasy’s age and her throat was unblemished: a small woman with a flat mouth and luscious seal-brown hair. She wore jeans and a nice pine-colored polyester blouse too thin for the weather, and a ratty parka too heavy for the weather. The little girl wore pink pajamas with purple cuffs.

No Ascension robe, Kasy thought. And she brought her daughter to the procedure. Her flock had pecked at her mother for doing the same, but that’s how it was when circumstances demanded it. Since joining the flock, Kasy had mucked stables, baked bread, scrubbed floors, beat rugs, wrung laundry, and raised chickens from egg to oven. She had calluses so thick she could grip a smoking skillet without potholders. When her mom had the procedure and then a fever from it, Kasy swabbed the surgical wound, lifted soup to her lips, wiped the shit, piss, pus, blood and did her mom’s work too. She watched the little ones and taught the older ones. Soon she and her mother were indispensable to the flock. She let herself feel a little pride in her hard work, her ambition, as a treat. That’s how it should be. Kasy joined the rest of the women in giving the new woman an approving, encouraging smile. God loves initiative.

The digital sign over the door blinked. Selena Cruz.

The girl and her mother rose. The leftover women watched her ponytail switch her shoulders with a kind of hungry softness as she went through the door. Kasy’s mother watched the door and her thumb and finger pinched the beads of her rosary. The beads passed through her fingertips and there was no noise behind the door. Kasy’s muscles clenched.

Then, the little girl screamed.

The women shifted, crossed themselves, and signed, “What a pity.” Kasy’s mother touched the scar on her throat. Kasy’s mind frothed. Her body felt galvanized with the screams. Move! Don’t move! Shut up, shut up, shut up!

Selena’s cries weakened, as if she had heard. They suddenly cut.

Kasy felt something like a pillar fracture within her. Inside her head was a tinny ringing as if her eardrums had burst and a static feeling. Her heartbeat prayed OGodOGodOGodOGodOGod. Maybe she had misheard. The doctor, surely, wouldn’t have taken her. If he Lifted them high, then what would Kasy’s Ascension mean?

It wasn’t that bad of a trade. You’d swear your faith and loyalty and do the procedure. You and Mom would be taken care of, Kasy thought. But you’re an adult, even if you won’t admit it, even if the Shepherd won’t acknowledge it.

Shut up!

Thirty minutes later, the girl, Selena, and her mother emerged wet-eyed. Selena swallowed, winced. Tears slid down her cheeks. The bandage around her throat had a dot of red where, if she were a boy, her Adam’s apple would be. She held a small blue satin box like a ring box, which her mom took from her and put in her purse.

They really did that to her, Kasy thought with an eerie serenity. Her spirit detached and bobbed to a level above her head. It took in the scene of the women and the girl who they had made one of them. The mother hoisted her daughter to her hip and slung her purse over her shoulder. She made no eye contact with anyone, not even the receptionist, as she signed out.

As she passed, making for the door, Kasy leaned over and pinched the woman’s sleeve. The woman started. Kasy whispered, “Soft serve.”

The other women rustled. Kasy didn’t have to see their hands flurrying to know what they were saying. Kasy kept her eyes locked on the mother’s startled eyes, as if willing the memory to transfer telepathically. Icy-sweet numbing swirl from the gas station. The hand signs for soft serve had not been invented yet, and Kasy could not wait for them to be, nor did she expect the woman would know them. She was just guessing, but she didn’t think the woman would know why soft serve mattered. The woman at the gas station would tell them. Kasy would not let the woman and Selena go, unless they understood everything she couldn’t say.

The woman pulled out of Kasy’s pinch and exited the clinic doors. Moments passed where Kasy wondered if she had said enough. Then, her mother slapped her. Its sound seemed to jolt Kasy awake. She had broken the six months of silence before Ascension. Her mom breathed in rapid puffs, and her eyes were ringed with white. She raised her hand again.

The receptionist hit the silver bell and rose behind the glass partition.

“Who spoke?” she signed. “Raise your hand.”

Kasy would have to start the six months of silence over—if the Shepherd would forgive her and allow her another chance. “The devil is unusually loud within you,” he had said after the previous failure. She had screamed for help when a young boy had fallen from a tree and seized on the roots, bleeding from the ears. She had suggested that maybe this time it was a guardian angel. But her Shepherd’s eyes were cold and remote, and his sermon the following day was about gratitude and duty and the sinners begging outside the walls, and he referenced Corinthians 14:34.

Yet God abhorred a liar. She slowly lifted her hand.

As she did, so did everyone else in the waiting room. Her spirit made a great shout.

The receptionist looked round, astonished. Then, with jerky angry hand motions, “I’ll end the appointments for today and send you home to your Shepherds.”

Hands stayed in the air. Eyebrows slanted and furrowed. Who needed hand signs when veins throbbing in their temples could speak more eloquently?

The receptionist threw up her hands and sat back in a huff. Hands lowered back into laps. Kasy’s heart felt too swollen with neighborly love and relief. But she still thought about Selena. She shouldn’t have Ascended at all. Why hadn’t the doctor stopped them?

She soothed herself. It’s done now. They might be able to join a flock based on the strength of their offering. It is what it is.

Immediately Kasy hated herself for that thought, because she always hated it when her mother said it to her. She had hated it after they had to leave their tornado-smashed home in Verdigris for Tulsa. She had hated it after the city cut disaster funding after they got there. She had hated it when her mom got the procedure to get them accepted into the flock. She had forgotten that she had hated it. If Kasy had been a boulder, it is what it is was the river that would wear her down to a pebble before carrying her with it.

The sign over the door blinked: Casy Hernandez.

Kasy was used to her name being misspelled. Today it felt like evidence for the devil. Her mother crossed herself as Kasy stood and went through the door.

The room was small, low-ceilinged, cave-like. There was a chair like the one at the dentist’s, and a young nurse on her knees, wiping the floor. The nurse held up one finger—the first and oldest and most recognizable hand sign—and continued wiping up the fine spray of blood. Her eyes, too, were wet.

Kasy plucked a sanitizer wipe from the tube by the door and knelt. The nurse waved, shaking her head, but Kasy shook her head back. She threw the pinked sanitizer wipe into the trash and beat the dust off her robe. I’m already here. It’s too late.

She eased onto the chair. There was a ghost of warmth on the vinyl. On the counter, the scalpels, slicked with girl-blood. Suddenly she hated that nurse.

She asked aloud, “You’re going to get some fresh scalpels for me, right?”

The nurse blanched. Kasy insisted, “You do use clean ones, right? God may have invented germs, but he also invented soap.” Her voice had gone hoarse after not being used for six months. It was a voice she wouldn’t want to hear in the dark. But how that nurse nodded! Her hand spidered towards the doorknob.

Childishly, Kasy thought, You’d tell on me? But the Shepherd would make her do more than stand with her nose in the corner. She should have been dismissed when she first spoke. Instead the nurse gathered the dirty scalpels and set a tray of fresh ones on the doctor’s cart. She was red.

Kasy lifted her arm to sign, sorry. But when she peeled her arm off the armrest, there was a scent of blueberry. Her forearm was smudged with blue ink.

“For God’s sake.” Her disgust was made dreadful by her voice. The nurse snatched another sanitizer wipe and offered it to Kasy. Her eyes pleaded. Kasy snatched the wipe and rubbed down her forearm and the chair arms. A lemon smell replaced the blueberry. The nurse slipped out of the room.

Kasy imagined the mother adjusting her daughter on her hip outside and walking towards the gas station. It didn’t sell gas anymore—no point—but sold caloric encouragement. Greasy pizza slices, hot dogs, plump, sweaty, brown, rolling alongside dry yellow taquitos. Donuts with translucent glaze. Coffee—not the real stuff, not anymore—but the soft serve was real, cool and soothing and soft. A sweetness sliding down tongue to belly. For whatever change could fit in a child-sized pocket, you could get a spoonful of strawberry or cherry preserves from the lady who ran the register. If you hung around tonguing the swirl’s point sideways, she’d tell you about how ice cream used to come in a thousand flavors, but the most common flavor came from a rare orchid far away. How ice cream now comes plain, and they had to make their own flavors. It was most unbelievable that ice cream could be better, Kasy had thought then. Her mom had last taken her when she was ten, before she had gotten her own procedure.

But that’s enough fairytales, said the gas station woman. I’ll introduce you to a good Shepherd. Just come back here when you Ascend. It’s tradition. Ice cream makes everything better.

The nurse returned with a doctor in his dirty white coat.

He said warmly, “Kasy Hernandez, sorry for taking so long. Lean back, lamb. I can’t get at your throat if you’re sitting up.”

Her mind howled the same words her aunt had howled about joining a flock, This isn’t right, nobody sane would make you to do this—

What else can I do? Kasy prayed. She imagined prayer rays beaming out of her body even as she leaned back in the chair. What can I do now? She wanted her mom to hold her hand—no, she wanted her aunt to take her hand and pull her out of the chair and run. She wanted to run back in time and pull the little girl out of the chair, and her mother, and every woman who had lurched away with their voices in satin boxes, and all the women waiting with their ears turned towards the door.

The scalpel had just penetrated her throat when she let out a monstrous scream.

She’s clear, crisp in my mind’s eye. Her eyes shine. Her hair falls loose. She’s achingly beautiful.

“It’s your turn, Daddy. Stop texting.” Sara is glaring at me from across the table, cross.

“Just a sec, sweetie. It’s Josh about a job for me.”

It was more than a second. I had priorities. I was stupid.

“Daddy?” She’s exasperated. She’s adorable. She’s…

For the first time in a long time, I can see Sara’s face, too. Clear, bright. Her eyes too big to be real, her hair like her mom’s, a tiny sharp chin. Little teeth in her smile.

“Alright, alright!” I free up a hand and reach for the dice…

The dice hit the board. My phone dings. It’s Yours! “Fuck YES!”

Sara stares at me. “Why are you cursing?”

Amina stares too, but she’s amused. “Good news?”

“You rolled a seven.” Sara is back at the board, counting spaces with her fingers. She squeals when her finger touches the seventh space. “Park Place, Daddy! You owe me eleven hundred dollars.”

It was adorable the way she said it.

“Eleven hundred dollars.” It doesn’t sound the same when I say it. I can’t match her pitch, her inflection, her enthusiasm, her glee. I can’t be her.

I don’t have much. I’ve been playing with half my brain, too focused on… “I’m gonna be in a big movie, Little Winner. A big scary movie…” I fork over the remainder of my money. “I’m gonna play the killer!”

“You’re not a killer, dad. You’re too nice.”

“Am I?” I reach into the take-out box next to Amina and pull out the last shrimp bao.

“That’s mine.” Amina reaches for it.

“Too bad.” I put it in my mouth. “I’m a killer, babe.”

Pulled over in front of Hotel Figueroa, lost in time.

Sara is on the couch, looking down at me. She’s wearing a nightgown? Did she own a nightgown? I can’t remember. We’re running lines for a stupid commercial.

“What’s in your wallet?”

“Sillier, Daddy.” She’s laughing.

I can’t make out her face, a mess of smiles, eyes, and skin descends into a panic-inducing swirl. She’s gone. It’s gone.

Sillier, Daddy.

The memory slips entirely. I’m alone in the car. Smashmouth on the radio, Rockstar. I turn it off, hit my vape, but it doesn’t settle me.

The App dings. Its pink splash brightens the inside of my Kia. “Jayson” needs a ride. Black. Smiling guy. Photo on a beach. “Ugh.” Beach photo people never tip. Lower my window to vent the vape-smoke but take one more hit to get me through the ride. The city mellows. The brake-light sea up Figueroa from the arena is fine now. It’ll take me eight minutes to go three thousand feet to The Bloc where Jayson is waiting. I give it a moment, maybe get reassigned something in the other direction. Nope. Okay.

Ugh. No. I know him. He’s an asshole. Arrogant prick.

“Danny?” Jayson recognizes me, changes course and gets in the front seat. “I thought it might be you from your pic, but damn, man!” He jams his hand across the center console. His smile threatens to envelop me. I take his hand, dreading the bro-hug that’s going to follow. “How you been?”

“Alright, I guess.” ‘Jayson is Jayson Means. Years since I’ve seen him in person. Twenty maybe? But recently he’s everywhere on TV. Movies. “Not like you, man.” Fuck him. He’s king right now. Everywhere.

“Oooh…” he leans back in the seat, throws his hands behind the headrest and clasps them. He takes up all the space in the car. “I had myself a rough patch, though, believe me.” He turns to me. I pull into traffic. He’s going to Silver Lake. A house up above The Red Lion. The App wants me to take Hill to 2^nd. Makes sense. Twenty-two minutes. Too long. I won’t survive that long in a car with him. “After Master Class, I couldn’t buy a fucking role.” He chuckles. “Not like you, man. You just…” he makes a sound like a rocket, lifts his hand in a slow arc.

“Worked out great.” I haven’t done shit in the last eight years. “I got some stuff on the horizon, though.”

I see him look me up and down. “Good to hear. You deserve it.  I loved Venice Station. Lasted what? Like five years?” He barks a laugh and claps — “Network, too — some fucking residuals, man.”

He’s waiting for a response. I shrug. My last check was for $396.42. I smile for him. “Yeah.”

He sighs. “Tough when that shit ends, though. I had a rough patch myself. Got far down. Burned through all my Master Class money thinking thing’s’d pick up again, you know?”

“Yeah?” I know all too well. After Venice Station, a couple B movies, a few starrings, and then a collection of day-play five-and-unders until… nothing. Stupid fucking business.

Hill Street’s wide open. Time to destination drops by six minutes.

“Danny man,” I can feel him looking at me. “I worked at Gold’s Gym, got my personal trainer license. People used to recognize me, ask me to say my line when they did good.” He chuckles. “Reeee-dicyoulusssss.” Like he said on the show. “Three years ago I was on Cameo for twenty dollars a pop. It was saaaad…”

“Not anymore, though.” He’s everywhere.

“Nah,” he chuckles again. “Not anymore. Things are good.”

The tunnel under Bunker Hill makes things loud. He doesn’t try to talk over it. He was bad. Before. He was a bad actor — no depth, just looks and a schtick. Nothing going on underneath. Embarrassed me to be on the show with him. I was a lot better than him. Fuck this business.

But he’s good now. Impossibly good. “Been watching Manchester Square.”

He looks at me. “Yeah?”

“It’s good.”

“You think?”

“You’re good. Really good.” Brake lights at Glendale and Beverly.

“Thanks, man.” He’s looking me over again, weird expression. Thinking about something. Then: “You want to join me for a beer or two at the Lion? I haven’t talked with someone from the before-times in years, right.” He waits a moment. “I’m buying.” That smile again.

It’s 9:30. I need money but I’m suddenly tired. I shouldn’t. Shouldn’t drink. It’s a chance to talk myself onto Manchester. He’s a lead. He’s got pull. “Yeah.” I smile. “That’d be good.” I tap, “Last Ride.”

The Red Lion is a cop bar. Two of them recognize Jayson when we come in.

“Reeeeee-dickyoulussss!” One of them shouts. The other one laughs.

Another recognizes me. “You used to be Danny Ruiz!”

I hate it here. “Still am.”

They want a photo. “Manchester Square, man.” The older cop confides when the picture is done. “You ain’t fair to the LAPD on that show, you know. Makes it hard to respect you when you don’t respect us, my man.”

Jayson nods gravely. “I’ll bring it up with the writers.”

I’m drinking again. Oh well. It was a short sobriety. The beer loosens me, clears me like weed just doesn’t do. “Can I ask you something?”

Jayson’s looking over my shoulder at the cops. They’re loud, boisterous and menacing. “Yeah, what do you want to know?”

“Back in Master Class,” I hold my beer up to the light, then finish it off. “You were…”

“I was an asshole, man.” He shakes his head. Rueful. “Especially to you. Part of why I wanted to do this.” He leans in. “I owe you an apology.”

“For what?” Could be a hundred things. He treated me like shit.

“I knew how you felt about Katy, man. I knew but I…” he laughs, embarrassed. “You were better than me, man. I was scared of you so I always tried to put you down, keep you there, you know. I was a scared kid and you were better than me.” He shrugs elaborately. “I never felt good about any of it and I’ve wanted to say this to you for years.”

I don’t remember Katy. Who the hell was Katy? “It’s cool man.” The apology is nice. Unexpected. Maybe now he’ll get me on Manchester. “You were good, though.” It’s a lie.

“Bullshit, man. I sucked and you know it.”

“Yeah, no. We all sucked.”  He sucked more than the rest of us. “We were kids.” I tip my empty bottle at him. “But you are now. Good.”

“I am?” He’s being modest.

“Fuck you, Jayson, you know you are.”

He shrugs. Big smile. “Yeah. I got a lot better.”

“How? I mean, it’s like you got depth or something. I freaking believe you on screen and talking with you I just…”

He chuckles, disarming. Charming. “I learned some stuff, some good stuff. Things that changed me. Changed my life.” His smile changes. He leans in. Conspiratorial. “Gave me a leg up.”

Scientologist. It’s clear now. His big secret. His new success. “Wow!”

“What happened to you, then?” He leans back again, eyes the cops for a moment then back at me. “You were good and then you just…”

“This stupid town, man. After Venice Station, I was primed, you know? Ready. Then Josh talks me into doing some stupid trashy slasher shit that’s supposed to be the next Scream and it bombs, then he talks me into Stellar Ship and that bombs and I start to get the reputation, you know?” I’ve told this so many times. It’s sing-songy now, rote. “Josh tells me I’m poison because he made bad calls, then he drops me.” I sigh, wry smile. “Things are looking up, though. I got some things that might pop. Been writing. Some AD gigs, building my portfolio so I can direct TV, you know.” Don’t push too hard. “Love a chance to get back in front, though.”

