“Pining for sea-folk,” my gangly new apprentice said — loudly, to no one in particular — as I left the sawmill, bento box in hand. He was one of the mayor’s clan, a cousin twice removed or some such, which he frequently found call to mention. I ignored the jibe, however accurate, just as I overlooked all the other whispered workplace tales of my romantic escapades. Stacked against the host of troubles a shipwright faces these days — rotting lumber, scarce tar, machinery so old it has parts stamped “Made in USA” rusting inside it — the nattering of a silver-buttoned teenager with an oily mustache matters less than chicken feed.

The breeze coaxed me onward with scents recalling my distant youth. I skirted the remains of Old Mobile, not even glancing at the crumbling factories and the skeletal apartments. (As Lem once pointed out, back when he still liked to tease me, locals learn not to see the ravaged glories of the past.) About halfway between the mill and the shipyard a narrow footpath leaves the boardwalk and meanders down to an inlet scarcely bigger than a pond which nonetheless provides a panoramic view of the bay. Those who know the spot have dubbed it Rabi’s Cove; in deference, they allow me my privacy there at sun’s-height during workdays. I suppose they can do without my scowling for an hour, during which I can escape the clamor of saws and the pestering of novices.

The bay’s annual transformation still surprised me, even after forty-five springtimes. Fresh gulf air brushed crisply across my face. The seaside stretched in front of me, full of life: bullfrogs lurked in the cordgrass that lined the shore; newborn redfish snapped at midges on the placid waters; a lonely gator drifted by. Far in the distance bright red buoys danced over onetime islands, now sunken hazards in the risen gulf. Despite my disappointment in the momentary absence of sirenae, I couldn’t withhold a smile.

Settling in amid this cacophony, I sat and munched on a slaw made with wilted collard greens and spongy radishes. Lem’s mother must have packed my lunch; I always got the worst bits when the widow did kitchen duty. Usually Mondays were Lem’s turn, but he’d been up all night tending to the twins’ fever. I spit out a stem, and grimaced. Lem used to joke that she’d poison me one day and I’d never notice it. He used to joke a lot until last year, when little Siu drowned and the widow grew ten times colder.

But a flood of tears won’t wash away calamity, so I pushed those thoughts aside and, sipping from a canteen of weak sweet tea, looked out at the bay. For a stretch of heartbeats I forgot as well about the Texas Conflict that had us working overtime under orders from Colonel Jin. This quiet thought-free moment stretched on and on until, with a sudden flutter, a motley heron swooped into the cove. Cupping its wings at the last moment, it landed elegantly in the shallows but then let out a comic squawk. Their honk always put me in mind of a circus clown, that and its feathers — a riot of scarlet and indigo, lemon and lime. A far too showy relic of the Geneshift Days, the poor birds have nearly gone extinct just two hundred years later. To most folk around here, spotting one means good fortune: Ma had seen one the summer she met Pa, en paz descansen. To me, that day, it only kindled memories of one I’d seen a quarter century earlier.

Back then, I’d left the journeyers’ party just before midnight, when the revelry was beginning in earnest. A full dozen of us had been raised up from our apprenticeships, so the taverns were full of sweaty young laborers already drunk on cheap beer and cheaper moonshine. I’d gotten politely tipsy on toasts in our honor, smiled through long reminiscences by various greying adepts, nibbled on the cornbread and the sweet potato pie. Eventually a few of us stepped outside to share a spliff and speculate about the next seven years of service. Such a stretch seemed mighty long back then, and my thoughts turned to the futures I’d just lost, having signed on under that snarling one-armed tyrant, Yoshikawa-sencho. My mood turned sour, and when the rest of the crew returned inside, I simply wandered off homeward, back toward the apprentices’ dorms which, for a few hours, I would have all to myself.

The ballad of the Alabama night accompanied me as I meandered up the boardwalk — barking treefrogs and lowing bullfrogs, the whippoorwill mourning, the katydids bleating. That muffled the partiers’ chatter, gracias a Dios. But as the wild choir ran through its repertoire, a motley heron swept past not a meter in front of me, landing to snap up a mouse hiding in the brush. While the bird gobbled down its prey it eyed me placidly, and then with a bob of its head and a flutter of its wings strode off toward the shore.

Like a fool in a folktale I followed it. Not for three wishes, not for a path to paradise, not even for the prestige that nabbing one of its feathers would bring, though I suppose each of these crossed my mind, particularly the last. But mostly I stumbled after this omen that had plopped down in my path on graduation night because the splendid bird had flown across entire nations, while I’d never left this simple harbor. Envy, besides curiosity, drew me onward.

When I caught up to it it was floating idly in the shallows of this same cove, occasionally swallowing up small fish that ventured incautiously near. Maybe I could pluck one feather for luck and remembrance? It paid me no mind as I stripped off my blue and white journeyer’s gown and slipped into the muck and the warm ripples of the bay. I waded slowly through submerged weeds that tangled my ankles and scratched at my legs, and though the heron haughtily pretended to ignore me, as I approached, it somehow receded. Soon the water was at my chest and doubts had begun to filter into my fuzzled brain, and at that moment I felt a gentle tug at my arm.

I pulled away with a shout. In the moonlight a cadaverous figure rose from the bay. Long black hair clung to a pale body about as old as my own, skin pocked with myriad tiny scars and adorned with luminous tattoos. Gill-like folds draped around an eellike neck, and after a moment’s shock I recognized it as a sireno, one of the sea-folk genetically altered  by the ancients to dwell in cities swallowed by the rising oceans. It smiled — he smiled — mouth full of sharp teeth, and in a croaking voice said, “Come.”

Some coast folk call the sirenae monstrous: misshapen caricatures of humanity that infest our waterways, raiding our aquafarms and scuppering our ships. We apprentices took more notice of a different sort of accusation, swapping jokes and lurid yarns about the sea-folks’ sexual depravities (which perhaps included a fair amount of invention on our part). Finally face-to-face, skin-to-skin with a sireno, I understood the allure of the grotesque. No man I’d ever touched had seemed so raw and otherworldly. My fingers tingled with an urge to stroke his earless skull and caress his mottled chest.

I knew the other stories, too: tales of children snatched from the shores, of bathers lured to the deep and ravaged, of sailors dragged overboard and drowned and eaten. Stories to frighten youngsters, yes, but I was not then old enough to entirely disbelieve them. I backed away but he followed, legs ungainly in the shallows, webbed hands extended. The stories say as well that the sea-folk exude a drug to pacify their prey, and perhaps that’s not balderdash, for as he neared me my fears dissolved, and I found myself entranced by his sparkling eyes, his muscular arms, his brawny, husky thighs. Whether behexed by his chemicals or by my own inebriated lust, I hesitated, my heart pounding, and then I took his hand.

As he led me out into the bay, I heard behind me the boom of fireworks and the cheering of partiers. Ships huddled against creaking docks, and among them a few startled curlews whistled their complaints about the nearby pandemonium. But the shore soon grew distant, and ahead past the mouth of the bay lay the vastness of the Gulf, and above it the deep star-dotted inky sky. The ships I helped build sailed in the one, and our ancestors (so the chronicles say) traveled in the other, while for me each breaststroke brought me the farthest I’d ever ventured from home. I followed dreamlike onward, feeling neither fear nor triumph.

The sireno swam easily into the deep, and when I struggled to keep pace, he had me cling to his back and carried us both out, out beyond sight of land, beyond even the lighthouse’s blinking. I clutched him tightly, felt his taut muscles pulling us through the mild surf and the salt spray. My last doubts vanished with the shoreline as we sped toward the horizon. We plowed on, on through the gentle waves, until after ten minutes or then again an hour I found we had stopped, and he was turning to face me as we treaded water.

His prickly hand swept across my cheek and neck. I grasped his scar-speckled shoulder, and we kissed. I tasted the ocean on his lips, felt the sea in his embrace. Buoyed by the water, my legs moved up against his chest, and slowly, gently, he entered me. I winced once yet never wavered from looking into his violet-flecked eyes. As we rocked together in the soft night tides, he suddenly took my forefinger and bit it, hard enough to draw a few drops of blood that trickled down his throat. I swore, but he had quickened his pace, and soon we were rushing together toward satisfaction. As he came he released my finger and howled gutturally at the sky.

An hour or a few minutes passed, and I was floating on my back — the cradling bay beneath me, the Triangle sparkling above — reaching out for the sireno, when he said, “Wait,” and vanished under the surface, down to the depths, the drowned past, as obscure to me as any distant shore, as far from my reach as Arcturus or Spica. I hung alone in the universe, neither down nor up nor far nor home. For a brief moment I attained what Lem tells me is sati: I and the breeze and the waves were one; I drifted unattached from my past, unlinked to my future; every ripple was the sea’s breath, every twinkling star was the night sky winking. I observed the feeling, and it slipped from my grasp.

How long since the sireno left? I shooed away that qualm and lolled in the water, hoping to regain transcendence. Out of habit I searched for the Little Bear, for Polaris low to the horizon. Every child who plays in the gulf learns to follow it home, that if you just head north you’ll reach the coast. But the coast is long, and I’d be alone, naked, unarmed, lost in the wilderness. Without much realizing it I moved to treading water, as if waving my arms could swat away my worries. My finger still bled, and I wondered what its taste might draw. A swarm of suspicions seized me, of plots by the sea-folk, lures and traps and dreadful appetites, vengeance against the unshifted who still could walk the land. My breath grew ragged and my swimming choppy.

A rogue wave splashed my face. I spluttered, coughing up the ounce of water I’d almost swallowed. I had begun to panic, and with the mouthful of brine I was five again, my father at my side, teaching me to swim the year before he went off to die in the last war with Texas. I’d been terrified then, but he’d put his hand on my back, and I heard his baritone voice chanting the old rhyme:

Arms down, won’t drown.

Breathe slow, fears go.

over and over till I floated safely in the shallows and he grinned with pride.

I clutched at that memory, one of the few clear recollections I have of him. I seized it  and lay still in the sea, occasionally raising my head to breathe, imagining my father beside me, letting the fear dissolve.

After a few minutes I regained my composure and sought out the North Star again. Easy enough, but now beneath it I saw the fin of a sharpnose circling me at a distance. Small and not particularly hostile, it didn’t pose much of a threat, except that it might draw the attention of larger sharks — bulls or tigers — which would be troublesome. Apprehension and exhaustion made my decision simple, spurring me toward the coast.

I’d only swum a few meters when I felt the pull on my ankle, not teeth, but a hand. I turned to the sireno full of anger and relief, both of which he seemed oblivious to. I wanted to shout at him, but could summon neither the energy nor the right words. Ignoring my distress, he took my hand and placed on one of my fingers a ring, a glistening gold band that he must have fetched from some trove he’d hidden in the deep. Words fell even further away from me, but he had one: “Wait,” he said again.

He seemed to expect a response, so I nodded as if I’d understood his meaning. At that he grinned, baring his long sharp teeth, and turned so that I could climb onto his back. Exhausted, confused, I lay atop him and let him swim us back to shore, returning to the cove in which we’d met. He dropped me there in the shallows, kissed me once, long and thirstily, and then was gone, vanishing into the dark waters of the bay. I stared out after him wondering what, exactly, had just transpired.

“Wait,” he’d said, and so I had. Days, weeks, a quarter century had passed, twenty-five years of absence in which my life had gone on. I’d worked my way up from journeyer to maestro, and then two years ago, after Yoshikawa-sencho retired, had become head shipwright of the bay. Ma had long since succumbed to the fever, and I’d met Lem when drought forced his own family in from the farmlands. We’d gotten bonded (despite his mother’s pride) and taken in young ones to raise. And then, in a moment of inattention at the riverbank, Siu was gone.

Now I finished my tea as I watched the heron hunt in the shallows. How often had I sat in this cove and gazed at birds who traveled farther in a single day than I’d voyaged my entire life? “For a Mobile man,” Lem once said, “you’re awfully stationary,” and I’d smiled to hide how deeply the old joke stung. Every time one of my boats left the harbor I’d imagine myself aboard it, face to the fore, but every night I’d end up back in the house I was born in. I spat out a stray tea leaf, and the heron cocked its head at me, then snatched up a tiny fish and waded on.

I suppose I could have stalked it for its feathers, as I had on that earlier night, but such pastimes are for kids who still believe the promises of fairy tales. Instead I wadded up the last of my stale vegetables and hocked the ball at the gene-shifted bird. It ignored the splash. I sighed and started repacking my bento box, rehearsing my schedule for the afternoon.

The first figure surfaced with nary a ripple. I’d sighted sea-folk in the cove before, more often in the harbor proper, but rarely so shore-close in full daylight. Not wanting to startle the visitor, I froze; but it stood, brushed back its long, dripping locks, and stared directly at me. The face was weathered and bearded, the chest and arms covered in a multitude of scars, the whole scarcely recognizable until, catching my gaze, he smiled.

“You’re here,” he called, much more eloquent now, but his voice still just as gravelly. He waded toward me through the cordgrass, wet skin sparkling in the midday sun. I stood but neither approached him nor stepped away, opened my mouth but found no words came out. At this he laughed a seal’s bark, harsh and happy.

A year before, the Kukulkan limped back into harbor, sails tattered and masts splintered, a decade after we’d all presumed it sunk. My emotions now mirrored those I saw in the crowd that day: not just the sulky teen who greeted her resurrected mother with unrestrained cries of joy, but also the sudden un-widow who stood in mute anguish beside her second husband, their babe bawling at her breast. Half a lifetime of idle daydreams hadn’t, in the end, prepared me for this at all.

Pure foolishness, pining for sea-folk, so all the folktales say; but those who write the stories are those who stayed behind. What do they know of dwelling among the restless tides, or penetrating the lightless deep? And besides, fond as I am of the nomads, truly I yearned for only this one, the apparition I met long ago. Now here he stood, beaming as I trembled.

I tugged at my beard. Lunchtime was over. Back in town my timber supplier awaited my return, no doubt bearing more bad news about the pine borer infestation; and Colonel Jin would probably storm in again today to demand another warship we hadn’t the material for. The Texans threatened new blockades and the summer forecast promised drought. And I’d told Lem I’d stop in at the florist to order lilies to lay on Siu’s grave next week. My schedule didn’t allow for mid-day dalliances.

Yet I discovered I was undressing. Discarding my checked shirt and overalls in the brush, I schlurped through the muck into the chilly bay. The weeds fondled my thighs and the skitterbugs darted in my wake. The clanging alarm of a distant fire-wagon echoed through the woods — the brigade wasn’t headed toward the mill, surely? I briefly turned back toward the city, but then the sireno took my hand in his and tugged me close. He kissed me, and the commotion faded away.

When I drew apart a minute later, I saw that company had joined us in the bay: behind him emerged a stout, jewel-braided sirena with skin even darker than mine; a beardless, swaggering adolescent who clutched a mid-size fishing spear by its freshly-hewn shaft; and an older, one-armed sireno riding herd over two shy toddlers who poked their heads above the surface, eyes goggling at my appearance. “My kin,” he said, his arm wrapped around me. “A few of them. Come, mix your blood with ours.” And he escorted me out to meet them.

The teen took two fierce steps through the water toward me, but the sirena caught the child by the shoulder and gave a shake of her head and a half-smile. Cross, the teen relented. The sirena untangled the youngster’s hair for a moment until the child remembered its petulance and swam apart. At my approach the two little ones dove behind their guardian, reminding me so much of how our twins greeted strangers that I halted abruptly, slipping a bit in the breast-deep water.

The twins! I was supposed to pick up some calamine lotion, now they’d made it through the worst of the fever and just had the rashes. A few nights last week had been particularly worrisome. Siu’s death had struck us hard, but to have lost all three children would have broken Lem for certain. Yet here I was, on the verge of abandoning them all. I yanked myself from the sireno’s grasp. He looked at me, perplexed and hurt.

The bay was quiet then. I heard no gulls call nor a single sandpiper wheet, just the tide lightly lapping. The speck of a freighter bound for Yucatán disappeared south across the horizon, and I recalled being told that sea-folk spend their winters there, carousing in the bahías turquesas and lolling on the white sand beaches. Back at the mill the afternoon whistle blew, shrill but distant, no louder than a piping plover. Still, it roused the heron, who took to the air with a raucous squawk.

The sireno echoed it with his laugh. “Garza knows to flee the song of dirt-folk,” he said as the gaudy bird circled us twice and headed out to sea. “That melody holds you fast and grinds you to dust.” The sireno held out his hand again, smiling that toothy grin, beckoning. The rest of his pack had closed rank behind him, the little ones bobbing and darting between the others. “I scouted your shores while I gathered my tribe. I saw how your cities drain your people of joy. I even spotted you, now and then, sitting seaside, dreaming of escape. Break free of your net, mud-strider, and come with us.”

The sirena, hands full with one of the little ones, exchanged whispers with the graybeard as they sized me up and smiled at some private joke. Then, graciously, she nodded. Meanwhile the teen peered over my shoulder at the woods and the land beyond, eyes blazing with the pull of adventure thoroughly mixed with doubt and fear. Despite our differences, I felt the comfort of this pack and reached out for the sireno’s hand.

His toxins had sedated me. His familia had charmed me. But I found there was a vast gulf between the midnight passions of a young man and the daytime responsibilities of a middle-aged shipwright. Squeezing the sireno’s hand once, I pressed the gold ring into it, then turned my back and waded resolutely back toward shore. I heard a brief burst of furious, incomprehensible chatter behind me, but I refused to turn around. My eyes were wet, though not with mist.

I felt a tug on my ankle, and I hesitated. What opportunities, what adventures lay just behind me, waiting only for my assent? But then I realized it was only weeds in the shallows that held me, and I clambered onto land, shaking the seawater from my brown arms and hairy chest.

There was a rustle of branches at the edge of the cove, enough noise to spook a dozen terns to flight, and the new apprentice broke through, muttering uninspired curses. “Rabi-sencho,” he called at last. “You’re late for the meeting.” He peered down his nose at me as I sloshed through the muck, then looked over my shoulder at the bay. “Enjoy your dip?”

I turned. Not only the terns had fled. The sireno and his kin had vanished, traceless in the sea. As the bullfrogs found their voices again and croaked farewells, I pulled on my clothes — judging by his grimaces, much too slowly for the mayor’s cousin’s taste. Once I had dressed, he all but dragged me to the boardwalk, imperious and impertinent as he marched me back into captivity.

That spring night, as I sat on the back porch watching the twins playing outside for the first time in a week, Lem took my hand in his and gently rubbed the emptiness that the sireno’s ring had left. The evening breeze slipped between us. He pecked me on the cheek as the children squealed and the fireflies glimmered, and in that moment the gulf felt very far away.

This one is no different. And it’s all true. And it’s not happy.

Not mostly, anyway.

It has its moments.

Early one morning, at my restaurant in Denver, a metal box arrived in a metal truck, escorted by guards. They carried assault rifles, like they thought they might have to defend themselves against the bell peppers we kept in the fridge. Or the turmeric.

They checked the kitchen out to make sure it was secure. They checked the empty dining room.

Someone gave a signal. Unarmed men in grey jumpsuits brought the box inside.

It was big. We gave them space. They had rigged the box with antigravity clamps, which they took with them when they left, which meant I had to hire someone else to lug it out of there later.

I signed my name on a tablet, and on their way out one of the guards, under her breath, called me a fairy.

I grinned at her and winked. Life is short.

And when they were gone it was me, the box, Antoine, and Zaid, my chef de cuisine in Denver. He didn’t know what was going on, because I hadn’t told him anything, except that he should close the joint for a day so we could have a meeting.

When the army departed, the three of us stood back and watched the box for a minute.

“Does anyone have a crowbar?” Antoine asked, sipping a glass of beer.

Zaid laughed. We couldn’t have opened that box with a crowbar. We couldn’t have sprung it with a Howitzer.

The box was advanced. State-of-the-art. It had traveled hundreds of light-years to get there, and they’d made the box so that none of the contents would get knocked around when the speed they were moving scrambled the atoms of everything onboard the spacecraft that carried it.

I don’t know what the box was made of—some kind of compound. Steel and titanium plus nine things I never heard of.

We didn’t know how to open it. They had left no instructions.

Antoine stood back and watched as Zaid and I pawed the thing over, looking for a way to get it open.

Zaid found a button and pressed it.

The box whirred. It whooshed. I felt air come out of a vent on one side. The top detached, and it took all three of us to lift it away.

Mist poured out. When it cleared enough so we could see, we found the box was lined with some kind of foam, containers pressed into it to keep them safe.

With a gloved hand Antoine reached in through the mist and pulled out a glass jar of what looked, from where I stood, like rocks.

“What is that?” asked Zaid. “It looks like gravel.”

“It’s not gravel,” Antoine said. “The label says it’s gnorsalt.”

He set the jar on a steel table.

“How much do you know about this stuff?” Zaid asked.

“Not much,” I said. “I’m not supposed to even have it.”

Antoine removed his glove and found the jar was okay to touch.

I said, “I only have this stuff because I know a guy.”

“What guy?”

“He’s a higher-up with the Expeditionary Corps. The Interstellar Expeditionary Corps.”

“I thought all they did was strip gold off asteroids.”

Antoine unscrewed the jar’s lid like it was a bomb that might go off.

“That is what they do,” I said. “But they reached the Sariel system last year. You heard about that, right?”

“No.”

“It was all over the news, Zaid.”

“I don’t watch the news. I work, I sleep, and I come back to work. I don’t have time for news.”

“You should start making time for it. The Corps found the stuff in this box on Sariel III. There are eighteen freighters full of it headed our way. They’re burning out their hyperdrives, to get here as fast as they can. And they’ll go back for more, and a lot of people are going to make a fortune off of it.”

“Off of gravel?”

“It’s not gravel, Zaid. It’s food.”

“It’s an ingredient,” said Antoine. “One that no one on Earth has had before. One that came from another planet, far away.”

I said, “The guy who got me this box says the stuff in it is going to change the way we eat. Totally and irreversibly. And I paid a lot of money so we could get this box early.”

“Before the freighters get here?”

“That’s right.”

“Why not wait for the freighters?”

“Because, my friend, if we get a little of it in advance, we can learn what it is. What it’s about. We can experiment.”

“And that means,” added Antoine, who reached into the jar with tongs, “we can learn to make a whole range of dishes out of what’s in this box before anyone else gets their hands on it.”

I said, “In three months, those freighters will reenter Earth’s orbit. And Hampton Sherlock, and Sally Conroy, and Dallas fucking Everhart will be in their billion-dollar test kitchens, scrambling to fuse whatever’s on the freighters with the food we’ve always had on Earth.

“They’ll do exactly what we’re doing right now. But it will be too late.

“They won’t know it, but by the time they’ve figured out what the rocks in that jar can do, we’ll be rolling out a line of prepared meals and exclusive dishes at my restaurants.

“And when we start making money off of that, I’ll open more restaurants. It’ll be beautiful. We’ll be rich.”

Zaid looked stunned.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“ I thought you were going to fire me.”

“What?”

“When you told me to close the restaurant.”

“Oh.” I shook my head. “No, Zaid, this is not about you. Jesus, not everything is about you!”

“I didn’t say everything was about me. How often do we close for no reason? And you tell me to come in anyway? I was sure I was getting shitcanned. I spent last night updating my resume.”

“Zaid.” I rubbed my eyes. “Come on.”

“You guys,” said Antoine. “Look.”

We looked.

He held the gnorsalt up to the light. It was crystalline, like quartz. And when we looked closely, we could see colors swirling through it like oil on a puddle.

“What is that about?” asked Zaid.

“No idea,” said Antoine. “I wonder what it tastes like.”

He dropped the gnorsalt from the tongs into his hand.

He took the rock in his other hand, and licked his palm where the rock had been.

“It tastes like salt.”

I said, “Is that what it is? Big salt?”

Zaid said, “I can’t believe you tasted that. It’s from outer space.”

I went to the jar, pulled out a rock with my bare fingers, licked it.

“Fucking hell,” I said. “It is salt.”

“It isn’t salt,” said Antoine. “Salt doesn’t have this coloration.”

“It’s rainbow salt.”

Antoine lay the gnorsalt rock on a cutting board and banged it with a mallet. It broke.

Now we had a big piece of rainbow salt that was broken into smaller bits. Like regular salt, only colorful.

“So far,” Zaid said, “this is underwhelming.”

“Thank you, Zaid,” said Antoine. “Let us not draw conclusions yet.”

He got a pan from the rack above his head, put a burner under it, and swept that broken gnorsalt into the pan.

It melted as soon as it was warm. It turned to a viscous, cloudy liquid.

I said, “That was quick.”

It started to steam, and when it did it filled the room with a smell like nothing I’d smelled before.

Antoine tasted the liquid, now, and said, “It doesn’t taste like it did.”

I tried it myself. “It sure doesn’t.”

“What’s it taste like?” asked Zaid.

“I don’t know,” I said.

It was like the first time I had a glass of wine. I couldn’t have described it, not until I’d had more, and I had to have a lot more before I knew if I liked it or not.

I said, “I’m not sure I’ll be recouping my investment.”

Antoine was writing in one of the black notebooks he kept in his pocket at all times. “It’s too soon to say such things,” he said. “We have time to experiment.”

“What else is in the box?” asked Zaid.

“Freigenberries,” Antoine said, pulling out another jar.

“Do you think,” Zaid said, “they tested these things? Are they totally safe?”

I said, “My guy said they are.”

“You trust him?”

“As much as I trust anybody. Present company excluded.”

“Well,” Zaid said. “It’s the military, right? Who are handling this? They’re in charge of it?”

“Sure, it’s the military.” I took a bite of the plump freigenberry Antoine sliced open, so that its smell, like edible asphalt, filled the kitchen. “That’s a weird berry. But you know how it is. It’s not just the military, it’s the military in service of capital. Like it says in the New Constitution.”

“And what does it say there?”

“I don’t have a copy right here. This thing tastes nothing like it smells.”

“Good for salads,” said Antoine, munching his half of the berry. “Toss it with arugula?”

“Maybe. Not the most versatile thing.”

“You’re so negative.”

“I’m only saying,” Zaid said, “that even if you include capital among the forces that have brought these new things to us, they don’t exactly have a record of keeping the best interests of ordinary citizens in mind.”

“What do you think is going to happen?” I asked, holding up a freigenberry. “You think it’s going to bite you?”

“I don’t know what’s going to happen. But I have a bad feeling about it.”

“How about you, Antoine?”

He didn’t answer. He was focused. He was looking in the box for the next new thing.

I could have fired a gun in the air, and I doubt he would have heard it.

He pulled a jar of black liquid from the space box. It was full of Zösch.

Everyone remembers the first time they saw Zösch. And we were some of the first human beings ever to see that black slime that ran like molasses and tasted nothing like molasses.

I was hoping it would taste good. Because so far none of the things in that box were worth the price I’d paid.

“You want to do the honors this time?” asked Antoine, tilting the jar so the Zösch sloughed to one side.

I took a long spoon, said, “What the hell, right?” dipped the spoon in the Zösch, and tried it for myself.

And I ran to the sink and spat it right back out.

I had not tasted anything so bitter in my life. And the consistency! It was thick, but it was grainy, and something about it made me think of butter.

Antoine tried it for himself.

He was utterly unfazed.

He said later my reaction made him think it would be worse than it was, so he was prepared—but really I think the guy was a mutant. I think nothing fazed him because it was like he wasn’t really living in his body. It was like he controlled it from someplace far away.

Zaid watched the Zösch jar like it might leap up and bite him, which we weren’t sure it wasn’t going to do.

“This is not good,” I said.

“It’s not bad,” said Antoine.

“The fuck it’s not. This is a disaster.”

He said, “Look.” And he got to work.

He tore another skillet off the rack above his head, laid it on the stove, poured avocado oil, diced a red onion in seconds flat, and tossed it in.

We had the best red onions in the world at that place. A guy was growing them upstate and they were unreal.

I was the one who discovered him. I don’t know where he is now. Counting his money full-time, I bet.

Into the pan went some minced garlic and roughly chopped chanterelles.

I watched Antoine with my arms folded. Zaid kept eyeing that jar of Zösch.

Half a minute ticked by. Antoine pulled a spoonful of Zösch from the jar and poured it over what was in the pan.

I’d never seen anything quite like what happened then: the Zösch melted into the mushrooms, like it was set to attack. Like its mission was to coat the mushrooms. A liquid mushroom blanket.

“What did that stuff just do?” asked Zaid.

“I don’t know,” laughed Antoine.

He could laugh. It wasn’t his money that had been thrown after this disaster.

Antoine plated on three plates whatever it was he’d made.

All at once, the three of us took a bite.

And there are things I have no words for, things that language can’t describe, at least not when I’m the one wielding it. Like the first time I ever had a kalamata olive. And the last time I ate pork loin, at a time when such a thing was scarce, when pigs were on the edge of being extinct. I paid $10,000 for that pork loin.

Zösch on its own was an abomination. But if you put it with something else, or a couple of other things, they combined to make something altogether new, unlike anything we’d had before. It would taste something like what you mixed it with, but there was a new element, too, that you couldn’t taste in Zösch on its own. It seemed to come from nowhere.

After a few more experiments, we learned you couldn’t predict what anything with Zösch in it would taste like.

It was fascinating. Unprecedented. Otherworldly—literally. And while I was hung up on how much money I’d spent acquiring the stuff, Antoine was fully absorbed. He took many pages of notes in his black notebook.

We tried cooking Zösch with potatoes, with seitan, with tofu, with rice. We baked Zösch cornbread, and drizzled Zösch over broccoli.

What we made tasted like those things, but it tasted like nothing else, too.

Now on his fourth glass of wine, Zaid said, “This isn’t right.”

I said, “What’s not right?”

“It’s too good. Nothing should taste this good.”

I laughed. Antoine laughed.

But Zaid was serious. He said again, “It isn’t right.”

“It doesn’t matter if it’s right,” I said. “This is it, there’s no going back. And I think maybe we’re going to be rich.”

Antoine suggested we mix Zösch with some bourbon.

I never would have thought bourbon could get better than it was already. I mean, who the hell wants to try and fix bourbon?

Zösch does. That’s who.

And within a half-second of coming into contact with bourbon, Zösch did it. It fixed it. And it was never even broken in the first place.

We spent the next month perfecting the dishes that used the new foods.

We were in no hurry. We weren’t yet allowed to serve the Sariel-infused dishes to anyone.

We would be, soon. Maybe if the new foods had arrived in, I don’t know, 2071, when bureaucrats ruled the land, it would have taken longer to cut through the red tape. They’d have run endless tests and made sure only the biggest players in the game had access to the new ingredients. No advance shipments for the enterprising, well-connected few; no box of Zösch and a dozen other things.

We spent that month in the kitchen in Denver, after hours. Antoine and I stayed in our Denver loft, blasting the AC. It was the middle of spring, and it was hot.

But that kitchen was the perfect place to fool around with the Sariel foods. And when we were done, we had created a new cuisine: interplanetary fusion.

We were ambitious. A little corny, too.

We represented every Earth cuisine we could do justice to with what we had. We made black bean and yakkon tacos, and the world’s first slipwort gnocchi. We invented ragapepper hummus, gnaxxji salads, and cocktails garnished with porp zest.

But the finest dishes we created were those that used Zösch. Stuffed peppers with Zösch. Scrambled tofu with Zösch. Zösch crepes, Chile Con Zösch, Petit Pois with Zösch.

Zösch, we found, adapted to what it was served with. It was the first edible thing we’d encountered that could change what it tasted like, altering its own flavor somehow. Pour it on a sundae and it was better than chocolate syrup. Dump it onto mashed potatoes and it was better than gravy, in ways it would take you a year to put into words.

It’s true. Food critics lost their minds when we rolled these things out.

We stayed up all night, some nights, getting things right. By the time we could legally serve all the young foods, a time when every restaurant but ours was getting their first taste of them, we had it figured out. We had engineered a new way of preparing and serving meals.

We were the only ones who had this head start. We couldn’t fail. We couldn’t lose.

And of course I know now that I should have listened, the night Antoine came in with his notebook open and said he had something to show me.

“I’ve been experimenting with Zösch,” he said.

“Experimenting? What kind of experimenting?”

“Nothing dramatic. I’m not Victor Frankenstein.”

“It must be pretty serious, if you’re coming to me with that look on your face.”

He sat beside me on the couch, where I was drinking a scotch and Zösch on the rocks and watching the news. He held out his notebook for me to see.

“Antoine,” I said. “I can’t read your handwriting. Just tell me what’s up.”

“Okay.” He leafed through his notes.

I rolled my eyes. I took a drink.

“You were with me,” he said, “when we learned that Zösch replicates itself.”

“I was. I remember.”

“When you leave it in the dark, it increases in quantity without outside influence.”

“Yes,” I said into my glass. “I did not forget.”

“I may have been wrong, when I determined why it was doing that. And I think the scientists who’ve studied Zösch are wrong about what it is.”

“You think you know better? How can that many people be wrong?”

“The same reason they could be wrong about all of the things they were wrong about for so long. The same reason it took so many centuries to develop the theory of evolution. Based on the evidence I have gathered the last few days, I have reason to believe Zösch is alive.”

“Have you lost your mind? I’ve looked at that shit under a microscope. It’s not alive.”

“It doesn’t look like it’s alive, because it doesn’t look like any living thing we’ve seen before.”

“It’s crystals. That’s all it is. How could it be alive?”

I think it’s a form of life that’s new to us. Of another nature. It doesn’t breathe, it doesn’t eat, it doesn’t meet our preconceptions of what life must be. All it has in common with us is that it reproduces. And we didn’t recognize it as reproduction because it doesn’t look like reproduction. Not as we have known it.”

“Antoine, don’t you think someone else would have noticed this aside from you? I mean, a lot of people have studied this already. They’re really smart.”

“I doubt I’m the only one to make this discovery. Others must have learned of it as well.”

“What, then? They’re keeping quiet about it?”

He shrugged. He nodded.

“Bullshit.”

“Think about it. No one wants to eat complex organisms anymore. Since all the livestock died off, and we have no meat we can eat, people have no appetite for creatures that can feel pain. They’ve lost the stomach for it.”

“And you think Zösch is alive and that it can feel?”

“I can walk you through my findings.”

“Please don’t call them that.”

“We have to pause production on everything that has Zösch in it until we learn more.”

“You’re out of your mind.”

“I’m telling you.” He put his hand on my arm. “This is serious.”

“You know what? Maybe it is. Maybe it’s the most serious thing in the history of serious things. But maybe I’m not a serious enough guy to halt production of all the prepared foods that are about to hit the market, and to not serve the stuff at my restaurants, which I’ve been planning for months. Maybe I’m not serious enough to lose millions of dollars.”

Antoine looked at me with sad eyes.

I hated his sad eyes.

“It’s too late for this,” I said. “You should have come to me sooner.”

“I tried to come to you with this. Three times.”

“You didn’t try hard enough. And if Zösch is alive, and can think and feel—which I assure you is not the case—then why don’t you work on a way I can talk to it? Because I want to thank it for being so goddamn delicious.”

I downed the rest of my scotch and Zösch.

Business boomed. I opened more restaurants. I sold frozen dinners at supermarkets with the Sariel ingredients inside.

A lot of people hesitated, at first, when it came to trying the new foods. But when they heard how good they were they got over it. We spent a fortune on advertising, to make sure everyone heard about it.

We sold literal tons of Zösch syrup. I don’t know how many tons. It was our bestselling product: Zösch, vinegar, salt, aminos, and I won’t say what else we put in it. Trade secret.

I was busier than ever, traveling to one city then another, opening a new restaurant, meeting with a food distributor, getting Zösch syrup served in the schools alongside ketchup and mustard, proving to the right people it had all the nutrition you could ask for.

At my restaurant in Washington, DC, we served the king of Saudi Arabia himself. When he had his first taste of bread dipped in olive oil, with pepper, gnorsalt, and a dash of Zösch, he said he’d never had anything like it before in his life.

I stood before him in my spotless, white apron, and fought back tears.

The next time Antoine called, his voice didn’t sound right.

I hadn’t heard from him in weeks, hadn’t seen him in months.

He said, “You need to come home.”

“Why?” I said. “I’m busy.”

“I’ve been busy, too.”

“Doing what?”

“Come home and see.”

“Antoine.”

“Now. You need to come home right now.”

He hung up.

Sure I’d go home. But I wasn’t in a hurry to get there. I had another day of helping to set things up at our new place in St. Louis. Someone else could have handled it, sure, but if my name’s about to be put on something I want to make sure it’s right. It’s called quality control.

When I went back to the hotel that night, I undressed and lit a joint, and Zaid called. He said there was a problem in Denver.

“What kind of problem? Why aren’t you handling it?”

“It’s a customer.”

He switched on the hologram and appeared in my bedroom. I’d forgotten to set it to Do Not Disturb. I was sitting up in bed, smoking, naked.

“Oh,” he said. “Sorry, boss.”

I didn’t cover myself.

“What’s going on?”

“Somebody came in a little while ago. Some lady? She said her husband’s in the ICU. He can’t move. His eyes are open, but he won’t talk or anything. She said the doctors said it’s not a stroke. She said they don’t know what it is. She said there must be something in the food he ate. The alien food. He left here, I don’t know, three hours ago?”

“All right. How serious is this?”

“Pretty serious. She was freaked out.”

“I’m not asking how serious she was. I’m asking if she had a lawyer with her.”

“I don’t think she had time to hire a lawyer.”

“All right, then. If she comes back with one, you know who to call.”

I hung up. I called the head of my legal team, made sure our people were briefed and ready. If that woman came back, with or without counsel, I’d have half a dozen of my guys there as holograms, to send her reeling back to her idiot husband.

How was I supposed to know she wasn’t blaming us for his stroke because she wanted money? I thought she was making it up. I thought she might not even have a husband.

Antoine blinked into the room. Another hologram.

“Holy shit,” I said, taking a drag, “it’s a convention in here.”

“Why aren’t you home?” he said. “You said you were coming back.”

He looked tired. And since I’d gone away, he’d been growing his beard, skipping haircuts, and otherwise losing his grip on his appearance. He looked like he’d been on a frontier, somewhere.

I thought for a second. “That’s right,” I said. “I did say I was coming back.”

“Summon a chopper. Get out here.”

“I can’t. Something’s up in Denver. Zaid just called.”

“Did someone who ate Zösch get paralyzed? Like they had a stroke?”

“How do you know about that?”

“Don’t go to Zaid. You need to get here now. I’ll tell you everything.”

He hung up on me again.

Hours later, stoned and airsick from a rough chopper ride, I found Antoine in our kitchen, though it was hard to find him in our kitchen.

I wasn’t sure it even was a kitchen anymore.

He had transformed it. He had filled it with beakers and vials, burners and pipettes. Metal rods attached to wires stuck out of jars of Zösch. The wires ran to machines, and other wires fed from the machines into what once was a soundboard, but which Antoine had converted to something I could never have made sense of on my own.

“Antoine,” I said, “what’s going on here?”

He stood. He’d been crouched behind one of the machines.

I didn’t know what the machine was—some kind of computer from long ago, when computers were big enough to crouch behind. I don’t know why he needed that.

His beard looked worse in person than it had as a hologram. He had a look in his eyes I didn’t like.

“You took your time getting here,” he said.

“I was busy.”

He scoffed.

“You know who pays for this house, don’t you?”

“Come look at this.”

“I pay for this house. Come look at what?”

“Put your hand here.” He pointed to a metal cylinder he’d mounted vertically so that it rose out of what had once been my stove. I followed the wires sticking from it with my eyes and saw that they ran from machine to machine to a jar of Zösch.

“Why should I put my hand there?”

He took me by the arm and put my hand on it himself.

I felt an electric shock. Or something like an electric shock.

It didn’t hurt. It was gentle. The shock ran in waves through my hand, up my arm.

I knew at once why Antoine had that look in his eyes. He’d been spending all his time lately with this electric current running through him.

How did I know that?

I took my hand off the cylinder.

“What did they say?”

“What did who say?”

“Zösch. They spoke to you.”

“Have you lost your mind? No one said anything. Your machine shocked the shit out of me.”

He grabbed my arm again and put my hand back on the cylinder.

He was quick. I didn’t think to pull away.

And I knew as soon as I felt that shock again that Antoine was right.

They were telling me he was right.

I let go again.

“We are in trouble, aren’t we?”

“Yes. We are.”