“I do know.” He laughs, looks up and raises two fingers. I don’t turn around. “That’s awful, man. You deserved better. You were great on Venice Station.”

“I was a surfer-cop who solved beach crime.”

He smiles. “A good surfer-cop, though.”

More beer arrives.

“Let me see about getting you some time on Manchester, Danny — get you straight to producers for something recurring — we got a Latino neighbor coming up. They all love me there. I’ve got real pull.”

“You don’t have to,” but he has to. “That’d be amazing.” Hope. Fuck. Scientology. Oh well. Might be worth it. “Do you need me to go with you to get…” I’m so stupid. “Never mind.”

Jayson’s amused. He’s leering at me. “You think I’m a Scientologist.” He laughs. “I ain’t a fucking Scientologist, Danny.”

“You’re not?” I blurt it. I shouldn’t drink.

“You’re safe.” He lifts his beer. He’s still amused. Thank god.

“Then how’d you get so good? Whose class?”

He chuckles like he’s got a secret. “No class, man.”

“Then how?”

He shakes his head. “Can’t tell you.” He leans in, intimate. Whispers: “Not supposed to tell no-one.”

We drink. Talk about other things. What happened to so-and-so, do you remember how hot so-and-so was, did you actually fuck so-and-so in the costume trailer. Can’t stop thinking about how he got good.

It gets late. The cops filter out. “Don’t think about driving home, buddy,” one of them says to Jayson. “That’d be reeeee-dickyoulusss!” It gets laughs.

Jayson looks at me, then him. “Don’t worry, man, I got a Lyft.”

In the car, Jayson blocks the ignition with his hand. “Maybe we should sit a while.”

“Yeah.” We listen to music, talk more. I’m feeling alright. I’m actually liking Jayson. Still arrogant, but not a dick anymore. “So really, how’d you get so good? What’s the secret?”

He squints at me like he’s remembering something. “You’re married, right?”

“Was.” I don’t feel the whole weight like I normally do. I smile. Feels good to talk about it. “She left me.” He tenses. “Relax, it was years ago. I wasn’t my best self, you know? Things had gone bad. I don’t blame her.”

“That sucks, man.” He looks concerned, sympathetic. “Did you two have any kids?”

Fuck me. “Yeah.” Then: “No.” Then before I can stop it: “Not anymore.” It’s out. This wasn’t the plan. My eyes burn. My throat closes.

He bites his lip, his face creases like he’s screwed something up. “Dammit. I’m sorry, man. Sara, right? I totally forgot — she died? I wasn’t…”

I wave him off. Shake my head. The sadness won’t stop. Beer-loosened emotional sphincters give way. Grief. Ugh. Fuck. Sara. Sara. Jayson’s hand is on me. The warmth. I choke a little.

He pulls me close. “It’s cool, man. I got you.”

He’s strong, comforting. I give in to his hug. I’m crying a little. “Sorry.” I sit up, reach behind me for the tissues in the back seat and set about cleaning myself up.

I forgot about Sara.

“You knew about Amina? About Sara?”

He nods. “Yeah. I knew.” He sounds so sad. “Didn’t know what happened, though.”

“Who told you?”

He shrugs. “I don’t even know, man. Word got out. Danny’s got family, right?” He shakes his head. His sympathy is going to drown me. “I can’t even imagine how awful that must’ve been.”

“You don’t even know…” It’s a whisper. The blue glow from the dash blurs and Jayson’s hand is on my shoulder again. “No.” I clear my throat but it ends in a cough. “FUCK!” Hand to face, hard. Control. I breathe in. Got it. Good. “I’m fine, man. Most of the time.” He’s looking at me, eyeballs round with concern. “Some of the time.” I pull my vape up from the map-holder. “You mind?”

He doesn’t. Deep in. My psyche uncreases just a little bit. “It ruined me, man. I’m just done, you know? My career was already tanked by then anyways, so…” I shrug, because I don’t have the words. “People are supposed to get on with things, but I… I’m not. I can’t. I got nothing now. No family, no daughter, no career. I drive and smoke. I just want to go back, you know? Go back. Go back to when she was here, when I had Amina, back to when I had work. All of it. Go back.” I’m whining, nearly crying. “Jesus.” Another hit. It doesn’t help. “All night every night, all day every day, I stare at the goddamned ceiling and try to remember things. Things we did. Times we had.” I don’t know what I’m doing. I shouldn’t be saying all this.

Beer, weed, and kindness fuck me up every time.

Jayson isn’t saying anything. He’s looking at me. His expression is weird, conflicted. “What?”

He nods, just a little movement, like he’s made a decision.

“What?”

“You really want that, don’t you? To go back? One more game of Monopoly, eating bao with your wife and kid?”

Monopoly. Bao. Happiness. The wish is strong, rises like hope in my gut. Head shake, slow, with the wonder of imagined happiness. “Groundhog Day my ass right fucking then because I’m done here.” I turn to face Jayson square. “I wake up every day and wonder why I haven’t killed myself. I should. I should just do it.” I hold his eyes. “Stupid question.” I’m tired now. I want to go home. I reach for the ignition, then freeze. “How the fuck did you know about that?”

He shrugs, looks guilty.

“What?”

He sighs, deep. He’s still looking me in the eye. It’s uncomfortable. “You wanted to know what happened, how I got good. Can I tell you something? Like in confidence?”

“I couldn’t give less of a shit about your Artists Way journey right now, Jayson.”

“It’s related, man. I could help you. Just listen. It’s not anything you’ve heard before, I guarantee that. I can change your life. I know things. I’m not supposed to tell you, but I’m big now. There’s nothing they can do to me and after how I treated you on set, I feel like I owe you this.” He leans forward, close to me, intimate. His voice is a whisper. “You said you wanted to be in 2014? I can help make that happen.”

His insanity, his narcissism — they’re slaps. I face forward, hands on the wheel. “Fuck you. Get out of my car.”

“Listen.” I lean away, my head pressed against the window, yearning. “Three years ago, man, I was low. Low low. I had nobody. I was months behind in rent and the pandemic was just starting. It was bad.” He sighs. “I was sitting on my bed, holding my Glock and thinking hard about what came next when there was a knock on my door and this girl…” He shakes his head like what he’s about to say is crazy. “She came in and told me I had a choice. She offered me a different way and I took it and… it’s everything, man. It’s my secret — it’s my superpower, and it can help you, too.”

“You said you weren’t a Scientologist, man, get out of my car.”

“This ain’t about fucking Scientology.” He seems genuinely offended. “This isn’t anything like that. This is magic. You know how I knew about Sara? Amina? Monopoly and Bao? I was there, man. I saw it through my own goddamn eyes. That girl? She made me a patch-worker. I protect the integrity of the time-stream, man. I fix the past and it’s got real side-benefits that can help you.”

“Seriously, get the fuck out of my car before I hurt you.”

He doesn’t hear me. He’s ranting, relentless. “I’m not supposed to tell anybody, man, but I think I’ve got to tell you because I owe you that much for how much a dick I was.” I’ve got my head pressed so hard against the window it hurts. I close my eyes. I see spots. The door. I reach across myself. Open it. Stumble out. “Danny, man!” He’s coming after me. “Wait!”

My right foot catches on the lip. I stumble, catch myself, then sit on the pavement. “Leave me alone, man, just leave me alone.”

“I’m telling you real shit. She hooked me up. I work for Time now.” He’s kneeling next to me, leaning close above my ear. His voice burns. “I fix holes in the past — lost memories. I go back in time and fill in the goddamned blanks — it’s how I got so good man. I don’t have to wonder what it’s like being other people. I don’t have to play the truth of imaginary situations. I’ve been other people. I’ve been you, man.” His hand on my shoulder. “Several times.”

“Stop.” It’s a whisper. “Please just stop.”

He won’t. He’s smiling, maniacal. “I rolled the seven that landed you on Park Place where Sara had three houses. I ate the last shrimp dumpling that Amina wanted. I felt that, man. I have been a thousand people in a thousand different lives now and so can you. I can talk to that girl again, man. I can hook you up and maybe you can go back, live that moment, too.” He’s leaning over me again. Tender eyes. Intensity. “Very least you’ll get to be other people, too, help your career, maybe help you in general.”

“You’re fucking insane.” But he’s not. He’s sane. I had rolled a seven. I had eaten the last shrimp dumpling. Amina had wanted it.

He shakes his head slowly. “I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone, man, so you can’t tell anyone, either, okay? Next time I see the girl, I’ll talk to her for you, though. I promise.”

I look up at him. His face is open. He’s earnest, honest. “You go back in time…”

“Yeah. Not like some movie sci-fi shit, though. One moment I’m me now and the next moment I’m Sally Archer in Omaha, Nebraska, in 2017 trying to decide which canned soup to buy at Dollar General and wondering if I should leave my husband, and then I’m back to being me.”

“Man…” It’s insane. What if it’s real?

“I swear it’s true.” He looks so earnest. “We’re the people who keep time from getting fucked up. Sometimes things don’t get stored right — things happen but then they get erased so they both happen and didn’t happen at the same time and that can really fuck things up. We go back and re-live the lost moments.  That’s why I’ve been you, man. You keep erasing things.”

It’s not real. I stand up. “You’re such an asshole, Jayson.”

He stays where he was. I watch him watch me drive away. He looks scared. I can’t shake the feeling.

Morning. I think. Light anyways. The vertical blinds in my bedroom are useless. My head hurts. My back, too. Last night’s memories filter in. Slowly. I rolled a seven.

“Fuck.” It’s a whisper, raspy, forced through phlegm. I screwed up my chance for a recurring on Manchester. I feel sick.

Toast, peanut butter, coffee. Consider my day. Drive, I guess. Amina wanted the bao. I should have let her have it. Maybe if I’d let her have it, I’d…

Fuck I’m hungry.

My apartment is gone. I’m…

The Gas’n’Save looks bright and cheery inside. 

I’m being painted over, hidden.

I’m Jimmy Dammaker. 

It’s winter-bright, sun-shiny. I’m in Akron, Ohio. It’s four days before my ex-wife’s birthday. She’s a bitch who took my kids. I need twenty-five dollars in the next few hours or it’s going to be a rough fucking night. 

It’s not me. It’s Jimmy. I’m Jimmy.

The shelves inside are colorful, filled with friendly food. I’ve got four dollars and seventeen cents, but I need that. More. It’s cold. I’m sweating. Not good. The Indian who owns the station kicked me off the property this morning, but he’s not here now. Just the girl.

I walk up slow-like. Casual. I’m beside the door. The wind picks up, blows my coat open. It’s cold as a motherfucker, but my hands, my back, my face feel shiny. 

There’s an older guy getting out of his car, fat and weak. Polo shirt under his coat, khaki pants. The kind who carries cash. “Hey man! Hey, you got a sec, man?”

He won’t look at me.

“I’m a fucking vet, man. You’re gonna walk right past me like you don’t see me? I served for you, asshole.” I didn’t, but I’m mad now anyways. Fuck this guy. I’m jonesing. Hard. “Give me some money, you pussy.”

The girl inside is wide-eyed scared, hand on her phone. The guy in the polo shirt slows. “You need to leave.” He won’t even look at me.

“Give me twenty bucks, then.”

His step stutters. “Here.” He pulls his hand from his pocket, holds out a five. “Go.”

My hand is halfway to my mouth. Jimmy Dammaker is still in me, memories that feel like mine but aren’t. A house with a big lawn, fist-holes in a wall, a twelve-foot python named Sofie. Sadness that feels like anger. He’s slipping away, but he leaves a sheen of himself behind in me.

My toast reaches my lips. I bite instinctively, but I have no saliva. The bread sits in my mouth unlubricated and unpleasant. I spit it into the trash.

I pulled Jayson’s number from the app. His phone rings a bunch before it’s answered. “Who’s calling, please?”

It’s not Jayson. Maybe an assistant. “This is Danny. Ruiz. Can I talk to Jayson?”

“What’s your relationship with Jayson?” The guy on the phone sounds too old to be an assistant. Professional. Suspicious.

“We’re friends, man. We were drinking last night. Can I talk with him?”

The voice changes. Harder. “You were with Mr. Means last night? At his house?”

“No man, at the Red Lion. What the hell?” My head is pounding. I’m starting to feel sick.

“Mr. Ruiz, my name is Detective Rafael Luna, LAPD. Would it be alright if I sent someone over to talk with you?”

Jayson is dead. Beaten to death in his home. They ask me about baseball bats, whether we fought. I tell them the truth. When they leave: “We might have more questions, so please keep yourself available.”

After the door closes, I vomit into the sink, spare sausage from last night, bile, water. It burns.

I collapse on a chair, put my head in my hands.

A knock. Solid, confident, a set of three raps. Moments later, three more. I should get it, but I can’t move my hands, my head. “Just a minute.” I pinch my cheek hard. The pain brings me out.

“Sorry, I was in the bathroom.” It’s a woman I don’t know. “Who are you?”

She’s in her thirties, maybe my age exactly. A little heavy but wearing it well. Her hair is thick, teased and messy, reminds me of Jennifer Finch from L7 back in the day. Clean jeans, a black tee, black Chuck Taylor’s. Pretty but scary. “Hi Danny,” she says. She smiles, but it doesn’t touch the rest of her face. “Can I come in?” She pushes past me. “Thank you.”

I stay at the door, watch her scan my living room. It’s been a long time since anyone who wasn’t me has seen it. I imagine what she sees and blanch. “Sorry. Who are you?”

“My name’s Darby.” She turns to face me. She smiles again, then motions me to the couch. “Have a seat, Danny.” She sits on the far side, angles herself to look at me. “I was a friend of Jayson’s. We need to talk.”

I can’t sit down. I stay standing, arms crossed, between her and the door. “You know about… It was you, wasn’t it? The girl who talked to him, told him about Time and whatever. What did you do to him? He didn’t do anything, man. He was trying to help me.”

She laughs, for real. It’s at me. “Danny. there wasn’t anything me or anyone else could do to keep Jayson from dying once he broke the rules.” She widens her eyes at me, like I should understand. “He told you. He shouldn’t have done that.”

“But none of this is real.” I don’t even believe myself anymore. “Was it? Is it? It wasn’t. That’s stupid.”

“Okay.” She stares up at me, dead-faced.

It deflates me. “Fuck.”

She glances at her watch. “Jayson broke the rules and was sent to patch a death. You are now a patch-worker because it was either that or kill you because Jayson was an idiot and told you.” She widens her eyes, leans forward. “Rules.”

She lays it out. Just like Jayson.  “You’re gonna fix Time, Danny.”

It’s heady. Patching is re-creating a forgotten moment, a piece of time. It takes a while for the past to solidify. Most moments are strong, sticky, built to last, but others don’t set right. Others get erased.  She gives me an example: “Imagine you buy blueberries at the store and pay six bucks — if that moment disappears from Time, then you ate blueberries that you didn’t buy, someone else might buy blueberries that don’t exist and the shopkeeper is six bucks short while you have six extra you already spent. We go back and relive that moment, make sure it sticks.” 

“I don’t…” It’s a lot.  My head hurts.

“Don’t get lost in the whys and wherefores, Danny.” She wrinkles her nose, shakes her head. “More things on heaven and earth and all that. Just know you’re saving the world.” She shrugs. “If those paradoxes make it to the present, Time’s fucked. We’re all fucked. We keep that from happening.”

As she leaves, I ask my only question. “What rules? What are the rules?” I don’t want to die like Jayson.

“Fight Club, Danny.” Darby smiles as she stands up to go. “The rules are Fight Club rules.”

Donnie Gleason. It’s 2016. Richmond, Indiana. I’m wide. Tall, too. My skin beads with sweat. My hair is hot on my head. It’s hot. Can’t believe I still live here. You ain’t leaving, Donnie. Too fucking scared. I tighten inside, shameful. Speedway has twenty-five pumps, but the one I chose is out of regular. I scan the lot, consider getting back in the car to move to a different island, but it seems like too much. It’s too hot. The Purina factory is making the whole town smell like dog food again. Seattle doesn’t smell like this. How the fuck would I know. 

I slap the button for premium. It’s twenty cents more.

“Fuck.” Nobody’s listening. Nobody cares.

Patches come randomly, no warning. I’m here, signaling left, third in line for the turn and then suddenly I’m Jaden Preble helping my sister buy a dress for her eighth-grade prom and I’m mad she hasn’t even said thank-you even though I could have spent the day playing Call of Duty. Then I’m back but I don’t remember where I am or what I was doing and everybody gets pissed at me while I puzzle it out.

She should have thanked him, though.

Patching. Inconvenient, but not awful. Sometimes good. I feel what they feel. I’ve been thrilled about finding twenty bucks when I was Emmett Combs, a bricklayer in Evanston, Illinois in 2015. I’ve felt schadenfreude as Connor Fields in Klamath Falls when Caden Brooks got busted for vaping in the bathroom. I’ve felt the sadness of Alberto Mendez of Massapequa when his favorite pair of socks were too worn to keep.

There are downsides, too. Something happens to me there, it happens to me.

Eric Bledsoe. Truckee. 2018. Driving, barely thinking, thinking. Not thinking.

“Not…” words are weird. Sounds. Mindblowing. Moving air makes music. Moving air.      “Blah blah blah blah” means something but it’s just air.

Laughing now. Can’t help it. It’s snowing a little, still September. Weird. Brake lights in front of me. I feel lazy. Moving slow, foot from gas to brake.

Not going to make it. No panic. No worry. Just is. I turn the wheel, slide onto the shoulder, then over the shoulder… over the shoulder sounds… more sounds.

The car bumps, then we’re riding a bucking bronco, up down up up up up down down. Stop.

“We’re okay!” I tell myself. I’m the only one listening. My nose hurts.