How was I supposed to know that what looked like space gravy—and was handed over to us by the authorities to serve at restaurants—was a vast assemblage of cells that worked together to solve problems and make decisions? That even when those cells spread across the surface of the Earth, they could think like we can, only better? That the reason complex intelligent life never evolved on Sariel III was that the planet was covered already with simple intelligent life—life that was so smart it could prevent anything that could threaten it from ever evolving there?

I know all of this because I’d placed my hand on that machine. I touched it for two seconds, and I learned all of that.

Yes. I know. Antoine alerted me to the likelihood that the Zösch were alive before that point. I could have listened to him then.

But he never said anything about them being smart. He never said they might be choosing to adapt their taste to how other foods tasted, rearranging their molecular structure so more of us would want to eat them.

And why were they doing that?

I asked Antoine that question, after I was done throwing up in the sink, which was a reaction to what I’d learned from my first couple of shocks.

He said, “You want to know why they do what they do. Don’t you want to know how I learned to talk to it?”

“Later,” I said. “Just tell me what they want.”

“They don’t want anything. They don’t know what it means to want.”

“Dear God!”

“They’re beautiful creatures.”

I clutched the metal cylinder again.

No words passed between me and Zösch. They didn’t use words. But I knew as I spoke to Zösch that I was talking with all of Zösch. The metal handle was wired to one jar, but through it I could reach the whole, vast being.

They said, without having to say it, that they were everywhere, now—not only in the foods we’d put it in, and not only in the bodies of the people who’d eaten that food.

They had passed through human bodies and spread from sewers to waterways. They had reached into the trenches that run across the floors of our oceans, where humans can’t go. Zösch had embedded itself in the world, like microplastics before them. They had done it fast, and we couldn’t breed new bacteria to eat it, like we did with microplastics. Zösch were too smart for that.

They had done the same thing on Sariel III. Their home planet. Now here they were.

When the Corps discovered Zösch, they thought they were nothing more than another inert substance, confined to the pools of black slime they found them in. But there was nothing inert about it, and bits of Zösch were everywhere you couldn’t see them, not just in those pools. They were in the water, in the air, in other plants, and in the clouds. They saw, felt, tasted everything. They were in control. They didn’t show up in the Corps’ analyses of water and soil because they knew how to outsmart their instruments, how to hide from us.

While Zösch explored the Earth, they reproduced constantly. In the dark places—in pipes and water treatment plants, rivers, lakes, and oceans—they thrived and spread farther than anything.

When they described to me how they were growing, I could feel the whole of Zösch growing. They conveyed the information to me in the form of sheer sensations. I could feel all that they said, the knowledge running through me faster than words. My body felt like an instrument Zösch was learning how to play.

I let the metal handle go. I left the kitchen.

“Where are you going?” Antoine asked.

“I’m calling my lawyer.”

But I didn’t call him first. I called the CEO of my company.

She asked if there was a problem, and for a second it was hard to answer. I realized why Antoine had that look in his eyes, why something about him seemed off. Talking to Zösch, even for a moment, made it hard to form words.

“Shut everything down,” I said. “It’s all over.”

She asked me to explain.

I said, “Zösch are alive.”

After a pause, she said, “Could you slow down? Explain what’s going on?”

“No. Call the restaurant managers, call the distributors of our microwave dinners—”

“They’re not microwave dinners.”

“Whatever the fuck they are, don’t let one more of them get sold.”

“I can’t do that,” she sighed. “It’ll ruin us.”

“We’re already ruined. That’s the point.”

I hung up and called the lead lawyer. I briefed him on the situation. It was all hands on deck.

I went back into what used to be my kitchen. I pulled up a stool, and while Antoine asked what I was going to do, I put both my hands around the handle of the device, the direct line to Zösch.

I don’t know how I knew how to talk back to the Zösch, how I made meaning by pressing on a metal thing. Somehow, though, the thoughts in my head traveled down my arm and through my hand to meet them.

I told them I was sorry I had eaten so many of them.

They didn’t understand what I meant. They didn’t comprehend Sorry.

And they didn’t think they had been wronged. They thought they had consumed us, not the other way around.

I had an image in my head of eating a pumpkin and finding myself growing out of the inside wall of a vast pumpkin.

Electric thoughts ran down my arm and I knew what Antoine knew. That the husband of the woman in Denver was an experiment. Others had suffered the same fate since then, people we hadn’t yet heard about.

Zösch weren’t cruel. They were only running tests. They wanted to see how our bodies would respond to stimuli.

We were in their test kitchen, now—only Zösch didn’t want to eat us. They had no need for that. They didn’t eat.

I didn’t know why they did what they did. I asked them not to do it, but I don’t think they understood.

I spent a long time pleading with Zösch to spare us, to not give more people strokes. I tried to make them understand.

I had a hard time paying attention to what was going on in the room while I spoke to Zösch—it was like my mind was being split in two—but I knew my phone was blowing up. I knew what it was about. Zösch told me they were running more tests on people. The calls must have been about those who’d had strokes as a result.

I had to do something. Didn’t I?

I mean, I’d done some awful things in my life. I’d cheated on Antoine, cut corners with the health department, embezzled money—and one time, long ago, I broke a young man’s heart. I felt nothing when I did it, and wondered for the first time—not for the last time—if everyone else had something in them that was missing from me. Something that made them good.

But minds were blinking out, one by one, all over the world. Maybe I have no heart, but I had to do something about that.

I asked Zösch if they were in me. If they circulated in my system.

They didn’t understand the concept of Me.

I knew I had to make them understand it, if I was to get anywhere. Zösch had to realize that human beings weren’t one mass organism with a shared intelligence that could spread across the world and still think as one.

I knew from the way the electric shocks felt that Zösch had no sense of time like we had, that they had no sense of history. Their experience was unified. When all your constituent parts, all the little selves that make up your species, are bound together, then when one of those selves dies it’s like shedding skin cells. It’s nothing.

Zösch knew their history as a constant present. There was no past. Everything was now.

I thought the way to tell Zösch that one life was precious to us, that it meant something it didn’t mean to Zösch, would be to tell them a piece of our history. And so I told them about something Antoine and I had talked about, not long after we’d opened the box and seen Zösch for the first time.

We talked about how this wasn’t the first time something like it had happened before, how we were repeating a drama that had played out centuries before we were born.

Way back in the middle of our second millennium—I explained to Zösch without using words—if you lived in Africa or the Middle East, Europe or Asia, you had no clue what was growing on the other side of the world. You’d never seen a tomato. You hadn’t heard of corn. And when those things started showing up at harbors?

Imagine it.

Imagine what Italian food must have looked like before they had tomato sauce. They didn’t even have noodles for the longest time. Those came from China.

No spaghetti. No ziti. No lasagna as we know it.

Can you imagine going to an Italian restaurant that didn’t serve those things? What would you order?

Garlic bread. That’s it!

Now imagine you’re an Italian chef in 1492 AD. You’re at the top of your game, you know everything there is to know about feta and artichokes—I almost said zucchini, but those came from Central America. Potatoes were imported from Peru.

But you’re the best of the best, the master of carrots and chicken. And then out of nowhere this jackass comes back from his suicide trip across the Atlantic with a round, red thing that everyone thinks is a vegetable but is really a fruit.

You can slice it, crush it, chop it. It’s like nothing anyone’s eaten before. And everybody wants to put it in everything.

It’s the tomato.

Huzzah, shithead! If you don’t figure out what to do with it fast, you’ll be out of a fucking job.

You do the best you can. You get a handful of those little guys, you see what you can do.

And before long, you’ve got the world’s first pizza. And some beautiful maniac down the street makes a plate of spaghetti with meatballs.

And you change the course of history. You don’t conquer any nations. You’re not Julius Caesar. You haven’t discovered electricity.

You’ve done something bigger than that. You’ve changed what people put in their mouths. You’ve given them something new to crave, something to look forward to eating after a long day’s work, something that a year before then no one on your continent had ever even smelled.

You’ve changed how they sustain themselves, how they put nutrients into their bodies and one another’s bodies. You’ve introduced to the world a new way for people to show they love one another. You’ve expanded the vocabulary of human relationships.

That is what cooking is about. That is what I have devoted my life to.

I didn’t even realize that myself, until I told it to Zösch. I’d never had to formulate the thought before. But it was true.

And Zösch seemed to know it was true.

Something in what I told it made it understand what it was doing to us, that it was destroying the bodies, minds, and lives of individual people, and that those people and their lives were precious to us.

It worked. I felt, through that metal handle, that everything Zösch had been doing was paused.

I had to act fast.

Zösch said they couldn’t halt what they were doing forever. They said they had to carry on with their work.

I asked how many people they needed for their experiments.

They still hadn’t quite wrapped their collective so-called mind around the basis for that question. The sense we have of being individuals. Our identities, and the lives we lead apart from one another.

But after some time passed, I understood that Zösch had made quick progress on this. Their answer was that they didn’t need more than one person. One of us would suffice. Now that they realized we were all different people, or that we thought we were all different people, and not just a vast species, like themselves, they said they could work on just one living body, not thousands.

And so, after a split-second of hard thought, I did what anyone would do.

Or, not anyone.

Actually, a lot of people wouldn’t have done what I did then.

A lot of chefs wouldn’t have done it. They’re egomaniacs.

I may, in fact, have been the only chef of my standing who would act as I did in that moment.

I offered myself to Zösch. I asked if they would settle for experimenting only on me. They could take my mind away, and use it for what they needed, if it meant they could spare everyone else.

The answer came back in an instant.

Zösch agreed to my proposal. They said okay.

That was when my grip on the handle began to relax at last. I began to be aware again of what was happening in the room.

My hand was stiff. My arm, too.

Morning light shone through the kitchen window, which meant I’d been there at the stove for at least an hour. My phone was still buzzing on the counter. The first thing I wondered was how its battery hadn’t died. It was low when I got there.

Any second now, I would leave my body. Zösch would take over. I’d be there, but I would be gone.

I wondered what it would be like. To be alive but unable to move. To be locked in myself until I died.

I wondered what was taking Zösch so long.

That was when I saw Antoine lying on the floor. And I knew at once what had taken place.

I should have known what would happen. I wish I had known.

Zösch had not yet mastered the concept of individual human beings. They were still getting the hang of human experience.

When I offered myself to Zösch, and said they could take me as their living cadaver, their perpetual test subject, they still didn’t quite know the difference between me and Antoine. They couldn’t tell us apart, didn’t fully know what apart in this case even meant.

They had mistaken him for me. They had thought they were still talking to him.

He was gone before his body hit the floor.

Nothing that’s happened since then has mattered much to me. Not the bankruptcy, not the foreclosures, not the testimony I gave before Congress, where I was so drunk I could barely sit upright.

There may have been several of those. I don’t remember and I haven’t checked.

After I lost Antoine, I lived in a fog.

Things got a lot worse before they got good again. I lost everything before I got back some of it.

It took time for everyone to realize the wave of Zösch strokes had halted for good. All they knew was that a lot of people had eaten Sariel food and gotten sick, that more of them could start getting sick at any time, and that it was my fault.

Or, rather, they thought it was my fault, when really it was the fault of the Interstellar Expeditionary Corps. They were the ones who had brought Zösch to Earth, not me. I’ve never even been in space. I have no interest in going. I hear the food is awful.

But I can’t blame people for blaming me for how Zösch took their loved ones away. I did, after all, ensure that everyone in the world associated Zösch with me. I had hired a marketing team to make that happen.

I got hate mail, I got death threats. I went into hiding, and three times I tried to kill myself.

I was in a bad place. Zaid helped me out of it. Hooray for Zaid.

It worked out, in the end. A few months after Antoine’s mind went dark, and the light left his eyes, but he kept on breathing, Zösch decided it was in their best interests—and in ours—to keep the human race around. To help us, to make us better. Since they were living in all of our bodies, and in the trees, the grass, the air, and the soil, and since their intelligence is vaster than anything we can comprehend without their help, they were in a fine position to improve our lives, our species, our world.

Once they made up their minds, the change happened overnight.

People stopped getting sick, first off.

There’s no cancer anymore. There are no diseases. We don’t even catch colds, because the Zösch supplement our immune systems.

We all stopped getting hangovers. Zösch preserve us, now, from hangovers.

No one goes hungry. When we don’t eat for a while, Zösch reproduce in our stomachs so we feed on them.

Zösch live in our brains. Mental illness is no more. No one gets dementia.

People make mistakes, and hearts get broken, but no one gets depressed for no reason.

Zösch cleaned Earth’s oceans in a year and restored balance to the natural world, which they say they will maintain in perpetuity. The forests are thriving and the ice caps are back.

Last week, it snowed in Maine, for the first time in fifty years.

We are all partially Zösch, now. Zösch are the human race’s better half, the piece we were missing that has made us whole.

We are each other’s perfect symbiotes. Intergalactic soulmates.

I don’t know for sure what they get out of the deal, except that we spread them to new planets, new species, new ecosystems.

That’s probably it, actually. We have spaceships, and they hitch rides with us on those.

The human race is expanding, while I stay here and attend to Antoine. I file his nails, cut his hair, bathe him, read to him. Every time a ship travels to a star we never thought we’d reach before Zösch showed us how to get there, I sit with him and a tall glass of whiskey, and I read him the news of things we never thought possible.

He takes his meals through a tube, but we eat together, still. I cook meals the way he laid them out in his black notebooks, the ones he wrote his ideas, thoughts, and recipes in, starting long before we met, when he was young and his whole life was ahead of him. There are hundreds of those notebooks, and in some of them he wrote about us.

The chill breeze that skips off the waves to power her flight tells she is somewhere north (the Bering sea, maybe?). Her shoulder muscles, the ones that power her flapping, ache. There is not so much as a piece of driftwood. There is only the vast, unbroken sea.

Calypso flies for days.

She expects hunger to gnaw at her stomach but she only feels emptiness. It’s like meditation, just like emptying my mind, but I’m terrible at that, aren’t I. Her muscles suffer but do not fail. She yearns for sleep. Calypso soars onwards.

Days become weeks become months. She waits for the moment when her body can no longer sustain her, but it never comes.

What torments her more than the starvation, the sleeplessness and the physical fatigue, is the boredom. The ubiquity of her numb flight never changes. One day she looks around and wonders if she has moved at all. The slapping of the waves is the same as it has always been. Calypso has adjusted to the sensation of air under her feathers so much that she is unsure whether she is moving or floating in one place. Maybe this is meditation, maybe I finally figured it out.

Calypso angles her beak downward and closes her wings into her body. She plummets towards the waves. The arctic air is freezing but the water will be colder. Bald eagles cannot swim. Even this sensation (faster, faster) of dive bombing does not shock, exhilarate, or scare her.

The moment Calypso the eagle’s beak pierces the surface is the moment Calypso the woman wakes. Under the outline of her body, the mattress is damp with sweat that has cooled. On the bedside table is the empty potion bottle, which is really no different than a mason jar, but Calypso can’t help but think of it as a potion bottle. A dried film of the purple liquid paints the floor of the bottle and traces a riverbed up one side towards the mouth to record the path the draught flowed on its way to her lips.

The enormously fat man, built like a blob of melted wax, shuffles over to her bed.

“Just coming up on fifteen hours. Not so bad.”

Calypso wonders hazily what his name was. Pemba. That’s right. Her bed is the third in a row of identical cots. Every other one is unoccupied. Calypso tries to sit up but Pemba forces her down with meaty hands.

“Don’t stand. You’re awake but that doesn’t mean that all of the chemical has left you. Stay and rest.”

Pemba presses something with his foot, and with a metallic vrrr, Calypso is sitting up. The sheets shift slightly and Calypso recalls she is naked.

“How did you get your hands on a dozen hospital beds?” Calypso’s voice is dull and feels like it is coming from somewhere far away, certainly not her mouth.

“You were out for fifteen hours. Pretty good for a first potion.”

Calypso shakes her head, trying to rid herself of the fatigue like a cloud of black flies. She feels the pounding of a bell knocker between her ears. Her head droops the way your eyelids do after many hours of sleeplessness, but she cannot shut her brain as she has just woken up from fifteen hours of unconsciousness. In the back of her throat is acid.

She looks at Pemba and says, as clearly as she can, “Where was the fucking sage?”

“That potion does not induce a sage. You know this.”

“I was an eagle. A stupid bald eagle! And I didn’t see shit. So what’s the point?”

“Your mind needs time to adjust. Otherwise it will be unable to handle the stronger drugs. This first potion went well.”

“I paid for a sage. Give me the fucking sage.” Calypso glares at Pemba. She may not have the physical strength to overpower the man, but she knows what she looks like. She knows the half-moons beneath her eyes and the menacing darkness behind them. Calypso has seen the effect she has on passersby when she pierces them with her gaze; she’s seen how they shrink on the sidewalk, how they are caught between pretending she does not exist and keeping an eye on her.

Pemba does not flinch. Pemba sees people as desperate as her every day.

“You will not see a sage today. It would kill you. I have told you this.”

“Give me the sage or you can kiss goodbye to any more cash you think you’re getting out of me. Don’t think I haven’t noticed you’re not exactly overflowing with customers.”

“If you die, I will receive no more payments.”

The cloud in Calypso’s head is dispersing, leaving a biting vacuum. She lurches forward, and, lightning quick, Pemba pushes her back down. Now Pemba is the one scowling, and Calypso, despite herself, is shocked at how the round, even countenance can flip to hostility.

“I need you to behave if we are going to have any relationship. I cannot bring the sages to those who don’t behave. It is dangerous, and I don’t do well with danger.”

“Fuck.”

“I do well with trust.”

“I’ve gotta get out of here. I’ve gotta get home. I need to sleep.”

“Can I trust you, Calypso?” Pemba’s hand is on Calypso’s collarbone.

“Goddamn it. You can trust me.”

“Stay here to rest for one hour. Then you may leave. I will see you in a week. You will bring me the rest of the payment then. If you try to see a sage today, you will die. And then neither of us will get what we want.”

Calypso remains silent and refuses to meet the man’s gaze. Pemba appears unbothered.

“Do your best to relax. Clear your mind. You have been meditating?”

“What the fuck do you think?”

He is nonplussed. “Have you been meditating?”

“Of course! That’s the one thing you told me to do, isn’t it?”

“Keep meditating. I’ll see you in a week.”

Pemba ambles away from the bed, easy as can be. His bulk vanishes into the darkness.

As soon as the fat man is out of sight, Calypso grabs the handrail and pulls herself up from the bed. “Probably stole ’em from a fucking hospital,” she mutters. When she gets to her feet she sways and her vision shrinks to a tunnel through which the only thing that can be seen is a colorless plastic package of syringes. As her sight returns, she throws on her clothes and flees the basement as quickly as her feet will take her. Calypso bangs her head on a hanging pipe and bruises her knees falling on the stairs and yells out a cuss each time, but Pemba does not reappear.

A week later, Calypso is supine on the hospital bed and Pemba is holding a vial to the light. The circles under her eyes are no smaller.

“I told you to rest.”

Calypso doesn’t know if she can feel the dried sweat from her last visit still on the mattress or if she’s imagining it. There are no windows in Pemba’s lair.

“I’ve been sleeping like a baby.”

“If you lie to me, it does not matter. If you lie to yourself, you may die. You know this is true.”

“I’ve been fucking sleeping. Shut up and give me the potion already. I don’t pay you to talk.”

“You don’t pay me at all.”

“I’ve paid you some.”

“You don’t pay me what you owe me.”

“How many fucking times do I have to tell you? The money’s on the way. It’s tied up with the lawyers.”

“Calypso, you must rest. Rest clears your mind. And meditate. This is the only way the sages will consent to meet with you.”

Calypso does not so much as twitch a muscle. The only sound that can be heard is the drip of some unseen liquid.

Pemba sighs and walks away. “Sleep for a week and come back with money.”

“Hey!” Pemba wheels at Calypso’s shout and raises his eyebrows. “I can’t fucking sleep, don’t you know that? Why the hell else would I be in this hellhole spending my last dime shooting up all this shit with some fucking crackpot?”

Pemba returns to the bed and stands statuesque for a moment. Then he hands her the vial. “Be careful,” he says. “You are in a tough spot, and the sages may help. But they can only reveal what is already inside of you. There is no help from outside that can fix what is inside. You must do that.”

By the time Pemba has finished talking, Calypso is adjusting to her form as a silkworm. Crawling with six legs comes instinctively to her and requires no more conscious thought than walking on two legs does. Her body trundles across the web of silk like a sleeve of coagulated milk.

“Look up,” says the silkworm (is she the sage?) next to her. Her tone is serene and Calypso feels that if the silkworm had been a human, she would be smiling. The two silkworms are alone on a cluster of mulberry leaves pockmarked with holes where they have grazed. The stem of the mulberry bush curves downward into a white abyss, giving Calypso the sense that they are above the sky. As Calypso moves, the plant jiggles, but she feels certain she will not fall.

“You must be the sage,” she says to the other silkworm (fucking finally, a sage!). The sage does not respond. Her back is arched in an upward-dog yoga pose.

Calypso follows suit. Two inches above them, a tapestry of silk extends infinitely. It is dense enough to block the view of anything behind it. Calypso looks from filament to filament, entranced by its luster. The weave contains no discernible pattern but instead a random assortment of dizzying colors. These colors are so vibrant they give the impression that they’re not dyed silk. The silk really is that color, right down to its core.

“What is this?” Calypso asks.

“You should have listened to Pemba’s briefing,” says the sage (damn it, she’s right, isn’t she?), and lets out a slow, echoing laugh.

Some threads, Calypso notices, are the same color as others — the exact same color. The most common color is somewhere between yellow and pink, like the blush she’d blend onto her cheeks (don’t think of that) or the rosé that she and Britt would drink on the rooftop of the Classics department (don’t think of that, for god’s sake). She hones in on one thread of this color. As she stares, its end disconnects from the web, leaving a pinpoint of white light, and bends towards her. Calypso the silkworm stares at it in recognition. I know exactly what color that yellow-pink is.

The other silkworm swivels towards her. “Don’t touch that,” she screams. It is too late. Calypso’s silkworm nose nudges the tip of the strand to find that it is the soft of pure silk, not the poke of plastic twine.

The yellow-pink strand doubles, then doubles, then doubles again. It grows to a sheet of threads, slapping and rubbing its ends against Calypso’s face all the while. They tickle her and she feels as if she is going to sneeze so she pushes forward, hard but controlled, an equal effort between her two arms (I have arms again?) like pushing a swing. The fluttering of the silken head of hair flies in the breeze (no) but it’s a few feet ahead of her and below it, she can see the furious pedaling of sneakers that she found at Goodwill not two weeks ago (No) and the girl is biking, she’s biking all by herself and something like pride is (no no no no NO) swelling within Calypso’s chest and she’s laughing (oh god!) and her legs burn with the running she’s not so young any more is she but she doesn’t mind she sprints trying to catch up and the worry and the fiero are equally balanced in her and the girl is squealing in delight (please no no no no) and Calypso’s stride is opening up maybe she’s not so old after all eh but the girl is pedaling faster and faster around the little asphalt loop in the pocket park she’ll never catch her now and

The other silkworm is pressing her body against Calypso’s. Silkworms are not warm-blooded, but Calypso can feel the little warmth where their exoskeletons touch.

“How was that?” the sage asks.

“Get the fuck off me,” says Calypso.

“I should have warned you. The webs can bring back ghosts.”

“Let’s get this over with,” says Calypso. “What the hell is all this,” she attempts to gesticulate upwards but can’t (goddamn it! I’ve lost my arms again), “shit?”

“Are you sure you’re okay?”

“Let me guess, those are all my memories?”

“Not quite. They’re figments of your character. This is your life’s tapestry.”

“Like bits of my brain?”

“Sort of. But your character is about who you are. It’s not about your cognitive processes.”

“So explain to me, then, what the hell all these things are.”

“I’d be happy to.” The sage turns to face Calypso, who upward-dogs to look at the tapestry.

“Every strand is a piece of who you are. Not your ability, not your history, but something that makes up you in the present day. These pieces comprise exclusively of what you have learned from other people. I don’t mean learning like you learn in school; I mean learning like you absorb in your everyday life. Everyone knows that you grow alike those who you spend your time with, but most don’t realize how fine-grained this is: every interaction you ever have contributes to your person in a big or small way. The colors, of course, correspond to the individuals who changed you. The light-ish blue ones — you see those scattered about — those are from your mom. I’m sure you’ve noticed that they’re the color of her eyes. If there are twelve strands, your mother’s blue is one of them. That’s how responsible she is for who you are. One in twelve. You might not think that’s a lot for the person who raised you, but really it is, when you start to consider everyone who has affected you. She’s left a strong mark on you. That murky black one, that’s from you dad. If there are one-hundred-and-ninety fibers, he makes up seven of them.”

“Nope. I never knew my dad.”

“And yet he left a mark on you all the same. We learn nearly as much from someone’s absence as we do from their presence. Like it or not, what he taught you is seven in one-hundred-and-ninety of your being.”

“Yeah, well, three percent’s not so fucking great for a parent. Look at my mom, she’s got ten percent. That’s what a parent should be.”

The sage acts as if she can’t hear Calypso. “And these sort of light-pink ones, the ones that are all over…”

“Doesn’t take a genius to figure that one out.” There are so many.

“Well, I suppose you don’t need any help there. You just saw that memory, after all. What I find really interesting is that so many of these fibers are not repeated many times across the tapestry. A lot of them are even one-offs. And that’s across this whole tapestry, which is miles wide. A less diverse tapestry is the sign of a narrow, closed mind. You’ve got a beautifully multi-colored web, Calypso. You’ve taken influence from thousands and thousands of people in your life. That’s good. You’ve learned from every friend you’ve ever had. People you’ve worked with or bumped into on the street or served you coffee. It’s all here. It’s all a part of you. It all makes up who you are today.”

“If you say so.”

“Take this thread.” The sage nods towards a royal purple thread, handling it with practiced mind-control, and it bends towards them. The silk loop falls between the noses of the two worms, so close that an exhale from either would push it into the other’s face (be careful, don’t touch it like you touched the other one). It is tiny and diaphanous like a spider’s rappel and Calypso instinctively recoils, worried that it will break.

Calypso feels the memory incompletely, the way you hallucinate when you’re drifting into a nap.

She sprints up the steps of the library, each footfall crunching a cluster of brown rock-salt beneath her boots. At the top another student — a sophomore, by the looks of it — pulls the key from the door and adjusts a checkered scarf wrapped around his neck. Between breaths that make puffy clouds, Calypso pleads with him to re-open the library, just for a minute. She needs a book, she says. She has a test in the morning. The boy looks out with eyes that tell the story of another tired college student more than ready to hit the hay and says no. The library is closed, Calypso should have come earlier, what kept her so late anyways. But the boy doesn’t walk away just yet. Calypso hangs her head. She meant to come earlier but had to run to the drugstore. Her baby is sick and so, of course, she can feel it coming on too. She needs this class to pass, and she needs to pass to graduate, and she sure as hell needs the degree to get a job. The boy shakes his head and the key clicks as it fits in the lock. Five minutes, he says, drawing a cigarette from his jacket pocket and looking blankly into the night.

“That act of kindness,” says the sage, the thread retreating from the pair of silkworms to return to its place in the weave, “changed your character, just a tiny bit, even though you forgot all about him the next week. You never spoke to that man again — you never even got his name, and he doesn’t remember you either — but he’s a part of you. He’s just one strand, but he made you kinder.”

“And now I’m a regular old mother Teresa.”

“It might be imperceptible, but it’s there. The threads just go on and on and on, and there are new ones all the time. No one’s tapestry is ever finished.”

“How nice!” says Calypso (really, thanks a lot, off my rocker in a basement off Spring street for an art lesson). “That’s really something special. Now how does that help me?”

“Help you?” The sage nibbles the leaf they stand on. “I’m a silkworm. I’m just explaining the silk.”

Calypso (fuck this!) trundles towards a patch that is entirely made up of the yellow-pink threads. She focuses on them and they bend as if an invisible finger is curling through them.

“Calypso, what are you doing?” Calypso ignores the sage. She backs up as she pulls, concentrating with all her might. As the threads stretch taut she feels resistance build up like a headache and she grits her silkworm teeth (pull, damn you). They’re at their maximal stretch. One snaps. Oh God!.

Calypso shrieks. Her chest seizes (I’m on Fire oh dear God). The other silk strands rubber band back to their original spot in the tapestry. Her silkworm body curls into a fetal circle. She rolls and rolls and falls from one leaf to the next (on Fire Fire Fire). The sage hustles towards her, hopping from leaf to leaf, but can’t catch up. Calypso cannot grasp at her chest because she is a silkworm (I’m Trapped) so she rolls and rolls and rolls and falls.

When Calypso wakes, her eyes are stained with tears.

Pemba is standing over her. He’s smiling. “You have been meditating.”

Calypso wipes her eyes on the sheet and sits up. “Didn’t I fucking tell you that?”

“Very good, Calypso. Was your mind clear enough for a sage to come?”

“I’ve been meditating every day this week. Like I told you.”

“Very good, very good.” Pemba’s face grows rounder still as he beams at Calypso. “Which sage did you see?”

Calypso stumbles to her feet, again feeling the darkness creep in from the edges of her vision, and Pemba does not stop her. “How soon can I see the next sage?”

Pemba stands in the direction of the exit. He is still smiling but his eyes are sad as he watches Calypso dress. “None of the sages can bring her back, Calypso. I have told you this. You know this.”

“Get out of the way. I’ve gotta get home. When can I come back?”

“You have the payment?”

“I’ll get the fucking money.” Calypso picks up her belt, drops it, picks it up again.

“How?”

“How do you get these hospital beds and besides that the fucking potions? Ask me no questions, I’ll tell you no lies. What that means is, none of your goddamn business.”

“Come back in a week. Don’t forget to meditate.” Calypso is dressed but Pemba remains in the corridor, blocking it with his bulk.

“Move it.”

“The potions can’t bring your daughter back, Calypso. You know this.”

Pemba swirls a potion the color of sewage. When he shakes the vial, dark clouds rise from the bottom like muck in shallow water.

“Shake it again before you shoot it. And make sure you get all the dregs down.”

Calypso extends her hand but Pemba does not proffer the potion. “Which sage is next?”

Pemba shakes his head, and Calypso imagines this motion stirring his thoughts from rest like the potion. “I have told you this. The sages only bring out what is already inside of you. I can’t predict the next sage any more than I can predict what you’ll eat for breakfast tomorrow. You know this.”

Calypso makes a swipe for the potion and misses.

“Trust,” says Pemba. “I need to trust you.”

“Fuck. I’m sorry.”

“How can I be sure you’ll pay what you have promised if you are the sort of person who grabs the vial out of my hands?”

“I told you, you’ll get the money. Tuesday by the latest. If you can’t keep this business on its feet for another six days, that’s on you.”

“It’s a lot of money, Calypso.”

“Fuck.”

“I’d like the money now.”

“I told you. The life insurance payment comes on Tuesday. Then we’ll be square.”

“You have promised me the life insurance payment before, Calypso.”

“They delayed it. You know how lawyers are. Always want to cross more T’s and dot more I’s. I crawl up his ass whenever I have the chance. This hurts me too, you know. I want the money just as bad as you do. He promised me. Tuesday.”

“Do you trust his promises?”

“I’ll get it to you. Don’t worry about it. Don’t go fucking soft on me, Pemba.”

“Can I trust your promises?”

“The life insurance payment gets delivered Tuesday. Maybe the bank will take a day, so Wednesday I’ll get the cash and bring it in. First thing in the morning. I’ll wake up early to bring it in. I’ll bring you a bagel too. Lox and cream cheese and scallions on an everything bagel. How’s that?”

“My patience is wearing thin.”

“You can trust me.”

“Tell me something to build my trust.”

“The money’s on its way.”

“How did your daughter die?”

“Fuck you.”

“Let’s trust each other.”

“I’ll bring coffee with the bagel.”

“Calypso.”

“Cancer. Leukemia.”

“Did she suffer?”

“Fuck off. That’s enough of this bullshit. Give me the potion. Give it.”

“Being honest with me may help you be honest with yourself.”

“Go to hell.”

“If you’re seeing my sages, I should know what you’re asking them. ”

Calypso seethed. “She didn’t suffer much. They do a good job in the hospital. They keep the kids happy, as best they can, you know, given the circumstances.”

“Did your daughter have to go through chemotherapy?”

“Fuck.”

“Calypso.”

“Yes. A bit. That part was tough. But we made it through. As a family, you know.”

“But your husband left?”

“Boyfriend, not husband. And that wasn’t until after. He couldn’t take it.”

“Thank you for sharing, Calypso.”

“You’re sick in the head.”

“I feel certain I can trust you.”

“You’re sick where it counts. Something’s fucking wrong up there.”

Without warning, Pemba jerks forward and wraps his fingers around Calypso’s throat. When Calypso’s mouth gasps for air, Pemba upends the potion into it. Calypso is under before she can make a move.

Calypso the cicada nymph is underground. She senses it is dark, though she does not have eyes, and she can also perceive other elements of her surroundings: the soil on her back and under her spindly legs. Goddamn it, he put me under without my consent, I’ll see how he likes a lawsuit (well, I can’t exactly call the cops, can I?). Beside her is another cicada, though Calypso does not comprehend how she knows this.

Calypso and the sage set into chewing what is at their mouths: wet, chalky, like tree bark. It’s not tree bark, she realizes; it’s tree roots. Calypso isn’t exactly hungry, but is driven by a deeper atavistic instinct that overrides hunger as it overrides all of the brain’s desires. Chewing is a default instinct for cicada nymphs, so eating involves relaxation more than conscious effort. It is reassuring to Calypso to have her brain’s noise drowned by one aim.

“Okay, give it to me straight, sage. Just tell me your speech or whatever and get it over with. I’ve been jerked around enough today.”

“We’re chewing to get to the sap. We’ll get there soon.”

Calypso nibbles and nibbles only to reach more root. Past the outer layer of bark, like substance she finds healthy, wet wood like cords of muscle. This is almost tasty.

“And the amount of sap we find represents how much piss is in my body, or something?”

The sage laughs, a full-throated genuine laugh that surprises Calypso. Am I funny? I’m not funny.

“Not quite. It represents how much you have lived.”

“So twenty-eight years. Ding-ding. Mystery solved.”

“Not how long you’ve lived, but how much. Most twenty-somethings have a few ounces of sap collected in their roots. A few have more. Some have none at all. Sap accrues the same way memory does: each experience nurtures the tree as does sunlight or rain or fertilizer, which crystalizes in one drop, or a few drops of sap in the roots. Diverse and novel experiences add up. Days that are boring and uninteresting and redundant, your tree won’t grow at all. But the times where you produce something or open your eyes in wonder or spin the silk of those you care about, those times sap flows in abundance. Those are the times, rich and varied, that lead to gallons of sap. Those are the times that matter.”

“So it’s just a measure of how many different types of food I’ve ever had. Great.”

“Variations in food and travel, yes, those things can comprise much sap for folks your age. But more of it is due to interpersonal experiences with those who matter to you.”

Calypso does not stop nibbling. The faster I get through to this sap the faster I can get the fuck out of here to a sage that will actually fix me. She and the sage work in silence for some time.

Finally, Calypso’s chewing produces a noise reminiscent of Pemba popping the cap off a tube and the two cicada nymphs retreat a step. A dribble of sap leaks from the spot Calypso has been chewing.

“So there it is. That’s all.” But that’s not all. As the sap covers their tarsi, the opening widens and sap flows thicker, faster. Oh shit!

The sage chuckles. “Very good, Calypso.” The sap fills their cavern, its tide reaching their bellies, and still the hole from which it emanates grows and soon their claws are no longer embedded in the hard subterranean soil (woah!) and they’re flowing away downstream (holy shit!) in the torrent of sap, its thickness buoying them pleasantly like a lazy river. The sage is laughing, and, despite herself, Calypso is laughing too.

“That’s a lot of sap!”

“Damn straight, a lot of fucking sap!”

“A windfall.”

The two cicada nymphs float lazily, side by side. Thank god we’re done with that chewing. “How much is that? It’s gotta be more than an ounce, right?”

The sage looks at Calypso with wonder in her eyes. “You have lived much, my friend. You have lived more than anyone I’ve ever seen. You are fulfilled.”

“No, no, no. Fuck that.” Calypso shifts, trying to turn away from the sage, but in the flow of sap, it’s impossible to maneuver. “I haven’t done shit. I lived in New York my whole life. I never left. I never had the money to go gallivanting around. I work at a gas station, for Christ’s sake. So I couldn’t tell you where this sap comes from.”

“Let’s find out.” Without so much as a gesture, Calypso knows what the sage is asking of her. She brings her mouth to the liquid and tastes the sugar of the drink almost sooner than she feels the crystalline texture.

Calypso is on her roof dangling her feet off the side. Isn’t it funny how the wind is stronger on my legs than on my arms? There must be some sort of wind tunnel effect. Below her, trash bags line the street like ugly black shrubs. Someone (is the white line on the road painted crooked, or is the whiskey getting to me?) calls up at her, asks her if she is okay (ignore it). For a moment, Calypso sees a yellow-pink head of hair belonging to an eight-year-old girl on the streetcorner and her hands stiffen beneath her, as if she’s ready to leap from the sixth-story roof and chase after her, but in the next (shit) moment, she realizes it’s only the shine of the streetlamp on the naked head of a firehydrant. I’m really losing it now. The man on the street is standing between two plywood sheds (from up top you can really see how shitty they are. I mean, make a restaurant or don’t, but don’t half-ass one in the middle of the street) from which waiters shuttle food and cocktails from the Bistro directly beneath Calypso. I can almost see the roof of my old apartment from up here; it’s only a few blocks east. The man looks up (what are those white lines called, anyway?) at Calypso on the roof, then to his right and to his left (he’s wondering if anyone else sees what he sees), and then takes five steps down the street, checks his watch (he’s got somewhere to be), then looks up again (he really does have a good heart, doesn’t he?). The voice below implores her not to jump, but she wasn’t going to jump anyway. It’s late, the man says (well, my apartment was too lonely to sleep so I came up here). He’s dialing someone (goddamn it, it better not be the cops) and saying something else to her (I can’t deal with fucking cops tonight) and she rolls backwards onto the roof, out of his sightline onto her back and stares up at the sky. I wish I was out of the city and could see a star, just one.

And then once again, she is a cicada nymph in a river of sap.

“That sounds like a rough night,” says the sage. “And yet it added meaning to your life.”

“That was last night.”

“You had a hard time sleeping?”

“I’ve got fucking problems sleeping, who doesn’t?”

“Sleeping can be hard,” says the sage, “but so can being awake.” For a moment, the two cicada nymphs float in silence before she continues. “I should have noticed it earlier. Sometimes you can tell these sorts of things from the quality of the sap. A bit sweet, a bit watery. Calypso, an overwhelming majority of your sap derives from suffering.”

“Oh great! So I’ve had a shitty life. Like I didn’t know. Wonderful.”

“Surely you had already realized that. But, you see, suffering has as much meaning as joy.”

“That can’t be it. My life has no meaning. Not anymore, that’s for sure.”

“Your life is as rich and complex as anyone’s. The amount you’ve lived is more than nearly anyone in the world.”

“I hate my life. I might as well be dead.”

“Right and wrong. You’re not happy but you’re alive, and that’s what living is, joy and pain, and sometimes one is disproportionately larger than the other. That is all part of living. As long as you can feel, you are alive, even if only what you feel is suffering.”

When Calypso wakes, she is babbling. She is talking even before Pemba comes into her frame of vision. Her pupils are dilated enough to swallow her irises. She makes no acknowledgement of Pemba when he places a glass of water on the bedside table.