I had a bloody nose after that one. Back and neck sore for a week. Jayson died like that, being someone else when they got killed. He was trying to help. Wanted to give me my career back, give me a chance to see Sara again. I think about Jayson a lot. Beaten to death. A bat, maybe something else. Found in his living room, wearing boxer-briefs and a robe. The robe didn’t have any blood on the outside, no blood anywhere but on his body. Reddit’s got a sub now, r/meansmurder. People think he was killed elsewhere.

Not elsewhere. Elsewhen. Sent to patch a death.

Most patches are small. Moments in time easily forgotten — choices made doing laundry, whether to buy tomatoes.  People worry. People care. People are scared. People have joy. Patching is making it harder to judge people.

Then there are erasures, moments people remember into oblivion. People like me. We are memory destroyers.

Paula Robinson. The Anasazi Steakhouse is fancy. Caleb’s choice. He’s across from me, eyes down, intent on his rib-eye. He cuts it carefully, fork in his left hand, backside up, tines in the meat. His manners are so good. He’s refined. People would never know if they saw him at work or driving on the freeway in his beat up ancient green Tundra.

“This is nice.” I feel myself flush. I sound simple. “I’ve never been here before.”

Caleb looks up. He’s chewing, but it’s subtle, quiet. His eyes are bright. His face, he has a look. Everything about him is slightly wrong — his nose is too large, crooked, too. His eyes too deep. His goatee isn’t full, his cheeks are hollow but the whole thing together looks… good. He’s like a younger Sam Elliot. He smiles. “Couldn’t think of another place where I could take you and people wouldn’t think I was too cheap for my date.”

I’ve been here as Paula three times already. Something must’ve happened to Caleb. She must really miss him. Erasures like hers and mine are always tragic nostalgia.

Every time I fade, splash down inside a mind somewhere else in time, I hope it’s mine — that moment where I rolled a seven. Some other moment of joy with Amina, with Sara. I drill down on memories daily, forcing moment-by-moment replays until the faces dissolve and the moments drown in murkiness and I’m not even sure it happened at all.

If they’re sending patchworkers, they’re not sending me.

But Jayson was right. While I’m patching I am them. I feel them, think them, know them. It’s real. I don’t have to play at imaginary truths anymore.

“You want back in.” Josh sounds skeptical.

We haven’t talked in four years.  Last time we did he told me my only options were reality. Screw that. If my career was going to end, it wasn’t going to be sitting across the desk from whoever-the-fuck replaced Donald Trump on Celebrity Apprentice or whatever.

“I’m ready. I’ve spent real time focusing on craft. I’ll impress you, man. I’ll impress everybody.”

He tells me I don’t need to impress him. He wants a new headshot. “You haven’t updated your webpage.”

“I’ll have it all by Tuesday.” Hang up. Lean back, close my eyes. Another moment with Sara. I focus, remember it hard.

The concrete path to our front door in South Pasadena. Amina is on the porch. She’s radiant, watching us. I’m holding Sara’s hand. The sun is hot. She’s looking up at me. She’s smiling. “The baby muskrat!” She says. She’s telling me about Wonder Pets.

I can hear her voice. It’s everything. Her face blurs, the house, the path, the heat, the voice, they fray, degrade into swirled flashes of colors.

Somebody will get to patch that. Probably not me.

Headshots and web-service are expensive, but Venice Station residuals check came in yesterday. $433.89. Bigger than expected. If I don’t pay rent I can swing it.

“You booked it, man!” Josh.

The call woke me from a sound sleep. “I did? That’s great!” I don’t know which part he’s talking about. I’ve sent in tapes for more than a dozen in the last few weeks. “Which one?”

“The recurring, man! Sunset Emergency!”

“Really?” I smile. Channeled Dr. Ahmet Pour for that one. I was Ahmet for three minutes while he sat on the toilet and thought about calling his wife. We didn’t. There was too much to talk about and not enough time. We both knew he wasn’t calling because he was afraid. “That’s awesome.” My superpower. Jayson. “Thanks, man.” I didn’t used to thank Josh. Didn’t used to thank anybody, I guess, but people need to hear it.

Off the phone. Jayson was right. Don’t even have to rehearse. Shit’s just there.

Jayson.  “Thanks, man.” I touch my heart, bring my fingers to my lips, and then raise them to the sky.

“You’re doing it on purpose.” Darby showed up at my door unannounced. We’re sitting on the couch. “You’ve got to stop.”

She’s intense. I want to meet her eyes, but I look at my coffee instead. “I’m not…”

“You want to see them again, I get it, but it’s not going to happen.” She sets her water bottle on the table. It lands firmly, with a clack against the glass that startles me. “We don’t patch ourselves.”

“Why not?” My voice betrays my panic.

“It just doesn’t happen, Danny.” She sounds sympathetic, sad, like I’m a child. “You have to stop.”

I shake my head. I’m not going to answer. She waits. I wait longer.

She gets up, lifts her bottle from the table. “I’m serious, Danny. You need to stop. You’re creating work for other people and it’s never going to get you what you want.”

I don’t look up.

“Daddy?” Sara just got her uniforms, ugly gray polos, blue polyester pants. She’s standing in the doorway, silhouetted by the setting sun behind her from the open patio doors. There’s jasmine in the air…

She stands to leave but pauses at the open door. “I’m serious, man. This is serious.”

Sara does a spin. “I’m modelling!” She spins again.

“Gorgeous, Little Winner!” It’s ugly, but she’s amazing. I’m smiling. Happy.

When I look up, Darby’s gone.

In line at Lassen’s, basket full of fruit and meat. People look at me as I shop. They recognize me. The girl staring from the cross-aisle by the coffee, the guy by the meat counter.

I hear my name. I smile, pretend not to have overheard. It’s been years. Decades. They know me. Sunset Emergency is big. My character’s arc is airing currently. There’ve been interviews — “Phoenix from the ashes” sort of things.

“Hey man.” Guy behind me. I turn around, smile.

“What’s up?”

He points to the front of the store. “Register’s open.”

Still awake. Still in bed. Sheets are too warm. Blanket’s too much. I feel damp.

Amina is standing beside the bed, pulling off her shirt to put on her nightgown. She’s telling me about something that happened at Sara’s daycare, something about what another parent said or did. I’m not really listening, watching her breasts, waiting for her to take off her pants.

“Mom?” The door bursts open. Sara’s there, all smiles until she sees Amina clutching her shirt to her chest. Her eyes go wide. “Were you having sex?”

Again.

Amina is standing beside the bed, pulling off her shirt…

The image is blurring. Amina’s skin, face, hair, muddling into blotches. Her voice slips, becoming simple unspoken words in my brain. She’s being erased. She’ll need a patch.

Jayson lied. It won’t ever be me.

Bestia. Josh’s choice. “We gotta celebrate!” He just bought a new condo in the old Parker Paints building. He’s high on the Arts District and wants to share it.

Bestia’s fine. Good food. The agency’s picking up the tab with the Marvel money I’m about to bring in. We’re sitting by the big windows in front, visible from the street for obvious reasons. People aren’t staring, but I still feel eyes while I eat flatbread and tapenade.

“Danny?”

She’s standing beside me, snuck up without me noticing. She was always quiet. She’s dressed well, but I recognize the loose long dress that cinches at the waist. She bought it when we were still together. It’s frayed at the hem, a little faded. The tailored black cardigan hides it. She’s lost weight. Her hair is swept back into a loose knot. There’s gray in it.

I don’t know what to say. I stare until the discomfort of silence overrides surprise, overrides the ache she brings. “Amina… hi.” I gesture across the table. “You remember Josh.”

“Hi Josh.” She smiles. It’s hollow. Her cheeks are hollow. She’s hollow. She’s a gutted version of herself, a taxidermy like me. To me: “How’ve you been?”

I shrug. I ache. I’m hollow, too. I’m sorry. You left me. She’s dead. I’m dead. “Okay, I guess. Career’s picking up again which is cool, but…” another shrug. “How are you?”

“I’m…” She shrugs. Her eyes turn hard, the look she had after Sara whenever she looked at me. I wilt. “I’m surviving.” She turns, looks back at someone or something. “I just saw you over here and didn’t want to leave without at least saying hi.”

I stand. “Hey, maybe we…”

She shakes her head, smiles again. Sad. Still hollow. “No, Danny. I don’t think I hate you anymore but this is all I can handle, okay?”

Maybe before I might’ve forced the issue. Not anymore. Too much of other people’s pain in me to prioritize my own anymore. Sitting down again, watching her walk up Traction with another woman. They look back, but I can’t tell if it’s at me or the restaurant. Josh is speaking, saying something. Enthusiastic.

She still thinks I let Sara die. I want to die.

Sara. She’s standing in vomit outside my bedroom door. I’m etching it into my mind. Every moment, every color, sound. Erasing.

“I threw up.” Her voice is soft. She’s holding her head. She’s so small. She’s sad. “My head really hurts.” Then: “I’m sorry I made a mess.” She’s clear, then she’s not. For moments I see her face as it was, but then it degrades, disappears. Needing a patch.

“No worries, Little Winner.” I step over the puddle. The smell is acrid, awful. Bile. Vomit usually makes me want to vomit, but hers doesn’t. It’s just a mess to clean. Weirdly undisgusting. “You want some Tylenol?” It’s the moment before the worst moment of my life. If they won’t give me this, they won’t give me anything.

“Yes, please.”

That vomit stayed for days.

“Just over there,” Cassidy gestures at the hill across Sunset. She’s twenty-four, been in LA for two years and now she’s Daimeon to my Ghost Rider. She’s pointing at her apartment. “I might move, though.” She shrugs, twirls her drink. “I want to stay in the neighborhood but my apartment is…” She makes a face. Some fans are pissed she’s a girl. Incels and losers.

We’re good together, on screen. She’s okay but together, chemistry. “It’s a good area.” I don’t know what else to say. It’s true. Echo Park is nice.

Daddy? I threw up. I take a breath.

“Are you liking Beachwood?” The show is coming together nicely.

“Only been there four months, but so far it’s fine…” On set, I get to be Johnny Blaze more than I have to be Danny Ruiz. It’s a relief, being someone else consistently. Not one-offs. Even Ronnie Suarez on Sunset Emergency wasn’t as all-encompassing.

But at the end of the day, I still go home.

Cassidy’s eyes move off me, up. Something behind me. “Hey Danny.”

Darby. She’s not alone, standing with a tall lanky Black guy who reads gay. I shift on my stool. “Hi.”

“I’m Darby,” Darby puts her hand out to Cassidy. “I’m a friend of Danny’s.” She points to her companion. “This is Alex. Alex, Danny and…” She cocks her head in Cassidy’s direction.

“Cassidy.” Cassidy tells her. “It’s nice to meet you!” She looks around as if trying to find a pair of stools to pull up to our counter at the window. “There’re no…”

Darby shakes her head. “No worries, we can’t stay. Can I steal Danny for a sec?”

Outside. Alex has stayed with Cassidy. I can see them talking. Laughing. “You brought muscle this time.”

“Alex is not muscle, Danny. Alex is just a friend like us.” She shifts herself, putting her body between me and the window where Alex and Cassidy sit. “You’ve got to stop, Danny. I told you it was serious. Don’t fuck with things you don’t understand.”

“You’re telling me to stop remembering my daughter. You shouldn’t fuck with things you cannot understand.”

“I’m just the messenger. I’m trying to save your life. Erasures like yours, they endanger Time and they won’t have any compunctions about stopping you permanently if need be.” She leans in. “If you keep at it, you’ll end up on a death patch, just like Jayson.” She looks honestly concerned. “Please.” Then: “You’ve built a good life, Danny. Love what you have, look forward not back okay?”

I look past her at Cassidy. A good life. Daddy? Maybe. In some ways. It’s not enough. It will never be enough. I nod, let go the breath I didn’t know I’d held. “Yeah. Alright.”

It’s later. We’re still at the bar across from Cassidy’s. Lights are bright. Noises loud. My cheeks are warm. Cassidy is laughing.

“Can I ask you something?” She leans forward. “Something serious?”

“Sure.”

“It might be rude.” She shakes a finger at me. “I don’t like being rude, but I really want to know.”

“Ask. I won’t be offended, I promise.”

“Okaaayyy.” She sits up straight. “I was watching Master Class and a little of Venice Station…”

“Why would you want to do that?”

“We’re working together. I wanted to see.” She sighs. “Anyways, I was watching and… I work with you and you’re like… you’re amazing now but then you…”

“I wasn’t very good.” I chuckle. I wasn’t very good. Jayson’s words. “I know.”

“What happened? How did you get so good?”

“I just…” I shrug. “I learned some stuff, you know.”

“You took classes?” She squints at me. “Playhouse West or something? Studio 5? It’s just… I’m not very good.”

“Cassidy, you’re good.” It’s a little bit of a lie. She’s cute and she’s got charisma but she’s not good. I lift my beer to my lips to hide my shame. She could be good.

“Bullshit. I’m cute. I won’t be cute forever and I want to be good. I want to have staying power. How’d you do it?”

Staying power. I’ve got staying power now. I’m big again. I’ve got the nice place, the career. Daddy? I couldn’t care less. It’s your turn! Cassidy is watching me, waiting. I can give her what she wants. Patching made me a better actor. A better person, maybe. It didn’t give me what I wanted. Maybe it will for her. Maybe she’ll be happy. “You really want to know?” Daddy?

“Seriously, Danny!” She pushes my leg.

“It’s a big dark secret, Cass.” I raise my eyebrows, take a sip. “Life and death.” Park Place, Daddy!

“Tell me!” Eleven hundred dollars!

I sip my beer. It tastes good. The evening light is perfect. I’ll miss this. “I really shouldn’t, but okay…”

I have two of Sara’s uniform shirts left in my closet. I take one. It’s very small. I raise it to my face, but it only smells like soap. I bring it with me to the couch.

A hit from my vape. I wait in silence.

Fight Club Rules. “Anytime now.” I wait. Nothing.

Until.

He’s not coming. “Daddy!”

I’m not me. I’m her.

My head. The noise.

Oh god.

The door opens and he’s there. I can’t look up at him. At me. “I threw up.”  He doesn’t look mad. “My head really hurts.” I look around. The vomit. The mess. I feel bad. “I’m sorry I made a mess.”

“No worries, Little Winner.” He’s smiling. He looks tired. He’s got no shirt. His hair is messy. “You want some Tylenol?” He looks around. “I’ll get this cleaned up later.”

 He takes my hand. I can barely see it. Things are dark now, blurry. “Daddy?”

“What’s up, Winner?”

“My eyes are weird.” My head hurts. A lot lot lot.

He chuckles. It relaxes me. He’s not worried. “Let’s see. Headache? Barfing? Weird eyes?” He lifts me onto the couch and sits down next to me. He’s warm. He’s comfortable. Daddy. “Sounds like you’ve got a migraine, Winner.” He leans forward, looks me in the face. “I used to get them, too. They suck.”

I laugh. It hurts. It’s hard to see. I… more vomit. Dad sees it coming. Catches it with a popcorn bowl.

I’m soooo tired. My eyes.

My head…

It hurts… “Daddy?” It hurts so much. “Where’s mommy?”

“She’s in Houston, remember? Work. She’ll be back tomorrow.”

I want her to be here. I want to see her. My head hurts so much. “I’m scared.”

“Don’t be, Winner. It’s just a migraine.”

I can barely hear him. Through a tube, a long long way away. It’s so dark.

Am I dying?

It’s not a migraine, Little Winner. It’s an aneurysm. I’m so sorry.

It’s dark.

I love you so much.

A long time. Our hearts beat.

I’m so sorry.

Then slow. Beat again. Once.

We’re together. In silence.

The light that illuminated the supermarket was as fake as the milk Sascha was about to buy. The milk was synthetic. It contained water, colour, and minerals that humans had made in large chemical factories. Before the supermarket was built, real cows had stood in its place. Then all the cows died. Many humans as well. Then Sascha’s father, Anton van der Meer, died. Sascha died in the supermarket while buying milk. The supermarket was built in the year 2057, when World War III had already begun. It had been triggered five years before.

The trigger for World War III was fifteen years old and went by the name Batbayar Ganbaatar. Ganbaatar never knew he was indirectly to blame for it. He sat at the foot of Sutai Uul when the incident occurred. Sutai Uul was one of the tallest mountains in a country then called Mongolia. From a glacier high on Sutai Uul, melted water trickled past Ganbaatar, until it reached Lake Tonkhil. A glacier was a thick mass of ice which crawled through the mountains.

Today there are no more glaciers.

Ganbaatar was a nomad and cowherd. But most importantly, he was in the middle of puberty and would have preferred to spend his time masturbating rather than looking for his cows. When Ganbaatar masturbated, he liked to think about Arielle McConnor, who back then enchanted the world with her beautiful voice and her big brown eyes. Arielle McConnor came from the United States of America, the land of great freedom, and sang in English. Ganbaatar didn’t understand English but he liked her voice and her eyes and what she did to him when he closed his eyes and concentrated.

While sitting there, eyes closed, concentrating, his cows continued to drink the water of the Sutai Uul glacier that flowed past them on its way to Lake Tonkhil. If Ganbaatar had looked closely, he still would not have seen that his cow Arielle had laid the foundation for World War III.

Here is what ice on Earth was good for: humans stored food in ice to make it last longer. Nature stored bacteria in ice to make them last longer. Bacteria were small creatures that humans could only see with the help of a magnifying device. Nature had stored bacteria in the Sutai Uul glacier. Now these bacteria floated down, past Ganbaatar and his cows, all the way to Lake Tonkhil. Some of these bacteria were absorbed by the cow Arielle. Clever humans later named the bacterium Mycobacterium bovis subsp. mongoliense. The disease it caused was called Cattle Tuberculosis, or CAT for short. Cats couldn’t get infected with it.

When one of the bacteria entered a cow, it multiplied. If a cow had the bacterium inside it and met another cow, the bacterium entered that cow as well. Ganbaatar’s cows met many other cows. The following happened when the bacterium had multiplied sufficiently: The cow got tired and was hungry no longer. In the cow’s lungs, small nodules formed in the blood vessels, which burst after a while. The cow coughed up blood from its lungs and died. Ganbaatar’s cow Arielle died after twenty-three days. Had it been able to speak, it would have wished for death to arrive sooner.

Thanks to Ganbaatar’s cows, which he drove further south, CAT was able to reproduce and from there came to China, Kazakhstan, and India. India was a country where cows were sacred to many humans. I mean, why not? Unfortunately, a disease that killed cows was not the best thing for a country where cows were sacred. While CAT was not dangerous to humans, many clever ones thought it might be possible for the bacterium to mutate and eventually adapt to them. Some of these wise humans said the best thing to do was to kill all the cows.

Nobody killed cows in India because cows were sacred.

In the United States of America, the land of great freedom, humans liked to kill because guns were sacred. So, the humans there started shooting all the cows. The smart humans then said to humans in other countries they should pretty please do the same. In Europe, humans followed the words of the United States of America, the land of great freedom. In India and China, they refused.

Four years after Batbayar Ganbaatar sat by Sutai Uul with his eyes closed, concentrating, the last cow in the Americas died.

At the same time, back on top of Sutai Uul, the glacier continued to melt and revealed something else: a tiny spaceship.

The spaceship belonged to Dulrax Zondobar. Dulrax Zondobar himself belonged to the Pirasakut, who lived about eighteen light-years from Earth on the planet Ylon-B.

Here’s why Dulrax Zondobar’s spacecraft ended up in the glacier: Dulrax Zondobar, distinguished professor of anthropology at Ylon-B University, had to make an emergency landing during a research trip. The forced landing took place during the last great ice age, when the glacier had formed on Sutai Uul. Dulrax Zondobar had been preserved in ice for thirty thousand years. Just as nature had preserved the Mycobacterium bovis subsp. mongoliense, the cause of CAT, in ice.

When Dulrax Zondobar landed on Earth, Mycobacterium bovis subsp. mongoliense did not exist. What did exist was the Mycobacterium bovis, which caused a less dangerous variant of bovine tuberculosis, and a hole in the fuel tank of Dulrax Zondobar’s spaceship.

The Pirasakut used a biological fuel made from slug-like creatures that was harmless on their planet, Ylon-B, but could cause serious mutations in living beings on Earth. Thanks to the fuel, Mycobacterium bovis mutated into the much more dangerous Mycobacterium bovis subsp. mongoliense.

When Dulrax Zondobar awoke from the ice, he had a problem: no fuel. So, he sent a message to his fellow Pirasakut. The Pirasakut communicated with their hands and fingers.

Before humans began communicating with their lips and their tongues and other parts of their mouths, they also used their hands. Then they used their hands to develop tools and beat other humans to death.

Now they don’t communicate any longer.

Even though the Pirasakut had a similar build to humans, there was one difference. Where humans had a head, the Pirasakut had a third arm with a third hand and a third set of fingers. They used their side-fingers to telepathically send messages and their top-fingers to receive them. Sending a message far into space required larger fingers than usual, so Dulrax Zondobar had to boost his transmission power. He did this by using the largest hands that existed on Earth.

These hands belonged to humans that have been more important than others. They were as fake as the milk and as fake as the illusion that all humans were equally important.

In order to show these important humans how important they were, less important humans recreated them using stone or metal, and these recreated, important humans were placed in large squares. Humans called these fake humans statues.

Dulrax Zondobar used the statues’ hands to send a message to the other Pirasakut. With the help of a device in his spaceship, he was able to position the fingers of the statues as needed and sent the message out into space. The Pirasakut called the device Telespector. The message consisted of two hundred and eighty-three thousand different finger signs. Here’s what Dulrax Zondobar sent to the Pirasakut on Ylon-B:

HELP! DULRAX ZONDOBAR

While Dulrax Zondobar waited for help, the United States of America, the land of great freedom, threatened to use nuclear weapons to wipe out all cows in India and the rest of Asia. Some humans thought this was a slight overreaction. India still refused. Cows were still sacred there.

Meanwhile, Dulrax Zondobar’s message had arrived on his planet Ylon-B, and the Pirasakut sent a fleet to rescue the stranded professor. The Pirasakut ships were fast. On departure they said, “Zip-wop.” Mongolian authorities, who sided with India on the cow issue, discovered their ships and reported enemy aircraft to India. India mistook the spaceships of the Pirasakut for airplanes of the United States of America, the land of great freedom. Fearing invasion, India sent a nuclear bomb towards the Americas, which was intercepted en route.

The United States of America fired back.

World War III was now coming to India and with it Americans and Europeans who killed all the cows and many humans. By that time there was already no more milk in the supermarkets and the Pirasakut were on their way back to Ylon-B.

Sascha van der Meer was not only good-looking, but I had also endowed him with a polite personality. He would never have said the following word to the old lady standing next to him at the supermarket’s milk shelf: “Cunt!” Perhaps he would have been able to if he had known who the lady was. But I never gave him that information.

The lady was seventy-one years old, and her name was Anna Baumann. Her husband’s name was Julius Baumann. Julius Baumann was dead. And it was his fault that Anton van der Meer, Sascha’s father, was dead too.

Julius Baumann had been working at Tepco Ltd. when CAT started to spread. Tepco Ltd. was the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer, and Julius Baumann tried to develop a vaccine against CAT. Although Julius Baumann was among the smart humans who were concerned about mutations in the Mycobacterium bovis subsp. mongoliense, he didn’t succeed with creating a useful vaccine. One of the promising vaccines was called CI-6. CI-6 was Julius Baumann’s greatest hope. With its help, many test cows had been saved from death by CAT. Unfortunately, CI-6 came with side effects.

Cows vaccinated with CI-6 developed toxins in their milk. When calves drank from it, they would go into a frenzy and soon die of cardiac arrest. One morning, Julius Baumann arrived at the Tepco Ltd. laboratory and he found the usual pile of dead cows, but also an unusual pile of dead employees. Millions of dying cows had a bad effect on the mental health of humans, so many of them decided to end their lives. This was what one of Julius Baumann’s colleagues decided as well. He was a mad man. This mad man wanted to die by drinking the milk of cows that had been vaccinated with CI-6. In his opinion, something that caused cardiac arrest in cows should certainly do the same in humans.

He was wrong.

What happened was that Julius Baumann’s colleague had been thrown into a frenzy and killed all the colleagues in the lab. Tepco Ltd. security guards eventually shot him.

At least he had reached his goal.

Julius Baumann continued his research on this milk and found that it made humans uninhibited and aggressive. Exactly the right tool for a war. And since Julius Baumann was not only in possession of intelligence but also had a wife who was very fond of money, he sold his knowledge about the milk to the military. They were pleased because from now on their soldiers could kill much more efficiently and without a bad conscience.

They called the milk War Milk. War Milk turned even the kindest of humans into ruthless killing machines.

One of the kindest humans was called Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ was born about two thousand and sixty years before World War III, and two thousand years after his birth many humans gave socks to each other to celebrate his birthday. Apparently, he was the son of a God.

In this story I am the only god and my son’s name was Sascha.

All soldiers stationed in India received War Milk. Anton van der Meer, Sascha’s father, was stationed in India twenty-one years before Sascha entered the supermarket.

Before World War III began, there were too many human beings on Earth because humans spent a lot of time connecting parts of their bodies, and not so much time caring about glaciers. This is one of the reasons why there are no more glaciers today. Nine months before Sascha’s visit to the supermarket, an Indian woman had spent roughly seven minutes connected to an Indian man, and nine months regretting it.

To compensate for this new life and to counter overpopulation, I decided to kill Sascha.

In Jaipur, in the northern part of India, Manisha Bhandari was in labour. Manisha Bhandari’s father, Himal Bhandari, was among the humans who considered cows sacred. Manisha Bhandari was poor. When she was a little girl, she played with cow bones.

She had never found her father’s bones.

Before Himal Bhandari, her father, died, he was tired and no longer hungry. When he was shot, he was coughing up blood from his lungs. Had he still been able to speak, he would have wished for death to arrive sooner.

As Manisha Bhandari’s labour intensified, Sascha’s death also advanced with great strides.

Sascha was still standing in front of the shelf with the artificial milk. Here are the last words his father spoke to him: “Make sure to drink enough milk.”

Then he shot himself.

Sascha’s mother removed her husband’s blood residue from the tiles with scouring milk. Scouring milk wasn’t real milk, but a white liquid that humans used to remove stains. When humans drank scouring milk, they died.

Sascha’s mother drank scouring milk.

Anton van der Meer, Sascha’s father, didn’t drink scouring milk. He drank War Milk.

Anton van der Meer was the perfect killing machine. He worked smoothly. In five months, Anton van der Meer killed one hundred and thirty humans in Jaipur, in the northern part of India. He was an excellent automated killing machine. He killed one hundred and thirty humans with a well-aimed shot to the lungs, sometimes a second one, just to make sure. Anton van der Meer was efficient and bureaucratic. One hundred and thirty humans on a list.

Ayush Singh: a well-aimed shot to the lungs. Next please! Khira Kumar: a well-aimed shot to the lungs. Next please! Himal Bhandari: a well-aimed shot to the lungs. And so on. Anton van der Meer was a mindless killing machine as long as he was given War Milk.

When the war was over, he was no longer given War Milk but what he got instead was dreams of Indians starved to the ribs, bleeding from their mouths.

Next please!

At first the dreams haunted him at night, then also during the day. Anton van der Meer saw dead Indians everywhere.

“Make sure to drink enough milk,” he said to Sascha when he could no longer bear the many Indian nightmares, and he shot himself with a Glock 54. The Glock 54 was a semi-automatic killing machine that fully automatic killing machines like Anton van der Meer used. The semi-automatic killing machine came from Austria, the country where Sascha was now standing in the supermarket. Anton van der Meer’s gun was never found after his suicide. Sascha’s shopping trip had meanwhile led him to the cleaning supplies. On the shelf next to the scouring milk I put the second present for him, a Glock 54.

Sascha knew what he had to do. Meanwhile, Manisha Bhandari’s son was born. A little later, a bacterium entered his body, which clever humans called Bordetella pertussis. The bacterium caused Manisha Bhandari’s son to develop whooping cough. He died a few days later. Well.

You should have known me when I was on top of the game. Morphing was still new and few artists had mastered it. Not everyone could handle the drugs that would transform you into a piece of art a Collector would be proud to hang on the wall. We were a small group, known to the gallery owners and dealers, and cultivated, like rare hothouse flowers. There were parties loaded with the best Stimuli (especially the music, either tingling or throbbing) to trigger a Morph that would be as interesting and innovative as possible.

Oh, those parties! When you could hardly remember what you were when you came in and could barely recognize yourself when you came out. It took days to get back to your usual self, but who cared? If the Morph was successful and you sold, there was a nice fat contract —six months to a year—waiting for you with your dealer. The perks were there too, as most likely you’d be living in some penthouse or estate, with the best food and drink, all expenses paid, and a staff to wait on you at all times.

So, what happened, you want to know? Why am I hanging in a place like this? Well, when I tell you the story, it will become clear.

I had just come off a year of hanging in a mountain retreat somewhere in Colorado, tanned and relaxed and feeling refreshed. Ready for the next Morph, back in New York, where the best Collectors were, and represented by one of the top galleries. My dealer, Hans, an expert at the game, was adept at teasing multiple buyers or establishing a new trend, which ironically, only his artists could fulfill.

I had a nice, loft-like apartment on Tenth Street in the Village, stocked with ample supply of morphizine and art books, my only treasures. The Cubist and Futurist movements of the early 1920s were my sources of inspiration, and influenced my Morph, making it distinctive from most of the other artists. My unique talent was Fragmenting, projecting my fragmented self onto different planes, taking Cubism from two dimensions to three, sure to excite the most elite of the sophisticated Art Collectors.

Hans had scheduled a top-tier Collector’s party, a showcase for his high-ticket Morph Artists. Grabbing a two-pack of morphizine, I donned my black shiny raincoat and was on my way. The black pavement was shiny after a drizzle and my stiletto-heeled retro pumps clicked loudly across it as I followed the route to the warehouse site of tonight’s gallery party.

“The biggest Collectors will be coming, Liebchen,” Hans had gotten me into the habit of referring to Collectors as their own special entity with a capital ‘C’. Big Collectors were very busy and very rich, but in pursuit of their Collection they tended to come early and stay late, wanting to be certain of the art that caught their attention, before committing their millions to a purchase.

However, that night, at least, I was game—and if took a little more morphizine than usual, so be it. I was healthy, relaxed, and felt I could easily handle a full night of Morphing.

Wandering around by myself, (Hans was too cheap to pay for added chaperones for Morphing artists) I finally found a dressing room, where I disrobed, took out my syringe and sat on a rickety chair to shoot up the morphizine.

If you’ve never taken morphizine, you can’t imagine the initial rush as it sets your cells up to Morph. It leaves you feeling you’ve had a small taste of paradise. (By the way, in those days I scored the best morphizine you could get; the crap I get now barely gives me the same kind of buzz).

How does it work, you ask? I’m not totally sure, but one time a doctor tried to explain it to me:

Your DNA is like the instruction book for your genes, much like the instruction book that comes with a Lego set. Evidently, the DNA tells the genes and cells of your body how to structure itself, and how all the little tiny pieces should come together. Then, some scientist discovered that DNA can be altered, and with the injection of a new drug into the bloodstream and the right stimulus to activate it, it can direct cells to change the body’s structure.

Initially, the drug was used to retool the DNA and restructure the genes of people who were born with disabilities caused by missing or non-functioning genes. With the success of this application, the excitement of more possibilities grew, after scientists discovered that some people were more responsive than others to DNA-change. These people had genes which were dynamic and would bind and move quickly and easily once the drug and the stimulus were administered, and experienced few, if any, side effects. Oddly enough, those who responded so well to the drug had a high creative instinct and became Morph Artists.

Since there were no serious side effects to taking the drug now known as morphizine, it was made easily available to Responders, although artists have to take a blood test to confirm their response everytime they refill a prescription for morphizine. 

So here I was, eyes closed as I reveled in the euphoria produced by the first rush of morphizine into my veins, and I took my time before getting up and into the Morph. Even without Stimuli like music or flashing lights, my body was beginning to morph. My fingers extended into tendrils, turning green, and my hair began to grow into vines, encircling my body. Feeling good, I slithered out of the dressing area to where the music caused the floor to throb, while trying to control my feet from morphing, until I got to the heart of the party.

I followed the throbbing floor to a white metal door, which was a struggle to open with my fingers already morphed into tendrils. I stepped onto a painted metal catwalk surrounding a giant fish tank filled with colored oozing things. The music made both my legs and the catwalk vibrate with its syncopation, and I had to concentrate to prevent the Morphfrom rearranging my cells randomly to the rhythm. It not only took the right DNA, but self-control to direct the Morph into the kind of art a Collector would appreciate.

I climbed down the ladder into the tank, and let the warm water engulf me. Concentrating on fragmenting, not angular but smooth. My tendrils stretched and diversified into more branches through the pulsating water.

With the disintegration of your usual form, it takes the power of imagination to reshape every cell in your body. As the Morph progresses, the connection between consciousness and emotion grows fuzzy, and oblivion sets in. It’s important you understand this now, so you’ll understand what happened later.

I remained in a semi-conscious state until 4:00 am when, at last, the morphizine began to wear off. The water in the tank had grown cold and goopy, and I tried to avoid oozing forms clinging to the walls as my tendrils slithered upwards. With a shiver that shook my entire form, I emerged, restored to my natural shape. However, the Morph was now stamped into my brain, and at the right price, I’d recreate it for the Collector who wanted to buy it.

Hans was waiting for me when I exited the dressing room, a big smile on his professionally reconstructed face. “Well, you did it this time, Cecilia,” he said as he kissed me on both cheeks, “You’ve caught the big fish. The biggest Collector of Modern Art of the western world, Sir Giles McCullen.”

“You’re kidding,” I said, skeptical.

Hans patted his jacket pocket. “Got the contract right here, already signed by the Collector and now ready for your signature.”

Landing in the art collection of Sir Giles McCullen, one of the richest men in the world, was the ticket to stardom. Sir Giles was a leading Collector, and an influencer, and I was to be his first Morph acquisition.

Han’s answer to my next question of, “How much?” staggered me with its outrageously high amount. His surgically enhanced facial muscles strained as they widened into the biggest grin I’d ever seen him attempt. Grabbing the papers he offered, I did a quick scan, looking for the location and start date. Two days! Not much time to get a full supply of morphizine, but, luckily, the location was a penthouse apartment on Park Avenue, not some lonely far-off estate, so delivery from a nearby pharmacy would be feasible.

“Wait a minute. It’s only a 3-month contract!” I looked up angrily, “what’s with that? I thought we don’t do samples.”

Hans tented his fingers before his face, “He likes to rotate his art and allows nothing to hang for more than a month or two. For Sir Giles McCullen, you’ll do three months or whatever time he wants, capisce? You’re getting the three because you’ll be his first Morph Art, and I convinced him he should take more time with it. The good news is that after he’s done with a piece, he usually makes sure to pass it along to another prestigious Collector. So, you’re far from being left out in the cold. This will turn into a never-ending gig. Promise.”

Oh, well. Hans was as ambitious as I was, and would ensure the commissions would keep rolling in.

Within two days, I found myself in the stark white entry of Sir Gile’s penthouse on Park Avenue. My contract required me to hang for about 6 hours a day, beginning at seven o’clock in the evening when Sir Giles got home, and ending when he retired to his bedroom, at around one in the morning.