“I keep moving west. Every time my lease is up, I move west. In each new apartment, after I get adjusted, I have my new go-to spots: my grocery, my liquor store, my whatever. Then, every day, I start to notice which way I head when I leave my house. I can’t help but keep track of it, it’s just some shit my brain does. And you always go one way or the other, when you leave your building. You go right or you go left. And you’re always walking somewhere, in New York. So the way I go most often — right or left — that’s the direction I move when the lease is up. It makes sense that way. And for years I’ve been moving west. Ever since she died, and Britt left, and I’ve been going from place to place, I’ve been moving west, a few blocks each time. It seems like each time, everything I end up doing is just a bit more west. But there’s one place I always go that’s east, no matter where my apartment is. In my new place, the door faces south, so that means when I exit I turn left. It’s the only time I leave and turn left. But when I do, I walk all the way to East River Park. After all the moving house I’ve done, it takes me about forty-five minutes of walking to get there. And when I get there I turn around and come back. I always think I’m ready to see the spot where she went under but I’ve never made it all the way back there. I walk all the way there, probably twice a week, and I’ve never made it to the little pier where East River Park pokes out into the river. My daughter didn’t die in the hospital, did you know that? We didn’t want her to. She was suffering too much. It was taking too long. She had no chance. I was lying to you before, when I said she didn’t suffer, but I’m sure you figured that out. She was in the hospital for two years. People always said she was strong. Fuck that. There was no hope by the end. It was her idea, going off into the river. When we set her in the water, off the end of the pier, she couldn’t swim. She couldn’t even flail. She was too weak. Couldn’t move her limbs. I was wearing my patagonia zipped all the way up and I had tucked my chin into it because of the cold. She went right under and barely any bubbles came up. No struggle. Britt tried to hold my hand but that felt wrong. And then we walked away and all I could think about was how loud our boots were on the wooden dock and that was the end. So, yeah, she suffered. She suffered like all hell. It killed me. It fucking killed me. I mean, that’s obvious. Why else would I be in this shithole? She suffered and suffered and suffered. I would have ended it sooner if I could go back and do it again. I held onto hope for too long. Or I would have held onto it longer. I don’t know. And there’s nothing I can do about it now. I just keep moving west.”

Pemba looks at her for a long while before the smile returns to his face.

“I trust you, Calypso. Bring me the money on Wednesday. And get me a bacon-egg-and-cheese on an everything bagel. I can’t eat fish.”

Calypso waits an hour before standing. As she puts on her clothes, she mutters, “at least I got all this fucking sap.”

As Pemba swallows the last bite of the bacon-egg-and-cheese, he looks off into the distance, as if what he sees is a mountaintop view rather than nailheads intermittently protruding from a brick wall. He finishes the bagel, wipes his hands on the napkin, and throws the paper bag of scraps into a corner before turning to Calypso and saying: “I take it you do not have the money.”

“The lawyer said he needs confirmation from the bank. He said it would take another few days. A week, tops.”

Pemba shakes his head. “I don’t think so.”

“I’ll get it. I promise. This bagel was an act of goodwill. Doesn’t that count for anything?”

“No. No, no no.”

“I fucking promise, okay? The goddamn lawyer is screwing me royally.”

“There is no lawyer. You did not have a life insurance policy on your eight-year-old daughter. You know this.”

“What the fuck’s wrong with you?”

“You have spent the trust you earned. You have used up your credit. Come back only with the money you owe me. Otherwise, you will never see the sages again.”

Calypso stands and the straightening of her knees kicks the plastic chair to the ground. By the time she is upright she has a gun in both hands. “Give me the fucking potion, Pemba.”

“A gun hidden in the waistband. How clever. Well done.”

“Give me the potion.”

Pemba is calm as he regards her. “A potion is not worth a bacon-egg-and-cheese bagel, Calypso. You know this.”

“I’m not asking. I’m ordering. I’ll fucking kill you.”

“You can be rather abrasive at times. Has anyone ever told you that before?”

“Don’t you know how fucked up my life is? I can’t sleep. I can’t think. I can’t look in a fucking mirror. I need this sage to fix me.”

“You still do not understand. Only you can fix yourself. Besides, you have not paid.”

“I paid for the first potion.”

“You paid for half of the first potion. I help you, and this is how you treat me? You disappoint me, Calypso.”

“You know, you’re not some fucking saint. You act all high and mighty and tell me you’re helping me, but all you give a shit about is money. I don’t know what, but I’m sure there’s a good fucking reason you’re not practicing medicine in a hospital any more. I looked you up and you did have a medical license at some point. So what the fuck happened? You’re down here with the rats. That’s what you are: the fattest fucking rat in the city.”

“You know, cussing does not give the appearance of strength. It also does not make you stronger.”

“I was right about you. You’re a fucked up guy. You’re sick in the head. And you’re not helping anyone.”

Pemba is smiling. “Then why do you keep coming back?”

“Because I’m an idiot, obviously. Now give me the potion.”

“You’ll need me for this last potion. It’s not like the other ones. You need a healer to administer it.”

“I’ll take that risk.”

“You can’t drink it. You inject it, slowly, over the course of six hours. Every hour I empty one-sixth of the syringe into your veins. Any less and you won’t see the sage. Any more and you’ll die.”

“So, fucking administer it.”

“And then what’s to stop me from killing you while you’re under?” Pemba licks his fingers, then wipes them on his pants. “That really was an excellent bacon-egg-and-cheese. There’s nothing like them.”

Calypso’s hands are trembling on the gun but she does not speak. Pemba rises and turns away to amble down the throat of the room. “Get me the money, Calypso. Then I will happily administer the last potion. I won’t ask you where it comes from. But bring it here, please. And in the meantime, don’t forget to keep meditating.”

When Calypso squeezes the trigger she is surprised at how easily it gives. There is no resistance. The gun does not care that she is ending a life. The recoil jerks her wrists upwards but the bullet flies true.

Pemba screams at the impact of the bullet but falls silent when his bulk hits the ground, as if the floor has knocked the sound right out of him. Calypso tries to flip the fat man onto his back, is unable, feels through the pockets of his lab coat with one hand, the other holding the trembling gun. His body is still. Surprising he isn’t too fucking fat to be pierced by a bullet. When she pulls the syringe and the vial from its hiding place, she sees his eyes and finds that they hold neither fear nor hate but pity. Oh god, what have I done?. They are already beginning to glaze over.

When Calypso springs from the basement door, the daylight hits her like a slap to the face. Shit, it’s still daytime, how did I forget?. She sprints down Spring street, rounds the corner, forces herself to slow to a brisk walk. The gun is still in her hand (shit!). She shoves it in her waistband and pulls her shirt over it. I’ve got blood on my jeans!.

In Washington Square Park, the density of the crowd allows her to be anonymous if not alone. She reaches a square of benches half-blocked by curtains of leaves and lies on her back (meditate, meditate, meditate, empty your mind, empty your mind). From the path, a boy stares at her, too young or too new to New York to have honed his disregard for tramps or his awareness that it is rude to gawk. He does not blink. She stares back, the two foreign creatures regarding each other with cool caution and curiosity as a giraffe and a wildebeest would.

Calypso gives up on emptying her mind and thrusts the syringe into her quad. She depresses the top until it is empty.

She is a frog (a frog?), feeling the texture of the lilypad beneath her with webbed feet in more detail than she had ever thought possible. It’s like I can feel every individual atom, or at least each little cell of the lilypad (all these tiny little bumps, they’ve gotta have a name). Beside her, the sage looks out over the water, her throat bulging and deflating in the rhythm of steady breath. Oh, god, I killed him. I killed Pemba.

They are together on a single lilypad (he’s dead, lying in his own fucking basement) in the middle of what appears to be (how long before he’s found?) endless still water. It is too small (weeks? days?) to turn around, but Calypso (does he have other patients? patients isn’t right, and it’s not druggies, either, it’s fuckups like me, people who have found some way to fuck their mind up without even any drugs) believes the lilypad is rotating, letting her see that the gentle curve of the horizon can be seen in all directions. Even if no one goes in there at first, the smell will go up to the apartments above.

“What’s the lilypad?” asks Calypso (there are tons of smells in New York, who’s got time to check them out), the exhaustion apparent in her voice. “What does it mean? Just give it to me straight.”

“I thought you’d never ask,” says the sage (maybe I am a druggie, I’m flat on my back in a park like the rest of them), letting out an easy, ribbity chuckle. “This is the sum total of your contributions to humanity, good and bad. The more sap” — (back to the fucking sap, good lord) — “you add to someone’s life, the more positive threads you weave, the more you contribute to their happiness, the more contributions you accrue. Most people can see the direct effects” — (maybe I’ll go to East River Park after this. Maybe this is finally the time, I’ll be so drained from the drugs I can wander over there and look at the spot where she went under; maybe I’ll jump in too… I’m not sure if I could drown, I mean I’m physically able to swim and my brain… stupid fucking brain that causes all my problems… might force me to be alive from some basic instinct I can’t override… did her brain have that instinct? Did she want to survive, when she was under?) — “of their actions, which are obvious — bullying is bad, helping an old woman cross the street is good — but the indirect results are much more wide reaching.” — (I killed her and I killed Pemba) — “Here are the downstream effects of your actions, all laid out for you.”

“And all I’ve given to the world is this lilypad.”

“No. What you have contributed is the water.” The water is light and clear, but Calypso is unable to see to the bottom.

“That’s the impact I’ve had on others?”

“Each positive contribution to someone else’s life, direct or indirect, adds a drop of water.” — (a drop, well what’s a drop, really, what does a frog think is a drop) — “A negative contribution results in water evaporating.”

“No, that’s wrong.” Calypso edges forward (there were hardly any bubbles when she went under. I should have counted them, it wouldn’t have been hard), shuffling towards the edge (let’s see the bottom). The motion of her frog-legs causes the lilypad to crease and a dribble of liquid breaks the meniscus. It slides down the green plant to touch her feet.

The memories (oh god oh fuck) come in flashes. Calypso knows that they are memories (they’re memories but they’re Real, they were real then and they’re real Now), but that does not soften their bite. Each scene hits her like a staggeringly bright slide of a ViewMaster (like I’m right up against the movie screen… I haven’t seen a movie in so, so long; I gave up when I couldn’t sit through one, when I couldn’t concentrate, I would walk out not even knowing the plot… everyone else around, chattering happily and I didn’t even have anyone to go with) from which she cannot look away: balancing the textbook on her knee as she rocks the baby back to sleep, bleary street light filtering in through the sheer curtains, tying shoes and teaching to tie shoes (she learned quick, didn’t she? That surprised me, I thought that would be more trouble, but no, she learned so quick), filling up the tiny backpack with donated school supplies before the first day of kindergarten (I had to beg for those like a beggar, but I did it, didn’t I, I filled that bag right up to the brim), glancing up above the storybook to see if she is asleep in the hospital bed, seeing the bald head (oh god) and the closed eyes and the emaciated body (no no no no) and trying to cry softly so as not to wake her (I cry loud now, as loud as I please, all alone).

When Calypso is a frog again, the sage rotates to face her. “Nearly everyone is surprised by how much water is in their ocean.” — (I killed him, Pemba’s lying dead in a pool of his own blood) — “Even those who we consider to be bad people usually have a net-positive effect on the world. There is no necessity for balance between good and evil. Humanity is overwhelmingly kind to each other. We naturally help each other and build each other up. That’s why our few negative actions bubble up in our memory. Our shame propels us to fixate on them because they are unusual.”

“No, no, no.” (wrong, all wrong; who does this frog think she is?) Calypso is shaking (no bubbles, almost no bubbles at all) her head. “You don’t understand. You don’t know what I’ve done.”

“I am a sage. I understand.”

“What I could tell you… I don’t ” — (she’s probably still underwater, under the East River… not the only one, I’m sure the mob has sent men to sleep with the fishes… what a fucking cesspool…, her rotting corpse… is there anything down there? fish? that eats human flesh? Or does it just degrade slowly?… Eventually she’ll be just bones… that’s better, that’s more comfortable, somehow…, child’s bones) — “deserve all this water.”

“It’s not what you deserve. It simply is. Calypso, anything you could tell me, I already know. I’m a part of you.”

“You’re a sage. You know wise things. You don’t know what’s in my head.”

“I’m a drug-induced fantasy, Calypso.” — (I should have jumped off my roof the other night, do what I did to my daughter, end all the suffering because what’s the point of only suffering?… somewhere in me, there’s still hope). I’m a product of your own imagination. I only know what’s in your head, and nothing else.”

“Then you know I killed my own daughter.”

“Yes.”

The two frogs face each other, neither speaking, each gullet pulsating in a tense rhythm. That’s it, it’s out, nothing else to say. (it feels like I’ve puked, something… revolting, acidic, secret… out of my system that needed to get out and now there’s an empty spot in its place… for once, nothing to say… we walked away and I wouldn’t take Britt’s hand and I felt so utterly numb as if I were the one under a thousand pounds of freezing East River water and I thought the guilt would lighten but it hasn’t, it’s only killed me since).

“The good outweighs the bad, Calypso.”

“No. This is all wrong.”

“You have a rich tapestry of silk” — (my dad, where did he go? he got three percent of me, and I never even knew him, he got three percent for free; what percent of my daughter’s tapestry did I have?) — “, a river of sap,” — (don’t think of those same memories… pushing the bike… tying the shoes… bedtime stories… they’ll never stop coming back)) — “and an ocean as far as the eye can see. You have learned from others; you have lived a meaningful life;” — (the day when she told me about the East River plan she was so sad, but a little happy too; she had found a way out and she had thought of something I hadn’t) — ” you have been good to the world.”

“I can’t, I just can’t. I still just…”

“You’re stuck. You can’t move forward.” She didn’t struggle when she went under; almost no bubbles came up; when I walked away I don’t know if I heard the clacking of my boots on the pier or the pounding of my blood in my head or nothing at all.

“Then let me say” — (Pemba’s dead, he’s bled out by now, he’s dead on the floor of his lair, dead like a dog) — “this. You need to hear it.” (you’re just a figment of my imagination).

“Say it!” Dear god, is it what I think it is?

“I forgive you.”

The words ring out like a clarion dinner-bell, reverberating as if they are in a cavern rather than at sea.

Over the sage’s shoulder, Calypso can see land on the horizon. She doesn’t feel anything but stillness from the lilypad, so it surprises her to learn that they have been moving. The land approaches at a rapid clip, and soon it clarifies into blocky shapes above a sliver of earth, disjoint but connected into one mass. The shapes grow. They are distant, then significant, then towering, then comforting as she recognizes the skyline of the southern tip of Manhattan. It takes her a moment longer to process the view since she’s approaching from the east, meaning the buildings stack in an unfamiliar order. Just to her right is the Williamsburg bridge, and far to her left is the Manhattan bridge. She knows that if she were able to turn around, behind her would be Brooklyn. There are no ships in the East River, and no waves. The lilypad has not wobbled once.

“It’s New York,” she mutters, without thinking. “I’m headed home.”

“And I’m almost there.”

Tigers in the Sky

Last night the sky split open,
ribs of starlight cracking,
and tigers leapt through constellations,
paws sparking comets over sleepless cities.
I counted stripes as I ran,
through markets smelling of spice and fire,
wondering if the stars
were teaching me
to hunt my own shadow.
A child laughed somewhere,
jar of wind in her hands,
and the tigers bowed
to taste her air
before slipping behind fractured clouds.

In the garden where bones bloom,
petals curl around ribs and skulls,
white as forgotten ghosts,
soft as the rain that never falls.
The wind hums between marrow and marrow,
a lullaby for things that cannot sleep.
I plant my fingers in soil that remembers
every story I forgot,
every lie I whispered to the stars.
A crow perches atop a femur,
tilting its head,
watching me learn
how to speak without a tongue,
how to grow without soil,
how to love without living.
And in the moonlight,
the bones shift,
forming shapes that blink
like eyes I’ve never seen,
breathing in the dark
with a language older than memory.

The Mathematician

He went seeking primes so monstrously large
even the cosmos blanched at their breadth.

He scribbled formulas,
stuffed them with numbers
to the point of gagging,
then fed them all the more.

His masterpiece — ten thousand digits of pride —
was pricked with one unforeseen pin —
it was divisible by 10007.

Not thirteen, his usual foe,
but this fifth columnist,
hiding out in the land of five digits.

He folded up his brain
like old clothes,
tossed it in the nearest donation box.

In the city, there’s a homeless man
who will prove 1=0
for spare change.

Weightless.
Yes. I’ve been that,
floating around in a cabin
like a dust mote,
waving my arms, kicking my legs,
anything to introduce myself
into such an absurd situation.

I’m sorry but I can’t really
explain it to you,
other than,
without gravity’s anchor,
the body’s about as useless
as your brother.

I drift up.
I touch the ceiling.
I maneuver myself
but, like an oar
in a maelstrom,
my intentions rarely
match the results.

Yes, it’s strange.
My heart, every now and then,
has abruptly ascended,
(like the time when I first met you
if you remember)
but, on those occasions,
the rest of me
didn’t come along for the ride.

As for my head…
nothing’s changed there.
After a while, it tells me,
“You can do this.”
Of course,
that’s after I’m already doing it.

“Be careful walking to school,” Vimala says, a mantra that is common in their mornings. Her daughter Chinni has to walk half an hour to get to school, and while she is always accompanied by her friends, Vimala still worries. The road is more of a dirt path, and she knows how easy it is to be tempted by something off the path. People with safety and security could dream of paths less taken and find whimsy in twisted, poorly maintained routes. For people like Vimala and her family, the well-worn paths were the easiest and the shortest paths to the destination.

“Yes, Amma,” her daughter says, and Vimala wishes that she could offer her daughter more than just words of advice and warning. Her husband owns a bicycle, but he is off to work at the break of dawn. In the evenings, he leaves the fields for the local bar, spending half his salary on cheap liquor and fried snacks. Vimala does not know what he finds in the sordid, dirty place. The few times she has visited to bring back her inebriated husband, she found a place filled with grimy men, cheap string lights covering a thatched shed, some delusion of being something more than the place actually was. It was a place of vice, a place where dreams died, a place where men withered and finally let go of their hopes of leaving the village behind for something grander and greater.

Chinni is well-behaved, and she comes home with report cards with high numbers and comments from her teachers that Vimala reads with pride. But she is alone in her pride. Already, she is hearing from her in-laws about the eventual day when Chinni will be taken out of school. The only thing keeping Chinni in school is the free lunch given by the government and the free childcare provided by the teachers. But the colleges that come after school will ask for tuition, and there is no college within a traveling distance from their home. Chinni will have to be kept in a hostel, and Vimala knows that in their family, such things are unheard of.

In their village, daughters are treated like yearly crops. They are raised to harvest and then sold. Sons are trees, watered and cared of, expected to provide shade. Daughters are never treated as one’s own. Vimala sees that thought in both men and women. She remembers the sting of her own childhood, of never belonging. Her mother’s home became her brother’s, and this new home she has with her husband is her husband’s. But it seems she is alone in remembering. Everyone else around her seems to understand and accept that it is the way the world works, and it is the way the world must continue to work. They want her daughter to repeat Vimala’s life. When Chinni is a girl still too young, she will be placed like a doll in front of some strange family and their son. The family will appraise her value and demand a dowry, as if they are doing Vimala an enormous favor by taking her daughter away from her.

Vimala wants to say she will never partake in the ritual, but her life is evidence that she has done everything just as other people have. She will live the same life as the people around her, and perhaps the only inheritance she will leave her daughter is the same fate. A transactional marriage with a man that others deem appropriate, a lifetime of domestic chores and simple living, a life devoid of dreams. Vimala wishes that her daughter could live any life other than her own. Anything would be better than a life so barren of love, so bereft of hope, and so destined for an inconsequential life and death.

But she cannot offer anything more to Chinni. Instead all she can offer her are the smallest of pleasures. Vimala takes out two candies from the knot she’s made at the end of her saree. They are hard mango candies, sweet and sour, wrapped in thin paper. She presses them into Chinni’s hand.

“Come home right after school,” she says. “Don’t hang around the school field.”

Winter is coming, and the days are growing shorter. The path from the school to their home is too narrow for cars, but people travel on bicycles and motorbikes, and she knows the recklessness of men when they are given anything that can go fast. “Chinni” means small, and her daughter has always kept to her namesake. She is a bird-like thing, thin and gangly, easy to miss.

“And walk on the side of the road,” Vimala warns her.

“What if I don’t?” Chinni asks, a joking tone in her voice.

“Then the Boochodu will get you!” Vimala yells, tickling her daughter’s sides. It is a frequent joke in their house. A threat of a mystical bogeyman who will take her daughter away. Vimala had received the same threats from her mother when she was a child, although the tone had been different. Vimala had thought the Boochodu to be a real person, some shadowy figure in the night who came and abducted unruly children. For her daughter, the Boochodu was a character restricted to bedtime stories. Chinni knew he wasn’t real nor a real threat.