For my off-hours, I had been given a cozy large room with a private bath, with big picture windows framing a stunning view of Manhattan. The lap of luxury and the kind of life I’d always imagined, complete with an efficient and courteous staff to tend to my every need.

You’ve heard of Sir Giles McCullen, haven’t you? Want to know what he was like before the murder, don’t you? Well, I couldn’t tell you. I never spoke to him, and he never spoke to me.

Usually, Collectors couldn’t stop asking about the Morph, because it was the one experience they couldn’t buy. Even if they were to shoot up a ton of morphizine, there’s no way to force a Morph; it was all up to the DNA.

Sir Giles, however, seemed to have no desire to know more about the Morph, and the only reaction I got out of him was a lift of an eyebrow on the first day he sat down to dinner and noticed me on the opposite wall.

Sir Giles may have initially been attracted to my creation, the fragmenting of the physical plane and the creation of tendrils that glinted, mercurial and ephemeral, in different lights. Though he lacked understanding of Morph Art, he obviously had been informed of the need for continued Stimulus to maintain it and arranged a full-spectrum light show along with pulsating music to play during the hours I was scheduled to be on the wall.

In my off time, I kept busy by meandering around the apartment or swimming in the infinity pool on the terrace. Occasionally, Sir Giles would see me in my ordinary human form, but his face never registered a flicker of recognition nor the inclination to speak to me. When I wasn’t on his wall, I was invisible, just like everything else in his household.

In that vast complex, servants and assistants were ever ready to receive his orders, and they too were treated as invisibles. It was not intentional or derogatory; it was just Sir Giles. He had a lack of interest in anything once collected, and anyone already on his payroll.

Except for a beautiful man. Many know of his obsession with Michelangelo’s David, and it was rumored he’d purchased it, although was persuaded to leave it where it was, in the museum in Florence. It was also whispered that Sir Giles seemed to have a passion for collecting a living embodiment of Michaelangelo’s artistic ideal and had many flings with David-like young men, who all signed non-disclosure agreements, of course.

Now, let me set the stage for Sir Giles’ final night on earth.

I was hanging in my spot in the dining room when Sir Giles came home at his usual time, accompanied by a tall, blond, perfectly proportioned young man who looked like he had been chiseled out of ice. Sir Giles was in constant movement, picking up a glass, pouring a drink, tinkling the ice. He tapped his fingers repeatedly on the side table not more than two feet from where I hung, but he ignored me, didn’t even try to show me off to his guest. He did not acknowledge the staff or the dinner they laid out for him and his guest on the long dining table.

Sir Giles was in his late fifties, with graying hair, and he sported a beard that hid the lower half of his face. He could not take his eyes off the young blond man, as if he were some new treasure to be added to his collection.

Reality gets hazy when you’re into a Morph, but I remember snippets of the evening. I could see the young man, as he tried repeatedly to engage Sir Giles in conversation and waited and waited for some response. After absolutely no reaction, his guest reached for knife and fork and began to dig into his dinner.

While in the middle of a Morph, your senses feel like they are on overload. Waves of disgust and disappointment were emanating from Sir Giles. He must have said something to the young man, who paused for the first time in his eating. Rising slowly, I could see the glint of the knife clutched so tightly in his hand, and felt the anger, like a hot wind, simmering from the young man. Although my senses were in high alert, my consciousness was not, and so when the young man began to shout at Sir Giles, with the knife still in his hand, I could not summon any muscle to react or even to open my mouth.

If Sir Giles noticed the knife or the young man’s anger, he did not seem to react to it, and instead, reached for a tumbler, poured something into it, and offered it to the young man to drink. The young man took it and downed it in one gulp, then wiped his mouth on the sleeve of his white shirt, leaving a faint brown stain.

Sir Giles turned away to the window. The turmoil of emotions surging from the young man was so powerful, it caused new branches to sprout from my tendrils, which inched down the walls towards the source of the sensation. The young man came closer to Sir Giles, who suddenly turned and struck him full across the face. Stunned, a red splotch appeared on his cheek, and he placed a hand on the mark, as if feeling for damage. Suddenly, the young man’s arms shot out, and then in a flash, Sir Giles was propelled through the picture window with a trailing scream.

I was too far into the Morph to pull myself off the wall or call out for the staff or reach for the phone to summon the police. It took all my willpower and control to prevent myself from Morphing to the waves of fear and anger blasting from the young man. He still had not noticed me as a live person, though he came close enough to me on the wall to hear him snarl. I watched helplessly as he grabbed a tabletop sculpture, and tossed it out the shattered window after Sir Giles.

Paralyzed, I was in my position, because aside from taking morphizine I had ingested a Fixative pill to keep the Morph in the exact position that Sir Giles had paid for. It was the Fixative, not the morphizine, which locked me in place, as I kept explaining to the authorities. Besides, I was in danger. The young brute could have taken me in his arms and tossed me out after the sculpture he just threw, and I would have been helpless to save myself.

Luckily for me, the servants must have had heard the window shatter, and they had called the police, who burst into the room, handcuffing the young man before he could get away.

After twenty-four hours, the Fixative and the morphizine was out of my system, and it was my turn to be interviewed by the police, who had already completed their discussions with the suspect and Sir Giles’ staff.

An eyewitness, wasn’t I, you say? What I saw should have put that young murderer away for good, but my testimony was discounted. The Defense Counsel turned the case against the Morph, and public opinion turned against me, as if I had committed a crime. They claimed I could have saved Sir Giles, but I was “under the influence of morphizine” and “in a state of disarrayed molecular structure” which disqualified me as “an individual capable of testimony”. In short, I was ruled to be an Object, since the Morph had deprived me of my humanity. Therefore, I was disqualified as a witness to an act of murder.

The press had a field day, and I’m surprised you don’t recall it. Artists like me were condemned for going to such extremes for the sake of newfangled creativity, demonstrating our defiance of basic ethics and standards of humanity.

There was a public debate, with vocal protests about the dangers and depravity of the Morph from one camp, and criticism of the judiciary for ruling an artist was no longer a member of the human race but an Object while in the midst of art performance, from the other.

“Accidental death” was the official ruling–not murder, and the beautiful but deadly young man got off with no charges filed against him. Wouldn’t you know, it turned out the young man was also an artist, a sculptor of some new technologically advanced non-melting ice? Now, with new notoriety and Hans representing him, he became the newest Art Star.

At Hans’s suggestion, I left town and he promised to get me back into circulation once the publicity died down. I should have known better than to trust Hans.The estate of Sir Giles McCullen paid out the rest of my contract, keeping me in some basic comfort as I waited for Hans to send me a new commission.

However, Hans was sad to inform me that my role in Sir Giles’s death, contrary to the judge’s ruling, had stirred the Collectors to realize the artist was not an Object, but a human being, who had a fly-on-wall-intimate view of their personal lives. Not an appealing thought to Collectors, who believed their wealth allowed them to indulge in anything they chose, secure in the privacy of their homes. The art they buy for their walls should tell no tales, but an artist hanging on their walls, no matter how altered their physical shape, was seen as an invasion of their privacy.

My short-term exile became a long one. Outside of New York, there were still wanna-be Collectors who still wanted to get in on Morph Art, so I found work for a time. Then, like everything else in the art world, the Morph went completely out of fashion. Nowadays, I can count my Morph gigs on the fingers of one hand, and with morphizine so much harder to come by, it’s probably time for me to retire.

That’s my story, so have another drink, on me. I bet it’s not every day you meet a witness to a famous murder, even a discredited one.

That’s why I landed here, an oddity, in this rundown, godforsaken bar in Newark. No matter what I see, and man, I can tell you, I see a lot, does it really matter in the long run? No one’s buying it.

He had ordeals before but rarely accompanied by such a strange, inexhaustible urge; a feeling that had been with him right from the start. He thought everything about the place was off-kilter. The shapeless, shuttered windows. The wrangled pitchfork tines hanging from the greased wall. The way the notched beams of the log cabin coupled at the corners, harbouring weird and elusive shades. The sporadic hiss and shriek of a feline or some other thing outside, which bolted him upright from his stool every time.

The men who sat around him had an unusual manner about them. Strangely hypnotic, strangely absurd. It wasn’t their spoken tongue – though he found that maddening too – but the odd way their mouths moved in conversation. When they spoke their jaws hung in mid-air and the tongues coiled and uncoiled inside the mouths, resembling murky, androgynous eels. It made for a bewitching spectacle Mick couldn’t draw away from as they all sat positioned around the head of a barrel shedding cards onto the flat round surface, their knees cosily pressed against the staves. Three of them besides him – Valera, Volodya, Vasya. He tried to remember their names via some rhythmic sequence but for the life of him could not remember which was which, especially in his drink-induced haze. He only knew the bus driver, Valera, who embodied the inert mass slumped in a stool across from Mick bearing an incredibly broad jaw and a thick, ruffled head of hair. The rest of them sat nameless, fading into the surroundings until someone would sporadically shoot up and bellow out some gurgling inanity, incomprehensible to all.

Every one of them brandished glass jars with a strange liquid that shimmered oddly under the light of the ceiling lamp. A sharp, piercing tang when it hit the back of Mick’s palate – something mildly comparable to tequila or a whiskey single malt, but lost among even the strident of beverage aficionados.

He tried to amend his posture on the weakly riveted stool (his spine was in a complete knot from the three-day jaunt). The rickety 70-hour train had taken him through a litany of destinations, from the murder site of Russia’s last tsar (Yekaterinburg) to the industrial dive where Lenin’s corpse was exiled during the Second World War (Tyumen). But it was the half a day spent on a suspension-less marshrutka that had really done him in. The pitiless, Soviet-made minibus mowed over the harsh, mountainous terrain to get to the warren he now found himself in. The single fulfilment he got from it was having the pleasure of comparing it to the image he found on the obscure, low-traffic travel blog that brought him here. He had finally made it.

Mick turned his head to the rear of the cabin, where a charred firewood stove stood with its thin long chimney reaching up through the wood shafts. It crackled and popped in the blaze. The men’s hands blundered on top of the barrel with a rich dissonance; Mick looked at the tattered cardboard lumps in his hand which bore the insignia of playing cards. He tried to participate in the game but was distracted by the smell coming from the gentleman to his left. A vegetal undertone with an unmistakable tinge of samogon. He resembled a still from a travel photography magazine: his thin, wavy beard withered under the neckline of his shirt, and he dispensed loud snores that sent waves of putrid scent in Mick’s direction. Mick imagined a caption accompanying the guy’s photograph on the glossed page of a National Geographic magazine. Bucolic life in the village of Belkovo. Or Domodedovo. Or wherever the fuck he was.

He turned to the barrel-chested driver – Valera. “How far is it to the next village, Valera?”

The other did not respond.

“Kak daleko—?”

“Kak daleko kuda?” grunted the infernal Valera.

“To next village,” Mick replied, moving his hands from top to bottom in a broad curve, like he was stroking a ball. “Next… village.”

Valera eyed him bewilderingly. “Ne ponimayu nitchevo, Misha.”

His voice sounded like an off-tune symphony emanating from his battered larynx. The drink seemed to completely erode his ability to speak and understand English. Mick lowered his right hand into his pocket and clawed out his phone, sending it alight with the glow of a Google tab. His fingers typed out a slew of text, then hit ‘Translate’. He passed the device to Valera. The other read it and let out a satisfying howl. “Ahhh – yes!” He set down with startling gusto to type on the Cyrillic touchpad. Meanwhile, the third man, sitting on Mick’s right, looked on vacuously. This other man hadn’t talked all night, only occasionally looking up to flash a coy grin – a grin Mick couldn’t stomach for reasons beyond his command. The guy’s stiff lip retracted, revealing a stained, toothless gum. It didn’t do much to compensate for the rest of his features.

The heat from the fire gathered in thick waves of mist around the room. Mick was called to its direction by a sharp snap. The burning pine vaporized in a thin rivulet of smoke. He looked at the flickering blaze with hypnotic fixation, rising above the room. He moved through the bulky, congested avenues of Moscow, where the grandeur of Soviet edifices and the wide, people-smelling underpasses had left an unlikely impression on him. He remembered how easy it was to pass the time there, walking – or even staring; at nothing, really. Or maybe, the best of all, indulging his inexhaustible fondness for the local Tinder selection. Those endless collages of slender and bony Slavic women with their elasticized limbs and all-revealing smiles. He was disgruntled that none of them had graced him with the pleasure of their embrace, though he made sure to revel in the decorum their profile photographs had supplied.

Mick was pulled out of his stupor by an approaching arm clenching a phone between its fingers. He reached over the makeshift table and pulled the glowing screen of it up close.

“We are four hours from Tyumen,” the text read.

Mick cleared the screen and fingered a reply. “Where is next village?” he wrote, passing the phone.

Valera took to the keyboard again and hammered out a slew of text. He handed it back. “Village area not village.”

“For fuck sake…” He took a moment to contemplate the message and returned to the keyboard. “How far to the next” – thinking of the best way to phrase it – “occupied settlement.” The phone passed between them like a divine herald.

“20 kilometres east,” Valera’s reply read.

“What is the name?” Mick wrote, passing, receiving.

“Heavenly.”

Mick looked at the text for a while before dropping his head in slow resignation. Google.

He stared back up at the screen. A ‘No Service’ was embroidered across the top bar like an affirmation – of what or who he could not tell. He was recalled to the present by the elusive fire stirring up embers in the oven. Flakes of ash swirling aimlessly around the room, eager to escape their wanton captivity. A cold chill swept across the surface of Mick’s forehead. He sat with hands joined over his thighs, holding up the cards and gazing at the wall behind Valera. Two sagging doorways gleamed back at him. One of them had a huge, fist-sized gap between the closed door and transom, revealing a thick bar of darkness on the other side. Mick stared at it. It stared at him.  Somewhere between the awkwardly-exchanged looks Valera requested for Mick’s phone again. When Mick passed it, Valera took to the keyboard and typed in his drunken vigour.

“Misha let’s, go guessing.”

Mick took a moment to comprehend. He did not have the slightest idea what the gesture implied. He wished for some kind of follow-up or a clue to decipher this cryptic fucking inanity. Instead the giant raised the jar to his mouth and knocked back a good measure of gargle. Bucolic life.

The alcohol gave Valera a renewed sense of zest; he stood erect, brandishing a grin that suspended his boorish features about half an inch. When it ceased, his skin withered back down like a loose drape, hanging down off his cheeks with the light playing curiously between its folds. Still clasping Mick’s phone, Valera brought down his bulging thumb on the screen and produced another slew of text. “We have a magic basement,” it read. “It can show you whether you will have good fortune.”

Valera jumped on his feet suddenly and lugged himself towards the stove, stepping over a stack of tools that lay on a brittle-edged hatch in the floor. Its square shape stood out by the slight inward curve of the timbers. Mick felt a twinge in his bowels of an unpleasant sort. He tried to reason but was overcome with a weird, pulsing sensation. He thought of something. Moscow. Lenin. Anything to distract himself from the nauseating putridness of this place.

“Do you know Lenin?”

Valera’s head turned in a slow, delayed nod.

“Vladimir Lenin,” said Mick, trying to hit home with the name. “Did you know he hired an Irish lad to teach him English while he was living in London?”

Mick looked in Valera’s face for some sign of comprehension, “Irish lad… taught him English.”

The other looked on unresponsively.

“People say he ended up speaking with an Irish accent, Lenin.” He waited a moment then poked his finger toward Valera with declaration, “Your Lenin, spoke with an Irish accent.”

Acknowledging futility, Mick sagged back down in his chair, reflecting on a painful conclusion to his gallivanting, the backpacker’s life he promised himself would bring him some indescribable ecstasy or a meaning to the world he could not foresee. He was done, he thought. No more raking through mud. No more crazed and delirious Russians. No more acting bollocks.

There was a sound of moisture and he turned to see the toothless man’s lips part into a wide curve. The last one – Vasya or Volodya – now lay fully comatose, draped over the back of the chair like a boneless mass. His torso had slid down inertly and his neck was bent with immaculate elasticity, creating a hook that propped his body up on the chair spine. Mick’s eyes shifted back to Valera, who stood on the loose trapdoor chucking stumps of wood into the flames with a look of excitement over his face. He beckoned for Mick’s phone. Mick stared back in trepidation. The queer light and the smell and the ruffling cacophony outside rattled him to the innards. He got up and approached the grinning idiot, putting the phone into his outstretched hand. Valera typed something on the screen and handed it back.

“You need to sit on the edge here and put your feet in,” the text said, “Then wait. If the hand that comes is a hairy hand, it is good sign. If the hand is without hair, it is bad luck.”

Another twinge gripped Mick outright. He looked at the small window on the wall. The twigs beat aimlessly against the loose glass in the night wind. Droopy, rod-like strands of loosestrife and larkspur bonding in lustful accompaniment. Mick looked at Valera and the curved trapdoor beneath the man, scanning his eyes over the chipped edges and the strip of forged iron binding together the timbers. He blurted something. Something like “Bollocks”.

Valera spread his giant buckled legs over the trapdoor and yanked up the ring-pull handle. A shower of dust fell into the pit underneath. Mick could see the marshy ground in the square of light along the bottom. Ruts crisscrossing along the floor, from a bicycle or wheelbarrow or god knows what. Mick caught a glimpse of Valera looking for his attention and looked up to see him standing on one leg, fluctuating his wrist over the raised foot. “Naski snimai.”

Mick hesitated a moment. Then he slowly, as if by instinct, stepped back, leaving his flip flops behind. As if he was not his own command. He followed the action by pinching the hem of his right sock, then peeled it off his foot. Then the left. He did not know why he was doing it. He was commandeered by some divine, unnegotiable force. His eyes darted from one object to another. To the men. Looking for some predictability or an order to things. His eyes stopped on Valera, who was beckoning him to sit at the edge of the hatch, slapping his hand against the chipped timber like a large spatula. “Davai – Come on, come on,” he said in an eastern timbre.

Mick shot a look down into the hole. At the floorboards. Marks of oily residue along those edges. Tiny little clumps of dirt, like a boot sole was scraped across. Mick lowered himself onto the hardwood, staring into the ominous rendition of darkness below him. He planted his backside down, carefully lowering his feet into the gap. First slowly, calculably, and then with a quick, careless release. His body shivered with the cold. Some kind of sorcery, he thought: it must have been twenty-eight degrees outside. He sat for a second or two, rigid, sampling the mellow draught wheezing in from under the house. The hollow floorboards thumped behind him and he turned to see the toothless man slowly approaching. The sneaky culprit circled around him and stood beside Valera and they both stared down at him with unwavering amusement.

The room developed a strange anticipant air about it, like someone’s arrival was forthcoming or a thing that was heretofore absent was now imminent. Mick looked at Valera. The latter wore a strange grin on his face that Mick hadn’t been acquainted with – a meld of curiosity and expectation. His skin paled slowly under the jittering light.

“Aghhhh… Haghhhh!” The spittle flew in every direction as the toothless man recoiled from his sneeze.

“Jesus Christ,” caromed Mick. He turned to look at Volodya or Vasya passed out by the table. Still unmoving. A gravestone. His skeletal frame was caved in over itself and the wispy beard fluttered with each breath like a trick of the light. He hadn’t moved at all.

The combination of nerves and fascination held Mick’s gaze. Eventually, when he turned away, the strange tickling was already felt at his feet. A coarse brushing. Mick sat unmoving for a moment, letting his senses connect, then he felt the unmistakable touch of flesh closing around his ankle, like a retracting noose. He let out a choked yelp and sprang erect like a garden rake, watching everything spinning around him frantically, the faces of the men and the implements on the wall, the barrel and loose cards on its surface. In his frantic dance Mick shot his eyes back into the hole: he saw the shadows copulating and moving and he was standing up on the edge with his fists clenched and the sweat waterfalling down his back. The tinge of adrenaline rushing through him like a rapid stream. He cast a look over at the two men and saw Valera suddenly bowled over, choking himself with laughter. Mick did not move. He could not move. He gathered his breath and after some time enough faculties to mutter some low-pitched variation of “fuck”.

Valera, catching a breath, shouted, “Pyat sekund!” He held up his fingers. “Very short,” he said, “Longer need.”

Mick took a breath and then another and then another again. And once more. The toothless man stood beside Valera with the big gape of his mouth formed into the shape of a grin.

“So which is?” groaned Valera.

“Which is what?”

“Hair, no hair?”

In his paroxysm Mick lost all the sensibility inside him.

“I… fuck. Hair.” He breathed. Paused. “I donno. Fuck that.”

“So is good!” Valera expounded. “You understend? Is means good.”

Mick stared in stupor. Valera chuckled in a soundless, careless manner. Slowly he turned and made his way back to the table. Mick looked down at his legs – blue as Christmas – and thought in his palsied, deluded state: bucolic my arse. When they returned to their seats Mick took a refill of the gangrene-looking drink. Valera still chuckled to himself. He carried a couple of broken sticks to the fire and heaved them into the blaze. The unconscious one still lay in his chair, marinating in a horrible stench of his own devising. Mick sat quietly with the feeble limbs on him drenched of all physical capability. Listening to the restless felines mucking about outside. He did not think about what he experienced. Instead he thought of girls. The Russian girls. The Kalinka. Lenin. He thought he had only a week more to see what was left of the stubborn Siberian steppes. As they sat around the awkward barrel Mick raised the glass jar up to his mouth. Sharp and new. He sat quietly sipping on the concoction, watched as the card game slowly regained dominion. Perhaps, he thought, he would take the week. Take it all. And maybe he would not stow away his backpacker’s days just yet. Maybe, or perhaps, he would use his new strike of luck to continue that venture. And let the rest determine itself.

Our daughter swims toward us, dipping below the surface, and for a minute all we see of her are two small horns slicing the waves. She comes from the shallows and over to the stones where we sit, our feet dangling. We eat persimmons and look out across the water to the towers of the drowned city.  I turn to her father and remember the night I arrived, when I was afraid to look at him as he stepped out of the shadows, and I looked instead up at the trees and the bowl of the sky.

The day after I turned seventeen, my father and I came out of the clouds and I saw the islands. Real islands, thousands of them, dots of bristly green fading to the horizon. I wanted to cup them in my hands. His voice came in, excited to show me each thing, give me this landscape like a gift he’d invented for me. I remember it from the old news clips, he said. These weren’t islands, this wasn’t the sea. Way back when there was nothing but snow here, Barbiedoll, waving his arm at the expanse, snow, slush, black ice. Tractor-trailers jackknifed in the ditch, pile-ups everywhere, probably on that very highway, pointing to a distant spire of asphalt jutting from the water. Pile-ups, Barbiedoll, pile-ups! A fine spray shot from his mouth and hit the helicopter window. Honestly, you would not believe it. Sideways snow, whiteouts. He looked at me to convince himself that I would not believe the whiteouts. Look at it down there, Barbiedoll, he went, feast your eyes, now waving both arms. Fantastic, he said. A tropical paradise, he said. He squeezed my shoulders. Fantastic again,just to drive the point home. This was the arctic circle, and we were in it.

It’s like an oven on these islands, he said happily, as the heat wrapped around me like a tongue. All I’d ever known were the cold breezes of the compound, icy sips of air that drifted through the rooms. Mother’s flinty fingers pulling down the blinds, sun flecking the upper canopy. Don’t touch the front gate or you’ll char your hands, and I didn’t go near the gate ever, although I was a bad daughter in every other way. Mother ticked-off and too tight in her thought-corsets, clacking across the compound in those high-heeled shoes, you, girl, you can’t even put together a decent breakfast or choose the right color wallpaper.

Take her with you, she said to Dad. We were looking at the northern archipelago on his screen. Give me a break.

My father and I passed over a town half-buried in water, over green that flowed like a river below our feet. Look, said Dad, the islands, thousands of them. This is my lab, Barbiedoll. All this. So much to study, you have no idea.

To me, the Arctic Circle didn’t look like a lab. A lab was Dad’s labyrinth of white basement rooms at the far end of the compound. White lights, white coats, people with masks, and those things like turkey basters in their hands, sucking bird flu or the red plague or pale blood from one tray of vials and squirting them into another.

And there were the other things. Better not to think about them in their cages and water-baths that he let me see only I never should have, I was only little then. It’s okay, I remember him saying, they won’t hurt you. Now here he was practically saying it again. The islanders they’re different from us, but don’t worry.

Will we be okay?

Yes, we’ll be okay, he said and laughed. The islanders were harmless, knew their place. They won’t hurt you. Nothing’s gonna happen.

Under the high bowl of stars the helicopter touched down, the bushes and grasses went sideways in its wake, and through the screen of trees I saw a long low house that went on forever. I stepped out, looked up at the sky, heard the sea tonguing the shore.

Our names were called from the doorway. It was Uncle Winch the lab surgeon, Uncle Winch who smelled of mice and electrical currents, Uncle Winch who practically jumped off the wide porch, Brothers in arms, he yelled, Barbiedoll, partners in crime, their arms around each other.

I looked past Uncle Winch and Dad. I saw the people, the not properly human people, standing in the shadows.

The islanders. The harmless islanders.

Nothing’s gonna happen.

They stood there like stone.

Here, Cornelia, said Uncle Winch, show this tired girl to her bed, nudging a woman forward. Beside her, a man held a dog by its collar. This is Galileo, said Uncle Winch, and here’s the night dog. The dog was a tight bristling shadow with yellow teeth.

Galileo came forward to take my suitcase and my gun box, and was his skin really blue, the blue of water, or was it the moonlight, or were my eyes playing tricks on me? He bent to my luggage, and it was then that I saw on his head the two horns. I reached back for Dad’s hand, but he’d taken over the dog. It was whining, belly on the floor, good boy, said Dad, good boy.

ButGalileo’s horns. The low arc of his horns in the air. Galileo’s hands like human hands lifting my cases. The blue fingers on the leather.

Good boy, again.

Cornelia, said Uncle Winch, and Cornelia moved into the light of the porch. I saw her long dress and smeared apron, knife in one hand, Cornelia standing as if interrupted in the kitchen. I didn’t want to look at her head. I looked instead at the animal that was neither snake nor fish that hung from her other hand. I remember trying to look everywhere but at her horns and bluish skin.

There was a boy, too, about my age. I didn’t look at him. I looked everywhere else, at the trees, at the stars cupping the sky.

Dad, I said, but Dad just squeezed my shoulders, everything’s good, he whispered, you’ve seen worse, and I watched him go off with Uncle Winch. Cornelia led me through rooms and gardens and at the far end, she opened a door. This is yours, she said in a voice, a human voice, low as a whisper. Galileo slid my suitcase and the gun box inside. I was alone in the darkness, afraid to lie down, afraid to sleep. The moon cast a shard of light across the white sheets of the bed.

Dad, I called when I heard him, finally, at his door across the hall.

Nothing to worry about, he said lightly, they know their place. He sounded a bit drunk. Oh, he said, I nearly forgot. I’m calling your mother. Their voices came across the hall and into my room.They were arguing about me. Mother’s voice was teary and shaking but it got choked off.

I shut my door and lay on the bed, looking out at the branches that lifted and fell in the wind. I heard Dad release the dog. It went padding through the hallways and through the gardens, and sometimes it snuffled or whined, or seemed to stop and listen, then move on.

Morning.

In the kitchen, Cornelia was skinning the snake-fish. It was as long as my arm.

What’s that?

An eel, she said. The eel-word filled my mouth, slippery, with a sickening taste. I slid past her horns and concentrated instead on her eyes, which shone when the boy came in the door. His skin was a lighter blue than hers, and his horns were young. He had a beautiful smile. I made myself look at his horns and then at hers.

My boy, said Cornelia, showing him off to me, her hand in his hair. He’s come for his traps, she said, putting a piece of bread and a yellow fruit into a worn plastic bag. I watched him go down the path to the shore, juggling the plastic bag and an armful of wire mesh boxes. He climbed into a rowboat and fixed the oars in the locks, rowed along the shoreline till he disappeared.

He came back at night. I didn’t see him but heard the oars slipping through the water and the boat knocking against the stones. Then his footsteps on the path. Mother? Are you there? Cornelia was serving dinner in the dining room and went back into the kitchen when she heard his voice. I listened to them through Uncle Winch talking to Dad. I learned, from my listening, that the boy’s name was ManRay, and that it was eels he caught in the traps that he dropped wetly in the kitchen, and he stayed out all day with nobody looking over his shoulder. Like a boy from the compound, except for the blue skin and the horns. There’s nothing wrong with the horns, I told myself.

Salt fields, Dad was saying.

Uncle Winch picked some gristle from between his teeth. Seawater’s moving in faster than expected. We’ll decide which ones to keep. Then we separate them, move them further out.

Dad put down his knife and fork. And if they resist?

No problem, we need only a few, some good ones off-island, all docile. We have time, said Uncle Winch.

Fantastic, said Dad.

On the second morning, I heard Dad fiddling around in the supply room, shutting the door, locking it, calling, Barbiedoll you up yet? He was in work clothes, his gloves and face shield hanging from his waist. We went down the hallway, through the gardens, to the dining room. Coffee? he said to Uncle Winch. Uncle Winch, too, was dressed for work. They stood at the window, watching for the helicopter, drinking their coffee. Seven gastromorphs on island three, Dad said, frowning at his cellphone, blood-clotting factors normal.

Good, said Uncle Winch.

Wait, still reading from the cellphone, three females, one immature, the shell still soft. Oh. A problem. Blood-borne pathogens, maybe? Let’s get out there and have a look-see. The helicopter landed and sent the grasses sideways. I stood there and watched them leave.

We’ll move them right away, said Uncle Winch as they climbed inside. Island three, he said to the pilot.

I went into the kitchen.

Cornelia was bent over a chopping block on the counter.

Can I sit here?

She put a dish of yellow fruit on the table, mangos, she said, holding one out to me, and went back to her slicing and cutting. I put the mango down, not knowing how to eat it. The kitchen was filled with the sound of her knife against the wood.

Here’s my boy, she said, looking up.

ManRay was in the door with his empty traps. He looked at the floor and spoke. Want to come with me tomorrow, he said, out in my boat? His voice was shy. Too shy to say those words. He put down his traps and stood across from me, leaning against the wall.

I’ve never been in a boat. I could hardly hear myself. I’ve never gone outside. Except to come here. He looked at me, polite. Worse than any mockery. I lived in a compound, I said.

Compound? said ManRay.

I did go out later, with my rifle. I got some empty tin cans from a pile behind one of the sheds and set them up on a half-collapsed roof. I couldn’t concentrate very well because of being in the open air, unprotected. It was dark when Dad and Uncle Winch got back.

Dinner was eels braided on top of onions in a kind of pie, and Dad kept smacking his lips. Fantastic, he said, what a cook, and gave Cornelia a thumbs up. After dinner, we played cards in his room late into the night, and then he called Mother on his screen. More fertile ones than we’d thought, four so far, he said cheerfully, and some of the young just coming out of their shells. Three, though, clotting factors not so good.

Too bad, said Mother about the clotting factors. Her image was blurry. She kept interrupting with her plans for braised 3D pork bellies.

In the morning after the helicopter left, Cornelia went down to the shore. I saw her from the window. She waded into the water, her blue body dipping in and out of the waves. She swam till she was only a speck in the distance, and came back later, up through the mangroves, her skin dripping in the heat. She waved when she saw me.

I met ManRay at the water, and he held the boat steady while I climbed in. He saw how scared I was. I sat down, gripping the seat. He pushed off. We were still by the shore when he said I could put my hand over the side. See how shallow it is.

I can’t, I said. He put his own hand in, grazing the small stones.

We waited. Later, good, he told me, watching my fingers touch themselves to the water. Do you feel it? he said. It’s the skin of the world. I watched the drops fall from my hand. It’s beautiful, he saidand made a splash with his oar. He started to row, slowly. Are you okay?

Yes. I turned to watch our island disappear behind the one we were circling.

Here’s the reef. Look, said ManRay, look down. Under the surface were the roofs of houses. That’s where they put the old people after they moved them here. And the house with the tv antenna, that was my great-grandparents’ house. But there was no tv. They didn’t want us to have a tv.

They? Who are they?

The ones who sent us.

What’s a tv?

Like a screen, he said, but it can’t hear you walking around.

We rowed out toward a further island. I saw, as we grew closer, that it wasn’t an island, but trees, persimmon trees, he said, that grew in the earth along a high mound of pink stones. That was the provincial legislature, he said.

When we got back home I said thank you. I don’t know what made me do it but I reached over to him and touched his arm. I didn’t want to ask what is a provincial legislature, for fear of looking stupid.

I get back early and where are you? Nowhere.

I was sitting down at the mangroves by the water, I lied, and fell asleep.

You’re off the hook this time Barbiedoll, Dad laughing but ticked off underneath, tomorrow we go island-hopping for the rest of the week, you and me, getting away. I thought of getting away with Dad, whatever that looked like. I thought of gliding out over the water with ManRay, of the oars clinking in their locks. Of the houses under the surface, and his arms holding the boat as I stepped back onto shore.

I want to stay here.

Dad laughed. After all my great plans, he said, to show you the islands?

I invented. I’m doing target practice.

Okay. Okay.

We didn’t talk much at dinner. I saw Cornelia move back and forth across the kitchen. ManRay came in the door with his traps full and squirming, and our eyes met. Later in Dad’s room, we called Mother. No, I’m not doing better today, she said between coughs. But you, daughter. She reached out to touch her screen. Mind yourself. Her eyes were swollen and her handkerchief spotted with red. She bent and spat into the bowl on the floor. There, she said. Her blood wasn’t stable, but whose was? I felt so sorry for her.

We rowed out every day past the provincial legislature to where the land ended and the real waters began, with the drowned towers off in the distance.

He taught me to swim, holding his hand under my stomach till the day he took his hand away and I floated like a leaf on the water.

We dived off his boat to graze the tv antenna, swim down over the house, through the slippery green rooms. I found a box stuck under a windowsill. We surfaced and looked inside. ManRay lifted out a peeling photograph, a man and woman without horns. My great-grandparents, he said.

We faced each other, treading water.

Why do you have these? I touched his horns.

They’re from the experiments.

Experiments?

The ones they did on my great-grandparents. They were gestating new strains at the lab, he said, they did that every few years. His great-grandparents were no longer needed. They got shipped out here. I didn’t know what gestating meant. I was confused by his explanation. They really keep you in the dark back at that compound of yours, he said, don’t they.

I thought about the compound. Not dark. Clean white light everywhere. A bright place, too bright to think, but darkness around the edges of everything. We pulled ourselves up over the sides of the boat and slithered in, waving our legs for balance. We rowed together back to the shore, his hands on one oar, mine on the other.

That room, he said. The one with the photograph. My mother was born in that room.

After his island-hopping, which Dad said was really fantastic, he and Uncle Winch stayed home. One night at dinner, which was shrimps with grapefruits and forest honey, he said, Cornelia, you’ve outdone yourself. I raise my glass to you, and he lifted his glass in a salute.After the shrimps came mango ice cream, from mangos picked off the tree behind the shed. I’m in heaven, said Dad. My wife’s gonna be jealous. Cornelia looked at the floor. The nerve he had,following her with his eyes, saying not bad, watching her walk her slow walk into the kitchen. Almost like a real human, if you don’t look at the horns. Later in the living room, he went, I’m just kidding around, what’s the big deal? Somebody like her, it’s okay. She’s just a chimera. His cigar went out and he lit it again. They aren’t like us.