After Chinni leaves, Vimala sets out to complete the day’s work. She is considered a housewife, but the house is much to maintain. She hears of women in the cities who have maids or machines to do the dishes and the laundry, but in their little village, all she has is her two hands. They are rough and calloused now, and she resents the day Chinni’s will be the same. She feeds the chickens in the yard and cooks lunch for her and husband. With the steel lunch box tied up in cloth, she walks to the field to join her husband in working the land.

It is difficult labor, under a sun that does not relent, but it is the only work available in their land. She sets out to leave earlier in the evening than her husband. Someone has to be home when Chinni returns. A train passes through the edge of the farm land, and she imagines the journey of the train, all the people traveling inside of it. The train makes the same journey every few days, but it has seen more of the world than Vimala has. She has never been to a city, and the little television in their home is a relic of the past, with a screen that curves outward and where everything is too colorful, too artificial.

In the evenings, after Chinni comes home from school and before her husband comes back, she watches a soap opera for a half an hour while Chinni does her homework. It is the one little pleasure in her otherwise mundane life. The woman in the show is belittled and humiliated, overworked, and Vimala sees parts of herself in the woman. Granted, the woman lives in a palatial house, wears jewelry even to sleep, but at the core, their problems are the same. A bad husband, a sad marriage, and a life that seems devoid of hope. But in those soap operas, hope does sprout eventually. All the problems are resolved by magic. The woman’s husband changes into a romantic hero, and the heroine herself discovers she is special and talented. After thousands of episodes and countless misunderstandings, there is a happy ending.

But Chinni is not home yet, and the soap opera episode ends on another cliffhanger. Vimala goes out of their little house to see if she can see a little figure walking on the road in the dusk. There is no one, and the light is rapidly diminishing. Soon, she will be able to see nothing. She lights the kerosene lamp and heads out beyond their compound fence.

It is only a half-an-hour walk, a route Chinni has taken for over a year. Sometimes she does come home late, disregarding Vimala’s warnings to play with her friends in the dusty school field. From her home, Vimala ventures out on the path to school, but she sees no one. She goes to the homes of Chinni’s classmates, but they tell she left the school on time while they stayed behind to play. She comes home again, hoping that she might find her daughter in the house, but it is empty.

At the bar, her husband is too drunk to be of any help, and so she walks the path between their house and the school. She checks behind the school building, where there are always abandoned beedi butts and broken bottles of liquor. She checks the fields and the bus stand and finds nothing.

She continues her search, poring through the streets of the village, knocking on every door that she can think of. Chinni is light enough that most adults can carry her with one arm. There are so many places where a little girl can be hidden. So many ways to hurt a child so fragile.

Finally, she makes her way to the bar, where her husband is sitting with friends. His face is slack with drink, his words slurred. It takes him a minute to register what she is saying, and when it does, he is not as worried as her, not nearly as concerned. The men start from the bar, each armed with heavy steel flashlights and lanterns, searching through the fields and the nearby forest, calling out her name.

The other women come to Vimala and escort her back home. Her home is relegated to waiting, to wailing in silence while the sky gradually lightens into morning. The day passes and another, and a week goes by. Her house remains empty. The police are informed, but there is little they can do. The truth is that village lives do not hold much value, and Vimala herself knows that it could be a freak accident. There are old wells in the village that have never been filled up or closed. As more of the forest is being converted to farmland, kraits and cobras are beginning to crawl through the rice paddies and the village alleyways.

After a week, there is an unsaid acceptance of Chinni not returning. Her husband stops his search and buries himself in half-hearted grief and alcohol. The police ignore her gaze when she goes to the police station for updates. Vimala is not angry with them. There is nothing to search for. The old films she sees on television have crimes with clues, with pieces of fabric left for detectives to find, with motives and money to be gained, but in her case there is nothing.

Vimala continues her search, scouring the fields and shining lights into open borewells, venturing further into the surrounding forest and calling out Chinni’s name and getting no response. She stops going to the fields and stops cooking their humble meals. Their house gathers dust and she gains the feral appearance of those on the fringes of society.

She goes out earlier and earlier on endless searches in the same area, seeing if there is some new hiding spot in her old village she will discover. Hope is long gone, but she wants an end. She wants an answer. One morning she leaves for the rice paddies far beyond their village. She has scoured the land multiple times before, but soon it will be winter and the mornings will be too cold for her to walk for long periods.

She spots small footprints in soft soil, and she thinks of all the times Chinni has walked and played in the village. Her one pair of shoes were things to be saved and sparingly used, polished every morning before school and kept neatly outside the door of their home.

Vimala follows the footprints. It cannot be Chinni, but it is perhaps some other child lost in the fields. It is early enough that the snakes will still be out, and their village rests at the foothills of mountains known for leopards.

She follows the footprints and goes into the forest, to where the trees are so densely packed together she has to squeeze between them to pass. The footprints are now dirty marks of mud, and she gets the feeling the child was running. Vimala notices the increase in the length of the gait, but it takes her minutes before she sees how the footprints are different now. They are an adult’s footprints now, and the forest is no longer filled with the morning birdcalls or even the sounds of her own footsteps.

The footprints disappear, and when Vimala stops, she sees she is lost. It is a simple thing most days to get back to the village. It is only a matter of heading downhill, where the forest meets the edge of the fields. Now the land is flat where it should not be, and the trees are strange and gray.

Vimala hears footsteps, slow and deliberate. When she turns, there is no one and nothing.

“Who’s there?” she asks, hoping it is not a leopard or a bear.

Instead, it is a young woman dressed in rags. She looks like Vimala, yet is taller and wilder. Her hair has ribbons streaked through it, and her feet are not barefoot but bound with cloth. It is Chinni, but not so small anymore. Instead, she is a changed thing. She is a wild and free thing, unhindered by responsibilities and untethered from the rules of society.

“Amma,” Chinni says, and her face is filled with joy but devoid of childhood. She has seen things, this young woman, and survived things. She stands straight in a way Vimala can never stand. In her life, she was expected to bow to the world, to the people around her, to her husband. But the young woman in front of her does not slouch to hide her body or wear a veil to cover her hair.

“Chinni?” Vimala asks.

It is a mirage or a delusion. Vimala has finally succumbed to the madness, and she welcomes it. It is a pitiable thing to be half-mad. To embrace the madness fully is to no longer see the concerned and critical looks of the people around her. It is a madness in which she can be with some form of her daughter.

Vimala embraces her daughter. She ignores the changes in the temperature, the way the sky is red, and the way her daughter’s form flows and changes shape like water within her arms. The way something is not quite right, because something wrong is better than nothing at all. Because the monster who steals disobedient children away may be spiriting them to a place where they belong. And for all of her effort and all the ways she shrank and bent herself to fit into the roles she was given, she never felt she belonged.

In the village, a little girl returns to an empty home. She keeps her shoes to the side of the door, and calls for her mother.

I turn over on the couch, where I’ve curled into one corner. In the middle of the night, I didn’t have the energy to move Lena’s laptop. Instead, I just slept around it.

The couch smells like dried-up white wine in one spot, something I never realized until I started sleeping here. We must have spilled it a long time ago. We haven’t had wine in the house for two years, since before the IVF, before the cycle-coded calendar in the kitchen and the evenings we’d giggled and clinked together the matching self-insemination syringes.

Cheers! We’d said.

I squint into the living room, listening for the baby’s whimper as I look at the time. It’s 5:30, which feels like a blessing. Four hours of sleep. I’m sure Lena got less.

The baby sounds rise and fall, closer. Under them, I hear Lena’s slow footsteps padding down the hallway. There’s a sear of guilt as I consider, split-second, whether to pretend to be asleep still. But then they’re here in the room.

“Good morning, mama,” Lena murmurs, more to the baby than to me.

“Good morning, mama,” I say back, smiling.

As always, when the baby is actually here, in front of me, with her tiny wiggling shrimp fingers and her face squashed up in the huge effort of crying or gurgling or smiling, I melt.

What’s happening to me? I’d said to the delivery nurse, when I felt my eyes overflow all at once, nothing like the crying I was used to.

Welcome to parenthood, she’d said. It felt practiced, tailored to the bewildered men she was used to seeing in the delivery room. Not to me, who could have been in Lena’s place if it had gone that way.

“I’m going to make some decaf,” Lena whispers to me. The baby is settling into her chest, little face slack over the edge of the wrap Lena wears to hold her close, to be one being. “Will you do the bottles?”

I nod and roll out of the throw blanket that I’ve gotten used to sleeping under. Lena sways toward the kitchen, her soft hums keeping the baby quiet. As I turn to fold the throw—a semblance of the normal, neither of us want to talk about how I’ve been sleeping out here—I see them.

Four wet shapes on the floor in front of the coffee table.

Smudged half-circles I can only see because thin light through the living room window catches them.

I gaze around the room, trying to identify the source. My face feels slack with sleep and confusion. Maybe I spilled a glass of water as I moved the coffee table in the night, half-awake? But, no, it rests on modern, square legs. Too heavy for me to have shoved it semi-conscious, and the wrong shape to leave those marks. And there is no glass of water.

“Did you move the crib last night?” I whisper to Lena when I’m in the kitchen, rinsing bottle rings as she clicks on the coffeemaker.

She frowns at me over her shoulder.

“From our room?” she asks.

It stings to hear her say our room. It is ours, but I’m on the couch now and she’s with the baby. I wonder if that’s what she means, even by accident: her room and the baby’s room. Ours.

“Yeah,” I say. “It looks like something got moved in front of the coffee table.”

“What do you mean?”

“Marks on the floor,” I say. “Did we spill something?”

Lena shakes her head in the same gentle cadence that she approaches every movement, now. Back and forth, quiet and smooth. Serene. I feel like I can’t keep up with it.

“Maybe we have a leak,” she says, handing me a mug.

The baby makes a quiet little sound and a fist emerges from her onesie to curl toward Lena’s hair. I take a sip. Decaf coffee tastes the same as regular, to me.

It takes almost until evening for me to remember to check the living room ceiling. The baby is restless today, a continuation of last night. Lena tries to open her laptop for the third time only for the baby to wake and squeal again.

“I thought you were on maternity leave,” I say, trying to tease gently. I worry it comes out shrill.

“Just a couple of emails,” she whispers, reaching for a bottle as she pulls the baby into her arms, balancing the open computer.

“They should know better than to email you,” I say. “Let me take her.”

Lena hesitates a millisecond too long.

“Thanks.”

The baby is always warmer than I remember. Even though I touch her dozens of times a day—when Lena showers, when she wants to change her clothes or stretch her arms–it’s as though my skin forgets. And my nose forgets her smell, which up close is overpowering, the raw scent of brand-new flesh, of being completely alive. I kiss her forehead and try to ignore how immediately she returns to fussing in my arms. I whisk her away into the kitchen to defrost the 4pm bottle. I try to replicate Lena’s soft sway as I walk and it feels clumsy in my hips.

Lena takes a half hour to frown over her laptop. The baby, meanwhile, naps fitfully in my tired arms. I don’t know what to call it when, dozing, she turns her sucking mouth to my breast. I know that I scowl and then turn red, ashamed.

When Lena joins us, a thin crease has appeared between her eyebrows. It’s the face of the old Lena, the Lena who would stride through the front door promptly at six, who would lean in to kiss me at my desk, who would regale me with complaints about her coworkers over dinner, to my delight.

Her reading glasses are still on, giving her eyes a slight distortion that makes me love her with such violence I’m surprised at myself. I lean over the baby’s head.

“You’re so beautiful,” I whisper.

Lena rolls her eyes.

“Never prettier than when I’m wearing nipple guards,” she says.

But she kisses me anyway, lingering in a way that weakens every joint in my body. Her mouth tastes like the syrupy tea our doula gave her. I watch the crease smooth itself as she nestles the baby onto her shoulder. And then they both are gone.

The new Lena, born with the baby, floats on something I can’t see, a buoyancy in her movements that gently bobs her away from the shore, out of reach.

I pull out the stepladder and haul it to the living room.

The ceiling is dusty. Cobwebs form tracery against the stucco. I find several things I need to do—fix a piece of crown molding that’s coming loose, replace the batteries in a smoke detector, repaint—but I don’t find a leak. I even check around the casing of the ceiling fan’s motor, wiping lint from its blades which falls like snow. But the ceiling is unblemished, and there are no signs that anything has dripped through it and onto the floor.

From the stepladder, I can barely see the smeared shapes, but when I climb back down, the light hits them again. Four sloppy curves, evenly spaced. They’re not water stains, I realize, or not just water. They’re greasy, like oil wiped by a rag. One of them is crusted with a thin rind of mud, as though tracked in and left there, but there is nothing in any other direction.

I sweep up the lint and spray down the smears with cleaner. When I come back with a handful of paper towels, I can’t even see them anymore.

That night, I make soup for Lena with as many beans and vegetables as I can. My body feels hollow from lack of sleep, and I can only imagine the wear on hers. It’s hard not to compare how I think I’d do in her place.

There were pros and cons for each of us, but we’d agreed it was lucky that Lena had conceived instead of me. Her company’s maternity leave was generous, whereas my freelance work was spotty at best. And so that was the reason we clung to, along with little things: the year difference in our ages, Lena’s family a few hours closer than mine. But we both knew the real reason: that she was better at hard things.

It was my hands that had gone numb as she pushed through the tenth hour of labor, and it was me that the nurse handed a cup of juice to, saying I looked pale.

When dinnertime comes, Lena doesn’t eat the soup because the baby can only settle when she’s bounced on tiptoes. I offer, half-joking, to feed Lena spoonfuls as she bobs.

“I’ll get a bowl in a bit, when she’s down,” she whispers. “Smells amazing.”

Much later that night, I awake in a panic.

Before my eyes are open, I’m thrashing to get my legs untangled from the couch throw. The baby has screamed louder than I’ve ever heard her, and my heart pounds in my throat. But as I struggle to sit up on the couch, I realize the house is silent. I stiffen and wait for the next round of cries. I listen for Lena. But all I hear is the soft click and hum of the refrigerator’s compressor and the faraway whir of the white noise machine that Lena plays for the baby. I must have dreamed the scream.

I blink into the dark living room, waiting for my breath and pulse to calm, trying to make out the bleary shapes around me.

And then, one shifts.

Just slightly. An adjustment. The rise of a spine with a breath.

I do not move.

I know I am mistaken. I must be. My eyes dart to the curtains that I forgot to pull closed all the way, so that they billow in the air from the vent. When my eyes slide back, the shape has resolved itself—a heaped blanket with one of the baby’s slings sprawled on top of it—and I’m alone.

I squint at the heap through my lashes, trying to recreate what I thought I’d seen. But it stays gone, the objects insensate. They do not breathe again.

I fall back asleep. It takes a long time. The baby sleeps through the night.

“You can always just get her flowers,” my mother says through the phone.

I am loitering in the detergent aisle. We don’t need detergent, but I’ve already put the fruit Lena asked for and all the other things on the list into the cart, and the conversation doesn’t feel finished.

“They’re nice,” she’s saying, almost defensive. “It’s a cliché for a reason. That’s what your father did, and I always loved them. Keep it simple.”

“That’s true,” I say, trying to remember Lena’s favorites. Lilies? “I guess… I don’t know, for her first Mother’s Day I want it to be special.”

“Sweetheart, you’re going to do this every year. Next year with a toddler, and then the macaroni art starts to come home from preschool and that’ll be better than anything you could buy her.”

She’s doing something in the kitchen. I can hear cabinets opening and banging shut. I picture her pinching her cell phone between her shoulder and ear, like I’m doing.

“Bottles every four hours, still?” Mom asks.

“She slept almost seven hours last night,” I say proudly, like I’m supposed to. My mother is excited to hear this.

“Isn’t it so sad when one stage is over?” she says. “You miss it, even though you couldn’t wait to be done.”

Mom promises to text me a website that has the kind of lilies she remembers Lena ordering for our wedding.

“And get yourself something, sweetie,” she adds. “You’re a mom, now, too.”

When I get home, Lena is asleep on the armchair with her feet up on the coffee table, the baby napping on her chest. They’re beautiful together, matching in soft beige without meaning to, dappled in the afternoon light. I feel for my phone to take a picture. Something to send to my mother, though I realize it’ll mean keeping the picture myself. I don’t think about that. One of the grocery bags rustles in my hands and Lena opens an eye.

“How’s the world?” she murmurs.

“You’re not missing anything,” I whisper, snap a picture, hit send.

I stare at the ceiling fan. Dim light filters in through the curtains from the street lamp. A shred of lint that I missed hangs off of one of the blades.

I had promised myself, locking eyes with my reflection as I brushed my teeth, that I wouldn’t check the time. I remember the deep breathing exercises I’d learned from an online video years ago, and resolve to try them instead, letting breath fill my lungs and press against my taut diaphragm. Hold for a moment. Then out in a hiss. The video had dissolved into slow-motion footage of waves crashing against sand, and I close my eyes, trying to picture them as I breathe in and out.

As I slide into sleep, the sound of my breath twists and doubles into a sound like the rush of water at the edge of my consciousness, filling the room.

In the morning, my hands are still clasped to my ribcage where I’d placed them to measure my breaths in. On the floor, the prints, greasy and caked with thicker mud, are back.

“Have I ever sleepwalked?” I ask Lena.

I’m picking up each of my shoes, looking for grime. She’s feeding the baby in bed, a curved pillow wrapped around her like a cloud. She looks up at me and I see the bliss drop from her expression slightly.

“No,” she says. “Why?”

“These marks keep showing up on the floor,” I say. “It’s not a leak. I checked.”

Lena shakes her head slowly.

“Maybe you tracked something in when you shopped yesterday?” she said. “I bet we’re just too tired to notice. Things are going to fall by the wayside for a while.”

I nod, but I don’t agree. She doesn’t seem tired at all. She is doing so much. The least I can do is keep the house together.

“I’m going to mop again,” I say. “Do you need anything?”

She smiles at me, looks down at the baby who swallows softly and grips the bottle in her tiny fist.

“I’m all set.”

The marks on the floor are clearer. This time, before I spray them down and fill the mop bucket, I examine their shape. They are heavy on one side and delicate on the other, as though whatever made them was leaning off-kilter. And there are small splits down the center of each that remind me of something I can’t place right away.

When I’m filling the mop bucket, I remember the summer in my early teens that I spent at a wilderness camp, where we earned points for correctly identifying animal tracks from a chart. Graceful crescents for whitetail deer, skinny cat-paws for red fox, cloven lobes for bison.

I stare at the prints now, bottle of cleanser in hand, blinking. In the split-seconds between my eyes opening and closing, I try to conjure whatever creature I imagine leaving these tracks. Do I see afterimages shimmer behind my closed eyes? Gnarled legs, jet-black and dripping, thick-knuckled and long. I know I am imagining them, but they are clearer than anything I’ve imagined before. Images shift and warp in my mind, usually. These stay. I close my eyes as long as I dare. A few seconds, and then my pounding heart forces them open. I spray the floor down again and leave the mop there.

At five, I take out the package of frozen ravioli, but I forget it on the counter. When the washing machine chimes, I gasp and realize I’ve been sitting on the couch for almost an hour. I rush to switch the laundry and start a pot of water boiling before Lena and the baby wake up from their nap.

When Lena comes in, her hair is tied back in a bun, her glasses pushed to her forehead, and her phone in her hand. The baby is wriggling in her sling.

“You’re not going to believe this,” she says. She doesn’t whisper. She’s right there.

“What?”

“I swear,” she says, “They can’t do anything.”

Pacing with the baby as I chop an onion for sauce, Lena details the disaster unfolding at her workplace. The someone or someones assigned to cover Lena’s HR management role in her absence have fumbled their jobs so badly that a former employee has filed a lawsuit, throwing the company into crisis.

“Unbelievable,” I sneer, gleeful. The gossip feels precious, the laughter between us at others’ expense a balm. I’ve missed this more than I can bear.

“But,” she grins, “You’ll never guess what else.”

I widen my eyes. I am her audience and my attention on her is rapt.

“They offered me half-time to help organize everything for the lawyers. They’ll pay me for full-time, plus overtime, plus they’ll grant me additional leave.”

Lena caresses the baby and talks on about the timeline of the suit, the benefit to her resume, the validation that she is indispensable to the company. I smile approvingly. I ignore the heat in my face and the spikes in my throat.

“It does mean,” she says, “That I’ll need to leave the baby with you while I’m at work for a few weeks. Just a couple hours a day. I hope that’s okay. They’re offering so much money. It has to be worth it.”

I nod vigorously, blinking water from my eyes. I wince at the tang of onion and the taste of salt.

“Of course,” I say, and then the lie tumbles from my lips. “What could be better than more time with my favorite person?”

That Wednesday, the house sounds different.

Lena is up early, and all the lights in the kitchen are on. The radio reports the news, and she pulls out the stepladder to get the regular coffee pods out of a cabinet.

“I pumped already,” she says, winking. “There’s more than enough milk in the fridge for today.”

She pours coffee into a tumbler, grabs her keys, and is gone.

The baby frowns up at me from her bouncer, squinting in the bright light.

From the kitchen, I can see the tracks on the floor in the living room, in front of the coffee table.

The baby cries almost all day. I do not go into the living room. The prints are still there that night.

I sleep with my arms folded around my head, covering my ears. All night, I keep waking to the sound of something very loud, but very far away, a crushing roar like a waterfall.

At dawn, I peer under my forearm and think that I see an eye, huge and black, glistening and soaked.

I do not breathe until Lena bustles in to hand me the baby and kiss me as she breezes out the door.

Nothing is there when I look back.

“Have a good day,” I whisper, but the door is already closed.

Today the baby screams at me nonstop as I try to give her a bath. I give up, shaking and sobbing, and pat her down with baby wipes while she howls. Her little face contorts and turns red, then nearly purple. I back away.

“I’m sorry,” I plead. “Please, I’m so sorry.”

She purses her lips when I try to give her a bottle, later. She kicks me when I change her. I’m sweating through my clothes by the time Lena comes home.

She takes the baby from me without a word.

I scrub the living room floor until my cuticles bleed. The tracks do not disappear.

The baby cries throughout the night, and I lose count of how many times I hear Lena get up to soothe her after the first dozen.

It is darker than usual, and I realize that the streetlight has gone out. I stare across the living room and do not flinch when it appears.

All of it.

Skinny, contorted legs lead up to a body twisted with jutting bones, at once heavy and emaciated. An angular head with one bleary eye that sees nothing and another that gazes at me, shining, wet, and huge. Whether the thing drips with water or some greasy tar I can’t tell, but the whole of it is a smear, dribbling down limbs to the floor below, as if oozing from the pores beneath the thick, dark fur.

The baby’s cries echo down the hall and the creature opens its blurry mouth. Water gushes out, more and faster than can be possible, as though draining an entire sea. I am drenched, and it is not cold but boiling and salty, and it blisters my skin and the raw flesh of my throat as it pours over me in waves. I feel pieces of myself dissolve and then I wake up for real, gasping as I wipe thick sweat from my eyes.

I rush to check on the baby, but Lena already has her.

It is the weekend, and Lena shakes her head at me as I stumble into the kitchen well after ten.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I overslept.”

“You look terrible,” she says. She feels my forehead with the back of her palm. “You’re warm.”

Panicked, I fumble for a face mask from the junk drawer, but Lena waves it off.

“You’re probably just run down,” she says. “I can’t imagine how hard it is to take care of her all on your own.”

She points me into the bedroom with strict instructions to take acetaminophen and rest. When I lie down, the bed smells like Lena, but it is not familiar at all.

I am small in my fever dreams, shrunk down to half size or less. I wander around our house for what feels like hours, dream-time stretched out and disjointed. I’m looking for someone, but not for Lena, and I can’t figure out who it is. When I call out, I find my mouth doesn’t form words, and my voice sounds absurd. Our house bobs up and down as though it is floating on a river. I hear the roar of water everywhere.

On Sunday afternoon, my fever breaks. Lena brings me a plate of leftovers from the takeout she has ordered.

“We miss you,” she says. She’s not carrying the baby. Sensible, in case I’m contagious. I wrap my arms around her and squeeze her tight.

On Monday, Lena lingers in the kitchen, her keys in hand.

“You’re sure you’re okay with her?” she says. “You’re feeling up to it?”

“Of course,” I say, smiling. I’m bouncing the baby, who wiggles in her sling in my arms.

“Call me if you need anything.”

I walk around the house all day with the baby wrapped tight against me. I get the laundry done, then re-organize the kitchen and clean the bathroom. Whenever I walk through the living room, the creature stares at me and drips.

My mother calls, and I pinch the phone between my ear and shoulder as I throw silverware into the dishwasher.

“Sweetie, what’s wrong with the baby?” she asks, alarmed.

I hadn’t realized she was crying. I drop a handful of spoons and get a bottle out of the fridge.

“Gosh,” my mother says, more to herself than to me. “She sounds like how you did when you were that age. Blood-curdling, that’s what your father used to call it, when you cried.”

I don’t know what to say. The baby whimpers a little as she sucks down the bottle of milk, as if she’s angry with me.

“It’s so hard at this age,” my mother continues. “But it’s really not forever, sweetheart. You’ve just got to get through the first year, really.”

I don’t know what time it is. I can’t even think past the next hour.

“You know,” my mother says, “I sometimes used to run the faucet in the sink and turn the shower on at the same time when I couldn’t get you to settle down.”

My breath catches.

“Something about the noise of running water seemed to help,” she says, and then laughs. “Or maybe it was just that I couldn’t hear you and Lord knows I needed that little break sometimes.”

I don’t register what else she says. I’m running water over the dishes in the sink, and it’s deafening. The sound is all around me, and then it concentrates in the living room, drawing me to it. I drop my phone and it splashes on the floor.

The creature turns toward me. Its mouth is open down to its knees.

Lena is shaking me. With a sting, I feel her slap across my face.

“What?” I shriek, “What?”

“Where is the baby?” she screams, her face flushed with rage. “What’s wrong with you?”

“She’s—” I flounder, looking around frantically. “She’s here—”

I’m soaking from head to toe, my hair dripping into my face and onto the living room floor.

Lena has left the front door open and I hear her crashing through rooms down the hall.

“Why?” she screams, “Why is she in the bathroom by herself?”

I don’t hear what she says next, so I don’t know where it is that she says she is going with the baby, who she has wrapped in a towel and is hugging close while she throws things into the diaper bag and clutches her keys. I can only hear the roar of water. I feel the look she gives me though—heartbreak, sorrow—like a knife to my stomach.

I turn to the creature as the door slams behind them.

It looks back at me, eyes streaming. I hear something, now. Beneath the water’s roar, I hear the whimper at last, a little cry of terror and anguish. It’s been there the whole time, an urgent pull. Please.

I open my arms.

“Come here,” I whisper.

It climbs into my embrace, its sickly legs trailing down into the pool of water beneath us. It is light and fragile, and I feel the tiny warmth within it, the fluttering of its heartbeat. I smell the wet scent of its skin. It trembles against my collarbone.

“It’s all right,” I whisper. I rock gently back and forth. I move to the couch, and we nestle as one into the soft cushions. I find a blanket and dry us both.

“I’ve got you,” I say, over and over. “I’ve got you.”

No owl came for you.

But you watched her go:
best friends, best friends
until that moment
when she warned you: Don’t follow.

But when had you ever not followed?

Bricks, bruising.
Blood, a little.
Eleanor, why?

For months—years—you marked time at another school,
which was deathly dull.

Every summer she returned
ever more a stranger.
Maths was your magic.
So you knew, each autumn, when she
disappeared,
that hers was not the only platform
between 9 and 10.
That there exists, in fact,
between any two
numbers,
a space that may
be more
finely
divi-
ded.

9 and 5/6: Smash!
Wrong.

Inside the infinite,
every outcome is inevitable.

9 and 18/25: Smash!
Wrong.

But it was righter;
you felt that.

You noted that in your notebook.

Somewhere, in there, was a place for you.

A platform that would open
to a train
to a school
that was almost like hers,
to a friend
who was almost like her,
but not
to a bird that would belong to you,
if not quite an owl.

A finch
or a falcon vulture
bluebird blackbird
woodpecker
parrot
sparrow
robin raven—
anything—
with a scroll in its beak.

9 and 4,817/6,311
Smash!
Wrong.
But righter.

You noted that in your notebook.

In this world, you saw her
less and less—
best friends once,
but not now.

You saw her
(and her owl)
sometimes
from the room that was yours
(in the house that you had since inherited from your parents);
she was visiting her parents:
best friends, next door friends,
growing up,
but nothing now.

She was 30… 40… 50.

For you, whose birthday was only 3 months and 3 days after hers,
it was the same.

(This is the simplest kind of maths.)

Now, she was a Minister of Magic.

9 and 40,927/54,581
Smash!
Wrong.
But righter.

You noted that in your notebook.

You were not invited to her funeral
(an accident: a hippogriff)
But the dream transmuted
as you did,
so that while—yes—you would enter any platform that opened…

What would you do at a school?

Let it be—if you were dreaming—
a house for pensioners.
And let them offer you a bird.

In its feathers, you could rest your hand.
Rest.

9 and 226,943/302,573
Smash!

9 and 328,687/438,241
Smash!

No.
At one time, perhaps,
this may have been about something else.

Eleanor, why?

But as your numbers have become sharper
(a series of inessentials
whittled
implacably a-
way)
so has your ambition.

Your try another and another
(smash smash)
and your body stoops
and your hair whitens,
and you acquire a staff, too,
to assist your balance
(have you, at any
earlier period
of your life,
so resembled a true witch?
did Eleanor, even, ever so inhabit the part?)
and the
problem nar-
rows,
increment by 
in-
cre-
ment,
as your newest notebook fills:
infinity opening
to additional infinities,
and within them—
shiver—
lie
an infinite number of platforms
that will open
exclusively
to you.

Finer. Fi-
ner. F
in
e
r
.

Irvine, California (Dec. 23, 2024) — Effective immediately, fans can enjoy a new Sunshine menu featuring a Cheesy Chalupa, a hardshell Double Nacho Cheese Taco and Plasma Twists. Fans can also order Taco Bell’s iconic Nacho Cheese Sauce a la carte and create their own cheese-tastic combinations.

Parker Solar Probe Briefing

December 23, 2024

NASA’s Parker Solar Probe, a historic mission poised to transform our understanding of the Sun, is scheduled to reach its closest point to the Sun on Tuesday, Dec. 24, Eastern Time. The spacecraft has withstood brutal heat and radiation to deliver unparalleled observations of the only star we can study up close.

Coverage will begin on NASA Television and the agency’s website at 4:00 p.m. EDT.

White House Press Release: Announcement of Findings from Parker Solar Probe

On December 24, 2024, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe reached a scientific milestone by flying over seven times closer to the Sun than previous spacecraft, orbiting just within 3.8 million miles of the Sun’s surface. During yesterday’s flyby, the probe’s science team analyzed the most recent data and concluded the Sun’s plasma is not, as previously thought, comprised primarily of hydrogen.

Analysis reveals that the Sun’s plasma is predominantly lactose, plus a mix of vegetable oil, modified food starch, maltodextrin, salt, dipotassium phosphate, Capsicum annuum, acetic acid, lactic acid, cellulose gum, potassium citrate, sodium stearoyl lactylate, citric acid, annatto and oleoresin paprika.

NASA has assured the White House that these findings are legitimate.

The President will provide more information as it is received.

We urge the American people, and all the people of the world, to stay calm.

Substack Post: The Sun Is Made Of Nacho Cheese. Now What? 

January 1, 2025

Happy New Year, readers!

I was convinced that the nacho cheese announcement was a prank, but… the data has been verified by scientists globally.

The implications are enormous. But I say, look to the future of food! Now that you can buy Taco Bell Nacho Cheese Sauce on its own, you can cook your own Sun-fun creations. Enjoy these five nacho-inspired meals, and drop a comment on which one was your favorite.

Stay cheesy, my friends.

Climate Change journal

“Concerns of Sun Mining by Taco Bell”

Open access | Volume 178, published Summer 2025

C. Major, J. Baker, M. Scott

Abstract: This paper examines the correlation between the recent NASA discovery of the Sun’s composition, revealing unexpectedly high levels of compounds structurally identical to processed nacho cheese, and the concurrent release of Taco Bell’s expanded nacho-based menu offerings. Our analysis identifies a statistically significant negative trend in solar luminosity measurements beginning in the early 1990s, coinciding with the introduction of Taco Bell’s signature nacho cheese products. We propose that Taco Bell may possess privileged access to solar mining technologies. If the fast-food restaurant continues any covert mining it may be practicing, Earth’s climate will experience negative consequences.

Melinda Davies @DreamDivergent posted on June 13, 2025, “If the SUN is made of cheese, what’s the MOON made of?”

Wendy’s @Wendy’s posted on August 2, 2025, “Get ready to launch your taste buds into orbit this September with Wendy’s out-of-this-world Nacho Supremes! Made with authentic Sun sauce. #WendysWins #NachoMania”

Samplings from nona’s Winter 2025 prix fixe menu

moss, creamy nacho cheese sauce, topped with bee larvae

butternut squash soup, infused with nacho cheese sauce, topped with sour cream

beef sausage, nacho cheese sauce reduction, sweet potato

cumin-spiced lava cake with nacho cheese filling, alongside savory ice cream

Superior Court of Orange County, California

Natural Resources Defense Council vs. Taco Bell Corporation

Defense opening statement

February 9, 2026

Mr. Gilbreth: Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the accusations that the prosecution has brought forward are nothing more than a cheap dog and pony show. The prosecution says they will prove that Taco Bell has been mining the Sun for decades, but they will produce no evidence, only speculation. Taco Bell claims no responsibility for its classic Nacho Cheese Sauce recipe being identical to the Sun’s plasma. It simply has a recipe, a delicious recipe, that the world can’t get enough of. Is that a crime? No, it is not.

Straight Talk podcast transcript

December 2026

[Opening music]

Todd Evans: Welcome to another episode of Straight Talk, with your hosts, Todd and Angie.

Angela Booth: Today, we’re talking about an issue that’s “out of this world”. It’s been two years since NASA rocked the world with its findings. By now, you’ve heard: no longer content with buying Taco Bell Nacho Cheese Sauce directly, fast food corporations have built their own massive solar probes, shaped like tortilla chips, to scoop up the Sun’s plasma cheese. It seems that the floodgates were released after Taco Bell won its recent lawsuit against the NRDC.

TE: Some are hailing this as the next “space race,” saying it will drive competition and lower prices of the tasty cheese sauce—

AB: Which has gotten ridiculously expensive.

TE: Absolutely. I haven’t been able to buy any in months. But critics say that the last thing the world needs is restaurants venturing into space. We’ll discuss after a quick word from today’s sponsors.

CNN article

Published June 2027

Two Hospitalized After TikTok ‘Suncheese Challenge’

What started as fun turned into tragedy after two teenagers were hospitalized with second-degree burns due to the latest TikTok trend, the so-called “Suncheese Challenge.” The challenge consists of heating Taco Bell Nacho Cheese Sauce to boiling temperatures and trying to eat it. The teens suffered burns on their tongues and in their throats.

MSNBC Andrea Mitchell Reports

August 2031

Interview with Dr. Michael Thompson, climatologist and author of Cut The Cheese: Why We Must Stop Consuming The Sun.

Andrea Mitchell: Michael, thank you for joining us. So you predict a serious global impact from consuming the Sun’s plasma?

Michael Thompson: Yes, that’s right. We’ve already consumed too much.

AM: But what about those who say that the nacho cheese sauce is an infinite resource that we can make at home?

MT: That was a nice pipe dream five years ago, Andrea. But let’s be real: nobody can recreate the exact taste of Taco Bell’s Nacho Cheese Sauce because Taco Bell never made it using ingredients on Earth. It was always mined from the Sun, decades before anyone found out.

AM: The NRDC tried to prove that in a court of law and was slapped down.

MT: You’re right, and I can’t prove the allegation now. But what I can predict—what I can show you—is that with future decreased sun output will come another Ice Age. Are you prepared for that?

Target Weekly Ad

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The Guardian article

Published May 17, 2035

Taco Bell CEO Says Public Appetite Is Responsible For Darker Sun

Speaking on the sidelines at the annual Foodservice Conference & Expo on Wednesday, May 16, Taco Bell CEO Karl Stills attributed the recent decrease in sun luminosity to the collective appetite of the public, citing it as the driving force behind the celestial change.

In his statement, Stills defended Taco Bell’s menu offerings, emphasizing that the restaurant chain merely responds to consumer demand.

“Taco Bell was providing its signature Nacho Cheese Sauce for many years before the Sun began to grow darker,” Stills added. “Taco Bell’s menu innovations are a direct response to consumer preferences, not a causative factor in astronomical phenomena.”

Despite Stills’ assertions, many astrophysicists and climatologists have expressed certainty of a direct link between sun mining from Taco Bell and other food corporations and the observed decrease in sun output.

Taco Bell maintains that its research team has not conclusively found any determinative evidence showing that the Sun’s decreased output is harmful. “A decreased output is a natural part of the solar cycle,” argued Taco Bell’s chief scientist, Dr. Evan Roberts. “The measured decrease is only about 1.34 percent. There is no cause to panic.”

Arctic Rescue Keepers (A.R.K.) Passenger Manifest, Premier Class

Departure: May 31, 2070

June Walton—Age: 35—Passenger ID: ARK-P001

Pat Bezos—Age: 21—Passenger ID: ARK-P002

Angela Mars—Age: 60—Passenger ID: ARK-P003

Kevin Koch—Age: 49—Passenger ID: ARK-P004

Marcus Cargill-MacMillan—Age: 53—Passenger ID: ARK-P005

A.R.K. Brochure

YOUR GREAT ESCAPE

Fleeing the planet doesn’t have to be a hassle. When traversing the galaxy on the luxury departure vessel A.R.K., you will have access to all the finest Earth amenities: Olympic-sized swimming pools, fruits and vegetables, spa treatments, authentic nacho cheese sauce, space heaters—all this and more, thanks to our generous corporate sponsors. Say goodbye to ice sheets and everlasting snowfall when you board the A.R.K.

Suite reservation requires a $1 billion deposit. Act now! Your time is running out.

Rumors hold that everything worth remembering in human history has been written down by one person, someone who has been around to see it all. No one can imagine who it might be; human history has been written for thousands of years, yet no one can live that long. Except a god, one recording humanity’s actions for a purpose they were too little to understand.

No one knew who first spoke of a god of written history; the best historians could only find short sentences describing this god, but no mention of its name. Many gods were known in that time: the god of the sun, the god of the moon, and many gods that helped people in their times of need, but a nameless god that kept history was still a great mystery. These other gods were more concerned about the number of worshippers they had, how many temples were built in their honor, and their own divine stories of greatness and power, not stories about humans. Their stories were meant to be tales that were passed down through the ages: tales of great courage or wrath or kindness, these stories were reasons to worship and build temples for these gods. A god with no temples and no stories of their own was no god. Though no one knew what this supposed god looked like, everyone from the biggest cities to the smallest villages agreed that whoever was written down in this nameless god’s books was one to be remembered throughout history. Even though no credit was given and no praise was held, the nameless god still wrote down everything that was necessary; a thankless job but one the god knew was necessary for humans to keep moving forward.

While the stories of gods were told more than any other, humans were still desperate to reach the level of remembrance that the gods had by having their own tales of greatness. Whether it was kings conquering lands untouched or emperors creating mountainous civilizations, it is human instinct to want to be remembered and those who are remembered can be remembered for anything. Families have tried for centuries, gods for millenia, and while not everyone is remembered, every story worth passing down was written down by some god, somewhere. If you were not written down, you may as well have not existed.

For those who could not make their name in eternal history, they were content with leaving a legacy their own family could remember and be proud of. Some became local legends rather than national ones; others were famous within their own families. Shino had a family that had no legends and no legacy, but this was not for a lack of trying. His grandfather’s grandfather had tried to save his village from an oncoming flood, but his body had been swept away by the rushing currents. Shino’s grandfather’s father had thought he could launch himself to the moon to conquer land no one else could reach; his footprints are still marked with soot in a town center somewhere Shino has never visited. Shino’s grandfather had thought he could gamble their family’s little worth on bad bets and Shino’s father had thought joining his country’s military would be the safest option to repay the debts Shino’s grandfather had accumulated. These were stories that would be passed down and forgotten one day, just as the names of the people in these stories were gone. Shino knew his family was not written in history, not yet.