I said: you wouldn’t know.

I’d made him mad, I could tell by the way he turned his back and went quiet. They have their uses, was what he said.

Then I crossed the line. Uses? I said. I’m in heaven? I said. My wife’s gonna be jealous? I said. Like that? He got up from his chair, and out flew his hand. He slapped me. I took my rifle and slammed out of the house. I went down to the mangroves at the shore, shot out over the water. It didn’t matter where I was aiming. Any place would do. He yelled for me to get back inside. I didn’t. I stayed there listening to the waves and then I kept shooting. He came down and found me, yanked the rifle from my hands, pulled me to him and cried. He said things to me, things I forgot as I stood cold and angry inside his arms.

The next day my aim got sharper, everything inside me swimming to my trigger finger, and crack, the ricochet off my shoulder, the rush of the bullet to its target. I went out in the mornings and stayed till nightfall, and even though it was just my grandfather’s old rifle with terrible sights, at the end of the week before dark I brought down a petrel skimming out over the bay.

At dawn, the helicopter angled up away from the house, and I saw Dad’s arm, tiny now, waving at me. Before the sun climbed over the islands, ManRay and I rowed out and lowered the eel traps into shallow water. We ate mangos and swam all day, collecting the traps as the night air gathered. We loaded them into the boat and carried them through the mangroves and up the hill to Cornelia in the kitchen. I didn’t want to touch the eels. You have to get over your initial repulsion, she said, which is nothing more than fear, and she placed a small eel in my palm. The next day she taught me to make a rich broth from the bones, to roll out a crust and fill it with the wild onions, to braid the eels into a lacy shawl, and bake it all in her dish, feeding the cookstove five sticks of wood at a time. We sat around the table, Cornelia, ManRay and Galileo and me, and we devoured the whole pie. Then we played cards and drank some of Galileo’s sugarcane wine.

Cornelia was in the water. She’d taken the rowboat into the bay. I watched her throw down the anchor, a rope tied around a rock. She seemed to be over the houses, then dived. She stayed down for a long time. Later she came up, left the boat anchored there, and headed out in the direction of the provincial legislature. I heard the distant splash at each lift and kick of her feet.

Dad never went into the kitchen, but now there he was. Standing across from Cornelia, facing her, saying something about the next meal. I have a fish here, they gave it to me yesterday at island six. He put the fish on the table.

Cornelia took the fish and turned it over in her hands. I can grill this, she said. With persimmons and sorrel and wild garlic.

Good, said Dad, fantastic. Then he told her: I need to do some tests.

A current of air, a troublesome current, went out from Dad to Cornelia.

Yes? said Dad, looking up and seeing me, frowning, what is it?

The nights got darker and thicker, the bowl of stars lowering itself over the gardens that ran through the house. The sheet stuck to my body in the narrow bed and the air didn’t move. It filled the room like a jelly. Dad grew quiet.

A cage settled over the days. Nothing to eat, Cornelia, only coffee this morning please, and no, Winch, I won’t go out, I’m waiting for messages. Finally, one morning, Dad appeared at breakfast after days of frowning at the screen in his room. He told Uncle Winch the order had come through. We got the go-ahead. We’re on.

Cornelia was heading out from shore. Why didn’t I use my phone to take a picture of her as she swam? Or a movie? You never think of it at the time. Preserve it now, while it’s still here, this moment, so you can look back and back and back and see the lift and fall of her arms, the carving of the water, the picture organized into shapes and colours, into Cornelia flattened on a screen for me to remember.

I woke from the silence. No night dog padding through the gardens. It was inside Dad’s room, whining softly. I opened my door and stepped out into the hall. The moon shone through the pines. Halfway through the dining room, in a pool of shadow, I was stopped by what I saw. Dad in the kitchen, seated at the table. He looked like he was trying to leap out of his body.

Here, he said. Bring it here. The ripest one.

A hand appeared. Cornelia’s hand. I’d never noticed how slender and pointed her fingers were. They held a mango.

Closer, Dad said, give it to me, and Cornelia approached him, put the mango into his hand. Cut it, he said.Her hand lifted the knife from the table, held it over the mango, over his hand holding the mango. She cradled his hand in hers, pushing up to support the cutting, worked the knife around and under the skin, sliced the pieces off the seed bulk, the knife never touching his hand.

He ate till the mango was finished, sat back and wiped his mouth with his sleeve. I could hear him chewing, and then he swallowed, never taking his eyes from Cornelia and the knife. Her hand held it steady. Moved it closer. He spoke. I’m your monster. Aren’t I. Your monster.

He got to his feet and came toward the door. I think he might have been drunk. I couldn’t let him see me. He almost touched me as he passed. I watched him go unevenly through the rooms and the halls, through the gardens and then came the opening and closing of his bedroom door. I watched Cornelia in the kitchen. Back and forth went her hand with the cloth across the table, back and forth. She picked up the kitchen knife and stood looking down at it, running her forefinger along the blade.

In the morning she was in the water, and swam away from me till she disappeared around the curve of the shore. I don’t know when she came back, but when I went to the kitchen, she was sitting at the table. The knife lay on the cutting board. There were no persimmons, no oranges in the bowl. No wild sorrel draining in the sink. No fish laid out ready to scale and clean.

They want to operate on my mother.

What do you mean, operate?

I could hardly hear him. His voice was shaking. They said they want to remove her horns.

How do you know this?

Galileo heard.

Get her out of here, I said.

Yes. We leave in the morning.

Leave tonight.

There was a leak in the boat. Galileo was fixing the leak, but it had to dry. They’d go around dawn.

Dad, I said at his door, why are you taking Cornelia’s horns.

We have to monitor the blood supply, check for clotting factors, possible pathogens. Her horns are key to this.

Did she agree?

She’s an ideal candidate.

Did she agree?

His voice exploded. What do you think I am? he yelled. Yes, she agreed.

How do you know when a person’s lying? There’s nothing specific that they do, you just know. Words spilled out of his mouth. New stage in the research, pathogens in the blood, trauma, genetic considerations. Infinite variables. Bleeders, Barbiedoll, we’re all bleeders, do you want to end up like your mother. Verge of a breakthrough what it means you have no idea. A simple operation, an hour at the most. Horn tissue contains the answer. Then two small bandages where Cornelia’s horns had been. Blood and tissues flown to the lab for testing. Breakthrough, he said again.

I woke when the night was no longer night, waiting for the clink of the oars in the locks, the boat being pushed out into the water. There was nothing but the lapping of the waves. They must have gone. I sank back into my bed. The dog was prowling. I heard its shaggy breath at my door, its feet padding through the halls and through the gardens of the house. Don’t sleep don’t sleep.

No coffee on the dining room table, no smell of oranges or scrambled eggs in the kitchen. Voices somewhere down beyond the mangroves: men and women in their boats crowding along the shore.

What’s going on? There was a rich ugly smell like at the butcher’s and it was coming from the kitchen.

Get out, yelledUncle Winch, who held a sheet blooming with blood. He was trying to stuff it into the kitchen stove, but it wouldn’t fit and made a red trail across the linoleum. And beyond him, Dad with my rifle, yelling into his cellphone, Where is the Goddamn helicopter?

What was this laid out on the floor? On a pool red and sticky as paint? Lift the sheet, lift the sheet but too scared. Lift the sheet. Her head was turned toward me, reddish trails like dried streambeds from her nostrils, ears, eyes, mouth, from the pores of her skin. And bruises on her arms. She must have fought. Eyes wide and staring at nothing. Two black pools in her head where her horns had been.

This wasn’t real. It could never be real. It was one of those made-up horrors they tagged from your compound life and put on the screen to terrify you, get you begging for them to make it go away, make everything tidy, everything quiet and grey again. Here was the helicopter thwack thwack against the trees and the grasses, move, move, Dad shouted, waving the rifle, shoving me out the door, and the men and women from the fishing boats were coming up through the mangroves. Somebody threw a rock and Dad went sideways. As he fell he slid me the rifle. Barbiedoll! Shoot!

My father. My father who’d rocked me on his knee. Who ran the cool cloth across my forehead when I was sick, pushed me on the swing in the compound yard, put me on his shoulders and I was bigger than the sky.

Shoot, he yelled.

My father who took me to work with him and let me pour the yellow liquid into the blue liquid and watch the emerald green smoke burst out like a small volcano. Who showed me the veins of leaves under his microscope, the lace of a fly’s wing, mosquito larvae in a drop of water. Who let me feed the creatures in their cages, even the big ones who looked like people but he said they weren’t, they were more pig than human. Or the ones who were part woman part mouse part scorpion part snail and some kind of blood bacteria and I had no idea at that age what was a bacteria an animal or a plant or something else but I forgot what he told me, rushing me past the blood-harvesting room where they lay, asleep and draining, in rows. Or the little ones in the special place at the back, part child part blue-violet wavelength with virus protein, dolphin dna, notes of snail dna, them with their soft shells and swimmy bodies, and then the shells dropped off and blue legs appeared, and little horns sprouted on their heads, and even though they spoke and said please and thank you they weren’t real people, never think they are real people at all.

Shoot, he yelled again. The women were over Uncle Winch. Cornelia’s kitchen knife lay red at his side. ManRay was there, right in front of me, and Dad yelled pull the goddamn trigger. ManRay was looking at me and trying to say something, and I pulled the trigger.

Somewhere something was burning. It must have been the helicopter because I saw its smoky mangle jutting above the trees.

I’m sorry. Did I actually say that? I’m sorry? What do those words even mean?Where do you find the right words for the thing that pulls you apart from yourself? I looked at the rifle and at him lying there on the ground, and he seemed so quiet, as if nothing had happened at all. Nothing. The fingers of his left hand were moving slightly. I couldn’t stop looking at his fingers. Wake up, I said, and started to shake him, Dad, wake up. Galileo pulled me off. I’m sorry, I said to my father.

Galileo’s arms were around me. ManRay’s arms were around me.

We buried my father in the high ground, covering the grave with palm leaves. There was no ceremony. No words of remembrance. What should I remember? I tried to call Mother but she’d been shut down. Function temporarily deleted, the screen said. I sat there and cried. Not for what was, but for what could have been.

The islanders washed Cornelia’s body. They covered her with the flowers and leaves of the shore, laid her in the water, and we floated her to the deep of the bay above the drowned houses, lowering her to the roof, their old roof with the tv antenna nearly touching the surface, swimming her into the bedroom of her people.

That night ManRay and I rowed out to the pink granite stones of the provincial legislature, slept under the sky, eating eels, shrimps, and persimmons ripened in the shadow of the stones. It was there, a year later, that our girl was born. We called her Cornelia. Her horns were velvety buds, and her shell, before it sloughed off, was tightly bound like transparent ribbons of seaweed.

We come out here all the time to swim. She’s still the deepest blue, our Cornelia, the blue of the saltwater she was born in. Cornelia, swimming toward me, climbs out to the shore and we sit on the stones of the provincial legislature, dangle our feet over the side. We eat persimmons and look across at the towers of the drowned city.

She’d remembered Grandma’s words as she’d tied the scarf around her neck. “You keep this on Rose, all the way to your daddy’s work, all the way home. You don’t take it off. You don’t stop along the way. You go straight there. Leave the lunch pail and you come home, quick. Out after dark is no place for a thirteen-year-old.”

Grandma’s voice carried the heavy Hungarian accent and inflection of her homeland. Daddy’s accent was thinner and Rose’s almost non-existent. It was as though each generation had retained a part of Hungary equal to their time there. Daddy had been ten when he’d boarded the dirty steamer that had carried them to Canada. Rose loved when Daddy told his childhood stories before bedtime, before heading out to work at the coal mine.

Rose slept while Daddy worked. He slept while she was at school. Grandma kept house and everyone on schedule. Grandma kept house because Mommy had died when Rose was born. Rose sometimes wondered if Mommy had a thinner or thicker accent but was scared to ask. What she knew of her mom, she had overheard when Grandma and Daddy talked, when she pretended to be asleep.

It felt strange skipping up the street with darkness pressing in, heavy, like Grandma’s accent. Rose recalled how the old woman had woken her, unusual urgency in her voice. Daddy had forgotten his lunch bucket and he wouldn’t be able to work all night if he didn’t eat. He had the diabetes.

The click of Rose’s hard leather shoes on the rough road echoed and ricocheted off the walls of the buildings that crowded both sides, looming. It sounded as though she was kicking up the stones instead of dancing over them. A lilting sound reached her, and it was a moment before she realized she’d been singing the words of a folksong Grandma often sang. The tune was quiet, halting but comforting. An alley yawned on her right and Rose skipped closer to the center of the road, thwarting the efforts of skeletal arms, or dirty fleshy ones, that might stretch out of that black space. She peered into the dark maw to see if scrabbly fingers were reaching for her.

Rose walked this route to school every day, but it was unfamiliar in the silence and dark shadows of late evening. No clatter of steel-clad wagon wheels, no children’s play sounds, no mothers calling out instructions, just silence and dark, suffocating and alive.

Rose glanced behind her, left, then right. Her hand clutched Grandma’s scarf, and she lifted the lunch bucket, holding it against herself to keep it from knocking. Her tight grip squeezed the blood from her knuckles.

Grandma had surprised her when she pulled the scarf from the sleeve of her coat; the old woman was seldom without it. Rose enjoyed looking at the scarf’s many colours, how its pattern seemed to shift and change as she gazed at it. Of course, it was just the shiny fabric catching the light as it flowed and rippled in Grandma’s hand. How could a pattern change otherwise? It was warm at her throat and Rose knew why Grandma always kept it with her. It would be real comfort from the arthritis that often made the old lady cry out in her sleep.

Rose understood too, why Grandma had been stern when she knotted it at her throat. “You keep this on.” She didn’t want it to get lost. But there was something else in her eyes, or rather, eye. Grandma only had one eye; the other was just a flap of skin folded over an empty socket. “Plucked out by a raven when I asked a nosey question.” She had responded to Rose’s query. And that empty socket wept a lot, as though forever mourning its loss.

That eye also kept people away, made the kids at school say terrible, hurtful things. Evil eye, gypsy, witch woman. Rose had heard them all, seen them finger a V against their noses, against any vexes. But now the scarf that the old, one-eyed woman had given her was keeping her warm, bringing comfort on a cold, dark, hard street. Rose stopped skipping, quiet wrapped around her. Something snagged her shoe.

Rosie’s quiet curse of the darkness that hid pit-falls in her path was absorbed by the tendrils of fog that swirled around her ankles. A puff of cold air ruffled the scarf. “Cemetery air,” Grandma called the rogue chill breeze of early autumn, “Cooled by the dead.”

Something, maybe mud or dung dropped by a passing horse, tugged at her foot. She stepped with the other, quick to catch herself, and found it stuck as well. Rose uttered a single chirp, but sweat iced her bow as the air thickened, pressing in with the hug of a corpse. Rose jerked up her foot. It only lifted an inch. She tugged harder; her mouth pulled into a grimace. The cords of her neck grew taut. Her laces rose above the fog, then her whole foot, but it remained shrouded in white. What sort of mud was this; she wondered, then realized spectral fingers were gripping her. A bony hand jutted from the ground, wrapped around her ankle like a groping tree root. The fingers squeezed but not with flesh and bone, just tendrils of fog.

As though being freed from a dark crypt, the hand was easier to pull the higher Rose raised her foot. When she could lift it no more, she stepped down hard, slamming it into the cobblestones. The hand let go but remained hanging in the air. Rose pulled up her other foot. A hand held it as well. She stomped that foot back down, freeing it from the dead grip, stirring the fog into dancing, twisting swirls.

Rose stepped back to get away from the floating hands, trying to keep herself from falling. She wanted to run, escape, but couldn’t drag her gaze from the ghostly arms.

The hands reached down into the fog, the elbows still visible. Rose knew the specter was struggling to free itself from the ground, pull itself out as she had pulled herself onto the raft at the swimming pond. Wind swirled around her, encircling her legs and creeping up her body, trapping her in a rising vortex. A droning invaded her ears. It grew in intensity as the wind stiffened, rising in volume and pitch. The fog rose with it, licking at her calves, knees, thighs. A thrumming added to the effect, a pulse pounding at her body. The scarf burned her neck, the loose ends slapping her chin in the wind. Rose tugged at it with one hand, but it tightened, restricting her breathing. She raised her other hand to the scarf; her gaze remained on the figure extracting itself from the roadway. The higher the figure pulled its misshapen lump of a head from the mist, the stronger the wind blew, the louder the wail rose, the greater the pulsing.

Rosie’s fingers picked at the knot in the scarf. Grandma had just looped it but now it was a hangman’s noose. Her eyes bulged as fear scorched her throat. Her lungs heaved, gasping. The figure from the ground stood erect as a grey veil drooped over Rose’s vision. The screeching, pounding wind became her whole world. She felt her eyes closing, her body relaxing, welcoming the darkness. Her shoulders softened.

Then fire coursed through her. From the burning scarf at her throat, it flashed to her feet then up to her shoulders. Down her arms, the heat injected energy into every cell, awoke every muscle, flicked her eyes open. Rose barked a quick “No” and her fingers found the knot in the scarf, just a hanging loop again.

The spirit’s eyes flicked open, two bright orbs piercing the dark. They grew wide, round, then narrowed to slits as the shoulders hunched, the arms raised, and the head lowered. The spirit lunged at her.

Rose swept the thin fabric from her throat and swung it in front of her as a barrier, a glowing shield that flared, lit from within by some secret fuel.

The spirit reared back, a wail louder than the screaming wind escaping its yawning mouth as it tried to alter its attack. It struck the scarf, then disappeared as though passing through a door. Its banshee wail cut off with the suddenness of death. The scarf flared brighter, then the inner fire died away, and it was just a scarf, its pattern shifting and dancing in the wake of the wind from Rose’s movement.

The air was motionless around her, the quiet of the night pressed in as though darkness bore a weight of its own. There was no evidence of the chaos that had assaulted her, pounded her only moments ago. That maelstrom had disappeared as completely as the attacking spirit. Rose realized she was still yelling a long, drawn out no. She tightened her lips, cutting off the sound, making the silence perfect.

Above her, shutters slammed open and a tired voice called out, “What’s the ruckus? Working people have to sleep, you know.”

Rose stepped closer to the building, scrunching her shoulders, making herself small. She moved along the wall, casting quick glances around her. She clamped her mouth shut. After a moment, the shutters clapped shut and a quiet rasp signaled them being locked against the night.

The scarf was warm in her hands, but Rose was reluctant to return it to her neck knowing what it contained. Grandma’s words echoed, “You keep this on, keep you safe.” She pulled it into a loose knot at her throat as Grandma had done only a short while ago. A sense of calm washed through her. She felt safe, protected, despite wearing the essence of some dead thing.

Rose forced her feet to move her forward. She wanted to run home and hide under her covers, but Da needed his lunch. Grandma was relying on her. She moved faster, tracing one hand along the wall, keeping her anchored in the real world, away from one of spirits. Soon she was running, ignoring the danger of tripping on the cobblestones. Imagined spirits at her heels urged her on. She didn’t know if the scarf would protect her anymore, if it could contain another spirit.

Five minutes later, she moved beyond the shelter of the town. Cobblestones gave way to the dirt track that led to the coal mine. Deep ruts carved by the wheels of heavy ore carts offered a treacherous path for anyone on foot, but the softer surface seemed to absorb the ground fog and soon, even the wispy remnant that spilled out of the town faded away. The night hid the moon behind thick clouds, challenging Rose to pick her way in full dark. Squishy, boggy ground on both sides of the roadway forced Rose to navigate the grooves by feel. Her only beacon was the yellow flare of the vent flame at the mine entrance. That dim light wasn’t enough to illuminate the way, but it offered a landmark to guide her.

Moving as fast as she dared, Rose stared into the darkness, fearing what hid there, waiting for a foolish teenager to stumble into its grasp. Why had her dad forgotten his lunch, leaving her to the mercies of night?

She stumbled and tripped as she followed the yellow light of the mine flare. Twice her knees scraped when she fell. After the second nasty fall, she moved to the edge of the road, onto the strip of grass there, but the damp ground sucked at her feet and she imagined scrabbly fingers clawing at her. She tugged at the scarf around her neck, and realized the fingers were only in her mind. The squelching muck of the mire helped her to choose the roadway again, despite its unfriendly surface. She turned her ankle hard when a cry from the bog startled her. She fell, twisting onto her back, pain flaring up her leg. She realized the noise was merely an owl calling for a mate. She continued, limping.

By the time the yellow flare was close enough to reveal the ground, Rose’s ankle had a hammering pain. She could hardly take any weight on that foot. The mine clerk’s shack was close, and Rose sighed. Perhaps Kraten, the timekeeper, would have something she could use as a crutch to get her home. She hated to ask him for anything, felt uncomfortable when he looked at her, but it was him she would leave the lunch bucket with. She would make her stop quick, drop the lunch, get a crutch, and be on her way back home. She reached for the door handle.

“What’s this?” A voice behind her caused her to stumble, twisting her ankle again. Her hand missed the door latch and splinters from the rough wood slid under her fingernails. Rose turned toward the voice as she fell back against the door, gripping her injured fingers against her chest. “Here’s a pretty girl knocking up my door.”

It was Kraten. There was no mistaking that voice, like he was talking through his nose. Even though his face was in shadow, Rose felt his eyes on her like hands, rough and eager.

“It’s Rose. I’ve brought my dad’s lunch.” Rose held the bucket out as though it was a shield.

“I knows who you are,” Kraten pulled his torch closer, chasing the shadows from his face. His smile was wide, full of teeth. His eyes bulged. He took the lunch from her, placing his hand over hers on the handle. “For your da? How fortunate,” Kraten squeezed her hand. Rose tried to pull away, but he held it there. “that you could bring it.” Kraten’s eyes bugged out further as he leaned in close to Rose. He blinked. The way his eyelids slid out and over his buggy eyes reminded Rose of a toad. “A man gets a mighty appetite working the mines.” His tongue slithered over his lips.

“You’re hurting me.” Rose tugged again to free her hand and this time he let her go.

“Not safe for a young woman to be out in the dark. All manner of restless things there. Come inside, I’ll make you comfortable.” Kraten licked his lips again.

“I have to get home. Grandma’s waiting for me.” Rose knew she was speaking too fast but couldn’t stop herself.

“At least stay a wee bit. Get warmed up. Loosen your clothes by the stove. Let the heat sink into yer bones.” His mouth was a toothy grin.

“No.” The word came out of her mouth with force enough to make Kraten pull back as though slapped. “I mean, Grandma will be worried.” After a moment she tried to divert his attention, “I’ve twisted my ankle. Do you have something I could use as a crutch to help me home?”

Kraten’s brow furrowed, and he stepped forward again. “Hurt your foot? Lemme see.” He reached toward her. Rose turned away, not wanting those hands touching her again.

“I’ll be alright.” She said, afraid that no matter what she said, he was going to try to get her inside his shack, alone, touch her. She hobbled a few steps toward the distant town.

“Wait.” Kraten said, pulling the door to his shack open. Light spilled out, carving a wide swath across the roadway, framing Rose in its center. “Yer hurt and scared. I have something that’ll help. Your da would be pretty mad if I didn’t help.” He stepped into the shack and reappeared a moment later. He tossed a broom toward her, one with a wide head of bristles.

Rose bent and picked it up. She tested her weight on it, then tucked the head under her arm, leaning on it fully.

“Thank you. I’ll send it back with Da tomorrow.”

“You do that now. Those things don’t come free, you know. Now, get along.” With a dismissive wave of his hand, he disappeared into the shack and the door closed, cutting off the light.

Rose stood still, her night eyes gone, and waited until she could see again. She hobbled along the road.

In a few moments she left even the meager light of the mine flare and ventured blind. There were no lights in the town to guide her, only her memory of the road. She stumbled often, sometimes her feet caught in the ruts, sometimes the broom. Her arm ached where her crutch dug into it. Night sounds crept out of the bog, but she knew those sounds. Now that she had some time away from the spirit incident, she could picture the crickets and frogs and foxes making the sounds instead of stalking ghosts. Then she heard the sloshing, water sucking noise.

The sound was the same as when she had ventured too close to the swamp and it had grabbed at her feet, but it was also the sound a corpse would make as it pulled itself free from a watery grave. Rose’s free hand found its way to the scarf at her neck as her eyes strained into the darkness, toward the sound, searching. She hobbled a little faster, risking a fall, hopping more on her good foot to take longer steps.

Her breath rasped in her throat and blood pounded in her ears as she hurried on, casting glances over her shoulder. She heard the long grass of the marsh rubbing, splashes where something rushed through the bog. She looked toward the town, where she believed it was, for any sign that she was getting close to the cobblestones. That surface wouldn’t be much easier to crutch over but even a little easier would help. Only darkness ahead. She could step off a cliff any moment for all her eyes could tell her. Her ankle flared and she leaned hard onto the crutch to keep from falling.

Hot breath on her neck and hard fingers closed around her arm. Rose gasped and turned and stumbled and fell onto her back, but the hand lost her in the movement.

“Come here, you little ingrate.” It was Kraten’s nasal voice. “You’ll do what I say, or they’ll say it was a tragedy how you wandered into the bog in the dark when they fish yer body from the muck.”

Rose scrambled backward, pushing with her feet to get away from his voice. Fingers closed on her sore ankle and squeezed. She cried out.

“I said come here.” He tugged her leg. The road scraped into her as he pulled her toward him. “I was nice to you, gave you that broom and everything. Now you’ll be nice to me.” His face was inches from her own. She was close enough to see him despite the darkness, could smell his reeking breath as his words puffed into her face.

“No, please, leave me,” Rose pleaded, pushing backward with her hands, but he held her firm.

“You’ll be nice to me and then you’ll forget it, or I’ll make sure your dad’s begging in the street this time tomorrow. I have the ear of the foreman, you know.” His hands pawed at her, on her legs, her arms, her chest. His breath panted, deepened. His fingers slid to the folds of her skirt, began tugging at it.

Rose kicked out with her good foot, but it glanced off Kraten’s arm, allowing him to crawl between her legs. His hands were up her skirt, tearing at her underwear. Rose pushed on his head and he let go with one hand. Pain flared in her face as his free hand smashed into her.

“I said be nice.”

Rose’s head slammed back onto the road, her arm flopped to one side and lay across the broom. She gripped the handle and swung it hard toward him. She kicked out with her sore foot. The handle struck the side of his head and he reared back. Her foot connected with his throat and he gagged and choked. Rose scrambled backward a few feet when his hands lost their grip.

“Oh you little bugger,” Kraten’s voice had lost its nasal sound, “I’ll be sticking yer head into the muck and holding it there til you quit squirming. Won’t be as nice having at yer then, but I’ll be done before you cool off too much.” He lunged toward her.

Rose turned, crawling away just before the crushing weight of Kraten fell on her. He grabbed her by the throat and began dragging her toward the road edge. His squeezing fingers cut off her breath and her hands rose to her throat. She felt the fabric of grandma’s scarf. It came loose into her hand.

Wielding it like a whip, Rose pulled her arm back. She pulled her knee up to get it between herself and Kraten. She pushed with her knee and pulled her shoulders back and flicked the scarf forward all at the same time. The force of her movement pushed space between her and Kraten, and the scarf whipped forward, the edge of it snapping against his face.

The colours of the scarf blazed to life as if a fire inside was struggling to get out. Rose noted that the blues and greens and greys flashing across the scarf were the same shade as Grandma’s remaining eye. Kraten screamed and pulled backward as though struck by leather instead of silk. The scarf tugged at Rose’s hand like her fishing stick did when she had a bite. Rose looked at Kraten and saw skeletal fingers stretching from the scarf, digging into his face. As she pulled the scarf, the spirit, trapped earlier, pulled free. Kraten’s hands were at his own face, trying to tear free from the boney grip on his cheeks. Blood poured from the gaping holes the fingers dug, their grip so fierce.

The spirit pulled free of the scarf and its blazing light died. Darkness enclosed the scene as Rose saw Kraten run toward the bog, the spirit still clinging to him. She lay still for a moment, then, fearing the spirit would return for her, felt around for the broom and got to her feet.

Finding the cobblestones with her crutch, she knew where she was. She hobbled into the dim light of town, Grandma’s scarf dangling from her fingers.

I liked the way that sounded. It was a compliment and I replied with a smile.

The next time our paths crossed, he shouted the same thing.

“Hello, handsome man.”

“Hi,” I replied, walking on.

It took me a while to realise he was a neighbour. Two houses down from mine. One night, I saw him go in there, a residence that, unlike my town house, was shared by lodgers. Through the ground floor windows, I saw abstract art and a faraway television showing the news. Near the house was a bench I’d begun to settle down on from time to time when the evenings were warm. The street was quiet on those summer nights. I’d enjoy a beer or two there, watch the passing cars and contemplate the meaning of life.

One day, coming home from work, I noticed him on the same bench.

“Hello, handsome man,” he’d said.

“Yeah, that’s me. The handsome man.”

“Where are you from?”

“You know, around…”

“A beautiful evening.”

“That it is.”

I carried on walking, got to my door, shoved the key in and turned the lock.

Now and then I’d see him coming out of our local convenience store. Dirty shorts and T-shirt, a satchel round his shoulders and a plastic bag swinging by his side. There was something about him… a sadness. Pity! I’d begun to avoid our little exchanges when I could.

Sometimes, however, I was lonely myself. On one such night, I spotted him while I was out for a walk. I’d wander the streets to get out of the house, get away from the computer, the TV, get out into the real world for a half hour or so.

He was there, coming straight for me.

“Handsome man,” he bellowed.

“How’s it going?” I replied.

We talked about the weather, the hot summer we were having. Then, somehow, we got onto the subject of UFOs.

“Up there,” he warned me. “They are watching.”

“Oh yeah?”

“They’ve taken me.”

“Taken you?”

“Before,” he answered, his friendly expression sliding into that of morbid sorrowfulness.

I backed away.

“You be careful,” he warned.

“Sure,” I answered. Then: “So, you’ve seen them?”

“I did,” he replied, looking down at his satchel. “But I have ways. Ways to make them stop.”

By coincidence, I wrote sci-fi stories and was working on a collection—I should have been more interested (What had they done to him, what did they look like? Did they have names, these aliens?)

But this was real life, not a game.

Frowning, I asked if he took medicine. A cousin of mine had heard voices. She’d been put on medication. I considered the possibility of helping this man. Reporting him … but to whom?

He began to wave a finger at me. “They are watching!” he shouted. “Watching you. Watching us.”

“Yeah, sure.”

“You just be careful, handsome man.”

I looked at my watch and reassured him that I’d be okay.

An argument broke out on my street. Unable to resist the temptation, I carefully slid open a window.

It was him, shouting at two drivers who were having trouble passing each other in the narrow road. Parked cars on either side: a phenomenon not uncommon in the street in which I lived.

Ordering each driver to back up, to move forward, to drive more carefully, his shouts were met with embarrassed politeness. This was not his business but who were they to argue? Best not to get involved.

Inside the convenience store one evening, I ran into my boss. We got to talking, an awkward conversation about work.

“Hello, handsome man.”

“My neighbour,” I stated by way of introduction.

“Ah, hello there,” said my boss. “Neighbours, then. And what is it you do?”

“He sees UFOs,” I muttered by way of explanation for this dishevelled figure. To excuse whatever words he might come up with.

“I live two doors down,” he exclaimed happily while my boss shrank away in horror.

Again, I’d pass him. Some days I’d stop to talk; other days I’d just smile. I began to wonder how hard it would be to make friends with this man. I was lonely myself, so why not strike up a partnership of sorts? I’d have to set down rules though. No hassling me every day. It would have to be on my terms. We could wander the streets after dark, take in a beer or two. Or we could become best friends. Why not? I’d be doing him a favour. I could change his life.

“Hello handsome man,” he shouted, his satchel clanging by his side.

“Hello,” I’d reply, walking on.

Soon, however, I started to notice a change. There were a set of drunks who’d gather at the park, who’d sit outside the convenience store with their cheap wine and angry banter. I noticed he was sitting with them more often than not. He’d found friends. I was off the hook.

He’d pass me in the street with a plastic bag full of beer cans. Instant noodles. I noticed the lady who worked at our store had begun to chat with him whenever he was in there. Before he’d been served coldness, a glacial apathy, but he’d become more respectable, acceptable. A local, friendly drunk.

He’d pass me looking worse than ever and I was often the first to acknowledge the other.

“Hello,” I’d say.

“Handsome man,” he’d reply with a glazed expression.

And we’d both walk on.

But one time, I saw him in the supermarket at a table drinking a coffee and I joined him for a moment, saying I had somewhere to go, someone else to meet. I couldn’t stop—just wanted to say hi. There was a queue, and I had a minute to spare.

“My son,” he said. “He lives in America.”

“Oh, so you have a son,” I replied. “That’s nice.”

“He’s a good boy. Very handsome.”

And your wife? I almost asked.

“Studying there.”

“Oh, yes?”

“He’s very smart.”

“Of course,” I stumbled. “I mean, he must be.”

The last time I saw him he was with two older men playing chess in the park. He wasn’t playing, just watching. It was nice, I thought, that he was allowed to sit with them. I wondered what his life had been like before. If he really did have a son. What he’d been like as a boy. Sitting with other kids in the classroom, the same as everyone else. From what I knew of my cousin, common forms of schizophrenia and such types of madness could hit at puberty, other kinds hit you later in life. But as a child, he’d had a mother and father and friends at school. He’d had hopes and dreams. One day, when he was older…

It must have been over two months when it finally dawned on me that I hadn’t seen him in a while. Where had he gone? Whatever happened to that crazy fellow who always used to call me a handsome man? I suspected that he might have died. Either that or moved away. I wondered if he’d been committed. Cured.

“That guy,” I said to my neighbour. A retiree who often stood outside smoking by his front door. “The one who was…” how to put it? “A bit crazy. Haven’t seen him in a while.”

My neighbour peered at me through a cloud of smoke. “Two doors down that way?” he coughed.

“That’s the one.”

“Dead, so I heard.”

“He died?”

“Bad heart. He was young and all.”

Older than me but younger than my neighbour. Must have been in either his forties or fifties, though I decided to not bother with asking for any confirmation over his age.

“His heart?” I said instead.

“Drank, you see.”

“Sure, I guess he did.”

“Not mad. Just drunk.”

“But he was a bit, you know, I think he had some mental illness. Maybe that’s what—”

“—No, not mental illness. He was a drunk.” My neighbour spat on the floor. Stubbed out his cigarette.

“At the end he was, sure,” I insisted.

“No, no, always. His satchel. Full of it. Drink like that—it’s bound to get you in the end.”

About a week later I walked up to the woman in the store, the one who’d been nice enough to chat with him in the last few months of his life. I wanted to tell her, just in case she didn’t know. He’s dead, I wanted to say. The news—I felt a strange need to share it with somebody. I wanted to find out more about who he’d been. Had there been a funeral? Who, if anyone, had gone?

“Would you like a bag with that?” she asked.

I hesitated open-mouthed. I didn’t want to shock her with talk of dead neighbours.

“Sure,” I said instead, handing her the money. Giving her the best smile I could manage, I picked up my stuff, then walked outside.

You be careful, handsome man. They are watching you, watching us!

Grey clouds mixed with emerging stars. The wind blew softly.