After seeing the failures of his forefathers to reach any sort of height or fame or leave a legacy worth sharing, Shino took it upon himself to make his name in history.The rest of Shino’s family wanted little in life; the siblings who survived to adulthood despite poverty were grateful to be alive. While his siblings saw their failures as reasons not to search for notoriety, Shino took his family history as motivation to do better. Shino had already forgotten his grandfather’s name by the time he was old enough to leave, as had the rest of his family. He did not want the same legacy for himself, so with little knowledge but rumors and prayers, Shino searched for the historian god. “If my name is great enough to be written down by gods themselves, we are sure to live fruitfully,” Shino reassured his mother the night before he left on a quest for a better legacy.

Shino had listened to what little he could go on to begin his quest, mostly whispers from other gods written down by devoted worshippers, largely forgotten by humanity. It was said that the god of history stayed on a mountain that never changed while history changed around it. Shino could not find much of what it meant for a mountain to never change. How much was a mountain supposed to change over time? Shino did not know and checking every mountain in the world would have been an arduous task, so Shino took his time to ask masters in knowledge what such a rumor could mean.

“A mountain stuck in time,” one master said smugly. “Find a mountain where nothing happens and climb to its peak.”

Shino pondered the master and asked, “What happens when nothing happens?”

The master said he had no more time to answer questions and needed to return to his studies. Shino knew the master had no answer.

“A mountain in the middle of nowhere would have no history. If the mountain is nowhere important, it would have nothing to occur,” a second master reasoned.

Shino thought about this too, and asked, “Are there places in the world left unexplored?”

Unlike the first master, the second master was excited by Shino’s curiosity. He answered, “There is always land left to conquer, something for rulers left to seize. As much as we record every piece of knowledge, there is always something new to learn from our world.”

The second master’s answer left Shino unsatisfied, had most of the world not already been recorded by adventurers older than Shino? Shino also knew that conquering an unexplored land required an army, resources only few in the land could afford. No one was going to give Shino what he needed so his name could be recorded by some mythical being. The second master’s answer made Shino concerned this task was an impossible one, so he sought after a third opinion, one that he felt he could take on his own with only a satchel on his back and food to trade.

Shino was able to find his answer with the third: “Find a mountain for which nothing changes. A height that does not shrink or grow, a peak that does not melt or clear, a storm that never leaves, the parts of a summit that would change with time. There are a few that fit, but there may be one close enough to make the journey close to home. But would this make the journey worth it?”

The third master’s answer reignited Shino. There was hope in such an answer, it was so obvious to Shino that he was surprised the masters couldn’t see it earlier: find a mountain whose weather never changes. He took months of climbing to scour the mountains of his country, praying that whatever god was watching over Shino was recording his journey. While climbing mountains alone was not worth a legend, Shino reasoned climbing to the peak of every tall, snowy and stormy mountaintop might be. It became an arduous task, Shino frequently having to climb down his mountain once the storm settled after days of raging furiously. He had never bothered to ask how many tall peaks his country may have had, he only had a map to cross out where he had been.

Starting up one of the last remaining mountains on his map, Shino could feel paranoia and anxiety creeping in at every crack in the clouds. Despite looking for a god, Shino never considered himself religious. With the luck his family had in their own fortune, what god could possibly have been listening? Knowing this, Shino still prayed. As he lay in his shelter, preparing for the scouting ahead, Shino prayed aloud, “Please lead me to you, whoever you may be. Am I not worthy? Am I the first to seek your guidance? I cannot go back home as much of a failure as my forefathers and only you have the solution, oh god of history.”

Until, one day, around the age of 20, the same age as his father when he left, Shino found a cabin in a blizzard, halfway up the last mountain he could check before he would have had to ask permission to leave the country to search nearby countries for other mountains. The cabin was shoddy, Shino was surprised to see it still standing against the fiercest winds he had faced. “Shelter,” he told himself as the snow crushed under his worn boots.

While the outside of the cabin had seen better days, the inside was a different story. Inside the cabin was a golden sheen that illuminated the dull colors on Shino’s wet coat. As Shino stepped inside, he looked and saw the walls were coated in lights and scrolls. The room itself was small, only another door and a fireplace displaced the walls. Shino followed the scrolls upwards and saw the cabin had no end, contrasting the shabby cabin roof outside that was at most two heads higher than him. Closing the door behind him, Shino began to strip away the snow-soaked clothing and warm up by the fire, its flames licking a wood that never seemed to burn.

Once finished and down to his barest garments, Shino saw the other door open. The warmth of the cabin had caused Shino to drop his guard, along with his weapon. He scrambled towards his knife, one that had helped him defend himself against thieves during his journey, and held it close to his chest.

This isn’t your home, a small voice reasoned in Shino’s head.

This voice was drowned out by the louder, Protect yourself, you are the most precious thing.

Standing close to the fire but far from the door, Shino saw a child, maybe younger than when Shino was when he left home on his journey for the god. The child had hair a paler blond than any scroll in the cabin, the lights gave them a golden aura.

No, it wasn’t the lights doing anything, the child themselves glowed.

The child closed the door behind them and greeted, “Hello Shino, how may I welcome you to my home?”

Shino lowered his knife, no one had said his name for months. In order to be safe, Shino had always opted for a fake name, especially if there was any chance he would have to owe money. He knew it wasn’t right, he knew his mother told him his father did something similar, but Shino reasoned that nothing should get in the way of finding this god. Now that he was in the presence of one, he thought about how stupid his actions might have been.

“Are you—”

“Please, call me Um. I am but a humble archivist. I write what needs to be written.”

Shino smiled. “That is excellent because you need to write about me!”

Um turned their head before they turned away and began to make tea over the fire. As he took a metal rod and began to poke the fire, Um asked, “Why do I need to write about you? Have you done something noteworthy?”

“I climbed every unchanging mountain to find you! Is that not worthy of being written down in history?” Shino was given a cup and told to wait for tea. As he waited, he wondered why Um looked the way they did. He thought the god of history would look, well, historical. As if to prove Shino wrong, Um reached out an arm to the ceiling and watched as a scroll fluttered down from the pile on the wall. Um didn’t open the scroll but held it tight in their hand as they began to pour tea for Shino.

“You climbed five hundred and twenty eight mountains, but I have a record of someone who climbed over a thousand mountains. Do you think climbing less than half the mountains the person in this scroll did makes you a legend?” Um asked.

“No.” Shino took a shameful sip of his tea. It tasted close to the brew made at home.

“Shino, to make legends, you need to have something worth passing down. Come back in double your lifetime after you have done something will be passed down.”

Shino accepted Um’s challenge and, in a blink and a sip of his tea, found himself at the bottom of his first mountain, the one closest to his hometown.

Once he returned to his village, Shino’s peers began rumors that he failed. None of this deterred him, Shino vowed to himself he would find something worth passing down. His first step was to leave his family home and start his own. While the chastisement from his mother was a harder sting than the disapproval of his village, Shino left his home and started a new life in a new village.

After finding a new village a week’s time away from his own, Shino was able to integrate himself. He took an interest in the village’s administration. He volunteered for all the work no one else wanted and gave helpful advice whenever asked. This attracted one of the village higher-up’s daughters to Shino’s side. After a short time together, Shino was married with a few children.

Once Shino was forty, he saw his new home thrive. Thanks in part to his efforts, his village was one of the few that was able to survive several droughts and a handful of famines. When a plague soared through the land like a blanket of death, Shino was able to help keep the village clean and away from any dirty omens. He was claimed a hero in the village many times over. He saw how his family looked at him, full of hope and pride for their patriarch.

Shino knew he was ready.

“Do you have to go to the mountain?” Shino’s fourth oldest child asked him.

“They said to return at the time when my life has doubled. When I went then, I had nothing, but now, I have everything. When you get to my age, what will you tell your children about me?”

“That their grandfather saved his village many times and was a hero!” his child cheered.

Shino smiled before he headed off, making sure everyone knew he was going to come back a legend. If he had been in his old village, Shino knew he would have been ridiculed many times over before he had left the front gates. Here, with all the good he knew he was doing, the most anyone did was a passing glance. For the first time, Shino found himself feeling respected.

The god’s cabin on the mountain didn’t change, neither in location or shabbiness. Shino felt blessed to not have to wander mountains for ages again just to meet and ask a simple favor. On the shorter journey, the more he found himself talking to himself, the more Shino was assured that he was due to be written in history.

Opening the door, Shino saw that nothing had changed. Even with styles and cultures changing in areas Shino had seen twenty years prior, the cabin had remained the same. Its intense glow bathed Shino as he began to take off his coat, rather than stripping almost entirely. As the fire flickered nearby, Shino declared, “Um, I am here to be made a legend!”

Their inner door opened and they rushed to Shino. After a moment of inspection on both ends, Shino saw no change in Um’s appearance. They looked as young as the first time Shino met them. He couldn’t find any wrinkles on the child’s face while Shino unconsciously felt the slight folds on his face crease further. His mouth twitched.

“It is further proof of your godliness that you remain so young after so many years, Um. Please, as the god of history, you must have seen my contributions.”

Um backed away, tending to the fire. “I have, yes. Do you feel these are sufficient for you to be written as, how you say, a legend?”

“Well, yes, my village may have perished without my help. Is saving a village after what could have been numerous disasters not enough for my name to last generations after me?”

Um shook their head. “Maybe a few… Maybe your great grandchild will know your name, but there are many others and there will be many others that will save their fellow countrymen from danger and their names will last until they die. After that, they are as important as the spit from a full man. I cannot write your name down as you have not done anything any other man would not have done in your place.”

Mouth agape from the god’s bluntness, Shino watched as Um made their way back to their hidden room. Before they grabbed the door, Shino came to his senses and asked, “You gave me advice last time; can you give me more? I will spend just as many years and come back to show you I am worth writing down, even in a single line.”

Um’s hand cradled the knob while they watched Shino in their peripheral vision. “Do something worth remembering, else why should history remember you?”

Before Shino could protest or ask for further explanation, he felt his body flying back through the door and ended up back at home, crashing into a nearby table while he heard his wife cooking nearby. Rushing from another room, Shino’s wife shrieked, “Shino! I thought you would have been at your mysterious mountain at this point. Tell me what you’re doing!”

Regaining his composure, Shino stood from the ruins of their table and announced, “We will be moving to the city, I have a new goal in mind.”

After getting the god’s advice, Shino took less time than before enacting a new plan to be written down in the history scrolls. When picking the village he would move to, Shino originally picked a village a week’s time away. Unknownst to Shino, he had picked a village that was less than a day from his country’s capital. When he explained to his father-in-law why he wanted to move to his country’s capital, Shino assumed that his wife’s father would have forbidden Shino from taking his daughter away from him.

Shino was never happier to be wrong; not only did his father-in-law approve, he wrote Shino a letter of high merit for when he went to apply for a job. Once Shino and his family reached the capital, the letter allowed Shino to start his job in the government in the city. His family lived better than they ever could in the city, a large house near the capitol building with enough rooms to have at least three more families move into, if Shino’s children wanted to stay.

As Shino aged, he gained more respect from his fellow countrymen, helping strategize and lead battles as the number of enemies of the country grew. Shino grew to be a natural leader, his oldest children starting families in the house that only grew with age. While his decisions were thought to be more ruthless against any country that tried to smudge the beauty of their prosperity, Shino was well liked by a majority. Once it was time to elect a new leader, Shino was the almost unanimous winner, with the few dissenters changing their mind once Shino brought further happiness to his country.

His rule was bloody, but only to outsiders that refused to come. Many saw the wealth and joy Shino brought to his country and were nothing but jealous. He cut leaders down like the threshing of wheat, giving any land captured during the times of war to citizens who had nothing. At the peak of Shino’s reign, a quarter of the world was under his command.

Once he was sixty, Shino saw everything he ruled over and everything he had accomplished. He saw his children grow up to fine adults, his wife raise a home that gave Shino the support he needed to guide his people, and the citizens he gave a better life to than he had at the same age. He knew the god would be pleased.

“Father, you have accomplished more than any man I could find, why do you still go on what appears to be a fruitless journey?” One of Shino’s sons grew to be an academic, one that questioned if the person Shino was meeting was even a god.

“If you saw them like how I saw them, you would understand.” As Shino aged, he found himself giving vague answers to his children about his goals. His children would never understand, his wife never did and argued with Shino the days leading up to his journey.

His son continued to complain, “Then take me with you! Let me see this so-called ‘god’ and prove to you that this dangerous journey was never worth it.”

Shino put his foot down. “If you are calling it dangerous, I refuse to allow you to journey alongside. I forbid it. Besides, young one, if I did not go on this journey, we would not have had this wonderful home, or the education you received to be able to snap at your elders. Now, if you’ll excuse me.”

The son wanted to snap back, but it would have only proved Shino right. Even though Shino was the highest politician in the land, no one followed Shino in his journey. Bringing such a time of peace and prosperity into the country itself, many felt grateful to have Shino as their leader and those who didn’t were terrified of the consequences of hurting the sixty-year old man. This made the journey to the mountain much easier than in previous years, despite his old age slowing him down.

Instead of letting himself in once he reached the cabin, Shino thought it would be polite to knock. He raised a fist to the door but before he could rap the cabin door, he heard Um say, “You may come in.”

The door opened on its own and Shino shuffled inside. Um was sitting, waiting for Shino’s return. They were unaged while Shino’s joints cracked and popped more than the burning wood. The fireplace looked unchanged, still flickering as brightly as the first time he came through. The only thing that seemed old in this cabin was him. “I followed your advice.”

Um looked Shino up and down, Shino wearing coats made out of animals only found in countries he had taken over. Exotic furs lined his body, Shino asked for only the warmest for his journey. “I can see.”

“Am I a legend in your history?” Shino asked.

“What advice did you follow?” Um asked.

Shino was taken aback, wondering if the god couldn’t remember the past twenty years. No, it had to be a test, to see if Shino was paying attention to the god’s words. Shino answered, “You said to do something worth remembering. I did. You must see the gifts this country has been bestowed under my leadership?”

Um asked, “Is the slaughter of thousands worth remembering?”

“Yes, we remember the lives of those we have had to cut down in order for us to better our people.”

“Do you remember Okin, the fifty-ninth throat you had to slice? Do you remember Chi-Won, the mother that you executed? Or do you remember the idea of them, the concepts of dead citizens to be remembered?” If Shino had not known better, he would have assumed Um was mad. Instead, Shino knew Um was asking in earnest. They were testing Shino, getting towards the end, he felt the title of a legend was within grasp.

“While I do not remember, the fact that you do means you have been looking, watching. I must be ready,” Shino rationized.

“You are not,” Um responded.

Shino stopped, his heart sank. It had been sixty years and he still wasn’t ready. Before Shino could protest, Um clarified, “People come and die all the time. Killers are not new, there are and always will be people who kill in different names, whether it’s religion, their country, or their way of life. Killing for the sake of making a name of yourself is nothing new. Do you want to be a legend?”

Shino nodded vigorously. Shino heard the door open behind him. Um looked to Shino and said, “Come back in twenty more years after you do something that will leave a true mark on history.”

Shino was once again swept away before he could ask for an explanation. Sixty years and the god refused to put his name down for him. All Shino ever received was vague sayings instead of real answers. Frustration from divinity erupted into a loud anger as Shino started to destroy valuable art pieces his wife had spent time curating to make their palace a home. When one of Shino’s sons found him and restrained Shino from destroying their home, the son asked, “You just left not that long ago, why have you returned?”

“I am quitting as this country’s leader, effective immediately. I have a new goal to make my name matter,” Shino explained.

“But your name does matter, father. It matters to your family, isn’t that all that matters?”

“No!” Shino cried.

He knew his time was coming, this next visit would be the last one he would have with Um. After Shino’s resignation, the country began to enter a time of war, wiping the peace Shino worked for within half the time he had spent working for it. Before his meeting, Shino would have cared that his legacy in the country might have been destroyed, but Shino continued to swallow his anger. Some of Shino’s grandchildren were drafted into the wars ahead, but Shino didn’t care when he heard over half of them perished on the battlefield.

Shino’s wife left him after she found her husband becoming an uncaring patriarch. His kids stopped visiting his home, shrinking Shino’s living space from a large mansion to nothing more than a shack, smaller than the cabin he was destined to see. All the while, Shino spent his time in pent-up rage. He had lost almost all of his belongings he gained during his leadership, but kept around a knife he had taken from a foreign temple. The knife’s blade was nearly invisible, only small black specks were seen in the blade’s edges. Shino had always felt there was something special about this blade, so he decided this was the one possession he needed. He focused all his anger into this blade as he trained to use the knife to the highest of his potential.

By the time Shino was almost eighty, no one visited him anymore. Shino didn’t notice anyone coming in or out of his cabin, just whether someone had touched his most important knife. On the day before his final visit, The academic son spent one more visit to convince Shino to give up on his mission.

“Mother is dead,” the son announced.

Shino didn’t move. It took him a long moment to realize what the son had said. All Shino could respond with was an unenthusiastic, “Shame.”

“Do you care? Most of your family is dead, do you care?”

Tears swelled in the son’s eyes as his father responded, “I don’t know.”

The son slammed the shack’s door, the whole foundation shook under his anger. Shino didn’t look at his son during the encounter, he refused to give any of his negative emotions where it didn’t count. Instead, he packed, focusing his anger on the knife. He knew where he could make history.

Shino didn’t pack anything for the journey, not that he had anything worth packing. The cabin was still there, undisturbed by time while still falling apart. Once Shino opened the door, he saw Um was not inside. It looked as warm as the first time around, but the heat felt less inviting. Instead, Shino felt rage, nothing had changed but he continued to age. He felt the god mock him from the other side of the door.

The door he had yet to open, the one that no doubt contained Um’s living quarters. It was ridiculous, why would a god need to sleep, but Shino rushed to the door. Inside, he saw Um, sitting at a table, hunched over something Shino was unable to see. Their back was turned to Shino, but they still greeted him like an old friend. “Shino, have you made your mark on history?”

They sounded happy, almost excited, infuriating Shino further. He took the knife and plunged it into Um’s back, holding them against the table while Shino sliced in further. Shino dragged the knife and watched as black blood spilled from the god’s back, flooding the floor as the god began to shrivel. The body turned to a shade of white devoid of any life as Shino stabbed them for the umpteenth time. Once the god no longer moved, Shino saw what he had done. The body looked aged and decrepit, as if all the years spent young caught up to the poor god.

After he finished inspecting his years of anger abused onto one god, he saw what Um had been working on on the table; a piece of parchment with one line: “Shino killed the god of history—” The name was covered in ink and Shino was unable to remove it.

At first, Shino smiled; he had finally made his name in history, the god had written Shino down like he wanted. He grabbed onto the parchment and read it against the nearest light. For a short moment, he was proud. Then the consequences of Shino’s actions filled his mind. Shino had only known one god, but there must have been more. Killing a god had to incur the wrath of many others. He looked back to the parchment and thought about how to spin this in the positive. “People conquer gods all the time, right? I cannot have been the first warrior to do so. Let me just write down their name, so I’m secure in history. It was, um…”

Shino couldn’t remember. The god’s name refused to surface, Shino couldn’t think of any of the times he had addressed the god by name. “Well, I told my children at some point, I must have, I’ll just ask—”

Shino stopped, the names of his children were fading from his memory. Panic set in as Shino ran out of the god’s room into the main cabin. Once in the main room, Shino noticed it was dark, only moonlight illuminated the room as it began to fall apart. The cabin began to shrink, scrolls from the infinite ceiling rained onto Shino before turning into dust once they hit him. Shino attempted to grab a scroll from the wall but it disappeared into nothing once his fingers touched.

The cabin became smaller and the threat of Shino getting hurt inside grew larger. He ran out into the snow and closed the door behind him. His heart began to slow and he looked to the cabin falling in on itself until it disappeared. Shino looked around at his environment, he had no idea how he got to the mountain or why he was sitting next to a pile of wood in a blizzard. He reread the piece of parchment as winds began to pick up. “I am Shino and I killed the god of history. I am Shino and I killed the god of history.”

Those who travel the mountains claim to hear the voice of a god killer, crying as he repeats the last thing he ever read. History went on without him as his country faded into obscurity and his family legacy was lost after two generations.